It's
not often that four generations of a family can watch one of their
own graduate from law school. But Joseph D'Annunzio Jr. '49, who
received a J.D. from the Florida State University (FSU) College of
Law last May, was cheered on by his 49-year-old son and his
9-year-old grandson. His 97-year-old dad, Joe Sr., led the cheering
section.
D'Annunzio, age 73, made history. He's the oldest person ever to graduate from FSU's law school. He put an-other first on the books on Jan. 1, when he became the first person of the new century sworn to the Florida bar--arranging to have the oath administered by the chief justice of the state Supreme Court.
That's after a career building a family-owned business in New Jersey, moving to Chicago to become vice president of a big conglomerate, running his own company in Minnesota, then moving to Tallahassee to work for a Venezuelan firm.
"I want to be useful,'' D'Annunzio said, explaining his decision to study law. "I've seen too many people retire and have no enthusiasm for life.... I'd be interested in prosecuting white-collar crime,'' he said. "Or maybe working for a trade association.'' Another possibility is public service with a state environmental or public utility commission.
Professors and fellow students mention some facts not on his résumé: He never missed a class, he wore a jacket and tie to school every day, and he was older than all of his law professors, except one.
In fact, D'Annunzio had some of his fellow students fooled.
"For the first several weeks, I thought he was with the Board of Regents, monitoring the classes,'' said Neil Mooney, a former classmate who graduated in December 1998.
"This has not been an intellectual exercise for Joe,'' he said. "He came to every class prepared, asking questions that indicated a deep understanding of whatever subject was discussed.''
D'Annunzio was born in Philadelphia in 1925 but grew up in Trenton, N.J., the state capital. There, during the Depression, his father opened D&W Blueprint Co., an engineering supply firm that was the forerunner of today's ubiquitous quick-copy shops.
In 1943, D'Annunzio joined the Navy, which sent him to Columbia University to study electrical engineering. He briefly spent time on a gunboat in the North Atlantic but saw little action.
After the war, D'Annunzio returned to his studies on the GI Bill, earning a humanities degree from Swarthmore. After marriage to a local woman that ended in divorce, he lost touch with the College but now says that Swarthmore "provided balance in my education. Between my technical education at Columbia and the liberal arts at Swarthmore, I had the beginnings of a proper education."
He also recalls fondly his stint as goalkeeper on the Swarthmore soccer team, with Chris Pedersen '49 playing fullback in front of him. "He made my job easy," says D'Annunzio.
After college, D'Annunzio went back to work for his father and, during the next 20 years, helped build the family business from a single storefront to four locations. In that time, he and his second wife, Barbara, raised a son and two daughters.
In 1968, Joe Sr. and Joe Jr. sold the family business. D'Annunzio moved to Chicago to head a division of the Teledyne Corp., rising to vice president, overseeing nine companies that made everything from robots for car assembly lines to wooden pizza paddles, he said.
Upon retirement from Teledyne in 1991, he bought one of the company's divisions in Minnesota that made graphic arts reproduction products. Barbara ended up running the company, however, when he was asked to help a Venezuelan company set up a blueprint-paper manufacturing plant in Quincy, Fla., near Tallahassee.
After that assignment, Joe and Barbara sold the Minnesota company to its employees (according to their original plan) and bought a house in Tallahassee, making Florida their home. In 1995, he began volunteering for the Leon County Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Program, which mediates small claims disputes.
"To learn more about ADR, I took a course at FSU law school as a special student--not expecting credit or to pursue further, but a little learning is a dangerous thing. I decided to apply the next term, took the entrance exams, jumped all the hurdles, and submitted an application. 'If you want a diversified student body,' I wrote, 'here I am.'"
One of his professors was Jean Sternlight '79, who teaches ADR. Her father, Peter '48, was a contemporary of D'Annunzio at the College.
After three years, D'Annunzio admits to being a B and C student at FSU. "I pay no attention to it,'' he said. "Scores are not going to determine my future.''
"Stopping at age 65 would have been a mistake for me,'' D'Annunzio said. "One should never stop learning--that is the measure of vitality.
--James Rosica
Tallahassee Democrat
Adapted by permission
Sherry
Bellamy '74, president and chief executive officer of Bell
Atlantic&endash;Maryland, has many shoes to fill. Representing Bell
Atlantic's interests in Maryland with customers, legislators, and the
business and civic communities, she rarely has time to spare. "The
demands on my time and the need to adapt to several different roles
and juggle several different issues in any one day can be daunting,"
she says. "But I'm never bored."
Bellamy grew up in Harlem, as the youngest of seven children. Attending New York City Catholic schools, she was a good student, curious and eager to learn. "Education was always emphasized in our home," she says, "and I saw educational attainment as a way to achieve a secure future." She was encouraged to apply to Swarthmore by a friend who recognized her scholastic performance and interests to be a "good fit." Her school counselor laughed at her, thinking that the school was "out of her league, as a poor kid from a school in the Bronx." Refusing to be put off, she applied and was admitted early.
For Bellamy, who graduated with a degree in political science, Swarthmore presented "an incredibly beautiful change from the streets of New York City and an intellectually challenging adventure." Musing on her College years, she says: "Swarthmore gave me confidence, stretched me beyond what I thought I could do, and allowed me to feel comfortable being 'brainy'. I have never felt more at home than in a seminar at Swarthmore, arguing over some arcane bit of political theory. Nothing seemed difficult after four years there."
Bellamy went on to obtain a J.D. from Yale law school, aiming to use the law as a force to improve society. Then, she joined New Haven Legal Assistance, founding a specialized unit to represent children. She says, "Growing up in Harlem, I thought I had seen most of the trauma that life can throw at the unfortunate, but I had never seen anything like the painful lives of these children." While representing three little girls whose mother was starving them, she became tearful when the girls asked her if they could live with her. During four years with legal aid, Bellamy paid a high emotional toll.
Ten years in the very different world of corporate law followed. Then, in 1991, Bellamy was recruited by Bell Atlantic and, only one year after being hired, she was promoted to vice president and general counsel of Bell Atlantic&endash;Washington, Inc. During that time, she was instrumental in obtaining approval for the merger of Bell Atlantic with Nynex Corp., which, she says, was essential to Bell Atlantic's progress. She was appointed to her current position in 1997. One legislator with whom she worked, Casper Taylor Jr., Allegany County Democrat and Speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates, says of Bellamy: "She's very, very knowledgeable and proficient in the way she deals with government. She's a tremendous ambassador for her company."
Bellamy, who enjoys being a visible representative of the opportunity and diversity of Bell-Atlantic, is proud of being the first African-American woman to reach a senior executive level within the company. On the other hand, she regrets the fact that so many people make the mistake of labeling her "special" or "different." She says, "I usually take those comments to mean that I surprise them because they expect so little of someone black and female. I am not exceptional, but I am lucky to have been given the skills and the opportunity to use the talents I have. People usually live up to expectations--it is racist and sexist to expect less than excellence because of one's color and gender."
Despite a whirlwind professional schedule, Bellamy still succeeds as a devoted spouse and mother. Raising four "great children" and creating a "great marriage" are more important to her than anything else. "While that may sound outdated, coming from an avowed feminist," she says, "without the mental and emotional support that I derive from my immediate family, I wouldn't be able to do all the other things that I spend my time on." Of architect husband George Bumbray, Bellamy says, "He helps keep me sane, by ensuring that I never take myself too seriously." They enjoy collecting African-American art, selecting only the pieces with which they "fall in love."
Bellamy, who is 47, sees her professional career as only half over; she intends to stay in the telecommunications business for many years to come, saying, "There is no other industry that is more exciting or changing more quickly." One of her goals is to lead her company into the long-distance business, from which it is currently barred. She's also eager to further a full-scale effort to ensure that all Americans have access to the advanced technologies evolving in telecommunications.
Bellamy's commitment to social betterment is undiminished by her cor-porate career. In fact, she says: "One thing my career has afforded me is to be involved in civic and nonprofit activities. I'd like to make a difference in whatever way I can." Among other things, she serves as director of the Kennedy Krieger Institute, where children with brain injuries are treated, studied, educated, and supported. And last December, Bellamy was appointed to Swarthmore's Board of Managers.
"Ultimately," Bellamy says, "I'd like to find a nice spot on a beach and read those few Michener books I've had no time for yet. But that is many years off!"
--Carol Brévart-Demm
For
more than a year, students nationwide have rallied against sweatshop
labor, urging their colleges and universities to stop purchasing
goods made under adverse labor conditions. Last spring, the
anti-sweatshop movement at Harvard University took another turn when
newly energized student activists began to look at wage structures
and working conditions within the university.
The result: a "living wage" campaign that has confounded the nation's oldest and wealthiest university and led to a re-examination of how its lowest-paid workers are employed and compensated. The primary goal of the campaign is a $10 per hour minimum wage for all Harvard workers--including those whose jobs have been outsourced in recent years to private contractors.
Aaron Bartley '96, now a second-year law student at Harvard, is de-
scribed by The Harvard Crimson as the founder of the campaign, but Bartley gives credit more broadly, citing Harvard's Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) as the source of the activism. The PSLM is a coalition of undergraduate and graduate students with ties to local labor activists and unions.
Bartley, along with fellow Harvard Law student Mike Mirarchi '97, has helped organize more than 10 public rallies. The 300 Harvard-employed custodians won a $1.15/hour wage increase, which will bring their base wage above $10 per hour by 2002. But, says Bartley, most food service, custodial, and security workers at Harvard are employees of outside contractors, some of which pay only about 60 percent of prevailing university wages.
As a result of rising rents and the high cost of living in Cambridge, Mass., says Bartley, many low-wage employees of the city's universities can no longer afford to live there: "The departure of working-class people has decreased the diversity of our community. We think Harvard has a responsibility to pay wages that allow its workers to live in and be a part of the Cambridge community."
Mirarchi, elected this year to the Harvard Law Review, has created a Web site for the Living Wage Campaign, where a digest of articles about the movement and other salient documents about the campaign are posted. Readers can visit the site at http://record.law.harvard.-edu/~mirarchi/living-wage.
The vocal campaign last spring prompted Harvard president Neil Rudenstine to appoint a faculty-adminstration ad hoc committee on employment policies. Rudenstine stated that regular full-time Harvard employees receive competitive wages and generous benefits, but he asked the committee to report on the status of the university's many part-time and contract employees, whose numbers have grown in recent years.
Although a political science major, Bartley says he didn't think much about labor issues as a Swarthmore student. Yet after graduation in 1996, he joined the AFL-CIO's Union Summer campaign--an effort to introduce college students to labor organizing. Bartley worked with a local Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in Denver, trying to organize janitors in big corporate office buildings.
"It opened up a whole new way of looking at politics and the economy," he says of the "summerista" experience. He stayed on with SEIU for four months after the end of the Union Summer program, then worked with community and consumer organizations in Brooklyn and Cambridge before entering Harvard Law School in 1998.
Finding a like-minded group of activists in the PSLM, Bartley first joined the anti-sweatshop campaign, but as the university responded in positive ways to that initiative, the PSLM "decided to focus on something more immediate."
The group's public rallies and direct actions--such as loudly demonstrating in the office of the university's director of labor and human relations--have made it one of Harvard's most visible student organizations. One student told The Crimson, "they pay attention to us relative to the amount of noise we make."
President Rudenstine admitted in December 1999 that "the students have been unusually effective in making clear what the issues are."
The future of the movement is unclear. The university's ad hoc committee, whose members Bartley characterizes as "moderate and apolitical," has yet to report its findings. It is not known whether they will make any recommendations regarding specific wage targets.
After finishing his law degree, Bartley plans to continue his activism. "Studying law sometimes seems irrelevant," he says, "but it puts you in touch with a lot of good people."
--Jeffrey Lott
ALUMNI DIGEST / BACK PAGES/ BOOKS BY ALUMNI / COLLECTION / EDITOR'S NOTE / FEATURES /
IN MY LIFE/ LETTERS / PROFILES / ARCHIVE / TALK BACK
Swarthmore College, March 2000. All rights reserved.