1972

Greetings and best fall tidings! First off, some updates from yours truly as you can tell from my new e-mail address, I joined the e-commerce world in May as vice president of customer service at Amazon.com (NASDAQ AMZN), a new position, here in my home for the past 5.5 years, Seattle. After eight years with MCI, following its merger with (acquisition by) World Com, I was planning to start up my own call-center managed services and consulting firm when I had the chance to meet Jeff Bezos and his senior team, and discovered that "being the most customer-centric company on earth", atop Amazon.com's pioneering of online retail and auctions, was simply too exciting to miss. I'm responsible for our two U.S.-based contact centers (where well over half of our customer contacts are, as you might expect, from e-mail), two European-based contact centers, and our entire "customer experience" post-sales. Fun stuff, about which I'll expound in future columns!

When you think of '72 entertainment, of course you remember Pilobolus, and Rob Barnett, now one of its four artistic directors. A recent Sacramento Bee article covered Pilobolus' start in 1971, its early awards (Edinburgh Festival 1973), and descriptions of their dance and music. "We look to dance as a way of moving. When we'd done something, we stood back and said, 'What have we done?' That's still the way we work, always from the standpoint of self-analysis. And there's still a certain simplicity to our approach. But people have been creating remarkable works of art as a form of self-expression for millennia. Man's subliminal feelings about the world are a constant as the speed of light."

Ingrid and Bill Roberts report celebrating their 25 th wedding anniversary, repeating their original honeymoon trip by taking Amtrak to California, where they celebrated Bill's dad's 75th birthday James Huston Roberts '46.

Weider Nutrition International (NYSE:WNI) announced the appointment of David Gustin as president and chief executive. Dave was formerly president of the ConAgra Grocery Products Companies and its $3 billion Hunt-Wesson Companies including Hunt, Wesson, Peter Pan, Knotts, Orville Redenbacher, and Swiss Miss brands. Weider's chairman applauded Dave's skills thusly: "Dave is a marketing visionary with strong operating experience."

From Rome writes Bob Petroni that Baron's Who's Who in Global Banking &Finance has selected him for inclusion in their latest edition. Bob's card notes that he's with BNL, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, in its international division as pro manager, special legal affairs.

And lastly, from Dick Kendall '45, an article about Tom Kendall, whose ski race results software program now known as BART, originally written in (you guessed it) BASIC, "is really the only show in town." Tom will be the chief of timing for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City (now we know where to get those inevitably scarce tickets!), where BART will be used as it was at the Nordic World Championships earlier this year: "It provides to the TV and stadium announcers and spectators out on the course, the interval times, times between intervals, and all the immediate information about what's going on at every point between the start and finish". Sounds like a labor of love stemming from Tom's outstanding skiing on the Skiway and all over New England. That wraps it up for this month. Keep those e-mails and letters coming!

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