Durable Art 

When Robert Kresko ’59 donated twenty-five Chinese bronzes to the St. Louis Art Museum recently, it was the culmination of fifteen years of collecting triggered by a conversation with the museum’s Asian curator, Steven Owyoung. “I asked him to give me an area in which I could start collecting, something that was not in the collection, something that the museum would like to receive, and something that was not too fragile,” Kresko, the chairman of commercial real estate at Grubb & Ellis/Krombach Partners Inc., told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in March. “I wanted to be able to live with it.” Owyoung suggested Chinese bronzes from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, and Kresko was off and running. “Bob Kresko is a curator’s dream,” Owyoung told the Post-Dispatch. “He buys the finest material; his taste is impeccable. He has been involved so long that he has become a known figure in the field.”

Just the Facts, Ma’am 

Among the three judicial nominees that Elizabeth Dole, a U.S. senator from North Carolina, introduced to her colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee in early March was Terrence Boyle ’67, who has served on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina for the past twenty-one years. Although nominated by a prominent Republican, Boyle, who hopes to join the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, also received support from Wade Smith, a former chairman of the North Carolina Democratic Party. “I think he would happily rule against me and happily rule for me whether I’m a Republican or Democrat,” Dole quoted Smith as saying. “I think he makes his decisions on the facts, and that’s the best we could ever hope.”

Man of Steel 

When the steelmaker Nucor topped the annual list of the BusinessWeek 50 in early April, credit for the company’s recent success went to its CEO, Daniel DiMicco ’72. When steel prices dropped a few years ago, DiMicco spent $1.1 billion buying ten steel plants on the cheap, thereby increasing the company’s profits from $62.8 million in 2003 to $1.1 billion last year, when steel prices began to rebound. “Nucor has done a better job of navigating through an extraordinarily difficult time than any other cyclical company I’ve ever seen,” an industry analyst told BusinessWeek.

Keeping It Together  

According to the Associated Press’s Christy Lemire, Christine Vachon ’83 is to independent films what the producing kingpins of Hollywood’s golden age were to commercial movies back then. “I think she’s part of that tradition,” Magnolia Pictures president Eamonn Bowles told Lemire in March, “but it’s from the perspective of … material that can be very subversive and very, very provocative.” Vachon, who has produced such movies as Kids, Boys Don’t Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Far from Heaven, told Lemire that producing was not her ambition at Brown, where aspiring to direct films was “very sexy.” But she added, “When I started working on the movies, I started to realize that there was somebody who was holding this whole thing together.”

Senior Moments 

Almea Matanock ’03 has been spending a lot of time lately getting to know Norman and Madelyn Carlisle, even though Matanock is 24 and the Carlisles are, respectively, 94 and 93. All three are participants in a pilot program at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine’s geriatrics program that matches future physicians with senior citizens, who are likely to be a large part of their practice. “A lot of young people are afraid to talk to older people,” Matanock, a first-year medical student at the school, told the Albuquerque Tribune in March. “It’s nice to see that Mr. and Mrs. Carlisle are still so young in their minds and hearts.” Norman Carlisle adds, “Physicians need to know where patients are coming from psychologically, but most doctors don’t have time for that. They are on a treadmill.”