Six UMass success stories from the metropolis to the south
Photographs by Ben Barnhart
Ernest Patrikis '61 - first vice-president of the New York Federal Reserve
Rudolph F. Crew - Chancellor of the New York Schools
Gloria Foster - actress
Net Café - John Scott '92 and Melissa Caruso '93 and their East Village cyber-café
Bon marché - Andy Arons '81 and Gourmet Garage.
Ernest Patrikis '61 shuts his office door behind him, and shows his guest to a chair. The gold in the basement, eleven stories below, accounts for the gracious but inflexible gauntlet of security checkpoints, escorts, and metal detectors with which the Federal Reserve Bank of New York greets its visitors. Patrikis' tenth floor chamber, however, is imbued with something almost equally precious in the city: silence.
As First Vice President -- second in command -- of the New York Fed, Patrikis works high up in a massive neo-Florentine palazzo a few blocks from the southern tip of Manhattan. The building is imposing from the street and increasingly, if quietly, opulent as one ascends from the vaulted lobby to the upper floors. The hallways of those floors are also vaulted, as well as thickly carpeted and adorned with paintings and sculpture on loan from the Metropolitan Museum.
In Patrikis' private office, a portrait by Gilbert Stuart hangs over the fireplace. Thick doors, carved wood paneling, oriental rugs, and upholstered furniture insulate him from the clamorous financial district beyond the windows. The tranquillity is startling. Had an outsider somehow failed to appreciate the enormous authority embodied in a Federal Reserve Bank, Patrikis' office would make this unmistakably clear.
The New York Fed is a bank to banks, a key component of the nation's central banking system. It helps develop and implement national monetary policy. It supervises domestic and foreign banking organizations in its district -- no small thing, considering that New York City is one of the financial capitals of the world. And it provides banking services to domestic and foreign banks, foreign central banks and governments, our own government, and international organizations -- handling, in this service role, over a trillion dollars in transactions every day.
"It's no piggy bank," says Patrikis, a reserved but unpretentious man who introduces himself as Ernie. Plainspokenness is one of several factors to which this powerful banker attributes his ascent. Raised in Swampscott, the son of first-generation Greek-American parents, Patrikis graduated from UMass in 1961 with honors in economics, then from Cornell Law School. The New York Fed has been the focus of his entire professional life. He rose through the ranks of its legal department to become general counsel in 1987, and in 1995 was named to his current position in the institution. His appointment was reported at length in, among other places, the New York Times and The National Law Journal, where he was referred to as "absolutely one of the top banking lawyers in New York" and "perhaps the nation's foremost expert in payment systems."
Patrikis says the law requires a measure of detachment that has meshed well with his tendency toward bluntness. "A lawyer is an advisor, and should be able to provide objective commentary to those who carry the burden. Speaking out and giving that input, knowing that some people don't feel like hearing it because they're in charge -- that was a key aspect of the job." His years in the legal department also familiarized him with a broad spectrum of the bank's operations, and introduced him to his wife, Emily Trueblood, formerly the New York Fed's chief librarian.
Patrikis is conspicuously bright. His elaborate trains of thought unfold meticulously in conversation. When it's time to make a point or respond to a factual question, he locks on. How many years has he been at the Fed? He tilts his head toward the ceiling. "What's today, the third? Twenty-eight tomorrow." In his own estimation, however, the single most important factor in Patrikis' success isn't being bright. It isn't something he learned at law school or on the job. It's elbow-grease. Patrikis has worked hard since he started working, at the age of nine.
"There's no secret to these things, it's just a lot of hard work," he says. "The more you do, the more you learn. I really try to keep my plate very, very full. I push it pretty hard. That's the way I like it." Asked what one project occupies the bulk of his attention at the moment, he rattles off half a dozen: "New software for the securities system; foreign-exchange settlement risk; derivatives regulation...."
In what spare time Patrikis, now 52, does allow himself, he and Emily "avail ourselves of as much what this city has to offer as we can." Movies and theater are shared interests. A stack of classical CDs stand next to the computer behind Patrikis' desk: Bellini, Sibelius, Brubeck. It's a perk of his position, literally and figuratively atop the New York Fed: the sound quality, in that hushed atmosphere, is outstanding.
-Sam Silverstein '91
Unlike sleepy Seattle, the epicenter of the current coffee craze, New York City generates ample adrenaline on its own. The larger appeal of Manhattan's caffeine scene is its ability to shrink the city down to size. Case in point: alt.coffee, an East Village cafe operated by UMass alums Melissa Caruso and John Scott.
Alt.coffee is java with a twist, one of a only a couple such places in Manhattan: a neighborhood spot where patrons can tap out email and rummage the Web as they sip their cappuccinos. The saffron-walled space behind the blue-arched exterior is furnished with user-friendly second-hand furniture and, stationed around the perimeter, six computer terminals connected to the Internet.
Around each terminal, in turn, is an impromptu semicircle of chairs. Technology, say the proprietors, helps break the urban ice. "It's not like people are sitting there staring," Caruso says. "It's much more social than you might think." On a recent autumn afternoon, in fact, everyone in the place was immersed in either hard-copy or conversation; every computer screen was blank. About the only time they're all switched on, says Scott, is Tuesdays around one p.m.: "That's when the apartment listings change."
Caruso and Scott set alt.coffee's comfy tone. From her station alongside the espresso machine, Caruso, 25, chats up a steady stream of neighborhood denizens who come in to refuel. Scott, 26, works the room, tinkering with equipment and tutoring novices. The work of local artists is displayed both on the physical walls of alt.coffee and on a website created by Scott; neighborhood music and "spoken word events" have been broadcast live over the Internet.
Caruso, who grew up in the city, and Scott, who's from Connecticut, met at UMass, where she majored in comparative literature and he in mechanical engineering. John was working for a software development firm, and Melissa was teaching, when they hit on the idea of opening a net-accessible coffee shop. Alt.coffee opened in September, 1995, in a coffee-saturated neighborhood directly across from Tompkins Park. (Melissa says the view makes her nostalgic for Northampton, where, in fact, the spiffy Java Net cyber-cafe recently established itself across from Pulaski Park.) The Manhattan version can be found at 139 Avenue A or at http://www.altdotcoffee.com
-Sam Silverstein '91
Take the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan, zig and zag a few blocks, and you'll find yourself at 110 Livingston Street, headquarters of the country's largest school system. Ten stories up is the office of the New York Schools Chancellor, a position currently held by Rudolph Franklin Crew, who earned his master's from UMass in 1973, his doctorate in 1978.
To the left of the frosted-glass door, a long, dim corridor extends, one wall lined with black-and-white photographs of Crew's predecessors. The dates below the portraits tell the tale of this office's recent tumultuous history. Ten chancellors have come and gone in the last fifteen years, -- five in the last seven -- more than one felled by the pressures and politics of the job.
Rudy Crew, who became Chancellor just about a year ago, plans to buck the trend. "I'm gonna be here a while," he says with calm assurance, "until my work is done. I think we're just starting."
He has his work cut out for him. The New York City school system has 1.1 million children, mostly poor and minority students, attending about 1,100 schools. This fall there were 91,000 more students than the system has classrooms to put them in. Utility closets, locker rooms, and leased space contained the overflow. According to news reports, the roots of this crisis date back 20 years. Other problems with which the system must cope -- poverty, violence, racism -- are far older and more intractable. Throw in perennial budget cuts and political obstructiveness, and you begin to see what Crew is up against, as he tries not just to run the system but to reform it.
Before coming to New York, Crew headed up the Tacoma, Washington, school system, which has half as many students as New York City has teachers. Yet, Crew is not daunted. "There isn't anything I've dealt with here that I haven't dealt with in another school system, it's just that there's so much more of it."
If the Chancellor sounds relatively philosophical, it may be because he comes from a family who successfully fought the odds. His Aunt Lois, one of 12 children of South-Carolinian sharecroppers, managed to save enough as a maid to put herself through college and become a teacher. His uncle Carl was the first African-American principal in Cleveland. A cousin, John Crew, is a former superintendent of the Baltimore schools.
Crew's mother died when he was only two, but his father, a security guard for IBM, raised him to be an achiever. "At six o'clock in the morning," Crew remembers, "he would say, 'Get up, because we are going to be doing these 27 things today.'"
Crew thinks most parents today value education as much as his father did. "What is different now is that the access routes are more complicated. A school is a much more complex organization. And we are trying to educate children whose lives are enormously complex."
Where to start? Crew starts from the conviction that "all children can learn." Apparently, this premise is less widely held among educators than one might think. Crew's office is in the "process of removing people who don't care about children," and giving those who do more freedom to act. Crew also believes in setting high standards, for the system and its students. He envisions turning out graduates with mastery of a foreign language and calculus.
In person, Crew is restrained, cautious, thoughtful, articulate. He has a strong physical presence, an air of authority. There are accounts of him "dazzling" audiences. In a tough city, he can be tough, too. At the same time, he comes across as a mensch -- he hasn't sacrificed his humanity to ambition. Through the years, he has attracted several mentors, among them, the late UMass professor of education Byrd Jones.
"He was one of the dearest people in my life," says Crew. "He was a very smart man, an economist, who became a friend and a colleague, but was always a mentor. He pushed you, that's half the battle in learning -- and in changing an organization. He gave me a way of rethinking public education in urban America. He was the reason it all converged at UMass for me."
Crew's praise for those who helped him reflects another belief: that encouragement is a basic food group for children. "Kids get tired of having people cast doubt on the decency of their schools," he says. "It's entirely useful to say what isn't good, but absolutely imperative to say what is."
Asked to compile a wish list, he says first that he'd like "full and complete authority to run this system, to be its CEO. It wouldn't be a vague question as to who's in charge." He goes on, "Second, I'd like kids and teachers and principals to feel very comfortable, very much rewarded for taking risks for change. And I'd like kids to know that community around them really believes in them, knows how bright, smart, and talented they are."
-Faye S. Wolfe
Andy Arons '81 grew up on meat and potatoes. But when he was 22, living in New York City, and suddenly out of a job, he parlayed five spare bucks into a wildly successful specialty-foods importing venture. (He was Andy Udelson back then; he legally changed his name in 1985.) Arons and college roommate Walter Martin '80 started Flying Foods in 1981. Six years later, Kraft Foods bought the business for $8 million. In 1992, Arons got back into the industry when he and current partners John Gottfried and Ned Visser opened Gourmet Garage.
Gourmet Garage sells normally pricey specialty foods at a discount: extra-virgin Italian olive oil, for instance, at $7.95 a liter. The store can offer lower prices because its main distributor is also its partner, Metro Agri, which wholesales specialty foods to La Cirque, Montrachet, La Grenouille, and other renowned restaurants in the city. Currently there's a Gourmet Garage downtown and another on the Upper East Side, with three more scheduled to open in 1997.
The downtown store occupies a typical SoHo cast-iron building on the corner of Mercer and Broome. It's cheerful, bright, and bustling, with much of the cheer and bustle generated by a staff who seem exceptionally hard-working and helpful. Equally cheering is the sight of all those mouth-watering, wholesome fruits and vegetables, many of them exotic. As Gottfried once said, "If it's baby, giant, purple, or free-range, we probably sell it."
About three-quarters of the produce is organic. Some items are available year-round; others are strictly seasonal. When we were there, so were Crispins, Cortlands, Galas, Macs, Anjous, Boscs, and Baby Sec apples. The most beautiful tomatoes in the world formed a gleaming red pyramid. Across the aisle were haricots verts, those luscious little green beans, and other diminutive vegetables; several kinds of hot peppers, including those that go by the misleadingly demure name of Scotch Bonnets; and a panoply of mushrooms: chanterelles, shiitaki, cremini, porcini, portabellas, pied du moutons.
There's an array of olives worthy of a Roman market, Basmati rice, Stewart's cream ale, Burton's rich tea biscuits, Lumisia sparkling water -- in short, an international miscellany of fresh and packaged delectables. The Garage also does a brisk deli business, offering upscale sandwiches, soups, pastas, salads, gnishes, frittatas, pierogi, and the usual caffe suspects to go.
Arons' buying trips keep him busy: he's been to France five times in the last six months to scout cheeses. Energetic and enthusiastic, he's always scouting ideas as well. Recently he returned from a weeklong food show in Paris, where "the convention hall was six times as big as the Javits in New York" -- and where, he notes, the European market for American organic foods looks promising.
-Faye S. Wolfe
Gloria Foster doesn't have an office to go to. Actors usually don't. "We go from stage to stage," says Foster, with a smile that shifts from melancholy to incandescent in the flicker of a thought.
In lieu of a place of business, Foster suggests a friendly cafe in the west seventies as a meeting spot. She's done interviews there before, she mentions. She doesn't mention that requests for interviews imply a certain eminence. Last year, when she and colleague Mary Alice appeared on Broadway in Having Our Say, the New York Times described them as "two of the first ladies of black drama."
(An evening of spirited reminiscences by two centenarian African-American sisters, the play was based on the non-fiction best-seller Having Our Say: The Delaney Sisters' First 100 Years. Foster played the 103-year-old Sadie Delaney, Alice her sister Bessie, 101.)
Even when flashing her incandescent grin -- which she does, rising from her table by the window the moment her guests appear in the doorway of Sarabeth's Kitchen on Amsterdam Avenue -- Foster confirms in her smallest gesture the aptness of even such a high-strung accolade as "the black theater's leading high-tragic mater dolorosa." (That's from Variety.) In her royal-blue-and-buff patterned tunic, with her pyramid of crinkly black hair, she is a majestic, as well as a gemutlich, figure.
As the reference to tragedy suggests, Foster is a classical actor. Medea, Oedipus Rex, and The Trojan Women figure prominently in her professional biography, as do Shakespearean and Chekhovian plays. She can also get down. In the 1994 John Sayles film City of Hope she is utterly convincing as a tired single mother in a housing project.
Both this range and this firm classical grounding have been godsends to a middle-aged, African-American actress who is quite aware of her now-double disqualification for all-American-ingenue roles. So has timing, says Foster. She considers herself fortunate to have come to New York in the sixties, "a vital , vital period" with considerably expanded opportunities for African-Americans on both stage and screen. There were tougher times later, when the market for black actors backslid. She remembers "picketing the soaps" in the years when daytime TV was a near-complete whitewash.
She considers herself especially lucky to have built a career based in the New York Shakespeare Festival and augmented by an actor's piecework: "You know, a voice-over here, a commercial there; and every once in awhile a TV show, every once in a while a movie, so you could play catch-up." But she laments the plight of "so many of our people who missed that time; so many beautiful young actors and actresses -- so many extraordinarily fine actors and actresses -- whose time of youth and beauty passed before the world got to know them."
Her own penchant for classicism, which came early in her training, made her choice of career even more foreign to her family. Foster was raised in Wisconsin by her maternal grandparents: "Old and very rigid grandparents -- not young grandparents!" Her upbringing, she says, "was all about education and being able to take care of yourself," which the theater just doesn't promise.
Then too, her grandparents' knowledge of theater was limited. They knew vaudeville, which they found somewhat distasteful. They were vaguely aware of musicals. "But drama! And Greek drama at that! They just didn't know what I was getting myself into."
Foster persevered, however, in the vocation that had opened itself to her in oratory classes at the University of Illinois -- "my first experience of affecting an audience," which led her in short order to the Goodman Theater School in Chicago, then on to New York. To her joy, her grandparents Eleanor and Clyde Sudds lived to see her first off-Broadway success. They didn't live to see her receive a college degree -- like her friends Bill and Camille Cosby and a few other distinguished professionals, she was admitted to a special graduate program in education at UMass in the early seventies. It was in large part because of them, however, that it was so satisfying to her to earn it.
"I felt it was a debt that I owed to my grandparents," she says. "To bring respect to them, to all that they taught me about trying to do everything well. That doesn't come just from the self, and recognition is due to those people whether they're here or not."
-Patricia Wright
