While wrapping up a screenplay about a 34-year-old athlete facing the end of her career, Jon Weisman learned that 34-year-old former Stanford star Paul Carey had retired as a professional baseball player and was managing in the low minor leagues. Weisman, himself 34 and “enduring a stretch of $120-a-week paychecks” at the time, wondered how Carey, ’90, was coping. “All of us had high expectations for success in our 20s,” says Weisman, ’89. “I’m preoccupied with how people, even after their careers become a bigger struggle than they were prepared for, find peace of mind.” Weisman, whose own bid for career contentment has taken him from sportswriting for the Los Angeles Daily News and Los Angeles Times to television scripts for Disney and others, in April became associate writer/editor at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He and his wife, Dana, are expecting their first child in September.
Brian Smith is drawn to unusual assignments. So when he was asked to photograph minor-league ballplayers at a historic Georgia ballpark (“A Season in Savannah"), he jumped. “I wanted to give the photographs a vintage feel,” says Smith, who shot in black-and-white using four different cameras, including one made in the 1930s. An Iowa native, Smith earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Missouri–Columbia. During a 22-year career, his work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, ESPN magazine and Business Week. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his photographs from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics while working for the Orange County Register. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, Fazia.
Covering campus fires, floods and earthquakes was all in a day’s work for Theresa Johnston (left) and Karen Bartholomew during their time with the Stanford News Service in the 1980s and early ’90s. So when we asked Johnston, ’83, to write about the Farm’s student firefighters, she tapped out an e-mail to her friend and former colleague. “Sure enough, Karen’s help with the research was invaluable,” Johnston says. That’s not surprising: Bartholomew, ’71, comes from a family of firemen, and she fondly remembers visiting her father, a Stanford firefighter from 1961 to 1976, during her student days. A board member of the Stanford Historical Society and author of Century at Stanford, she divides her time between Menlo Park and Boothbay Harbor, Maine. Palo Alto-based Johnston, who wrote last issue’s cover story on the Viennese Ball, is a freelance education writer and ardent soccer mom.
