Farm Report

NEWS FROM INSIDE CAMPUS DRIVE AND BEYOND

Quote "Anybody who knows anything about golf knows that you don't remove the first hole." --Richard H. Harris Jr., '68, leader of the Committee to Save the Stanford Golf Course, on the proposal to build much-needed faculty housing on part of Stanford's landmark course.

A Quantum Leap into Politics THE CANDIDATE: Hagelin would apply the laws of physics to government. Ron Haviv (Saba) John Hagelin has a penchant for eccentric crusades. He once led 4,000 "yogic fliers" to Washington, D.C., in an attempt to reduce violence through meditation. He's run for president twice on the Natural Law Party's ticket. And in August he wrestled conservative columnist Pat Buchanan for the Reform Party's presidential nomination. At presstime, the party had split in two and the outcome was, uh, still up in the air. A research associate at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1982-83, Hagelin has a grand vision -- for the universe and for politics. At Stanford, he coauthored a physics paper titled "Flipped SU(5) Supersymmetric Grand Unification." His summary: "The theory reveals the central unity of nature's deepest laws governing the birth and evolution of the universe." Government should follow those laws, too, Hagelin says. That premise led him to study environmental and health problems and, from there, to jump into politics. "The most powerful way to get the government to listen was to send them scrambling to co-opt our ideas," he says. Now he hopes to compete directly, as the nominee of both the Reform and Natural Law parties. It's surely something to meditate on.

From TV Star to Reporter CAREER MOVE: Thompson Courtesy Andrea Thompson First, he told her she was nuts to leave her job as an actor on an Emmy-winning cop show to become a broadcast journalist. Then he said, "Okay, if you really want to do this, you've got to do it right." And that's how Jack Hubbard, associate director of the Stanford News Service and a former CBS producer, took on the apprenticeship of Andrea Thompson, a.k.a. Detective Jill Kirkendall, of NYPD Blue fame. Starting in April 1999 he gave her daily writing assignments, which she e-mailed back to Hubbard from the Los Angeles set of Blue. On weekends, Thompson flew to Stanford, where Hubbard taught her how to shoot stories in the field with a camera crew. A year later, Thompson's demo tape landed her a job as a reporter for KRQE, the CBS affiliate in Albuquerque. Within days of being hired in May, she was out in the field, filing stories about the wildfires then threatening the Southwest. "She's got reporting instincts you can't teach," Hubbard says. "Cops love her, and everybody else wants to talk to her, too. Plus she has an incredible work ethic, putting in 12-hour days without whining. She really gives a damn." Memo to Diane Sawyer: watch your back.

AP Photo/Richard Drew Chelsea Joins the Fray She's kept a low political profile as a Stanford student, but with Mom fighting for a U.S. Senate seat and Dad finishing his last months in office, senior Chelsea Clinton couldn't resist: she's stopping out fall quarter to support Hillary Clinton's campaign and to spend time with the president in Washington. "I love Stanford, I adore it, it's a fabulous place," she said at one of her first campaign appearances on Long Island. "But my family is here." News of the decision sent a ripple through the national media, which has taken a low-key approach to covering the first daughter while she pursues a degree in history. Time magazine described her as a crowd-pleasing campaigner and "the most potent familial ornament in American politics since Jackie Kennedy." The Clintons say they're looking forward to spending some time with their daughter, who plans to return to campus in January and graduate in June (she took extra classes as a junior and should have plenty of credits). "She wants to help her mother," the president said at a Rhode Island fund-raiser in July. "And she wants to keep company with her father, which is always a surprising thing when your children grow up and they want to spend time with you." There She Is… AP Photo/ The Fresno Bee, Darrell Wong Less than 24 hours after Rita Ng was crowned Miss California in June, reporters set up camp outside her Tracy, Calif., home. They wanted to know just one thing, says Ng: "You graduated from Stanford with a 3.99 GPA -- what in the world are you doing in this pageant?" Plenty, as it turns out. The first Asian-American to serve as Miss California, Ng, '00, is also the first contestant to win multiple awards at the competition, a warm-up for Atlantic City, where she will compete October 14 for the Miss America title. A human biology major who rarely wore makeup on the Farm, Ng has postponed enrolling in UCSF's medical school to focus on her duties as Miss California, which include trips to the French Riviera and Africa to promote children's health and welfare. Ng has the help of a personal trainer, a nutritionist and hair and makeup stylists. But don't call her a beauty queen. "It's not all how you look in a swimsuit," she says, citing the generous scholarships the program awards (she won $10,000, plus a 2000 Ford Mustang).

How the West Was Fun Courtesy E. Clampus Vitus Like any historical society, E. Clampus Vitus puts up brass markers to commemorate bygone days. But ECV is to heritage organizations what the LSJUMB is to university bands. No demure tea parties or sedate walking tours for these folks: they dress up in Gold Rush duds and party hard, in keeping with their own 1850s roots as a miners' social and benevolent club. The Wild West being what it was, ecv's 40-plus chapters memorialize everything from boneyards to bell towers, varmints to visionaries. In June, the society honored Leland Stanford, erecting a plaque in Sutter Creek, Calif., near the Lincoln-Union mine he owned. The marker notes the University founder's contributions to both Sutter Creek and California. Of course, it was the Gold Rush that drew the Stanfords west in 1852, and the rest, well, goes without saying.

BABY TALK: Story began his life concurrently with Life. Erica Burger A LIFE in Pictures George Story didn't mind playing those tell-us-something-interesting-about-yourself party games. He'd grin and announce that he once had been photographed nude in a national magazine. The editors of Life backed up his claim every decade or so for more than 60 years by rerunning the eye-catching photo and reminding readers that Story, '58, had appeared in the magazine's debut edition, November 23, 1936. Story, who died April 4, was only seconds old when a photographer slipped into the delivery room of a Portland, Ore., hospital and snapped a photo later headlined "Life Begins." "Several more pictures were taken that day, and in one you can see that he's obviously a little boy," says Story's widow, Judy, who lives in Kailua, Hawaii. "But I guess it was too risqué to use in those days." A new photo of Story was supposed to appear in the farewell issue of Life, which ceased publishing in May. But in what the magazine's editors described as a "sad and altogether strange" convergence of events, Story died of congestive heart failure two days before a Life photographer was scheduled to take his picture. The magazine's headline this time: "A Life Ends."

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