|
|
Who's Who
GEORGE
GMELCH, '68, led two lives at Stanford. He'd take
classes in fall and winter, then leave every March to play
minor-league baseball. Now a cultural anthropologist, Gmelch
has spent the last decade traveling with teams, trying to
decipher the culture of this enigmatic profession. His book
The Ballplayers will be published this December. One
finding: "We have this stereotype that retired baseball
players don't do well in white-collar careers," he says,
"but quite a few have really landed on their feet." Gmelch,
chair of anthropology at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y.,
lives in nearby Slingerlands with his anthropologist wife,
Sharon, and ballplaying son, Morgan. He writes
about the demise of his own baseball career in this
issue.

DOUG
SWANSON had a presidential kind of week recently.
In the midst of researching our cover
story on Stanford's next chief, he had to drop
everything to cover a Sacramento campaign stop by George W.
Bush. Writing about presidents and contenders is nothing new
for Swanson, a Palo Alto-based reporter for the Dallas
Morning News. "Anybody remember Pierre duPont?" Swanson
asks. "He ran for the White House in 1988, and I spent three
days riding around New Hampshire with him, both of us
crammed into the back seat of a Chevy compact. And I once
had dinner in downtown Billings, Mont., with Dan Quayle."
Swanson was a 1998-99 Knight fellow in journalism at
Stanford and now covers Northern California and Silicon
Valley. His fifth book, House of Corrections, is due
out in August.
Illustrator
MICHELLE CHANG has some
affinity for the itinerant life that development
consultants lead. Her education took her from studies in
design and environmental analysis at Cornell to San
Francisco for a second degree from the Academy of Art
College. Early in her career, she worked in France, Japan,
the United States and Korea. Now she has settled in New York
City, with a client roster that includes GQ, Harper's,
Atlantic Monthly, Time and the Wall Street
Journal. The best thing about living abroad, Chang says,
is interacting with new cultures. Still, she finds
present-day New York so different from her childhood
memories -- "I feel like I don't know it at all" -- that she
hardly misses globetrotting.
"You
can't go to Mata Ortiz without buying pots," says writer
SUSAN LOWELL, '72, MA
'74. "They are absolutely seductive: so smooth, so frail, so
exuberant, sometimes so funny." Lowell and her husband,
photographer Ross Humphreys, own a small press in Tucson,
Ariz., and decided to publish a book on the pottery of the
tiny Mexican town after seeing some pieces at a museum.
Lowell's article
on Mata Ortiz and its biggest booster, Walt Parks, '54, MBA
'59, appears in this issue with Humphreys's photos. The
couple also has a cattle ranch, so Lowell writes between
branding chores and sales conferences. Her children's book
The Three Little Javelinas sold half a million
copies. She is currently working on a novel based on
Victorian family papers she discovered in an iron
strongbox.
|