Last summer was the first that STANFORD intern CORINNE PURTILL, '02, had spent away from the ocean, and she was feeling a little landlocked. So when the Huntington Beach, Calif., native was offered the chance to write about surfer/oceanographer Rick Grigg ("Rapture of the Deep"), she dove right in. "Dr. Grigg has had an absolutely incredible past . . . it was so exciting to be able to talk to someone who has that love of the water that I saw growing up, as well as a huge intellectual life." Although she isn't a surfer, Purtill grew up in a beach culture (her hometown bills itself as Surf City, USA), and she's a true naiad: "In [the summers during] high school, I would play at the beach for a few hours in the morning, put shorts on over my bathing suit and go to work." She traded the sandy shoreline for the English countryside last fall, while studying at Oxford University.
In 1969, at the request of art chair Lorenz Eitner, LEO HOLUB set up a photography department in the basement of what was then the Stanford Art Gallery. He stayed on as a member of the art faculty for the next 11 years. Holub, 85, says his teaching experience convinced him that "students are the best part of the University." A native of Decatur, Ark., Holub has lived in the same house in San Francisco's Noe Valley since 1956. Although he set out to be a painter -- training at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco -- he says either "lack of talent or lack of desire" led him away from the canvas and toward the camera. The subject of his earliest work was his eldest son, Michael, whom Holub began photographing in 1942. His photographs of the Stanford foothills appear on the cover and in the article about land use ("This Precious Plot").
DEBORAH CLAYMON '92, underscores the importance of writing about new ideas when they're still in the seed stage "so they can spread far and wide and grow into as many new things as possible." Her story on distributed computing ("Strength in Numbers") describes how individual pc users link their machines to form supercomputers capable of solving dazzling mathematical calculations. It's a good fit for Claymon, who enjoys reporting on social and cultural changes brought about by technology and the new communities that emerge as a result. When not writing for the San Jose Mercury News, Industry Standard, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Salon.com, Claymon and her husband, Doug Boeschen, '92, are converting a storage area in their San Francisco home into a writing den: "an inspiring place to be creative."
