At his 15th Reunion last year, Tyler Bridges, ’82, spent a Saturday morning riffling the bound volumes at the Stanford Daily offices. “I looked at three years of papers until I found it,” he says. What he found was a 1979 op-ed by then-sophomore Joel Dickholtz. That column -- in which Dickholtz announced his decision to drop out of Stanford -- propelled Bridges on a search that eventually led him to a career in journalism. After reporting from Peru, Brazil and Chile, Bridges now works in Tallahassee, Fla., where he covers state politics for the Miami Herald. But one of his most meaningful assignments, he says, was this story . . . tracking down Dickholtz. “ What I Learned from Joel” tells as much about Bridges as it does about Dickholtz.
Her parents graduated from Stanford, as did her brother, her husband and her two children. So when emeritus political science professor James Watkins was searching for someone to write a column for the Stanford Historical Society in 1978, Catherine Peck, ’35, was a natural choice. Three years ago, this magazine began publishing her column, which runs every other issue under the title “ A Century at Stanford” A resident of Palo Alto, Peck enjoys traveling; she just returned from an archaeological tour of Cyprus. “I love old things,” she explains. “Helps me understand what’s going on today.”
A few weeks after Jason Grow photographed chemistry professor Carl Djerassi, we called to ask him to make pictures of the Stanford Museum for the same issue. “Night and day,” Grow says, comparing the two assignments. Djerassi, an art collector, really understands movement and light. On the other hand, Athena, the sculpture on our cover, “just stood there,” laughs Grow, 34. To get the cover shot, Grow perched a ladder on the museum’s marble steps. A freelance photographer, Grow shoots for Forbes, Fortune and Wine Spectator, among others. “I work between the valleys,” he says, “doing geeks and grapes.”
For almost a week last spring, David Jacobson hung out at rehearsals of Carl Djerassi’s new play, Menachem’s Seed. “What was so striking was the amazing energy the guy has,” Jacobson says. “It was inspiring.” As Jacobson discovered while profiling Djerassi, the Stanford professor and “father of the Pill” has more on his mind than chemical formulas and science prizes. Jacobson, 41, spent a decade tracking down fascinating characters as a feature writer for the Hartford Courant and the Detroit News. Since moving to the Bay Area in 1996, he has worked as a freelance writer for such magazines as Maxim, Health and the online publication Salon; his last article for Stanford was the July/August 1998 cover story on Hewlett and Packard.
