DOUBLE TEAM: Olympic bobsledding twins Darrin and Dan Steele give the winning car a push.

It wasn’t exactly your Norman Rockwell soap box derby. The Challenge mixes the competitiveness of venture capitalists with the goofiness of the Stanford Band. Held September 20 on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, the races drew 48 entrants–many of them Stanford alums–and a crowd of 20,000, including 300 accordionists who played "Lady of Spain." The event raised $135,000 for charity.

For the second year, the speed division victory went to Mohr Davidow Ventures, whose torpedo-shaped vehicle hit 43 mph. "It’s fun to win," says driver Larry Mohr, ms ’67 , mba ’70. "But I’m nothing but ballast in the car." How much did the venture capitalist invest in his high-tech soapbox? "That’s confidential."

	NO PLAIN JANE: Mrs. Stanford in "faded gingham"? Nonsense.

Take the tale of two “backwoods country hicks” that’s been zapped across the nation and around the world in countless e-mails over the last few months. The story has it that sometime in the 1880s a man and woman show up unannounced to meet with the president of Harvard. They talk to him about building a memorial for their son, who “accidentally killed” himself after his freshman year at Harvard. Eyeing the woman’s “faded gingham dress” and the man’s “homespun threadbare suit,” the president rudely informs them of the cost of building a university. “Is that all?” the woman says to her husband. “Why don’t we just start our own?” With that, the story goes, Leland and Jane Stanford returned to Palo Alto, “where they established the University that bears their name, a memorial to a son that Harvard no longer cared about.”

The account, of course, is wrong -- and, in places, absurd. Leland Jr. died of typhoid fever at age 15. He never enrolled at Harvard. His parents did visit Harvard President Charles Eliot, but only to get advice on endowing a university. Perhaps most ridiculous is the notion that Sen. Stanford, a wealthy railroad baron, and his wife would show up in ratty clothes.

Still, the story lives on. Stanford officials have fielded questions from tourists, alumni, reporters -- and Harvard itself. Archivist Margaret Kimball, ’80, was even asked to settle a bet between a husband and wife. “I might have caused a divorce,” she says.

		PET PROJECT: Hyde found "cute guy" at Governor's Corner when he was a kitten.

The Network was formed in 1989, after University officials announced plans to turn over the growing number of stray cats to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Fearing the tabbies would be euthanized, campus catlovers rallied and promised, in writing, to care for every stray.

On the eve of its 10th anniversary, the Network claims success. Founding member Carole Hyde, a project associate at the Institute for International Studies, says volunteers registered 500 cats in 1989. Today’s population is down by 70 percent, thanks to a program of spaying, neutering and, when possible, finding homes for their charges. Better still, universities from Texas to Virginia have started programs modeled on Stanford’s.