Newsmakers

QUOTE/UNQUOTE "The only attention I want is when I'm sitting in that car driving down the street after we've won the World Series." —CHICAGO CUBS PITCHER MIKE REMLINGER '88

John Merrow '63, a 2001 Peabody Award winner for his documentary film School Sleuth: The Case ofan Excellent School, weighed in on the opinion pages of the The NewYork Times in January with a breakdown of how language is used by politicians. In a piece titled "Speaking in Tongues," Merrow argued that "parsing the language may help us understand what education leaders are really up to." One example: "The Children's Defense Fund has long proclaimed its mission, in an active voice that makes it an imperative for all: 'leave no child behind.' But President Bush has chosen a passive construction, 'no child left behind,' suggesting that it is someone else's responsibility, not his and not ours."...Where do those lab mice come from? It turns out there is one—and only one—facility in the world that produces them. It is JAX Research Systems in Bar Harbor, Maine, and the president since 1998 has been Warren Cook '67.Profiled recently in the Bangor Daily News, Cook trumpeted the same homily he preached for years as president of the Sugarloaf-USA ski resort and CEO of American Skiing Cos.: customer service. "The need for the mouse has been increasing significantly, and JAX knows how to breed them better than anyone in the world," he says. Research mice are big business for JAX: In 2001 the company sold 1.9 million animals with a value of nearly S4O million.... Another alum in the research realm: Ron Britton, Adv'67, who earned a master's from Dartmouth in organic synthetic methods and is now president and CEO of Fuel Cells Canada, was profiled in Business in Vancouver in late October. "To some extent [the fuel cell] industry has been overhyped," he told the newspaper. Among the most grandiose plans: producing a pollution-reducing alternative to the internal combustion engine and using it to fuel cars. 'At the same time," he says, "how do you ever get things started if you don't plant some dreams in people's minds?"... Still another alumni profile ran in Virginia's Raleigh Business Journal, this one on Brad Brinegar '77, CEO of McKinney & Silver advertising agency. No, Raleigh is not Madison Avenue, or even Chicago—Brinegar was at Leo Burnett for 19 years—but McKinney & Silver had some pretty heavy clients in the stable, including Audi of America and the Nasdaq equities market, when Brinegar arrived. However, Brinegar believes the 33-year-old company has not yet fulfilled its potential. "I intend this agency to be my legacy," he told the magazine. "I want to see this agency be great." Early returns are promising: The firm won the $20 million account of Lands' End—an Upper Valley favorite— and generated buzz with its new Nasdaq TV campaign... .Tyler (nee McConnell) and Jennifer (nee Irish) Running Deer '90 gar- nered plenty of attention in The Seattle Times when the paper ran a "No. I Lord of the Rings Fan" contest in late December. Jen was bestowed the papers "Middle-Earth Craftsmanship Award" for costumes she put together for herself, her husband and friends that were unveiled at a LOTR premiere party. They were even pictured in the paper; he was Aragorn, she was Arwen....The Boston Globe did a large piece in December on John Roberts '57, who recently stepped down as head of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He admits that there are parts of the job—defending the rights of Nazis to march, the Ku Klux Klan to hold rallies and white supremacist David Duke to be on the Massachusetts ballot—he will not miss. "You don't want those cases," he tells TheGlobe. "You go, 'Oh no. Give me a break.' But there's a guiding principle. No matter how obnoxious it is, how racist it is, we don't want the state to decide who has the right to speech. We take this very, very purist position." He is proud to have championed many controversial issues in his 32 years with the ACLU. "People see us as this weird organization without understanding the role we play in challenging the government on speech, political rights, search and seizure, discrimination, cruel and unusual punishment, the death penalty," says Roberts. "They don't understand the necessity of what we do."...Dr. HarrisHinckley '45, DMS'49, still remembers his first solo performance, when stage fright set in as a young child and he sang from his mother's lap during Sunday school. He has made up for that, though, with several Sunday performances since then. In January the Portland Press Herald of Maine did a feature on him as he approached his 50th year as a member of the Meetinghouse Choir at the First Congregational Church in South Portland. "To me, singing is fun," says the former Glee Club member. "Music and church kind of go together." Though he admits he has sung "Hallelujah" more times than he would like, he says he continues to be inspired by singing hymns each week....As the new director of the New Hampshire Bureau of Securities Regulation, Mark Connolly '79 has already overseen the largest corporate settlement in state history ($5.1 million from Tyco) and has launched an investigation into activities at Enterasys Networks—a probe that could involve newly elected Gov. Craig Benson, a former board member and the company's largest stockholder. Connolly told the New Hampshire Business Review that while his predecessors didn't get involved in such high-profile investigations, times have changed. He said that there has been a vacuum at the federal Securities and Exchange Commission that state regulators have been rushing to fill. There was a "growing sense of disenfranchisement" on the part of investors, "so in the last few years the states have played a key role in bringing confidence back by showing that there is active regulation," says Connolly. "The times dictate the office."

John Merrow '63

Brad Brinegar '77

MIKE MAHONEY is associate director of athletic media services at Northwestern Universityin Evanston, Illinois, and the '92 class secretary.