If the rumble of the rails, the hiss of the air brakes, and the shrill piping of a train whistle are music to your ears, then you have a lot in common with Frank Moscatelli.
A self-proclaimed “gears-and-pulleys kind of guy,” Moscatelli is an experimental physicist who’s taught at Swarthmore for 31 years. He’s quick to [...]
A stroll across Swarthmore’s idyllic, 300-acre arboreal campus presents an ideal opportunity to meditate on generosity. Imagine the early 1850s, when the College was just a dream in the minds of a small group of Quakers. One of them—Edward Parrish—rode out on his horse from meeting to meeting across the mid-Atlantic region pitching the idea [...]
“I’m an old-timer. I’ll be 90 very soon,” says Warren Uchimoto ’45, a retired engineer who was eager one sunny summer day to talk at length and with great affection of his two-and-a-half years as a Swarthmore student. Uchimoto was one of 10 Japanese Americans who left internment camps in the West to find refuge [...]
For 34 years, the Swarthmore education of Emily Howe Wilson ’72 caused tension with other managers in the Brown County Library system—for the right reasons.
“Ten years ago I suddenly realized it was because I was running my department by consensus when management didn’t think I should,” says Emily, now retired. “Until then I never realized [...]
While James A. Michener ’29 proved the benefits of smart estate planning back in the 1990s, other Swarthmoreans are doing so today. Robert Putnam ’63, himself the author of groundbreaking works such as Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and wife Rosemary Werner Putnam ’62, a retired teacher, chose to provide for [...]
In 2011, Marc Freedman ’80 published The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife, his book on encore careers. An excerpt from chapter one follows.
We’re in the early stages of a great migration, but it is not the old retiree migration that literally saw millions travel from North to South, from cold, drizzling places [...]
James Matheson ’92 is driven to write music. He works out of his Brooklyn apartment, where he has a tiny studio containing an electric keyboard and a computer. A picture of modern American composer Charles Ives hangs on the wall. “It’s kind of cramped,” Matheson says. But not so his creative urge. Ideas for works [...]
It’s mid-April, and Jeff Sugg ’95 is hunkered down in Houston, prepping the projection design that he will integrate into the live stage revival of The Elephant Man at the acclaimed Alley Theatre.
“It’s an interesting take on the show—very industrial, with an almost carnival feel to it,” he says. The visual effects he’s created mimic [...]
This spring, honors history and German studies major Ben Goossen ’13 became the unprecedented four-time winner of the coveted annual A. Edward Newton Award for a student book collection. His varied editions of The Hobbit—including some in foreign languages—were displayed in McCabe Library throughout the semester. One of the exhibited items is an artist’s book [...]
David Linde ’82 is living proof that a little bit of moxie and a lot of hard work can lead to a career in the creative arts—as he has demonstrated so powerfully in the film industry.
Linde, CEO of Lava Bear Films and former head of several Hollywood studios, has overseen the production and distribution of [...]