Mothers at War, Torn Between Country and Children

Abstract: When Specialist Jaymie Holschlag returned home after 12 months in Iraq , a new set of children awaited her. Her son, Seth, 10, who had moved in with his grandfather, switching towns and schools, was angry and depressed. His grades had plummeted and his weight had ballooned by 60 pounds. Her 4-year-old daughter, Celeste, scarcely knew her. And in Specialist Holschlag’s absence, new rules had taken hold — chocolate syrup on waffles, Mountain Dew with dinner. Any hint of a return to the old order met with tirades and tantrums. Specialist Holschlag, a single mother and a combat medic, had changed profoundly, too. The violence in Ramadi had staked a claim on her patience, her tenderness and her resilience. She snapped at her children routinely, at times harshly. Last month, on the eve of her second tour in Iraq, Specialist Holschlag decided she could not put her children through another deployment, and she requested a transfer. “They are my kids, and they deserve a mom that is wanting to hug them,” she said. The military has in large part adapted to women living, working and fighting successfully alongside men in Iraq and Afghanistan , and bringing home their own medals for bravery. Women can now find birth control on bases in war zones and get ultrasounds and gynecological exams. Married couples share trailers. Motherhood, though, poses a more formidable challenge for the armed forces. Hanging on to today’s war-savvy, battle-tested cadre of mothers — and would-be mothers — is both crucial and difficult for the Army , say officers, enlistees and experts. So is attracting recruits. Since the war in Afghanistan began in 2001, the number of female Army recruits has declined by 5 percent, a sharper drop than for men. “The Army’s challenge, but also the military’s challenge, is to help service members feel they don’t have to choose between family life and their military career,” said Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, director of the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University , an organization supported in part by the Department of Defense. “They leave when they can’t figure out” a way to do both, she said. More than 100,000 female soldiers who have served in the wars are mothers, nearly half the number of women who have been deployed. The vast majority are primary caregivers, and a third are single mothers. Like men, they turn to the military for all sorts of reasons. The pay is good, particularly in a war zone, the benefits are excellent and the jobs offer financial security and career advancement — all of which is good for their children. Many love their work and feel a sense of pride and patriotism in defending the country. Yet mothers, whether married or single, say that long periods of time away from their children and then the transition back to domestic life — where they are expected to immediately resume household responsibilities — can be excruciatingly difficult. The Pulls of Duty Not long after reuniting with her children in 2005, Specialist Holschlag said, she was sitting alone in her apartment in Iowa when she was struck by a thought she recognized as absurdly selfish: she wanted to go back to Iraq. “All of us that were single parents, who came back to our lives, there isn’t one of us who didn’t say it was easier being in Iraq than coming back and picking back up,” said Specialist Holschlag, 36. The military tries to discourage single parents altogether. They are not allowed to enlist in active duty, though if they become single they can stay after providing a notarized family care plan. (Nearly 12 percent of the women in the regular Army and 4 percent of the men are single parents, according to 2008 statistics.) The National Guard and the Reserves allow single parents to join since those jobs are technically part time. They, too, require a family care plan — but even the best-laid plans can go awry. When Willa Townes, a single mother in the Army Reserve, was called to Iraq early in the war, her sister agreed to watch her 5-year-old son — then backed out two weeks before Ms. Townes was to deploy. “I broke down right there,” Ms. Townes said. “I was devastated.” Refusing deployment was not an option, she said. She was then the No. 3 person in the chain of command, and it was her 15th year in the military. She needed five more years to retire with a hefty bonus. “I wanted to go,” said Ms. Townes, who retired last year as a lieutenant colonel. “I needed to go.” Frantic, she turned to her son’s first day care provider, who had become a friend and volunteered to take him for the year Ms. Townes was away. “We were not related at all,” Ms. Townes recalled, adding that the arrangement worked wonderfully and that she insisted on sending her friend money for expenses. “We were not even of the same race. That didn’t matter. People come together to help you when you are in need.” Easing the Path Since the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the armed forces have changed some long-held policies, hoping to ease some of the difficulties mothers face. Without a return to the draft, the need for women is unlikely to go away. “We’re certainly attuned to the challenges that motherhood imposes on our female soldiers,” said Lt. Col. George P. Wright, an Army spokesman. “We have several programs that are designed to address those challenges.” Last year, the Army extended the time that a new mother can defer deployment from four to six months. Then, in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany , the base commander, Col. Brian Lein, following the Navy’s lead, increased it to a year, the recommended time a mother should breast-feed. To help lessen the stress of long separations, the Army has started to allow more families to accompany soldiers to South Korea , where once soldiers had to deploy alone. Back home, the Army has built additional day care centers and allowed some families to stay in one place longer. Last year, the Army approved 10-day paternity leaves for new fathers, a milestone. Working off surveys that show women respond better to flexible schedules than financial incentives, the Navy now allows more sailors to work from home on computers, when possible. It is also running a small pilot program that permits three-year sabbaticals. Advocacy groups for women and families say more can be done but recognize that with the military fighting two wars and strapped for deployable soldiers, significant changes will have to come gradually. Some fixes, though, are relatively straightforward. “The one thing the military could do that would have a lasting and immediate impact would be to provide plentiful round-the-clock child care,” said Lory Manning, who directs the military women’s project for the Women’s Research and Education Institute , a nonprofit group. Meanwhile, hardships remain. Under current regulations, the military offers no assurance to military couples that they will not be deployed to war simultaneously. A unit’s requirements come first. But some joined the Army with the expectation that this would never come up. Maj. Katherine P. Guttormsen, who has a year-old son, dreads the moment she gets the call to go back to Iraq or Afghanistan, particularly because her husband, an officer, is still there. The thought keeps her up at night, she said. As a mother in the military, “the sacrifice is greater now,” said Major Guttormsen, a graduate of West Point who served in Iraq as company commander of an engineering unit then switched to public affairs when she decided to have a child. “This is a different Army than I entered into in 1996. It was fun. You were doing exercises. You weren’t going to Iraq and getting shot at.” Major Guttormsen, who was a “lioness,” part of the first team of Army women to search Iraqi women in Ramadi in 2004, said, “I don’t know if I get that call, if I would be able to do it, and that would be the end of my Army career.” Staff Sgt. Connica McFadden of the Army received only two weeks’ notice that she would be deploying and scrambled to find a caretaker for her 6-month-old daughter and 6-year-old son. Her commander at Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia had given her assurances in 2003 that she would not be going to Iraq that year so soon after giving birth. Her husband also would be deploying. But the rules changed. Heartbroken, she weaned the baby abruptly and left her with an aunt, while her son stayed elsewhere with his grandmother. Not obeying orders was not an option. Sergeant McFadden, who holds only an associate’s degree, wanted to hold on to her career. “It matters what I do,” Sergeant McFadden said. “I love helping people. It’s for our country. My dad was a Vietnam vet. I feel like I owe it to him.” The Children’s Burden Parents fret most about the consequences that long deployments will have on their children. By now, nearly two million children have seen a parent go to war. In some cases, their mothers have not come home. At least 25 women with children have died while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, out of 121 women casualties. Recent surveys indicate that most children, while largely resilient, experience worry and anxiety when a parent deploys, and the military has tried to address this by increasing counseling services. Nevertheless, grades and behavior suffer. Young children cry more. Some start wetting their beds. Nightmares are common, and teenagers can become more reclusive and defiant. National Guard and Reserve children are often hit worse since they live outside the military community. Single mothers have the fewest options, said Mark C. Pisano, a psychologist at two schools at Fort Bragg in North Carolina . “Not only are they getting up and moving, but moving without Mom makes it even more stressful.” Even under the best circumstances — leaving young children with a spouse — a deployment can bring on feelings of anguish. After her cousin was wounded in Iraq, Specialist Stephanie McCulley, 27, felt compelled to enlist in the Army. She left her two young boys with her husband, a former Marine, when she deployed to Baghdad in 2007 as a combat medic. Specialist McCulley earned a Bronze Star with Valor for administering aid after a roadside bomb demolished a Humvee. Two soldiers died instantly. She was able to save a third. Technology has helped soften the separation for many parents. Webcams and Skype have allowed them to talk to their children over dinner or before school. They leave teddy bears behind with recorded messages or record themselves reading books that their children love. But Specialist McCulley relied on old-school communication, mostly because the Internet was not always available and her boys were so young. She wrote letters and a journal. “You should have seen your mom driving a big old truck,” she wrote in one entry. But Specialist McCulley could not help but catalog the milestones she was missing — first words, first wobbly run, first day of preschool . The feeling was worse on days she “should have gotten killed and didn’t.” “I always felt guilty,” she said. Now, more than a year since her homecoming, any trip out the door — to the grocery store, to her Army base — prompts a flurry of nervous questions from the boys, who are 4 and 5: “Where are you going?” and “How long will you be gone?” “They still think I’m going to leave,” Specialist McCulley said with a note of melancholy. “They have paid a price. It will always affect them in some way. I do think they are resilient; this makes them stronger. But I do wonder sometimes, what long-term damage did I do?” One positive thing did come of the separation: her husband, John, grew closer to the boys and became a true partner in the marriage, something other mothers also cite as a silver lining. “It made him a better dad,” Specialist McCulley said. “He acts very motherly sometimes.” If called again, though, Specialist McCulley said she would go. “The children are being taken care of, and if I wasn’t here, people would be dying,” she concluded. But Jaymie Holschlag’s experience in Ramadi convinced her that for her family, the sacrifice was too high. She returned in 2006 with post-traumatic stress disorder . Working as a medic had left her raw. She lost three soldiers to a roadside bomb in her month there. “We were either getting hit with I.E.D.’s, finding I.E.D.’s or getting hit when we were on post,” she said, referring to improvised explosive devices . From Iraq, she kept in touch with home by e-mail. But she could only stay focused by disconnecting from family life. She rarely talked to her son on the phone because the conversations made a bad situation worse. “To hear them cry and miss me would keep me out of the game,” she said. “It would make it hard to put the game face on.” Her stepfather and her 21-year-old sister, who agreed to share responsibility for the children, a significant sacrifice, were struggling to cope. The children had trouble sleeping. Seth had trouble in his new school. “My sister was on the verge of totally freaking out,” Specialist Holschlag said, adding: “There was no sense of co-parenting. It almost tore their relationship apart.” When she returned, she saw that her son had “gained a good 50 or 60 pounds,” she said. “His depression , he wore it. I could see what my year away from him did.” Yet she was determined to hold on to her military job. It gave her a sense of identity and paid the bills. She also wanted to help her family heal. She and the children began counseling and moved to Texas to start fresh. But recently three weeks of intense combat training, the kind that simulates Iraq, exacerbated her stress disorder. She could feel her temper flaring again and asked to transfer out. Specialist Holschlag is back in Iowa now, getting mental health counseling and gearing up for college and a nursing degree. Her children are ecstatic about the turn of events, she said. “It was the hardest choice of my life,” Specialist Holschlag said. “My daughter keeps running around saying, ‘You love me so much, you’d give up Iraq for me.’ She knows how much I love my job. She also knows that I won’t leave them no matter what.”

Family
Parenting
Afghanistan War
Women and Girls
US Military
US Army


Tony Sparano Follows Unconventional Path to Become Dolphins’ Coach

Abstract: DAVIE, Fla. — If someone made a film about Miami Coach Tony Sparano, Dolphins players insist Joe Pesci could play the lead role. Sparano speaks with the thick accent of a Queens cab driver. He looks like an extra from “The Sopranos,” with a thin mustache, a compact build and a barrel chest. He sprinkles sentences with “youse guys.” “There’s no question I’m a Northeast guy,” Sparano said this week, taking a break from his marathon film sessions and practices for the season opener against the Jets on Sunday. “I never figured out if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.” Coming off the worst season in team history, in which the Dolphins (1-15) nearly became the first team in N.F.L. history to lose all 16 games, they whacked Coach Cam Cameron and empowered a football wise guy, Bill Parcells , to make their problems go away. Parcells brought in Sparano to help. Sparano said he first entertained the notion of coaching an N.F.L. team in high school, and 24 years after he started coaching, he took over the worst team in pro football. In between, he coached at Division II New Haven and Boston University, returned to New Haven for four years as a head coach, and was fired as part of staff house cleanings in three of his first four stops in the N.F.L. All the while, Sparano followed one saying that now hangs in the Dolphins’ locker room: the first step to getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are. “Unorthodox, no question about it,” Sparano said of his path. “From a small school in West Haven, Conn., to a billboard.” Indeed, his face is plastered on advertising around Miami, accompanied by the phrase “A New Beginning.” Driving back from his vacation home in South Carolina, Sparano said he nearly drove off the road the first time that he saw it. Next to him on the billboard were Parcells, the Dolphins’ executive vice president for football operations, and Jeff Ireland, the general manager. The Trifecta, as some call the three men around these parts, worked together in Dallas and migrated to Miami. Even when Sparano coached the Dallas Cowboys’ tight ends, Ireland noted his meticulous nature, the way he planned days down to the last minute, even on vacation. Ireland said Sparano reminded him of other coaches he had worked with, men like Parcells, Mike Ditka and Marty Schottenheimer. Some day, Ireland thought, Sparano would be a head coach. “He did take a different path, but he never, ever felt like he wouldn’t be here,” Ireland said. “His confidence about how he does things and what he’s good at is what makes Tony, Tony.” Sparano had a scare as a teenager that could have prevented him from becoming a coach. He worked at a restaurant in Connecticut, and when hot grease splashed into his eyes one day, he lost his vision for weeks. His eyes have watered ever since and remain sensitive to light. As a result, he often wears sunglasses indoors or at night, and the lights in his office generally stay off. Sparano is also known as a barker. Players often hear Sparano before they see him. Fullback Boomer Grigsby said, “There’s no rah-rah, ‘Remember the Titans’-type speeches, but there is very clear direction.” “He hasn’t changed a bit,” Ireland said. “Always hard on his players, very demanding, a very clear, concise communicator.” The truth is, Sparano has always been meticulous. As a child, he organized marbles instead of playing with them. He cleaned his room like a good soldier, no sheet untucked, no shirt unfolded. He took volumes of notes in school. Sparano played center in college at New Haven, and that background is what guard Justin Smiley used to describe Sparano’s strengths. Good offensive linemen, Smiley said, are meticulous in hand placement and footwork. “That’s really the only way you can survive,” Smiley said. “Most of the time, you’re going up against guys that are faster, stronger and more athletic than you, and they’re running at you while you’re backing up. You have to be a technician. Coach Sparano understands those nuances.” He often acts them out in practice, demonstrating technique, pulling players to the side. Almost, Smiley said, as if Sparano wishes he were still playing. Instead, he is in charge of his first N.F.L. team, more than two decades after he decided being a head coach in the N.F.L. would be his vocation. Sparano said the enormity of his first head coaching job, of finally becoming what he always wanted, had not sunk in. Maybe it would, he allowed, “for a second” when the Dolphins come out of the tunnel Sunday. Grease might have briefly robbed him of his sight, but he never lost focus on his goal — not while grinding in Division II, not each time he packed after getting fired, and not when Parcells took Sparano under his wing and turned his dream into reality. Parcells taught Sparano the little things, more details for a man obsessed with them. They talked about making a 53-man roster, about roster flexibility, about having different visions for different players. Even Parcells’s sayings started to stick, including Sparano’s favorite: If they don’t bite when they’re pups, they don’t bite. Ireland recalled one colorful exchange between Sparano and Parcells during Parcells’s final preseason game in Dallas. Parcells: “Tony!” Sparano: “What!” Parcells: “Don’t SCREAM at me!” Sparano: “You’re SCREAMING AT ME!” Parcells: “Forget about it.” Sparano counts Parcells as his greatest influence. He credits Parcells with making him a wise guy in a different sense, a football sense. And now, as they embark on Parcells’s latest reclamation project, they do so as the Dolphins’ version of an old married couple. The wise vice president. And the wise guy coach.

Football
Sparano Tony
Miami Dolphins
Parcells Bill


Error-Prone Alabama Falls to Texas A&M

Abstract: TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — At some point Saturday, the glare was supposed to be too much for the Texas A&M Aggies, the new arrivals in the Southeastern Conference, who were not supposed to be ready for the ferociousness of this kind of SEC road game. It was Alabama’s top-rated defense against this phenomenon called Johnny Football, and surely the Aggies would compete for a quarter or two and then go away once their redshirt freshman quarterback, Johnny Manziel, had his face mask shoved into the turf at Bryant-Denny Stadium. Manziel, a target throughout the second half for Alabama’s blitzing defense, did not crumble under a pile of anxiety before 101,821 frothing fans, and neither did the rest of his team. Instead, he accounted for 345 yards rushing and passing, and the Texas A&M defense, shredded in the second half, made a goal-line stop with 1 minute 36 seconds to play as the 15th-ranked Aggies stunned No. 1 Alabama, 29-24 . Texas A&M improved to 8-2 over all and 5-2 in the SEC; the only losses in its first season in the conference were by 3 points to Florida and by 5 to Louisiana State. All this season, the Aggies were expected to be fodder for the rest of the SEC, but now they are the rude newcomers who might have ended the conference’s run of six national titles. Alabama (9-1, 6-1) got to the national title game with one loss last season, but this year the Crimson Tide will need considerable help, with Oregon, Kansas State and Notre Dame still unbeaten and the season winding down. Manziel completed 24 of 31 passes for 253 yards and did not throw an interception. He also ran for 92 yards, and his playmaking helped Texas A&M convert on 11 of 18 third downs. Manziel was Johnny Magician in the first quarter as the Aggies built a 20-0 lead with his improvised runs and throws. They included bobbling a ball, snatching it out of the air and throwing a touchdown pass. “If you’re around him every day, you know it’s not too much for him,” Texas A&M Coach Kevin Sumlin, a native of Alabama, said when asked about Manziel’s being a target of defenses. “There hasn’t been a moment that’s been too big for him.” Manziel, who is not permitted to speak with reporters, brought plenty of help to Alabama to compete against a program that had won 14 straight games and two of the last three national titles. Alabama should have been concerned. Texas A&M had won five straight road games and arrived with two N.F.L.-caliber offensive tackles, the juniors Luke Joeckel and Jake Matthews, who kept Manziel safe as the Aggies built that 20-point lead. “It just shows we can compete with anyone in this league,” said wide receiver Ryan Swope, who caught 11 passes for 111 yards. Alabama will insist it gave the game away. Quarterback A J McCarron came into the game with a streak of 289 passes without an interception, and no interceptions this season. He threw two against Texas A&M, including the one caught by the Aggies’ Deshazor Everett at the goal line with 1:36 to play. After its defense held, Alabama was poised to get the ball back for one last chance after a Texas A&M punt, but it jumped offsides to give a first down to the Aggies, who proceeded to run out the clock. In the first half, Manziel did not just look like the best quarterback in the country, he looked like the best point guard. The Aggies’ offense moved smoothly up the field with Manziel throwing darts into the numbers of his receivers or scampering away from defenders. Texas A&M went 73 yards on nine plays in just 2:50 on its first possession, with running back Christine Michael scoring from the 1. When Alabama got the ball back, McCarron threw his first interception of the season. The pass bounced off his receiver, and linebacker Sean Porter returned the ball to the Crimson Tide 41. Manziel completed a 32-yard pass play to Kenric McNeal. Two plays later, Manziel scampered out of trouble in the pocket, ran right, then threw to Swope in the end zone for a 10-yard touchdown. “We seemed like we were a little bit out of gas,” said Nick Saban, the Alabama coach. After a punt by the Tide, Manziel and the Aggies went to work again with a 73-yard, 14-play drive. Michael scored again with 41 seconds left in the first quarter. But something finally went right for Alabama when Taylor Bertolet missed the extra-point kick. Down by 20, Alabama finally found a remedy for Manziel and the A&M offense: it held on to the ball. The Crimson Tide went on one touchdown drive of 5:37 and another of 3:51 to make the score 20-14 at halftime. But Manziel never committed the turnover that would allow Alabama to build momentum and overtake the Aggies. Play after play, he kept his poise, and the only meltdown was by Alabama. “Two of the three national championship teams that I’ve coached both lost a game,” Saban said, before adding, “There is still a lot for this team to play for.”

Football (College)
Texas A&M University
University of Alabama
Manziel Johnny


At Kodak, Some Old Things Are New Again

Abstract: ROCHESTER — Steven J. Sasson, an electrical engineer who invented the first digital camera at Eastman Kodak in the 1970s, remembers well management’s dismay at his feat. “My prototype was big as a toaster, but the technical people loved it,” Mr. Sasson said. “But it was filmless photography, so management’s reaction was, ‘that’s cute — but don’t tell anyone about it.’ ” Since then, of course, Kodak, which once considered itself the Bell Labs of chemistry, has embraced the digital world and the researchers who understand it. “The shift in research focus has been just tremendous,” said John D. Ward, a lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology who worked for Kodak for 20 years. Or, as Mr. Sasson put it, “Getting a digital idea accepted has sure gotten a lot easier.” Indeed, physicists, electrical engineers and all sorts of people who are more comfortable with binary code than molecules are wending their way up through Kodak’s research labs. “When I joined, I knew my salary came from film sales,” said Dr. Majid Rabbani, an electrical engineer who joined Kodak in 1983. “But I knew that I would eventually produce paychecks for others.” Kodak is by no means thriving. Digital products are nowhere near filling the profit vacuum left by evaporating sales of film. Its work force is about a fifth of the size it was two decades ago, and it continues to lose money. Its share price remains depressed. But, finally, digital products are flowing from the labs. Kodak recently introduced a pocket-size television, which is selling in Japan for about $285. It has software that lets owners of multiplexes track what is showing on each screen. It has a tiny sensor small enough to fit into a cellphone, yet acute enough to capture images in low light. The company now has digital techniques that can remove scratches and otherwise enhance old movies. It has found more efficient ways to make O.L.E.D.’s — organic light-emitting diodes — for displays in cameras, cellphones and televisions. This month, Kodak will introduce Stream, a continuous inkjet printer that can churn out customized items like bill inserts at extremely high speeds. It is working on ways to capture and project three-dimensional movies. And, of course, it continues to prompt consumers to take pictures with Kodak cameras, store them at Kodak sites online, display them in Kodak digital picture frames and print them on Kodak printers that use Kodak inks and papers. “They want to be the World Bank of Imaging, to offer a Kodak-branded solution for anything you might want to do with images,” said Matthew Troy, an analyst with Citigroup Investment Research, who recently upgraded Kodak to hold from sell. Paradoxically, many of the new products are based on work Kodak began, but abandoned, years ago. The precursor technology to Stream, for example, pushed ink through a single nozzle. Stream has thousands of holes and uses a method called air deflection to separate drops of ink and control the speed and order in which they are deposited on a page. “I remember wandering through the labs in 2003, and seeing the theoretical model that could become Stream,” said Philip J. Faraci, Kodak’s president. “The technology was half-baked, but it was a real breakthrough.” Other digital technologies languished as well, said Bill Lloyd, the chief technology officer. “I’ve been here five years, and I’m still learning about all the things they already have,” he said. “It seems Kodak had developed antibodies against anything that might compete with film.” It took what many analysts say was a near-death experience to change that. Kodak, a film titan in the 20th century, entered the next one in danger of being mowed down by the digital juggernaut. Electronics companies like Sony were siphoning away the photography market, while giants like Hewlett-Packard and Xerox had a lock on printers. “This was a supertanker that came close to capsizing,” said Timothy M. Ghriskey, chief investment officer at Solaris Asset Management, which long ago sold its Kodak shares. But in 2003 Kodak hired Antonio Perez away from Hewlett-Packard. Mr. Perez, now the chief executive, has sprinkled Hewlett alumni — including Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Faraci — throughout the executive suite. Together, they have turned Kodak inside out. They exited a mainstay business, health imaging, and took the company back into inkjet printing. And they mined the patent archives for intellectual property, a step that is yielding well above $250 million a year in licensing fees. One recent example: Kodak is licensing out a method to embed a chemical signature in materials that enables manufacturers and retailers to scan for counterfeit products. “When it comes to intellectual property, they’re finally acting like a for-profit corporation instead of a university,” said Ulysses A. Yannas, a broker at Buckman, Buckman & Reid who has been buying Kodak shares. The Hewlett alumni introduced an expensive consumer printer that runs on inexpensive ink — tantamount to heresy in an industry that has always sold cheap hardware in hopes of making money on high-margin inks and toners. “We were entering an entrenched market, so we went after the biggest dissatisfier for consumers, the cost of ink,” said Steven A. Billow, a manager in the inkjet systems division And, perhaps most traumatic for a company that was known as the Great Yellow Father in Rochester, they eliminated jobs. Kodak, which employed 145,300 people 20 years ago, ended 2007 with 26,900 employees. Last year, $6.4 billion of its $10.3 billion in revenue came from digital products, but it earned only $179 million from them. And on Thursday, Kodak announced a first-quarter loss of $114 million on revenue of $2.09 billion. It was an improvement over the first quarter of 2007, when it lost $175 million on revenue of $2.08 billion. And Kodak’s revenue from digital products rose 10 percent, to $1.366 billion. Mr. Perez told analysts he had “full confidence” that 2008 would be a good year for Kodak, but investors did not share it. Its shares fell 67 cents on Thursday, to $17.22. After peaking at $94.25 in February 1997, they have steadily trended down. Analysts remain wary. “The stuff that comes out of the Kodak labs is impressive, but it does not give them a leg up on Hewlett or Xerox,” said Shannon S. Cross, an analyst at Cross Research who rates Kodak a sell. Nor is she impressed with Kodak’s consumer printer. “Consumers buy on the cost of hardware, not of total ownership,” she said. The Fujifilm Corporation, the Japanese company that was Kodak’s main film rival, is not out of the picture, either. It recently moved its chemistry and electronics labs next door to each other. “If they work as a single team at the same location, R.& D. productivity is significantly enhanced,” Shinpei Ikenoue, the head of research at Fujifilm, said in an e-mail message. Still, analysts no longer predict Kodak’s demise. “Kodak still has the most color specialists,” Ms. Cross said. There are a lot fewer of them, though. The research ranks have been cut in half, to about 1,000 people. ”We watched a lot of chemists get downsized out of jobs,” said Dr. Margaret J. Helber, an organic chemist who joined Kodak 18 years ago. “The rest of us soldiered on for several years, not knowing if we would remain relevant in the transformed Kodak.” They did, but in radically altered jobs. For one thing, researchers who rarely interacted are now expected to collaborate. “This used to be a closed society, where some researchers kept their records in locked safes,” said Dr. John D. Baloga, director of analytical science and a Kodak employee for 31 years. “Some of them were crushed when the secrecy went away.” Researchers also must now work with the business managers. Amit Singhal, a computer scientist who joined Kodak in 1998, said he had biweekly meetings with the business units. “I never used to see them at all,” he said. Indeed, until recently, functions like finance, marketing and research all reported up through their own hierarchies, ultimately to the chief executive. Today, everyone involved in creating, selling and servicing inkjet printers is grouped together, as are those dealing with cameras, sensors or other products. “Finally, we have a structure that promotes commercialization of research,” Mr. Faraci said. The research chiefs do hold quarterly meetings to uncover technologies that can cross product boundaries. Marketing, operations and customer service chiefs meet regularly as well, to discuss which products and services can be bundled together for sale, or to see whether economies of scale can be achieved. But day to day, researchers and marketers deal more with each other than with their functional peers. “Researchers invent something, demonstrate its feasibility, talk about commercializing it,” said Julie Gerstenberger, vice president for external alliances. “But these days, it’s all in collaboration with the business side.”

Photography
Eastman Kodak Co
Science and Technology


Monte Irvin, Star Outfielder Who Lost His Prime to Racism, Dies at 96

Abstract: Monte Irvin, the New York Giants outfielder who was one of the first outstanding black players in the major leagues and a Hall of Famer for his brilliance in the Negro leagues, where he spent most of his prime years before baseball’s color barrier was shattered, died on Monday night at his home in Houston. He was 96. The National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., announced his death . Irvin was voted into the Hall in 1973 after it was opened to Negro leagues stars. Irvin also became the first black executive in Major League Baseball’s hierarchy, assigned to promote a game that had once barred him because of his race and had left him and his fans wondering, What if? From the time he was growing up in New Jersey, where he had arrived by way of Alabama, Irvin could do everything: In high school he was an all-state performer in baseball, basketball, football and track and field, building his strength by helping his father deliver milk by horse and wagon. On the baseball field he could hit both for average and for power, as well as steal bases and cut down a runner from the outfield with his howitzer of a right arm. Yet by the time he played his first game for the Giants, in 1949, after years as a star for the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League — having endured the long bus rides, the run-down hotels and the precarious paydays of black baseball — he was already 30, two years older than Jackie Robinson had been when Robinson broke the major league color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Irvin knew his best years were behind him. “I was way past my peak then,” he later said. “My only regret is that I didn’t get a shot at 19, when I was a real ballplayer.” Willie Mays, the Giants’ great center fielder, who joined the team in 1951, when he was 20 years old, regarded Irvin as a mentor. In a statement on Tuesday he said, “I lost someone I cared about and admired very, very much; someone who was like a second father to me.” When the Giants overtook the Dodgers in the storied National League pennant race of 1951, Irvin, playing in his first full major league season, provided a glimpse of what he could have done to big league pitching during all his years of waiting. He batted .312 with 24 home runs and a league-leading 121 runs batted in during the regular season, and he hit .458 and stole home in the Giants’ World Series loss to the Yankees. Image Irvin, with the Giants, stealing home during the opener of the 1951 World Series against the Yankees. Credit Associated Press “Most of the black ballplayers thought Monte Irvin should have been the first black in the major leagues,” Cool Papa Bell, a Negro leagues star and Hall of Famer, was quoted as saying in the book “Baseball for the Love of It” (1982), by Anthony J. Connor. “Monte was our best young ballplayer at that time. He could hit that long ball; he had a great arm; he could field; he could run. Yes, he could do everything.” But in 1945, when Branch Rickey signed Robinson to the Dodgers’ organization, Irvin was returning from Army service. He did not make it to the majors until July 8, 1949, when he and Hank Thompson became the Giants’ first two black players. Irvin played on two pennant winners with the Giants: the 1951 team, remembered for Bobby Thomson’s playoff home run off Ralph Branca, and the 1954 club, which swept the Cleveland Indians in the World Series. A thick-bodied right-handed batter, Irvin had a career average of .293 with 99 home runs over seven seasons with the Giants and one with the Chicago Cubs, despite his belated arrival in the majors and a severe ankle fracture he sustained in 1952. He became baseball’s first black executive in 1968, when he was named to handle promotion and public relations for Commissioner William D. Eckert. He remained in the commissioner’s office, as an aide to Eckert’s successor, Bowie Kuhn, until 1984. In 1971, Irvin was appointed to a committee created to open the Hall of Fame to Negro leagues stars. He was voted into the Hall by that unit two years later, following Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard to Cooperstown. Irvin had been the second-oldest living member of the Hall of Fame behind Bobby Doerr, the Boston Red Sox second baseman, who is 97. The No. 2 spot is now held by Red Schoendienst, best known for his years with the St. Louis Cardinals, who is 92. Monford Merrill Irvin was born on Feb. 25, 1919, in Haleburg, Ala., one of 11 children raised by Cupid Alexander Irvin, a sharecropper, and his wife, Mary Eliza. When he was 8, he and his family moved to Bloomfield, N.J., and they settled in Orange, N.J., two years later. He soon developed a powerful physique, strengthening his legs by climbing on and off a horse-drawn wagon that his father and his brothers were using to deliver milk for a dairy. Irvin achieved renown in the mid-1930s as an athlete at Orange High School, and he went on to the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he majored in history, planning to be a teacher. But he also played part time for the Newark Eagles, using a friend’s name and appearing only in road games, where he would not be recognized, in order to retain his college sports eligibility. He left Lincoln in his sophomore year to play full time for the Eagles. Irvin played the outfield and the infield for Newark. He appeared in the Negro leagues’ East-West All-Star Game in 1941, played in Mexico for most of the season that followed and then, after serving in the Army in World War II, returned to the Eagles and was an All-Star from 1946 to 1948. He was an Eagles teammate of Larry Doby, another future Hall of Famer, who became the first black player in the American League when he joined the Cleveland Indians in 1947. Late in 1948, Rickey signed Irvin for a Dodgers farm team, evidently believing he was a free agent because the Newark team was being sold. But when the Eagles protested that Irvin was still under contract, Rickey renounced his rights. The Eagles then sold his rights to the Giants for $5,000 in January 1949. Irvin split time between the Giants and their Jersey City farm team in 1949 and 1950 before moving to the Polo Grounds to stay. He got off to a slow start at the plate in 1951 while playing first base, where he was not comfortable. But after Manager Leo Durocher moved him to the outfield early in the season, switching him with Whitey Lockman, Irvin’s batting picked up, and he was a key figure in the pennant drive that came to be known as the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff. Irvin remembered how Durocher and his teammates, including Southerners, welcomed him. “Back in those days, the race business was still a big problem for baseball,” he said in an interview for Thomas Kiernan’s 1975 book, “The Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff.” “And yet there was never any ‘anti’ feeling on the club. Everybody pulled for everybody, no matter the color.” Irvin’s career suffered a jolt on April 2, 1952, when he broke his right ankle sliding into third base in an exhibition game against the Indians in Denver. He was carried off on a stretcher and was out of action until July 27. He favored his bad leg when he returned, throwing his back out of line. Although he hit .329 in 1953, his back problem hampered him for the rest of his career. He retired in 1957 after playing four games for the minor league Los Angeles Angels. The Giants retired Irvin’s No. 20 in a ceremony in San Francisco in June 2010, although he never played there for the franchise, which left New York in 1958. When the Giants opened the World Series in San Francisco against the Texas Rangers in October 2010, Irvin threw out the first ball. The Giants arranged for Irvin to attend President Obama’s June 2015 reception at the White House for their 2014 World Series championship team when they learned that he had never met Obama, and Irvin sat alongside Mays at the ceremony. “I am particularly honored to have a couple of trailblazing Hall of Famers here,” the president said. Irvin’s survivors include his daughters Pamela Irvin Fields and Patricia Irvin Gordon. His wife, Dorinda, known as Dee, died in 2008. When Irvin was named to the Hall of Fame, he reflected not only on his achievements but also on the missed opportunities. “I wasted my best years in the Negro leagues,” he said. But he added: “I’m philosophical about it. There’s no point in being bitter. You’re not happy with the way things happen, but why make yourself sick inside? There were many guys who could really play who never got a chance at all.”

Monte Irvin
Negro League
Baseball
Obituary
Black People,African-Americans
New York Giants Baseball


Another Stumble as Juventus Falls to Newly Promoted Bari

Abstract: Juventus’s troubles continued in a 3-1 loss at newly promoted Bari, with the playmaker Diego missing a penalty kick for the 27-time Serie A champion. Juventus was eliminated from the Champions League on Tuesday after a 4-1 home loss to Bayern Munich. The Bianconeri beat Inter Milan, the Serie A leader, last weekend but risk falling further behind the four-time defending champion. “We’re lacking continuity,” Jean-Claude Blanc, the club’s president, said after the loss Saturday. Inter has 35 points, A.C. Milan has 31 and Juventus has 30. Inter was visiting Atalanta on Sunday and Milan was hosting Palermo. Ciro Ferrara, the Juventus coach, would not criticize his team, which created plenty of scoring chances, but he called it “a heavy loss.” “It’s tough to digest, and you can see that in the players’ eyes,” he said. “It’s difficult to offer an explanation.” Earlier, Napoli and Cagliari played to a 3-3 draw featuring a frenetic finish. Bari and Napoli moved into a six-way tie for fifth with 24 points each. With 51,849 fans on hand for Juventus’s first visit to the San Nicola stadium in nine years, Riccardo Meggiorini put Bari in front after seven minutes, taking advantage of a defensive breakdown. David Trézéguet leveled for Juventus in the 23rd minute. Paulo Barreto restored Bari’s lead with a penalty kick in the 44th. Diego put his spot kick over the bar in the 68th minute, and then Sergio Almiron scored Bari’s third in the 81st minute. Cristian Molinaro and Mauro Camoranesi left for Juventus with apparent injuries, and the game was likely the last for the Juventus goalkeeper, Gianluigi Buffon, before knee surgery on Sunday. The result was all the more surprising since Bari’s top defender, Andrea Ranocchia, was suspended. In Sardinia, Napoli took a 2-0 lead after 65 minutes with goals from Ezequiel Lavezzi and Michele Pazienza. Cagliari rallied with three goals in the final 15 minutes — including a potential match-winner from the striker Jeda in the 90th. Lavezzi was sent off for booting the ball at the Cagliari manager, Massimiliano Allegri, in a melee that followed Jeda’s goal, but Mariano Bogliacino equalized for Napoli in the sixth minute of added time, heading in from close range. GERMANY Schalke snapped Werder Bremen’s 23-game unbeaten streak Saturday with a 2-0 victory to move within a point of the Bundesliga leader, Bayer Leverkusen. Kevin Kuranyi and Jan Moravek scored for Schalke, which has 31 points, one fewer than Leverkusen, which drew 2-2 with Hertha Berlin on Friday. Bremen dropped to fourth, with 28 points. “We stood really well defensively because we know that they can create a lot of chances,” said Kuranyi, who scored his eighth goal of the season. “But we outran them and that is our strength. We know that we cannot play as entertaining football as they can.” Felix Magath, the Schalke coach, praised his players’ second-half performance. “We had some small problems in the first half,” Magath said. “We wanted to use our chances in the first half, but we did a better job on that in the second half. I think everything regarding the streak was a bit in their heads and we were lucky to have faced a team that did not play that well today.” Ivica Olic scored twice and set up another goal as Bayern Munich thrashed VfL Bochum, 5-1. The Bayern striker Mario Gomez scored his fifth goal in six games as his team improved to 30 points. Hamburg won 4-0 at Nuremberg to snap a seven-game winless streak. Eljero Elia scored twice, while Marcell Jansen and Tunay Turon each added goals for Hamburg, which has 28 points and is tied for fourth place. FRANCE Marseille moved within three points of the leader, Bordeaux, in the French league by beating Boulogne, 2-0, on Saturday. The defender Gabriel Heinze scored with a header in the 48th minute. Six minutes later the fullback Taye Taiwo converted a penalty kick. “It was a tricky match — we knew it,” Bruno Cheyrou, the Marseille midfielder, told Foot Plus television. “Last season, we lost many points, and the title race, in those types of matches. Such victories are encouraging for the remainder of the season.” The Boulogne defender Olubayo Adefemi was sent off in the 89th for a harsh tackle on Hatem Ben Arfa. Bordeaux, the defending champion, topped the standings with 31 points before its game with Lyon on Sunday. Auxerre and Lorient both had a chance to move into second but the clubs drew, 0-0, at Lorient.

Bari
Diego
Serie A
Champions League
Bayern Munich
Soccer
Juventus Football Club


Brussels Attack Lapses Acknowledged by Belgian Officials

Abstract: BRUSSELS — Top Belgian officials on Thursday acknowledged miscommunications and other errors in the prelude to the Brussels suicide bombings, as growing evidence of links to the Paris assaults by the Islamic State suggested that a wide network of trained attackers leading back to Syria is now rooted in Europe. The Belgian justice and interior ministers acknowledged that their departments should have acted on a Turkish alert about Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, a convicted Belgian criminal briefly arrested in Turkey last year on suspicion of terrorist activity, who turned out to be one of the suicide bombers. And the Belgian prosecutor’s office said that man’s brother, Khalid — another suicide bomber — had been wanted since December in connection with the Paris attacks . Taken together, they amounted to the first high-level acknowledgment that European officials could have done more to avert the bombings, and came amid other recriminations in the European Union about recurrent failures among its national police forces and intelligence services to share information. Uncovering the Links Between the Brussels and Paris Attackers At least two of the attackers are believed to have had roles in both plots. New raids in connection with the Brussels bombings were carried out Thursday night in the city’s Schaerbeek and Jette neighborhoods, and the police held six people for questioning. At the same time, officials in France said a French citizen had been arrested in the Argenteuil suburb of Paris on suspicion that he was involved in the “advanced stages” of a terrorist plot. The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said that “at this point” there were no tangible links between that plot and the Paris and Brussels attacks. Even as investigators have collaborated in Belgium and France since the Paris attacks four months ago, which by all accounts were planned in Belgium, they were caught unaware by the Brussels attack on Tuesday, which killed 31 people and wounded 300 in the airport and a busy subway station. The investigators now say that at least three and probably four people played roles in both the Brussels and Paris assaults. With at least one suspect still missing and unidentified from the Brussels bombings, experts said it was likely the attacks are not over. Video A short explanation of how brothers keep turning up as suspects in terrorist attacks. Credit Credit Interpol / Handout/European Pressphoto Agency “There seems to be more and more evidence that there are links between French commandos who had a role in Paris and Belgians who targeted the airport and the Maelbeek metro station,” said Didier Leroy, a researcher of jihadist networks at the Belgian Royal Military Academy and Brussels University. “There are fingerprints, there are some specific phone calls on the night of the Paris attacks.” “Definitely there are other attacks to be feared and other individuals will emerge,” he said. The Franco-Belgian network is part of the wider trend of European fighters in Syria and Iraq, estimated by security services to number 4,000 to 6,000. It is not clear how many have returned to Europe; while some officials estimate 10 percent, others have disputed that as exaggerated. The French and Belgian fighters, however, are especially close, said Nathalie Goulet, vice-chairwoman of the French Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee and a co-chairwoman of a committee that looked into jihadist networks in Europe. “We will find more connections, because I don’t believe in the lone wolf,” she said. “These people have the same training, the same national connection; they have long friendships and when they left for Syria they all went to the same place there because they are French speakers and that reinforced their connections and ability to work together.” Video Triacetone triperoxide, which was used in the Paris attacks in November, has become the Islamic State's explosive of choice in Europe. Specialists in bomb detection explain why. Credit Credit Marius Becker/European Pressphoto Agency They were tied as well — much as gang members are — by lives of petty criminality and sometimes larger crimes, Mr. Leroy said. The Paris and Brussels plotters appear to have shared a bomb maker, Najim Laachraoui, 24, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, who is widely reported as having been one of the suicide bombers at the Brussels Airport. Neither the Belgian prosecutor’s office nor Mr. Laachraoui’s family have confirmed his death. The prosecutor’s office said that Mr. Laachraoui, a trained electrical engineer, went to Syria in 2013. He was noted by the police in a routine check in September as he drove between Hungary and Austria with Salah Abdeslam, believed to be the lone surviving suspect of the Paris attacks, who was arrested in Belgium less than a week ago and who now says he wants to be returned to France. There were unconfirmed accounts on Thursday that Mr. Abdeslam may also have been planning to participate in the Brussels assault, which would suggest that he was also involved in logistics and planning for both. However, his lawyer said Thursday that Mr. Abdeslam knew nothing about the Brussels attacks. Mr. Laachraoui was using the name Soufiane Kayal. He later rented a safe house south of Brussels, used by the Paris attackers as they were preparing. The Belgian authorities said they found traces of his DNA there. His DNA was also found at another apartment in the Schaerbeek district of Brussels where the Paris attackers appear to have assembled some of their suicide vests, according to a statement from Frédéric Van Leeuw, the Belgian federal prosecutor. Traces of the explosive TATP were found in the apartment when it was raided in Schaerbeek, one of the heavily immigrant districts next door to Molenbeek, the home of three of the Paris attackers. Mr. Laachraoui and Mohamed Belkaid, another of the accomplices in the Paris attacks, traveled together to Belgium with Mr. Abdeslam, and are believed to have been on the phone with some of the Paris attackers as that assault was underway. On Monday, barely 18 hours before the Brussels bombings, the Belgian authorities issued an all-points bulletin for Mr. Laachraoui, asking the public to call immediately if they saw him or knew his whereabouts. That alert came too late: The bombs were likely to have already been made and packed into suitcases. Video Two friends heard about the airport bombing as they entered the Brussels subway. They feared a second attack on the subway. It happened on their train. This is their story of survival. Credit Credit Evan Lamos/Associated Press One man who figures in both Paris and Brussels, although his role remains mysterious, is Mr. Belkaid, 35, an Algerian. It appears he was important enough for the attackers, or their directors in Syria, to have him travel across Europe — and possibly from Syria — to help in the attacks. It also seems that, like Mr. Laachraoui, he was designated to survive the Paris attacks since he was left behind in Belgium, although his next assignment was unclear. He was a behind-the-scenes participant — at least until the gun battle that killed him on March 15 when he fought the Belgian police as they raided an apartment in the Forest section of Brussels. His rapid response to the arrival of the police at the apartment almost certainly helped the two other men in the house with him to flee. The two have not been identified and it is not clear if they are among those accomplices still alive. When Mr. Belkaid first surfaced in connection with the Paris attacks he was using the name Samir Bouzid, which was on the false identity papers he used as he drove across Europe with Mr. Abdeslam and Mr. Laachraoui. It took the police until this week to determine that his real name was Belkaid. There appears to be a deep reserve in Belgium of people with the potential to become the next participants in a violent attack on civilians. The country’s security services maintain a list of 1,000 names that includes every potentially dangerous person with Belgian citizenship, said Mr. Leroy, the Royal Military Academy researcher. However, the list encompasses such a broad range of individuals that it is hard to figure out who represents the most risk for the country, he said. What does emerge from the list are some revealing demographics. About 80 percent of those named are of Moroccan origin. Even in places such as Schaerbeek where the Muslim population is roughly half Turkish and half Moroccan, “we have no, or almost no, Turkish foreign fighters, and we have many Moroccan ones,” Mr. Leroy said, adding that researchers were trying to understand the reasons for that. More and more of those in Belgium who end up as radical militants start out as criminals, forming their bonds in criminal networks. “The attacks in Paris and the ones in Brussels are prepared and executed by essentially the same network, and it’s quite an old network,” said Brice De Ruyvers, a professor of criminal law and criminology at Ghent University in Belgium, who has worked in government posts involving security. “They were not in the past a terrorist network, they became terrorists in liaison with ISIS and what happened in Syria in the past years — this is the case not just in Paris and Brussels, but there all those people come from the same neighborhood, they knew each other for years,” he said. “This is the composition of the network and these are the people who have established a clear link between serious crimes and terrorist crimes; they are used to using violence.”

Brussels Attacks
Paris Attacks
France
Belgium
Najim Laachraoui
Salah Abdeslam
Mohamed Belkaid
ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State
Terrorism


Foot Is the New Traffic for Urban Cowboys

Abstract: Five years ago, a trip on foot over the busy freeway that separates downtown Dallas from neighboring Uptown would have required a bit of courage. Uneven, relatively narrow sidewalks lined the traffic overpasses that crossed the eight-lane freeway. Pedestrians on the sidewalks, which lacked shade during the day or ample lighting at night, could sometimes feel the overpasses tremble as traffic roared by underneath. Today, the traffic still flows below, but the same trip takes a pedestrian past fields of picnicking families, a dog park and a putting green. Completed in 2012, the five-acre Klyde Warren Park was built on a platform over the freeway, providing a walkable link between the two urban centers. The bustling patch of urban parkland may seem unlikely in a state still largely seen as a sprawling, highway-laced land of car-centric cities and dispersed suburbs. But advocates for more pedestrian-friendly urban cores and communities say interest in making Texas cities more walkable, as Dallas has attempted downtown, is on the rise — a subtle shift spurred in part by changing demographics and the state’s growing population. Pockets of walkable, mixed-use development have existed in Texas for years, especially in and around the major downtowns. But an influx of young adults in Texas, the nation’s second-fastest-growing state from 2010 to 2013, has given walkability advocates more visibility. Image People walk towards Klyde Warren Park. Credit Allison V. Smith for The Texas Tribune “Millennials are very interested in urbanism and walkable communities as well as being active in trying to create change,” said Patrick Kennedy, an urban planner in Dallas who develops walkable communities. Mr. Kennedy has attracted attention for his campaign to tear down Interstate 345, an aging highway in Dallas that divides downtown from the Deep Ellum neighborhood. The proposal, which would open the land to walkable redevelopment, faces long odds. But Mr. Kennedy said he had been encouraged by public interest in the plan, especially among young people and on social media. At the same time, as in the rest of the country, the state’s older population is growing. Walkable communities offer more mobility for seniors no longer willing or able to drive, and many empty nesters now want to live closer to everyday amenities, said Tim Morstad, an official with AARP Texas , which has worked to make Texas communities more accessible to older pedestrians. (AARP is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.) “We had a whole generation of folks who felt that the ideal situation was to land out in the suburbs, perhaps raise a family, and that was the American dream,” Mr. Morstad said. “Now they’re still in those homes, and they’re realizing that the services and the activities and the cultural enrichment isn’t next door.” Walkability, advocates say, also fosters healthier communities, safer streets and increased vibrancy capable of generating economic activity and contributing to the local tax base. Mounting frustration with the state’s worsening traffic, they say, has also made walkable areas more desirable. Image People enjoy a moment of nice weather. Credit Allison V. Smith for The Texas Tribune In Harris County, which includes Houston, traffic and demographic changes have helped propel a shift in housing preferences, said Stephen L. Klineberg, a director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. (Rice is a corporate sponsor of the Tribune.) According to an annual survey of Harris County residents by the institute, the proportion who said they would prefer to live in a smaller home close to shops and workplaces to one with a big yard in a neighborhood where they would need to drive almost everywhere rose to 51 percent in 2012 from 36 percent in 2008. “I don’t think there’s any reason to think that Houstonians are going to be different from Dallasites, Austinites or San Antonians, because these are national trends,” Mr. Klineberg said. Large-scale urban redevelopment projects have also transformed parts of the state’s biggest cities, stirring interest in walkability. In Houston, an expansion of the light-rail system has fueled hopes of denser, more pedestrian-friendly development along the new lines. A plan to connect 150 miles of trails and parks along the city’s major bayous has been billed as the largest urban park project in the country. Image Martha and Ashley Navarro sit in some shade at Klyde Warren Park. Credit Allison V. Smith for The Texas Tribune In San Antonio, new trails and parkland along the San Antonio River have linked the Pearl, a bustling mixed-use development north of the River Walk , to the city’s historic Spanish missions south of downtown. Austin and Fort Worth have also revitalized large portions of their downtowns and surrounding areas in recent years. And even El Paso, far from the major population centers, has broken ground on new downtown projects, aided by an innovative city planning department that offers courses on so-called New Urbanism. “People are seeing these projects on the ground now in communities and neighborhoods that have been reinvented as more walkable, and they like it,” said Scott Polikov, a North Texas-based town planner who serves on the national board of the Congress for the New Urbanism . “The tipping point has occurred where people actually are becoming aware of the benefits.” Dense, mixed-use town centers and revitalized historic downtowns have drawn attention to walkability even in suburbs like The Woodlands and Sugar Land, outside Houston, and Plano and McKinney, north of Dallas. To be sure, walkability advocates in Texas face significant challenges. Urban officials have generally become more receptive to projects that make communities more walkable, advocates say. But robust public transportation remains rare, and persuading state and regional officials to prioritize limited transportation funding has proved tricky in independent-minded Texas. “There’s a struggle between the collective vision for the city and individual rights and desires that seems to be very pervasive in Texas,” said Dean Almy, the director of the urban design graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin (a corporate sponsor of the Tribune). Still, the appetite and potential for more walkability in Texas cities is encouraging to advocates. “I don’t think I’d want to be anywhere else,” Mr. Kennedy said. “To me, this is where the game is going to play out in the country. Personally, if I was in Seattle or Portland or one of these cities, I would just be another guy. Down here trying to make that change, it’s been exciting and interesting.”

Dallas
Texas
Congress for the New Urbanism
Urban Planning


In Biotech Brews, Questions of Consistency

Abstract: VACAVILLE, Calif. THE cancer drugs produced at Genentech ’s gleaming factory here are the vanguard of 21-century biotechnology. But the way the drugs are made is borrowed a bit from a more ancient industry of Napa Valley. Wine and biotech drugs are both made by growing cells, usually in stainless-steel tanks. But rather than using yeast to convert sugar to alcohol, biotechs use genetically engineered animal or bacterial cells to make proteins from nutrients. The process for both is part art, part science. Results can differ from factory to factory, or even between lots in a single site. While wine lovers savor the differences among vintages, patients could be hurt by inconsistencies in drugs. Such vagaries lie at the heart of a debate going on in Congress — whether pharmaceutical companies can be allowed to make generic, low-priced copies of the drugs originated by Genentech and other biotech companies. Genentech says the pharmaceutical companies should not be allowed, arguing that other companies could not replicate its drugs precisely because the process is so complex. Genentech says the Vacaville plant is one of the largest factories in the world making genetically engineered drugs using animal cells. The plant was built in the 1990s for more than $400 million and has tanks with a capacity of 144,000 liters (about 38,000 gallons) to produce the drugs Avastin, Rituxan and Herceptin for cancer and Xolair for asthma. These drugs, which are proteins, are made by splicing a human or other gene that has the recipe for the protein into another cell, creating a master bank for each drug. For simpler biotech drugs like insulin and growth hormone, bacterial cells are usually used. But for the more complex proteins made here, bacteria are not up to the task. So Genentech uses cells from Chinese hamster ovaries, which have become an industry standard. At Vacaville, scientists take a small vial of cells from the master bank and multiply them until they fill a steel vessel that is nearly two stories high and produces mass quantities of the drug. If all goes well, the process takes about three weeks. But everything doesn’t always go well because the cells normally grow inside hamster ovaries. “Any cell line, at any point in time, can go, ‘I’m tired,’ ” and stop growing, said Mark Fischer, a production specialist for Genentech. “You may not know why.” When the factory first opened, the cells for making Herceptin would not grow. Company scientists found that traces of tungsten were leaking into the vats from bearing seals, poisoning the broth. One cannot simply pour a few cells into a huge vat and wait for them to multiply. Rather, the finicky cells must acclimatize to larger and larger tanks. At this factory, the contents of the original vial are poured into a three-liter flask. When the cells fill that, they are transferred to a 20-liter steel tank. When that is filled, they are moved into vessels of 80 liters, 400 liters, 2,000 liters and finally 12,000 liters, or about 3,200 gallons. At each step, the cells are fed a secret sauce of sugars, amino acids, proteins and hormones like insulin. Inside the vessels, paddles stir the mix. All the manufacturing is done under strict sanitary conditions. Workers wear jumpsuits, gloves, booties and covers for their hair and beards. The cells and other ingredients are not exposed to the environment, but are pumped into the sealed vessels through hundreds of miles of pipes. When the 12,000-liter tank is full, the drug is separated from the cells, the other proteins made by the cells and the nutrient mix. This process isolates the desired protein based on its density, electric charge, molecular weight and chemical affinity. Once the protein is 99.9 percent pure, it is frozen and shipped to other plants for packaging. Subtle changes in conditions can change the drug. When Genentech transferred production of its psoriasis drug, Raptiva, from a 2,000-liter tank at a partner’s factory to its own 12,000-liter tank, tests showed that the drugs had changed, even though the same cell lines were used. The Food and Drug Administration required that Genentech conduct new clinical trials to show that the drug worked as well as the drug that had been made by the partner. That process delayed approval of Raptiva by nearly two years. Congress is considering legislation that will allow pharmaceutical companies to make “biogenerics,” or “biosimilars,” for much lower prices than the original biotech drugs, which can cost patients and insurers tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Genentech executives argue that generic drug companies could never precisely replicate biologics, as these drugs are called, as they can simpler pills made from chemicals. “The minute you change the cell line, you’re going to make a different product,” said Robert L. Garnick, senior vice president for regulatory affairs, quality and compliance at Genentech. And as the case with Raptiva shows, the product can come out differently even using the same cell. Company executives say that makers of biogenerics should be required to conduct clinical trials on humans to prove their drugs are safe and effective. That requirement would increase the time and cost of taking the drugs to market. Companies that want to make biogenerics say that analytical techniques are becoming sophisticated enough to ensure that their drugs would be as safe and effective as the originals. Theresa L. Gerrard, a consultant to the Generic Pharmaceutical Association, said that biotechnology companies often tweak their processes but do clinical trials only if analytical tests show the drugs differ, she said. Moreover, she added, perfect replication is unnecessary because the drugs that Genentech produces also vary slightly from lot to lot. “We’re not asking for a lower standard,” Dr. Gerrard said. “We’re asking to use the standard that has been in place at the F.D.A. for 15 years.”

Biotechnology
Genetic Engineering
Drugs (Pharmaceuticals)
Genentech Inc


GTT ★

Abstract: Our quirky, discerning picks for the most interesting things to do around the state this week. BRYAN-COLLEGE STATION Homegrown Celebration Urban farming has become a way of life as people focus on buying locally and seeking artisanal food. A good entry point for current and future farmers is this year’s fourth annual Foodways Texas Symposium, hosted by Foodways Texas, the organization of scholars, chefs, journalists, restaurateurs, farmers, ranchers and other Texan locovores who celebrate the state’s diverse food cultures. Titled “Farm to Market 2014,” the weekend retreat, held at the new Agriculture and Life Sciences Complex on the Texas A&M University campus, will explore the complicated definitions of “local” and “organic” and host discussions on various Texas crops like grapefruits, olives, onions and wine. Dinners served by Todd Duplechan, the chef at the acclaimed Lenoir restaurant in Austin, and Sharon Hage, a Dallas farm-to-table food consultant, will set the bar for aspirational attendees. Texas A&M University, March 21-22, foodwaystexas.com . LUCKENBACH Muddy Buddies Hondo Crouch, the folklorist who was one of the buyers in 1970 of the ghost town of Luckenbach, population 3, had arachnophobia. Fortunately, the place was rife with mud daubers, wasps that commonly make their nests in tubular adobe-like mounds and stock them with spiders as food for their offspring. Mr. Crouch, who was an eccentric visionary who transformed Luckenbach into an outpost for ’70s progressive country pioneers like Ray Wylie Hubbard, Willie Nelson and Jerry Jeff Walker, welcomed the springtime arrival of mud daubers with an annual celebration. The event had fallen by the wayside but last year staff members at the Luckenbach dance hall resurrected it. They have added a people’s choice chili cook-off along with live music, billing it the Mud Dauber Rock’n Billy Chili Fest. The festivities return on Saturday, with featured performers like Dale Watson, whose new “Ameripolitan” genre combines rockabilly, western swing, honky-tonk and outlaw styles, and Billy Joe Shaver, who demonstrated his mastery of honky-tonk and outlaw at an array of recent South by Southwest shows. The chili cooks will also likely be seeking revenge against last year’s winner, whose recipe included — gasp! — beans. Luckenbach, March 22, 12 p.m., luckenbachtexas.com . TYLER Nature in Vivid Colors Billy Hassell is like Mother Nature’s stylist. In his paintings, Mr. Hassell, who was born in Dallas and lives in Fort Worth, dresses up the flora and fauna of his home state with vivid colors, clean lines and layered pattern work. For those who have been intrigued by his “Early Morning Flight,” the 20-foot mosaic on the floor of Terminal D in the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, there is “Illuminating Nature,” a Tyler Museum of Art exhibition open through this weekend. The solo survey encompasses 15 years of Mr. Hassell’s work with about 30 paintings and prints, including two landscape pieces — “Spring in East Texas” and “Alligator and Egret” — that reveal all the wonderful detail of the nearby piney woods. Tyler Museum of Art, March 21-23, tylermuseum.org. PALESTINE An Instrument’s Festival Twenty years ago, Jerry and Margaret Wright of Kennard were on a family vacation through Arkansas and Missouri when the sweet sounds of the Appalachian dulcimer struck a chord with them. Their son, Lloyd, mastered the dulcimer, a fretted, stringed lap instrument, and in 2000, won the National Mountain Dulcimer Championship. Two years later, the Wrights started the Palestine Old Time Music and Dulcimer Festival, one of the last true mom-and-pop regional music events. The workshops and performers come together somewhat spontaneously, but there is one thing fest-goers know for sure: A portable chair is a must for the many jam sessions that will break out during the weekend. Museum for East Texas Culture, March 27-29, oldpalmusic.com. SAN ANTONIO The Grass is Greener The Valero Texas Open PGA tournament enjoyed a banner year in 2013, after the appointment of Greg Norman, the great Australian golfer, as manager of the event, and this year the roster looks even stronger, with seven players in the top 50, including Zach Johnson, the 2007 Masters champion; Jim Furyk, winner of the 2003 U.S. Open; and Jimmy Walker, the Boerne resident who has won three of his first eight tourneys of the 2014 tour. TPC San Antonio, March 24-30, valerotexasopen.com. SMITHVILLE A Dash to Goliath Awaiting runners at the end of Saturday’s 3.7-mile Warrior Dash course in Smithville, part of the world’s largest obstacle race series, is Goliath, the newest and largest obstacle, which requires competitors to scale a structure of imposing height, walk a balance beam over a bubbling pool of water and then plummet to the ground before enjoying the complimentary cold beer at the finish line. Rocky Hill Ranch, March 22, 8:30 a.m., warriordash.com .

Texas
Restaurant
Museum
San Antonio
College Station TX


Lost: Pink Dog With Sneakers. Return to West Hollywood.

Abstract: WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — This city’s new dog is certainly conspicuous: fluorescent pink, weighing as much as a grown man, wearing sneakers on his paws and a water bottle strapped to his back. But for two weeks now, the nameless dog — a statue that was installed along Santa Monica Boulevard here — has been missing. It was stolen off its stand in the hours after the city’s annual gay pride parade on June 9. The theft sounds impossible not to notice, with people moving a bright pink dog from the middle of a bustling city boulevard in the middle of the night. Yet, so far, the Sheriff’s Department here, notwithstanding its reputation for being fairly effective when it comes to fighting crime, has turned up no leads and no suspects in the case. There has not even been a reported sighting of the missing hound. “I would say how can you miss it?” said John Duran, a West Hollywood city councilman. “It’s 200 pounds, pink and wearing tennis shoes.” He paused and considered what this city, famous for its gay night life, looks like on most weekends, and particularly during the gay pride celebration. “But that would be consistent with what you might see on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood,” he added. At first, the case of the missing pink dog appeared to have all the hallmarks of a drunken college prank or the antics of a West Hollywood denizen who, after a few drinks the day of the parade, thought it would make a particularly distinctive feature for his or her pool. If the dog was returned unharmed, city officials promised to ask no questions. As days have dragged into weeks, however, no one has stepped forward, and the missing dog has become a bit of an embarrassment. Its stand remains empty on the median in the middle of the road, beside four other identical red and pink dog statues, an irritating reminder of the crime every time a deputy’s car drives by. “We have no leads, no sightings, no suspect information,” said Lt. Michael White of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department station in West Hollywood. He could not even say when exactly the statue disappeared — sometime between midnight and 8 a.m. the day after the parade, he said. “Something like this is pretty rare,” Lieutenant White said. “But it was a Monday after midnight. Things slow down. There aren’t as many people around.” So far, at least, the authorities have not resorted to posting “missing dog” signs on telephone poles. “I’m very surprised it hasn’t come back,” said Andrew Campbell, the city’s cultural affairs administrator. “We assumed someone had been celebrating a little too hard and didn’t quite realize what they were doing. But it’s starting to leave the realm of a prank and move into the grand theft.” Created by William Sweetlove, a Belgian artist, and installed just in time for the annual parade, the dog and its accompanying statues were designed to convey the artist’s concerns about climate change; as the planet continues to grow warmer, dogs might need shoes to keep from burning their feet. Mr. Campbell realized that the gay pride parade might not be the safest spot for the statues. (West Hollywood’s parade, like many others across the country, has in recent years become more booze-soaked, skin-baring fiesta than political rally.) He stood guard by the statues during the parade to make sure they were not harmed. And they were a hit with picture-snapping revelers, he said. But when he drove by the next day, one was missing. Having watched workers install the statues, Mr. Campbell said it would have taken two or three people to move one. Mr. Campbell said workers would now do an additional “thing” to secure the dogs to their podiums. He would not go into specifics about exactly what that thing would be. “I kind of don’t want to get into that,” he said. “I don’t want to help people understand how they, too, could abscond with a dog.”

Dog
Parade
Robbery
Art
West Hollywood California


Home Prices Still Rising at 5% Annual Pace

Abstract: Steady job growth, low mortgage rates and tight inventories helped spur rising home prices in October, and a stronger job market lifted consumer confidence in December, separate reports showed on Tuesday. The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index rose 5.5 percent in the 12 months ending in October, up from a 5.4 percent pace in September. Home values have climbed at a roughly 5 percent pace during much of 2015, as strong hiring has bolstered a real estate market still recovering from a housing crash that led to a recession eight years ago. Rising demand, however, has not been met with an increase in sales listings, causing prices to rise much faster than inflation or wages this year. This could limit the number of first-time buyers coming into the market next year. Still, many buyers are also benefiting from 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages averaging less than 4 percent, making it cheaper to borrow. Mortgage rates have historically been closer to 6 percent. But the gains in home prices have been uneven. San Francisco, Denver and Portland, Ore., led with reported increases of 10.9 percent over the last year. Prices in Chicago and Washington rose less than 2 percent. The 20-city index remains 11.5 percent below its peak in July 2006, and metro areas such as Cleveland, Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis and Tampa are still significantly below their prerecession highs. The Case-Shiller index covers roughly half of the homes in the United States. The index measures prices compared with those in January 2000 and creates a three-month moving average. In another report, the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index rose to 96.5 this month from November’s revised 92.6. Americans were more optimistic about current conditions and about the future. “As 2015 draws to a close, consumers’ assessment of the current state of the economy remains positive, particularly their assessment of the job market,” said Lynn Franco, the group’s director of economic indicators. More than two-thirds of consumers said they expected interest rates to rise over the next year, the highest share since August 2013. On Dec. 16, the Federal Reserve raised the short-term interest rate it controls for the first time since 2006. Hiring has been healthy in 2015. Employers added an average of 210,000 jobs a month through November. Unemployment has stayed at a seven-year low of 5 percent for two straight months.

Case Shiller Home Price Index,S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Indices


Gene Fullmer, a Brawling Middleweight Champion, Dies at 83

Abstract: Gene Fullmer, the middleweight boxing champion known for a brawling style and an ability to shake off punches and remembered for his title fights with Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio, died on Monday in Taylorsville, Utah. He was 83. His death was confirmed by his nephew Larry Fullmer, who told The Associated Press that his uncle had dementia and, most recently, a bacterial infection. Fullmer was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, N.Y., in 1991. At his death, he was cited by its executive director, Edward Brophy, as “one of the shining stars of the Golden ’50s boxing scene.” Fullmer reigned when fight clubs abounded and Friday night fights were a television staple. One of three brothers who fought professionally, he won the middleweight championship at Madison Square Garden in January 1957 by unanimous decision over Robinson, often cited as boxing’s most brilliant pound-for-pound fighter. In a bout described by The New York Times as a “bitter, savage fight,” Fullmer kept moving forward, battering Robinson with both hands, and knocked him down in the seventh round. Robinson sought to tie up Fullmer in clinches, biding his time for a knockout blow that never came. Robinson won the title back by knocking out Fullmer in the fifth round of their May 1957 bout. “Robinson’s best punch was any punch he could hit you with,” the website Boxing.com once quoted Fullmer as saying. “But I felt without doubt that if I could beat him once, I could surely beat him again. I felt that if I put more pressure on him, I could maybe knock him out. “In the fifth, I moved in with my left hand maybe six inches lower than it should have been, and he slipped that left hook over the top and caught me right on the chin. All at once the lights went out. I had never been knocked out.” There was more to come in the battle for middleweight supremacy among Fullmer, Robinson and Basilio. Fullmer became a champion again when he stopped Basilio in the 14th round in August 1959 to capture the vacant National Boxing Association crown, Robinson having been stripped of the title for failing to defend it. Fullmer stopped Basilio in the 12th round in a June 1960 title defense. Fullmer retained his title on a draw with Robinson in December 1960 and won a unanimous decision over him in March 1961 in their fourth and final fight. He lost the title to Dick Tiger in 1962 and retired after losing to him in August 1963. Fullmer won 55 bouts (24 by knockout), lost six times and fought three draws. He was born on July 21, 1931, in West Jordan, Utah. His father, Lawrence, known as Tuff, who did some amateur boxing, and his mother, Mary, named him for the heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. When Gene was 6, his father gave him a pair of boxing gloves, and he was fighting in youth exhibitions at 8. After boxing as an amateur, he turned pro in 1951. Aside from his boxing career, Fullmer operated a mink-breeding ranch in Utah. He also joined his brothers — Don, a middleweight, and Jay, a lightweight and welterweight — in operating a boxing gym. Don Fullmer died in 2012, and Jay died five days before Gene. Information on Gene Fullmer’s survivors was not immediately available. Fullmer once told The Deseret News of Salt Lake City that he “wouldn’t change a minute” if he had to do everything over again. But, he added, “I might have ducked Robinson’s punch in that second fight.”


Odd Fox News Interview Lifts Reza Aslan’s Biography on Jesus

Abstract: Reza Aslan, the author of “Zealot,” a provocative new biography of Jesus, has found an inadvertent ally in generating book publicity: Fox News. In an interview on Friday that was by turns bizarre and uncomfortable, Lauren Green, a host from “Spirited Debate,” a weekly Fox News webcast, pressed Mr. Aslan on the question of why , as a Muslim, he would choose Jesus as his subject. “You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?” Ms. Green asked. “Well, to be clear,” Mr. Aslan said, his eyebrows lifting up in surprise, “I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament, and fluency in biblical Greek, who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades, who also just happens to be a Muslim.” The nearly 10-minute video clip quickly entered the Internet bloodstream on Saturday after it was posted on Buzzfeed with the irresistibly clickable headline, “Is This The Most Embarrassing Interview Fox News Has Ever Done?” Since then, the Buzzfeed page featuring the video has been viewed nearly four million times. Mr. Aslan quickly amassed an additional 5,000 Twitter followers. On Monday, Random House, Mr. Aslan’s publisher, said the interview had clearly helped the book: in two days, sales increased 35 percent. On Friday, “Zealot” was in the No. 8 spot on Amazon.com, the nation’s biggest seller of books; by Sunday, it had hit No. 1. Random House is rushing to meet the surge in demand for the book. On Monday, the publisher ordered 50,000 copies, bringing the total to 150,000 copies in print by the end of the week. An investigation of the historical Jesus, “Zealot” has been praised by many reviewers since its publication on July 16. In a review in Tablet magazine, Adam Kirsch called “Zealot” a “coherent and often convincing portrait of who Jesus was and what he wanted.” But some conservative critics have suggested that the book is not a work of scholarship, but merely “an educated Muslim’s opinions about Jesus and the ancient Near East,” as John S. Dickerson, an opinion columnist, wrote on FoxNews.com last week. The reaction to the book has spread to Mr. Aslan’s Amazon page: on The Atlantic Wire, Alexander Nazaryan pointed out that browsing through dozens of one-star reviews on Amazon revealed that “plenty of readers of what seems to be a fundamentalist/Evangelical persuasion are furious that a Muslim published a book about Christianity’s origins.” The book was already selling steadily before the FoxNews.com interview on Friday. Since the release of “Zealot,” Mr. Aslan has hit the publicity circuit, discussing the book on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and “Weekend Edition” on NPR. “Zealot” had its debut at No. 4 on the New York Times print hardcover best-seller list that will appear in print on Aug. 4. In a telephone interview, Mr. Aslan said that in three weeks of his book tour, he had received an “overwhelmingly positive” response to his work, and that it was anything but an attack on Christianity. “I hope that people recognize that your faith, as Jesus said, is supposed to be built on a rock, not on sand,” he said. “I guess my message is: Relax.” Mr. Aslan was born in Iran, moved to the United States with his family as a child and later earned degrees from Santa Clara University, Harvard and the University of Iowa. He is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. Book Passage, a bookstore with two outlets in the Bay Area, hosted Mr. Aslan for a signing last week. Karen West, the director of events, said more than 250 people attended it. But the Fox News interview, she said, has exposed the book to consumers who aren’t regular book buyers. “It’s moved now out of the NPR realm and it’s gotten into the broader culture,” she said. A spokeswoman for Fox News did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment. Mr. Aslan said that after reading Mr. Dickerson’s essay on FoxNews.com, he was prepared for a similar line of attack from Ms. Green. He was so eager to promote the book on Fox News that his publisher tried — in vain — to secure an interview spot on “Fox & Friends,” a morning show. “I’ll be perfectly honest — I’m thrilled at the response that people have had to the interview,” Mr. Aslan said. “You can’t buy this kind of publicity.”

Reza Aslan
Books
Christianity
Fox News Channel
Jesus Christ
Islam


Double Duty: Guarding the Art, and Explaining It

Abstract: “Are you the person that we can ask questions? Or are you just a guard?” If the visitor’s words sting Jeffrey Martinez, he doesn’t show it. After a summer protecting works by the artist James Turrell at the Guggenheim Museum, he has grown accustomed to roving throngs of the baffled. Fielding questions is not his job as a guard, but the questioners don’t know that. “They’ll come and say: ‘What’s going on? What is this?’ ” he said. “And they’ll either shrug and move on, or stay and be interested.” The dark secret of this acclaimed show , which closes on Wednesday, is that it has mystified a lot of people, whether or not they admit it. Many don’t understand what Mr. Turrell’s quadrilaterals of light projected onto dark backgrounds are about — and why this show is such an art event. You see it in the visitors’ eyes, searching the room for the likewise perplexed. Some, spotting a guard like Mr. Martinez, sidle up with questions. He always answers — based on his own reading and on insight foraged from his colleagues. It was not the first time I’d seen guards at this exhibition, which is short on explanatory labels, do the same. They were, after all, the only things standing between many visitors and incomprehension — or in the case of at least one, regretful musing about the number of beers he could have had for the price of admission. “If they’re going to pay $22 to get in, they might as well know what it is,” Mr. Martinez said. But he brings to his brief and modest answers empathy not just for the visitor but also for the artist. After all, he, too, is an artist — a lifelong painter who knows that his own work is unlikely ever to require guarding but who has lived for art all the same. Tall and thick as a linebacker, with eyes that swell in conversation and just a dusting of buzz-cut hair, Mr. Martinez, 47, was standing on a recent Tuesday in the museum’s High Gallery, beside a Turrell work titled “Ronin, ” a vertical corridor of light whose depth and source are its alluring mysteries. One by one, the visitors came, saw, became confused and, very often, sought the guard’s guidance. An elderly man who wished to be identified only as Martin walked in and, failing to notice the illuminated strip, pointing instead toward an empty wall, asked, “Is this part of the exhibit?” Mr. Martinez redirected the man’s eyes toward the light, and Martin walked off to stand before it, dutifully communing. “This one I don’t get,” he mumbled. Martin was there, he said, because of a friend who gets on his nerves. The friend always finds everything great, wonderful, amazing. Martin thus avoids whatever the friend praises. The friend disliked the Turrell show, which made Martin think, “This one must be good.” Now Martin walked back to Mr. Martinez. “So it’s an opening?” he asked, wondering where the light was coming from. Reassured that it was, Martin now declared that he’d understood all along: “My perception isn’t usually that clear, but it was immediately clear that it was a hole in the wall,” he said. Not everyone needs to understand. “I wasn’t trying to get it; I was trying to experience it,” said Carol Hoffman, 73, a mixed-media artist from Princeton, N.J. For her, shared bafflement was the point: “We’re with all these other people, trying to figure it out.” The 4 p.m. rotation came, and Mr. Martinez moved to another room. He watched adults make shadow puppets in the projected light of another Turrell piece. A Frenchwoman strolled past, putting a spin on the exhibition as “très, très, très minimaliste.” Three Chilean women approached Mr. Martinez and in Spanish asked the “significación” of a work that looked a lot like someone had turned on a home projector without firing up the laptop. Mr. Martinez was careful to begin, “There’s no specific meaning, but my own interpretation is ... ” He offered his standard Turrell spiel: This particular artist’s method is to play with your perceptions. Image Mr. Martinez at home in Queens. Credit Joshua Bright for The New York Times No one wants to be the person who doesn’t understand, and a moment later one of the women declared herself enthralled: “Beautiful, precious, very exciting!” she said. Mr. Martinez cherishes these occasions to rescue a bad encounter with art. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to find a better job than what I have,” he said. On work nights he heads to his two-bedroom apartment in the Murray Hill neighborhood in northern Queens. He grabs a bite, changes into his paint-speckled jeans and puts brush to canvas until around 11. His wife, Ana, isn’t crazy about the door to their apartment opening right into an easel, nor about their dining table being covered (only Monday to Friday, Mr. Martinez insists) by a plastic tarp, a wooden box of paints and a jug of brushes. But they have found an accommodation. While he paints, she watches TV shows on her iPad or Skypes with her sister. Mr. Martinez, talented if not quite Guggenheim-talented, has a wide range. He may paint a still life of fruit on a table. Or a nude woman asleep on a bed beside her guitar and the sheet music to a Bach fugue. Or, in the case of his current undertaking, an interlocking assortment of human organs. “I do Surrealism, Photo Realism and abstract,” he said. He says his mother identified him as an artist when he was a toddler, and only a crayon and paper would quiet him. As a young man, reared mostly in Woodside, Queens, he took classes at the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. It was in the late 1980s, he said, that he began to burrow his own tiny, meandering tunnel through the art world. He went after art the way he would any honest, working-class profession. The goal wasn’t to be heralded, but paid. The tunnel led him to a Manhattan variety store where Mr. Martinez custom-painted people’s mothers and golden retrievers onto T-shirts. It led him to a job painting reproductions of famous art for offices and decorators. It led him to his roots in Puerto Rico, where he spent much of the 1990s painting more T-shirts. It led him back to New York and to drawing cartoon backgrounds, which got him a credit as a color stylist for the animated series “Courage the Cowardly Dog.” In hard times, he said, it led him away from art, as with the months he spent working security at Sears. During that stint, a work-drained soul prevented him from producing a single painting. Working at the Guggenheim, by contrast, impels him to paint. He figures he’s painted nine substantial works in his two years at the museum. A few of the other guards are artists as well. Sometimes they huddle with their phones and share photos of their work. Mr. Martinez said the modern works surrounding him at the museum have convinced him to relax a bit and roam from his realist roots. He consults Dalí, Bosch and Miró for inspiration for his attempts at Surrealism; he reads André Breton, author of the Surrealist Manifestos . Mr. Martinez sells his artwork when the chance arises, using a simple pricing scheme: a dollar per minute of labor. Life has trained him to keep track of the time he spends on every activity. He clocks in and out when he paints, just as he does with other work. You have to wonder: standing amid recognized pieces of art day after day, does he not dream of his paintings hanging beside them? “I wouldn’t presume,” he said. “Maybe after I’m dead. If it ends up in a museum, beautiful. But if not, I did the thing I love to do.” What he does covet is a badge. He recently applied for a new job at the Guggenheim, as a guide. That job brings formal training in explaining art. In some ways, the jobs are similar: guides also guard and vigilantly warn, “Keep three feet away, please.” But there are differences. The first one that came to Mr. Martinez’s mind was that guides get to wear a badge that says, “Ask me about the art.”

Art
Jeffrey Martinez
Museum
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum