04 October 2004
SAN FRANCISCO-- Bill Gates may have spent the last ten years on the top of the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list--but only now has he gotten comfortable with the altitude.
Last week, at the annual luncheon of one of Silicon Valley's longest-running philanthropic organizations, the Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) chairman struck a very Carnegiesque note when he urged others to open their eyes--and their wallets--to urgent needs around them.
"We need to get this new generation drawn into philanthropy," Gates told an audience of 1,500 Silicon Valley denizens Friday. "I think we can draw people into being more generous," he said.
The man who once shrugged off questions about what he would do with his wealth has taken to philanthropy in a big way. Forbes calculates that Gates has given 37% of his wealth--more than $28 billion--to charitable causes, largely via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (By contrast, add up the donations made by billionaires Warren Buffett, Paul Allen, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer and you get about $2.55 billion--not even the equivalent of a decent tip on a $28-billion tab.)
In two separate speeches given in the Valley on Friday, Gates credited his parents with spurring him into getting Microsoft involved in charitable giving--and then continuing to nag him until he personally got involved in giving. At the 50th anniversary luncheon of the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley, Gates described how his mother began asking him when his fledgling company of 30 employees was going to contribute to the greater Seattle area.
"Mom said, 'It's time you did a United Way campaign,'" Gates recalled. "And I said, 'I'm too busy--we're working day and night to write software,'" and so on. But his mother kept pestering him "until I came up with the right answers."
But even as Microsoft's contributions increased, Gates shied from getting personally involved in philanthropy. "I used to think it would be schizophrenic to say, 'Let's make money'' in the morning and then 'Let's give it away,' in the afternoon," he said, in a talk also on Friday to a group of students at the University of California, Berkeley. Instead, he insisted he would take up philanthropy in his "declining" years, after he had left Microsoft.
That plan began to change in the fall of 1995 when Microsoft began donating money and software to put computers in public libraries throughout the U.S. Gates made the program his own, ultimately fusing it into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which was established in January 2000. "With that success, I thought, 'Boy, I can do this,'" Gates said.
There were other factors at play, too. Microsoft had been battered by years of antitrust investigations and litigation by the U.S. government. Gates, who had become a lightening rod for much of the criticism, relinquished the job of Microsoft's chief executive in January 2000 but continued as the company's chairman and chief software architect.
Gates still devotes most of his time to working on software at Microsoft. At the end of Friday, he stopped at the Computer History Museum for an on-stage discussion with computer scientist and Stanford University president, John Hennessy. He showed a flash of his legendary touchiness when a member of the audience suggested that Linux software now runs 50% of the world's servers. "That's not the right number," Gates shot back. "First, start with the facts, then proceed from there." As for whether Linux threatens Microsoft, Gates noted: "Microsoft has had competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document this stuff."
But these days, Gates takes a broader view of "urgent" problems--and says he realized they could not wait for him to retire. "If you can solve a problem today--and avoid the compound effects that happen over time--it's way smarter than waiting." He says he realized he could use his money to address health problems that affect millions of people but where the commercial prospects are thin. Gates says he was stunned to learn he could instantly double the funding for researching ways to fight malaria with a $50 million donation. (He gave it.) "One million people die of malaria every year, 200 million people are suffering from it," he told his listeners. But malaria drugs are not the potential money-makers that, say, a new cholesterol drug could be, leaving a market gap that Gates feels philanthropy is suited to address.
Gates' words echoed an early philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie, who considered himself a pioneer in "scientific philanthropy," literally wrote the book on charitable giving in two 1889 essays later republished as a book entitled, The Gospel of Wealth. His points were bold: "The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth," he wrote. The smartest strategy was for the rich man to oversee how the funds were distributed during his lifetime.
"I think of philanthropy in two ways," Gates told the gathering at the Community Foundation. "From a purely rational perspective, if we can save lives, that's great. But if you can meet with people--you can take the statistics and map it to individuals. It's uplifting. I encourage you to do it. Drawing people in is what this is all about."
http://www.forbes.com/philanthropy/2004/10/04/cz_ec_1004gates.html
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Monday, October 04, 2004
News: Bill Grows Up
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Book Review: A Child's Work
Playing make-believe is the serious business of childhood
Sunday May 30, 2004
A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play
By Vivian Gussin Paley
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO; 111 PAGES; $19
Like our obsession with finding the next great diet, American public opinion about how we educate our children boomerangs from one extreme to another. One day we're all for letting them roll around in the mud; the next, we tell them to sit quietly at desks as we test them on verb conjugation.
Propelled by the Bush administration's "No Child Left Behind" policy, mainstream public education has most recently swung toward the formal side. Reading and writing are the hunter-gatherer skills of our age. Kindergarten has become the place to learn them. By second grade, we start giving children standardized tests to assess how much they've learned. Have we gone too far? Are we raising children with heads so densely packed with "facts" that their imaginations will slip away like dreams?
In a new slim volume, "A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play," Vivian Gussin Paley contends that we "perform a grave error" when we discard fantasy play as the foundation of early childhood education. Paley is an important voice: She spent 37 years as a kindergarten teacher at the famed University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and has written a dozen books on early education. Her essay is a richly detailed reminder of the enormously important role of imaginary play -- but falls short of arguing convincingly that it should be the basis for early education.
Playing make-believe is the gold dust of childhood. Pretend play helps children build dreams, grapple with fears, experiment with language and social rules and sharpen their observations about the world, and bestows a thousand other unrecognized blessings, Paley writes. Through imaginary games, children test how the world works and where they fit in. Pretend to be a baby and crying is OK. Pretend to be a firefighter and you must act brave. Fantasy play lets children try out roles and behaviors with little fear of adverse consequences. You can be a wicked wizard in the morning and a heroic knight by snack time. In either case, your friends will still sit next to you. This is good, Paley points out. "When play is curtailed, how are [children] to confront their fantasy villains?" she asks.
Teachers can also use stories to convey lessons. Paley describes how "Franklin" kept disrupting play in the corner of her classroom devoted to building blocks. Just telling Franklin to play nicely didn't work. Paley resorted to storytelling: "Once there was a boy who had a big problem in blocks. Pretend I'm that boy," Paley told her class. She began waving her arms and shouting. The real Franklin laughed. "That's me! You're pretending me, right?" Paley then asked Franklin to pretend to be a child called "Good Player, " who knew how to cooperate with others. He did. After that, whenever Franklin lost control, his classmates would remind him to "play" a different character. "Hey Franklin, you're pretending the wrong boy, remember?"
Through "play," Paley gently gave Franklin instructions he could follow, rather than reprimanding him or isolating him in "time-outs." But Paley's thesis gets hazy when she writes about how teachers should be guided by children's stories. As a teacher, Paley writes, "I rarely paused to listen to the narratives blooming everywhere in the garden of children in which I spent my days. I saw myself as the bestower of place and belonging, of custom and curriculum, too often ignoring the delicate web being constructed by the children in their constant exchange of ideas."
And so? Paley doesn't finish the thought. She recites another classroom conversation -- "Let's both be baby sisters and our nice mother isn't lost yet" -- then wonders what it means. "These were the dialogues that had begun to fill my journals and there was never enough time to follow up every intriguing notion and original idea." Not every game of "make-believe" need teach a lesson, but as a parent, I want my children to take away more from their teachers than their teachers take from them.
Strikingly absent from this book is any discussion of what happens to children outside the classroom. On one end of the spectrum are children with schedules as crammed as those of corporate executives: swim lessons, ballet, karate, T-ball, music -- maybe even a foreign language and cooking. Paley's work should send a message here: Lighten up, folks. Close your eyes, open your imaginations and play "pretend" with your kids. At the other extreme are children who live in a world stripped of anything resembling healthy educational experiences.
Teachers need to nurture these children's imaginations, but it also stands to reason that these children desperately need teachers to help them learn the basics that other families take for granted: the ABCs, counting and the colors of the rainbow. Early childhood education should not resemble an Atkins diet of pure instruction and no make-believe. Neither should it be the other way around. Paley does children a great service by reminding us of the enormous value of fantasy play. Our job, as parents and educators, is to give children time to pretend they've fallen down a rabbit hole, without neglecting the skills they will need to read what Wonderland looked like to Alice.
Elizabeth Corcoran is a contributing editor at Forbes.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/30/RVGQQ6PUKP1.DTL
Monday, May 10, 2004
Forbes: Unoutsourcing: Dell's problems with customers
Dell moved product support for business accounts from India back to the U.S. It seems some customers were not happy with the prior arrangement.
Dell can assemble and ship a new computer for a customer in 24 hours. But it took six months for the company to get Karen Anderson's name right. Anderson, who lives in Calistoga, Calif., endured dozens of phone calls before Dell issued her a promised $200 rebate for a computer she ordered last October. Dell also gave her the wrong Internet service provider. And her printer broke. "I just want to scream when I see Dell's TV commercials," Anderson fumes.
Dell is number one in the PC industry, but recently has been earning more than its share of complaints. Last year it shipped 5.4 million personal computers in the U.S., ahead of rival HP, which shipped 5.2 million, according to IDC. Dell's high marks for quality notwithstanding, it has unhappy campers.
Last year the central Texas Better Business Bureau logged 3,726 complaints against Dell from consumers throughout the U.S. That's up threefold from 2001, a period in which Dell's sales volume grew two and a half times. HP earned only 1,362 complaints nationwide for that entire three-year period, according to the Better Business Bureau of the Silicon Valley. Last year the Texas attorney general's office logged 504 complaints against Dell and Dell Financial, more than double the pace of 2002. Complaints about the Round Rock, Tex. firm for the first four months of this year are running even with last year's.
Business customers have been having issues with Dell, too. Technology Business Research, a consulting firm in Hampton, N.H. that has been tracking corporate customer satisfaction with PC vendors since 1997, ranked Dell far ahead of its competitors for years. Those marks began sliding a year ago. TBR's most recent data on satisfaction with desktop computers show Dell below unbranded "white box" computers and tied with competitors HP, Gateway and IBM.
What happened? Cost control. Dell was among the earliest computer companies to route customer service and technical support calls to India. Dell set up its first center in Bangalore in 2001 and opened a second site in Hyderabad last year. Language and cultural rifts between disgruntled U.S. customers and Dell's bright but unseasoned Indian support staff fueled the flames. U.S. customers say they got frustrated when Dell employees fielding calls seemed unwilling to depart from a script. TBR began hearing complaints about Dell's telephone support from business customers in early 2003. In November Dell took the rare step of rerouting its large- and medium-business support work out of India and back to Austin. Support for small-business and consumer accounts remains in India.
M.D. Ramaswami, who helped establish Dell's Bangalore center, is proud of Dell's early hires. "We put them through eight weeks of training--four weeks around accent and culture and another four weeks around Dell products," says Ramaswami, who now runs his own consultancy in Bangalore. "The biggest challenge was working on the accent and culture. That challenge still remains--for all companies across the board."
After Lisa Ross in Colt, Ark. had problems with a $5,000 PC she bought from Dell in 2002, she spent two weeks exchanging e-mails with customer support, trying to learn the manufacturer and part numbers of components to ensure there would be no fatal compatibility errors. She still doesn't have all the answers. "I worked in technical support for Gateway for 14 months," she said. "I feel sorry for Dell technicians if they don't have that information. They're on the front lines."
Analysts point out that Dell's service isn't bad--just no longer dramatically ahead of its competitors'. The March issue of Consumer Reports gave Dell a 62 (out of a possible 100) for its desktop PC support--down from its December 2001 grade of 74 but still ahead of HP and its Compaq brand, which last year received scores of 54 and 51, respectively. For consumers, Dell's desktop service and reliability scored an "A+" last July from PC Magazine, even as the magazine pointed out that "many readers are extremely unhappy with Dell [service] practices."
Concedes Bobbi Dangerfield, director of Dell's U.S. consumer customer experience, "Last year we experienced some challenges in customer support."
Carrie Hurt, president of the central Texas Better Business Bureau, says that Dell meets with her staff quarterly and works diligently to resolve complaints.
Despite its partial pullback to the U.S., Dell remains committed to its overseas operations and plans to open more call centers around the world. A year ago Dell also kicked off a "Voice of the Customer" effort aimed at improving product quality, fixing problems faster, making it easier to reach Dell and simply being nice.
This March Dell simplified the automated menu of options customers hear when they dial in for support. To cut wait times on the phone, Dangerfield says that Dell added more people to its call centers. Beginning last November Dell also prodded its customer support staff to team up with technicians to answer technology questions, thereby cutting by two-thirds the number of times a caller is transferred. Six months ago Dell began to roll out a new database of tools for resolving technology problems and later this year will put those tools on the Web.
Any improvements would be welcome news for Daniel Summars, a Lewisville, Tex. software engineer who says that over 24 months he had 21 part failures or replacements in the same Dell notebook model; Dell replaced it twice. "I submitted it to the Guinness World Records," he says.
Monday, March 29, 2004
FORBES: The Price of Peace; Microsoft is back in it.
--Microsoft returns to the hot seat in yet another antitrust trial.
Microsoft just can't seem to stay out of the courthouse. In early March its lawyers were off to a surprising venue, the Hennepin County district court in Minneapolis, to once again defend the company against charges of being an unfair, rapacious bully. Even more surprising: Chairman Bill Gates and Chief Executive Steve Ballmer are slated to take the witness stand if the trial gets into full swing.
It's a remarkable twist in the company's decadelong antitrust odyssey. Although Microsoft has been working steadily to settle all the cases against it, this one seems headed to a jury trial. At stake is close to a billion dollars--along with the beleaguered reputation of the software giant and its chairman.
"When you don't have competing products, innovation suffers, quality of product suffers, and you pay too much. That's what this case is about," says Richard Hagstrom, partner with Zelle, Hofmann, Voelbel, Mason & Gette, the firm leading the charge in Minnesota. His firm is calling for damages that range from $283 million to $425 million, a figure that could triple under antitrust law if Microsoft loses.
Hagstrom says his team has fresh evidence extending over a decade that shows how Microsoft unfairly tried to snuff out competitors and overcharge consumers--and that Gates personally directed many of the anticompetitive activities.
Microsoft's attorneys are primed for the fight. "The basic premise, that Microsoft did something that causes higher prices for consumers, is just wrong," says David Tulchin, a senior partner with Sullivan & Cromwell, which is representing Microsoft. "There's a big number at stake," Tulchin says. "We're going to trial because we want to win. The right number is zero," he says.
Microsoft was pelted with 140 private class actions after it lost to the federal government in U.S. district court in 2000. After those cases were consolidated, Microsoft struck settlements with 11 groups (representing customers in nine states, the District of Columbia and a group representing online purchasers). A few states still have class suits pending, but so far the face value of those 11 deals is $1.6 billion. California, where the first settlement was reached, captured the biggest plum at $1.1 billion. (The California legal team may score nicely, too. It is asking a judge to make Microsoft pay $260 million to cover fees and costs.)
The Twin Cities lawyers, rejecting the token payoff most states received, are gambling they can get a deal more like California's. The basic settlement calls for Microsoft to issue vouchers, good for any technology purchase--Windows XP, an iPod, a Dell laptop, you name it--to those state residents who bought Microsoft software between 1996 and 2001. Most of the settlements averaged $11.50 per state resident (see chart), but in California, thanks to its uniquely plaintiff-friendly antitrust laws, lawyers were able to wrangle a deal worth $31 per state resident. A portion of unclaimed funds--two-thirds in California and half in the other states--will go to schools in low-income neighborhoods. Microsoft gets to keep the rest.
Microsoft wants to crush the plaintiffs at trial because a settlement for more than that $11.50 amount could prompt a rush to other state courts to sweeten many of the earlier arrangements. Most of them are still pending a judge's final approval. "Microsoft would have to do some explaining to the courts," says Kieran Shanahan, with the Raleigh-based Shanahan Law Group, the lead counsel in North Carolina. Estimates of possible revised settlements push Microsoft's total penalty into the $2 billion-plus range.
The Minnesota lawyers are emboldened by their knowledge of the California antitrust case, which was steered by antitrust veteran Eugene Crew of San Francisco's Townsend and Townsend and Crew. That team, which included lawyers from the Zelle, Hofmann firm, amassed 6 million pages of documents and 162 depositions, including some with Gates and other senior Microsoft officials. Among the juicier details exhumed was the story of a defunct startup, GO Corp., that built an operating system for pen-based and notebook computers in the early 1990s. According to the documents, Gates and other Microsoft executives discouraged chipmaker Intel from working closely with GO. "I guess I've made it very clear that we view an Intel investment in GO as an anti-Microsoft move, both because GO competes with our systems software and because we think it will weaken the 386 PC standard," wrote Gates in a note to Intel's then-chief executive, Andrew Grove.
Microsoft settled three weeks before the California case was due in court. Zelle, Hofmann has since tapped Crew's firm to be co-counsel. Declares Zelle's Hagstrom: "Since Minnesota law is better than California law, and since we have successfully overcome legal challenges by Microsoft that were still pending in California at the time of the settlement, we see no reason why Minnesotan consumers would not be entitled to at least what's being paid to Californians." Given that Minnesota has only 5 million residents, the plaintiffs would still fall well short of the $283 million-plus range they're seeking, even if they manage to get a settlement of $30 per resident.
But Microsoft lawyers say Minnesota is no California, where it had every reason to avoid a trial. If Microsoft had lost a trial in California, the court could have ordered the company to pay additional damages based on behavior it considered "unfair," regardless of federal law, says Sullivan & Cromwell's Tulchin. Those damages could have topped billions of dollars, Tulchin adds.
Even pro-plaintiff groups concede that Microsoft is unlikely to shell out all the money set aside for settlements. Not every consumer of its software will go through the work of filling out the paperwork needed to get the vouchers. "I'll be shocked if half the money is claimed," says Howard Yellen, founder of the Settlement Recovery Center, a San Francisco-based firm that helps organizations and businesses file their voucher claims.
Microsoft is weighing what to do with the accumulated $53 billion in cash now on its balance sheet. The Twin Cities lawyers have some ideas.
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By the Numbers
Microsoft has so far settled antitrust class actions (listed below in chronological order) for a total of $1.6 billion.
CALIFORNIA
$1.1 billion
$31.00 per person
FLORIDA
$202 million
$11.87 per person
MONTANA
$12.3 million
$13.40 per person
WEST VIRGINIA
$21 million
$11.60 per person
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
$6.2 million
$11.00 per person
KANSAS
$32 million
$11.75 per person
NORTH DAKOTA
$9 million
$14.20 per person
TENNESSEE
$64 million
$10.96 per person
SOUTH DAKOTA
$9.3 million
$12.17 per person
NORTH CAROLINA
$89 million
$10.59 per person
Monday, March 15, 2004
FORBES: I Opt for Opteron
by Elizabeth Corcoran and Quentin Hardy
For the first time in decades perennial underdog Advanced Micro Devices has one-upped the chip king, Intel Corp. One of AMD's latest microprocessors, Opteron, is winning over loyal Intel customers, and Intel has now conceded it must match it. Just how seriously Intel miscalculated the needs of business customers became clear in late February when HP, Intel's longtime partner and a codeveloper of its top-of-the-line Itanium chip, said that it would begin using Opteron as well as Intel chips in its low-end and midrange servers.
The HP announcement followed similar declarations by the likes of Sun Microsystems, IBM and Fujitsu Siemens--in fact, virtually all the big computer makers except Dell have opted for the 64-bit Opteron. Says Richard Marcello, HP's senior vice president of business-critical servers, "The fundamental reason we picked Opteron right now is that the overall performance is very good."
In the year since Opteron's arrival, AMD has come from nowhere to become a contender in business computing. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD has at least another few months to gallop unchallenged through the selling fields. Intel Chief Executive Craig Barrett has said his Opteron-beater won't be ready until midyear. Quips Hector Ruiz, AMD's chief executive: "We are happy that our competitor sees the advantages of AMD64 and has decided to try and adopt a similar strategy."
Right now AMD's share of the $11 billion market for chips that power midrange servers is tiny, says analyst Nathan Brookwood with Insight 64 in Saratoga, Calif. The company could capture $680 million in sales this year and up to $2 billion in 2005, with juicy 80% gross margins, he says. AMD needs the boost. In fiscal 2003 it lost $274 million on sales of $3.5 billion.
Sacrificing a billion dollars to AMD is a flesh wound for Intel, which grossed $30 billion last year. But the psychic gash is deep. Opteron doubles, from 32 in the last generation, the number of bits that a microprocessor handles at one time. As a result it increases, from 4 billion bytes to a number 4 billion times as large, the amount of memory that can be used by software running on the chip. Intel spent a decade and, by at least one estimate, more than $1 billion developing the Itanium, its own 64-bit chip, but has had trouble getting customers to use it.
Intel's tactical blunder was in breaking with its tradition of designing chips to run old software. "Intel thought that being Intel, it could force everyone to switch" to the new design, says Linley Gwennap, a longtime chip analyst who heads The Linley Group in Mountain View, Calif. "Intel didn't think there would be an alternative," he adds.
The first Itanium, available in 2001, was a dud. Its successor, dating to 2002, also had a lackluster reception. Software writers found Itanium difficult to program. Worse: It didn't run most programs dramatically faster than Intel's 32-bit Xeon chips, it radiated tremendous heat and it was expensive. In April 2003 AMD plunged into the gap with Opteron, which runs both old 32-bit software and revved-up 64-bit software. "It may look like magic, but it wasn't," says Martin Seyer, vice president of AMD's microprocessor group. "Customers wanted to protect their software investments."
It was only last June that Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and others finally began selling databases written for Itanium. "Last year was a watershed year for Itanium," declares Lisa Graff, who is director of Intel's Itanium group. That's faint praise: Intel sold 110,000 Itanium chips last year--a big boost over the past but barely a ripple among last year's estimated sales of 2.9 million 32-bit Xeon servers.
HP executives are quick to say that Opteron best fits systems in which one to four processors will do the job. Itanium, they argue, suits those with the biggest computing loads, such as large databases or scientific modeling that require eight or more processors. "We have no illusions about making that market available to AMD anytime in the future," HP's Marcello says. Counters Ruiz: "Our path to pervasive 64-bit computing remains clear, while our competitor's only becomes increasingly muddy."
But the rise of Opteron has injected competition into a part of the market where the only color was Intel blue. Sun has its own 64-bit UltraSparc chips running its own Solaris software, but it is now also heavily flogging a low-priced Windows-compatible line using Opteron chips to appeal to a huge base of customers it was missing. Says Sun's chief architect, Andreas Bechtolsheim, "With the exception of UltraSparc, Opteron has the best performance of any chip we've seen." Cashing in the Chips
Rivals to Intel reap more per server shipped. Itanium is its pricey response.
Sphere: Related ContentSunday, February 08, 2004
Book Review: Ishi's Brain
Identity crisis
Scholar re-examines the life and lasting controversy of Ishi
Reviewed by Elizabeth Corcoran
Sunday, February 8, 2004
Ishi's Brain: In Search of the Last "Wild" Indian
By Orin Starn
NORTON 352 PAGES; $25.95
Great legends are allegories, stories that impart a deep moral lesson even if they have to fudge the facts to do so. Over the decades, the story of Ishi, typically billed as "California's last wild Indian," grew to legendary proportions. Now, "Ishi's Brain: In Search of the Last 'Wild' Indian," by Orin Starn, an anthropologist at Duke University, aims to strip away the moralistic veneer of the Ishi legend.
Told like a detective story, "Ishi's Brain" is a compelling, and at times, agonizing story of human fallibility, of conflicting good intentions gone awry.
First the history: In 1911, a half-naked, starving man stumbled into the yard of a slaughterhouse outside of Oroville (Butte County), about 150 miles northeast of San Francisco. He did not understand any language spoken to him including a local Indian tongue, Maidu. Someone suggested that he might have belonged to a tribe that, many years earlier, was believed to be responsible for raids on white townspeople.
The day after he was found, the town paper ran a banner headline: "Aboriginal Indian, the last of the Deer Creeks, captured near Oroville." Alfred Kroeber, of the University of California at Berkeley, immediately sent a colleague to Oroville to take custody of the Indian. (At the time, American Indians were considered wards of the state, receiving citizenship only in 1924.) The anthropologist ascertained that the Indian spoke a dialect of Yana. The scientist consequently dubbed the language "Yahi," and named the Indian "Ishi," which sounded like "I'citi," his word for "man." He appeared to be the last surviving member of his tribe.
Kroeber moved Ishi into quarters in his new museum by Golden Gate Park. Ishi became friendly with the museum staff, demonstrated how to chip arrowheads for tourists and recounted songs and stories into early audio recording devices for the Berkeley anthropologists. In March 1916, he died of tuberculosis.
Against Ishi's expressed wishes, a doctor autopsied his body, removing and preserving his brain. The body was later cremated in a private ceremony and the ashes stored in a black Pueblo Indian pot at the Olivet Memorial Park in Colma. In 1961, Kroeber's wife, Theodora, published "Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America." Told with all the flourish and moral underpinnings of a legend, it became a best-seller. As Starn points out, even though Theodora vividly described the massacres of the Yahi people, Ishi's forbearers, she wanted her story to be about healing: Ishi survived thanks to the kindness of her husband, Alfred, and other white protectors. Once settled at the museum, Ishi embraced these people as his "intimate friends," Theodora wrote. But Theodora was loose with facts and omitted some key points, including the fate of Ishi's brain.
Starn spent about two years poking around into the history of Ishi. Even Starn's library research takes on an air of suspense with the rich mosaic of detail he provides: "I decided to take one more look at the Bancroft Library. The Bancroft closed at three, which only left me forty-five minutes before the doors shut for good until after the New Year. ... I checked my bag, signed the register, and showed my ID as now required to enter the library's oak-paneled reading room."
At last, Ishi's pickled brain is found. It is floating around in a vat of preserving solution (along with 32 other brains) in a Maryland warehouse maintained by the Smithsonian Institution. No one was happy. Indian tribes were angry that the Smithsonian still had the brain. Officials at the Smithsonian were vexed by the uproar over a specimen that had been forgotten for decades. Sorting out the legitimate heirs to the brain of someone billed as the "last" of his kind was fraught with tension. Leaders of one tribe, the Maidu, had set Starn on the trail of the brain. But another tribe, the Pit River Indians, claimed closer linguistic ties to Ishi. The Pit River Indians won and then snubbed the Maidu by not inviting them to the burial ceremony.
Starn does not shirk from describing these clashes. Many of his characters' decisions are flawed by ambition. Ishi, too, comes under scrutiny. Starn locates a couple of Indians who can understand some of the songs that Ishi recorded decades ago. They are dismayed. "He shouldn't have sung those songs," explains an elderly woman. "They were given by the spirit to the medicine man." Why would Ishi choose those songs? Starn wonders. He recalls hearing a story told by Indians that cast Ishi as a malevolent shaman expelled by his tribe.
But even as he seeks to correct the historical record, Starn, like Theodora, wants to be a peacemaker. He wants us to understand everybody's motives -- the doctor who chose to dissect Ishi; Kroeber, who packed off the brain to a distant museum; Theodora, who sugar-coated the story; the Smithsonian officials, who tarried over the decision to repatriate Ishi's remains; the Indian tribes who clashed over the right to bury the brain. By leaving the nuances and complexities in the story, Starn has completed the transformation of Ishi -- from man, to legend, and now, at last, back into mortal man again.
Elizabeth Corcoran is a contributing editor to Forbes.
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/02/08/RVGQ94K8721.DTL
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle Sphere: Related Content
Friday, January 02, 2004
Telling Tales
(originally published in the Burlingame Mother’s Club Newsletter)
Once upon a time, there was a mother who loved taking walks. When her first child was born, she strapped him into a Snuggli and walked for hours. As he grew a bit bigger, she would nestle him into a stroller and go for leisurely jogs. He grew sturdy and strong and she eagerly looked forward to the day when they would stroll, hand in hand, around their neighborhood.
But soon it was clear there was a problem: he just didn’t want to walk. It wasn’t that he couldn’t. The child could run like a squirrel when the mood struck him. But rather than walk with his mother, the boy would throw himself on the sidewalk and howl. The mother pleaded with her son to walk. She promised him cookies. She got mad and threatened to walk off. Nothing worked. Then one day, she had an idea. She began telling him a story: “Once upon a time, there was a baby caterpillar with twenty legs…”
No one can resist the tug of a story. And every parent—really, anyone at all—has a treasure trove of stories locked in their head. All we have to do is get them out.
Everyone tells us that children love to hear their mother sing, whether or not she can carry a tune. What they forget to tell us is that every child craves to hear stories told by their parents—“with your own mouth,” as my littlest one likes to say.
True confession: I started telling my first son, Matthew, stories when he was very small to coax him to go for walks. I’d start the story—then begin strolling. It was magic: instead of fussing, he would trot alongside, eager to hear every twist. Now, at age 7, he’s a great walker and has an insatiable love of stories.
Although I’ve been a journalist all my adult life, I have had no formal training in making up stories for children. Over the past few years, however, I’ve conjured up hundreds of stories to amuse and distract my boys. Story telling, I’ve realized, is much like cooking: You can, of course, whip up a simple story from scratch. You can make up a fine story using “prepackaged” materials. And, with a bit of practice, you can weave a gourmet tale with more parts than a nine-course meal. Like cooking, the only prerequisite is utter confidence.
Here is the list of ingredients and a few of the short-cuts I use to make up stories. Although it may seem like a bit of work at the beginning, you’ll discover that as you tell more stories, your cupboard will become packed with characters, plots and twists that will make story telling a cinch.
Ingredients:
- Characters: You only need two or three characters for a good story. The logical star for many of your stories, of course, is your child! (Who doesn’t want to be the hero of a story?) Beloved stuffed animals are another good bet. Other sorts of creatures—lions, dragons, witches—are also favorites.
Once upon a time, there was a baby caterpillar with twenty legs.
2. The plot: Seize the moment. Every child likes to hear stories about familiar stuff. There’s nothing more familiar than the situation at hand. Heading off to the park? Then tell a story about a character going to the park. Bedtime? Tell a story about a character going to bed.
More than anything else, he wanted to walk to a nearby park where there was a tree with leaves so delicious they tasted like candy. “Please, Mommy,” he said, “can’t we go for a walk to the park?”
3. Conflict: Every good story has an element of conflict. And every good mother encounters plenty of conflict every day. Is your child fighting bedtime? Refusing to eat green vegetables? Does she insist on wearing the same pink socks day after day, whether or not they’re clean? Even better: flip-flop the situation. Maybe your character is begging to do something that your child resists.
“Oh,” sighed his mother. “Aren’t you tired from playing all day? Are you sure you really want to go to the park?”
“Oh, yes,” said the little caterpillar. “I’ve got lots of energy!”
4. The comic twist: Here’s where you can be really creative. You’ve described a character and situation in your story. Now add an element of absurdity. The crazier, the better. Why not a story about an animal who really, really wants to go to bed—but spaceships, dinosaurs and a licorice-wielding wizard keep stopping it from getting to sleep? Or, a creature who loves peas and hates candy—but is forced to eat only candy, all day and all night, by a wicked witch?
So, the mother caterpillar inched her way to the closet and started to pull out all the little caterpillar’s shoes. You have to remember that the little caterpillar wore 20 shoes at once. First the mother put on a pair of blue shoes and laced them up, one on the right, one on the left. Then she put on a red pair of shoes, one on the right, one on the left. Then she put on a pair of shoes with blinking lights in the heel, one on the right, one on the left…[you get the idea. Somehow, little kids often think such repetition is pretty funny. Ask your child to start adding examples to the list.] By the time the caterpillar’s mommy had laced up the very last shoe, which had pink and green polka dots, the little caterpillar had fallen fast asleep. The mother caterpillar gave a great big sigh—then started to unlace each and every shoe—and finally put the little caterpillar to bed.
5. The resolution: personally, I love happy endings. If your child is the star of the story, then let them do something heroic. If the story is about a creature, then invent an ending where the creature has a “great idea” and creatively solves a problem, or learns a lesson, or makes a friend or somehow winds up with a smile on its face. If you’re really stuck, ask your child what he or she thinks should happen. Chances are, the answer will surprise and delight you.
The next day, the little caterpillar had a great day, going to caterpillar school, learning what it would take to become a butterfly, playing with his friends and nibbling on tasty leaves. Toward the end of the day, the little caterpillar once again begged his mother to take him to the park.
“Oh please, Mommy!” said the little caterpillar. “Please, please, please! ”
“Oh dear, my darling little fluff ball. I’d love to take you to the park but I’m afraid that by the time we get on all your shoes, you’ll fall asleep again!”
[You can, of course, drag it out and go through the shoe scene all over again. Or not. Hey, it’s your story.]
All of a sudden, the little caterpillar had a Great Idea. “Mommy, look! Haven’t we seen that boy in the park before?”
Sure enough, the mother caterpillar looked up and saw a little human boy who looked very familiar. The caterpillars had often seen him in the park playing very near the tree with the tasty leaves. Even better—the backpack that he always carried with him was lying on the ground nearby.
“Let’s go!” said the mother caterpillar. In a few moments the pair had wiggled into the backpack and was soon on the way to the park. But the mommy hadn’t forgotten the little caterpillar’s shoes. She pulled out her own sack, filled with all twenty pairs. “Okay,” she said, as they bumped along in the little boy’s backpack. “Let’s start with a red shoe on your right foot…”
Premixed ingredients: Don’t hesitate to borrow story themes from tried and true fairy tales like Goldilocks, little red riding hood, the three little pigs or your own personal favorites. (The three little pigs is a wonderful story for improvisation. Ever hear the story of the three little elephants and the mean, nasty mouse?)
Even better: tell your child a story about something that happened to you when you were a child. This is obviously a different kind of story: you are the central character, the events are true. But every child is fascinated by the image of Mom or Dad as a kid. You can tell them how “life was different” in the days before videos and computers. You can share stories about ups or downs that you faced that might be similar to something they are confronting. Tell them about your favorite pet, your scariest Halloween or the best birthday you ever had.
