Margaret Neisser Lobenstine ’65 divides the world into two categories. One includes those highly focused, decisive individuals who come into the world knowing exactly what they want to do when they grow up. These souls she compares to Mozart, whose intelligence and inspiration went wholly into his music. These are the freshmen who know what their major will be, who graduate four years later with a degree in that subject, get advanced degrees in the same, and then go on to make a name for themselves in that field.

This article is not about those people.

Instead, it is about those in the other category, the one comprising people Lobenstine calls “Ben Franklins.” Inventor, publisher, writer, philosopher, public citizen, statesman, Francophile, founder of a university and a post office, and all-around Promethean thinker, Franklin was what Lobenstine calls a “Renaissance soul.”

Lobenstine pays tribute to people of diverse passions in her unpublished book manuscript, “Secrets of the Renaissance Soul: Making ‘Too Many Interests’ Work for You.” A career and “life design” counselor in the Amherst, Mass., area, Lobenstine wrote the book after realizing that many seeking her help were the proverbial round pegs trying to force themselves into square holes.

They worried that there was something wrong with them. They labeled themselves as hopelessly indecisive, vacillating, restless. They started a million projects but completed few; no sooner did they master a subject than they moved on to something new. When attention-deficit disorder came into vogue, these people were sure they had it. Their friends described them as dilettantes and jacks-of-all-trades, and their families wished they’d “find themselves and settle down.”

At midlife and beyond, many of Lobenstine’s clients were still casting about for the one thing that would bring all their areas of passion together.

Lobenstine says she’s had clients collapse in tears of relief when she assures them there’s nothing wrong with them.

Drinking tea in her living room, where a small sunlit corner doubles as her office and a constant flutter of birds at her feeder provides background entertainment, she runs through a list of her own Renaissance endeavors. At Swarthmore, she had a difficult time picking a major, of course. She settled on political science but backed it up with minors in economics and history. Did she use these directly in her life? No—she worked with blind children at a camp one summer and decided to drop a political science seminar to take two education courses. She writes, “My request was considered so out of the ordinary that it had to be taken up by the entire faculty.”

Lobenstine continued the pattern after graduation. Her resumé reads something like this: obtained a master’s from Bank Street Teacher’s College; worked at the New York University Reading Institute as well as in one of the original Head Start programs. Subsequently, Margaret did political work with the Black Panthers, worked for an alternative press, worked at an eyeglasses factory and at the post office, and started her own errand business. She ran a bed-and-breakfast; coordinated labor groups for First Harvest Brigade for Nicaragua; taught others how to run inns; was regional master trainer for the Massachusetts Literacy Corps; and started her current business, Alternative Approaches.

Now, she responds to questions through her Web site www.-ToGetUnstuck.com, leads career and Renaissance Soul workshops, is a guest expert for the Staples Inc. small business Web site, does family business consulting at the University of Massachusetts, writes both fiction and newspaper articles, and does professional photography.

Much of this overlapped with raising twin daughters Lori and Heather, now grown and showing their own signs of Lobenstine’s Renaissance nature.

Lobenstine believes the pendulum is swinging in favor of Renaissance souls. Hard economic times and destabilizing political forces are forcing people to become more adaptable, more adept at having more than one skill to offer in the job market. “The cradle-to-grave security simply isn’t there,” neither as a mind-set nor as a reality, she said. “People are re-examining their priorities.”

As for myself, I have an interest in pretty much every subject academic, abstract, and practical. I left Swarthmore with a B.A. in religion and a minor in studio art. My first business card read, “Ali Crolius: Generalist.” Later, I became a journalist—a career that enabled me to follow my curiosities to my heart’s content. I continued to write fiction and letters to the editor, sell my paintings, and be an outspoken citizen of the republic. Now, I am a teacher as well as a writer, a field that enables—and demands—that my multiple interests find expression. Like the other Renaissance souls, my life would feel diminished if I eliminated any of these joys.

When Mark Schwartz was doing Chekhov scene studies in his junior year, he never imagined he’d have an encore. “I didn’t think acting was the responsible adult thing to do,” he said. He majored in political science instead.

To be sure, years in the courtroom as an attorney provided him with ample opportunities for theatrics. The Pittsburgh native’s early career choice, law, looked rather “duckish,” to use Margaret Lobenstine’s language. Schwartz took the drive he’d put to good use in the Honors Program and went to work. Law segued into investment banking, in which he became first vice president of Prudential-Bache Securities’ Public Finance Department in Philadelphia.

Schwartz’s first brush with drama was self-imposed and unofficial: He became a corporate whistle-blower. As manager of the mid-Atlantic region of Prudential’s tax-exempt division, he said he became aware of pressure on employees to contribute to political campaigns. After objecting to the practice and getting fired, he spent two “unpleasant” years pursuing a case against Prudential’s practices with the National Association of Securities Dealers. As a result, the Securities and Exchange Commission banned political contributions by underwriters and began keeping a closer eye on political gifts by brokerage firms. Some major houses agreed to curtail political contributions, but an industry panel reviewing the Prudential case threw out a claim that Schwartz had been wrongfully dismissed. He felt only somewhat vindicated by the fact that Prudential was heavily fined by the Federal Elections Commission.

The experience left Schwartz “flat, I mean flat, on my back.” Unable to interest other Wall Street firms in hiring him, he set up a private law practice from his Bryn Mawr, Pa., home; burned through his savings, trying to support his wife and two young sons; and came to the edge of bankruptcy. “It’s very nice to be outspoken,” he reflected, “but it’s also nice to pay the mortgage.”

The breaking point came when a former investment banking partner died of cancer at age 40. Schwartz says he spiraled into a serious depression but was thrown a lifeline by a generous fellow Swarthmorean who retained him to do some legal work for his family. “He admired my whistle-blowing,” said Schwartz, “and he gave me work at a critical time, which gave me the opportunity to re-evaluate my life.” The verdict: Schwartz came to view his years in high finance as an empty, if educational, interlude: “It wasn’t allowing me to use my brain the way Swarthmore developed it.”

It was after Schwartz had regained traction in his law practice that his early love of theater re-emerged. Representing a literary agent and a filmmaker gave him the urge to try some acting classes. He began auditioning and found himself cast as Truman Capote in Cruelties, a play about the writer that won Best New Play for the New York Drama League. To prepare for his role, he dived with characteristic intensity into “reading everything (of Capote’s) I could get my hands on,” digging up old recordings to get the literary legend’s pouting drawl and ordering first editions of his books on eBay. For his six performances in a tiny theater at New York City’s Pace University, he was paid a grand total of $65.

Schwartz concluded that acting, far from not being very adult, demands everything a person’s got. “Acting’s the hardest profession I’ve ever seen. If investment bankers are brain dead, and lawyers are a small step up, then acting is the hardest as far as what it takes to be successful.”

With a few parts in independent films now on his resumé, Schwartz is casting around for a new role. In the meantime, he hopes his next gig will be as mentor of a new generation of lawyers—starting with Swarthmore’s current crop of Renaissance souls, including son Benjamin ’06.

Firearms enthusiasts at a Quaker college are as rare as pacifists at West Point. But as a student, Paul Kopsch, fascinated with guns from childhood, would go down to the Crum with his Civil War-era muzzle loader and shoot away to his heart’s content with fellow gun aficionado Fred Richards ’45.

“We did all right until some old man came running down and hollered that we were putting bullets in his prize trees,” he chuckled from his home in Lorain, Ohio.

It might seem paradoxical that both men went on to medical professions. Kopsch, an anesthesiologist for 35 years until he retired, would tell his fellow physicians that he saw no contradiction. “I told them the best way to keep the good guys well is to make the bad ones real sick,” said the lifetime National Rifle Association member.

Originally a member of the Class of 1944, Kopsch, a reservist called to active duty during World War II, was eager to put his marksmanship to practical use. “They kicked me out after a month, when they found out I’d been accepted to medical school,” he said.

Initially drawn to obstetrics, Kopsch found that the only residencies open to him at the time were in anesthesiology. He liked the work right away and became the first board-eligible practitioner of it between Cleveland and Toledo. Later, he became county coroner as well. But “a few years after all this, I realized I’d gotten off easy and owed my country.” He enrolled in the National Guard as a medical officer, where, in addition to taking care of soldiers, he got to “use all those guns.” When partners in his office would come spend Mondays talking about adventures on the links, Kopsch came back with stories of drills with anti-aircraft guns called Vulcans, which would fire 100 rounds per second.

In the mid-1960s, Kopsch the coroner teamed up with a couple of police officers who had been involved in gunfights. They were tired of shooting their .38 Specials at speeding cars, only to see the crooks escape while bullets bounced off. The three of them put their heads together to design a Teflon-coated bullet that increased penetration of metal and glass by 20 percent.

For a while, the KTW round (an acronym for the names of Kopsch and his two partners) was employed by police and the military. He claimed it was the literal “magic bullet” that killed the hijackers of a passenger train in Holland in the 1970s. Kopsch’s voice grew bitter as he recalled how critics began dubbing his invention the “cop killer bullet,” although it was only sold to police and the military. After acrimonious public debate and congressional hearings, in which Kopsch testified, manufacture of the KTW was suspended.

Despite that disappointment, Kopsch kept returning to his workbench on his 5-acre farm—a former peach orchard that he’s deeded to Swarthmore after his death. (He’s also set up premed scholarships in his and his wife’s name and another in memory of Swarthmore roommate Bill Inouye ’44, the late professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania.) Kopsch invented and patented an anti-tank rocket he thought would be useful against Soviet tanks but found no takers among the munitions makers. And he continued to add to his firearms collection, which includes such rarities as a Colt percussion revolver whose cylinder is decorated with portraits of Buffalo Bill, Chief Sitting Bull, and Annie Oakley. It’s both the craftsmanship and the pleasure of shooting that continue to fascinate him.

As a man of many talents, Kopsch found it relatively easy to balance his dual interests in medicine and firearms. “I’d just tell my partners in my practice, ‘I’m going off to camp,’” he said. In a profession that kept him at the end of a pager and exacted 60-hour weeks, he found the variety lifesaving. “Having different interests is an aid to sanity,” he noted, “because if I’d stayed glued to anesthesiology all the time, with the phone ringing and those hours in the delivery room and in surgery—this drives you quietly nuts. Getting out and doing something different balanced all that.”

These days, it’s retirement that needs its own counterbalance, and Kopsch found it in jewelry making. “A guy showed up a couple of years ago with a busted computer. I cut it up and found this beautiful patterning on the circuit board.” He took the board to his shop and began tinkering; this led to the creation of necklaces, brooches, and key rings fashioned out of the innards of the computer. He soon foresaw the ready, cheap, and endless supply of raw materials, given the rapid obsolescence of computer hardware. He now makes several hundred pieces of jewelry a year, selling it to a company that gives them away as promotional gifts. With a lifetime of achievement behind him, why does he bother? “I get bored with the status quo,” he said.

Robinwyn Dietrich Lewis was raised as a Quaker. It would never have occurred to her that some day she would work for the U.S. Navy.

And if you told the Navy lawyer she is now that she would eventually turn to painting portraits of private homes on commission, she would have been very surprised. The life of the Renaissance soul is full of unexpected twists of fate.

“I could never figure out what to do,” she said. “As a kid, I wanted to read everything. In college, I did folk dance. Later, I did tap dancing. It would always be, well, I did that, now I want to try something else.”

In high school and at Swarthmore, Lewis studied languages—French, German, and Russian—in which she declared a major and eventually got a master’s. Her first job upon graduation was as a maid in Chicago, where “I learned how to clean bathrooms and make Old Fashioneds, while I waited for my job with the United States Information Agency (USIA) to start.” The USIA, Uncle Sam’s public relations arm, sent Lewis to the Soviet Union to answer questions for Russians about an expo of American architecture.

Eventually, Lewis went to New York to work for Harper’s Bazaar, where she worked as the second secretary to the editor in chief. “I had absolutely no interest in fashion,” she laughed. She did, however, “drink up the city,” enrolling in a painting class at the Museum of Modern Art. “Margaret’s [Lobenstine] idea of nurturing your interests was very real to me even then,” she said, referring to her Swarthmore roommate.

Lewis then took a job writing press releases and articles for the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia. The work plunged her among the most ardent voices for peace in Vietnam and justice at home, and it was during this time that she first observed lawyers up close and came to admire them.

By 1970, Lewis thought she needed to make up her mind about settling on a career. “I reached a point where I thought I really had to make a decision,” she said. All her Renaissance fascinations vied to be taken seriously—languages, writing, social action, and the law. She entered George Washington University Law School in 1971, only to be surprised by how attractive contracts law appeared to her. “I think it has something to do with my interest in linguistics, with what something actually means. In this case, it was interpreting statutes and contracts,” she mused.

Following law school, she taught in and later managed a legal clinic. “I burned out after five years and started looking around. In 1981, I went to the Navy because some friends liked the work there, and it had a good reputation.”

It’s work she loves, involving acquisitions of ships; environmental, labor, and personnel law; and managing 120 lawyers in offices from coast to coast and in Hawaii. Mentoring young lawyers, who she says are often trying to dedicate themselves to both their careers and their families, is a big part of her job. “I think they come to the Navy because they think they can have a life here. Frequently in the beginning of a law career, they’re expected to give everything and more. We don’t demand that of our attorneys.”

How did the Friend come to be at home in the Navy? “I’m just a different person than I was 30 years ago,” she reflected. “Vietnam was a different time. I’m comfortable now with the idea that we need a military force to defend the country.”

Still, the law hasn’t been her only focus. In spurts, Lewis has written poetry and begun a mystery novel. Dabbling in watercolors gave way to oils. Figure painting, landscapes, and still lifes led to paintings of people’s houses she calls home portraits. Once again, she hit a place where she was juggling “too many interests” and feeling she had to focus.

“I’m not trying to escape the law, because I love it,” Lewis said. “But I finally decided, about a year ago, that with the job I’ve got, I had to pick.” She chose painting, an avocation she hopes to master well enough to carry her into retirement from the Navy. She approached a friend about helping her with marketing, and recently, she’s started doing paintings of private homes for people around the Washington, D.C., area in earnest. She spends weekends painting, showing her work at outdoor art fairs, preparing for a gallery show in the fall and building up her portfolio for commission work.

People ask her how she manages to do so many different things. “I just say I don’t clean my house very much,” she laughed. “It’s always a trade-off.”

What do you call a fellow who cuts real estate deals in Manhattan one day, shoots photographs for National Geographic another, takes regular trips to meditate with Eastern Orthodox monks in Greece, and makes sure he’s always taking a college class?

A maverick of the market and the mind.

Philip Metzidakis insists he’s not a Type A personality: “I’m just seeking an interesting and fulfilling life. I like adventure.”

Adventure was a pattern established early. As an undergraduate, Metzidakis, son of retired Spanish professor Philip Metzidakis, quickly established a rhythm. He took the first semester of his sophomore year off, went back to Swarthmore for three semesters, and then took a second semester off before returning for three semesters and graduating. On his first semester off, he hitchhiked through the United States and Mexico. On his second semester off, he flew to London and made his way eastward—overland to Egypt, into the occupied Sinai. He financed his travels with carpentry, both as summer jobs near home and while on the road.

After “enough” trips abroad and back, Metzidakis got his degree in 1980 and settled in New York. He thought to return to Europe, but as he was planning to go, he had an epiphany: “I realized that most people are like trees: They live where they are planted. Very few are strong enough to leave the place where they are born to pursue a dream because leaving means abandoning the known for the unknown. New York is a magic filter that collects the people from all over the world who are strong enough to abandon everything for their dreams. It’s a city of people with dreams. It’s the city for me.”

Nurturing his own dream of making his living independently, Metzidakis turned his carpentry experience into a viable business. He was soon supervising 10 employees on three or four jobs at a time and vying for business against the city’s fraternity of veteran builders. “I knew nothing—absolutely nothing—about business,” he said. “I cringe when I think back on some of the contracts I signed. I made a lot of money, and I lost a lot of money.”

He soon saw that real estate brokers were making more money selling the stores, offices, and homes he was building. So, in 1985, he became a commercial real estate broker. That went well until the recession of the late 1980s dragged the market to a crawl. He made a nimble jump into building office interiors, taking a job as director of the interior construction division of Tishman, one of the largest builders in the country. “I hated it,” he said. “It was absolutely corporate. Everything flowed downstream from the top.” In true Renaissance fashion, he realized he was happiest working for himself. “I said: ‘That’s it, if I ever work for a grand and glorious individual again, it’s going to be me.’”

Metzidakis tried his hand at writing video scripts and corporate speeches. When a friend called to say she was writing an article on New York for a magazine in Chile, he dashed off a list of angles she could cover—and she invited him to take the pictures. The pictures were a hit in Santiago, and the editors asked to see more.

When a producer with whom he had worked before announced that he was going to Greece on assignment for National Geographic, Metzidakis piped up that he’d been taking a night class in Modern Greek and could go along as a translator—and photographer. “I got two spreads out of it,” he said.

As the New York real estate market came back to life, Metzidakis founded a new company. The Jansizian Group, Ltd. (named for his maternal grandfather who, because of the massacre of Armenians in 1915, was the last man to bear the family name), has become a force in Manhattan’s commercial real estate market. “Mostly, we represent companies and not-for-profit organizations in their search for space,” he said. “We do what the big real estate brokerage companies do but without the hype.”

And when he’s not wheeling, dealing, pointing, or shooting, Metzidakis can be found in Greece meditating with monks in a monastery on Mount Athos. In their own way, these retreats have allowed him to revisit his religion thesis. “The Depravity of Hope and Faith: A Search for Meaning” was his attempt to shake his own late adolescent nihilism and find meaning. “I argued that hope and faith create slaves of men, but what I wanted more than anything was not to be an atheist.” He still doesn’t have his final answer, but he finds useful markers for his journey in the Christian mysticism of the monks.

Think engineer, and you probably don’t think of someone who, in Lobenstine’s words, “prefers variety and combination over concentrating on any one thing.”

But even when he was engineering full time—for the first 15 years after graduation—Scott Cowger chafed against the same-old same-old. His first job, at Maine’s legendary Bath Iron Works shipyard, found him cooped up in a trailer inhaling the cigar smoke of a decidedly one-dimensional boss. And the fact that he was working on weapons systems for warships wasn’t a match with his own values or the Quaker orientation of his alma mater.

In a quest for a little fresh air, Cowger spent the next 15 years moving from job to job, dipping his drafting pen into the challenges of working with municipalities and the private sector. He designed stormwater systems for housing developments, capped municipal landfills, and drew up wastewater pollution abatement plans for the city of Portland. Anything to keep his mind active, his people-oriented personality satisfied, and his day’s work aligned with his deeply held environmental values.

“The pattern I’ve always followed is to do several different things at a time,” said Cowger. His Renaissance spirit found that variety in being sole proprietor of his own consulting firm, with its multiple demands of managing a budget, putting out bids, and juggling several projects at once. “Without the variety and change of things, I would have become bored. You can definitely tie that to Swarthmore. I happened to have an engineering degree—from a liberal arts college.”

When the opportunity to buy a 1906 farmhouse on 130 pastoral acres outside Augusta, Maine, came up seven years ago, Cowger grabbed it. “I still don’t know what drove me into starting a B&B, other than that I was interested in running a business, serving people, and living my life by my own interests,” he said.

As we spoke by phone, front-desk sounds came over the line. Guests were greeted and checked in by Cowger’s partner, Vince Hannan, as Cowger described the view from the office window: “I see the hills way beyond our animal pastures and the sun just starting to set,” he said.

After 10 years of trial and error, the business of running an inn has become as idyllic as his initial vision of it. But Cowger’s goal of “going out in the garden and planting perennials” has been more difficult to realize. There was a major renovation to do, the constant demands of hosting guests, and the challenge of finding reliable help. And any thoughts he had of “staying home on the farm” have been happily delayed by his duties—as a state representative.

Well aware of Maine’s environmental problems after so many years of hands-on contact with them, Cowger wanted to make changes on a broader level. After losing on his first try, Democrat Cowger unseated the Republican incumbent two years later by a slender 27 votes. In typical Renaissance style, though, Cowger resists the loaded label “politician,” preferring “public servant.” By any name, voters must like what he does because they’ve re-elected him twice.

As House chair of the Joint Natural Resources Committee, he has overseen many satisfying victories. Maine enacted the strictest standards in the nation for mercury and dioxin emissions. It was the first state in the country to outlaw the sale of mercury thermometers and thermostats and now requires dentists to make brochures available informing patients of the risks of mercury amalgam fillings.

After three terms, he finds that representing his constituents is its own 24-7 job. “I don’t have time to read books anymore,” Cowger sighed. “I go to bed reading reports.” Despite not having a vacation for close to a decade, he’s not complaining. He accepts constant motion as the price for satisfying his multifaceted interests.

“That’s the problem of having so many interests. You don’t have time to realize every aspect of any one,” he said. Innkeeping comes closest yet to a holistic expression of himself. “This is the best experience I’ve ever had,” he said. “As an innkeeper, there’s the big benefit, psychologically, of making people happy every day.”

It must be working. Maple Hill Farm Bed & Breakfast Inn was recently featured as one of “30 Great Inns” in Travel & Leisure (June). It can be found at www.maplebb.com.

Ali Crolius is a Renaissance soul who writes, teaches, and paints in Amherst, Mass., where she lives with her 10-year-old son, Ezra.