Going Nowhere

Lots of overworked Silicon Valley employees look forward to a two-week vacation in the middle of nowhere, but that wasn’t what Eric Tucker had in mind when he left on June 27 for a five-day solo hike in the Stanislaus National Forest. Thirteen days and several search parties later, he staggered out of the wilderness as his family was beginning to plan funeral arrangements.

“I lost the trail and didn’t realize how rugged the terrain was,” recalls Tucker, ’94, MS ’96, who works for a Sunnyvale software company. As he scrambled through a rocky streambed, trying to get back on track, he removed his pack to slide down steep sections. During one of these descents, he tossed his pack ahead and it tumbled over a 40-foot cliff. While trying to retrieve it, he slipped and fell, spraining both of his ankles and dislocating his shoulder. After lying immobile for five days, drinking from a tiny pool of water, he tried standing up and hoisting his pack. But the pain in his arm stopped him before he took a step. “The problem was, my dislocated arm needed a sling, which I couldn’t make with one good arm,” he says. “My only other choice was to hold the bad arm in place with the good one, which left me no arms at all.”

After more rest and some reinterpretation of his map, Tucker set out for a campground three miles away. By the time he limped into the campground on July 10, rescue efforts had been suspended.

Tucker was driven 50 miles to the nearest hospital and treated. Then, having subsisted for nearly two weeks on trail mix and a handful of energy bars, he did what any sensible person would do—he had a pizza.

Blonde Ambition

If only every student’s daydreams led to such success.

“I was sitting in tort class when the novel popped into my head,” recalls Amanda Brown, author of Legally Blonde, which inspired the July movie of the same title. “I wanted to do a parody of law school.”

Originally an e-book, Legally Blonde tells the story of usc sorority princess Elle Woods, a jewelry-design major who follows her blue-blooded East Coast ex-boyfriend to Stanford Law School.

Describing Elle’s proposed Blonde Legal Defense Fund, Brown writes: “True blondes, whether natural or not, can be identified by their inner light of buoyant, charmed confidence. Andre Agassi, for example, has the beacon of a true blond despite the atrocious things he has done to his hair.”

The movie earned $20 million in its first week of release and remained a top-10 box office draw well into August. It garnered mixed reviews but almost universal acclaim for Reese Witherspoon, ’99, who portrays Elle.

Though the film changes the setting to Harvard, Brown says the book was completely inspired by her experience at Stanford Law. Screenwriters Karen Lutz and Kirsten Smith spent two days on campus in the spring of 2000 doing research for their screenplay.

Brown, who left the Law School in 1995 after two years, says she’s glad she went. “It helped me decide what I wanted to do: write.”

His Teams Always Had a Prayer

Moments before the Stanford football team took the field for the 1972 Rose Bowl game, a priest in full vestments rushed into the locker room accompanied by a police escort. Father Victor Sivore had flown on a red-eye to Pasadena from Chicago, where he had celebrated midnight Mass, then raced to the Rose Bowl, police officer in tow, where the Stanford team was waiting for him to provide a blessing and invocation. Coach John Ralston had delayed sending the team out to face Michigan until Sivore arrived. Just as officials were ordering the team to take the field, the priest appeared, the room went momentarily silent, and Sivore gave his blessing.

That story and others about Sivore were shared by 20 or so friends who met in Half Moon Bay, Calif., for an unusual memorial in June honoring “the Robe,” as the priest was called by Stanford players and coaches in the early ’70s. Sivore, 62, died in January from complications following back surgery.

Robert Jamplis, Sivore’s cousin and Stanford’s team physician at that time, had introduced the priest to the team prior to a game at Notre Dame in the mid-’60s. “He was the only priest in the stadium wearing a red jacket,” Jamplis recalls. A few years later, Sivore gave the pregame blessing at the 1971 Rose Bowl, where Stanford defeated Ohio State, 27-17. When the team returned to Pasadena the next season, Ralston asked Sivore to again address them. After Stanford won that game, beating Michigan, 13-12, the priest became a kind of “spiritual mascot,” says Jamplis.

Sivore befriended several Stanford student-athletes and officiated at some of their weddings, including that of Heisman Trophy winner Jim Plunkett, ’71.

Sivore’s funeral at Saints Cyril and Methodius Church in Lemont, Ill., where he had been pastor, was attended by more than 1,000 people. He was laid to rest in his vestments, under which he wore a red Stanford T-shirt.

Beginning

When they jumped down from the train through the steam
you could tell them by the way they looked around,
puzzled shirtsleeved, raw young men in groups
with their bags roped and battered beside them,
adventuring here to the new university
over there where the sandstone sparkles
in the brilliant September sunshine,
as bright as ideas flashing in curious minds.

The townspeople gathered, helping and joking
with the boys, and respectful with the few girls,
this first class, students at Stanford’s free school,
a bold western place of rough hewn scholarship,
risky studious encounters with argument
and thought and challenge, coming up
against regal professors from the East, scholars
out here for the money,
wondering, would it last,
tough and bright and angry, eager
for these arrivals, ready to test
and shape them,
to build with them one by one,
like the blocks of sandstone.

From Rings of Growth: Poems Celebrating Palo Alto’s 100 Years, by Ryland Kelley, ’49

More Ink for a Publishing Giant

Long before he became publisher of the Los Angeles Times in 1960, Otis Chandler (“The Last Great Newspaperman,” July/August 2000) was making headlines on the Farm. Chandler’s world-class athletic exploits, robust campus social life and courtship of his first wife, Marilyn “Missy” Brant, ’51, occupy one chapter of Dennis McDougal’s book Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty (Perseus, 2001). McDougal, a former Times staff writer, adds muscle to the legend of Chandler, ’50, as a larger-than-life figure. Characterized as a “bronze California Adonis,” Chandler marked his college years with a disciplined regimen of physical training and an almost equally developed passion for female students, according to McDougal. A member of DKE, like his father, Norman, ’23, Chandler admits that his formula for dating at Stanford was “one is fine, two is better, and three is the best,” and chastises himself for his deceits. Chandler had more laudable accomplishments in the athletic arena. A record-setting shot-putter, “at one point, Otis became such a fanatic about weight training that he wrote and published a pamphlet—‘Scientific Weight Lifting Exercises Designed for Track and Field Events’—that he maintained had been stolen by the Soviets and incorporated into their 1952 Olympic training program,” McDougal writes. The book positions Chandler as the protagonist in a history about one of the 20th century’s most influential families and the transformation of both Los Angeles and its major newspaper from backwater wannabes to world-class powers.

Capsule Summary

Jane Stanford, it turns out, still has a few secrets.

When the cornerstone was laid for the Thomas Welton Stanford Library—the first building of the Outer Quad—on November 2, 1898, Jane ceremonially placed inside it a 12-inch-by-6-inch copper box. She hoped its contents would be revealed far in the future and examined for clues about life during the University’s infancy. But she forgot to say when. With no instructions about when the box should be opened, it remained entombed for 103 years, unbeknownst to anybody on campus.

On June 25, construction worker Manuel Astorga found it. He was chipping concrete in what is now Building 160, currently being renovated, when his tool hit something that wasn’t concrete. Thirty minutes later, he extracted Jane Stanford’s forgotten time capsule.

The unornamented box, welded shut and completely intact, was turned over to Stanford archivist Margaret Kimball, who searched Jane Stanford’s official papers and found a description of the box’s contents. But she isn’t telling. Instead, she is planning a special unveiling for the campus community on Founders’ Day next April.

The secret is well guarded—even Kimball’s mother (Dorcas Thille, ’53) doesn’t know it. “She called me one morning to talk about something else and in the middle of the conversation asks, ‘What’s in the box?’” says Kimball, ’80.

Her response? “Sorry, Mom.”

Splendor on the Grass

The 30s have started out quite well for Jared Palmer.

On July 8, six days after turning the big three-oh, Palmer, ’93, teamed with Don Johnson to win the Wimbledon men’s doubles title, defeating the Czech team of Jiri Novak and David Riki, 6-4, 4-6, 6-3, 7-6.

The NCAA singles champion in 1991, Palmer has concentrated on doubles competition in recent years, rising to the top of the atp rankings in 2000 and representing the United States at the Sydney Olympics.

The victory at Wimbledon is Palmer’s second Grand Slam title—in 1995, he and Richey Reneberg won the men’s doubles championship at the Australian Open. It’s also the culmination of a comeback from a string of injuries—torn cartilage in both knees, a strained rotator cuff and a pulled hamstring.

Palmer (above left) and Johnson (right), who have won five tournaments since they began playing together in March, are the first all-American pairing to win in men’s doubles at Wimbledon since 1990.