Rhode Island Monthly>The Advocate

The Advocate

State child advocate Jametta Alston is willing to protect children in DCYF custody at all costs. Even if her bold decision to sue the state for neglect forces her to commit career suicide, she’s determined to make her case for the kids.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
June 2008

Growing up in working class West Philadelphia, Jametta Alston never dreamed she’d be a lawyer. No, she had her sights set elsewhere: Broadway. The lights, the drama, the power to transport people to another place.

Twenty years later, Alston has plenty of drama in her life. But it’s not on a stage. Here, in Courtroom Four of the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island, the focus is on children. Lawyer and governor-appointed Child Advocate Jametta Alston is convinced that the state is turning its back on its most vulnerable and wounded children, children whom it has sworn to protect. So Alston is doing what many consider the unthinkable. She’s suing her boss.

“It is just amazing to me how hardened hearts appear to be,” Alston says. “These children are being neglected, abused. And we should do nothing?”

Nothing—or worse than nothing—is what Alston accuses the Department of Children, Youth, and Families of doing in the face of its responsibilities. DCYF is charged with removing children from parents who abuse them or who don’t take care of their basic needs. The agency maintains a stable of foster homes, group homes and shelters to house the children while they are in state custody, and must either work with the biological parents so the children can return home safely or arrange for the children to be adopted. The sole responsibility of the independent child advocate’s office is to watch over DCYF: to ensure children are safe and well cared for while in state custody, to lobby the legislature on their behalf, and—if all else fails—to take legal action to protect their rights.

Alston, who was appointed to the post some two and a half years ago, had always seen this last option as a last resort. At her 2005 confirmation hearing for the post, she said, “I truly believe that if I must take matters to court, it means I’ve failed. I have failed to find the words or ways or means to...resolve matters in a beneficial way for the children of Rhode Island.”

Two years later—almost to the day—Alston filed suit in federal court against Governor Donald Carcieri, former Secretary of Health and Human Services Jane Hayward, and DCYF Director Patricia Martinez. Representing “Sam and Tony M.,” “Caesar S.,” and five other children whom she will argue represent a class, Alston’s lawsuit says DCYF “is plagued by fundamental, systemic failings of great depth and scope.” Not just benign neglect, the failings alleged in the lawsuit add up to willful ignorance—or worse. Federal dollars squandered because the agency simply didn’t meet the benchmarks for safety and efficiency required to qualify for them. Children placed in homes with people known to have committed domestic assault and sex offenses. Whole young lives destroyed by the instability and abuse suffered in custody of the state:

DAVID T. is a thirteen-year-old boy who has been in DCYF’s custody for eleven years. DCYF has cycled him through more than fourteen placements...When David was four years old...DCYF moved David to a shelter. David has not lived in a home since, and his lifetime of living in institutions, compounded with the stress of [a] disrupted adoptive placement, has caused his mental health to steadily deteriorate.

The statistics are damning. Each year from 2000 to 2005, Rhode Island ranked forty-ninth or fiftieth in the country in rates of maltreatment and neglect of children in state custody. Thirty-five to 40 percent of children in foster care are living in institutions—twice the national average. More than 60 percent of children do not receive enough face time with their caseworkers. Children in state care are experiencing abuse or neglect at twice the rate of the general population. “If they’re going to be raped and beaten [in DCYF care]—literally raped and beaten—then leave them at home,” says Alston. “You’ve taken them from something they know and said, ‘We’re going to make you safe.’ And then you put them in a place where they’re brutalized? It’s wrong.”

Four hundred fifty million dollars is a lot of money. It’s enough money to stop legislators and budget-makers and taxpayers dead in their tracks. It’s the size of the projected deficit in the state budget for the coming fiscal year, and it’s apt to keep growing.

Discussions about DCYF’s alleged shortcoming always come down to this: money. The 2008 DCYF budget totals $232.7 million—a $37.3 million decrease from 2007. Budget shortfalls caused two major changes to DCYF policy last year. The first, now reversed and widely acknowledged to have been a mistake, was legislators’ decision to try seventeen-year-olds as adults, and, if convicted, send them to adult prison. The second was to cut children off from DCYF services at age eighteen instead
of at age twenty-one.

Patricia Martinez declined to be interviewed for this story, but several other top administrators in the DCYF orbit testify that many of the Department’s failings, so painstakingly detailed in the lawsuit, are simply a matter of dollars and cents. On the issue of overburdened caseworkers, for instance, Lucie Burdick, president of SEIU Local 580, the union that serves DCYF’s social workers, says the union has been working with the Department to try to keep caseloads down. “Of course, what happened [since the last contract negotiation] is the caseloads became intolerable,” she says. Burdick doesn’t blame the Department, though. “DCYF doesn’t get the money they need to do things properly.”

On the other hand, even working within a tight budget, according to the lawsuit and to people familiar with the Department, many of DCYF’s financial woes could be avoided with better management. “It is an issue of money, but it’s also an issue of system reform, and we need to be working on both simultaneously,” says Elizabeth Burke Bryant, executive director of the nonprofit children’s advocacy organization, Rhode Island Kids Count. Burke Bryant declined to comment on the lawsuit specifically, citing ongoing work her agency does with both the child advocate’s office and DCYF, but she did acknowledge that “there are opportunities to improve the system even in this tight financial climate.”

Federal funds, for example, are available to states to help care for children with special needs in foster care, as long as states meet certain standards; this year, Rhode Island will forfeit $1.5 million of those funds because it places too many children in unlicensed foster homes.

Too many cuts in caseworker positions (or too few hires) have led to overwork and stress among the remaining caseworkers, which has led to low morale and even more staff departures. Rosa Gough was a DCYF caseworker until 2004; she loved her job, she says, but high caseloads and her frustration at what she saw as the system’s unresponsiveness to change eventually forced her out. In the years before she left, Gough says, case workers were regularly assigned eighteen or nineteen families, even though at one time DCYF’s target caseload cap was fourteen; with many families having more than one child, the number of children under their supervision at times reached as high as thirty. It was impossible for them to follow up appropriately with all of their clients, she says. This left her walking around with a constant low-level dread that at any moment she would get a call with the news that one of her kids was dead.

As a result, kids like David T. fall through the cracks, as the lawsuit alleges: DCYF removed David from his mother...due to neglect...By the time David entered foster care, his mother had already been deemed unfit to care for at least one of David’s siblings and had lost her parental rights. Despite clear indications that David had been sexually abused while in his mother’s care, DCYF failed to ensure that he received a sexual abuse evaluation or appropriate treatment...DCYF first placed David with a foster mother with whom he lived for two years and to whom he became attached. This was the first—and last—loving, lasting, stable home David would experience for the next eleven years. At the age of four, David was removed from the foster mother he referred to as “Mommy Mary,” because she was unable to continue to care for him. Despite its obligation to place David in a family-like environment, DCYF moved the young child to a shelter.

David and six other children in DCYF custody are the named plaintiffs represented by Alston, Providence lawyer John Dineen, and several lawyers from the New York-based nonprofit Children’s Rights, which specializes in bringing lawsuits like this. Attorneys for the state have filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. If Senior U.S. District Court Judge Ronald R. Lagueux rules that the case can go forward, the plaintiffs’ lawyers will next try to argue that the abuses they allege are widespread enough to allow the named plaintiffs to stand in for all children in DCYF custody, making this a class-action suit.

Children’s Rights has been involved with a dozen successful such lawsuits, from New Mexico to New Jersey. Typically, it will begin when an advocate or attorney on the ground, like Alston, contacts Children’s Rights; if Children’s Rights finds the case strong enough, the organization will offer its legal and organizational support. Because Children’s Rights lays out the costs of the lawsuit up front and is reimbursed only if the suit is successful (and then only partially), “we won’t bring a case unless we think we can win it,” says the organization’s associate director and the lead attorney on the case, Susan Lambiase. “The bottom line is the children really need this lawsuit. It’s never easy to reform a child welfare system, but the things that are wrong with states are fixable things. The law is quite good for us and for the kids.”

The settlements differ, but they usually include a court-enforceable reform plan, plus a court-ordered infusion of cash into the system to make the changes possible. “There are intractable bureaucracies that it’s really hard to change. It’s like mov-ing mountains,” says Lambiase. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. We’ve seen it happen.” As for Alston’s odds? “I would never presume to say how a case would go ultimately in court,” Lambiase says, “except that we did our research and our analysis and we’ve got the facts and
the law on our side.”

Alston’s is not the first lawsuit that the child advocate’s office has filed against DCYF. In 1986, then-child advocate Mi-chael Coleman asked a federal judge to intervene in the practice of “night-to-night placement”: shuffling kids, night to night, from one placement to the next. In 1988, a judge ordered DCYF to stop using the practice except in emergencies, and ordered the state to supply more funds for additional foster care beds. In the years since, each successive child advocate has moved to hold DCYF in contempt of court, citing numbers of night-to-night placements that continue to creep upwards.

Of course, many advocates say that it’s all a matter of priorities. The governor has taken flak from many in the human service sector for his reluctance to repeal the flat tax and the phase-out of the capital gains tax, both aimed at making Rhode Island a ‘business-friendly environment,’ even as he slashes DCYF’s budget. “Second to the death penalty, removing somebody’s children from their homes is probably the most awesome power that is entrusted with any state,” says Lisa Guillette, executive director of Rhode Island Foster Parents Association. “If collectively—because we all own that, the entire state owns that—we’re saying we don’t have enough money to do this right, that’s a big indictment on our priorities as a state. As a citizenry.”

Alston says that after meeting with DCYF Director Martinez and her staff every month for two years, after hearing promises made and seeing promises broken—about capping caseworker case loads, about training new supervisors, about all of the systemic problems plaguing DCYF—she felt that she had no choice but to file suit. “The excuses I was getting, I felt like maybe she needs my help by bringing a lawsuit,” says Alston. “Then it’s out of her hands, it’s out of the legislature’s hands, it’s out of the executive’s hands. We’re going to put this in the judicial hands. It seems like the only resort to make the kind of changes you need to keep children safe.”

Kevin Aucoin, a lawyer for DCYF, speaking on behalf of the defendants in the suit, says, “We do take issue with the facts as asserted in the plaintiff’s complaint. But it’s premature to get into any substantive comment with litigation pending.” The governor declined to be interviewed for this article, but in a July press conference, held just after the lawsuit was filed, he said, “We don’t believe right now...that there are any youngsters in our care right now being abused...Are the allegations in fact true? I don’t know any of that right now, but we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”

It was less than a decade ago that Jametta Alston, a round-faced woman with gold wire-rimmed glasses and a bright smile, was childless and happy about it. “I was a career woman,” she says. “I loved my lifestyle. I liked hanging out at Borders for three or four hours, drinking tea and reading books.” Children were the farthest things from her mind, in fact, confirms Susann Gardner, Alston’s best friend since childhood. “Jametta grew up as an only child. She was used to being by herself and having her own things.”

Things changed in 1997. DCYF was sued by a set of foster parents who claimed that a foster child they had planned to adopt was unfairly removed from them. At the time, Alston sat on the other side of the courtroom, working for Rhode Island Attorney General Jeffrey Pine. In order to understand better what the plaintiffs were alleging, Alston decided to go through the state’s foster parent training and licensing process. “I’m a hands-on attorney,” she says. “I wanted to see what the process is like.”

A few weeks after she became licensed, she got a call from DCYF. They said, “You’re licensed to be a foster parent, why don’t you take a child?” Alston recalls. After a brief stint with an eighteen-month-old boy (“I couldn’t send him back fast enough,” says Alston now, with a laugh), Alston gave in one last time when a caseworker begged her to come meet a little girl, seven years old. The girl had been in a shelter for nine months (children are not supposed to stay in shelters for more than three weeks), and she talked a mile a minute. “She drove me insane,” Alston recalls with a giggle in her voice. “I was an older woman who had lived alone for fifteen years, and she didn’t stop talking. She never stopped talking. She talked in her sleep!” After a few weeks, DCYF asked Alston to consider adopting the little girl.

By that point, Alston had all but decided that she simply wasn’t equipped to be a parent. She had resolved to keep the child through Christmas, and then go back to her quiet life. She was in the mall, of all places, holiday shopping, when a strange thing happened: She heard a voice in her head. “It’s not this big booming voice, but it was this quiet thing, like, ‘This is yours to do. This is your child,’ ” Alston recalls. “As soon as I accepted that—I don’t know if I’ll ever experience it again—there was a peace. A peace of rightness, a peace of joy. Thy will be done. She was my baby from that moment on.”

Now a poised fourteen-year-old young woman, Alston’s daughter poses in dresses and ballet leotards, braces and pony-tails, the stack of photos in Alston’s wallet chronicling a happy childhood. Still, she has provided a singularly intimate and personal window into the troubles that face children and families who enter DCYF’s system. “She is still struggling with all of the pain, embarrassment, shame that kids internalize,” says Alston. “Because kids think, ‘It’s my fault.’ I look at my daughter and I just worry. Can we overcome what happened the first seven years? And if we can’t overcome it, can we mute it? Can we give her strength?”

After graduating from Temple University in 1977, Alston pursued her dream of making it to Broadway by working as an entertainment manager at a casino in Atlantic City. There, she became increasingly disillusioned by the people she met, who were incredibly talented yet unfailingly unhappy. Then Bill Cosby arrived for a performance and was struck by Alston’s intelligence and competence. “ ‘What are you doing here?’” she recalls him asking her. “‘You need to go on to law school.’ ”

So she went to Howard University, and afterwards spent a few weeks on Cape Cod as a graduation present to herself. She fell in love with the beaches and the New England sunsets, and decided to apply for jobs in the area. “I thought I’d be here a year or two, and here I am, twenty years later,” she says. She worked first for Legal Services, then in private practice. She was at the attorney general’s office for almost ten years, and then left to become the Cranston city solicitor before being forced to step down after two years because the city’s char-ter stipulates the solicitor must live in Cranston (Alston lives in Warwick).

Because she was appointed to her job in Cranston by a Republican mayor, Stephen Laffey, and then to her current post by a Republican governor, many mistake Alston for a Republican. She’s not. In fact, she’s not much of a political player at all. The lawsuit is widely seen as political suicide for Alston, making a re-appointment in 2010 highly unlikely, and an appointment to a Family Court judgeship even more of a long shot. (As a case in point, a Senate bill proposing to eliminate the Office of the Child Advocate was introduced in early March. It was hastily withdrawn after an outpouring of support for the Office.) “I’m blunt, I’m tactless, I have no political sense at all,” Alston admits, only half-jokingly. “Honesty is a tool, not a weapon. But let me use this as a tool that we can break down some of these power plays and get to what we need to do to protect children. It may work against me. Do I care? No. My goal is to do this job well.”

Alston doesn’t worry about what’s in store for her. A deeply religious woman who follows her heart, she says, “you walk with faith. What’s important is to be prepared for whatever is delivered to me to do next.” She often jokes that her prayers include a request that her next job be at Borders—“Lord, you know I love books!” she says with a laugh.

To this day, Alston takes her daughter on a yearly trip to Broadway.

She remembers fondly all the shows she saw as a child. Her favorite was Sweet Charity, about a down-on-her-luck but ever-optimistic New York dance hall hostess. Susann Gardner recalls going to see Man of la Mancha with her best friend when they were teenagers. Even then, Don Quixote reminded Gardner of Alston. “She would always stick up for the underdog,” Gardner recalls.

Alston knows that it may take years for her lawsuit to come to any sort of conclusion. A lawsuit is not the speediest possible recourse, and it pains her that “while we strategize and go back and forth in this case, children are being harmed.” Still, when it is time to sit down and figure out a better way to care for the children in DCYF care, Alston will be there, bucking the system, hoping to get the better of a failed bureaucracy tangled in red tape.

Alston sometimes gets choked up when talking about kids in DCYF custody. It’s clear she feels the pain of each child as if he were her own.

“They are the gift we’ve been given. And there’s not one that we can waste. Not one,” she says. “This is giving these children a safe place to find their identity and their strength and their greatness. We’ve got to change the system. And we can’t worry about money,” she adds, her determination palpable. “Let’s acknowledge the system’s wrong. Now let’s sit down and see how we can make it better.”

Brown Alumni Magazine>A Nation of Jailers

A Nation of Jailers

Economics professor Glenn Loury is speaking out about what he believes is one of the nation’s gravest injustices: despite falling crime rates, the number of black men sent to prison continues to rise. It's the latest cause for a man whose work has taken him from liberal to conservative and back again.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 2008

Standing in front of a room full of people, Glenn Loury stumbled. It was a rhetorical stumble, not a physical one. It came near the beginning of the first of two Tanner Lectures on Human Values he delivered at Stanford last April: "As it happens," he said, "I have passed through—" he paused briefly, taking a deep breath, "the courtroom, and the jailhouse, on my way to this distinguished podium.

Then he paused again, longer this time, collecting himself before reading the rest of the lecture. Later he recalled the moment: "It was harder for me to say than I realized it was going to be when I wrote it down on the page."

For Loury, the lectures marked an important moment on the long and ongoing trajectory that has joined his lived experience to his scholarship and his politics. Titled "Racial Stigma, Mass Incarceration, and American Values," the lectures brimmed with both moral passion and rigorous analytical scholarship, a combination that has become something of a trademark for him. The lectures asserted that the number of black men incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails—a number wildly disproportionate to their representation in the general population—reflects the social dishonor to which African Americans are still subject today, a dishonor with roots in U.S. slavery.

"We are becoming a nation of jailers, and racist jailers at that," Loury said later in the lecture. "We must ask, in light of our history, whether this is the nation we want to be. And, deciding not, we must then try to do something about it."

Loury has indeed committed himself to doing something about it. In addition to lecturing and writing on the issue, he appeared last year before a U.S. Congressional committee examining the economic costs of the surge in the nation's prison population. The issue has propelled Loury back into the role of public intellectual, a role he has flirted with through much of his career. As an economist, his work is to crunch numbers, but what the numbers have revealed to him has triggered his moral outrage. Loury makes no apologies for his attempts to "reach beyond science and, within the limits of my abilities, to address deeper questions." Unlike many of his academic colleagues, who after earning their PhDs obtain stable professorships and address their peers in scholarly journals, Loury's journey to Brown and the issue of prisons has taken unlikely twists and turns. It has involved not just the courthouse and the jailhouse, but years as a conservative pundit. It has included a religious rebirth followed by a repudiation of that religion, and now has brought him to the far left of the political spectrum.

The oldest of two children, Glenn Cartman Loury grew up on Chicago's South Side in the 1950s and 60s. Although the neighborhood was rough, Loury's family was comfortable enough. His father was a high-level administrator with the Internal Revenue Service and his mother a secretary with the Veterans Administration. He had cousins who were doctors and lawyers but, he recalls, he also had relatives and neighbors caught up in illegal activity.

The sociologist Elijah Anderson has described two broad categories of social orientation in inner cities: "decent families," who tend to be working poor (rather than unemployed) and who value self-reliance, hard work, education, and church; and "street families," who turn to lawlessness to make ends meet and violence to settle conflicts. Loury's family had a little of both, sometimes in a single person. "I'm talking about my uncle Mooney," Loury says. "He was a legitimate small businessman but also sold marijuana out the back of his barbershop, routinely. I'm talking about my great Aunt Candy, and Aunt Rosetta, who fenced stolen goods as a regular course of events. They had young women who were shoplifting clothing and foodstuffs from retailers, and they would get twenty cents or thirty cents on the dollar from my aunts, who then had big freezers in the basement. So that whenever you wanted to have a family thing, you knew that you didn't go and buy your ham and your turkey from the Stop & Shop. You went to Aunt Candy or Aunt Rosetta." When Loury gets excited telling these family stories, his voice clicks up a register or two. "These are church ladies with big hats!" he says. "They were salt of the earth, these people! But that's what they did."

One's racial identity was of primary importance in Chicago during that period. White flight had turned many of the city's neighborhoods into African American enclaves, and the civil rights and black power movements had fired up black youth, Loury included. In the prologue to his 1995 book of essays, One by One from the Inside Out, Loury tells a moving story about attending "one of those heated, earnest political rallies so typical of the period" with a longtime friend and neighbor, Woody. With two mixed-race parents, Woody looked white, but growing up in a black neighborhood with black friends, he identified as a "brother." When at the rally Woody raised his hand with a suggestion, Loury recalls that "one of the dashiki-clad brothers-in-charge" asked for someone in the audience to "vouch for this white boy." Eighteen-year-old Loury, fearing that "speaking up for Woody would have marked me as a disloyal 'Tom' among the blacker-than-thou crowd," said nothing. Years later, still cringing at his disloyalty, Loury continues to struggle with the issue of what it means to be "authentically black."

Even as his political approach to "the race problem" has veered sharply from left to right to center and back to the left again, Loury's foundational belief has remained consistent. He has always held that race is a "socially constructed mode of human categorization," as he wrote in his 2002 book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. The key intellectual innovation in this most recent of his books is the concept of "racial stigma," which he explains this way: "If we believe that people of a different look and hue and shape of face and such are different from us, and we act on that belief, we can create dynamics that make that a fact. Moreover, if we are unaware of how some of these influences bias and influence our conceptions in society, then we can draw conclusions and be very comfortable and set in those conclusions without interrogating them."

A heavyset man of fifty-nine, Loury sports a graying goatee and a presence that, although guarded at first, quickly softens. In conversation, he ranges from the formalized diction of the lecture hall to the chatty, easy way of a friend. He is unwilling to dumb down his opinions or his way of speaking. This has the effect of making people around him strive to be sharper, more well-read, quicker on their toes. He can be cocky, though not obnoxiously so, and his discourse is peppered with the names of his friends in high places.

Loury was an exceptionally bright student in high school, and, after graduating at age sixteen, he entered the Illinois Institute of Technology. But after his girlfriend—whom he later married—gave birth to their daughters, Lisa and then Tammy, Loury dropped out and took at job at a local printing plant. He continued to take night classes at a local junior college. (He also fathered a son, Alden, with another woman around this time.) Soon he had secured a scholarship to Northwestern, where once again he demonstrated great promise, particularly in mathematics and economics. In 1972, divorced from his first wife, he arrived at MIT and quickly became one of the top students in one of the top economics departments in the world.

Loury's 1976 PhD dissertation, "Essays in the Theory of the Distribution of Income," was a rigorous economics-based examination of why, years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, blacks still weren't getting ahead. He put forth a theory of "social capital," asserting that who a person knows—the informal networks and connections that can give one a leg up at everything from jobs to housing—matters at least as much as a person's intelligence or hard work. African Americans had few, if any, such networks. This view of racism as far beyond the simple fix of antidiscrimination laws and perpetuated by an ongoing, self-fulfilling social cycle, has since become one of the hallmarks of the American left and a frequent justification for affirmative action.

Over the next decade, however, Loury's thinking turned right and made him one of affirmative action's most outspoken black critics. He wrote essays and op-eds with such titles as "Beyond Civil Rights" and "Blacks Must Now Fight the Enemy Within," arguing that placing blame for the African American community's problems solely on white America was incorrect and counterproductive. "The bottom stratum of the black community," he wrote in a 1984 article in The New Republic, "has compelling problems which can no longer be blamed solely on white racism, and which force us to confront fundamental failures in black society. The societal disorganization among poor blacks, the lagging academic performance of black students, the disturbingly high rate of black-on-black crime, and the alarming increase in early unwed pregnancies among blacks now loom as the primary obstacles to progress." Personal responsibility became his mantra. Black folks, he said, needed to quit the blame game.

By 1982, when Loury, at age thirty-three, became the first tenured black professor in the Harvard economics department, he had gained a reputation as a brilliant, if ornery, iconoclast. He'd alienated such black leaders as Coretta Scott King and Jesse Jackson with his disdain for what he saw as their outdated approach to problems in the African American community. His intellectual allies were such conservatives as William Kristol and James Q. Wilson, who had the ear of the Reagan administration. By now, Loury was speaking publicly and vociferously against affirmative action. ("By what calculus of fairness can those claiming to be fighting for justice argue that outstanding white students ... should be denied the opportunity for ... education so that minority students who are not prepared for it may nonetheless enroll?" he wrote in "Beyond Civil Rights.") And even as old friends and family back home in Chicago were increasingly disappointed with what they saw as Loury's selling out, he says, "The answer I would give to that was, 'I'm a free thinker, and I go where the ideas lead me, and I'm sorry to disappoint you but I gotta speak the truth.' "

He resented the idea that he need hew to a party line because of his race. "I felt a little bit martyred," he recalls, "because, you know, these people gonna drop a ton of bricks on me just because I have the integrity to say what I think is correct? Because I'm black and I'm at Harvard I'm supposed to be part of some imaginary team that you people are constructing out there to help the race—quote-unquote? So now I've got a chip on my shoulder. You expect me to say something that is beyond the pale. In a way, I need to live up to that expectation. That's now my role. My role is to upset you."

In 1987, Loury's room in what he calls "the house that Reagan built" seemed secured when U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett offered him a position as under-secretary.

Meanwhile, thanks to President Reagan's War on Drugs and the generation of tough-on-crime policies that followed, Americans in general, and black men in particular, began going to prison in increasingly large numbers. "Two decades ago, it is fair to say, America faced a violent crime problem," Loury said in his Tanner Lectures. "This was a time when drive-by shootings and drug-deals-gone-violently-bad were common fare on local news, when the War on Drugs was taken to a new level, and 'gangsta' rap was born."

But, Loury now believes, like the drug use the incarceration boom was supposed to lessen, incarceration itself became an addiction. Once the United States began turning to lockup as the solution for a growing list of what had previously been considered social, not criminal, ills, it couldn't stop. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of people in U.S. prisons more than doubled. Although the rate of violent crime peaked in the early 1990s and has been declining ever since, between 1990 and 2000, incarceration rates nearly doubled again. Today, at least 1.6 million people are incarcerated in U.S. prisons. Include people on probation and parole, and the number jumps to more than seven million. According to a recent report from the Pew Center on the States, one of every 100 adults in the United States is behind bars—the highest incarceration rate in the world. As Loury points out in his Tanner lectures, Americans account for 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of its inmates.

"Today, fifteen years after crime peaked, the American prison system has become a leviathan unmatched in human history," he said. "Never has a supposedly 'free country' denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens."

The impact on communities of color has been enormous. According to U.S. Department of Justice figures, a black man has a 32 percent chance of entering state or federal prison during his lifetime. If current incarceration rates continue, one of every three black male babies born today will see the inside of a prison cell, a rate more than five times higher than that of white male babies. In many inner-city neighborhoods, a stint in prison is as much a rite of passage as graduation from high school. The effects of these incarcerations are not confined to the prison walls. More than half of state and federal inmates are parents of minor children; according to DOJ, black children are nearly nine times more likely than white children to have a parent in prison. Finding work for any person with a criminal conviction is already a challenge; for an African-American, that challenge can be almost insurmountable.

Prisoner statistics, Loury said in his Tanner lectures, tell only part of the story:

[N]o cost-benefit analysis of our world-historic prison build-up over the past thirty-five years is possible without specifying how one should reckon in the calculation the pain being imposed on the persons imprisoned, their families and their communities. How to value this aspect of policy is, to my mind, a salient ethical issue. Punishment politics, it seems to me, invariably discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists and, yes, of those whom we unceremoniously put to death. It should be clear that social science has no answers for the question of what weight to put on a "thug's" wellbeing, or on that of his wife or his daughter and son. Nor can Science tell us how much additional cost borne by the offending class can be justified in order to obtain a given increment in security of life and property—or in peace of mind—for the rest of us.

When Loury says "the rest of us," he includes himself in his audience of well-off academic peers. He is in a stable marriage to his second wife, Linda, with whom he is raising two teenage boys in an affluent Boston suburb. Yet in the same passage Loury points out that by virtue of his race, he is "knitted together with offenders in networks of social and psychic affliction." His admission to his audience at the start of the lecture that he had once been behind bars echoes powerfully. In a sense, he is siding with the "thug."

"This was a big deal," says Josh Cohen, a professor of political science and philosophy at Stanford and a friend of Loury. "To be doing these lectures and to be stepping outside of his usual responsibility as an economist to be talking about issues of political morality: it wasn't like there was some bold new moral idea in the lectures, but that's usually not the way moral thinking works. You get yourself worked up about a problem. Then you try to bring it to bear."

Throughout the 1980s, as Loury's professional influence grew, his personal life fell to pieces. By day, he lectured at Harvard alongside some of the top minds in economics and political science; by night, he ventured into housing projects and strip clubs, freebasing cocaine and picking up women. Even as he preached about personal responsibility, he frequented crack houses and nightclubs, where he was not a Harvard professor but just another brother, out looking for a good time.

"I knew how to talk and how to walk, not to seem an obvious mark in such a community so that I would get robbed," he says now. "I wore that as a secret badge of honor. It made me, in some way or another—nutty, nutty, I can't defend this—more authentically black somehow. This is sick, I would say in retrospect. But I believe it's an accurate reflection of what I actually thought in the back of my mind in those years."

Three months after he was offered the position in the Reagan education department, he withdrew his nomination, citing "personal reasons." Days later, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Pamela Foster brought assault charges against him. She was, it turned out, his mistress, living at his expense in a Boston apartment. Although the charges were eventually dropped, she accused Loury of dragging her down a flight of stairs and throwing her belongings out the window. Local newspapers had a field day. Here was a conservative unable to live up to his own gospel of personal responsibility.

"At the time, I guess the way I'd construe it was: what I'm saying is correct," he says now. "Whether I'm doing what's right is another matter. People should take better care of themselves. They should take care of their children, they should be responsible. If I fall short of that, well, there you are."

Loury's problems were far from over. His drug use continued to spiral out of control. His marriage was at its breaking point. Then, towards the end of the year, he was arrested for possession of marijuana and cocaine. Shortly after the scandal with Pamela Foster surfaced, Loury recalls, he remarked to his friend, the evangelical Catholic priest (Loury calls him a "theo-con") Richard Neuhaus, that Martin Luther King and John Kennedy also had mistresses. "If he could have slapped me, he would have," Loury says now. "But he gave me the stern reproach look, the equivalent of a slap in the face. And he said, 'It was a terrible flaw in King. It seriously compromised his effectiveness. And it's a flaw in you as well.'"

A judge agreed to drop the drug charges in exchange for Loury's entering rehab. He emerged, after several months, a changed man.

He was still conservative, but, as one old friend told the Boston Globe, he was a "sensitive conservative." He was also a born-again Christian. He and his wife, Linda, who shortly after Loury returned home from rehab gave birth to their son Glenn Jr., joined the Bethel AME Church. The couple's second son, Nehemiah, named after the Old Testament figure, was born three years later. The church's pastors, civic leaders in Boston, helped the Lourys rebuild their family. "They saved my life," says Loury. "Our children were born into this church. Our marriage was saved there."

In 1991, Loury left Harvard over the protests of his colleagues and joined the faculty at Boston University for a fresh start. Over the following decade, he tried—unsuccessfully, he now says—to straddle the line between his old commitment to conservatism and personal responsibility and his growing awareness of the structural issues preventing black people from achieving full integration in every aspect of American society.

His 1995 book, One by One from the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America, was an attempt to delineate this new, softer position. It contains an essay called "Leadership Failure and the Loyalty Trap," in which he returns to his old frustrations about the "loyalty" that blacks supposedly owe to a particular political ideology. He indicts the black community for, among other things, having "made excuses for and sometimes even glorified the supposedly rebellious actions of thugs" and having made "apologies for the able-bodied, healthy, and intelligent young men who gather children and then walk away from the responsibility to support them."

At the same time, the book is humbler than his previous work, steeped as it is in his new religious beliefs. Its epilogue reads like a searching and personal confession. It also closes with a scathing review of the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve, which asserts, in part, that a sizable proportion of America's (black) citizenry is simply not smart enough to grasp the nuance of anything less than a hard line on crime and parenthood, among other social ills.

The Bell Curve was one of a series of books published around that time by former friends and colleagues whose approaches to race made Loury increasingly uncomfortable. In 1995 Dinesh D'Souza published The End of Racism, in which he argued, among other things, that slavery was not a racist institution, and that the only reason racism continued to be a problem in the United States is because of such "racist" programs as multiculturalism and affirmative action. Crime and Human Nature, published in 1998 by James Q. Wilson (with whom Loury had, in 1987, co-edited a book) and Richard J. Hernnstein, argued that crime was caused by biological determinants, and that zero-tolerance policing with less emphasis on rehabilitation was the only answer. In 1999 Loury's old friends Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom cheerfully announced, in America in Black and White, that African Americans were doing just fine—better than ever, in fact—and that we should not impede their progress with such wrongheaded programs as affirmative action.

Loury began to speak out against such thinking, at first quietly, and then more forcefully, prompted in part by the chilly reception he received from conservatives for his critiques of their ideas on race. Commentary magazine, whose pages had contained many of his words over the years, refused to run his review of the The Bell Curve. The American Enterprise Institute, with which he'd long been affiliated, refused to repudiate D'Souza, who had written his book while he was a fellow there. Loury resigned in protest.

He also began to take himself to task for all the years he had provided political cover for what he was beginning to construe as thinly veiled racism among his colleagues. At a 1990 conference called Second Thoughts on Race, organized by the neoconservative David Horowitz, he gave a presentation in which he said that his agreement with conservatives on affirmative action "helps you to see your [position] as valid and nonracist. If by some magic I were suddenly to become white, my brilliant, perceptive, and courageous insights would just as suddenly be reduced to pedestrian, commonplace complaints, of little political or personal comfort to you."

Finally, in 1996, Loury reached a turning point. He and his old friend, fellow black conservative Shelby Steele, were assembling donors and board members for their new organization, the Center for New Black Leadership. California's Proposition 209, which proposed an amendment to the state's constitution prohibiting public institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in admissions or hiring decisions, had just been placed on the ballot. The Center's funders wanted Loury and Steele to come out in support of the measure. It should have been a no-brainer. Here was perhaps the most central issue of the era for both conservatives and African Americans, an issue that Loury had not minced words in criticizing over the years. "What is our brand, as black conservatives, if it's not that?" Loury recalls Steele asking him. But he found that he couldn't do it.

"What I said was, 'I'm against affirmative action, but this is over the top.' I tried to split the difference, which was a mistake," he now says. "I was for affirmative action, is what I should have been able to say, but I couldn't quite make myself say it." Instead, he resigned.

It was also around this time that Loury repudiated his religious beliefs. He had many long, searching conversations about his growing doubt with his Christian mentors and friends. He found it increasingly difficult to reconcile his religious beliefs with his faith in rationality and science. But the breaking point came with the death of a bright young woman who had worked as an administrative assistant in his office at Boston University. It had taken her into her thirties to finish college, and she was now pursuing her dream to go to law school. She'd had a wildly successful first year at BU's law school and had made law review when she died, suddenly, of a freak heart infection.

"I'm devastated by the tragedy of this young woman's death," Loury says, describing his feelings at the time. "Don't tell me that this is God's work and he knows better than me. You're just fooling yourself. You're afraid to look down in the abyss." He is still haunted by the image of the young woman's mother, at the funeral, smiling because God must have loved her daughter so much to take her away. "And basically I haven't been back to church since. There was no going back from that."

These days, Loury has found his footing to the left of center. He has repudiated many of his own former positions on public policy, but the core of his beliefs, he insists, was not wrong. It simply lacked context.

"I'm not eschewing personal responsibility," he says. "I don't want to say, a kid goes out and commits a crime, it's society's fault, it's not the kid's fault. The core of the error was a failure to give an appropriate weighting to the communal responsibilities of developing and sustaining a cultural milieu that's supportive of human development. I was loading way too much weight on this autonomous communal capacity—self help and so forth—vis-√†-vis questions like, What's the IRS doing? What are the police doing? How are cities and states organized? And what role does race play within that?"

Loury knows that his changes in position harm his credibility with some peers. Others, however, see his intellectual journey as evidence of his honesty. Economist and former Princeton president William Bowen has been one of Loury's friends and mentors. (Loury wrote the introduction to Bowen's most recent book, The Shape of the River, a defense of affirmative action in higher education.) "When people would accuse Gandhi of being inconsistent," Bowen says, "Gandhi would reply, 'my goal has never been to be consistent with myself from year to year, but to be consistent to the truth as it appears to me.' Really capable people think like that. That takes courage, and I admire it."

Loury arrived at Brown in 2005, after a falling-out with BU's president over funding for his Institute on Race and Social Division. He has thrown himself into the life of the University, serving on the Advisory Committee on Slavery and Justice, instituting a seminar series on race and inequality, and publishing several papers in both economics journals and the popular press. "He is a combination of someone who is an incredible theorist—who can think in terms of economic models in a sophisticated way—but who fundamentally cares about the most important issues of the day," says Andrew Foster, chairman of the economics department. "He's also clearly stimulating research in this area among grad students."

Given his complicated history, Loury has been an easy target for armchair psychoanalysis. A 1995 New Yorker profile speculated that he had turned away from some of his earlier hard-line stances because he was lonely; as a black conservative he didn't really "fit" anywhere. A longtime friend and colleague, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, was quoted in a 2002 New York Times profile as saying that Loury was "overcompensating" by listening to gangsta rap. And yet, even as his most recent crusade is deeply personal in some ways, he remains a consummate social scientist in others, and resents any implication that he is speaking out against racial inequality in mass incarceration as a way to assuage guilt or do penance for his former views.

Josh Cohen, the Stanford professor, recalls an incident during a series of seminars associated with the Tanner lectures. A politically progressive friend of Loury's made a joke about how Loury hadn't moved far enough to the left yet. "He used some sort of therapeutic vocabulary, like 'his treatment isn't quite done yet,'" Cohen recalls. "Glenn responded badly to that, and I agreed with him. He was saying, 'This is a matter of intellectual convictions. We're in this business of argument and analysis. It's really misguided to put this in the language of therapy and cure. It's about changing your mind. About being changed by reason.'"

Mr. Beller's Neighborhood>Coffee, and This and That

Coffee, and This and That

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 3, 2008

“I don’t know their names, but I know them by voice,” said Galo Cardenas, proprietor of GC Snax, located on the ground floor of the New York Supreme Court building at 60 Centre Street. And if Mr. Cardenas looks at his customers askance, it’s because sideways is the only way he can see them -- he’s legally blind, and only has vision out of the right half of his right eye.

GC Snax sells the standard fare that its name implies, as well as Sole Proprietorship Forms, Affidavit and Judgment Confession Forms, and legal document covers. Its walls are hung with pictures of the snacks on offer -- breakfast sandwiches, hot pockets, burritos -- and handwritten signs announcing prices and specials: “Snyder’s Pretzels, only 40¢ ea,” and “New Altoid: Dark Chocolate Dipped Mint.” The shop itself is like a tiny extension of the lobby, with worn marble floors and ornate wrought iron work around the door. A formica-topped wooden counter runs its length horizontally. When Cardenas first opened GC Snax ten years ago, he moved the cash register from the right side of the counter to the left, the better to see the customers who line up to the register’s right.

On a recent weekday, classical music played softly overhead. When a customer ordered a soft pretzel, Cardenas opened a heated glass case in which a rack of pretzels spun slowly, and the room filled with the smell of a New York City street.

“How much, two hundred dollars?” he asked the customer, who had just handed him a twenty. He likes to joke with his customers by adding a zero to their totals. “That’s twenty thousand there, Mr. Galo,” the customer replied. The cash register announced the numbers on the keypad in a mechanized voice as Cardenas punched them in. “Two. Zero. Point. Zero. Zero.” the register said.

Arriving at GC Snax from the street is a task; after climbing the Supreme Court building’s imposing stone steps, passing under George Washington’s words -- “the administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government” -- and, appropriately, walking past 14 formidable stone pillars, one then has to go through airport-style security (belt off, watch and wallet in little plastic bin, bag on x-rayed conveyor belt), before doubling back to the left of the main entrance, where the shop is nestled. It’s nearly impossible to know how many New Yorkers pass through the Supreme Court each day. The Court System’s Communications Director, David Bookstaver, puts the number in the “thousands,” although they don’t formally keep track -- but Cardenas estimates that some 500 people a day stop by his shop. Of these, he knows about half, and he has a remarkable ability to recognize them -- and anticipate their purchase -- as soon as they walk in the door. “You want blueberry yogurt, right?” he asked a customer in a trench coat. “Yes, and a spoon and a bag,” the man replied. “No spoon! No bag!” Cardenas answered. “You use your fingers today!”

Cardenas, 60, was a guidance counselor for the Brooklyn Public Schools in East New York before he lost his vision 20 years ago in an accident. Born in Italy but raised in Spain, Israel, and the United States, Cardenas speaks 4 languages, and his accent is accordingly difficult to pin down. “I’m like a gypsy,” he said. His black hair, graying at the temples, is gelled and combed neatly back into a side-part. After several years of recovery and rehabilitation, Cardenas made his way to Lighthouse International, a New York-based nonprofit organization whose occupational therapists teach the blind and visually impaired how to negotiate work in a sighted world.

After learning “how to do coffee, and this and that,” as Cardenas puts it, he connected with the New York State Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired, whose Business Enterprise Program operates shops in Federal and State office buildings statewide. He went through an interview process, where he had to demonstrate a mastery of business principles, like balancing profit and inventory, and then he was allocated the space at 60 Centre Street. He gives 25% of his profits to the Commission, whose business advisor comes to check in on him each month. His wife comes each weekend to clean and make new signs. And Cardenas opens his doors at 7:00 each morning, fires up the coffee pot, and begins cracking good-natured jokes at his customers.

“You got taller!” he said, squinting up at a blue-uniformed security guard. “You used to be a short guy! That’s what working here does to you, I guess.”

Brown Alumni Magazine>Lady of the River

Lady of the River

As cofounder and president of Mad River Canoe, Kay Henry ’67 manufactured some of the most innovative canoes of the past generation. Now retired, she’s dedicated herself to saving the rivers that inspired them.

by Beth Schwartzapfel
September/October 2007


The morning dawned foggy over Vermont.

Kay Henry ‘67, just back from a three-week canoeing trip in the canyons of the American Southwest, pulled up with a Mad River canoe strapped upside down to the roof of her Audi. Her blonde hair fell to her ears in a tousled center part, and she wore sunglasses, sandals, and lightweight khaki pants. A spunky woman who seems at least a decade younger than her sixty years, Henry has a chatty, easy way about her. Her stories and demeanor seem to convey that every day is an adventure—today perhaps more so for me than for her. I’d never been canoeing before and didn’t know what to expect. We headed north from Burlington on Interstate 89 toward Swanton, where the Missisquoi River meets Lake Champlain and where great blue herons build their summer homes high in the treetops.

By the time we untethered Henry’s canoe and plunked it into the river with a splash, the sun was shining, the day was warm, and the sky was blue and clear. Henry showed me how to paddle—“Short, choppy little strokes,” she said. “Ka-chunk, ka-chunk”—and we were off. The water was a calm blue-gray, and the paddling motion felt natural and easy. The canoe was lighter than it looked. “This is a seventeen-footer, and it’s good for ease of paddling,” Henry explained. “And that’s really what Mads are known for, being stable yet easy to paddle.” She should know. She and her first husband, Jim Henry, founded Mad River Canoe in 1970. Henry ran the company continuously until 1998, when she retired from the business and turned her attention to the river.

Since then, Henry has been working to create and maintain part of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail, a 740-mile water trail that connects Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Quebec, and New York state—including this stretch of the Missisquoi—by using historic Native American trading and transport routes. Henry and her second husband, Rob Center, adopted the Trail project and have transformed it from what it had been—scribbled pages of research in the imaginations of a handful of paddlers—to a 700-member nonprofit organization with two paid staff members and a $250,000 budget, all aimed at creating a contiguously mapped waterway complete with campsites, portage routes, trail signs, and access points.

Today was the start of the second season since the Trail had officially opened. Already two Bates College students were completing the Trail’s fourth-ever through-paddle: beginning in New York, they were canoeing their way to the end of the trail in Maine, blogging as they went. (This week’s entry: “Sun! Downstream! Maine!”) Part of the beauty of the trail is that it runs through so many different water bodies and landscapes. The routes range from slow-moving rivers like the Missisquoi, to wide-open lakes, to class IV rapids. The Trail also connects communities to one another, allowing paddlers to assemble a patchwork trip, sleeping out with a tent and a campfire one night, staying in a bed-and-breakfast the next. Some towns along the route, like Saranac Lake in New York’s Adirondack Region, are established tourist destinations; outfitters there are practiced at renting canoes and kayaks to visitors, trucking them to their put-in point and picking them up days later at a predetermined spot, sunned and sore and ready for home. Other towns have long been cut off from the tourist economy—their livelihoods departed with the timber companies—and the Trail provides an opportunity to re-invent themselves as destinations for paddlers. “For many years, the river was a sewer,” says Henry. “You didn’t even paint the buildings on the river side because no one saw it. It’s kind of fun to have these communities look at the river as a resource again.”

Henry’s passion for canoes and rivers began shortly after her graduation from Brown. Armed with a degree in geology, she worked at an oceanography lab on the Hudson River for three years before she and her then-husband, Jim, concluded that they “were really not New York people.” They found new jobs at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod, but before beginning work there they loaded up a Volkswagen bus and headed west for a six-month road trip. Although camping was relatively new to her, “we basically lived outdoors” during that trip, says Henry. “I thought, ‘This is fun. I’d like to do more of this.’ ” Strapped to the top of the VW bus was a canoe that Jim had designed. He’d taken a book from the library about native North American bark-and-skin boats and, for fun, had built a mold out of plaster, then had it cast in fiberglass.

When the couple returned east from their trip, they learned that their jobs had fallen through. With nothing better to do, Jim took his boat and raced it in the national championship, held that year on the Dead River in Maine, and won. Word got out about Jim’s winning canoe, and people started asking him to build a similar canoe for them. The Henrys moved into their ski house in Waitsfield, Vermont, and Jim started building boats in the garage. Henry, always a numbers person, took over the business end of the fledgling company while her husband continued to design canoes. Soon, Mad River Canoe had a building in downtown Waitsfield, more than eighty employees, and 200 dealers selling a line of more than twenty canoes—“Everything from little twelve-foot solo canoes to big eighteen-and-a-half-foot racing boats,” Henry says. The company had also made a name for itself as a manufacturer of quality high-end boats and as an innovator in the outdoor industry.

One of the major innovations that Mad River introduced, for example, came about in the early 1970s when the Henrys approached the DuPont Company to see about constructing canoes out of a new material that DuPont had been using to make tires—it was durable and strong and lightweight, but had never before been used to make sporting goods. Mad River introduced the first Kevlar canoe in 1974. “That was before it was even called Kevlar,” Henry says. “Now it’s in golf clubs, skis, everything.”

After the Henrys divorced in the mid-1980s, Kay bought out Jim’s share of the company, and as the female president of a sporting goods company—“a hard-goods company, not clothing,” Henry points out—she became something of a pioneer. “I was the Lone Ranger,” she says. “You had to prove your credibility.” It helped, Henry says, that she was “fairly financial. People think a woman doesn’t know numbers. That was an important strength.” In fact, Henry started out as a math major at Brown, but switched to geology because it was a “really good and fun and logical” department. She says that the most important thing she learned at Brown was not necessarily specific information but the skill of “learning how to get information.”

Another aspect of her business success, says Henry, is that she is a fierce competitor who’s sure of her own smarts and savvy. With any project, she says, “I expect to build something better than others do, and I don’t usually stop until I feel I have achieved a good portion of that.” (The Mad River logo—a smoking rabbit—represents self-confidence and, let’s be honest, a little cockiness. It comes from a Native American legend that envisions a rabbit so sure of his own speed that he can sit in the bushes, smoking his pipe, even as his mortal enemy, the lynx, lurks nearby.) Henry’s leadership style was to be clear about the company’s overall vision and direction, and then hire talented people who were passionate about the outdoors and whom she could set loose from there. She encouraged teamwork among her staff and let them try out some pretty crazy ideas, even launching, for a short time, Mad River Canoe paddling tours. The company was committed to “making this a lifestyle instead of just a manufacturer,” recalls Kay’s husband, Rob Center, who served for many years as vice president of marketing and sales. “Kay always believed that we’d sell the product if we sold the sport.”

She certainly believed in the sport. There was the time when she and Jim took their son and daughter, aged seven and nine at the time, on a three-week canoeing trip in the Yukon. “It was really great until it snowed two inches,” she recalls with a laugh. “We were miles from our scheduled pickup point. That’s when I learned to handle a canoe: when I had a child in the bow who didn’t want to leave his sleeping bag.”

In 1989, Henry and Center traveled to Finland to launch the Mad River brand there. The local distributor asked if she and Rob would join them in the weeklong, 350-mile annual Arctic Canoe Race, which runs from above the Arctic Circle clear through Scandinavia to the Gulf of Bothnia. Not knowing quite what they were getting themselves into, but having been in enough canoe races to be willing to take a chance, they agreed. “They woke you up at 1 o’clock to get you ready for a 3 a.m. start,” she recalls with a laugh. “You’re above the Arctic Circle so it’s light all the time. We finished that first night at 7 p.m.” The race featured Class IV rapids, twenty-foot waves, and one spot where they actually had to get out and swim. Dinner was reindeer. “We had seven nights of reindeer. And all you wanted was pasta!” The couple took first place in their class.

It was ultimately Henry’s love for the outdoors that drove her to sell the company, in 1998, to a private equity firm. “Suddenly it got to be really discouraging,” says Henry. “You couldn’t take a summer vacation because you spent the summer planning for the new line. That was getting to me. You weren’t as close to the product anymore as the company got bigger. Now it’s fun to have the freedom to get involved in issues you want to get involved in.”

Since selling Mad River, Henry and Center have hiked and paddled all over the world. Several years ago they went to Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro (like most experienced outdoorsmen, Henry refers to it affectionately as “Kili”); last year they traveled to Bhutan, where they trekked through the Himalayas. They stash a number of canoes in the tiny town of Norman Wells, on the MacKenzie River, in the Canadian Arctic, and take a three-week trip from there each year, paddling various rivers in the barren lands. A pilot flies them out with a boat and a GPS, and they arrange to meet again at a set latitude and longitude, on a set day. “You really do have to be prepared,” says Henry. “And you have to be self-reliant. That’s one of the things that I love about being out in a boat: you’re on your own. And that’s a feeling we don’t have very often in this world of cell phones. Cell phones don’t work up there.” Last year, on the Hornaday River, they were rewarded for pitching themselves headlong into the wilderness when they paddled through a herd of caribou that had just calved: moms and babies, fuzzy and weak-legged, nosing around in the snow. And Kay Henry, as always, on the river.

Canoeing, as it turns out, is as much about seeing the natural world from another point of view as it is about actually paddling a boat. At least, on this day it was. Henry explained that on trips through rapids and other tricky terrain, she “reads the water” from the stern, taking the long view to follow the fastest current and chart a safe path for the boat, while from the bow, Rob is the quick strength, making practiced pry strokes, draw strokes and cross-draws to navigate around rocks and other obstacles. For my beginner trip, however, we meandered and splashed, the paddles periodically making a pleasant clunk on the hull as birds called out raucously. We paddled past several floating logs where knots of turtles lay sunning, small and flat and green-brown; they flopped noisily into the water as we went by. Henry pointed out the herons among the birds that flew overhead, explaining that their wing beats are slower. We circled a beaver dam, glided past floating ducks, and saw cardinals, woodpeckers, and red-winged blackbirds, whose small black bodies were easy to miss until they exploded into the air in a flurry of red. We watched an osprey dive into the water and emerge with a fish in its gullet.

An avid backpacker, I looked down at my small but admittedly overstuffed day pack—for my first paddle, I’d neurotically packed everything from rain gear to a sweatshirt to a tuna sandwich—and it occurred to me that it’s much easier to toss a pack into the hull of a boat and paddle it than to strap it onto one’s back and walk. “That’s really what the Indians found out,” Henry said, “and that’s why they used these rivers as their highways. You can put a lot of stuff in a canoe.”

In the late 1990s, three paddlers and amateur historians named Mike Krepner, Ron Canter, and Randy Mardres set out to make a map of those ancient highways, and researched which routes the various North American tribes had used to move armies, to transport goods, and to hunt. Looking to promote their project, the men approached Mad River Canoe, whose catalog was as much “a storybook of what you could do, where you could go, with our products,” says Henry, as it was a vehicle for slinging boats. Calling the route Native Trails, one of the last catalogs the company published before Henry retired detailed a contiguous canoeing route through New England, modeled after the routes the Native Americans used.

And that would have been the end of it, until Henry and Center retired and were kicking around for a project. They called Krepner to see what had happened with Native Trails. “At first we thought, we can go raise money for them. We’ll help them,” Henry says. Then they realized that the project was still very much just an idea, a hobby, and that if it was going to go anywhere, they would need to bring the full force of their expertise, connections, and outdoor industry know-how to bear. They got the nod from Krepner, Canter, and Mardres, raised some money from their former colleagues at Timberland, L.L. Bean, REI, Thule, Old Town, and Eagle Creek, among others, and set to work.

Rechristening the project the Northern Forest Canoe Trail, they worked with private landowners, including timber companies, to arrange for portage sites, where paddlers must carry their canoes from one body of water to the next. They worked with congressional delegations, raising $250,000 in federal funds. They published thirteen different waterproof maps of the various sections of the trail. And they identified the “firecracker,” in Henry’s words—the mover and shaker, the visionary—in each small town along the route, to help plan itineraries and make a long-term plan for tourism. On June 3, 2006—National Trails Day—the Trail was officially opened, with an event held simultaneously in four states, in pouring rain.

“The Northern Forest Canoe Trail started as a wonderful vision and has become a reality, thanks in large part to the efforts of Kay Henry,” says Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, who helped Henry and Center secure federal funding. “Kay has exemplified a gracious persistence when seeking support for the Trail from the National Park Service, and that persistence has been complemented by a sincere understanding of and sensitivity to the local residents, partners, and communities along the route.” Coming up is a guidebook, which will provide a written narrative of the entire trail. Farther off, Henry envisions local state-based chapters to take responsibility for stewardship of their portion of the Trail.

One of Henry’s favorite words is “fun.” It’s a word that others might imbue with at least one part irony (as in, “We dropped our maps in the river and had no idea where we were. That was fun.”). But Henry almost always means it sincerely. It’s as if she’s taken the motto made famous by fellow Vermonters Ben and Jerry—“If it’s not fun, why do it?”—to heart and carried it with her to all her undertakings. Speaking of her time at Mad River, but in words that apply equally to her current project, she says, “I loved it. I was very happy being in a canoe as well as in the business world. Problem solving is fun. [The product] was good quality, it was going to last and do what [customers] wanted…. It wasn’t trying to be bigger than you were. A pipe-smoking rabbit you can have a good time with.”

After an hour and a half or so of quiet paddling, we drifted into the delta where the Missisquoi empties into Lake Champlain. Herons were everywhere: perched on rocks, drifting overhead, their beaks full of branches and brush for their nests. The treetops were jam-packed, not a single branch unburdened by the twiggy nests, which looked from the boat like messy pom-poms decorating the sky. Huge and graceful, the herons’ bodies floated across the sky, their playful racket fortifying us for the paddle back against the wind. Like an old hand, I dipped my paddle back into the river, and Henry and I pushed off toward home.

Rhode Island Monthly>Faces of War

Faces of War

With a mom or dad deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, sons and daughters step up to fill their boots on the ground.

By Beth Schwartzapfel

July 2007

With a mom or dad deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, sons and daughters step up to fill their boots on the ground. Jeff Kurtis is a man with the kind of ruddy good looks you might associate with Father Knows Best: closely cropped brown hair parted on the side, bright blue eyes, thick eyebrows and a five o’clock shadow. His brood, too, is like a band of model citizens. His wife, Bonnie, is a stay-at-home mom for the couple’s four children: Stephanie, eighteen, Gabrielle, fourteen, Zachary, nine, and Nathaniel, three. In 2005, when Jeff, a Captain in the 103rd Field Artillery of the Army National Guard, deployed to Baghdad, Iraq, the family knew they would have to stick together more than ever.

When Bonnie got the call that Jeff was going to deploy for a total of fourteen months, she says,“We weren’t sure what the next year was going to bring. But we knew we were going to have lots of adventures and make the most out of it.”

It’s almost impossible to know how many Rhode Islanders are deployed at any given time. A spokesperson for the Department of Defense says that the home addresses of servicemembers deployed overseas are not data they compile — and thus it’s even more difficult to find out how many children get left behind when they go. Laura Paton, the state youth coordinator for the Rhode Island National Guard, says her program worked with more than 1,000 kids last year, which provides something of a ballpark figure — at least a minimum.

“We hear a lot about nightmares these kids are having,” says Paton, “withdrawing from their friends, acting out in anger. We see kids being angry at their parent for leaving, angry at the war itself, angry at the military.” Many experience anxiety; some can name what the anxiety is —“I’m worried about dad” — while others simply find themselves more nervous or less focused than usual. Some children step up to the challenge, trying new things out of necessity and finding they like it, or are good at it. “We do all our own stuff now,” Gabrielle says. After a year of killing bugs, changing light bulbs, navigating the computer’s ins and outs, and doing other “dad stuff,” she’s a lot more independent now.

No matter how they respond to their parents’ absence, though, the Army’s maxim about their servicemembers’ kids is true: “Kids Serve Too.” “I think they go through more than the husband and wife does,” reflects Bonnie. “Because they don’t ask for it. We make the decision, and they live with our decision.”

To find out more about their lives, we interviewed several children whose parents were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. These are their stories.

Stephanie Kurtis, eighteen

twelfth grade, Aquidneck Island Christian Academy

My birthday was just a hard day. And so then this beautiful pink rose came in — the guy delivered it — and after I read the card, I started crying. It was a nice surprise. I was just missing dad. It was just one of those days. I think we always missed him, but there were some times that were particularly hard.

We always thought about him, but we knew he was okay. We knew he wasn’t going to get hurt or anything. I think just holidays and stuff, and birthdays, and the news. We just had to trust God that he’d be safe. We can’t do anything sitting here. We know he’s well trained and he’s smart and he’s not going to do anything stupid.

I think he felt he had a duty to go, to his country, and also — I forget whose quote it was, but it says, ‘If there’s trouble, let me be the one to go to war, instead of my son having to go to war later for it.’ So I think he did it out of love for his country and for his family. And he wanted to go. He was excited about it, and he just wanted to get the job done and be there for his guys.

We still are very, very proud of him. We tell everybody how proud we are of him. We have stuff on our lockers at school: “I’m proud of my dad,” “US Army,” “Go Army.” We have t-shirts and jackets and magnets on the car and everything that say “Support the Troops.”Dad left a bunch of messages on my cell phone before he left, like just, he’d just be joking or pulling my leg or something, and so every single message he ever left me, I saved. So sometimes at night if I missed him, I’d play them back and start laughing.

I couldn’t get a job, which is something I really wanted to do so I could save up for college, but instead I put college off for a little bit. I think I’m taking a year off, and I’m going to work and try and save some money, and then visit some colleges. ’Cause while dad was gone, I couldn’t really look at colleges. I didn’t apply, I wasn’t really — I had to just focus on getting my schoolwork done, and graduating and stuff. So now that he’s here he can help me, and we can go visit colleges and stuff. I’m interested in law or something with law enforcement. I was going to get my license on my eighteenth birthday, but I couldn’t go to driver’s ed because mom was the only driver, and she couldn’t take me to the classes because she had the rest of the kids and stuff.

People every day are giving their lives up, are really joining together to try to accomplish a good thing, and people here in America, they go about their everyday lives and they don’t ever think about it. And it’s not something we should think about and be upset about all the time, but it’s good to just have a respect and a reverence and just remember that I’m here because somebody else gave their life. Because everybody is over there for me. Helping me. So when I’m at school every time I raise the flag, I just think about that.

Zachary Kurtis, nine

third grade, Aquidneck Island Christian Academy

One time I wrote him a letter: ‘I hope you don’t get shot.’ He’s in a war, and usually almost everybody gets shot in a war.

We couldn’t do the science fair because he mostly really helped us out on that. Because when I was in first grade, I did black widow, and he helped me out on that a lot. And this year, I wanted to do king cobra, but I couldn’t because he wasn’t there.

On Christmas, my dad always wanted a big, nice tree. My mom always wanted a Charlie Brown tree — on “Charlie Brown,” remember when he gets a terrible tree and all the needles are falling off? That’s kinda the one my mom wants. So when we got a tree, it was only like that big. I could literally carry it up and throw it. And my mom says when we’re done hanging up all the ornaments, then it would look like one big, huge ornament since it was so thin and so small.

Sometimes we talked on the phone two days in a row, but that was kind of rare. Sometimes we only got to talk to him for one minute because he was really short on time. Or maybe it was like midnight for him, because he would stay up just to talk to us.

Maybe he went there to help out the children and to try to keep them safe and get rid of all the terrorists that are trying to bomb us and hurt the children. Because they put hand grenades on the children. They don’t care if they kill their people; they just want to get rid of us.

Our friends and family says, ‘It’s going to come quickly!’ I was like, ‘No it’s not.’ When he came home, I says, ‘Why didn’t you come home earlier?’ Sometimes I made jokes about it. Like, I could have gone in your bag. At the end of the year, I was still really mad at him — why’d he want to go if he loved me? I didn’t really understand that.

Sergeant Steven Gill deployed to Tallil, Iraq, with the 1207th Transportation Company of the Rhode Island National Guard in July 2006. His wife, Shannon Gill, expects him home in September 2007 “unless they extend him, which hopefully they don’t,” she says. “A lot of the guys that have gone over there expecting to go home a certain day, and then they extend them for a few more months without warning.” Shannon has two children, Brianna, fifteen, and Brian, eleven, from a previous marriage; the three of them share the same round face and dimples. Shannon and Steven married six years ago; he has been a father to Brian and Brianna ever since. The family lived in North Providence until Sergeant Gill left; then Shannon, Brian and Brianna moved in with Shannon’s mom in Pascoag.

Brian Latendresse, eleven

fifth grade, Steere Farm Elementary School, Pascoag

He liked video games, so we would play together and stuff. One time, we stayed up until 3 a.m., trying to beat a mission on “Conflict: Vietnam.” It was just kind of easier having him there because it was more funner. Also we went golfing a couple of times, and I got to drive the cart around.

There’s nobody around here to help me with guy stuff. Like why you grow armpit hair. So I can’t talk to anybody, really, about it.

My teachers know that he’s away. Not a lot of my friends know, though. I told three of my friends and that’s it. Because they think they’re better than everybody. And they’d probably think that my dad’s just a truck driver. It kind of makes me angry. On the other hand, I know my dad’s doing something good. So it’s kind of back and forth. It just feels weird. Because a lot of times, I don’t want to talk about it. Because sometimes I don’t like why he’s over there. And sometimes it’s good he’s over there. It kind of gets confusing.

You wonder if he’s okay. Because you hear every day that there’s car bombs and everything. And that there’s people being blown up and everything else. And it’s kind of scary. He told us that there’s little kids running around with bombs strapped to them, with AK-47s, and it’s really scary. People don’t realize how much they’re risking their lives. I feel really proud that he is doing this for us.

Brianna Latendresse, fifteen

ninth grade, Burillville High School

When he left, it was kind of like — we didn’t want him to go. But he had to go. It didn’t actually feel real until the day he left. It was sad. Everybody was crying. But I tried. I didn’t cry. I was teary-eyed, but I didn’t cry. I’m not good at showing emotions.

We used to go bowling a lot. That was his favorite. He loved to bowl. We joined a league, and we used to go all the time. We haven’t been bowling since he’s been gone.Moving to Pascoag was difficult. I have to share a room with my brother. We had to change schools. I told a few of my friends, but I don’t want everybody to know. I don’t want them to feel bad for me. Some people have their own opinions about people being over in Iraq and stuff like that. I want them to be over there, because at least I know that we’re protected. And 9/11 can’t happen again. Well, it can, but it’s not likely to. And then other times, I think of all the people that are dying over there, and it’s — sometimes I think it’s not worth it for them to be over there, dying, not over here, at home, with their family.

The other day I was at Walgreens, and there was this guy, and he had a sticker on his bumper that says, ‘Pull out of Iraq—there should be no war.’ It was kind of funny because me and my friend had Toby Keith, “American Soldier,” on, and the guy came out of Walgreens, and we blasted it, and started screaming at him. If they don’t want them to be over there, then why are they here? If they want to be free and stuff, well you have to pay a price for that.

My dad says, ‘You gotta get As in class! You gotta pass, or else you’re not getting a car next year!’ And it’s like, how can I pass when you’re gone? Because he used to help me with my math homework a lot. Because he was really smart with math — he could get it in a second. And now it’s hard. And I’m trying not to think about it, so I can try to get my work done so I can get the stuff that I want. I want to make sure he comes back, and I’m doing what he told me to do. And then other times, I worry about it and my grades plummet. When he first left, the first quarter, my grades were really bad. They were like Fs and Cs and stuff. I want to do my work, but then something pops in my head. And then I start to worry about what he’s doing. Like when he’s on a mission, or something, then that’ll distract me with my work and stuff like that. Other times, it’s just, I think of something we did, and then I think he’s not here anymore, so it distracts what I’m trying to do. Like the fun times that we had. Like Christmas morning and stuff like that, when he’s like the biggest child, and he’ll come and jump on my bed and wake me up, before I was even ready to get up.

He can be the strictest person you’ll ever meet. Now I know that he was strict because he wanted me to get my best education. He didn’t really get a good education when he was in school. He quit school. And he wants me to finish my high school, get my diploma, go to college, and all that stuff.The hardest thing is not having a father figure around. He’s always been my father figure because my father hasn’t been around. And with him not here, it’s just like I have my mother, but sometimes I’d like to have my father here too.

Lieutenant Colonel Denis Riel deployed to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar from April through September of 2005 where he was commander of the 143rd Aerial Port Squa-dron in the Air National Guard. He now works full time as the Public Affairs Officer for the Air National Guard. Garrett Riel, the youngest of Lieutenant Colonel Riel’s three sons, lives with his mother in Lincoln. I met Garrett in Lieutenant Colonel Riel’s office at the National Guard Headquarters in Cranston. The alt-rock band O.A.R. was blasting from Garrett’s iPod; his dark hair curled out from under his backward-turned baseball cap.

Garrett Riel, seventeen

twelfth grade, Lincoln High School

I really didn’t think about it, about his being part of the Air Force, working at Quonset. I really didn’t think he was going to have to go. He told me, some of his guys had to go, he felt bad, but I didn’t know if he was ever going to have to go or not. It just didn’t cross my mind. Then he told us he was going, and I was like, wow. Then it really sunk in that he was leaving. We were scared. At the airport, it was not cool when we had to say bye. Before it was like, wow, my dad’s leaving for five months. Something could happen. But no tears hit. But once we got to the airport, everyone was crying and sad, like, I hope he’s okay, I hope nothing happens. I worried, but he told us, ‘I’ll be OK. I’ll hang in there. Don’t worry about me. Just get your stuff done.’ Usually when he says that, I trust him. He’s a pretty smart guy.

Five months away — five and a half months — plus he’s my hockey coach, so we’re together all winter long. Because high school hockey is like mornings, afternoons, meetings and games on weekends. So we’re together all the time. I wasn’t going through a tough time, but it’s definitely different, not having your father around. Knowing he’s in the middle of the war.

He’d call us. He couldn’t call us much but we emailed a lot. He would tell us his day-by-day plan. ‘110 degrees out at night, with all my equipment on.’ And one email was funny, I saved it. He says, everyone came down with the stomach flu, a stomach virus, and the crapper, it’s a hundred yards away, so everyone’s racing for it, running. That’s funny. I could picture that.

I didn’t even have my license yet, so it was tough. Summer hockey, he’ll usually help coach the team. Or he’ll just bring me everywhere. He usually pays for hockey, and he lives in Burrillville, so it would be tough to go to his house, to my stepmom, get money, and then go to hockey and pay. Or get to hockey. So it was kind of awkward at times. My dad would email me, ‘Did you go to hockey today?’ I’d be like ‘Yeah,’ but I didn’t.

At one point it was kind of like a nice break because he’s a little stubborn. But when he’s away you start to miss him. Hanging out with him is different than hanging out with your mom. It’s better when he’s around, because every time he’s there, he’ll come hang out with the friends, and everyone likes him.

He says it was for us. Everyone is along the same lines — defend your country — but it’s also for your family. Even for his guys. He tells us all the time, sending guys over there — it’s the worst feeling in the world. But when he gets them back, he feels good. But he’s always gotta send out more. He’s like, ‘If I’m going to send them, then I’m going to go.’ I’m proud of him. I think it was a pretty loyal thing to do. But I don’t really agree with the whole war. I don’t know in detail what it’s about, but I know he doesn’t really agree with it, and I don’t really agree with it. I’m proud of him for going, because I think it was the right thing to do, but I don’t think the war is really the right thing.

I want to get into the Air Force. I want to be MP [military police]. I want to go to college, be a police officer, kind of follow the footsteps of my dad. While I’m in the Air Force, I want to go to college. I’m sure when I get into the military, which will be about six months from now —July, I turn eighteen — I’ll ask him for a lot of advice. I’m kind of following in his footsteps already because he’s shown me a good way. He’s definitely a good role model.

Staff Sergeant Cheryl Irving deployed to Baghdad, Iraq, as a team leader for a military police platform with B Battery, 103rd, from February 2004 through April 2005. As a single mother, she had to make arrangements for her two children, Valerie, fourteen, and Mitcael, twelve, while she was deployed. Mitcael stayed with Irving’s mother in Providence, and Valerie moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, to live with Irving’s sister, Vanessa. Valerie finished her sixth grade year in Flagstaff, but ultimately the adjustment was too difficult. Valerie and her aunt moved together back to Providence for the start of Valerie’s seventh grade year.

Valerie White, fourteen

ninth grade, Toll Gate High School, Warwick

There was one day she sat us both down and goes, ‘I have a chance of going to Iraq,’ and, I was like, ‘Stop joking!’ I didn’t really believe her. I just didn’t want that — usually when you hear that someone’s going to Iraq, you’re thinking that they’re going to end up getting hurt. And I didn’t want to believe that that was going to happen.

I started my sixth grade year at St. Mary Academy-Bay View. And then it wasn’t even halfway through the — I think I just got my first report card, and I had to go fly to Arizona and stay with my aunt. It was really hard making friends over there. I didn’t want to tell anybody that my mom was away. If I was to tell somebody, they would be telling everybody, then everybody would be wanting to be my friend and everything. I just wanted them to know the real me. I thought that they were going to have a lot of pity on me.

I was worried about her on a daily basis. From the beginning of the day — because usually in the beginning of the day, you see your mom, waking you up and everything. From the beginning of the day, I realized that my mom’s not going to be there waking me up and telling me, ‘It’s time to go to school! ’Til the end of the day, when she usually has to yell at me to go to bed. No offense to George Bush, but I used to really hate on George Bush a lot. Because I used to go, ‘Well, that isn’t fair. Why doesn’t he just go over there and fight? He was the one who declared war.’

I think I acted out in the beginning, when I first moved to Arizona. But then, once I came back here, I got better. But it was still times I just flipped out. I would give a whole bunch of attitude to all the adults. Basically I felt isolated. I think later I realized it. Before, I thought that’s how a person’s supposed to feel when their parents go. When I moved back to Rhode Island, I told people that my mom was in Iraq. They helped me a lot. Because if I didn’t have friends like them, I don’t think I would have done that well. They kept me in check, made sure I never flipped out to my mom and my aunt. Whenever I would have trouble in school, they would be like, ‘Don’t freak out, I’ll help you. I know you have trouble in this, and I want you to make sure that your mom’s proud.’

We used to chat on the Internet a lot. We talked on the phone at least three times a week. As soon as she comes on the phone, ‘How was school? Are you guys doing good in school?’ She is really hard when it comes to school. Most of the time we would ask ‘How is it out there? What you’ve been doing? Shoot anybody?’

Before my mom left, I took everything for granted. Everything that she bought, I would give her attitude because this person got that thing, I wanted that. Then when my mom came back with her stories, I was like, wow, that’s not right how I treat my mom, how all these people, they just don’t get what we get. Half the stuff, they don’t even get a quarter of the stuff. They don’t even get shoes, they don’t even have socks, they don’t have shirts. It’s just so upsetting, just thinking about that.

And I stopped doing that as much as I did before. I’m trying my best to change how my ways are. I really wish that I could change the world. When she came back and told us all these stories, it just really made me think, what can I do?

It’s not easy. You don’t have to be a strong person, just be strong within the heart. I had to learn to be strong. I did it by family, friends, and just normal people. They might not even know, they helped me out anyway. Just hearing them say, ‘God bless’ makes me so happy because there’s a lot of people can be ignorant and not even care. Even now, when people come up, they see my mom in uniform, they’re like, ‘Thank you so much.’ Every time someone says that, my mom puts on this big smile.

I adore my mom. She’s my idol. She’s like the Beyoncé of everybody. I missed copying her style, wearing her clothes and getting in trouble for it. I missed going to the mall with her. I just missed hanging out with her. She’s a very powerful person. Not only on the outside, with her big muscles, but on the inside too. She didn’t get scared. A lot of people, a lot of parents would freak out. But my mom, she kept her cool.

Brown Alumni Magazine>Arts & Culture>His True Loves

His True Loves
Jonathan Karp ’86 left his job as editor-in-chief of Random House to launch his own imprint and stage his first play, about a timid bookstore clerk faced with saving the world.

How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes, book and lyrics by Jonathan Karp, at the New World Stages, New York City.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
Jan/Feb 2007

It’s Friday afternoon, and playwright Jonathan Karp is seated in an otherwise empty theater at the New World Stages, an off-Broadway complex in midtown Manhattan. Rehearsing on Stage 5, actress Anika Larsen calls out, “Does anyone remember that line?” Karp thinks for a minute and begins, “Get your sniveling…”

Larsen smiles with recognition and finishes the line in unison with him, “… ferret-face out of my bookstore!” They both laugh.

Karp describes his new musical comedy, How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes, as the story of “a timid bookstore clerk who realizes that he’s the only person who can prevent a global catastrophe from occurring.”

It’s Karp’s first play, and the New World Stages production marks its first full run. Karp and composer Seth Weinstein began collaborating on the play in 1999, and in 2004 it was produced at the New York Musical Theatre Festival and the New York International Fringe Festival, where it filled the house and got great reviews. Karp jokes that six years from inception to production is “right on time,” noting that the average “incubation period” for a musical is five to seven years. Another reason for the delay, however, might be Karp’s day job: until this summer, he was editor-in-chief of the book publisher Random House.

After leaving Random House, Karp announced in July the launch of Twelve, a Warner Books imprint for which he now serves as editor-in-chief, publisher, and vice president. True to its name, Twelve will publish only a dozen books a year—a far cry from the fifty or one hundred that a typical imprint puts out. “As an editor, as a publisher, it’s possible to love twelve books a year without being promiscuous,” Karp quips. “I can be serially monogamous to twelve books a year.” Such a small number allows him to handpick the books and allocate enough resources into promoting each of them. Twelve’s debut lineup is eclectic and populated by such heavy hitters as Christopher Hitchens, John McCain, and the late Robert Altman. The first book, Christopher Buckley’s Boomsday, will be on sale in April.

Karp doesn’t take vacations and works on weekends. He admits that when he goes into a Starbucks and sees people reading magazines in the middle of the day, he is sometimes “overcome by a sense of longing.” But otherwise, he insists, “I’m not one of those people who only sleeps three hours a night. I have a normal life.” His “n