The Nonviolent Revolutionary

In late 2005, a law professor named Chibli Mallat announced that he was running for president of Lebanon. Since no one had ever actually mounted a presidential campaign and taken it to the public, people were by turns surprised, dismissive, energized, and bedazzled.

“Chibli Mallat is running for president of Lebanon, and I support him all the way,” gushed New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof as the campaign progressed. “[He is] exactly the new kind of leader that the Arab world needs.”

A few months later, though, Lebanon was at war with Israel, and the would-be election was history. But Mallat continued working behind the scenes for his ideals of nonviolent change. These days, he teaches in the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, where he is a Presidential Professor and “a unique combination of scholar and activist,” says Hiram Chodosh, former dean of the U’s law school.

“Intrinsically, he’s a scholar. But he’s driven at times into the public sphere because he cares so deeply about the conditions around him,” says Chodosh, who stepped down as dean earlier this year to become president of Claremont McKenna College in California.

Since 2007, Utah has been the safe haven where Mallat can teach, write, and direct Right to Nonviolence, an organization he founded with this mission: to advance constitutionalism, justice, and nonviolence across the Middle East. He still maintains a law office in Beirut that also houses and provides legal counsel for Amnesty International’s Middle East regional office, which he helped establish in 1999.

Chodosh calls Mallat “the leading expert on Middle Eastern law in the world,” but it is “aggressive nonviolence” that now captures Mallat’s intellectual and human rights passions, as well as his attentions as an author. He describes his latest book in progress, The Philosophy of Nonviolence, as “a manifesto for the Middle East nonviolent revolution.”

He holds onto his beliefs, even as the increasingly violent and sectarian war in Syria has spilled over into his native Lebanon.

“They say if you think you understand Lebanon, you haven’t been studying it long enough,” is the way former British ambassador Frances Guy described the beleaguered country that is Mallat’s first home. The sentiment is also sometimes expressed as “If you’re not confused by Lebanese politics, then the subject has not been explained to you properly.”

The small country is the most religiously diverse in the Middle East, a sectarian stew of Sunni and Shia Muslims, Maronite Catholics, and Druze. Lebanon is also home to hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinian refugees and now an estimated million Syrians who have fled that country’s ongoing war. Sandwiched between Syria and Israel, and home during the 1970s to the Palestinian Liberation Organization and since then to Hezbollah, Lebanon has been the unlucky place where all these players have duked it out, aided at times by homegrown militias.

“My generation’s youth was stolen by violence, and I think that marked me a lot,” says Mallat, who was 15 years old when initial clashes between Palestinians and right-wing Christian Phalangists turned into a full-scale religious war.

Although some of his friends eventually joined the fighting, Mallat never did. “It might have been cowardice,” he says, but then he offers an alternate explanation by way of a story. During the early months of the war, the family’s house was robbed, and the only thing stolen was the gun he occasionally used to hunt birds. When he discovered this, he says, “in a way it was a great relief, and I couldn’t touch a gun afterwards, and certainly not to shoot a bird or anything else.”

He realized “sort of a sense of the ugliness of violence, even against poor birds, or perhaps especially against birds,” he says. “Retrospectively, I see the reaction that would guide my thinking, to take nonviolence as what I call now ‘the midwife of history’ more seriously.” (The phrase is pure Mallat: an unspoken literary reference to Karl Marx’s declaration that violent revolution has been the midwife of history.)

The Mallats were cultured and well-connected. His grandfather and uncle were celebrated poets; his father, a lawyer, served as a cabinet minister and first president of Lebanon’s constitutional court, and helped establish the first Arab human-rights organization.

 

Chibli Mallat answers questions at a news conference during his 2005-06 campaign for Lebanon’s presidency. (Photo courtesy Chibli Mallat)

Chibli Mallat answers questions at a news conference during his 2005-06 campaign for Lebanon’s presidency. (Photo courtesy Chibli Mallat)

When fighting intensified in Beirut in the mid-1970s, the family moved to its second home in the mountains. When the war followed them there, they moved to Paris. After Mallat’s mother and father returned to Beirut, he and his older sister stayed on in Paris to finish high school, living on their own. He remembers it as a difficult and thrilling time. “It was an extraordinary intellectual moment,” he says. “I learned so much that was mind-opening, of extraordinary dimension.” His introduction to the work of the great French philosophers particularly was a revelation.

During a lull in the civil war in the late 1970s, he moved back to Beirut to study law at the Université Saint-Joseph and, simultaneously, English literature at Lebanese American University. Then Israel invaded Lebanon, the pro-Israeli Lebanese president was assassinated, and nearby shelling shook the law school building during Mallat’s final exams. On a whim, he had already applied to a master’s program in international and comparative law at Georgetown University in the United States, and deteriorating conditions in Lebanon convinced him to attend. Seven years later, he also received a doctorate in Islamic law from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

By then, he was itching to take on some of the world’s most egregious dictators, not by force, but in the courts, through human-rights trials that eventually became his hallmark. “Dictatorship is a crime against humanity,” Mallat says. “Every dictator in the world should know that he is going to be tried.”

In London, he befriended many of Iraq’s exiled opposition leaders, helping found the International Committee for a Free Iraq in 1991, and later INDICT, a group that built a war crimes case against Saddam Hussein. A year before the United States invaded Iraq, Mallat helped launch the Democratic Iraq Initiative, calling for global pressure to force Saddam to step down, in lieu of an invasion.

The idea was to promote opposition leaders, cut off transportation routes for the country’s military and intelligence, pursue Saddam’s indictment for war crimes, and deploy human rights monitors during the transition that followed. The initiative “was very close to being implemented,” Mallat recollects. “It ended up with me meeting with [U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense] Paul Wolfowitz in his office two weeks before the war and convincing him that the alternative [to invasion] was better.” In the end, of course—in part, Mallat says, because the Arab League wouldn’t go on record in favor of it—the initiative was dropped. “We would have gotten rid of Saddam with far less violence,” he says. “It would have been an extraordinary model of change in the Middle East.”

Justice, but without violence. Even when Saddam was tried in 2005 and 2006 for crimes against humanity, Mallat opposed the death penalty.

Picture Mallat in his office at the U’s law school: As he talks, he runs his fingers over a necklace of beads. They might be Muslim prayer beads. Or Catholic rosary beads. A man from Lebanon could be either of those religions or a dozen others. Actually, Mallat says with a smile, the beads are purely secular: Holding them helps him not bite his fingernails.

In a country rife with religious animosities, Mallat is pointedly nonsectarian. He was raised Maronite Catholic but, he says, “was never devout.” He is an expert on Muslim law and is admired among Shia Muslims for both his book about Iraqi cleric Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr and a successful lawsuit against Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi on behalf of Shia imam Musa al-Sadr, who disappeared in Libya in 1978. (The lawsuit verdict was a symbolic victory, since Gaddafi never traveled to Lebanon for the trial.) Mallat is also friends with principal members of the Syrian opposition, most of them Sunni, and is close to Lebanon Druze leader Walid Jumblatt.

In addition to the high-profile cases against Saddam and Gaddafi, Mallat also was one of three lawyers to bring charges against former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The case against Sharon and several members of a Lebanese Christian militia group was tried in a Belgian court and prosecuted by Mallat on behalf of survivors of the 1982 massacre of at least 1,300 people in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. The court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in 2003, but a change in Belgian law, disallowing such lawsuits unless they involved Belgian citizens, later prompted a Belgian appeals court to reject the lawsuit.

Chibli Mallat, who is pointedly nonsectarian, runs his fingers through beads to keep his hands busy. (Photo by Brian Nicholson)

Chibli Mallat, who is pointedly nonsectarian, runs his fingers through beads to keep his hands busy. (Photo by Brian Nicholson)

Rami Khouri, a syndicated columnist and director of a public policy institute at the American University of Beirut, calls Mallat “extremely bold and dynamic and courageous,” for his efforts such as the Sharon case. “Chibli has always been that person who challenges conventional thinking,” Khouri says.

In the mid-2000s, Mallat became a key figure in the movement known as the Cedar Revolution, a nonviolent attempt to overthrow both the nearly 30-year occupation of Lebanon by Syria’s al-Assad family and the presidency of Syrian-backed Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. On March 14, 2005—exactly a month after the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri (an assassination many blamed on Syria)—a million Lebanese (a quarter of the country’s population) marched peacefully through Beirut. Among the thousands of families waving flags were Mallat, his wife, Nayla Chalhoub Mallat, and their two sons.

Fourteen-thousand Syrian troops did indeed pull out a month later, but the opposition continued to complain that Syria still pulled the strings in Lebanon. Mallat’s unorthodox run for the presidency (in Lebanon, the president is chosen by the Parliament from a short list of sectarian and military leaders) was an attempt, as Mallat says, to “remove the dictator” and to set up a special tribunal to investigate Hariri’s assassination.

Trudi Hodges, executive director of Right to Nonviolence, says it was an innovative move. “He launched—really for the first time in the Middle East— this media-savvy and somewhat edgy campaign staffed by youths and others of all religions and political affiliations,” she says. “He developed a detailed platform and ran a modern, professional campaign, and encouraged other candidates to do the same.”

Mallat gave up his bid for the presidency in the summer of 2006 as Hezbollah attacked Israel (an attack Mallat had opposed). He then moved with his family to the United States, where he had secured a teaching job at Princeton University. He has since taught at Harvard and Yale universities, and the University of Virginia. He has also taught at Beirut Islamic University and is still on the faculty of Université Saint-Joseph.

At the University of Utah, in addition to teaching, he has been senior adviser to the Global Justice Project: Iraq, a legal think tank that has worked with the Iraqi government and judiciary to bring about legal reform. This year, he will direct the school’s Global Justice Think Tank with selected U law students. This past summer, he traveled to Libya, where he attended a conference aimed at reconciling Islamic law and international human-rights standards, and to Yemen, to help write that country’s constitution.

Most of his work, says Right to Nonviolence’s Hodges, “isn’t the type of work that necessarily captures the public imagination or garners headlines, but the impact may be far more reaching if one is advising on constitutional solutions, for example, or litigating a case of crimes against humanity that might serve as a precedent for later work.”

Nonviolence is an enigma, according to Mallat. “I find myself the philosophical disciple of Christ, whilst showing that Christ was wrong, as well,” he says. “Absolute nonviolence can only happen during a revolution.” After that, it’s necessary to adopt the rule of law—and the law, he says, “is inherently violent.” He points, for example, to its insistence on locking up (or sometimes even killing) criminals. It’s a point of view that may incense some readers, but Mallat says he is eager to have that debate.

At heart, he’s a philosopher. It is “philosophy, not law or any other discipline, which stands at the apex for those of us who seek in the same inevitable breath to understand and live their surrounding world as revolutionary change,” he writes in the introduction to his new book.

In between his trip to the Mideast and the beginning of the 2013-14 school year, Mallat spent most of his days working on the book, spreading out all his papers and reference books across the family’s dining room table for weeks on end.

He hopes the book will help the Middle East take the best of the Arab Spring and move forward. Of course, he says with the slightest grin, “everybody who writes a book thinks that it’s the one book that will change the course of human history.”

“It’s good to think that,” he adds. “So you put yourself to a high test.”

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City-based freelance journalist and playwright and a frequent contributor to Continuum.


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At Home in the Trees

Nalini Nadkarni, who describes herself as “a small brown woman,” has been pulled aside in airport security lines a couple dozen times as she has traveled the globe. For these special occasions, she has perfected what she calls her “Trees and Toiletries Lecture.”

As Transportation Security Administration agents rummage through her tote bag to make sure she’s not carrying any suspicious items, she begins her spiel. That lipstick? It gets its smooth texture from shea butter, derived from the seeds of a West African tree. The nail polish? Glossy because of tree fibers mixed with nitrocellulose. Those bandage strips? The adhesive on them comes from gum arabic, an exudate from trees belonging to the pea family.

She continues her lecture until the agents have finished searching—because even in the most unlikely situations, an alert scientist can always find an opportunity to talk about the topic she loves.

Nadkarni is a forest ecologist and, since the fall of 2011, the director of the University of Utah’s Center for Science and Mathematics Education. This is her mission now: to draw more K-12 teachers to science and math, to improve instruction on the college level, and to bring science and math to everyone else—to prisons and churches and halftime at Pac-12 football games.

The freedom to create such an ambitious center is what lured Nadkarni to the U, despite her initial reluctance. Utah, after all, is hardly the tropics, where she and her biologist husband, Jack Longino, have done the bulk of their field research. It’s not even the mossy, forested Pacific Northwest, where the couple had spent the previous two decades. Called “the queen of canopy research” by the National Geographic Society, Nadkarni is at home in the kind of lush foliage found hundreds of feet above the floor of the world’s rain and cloud forests. Utah, by comparison, is dry and sparse.

But in the summer of 2011, the couple packed up their labs and their furniture and moved to Salt Lake City, eager to start a new life at a research university dedicated to public outreach. In her office on the second floor of the University of Utah’s Aline Wilmot Skaggs Biology Building, she installed two hanging swings. If you climb onto them, look out the big windows, and squint, it’s the next best thing to being in a tree.

Her passion for science began in the towering maples in her parents’ front yard in Bethesda, Maryland. The trees were Nalini’s oasis, a place where she could read and watch birds and dream of tying a spool of thread to a squirrel’s tail so she could measure its journey across the branches. As she writes in her 2008 book Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connections to Trees, “Those perches aloft were my refuge from the world of homework, parental directives, and the ground-bound humdrum of the everyday.”

Her mother had been raised an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn, New York, and her father had been raised a Hindu in Thane, India. The family lived an Indian lifestyle in suburban Washington, D.C., sleeping on mats on the floor, eating without utensils, and subtly expecting more from Nalini’s three brothers than they did from her and her sister, she recollects. Trees were the place where Nalini could both escape and excel.

By the time she was nine years old, she figured she had learned something the rest of the world needed to know; so she wrote her first book, a hand-written, stapled tome called Be Among the Birds: My Guide to Climbing Trees.

Nalini Nadkarni, a forest ecologist, directs the University’s Center for Science and Mathematics Education.

Nalini Nadkarni, a forest ecologist, directs the University’s Center for Science and Mathematics Education.

By the time she entered college at Brown University in 1972, she was torn between careers in biology and dance. When she graduated, she wrangled two disparate internships: six months at the camp of a beetle taxonomist in Papua, New Guinea, followed by six months with a modern dance troupe in Paris. She came back home and drove a taxicab in Maryland while she sorted out her plans. She loved both science and dance—but science won out.

It was “the intellectual piece” that she found so enticing about field biology, she says. And the beetle taxonomist was 70 years old, proof that she’d be able to have a long career.

She enrolled in graduate school in the University of Washington’s College of Forest Resources, and it was during her first summer’s field course—in the tropical forests of Costa Rica—that she found herself drawn to what was so tantalizingly out of reach, hundreds of feet above the dark under-story. How did plants live up in the forest canopy without connection to the soil, she wondered. Were there insects and animals that spent their whole lives up there?

Her instructors had no answers for her, because almost no one had been up in the canopy to study it. She itched to get up there herself, but, as she writes, “Most of these trees have unnervingly tall trunks, without lower branches, and can sport spines, biting insects, and the occasional lurking snake. The tree-climbing skills I had developed in the benevolent trees of my childhood were useless.”

Everything changed when she met a student who was applying mountain-climbing techniques to reach the highest treetops. Suddenly, literally and figuratively, her world opened up.

She came back to graduate school intent on researching the differences between the temperate rain forest canopy of Olympic National Park and the tropical cloud forest canopy of Costa Rica. But when she approached her grad committee with her enthusiastic plan, they balked, reminding her there was plenty still to be discovered on the ground. So Nadkarni applied for, and received, a $50,000 grant on her own.

The result was a first-ever study of these forests’ epiphytes, the canopy-dwelling plants—orchids, ferns, mosses—that cover every available trunk and branch of rain and cloud forest trees. Her discovery, a cover article in the prestigious journal Science when she was still a student, was that these epiphytes are able to trap nutrients from rainfall, eventually forming a rich mat of soil underneath them as they cling to the tree. She also discovered that trees develop aerial roots to absorb these nutrients from the mats.

She has spent her research career since then studying the canopy, helping to classify and categorize epiphytes, learning how they interact with the rest of the forest, and beginning to learn what effect humans are having on them.

The first time Longino saw Nadkarni, she was bouncing down a road in Costa Rica. He was a University of Texas graduate student studying ants in a remote field site in the lowlands and was part of a field excursion to the cloud forest. They both say it was love at first sight.

After a few days, he had to return to his field site, located a day or two away in one of the most remote places in Costa Rica, but they continued to see each other as often as they could. Once, when the bush plane didn’t come on time, Longino hiked 20 miles across the rain forest to catch a bus to another airport to catch a plane that would take him to the village bus that would take him to the rickety school bus that would finally get him to Nalini.

Nalini Nadkarni speaks to prisoners at the Stafford gallery with more photos. Creek Correction Center in Aberdeen, Washington. (Photo by Benj and Sarah Drummond)

Nalini Nadkarni speaks to prisoners at the Stafford gallery with more photos. Creek Correction Center in Aberdeen, Washington. (Photo by Benj and Sarah Drummond)

Later, after they were married, he named an ant after her, and later still named ants after their two children. Asked if Nalini’s ant is beautiful, Longino—who is now a professor of biology at the University of Utah and a well-known taxonomist—admits “you’d have to be an ant lover to call any ant beautiful.” But her ant is a canopy ant. “And it’s rare.”

He says his first impression of his wife is still true today: a woman with energy, earnestness, and charisma. “It’s almost an aura,” says Longino, who is not typically a man who gushes. “And there’s not a political bone in her body. The normal politics that go on in any kind of organization, she’s somehow above it all. There’s nothing self-serving about anything she does. I watch her give talks, and it’s like people are ready to give their lives over to her. It’s some kind of Nalini evangelism.”

The search committee for the U’s Center for Science and Math Education was similarly smitten by Nadkarni. “She has this infectious enthusiasm that’s really hard to ignore,” says U biology professor Don Feener. “Her skills at outreach I think are really built into her bones.” Plus, adds U Interim Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Michael Hardman, “she’s one of the most respected plant biologists in the world.”

Nadkarni laments the widening gap between both nature and humans, and science and society. “People who do not have awareness or the understanding of the approach of science lack tools that can help them make good decisions about important issues such as human health and the environment,” she says. Science provides a way to take the glut of data and “interpret it wisely,” she says, “rather than basing decisions on religion or emotions, traditions or being swayed by political pressure.”

Most science researchers, though, “live in the country of Academia,” with their own customs and scientific language, she says. So she both encourages and instructs them on how to become “ambassadors” to the non-science community at large. Nadkarni herself has taken dancers, musicians, and Washington state legislators into the canopy, and has brought rap singers and urban youth together in the forest to make their own beats about trees.

Last year, she teamed up with the U’s Athletics Department to develop “Sports ’n Science,” a program designed to explain the science behind sports. During last fall’s football season, they launched their first home-game Jumbotron video, “The Science of the Punt,” featuring U math professor Peter Trapa and Ute punter Sean Sellwood discussing velocity vectors, angles, and psi. The video is now being shown at other Pac-12 schools.

And then, there is Treetop Barbie. Nadkarni first created the makeover of the iconic, perfectly coiffed fashionista in 1996. Students and volunteers round up the used dolls from thrift stores, dress them in climbing gear, binoculars and a hard hat, and sell them on the International Canopy Network website to raise funds for canopy research.

After an article about Treetop Barbie appeared in The New York Times in 2003, the doll’s manufacturer, Mattel, Inc. complained—until Nadkarni convinced them that 1) the money raised was for a good cause, and 2) she knows a lot of reporters.

Her most ambitious outreach has been to prisoners. In 2004, she began a collaboration with Dan Pacholke, then head of a small corrections center in Washington and now director of prisons for the state. Pacholke, who describes Nadkarni as “electric,” had already been interested in making the correctional facility more environmentally sustainable. With Nadkarni’s help, they were soon bringing in scientists to give lectures and hiring prisoners to compost, grow an organic garden, and raise endangered frogs, butterflies, and prairie plants to repopulate threatened ecosystems.

The prisoners were also hired to research the best ways to grow mosses— the same epiphytes that the floral industry was stripping illegally from the rain forest and that take multiple decades to regenerate in the wild.

Pacholke reports that these work opportunities have given the prisoners a sense of “meaning and purpose beyond themselves,” and although hard data on the program’s effect awaits long-term studies, indications are that the prisoners involved are less prone to act out.

With Washington’s Sustainability in Prisons Project as a model, Nadkarni this spring began the Utah Science in Prisons Project, with the goal of bringing science education, job training, conservation projects, and environmentally sustainable operations to correctional facilities in Utah. The project includes a lecture series at the Utah State Prison on science and math topics, featuring her colleagues from the U. Nadkarni has also been working with researchers and community partners who would like to involve prisoners in conservation research and restoration projects. And she is talking with prison authorities about developing sustainability projects at the correctional facilities.

She’s comfortable in front of prisoners and loggers, professors and TV cameras, but to see Nadkarni in her element, it’s best to watch a 1999 National Geographic special called Heroes of the High Frontier (a clip appears in her 2009 TED talk). There she is, outfitted with ropes and a harness, hoisting herself up an impossibly tall giant strangler fig in Costa Rica. Eager and free.

Fifty years after she began climbing the maple trees in her parents’ yard, this is what she still loves: the arms of a tree holding her, the mystery of nature about to unfold. She and Jack held their own private, unofficial wedding ceremony in a silk-cotton tree in Costa Rica. And someday, when she’s about to die, this is what she’ll want, she says: to be hoisted up into a tropical canopy and strapped to a tree branch, left to sway until she’s gone.

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City-based freelance journalist and playwright and a frequent contributor to Continuum.


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Nadkarni on life science in prison:

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The Impresario

Spacewar! is the silent movie of video games; it is the crank telephone, the biplane, the paper fan—every beginning that now seems laughably and sweetly from another era. In the mid-1960s, when he was getting his bachelor’s degree in engineering at the University of Utah, Nolan Bushnell played Spacewar! every chance he got. This entailed 1) stuffing wadded-up paper into the lock of the computer room in the Merrill Engineering Building so the door wouldn’t click shut, and 2) sneaking in late at night with his friends, when no one else was using the expensive mainframe computers.

This was a time in the history of computers when only the lucky and geeky—either in academe or research labs—could play a game on a screen, and the few games that existed consisted of a smattering of white dots. The idea of a video game industry seemed as improbable then as the idea of a computer small enough to sit on your lap. But his time at the U convinced Bushnell that the people who figured out how to combine computers and fun were going to make a whole lot of money.

Bushnell had three things going for him: He had big ideas, he loved to tinker, and he was a born entrepreneur. When he was 10, he built a rocket ship out of a bottle, a roller skate, and some alcohol, an endeavor that produced a startling but brief ball of flame in his parents’ Clearfield, Utah, garage. Around that same time, he was known in the neighborhood as the kid who could fix your broken TV; he lured his customers in by charging only 50 cents for opening up the set, and he then inflated the price of the vacuum tubes to get it running again.

His father, a cement contractor, died when Nolan was 15, and the teen briefly ran the business. After high school, he enrolled at Utah State University and then transferred to the University of Utah in 1963. There was no computer science department at the U when he arrived (computer graphics pioneer David C. Evans BA’49 PhD’53 was hired in 1965 to start the program), so Bushnell BS’69 got his degree in electrical engineering. Retired electrical engineering professor Carl Durney remembers that Bushnell, the man who eventually helped launch an entire industry, was on academic probation nearly every quarter at the U but was “conscientious and dependable” as secretary of the student branch of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Bushnell had always loved to play any kind of game, and during the summers when he was in college he worked on the midway at Lagoon amusement park, in Utah’s Davis County. After two summers, they made him manager of all the games. “It was my battlefield MBA,” he says now. When he was manning the booths, he learned how to convince customers to step right up and spend more money. As manager, he learned that if you streamlined the operation, using, say, four balls instead of six to knock down the pyramid of fake milk bottles, the park could make more dollars per hour. During his tenure there, he says, Lagoon’s midway games had the highest revenue-per-customer ratio in the country.

After the U, Bushnell went to work for the northern California electronics company Ampex, where he met Ted Dabney, a more seasoned engineer. Together, in their spare time, they created a video game called Computer Space, their version of Spacewar! They sold it to an arcade-game manufacturing company, Nutting Associates, which produced and distributed it in 1971—making it the first commercially sold, mass-produced video game in the world. It racked up $3 million in sales and made an appearance in the 1973 movie Soylent Green, as a symbol of the future. Still, it didn’t seem like the start of a revolution.

U alum Nolan Bushnell stands outside his Los Angeles home. He now has two companies that use computers to help kids and older adults with memorization.

University of Utah alumnus Nolan Bushnell stands outside his Los Angeles home. He currently has two companies that use computers to help children and older adults with memorization.

In the 2011 documentary film Something Ventured, Bushnell minces no words about his experience with Nutting: “These guys couldn’t find their butts with both hands. I said, ‘You know, I can run a company, and I won’t make any of the same mistakes these guys are doing.’ ” (Bushnell typically says what’s on his mind. Or, as venture capitalist Don Valentine says in the same documentary: “It takes a while to get used to Nolan.”)

Bushnell and Dabney decided to venture out on their own, and in 1972 they formally incorporated as Atari, named after a move in one of their favorite board games, Go!

The second arcade game they invented was Pong. Like Spacewar!, Pong wasn’t an original idea. Bushnell had seen a similar game called Odyssey, created by inventor Ralph Baer and produced by Magnavox, but, as Bushnell later said, “I didn’t think it was very clever.” So he asked his newly hired engineer Al Alcorn to make something better. (Magnavox later sued Atari; the case was settled out of court.)

Pong included a white square (the virtual ping pong ball), two vertical rectangles (the paddles), and a broken white line (the net). Unlike Odyssey, it included a score box and some squeaky, buzzy sounds. Bushnell and Alcorn then built a small wooden cabinet, attached a Laundromat-style coin box, and took it a few miles up the road to a Sunnyvale, California, bar called Andy Capp’s. The machine didn’t have a name on it, and there were no instructions. A few days later, they got a call from the bar: So many people had played the game, the coin box was jammed with $100 worth of quarters.

So the two engineers built 12 more Pongs. They sent 10 to other bars and one to the giant pinball manufacturer Bally. The company was kind of interested but wanted to see the profit reports first.

“They’ll think we’re lying. Shall we fudge the numbers?” is the way Atari veteran Curt Vendel describes Bushnell and Dabney’s reaction. Vendel, a computer games consultant who owns Legacy Engineering Group, runs the virtual atarimuseum.com and is the author of Atari Inc.: Business Is Fun. So they “skimmed off all the numbers” to make the profits look low enough to be believable, says Vendel. “And still Bally didn’t believe them.” Eventually, Atari itself ended up making and selling the game—a total of 38,000 worth of the arcade iterations and, later, 200,000 of the consumer version, Home Pong.

“I think the technology we developed at Atari made it possible for video games to develop maybe eight years faster than they would have,” Bushnell now says. He credits his engineering education at the U: “I understood not just the mathematics but the real world of how these circuits worked, so I could cut some corners.” It then became a matter of tricking the circuitry to go fast enough, he says, “and using parts way outside spec.” Thirteen years after graduating, Bushnell was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award, the highest honor bestowed by the U Alumni Association, in recognition of his accomplishments in the video-game industry.

Nolan Bushnell credits his engineering education at the University of Utah with speeding his development of video-game technology when he was with Atari.

U alum and Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell credits his engineering education at the University of Utah with speeding his development of video-game technology when he was with Atari.

If Spacewar! was the biplane of video games, Home Pong was the DC-3, available at last to everyone. In 1976, a year after Sears started selling Home Pong, Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications for $28 million. In 1977, Time magazine profiled him in a story called “The Hot New Rich.” By then, he owned a Mercedes, a 15-acre estate, a ski cabin, and a yacht, and he was divorced (and single again). That same year, he started Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater, with its arcades and relentless animatronics. Within five years, there were 200 of the restaurants in four countries. As Inc. magazine wrote in 2009, Bushnell “pretty much invented the whole cocky-young-entrepreneurial-genius pose.”

For all his derring-do and confidence, however, Bushnell’s journey since Chuck E. Cheese has been less spectacularly successful—at times beset by bad luck and bad timing. With the Great Video Game Crash of 1983, stocks in game companies plummeted, and Atari ended up dumping 14 truckloads of game cartridges and equipment into a landfill in New Mexico. By then, though, Bushnell had already left the company, his nine-year noncompete clause with Warner Communications was up, and he was ready to get to work on his new ideas. He started a business incubator called Catalyst Technologies and set about developing some forward-thinking products that made him a lot of money but never quite caught on.

There was ByVideo, a touch-screen electronic shopping system (sort of like online shopping before there was a widely used Internet). There was Axlon, which created AG Bear, a talking stuffed toy. There was Etak, a pre-GPS but not always reliable navigation system for cars that was the first to digitize the world’s maps. He sold Etak to Rupert Murdoch for $50 million.

And there was the Androbot. A fan of science fiction since he was a kid, Bushnell was convinced that personal robots could make life easier and more fun. At the 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, he introduced Bob and Topo, the robots he thought would start this revolution. He had financed the R&D costs himself by taking out personal loans from the investment arm of Merrill Lynch, secured by his Chuck E. Cheese stock. He planned to pay the loans back when Merrill Lynch took Androbot public. Then Merrill Lynch changed its mind on the IPO, Chuck E. Cheese stock plummeted, and Bushnell was deeply in debt. By 1985, he owed Merrill Lynch $23 million.

The ordeal with Merrill Lynch lasted 15 years. By the time it was over, Bushnell had lost his two houses (including an $8 million one in Paris) and all his other assets, he was sued by Merrill Lynch over a $500,000 promissory note, and he lost his backers for his next project, a newfangled restaurant arcade called E2000. He ended up renting a house in Los Angeles and starting over.

“My wife has said she’ll leave me if I ever try another robot,” he says about Nancy Nino, whom he married in 1977. So he has turned his fertile brain to other projects, including the fusion of computers and learning, and he has launched two more companies, Brainrush and Anti-Aging Games.

“We believe we can teach kids 10 times faster,” Bushnell says, with typical bravado, about Brainrush. “We do this through thalamic engagement,” he says, referring to the thalamus, the brain region involved with attention, sensory information, and memory. “Essentially, what you want to do is make sure the person is totally engaged, so that their mind is finetuned to be focused on learning.”

An early Atari console was used with television sets.

This early Atari console was used with TV sets.

In one game, for example, players master the location of the countries of South America by listening to the name of each country and then clicking on the map until they get it right several times in a row. With another, which is being tested on 100,000 school children, Bushnell guarantees, “Play 15 minutes a day for a month, and you’ll have a 2,000- word Spanish vocabulary.” The game itself creates the learning. There is no “exposition mode,” he says. “You put the kids right into test mode.”

Anti-Aging Games is designed to improve mental acuity. In the Pizza Game, for example, players are asked to remember a list of ingredients even during a distracting interlude where they try to click on colored balls. Bushnell says the game will be marketed largely to senior citizen facilities and through health-care professionals. His own mental acuity, he says, is doing well, and he gives credit in part to his eight children from his two marriages. “I’m trying to stay as current as I can, because I have all these kids, ages 18 to 42. …I can talk tech with any of my kids and generally stay ahead of them.”

He has also written his first book, Finding the Next Steve Jobs, a how-to (just published in February) about hiring and nurturing creative employees. Once upon a time, during the early days of Atari, Bushnell actually hired the real Steve Jobs, after Jobs had dropped out of Reed College. Later, after Jobs had left Atari, he came to Bushnell wondering if he would like to invest in a little home computer he and Steve Wozniak had come up with. But Bushnell and Atari had computer games on their minds, and turned Jobs down.

Bushnell isn’t one to dwell on the millions he might have made, or on failed ventures like his uWink Bistros. He opened three of the interactive entertainment restaurants with touch-screen terminals at each table, on which the diners (in the days before mobile handheld computers) could play video games with each other and watch short videos. But he was never able to franchise them. Then, too, there’s the uncertainty of whether the movie about his life, optioned by Paramount in 2008 and slated to be produced by and star Leonardo DiCaprio, will ever actually get produced.

Bushnell is never short of ideas for new products and companies, and he still likes to tinker. He has a small lab behind the garage of his Los Angeles home. It is filled with so many electronic parts, he says, “I basically could probably build the space shuttle if I had to.”

Four decades after Atari, and at age 70, he is still looking to create the next big thing.

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City-based freelance writer and playwright and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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The Groucho Marxist

Here comes Sam Wilson, carrying a wild pig.

He plops the pig, which is mustard-colored and plastic, on a platform in the center of his classroom. It is the beginning of the 2012 Fall Semester, and the beginning of Wilson’s 35th year teaching at the University of Utah, and he is here to show his students how to draw.

Today the topic is triangulation, the technique of drawing, for example, a pig’s head by sketching a series of smaller and smaller triangles instead of the object’s natural curves. It’s a technique that will help the students draw what they actually see rather than what they assume they see, and the result is often messy. That’s okay, Wilson tells the students. “Be sloppy. Leave footprints. Show me you were alive when you drew it.”

Before they begin at their easels, he demonstrates at his own. “I’m going to do a couple of brief drawings,” he tells them, then pauses before he delivers his next line: “I’m going to draw underwear.” He pauses again, waiting to see if they’ve gotten his joke. This is quintessential Wilson; if there’s a pun to be made, he’ll make it, rounding it off with a smile that looks something like a grimace.

The students stand around him in a semicircle. “We’re after drawing as a verb, not a noun,” he tells them. That means working at it, again and again, and it means being willing to make mistakes. “Remember,” he says, “in the College of Fine Arts, everyone sees your blunders,” by which he means, basically, get used to it. Drawing, as a verb, means caring about the act of drawing—or painting or making a sculpture—as much as you care about the finished product.

It might even mean caring more about doing art than selling it.

Which brings us, now, to Wilson’s home studio, a few miles south of the U. He is standing amid so much clutter and inspiration and finished products and nearly finished products that it’s hard to find an uncovered surface. “I have the world’s largest collection of my work,” he deadpans. There are paintings and drawings stacked deep on shelves and on the floor; many of the works are crammed into corners of the room.

There are also plaster busts, of Mozart and Beethoven and St. Francis of Assisi; there is a mannequin wearing a bra and Foreign Legion hat; there are skeletons and photos of popes; there is a rooster, a banjo, a moose head. There is a cabinet of rubber heads, including one with a fake nose, eyeglasses, mustache, and a beret. This is the one he calls Groucho Marxist.

In Wilson’s paintings, Groucho Marxist is a stand-in for the artist himself, and indeed the name and the mask add up to the perfect Sam Wilson. Don’t take any of this too seriously, they seem to be saying.

Like the studio itself, the paintings are crammed full of an odd juxtaposition of images. Wilson pulls out one painting with a title that’s 15 words long in Latin, plus 30 more in English, which he translates as “All things change as the years go by.” The painting is populated by a couple dozen figures, including a host of Renaissance-era Florentines, a comic-strip Blondie, the Groucho Marxist, and the initials LSMFT (from the 1950s ad slogan “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”).

U art professor Sam Wilson stands amid some of his artwork at his studio in his home in Salt Lake City. He often juxtaposes various images, leaving viewers to derive their own interpretations.

Wilson likes surprises, so perhaps it’s no wonder that when he begins each painting, he has no plan and no message in mind. They usually begin with something realistic—a finely rendered drawing of a turtle, perhaps—and then Wilson’s subconscious takes over. Many of his paintings include monks and everyday folks, which he freely admits he has copied from Renaissance works of art. The paintings might also include copied illustrations from 1950s magazine articles, with titles such as “Weasels Ripped My Flesh,” and perhaps a clown or a set of false teeth. The paintings are rendered in intricate detail, through a process of layering charcoal, pastels, and acrylics.

“He has his reasons for putting the objects together,” says his colleague, University of Utah art professor Kim Martinez BFA’98, “but he’s asking the viewers to come up with their own associations.”

Wilson sometimes calls his work “over-educated folk art,” and at other times “a neurotic conversation” or “these harmless dramas.”

He hates to be pigeonholed (he is, after all, a man who loves Italian Renaissance painter Domenico Ghirlandaio and also walks around a lot of the time chewing on toothpicks), but perhaps his art can best be described as pop art—not of the Andy Warhol variety but more Jasper Johns; art full of visual jokes about art itself. “They’re all legitimate historical things,” Wilson says about the art references in his paintings, “but I’ve redirected the truth of art history. It’s like I have a play with a lot of characters and I’ve mixed up the scripts; I have Hamlet quoting Puck.”

The titles of his works, often full of puns, add to the whimsy: He might refer to an “altar” ego, or “A Tension to Detail,” or the “Bisontennial.” Sometimes the titles are in Latin, or some approximation of Latin. Sometimes the titles go on for a hundred words or more.

His tendency to begin a painting without a roadmap of where it’s going to end up is “a product of a lack of discipline,” he says. But this is more self-deprecation than truth. His brother-in-law once figured out, for example, that one of Wilson’s paintings—a relatively small four-by-five-foot piece—took 450 hours to finish.

Wilson is a disciplined artist, comfortable with routines, and he has little patience or applause for what he calls T-ball art (anyone can do it), the kind of conceptual art in which the idea is sometimes more important than the execution. He is wary of celebrity culture, and museum and gallery curators who have too much power. “Contemporary art is too big a tent,” he says. “There has always been a balance between concept and content, and to me, it’s shifted excessively to the conceptual, at the expense of people making things. It’s getting to the point you’re denigrated if you make something.” And then, just to make sure you know that he realizes how he sounds, he adds, “Like every generation, Wilson’s gotten old.”

“I think my beef with contemporary art,” he says, “is their collar isn’t blue enough.”

Wilson was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Southern California, the son of two parents who never finished high school. His own high school career, he says, mostly centered on being cool. He gives a demonstration of what “walking cool” looked like in 1961: He strolls across his studio, slouching a bit and looking like someone who doesn’t care about anything very much.

His real name is Roger Dale Wilson; but one day when he was 5 his father looked at him and announced, “You look like somebody named Sam,” and that’s the way it has been ever since, except on his driver’s license and Social Security card and the Art Department list of faculty, where “Sam” is still in parentheses.

After high school, he enrolled in a community college and got a D in art history. He was married briefly in the 1960s and had one son. By the mid-1960s, Wilson was against the Vietnam War— and then he was drafted. He was sent to Vietnam as a sign painter, and when he came back home, his protestor friends thought he was too much a soldier, and his soldier friends thought he’d had too cushy a job in-country.

He enrolled in college again, and this time he tried harder. Here’s how he likes to tell it now, though: “You became an art major so you didn’t have to grow up too soon.” He eventually got bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts from California State University at Long Beach.

The art degrees led to teaching art at his alma mater. There were also some side jobs painting the carousel animals at Knott’s Berry Farm, and cleaning the brushes of the matte painter for the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In 1978, he was hired by the University of Utah as a visiting artist, and then stayed on and became a faculty member. Along the way, he met and married his wife, Kristie Krumbach BFA’80.

Today, as a professor of art, he teaches beginning and advanced drawing, figure drawing and figure painting, and intermediate and advanced painting. “I’m probably the least structured teacher” in the Art Department, he says. Except in the beginning drawing classes, he says, he tends to not have a series of set assignments. “I think it’s my role to encourage the students to find their particular voice.”

University of Utah art professor Sam Wilson sits in a corner of his home studio, which is filled with some of the eclectic objects that inspire him in his work.

Over the past decade, he has also mentored five emerging artists through Art Access, a Salt Lake gallery that encourages and provides a venue for disabled and disadvantaged Utah artists. Art Access, which is part of VSA Utah, which in turn is an affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, occasionally couples these new artists with established artists.

“Sam is one of the kindest people I know,” says Ruth Lubbers, who retired in 2011 after 17 years as director of Art Access. “He puts on a really good act, like he doesn’t care. But he cares.”

The first artist Wilson mentored was Vojko Rizvanovic, a Bosnian war refugee whose injuries left him nearly blind. They first started working together in 2003, and the mentoring continues informally to this day. Rizvanovic BFA’05 is currently working on his master’s degree in fine arts at the U.

“He never says ‘Look at me, I’m the best,’ ” Rizvanovic says about his mentor. “But I’ve never seen anyone who draws that well, especially with colored pencils.” More than most observers, Rizvanovic has gotten an up-close view of Wilson’s work; because he is legally blind, he views both his own art and everyone else’s by using a magnifying glass. Many of the paintings in Rizvanovic’s MFA art show were made with art supplies Wilson donated.

Rizvanovic likes not only the mastery in Wilson’s work, but the spirit. “His art says, ‘Laugh, eat well, make friends, because tomorrow we will die. … Use your mind, make some jokes.’ ”

Wilson’s most public art pieces can be found at Salt Lake City’s Cathedral of the Madeleine, where his 14 paintings of The Stations of the Cross line the cathedral walls. Wilson grew up Lutheran, which he defines as “an underachieving Catholic.” But he had spent 16 months in the 1980s helping to renovate the interior of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, and when the diocese put out a call seeking someone to do the Stations, he applied. The paintings, which he completed in 1993, are in Wilson’s brightly colored, fractured style, but his usual irony has been replaced by a more mystical, darker reverence. Wilson chose to make each Jesus look different from the one before: Some look Hispanic, some Middle Eastern; all clearly show their pain. In 2010, Wilson was awarded the Cathedral’s Madeleine Festival Award for his artwork.

This painting is one of 14 Stations of the Cross that Sam Wilson did for the Cathedral of the Madeleine.

His cathedral paintings sparked his interest in the long history of church art in Italy. He and Kristie now travel there every year. Like the 15th-century Florentines he admires— Ghirlandaio and Filippino Lippi—he isn’t what he calls “a headliner,” the way a Michelangelo or a Masaccio was. By and large, he has made no effort to sell or promote his art, although he has shown his work in galleries in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and California. Former first lady Betty Ford bought one of his paintings at a gallery owned by a friend of his in Vail, Colorado. The piece was from his tromp l’oeil days, a watercolor featuring a paper sack, masking tape, and a seascape in the background. The title: Pull-tab Seascape in a 10-ounce Container.

“Part of selling art is building a reputation,” he says. “But I don’t want the responsibility of a reputation,” because that entails going to too many gallery receptions, he says. And, too, “the expenditure of time promoting myself isn’t worth it.”

He is happy to be holed up in his studio, or teaching his students to draw, or traveling to Italy with his wife, soaking in yet another fresco.

“I would rather do art,” he says, “than ‘be an artist.’ ”

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City-based playwright and journalist, and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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The Way of Motion

Jerry Gardner teaches movement at the University of Utah but has an office so tiny he can hardly turn around in it. It’s just half an office, really, and is filled to the brim with masks and books and a pink tank of helium. But sit down and have a conversation with him (you’ll have to wedge a chair between the desk and the room divider), and you’ll soon learn that movement is only part of Gardner’s story.

Across town, at the Tibetan Buddhist Temple he founded with his wife, Jean LaSarre Gardner, Jerry Gardner is also known as Lama Thupten Dorje Gyaltsen. Visit him there, in the spacious yellow room where he teaches Buddhist practice, and you will find a man who can sit still for hours at a time contemplating the nature of awareness.

Movement and stillness: These are the yang and yin of Gardner’s life.

Jerry Gardner leads a group in meditation at the Buddhist temple he founded in Salt Lake City.

Most of his students at the U, where Gardner is an associate professor of theater, are in the Actor Training Program. He teaches them how to do mime, how to work with masks, how to move like ballet dancers, how to perform the stylistic, often disquieting Japanese dance known as butoh. He teaches them how to be at home in their own bodies and the bodies of the characters they portray. At the core of all these lessons is a deeper lesson: “how vital it is to be fully present,” says Jaten McGriff, a senior studying in the program.

“What is the gesture of weariness?” Gardner asks one afternoon as a student practices for an audition. The student has been rehearsing a monologue from William Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, in a scene where Domitius Enobarbus has deserted Cleopatra’s army and is near death.

You might think that weariness would be easy to convey, but there is the stereotype of weariness, and there is something subtler. Gardner watches and then offers a suggestion with his own body: He makes a slight movement with his chest, a gentle downward slope of his shoulders, and looks, suddenly, like a man who could convincingly utter the words “O sovereign mistress of melancholy.”

Good actors “learn to see the dishonesty of the body when there is a movement without a justification,” Gardner explains later. “The body has difficulty lying. … To move is to reveal.”

He came to theater from dance, and dance from martial arts, and martial arts from a need to put distance between himself and the ruffians who wanted to beat him up in New York’s Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood when he was a boy. He is now an imposing, powerful, and confident man. In those days, he was scrawnier but also already had a certain resolve, one that would keep him on a straight, if not a narrow, path.

Jerry Gardner rings a bell during a meditation at the Urgyen Samten Ling Gonpa temple.

He was born in Guam, where his father was stationed in the U.S. Army after World War II, but was soon adopted by another couple, Willie and (yes) Willie Gardner of Selma, Alabama. “I came into this world moving,” Gardner says. “I was constantly being moved around.” Eventually, he figured out that “the only constant is yourself.”

Selma in the mid-1960s became famous for its civil rights marches, but when Gardner was a youngster there in the early 1950s, segregation was just a fact of life. He remembers sitting behind the glass barrier that separated blacks and whites at the movies, and hiding under the bed when the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on his parents’ front lawn. “Willie was my first master,” he says. He is talking about his mother, who taught him how to react to racists. “Your job is to help them understand who you are,” she told him. She also taught him: “Don’t mistake kindness for weakness.”

In the third grade, he was sent to live with an aunt on Long Island, in New York, and in junior high, he moved to Brooklyn. “You either belonged to a gang or you were constantly on the run,” he says of those days. “I figured out if you stayed on the move, they couldn’t pin you down.” He remembers a pivotal moment when he was in junior high school. He was standing at 14th and Canarsie in Manhattan, about to get on a subway, and all of a sudden something said to him, “You can take what’s happened to you in your life and be angry, or you can get on with it.” And then the train doors opened, he says, and he made the decision not to use his life as an excuse.

It was about that same time that he heard about a U.S. Marine Corps sergeant who was teaching martial arts to young boys in Brooklyn. Gardner had already been beaten up a couple of times by then, so he was eager to learn some tricks. He soon discovered that he was good at karate and kung fu, and that he liked leading a disciplined life. He liked learning to move his body precisely, and he liked trying to quiet his mind.

“I walk a straight line not because of you but because of me,” he says now about his former—and present—self. “You can beat my body and sic your dogs on me, but you cannot enslave my mind.”

He studied meditation and martial arts all through high school, in New York and then in Oklahoma, where his parents moved when he was 15, and then in college, first at Cameron University in Oklahoma and then at Staten Island College and Fordham University back in New York. He fought in martial arts tournaments in Madison Square Garden, and once fought blindfolded in a kung fu show on Broadway, a spectacle that also featured a man who ate glass.

To get better at martial arts, Gardner started hanging out with dancers and mimes, studying how they moved their bodies. It was mime that drew him to Salt Lake City in 1980. Greg Goldstein had been a student of Marcel Marceau as well as Nick Johnson, who had studied with the great Polish mime Stefan Niedzialkowski. Gardner came to do a workshop with Goldstein and Johnson. “If you want to be good at something,” Gardner says, “you find a master.”

Gardner has since studied butoh with the co-founder of the form, Kazuo Ohno, in Japan, and with Diego Piñón, who created Butoh Ritual Mexicano, a method that draws from Mexican traditional energetic practices and melds them with Japanese butoh. Gardner has also studied with Tibetan rinpoches and with kung fu masters and qigong masters. He has earned all manner of black belts and sashes.

U professor Jerry Gardner leads students in wing chun kung fu at the Red Lotus School of Movement.

He ended up staying in Salt Lake City to run Goldstein’s mime school, then was hired by the Utah Arts Council to be an artist-in-residence, traveling to schools throughout the state to teach movement. Gardner also spent five years as movement director of Wisconsin’s famed American Players Theatre. In 1996, he was hired by the University of Utah to develop a movement curriculum specifically for actors. “I aspire to learn as much as I can and to be able to transmit teachings in an appropriate way,” says Gardner, his words, as always, measured and deliberate, his voice low and steady.

Those teachings include a recent 12-week qigong class for prostate cancer survivors at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. The randomized clinical trial of 60 men is aimed at determining whether qigong—a Chinese exercise form that looks like t’ai chi in even slower motion—can help improve muscle strength and reduce stress.

Gardner also teaches t’ai chi and wing chun kung fu at Salt Lake’s Red Lotus School of Movement, which he founded with his wife. The school and the Buddhist temple upstairs are housed in a 102-yearold building that originally was built as a Mormon chapel and later was home to an alcohol-free dance club featuring Mormon Goth deejays. The temple, known as Urgyen Samten Ling Gonpa, was established in 1994. Gardner was ordained a lama in 1997, by Khenchen Thupten Ozer and Khenpo Konchok Monlam Rinpoche, after years of rigorous study in Nepal and India.

If you happen to visit the temple on a Monday night—“Advanced Practice and Teaching”—you might meet Sene Noravong, a 60-year-old semiconductor technician who emigrated from Laos to the United States 30 years ago. Noravong studied with other Buddhist teachers before finding the teacher he knows as Lama Thupten. “Other teachers are …,” Noravong begins, and then, not quite sure of the right word, makes a so-so, namby-pamby gesture with his hands. But Lama Thupten is different, he says. “This lama is strong. He inspires me.”

Soon there are a dozen other practitioners gathered at the back of the room, each of them dressed in long maroon wraps. When Gardner enters, his students bow. Gardner does a series of prostrations and then takes his seat at a low table. For the next three hours, the students sit and listen, sit and chant, ask questions, chant some more. Underneath their voices is Gardner’s, as deep as a didgeridoo. As the evening wears on, he talks to them about the dreamlike quality of the unawakened life, the essence of emptiness, the challenge of being a person who can be aware while at the same time not lingering in that awareness.

Gardner’s path in studying those concepts included receiving a doctorate in Buddhist studies, with an emphasis on ritual and meditation, from the Ngagyur Samten Chockhorling Institute in Himachal Pradesh, India. This past summer, he traveled to Nepal, where he met up with some of his advanced meditation students from Utah and then went on to India, where he studied with one of his current teachers, Lama Dawa Rinpoche, at an intense nine-day, one-on-one retreat.

Back at the temple in Salt Lake City, Gardner tells his students as they sit cross-legged in front of him that their practice is not about effort. “Movement,” Gardner sometimes says, “is a tool to arrive at the intrinsic nature of the human being.” But so is sitting. At the front of the room, Gardner’s back is straight. He is hardly moving at all.

After a childhood and adolescence he characterizes as chaotic, it was the ritual and discipline of Tibetan Buddhism that appealed to him when, at age 22, he met Lama Kazi, the teacher who would direct his spiritual path and initiate his formal training.

“Ritual brings about order, and that gives us direction,” Gardner says. “It’s essential for our survival. Otherwise, we live in randomness. But if we create an environment of order, people can be themselves. … And even if you fall down the rabbit hole, you can pull yourself up.”

There is order in qigong, in Japanese butoh and Tibetan Buddhism, and in the guided meditation he teaches his acting students. Actor Training Program senior McGriff explains Gardner’s technique as leading the young actors to angry or joyous or dark places—essences that later on can be tapped into on stage in a controlled way, perhaps as Shakespeare’s Romeo.

“You wouldn’t want to visit your lover’s death on stage every night unless you know you can control your emotions,” McGriff explains. Gardner, he says, “helps us find those places, use them, and then walk away.”

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City-based writer and playwright, and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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Taking the Long View

Five things you should know about Fred Montague: He’s 4.5 billion years old, and he’s a large animal, a heterotroph, a flux structure, and a killer. That’s the résumé Montague wants you to keep in mind, not just about him but also about you. It’s the backdrop, he says, for every other assumption you should have about the world—we are part of, not separate from, nature and our environment. If for no other reason than this, we should not be making such a mess of things.

Montague’s résumé also includes these entries: University of Utah professor (lecturer) emeritus of biology, wildlife biologist, author, artist, and gardener. Among his legacies at the U are two organic gardens that students plant and tend each year, one just east of Pioneer Memorial Theatre and one west of the Sterling Sill Center.

He remembers meeting, 16 years ago, with the committee that had to approve this addition to the U’s Service Learning Program. Other Service Learning initiatives had obvious beneficiaries: refugees, adults who can’t read, at-risk youths. And who would be the recipients of your project, the committee wanted to know. “I thought for a moment in a cold sweat and panic,” Montague remembers. “And then I blurted out: ‘They haven’t been born yet.’ ”

The simple answer would have been “the community food banks that will receive the produce grown in the gardens.” But Montague always takes the long view. What he had in mind was the next generation that would benefit if he taught the current generation how to grow food without resorting to pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and patented seeds. Agribusiness, he argues, takes the short view, which is why its practices tolerate erosion, groundwater contamination, toxins in the food chain, and excessive use of fossil fuels, he says.

Fred Montague works on a drawing in the art studio at his Summit County home. His artwork can be found in private collections around the world.

“I dispense guilt and despair,” says Montague. But gardens are the flip side of this jeremiad; in the garden, he finds joy and peace—and answers.

In 2009, Montague’s own publishing imprint, Mountain Bear Ink, released the limited-edition Gardening: An Ecological Approach, a book that took him 13 years to create. The book begins with a polemic about the unsustainable practices of industrial agriculture, moves on to textbook discussions of botany, and ends with every detail you’d ever need to plant any edible thing.

Montague painstakingly hand-lettered the 400 pages himself, and the book is liberally illustrated with his own pen-and-ink drawings. Each book is signed and numbered.

It was this same down-to-earth intensity that made him a popular teacher during his 17-year career at the U. When the Biology Department announced that it was eliminating his untenured position a decade ago, remembers U cell biologist David Gard, “the students raised an uproar,” and the position was reinstated.

Two woodblock prints by Fred Montague: //Raven Chat//, top, and //Wolfpack—Alpha Pair//.

James Ruff, a biology graduate student who took classes from Montague and was his teaching assistant, says Montague enlivened the academic subjects he taught. “He bridged the gap between data, theories, and what those mean to you and me,” Ruff says. “And he still left room for wonder and inspiration from the natural world.”

Before retiring in 2010, Montague taught environmental science and wildlife ecology, was a recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award, and was academic advisor to the Biology Department’s 1,000 students. On the first day of class, he would typically ask his students to write down five things about themselves. Answers usually included academic major, religious affiliation, gender. But what he wanted them to recognize was that each student could also be described in other ways: as old as the universe, primate, killer. Although vegans might balk at this last descriptor, Montague delights in pointing out that carrots are no less an integral part of nature than a cow. And what’s a bean, he adds, but a plant embryo.

“Every atom in your body was not created the day you were born,” he reminded his students. “You are made up of the environment. So don’t you want it to be clean?… If everyone realized they are environment with a spirit, everyone would be an environmentalist, including Newt Gingrich.”

When he served as academic advisor, first at Purdue University and then at the University of Utah, Montague also liked to challenge students to think hard about why they were pursuing their major. Write your obituary as if you had died at a ripe old age, he would tell them, and figure out what you would have wanted your life to add up to.

This ink drawing, titled //Calico Butterfly//, is among Fred Montague’s artwork.

Montague’s own epiphany about the future came as a sophomore at Purdue in the mid-1960s. He was majoring in engineering, just as his father had done. But one fateful day, his English professor introduced the class to Robert Frost’s poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” with its last stanza that includes the lines, “My object in living is to unite/My avocation and my vocation/As my two eyes make one in sight.

Montague had grown up in Indiana, and what had captivated him was the outdoors—how things lived, not how things were put together. He liked to hike, fish, and roam the fields around Lafayette, and even in high school he began to notice with dismay as wildlife habitats and small farms were converted into industrial farms. So, not long after reading that Robert Frost poem, he changed his major to wildlife sciences.

After college and a three-year stint in the Navy, he returned to Purdue for a doctorate in wildlife ecology, supplementing his grad-student income by selling his nature drawings and woodcuts at Midwestern art fairs. His art can now be found in public and private collections in all 50 states and in 30 countries.

Fred Montague works on a raised bed at his home in Summit County. He also founded two organic gardens at the U that students tend each year.

He and his wife Patricia (they met in a geology class in college; he calls her “the smartest person I’ve ever met”) moved to Utah in 1993 to escape the Midwest mold she was sensitive to. Once here, they began searching for the cleanest air they could find within driving distance of the U, settling on 20 acres of sagebrush and scrub oak in Summit County. What sold them was the lichen they found on the rocks there, because lichens only grow where the air is clean.

They built their dream, green homestead, and Montague built most of their furniture by hand. There is a greenhouse and what he calls a “modest vegetable garden” covering 900 square feet.

Fred Montague stands in his studio with a 1913 “Golden Jobber” press that he uses for his print and book making.

“Environmentalists make lousy neighbors”—they’re always hectoring people to recycle—“but great ancestors,” Montague says. “Ecology emphasizes relationships more than individual entities.” And that makes it subversive, because “the dominant world view reveres the supremacy of the individual,” fostering the exploitation of nature, he says.

Montague is fond of testing our assumptions about the world, starting with the notion that “humans are No. 1,” and moving on through 129 other things we take for granted, including “nature equals resources,” “time is linear,” and “science and technology can solve all our problems.” Phrases like endangered species and extinction are “mealy-mouthed and wishy-washy,” he says. The words he prefers: condemned species and eviction, which acknowledge humanity’s role in the process, he says. Not one to hold his tongue, he argues that universities (including his own) are often “research arms of industries” and that most students are learning how to “cash in” rather than be part of a sustainable larger community.

“Politicians say ‘as soon as the economy is fixed, we’ll take care of the environment,’ ” Montague complains. “The assumption is that nature occurs inside a chain-link fence.” But people and their economies “exist with the permission of nature.” What really makes the world work, he notes, are not humans but bacteria, fungi, plants. “Without bacteria, ecosystems would collapse in a matter of months.”

So the trick to saving (insert your words of choice here: coral reefs, forests, biodiversity) and preventing (radioactive waste, dead zones, oil spills) is “responsible restraint,” he says, not “sustainable development.” Yes, “sustainable” is crucial, but “development” assumes we shouldn’t take a hard look at our dependence on economic growth.

Montague holds an art book he made that features hand lettering and ink-drawing illustrations.

Of course, creating an economy not based on growth, exploitation, and convenience isn’t easy. Even a professor of ecology might be known to drive 26 miles each way to teach his classes, he notes with a wry nod to his own inconsistencies.

These days, Montague occasionally gives guest lectures but mostly tends to his land. The U’s Edible Gardens, meanwhile, continue to flourish. Although there was concern that this prime University real estate might be turned into building sites or parking lots, says garden coordinator Alexandra Parvaz BA’06 BS’06 MS’11, the gardens have been put under the auspices of the U’s Office of Sustainability, and there is an effort afoot to write them into the U’s master plan.

A coalition of students and faculty launched a garden preservation campaign, and the result is not only four-season produce (more than 2,000 pounds in 2011) that is sold to the campus cafeteria and broader community, but also an integration of the gardens into the curricula of disciplines ranging from entomology to civil engineering.

So, yes, we should be filled with guilt and despair. But we should also celebrate Earth and the life on it, Montague says. Or, as he puts it, “Many organisms—from carrots to chickens—die so that we may live. Say grace.”

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City-based writer and playwright, and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

 

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Tracking Winged Sentinels

A U professor travels the world to document birds’ crucial role and conserve their dwindling numbers.

With its bald head, its preposterous neck, its tendency to hunch its shoulders while waiting for something bad to happen, the vulture is a bird that makes us cringe. But look what happened in India.

First, the vultures’ habitat was cut down to make way for human villages and farms, and then farmers began medicating their cattle with a painkiller that caused the birds’ kidneys to collapse when they ingested the cattle remains. Vulture populations began to decline—to near-extinction levels in some areas of the country—and then the land was littered with rotting carcasses, which caused the feral dog and rat populations to increase, contributing to a bubonic plague outbreak and the deaths of 48,000 people from rabies.

Collared redstart

Collared redstart

As Çağan H. Şekercioğlu tells it, this is one more cautionary tale about the perils of diminishing biodiversity. And it’s why, in 2009, he opened the first “vulture restaurant” in his native Turkey (that is to say, a place where the scavengers could get a safe meal, not an eatery with roast vulture on the menu.)

Çağan H. Şekercioğlu (pronounce it cha-HAN shay-KER-jeoh-loo) is a conservation biologist, ornithologist, and tireless advocate for biodiversity. Last year, he was honored as one of 14 “emerging explorers” by National Geographic for his work in tropical and mountain outposts from Costa Rica to Ethiopia. The distinction recognizes Şekercioğlu as being among the “uniquely gifted and inspiring adventurers, scientists, and storytellers making significant contributions to world knowledge through exploration while still early in their careers.” In 2008, he received Britain’s prestigious Whitley Gold Award for his conservation efforts in Turkey, from the Whitley Fund for Nature. At 36, he is already one of the most cited environmental scientists in the world.

Since 2010, Şekercioğlu has called Salt Lake City home. When the University of Utah wooed him in 2009, he was impressed by both the Department of Biology and its generous offer: a brand-new lab, a generous start-up fund, and enough time away from teaching duties each year to pursue his far-flung fieldwork.

During the 2011 Fall Semester, he traveled to Ethiopia, where he set up six bird-banding stations in a remote forest to explore whether climate change is forcing birds to seek higher elevations. He also went to Turkey, where he worked with his nonprofit organization, KuzeyDoğa, on projects including Turkey’s first wildlife corridor and the vulture restaurant, which is modeled after similar safe havens in India and Nepal. And at year’s end, he traveled to New Zealand to participate in the International Congress for Conservation Biology, where he urged the world’s university-based conservation scientists to not just go into the wild and then publish papers, but also to work with local groups that can make conservation happen. Decision-makers, especially in the developing world, he told them, are more likely to follow the recommendations of academics than those of independent NGOs, which they often suspect of having political agendas.

 

Çağan H. Şekercioğlu talks to high-school students about bird ecology, conservation, and migrations, at KuzeyDoğa Aras Bird Research and Education Center, in eastern Turkey.

To save birds, he believes, you’ve got to encourage humans to get involved. Increasingly, that means working with grassroots organizations to help them see that saving species can be a win-win for local economies. It also means dealing with bureaucrats to get permits and garner support for ventures such as the 58,000-acre wildlife corridor and a man-made bird-nesting island that Şekercioğlu spearheaded in Turkey’s Lake Kuyucuk.

Sometimes it also means drinking endless cups of tea with government officials. Writer Elif Batuman, in her keenly observed profile of Şekercioğlu published in The New Yorker last fall, quotes him on the matter of tea drinking:

“I should just put on an adult diaper and drink tea all day long,” Çağan reflected, rubbing his eye. “They’ll be like, ‘That Çağan, he’s a really good guy—the other day he had tea with us for five hours. Let’s declare this a protected habitat. ’ ”

Even a short conversation with Şekercioğlu is often a winged migration, a flight that starts in the tropics, perhaps, and then veers off-course toward an even better story.

He might begin with his historical idol, Alfred Russell Wallace, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, and then detour to the 19th-century extinction of a flightless songbird called the Stephens Island wren; then take a sharp turn toward the Ottoman Empire; and then veer east to Papua New Guinea, where the construction of a gas pipeline is destroying habitat yet also making the area accessible to birders. Then, suddenly, he will realize that he is going to be late to a meeting.

“I’m talking too long,” he will say then. It is part apology, part the clear-eyed observation of a scientist observing his own behavior. “I often give myself to things. Being a professor these days means doing three, four jobs at once. I am still learning to balance my life.”

It is this passion—for stories and work, for life and all living things—that first impressed University of Utah College of Science Dean Pierre Sokolsky. “You can tell immediately that this is not just an academic subject for him,” Sokolsky says of Şekercioğlu. “His whole face lights up.”

Resplendent quetza

Resplendent quetzal

In hiring a new faculty member, Sokolsky says, “what you’re really trying to hire is the intellect and the energy,” rather than to more narrowly find a person who does a particular type of research. The dean was also struck by Şekercioğlu’s ability to reach out to the world’s millions of bird watchers, and beyond them to the general public, to make science not just accessible but a heart-pounding experience.

Bird “watching” hardly captures the lengths to which Şekercioğlu goes to find the planet’s nearly 10,000 bird species. He is No. 69 in the world in number of bird species observed (last count: 5,781) and one of the handful in their 30s who has seen more than half the world’s bird species. “If I live to an old age and am able physically,” he says, “8,000 species is possible.”

To track down, keep track of, and study the habitats of everything from the scruffy bald ibis to the showy keel-billed toucan, Şekercioğlu has endured the following: He was chased by a machete-wielding mob in Costa Rica (they thought he was a thief when in fact he was searching for a Pacific screech-owl); he was charged by an elephant in Tanzania; he acquired the skin disease form of leishmaniasis in Peru from the bite of a sand fly; he almost lost his legs to a lymph system infection in Papua New Guinea; he came face to face with a grizzly bear in Alaska; and he was carjacked by AK-47-toting tribesmen in Ethiopia. Still, he says, it’s safer to do fieldwork than to drive a car in his native Istanbul.

Fieldwork—not just studying the habits and habitats of birds but working with local communities to save species—is essential for solving the world’s conservation problems, he says. But with the growing pressure on academic scientists to publish quickly and on big topics, biologists tend increasingly to work with existing data sets. And funding to do long-term field research gets harder and harder to come by.

On a recent afternoon, Şekercioğlu re-enacts what it was like to come upon the book that changed his life. He gets up from his desk in his office in the U’s South Biology Building, walks to the bookshelf, and picks up the Collins Field Guide: Birds of Britain and Europe. He was 14 when he first found it on the shelf of his high school library in Istanbul and was awed by what the world offered.

His father bought him a pair of Russian-made military binoculars, and, despite the fact that their heft gave him a neck ache, he wore them everywhere. Before it was birds, it was insects. And frogs. And hedgehogs. He made his first insect net out of his mother’s wedding veil. He taught himself to read when he was 4 years old (his parents wearied of reading him yet another book about animals). He read about Darwin at age 5 (although he thought Darwin had written On the Origin of Türks, since the Turkish word for “species” is “Tür”).

 

Çağan H. Şekercioğlu radio-tracks a silverthroated tanager to find its night roost near Costa Rica’s Las Cruces forest.

Worried that he preferred insects to soccer, his parents took him to a psychiatrist, who assured them that he was normal. But in Turkey at that time, he says, there was not a single role model for a boy who wanted to study wildlife. “If you’re good at science,” the conventional wisdom went, “you should become a doctor or an engineer.” To this day, no university in Turkey has an ecology department, and in all of Istanbul, there isn’t a single natural history museum.

Because there also weren’t many natural history books in Turkish, he read them in English. And that, he says, eventually boosted his college entrance exam scores, and that helped him get a full scholarship to Harvard University. It also probably didn’t hurt that at age 16 he contributed a rare beetle to the Harvard entomology collection. He got his doctorate at Stanford University, studying with famed population biologist Paul Ehrlich. While still in college, at age 23, Şekercioğlu initiated a study of a community of more than 400 bird species in Costa Rica. (So far, the project has mist-netted more than 60,000 birds of 262 species, radio-tracked about 450 birds, and monitored hundreds of bird nests.) The work has helped reveal how tropical forest birds respond to agriculture and deforestation. He also organized a worldwide bird ecology database that covers all of the world’s 10,000-plus bird species—one of the world’s most comprehensive archives of any class of organism, he says—and which he updates based on the literature and his field experience.

And that brings us to the heart of Şekercioğlu’s work.

Farming, logging, cities, roads: Over the centuries, birds have had to make room for human pursuits and have sometimes become extinct in the process. Now, add to that the threat of climate change, says Şekercioğlu.

“Even if we were oblivious to the present changes in Earth’s climate,” he writes with co-author Janice Wormworth in the 2011 book Winged Sentinels: Birds and Climate Change, “a careful look at birds’ patterns of responses over recent decades would warn us that some sort of widespread and systematic change is afoot.”

When and where and how often they breed, for example, can give us a clue that their ecosystem is awry. They are nearly literally the “canary in the coal mine,” warning of what might follow for other species, says Şekercioğlu. And their diminishing numbers could have a direct effect on the planet. The seeds of rainforest trees, for example, are mainly dispersed by birds. If the birds dwindle or become extinct, eventually, the trees will, too. As part of his efforts to help preserve those tropical species, Şekercioğlu co-authored the 2011 book Conservation of Tropical Birds, another exploration of how climate change, habitat loss, and invasive species affect birds and other wildlife.

In a 2008 study published in the journal Conservation Biology, Şekercioğlu and his colleagues at Stanford predicted that if the Earth’s surface temperature rises 2.8 degrees Celsius by the end of this century (a moderate scenario, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), it could trigger the extinction of 400 to 550 bird species. Part of that is due to what he calls the “escalator effect”—as habitats get warmer and vegetation changes, birds move to higher elevations; eventually they run out of places for escape. A worst-case scenario of habitat loss plus 6.4 degrees Celsius warming could mean more than 2,500 land birds would become extinct by the year 2100, about 30 percent of all land bird species.

 

Çağan H. Şekercioğlu, left, who joined the University of Utah faculty in 2010, puts a tracking band on an emerald toucanet in Costa Rica’s Las Cruces forest.

The good news, though, is that even a reduction of 1 degree Celsius of warming can make a huge difference, Şekercioğlu says, resulting in up to 500 fewer bird extinctions. We can also make sure there are vegetation corridors between forest fragments; we can improve the “hospitality” of farmland so birds can thrive.

Our economic system is based on constant growth, notes Şekercioğlu, and we humans are a “short-sighted species… Our brains are not wired to deal with long-term, catastrophic threats” such as climate change. At the other extreme, though, by the time scientific data are condensed into a magazine article or summarized in a misleading headline, projections can look worse than they are. It’s a constant struggle to make sure the science reporting is accurate, he says, and that the real environmental threats aren’t overlooked.

Like any scientist, he sometimes uses fuzzy phrases like “bird-mediated ecosystem process” and “avian extinction correlates.” But Şekercioğlu is also a photographer and a storyteller, a cheerleader for every bird that flies or swims or waddles.

If he could be any bird at all, he says, he would be a raptor. In English, his first name translates as “hawk.” But it’s not just that. He would rather be the bird that isn’t eaten, the one that lives long enough to see every other bird. He would rather be a long-distance traveler, spreading the word.

— Elaine Jarvik is a freelance writer and playwright based in Salt Lake City.


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A Quiet Force

Beverley Taylor Sorenson is waging a crusade to give all kids access to the arts.

Photos by Sean Graff

At 83, a person with big plans may not feel she has the luxury of dilly-dallying around. So when Beverley Taylor Sorenson BS’45 invited a few influential people to her kitchen one morning in 2007, she got right to the point.

Seated around the breakfast table at her expansive home in Holladay were University of Utah Dean of Education Michael Hardman, Dean of Fine Arts Raymond Tymas-Jones, and former Utah Commissioner of Higher Education Cecelia Foxley MA’65 PhD’68.

Turning to Hardman, Sorenson smiled and said: “Tell me why the U hasn’t focused on arts education.”

So began a conversation and, eventually, an alliance. Now, nearly five years later, the $24 million Beverley Taylor Sorensen Arts and Education Complex is taking shape on the University of Utah campus.

What Sorenson has on her side is money and a fierce determination that every child in every school in Utah should have the chance to both learn the arts and learn through the arts by integrating them into the core academic curriculum. She wants all of Utah’s colleges and universities to help prepare the way.

Beverly Taylor Sorenson

University of Utah alumna Beverley Taylor Sorenson sits in Beacon Heights Elementary School, one of 57 Utah elementary schools participating in her arts education program. Sorenson’s goal is all 562. (Photo by Sean Graff)

Sorenson is, at first blush, an unlikely crusader. She’s now 87 and in many ways unassuming, and for years she seemed to live in the shadow of her late husband, billionaire biomedical inventor, businessman, and philanthropist James LeVoy Sorenson ex’48.

She was the yin to his blunt, brash yang. “Dad was so bold, and he didn’t care what people thought of him as long as he was doing the right thing,” says their daughter, Gail Sorenson Williamsen BA’06, who notes that her father “took charge of a room by the way he set his jaw.”

On the other hand, says Williamsen, “Mom is refined and delicate,” the great-granddaughter of John Taylor, third president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a man whom Brigham Young called “Prince John.”

Beverley Taylor grew up in Salt Lake City, the shy next-to-youngest of six children. The older girls got piano lessons—sister Helen went on to play for dance legend Martha Graham in New York—but by the time Beverley was 5, at the start of the Great Depression, the car dealership where her father was sales manager had closed its doors. There was no money for piano lessons, so she learned from oldest sister Virginia. At 13, Beverley landed a job playing for a ballet school next door to her junior high.

She was a hard worker but also a daydreamer. In class, she might, for example, be imagining the man she would marry—“he’d have blond, curly hair and be from California,” Sorenson now recalls.

Sometimes when she daydreamed as a young girl, she also made a list of goals: 1) Get a college degree, 2) Save $1,000, 3) Become a kindergarten teacher. She got the degree and a teaching certificate from the University of Utah in 1945 and saved $1,000 from her after-school job sorting mail at the post office.

“There’s a big difference between integrated instruction done well and done at a more simplistic level.” If the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts and Education Complex does what it sets out to do, “it will be groundbreaking.” — Michael Sikes of the Arts Education Partnership in Washington, D.C.

Then she moved to New York, into an apartment with her sister, and got a job teaching kindergarten in a Quaker school in Brooklyn. On Sundays she attended an LDS ward in Manhattan, which is where she soon met the man of her daydreams.

Jim Sorenson, curly-haired and blond, was in New York to attend officer’s training school for the U.S. Maritime Service. He’d been born in Rexburg, Idaho, but he had grown up in Yuba City, Calif., so he fit the bill.

She laughs when she recalls her first impression of him: aggressive and outspoken, the kind of young man who spouted strong opinions in Sunday school. When he tried to kiss her on the first date, she said “Absolutely not.” When he asked her to marry him on the third date, she said “No way.”

On the other hand, she could see right away that he was the kind of man who made things happen.

After they married, she says, “we started our own kindergarten” by eventually raising eight little Sorensons. And then Jim Sorenson set about building an entrepreneurial empire—starting with buying up pasture land that eventually became prime real estate along the Wasatch Front.

In 1957, he co-founded Deseret Pharmaceutical, and he later invented the first disposable paper surgical mask, the first modern intravenous catheter, and the first real-time computerized heart monitor. He eventually held more than 40 medical patents and owned Sorenson Companies, a parent company of 32 corporations.

Beverley Sorenson wonders if she was too slow to recognize her husband’s genius. “I kept telling him to stop bragging,” she says.

At the time of his death in 2008, he and Beverley had been married for 60 years, and he was the wealthiest man in Utah, according to Forbes magazine, which estimated his wealth at $4.5 billion. But the big money, says Williamsen, didn’t come till after the children had grown. Before that, there were strict budgets and hand-me-downs.

Beverley Sorenson was the quiet, nurturing parent. But her husband’s strong will rubbed off on her, says her daughter.

“I’ve seen my mom, in her older age, saying my dad’s adages. She’ll say, ‘I’ve got some big, big things going on.’ ”

Beverley Sorenson’s list of new goals includes starting a program to fight drugs and gangs, and writing a biography of her late husband. But since the mid-1990s, the biggest big thing going on has been her campaign for arts in the schools.

“This needs to be in all the schools, because all children are at risk.”  — Beverley Taylor Sorenson

It’s a passion fueled by two images: her teenage grandson, who had lost interest in school, and the students at Salt Lake’s Lincoln Elementary. At Lincoln, where many of the children come from economically disadvantaged homes and are at risk for poor academic performance, the gutsy principal had wrangled partnerships with Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company and a visual artist-in-residence who helped the students create a 2,000-pound bronze sculpture. Sorenson was impressed that the children were encouraged to be creative and that the halls were lined not with look-alike construction-paper cutouts but with the students’ framed, original art.

“I said, ‘This needs to be in all the schools, because all children are at risk,’ ” says Sorenson.

So she invited a handful of artists to lunch to brainstorm. Soon she was funding a pilot project called Art Works for Kids. In 2002, she convinced the Utah Legislature to fund a five-year, 12-school version. When state coffers dwindled, she paid the bills herself, and she went back to the Legislature in 2008. By then, fewer schools could afford arts specialists, and teachers were bogged down in No Child Left Behind testing.

She took lawmakers on a tour of Salt Lake’s inner-city Jackson Elementary, where every student learns to play the violin, and she and son Jim went to the Legislature with what he now calls their “one-two punch.”

“I delivered the facts, and Mother made an emotional appeal about how important arts are for children,” he says. That year, the Legislature appropriated $15.8 million for arts education for four years in 52 schools, under the new Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program.

When budget shortfalls put arts education funding in jeopardy again, she visited 23 Utah towns to marshal the support of parents and educators. The program is now in 57 Utah elementary schools; Sorenson’s goal is all 562.

Scores of studies nationwide detail the ways in which arts programs positively impact students’ lives: better school attendance and test scores, lowered dropout rates and drug use, increased creativity and critical thinking skills. The newest buzzword is “integration,” the idea that art can perhaps best serve students if it’s woven seamlessly into every aspect of learning.

One vivid example close to home: University of Utah physics professor Saveez Saffarian teamed with dancer Kelby McIntyre-Martinez last year to teach young students science by creating a dance that illustrated how a virus infects cell membranes.

McIntyre-Martinez is planning and development coordinator of the Center for Integrating Arts Into Academic Learning, guided jointly by the U’s colleges of Education and Fine Arts—one of the interdisciplinary programs that will be housed in the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts and Education Complex.

The building will also house the Center for Reading and Literacy, the Utah Education Policy Center, the Center for the Advancement of Technology in Education, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Center for Community Caring, and the Center for Science and Math Education. And the complex will be the new home of the Virginia Tanner Creative Dance Program.

The building, nestled strategically between the College of Education and the College of Fine Arts, is scheduled to open in 2013.

“There’s a big difference between integrated instruction done well and done at a more simplistic level,” says Michael Sikes of the Arts Education Partnership in Washington, D.C. If the U’s new arts integration center does what it sets out to do, says Sikes, “it will be groundbreaking.” The center will focus on evidence-based research and teacher training and will be a systems-wide approach, involving public schools, several University departments, and policy makers.

“I think Beverley single-handedly saw that universities weren’t talking to schools, and university departments weren’t talking to each other, and nobody was talking to the community,” says College of Education Dean Hardman.

In October, Sorenson flew to New York to receive the Eli and Edythe Broad Award for Philanthropy in the Arts from Americans for the Arts, a national nonprofit that focuses on advancing the arts in the United States. It’s a prestigious honor, but Sorenson isn’t one to brag.

Instead, she might draw your attention to a song her daughter wrote. The tune immortalized a canoe trip many years ago when Beverley and Jim had been invited to view progress being made to clean up watershed areas and restore wildlife habitat along the Jordan River. As the other invited dignitaries successfully paddled the river, the Sorensons got stuck in the reeds and then overturned their canoe. Later, Beverley Sorenson told her daughter Gail: “Well, you know your Dad and I: When he zigs, I zag.”

The chorus of “The Zig Zag Rag” goes like this:

Oh, Jim and Bev, they zig and they zag
Like divine syncopation or a Scott Joplin rag.
They’re different, as different as night is to day,
But each needs the other in the very same way.

Beverley and Jim were sopping wet as they sat at the governor’s Jordan River dinner that evening. It still makes her smile, thinking of it.

— Elaine Jarvik is a freelance writer and playwright based in Salt Lake City.