When you look at Henry Clay Lindgren's résumé, the idea of his running off to pan for gold during the Depression doesn't seem so unusual ("Up the Creek"). Lindgren, '34, MA '35, PhD '42, grew up in Hilo, Hawaii, and tried a range of early jobs, including deck hand, boilermaker's helper, sales clerk and church organist. "It was while I was in the postage stamp business," the 87-year-old adventurer says, "that I realized I didn't have the personality of a businessman." After earning two degrees in German studies and a PhD in education, he settled on a career in psychology. Now an emeritus professor of psychology at San Francisco State University, Lindgren has published more than 40 books in his field. His latest vocational odyssey? Poetry. His Happy Marriage: A Celebration in Verse was published in 1997.
Writers often look to personal history for inspiration, but illustrator Jeffery Smith has seldom had that luxury. Then we asked him to bring to life the 1930s memoir, "Up the Creek." "When I was a kid, my dad used to go back into the Sierra and pan for gold. Just that little piece of information helped me connect to the story," says Smith, whose watercolor paintings appear in the article. "When I read the story, I was thinking about the movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I was visualizing that scene where Walter Huston is dancing around, making fun of Humphrey Bogart because he is standing right on top of the gold and doesn't know it." Smith's career has produced plenty of gems. A Los Angeles native, he spent 13 years in New York City, where his clients included Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Forbes, Time and Esquire. He returned to California in 1994 to teach at his alma mater, the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena. So, did his father ever find any gold? Smith isn't sure. "He never took me with him," he says, then adds somewhat ruefully, "but he took my brother all the time."
Of all the things Nancy Day did to support herself as a Stanford grad student—selling her blood to the hospital, hashing at an eating club—only one suggested a future: stringing for the Associated Press. There was plenty on campus for a reporter to cut her teeth on; it was the early 1970s, and Day simply "followed the protesters' rocks." (Her biggest scoop: a bylined story about an Indian scholar losing his life's work in a firebombing.) Day, MA '71, went on to specialize in politics and government for AP, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Examiner before joining Boston University's communications college in 1981, where she now directs advanced journalism studies. Profiling Stanford's new dean for religious life, Scotty McLennan, brought back her own student days, when McLennan's mentor, William Sloane Coffin, was making headlines in the anti-war movement she helped chronicle.
