HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2012 04:41:44 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.2 (Fedora)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8



<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC
"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://w.sharethis.com/widget/?tabs=email%2Cweb%2Cpost&amp;charset=utf-8&amp;style=default&amp;publisher=cd44cd52-7e73-4e97-89e5-ce59b03f0509&amp;linkfg=%230F3B5F"></script>

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/style.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/menu.css" type="text/css" />
<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" media="all" type="text/css" href="/css/menu_ie.css" />
<![endif]-->
<title>Alumni Span Decades and Continents after Daily Cal - The Daily Californian Alumni Association</title>

</head>
	
<body onload="" onunload="" >

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
	_uacct = "UA-2568634-2";
	urchinTracker();
</script>
   
<div align="center">
	<br/>
	
	<div id="header">
		<a style="display: block; width: 60%; height: 100%; text-align: left; float: left;" href="/"></a>
		<div id="header_right">
			<div id="header_button">
			<a href="http://www.dailycal.org" style="border: 0px"><img src="/images/dailycal_button.gif"></a><br/>
			</div>
			<div id="header_submit">
			<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: bold;">STAY CONNECTED</span>
			<form name="database" method="POST" action="/database">
				<input type="text" name="email" size="30" value="Enter your email address" onfocus="this.value=''"/>
				<input type="submit" value="Submit">
			</form> 
			</div>
		</div>	
	</div>
		
	<div class="menu">
		<ul>
			<li class=""><a href="/index.php">HOME</a></li>

			<li class="_selected"><a href="/news">NEWS</a>

			<!--[if lte IE 6]>
			<a href="/news">NEWS
			<table><tr><td>
			<![endif]-->

				<ul>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/newsletter">Newsletter</a></li>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/blog">Blog</a></li>
				</ul>

			<!--[if lte IE 6]>
			</td></tr></table>
			</a>
			<![endif]-->

			</li>
			<li class=""><a href="/database">STAY CONNECTED</a></li>
			<li class=""><a href="/endowment">ENDOWMENT</a>

			<!--[if lte IE 6]>
			<a href="/endowment">ENDOWMENT
			<table><tr><td>
			<![endif]-->

				<ul>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/endowment.php#mission">Mission</a></li>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/endowment.php#about">About the Fund</a></li>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/endowment.php#donorsrights">Donor Bill of Rights</a></li>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/endowment.php#recognize">Recognizing our Donors</a></li>
				</ul>

			<!--[if lte IE 6]>
			</td></tr></table>
			</a>
			<![endif]-->

			</li>       
			<li class=""><a href="/contribute">CONTRIBUTE</a>

			<!--[if lte IE 6]>
			<a href="/contribute">CONTRIBUTE
			<table><tr><td>
			<![endif]-->

				<ul>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/contribute.php#ways">Ways to Contribute</a></li>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/contribute.php#edfoundation">Support the Education Foundation</a></li>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/contribute.php#endowment">Support the Endowment</a></li>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/contribute.php#donorsrights">Donor Bill of Rights</a></li>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/contribute.php#recognize">Recognizing our Donors</a></li>
				</ul>

			<!--[if lte IE 6]>
			</td></tr></table>
			</a>
			<![endif]-->

			</li>       
			<li class=""><a href="/donorscircle">DONORS' CIRCLE</a></li>
			<li class=""><a href="/about">ABOUT US</a>

			<!--[if lte IE 6]>
			<a href="/about">ABOUT
			<table><tr><td>
			<![endif]-->

				<ul>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/about.php#alumniassociation">The Daily Cal Alumni Association</a></li>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/about.php#edfoundation">The Daily Cal Education Foundation</a></li>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/about.php#edfoundationboard">Education Foundation Board</a></li>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/about.php#dcboard">Daily Cal Operations Board</a></li>
					<li><a class="sub" href="/about.php#contact">Contact Us</a></li>
				</ul>       

			<!--[if lte IE 6]>
			</td></tr></table>
			</a>
			<![endif]-->

			</li>       
			<li class=""><a style="border-right: 1px solid #112b62;" href="/store/">STORE</a></li>
		</ul>       
	</div>  
	<!--Begin page specific-->
<div id="middle">



<div id="container_article">
	<div id="article_left">
		<div id="article">
	<h1>Alumni Span Decades and Continents after Daily Cal</h1><div id="article_right">
				<div id="article_vertical_photo" style="width: 300px">
					<a href="/image/12">
					<img border="0" alt="Photo: Betsy Brown with her grandson at his high school graduation." target="photo" src="http://alumni.dailycal.org/photos/20090310/5-online.Betsy-Brown-01.jpg" width=300/>
					</a>
					<div class="article_photocredit">
					<span class="article_photocredit"></span> 
					</div>
					<span class="article_photocaption">Betsy Brown with her grandson at his high school graduation.</span><br /><br />
				</div> 
				<hr><div id="article_photos"><h1>Photos &raquo;</h1><a href="/image/11" target="_blank"><img src="http://alumni.dailycal.org/photos/20090310/5-Anne-Benjaminson-Peter-Benjaminson-and-Susan-Harrigan-in-U-00.jpg" alt="Photo: Anne Benjaminson, Peter Benjaminson and Susan Harrigan exploring Uzbekistan." border="0" width="90" /></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="/image/14" target="_blank"><img src="http://alumni.dailycal.org/photos/20090310/5-online.Ed-Gargan-00.jpg" alt="Photo: Ed Gargan in the doorway of his Beijing residence." border="0" width="90" /></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="/image/18" target="_blank"><img src="http://alumni.dailycal.org/photos/20090310/5-online.Rone-Tempest-00.jpg" alt="Photo: Rone Tempest in Paris." border="0" width="90"/></a><br/><br/></div><br/></div><span class="article_byline">By Karlyn Barker '68 and Sandra Pohutsky '68</span><br /><span class="article_authorrank"></span><br /><span class="article_date">Wednesday, August 27, 2008</span><br />
		<div id="article_tools">
			<ul id="article_share">
		 
				<li><a href="/printable/5"><img src="/images/ico_print.gif" border="0" alt="Printer Friendly" /> Printer Friendly</a></li>
				<!--
				<li><a href="#comments"><img src="/images/ico_comments.gif" border="0" alt="Comments" /> Comments (<span class="js-kit-comments-count" path="/article/5">0</span>)</a><script src="http://js-kit.com/comments-count.js"></script></li>
				-->
		
				<li>
				<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
					//Create your sharelet with desired properties and set button element to false
					var object = SHARETHIS.addEntry({
						title:'The Daily Californian Alumni Association :: Alumni Span Decades and Continents after Daily Cal',
						icon:'http://alumni.dailycal.org/photos/20090310/5-online.Betsy-Brown-02.jpg',
						summary: 'Tuesday, Mar 10, 2009 - Once again we\'ve been in touch with Daily Cal alums across decades and continents, including a former editor now living in China. Ed Gargan was in Cal\'s PhD. program in Chinese history when he joined the Daily Cal staff in the late 1970s.  He started out as a \"worker bee\" before becoming editorial page editor and then editor-in-chief. This was during what he describes as a period of dire financial problems at the paper. He left Cal in 1979 without finishing his dissertation. That\'s because ...'},
						{button:false});
					//Output your customized button
					document.write('<span id="email_st"><a href="javascript:void(0);"><img src="/images/ico_email.gif" /> Email/Share</a></span>');
					//Tie customized button to ShareThis button functionality.
					var element = document.getElementById("email_st");
					object.attachButton(element);
				</script>
				</li>
		
		</div>
		<div class="article_content"><p>Once again we've been in touch with Daily Cal alums across decades and continents, including a former editor now living in China. Ed Gargan was in Cal's PhD. program in Chinese history when he joined the Daily Cal staff in the late 1970s.  He started out as a "worker bee" before becoming editorial page editor and then editor-in-chief. This was during what he describes as a period of dire financial problems at the paper. He left Cal in 1979 without finishing his dissertation. That's because he was offered a job at the New York Times.
<p>"I started at the very bottom as a news assistant on the foreign desk and later the news desk," Ed explains via an e-mail from Beijing. In less than a year, he was working as a trainee reporter on the Metro staff. He "did the usual stuff, general assignment, city hall, night rewrite and wound up in Albany covering state government, which I alternated with six-month stints doing a feature-writing beat on upstate New York."  This led to Ed's first foreign assignment � in West Africa, based in Abidjan. From there he moved on to Beijing, then left to write magazine articles for the Los Angeles Times and to work on his first book, "China's Fate."
<p>Next, Ed spent a year as an Edward R. Murrow fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations before rejoining the New York Times to cover South Asia, based in Delhi. He was then posted to Hong Kong. He left the paper again to work on another book, "The River's Tale," about the Mekong River, which he wrote while a fellow at Cal's Center for Chinese Studies. 
<p>"Somehow I was persuaded by a friend at Newsday to return to Beijing for that paper, where I stayed until going off to do a Neiman fellowship at Harvard in 2004," Ed says. After that he moved to Berlin. He is back now in Beijing, working on a new book about borderlands around the world. "That's it basically, not too exciting perhaps, but I've had fun doing it," he says, being way overly modest.
<p>Ed recently wrote an article on China for the May/June issue of the alumni magazine, "California." The article, "The Great Leap Nowhere," is featured on the magazine's website at www.californiamag.org. He splits his time between his courtyard home in Beijing and his retreat on Martha's Vineyard.
<p> �
<p>Rone Tempest, known at Cal by his middle name, Brent, worked on the student paper in the late 1960s as sports editor and columnist. He says he is best remembered "as the guy who hired Jack Scott as a columnist and advocated the abolition of intercollegiate athletics." He was in the Class of 1969 but left five credits short of a degree in philosophy.
<p>"I didn't get around to finishing until many years later when I was teaching international reporting at the UC Grad. School of Journalism," Rone says. "So my diploma reads 2003, only three years before my youngest daughter graduated from Cal with a dual degree in history and French."
<p>His "trajectory" went from Cal to Oklahoma where he worked on the Oklahoma City Times, Daily Oklahoman and Oklahoma Journal. After an Urban Journalism Fellowship at the University of Chicago (1972-73) he worked as general assignment and federal courts reporter at the Detroit Free Press and then suburban editor and metropolitan editor at the Dallas Times Herald. He went to work for the L.A. Times as Houston bureau chief in 1981, moving on over the years to head bureaus in New Delhi, Paris, Beijing and Hong Kong, and becoming great friends with Ed Gargan (even took the photo of Ed we have for this newsletter.)  Rone returned to the United States in 1999 as Sacramento Bureau chief and then Senior California Correspondent, but continued to do overseas reporting, including stints in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Beirut. 
<p>From 1999-2007 Rone taught many courses at Cal's Graduate School of Journalism, including a four semester series on the deployment of the California National Guard to Iraq that was coordinated with the Los Angeles Times. In 2003, he was one of the organizers of a major UC Berkeley conference on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. His most recent course at Berkeley was a spring 2007 graduate seminar on covering the environment in China in which he and his co-professors, Orville Schell, Mark Dowie and Sandy Tolan, accompanied students to China to do reporting. In June 2007, the month the youngest of his four children graduated high school, he took a voluntary buyout from the Times after 31 years with Times Mirror-Tribune.
<p>As a farewell message to colleagues Rone wrote "4 Career Life Lessons from a Retiring Hack":
<p>� Never write a company-wide memo
<p>� In any foreign language the most important phrase is, "My friend will pay," as in French "Mon ami va payer" or Chinese "Wo de pengyou yao mai le."
			<div id="article_ad">
				<!-- span class="advert">Advertisement</span><br / -->
			
			</div>
			<p>� Given a choice, Bordeaux Red
<p>� Never get killed for an inside story
<p>Rone is now editor and investigative reporter for a politics and public policy website: www.wyofile.com and serves as a consultant to the New York-based ProPublica public service journalism project. He also is working on a book about Mormon Zionism in mid 19th century England. ("Utah was their Zion and my great great grandfather was one of the converts.") 
<p>He and his wife, Laura Richardson, now live in Lander, Wyo.  "When it's not snowing and blowing here, I try to bike 12-15 miles a day in the foothllls of the Wind River Mountain range outside my front door," Rone says. "My evenings usually involve a few glasses of the aforementioned Bordeaux red. I remain an avid fan of he Oakland A's. And I have forgiven the university for not abolishing intercollegiate athletics and not hiring Olga Connally (a Soviet defector and another crusader) as athletic director."
<p>Rone "has almost nothing but fond memories of the Daily Cal. It was, to say the least, a tumultuous time. I was on the 6th floor of Eshleman when the helicopters gassed  lower Sproul Plaza. I spent many hours with the Linotype operators in the old print shop.  I was there for the SF newspaper strike, during which I wrote a column, heavily influenced by Norman Mailer, challenging then Chronicle sports columnist Ron Fimrite to a duel." They ended up getting drunk together instead. He has kept in touch with Joe Pichirallo, Mark Gladstone, Henry Weinstein and Tim Reiterman but wonders about several old colleagues, including Grover Wickersham, Les "The Moth" Harrison, Susan Redstone, and Alison Farley. 
<p>"I lost touch with one of my former editors, Tom Collins, whom I was delighted to see had a memoir in the last newsletter," Rone says. (He and Tom recently established e-mail contact.)      
<p>�
<p>Jean Craig Smith '40 has great memories of working on the Daily Cal, ending as Women's Editor for one semester in Spring 1940. An economics major who wanted to work in personnel, she became an Alpha Phi and joined the paper's staff as a freshman. She had worked on her Glendale High School newspaper and naturally gravitated to the Daily Cal office, laughingly describing times back then as "a lot of fun!"
<p>She believes she may have been the paper's last Women's Editor. "In those days," she says, "they thought that a woman was needed to handle the personnel, to train new women on the staff and to be available to woman staff who needed to talk with someone. When the war started all the men left, women started becoming editors and putting out the whole newspaper."
<p>Jean also wrote a regular column as Women's Editor and remembers meeting with University President Robert Gordon Sproul, at his request, concerning one of her columns, of which he disapproved.  That was an example of the ongoing tension between the administration and the Daily Cal staff.
<p>After graduation, Jean went to Boston to attend the Prince School of Retailing, a graduate school of Simmons College. On her return to San Francisco in 1942, she worked in the city in the personnel office of the Emporium. During World War, II she moved to the personnel department of the old Pan American Airways, then located at San Francisco Airport, and remained there for the duration of the war.
<p>Jean had an urge to see the world, so in 1949 she signed a two-year contract with the U.S. government and sailed for Japan. There she was assigned to the Office of the Inspector General in Yokohama and worked for two "most interesting years" as secretary to the Inspector General.
<p>Upon her return to California in 1951, Jean met up with an old friend, Grant Smith '31, who was shopping for a vineyard in Sonoma County. They married and settled down on the vineyard, had two daughters, Nancy and Susan, and lived happily on the ranch.  Now widowed, Jean lives in Eskaton Village, Grass Valley, near her daughters. She stays in touch with former Daily Cal editors Sarita Henderson Smedberg '41 and Col. Renwick Smedberg '39.
<p>�
<p> Journalism has long been part of Conrad Goerl's life. A Journalism major, Conrad, Class of 1942, was a Daily Cal reporter for four years and became the first Daily Cal personnel director, responsible for the training and mentoring of freshmen and sophomore reporters.  After graduation, Conrad briefly edited the Willows Daily Journal newspaper in Willows, Calif.  "I did everything but write the society column," he says.
<p>Graduating at the onset of World War II, Conrad quickly joined the U.S. Army. He served in the 84th Infantry Division and edited the division's newsletter, "The Railsplitter," named in honor of Abraham Lincoln, an earlier member of the division.  Conrad's division fought through historic battles in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, including the Battle of the Bulge, 1944-1945. The newsletter existed by utilizing willing personnel as the division advanced and invaded the area toward Berlin. It continued publication until the 84th Division returned home.
<p>After the war ended, Conrad returned to California and enrolled in law school. He also became a CPA and wrote articles for his local daily newspapers in Ukiah. He says he  considered buying a Northern Californian newspaper but decided against it and instead continued to write articles for his local paper. He moved to Marin County, home of his father, 25 years ago and closed his law office in Oakland in 2003. 
<p>Now retired and living in Fairfax, Conrad is a Bear Backer supporter of Cal Athletics. He recalls with fondness Daily Cal alums Gordon and Alan Furth [see Furth profiles in DCAA newsletter Winter/Spring 2007], Norrie West '41, Anne Pickering West '42, and many others.
<p>�
<p>Elizabeth "Betsy" Jones Brown '44 has had a 35-year career in journalism since working on the Daily Cal in 1941 and 1942. When the war broke out, she was a freshman assigned to Lillian Ota, a junior and the only Japanese-American on the paper's staff.  Lillian was sent to an evacuation center; several of the men on the staff left for the military in the next few months.  (Lillian and Elizabeth continued their friendship in New York and Connecticut until Lillian's recent death.)
<p> Betsy left college during the war after only two years to work on a shipyard newspaper in Oakland.  Later she worked on the old San Francisco Call Bulletin; the Honolulu Advertiser; Newsweek magazine; the Patent Trader, a twice weekly in Westchester County, N. Y.; and was a regional columnist for the New York Times.  Interspersed were periods of free lancing, when she says she wrote for every kind of publication, large and small.
<p>In 1988, Betsy joined the Peace Corps and served for two years in Antigua, West Indies. She says she had always wanted to join since President Kennedy first announced its creation in 1961, but was busy working and raising a family.
<p>"By 1988, at 64, I still wanted a big adventure, and applied for Africa," Betsy says. "But African leaders are wary of journalists, and no appointment came through, so I accepted the only offer--the West Indies."
<p>Her assignment was to help the Antigua Chamber of Commerce with its publication, a small monthly that took very little time. Volunteers are supposed to fill in by finding other projects on their own.  Eventually she also wrote for the government's Culture Department, an environmental group and the historical society. She also taught sewing.
<p>"Oddly, the women there are wonderful seamstresses and they make their own patterns, but they wanted to learn to work from commercial patterns," Betsy says. "They were tough and funny and lived hard lives, and they kind of adopted me  After Hurricane Hugo, which took off part of my roof and left everything soaking and me without electricity for a month, they brought me dry bedding."
<p>Betsy says her most worthwhile projects were a booklet she put out for the Chamber for high school students, on careers, based on interviews with local people, and initiating Careers Day in the high schools.
<p>"I loved being in the Peace Corps, living a totally different life in a flimsy apartment over a grocery store, from which I watched women carrying water from the community well," she says., Betsy had running water herself but experienced "a lot of frustration"  trying to get things done. For instance, "I had the bulletin all ready for printing and suddenly there was no ink on the island and we had to wait a few weeks for a shipment.  And people don't always want your help--some doubt that you know anything (some even thought we were welfare cases that the U. S. wanted to get rid of!) and some are afraid you'll make them look inept or endanger their jobs.  It was also lonely at times--I lived in a rural village where everybody went to bed at 8 and I sat alone all evening, often with no electricity, so no light for reading.  But I'd do it again in a minute!"
<p>Since her Peace Corps days and living in Ossining, N.Y., Betsy has written memoirs for House Beautiful and serves on the zoning board. She was married to Charles H. Brown, a newsman at the New York Times, and Newsweek, where they met. Now widowed, she has two children and three grandchildren. She says she does a bit of volunteering and has "the usual mainstays of the 'mature' person: travel, gardening and the grandchildren." 
<p>�
<p>Peter Benjaminson, '67, a reporter and Assistant City Editor on the Daily Cal in 1964-65, has published his seventh book, "The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard" (Chicago Review Press/Lawrence Hill Books, publication date April 1, 2008.)  The book is already in its second printing and is available at bookstores, on Amazon.com, and through its web site, thelostsupreme.com.  As a Daily Cal reporter, Peter helped cover the Free Speech Movement and had a long career as a journalist and teacher.
<p>Peter now lives in Manhattan with his wife, Susan Harrigan, who recently retired as a financial reporter for Newsday.
<p>His daughter, Anne Benjaminson '03, followed closely in his footsteps � at least for a time. She also went to Cal and was editor-in-chief of the paper before she graduated. She now lives in Tajikistan, as cultural affairs officer at the U.S. embassy in Dushanbe, and e-mailed this update:
<p>Anne calls herself "perhaps the most far-flung Daily Cal alum." As a Foreign Service officer with the State Department, she previously served in Budapest, Hungary. Her husband, Greg, works in the embassy as a political officer.
<p>"Tajikistan is the poorest country in the former Soviet Union, and while working there can be challenging, I've enjoyed traveling throughout the country and the region," Anne says. "If anyone is traveling in Tajikistan (hah!) feel free to contact me at ManhattanAnne1@aol.com.  </div><br /><span class="article_contact"></span></div></div>

<!--Side Bar Area-->
<div id="article_sidebar">
		
	<!--
	<img src="/images/right_postings.gif" alt="Job Postings" width="162" height="22" />
	<div class="sidebar">
		
		<script src="http://dailycal.personforce.com/jobbox/dailycal.js "></script>
		<script type="text/javascript"> 
			var boxwidth = 150; 
			displayjobbox(150); 
		</script>
	</div>
	-->
</div>
<br /><img src="http://www.dailycal.org/images/spacer.gif" width="800" alt="White Space" />

</div>
		</div>
<!--End page specific-->


	<div id="footer">
                <div style="float: left">
                <a href="/index.php">HOME</a>
                <a href="/news">NEWS</a>
                <a href="/database">STAY CONNECTED</a>
                <a href="/endowment">ENDOWMENT</a>
                <a href="/contribute">CONTRIBUTE</a>
                <a href="/donorscircle">DONORS' CIRCLE</a>
                <a href="/about">ABOUT</a>
                <a href="/store">STORE</a>
                </div>
                <div id="footer_right">
                        Daily Californian Education Foundation, All Rights Reserved
                </div>
        </div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
	
	