Reeling in the Words
After fifty-five years as an outdoors columnist for the Berkshire Eagle, Ted Giddings ’29 put his typewriter away in December. Giddings, who is 97, first joined the paper in 1928 and officially retired more than thirty years ago, but he continued to publish his weekly column, “Our Berkshires.” “The decision hasn’t been an easy one,” Giddings wrote in his final dispatch, “but certainly is overdue.”
Thinking About Feelings
Aaron Beck ’42, who is widely recognized as the father of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, has been awarded the 2004 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology and a prize of $200,000. “His extraordinary contribution was to turn things on their head—not that emotions drive thought but that thoughts can drive emotion,” Louisville professor Rich Lewine told the Courier Journal in December.
A+ for Effort
Martin Badoian ’52 has taught high school math for more than fifty years, most of them at Canton High School in Massachusetts, but his lessons to students often had little to do with equations or formulas. “He’d tell us to never give up,” Naomi Diaz, a former student, told the Boston Globe in January, “to just keep on working.” Diaz was one of dozens of Badoian’s protégés who gathered at a January banquet held in his honor.
On the Waterfront
Paige Miller ’71 was a lawyer and community activist before her election to the Port of Seattle commission, which oversees the city’s container port and the Seattle-Tacoma airport. Now in her third term as the commission’s president, she is charged with revitalizing the struggling port and overseeing a $1.2 billion runway construction project. “I sense a certain optimism in the region,” Miller told the Seattle Times in January, “and a feeling that we are finally turning the corner.”
The Vision Thing
As an executive vice president for ad firm Starcom Worldwide, Karen Jacobs ’85 oversees $300 million in print advertising for such blue-chip companies as Kellogg, Heinz, and Nintendo. Before she invests a client’s money, Jacobs likes to meet with a publication’s editor to understand its readers. “I don’t know if in the broadcast world it happens quite the same way,” Jacobs told Adweek in December. “I don’t know if I need to speak to David [E.] Kelley. I don’t need to hear [from him] who The Practice appeals to.”
Mortal Art
Anandamayi Arnold ’97 creates art that is meant to be destroyed. “If you wanted to be brutally literal,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported in January, “you could say that she makes high-end party favors in her old upstairs bedroom at her family’s house in Berkeley—‘my debris-filled pit,’ she calls it.” What she makes are surprise balls, carefully crafted paper animals, flowers, and other creations wrapped around toys and candy. According to the Chronicle, “the surprise ball presents its recipient with a terrible dilemma . . . As one child put it, ‘I don’t want to kill the birdie, but I do want to see what’s inside.’ ”
