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)

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)

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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In 1913, a young man named Thomas Giles, recently returned from seven years of musical studies in Europe, was appointed to the University of Utah’s faculty. Out of necessity, he taught virtually everything in the music department, including, of course, piano. Although others had taught piano before him, Giles, in both numbers and longevity, is rightly regarded as the founder of the U’s grand tradition of piano instruction.

Thousands of students have studied and performed at the U in the century since then, and many have gone on to illustrious careers. The School of Music’s Piano Area has evolved and grown and is now the largest area within the School of Music, representing 18 percent of the students. So it seems appropriate that Raymond Tymas-Jones, dean of the College of Fine Arts, has declared 2013-14 “The Year of the Piano.” Susan Duehlmeier BFA’70 MFA’73, the Piano Area’s chair, says the U plans a yearlong series of public and private concerts and community events to celebrate.

To kick off the festivities, a recital was held this past April in New York’s Steinway Hall. Several hundred alumni and friends of the University heard performances by three recent graduates of the School of Music: Whitney Pizza Smith BMu’08 MMu’10 and J. Michael Stewart BMu’11, who are both now pursuing graduate degrees at New York conservatories, and Karén Hakobyan BMu’06 MMu’08, who has become a successful international performer and composer. A second display of University talent will take place in Steinway Hall this October, when members of the U’s piano faculty will demonstrate their own keyboard mastery.

“Music holds a special place in the cultural language of Utah,” says U President David W. Pershing, who attended the Steinway Hall concert in April. “The University’s outstanding piano faculty, facilities, and program attract gifted students from around the state and the world to perfect their skills, explore their natural gifts, and create music that endures.”

Duehlmeier says that during the 2013-14 academic year, the Piano Area also plans a series of recitals by U piano students that will be held in community members’ homes and will give listeners a chance to mingle with the musicians in a relaxed atmosphere. In April 2014, the centennial celebration will culminate in a special “homecoming” concert in Libby Gardner Concert Hall that will bring together many former members of the piano faculty, as well as alumni. It will be a festive party, Duehlmeier says, “to remember where we’ve come from—the fledgling years as well as the recent past—and to honor all those who have made this extraordinary century possible.”

A worker places a newly delivered piano in Libby Gardner Concert Hall. (Photo courtesy U School of Music)

Back in 1913, Giles ran the department almost singlehandedly at first. Gradually, as other teachers were added to the faculty, piano study became more diversified. In 1923, Ellen Nielson, who had a certificate in piano from the New England Conservatory, joined the U faculty, followed four years later by William Peterson, a versatile musician and fine pianist with New York credentials.

Serious local students also had other alternatives. One was the McCune School of Music in downtown Salt Lake City, and some musicians studied both there and at the U. The most famous product of this kind of collaborative education was the acclaimed concert pianist Grant Johannesen ex’40. The son of Norwegian immigrants, he became the student of McCune’s Mabel Borg Jenkins, a native of Utah’s Sanpete County who had studied piano in New York.

While in Salt Lake during a tour, the famous French pianist Robert Casadesus heard the young Johannesen and accepted him as a student on the spot. But Johannesen’s parents insisted that he first get a practical education, so he became a freshman at the University in 1938 while continuing his piano studies with Jenkins. He performed in a recital in 1940 at the Assembly Hall at Temple Square in Salt Lake and then went on to study with Casadesus, and to an international career. Over the years, Johannesen continued to lend his name and services to his alma mater, and the U awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1978. Instead of the traditional acceptance speech, he played a recital.

Another noteworthy early U piano student was Leigh Harline ex’26. After studying at the U in the 1920s, Harline moved to Los Angeles, where he soon became a staff composer with Walt Disney Studios, writing music for such Disney classics as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Pinocchio (1940), for which he received two Academy Awards, one for best film score and the other for his song “When You Wish Upon a Star.” He went on to write scores for other studios’ movies after he left Disney in 1941 and, in all, received eight Academy Award nominations during his career.

Susan Duehlmeier (Photo courtesy U School of Music)

The World War II years seriously depleted the student body and decimated campus musical activity, but the return of large numbers of GIs under the GI Bill brought a welcome rejuvenation. After the war, large amounts of war surplus became available, including pianos and space for much-needed practice rooms, in buildings at Fort Douglas.

When A. Ray Olpin became the U’s president in 1946, every area of the University was challenged to look well into the future, and one important consequence was the formation of the College of Fine Arts, with the famous sculptor Avard Fairbanks ex’22 as its dean. Olpin then joined forces with Maurice Abravanel, the Utah Symphony’s new conductor, to find a chair for the Music Department to replace the retiring Giles. When Utah composer Leroy Robertson won first prize in a prestigious international competition, they knew they had found their man.

Taking charge in 1948, Robertson quickly organized the U’s graduate programs and incorporated new faculty members. With Olpin’s hearty approval, Robertson invited the Utah Symphony to rehearse on campus and made the symphony principals adjunct instructors in music. Reid Nibley BFA’50 MA’53 was appointed to the faculty in 1950 and remained until the early 1960s, as an artist-in-residence and master teacher, and was the Utah Symphony’s pianist. Ardean Watts MA’60, who followed Nibley as pianist (and assistant conductor) of the Utah Symphony, came to the U for graduate work and later served on the University faculty for the remainder of the century. Gradually, a real “piano faculty” was beginning to emerge.

The growing program also continued producing excellent alumni, such as Robert Cundick BA’49 MFA’50 PhD’55. A composer and organist for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir who also served on the music faculty at Brigham Young University, he received one of the U’s first three music doctorates. Although his major focus was organ, Cundick was in great demand as a piano accompanist and chamber music collaborator during his years as a student at the U.

What could be termed the modern era (with the “Piano Area” as a distinct division within the Department of Music) really began almost by accident with the timely arrival of Gladys Gladstone. She had been raised in upstate New York and had received impeccable training under Artur Schnabel in New York. “Gladys” to virtually everyone, she came to Utah from Los Angeles in 1947 when her husband, Dr. Harold Rosenberg, was assigned to the VA Hospital after World War II. She performed with the Utah Symphony and played chamber music, but not until several private students had won their divisions at the Utah State Fair did she begin to attract real attention as a teacher. With Abravanel as her musical champion, Gladstone was finally appointed to a U professorship in 1966, after years as an adjunct instructor. For almost five decades, she was “the teacher.” Her students now can be found performing and teaching around the world, from Hollywood to the south of France. Like all members of the piano faculty, Adjunct Professor Lenora Brown BFA’71 has studied with many world-class artists, but she says her most influential teacher was Gladstone. “She was the consummate musician and teacher in every sense of the word,” Brown recollects.

Grant Johannesen, who went on to an international concert career, plays at the U. (Photo courtesty Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)

Another “Gladys” student, Paul Pollei BFA’61, this past March was named Artistic Director Emeritus of the Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation, which he founded in 1976. Pollei, who was a faculty member at Brigham Young University, started the original Bachauer Competition on a shoestring. Gina Bachauer’s personal interest, coupled with encouragement from Abravanel and the Utah Symphony, brought the contest to Salt Lake, where, gradually, the competition assumed its present status as one of the oldest and most prestigious in the nation.

The Bachauer Competition has been the impetus for much of the U Piano Area’s growth. Ning Lu BMu’92 MMu’94 debuted with the prestigious Central Conservatory orchestra in Beijing at age 12. A few years later, after winning first place in the China preliminaries, he competed in the Bachauer finals in Salt Lake. He stayed to study at the University with Duehlmeier, who received her doctorate in piano performance from Boston University and has been the fire and energy behind much of the Piano Area’s success for nearly four decades. After Lu went on to doctoral studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he returned to join the U’s piano faculty, where he now serves as assistant chair.

U alum and concert pianist Karén Hakobyan performs at Steinway Hall in New York. (Photo by Brian Sargent)

Hakobyan, who performed at the U piano-centennial celebration in New York, came to America in his mid-teens after winning Bachauer auditions in Armenia. He decided to attend the U, and after graduating, went on to receive diplomas from the Mannes School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music in New York. He has performed several times in the last year at Carnegie Hall in New York.

Gladys Gladstone, left, with Utah Symphony clarinetist Martin Zwick (Photo courtesy Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)

Weihui Mao BMu’95, who was a child movie star in China during the 1980s, debuted with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra in 1988. She moved a year later to Salt Lake, studied with Duehlmeier at the U, and went on to win several top prizes in national and international piano competitions. She continues to perform around the world.

“Our students come from major schools of music to study with us, and our undergraduates have been accepted into some of the most prestigious graduate programs in the country,” Duehlmeier says.

Students from within the state have gone on to success, as well. Stewart, who also performed at the spring Steinway Hall recital, grew up in West Valley City, Utah, and received a full scholarship to attend the U, where he studied with Duehlmeier. In 2012, he won first place in the American Protégé International Concerto Competition, an honor that brings the opportunity to perform at Carnegie Hall. Smith, who shared the stage at the Steinway Hall recital, has been a laureate in numerous competitions, including the Seattle International Piano Competition. While at the U, she studied with Vera Watanabe and Bonnie Gritton.

Steinway Artist Josh Wright BMu’10 MMu’11, another student of Duehlmeier at the U, completed a piano album that topped the Billboard classical charts just three weeks after its release in April 2011, and he is scheduled to release a second CD in 2013.

Currently, the U School of Music’s Piano Area has about 60 piano performance majors, including 12 doctoral and eight master’s degree candidates. All of them have auditioned for their places. Other music majors also study piano as part of their degree requirements, and many other students enroll simply because they wish to play better.

One of the biggest challenges to the Piano Area has come since 2000, as the U has strived to provide enough instruments for the growing number of students. With the inauguration of the new Gardner Hall in 2000, Utah benefactor Bruce Bastian (cofounder of WordPerfect) made a generous gift of 55 new pianos, including two matched Hamburg Steinways, for the Libby Gardner Concert Hall.

The renovation also brought more studio space, along with new lab facilities and practice rooms, several of which, through Bastian’s gift, were equipped for the first time with Steinway instruments to replace most of the worn and battered pianos of the last century.

Little more than a decade later, however, growth had tripled, outpacing even the magnanimous Bastian gift. Space was once again at a premium, and providing enough instruments with the sensitive range and touch required at advanced levels was proving difficult. The influx of students made the Piano Area the largest single division within the School of Music, and the constant search for practice rooms (the bane of music students everywhere) was robbing piano majors of vital practice time. Other areas were also growing, and they, too, needed good instruments for accompaniments and chamber music.

Disney composer and former U student Leigh Harline, left, accompanies Cliff Edwards, the voice of Jiminy Cricket. (Photo courtesy Jo-An Lyman)

The solution was to find enough money for another major piano purchase. Through the efforts of Dean Tymas-Jones and other administrators, with an intermediary in the indefatigable Gerald R. “Skip” Daynes, Jr. ex’66, owner of Daynes Music in Salt Lake, a centennial campaign raised $2 million to help purchase 49 new Steinway pianos, mostly for the School of Music, but also for the Theatre Department, Kingsbury Hall, and elsewhere on campus. This allowed the School of Music to retain its coveted status as an All-Steinway School. The University now has a total of 196 Steinways or Steinwaydesigned instruments.

As this “Year of the Piano” unfolds, Duehlmeier notes that the Piano Area has much to celebrate with its century and more of great music. “Generations of piano students have benefited from the piano program’s start 100 years ago,” Duehlmeier says. “The program’s legacy—and its future—are graduates who become outstanding piano performers and teachers.”

—Roger L. Miller is a University of Utah professor emeritus of musicology who taught at the U for 25 years.

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To reach the Colorado River from Ken Sleight’s Pack Creek Ranch south of Moab, you first take a right off of the dirt and gravel Abbey Road, named after Sleight’s longtime friend Edward Abbey, the author who tapped away at a typewriter for a few years in a tiny cabin at Sleight’s ranch.

Pack Creek Ranch is a peaceful place, nestled in the foothills of the La Sal Mountains and surrounded by cottonwood, oak, and evergreen trees. A creek near the sprawling cabin that is Sleight’s home winds its way down the expanse of high desert below the ranch, flowing toward the Colorado River and its network of side canyons that Sleight explored for nearly 30 years as a pioneering river guide. He and Abbey became friends after meeting in July 1967, when Abbey, then a ranger with the U.S. National Park Service, offered to help him put in at Lees Ferry on the Colorado.

The roads and trails through the desert around the river have multiplied over the years. On a recent drive down State Route 128 for a stroll along the banks of the Colorado, Sleight was taken aback by all of the heavy equipment along the river where workers were putting in a paved trail and building two more footbridges to connect the two shores. It’s a scene that in the old days would have moved him to action, the kind that compelled Abbey to use him as the model for the character Seldom Seen Smith in the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang.

“They keep coming and coming. You can’t stop it,” Sleight says.

Ken Sleight, who majored in business at the University of Utah, enjoys a cup of coffee at the Moab Diner. (Photo by Stephen Speckman)

The wild vastness of Utah’s red rock canyons and the Colorado first beckoned to him in the 1950s, when he began his river-running business and started steering his path away from his accounting department job at Firestone Tire and Rubber in Salt Lake City and toward the desert, which he would eventually wage fierce fights for as an environmental activist.

Sleight BS’55 landed the job at Firestone soon after graduating in business from the University of Utah. Born in Paris, Idaho, he and his five siblings had grown up on farms in Idaho and northern Utah, hanging around in general stores run by their father and uncles. He headed to the U after high school, on track to become a businessman like his father.

Sleight recollects that he was timid when he first came to the University. Stuttering didn’t help. “I was very shy all the time,” he says. “That was an albatross. It hurt, because you can’t speak out when you want to.” He credits speech classes at the U with helping him to gain confidence and overcome not only his stuttering but his shyness. “I had some great teachers at the University,” he says.

But even during college, the outdoors beckoned him away from the classroom. “I kept sloughing,” Sleight recollects. “I always wanted to go hiking and so forth, and I did that.” He also took his first river trip, in 1951 with guide and friend Malcom “Moki Mac” Ellingson. The trip was through Lodore Canyon on the Green River, and Sleight loved all of it—the desert, the water, the time in the rafts.

The Korean War interrupted college for him. He was drafted in 1951 and served in Korea with the U.S. Army’s 48th Field Artillery Battalion, 7th Infantry Division, from June 1952 until September 1953, including a month on the front line near Chuncheon firing Howitzer rounds. He served another year in the Army Reserves after his discharge. Sleight, who reached the rank of sergeant, remembers that even during the war, he and a friend somehow managed to make an impromptu trip on a raft they fashioned out of a tree trunk, branches, and “derelict” boards, using a few of those boards for oars. The two Army buddies floated for an hour or so on the Bukhan River, in the northern Gangwon Province.

When he came back to Utah, he had changed. “I was getting damn good grades,” he says. “I knew I couldn’t get a good job without going to school.” Firestone recruited him as he graduated. He would occasionally attend John Birch Society meetings, though he never officially joined. Sometimes he’d wear a bowtie to work.

But the outdoors kept calling him. So he began turning his daydreams into plans, and saved money from his Firestone job to purchase eight neoprene Army surplus rafts for $35 to $50 each. He wanted to start a business that would allow him to guide people on the adventure of running rivers through canyons, and on horseback trips through the mountains. Back then, he recollects, you didn’t need the “rigmarole” of dealing with permits and approval from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management or the National Forest Service before you could embark on such endeavors. You just went. He began with guiding Boy Scouts down the Green and Colorado rivers. “I didn’t want to sell tires all my life,” Sleight says. “I saw more of a future in the river business than I did with Firestone.”

Officers escort Ken Sleight, second from left, away during a protest near Moab in the early 1990s. (Photo courtesy The Canyon Country Zephyr, www.canyoncountryzephyr.com)

He used a mimeograph machine to churn out brochures to promote his new line of work, and after a few years of guiding river trips, he quit his Firestone job in 1957, took on odd jobs, and began substitute teaching to help finance his new river-running business. Eventually he moved with his first wife and children to southern Utah, living in Escalante and then Green River. His Wonderland Expeditions, incorporated on April 1, 1957, soon became Ken Sleight Expeditions as he gained a stellar reputation.

“Dad thought I gave up all that schooling to be on the river,” Sleight says now. “But it was seventh heaven, and I made the right decision. I did what I wanted—I’ve always done that. It was an adventure. It was freedom. It was not only the places you’d go, it was the people—people with great ideas. I enjoyed that.”

Sleight guided epic river trips throughout the Colorado River system, through Cataract, Grand, Desolation, and Glen canyons, for three decades. In 1990, he began dismantling his business, transferring operations in Grand and Glen canyons to his son Mark. He sold the Cataract, Lodore, and Desolation canyon operations to separate buyers. “My last commercial river trip was down the Grand Canyon,” he says. So storied was his career that last year, Sleight was inducted into the River Runners Hall of Fame at the John Wesley Powell River History Museum in Green River, Utah.

Glen Canyon was Sleight’s favorite place as a river runner, and he loved the stops along the way, such as Music Temple and Rainbow Bridge. Construction on the Glen Canyon Dam began in late 1956, much to his dismay. But he continued to take passengers on float trips through the canyon, from 1957 to 1963, when the floodgates of the dam were closed and Lake Powell began to form.

In The Monkey Wrench Gang, published in 1975, Abbey wrote that the character Seldom Seen Smith, a lapsed Mormon and river runner, called the newly created Lake Powell “the blue death.” In the book, Smith kneels atop the dam and prays “for a little pre-cision earthquake right here.” He also helps a friend drive a road grader off a cliff and into the reservoir, and helps dynamite a coal train, among other exploits.

Sleight today still demurs on how much of the monkey-wrenching in the book was based on reality. “Your conscience tells you what you can do if you feel like paying the price, but don’t tell others what you did—that’s where you get them into the picture [as a witness in court],” Sleight says. “So, you do things on your own, but you don’t tell anyone about it.”

At one point, Sleight and others started a Sierra Club chapter in Moab, hopeful it would help push the agenda of one day getting rid of the Glen Canyon Dam and what he still calls “Lake Foul,” instead of Lake Powell. But they didn’t get the backing they needed, so Sleight and others quit, calling the Sierra Club back then a “milquetoast” operation.

The rivers, Sleight says, had talked the timidity out of him as he told stories to his clients along the way. And the more time he spent outdoors, exploring Utah’s red rock country, the more he and his political views shifted from the conservatism of his youth. He eventually served for eight years as chairman of the local Democratic Party Club in San Juan County. He protested and marched for various causes alongside Navajo and Ute Indians and environmental groups.

Dams. Roads. Overgrazing. Bridges. Drilling for oil in wilderness areas. Sleight had the “guts,” as he puts it, to speak up over the years. After the Glen Canyon Dam was completed in the late 1960s, he helped fight a proposed highway that would have bridged across the Escalante River near Stevens Arch, and won. “That effort was my greatest environmental accomplishment,” he says now.

Sometimes he lost. He and David Brower, then head of the Sierra Club, sued the federal government in order to preserve Rainbow Bridge National Monument, which was being flooded by the Glen Canyon Dam, and won the battle in federal district court, but were overruled in the federal Circuit Court of Appeals.

In the early 1990s, Sleight, then in his early 60s, saddled his horse Knothead and rode to Amasa Back Mesa near Moab, standing down bulldozers before they began to take down several hundred acres of juniper forest. The Caterpillar advanced right up to him and his horse, but Sleight didn’t back down, and his audacity helped prompt a moratorium on the forest’s destruction, according to the local bimonthly newspaper, The Canyon Country Zephyr. He made a similar stand against a road grader in another nearby area, but there, the people and machines won. He and Jim Stiles, publisher of the Zephyr, also more formally protested a proposed highway through the Book Cliffs region of Utah, and prevailed.

From left, Ken Sleight, tourist Carol Grohe, and author Edward Abbey pause for a photo during a 1988 horseback trip through Grand Gulch in Utah. Abbey died the following year, in Arizona. (Photo courtesy Ken Sleight)

Stiles says Sleight has waged plenty of quixotic crusades over the years, and yet played a real role in preserving some key areas and raising awareness about the need for conservation. “A lot of us see overwhelming odds and give up,” Stiles says. “Ken seems to thrive on fighting those kinds of odds. I think that’s something missing these days and a lesson from Ken that’s so important. It’s the integrity that you bring to the fight that counts.”

Sleight in 1999 received the David R. Brower Conservation Award, which honors individuals for their “dramatic, positive impact on conservation efforts in the Colorado Plateau region.” Sleight’s love of Utah’s rivers also has moved him to help others who were similarly enamored, including SPLORE founder Martha Ham MS’77 MSW’90. Sleight mentored her more than 30 years ago, to help her start her own river-running business, with its own unique twist of taking people of all abilities, notably the disabled, on river trips.

Most recently, Sleight has been a supporter of activist and fellow U alum Tim DeChristopher BS’09, who served a two-year prison term until this past April for monkey-wrenching a 2008 federal oil and gas lease auction in Salt Lake City by offering fake bids, which resulted in the auction being called off. Sleight met DeChristopher at a rally in Salt Lake to show his support and visited with the younger man before, during, and after the trial and prison term. “I think he’s done great,” Sleight says. “He’s got guts.”

DeChristopher says he read Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang when he was 17 or 18 years old, long before he learned the model for Seldom Seen was very real and living in Utah. “I think he is an example of principled courage,” says DeChristopher, who has been working in recent months at a bookstore in Salt Lake City.

These days, Sleight spends most of his time at the Pack Creek Ranch, raising horses and tending alfalfa with his second wife, Jane, whom he married in 1983. Jane recalls that when they first met—on a river trip, of course—Sleight had a quart of milk, a Slim Jim sausage, and a dictionary in the front of his pickup. “I said, ‘So, what’s with the dictionary,’ ” she says with a laugh. “He said, ‘I’m writing a book.’ So, he’s been writing a book for as long as I’ve known him, and for about 20 years before that.”

Sleight admits he’s still writing that book, inside his office on the ranch. Instead of sipping Jim Beam from his omnipresent coffee mug, he’s switched to actual coffee these days. He and Jane have also been busy in recent months with packing boxes, preparing to move out of the sprawling cabin on the ranch that they’ve long called home and into a trailer near Sleight’s office.

At the kitchen table in the cabin, Sleight produces a box of old photographs, many depicting in black and white a man gripping oars on a wild river or the reins of a horse as he rides through the mountains. The plan is maybe to finish that book, take Spot and Apache for rides on dirt roads and trails, and to give presentations inside a large room inside the old cabin—the same room where Abbey once spoke to a group as part of Ken and Jane’s “Conversation at Pack Creek Ranch” reading program. Sleight now wants to use that room to show people slides and movies from the old days—times spent running rivers, guiding horse trips, tilting at windmills.

—Stephen Speckman is a journalist and photographer based in Salt Lake City and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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David Kranes was a silent boy. He was always on the sidelines, observing, rarely saying much. On Saturday mornings, he might go to Boston’s University Theater to see a Tom Mix, Roy Rogers, or Gene Autry film. The theater handed out silver dollars to a lucky few between showings. It was a big deal to kids in their early teens. But even if the young Kranes managed to snag a silver dollar at the theater, it’s a safe bet that he wouldn’t yap about it very much. He just wasn’t a talker.

Even today, decades later, Kranes is by no means a chatterbox. When he speaks, he chooses his words carefully, as if plucking the ripest fruit from the branch. He exudes an almost Zen-like air. His home on a hillside above the University of Utah, near Popperton Park, is spotless. He has spent a lifetime cultivating his powers of observation, and honing an ability to not just communicate, but to select the right word and the right phrase.

Now a professor emeritus at the University of Utah, Kranes taught at the U for 34 years until his retirement in 2001, and he has mentored many preeminent authors. As the founder and onetime artistic director of the Sundance Playwrights’ Lab, he has shepherded numerous award-winning plays (his own and the work of others) from page to stage, working with such celebrated playwrights as Tony Kushner and actors including Kathy Bates and John Malkovich. His own dramatic work has been produced nationally, including at the Manhattan Theatre Club and Mark Taper Forum. And as the author of seven novels and a handful of short story collections—including, most recently, The Legend’s Daughter, released in May— he has established himself as a writer with a distinctive and clear voice, with accolades including a Pushcart Prize and the Utah Governor’s Award in the Arts.

Yet Kranes himself will readily admit that reaching a point where he felt comfortable expressing himself was a long time coming. “Discovering that I could speak and what that speaking might mean to others may have saved my life on a number of occasions. I tried not to be a writer in various ways. So to somehow earn my own permission to speak was so vivifying and life-giving.”

Kranes grew up in Boston, where his father was a highly regarded physician and was for a time chief of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. His mother put aside her nursing career to raise Kranes. “Though my parents couldn’t be described as ‘power’ people, they were respected people of note in many ways, and their friends were ‘important’ people in the Boston/ Harvard/MIT community,” he says. “I remember a night when there were three Nobelists at our house for dinner. How would one ever dare to enter into that conversation?”

Under this kind of pressure, Kranes remained a reserved and quiet child, the kind of kid who kept his mouth clamped shut. “I stood at the edge of things, taking notes but believing I’d never measure up,” he says.

Living in the deep shadow cast by his father led him to enroll as a pre-med English major at Bowdoin College. But then he hit a wall. “I applied to med schools my senior year, but, in the late spring, realized, I can’t do this! I understood that my medical path was to please my father, who had always said, ‘Whatever you do, I’ll be pleased,’ but the unspoken message had been, ‘I’d be so happy if you chose medicine,’ ” Kranes recollects. “So I ditched med school and flailed for a couple of weeks, then decided, I love words. Lawyers use words. Lawyers are respected professionals.”

Photo by Tom Smart

At 21, Kranes enrolled at Columbia University’s law school, where he flourished for a time. But the competitive nature of the school, with students clawing their way over one another to get into the best law firms in the country, began to wear on him. And his slate was full for another reason, as well. “I was trying to read a novel a day and write a sonnet a day, because I’d never get to do that once I graduated and started to practice,” he says. “And all that conspired into a breakdown. And after my head cleared from the breakdown, I saw that I’d best try to do what I loved, which was to write.”

He entered New York University and received a master’s degree in English. And the words wouldn’t stop: He wrote furiously, constantly. He also met and married his wife, Carol, during this time, and shortly after leaving NYU, he came to another crossroads. “I realized theater was more of a drive than poetry or fiction,” he says. “I’d had a few poems published; I’d had a story published; but I’d had a play optioned for off-Broadway production, and Yale was the place to go if you thought you might write for theater.”

So he hit Yale University’s Drama School in the mid-1960s, having finally found his niche. “[Yale] immersed me in the literature of world theater,” he says. “It gave me a laboratory in which to take seven of my plays through the entire process ending in production. It gave me a theater community of brilliant young theater people, such as director Jon Jory, actor Stacy Keach, and playwright John Guare, who actively stimulated one another when at Yale.”

After obtaining a doctorate of fine arts, Kranes headed west to Utah, where his wife had been raised. He also believed the move would be beneficial for him. “I thought it would be a good thing to get away from the East Coast, where I felt the pressure to become one of the Nobelists sitting around my family’s dinner table.”

He came to the University of Utah in 1967, teaching classes in both the English and Theatre departments. Once at the U, he found that he loved teaching. “That surprised me, because the choice to teach was a cynical one,” he says. “I asked myself, ‘What job might I have that would allow me the most hours in a given day to be a writer?’ ”

Kranes found that mentoring young writers was as much a calling as his own efforts to craft fiction and drama. “I think it’s very hard to commit to making stuff out of words without feeling a little odd, strange, or outside the mainstream. You help the younger writers see it’s not necessarily solitary,” he says.

One of those students was Ron Carlson HBA’70 MA’72, now a professor in the Programs in Writing at the University of California at Irvine and an author of numerous short stories and novels. Carlson first met Kranes in 1968, soon after Kranes had arrived at the U. Carlson says that Kranes had a talent for coaxing writers from their shells. And Kranes’ own work opened Carlson’s eyes to new possibilities. “I found it fabulous, dense and angular, and full of surprising imagery like nothing I’d ever seen. It made me want to write, and the truth is that his prose still is a spur to my own work.” Another of Kranes’ former students is Jon Tuttle BS’82, now a professor at Francis Marion University, who compiled and edited David Kranes: Selected Plays, released in 2011. Tuttle says that Kranes was one of the most beloved professors at the U during the early 1980s, when he was taking courses from him. “What he’s best at is making you feel like you belong and have something to say,” Tuttle says. “And that’s the first thing I keep in mind when I’m talking to my own students. I try to listen. That’s Kranes.”

The music of Kranes’ work largely follows two recurring themes. Like poking at a sore tooth, Kranes returns again and again to the charged dynamic of fathers and sons, tussling over control and veiled emotions. The landscapes of the West, of Utah, Idaho, and Nevada, also have come to figure prominently in his work. “I think we all need distance as artists,” Kranes says. “When I first got to Utah, my writing was about the East. It took me about six years to begin writing about the West. And it was different from my East work, which was cooler and more observant. The West work began with wonder and newness and discovery, senses of rebirth and initiation. … What’s good and bad about the East for me is its constancy. The West, on the other hand, is inconstant, shifting, changing, new—both discoverable and rediscoverable.”

That process of discovery and rediscovery took an unexpected turn during one of Kranes’ exploratory trips soon after arriving from Yale. He was heading to Elko, Nevada, with some friends when they hit a snowstorm raging across the salt flats. The travelers stopped at the old State Line Casino in Wendover. Inside, Kranes happened to stand behind a man who was raking it in at the blackjack table. The gambler passed a silver dollar to Kranes and said, “Here. Good luck, kid.” Kranes was transported back to his days as a teen in Boston, where those silver dollars were handed out as prizes during the Gene Autry or Roy Rogers flicks.

That confluence of the past and the present ignited a fascination with casinos and the emotions they trigger. “In a casino, the idea of ‘are you a winner or are you a loser?’ gets compressed into a three-minute or five-minute span of time,” Kranes says. And it dovetailed perfectly with his work in theater. “I’ve always been hypersensitive to space, especially affective space—the way any given configuration of space makes you feel,” he says.

David Kranes directs a production of Harold Pinter’s Old Times at the U’s Babcock Theatre in March 1984. (Photo courtesy Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)

After that fateful night in Wendover, first came stories and plays based in Nevada and its casinos, and then his essay about casino space called “Playgrounds” appeared in a Las Vegas travel guide. The essay appeared at a time when casinos were largely dark, dank spaces with wildly patterned carpets, and without windows and clocks. Kranes argued that patrons would be more inclined to linger if these spaces were more welcoming, and he chose a handful of poorly designed properties as examples of what not to do, predicting their demise. His prognostications proved true, and soon thereafter, in the early 1980s, the casino CEOs came calling, and he began evaluating casino properties for their effectiveness in keeping gamblers in the seats. He urged the CEOs to open up their gaming spaces, allow natural light to flood the casino floors, and bring a sense of the natural world indoors.

“It was the convergence of the two—the study of affective space and the fascination about Nevada’s images and surreality—which led to the casino consulting,” he recollects. “I was off and running on a consulting jaunt, which has taken me across the country and to Estonia, Lithuania, and Lake Como. Who was I to say no?”

In addition to the casino gig, he also was busy working with Robert Redford’s Sundance Playwrights’ Lab. “I had had a film project in the first Sundance Film Lab,” Kranes says. “The next year, I was approached and asked if I would like to create a Playwrights’ Lab which had the same developmental mission elements as the Film Lab.” He founded the new lab and worked with it for more than a decade, and although he is not involved currently, he still has a keen interest in its development. “I’m working on a book which tries to frame the first 14 years of the Sundance Playwrights’ Lab,” he says. “It was an inspired place and process, and I’m trying to record a sense of that.”

Today, Kranes is also facing a new challenge. In July 2012, he was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer. “The treatment has gone very, very well, but there have been side effects,” he says. One side effect of the medication has been periods of crippling mental depression, which have brought a new degree of gravity and urgency to his writing. “I wrote a kind of journal called ‘Writing Myself Well’ and, as hard as I could, tried to use the process of writing and what it ignited in me to not stay in that darkness.”

He now believes the cancer will soon be in remission, and he still has a lot of writing he wants to do. He looks forward to spending as much time as he can with his two grown sons. He also has been rediscovering old stories he produced many years ago but squirreled away in filing cabinets. “Sometimes I put them in the drawer and forget about them,” he says. “I’ve been a poor marketer of my own work. It doesn’t serve me well professionally, but there’s always been this drive to do the next one and the next one.”

In addition to his new story collection The Legend’s Daughter, his latest work includes two novels (resurrected from the depths of those file cabinets), which will be coming out later in the year. As he sits in his house recollecting the work to be done, he leans back and folds his hands together. “I’ve also started sketching a play titled Final Episode,” he says, “a title which, at my age, speaks for itself.” Then he’s quiet, grinning from ear to ear. These days, he is quite comfortable with his own silence. He has a lifetime of stories that do the talking.

— Jason Matthew Smith is a freelance writer in Salt Lake City and a former editor of Continuum.

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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.

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.

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.”

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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