An Ordeal that Paid Off

When Leander Robinson finally got to see his future wife after a five-week forced separation last December, she didn’t look like the same woman. “She had lost a lot of weight, her skin was much darker, she was very dirty and she was shaking,” recalls Robinson, an electrical supervisor at Stanford Medical Center. “It scared me. I was concerned about her.”

He had traveled to the tiny Pacific island of Marquesas, where his fiancée, Vecepia Towery, was among five remaining contestants in the battle for a $1 million prize on the CBS reality TV show Survivor. The show’s producers had flown in a friend or family member of each contestant and pitted the visitors against each other in a special “reward challenge.” The winner was allowed to remain on the island for one day. Robinson didn’t win, but he got to spend “about 30 minutes” with Towery, an office manager who works in Fremont, Calif.

A few days after Robinson’s visit to the island, taping concluded and Towery returned home as one of two finalists for the Survivor prize. She and Robinson were married on May 5. And on May 17, Robinson watched from the studio audience as Towery was voted the winner during a special episode in New York City.

It was an unlikely ending to an adventure that had begun last fall on a Stanford field near Sand Hill Road, where Robinson filmed Towery’s audition tape. “We figured V’s chances of getting on the show were one in a million,” says Robinson. He almost had it right: the result was a million.

Honoring the Code

WRIGHT ON: His program was tops.

Glenn Matsumura

For most computer science majors today, the notion of earning a six-figure salary right after graduation seems an artifact from the dot-com era. But for Daniel Wright, the big payoff came one year early and after only two days of work. Wright, who just finished his junior year, won the TopCoder Collegiate Challenge in April at MIT—and earned $100,000.

TopCoder pits students from some of the nation’s leading engineering schools against each other as they attempt to write algorithms for a set of problems as quickly as possible, then review and challenge each other’s submissions. Wright beat out 15 other finalists from powerhouses such as Caltech, Georgia Tech, MIT and Purdue.

It may not sound like a spectator event, but tournament organizers did their best to pump up the adrenaline level, Wright says. “They placed several computer monitors around the room and invited people to watch.”

In addition to winning the money, Wright—who was hired for a summer job at Microsoft a week before the competition—has evidently improved his career prospects. Several companies have courted him since his TopCoder victory. Meanwhile, he has to decide how to spend his prizewinnings. Maybe he will buy a secondhand car, Wright says—after paying for his engineering degree.

Where Do You Want to Go Tomorrow?

TECH TALK: Gates and Hennessy looked at the future.

Linda Cicero

Depending on how many times your computer has crashed lately, you may feel pretty jaded about the wonders of technology. But make no mistake: a revolution is coming, says a man who will have a lot to do with it.

During a campus appearance in April, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates presented his vision of a new generation of technology that he says will liberate users from keyboards and clunky hardware and put useful applications “right in their hands.”

“Uniting the phone experience” with new technologies will allow people to customize when and where they get information, communicate with others and conduct business, Gates told a packed Kresge Auditorium audience. For example, he says, e-mail users will be able to send handwritten notes via the Internet; motorists will listen to music from an online provider in their cars; and parents will schedule family activities on a touch screen in their home. Improved handwriting recognition and voice recognition will drive advancements in creating a “natural interface” similar to a telephone. The real promise of anytime, anywhere network connectivity still lies ahead, Gates says. “The key point I want to make is that we’re really just at the beginning.”

Auctioning Stanford, Bit by Bit

TOUGH SELL?: Not every item is so cheerful.

Courtesy Mattie Leigh

EBay, that province of vintage salt-and-pepper shakers, Darth Vader action figures (in unopened original package!) and millions of attic peculiarities, is also a repository for Stanford-related esoterica.

A recent search for “Stanford” on the auction website yielded 341 items, ranging from the predictable—Tiger Woods memorabilia showed up in 25 entries—to the outlandish. How about an 8-by-10 photograph of a shirtless Frank Zappa taken at a 1977 concert at Frost Amphitheater? Or perhaps a special-edition Stanford Barbie in a cheerleader outfit?

You can buy a book published in 1947 by the Stanford Press, titled Studying Effectively, or a CD by the band Stanford Prison Experiment or a T-shirt that reads “HARVARD: Stanford’s not for everyone,” surely a bargain at $5.24. There are old football programs and tobacco blankets (fringe missing) and felt pennants and three field passes to the 1971 Rose Bowl.

Of course, not everything appears to have recently turned up in a closet cleaning. For example, a parchment-and-leather dance program from the 1928 Senior Ball, “rolled up to look like a diploma,” looked museum-worthy. Most unusual of all: four uncut tickets from a benefit concert planned in the late ’60s at Stanford and headlined by one Jimi Hendrix. Apparently, the concert never happened (the University has no record of it), but the tickets on eBay were fetching $100.

Still a Force

APPOINTED GUARDIAN: Brown played Skywalker's Uncle Owen.

© Lucasfilm Ltd.

Phil Brown knows a thing or two about the forces of evil. First he battled the Blacklist, and later the Dark Side.

Brown, ’37, is best known for his portrayal of Uncle Owen, the guardian of Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars movie, who is killed by marauders early in the film. What most people don’t know is that Brown was an accomplished actor long before George Lucas cast him in his science-fiction classic, and that his career was nearly cut short by the Communist witchhunts of the 1950s.

A drama major at Stanford, Brown moved to New York after graduation, and then to Hollywood, where he helped found the fabled Actors’ Laboratory. In 1951 he directed his first feature film, The Harlem Globetrotters, and appeared headed toward a successful Hollywood career. However, a year later, several influential anti-Communists—including Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild—labeled Brown a ‘Red,’ although Brown had never been a member of the Communist Party. Deprived of opportunities in the United States, Brown moved to London, where he worked for the next 40 years as a stage actor and director and a television producer.

Now 84 and retired, Brown appeared this spring at several autograph conventions that coincided with the release of the latest Star Wars movie, Attack of the Clones. The people lining up to see him aren’t much interested in his “other” acting career, he says. “Everyone wants to know what we were drinking in the [breakfast] scene,” Brown told a Fresno Bee reporter. He doesn’t remember exactly, only that “it was blue.”