Sub-zero temperatures. A load of 25-plus pounds of gear. Skiing and searching. “You yell out the victim’s name all night long, and then, finally, you hear a call back, ‘Hey.’ It sends shivers down your spine,” says Dirk Schoonmaker, a 17-year ski volunteer with the Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue (TNSAR), a primarily winter mountain [...]

Meredith Hegg had been teaching high school math in Philadelphia and was planning to enter graduate school when she decided to take a slight detour—she applied for and received an American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mass Media Fellowship. The program places science, engineering, and mathematics students as science journalists with news organizations [...]

During the mid-20th century in New York City, smoke-filled night clubs could be found on just about every corner and the voices of Mabel Mercer, Janice Mars, Billie Holiday, and Thelma Nevins, among many others, sang their way into people’s souls. Listening and singing himself was Clarke Peyton “Peter” Conway ’51.
Through full-time work as a [...]

At the corner of Seventh and Madison in Chester, Pa., stands a building that looks like a church and, in fact, once was. Now transformed and renamed Wesley House, it’s a refuge for homeless women and their children. Until 18 months ago, the home’s only outdoor “recreational” area was the steps down to the sidewalk, [...]

Since relocating in 1994 to Wilmington on the lower Cape Fear River in North Carolina, Valerie Robertson has been quietly working—one encounter at a time—to create a green revolution. “It’s a big part of who I am and what I do,” she says. And yet, the Missouri native insists that she did nothing substantial for [...]

Julian Lopez-Morillas ’68 has played in or directed every one of the 38 plays that make up William Shakespeare’s canon. He passed the mark in June 2008 with a performance as Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.
“I started there in the summer of 1966—my first really professional theater,” Lopez-Morillas says. “I [...]

Designer and creative director Valerie Casey ’94 has worked with organizations around the world helping them launch new products and services. Recently, she’s been devoting much of her attention to motivating others in the design field to create positive social and environmental impacts.
It was out of personal frustration that Casey conceived a “Kyoto Treaty” for [...]

These days, 76-year-old Tom Beatson doesn’t spend as much time in the saddle as he once did, but on Sunday mornings, he’s up before the sun, eating breakfast and preparing to leave his house shortly after sunrise, to be one of the first members of his bike club to arrive at Phoenix’s Granada Park for [...]

On June 27, 1983, Cathy Hyder Ogden drove across the Mianus River on Interstate 95 in Coscob, Conn., with her 6-year-old son in the car. At 1:30 the next morning, the bridge collapsed, plunging two tractor-trailers and two automobiles into the river, 100 feet below. Three people were killed.
Luckily for historians, the bridge disaster occurred [...]

Although the Yiddish word bashert is typically understood in the romantic sense of “finding one’s predestined soul mate,” the word more literally translates to “destiny.” Lisa Hostein, executive editor of the Jewish Exponent, the Philadelphia area’s Jewish newspaper, seems to have found both her occupational and personal bashert at the publication. In 1983, she worked [...]