Slow and Steady
Charlie Banks ’62 , the CEO of the British building-product giant Wolseley, readily admits that his company never had the glamour of, say, an Internet start-up. But investors don’t mind. “We’re dull,” Banks told the London Sunday Telegraph last year. “We announce that we’re going to grow 10 percent a year—and we do it again and again.”
The Best Part of Waking Up
A morning dose of Vitamin C usually comes in a glass of orange juice, but to Seth Finn ’67 it comes from fresh, magenta-colored peppers grown on his roof in eastern Pittsburgh. The seeds for the ninety plants originated in Yugoslavia, where his wife was born. “The Yugoslavian diet is highly dependent on peppers,” Finn told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in October. “Generally at a Yugoslav table, you never know which peppers are hot and which are sweet.”
Fashion Sense
Clothes designer Dana Buchman ’73 has no patience for those tall, stick-thin models who dominate the catwalk at shows. “I don’t design for the runway,” she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in October. “I design clothes for … real women with real figures.” They are her inspiration, she adds: “My mission is to make them feel and look beautiful.”
Suite Dreams
Barry S. Sternlicht ’82 never expected to be chairman and CEO of a company the size of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide. But after his real-estate trust acquired both ITT and Westin during the 1990s, that’s just what happened. Now he’s calling it quits to spend more time with his family. “There’s infinite liability for CEOs today,” Sternlicht told the Wall Street Journal in late October, “and you have to ask yourself, ‘Why am I doing this?’ ”
A Sardine for the Teacher
When environmental educator Margaret Enkler ’82 was chosen to become supervisor of Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, Conn., members of the Friends of Dinosaur State Park expressed their displeasure with her “fishy” hiring by greeting her with a giant dinosaur footprint and some sardines. Enkler remains unfazed by the protesters’ claim that she lacks a sufficient science background for leading the park. “I have thousands of hours of classroom experience with elementary-school children,” Enkler told the Hartford Courant in November.
Bookworms
What started out as a diversion has transformed Michael Cader ’83 into a publishing-industry powerbroker. Cader’s electronic newsletter, Publishers Lunch, which he set up with the help of classmate and Web developer Michael Macrone ’82, is now read by 21,000 people looking for juicy book gossip and news of hot deals. Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch told the New York Times last year that Lunch “has become the bulletin board for the industry.”
Baby Boosters
Once dominated by retired teachers or moonlighting artists, tutoring has become big business—and apparently a youthful one. Just ask Joshua Lewis ’87, an NYU-trained lawyer who now helps baby-boomer children get into the college of their choice. Lewis refused to reveal his age when asked by a New York Times reporter in October. “I don’t want to be perceived as out of touch,” he said. “If you’re younger, you bond more.”
The Mom Phase
Tracey Liao Van Hooser ’93 and her son Jack were featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in October for a story on young mothers who opt out of successful careers to raise their children. “I’m not a housewife,” Van Hooser told the Times. “I am doing what is right for me at the moment, not necessarily what is right for me forever.”
A.K.A. “Mom”and “Dad”
For Zayd Dohrn ’99, whose parents made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list after fleeing as Weather Underground fugitives, growing up in hiding was never a big deal. “That’s just how I’ve grown up,” Dohrn, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia, told the Boston Globe in November. “My parents had fake names; I knew that at 3.”
