In search of a black dress to wear to a Hollywood award ceremony, Deborah Davis '73 borrowed a Nino Cerutti black evening gown with a revealing bodice, a discreet train, and slender metal shoulder straps that looked jeweled in the night.
“The instant I put it on, my posture changed, almost as if I were assuming a pose,” she says. “The dress reminded me of something, and I soon realized that it was John Singer Sargent's painting Madame X, famous for its depiction of a voluptuous, pale-skinned woman wearing a very similar gown.”
Allowing her curiosity to follow a long and winding course, Davis unearthed questions and explored mysteries surrounding woman, painter, and painting, such as:
Who was this unconventional beauty with the prominent nose?
Since her name was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, why the “Madame X”?
What was Sargent's relationship with her?
What Davis wound up with was a book now being honored in both literary circles and the art world. That book is Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X, published by Jeremy P. Tarcher, and the subject of a major review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review on September 28, 2003.
“I wasn't looking at the canvas so much as peeking behind it,” Davis says. “This is one of those works of art that suggests much more. I always visit Madame X at the Metropolitan-it seems to have a hypnotic effect on many people. Docents always stop there.
“That moment with the black dress led me on-I had to know everything. When I couldn't find much information, that's when I realized there was a story waiting to be told. I gave myself three months, immersed myself, wrote a proposal, which went to auction and got picked up. I was given a year-that's when it got interesting.
“I had worked for years as a story analyst, and people would tell me, 'You should write a book.' But I'd think, 'Everybody's writing a book! And I have nothing to say!' But this story made itself so clear to me, I had to write it!”
There were obstacles: “It hadn't struck me that my research would have to be in France (I don't speak French). And there was nothing about Madame X in the art publications. She was a socialite. These days, you'd go to Liz Smith, Dominick Dunne, Vanity Fair for topical information on celebrities, so I decided to go to the gossip columnists and the French newspapers. This approach was amazingly productive.”
She found material at the Bibliothèque Nationale, as well as at Madame X's estate in Brittany. “I was given a journal-actually a financial ledger-kept by her mother-in-law. It was like peeking at someone's American Express bill-such a detailed window in this family's life -when her son got his jacket cleaned, when he acquired a new chamberpot. He'd spent very little money before they got married, but then all hell broke loose! I found details of their wedding, Madame X's fashion purchases, the white face powder from the drugstore that was the real secret of her pale skin, and even an entry for a black satin gown!”
It was exciting for Davis to see her perspective shining a new light not only in the literary world but also in the art world. She hadn't known much about art, though she admits, “I'd picked up a lot in the past year.” Her work inspired the Adelson Galleries on Madison Avenue, which she says is really “Sargent Central,” to mount an exhibition called “Sargent's Women,” featuring paintings of the women he really cared about. “They had never thought about Sargent and women. It's a revolutionary exhibition, because it goes counter to the conventional wisdom that he was asexual or homosexual. I think he was pansexual-he worshipped beauty and painted with great passion.”
Davis quit her job to write the book. “I felt secure, and I don't know why. I'm not a mystical person, but there have been many moments when I felt I was being led. And now, everywhere I go, I see Madame X. It's a total craze. Bloomingdale's catalog shows a pale-skinned model in a black gown, with the copy line, 'From Madame X to Generation Y.' There are Madame X cookies. I have a Madame X doll.
“There's good reason for this fascination,” Davis says. “We live in an era when people are constantly propelled to the center of culture by beauty and scandal. She did exactly that. And there's a perennial fascination with the ephemeral nature of beauty. But what's really perennial is art; art is immortal. We wouldn't be talking about Madame X today if Sargent hadn't painted her.”
Madame X is Davis's first book, although she is a veteran writer and film executive, having worked as story editor and story analyst for such companies as Warner Brothers, Columbia TriStar, Disney, Miramax, and the William Morris Agency. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband, Mark Urman '73, who was producer of the Oscar-winning film Monster's Ball. (She and Mark met at Union, “in 'The English Novel-Defoe to Hardy,'” she says.)
“I was one of the first 100 women accepted at Union. I intuited that it would be exciting going to a school that was just starting to admit women. I could be a pioneer and forge my own way. The drawbacks didn't bother me-gym facilities weren't great, but then, I wasn't an athlete. It was a very exciting time. I did a lot of independent study and added on a class each term. I was able to graduate in three years, the same year as my husband. There were a lot of Union unions in that class.”
She kept friendships with professors after. “They were so stimulating-more than anything, they taught us how to learn.”
Davis thinks of herself as the resident feminist in those days: “It was important to help women find a voice at Union. You don't go co-ed just by admitting women.”
Is there another book in the works? In fact, Davis has just begun her second book (“also about the lives of the rich, dead, and famous”), titled Party of the Century, on Truman Capote's 1966 black-and-white ball, which took as much preparation, some people argue, as it did for him to write In Cold Blood. There were
stories about people trying
to sneak in, and others who hadn't been invited leaving the country or feigning illness.
This was the first party to include both high society and literary figures, politicians, and people from the entertainment industry. The mix may not strike us as strange today, but before this, society parties tended to be very stratified. Capote's guest list included everybody from Norman Mailer to Frank Sinatra, Rose Kennedy,
Candice Bergen, and George Plimpton. This will be a look behind another kind of canvas, Davis says, “an upstairs-downstairs peek at the party that changed the way we party.”
In the past few months, books by a faculty member and an alumna have received national attention. We talk with Brenda Wineapple and Deborah Davis about their books and how they came to be.
This year is the 200th anniversary of Nathaniel Hawthorne's birth. Is there anything he can tell us in the 21st century?
Quite a bit, says Brenda Wineapple, who sees Hawthorne as “a cross between Stephen King and Kafka.”
Today's world, she says, is “rife with terrorism, driven by religious fanaticism, and no one conveys better than Hawthorne how religion or ideology can induce hysteria, violence, and cruelty.
“He wrote scathingly of
the witchcraft delusion that possessed the men and women of Salem, Mass., and turned them into the persecutors and rank murderers of their neighbors. Fanaticism, whether of his Puritan ancestors or of the abolitionists-the zeal that overtakes any group besotted with its own self-righteousness-was repugnant to Hawthorne.”
And Hawthorne, more than anyone, “tells us about the flip side of fanaticism-self-doubt, guilt, self-hatred. In the wake of 9/11, the response of some very prominent people in this country was to ask why the U.S. should inspire such extreme hatred among the terrorists and to call upon our society to look inward,” Wineapple says. “I doubt that would have been Hawthorne's response, but he was a master at delineating self-doubt and guilt and all their vagaries.”
Wineapple has just published a biography of Hawthorne, titled Hawthorne: A Life. The book has been enthusiastically received and widely reviewed. From the October 5 New York Times Book Review: “Wineapple is a good storyteller and has created a vivid account of a highly interesting life; she has also managed to communicate, if not to resolve, the man's puzzling contradictions,” writes reviewer Brooke Allen.
For Wineapple, the Washington Irving Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies, this is not her first published biography. She has also written Genêt, about New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner, and Sister Brother, about the relationship of Gertrude and Leo Stein.
Asked how she chooses her subjects, she replies, “You never know to what extent you do the choosing and to what extent they choose you. I knew I wanted to write about a man, and a man who writes about women. Hawthorne has an incredibly beautiful prose style. Most of what I had read about him wasn't satisfying. And I guess I'm drawn to difficult subjects-my subjects have tended to be extremely difficult, complex people. And Hawthorne and I are both from New England.”
She's finding other connections, too: “I was shocked to notice recently that I had used a Hawthorne quote at the beginning of Sister Brother. And I'm sure there are unconscious reasons that I'm not aware of.”
Wineapple is the first female biographer of Hawthorne-the only major nineteenth-century American author before Henry James to make women the central figures of his novels and to write about illicit love, marriage, motherhood, women's rights, and spiritualism. He was also increasingly surrounded by women writers whose work, much to his distress, outsold his own-“a damned mob of scribblers,” he called them.
Wineapple says that such antifeminism notwithstanding, she knew the creator of Hester Prynne had to be a feminist as well, and she wanted to be the first to plumb his relationships with the women who were important to him-including his two sisters and widowed mother; the three Peabody sisters, one of whom he married; and Margaret Fuller, the likely model for the character of Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance.
“But most of all, Hester is Hawthorne himself; he identifies with her as an outcast brought low by a society she both respects and reviles,” Wineapple says. “Hawthorne felt the same way, especially after he was fired ignominiously from his post at the Salem customs house just before he wrote the novel. For a man who lived much of his life in poverty, that was a cruel blow, and the pain and alienation he felt accounts to some degree for the power of the book.”
Writing this book was a kind of homecoming for Wineapple, who was born in Boston and spent most of my life in New England.
“Essex County, Massachusetts, where I grew up, has changed from Hawthorne's time, but not all that much: I knew the streets Hawthorne rambled, the salt air he breathed, the hills he climbed, and the green, quiet woods. Like him, I knew the Commons, the churches, the color of the flinty sky during long New England winters. Those bright New England falls, harsh east winds, gracious homes, widows' walks, and decayed wharves were part of our common birthright.
“Although his family went back six generations in Massachusetts-and included a hanging judge in the Salem witchcraft trials-Hawthorne was poor for much of his life, at a time when Boston Brahmins amassed the great wealth that sustained them sumptuously for generations on Beacon Hill,” she continues. “Snobbery is endemic in New England life; so is anti-Semitism, as the novel Gentlemen's Agreement made clear over fifty years ago. Fortunately, things have improved since then, but as a granddaughter of Jewish immigrants, I came to identify, rationally or not, with the outsider status that was the lot of this scion of one of Massachusetts's earliest families.”
Wineapple was supported in her work by a one-year fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a one-year National Endowment for the Humanities grant (she'd also garnered an NEH grant to write the Janet Flanner biography).
Hardly resting on her laurels, Wineapple has just completed an edition of John Greenleaf Whittier poems
for the Library of America (Whittier is from Wineapple's hometown, Haverhill, Massachusetts, and is, according
to Wineapple, “the unHawthorne”), as well as the Modern Library edition of Emerson's Representative Men. She is also starting to work on a new book but won't reveal its subject quite yet; it's still too new.
Union has produced more than its share of entrepreneurs. We meet several of them, and hear a faculty member describe his new course about the mind of the entrepreneur.
Teaching the mind of the entrepreneur As Professor of Economics Hal Fried brought more and more alumni entrepreneurs to campus to talk to his internship class,
he became increasingly intrigued by the question of
what it takes to start a business.
The interest was followed by a second question: “Is there a way to share their experiences with students?”
The answer is a course called “The Mind of the Entrepreneur,” being offered for the first time this winter term to about thirty freshmen and sophomores.
The course is not, Fried emphasizes, a “how-to” exercise. Rather, it focuses on the kind of people who become entrepreneurs and what
contribution they make to
the economy.
More than 400 colleges and universities offer courses in entrepreneurship, and Fried says most tend to focus on nuts and bolts issues, such as how to start your own business. “We wanted to take a much broader perspective, something in keeping with the fact that we're a liberal arts college,” he says.
The resulting course gives students three perspectives. The first, presented by Fried, discusses economic barriers to the entrepreneur; the
second, from fellow Professor of Economics Doug Klein, discusses the entrepreneur
as a creator of demand; and the third, from Ken DeBono, the Gilbert R. Livingston
Professor of Behavioral
Sciences, centers on entrepreneurial thinking.
Underlying the course is the traditional economic paradigm of resource allocation in a market economy.
“The classical view is of a dynamic process in which resources adjust in response to the appearance of profitable opportunities,” Fried says. “As consumer wants, resources, and technology change, opportunities emerge for firms to produce new products; their motivation,
of course, is economic profit.
“But this process is not necessarily as automatic, smooth, or benign as it is
portrayed,” he continues. “The adjustment of resource allocation in response to the appearance of profitable opportunities does not just happen. It requires an entrepreneur to act, and our course is designed to examine the problems an entrepreneur faces as well as how an entrepreneur approaches problems, thinks, and assesses risk.”
Fried, who has taught at Union for more than twenty years, says he “absolutely” has had future entrepreneurs as students. “You just knew that somewhere down the road they were going to start something,” he says. “But I wouldn't want to generalize about characteristics or traits. It's more a feeling that 'this student has the knack.'”
Professor of Economics Hal
Fried, who is teaching a course about the mind of the entrepreneur, says he would love to hear from alumni entrepreneurs and welcomes their involvement
in entrepreneurship initiatives
at the College. If you would
like to fill him in on what you
are doing, you can e-mail him
at friedh@union.edu.
Encouraging
entrepreneurship
The Eliphalet Nott Society was established in 1992 to foster entrepreneurial spirit, study, and practice among all members of the Union community. The society sponsors regular business forums around the country
to build a stronger network among Union alumni who
are business leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors.
Members of the society lend direct professional and financial support to the College. Members agree to contribute a minimum of two percent of their equity in an enterprise in which they are
the founder, principal, leader, or investor. The contributions are made only at the time of liquidation of that investment, and the format is decided
upon by the individual. Members also invest and manage the Vash Venture Fund-a micro-venture fund created through already-realized commitments from ENS members (the late Arthur M. Vash '51, for whom the fund is named, was a founding member of the society).
Members also act as contact points for Union students, faculty, and graduates who seek advice or support with
an entrepreneurial initiative. They also advise the College
on services or programs from which entrepreneurs or prospective entrepreneurs might benefit.
ENS members include:
Clair C. Smith '44
Warren Bagatelle '60
Charles E. Roden '60
James G. Ehlen, Jr. '62
Stephen L. Zuckerman '62
William E. Mooar '67
Alexander E. Gelston '68
Mark L. Walsh '76
Leslie S. Trachtman '77
David K. Blakelock '83
Dennis H. Hoffman '85
Jennifer Lawton '85
Dennis Hoffman '85
The pursuit of opportunity
To Dennis
Hoffman '85, being an entrepreneur is
something like being an acrobat.
“As an entrepreneur, you're trying to pull off a very difficult feat, namely, creating an entire company from the ground up. On the one hand, you are constrained only by your talent and work ethic,” he says. “But there's no safety net. You get an incredible sense of satisfaction when it works, but you certainly have to have a risk tolerance above the average.”
Hoffman, now an entrepreneur in residence with Bessemer Venture Partners, was most recently president and CEO of Storigen Systems, a pioneer of distributed
storage networking software. Founded by Hoffman and two partners in June 2000, Storigen grew to 70 employees and raised over $34M in
venture capital before the company's technology assets were purchased by a major storage solution provider in October of 2003.
Hoffman is a fifteen-year veteran of the storage networking industry. He received his B.S. in electrical engineering and, he says, followed a
fairly conventional path. After working at Polaroid Corp.
for three years, he earned his M.B.A. at Harvard, became a strategy consultant at Marakon Associates in Stamford, Conn., and then joined Avid Technology in Tewksbury, Mass., where he led marketing and business development for the company's storage and networking business.
It was at Avid that he and two colleagues saw an emerging market opportunity driven
by two trends: the increasing distribution of corporate offices around the world and those corporations' increasing use of unstructured data, such as music, video, pictures, and PDF files. This data is too large to distribute from a centralized data center to remote locations over a wide area network. Storigen's software automated the management, movement, and delivery of digital information, and its products were used by companies worldwide to improve media production, sales, customer service, training, and corporate communications activities. Storigen established partnerships with a number of companies including EMC Corporation, and in 2002 it won “Best of Interop” award in the network performance category at Networld + Interop.
“When I was at Harvard Business School, a professor described entrepreneurship as the pursuit of opportunity without regard for resources controlled,” Hoffman says. “He called it a state of mind, not a vocation. That was us when we started Storigen-three guys with a vision, the right backgrounds, and a rough business plan-nothing else-all committed to doing whatever it took to build a company.
“Being an entrepreneur is
a lot of fun and a lot of work,” he continues. “It's not something you're taught as much as it is something you discover about yourself. If you are willing to go after an opportunity, knowing you don't have all the answers, and if you are willing to fail, the only thing left is actually doing it. Union's focus on marrying the liberal arts with science and engineering gave me an excellent platform from which to develop that entrepreneurial state of mind.”
John Ciavacco '87 (left) and Ted Eveleth '87
Energy + vision = a start-up
Twenty years ago, John Ciovacco '87 and Ted Eveleth '87 were key figures in the revival of crew
at Union-a revival that has led to a
rowing program that now competes with some of the best in the Northeast.
The two have since come together again, founding Cyclics Corporation in Schenectady, a company focused on new plastics technology. It is a place where their entrepreneurial spirit can thrive, Eveleth as president and chief executive officer and Ciovacco as chairman of the board who oversees global marketing.
First, some entrepreneurial background:
Ciovacco won the prestigious Bailey Cup for his work founding both the rowing team and the composite material lab. After graduation, he joined Advanced Composite Products, where he broadened his technical background in the fabrication, testing, and design of reinforced plastics and polymer composites. He later served as head rowing coach at Boston College before starting his own organizational development management consulting firm, Success Perspectives, in the Boston area.
Eveleth decided to hustle through college, and he earned his degree in economics (with Phi Beta Kappa honors) in three years. He has been an entrepreneur and has worked with early-stage companies since receiving his M.B.A. from Cornell in 1990. For many years he was at Individual, Inc., an information services company that grew from 20 to 180 employees.
Cyclics began in 1999, when Ciovacco heard from David Gascoyne '88 that GE had decided not to market the cyclic form of butylenes terephthalate (CBT). He and Eveleth assembled the technical and management team, eventually opened a 22,000-square foot headquarters on Technology Drive in Schenectady, and a spin-off business was born. To date, the corporation has some twenty private investors and millions of
dollars in financing. Last spring, Cyclics and Dow Chemical announced an alliance to develop automotive structural applications, such as body panels. In short order, Cyclics entered into similar pacts with Rohm and Haas and then Clarehill Plastics, Ltd., a corporation based in Northern Ireland. And in September 2003, Cyclics announced it would build a $38 million plant in Germany.
Ciovacco recognizes the enormity of introducing a new polymer technology where bigger companies have failed. But he is confident.
“A lot of large chemical companies spend enormous amounts of money developing materials,” he says. “I don't think our company will avoid all that, but we are able to respond to changes rapidly as a small company, and we are very focused on a set of customers and a base material. Chances are pretty good we won't break the bank.”
Last March, Ciovacco was cited by the Capital District Business Review's 40 Under Forty program. He says, “I am sort of an underdog kind of guy. I see a lot of opportunity in this region and would like to play a role in improving the economic climate. I am also struck by how many
people deeply care about this community, so I feel I am in good company.”
Adds Eveleth, “I don't think that either John or I knew when we graduated
that we would return to the Capital District and build a business a stone's throw
away from the College. But
it turned out the proper resources in terms of financial and intellectual capital were here, and now we can't imagine being anywhere else.”
Cyclics was recognized
by the Schenectady County Chamber of Commerce as
the Outstanding New Enterprise for 2002 and the Most Promising New Enterprise
in 2003.
John Corey '76, '80G
Accepting uncertainty
An entrepreneur
is a wheeler-dealer who takes an idea and leaps into the future, right? Not to John Corey '76, '80G.
That kind of person is a
gambler, not someone who
has the makings of a successful entrepreneur.
“A successful entrepreneur is rigorous about calculating risk,” he says. “It's one thing to jump off the bridge just
to see what will happen. It's another thing to figure out ahead of time what will happen when you jump, and then to do something about it-like invent bungee-jumping.
“Sure, entrepreneurs have
a certain level of comfort with taking risks, but they also are constantly asking questions about themselves and their ideas,” he continues. “Preparation is the difference between an eccentric and an entrepreneur.”
Corey is the president of
a small company in Troy, N.Y., named Clever Fellows Innovation Consortium, almost a case study in entrepreneurship. He and two partners began the business in 1989, convinced that they could create a freelance research and development department for small manufacturers who couldn't afford their own
in-house R&D. They would develop new products, production methods, and machinery for their clients, deferring their fees whenever possible for a share of the return.
One of their first deals was with a local window-shade company called Comfortex. Corey invented a new kind of insulating fabric (the first of a dozen shade-related patents he holds or shares), and Comfortex went on to great success, producing more than 20 million square feet a year of the fabric that Corey invented.
Those original clever fellows also wanted to conduct research on energy conversion technologies, and today Corey is focusing on Qdrive, the
manufacturing arm of Clever Fellows that is a leader in cryogenic cooler development.
Qdrive, he explains, brings together thermoacoustic pulse-tube technology with its own TwinSTAR pressure wave generators to produce non-lubricated, wear-free, low-vibration, low-noise cryogenic cooling systems. Applications range from cooling superconducting power devices to
liquefying in-home medical oxygen. Qdrive has partnerships and contracts with such organizations as PRAXAIR (the largest air separation and industrial gas company in America), Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Applied Research Lab at Penn State University, and NASA.
Corey says he always had the classic engineering trait
of looking at problems and seeing some solutions. As an independent project, he and his roommate designed a car and then built it, receiving credit in both engineering and art. After dropping out of Union for nearly three years to work on a railroad, he returned, and he and his wife converted a plywood hunting shack in nearby Clifton Park into their home. Determined to graduate cum laude after getting mostly Cs in his first two years, he compiled straight As and got the Latin honor.
Corey talks passionately about engineering and creativity.
“The root word for engineering is ingenuity,” he says. “It's all about coming up with solutions. Can you teach creativity like this? I think you can, and I think you can teach people to be good entrepreneurs-although, in the long run, people who have the knack from childhood will always be better engineers and entrepreneurs, in the same way that people who take to painting or figure skating as kids will be better than those who come to them later in life.
“Union is unique in enabling motivated students to build the skills and habits of successful entrepreneurship in a technological world-
rigorous critical and creative thinking abilities, flexible and effective communication competence, and a practical determination born of curiosity, all in a context of unified humanistic and technical understanding of our world.”
www.flyingpigsfarm.com
Embracing agrarian heritage and healthier eating
Jennifer
Small '88 and her husband, Michael Yezzi '89, raise pigs
the old-fashioned way on their 150-acre Flying Pigs Farm in Upstate New York's Battenkill River Valley.
They specialize in rare breeds that are on the brink of extinction-Gloucestershire Old Spots, Large Blacks, and Tamworths. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy lists these breeds as “critically endangered” or “rare.” Of the so-called heritage breeds, “Six of the fifteen breeds of pigs raised in the United States in the 1930s are extinct,” reports Small and Yezzi's website, www.flyingpigsfarm.com. One of their goals is to create a market for pork from these rare breeds, giving an incentive for others to raise them and thus increasing the breeds' numbers.
Small and Yezzi are themselves members of what is a “rare breed”-the small family farmer. Most of the pork, beef, and poultry sold in this country is controlled by a handful of major corporations producing enormous amounts for a seemingly small price.
But small farmers are experiencing a renaissance amid growing concerns about the real costs and safety of food produced by large corporations. To Small and Yezzi, news stories about such things as the heavy use of hormones and antibiotics in livestock production, recalls of meat produced in large slaughterhouses, and concerns about Mad Cow disease and animal parts fed to cattle have created a growing niche for agricultural products raised by on-site owners who eschew contemporary methods in favor of sustainable practices.
The pigs at Flying Pigs Farm have a vegetarian diet and are allowed to “free range” (roam outdoors in a large and safe enclosure) and munch on natural vegetation. The pigs even earn their keep by doing what comes naturally-using their strong snouts to root up overgrown pasture, thereby helping with land management. To Small and Yezzi, breeds that are allowed to engage in normal behavior in a comfortable environment and are offered a wholesome diet produce meat with a finer texture and a distinct flavor.
The two bought their farm about eight years ago and spent the first years restoring the nineteenth-century farmhouse. After investigating a variety of agricultural options for their woods and meadows, they chose to raise pigs because it dovetailed nicely with the schedules of their off-farm jobs (she is a development officer for Williams College, he is a compliance director for a nonprofit nursing home management company; both have graduate degrees in public health, and Yezzi also has a law degree).
Small and Yezzi began with just three pigs in 2000. “We didn't know anything about pigs,” Small says. “We didn't even know anyone who owned a pig. We felt a creature deserves fresh water, a good shelter, and plenty of space. We were too naïve to know that these basic measures are uncommon in the United States.”
Their instincts were correct. In 2003, they raised more than 140 pigs, and they find it difficult to keep up with demand. They sell their pork at New York City's famed Greenmarkets in Brooklyn and Manhattan and via mail order. They also have a growing list of prestigious restaurant customers, and food reviewers in The New York Times and House & Garden have raved about their pork.
Small and Yezzi remember taking the “World Agriculture” biology course offered by Professors Peter Tobiessen and Carl George. “Looking back, we realize it must have played a significant role in our understanding of and interest in U.S. food policy,” Small says.
Despite their hard work, it's a struggle for the couple to raise pigs the old-fashioned way and still make a profit. But they have stayed the course and plan to increase the size of their herd. “We would love to get to the point where everyone is raising diverse breeds of livestock, in a manner that is respectful of the animals and the environment,” Small says. “Then we'll move on to something else.”
Until then, Yezzi and Small will continue to promote these old breeds and sustainable methods of farming. As their website says, “Eating meat is a privilege. We respect and appreciate the animals that provide us with food, and we treat them accordingly. We do everything we can to ensure that our pigs are as comfortable as possible. This level of care limits the size of our farm, but we would not have it any other way.”
Ryan Menzer '04
Combining books and business
Ryan
Menzer '04, who combines running a business with majoring in computer science and math, has a word of advice for other in-a-hurry entrepreneurs: “Wait.”
Finish college first, he says, because if you start a business, you will quickly find that everything will take a lot more time than you had thought it would-and you will find yourself being stretched to the point of exhaustion. His case in point-working on two theses while trying to convince his landlord at 2 a.m. that a leak in his store's roof needed to be fixed.
Menzer and his partner, a computer engineering graduate of Clarkson University, are the owners of Focus Computers, a storefront operation next to a diner in the nearby village of Scotia, N.Y. They opened the store last fall, eager to build and sell their own high-end computers, but soon found they were spending most of their time servicing computer hardware and software problems.
“It's been interesting,” Menzer says. “We really want to build computers, because that's where the profit is, and it's what we enjoy. But customer service pays the bills, so that's what we spend most of our time doing.”
The two wrote a twenty-page business plan and took it to a bank for a loan. They were turned down, but used a combination of their own money and loans from family members to get started.
Menzer has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. He began taking courses at Union while he was still in his junior year of high school, and he has often doubled up on his courseload to try to graduate faster. He began building computers while he was going to classes and teaching math as a private tutor. When a mortgage broker hired him to network his office-and when his friend was hired by a local school district to do computer networking-they saw an opportunity to go out on their own.
“Basically, I wanted to run my own place,” Menzer says. “I know the odds are against me, but I also know that entrepreneurs have to be tolerant of risk. So far, we've had an answer for everything we've run up against.”
And if Focus Computers doesn't work out? Menzer probably will come up with something else. “I'm an entrepreneur,” he says.
Bobby Syed '03
An itch to be an entrepreneur
For a student interested in becoming an entrepreneur, what could be more natural than starting an Entrepreneurs Club?
That's exactly what Bobby Syed '03 did.
A computer science and economics major, Syed says he has always been interested in high-level business activity, and once he was at Union, he knew that he wanted to get into the management of a technical company.
Last year he interned at Tree Top Solutions, a Schenectady based Internet solutions company that was started by Derek Mebus '02 and Dave Ward '02.
“A lot of my classmates did internships at big companies, and I felt that my experiences were more fun and more interesting,” Syed says. “I was closely involved with the principals, getting my hands on things directly involved in making the company better.”
Syed's enthusiasm is exactly what you would expect from someone who envisions running his own company in ten years. Last year, he founded the Entrepreneurship Club, which has brought a number of speakers to campus-mostly alumni entrepreneurs. “We've heard a lot from people about how they actually did it,” he says. “It's great to get some real insights, like 'This is where we went wrong, so don't do this.' ”
In addition to being president of the club, Syed is
working on his M.B.A. at the Graduate College of Union University and serving as director of business development for Tree Top Solutions. “I'm young, so I can take a hit on the sleep,” he laughs.
His goal this year for the Entrepreneurship Club is to enter the Tech Valley Collegiate Business Plan Competition. Eventually, he would like to see the club actually start a small business that could involve new students each year. “I know that's pretty ambitious, but if we could get it going, participating in a real business would be great for students.”
Syed says the idea of building something is exciting. “I don't want to be a small part of a big corporation. I want to get involved in all aspects.”
But he is not going to let his enthusiasm become impatience. “Entrepreneurs are tolerant of risk, but not until they research their idea so they know it's the right risk to take. I want to have the right idea that's going to be successful.”
On the set of The Phantom Gourmet: Mike Andelman ’94,
vice president for business
development; Dave Andelman ’92, CEO; and Dan Andelman ’97, vice president of new media.
The Phantom Gourmet
The Phantom Gourmet is more than an anonymous Boston-area restaurant critic who pays his own bills in order to serve up the most trustworthy reviews; it is also is a multimedia enterprise founded by a recent Union alumnus.
While planning to begin
law school in 1993, Dave Andelman '92 launched Phantom Gourmet, Inc. He says he was looking for “a flexible job I could do while I went to school. Phantom Gourmet began with almost no capital, so my investment was really limited to my own hard work. My goal was to make enough money to pay my living expenses.”
As he was building the business, Dave decided to stay in school an extra year, earning his J.D. and M.B.A. at Northeastern University. He's now a member of the Massachusetts Bar as well as CEO
of Phantom Gourmet, Inc.
Andelman operated the company out of his apartment during those four years and then, after passing the bar in 1997, he brought his brothers into the company.
Dan '97 is vice president of new media and dedicated to turning out “phan-tastic content” on TV, radio, print, and the Internet; Mike '94 and a graduate of Georgetown Business School, is vice president of business development, handling all sales and business development deals.
“Pretty soon we had one of the hottest locally-produced media properties in Boston,” Dave says.
Dave says he and his brothers are “unusually, some would say abnormally, close. It works great. We fight sometimes, but then we go out to dinner and forget it.”
Their TV show, which began in 1993, quickly developed a cult following, winning “Best Talk Show” from Boston Magazine in 1994, and is now the most recognized name in the region for restaurant reviews and food information. After ten years on cable, the show was recruited by Viacom. “We just moved to broadcast television, UPN38 and WBZ4 in Boston; these stations control about 30 percent of the viewing audience,” reports Dave. “The show is now on UPN-38 every Saturday and Sunday 11 A.M. to noon.”
The Phantom Gourmet is also a daily ninety-second
feature on WBZ 1030AM NewsRadio, one of the premier radio stations in the country. And you can search more than 1,500 Phantom reviews on www.phantomgourmet.com, honored by Yahoo! magazine as one its favorite websites.
“Between the show, our TV reviews, our radio feature, our column in Yankee Food Service, our website, and other marketing tactics like the PhantoMobile (a purple, wrapped SUV that our VP of Visual Media & Production will drive to over 500 restaurants this year), we generate over a million impressions per week,” Dave says.
The company is preparing for expansion nationwide. “In about a year,” explains Dave, “I think we'll be ready to bring the show to 'local syndication,' the same system of doing business (the reviews, the graphics, the format, the music, etc.), built specifically for New York, Washington, etc.”
They're also looking at deals to do a book and a two-hour radio show. “I never dreamed we'd be the brand that we've become,” says Dave. “Our goal now is to bring the Phantom to twenty or thirty major media markets
-not bad for a company begun with $2,500.”
Dave, who studied political science at Union (where he launched a charitable sand volleyball championship that helped develop his entrepreneurial skills), claims to eat out more than 1,000 times
per year; to work off the calories, he ran the 2002 Boston Marathon. He and Mike and Dan are the sons of famed sports radio talk show host Eddie Andelman.
Kelly Herrington '96, associate dean of admissions, has received the Rising Star Award from the National Association of College Admission Counseling (NACAC) for his role as founder and organizer of Camp College, a program that encourages first-generation, college-bound high schoolers to “try on” college.
The award was presented recently at
the national meeting of NACAC.
Camp College, now in its fourth year, hosted some sixty high schoolers on campus last summer. This year, the program expanded to include sessions at Niagara University and Manhattan College, each of which hosted sixty students.
“There are so many high school students who don't think college is an option for them,” said Herrington. “This program has a proven record of success in making college a reality for those who might not otherwise continue their education after high school.”
The simulated college experience strives to demystify college life-from academics to social life. Students, chaperones and mentors attend classes, learn about
admissions and financial aid, participate in parties and sports, eat college food, and sleep in dorm rooms.
An admissions
travel recipe
Courtesy of Kelly Herrington '96, associate dean of admissions, here are some highpoints from life on the road:
Cover 3,758 miles by car
Fly 32,000 miles
Visit 61 high schools
Eat too much fried bread and beans after a presentation on Jemez Reservation in N.M.
Take guidance counselors kayaking
Wear tube socks on your hands in the mountains of Colorado because it's snowing outside and your rental car doesn't have heat
Conduct a presentation for the Northern Valley Regional School District in N.J. on writing letters of recommendation
Interview the captain of the Centralia High School Football team in Centralia, Wash. (halfway between nowhere and somewhere) in the bleachers after practice (did I fail to mention he has a 1520 SAT score?)
One speeding ticket
Three parking tickets
34 on-the-road interviews
Too many Starbucks' lattes
Plan a N.Y. state college program for a community-based organization (the Daniel's Fund) in Denver
Eat an organic lunch under
the Bay Bridge at a prospective student reception
They come each year like the leaves falling from the trees,
the questions from new students and prospectives alike.
Where can we eat? Where can we stay? Isn't there a dance museum in Saratoga?
Now, the College is ready.
“Around U” is a new website that was designed for campus visitors, new students, parents… even old timers looking for new things to do. The site invites the reader to “come explore Schenectady, where opportunities abound within an easy walk of Union's hillside campus.” It contains information about where to go to browse for books (try Jay Street), where to go for great Italian food (take your pick), and where to go for a Broadway-style musical (Proctor's, of course).
The site also includes links to some Capital Region attractions-museums, historical sites and outdoor activities-and some that are a bit farther afield-Cooperstown's Baseball Hall of Fame or the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.
The College's admissions officers took bundles of postcards on their fall travels to guide prospectives and their families to the new site.
To see what to do Around U, visit www.union.edu/aroundu.
On a web near you
AroundU is just one of many websites designed to tell the Union story. We encourage you to visit these others:
The Union College Campus
(www.union.edu/Campus)-A comprehensive tour of the College's historic 100-acre campus, including a webcam live shot, a guide to trees, a student-oriented video into several facets of life at Union, a medley of Union songs, and a downloadable Union screen saver.
The Virtual Advisor
(www.union.edu/Admissions/virtual_advisor.php)-You can choose to browse our frequently asked questions site, which will give you answers to the questions visitors ask most often, or, if you have a specific question, you can turn to our virtual admissions counselor.
Admissions Events (www.union.edu/Admissions/Events/)-Want to see all the opportunities you have to get to know Union? Start here.
Union Voices
(www.union.edu/Admissions/Viewbook/2003/) -For a comprehensive introduction to the College told by students and faculty, start with this award-winning site.
Tips for the College Search
(www.union.edu/Admissions/PerfectSchool)-In keeping with the Admissions Office's philosophy of making the college search process as painless as possible, this site offers advice and helpful hints to potential students and their families, including a parents' guide and interview tips.
