Octogenarian Opuses
Not ones for passive retirement, Tro Harper, ’37, and his wife, Jane Knight Harper, ’40, both published books recently—his unabashedly nostalgic, hers as practical as soap. Tro’s Remembered Treasures of San Francisco captures the sights, sounds and feel of the city he fell in love with 70 years ago. Wistful as he is over that bygone ambience, Tro takes heart in the survival of a few institutions like Albert, the man selling flowers at Geary and Stockton since Tro was a Stanford freshman.
Jane’s book is a survival kit both for the neophyte who has to chair a meeting, write minutes or audit a club treasurer’s books and for any organization member who wants to speed up endless proceedings. The Meeting Will Please Come to Order features sample scripts for every situation—a user-friendly, spiral-bound “Rules of Order.” Both are published by Oak Point Press and coming soon to amazon.com.
Classy Patchwork
Inspired by family stories of life in plantation-era Hawaii, graphic artist Corinne Okada Takara has turned to sculpture. Her thrifty forbears recycled candy wrappers, cloth and scraps of paper and plastics into dolls’ clothes, blankets, dresses and toy boats. Takara, ’90, gives new life to exotic, multicolored Asian food wrappers and fabrics in creations fashioned with wire, like Fireworks Kimono (left). She also makes accessories such as hats and wedding-veil ornaments. Takara’s sculptures have shown at galleries across the country, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., recently acquired one of the Cupertino artist’s pieces for its newly opened contemporary Asian-American collection.
