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Swarthmore in the NewsJune 17, 2011

Investor's Business Daily

T. Rowe Price Was Right for His Clients' Portfolios

By Vincent Mao

June 16, 2011

Do right for your customers, and you have a good shot at success.

Thomas Rowe Price Jr. (1898-1983) rode that theme seven decades ago - and delivered stellar investment results for his clients.

Price founded what is now T. Rowe Price Group in 1937.

From its humble beginnings as a small-time investment advisory firm, the Baltimore-based company has swelled to a global investment powerhouse with more than $500 billion under management.

..."He was the first to describe and use the terminology 'growth stock,'" Jenks Cromwell, a portfolio manager at Maryland Capital after 26 years at T. Rowe Price, told IBD.

Forbes deemed Price the Sage of Baltimore in 1975. The lesser-known investor was profiled in the book  Lessons From the Legends of Wall Street  by financial planner Nikki Ross, who deemed him a "visionary growth investor."

...Price built his business and reputation through hard work, long hours, great foresight and passion. He didn't care what others thought of him or his investment strategy. He simply did his own research and drew his own conclusions.

..."He was very intellectually open and he was always looking at the environment," said former T. Rowe Price Chairman George Roche. "He was very open to new ideas. He would say he always loved a good investment fight."

... Price's background wasn't in business, finance or economics. He graduated from Swarthmore College near Philadelphia in 1919 with a degree in chemistry. (more)

 

The Atlantic

How to Land Your Kid in Therapy

Why the obsession with our kids' happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods. A therapist and mother reports.

By Lori Gottlieb

July/August issue

As a parent, I wanted to do things right. But what did "right" mean? One look in Barnes & Noble's parenting section and I was dizzy: child-centered, collaborative, or RIE? Brazelton, Spock, or Sears?

The good news, at least according to Donald Winnicott, the influential English pediatrician and child psychiatrist, was that you didn't have to be a perfect mother to raise a well-adjusted kid. You just had to be, to use the term Winnicott coined, a "good-enough mother."

...Modern social science backs her up on this. "Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing," Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory at Swarthmore College, told me. "But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster." It's precisely this goal, though, that many modern parents focus on obsessively-only to see it backfire. Observing this phenomenon, my colleagues and I began to wonder: Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we're depriving them of happiness as adults?

..."We want our kids to be happy living the life we envision for them-the banker who's happy, the surgeon who's happy," Barry Schwartz, the Swarthmore social scientist, told me, even though those professions "might not actually make them happy." At least for parents of a certain demographic (and if you're reading this article, you're likely among them), "we're not so happy if our kids work at Walmart but show up each day with a smile on their faces," Schwartz says. "They're happy, but we're not. Even though we say what we want most for our kids is their happiness, and we'll do everything we can to help them achieve that, it's unclear where parental happiness ends and our children's happiness begins."

...Barry Schwartz, at Swarthmore, believes that well-meaning parents give their kids so much choice on a daily basis that the children become not just entitled, but paralyzed. "The ideology of our time is that choice is good and more choice is better," he said. "But we've found that's not true." (more)

The Philadelphia Inquirer

A tiny step forward for green roofs in Philadelphia

By Sandy Bauers, Inquirer Staff Writer

June 15, 2011

The city's newest green roof is also, in all likelihood, its smallest and oddest - a cheerful puff of plant life atop a bus-stop shelter at 15th and Market Streets.

...In Philadelphia alone, 52 green roofs have sprung up, totaling 10.6 acres by the count of the Water Department, which is tracking them as part of its effort to amass data on storm water.

...The roofs installed so far manage enough storm water every year to fill a swimming pool the size of City Hall's block with 5.5 feet of water, Crockett said.

The roofs also are seen as a way to improve the efficiency of buildings by keeping them cooler in summer and warmer in winter.

...Suburban green roofs are less assiduously tracked, but a national database shows green roofs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey atop government buildings, medical centers, college buildings, condos, private homes, and a mall.

These include Swarthmore College residence halls, the Colorcon global headquarters in Harleysville, and a pavilion at the Elmwood Park Zoo in Norristown.  ...

The Delaware County Daily Times (PA)

Seven decades of wedded bliss

By Frank Otto

June 15, 2011

SWARTHMORE - In the time that Edmund and Adalyn Jones have been married, actress Elizabeth Taylor married eight times.

Seventy years can change a lot. But if anything in Delaware County is steadfast, it's the Joneses. Tuesday was their 70th wedding anniversary.

In a word, Ed, 93, described the past seven decades with Lyn, also 93, as, "wonderful."

...The two met as students at Swarthmore College. Ed already was a sophomore when Lyn started her freshman year.

...Despite not sharing classes, Ed and Lyn got to know each other by dancing together frequently throughout college.

"My parents used to write, 'You're doing so much dancing, when are you studying?'" Lyn said.

The couple married in 1941 after both had graduated from Swarthmore. Ed finished his law degree at the University of Pennsylvania shortly thereafter.

...Among their happiest moments together are the trips they've taken with their three daughters.

...In addition to the three daughters they raised, the Joneses have six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

...Ed continues to be a lawyer in the firm his grandfather founded in Delaware County in 1876. He's also served as mayor of Swarthmore and as a state representative.

Lyn taught at the Old Forge School and created the Swarthmore Dog Show.

When asked what may have helped their marriage stand seven decades, Ed offered up a unique ritual.

"Before we went to bed, we'd each sit down and have a dish of ice cream," he said. "You get a lot of things settled in the few minutes before you go to bed."

The Dominion Post (WV)

WWII vet's story highlights flag's place in U.S. society

By Jim Bissett

June 14, 2011

...Today is Flag Day, a holiday that for 62 years has honored the red, white and blue weave of Old Glory. President Harry Truman signed the day into law in 1949 as America was still reeling from the effects of World War II.

...That leads us to who this story is really about: Joe George, a genial 85-year-old, Waynesburg, Pa., native who has made a career and a life in Morgantown since he moved here at the end of World War II.

By the time he was 20, he had been fished out of the English Channel, shot at by Germans in heavy fighting in Normandy and Belgium and -- although he had no way of knowing it at the time -- had forged his way to winning France's highest honor for service.

...After his service, he studied public relations at WVU under the G.I. Bill and went to work for Brown-Foreman, a wine and spirits distributer based in Kentucky.

He courted and married Catherine, a Morgantown girl, and on Princeton Avenue, the couple raised five sons: Robert, Leonard, Kent, Keith and Edward. All are lawyers, and graduates of Oxford.

Robert, a professor at Princeton, has garnered international acclaim for his writing and teachings on Catholicism and the Constitution. He was proud of his father, he said Monday from Milan, Italy, where he's speaking at a conference.

And when the story of the Leopoldville finally surfaced after its 50th anniversary in 1995, he was in absolute awe, he said.

"This was the generation of men who fought a war and won a war," he said. "They had great respect for authority, because they had to."

In 1974, 30 years after Joe George went to war at 18, Robert George was that same age, readying for college at Swarthmore and playing banjo in bluegrass bands in the Morgantown area.

"Vietnam was dying down by then so I knew I wasn't going to be drafted," he said. "I was playing music and getting ready to go to school. The reason my circumstances were so fortunate was because of guys like my dad."

"Think about what they did. They fought, they won. They liberated, and they came home. They came home, and that's the magic of America."

George was just as surprised as anyone when he got a letter from the French Embassy in Washington, D.C., last year.

He and 19 other soldiers were informed they were receiving France's highest honor for helping liberate the country in 1944 and '45: They were knighted into the Legion of Honor in the February ceremony.

..."I was honored,"  Joe George said, "but I think the medal should have gone to everyone who fought."

...These days, George soldiers on every Memorial Day by marching in the town parade at nearby Mt. Morris, Pa. -- an engagement he hasn't missed since 1949.

"I'll go as long as my legs can take me," he said. ...

 

The Post-Chronicle (CT)

Hamden's Eli Whitney students hear from Freedom Rider

By Ann DeMatteo
Special to the Post-Chronicle

June 13, 2011

HAMDEN - A man who has stood with the giants of the civil rights movement told students at Eli Whitney Technical High School that life will bring all kinds of opportunities.

Taking those opportunities, the Rev. Ralph Lord Roy said, "takes hard work and vision."

Roy has worked hard to ensure that the democratic principles of America are upheld. He was arrested twice during the civil rights movement, and again in 2002 for opposing the war in Iraq with 100 others during a protest at the United Nations.

Roy is now 82, and this year he is opening up the history book known as his life to educate others about the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides. He spoke last week at Eli Whitney, where juniors have been studying civil rights.

More than 400 Americans - many of them black and white clergy - were part of the Freedom Rides of 1961. The rides were sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality, an organization that began in 1942. Roy joined CORE when he was a student at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. He later attended the Union Theological Seminary and became a Methodist minister. He was serving as an assistant pastor at a church in Harlem when he went on his first ride.

The purpose of the Freedom Rides, he said, was to test a Supreme Court decision that made it illegal to have racial segregation in rest stops and waiting rooms in bus terminals that crossed state lines.

...Roy also told the students that his most rewarding time was in 1962 when he worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"I was a minister in an African American church in New York City and we went with black ministers and a rabbi to Washington, D.C. to pressure President Kennedy to do more on civil rights," Roy said.

"We got to know (King) pretty well. He asked us to organize a prayer pilgrimage," which led to the largest simultaneous incarceration of clergy in American history, Roy said, after the Pilgrims went to a city hall in Georgia to protest segregation. "We ended up being arrested and put in four different jails in Albany, Ga.," he said.

Students were pleased to hear Roy speak.

"I learned a lot. I didn't know that reverends and priests were some of the ones who fought in the Freedom Rides," said Odessa Little, 16, a junior from New Haven.

"He told us when he was arrested how he talked to Rev. King in the jail cell when blacks and whites were segregated and a bunch of Freedom Riders were singing, and King whispered to Rev. Roy and told him they were singing so the guards wouldn't hear their conversations," Odessa said.  ...

The News & Advance (VA)

500 Channels and nothing on

By Darrell Laurant

June 12, 2011

... This is not a tribute to the "good old days." I like cellphones, I'm addicted to ESPN and the History Channel, and I've developed a taste for Starbucks (although I still order "A small, whatever you've got," and don't really care if it comes from Guatemala or The Congo).

Still, there are moments, as I stand in front of my TV with remote in hand and nothing in particular to watch, when I feel my brain begin to freeze like a computer on lockdown. When Bruce Springsteen wrote his song "57 Channels and Nothing On" about a man who shot his TV set out of frustration, he set the prophetic bar much too low. Now, we're talking about over 500 channels, with everything on.

...But is this dangerous overload? At least one psychologist, Barry Schwartz, thinks so. The Swarthmore College professor has written a book called The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.  Quoted in an American Psychological Association blog, he says: "The presumption is, self-determination is a good thing and choice is essential to self-determination. But there's a point where all of this choice starts to be not only unproductive, but counterproductive -- a source of pain, regret, worry about missed opportunities and unrealistically high expectations."...

 

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Bucks blood-marrow donor sees things in a different way now

By Emilie Lounsberry, Inquirer Staff Writer

June 11, 2011

About a decade ago, when he was a student at the University of Florida, Marshal Davis made a spur-of-the-moment gesture during a campus drive for bone-marrow donors.

He got his cheek swabbed for a cell sample, signed some paperwork - and never gave it another thought.

Until his cellphone rang on a summer day in 2009.

The caller reminded Davis that he had registered as a potential donor years before. He barely remembered, but no matter. A 5-year-old boy in Chicago needed bone-marrow stem cells to fight off a disorder called myelodysplasia, often a precursor to leukemia.

Davis, the caller said, was a match.

By then a lawyer in Bucks County, he listened to the possible risks, did his own research, asked his doctor's advice, and talked to friends and family. Once again - though this time, not on a whim - he stepped up.

This spring, nearly two years after Davis' stem cells began coursing through Jacob Kowalik's body, the two finally met in Chicago to celebrate.

..."It was just an amazing opportunity to be a part of changing someone else's life," said Davis, 31, who lives in Buckingham Township and has a practice in nonprofit and corporate law in Warwick Township. "I never thought I'd be able to help somebody in that significant a way. To be able to do that, I can't really . . . put words to it."

...Until the end of the first year, neither recipient nor donor knew the other's identity, under privacy rules governing transplants. But Davis got periodic updates on the boy's progress - along with a card from Jacob's brother saying, "Thanks for saving my brother."

Jacob, however, had developed a common, and sometimes fatal, complication known as graft-versus-host disease. In essence, the donor cells were attacking the boy's body. He lost his hair. His skin became blotchy, and his eyes hypersensitive to light.

But increasingly, doctors are optimistic.

"He's doing amazingly well," Duerst said last week, while cautioning that Jacob has lingering skin problems and a higher risk of infection.

But in Mike Kowalik's eyes, his son's progress is clear. Jacob's hospital visits for photopheresis treatments - exposing his blood to light and medication to help his body adapt to the donor cells - are down from twice a week to once every other week.

When the Kowalik family learned that Davis, also a fencing coach at Swarthmore College, was headed to Chicago in April for a tournament, the trip became a momentous occasion.

...for his stem calls, Davis got a life lesson.

"You can't really have a bad day after that as long as you're healthy," he said, "and the people you love are healthy."