Yankees’ Fond, and Not So Fond, Farewells

Abstract: Mariano Rivera is a rare Yankees icon. As he approaches retirement, his career and character will be celebrated Sunday at the Stadium with fans cheering and bands playing. But in the often cruel culture of baseball, in the past, many of the most famous Yankees departed unhappily, if not sadly. Beginning with the most famous Yankee of all, Babe Ruth. At his best, the Babe was the Yankees. He put the words home run into baseball’s vocabulary, notably a record 60 homers in 1927. When asked if his salary ($80,000) should be more than President Herbert Hoover’s ($75,000), he said: “Why not? I had a better year than he did.” In his 15 seasons, his Yankees teams won seven American League pennants and four World Series. As the Babe’s career wound down, he wanted to be the Yankees’ manager, but the owner, Jacob Ruppert, insisted on retaining Joe McCarthy. When the Boston Braves’ owner, Judge Emil Fuchs, offered to make the Babe a vice president and assistant manager with a $25,000 salary and a share of the profits to mostly pinch-hit in the 1935 season, the Yankees could not agree fast enough. The only thanks the Babe got from the Yankees was thanks for the memories. And not long after hitting three home runs for the Braves in a game at Pittsburgh, he decided to retire, saying Fuchs had double-crossed him. The Yankees honored him in 1947, when he returned to the Stadium for Babe Ruth Day. In 1948, on the 25th anniversary of the House That Ruth Built, he was there when his No. 3 uniform was retired. Two months later, he died. “The termites got me,” he told a teammate. Cancer. The Yankees mourned. His body lay for viewing at the entrance to Yankee Stadium for two days before his funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Image Reggie Jackson, allowed to leave for the Angels, was cheered at Yankee Stadium after one of his five homers against the Yankees in 1982. Credit Ray Stubblebine/Associated Press But when the Babe departed to the Braves, the Yankees’ front office was glad to see him go. • For Lou Gehrig, the end was tragic theater. Gehrig, the first baseman known as the Iron Horse, played 2,130 consecutive games. With a career .340 average, he hit 493 home runs, including 23 grand slams. He drove in 100 runs or more in 13 seasons. But on May 2, 1939, in Detroit, he benched himself. He was batting .143 with four singles in 28 at-bats. He never played again. Seven weeks later, he learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, soon known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. On July 4, 1939, about 62,000 fans attending Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day at the Stadium heard him say, “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” He concluded, “So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for.” Early in 1940, the Yankees announced that his No. 4 uniform was retired; Gehrig was the only Yankee to wear that number. He died June 2, 1941, at his home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. He was 37. • Joe DiMaggio had a hollow last hurrah. His two-run homer in Game 4 of the 1951 World Series at the Polo Grounds helped propel the Yankees to a six-game victory over the Giants after his so-so season: .263 average, 12 homers, 71 runs batted in. Offered another $100,000 contract, he retired, saying: “I can’t play anymore. It’s not the money, it’s me. I don’t want to play baseball like this.” Those words confirmed a Brooklyn Dodgers scouting report in Life magazine. Against right-handed pitching, the report said: “His reflexes are very slow and he can’t pull a good fastball at all. Throw him nothing but good fastballs and fast curveballs. Will pull a left-handed pitcher a little more, pitch him the same. Don’t slow up on him. He will go for a bad pitch once in a while with two strikes. Speed: he can’t run and he won’t bunt. Fielding: he can’t stop quickly and throw hard. You can take the extra base on him if he’s in motion away from the line of throw.” He didn’t need to read that scouting report to know he was no longer the Joe DiMaggio who hit safely in 56 consecutive games in 1941. But until his death in 1999, he often returned to the Stadium, where he was introduced as “the greatest living player.” Image Joe DiMaggio’s home run in Game 4 helped the Yankees to the 1951 World Series title, but his skills had declined. Credit Associated Press • Phil Rizzuto, the popular 5-foot-6, 150-pound shortstop, helped the Yankees win 10 pennants and 7 World Series. But at age 38 late in the 1956 season, he was hitting .231 in only 31 games. On Old-Timers’ Day, he was about to take batting practice when he was told that Manager Casey Stengel and General Manager George Weiss wanted to see him. “We want to give you your release,” Stengel told him. On Old-Timers’ Day, the Scooter was suddenly an Old-Timer. The Yankees gave him a full season’s salary and a winning World Series share, and then put him in their television-radio booth, where, between cannoli and seventh-inning exits, he chatted for four decades. But that cut on Old-Timers’ Day took a long time to heal. • In 1961, Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle combined for 115 home runs — a record 61 for Maris, 54 for Mantle. But when Maris hit only 13 homers in 1966, he was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals. Mantle, a three-time most valuable player despite various leg injuries, went on to hit 536 homers, third on the career list at the time behind the Babe’s 714 and Willie Mays’s 587. Mantle tried to work out in 1969 but walked away from his $100,000 contract. “I can’t hit anymore,” he said. Three months later, on Mickey Mantle Day at the Stadium, his No. 7 was retired, he was cheered and he wept. • Whitey Ford holds the World Series record for wins, 10, and his 236 regular-season victories are the Yankees’ career record. But early in the 1967 season, with his left elbow burning, he walked off the mound in Detroit, flew home by himself and soon retired. “I knew I couldn’t pitch anymore,” Ford said. He assumed the Yankees would pay his full season salary. “I should have known better,” he said Image Whitey Ford, left, assumed incorrectly that he would receive his full season salary after an elbow injury drove him to quit in 1967. Credit Associated Press He got two weeks’ severance. In 1968, at Manager Ralph Houk’s request, Ford returned as the first-base coach for one season. In 1974, George Steinbrenner, the principal owner, lured Ford back as the pitching coach, but early the next season, Ford was hospitalized with chest pains. Since then, he has been a spring training instructor. • Reggie Jackson’s three home runs in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series engraved his place in Yankees lore. But when Jackson, Mr. October, hit only 15 homers and drove in only 54 runs in the strike-shortened 1981 season, he was at a crossroads. Would the Yankees re-sign him, or would they let him leave as a free agent? Steinbrenner let him leave. On his return in 1982 with the California Angels, he smashed a home run off Ron Guidry that prompted the fans to serenade Steinbrenner with an insulting chant. Jackson hit 39 homers that year. “My biggest mistake,” said Steinbrenner, who later hired Jackson to be what he has been ever since, a special adviser in the Yankees’ front office. • Yogi Berra had a record 10 World Series rings as a Hall of Fame slugger and catcher. As a rookie manager in 1964, he guided the Yankees to another pennant, but after a seven-game World Series loss to the St. Louis Cardinals, he was fired. He was rehired two decades later, but the Yankees started 6-10 in 1985, and he was fired again. Angered that Steinbrenner had sent General Manager Clyde King to tell him that he was out, Yogi vowed to boycott the Stadium until Steinbrenner apologized. After 14 years, Steinbrenner finally apologized personally at the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in New Jersey. “It’s over,” Yogi said. He was a Yankee again. • And now, with Andy Pettitte having announced his retirement Friday after a frustrating season, who knows how pleasantly or prickly the Yankees careers of Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez will end? But on Sunday, everybody knows how Mariano Rivera’s is ending. Happily. Respectfully. Proudly. As it should for a rare Yankees icon.

Yankees
Baseball
Mariano Rivera
Yogi Berra
Phil Rizzuto
Babe Ruth


For Two Women in Queens, a Sick Day Means You’re Fired

Abstract: There is a brutal constancy to the workweeks of these two women: 72-hour weeks piled one atop another. In Corona, Queens , Celina Alvarez chops chayote and avocados and chickens in a dank restaurant basement. And a few blocks away, Rocio Loyola makes juice drinks. Now and then Ms. Loyola, 35, wears down and the chill of flu runs through her body, and she vomits in the employees’ bathroom. And, she says, her boss shakes his head and warns: You go home, you’re fired. As for Ms. Alvarez, 48, some months ago her heart throbbed, her arms and chest heavy with ache. On her single day off she walked into a clinic, and a doctor listened through his stethoscope and told her: Your heart is in bad shape. He checked her into the hospital. A few days later, she was discharged and walked 15 blocks to beg her employer for her job back. She said he was disgusted: You’re old and you’re sick. With that, she said, he sent her back to chop in a basement filled with two inches of gray water. She is a proud woman with dark, piercing eyes set in a full face framed by high cheekbones. She said nothing to her boss. “I couldn’t stop thinking: How will I find money for food? For rent?” she says. “So I went to that basement.” There is now a Dickensian feel to New York City . You walk below the El on Roosevelt Avenue in Corona and find so many hard-fought-for laws — against overcrowded tenements, and wage violations and sanitary conditions — winked at. In this Upstairs, Downstairs city, those at the bottom of the pile learn the virtues of silence. Of late, however, a coalition of community groups has taken up the cudgel in support of paid sick days . This is a luxury denied to 700,000 to 1.2 million New Yorkers. The City Council has talked of mandating that all employers with more than five employees provide five paid sick or flexible vacation days. “Paid sick days should be on par with the minimum wage, the eight-hour day,” says Bill Lipton, deputy director of the Working Families Party . Perhaps, although in truth New York’s reform pulse flutters weakly. Last year the City Council spent months debating a so-called living wage that in the end, sanded down by compromise, seemed to apply to approximately 14 workers. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg worries a lot about our health; he’s banned smoking in bars and vat-size cups of soda. But suggest that a couple of women should be allowed to take off a day rather than cough bacteria into the chicken quesadillas, and his free-market spine stiffens. Compromise is no option. When the leaders of Chambers of Commerce in the Bronx , Queens and Brooklyn sounded dangerously amenable to a deal, the mayor’s top aides set straight these weak-kneed sorts. When more than 100 owners of small businesses signed a petition urging the City Council to pass sick-days legislation, some sharp-eyed fellow working against the bill happened to notice that a few of these owners had city tax liens. Voilà! The New York Post published an article proclaiming: “They want more government mandates but can’t even pay their taxes.” In theory, a sizable majority of the City Council supports sick days. In reality, few of this often emasculated body will buck the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn , particularly as she has a case of the mayoral fevers and much desires the endorsement of Mr. Bloomberg. Could it pass despite her opposition, I ask a councilman who favors the legislation. “Totally free to vote their conscience, the vast majority would vote for sick days,” he notes brightly. Then he acknowledges that conscience does not rate so high on the scale of useful City Council attributes. Ms. Quinn, unlike the mayor, takes pain to express her sympathy with those who say they’d like a day or two off if they or their children fall ill. A former tenant organizer, she recognizes that this city is defined as much by the crowded shift-bedrooms of Elmhurst as by the resale value of luxurious Chelsea co-ops. “I really don’t think this is a good idea for small businesses at this time,” she says. “But the economy has not yet turned the corner and we’ll put them in harm’s way.” So someday, maybe. Opponents have placed the cost of the sick-days bill as high as $800 million. But those mathematics are more than a bit dubious, relying on assumptions that every single employee would take the maximum number of sick days, and then some. More to the point, you wonder if perhaps there are a few jobs that a 21st-century global capital perhaps should consider passing on. Ms. Alvarez recently found a new job. Her pay is a touch better. Does she, I ask, have sick days? She shrugs. “They haven’t said anything,” she says. “I just pray to God each night I have good health.”

Paid time off
Legislation
Small business
NYC
Jobs


Move Over, HD-TV. Now There's HD Radio, Too.

Abstract: Traditional broadcast radio, the last bastion of analog entertainment technology, sees a bright future for itself. Its strategy for success is to become more like one of its main competitors, satellite radio. More channels and music formats, and less-intrusive advertising are critical to its growth, industry executives say. Last week, Clear Channel Radio and CBS Radio began carrying out that strategy by broadcasting advertising-free digital side channels -- complementary music and talk programs -- in a combined 43 markets. Digital radio technology allows a broadcaster to offer up to three additional FM channels in the space formerly occupied by one. The radio industry, like broadcast television before it, is switching to digital technology. With digital technology, AM stations sound like FM, and FM stations approach CD's in sound quality. A retrofit to HD Radio, or high-definition radio, costs about $100,000 per station. The industry once believed its future would be secure simply by switching to digital technology, but the popularity of satellite radio, MP3 players and Internet radio has changed the game plan. "Before the iPod and before satellite radio, broadcasters said, 'We already have 40 stations per market. Why cut up the ad pie?' " said Robert J. Struble, president of the iBiquity Digital Corporation, of Columbia, Md., the developer of the HD Radio digital technology. "But the industry recognizes that broader choices and niche formats do make a difference." Joel Hollander, chairman and chief executive of CBS Radio, said, "The radio industry is healthy. It's just not growing fast enough for Wall Street. More options and more programming will allow us to grow faster; this is a three- to eight-year process." The new side channels being offered by CBS, Clear Channel and other station groups seek to fill in the programming gaps in various markets. In New York, WCBS-FM is now offering an oldies music channel, and WKTU-FM is programming a country music channel. Beasley Broadcast Group is multicasting in 5 of the 17 markets where it has introduced digital broadcasts. The company, based in Naples, Fla., owns 41 stations, and expects to convert all to digital by the end of 2007. Its side channels include country and disco stations. "HD Radio is the future," said B. Caroline Beasley, the company's chief financial officer. "We have to respond to the emerging competitive technologies." By the end of 2005, 622 stations were offering digital simulcasts, allowing 80 percent of the United States population to receive a digital signal. That number should jump to 1,200 stations by the end of 2006, according to Mr. Struble. Few listeners are able to hear the new offerings, however. Digital radio requires the purchase of HD receivers, which remain expensive, although prices are falling rapidly. HD radios for the home are now available for $500. "Tabletop digital radios will be $199 before the end of the year," Mr. Struble said. As with satellite radio, the HD Radio industry hopes to persuade carmakers to offer digital broadcast radios as factory-installed units. BMW now offers digital receivers in two of its models, as a $500 option. Digital radio home receivers are available now from Boston Acoustics and Radiosophy; car units are available from a variety of manufacturers. By the end of last year, about 85,000 digital broadcast radio receivers had been sold, according to Stephanie Guza, an industry analyst with In-Stat, a market research firm. That number should climb to 500,000 by the end of this year, Ms. Guza said. As the traditional broadcast stations offer new digital side-channel formats, an industry group, the HD Digital Radio Alliance, will oversee the effort to ensure that no two stations offer competing formats in the same market. Member stations have agreed to keep the side channels free of advertising for at least the next 18 months. Once advertising is introduced, it will not be the same. The saturation of radio advertising is said to be one reason that satellite subscription radio from Sirius and XM has attracted more than nine million subscribers to date. "We will look at different types of ads," said John Hogan, president and chief executive of Clear Channel Radio. "There's a need to do it differently. Radio is reinventing itself by taking advantage of and embracing new technologies." The HD Radio technology was devised to be able to offer new types of ads. According to Peter Ferrara, president of the HD Digital Radio Alliance, new advertising formats could include text streaming across the unit's digital display, a push-to-buy button when a consumer hears about a product, or the sponsorship of a block of programming. Mr. Hogan of Clear Channel expects to see episodic commercials, 15-second spots that follow each other to tell a story. Broadcast radio executives believe that they continue to hold a trump card that their competition can never match: the local nature of free radio. "People live in communities and they want to connect in their homes, to see if their schools are open," Mr. Ferrara said. To encourage listeners to move to the new technology, the nation's major radio station groups have agreed to commit advertising valued at $200 million to promote digital radio. The promotional campaign will begin this quarter and will tie ads for the technology with promotions for digital radio receivers and radio retailers. The moves by the industry are expected to breathe new life into a trusted and traditional technology. "AM and FM are still very popular media," said Susan Kevorkian, a program manager for consumer markets at the IDC research firm. "Radio is still familiar and it's free. It's hard to compete with free."

CLEAR CHANNEL COMMUNICATIONS INC
RADIO
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY


Side by Side

Abstract: THERE are fences along both sides of Jay Street on the block that is most visitors' first view of the Dumbo section of Brooklyn. One, backed up against the Manhattan Bridge just outside the F train stop, is ramshackle blue plywood, covered with photocopies of building permits and signs for construction companies. Through peepholes and gates, passers-by in recent weeks have been able to see the frame of the 33-story J Condominium, the neighborhood's newest luxury high-rise, growing taller by the day. Across Jay Street to the east, toward the Brooklyn Navy Yard, is another fence, 10 feet tall, of gray corrugated metal. It is impenetrable, except for a small metal door tightly locked, and featureless, except for a blue-and-white sign marked with its address: 85 Jay. At the moment the site is a vast, unpaved parking lot owned by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, more commonly known as the Jehovah's Witnesses; their plan is to build four residential towers ranging from 9 to 20 stories and housing about 1,600 people. If there is a steel-and-concrete metaphor for the future of Dumbo, the patch of land down under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, it is here, on the stretch of Jay Street between York and Front Streets: headlong private development on one side and the Jehovah's Witnesses on the other. And what is notable about this and other Witnesses buildings, in the eyes of many local residents, is the extent to which they stand apart from the life around them. A particular sore point has been the Witnesses' refusal, on religious grounds, to include ground-floor retail space in any of the buildings. "The issue," said Michelle Whetten, president of the Dumbo Neighborhood Association, who has a perfect view of 85 Jay Street when she looks out her living room window, "was just that they weren't willing to share or intersect with us at all within the site. It's really that they don't interact with the community. So to have such a big piece of the heart of Dumbo just for them, that's what's frustrating." Responding to criticism that shops should have been incorporated into the buildings, a spokesman for the Witnesses, Richard Devine, said: "It's not retail because we're a noncommercial entity. We don't engage in commercial business, so retail on the site we can't do. But the idea of blending it in with the streetscape, making it open, well lighted and comfortable, that's what we're interested in doing." Whose Dumbo is it, anyway? Twenty years ago, the question was easier to answer. Dumbo belonged to the factories and the handful of loft-dwelling artist pioneers sprinkled among them, with the Jehovah's Witnesses perched warily on the edge. Today the artists remain — though, given real-estate pressures, their numbers are dwindling — and with 85 Jay Street the Witnesses are poised to establish a beachhead in the heart of the neighborhood. But in place of the working factories, there are new apartment buildings and loft conversions, filled with residents who are prosperous, highly educated and comfortable in well-cut business suits. This small patch of land hemmed in by bridges, a highway and the water is in demand from several directions. There are grocery stores now, and plenty of places to get a fancy meal, but for the first time there is not enough space to go around. Mr. Devine, who arrived at a Witnesses residence in Brooklyn Heights from Detroit in 1979 and moved into the group's largest housing complex, 90 Sands, on the edge of Dumbo, in 1993, remembers the old days. "In the late 80's and early 90's," he said, "it was empty. It was a ghost town." Now there are shops like Prague Kolektiv, which opened last fall on Front Street near Pearl, around the corner from 85 Jay. It specializes in furniture made in Czechoslovakia from the 1920's to the 1960's. Giovanni Negrisin, an Italian architect who is the store's co-owner, said he and his business partner, Barton Quillen, settled in Dumbo because of the large spaces, the closeness to Manhattan and the neighborhood's reputation as a design-oriented place, a reputation that has spread far and wide. As he put it: "I had people from Europe, from Italy, from Japan even, come in with articles: 'This is Dumbo; we heard this is the new SoHo.' " Red Wine and Hyper-Realism On a recent Friday night, it certainly looked like the new SoHo at Jan Larsen Art, a gallery on Pearl Street almost directly under the Manhattan Bridge. Jan Larsen, the owner, was tidying up for his weekly open house. Around the room were pieces by artists whom Mr. Larsen, bald and wearing a crisp white shirt and a tie, described as "some of the most talented in the neighborhood." Toward the front hung sculptures of animals — an eagle, some fish and a piece that was half fish and half machine — that had been bolted together out of metal. On the walls were hyper-realistic close-up paintings of padlocks. Among those admiring this display was Eric Hoisington, a dancer who has lived in Dumbo on and off for six years. "There's a lot of dance here," said Mr. Hoisington, who lives downstairs from a dance studio. He held a cigarette and a plastic cup of red wine in one hand while gesturing with the other. "There's a lot of cooking here, a lot of fine restaurants, and a lot of painting, furniture making, a lot of craftsmen. And a lot of fine art." Not to mention room. The vast living space available in the former factory district is what drew Michael M. Thomas, longtime columnist for The New York Observer, to the neighborhood. Mr. Thomas, also a novelist and a former Lehman Brothers partner and Metropolitan Museum of Art assistant curator who grew up on Park Avenue, was living in Sag Harbor on Long Island in 1999 when he decided to move back to the city. Flipping to the lofts section of the real estate ads, he noticed a place at 66 Water Street, for rent by Two Trees Management, a company owned by his old friend and business associate David Walentas. Intrigued, Mr. Thomas got out his map of Manhattan and searched, fruitlessly, for the address. He called Mr. Walentas and asked, "Where the hell is this place?" On his first visit to the building — where Two Trees says a one-bedroom unit with an office would rent for at least $3,400 a month — Mr. Thomas was struck by the noise from the highway and the two bridges. But when he saw the long, spacious apartment, Mr. Thomas fell in love. In April 2000 he moved in, and within months he was comparing Brooklyn to Paris. "The water's right here, the light is fabulous, the buildings are low — look at this space!" Mr. Thomas said, gesturing to a vast expanse of books and paintings, and a window that looks out over an old warehouse toward the Brooklyn Bridge. "I couldn't get anything like this space in TriBeCa for what I'm paying. I've got a big bedroom!" The Paris comparison may be apt, because he lives upstairs from the chocolate shop run by Jacques Torres, the former pastry chef at Mr. Thomas's old hangout Le Cirque, and across the street from Almondine, run by Mr. Torres and Herve Poussot, a former pastry chef at Le Bernardin. Liked or Just Respected? Long before Michael Thomas or Jacques Torres arrived, the Jehovah's Witnesses were a force in Dumbo, or at least on the edge of the neighborhood. For decades, four tan buildings with green trim west of the Manhattan Bridge and south of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway have been at the heart of the group's mission: translating its version of the Bible into hundreds of languages, and printing it and distributing it worldwide, along with supporting texts such as the magazines Watchtower and Awake! One of the buildings, 117 Adams, was a printing plant when Tom Combs first arrived from Oregon as a Witnesses volunteer in 1958. Next to the building, in an area ringed by the expressway and the on-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, sat an area of chest-deep brush that Mr. Combs helped clear. After a while, he started to cut the grass there in his free time, and now, at age 67, on warm days, he still does. In the beginning, he said as he gazed from the building's sixth floor, the only people he saw in the neighborhood were day laborers arriving in vans to work at local factories. Mr. Combs, who lives in a Witnesses residence on Livingston Street in Brooklyn Heights, would walk down to the water even then, when the Witnesses had the neighborhood mostly to themselves. "A lot of us are from out of big cities, so just to get anywhere there's a little quiet is nice," he said. "You can get the same thing in a park, but there wasn't a park then." There wasn't much of anything but factories, and the streets were littered with trash and industrial debris. In the last few years, things have changed significantly. "We're seeing a lot more people walking dogs or baby carriages," he said. Mr. Combs, who has tidy white hair and pale blue eyes smiling behind bifocals, has grown accustomed to seeing people out on the lawn — one man greets him as Papi, and a woman, who knows he is a minister, sometimes asks for advice. Still, he realizes that some people are less eager to approach a Jehovah's Witness. "To say that we're well-liked by everyone. ..." His voice trailed off. "I'd say respected by most, liked by some." The World of Brooklyn Bethel In 1909, when Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Jehovah's Witnesses, moved the organization to Brooklyn from Allegheny, Pa., it was the area's hospitality and reputation as a borough of churches, along with its access to shipping lanes, that impressed him. Over the years, the group grew to worldwide prominence as a religious organization and became one of the city's largest landowners. Brooklyn Bethel, as the Witnesses call their headquarters, soon spread across Brooklyn Heights, and in the early 1980's, the group finished its sixth building in the area, the towering residence at 90 Sands, on the southern border of Dumbo, that houses 1,000 residents. Halcyon, a record store on Pearl Street, is two blocks down from the Witnesses' buildings, and its owner, Shawn Schwartz, sometimes sees groups of the Witnesses' volunteers — recognizable because of their dark suits and short hair — headed to the waterfront. They don't stop in; the store caters mostly to D.J.'s. But Mr. Schwartz, who moved the store to Dumbo two years ago from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, says he bears the Witnesses no ill will. "They were here in a large way before any of the others of us were here," he said, "so if anybody's got a claim to the neighborhood, they invested in this neighborhood a long time ago." Still, the presence of so many Witnesses, coupled with their low profile, strikes some Dumbo residents as odd. "They are silent in the neighborhood," Mr. Schwartz said. "I've told a couple of people that their giant buildings up there are like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory: Nobody ever goes in, nobody ever goes out." But in the opinion of Robert Warren, 36, a volunteer in the Witnesses' communications department, the group is misunderstood. "I think one of the misconceptions that people have about us in this area is that because we have our own dining rooms and take care of our own services, that we don't go to places out in the neighborhood," Mr. Warren said the other day over a communal lunch of whitefish scampi, rice and asparagus in the basement of 90 Sands. "The thing that's important to remember about why we have the functions in here," Mr. Warren said, referring to the regularly scheduled morning and weekend prayers and the group meals, "is that it saves us a lot of time, so we can concentrate on what we're here for, which is our assignments." A Change of Focus The Jehovah's Witnesses are in the midst of a large-scale recentering, away from Brooklyn Heights and toward Dumbo and upstate New York. Their last printing press in Brooklyn, in a building on Dumbo's southern edge, came to a stop in April 2004, replaced by printing facilities in Wallkill, in Orange County. Last year, the organization sold its laundry building at 360 Furman Street in Brooklyn Heights and moved those operations into space vacated by some of the old presses. Plans are for the new buildings at 85 Jay Street to house Witnesses currently living in Brooklyn Heights. Jan Larsen, the gallery owner, wonders if the organization's low-key, professional approach to relations with the neighborhood, particularly during the contentious approval process of 85 Jay Street, was a mistake. "I was always surprised that they didn't see it as an opportunity to have interaction with a vibrant community," he said. J. R. Brown, the Witnesses' national spokesman, sees an irony in complaints that the group is not outgoing enough, given its weekly door-to-door outings around the city. And he said the Witnesses had a lot to offer as neighbors. "We try to get people to be fair and look at what's being contributed here," Mr. Brown said. "You're going to know for a fact that you're going to have good neighbors who are going to be honest, they're not going to try to break into where you are or start a petition against you. But we're going to pursue our mission." Mr. Larsen, walking around his studio on a chilly day in late March, thought back to all the time he spent cleaning, painting and putting up walls four years ago. "You're creating your own world," he said, "similar to what the Jehovah's Witnesses have done. They created a world around the way they see the world, and I'm doing the same. The same goes for Prague Kolektiv, and Halcyon. We're all creating our own scenes." Occasionally the scenes intersect. One evening earlier this spring, in a basement studio across Front Street from Mr. Larsen's gallery, an artist named Jaimie Walker was applying chalk and silver spray paint to a canvas as she sipped from a glass of cabernet. Jamie Jared, a burly plaster restorer and Jehovah's Witness, watched the proceedings with interest. A native Oregonian who lived and worked at the Witnesses' headquarters for six years in the 1980's before settling in Brooklyn for good, Mr. Jared is building a series of display and work spaces downstairs from the restaurant Superfine, to sublet to local artists like Ms. Walker, who might otherwise be priced out of the neighborhood. To Mr. Jared, the biggest threat to the neighborhood's current mix is not 85 Jay, but the development of luxury condos. "By the time the Witnesses get down here," he said, "there's already going to have been a cultural shift that's going to have happened, from all the Manhattanites moving in." One of those Manhattanites is Jill Montaigne, who moved to 70 Washington Street in October with her 7-year-old son, Schuyler. After living on the Upper West Side for 19 years, she looked at 85 places up and down the West Side before buying a 1,400-square-foot apartment in one of Mr. Walentas's buildings. Units that size in the building are being offered for at least $1 million. Ms. Montaigne, who is a partner at a consulting and design firm in Manhattan, appreciates Dumbo's funkier side. "This is not a sterile neighborhood," she said. "It's very vibrant in terms of the arts community, and the mix of people is so much more citylike than in the city, where the neighborhoods feel so homogeneous." Her concern about the new construction is outweighed by the positives of her new home. One of those is the view, which includes the Statue of Liberty, just beyond the Witnesses' Brooklyn Heights headquarters. "There's not a day that goes by," Ms. Montaigne said, "that I don't walk into this apartment and thank God I live here."


Saudi Arabia: 4 New Deaths Reported From Virus

Abstract: In the past 24 hours, Saudi Arabia has reported four new deaths from a Middle East virus and 36 more cases of infection. The Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, belongs to a family of viruses known as coronaviruses that includes SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. MERS can cause symptoms like fever, breathing problems, pneumonia and kidney failure. The most recent deaths reported by the Health Ministry raise to 85 the number of people who have died in the kingdom from the virus, which appeared in 2012. The kingdom has recorded a total of at least 297 confirmed cases. There is no vaccine or treatment for the virus, and it is unclear how it is transmitted.


Is Money Tainting the Plasma Supply?

Abstract: Eagle Pass, Tex. WHEN the tips her husband earned as a waiter began dwindling a year ago, Esmeralda Delgado decided to help support her family. Twice a week, Ms. Delgado, the mother of three young girls, walks across the bridge from Piedras Negras, Mexico , where she lives, to Eagle Pass and enters a building just two blocks from the border. Inside, for about an hour, Ms. Delgado lies hooked to a machine that extracts plasma, the liquid part of the blood, from a vein in her arm. The $60 a week she is paid almost equals her husband’s earnings. “This is like another income,” she says. Hundreds, probably thousands, of Mexicans like Ms. Delgado come to the United States to trade their plasma for dollars. Eagle Pass, a town of 27,000 that bills itself as the place “where yee-hah meets olé,” has two such plasma collection centers. There are about 15 others in border cities from Brownsville, Tex., to Yuma, Ariz. The centers are run by pharmaceutical companies that transform the plasma into life-saving but expensive medicines for diseases like immune deficiencies and hemophilia . Some border centers are new while others have been around for many years. They account for only a small percentage of the plasma collected by the industry, with the rest coming from collection centers throughout the United States. But they have stirred debate in recent years because they illustrate the workings of the $12 billion plasma products business, a fast-growing industry that has depended on the blood of people hard up for cash. Based on typical industry yields and prevailing prices, it appears that a single plasma donation, for which a donor might be paid $30, results in pharmaceutical products worth at least $300. Away from the border as well, many plasma collection centers have historically been located in areas of extreme poverty, some with high drug abuse . That troubles some people, who say it might contaminate the plasma supply or the health of people who sell their plasma. “Why in the United States do we have to depend on people who are down and out to donate?” says Dr. Roger Kobayashi, an immunologist in Omaha who uses plasma products to treat many patients. “You are taking advantage of economically disadvantaged individuals, and I don’t think you are that worried about their health.” Dr. Kobayashi, who also teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, says the collections on the Mexican border skirt the policy aimed at keeping plasma products safe from pathogens by prohibiting imports of plasma. “If you can’t import the plasma,” he says, “why not import the donor?” But the plasma companies and federal regulators say the practice is legal, ethical and safe. There have been no known cases of an infectious disease being transmitted through plasma products for more than a decade. And since the body quickly renews its plasma, the process is considered safe for donors if properly monitored. “It’s not like giving up a kidney,” says Dr. Jay Epstein, director of blood research at the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the collection centers and the plasma products. The industry says the same precautions are taken at the border as everywhere else. “I don’t understand the difference between having a center in El Paso and having a center in Columbus, Ohio,” says Bruce Nogales, who runs plasma collection for Talecris BioTherapeutics, owner of the center that Ms. Delgado visits. Nine of Talecris’s 71 collection centers, including four new ones, are on the border. Still, the industry has made a lot of efforts in recent years to shed its skid row image by building some centers in middle-class areas and by promoting altruistic reasons for donating plasma. Companies say donors now come from various walks of life. The United States is one of the few countries that allows plasma donors to be paid. (And even here the plasma industry says it pays donors for their time, not for the plasma itself.) But many of the countries that prohibit compensation do not collect enough plasma. So they rely on plasma or plasma products made from the blood of people who donate in the United States, which supplies more than half the world’s plasma. “The U.S. is the OPEC of plasma,” says Jim MacPherson, chief executive of America’s Blood Centers, a network of blood banks. FOR the plasma industry, times have been good. Growth has averaged 8 percent a year over the last two decades. Talecris, a leader in the business, just raised $1.1 billion in an initial public stock offering. The transaction represented a handsome return for Cerberus, the private equity fund. Cerberus acquired what is now Talecris from Bayer in 2005. To satisfy demand for plasma-based medicines, the industry has increased the number of collection centers to 408, from 299 in 2005, according to the Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association, the industry trade group. Paid donations in the United States rose to 18.8 million in 2008 from 10.4 million in 2005. There are even a few signs that in areas hardest hit by the economic downturn, people who once donated blood without compensation to organizations like the Red Cross are selling plasma instead. “I know of five or six people who are multi-gallon donors who have switched to plasma,” said Doug Klynstra, recruitment manager for Michigan Blood, a nonprofit blood bank. He said the bank’s donations are down 10 percent this year. The blood banks generally collect whole blood, which is separated into red cells, platelets and plasma and often used for transfusions. They almost never pay for donations because that might induce donors to cover up health problems that could make the blood unsafe. The plasma companies, which collect only plasma, say that is less of a concern for them because their manufacturing process can kill many viruses and because they have more time to screen donors. One donor who switched, despite Mr. Klynstra’s pleading, was his sister-in-law, Tina Dykstra, a 52-year-old grandmother. She started selling plasma two years ago when income from her husband’s electrical contracting business in Grand Rapids began falling. She makes $50 a week. But bonus payments she once received for being a frequent donor have been eliminated. “Now, because it is so busy, they don’t have to give you incentives anymore,” Ms. Dykstra said. Plasma contains infection-fighting antibodies as well as hundreds of other proteins. They are extracted from the plasma at plants like one in Los Angeles owned by Baxter International. There, steel tanks two stories high are filled with yellowish liquid — the plasma from thousands of donors — being slowly stirred by huge blades. Among the products are albumin , which is used to help treat trauma and burn victims, and blood-clotting proteins used by hemophiliacs. But the star product is intravenous immune globulin, or IVIG, which is used to treat an estimated 35,000 Americans with immune deficiencies. It can also help restore movement to some people with paralyzing neurological conditions and is being tested against Alzheimer’s disease . Carter Dougherty, a 4-year-old from Lincoln, Neb., was constantly ill because his body lacked antibodies. “He had pneumonia three times in one year,” says his mother, Melissa Dougherty. But since Carter started on IVIG in February, she says, “He’s naughtier than sin because he feels so good.” IVIG can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year per patient. Clotting proteins for hemophiliacs can cost $100,000 to $350,000 a year. And many of the uses of IVIG are not approved by the F.D.A. Insurers are becoming more reluctant to pay for such treatments, or are requiring higher co-payments, according to patient advocates. Ms. Dougherty was rejected three times before the insurer paid for Carter’s treatment, which costs $864 a week. Another challenge could be antitrust scrutiny. The number of plasma product companies has declined from 13 in 1990 to 9 in 2003 to 5 now — Baxter International of Deerfield, Ill.; CSL of Australia; Talecris, of Research Triangle Park, N.C.; Grifols of Spain; and Octapharma of Switzerland. And the companies now own most of their own collection centers instead of buying plasma from independent collectors. The industry “operates as a tight oligopoly, with a high level of information sharing,” the Federal Trade Commission said earlier this year in a lawsuit that broke up a planned $3.1 billion acquisition of Talecris by CSL. The lawsuit said that Baxter and CSL, the two biggest players, “even have explored means of punishing firms that dare to ‘break ranks’ and chase market share.” The F.T.C. dropped its suit when the deal was abandoned in June. But about a dozen hospitals have filed class-action suits charging that industry collusion has driven up prices of plasma products. CSL said in a statement that the F.T.C. “did not claim that our company ever engaged in wrongdoing,” adding, “There is no question that the plasma industry is intensely competitive.” A spokeswoman for Baxter said the company had no idea what the F.T.C. was referring to and that the charge was not substantiated in the government’s complaint. If there is a cartel, it is likely to be tested over the next few years because after several years of rapid expansion, plasma supply seems to have caught up to demand and could soon exceed it. One sign is that in Eagle Pass, payment for two weekly donations has dropped to $60 from $80 earlier this year. Early on a recent Tuesday evening, about 40 people were in the Talecris waiting room in Eagle Pass, sitting under a big sign reading: “Save lives. Earn money. Feel good.” Many of the people had just finished their shifts at Mexican factories. In an adjacent room, about 70 people rested on vinyl beds, with a line connecting a vein in one arm to a machine. Many of the donors are regulars. “It’s kind of like ‘Cheers,’ ” said Ruben Duran, the center’s manager. “They come here and know each other.” In 2007, Octapharma, which does not collect on the border, threatened to quit the plasma trade association, saying in a letter to the association that the border collections “compromised the fundamental ethics of our business.” But the other companies defended the practice and the matter was dropped. One issue is whether novel pathogens that perhaps are found in Mexico but not in the United States might enter the plasma supply. “That’s scary for the end users,” said Corey Dubin, chairman of the Committee of Ten Thousand, which represents hemophiliacs who, like Mr. Dubin himself, got H.I.V. or hepatitis in the 1980s from plasma products, before treatments were introduced to inactivate these viruses. THE other issue is the safety of donors. Plasma is collected by drawing blood, separating out the plasma by centrifuge, and then returning the red cells, white cells and platelets to the body. Some Americans have been giving plasma this way as often as twice a week for decades, with no apparent ill effects. But there have not been many studies devised to detect long-term effects. Germany allows people to give plasma this way only 38 times a year, compared with 104 in the United States. The Mexican donors need visas that require they have a job and a permanent address. The donor’s health is checked on each visit, and each donation is tested for five viruses. Most of the Mexicans interviewed said they had no problems with donating, though it can sometimes leave them lightheaded if they don’t have adequate nutrition . Reynaldo Bueno Sifuentes, who began giving plasma a year ago when overtime was cut at the auto parts factory where he works, said he did not take the recommended vitamins because they were expensive. He said the donations left him tired, and that when overtime was restored three months ago, he stopped selling plasma. But many of the Mexican donors are worried less about their health than the possibility that immigration officials will decide the donations constitute work in the United States, in violation of their visas. Some advocates for Mexican border workers see the plasma donations mostly as evidence of inadequate factory wages. “It provides a little escape valve” from economic hardship, says Ricardo Hernández of the American Friends Service Committee, which works closely with a Mexican organization, Comité Fronterizo de Obreras. Juan Carlos Torres, a 35-year-old father of three, started selling plasma when he lost his factory job three years ago. But he has continued to do so even after finding a new job because he doesn’t want to give up the extra income. To him, he says, “It’s a business now.”

Medicine and Health
Blood Donation
Poverty
Immigration and Emigration
Blood
Texas
Mexico


Road Trip to Trump’s Inauguration: ‘Let’s See What He Can Do’

Abstract: Updated: 11:50 p.m. The New York Times is driving to Friday’s inauguration with supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump. On Wednesday, we traveled with a woman from Massachusetts, the bluest state east of the Mississippi. On Thursday, we joined a man from West Virgini a, the reddest state in the East. Dianna Ploss, 53, is a volunteer organizer for Mr. Trump, a turn of fate that surprised even her — a longtime Democrat who until recently was uninterested in politics. I am a national correspondent for The Times, originally from Granville, Mass., and I rode with a photographer in the back seat of a Dodge pickup driven by Dianna’s friend Scott Hayes, a landscaper. There was a cardboard cutout of Mr. Trump, too. Along the way, we talked about life, Mr. Trump and the future of America. We stopped at a McDonald’s, Cracker Barrel, Applebee’s and multiple rest areas. We listened to Abba, the Supremes, Fleetwood Mac, Cheryl Lynn and Obama. I got carsick. And 13-plus hours later, we made it to Washington. SABRINA TAVERNISE _____ Meet the Trump Cutout GLOUCESTER, Mass., 10:27 a.m.: I just wrapped up a Facebook Live video introduction to Dianna and Scott, and we’re about to leave for the drive. For her part, Dianna spent the past year working tirelessly for Mr. Trump’s campaign, spending her own money and countless hours to get him elected. She was even a delegate at the Republican convention. She also lived for years in Cambridge, where Hillary Clinton won 88 percent of the vote. (Mr. Trump got 6 percent.) She has a rare ability to move back and forth between the two worlds. She has a lot to say about both. She had never really been that interested in politics. She grew up in Boston in the 1970s. Her dad worked as a school bus driver. Her mom raised four children and tended bar. “We were all Democrats back then,” she says. “Forty years later, we are all Republicans.” Miles driven: 0. Miles to go: 470. _____ The Winding Road Led Here NEAR WORCESTER, Mass., 11:59 a.m.: It has started to snow. The truck’s windows are steaming up. Dianna is talking to people on the phone, trying to help them find a place to stay in Washington. The Airbnb she will be staying in there is filling up fast. Her phone is pinging with people talking to her on Facebook. It’s like a giant extended family all chattering at once. Her journey to this point has been quite a trip of its own. Dianna’s adult life happened suddenly and soon. She got pregnant as a freshman in high school — a Catholic school. She was afraid. She says she got through it by putting each part of her life in a different room and closing the door. At graduation, she was the student council president. Image Dianna Ploss put a scarf on the cutout of Mr. Trump before packing him into the car for the drive to Washington. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times She thought she should go to college, but now she had a daughter. She had an underachiever boyfriend. She had no money. And her family did not understand what college would get her. It took her 10 years to finish community college. She worked in a bank, painting houses, as a secretary in an auto-body shop. In her mid-30s, she decided to go to nursing school. She worked in cardiac surgery, in psychiatry, in urgent care. She did well, but she didn’t like it. What she really liked was volunteering. And organizing. She knew nothing about running, but became the director of a private track club, managing 25 coaches and 200 kids ages 8 to 14, and raising the money to support it. When she had the kids sell a coupon book with discounts from local businesses, it was the highest-grossing fund-raiser the club had ever run. Miles driven: 71. Miles to go: 399. _____ Um, I Need Some Air ... CHARLTON, Mass., 12:26 p.m.: I am carsick. Scott spots a rest area and pulls in. Dianna buys me a Coke and even finds me generic motion-sickness medicine in a store. “Here you go, honey,” she says kindly. “Sit down. You don’t look so good.” I’m drinking a full sugar Coke, and my stomach is already starting to feel better. Miles driven: 83. Miles to go: 387. Image Ms. Ploss at a rest area in Charlton, Mass. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times _____ ‘It’s a Very Complicated Song’ STURBRIDGE, Mass., 12:47 p.m.: “Oh my God! You got to put this one in!” Dianna says, looking through a stack of CDs. “The Partridge Family?! Are you nuts?” says Scott. “I have Abba,” she says. “Neil Diamond. Chicago. Bee Gees. But I love the Partridge Family.” Scott: “Oh boy.” The music begins to play. “I woke up in love this morning. Went to sleep with you on my mind.” “It’s a very complicated song,” she says, laughing. Miles driven: 92. Miles to go: 378. _____ The Opposition Is Heard From NEAR HARTFORD, 1:07 p.m.: Dianna reads through some of the comments on the Facebook Live segment: Lots of angry shouting about Trump. Some of it about us. I ask Dianna how she feels. “Uncomfortable,” she says. As much as she is part of the Trump team, she tries to avoid alienating people. Maybe that comes from having lived in Cambridge. Maybe that comes from her personality as a networker. “I try to encourage people not to yell,” she says. “I had a little meeting with women who are part of the volunteer team. I said, ‘If our goal is getting people to go toward Trump, criticizing them isn’t the right way. It makes you look bad, too.’ ” “I don’t attack people personally,” she adds. “Except if I’m by myself and the TV is on.” She pops an Abba album into the truck’s CD player. Miles driven: 126. Miles to go: 344. _____ Becoming a Republican WETHERSFIELD, Conn., 1:30 p.m.: I ask Dianna how someone who grew up a Democrat in Massachusetts could have wound up a Trump voter. Her move toward politics, she explains, was less a burning ideological expression and more an affinity for people, and for bringing them together. She was good at leading people, but the world was also changing. In 2015, she sold her house in Cambridge and quit nursing to focus on an invention that involves beverages. Image Ms. Ploss, who was a volunteer for the Trump campaign, texted on her couch next to a cardboard cutout of Mr. Trump, as she and her friend Mr. Hayes prepared to head to Washington for the inauguration. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times “I was living in my camper in Framingham in my friend’s yard,” she says. “They were liberal. Stuff was happening — San Bernardino, Paris. I’d think: I don’t know if I agree with them.” When Mr. Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, she felt no sudden spark, she says. But his message steadily seeped in, like a slow-motion realization about herself and her beliefs: one she had always had, but had never really considered. “People were lying down everywhere,” she says, recalling protests about police violence. “They were lying down in Harvard Square. They were lying down on Route 93. They blocked traffic for three hours. Ninety-three is a really congested road; you want to pull your hair out anyway. To shut it down? What the hell is going on? What are these people doing?” At some point, she registered as a Republican. “I was trying to find out who I am in this whole crazy mess,” she says. “I feel like I had to take a stand. It was just crazy. I couldn’t understand it.” Miles driven: 135. Miles to go: 335. _____ Trump ‘Showed That You Can Stand Up for Yourself’ BERLIN, Conn., 1:37 p.m.: It has stopped raining. I ask Dianna how she came to like Mr. Trump. She says she did not take his candidacy seriously at first. “All I knew about him was that reality show,” she says. But when she tuned in, she realized he appealed to her. “I really liked Trump’s pro-America thing. I grew up, I went to Catholic school. We did the Pledge of Allegiance every day. That was important.” “I started to pay attention not to what he was saying, but to the effect that he had. The freedom of speech things. He said outrageous things but so what. People would get so worked up over outrageous things.” “He was the tough guy. I like that he stood up for himself. He didn’t take any garbage from people. He retaught people how to have their self-respect. He showed that you can stand up for yourself.” Miles driven: 142. Miles to go: 328. Image Mr. Hayes and Ms. Ploss placed an order at a McDonald’s in Norwalk, Conn., accompanied by their Donald Trump cutout. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times _____ Fries, and Some Free Speech With That NORWALK, Conn., 2:53 p.m.: “Oh, they were not happy in there,” Dianna announces, emerging from a McDonald’s with Scott, the Trump cutout and a small bag of French fries. (I had been in the bathroom and missed the action.) “The guy behind the counter said, ‘We don’t do politics,’” Dianna reports. “I told him we just needed some fries.” A woman in a puffy blue jacket sitting at the window bangs on the glass with her fist. Having caught our attention, she points her finger at the cardboard Trump and gives a deep thumbs-down motion. We are standing in the parking lot, and two women walk briskly up to Dianna. “I love Mr. Trump, trust me,” says Lillia Millard, a retired translator who was born in Russia and now lives in West Norwalk. “He says it like it is, just like me.” Dianna asks if she is going to watch the inauguration. “Yes!” she says enthusiastically. Her daughter, a journalist, will not. “She’s going to the women’s march, unfortunately,” Ms. Millard says, adding, “I still have until Saturday to talk her out of it.” Scott gives her a Trump-Pence bumper sticker, and we pull back out onto the highway to the music of Grand Funk Railroad. Miles driven: 202. Miles to go: 268. Image Ms. Ploss took a photo of two women posing with the cutout in the McDonald’s parking lot. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times _____ Agreeing With Obama, Until Not DARIEN, Conn., 3:26 p.m.: We are stopping again. The rest stop is all beige plastic and fake wood. A television is playing President Obama’s last news conference . It is barely audible under a thumping Stevie Nicks song. It is in the final minutes. “There are a lot more good people than bad in this country,” he says. Dianna says back: “Yeah. I agree with that. I do.” He says that he curses more behind closed doors. “So do I,” Dianna says. He is talking about his daughters. He keeps going. He says he believes in this country. Dianna stops agreeing. “Do you believe he believes in this country?” I ask her. “No,” she replies. “I don’t believe that.” I ask her why. “For all these years, people said all this stuff about him and I didn’t believe them,” she said. “But he has done so much to harm America. He basically tried to be Robin Hood. His trade policies. His willingness to try to take away from people who had more and give to those who had less.” “The middle class shrunk, more people ended up at the bottom. That was as the result of him. Obamacare was a big part of this. Look how much money it costs me just for my health care. It didn’t make sense to me. It’s hard to know. Is it really what’s in his heart, or are his ideals getting in his way?” Miles driven: 207. Miles to go: 263. _____ Why She’s Glad to See Obama Go Still in DARIEN, Conn., 4:33 p.m.: We’re eating spicy hummus and carrots at the Darien, Conn., rest stop. I am asking Dianna about Mr. Obama. She didn’t vote for him. But she defended him when her family or friends would attack him. Now, she is glad to see him go. Part of that is because of policing. “The first thing he said that struck me was when he said the Cambridge police acted stupidly,” she said, referring to Mr. Obama’s remark about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. , a black Harvard professor, in 2009 as Mr. Gates tried to enter his own home. “When that comment came out, something in my head went, ‘Huh?’” “Then he said, ‘Trayvon Martin could have been my son.’ Maybe that’s what he’s thinking, but when he says something like that as a leader, people listen. I had this like, ‘What?’ I was confused by that. What are you doing?” She added: “Things have changed in terms of the criminality. People will do anything. They are going up to cops and executing them. People are blowing themselves up. They are ramming trucks into things. If you alienate the police, then we are going to have no law and order.” On Mr. Obama, she said: “When you are the leader, there are times when you have to bite your tongue.” She added: “I feel the irony in that, because people will say Donald Trump doesn’t bite his tongue. I want to see how it plays out once he’s president. I don’t know the answer.” Miles driven: 207. Miles to go: 263. _____ Image Driving over the George Washington Bridge on the way to the presidential inauguration. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times Crossing a Bridge, but Recalling Another River FORT LEE, N.J., 6 p.m.: We are back on I-95, closer now to the end of our trip than to the beginning. The Supremes are playing; our driver, Scott, is grateful that we are no longer listening to Abba. We have just crossed over the George Washington Bridge. I’m asking Dianna and Scott about immigration. For Scott, economics undergirds his thinking. Two friends used to give him a lot of landscaping work 10 or 15 years ago, but have since stopped; they have Latin American employees now. Another client, who recently sold a company for millions, said he wanted to cut Scott’s rate to $20 an hour from $30 and asked him if he could learn Spanish to manage a work crew. “Fundamentally, it’s not fair,” he says. “I’m working seven days a week now so I can carry myself through the winter. They say Republicans want the cheaper labor and Democrats want the votes. But I think they both want cheaper labor. People with money just want cheaper labor.” He says he does not blame the laborers, but is angry with politicians who talk as if it were not a problem. “If I was a poor person south of the border, I’d probably do the same thing,” he says. Scott, 58, who lives in Beverly, Mass., has led rafting trips in Texas on the Rio Grande for years. In 2010, he says, he was at the end of a rafting trip when he saw five people trying to cross the river. They appeared to be asking him to help them across. He kept going. Several months later, Janet Napolitano — then the secretary of homeland security — was nearby, in Laredo, Tex., and said the border had never been more secure. Scott says he did not believe her. “You lose your language, border and your culture, you’re going to lose your country,” he says, sounding one of the president-elect’s campaign themes. “Your country is done.” Miles driven: 240. Miles to go: 230. _____ A Taste of Indisputable Truth EAST WINDSOR, N.J., 6:57 p.m.: The car is silent. Dianna: “Do you like lobster?” Scott: “I like it, but it’s expensive.” Dianna: “I just don’t like fighting with my food.” Scott: “The only thing that’s really good is the tail.” Dianna: “The only thing that’s really good is the butter. Anything tastes good dipped in butter.” Miles driven: 296. Miles to go: 174. _____ In and Out at Cracker Barrel MOUNT HOLLY, N.J., 7:38 p.m. We pulled into a Cracker Barrel for dinner. Dianna had never been inside one. “O.K., there’s country music in the bathroom,” she said. “It smells nice — like candles or something.” She surveys the store. She looks at a wall full of coffee mugs with names on them: Grandpa. Papa. Mom. “Look at all these cups. It’s spewing happiness. It’s like a quaint little town or something.” We left because there was no table with an outlet near it for Dianna or me. Miles driven: 318. Miles to go: 152. _____ Will Trump Disappoint? WESTAMPTON, N.J., 8:11 p.m.: We are waiting for dinner in an Applebee’s. I ask Dianna and Scott what they expect from Mr. Trump and if they are afraid he might disappoint them. “If he doesn’t deliver on the economy, I’ll be disappointed,” Scott says. “He says he’s going to change the tax rate for the middle class. That’s huge for me. I bought a house five years ago and the taxes have gone up $200 every single year.” Scott doesn’t trusts the elites — entrenched politicians with money. “I don’t trust McCain, I don’t trust Rubio, I don’t trust Paul Ryan,” he says. “I love Trump for calling out the elites and the ruling class for who they are. Because they have forgotten about the working man and working woman.” He is also suspicious of the term “comprehensive immigration reform.” Dianna says: “Anytime a politician uses the word comprehensive, it makes you think they are lying. It’s just an empty word. Smoke and mirrors. They throw big words around, make it look like they are actually doing something. Makes people feel like, almost like they are not smart enough to understand what they are doing.” She added, “I think Trump will deliver.” Our dinner comes. Two shrimp salads and a burger. Miles driven: 319. Miles to go: 151. _____ Image Scott Hayes in the driver’s seat, with a cardboard cutout of Donald J. Trump in the back. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times Taking Its Toll NEW CASTLE, Del., 9:51 p.m.: We are getting sleepy. Another toll, this one for the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Scott thinks the sign says $400. “What!?” Dianna says in mock shock. “Got to pay for that wall somehow.” Everybody laughs. We pull up to the cash lane. An older woman in a wool hat, glasses and a yellow security vest hands us change. Holding up the Trump cardboard cutout, Dianna asks: “Do you know who this is?” The woman responds in a deadpan voice: “I’ve never seen him in my life.” But when she is asked if she likes him, a smile creeps onto her face. “Thumbs up,” she says. Miles driven: 366. Miles to go: 104. _____ Yes, This Trump Voter Is on Obamacare NEWARK, Del., 10:03 p.m.: It’s dark. Dinner’s over. Disco is playing: Cheryl Lynn’s “Got To Be Real.” Dianna is driving to give Scott a rest. Cardboard Trump is still smirking in the back seat. “I’m getting out my bell bottoms,” says Scott drily. I sing for a while. Dianna does too. Then I ask about health care. “I spent probably $20,000 on health care last year,” Dianna says. She was paying about $850 a month through a private plan she bought herself. But her deductible for out-of-network care jumped to $4,500 from $3,000. In-network, she says, jumped to $3,000 from $2,000. Dianna, who has been living off the proceeds from the sale of her house in Cambridge, says she could have gotten insured through Obamacare last year, because she was not working. But she chose not to. “I said, Dianna, how can you go on food stamps and get free health care if you are volunteering for Trump? I thought it would be the wrong thing to do.” But now she has Obamacare. She is helping to support her father, she explains, and her budget has gotten tight. “I don’t feel good that I had to do that,” she says. “I have more control over my life when I have better health insurance. It’s also about pride.” Miles driven: 381. Miles to go: 89. _____ Not Lonely Anymore BALTIMORE, 10:50 p.m.: Hurtling through Maryland. Fleetwood Mac’s greatest hits playing, “ Rhiannon ” among them. Whatever happens with Mr. Trump, Scott Hayes has already won something important: a deep network of people who think like him. He has a flip phone. He is not on Facebook. But he believes he will hold on to those new connections. They have revived him. Made him feel more alive. “I always felt so alone, like nobody wanted to hear what I was saying,” he says. “So I’d go to these rallies just to see if there were other people who thought like I did. Now I’m meeting all kinds of people. It’s been awesome.” Dianna wants to keep up the momentum with all the people she has met, too. Like the woman named May who owns a Chinese restaurant in Newton, Mass., and who went up to New Hampshire on Tuesdays with some of her staff to volunteer. Dianna organized a Christmas party for Trump supporters in Massachusetts in December. There was Champagne on every table. The cardboard cutout of Trump was there, too. “I’m relieved,” she says. “He won. I think he’s going to deliver.” Miles driven: 427. Miles to go: 43. _____ Made It Image Mr. Hayes drove his truck 470 miles to Washington for the inauguration. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times WASHINGTON, 11:50 p.m.: We pull into the parking garage at Dianna’s Airbnb in southwest Washington, ride the elevator to the eighth floor, and walk into a spacious two-bedroom with parquet floors. Scott holds cardboard Trump. There is a view of the Washington Monument. “Wow, it’s huge,” Dianna says, looking out a long glass sliding door. “This is, like, pretty fancy.” Scott stands the president-elect up. I ask the two of them how it feels to be at the end of this 13-hour-plus journey. “It’s the end, but it’s the beginning,” Dianna says. “Now, it’s a new chapter in our lives, for the country, for Mr. Trump. Let’s see what he can do.” Miles driven: 470. Miles to go: 0. Video Dianna Ploss, Scott Hayes and the cardboard cutout of President-elect Donald J. Trump finished their road trip to the inauguration after driving 13-plus hours from Massachusetts. Credit Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times


Mexican Reporter Is Shot to Death

Abstract: MEXICO CITY — A newspaper reporter who wrote an article published Saturday saying he had received threats from local government officials in the northern state of Durango was shot to death the next day by unidentified assailants, his colleagues said Tuesday. The reporter, Carlos Ortega Samper, 52, who worked at El Tiempo de Durango, was shot three times in the head with a .40-caliber pistol after being pulled from his car, his colleagues said. “We are shocked by Carlos Ortega Samper’s killing,” said Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists . “Given the allegations the reporter made against local government officials, it is imperative that local and federal authorities cooperate during the investigation into his murder. It is time to put an end to impunity in the killings of Mexican journalists.” The Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, called for a thorough investigation.

Mexico
Murders and Attempted Murders
Committee to Protect Journalists


Jesuit Editor in N.Y. Is Intrigued by Politics and Motivated by Love

Abstract: In Rome, one of Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s first acts as Pope Francis was to call his newsdealer back home in Buenos Aires and cancel his daily delivery. In New York, the Rev. Matt Malone seemed reasonably confident that a similar papal ax would not fall on America, the venerable Jesuit weekly that he edits. “I know for a fact that America is read in the Vatican,” Father Malone said over lunch in a Midtown diner. He had yet to check if the new pope was among his 48,000 subscribers. “It’s almost certain that he’s seen it,” Father Malone said. “It’s sent to every Jesuit community in the world.” In Francis, the Roman Catholic Church has its first Jesuit pontiff. Relations between his religious order and headquarters in Rome have often been rocky. Peace has also not always reigned between the Vatican and America magazine, based in New York and once described by a former editor in chief, the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, as “the Catholic PBS.” Eight years ago, Father Reese was forced to resign because of Vatican displeasure with articles critical of church positions on sensitive matters like same-sex marriage. So, Father Malone, is it an article of faith that this new papacy is good for the Jesuits? “It’s uncharted territory,” he said, sipping the first of several cups of coffee. “It’s hard to know how it affects us other than to say we’re very proud. We have a reputation — sometimes earned, sometimes not — for being a little arrogant. We try not to give voice to our pride too much.” For now, anyway, Francis’s ascension seems to have been a boon for Father Malone’s magazine. During the papal conclave, “we had a huge number of hits on the Web site,” he said, adding, “In fact, it crashed after he was announced, because of the demand.” Across its 104 years , America has never had a chief editor as young as Father Malone, who was 40 when appointed last June, the same month he was ordained as a priest after a decade of preparation. Does Father Reese’s unpleasant experience weigh on him? He paused before answering. “There isn’t a newspaper or magazine that can say everything it wants to say,” he said, adding with a laugh that at America it is usually for want of space. But bear in mind that “we’re not disinterested observers,” he said. “We are evangelists. I think that America, historically, has gotten into trouble when we have forgotten that part of our identity.” Father Malone suggested meeting at Park Café, a coffee shop attached to the Hotel Wellington , on Seventh Avenue at 55th Street. It is around the corner from a building on West 56th Street that contains the magazine’s offices and a residence for about 20 Jesuit priests, Father Malone included. This choice was not an act of modesty, he asserted in an e-mail exchange to set up the lunch. “I just have a bland, Irish palate,” he said. “A grilled cheese and French fries is my idea of culinary heaven.” He lived up to his own billing, ordering grilled cheese on whole wheat, but skipping the fries. In that spirit of abnegation, his tablemate settled for two scrambled eggs. Jesuits elicit various reactions among Catholics, from a sunny belief that they are the brainiacs of the church to a darker view that they are grand conspirators, too clever by half. “Jesuitical” is not a word always said in admiration. But Father Malone cautioned against sweeping judgments: “There’s an old saying that if you’ve met one Jesuit, you’ve met one Jesuit.” His embrace of Jesuit life began in his late 20s while he was working in Boston, first at a political research outfit, then at a political journal. He had grown up in Mashpee, Mass., on Cape Cod — “16 miles and $600 million from the Kennedys” — the fifth of six children in a family of scant means but deep faith. From early on, though, “my great passion was politics,” he said, adding: “It still is in many ways. I followed the U.S. Senate the way my brothers followed the baseball box scores.” In Boston, Father Malone said, “I literally moved next door to a parish run by the Jesuits.” He became captivated by their “spirituality and way of praying.” He also had an epiphany, if you will, about the political world. “I never got cynical about politics,” he said. If anything, the church itself is “inherently political,” given that “the demands of the Gospel are of a social nature and not just an individual nature.” “But I came to feel that change, real change, only happens through the action of grace, a radical movement of the heart,” Father Malone said. “It wasn’t so much that I thought, ‘I’m disillusioned — I’ll go off and be a priest.’ It was very much thinking that I was moving closer to the source of real change.” “With many of the world’s most intractable problems,” he said, “a kind of radical love and forgiveness is the only solution.” As for celibacy, an integral part of the deal, it is “very misunderstood,” Father Malone said. He smiled as he imagined the reaction of friends from college days, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. If he had announced he was becoming a celibate Buddhist monk, “they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s really cool,’ ” he said, “but if I told them I was becoming a Catholic priest, they’d say, ‘What are you, crazy?’ ” “I think it’s simply understood as a negation of something,” he said. “But in order to make a celibate commitment that’s lasting and healthy, you really have to be oriented by what you’re saying yes to.” And that is? “Jesus,” Father Malone replied. “Without that dimension, celibacy is unlivable and it’s uncreative.” Perhaps a failing of the Catholic clergy is that “we are not giving an account of the joy that is within us,” he said. Also troublesome for him is how the American church, which should be “an instrument of unity,” has “thoughtlessly imported” the “extremely partisan, hyper-ideological, very broken public debate” that defines this country’s politics. For this priest, an enduring model is his own father, John Malone. In 1984, one of Father Malone’s older brothers, Joe, was killed at age 16 in a road accident. He was riding in a car driven by a friend, Kenny, who had been drinking. Now, at 17, Kenny faced imprisonment for vehicular homicide. John Malone stood up in court and pleaded for a minimum sentence that involved no jail time. The judge heeded his emotional appeal. Kenny has since “made something of his life,” Matt Malone said. Redemption was real. He described this in a 2005 article for America : “In my father’s eyes, Joe’s death was Kenny’s doing, but it was not his being.” In the Jesuit son’s eyes, his dad was “the father of mercies.”

Catholic Church
Pope Francis
Same-Sex Marriage,Gay Marriage
Celibacy
Matt Malone


Advocates Fear Big New York Budget Cuts Will Jeopardize Child Safety

Abstract: The threat of more than $83 million in budget cuts at New York City’s child-welfare agency has left advocates for children afraid that recent improvements in its operations, including reduced caseloads, could be threatened. To bring the agency’s budget down to the size that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has requested, officials at the Administration for Children’s Services have prepared to reduce preventive services, institute a 5 percent cut in fees to foster-care agencies that hold contracts with the city and lay off more than 550 of its more than 6,800 employees. The cuts would be the largest since John B. Mattingly became commissioner of the agency in 2004, and among the most severe reductions since it was created as a stand-alone department in 1996. The city, meanwhile, is receiving a steadily increasing number of reports of abuse and neglect — 65,856 in 2008, up from 63,434 the year before. “As the economic crisis worsens, there are probably going to be more families who need services,” said Stephanie Gendell, an associate executive director of the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York, an advocacy group. “It’s not like A.C.S. has become less busy.” Jennifer Marino Rojas, the deputy director of the Children’s Defense Fund-New York and a former associate commissioner at the Administration for Children’s Services, said the cuts could not come at a worse moment. “A.C.S. was just getting the resources it needed to better respond to the needs of children and families,” she said. “And now to start chipping away at that again really does threaten the stability of the agency.” Perhaps the biggest fear is that the average caseload could balloon, after an intense effort to bring it to its current level, just under 12, from 21 three years ago. A children’s services spokeswoman, Sharman Stein, said she could not say that child-protective workers, who investigate reports of abuse and neglect, would be spared from layoffs; Marc La Vorgna, a spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg, said, “It’s an issue we have to look at very carefully.” “We have a goal of reducing costs while continuing the progress made in reducing caseloads,” Mr. La Vorgna said. In a statement sent by e-mail, Mr. Mattingly said he would try to keep caseloads at the current levels. “These manageable caseloads are a critical element in our ability to do strong, thorough protective investigations,” he said. “Children’s services has committed to the children and families of this city that we will continue to strengthen and improve our child-protective work.” The city budget process is still underway; Mr. Bloomberg is scheduled to present his proposal on Friday. The Administration for Children’s Services was founded in 1996, after the much-publicized beating death of 6-year-old Elisa Izquierdo, who was killed by her mother. In response to the public outcry, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani removed child-welfare programs from the Human Resources Administration, then the umbrella agency for all city social services, and promised a renewed focus on protecting children. After a string of high-profile deaths of children in 2006 — including that of 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown, who was found abused and starved in her home — Mr. Mattingly instituted a series of changes, beefing up child-protective services, vastly increasing the amount of money spent on family support programs, reducing caseloads and shifting more responsibility to foster-care agencies. But if Mr. Mattingly plans to prioritize child-protective caseloads, the proposed budget cuts would eliminate some preventive services and reduce others. These programs, which are administered through contracted agencies, address problems in families through parenting classes, housing advocacy or domestic violence counseling, for example, and can often keep children with their parents and out of foster care. Officials from the 36 foster-care agencies that hold contracts with the city have been told to prepare for a 5 percent cut in their fees, a reduction that many agency directors said could be devastating. James F. Purcell, chief executive officer of the Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies, said that if there was less money to work with, “kids are going to stay in foster care even longer, and they’re already in care a very long time.” Jeremy Kohomban, the president and chief executive of Children’s Village, said he was planning to lay off several employees. Bill Baccaglini, the executive director of the New York Foundling, one of the city’s oldest and largest foster-care agencies, said the cuts would mean a loss of roughly $500,000. According to data compiled in Child Welfare Watch, a biannual report published by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, preventive programs were operating at full capacity through most of 2008. “A.C.S. is relying a lot more heavily on preventive services than it did, say, six years ago, and this means the caseloads are probably going to go up,” said Andrew White, the director of the center. “And it means there won’t be the kind of growth in family and children’s services that we need to diffuse the kinds of crises that send kids into foster care.” Some of the layoffs within the city agency itself appear to be in line with Mr. Mattingly’s goals under Improved Outcomes for Children, an initiative begun in 2007 to delegate more responsibility and decision-making to the outside foster-care agencies. Several directors of the agencies said they were not concerned that many of the city positions would be eliminated. But many of the proposed cuts are of positions that provide support to child-protective workers, like administrative staff, computer technicians and drivers. In 2006, the agency began building a staff of 60 former police detectives who work as investigative consultants. Ten of those positions will be cut. “The burden will fall on the child-protective workers, because they won’t have the supports that help them manage the cases and move the cases along,” said Faye Moore, president of the Social Service Employees Union. Some advocates predicted that the budget cuts were only the beginning. Even if the economy begins to recover, they said, another round of reductions was possible in the fall. “We finally started to get it right after Nixzmary Brown,” said Bill de Blasio, a city councilman from Brooklyn who is chairman of the General Welfare Committee. “Now, by definition, it will be much harder to keep up with the cases, it’ll be much harder to protect kids, and this level of cut at a single agency suggests that we are not making this agency a priority.”

Administration for Children's Services
Children and Youth
Child Abuse and Neglect
Budgets and Budgeting
New York City


Accounts and People of Note in the Advertising Industry

Abstract: American Advertising Federation, Washington, elected its board for 2013-14. Wendy Clark, senior vice president of the Global Sparkling Brand Center at the Coca-Cola Company, becomes the new chairwoman, succeeding the immediate past chairman, John Osborn, president and chief executive at BBDO New York. Rich Stoddart, president for North America at Leo Burnett, becomes the new vice chairman. Max Arlestig and Max Gebhardt, an interactive creative team, joined the Amsterdam office of Wieden & Kennedy after working together at R/GA, New York, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, and freelancing in London and Sydney. Kelly Williams Brown joined Leopold Ketel, Portland, Ore., as a copywriter. She has been a reporter and editor and most recently wrote a book, “Adulting: How to Become a Grown-Up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps.” Auro Trini Castelli and Lauren Glazer joined the New York office of Gyro in new posts. Mr. Trini Castelli becomes head of strategy; he had been senior vice president and global strategy director at the New York office of DraftFCB, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies. Ms. Glazer becomes client services director; she had been senior vice president and account director at BBDO New York, part of the BBDO North America unit of BBDO Worldwide, owned by the Omnicom Group. Ericsson, Stockholm, is acquiring Red Bee Media, London, a media services company, from a group controlled by Macquarie Advanced Investment Partners. Financial terms were not disclosed. Katrina Greenwood joined the Chicago office of Havas Worldwide in a new post, strategy director for the retail and direct marketing aspects of the Citibank account. She had been senior creative strategist for brand strategy at Digitas, part of the Publicis Groupe. Havas Worldwide is part of the Havas Creative unit of Havas. Amanda Hines joined Forge Worldwide, Boston, as an account supervisor. She had been a senior account executive at Roundarch Isobar, Boston, part of the Dentsu Aegis Network division of Dentsu. IgnitionOne, New York, has completed a buyout, led by management, from its parent, Dentsu. Financial terms were not disclosed. In addition to senior managers, the buyout was financed by employees and ABS Capital Partners. IgnitionOne had been owned by Dentsu since 2010. Peter Krasniqi joined Tapad, New York, in a new post, vice president and head of performance advertising. He had been iAd sales manager at Apple, based in New York. Latitude, Minneapolis, hired three executives. They are Van Horgen, creative director and copywriter; Michael Murray, account director; and Jason Strong, executive creative director and designer. Gayle Malone joined the Magnetic Collective, New York, in a new post, partner. She had been associate director for account planning at Razorfish, part of the Publicis Groupe. MediaCom Sport, part of the MediaCom division of GroupM, a unit of WPP, opened its first office in Asia, in Singapore, to be led by Jin Wei Toh, who had been Singapore managing director at the Parallel Media Group Asia. Palace Resorts, Doral, Fla., chose ISM, Boston, as its advertising agency of record in North America. Billings were not disclosed. The assignment had previously been handled by the Newlink Group, Miami, which will continue to work with Palace Resorts, handling public relations. Pascal Racheneur joined LSN Mobile, Atlanta, in a new post, senior vice president for products. He had been vice president for interactive media at AccuWeather. Michael Racic joined the New York office of Rocket Fuel in a new post, vice president for category development. He had most recently been executive vice president and managing partner at Universal McCann, New York, part of the Mediabrands division of the Interpublic Group of Companies. Relevant24 — which describes itself as an amalgam of publisher, advertising agency and multimedia content production company — was opened in Boston by Marc Gallucci, who is chief executive, and Lane Murphy, who is president. Seth Rogin joined Mashable, New York, in a new post, chief revenue officer. He had been a vice president for advertising at The New York Times. SK&G Advertising, Las Vegas, expanded further into Asia by forming a unit focused on the region. The unit, SK&G Asia Pacific, is based in Hong Kong and is teaming with the Tank, a Hong Kong agency that has worked for marketers like the Hong Kong Jockey Club. Elaine Wong joined McGarryBowen, New York, as director for corporate communications. She had been director for corporate communications at ID Media, New York, part of the Mediabrands division of the Interpublic Group of Companies. McGarryBowen is part of the Dentsu Network division of Dentsu. Po Yi joined the New York office of Venable as a partner in an expansion of the law firm’s advertising and marketing group. She had been vice president and chief advertising counsel at American Express, New York, serving as chief counsel to the chief marketing officer and global advertising and brand management group.

Appointments and Executive Changes
advertising,marketing
Public relations


The Boiler That Broke Her Heart

Abstract: ONE icy Christmas Eve a few years ago, I returned to my Greenwich Village apartment at 3 a.m. after a long night that involved many friends, a few drinks and the requisite little black dress. I was 23 years old and looking forward to a carefree sleep in my warm, cozy bed. When I opened the door, I noticed a glaring absence of warm coziness. Instead, I was met by the furious blinking of my answering machine (next to which sat my forgotten cellphone) alerting me to five new messages. A knot of dread formed in my throat. I knew those messages were not from my friends telling me they missed me already. They were frantic calls from my parents, and from the restaurant on the ground floor of the building. I had gotten these calls because I was the super of the brownstone co-op that my parents owned with another family, and so when the heat went out on a frigid Christmas Eve, it was my job to fix it as quickly as possible. Bundling myself into long underwear, jeans, a turtleneck and a sweatshirt, I grabbed a bulky ring of keys and headed to the basement. I hated our basement, a dimly lighted place that had low ceilings, a narrow corridor and junk everywhere and was deeply creepy. But I had a few tricks up my sleeve for handling our capricious and ornery 40-year-old boiler. First, I checked the emergency switch to make sure none of the waiters in the restaurant had accidentally flipped it off, mistaking it for a light switch. No such luck. Then I checked the circulators, the pumps that bring the heat up to each floor. They were whirring away. Finally, I pressed the little red button at the base of the machine and held my breath. The boiler burst into action. But I knew better than to get my hopes up. Crouching there, bleary-eyed, I gazed at the flame behind the iron door beseechingly, the way a woman silently implores a lover who has broken her heart many times before. After a minute, the flame died out. So I trudged back to my apartment, phoned the oil company and was greeted, as you might imagine, by a man not terribly thrilled to be of service in the wee hours on possibly the coldest night of the year. By 8 the next morning, I was assured that the correct part was on its way. Yet, despite the skill with which I had dealt with this particular crisis, I still felt resentful. In my opinion, young women my age should be partying the night away while wearing little black dresses, not handling oil deliveries, decoding arcane city forms, battling the city’s Environmental Control Board (an agency devoted to making my life miserable) or replacing rusted water heaters and rusted spare water heaters. But I suffered the often stressful and rarely rewarding tribulations of an unpaid super for the same reason so many New Yorkers tolerate unpalatable situations: real estate. In exchange for paying my maintenance charges and taking care of the Greek Revival brownstone, I got to live in a floor-through apartment downstairs from my parents’ duplex, where I grew up. Although I had a day job, my meager salary would never have allowed me to pay market rate on such a place. Occasionally, there was a bright spot amid the drudgery. One Saturday morning, while my friends were sleeping or indulging in free kayaking, I was in the basement with the Roto-Rooter guy, standing in two inches of backed-up sewage. And here’s the thing: The Roto-Rooter guy was really great. Instead of being bitter and cranky about having to do such a noxious, malodorous job, he was telling me how fascinating it was, how much he loved what he did. He had a passion for the history and the future of waste treatment, and had read widely on the subject. Although my expertise with sewage was limited to fixing a running toilet with a straightened paper clip, the Roto-Rooter guy had innovative ideas about overhauling the entire system of waste management worldwide. What was the point of living in New York if not to meet characters like this? With the encouragement of my parents and the purchase of an array of color-coded files, I learned a lot, quickly. My dad, a law professor who never met a problem he couldn’t break down into manageable chunks, taught me not to be afraid of the physical world. Electrical problems were just positives and negatives, he assured me. Plumbing was just water and air. I ONCE spent half a year doggedly lobbying the city for a remote water-meter reader to be installed outside our building so that the meter could actually be read, thus putting an end to the creative estimated water usage rates calculated by someone with a sense of humor at the water board. Once the remote meter was finally read, we coasted on credit for two years because the city had seriously overestimated our water usage, and I celebrated getting the accurate reading with the same enthusiasm as a law firm associate making partner. Being an Ivy League-educated 23-year-old super didn’t mean I could solve every problem myself, but it did mean I could explain the problem clearly and articulately on the phone to whatever high-priced professional was licensed to solve it. I now live in my childhood apartment with my husband and two children, who are fourth-generation on our block (my grandfather had a bachelor pad in another building). I used to be a super; now I’m a homeowner and a landlord. Although I still don’t enjoy my trips to the basement, they’re no longer a shocking contrast to the rest of my life. There’s an undeniable thrill that comes from being so competent at such an early age, from so tangibly earning one’s keep. And if my children want my old apartment in 20 years’ time, they’ll also have to resign themselves to being on intimate terms with the heartbreaking boiler.

Housing and Real Estate
Condominiums
Water Heaters


Changing the Rules at For-Profit Schools

Abstract: Attendance at for-profit postsecondary schools has grown sharply in recent years. These schools run the gamut, offering anything from two-year vocational programs to four-year degrees, and they include online schools. In some ways, the schools’ growth comes at a relatively high risk to taxpayers. Students at for-profits take out more debt than their peers at traditional schools and default at much higher rates; they also account for about 9 percent of students but receive about 24 percent of Stafford federal loans. The Department of Education is proposing a rule change aimed at reducing some of those risks. If the change is approved, more than 2,600 postsecondary educational programs could lose access to federal funds. The proposed rule, which is open for public comment until Thursday, would require certain schools to prove that they are preparing students for gainful employment that keeps them paying their loans on time and out of significant debt. If a high proportion of a program’s students have taken on too much debt and not repaid enough of their loans, the program could lose access to federal funds. The department estimates that up to 307,000 students could find themselves at such programs, though it says that most would then switch to eligible ones. But some say that those estimates are too optimistic, and that many more students could be locked out of higher education altogether. Many public schools are already at full capacity, and states in the midst of budget crises are raising tuition. Not-for-profit private schools can also be out of reach for many students. Jonathan Guryan, an economist at Northwestern University, was co-author of an analysis for the Career College Association, an organization of more than 1,400 for-profit schools, including DeVry and Kaplan University, that challenges some of the government’s assertions. He said the regulation would have unintended consequences that disproportionately affect poor, black and Hispanic students, who attend for-profits at higher rates. Schools may be tempted to turn away students with high debt, he said. “I’m concerned it would create an incentive for schools to discriminate.” David Bergeron, a Department of Education official who oversaw the development and analysis of the proposal, said he had already received more than 26,000 public comments with a wide range of viewpoints — far more than any other proposed rule change in higher education has ever drawn. After weighing the comments, Mr. Bergeron said, the department may make revisions, then publish final rules by Nov. 1. They would go into effect on July 1 of next year.

Colleges and Universities
Student Loans
Education Department (US)
Taxation