Campus Quote

"I had so much fun on Candide that I almost forget how much hard work and serendipity was involved."

--Judith Dolan, MFA '73, PhD '96, accepting the Tony Award for Best Costume Design

News and features about Stanford and its graduates

Grave Mistake

He's a professional historian and serious scholar, but Norman Tutorow is also something of an amateur detective. His latest case involves the lines of poetry carved on a marble memorial to Leland Stanford Jr., which still stands near the Stanford Shopping Center.

Tutorow, MA '60, PhD '68, MA '83, ran across a reference to the poem--a favorite of Jane Stanford's--while researching his new biography of Gov. Stanford. A well-wisher sent the poem to Mrs. Stanford after the death of her son Leland Jr. in 1884. She always believed the poet was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but later, scholars could never find it among Browning's work. In 1898, she had four stanzas chiseled into her son's memorial.

Curious about the rightful author, Tutorow and his wife and research assistant, Evie, began sleuthing. The standard Browning references were no help. He eventually identified the writer as Felicia Dorothea Hemans, a 19th century poet.

Mystery solved? Not quite. When Tutorow finally got a proper edition of Hemans's work, he compared it to the words carved in the memorial: They didn't match exactly. Numerous words were different, and more than a few commas were out of place.

The memorial is not the only campus stone etched in error. Tutorow recently noticed that the inscription dedicated to Gov. Stanford's mother in Memorial Church has the wrong date for her death. (It says February 27, 1873. She died February 25.)

Tales of the City

It gained national notoriety as the "murder capital of the United States" in 1992. But Michael Levin knew there was more to East Palo Alto than sound bites about crime and violence. A documentary filmmaker, Levin, '90, MA '90, wanted to recount the town's rich history--from the farmers of the 1920s to activists today. His 56-minute film, Dreams of a City: Creating East Palo Alto, spans 70 years and relies on interviews, oral histories and archival footage. Among other tales, it tells how whites left in the 1950s, as the newly built Bayshore Freeway sliced the town in two and dramatically weakened the business district.

As director and co-producer, Levin spent more than three years on theproject, which was funded primarily by several Stanford groups. "People look at this community from the outside and see its problems," Levin says. "But the residents are trying to do something good and are not giving up." City officials appreciate Levin's efforts to show the town's other side. "Michael saw various organizations and cultures working and blending together, which you don't usually hear about," says Rose Jacobs Gibson, a member of the city council who served as mayor, 1994-96. The film has aired on local cable and public TV. Levin now is trying to find a distributor.

Big Game Buildup

Perennial foes on the football field, Stanford and UC-Berkeley are on the same team when it comes to promoting the 100th Big Game. The schools are planning dozens of joint events in the weeks leading up to the November 22 contest. Topping the list: the Big Auction, a fundraiser expected to bring in $2 million in athletic scholarships to be divided evenly by the two schools.

Items on the auction block range from adventure travel (Alaska, the Amazon, the African bush) to a visit to the set of The X-Files guided by actress Gillian Anderson. Other goodies include (no kidding): TV walk-on parts on Murphy Brown and Melrose Place, Herb Caen's battered manual typewriter, 100 rounds at the Stanford Golf Course, a photo op with the Axe, a chance to have a character named after you in Scott Turow's next novel and an opportunity for your child to appear in a Gap ad. "We told everyone working on the auction to imagine the most outlandish things--and then try to get them," says Cameron Bianchi, '68,auction co-chair.

The live auction will take place at the Cow Palace the night before the centennial Big Game. More than 3,000 friends and alums from the schools are slated to attend; tickets range from $250 to $1,000 and include dinner. Others can join the action by telephone and the World Wide Web by purchasing a bid number for $250.

The countdown to this biggest Big Game began in the spring with the opening of a six-month exhibit at San Francisco International Airport on the history of the football rivalry. In August, look for the start of the "Hundred Days of Wonder" media blitz in local newspapers, on TV stations and on a special website. Closer to game day, there will be a Cal/Stanford luncheon for past faculty winners of the Nobel Prize, the selection of an All-Big Game Team by a Bay Area media panel and a series of televised quiz shows with students and faculty. And don't miss the "World's Biggest Tailgate Party and BBQ," to be held at Angell Field. Then, not quite an afterthought, comes the game itself.

The Father of Tofu

Bill Shurtleff wants you to stop pushing that white blob of soybean curd to the side of your dinner plate. Known as the Father of Tofu, Shurtleff, '63, MA '69, is the director of the Soyfoods Center, the world's only computerized database on soy and soy products. Shurtleff has compiled more than 53,000 documents--from information on soy ice creams to the history of tofu in Europe and Asia. He's also the co-author of The Book of Tofu, which features 500 recipes (including the cheesemushroom-tofu-egg substitute "scrambler" pictured at right). "We would like to do for soybeans what Johnny Appleseed did for apples," Shurtleff says .

Shurtleff discovered tofu while studying in Japan in 1971. He's been on a mission to teach Americans about its health benefits ever since. He says the high point came in 1995, when the New England Journal of Medicine published an analysis of studies linking consumption of soy protein to lowered blood cholesterol levels. The evidence suggested that replacing animal protein with soy could help prevent heart disease. Shurtleff adds that eating soy will reduce demand for more scarce food supplies. "The world is inevitably moving to a plant-based diet because of population pressures," he says. Pass the soy sauce.

Pulitzer Prowess

In April, History Professor Jack Rakove was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his book exploring the politics behind the making of the U.S. Constitution. He joins the ranks of seven other Stanford faculty and staff who won Pulitzers either before or during their tenure at the University.