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March 7, 2001: Class Notes Class Notes Features: From
Uganda to Princeton Gunning
for guns Building
relationships A
grown-up Lego lover Email your class notes...many secretaries have email. Check our online Class Secretaries Directory. From
Uganda to Princeton
These days, Robert Keeley '51 hands out business cards with the title "consulting iconoclast." Why? "Because I think I am one," says Keeley, a retired diplomat and three-time ambassador. Now a Washington author and publisher, Keeley grew up overseas as the son of a career U.S. diplomat. At Princeton he was disciplined for printing a satiric item in the Daily Princetonian. His thesis - the university's first-ever thesis of creative fiction - was nearly published as a novel by Simon & Schuster until Keeley, a self-described "arrogant young man," refused to make changes requested by his editor. ("Actually, the novel was terrible - it was very experimental, with one paragraph and no punctuation," he recalls.) Frustrated in his attempts to become a journalist, Keeley - by then a Korean War Coast Guard veteran - took the foreign service exam "out of desperation." He passed and served for 34 years. After a stint in Mali, Keeley's postings became increasingly harrowing: military-controlled Greece, Uganda under Idi Amin, and Cambodia as the Khmer Rouge swept to power. Later, he was ambassador to Mauritius, Zimbabwe, and Greece. He retired in 1989. Since then, Keeley has worked hard to document his experiences. In 1995 he founded Five and Ten Press, a one-man operation dedicated to publishing original literary works, in booklet or pamphlet form, "that were being rejected or ignored by the media," he says. Several of the dozen titles published so far recount Keeley's experiences at Princeton, in the Korean War-era Coast Guard, and as a diplomat. Roughly 200 people now subscribe (paying in advance for the next $25 worth of publications), and single copies of the books and pamphlets are available through leading Internet booksellers. Last year Keeley edited
First Line of Defense: Ambassadors, Embassies, and American Interests
Abroad for the American Academy of Diplomacy. The volume argues
that an on-the-ground diplomatic presence is still vital despite
advances in communications technology. To back up that proposition,
Keeley collected reminiscences by almost three dozen distinguished
diplomats, including Princetonians Frank Carlucci '52, Robert Oakley
'52, Anthony Quainton '55, and Frank Wisner '61. Keeley is now writing
a memoir of his difficult Uganda posting, as well as an account
of a more comical tale: his experience smuggling 36 Mauritian geckos
into the U.S. By Louis Jacobson '92
Louis Jacobson is a staff correspondent at National Journal in Washington, D.C.
Gunning
for guns
When Eliot Spitzer '81, New York's 63rd attorney general, announced his candidacy three years ago, he said that the state's chief lawyer should be "our Jimmy Stewart in Albany," evoking Stewart '32's 1939 role as the country-boy-turned-senator in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. So far he has tried to be just that, as he has used his office to "deal with seemingly intractable problems through the use of the law." Spitzer has pursued change in environmental protection, civil rights, consumer affairs, and public safety, including gun control - an initiative that many officeholders view as a political hot potato. Spitzer, who served as president of Princeton's student government and raised a number of controversial issues such as restructuring university governance, seems unperturbed. "Once a rabble-rouser, always a rabble-rouser," he says cheerfully. Last year Spitzer called on local, state, and federal government officials to form a coalition agreeing not to buy guns for law enforcement - which account for 25 percent of all gun purchases - from manufacturers that failed to commit to a "code of conduct," including mandatory design, distribution, and marketing reforms, to make guns safer and curtail their sale to criminals. Although officials from 18 state and local governments signed the agreement, among manufacturers only Smith & Wesson Company adopted the code. After Spitzer's attempt to use market forces failed to gain further compliance, he made New York the first state in the nation to sue gun manufacturers. The lawsuit, filed last June, named nine companies. The case argues that, by continuing to use distribution mechanisms whose channels to criminals have been already demonstrated, manufacturers and wholesalers seek to profit from the sale of handguns that they know end up being unlawfully possessed and that are used to kill and injure New York citizens. The suit is still in litigation. A Harvard Law School
graduate and Woodrow Wilson School major at Princeton, Spitzer practiced
both in the private sector and as an assistant district attorney
in Manhattan before running for attorney general. "I came to
the realization that the part of law I really love," he says,
"is the use of law for public objectives." By A. Melissa Kiser '75
A. Melissa Kiser is public relations officer at the Pennington School.
Building
relationships
Certainly that was what Anne Swinton Ruggles '89 did with her mentee Latanya Junior, now 19. Ruggles, a mother of two, was a trusted friend and guide through Junior's entire high school career and remains in touch with her to this day. Over the years, the two have explored many of Boston's museums and shared numerous movies, meals, and milestones, including Junior's graduation from Snowden last spring, which Ruggles proudly attended. When Junior recently moved into a two-bedroom apartment with her mom, Ruggles and her husband rented a U-Haul to help. And when Junior, currently a freshman at Mount Ida College in Newton, Massachusetts, was having some trouble adjusting to college life, she turned to Ruggles. "I was thinking about quitting but Anne talked me out of it," she says. "I'm glad I had someone to talk to." Ruggles stresses that her relationship with Junior is unusual because of its longevity. The program asks its participants for a one-year commitment, and just this year, the original guidelines for mentors, which included talking to their students at least once a week by phone and meeting with them twice a month in person, have switched from one-to-one relationships to a team approach. The brainchild of Michael Applebaum '97, current chairperson of the program, "Tiger Teams" group four to five alumni with five to seven students. "This way, if one mentor can't make it to an event, the rest of the group can pitch in," explains Applebaum, who works for an Internet startup, Retailexchange.com. According to Dr. Gloria
Coulter, head of the Snowden School, one of the strengths of the
program has been the relationships it fosters. "One of the
things that we know works for young people is to have an adult in
their lives who is interested in them not only to discuss options
after high school but to help them deal with the day-to-day stuff
that's going on in their lives," says Coulter. And those relationships
work both ways, says Ruggles. "I feel blessed to have Tanya
in my life and to have had the opportunity to learn from her."
By Kathryn Levy Feldman '78 Kathryn Levy Feldman is a freelance writer in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. A
grown-up Lego lover Some people never outgrow their obsessions of youth. Jonathan Knudsen '93, a Lego® enthusiast since grammar school, still plays with the brightly colored plastic bricks. But now he gets paid to do it. Knudsen, who used to spend hours making Lego spacemen and starships and later tinkering with the gears and pulleys of Technic Legos, wrote a book on programming and building Lego robots after the company unleashed its Mindstorms robot kit in 1998. When Mindstorms first came out, Knudsen, a programmer and author, bought a set, which included a small computer brain (the RCX), motors, sensors, and over 700 Lego bricks. "I felt a little sheepish lugging the big box up to the front of Toys 'R' Us, and even more sheepish about spending $200 of my family's money on it," says Knudsen, the father of four children under age five. "Then I had to wait until the kids went to bed to open it up and start playing." The software supplied with the toy is designed for people who have never programmed before and is therefore limiting to experienced professionals like Knudsen. His book, The Unofficial Guide to Lego® Mindstorms Robots (O'Reilly 1999), draws on alternate programming environments and new languages for Mindstorms culled from an online community for grown-up Lego enthusiasts. His robot Minerva - equipped with two motors, two wheels, and an arm with a gripper and light sensor - is the book's crowning achievement. "My goal with this robot was to totally max out, do as much as could be done with the basic set," says Knudsen, sitting in his home "office" - a computer and desk (adorned with a Tigger and teddy bear) in the corner of his bedroom. He programmed Minerva to look for dark objects on the ground, pick them up, and bring them back to where it started. "She actually does it pretty badly," says Knudsen, who majored in mechanical engineering. "It's really hard to do very simple things with robots." What's the attraction of Lego robots? Programmers like to fiddle with computers, says Knudsen, and Mindstorms "takes it to a different level. . . . I spend most of my day in front of a computer. And I didn't realize how flat my thinking had become until I tried to build a robot." Knudsen, who has written four books on the computer language Java, now writes course work for LearningPatterns.com, a training company for programmers. In his "free time," he's working on an article on Mindstorms, another book on Java, and he's planning to publish a second edition of his Lego robot book later this year. Free time is hard to define when you work out of your bedroom. Working from home, he says, "is pretty chaotic. Every day is choppy," and lasts from about 7 a.m. to midnight. He takes breaks to help his wife, Kristen, take care of their children: Daphne, 4, Luke, 3, Andrew, 1, and Elena, six months. It's tough to explain
his job to his kids. One day while he was writing the book on Lego
robots, his daughter Daphne, two at the time, said, "Want to
see Daddy." His wife explained that he was working and couldn't
be disturbed. "Daddy not working," she cried. "Daddy
play Legos." By K.F.G. http://home.sprynet.com/~jknudsen/
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In
the proverbial village that it takes to raise a child, Princeton's
mentoring program in Boston occupies prime real estate. Started
10 years ago by a group of alumni headed by Douglas Nadeau '62,
a Boston lawyer who was then serving as president of the Princeton
Alumni Association of New England (PANE), the program pairs alumni
with high school students from the Muriel S. Snowden International
School, one of the city's first magnet schools. "This is not
all about helping some poor inner city kids," says attorney
Frederick Dashiell '76, one of the organization's founders and another
former PANE president. "My philosophy has always been that
if you put a kid together with an adult, you open windows that kids
might not have been able to see through on their own. . . . We've
said to our mentors 'just like you develop relationships with anyone
else, do that with one of our students.' The idea is just include
them in your life."