The Oregon Trail

The dorm road trip—it’s a Stanford institution. Students pile into cars and minivans and head for one of their favorite destinations: Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, L.A.—or Ashland, home of the world-renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Near the end of winter quarter, Donner House—an all-frosh dorm in Stern Hall—sponsored its sixth annual weekend trek to the festival, and this year’s group was bigger than ever. More than 100 current and former Donner freshmen (upperclassmen and alumni are always invited) took the seven-hour trip to see four plays in two days.

“Ashland is a unique place, and there’s nothing like going back year after year with your friends,” says Alexis Kaminsky, ’01, who flew in from New York for her third Ashland trip. Linda Paulson, associate dean of the master’s of liberal arts program and Donner’s resident fellow, led the first trip in 1997.

When the group headed north in the winter of 2000, the 65 students were joined by longtime Stanford benefactor Helen Bing—who now underwrites the theater tickets to keep costs low for students. Thanks to her, says Paulson, “This year we were able to bring 101.” And counting.

Engaging Television?

LOOKING FOR LOVE: Michel hoped to find a mate via reality TV.

ABC/Bob D'Amico

Shortly after he agreed to participate in a reality TV show designed to find him a wife, Alex Michel felt his feet getting cold. “I watched a few dating shows to see what they were like,” he says. “I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, what did I get myself into?’”

Well, for starters, he got into a lot of limousines, a mud bath in Palm Springs, a gondola in Las Vegas and a yacht off the Santa Barbara coast—always accompanied by “amazing” female companions.

The Bachelor, whose six weekly one-hour episodes aired in March and April, followed Michel, MBA ’98, as he looked for a bride from among 25 women selected by producers of the ABC program. During six weeks of taping in January and February, Michel wined and dined, was whisked to exotic locales and hung out in the Bachelor pad, a sumptuous oceanfront home. Along the way, as he gradually narrowed his choices, cameras recorded the conversations and clinches, the drama and melodrama. And while Michel could not disclose the show’s outcome, he told STANFORD in early April “it has a happy ending.”

Michel joked that he agreed to be on the show after hearing that a Harvard guy was in line for the job. “I thought, ‘What an outrage!’ Stanford deserves equal time.’” (Michel got his undergraduate degree at Harvard.)

Most critics skewered The Bachelor, but the bachelor himself gave the experience high ratings. “I’m really happy I did it,” says Michel, a San Francisco businessman.

A Day on the Farm

COMMUNITY SPIRIT: Students from East Palo Alto painted a mural depicting their feelings about Stanford and displayed it on campus.

News Service

It probably was the only community festival that included 19th-century buried treasure as well as a dunk tank. Part street fair, part day camp, part historical celebration, Stanford’s first Community Day welcomed thousands of local residents to the Farm on April 7 for activities ranging from daredevil bicycle stunts to Arabic calligraphy to a couple dressed as Leland and Jane Stanford, riding in a horse-drawn carriage. Geared toward families and designed as a gesture of goodwill to nearby communities, the event involved more than two dozen student groups and more than 600 volunteers.

The centerpiece of the day was the founders’ celebration, an annual event that this year included an extra twist—the opening of a time capsule Jane Stanford had placed in the cornerstone of Building 160 in 1898. University archivist Margaret Kimball, ’80, and Mrs. Stanford (drama lecturer Patricia Ryan) opened the time capsule during a ceremony at the Mausoleum. Inside the capsule were several documents from the University’s early days; mint-condition coins ranging from a nickel to a $20 gold piece; an 1898 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle (the front page described events from the Spanish-American war); a Bible inscribed by Jane Stanford; and other publications.

University officials want Stanford itself to seem like less of a mystery from now on. “We hope this event will promote partnerships and increase understanding among and between Stanford and its neighbors,” says President John Hennessy.

A Ringing Endorsement

TALL ORDER: The carillon restoration took two years.

Rod Searcey

Watching a crane hoist a set of giant bronze bells toward the Hoover Tower observation deck, electrical engineering professor emeritus James Angell said to a reporter nearby, “I feel like an angel in heaven.”

The bells of the tower’s carillon were reinstalled this spring, two years after being shipped to the Netherlands to be recast and retuned. Their new sound was divine, according to Angell—carillonneur from 1960 to 1991—and it includes another octave thanks to 13 new bells added as part of the restoration. Housed in a new cabin on the 14th floor, the 48 bells range in weight from about 7 pounds to 2.5 tons. The carillon’s automatic player, damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, was also repaired.

The $500,000 project, funded primarily by donations, was long overdue. Hoover archivist Elena Danielson, MA ’70, PhD ’75, uncovered documents in which University officials discussed the need to restore the bells as early as 1943, just two years after their original installation. The carillon, built for the 1939 World’s Fair in Belgium, was a gift of the Belgian-American Educational Foundation, in appreciation of Herbert Hoover’s famine relief efforts during World War I.

Carillonneur Timothy Zerlang, DMA ’89, plays the bells from a keyboard near the carillon.

Carving New Paths

PARALYMPIANS: Davis (top) and Pearl both won medals.

AP Worldwide

The first time Muffy Davis heard about the sport in which she would later become a star, she was in a rehab hospital, recovering from a broken back sustained while skiing in 1989. A previously accomplished skier, she wasn’t interested in adaptive skiing; at the time, she says, it struck her as a poor substitute. But after a season off the slopes, Davis, who began skiing at age 3 and racing at 7, changed her mind. She signed up for lessons on a monoski, a single board mounted on a frame called an “outrigger” and equipped with a motorcycle shock absorber. “It was fun to get back out there,” she recalls, “but it wasn’t skiing.” Five years later, after hundreds of hours of intense training and frustration, Davis, ’95, finally coaxed the monoski into a good carve. It felt like the old days, she says.

Her career went downhill from there, so to speak. In February, competing in her second Paralympics, Davis captured silver medals in the super-G and giant slalom events for monoskiers in Park City, Utah. Teammate and Stanford medical researcher Allison Pearl won the gold medal for monoskiers in the giant slalom.

Now, Davis is giving up competitive skiing, but she won’t abandon the mountains altogether. This spring, she and three other paraplegics—using hand cranks and 42 gears in a specially designed “snow pod”—will climb 14,000-foot Mount Shasta.

Still Together After All These Years

CALLED TO SERVE: The Lagunita hashers, circa 1946.

Courtesy Sabra Driscoll

In the Lagunita dining hall 55 years ago, Ralph Duniway was in charge of a crew of students who served food, filled drinks, and cleared and cleaned dishes. Because of his supervisory role, he admits, “I wasn’t everybody’s favorite guy,” but it hasn’t kept him from staying in touch with his fellow “hashers” ever since. In June, just as they do every year, Duniway, ’46, MS/MBA ’49, and a couple of dozen Lagunita hashers will reunite to share old stories and invent new ones.

For the past 25 years, Sabra Driscoll, ’47, along with her husband, John, ’48 (they met as hashers), have hosted these annual get-togethers in the backyard of their Palo Alto home. People come from all over— “Connecticut, Iowa, coast-to-coast”—says Sabra, the group’s unofficial historian.

The tradition began soon after World War II when friends from the Lagunita group held informal summer outings on the beach near Half Moon Bay. As the participants aged and their children grew up, the beach lost its appeal, but by then the event had codified into an annual affair.

The durability of the relationships may seem extraordinary, but Duniway says it is a natural outgrowth of the tight bonds—including a few romances—the hashers developed while working together at Stanford. “That affiliation was stronger than our housing affiliation or our academic affiliation,” he says. “That’s the group we identified with the most.”

FOLLOW-UP
Where the Boys Are

Glenn Matsumura

Last we checked in with the Toledo Six (“Luck of the Draw,” September/October 2001), their Draw number of 693 had kept them out of top pick Toyon Hall. They were exiled to Eucalipto in Lagunita Court. “Draw Master” Achyut Phadke even got stuck living with a random roommate. So much for planning.

Nine months later, the sophomores’ first impression of Eucalipto—a quiet place with empty hallways and closed doors—hasn’t changed. Chris Wallis describes it as the place “upperclassmen go to die.” The Six have made only a handful of friends among their 65 dormmates.

“We play basketball, but we don’t talk that much,” Achyut says of his roommate, somewhat noncommittally. “It’s gone as well as could be expected.”

There have been no fallouts from the Toledo Six. They’re still bonding over video games (“Simpsons Road Rage” has supplanted “Counter-Strike”). They share a yearning for the good old days of Rinconada. Most of their Rinc buddies live on the other side of campus, and they visit them often. The closest foosball table, in neighboring Adelfa, is usually broken and “not worth our time, being professionals and all,” says Nic Kanaan.

This is the home stretch for the Toledo Six as a unit. Half of them—Sundeep Bhat, Nic and Chris—are applying for residence staff positions for next year. The other half, Albert Chen, Stephen Ku and the Draw Master, have yet to firm up their plans for this year’s Draw. Maybe they did learn something after all.

—Marisa Milanese, ’93