A small toy pig, well worn and with a raggedy limp tail, stands in a glass box on a side chest in the cluttered, sunken living room of Walter Lord '39's New York City apartment. The toy pig conceals a music-box, now broken, that sustained the spirits of the children in lifeboat #11 as it floated upon the frigid waters of the North Atlantic in the early morning of April 14, 1912, when the Titanic went down with 1,502 aboard. Four steps up from the living room, in what would be the apartment's dining room, is Lord's office, its walls covered with paintings and drawings of the Titanic. Framed and hanging on the wall behind Lord's desk, which is piled with papers, are strips of ticker-tape paper with fading typescript announcing the news of the ship's sinking. On another wall hangs a needlework memorial, whose eggshell-white threads shimmer under glass; it depicts a mourning angel, kneeling on a monument, the ship goes down behind it.

Lord, who suffers from Parkinson's disease and gets about in a wheelchair, is the author of 13 books, the most famous of which is A Night To Remember. A minute-by-minute account of the sinking of the ship and the later rescue of 705 people, it was published 43 years ago and has never been out of print. "My book had an enormous success in 1955," says Lord. "It gradually dropped off bestseller lists, but then suddenly it came back up again in 1985, when Bob Ballard found where the Titanic was located."

And now with a Broadway musical and a box-office megahit movie based on the tragedy, Lord's book is again a bestseller, #2 on the paperback list at the beginning of March. "I don't know what to make of the infatuation people have with this story," admits Lord, but he says his own fascination with the Titanic began when he was nine years old, when he sailed with his family and governess on the Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic.

The son of a lawyer, Lord grew up in Baltimore and came to Princeton from the Gilman School. A history major, he wrote his thesis on the 19th century Collins steamship line. Lord earned a law degree from Yale and was in the OSS during World War II. He then worked as a copywriter for an advertising firm in New York before turning to writing full-time in 1956.

Lord devised his writing style -- a meticulous, minute-by-minute reconstruction of events in spare prose -- for A Night To Remember, his second book, and used it again in such books as A Day of Infamy, about the Pearl Harbor attack, and The Past Would Not Die, about the civil rights movement. His research involves numerous interviews with eyewitnesses and participants. For A Night To Remember, Lord interviewed 63 survivors. After a movie based on his book came out in 1958, he interviewed another 60. Those interviews and other papers related to the Titanic will eventually go to a maritime museum in England.

Has Lord seen the Broadway musical or the new movie? "Yes, I've seen each one three times," he says. "Both are good, and the movie is a marvelous piece. It gets so many things right." While admitting he did not cry at the movie, as so many people have, he is moved still by the heroism on board the ship. "There were a lot of heroics," he says, referring to, among many examples, the musicians who played until the final moments. "I was especially touched by the bell boys, running messages back and forth. And the men who kept the lights on until the end. They weren't seamen, people who loved the sea. They were just electrical engineers, doing a job. All were lost."

-- Lolly O'Brien

When A restaurant blooms in the desert
Natascha Ovando '92 finds her niche

On a chilly winter night in Phoenix, Natascha Ovando '92 sprinkles parsley over breaded poulet, barks orders in Spanglish to her two kitchen assistants, spears another completed order onto the evening's growing pile of dinner checks, and worries about the effect the full moon might have on the service and food at her startup restaurant, Coup des Tartes -- culinary legend has it that on full-moon nights, havoc reigns.

She doesn't need to worry. In February, Ovando (known as Tasch to her friends at Princeton) celebrated her second anniversary as a restaurateur of innovation and acclaim. Phoenix food columnist Jim Cherry wrote: "Eating at Coup des Tartes is like dropping in for dinner at the warm, cozy home of an old friend who just happens to have been trained at one of America's most prestigious French cooking schools. I can't wait for my next visit."

Similar raves about the "cooler-than-cool" spot emanated from Phoenix Magazine's food critic, who gushed: "I love absolutely everything about Coup des Tartes: the ambience, the food, the music (which ranges from Piaf to Barry White) and Natascha's gracious hospitality."

Creating a successful restaurant is an impressive accomplishment for a 27-year-old sociology major who never planned to go into haute cuisine. After graduation from Princeton, the Phoenix native spent three years in Washington in an uninspiring job and returned home, where she dabbled in real estate. When her mother asked her what she really enjoyed doing, Ovando said she liked throwing parties. "So my mother told me either I become a society wife or figure out another way. I took that as a challenge. I decided to open a restaurant."

After training at the French Culinary Institute in New York, she interned at Ceci Cela, a French patisserie in Manhattan, and at the Food Network, a cable TV channel. She returned to Phoenix, amassed startup capital from outsiders and relatives, and opened a restaurant in an old house, near the city's Camelback area, a neighborhood in transition.

"There are prostitutes across the street, and a low-income hospital nearby. But we're two miles from a wealthy neighborhood, and an expensive apartment complex is going up nearby," she says.

She first opened the restaurant as a New York-style, breakfast-lunch-and-dinner cafe, but it didn't work. "I didn't know what the hell I was doing -- the cash register wouldn't open, and I didn't know how to price the food." Ovando shut down the restaurant to retool. "That was the hardest moment, realizing that the innocence was over," she says. "After that, I knew I would have to run it as a business, instead of just as a place where my friends could come over." She reopened the restaurant as a dinner-only, reservations-required bastion of country French cuisine with 38 seats in three rooms.

Inside what Ovando dubs "the world's smallest kitchen," the aura is one of controlled chaos. At least once a week, Ovando revamps the menu; she also does much of the shopping (organic and free-range ingredients where possible), handles the business's books, and cooks a few nights a week. She has eight employees, including her half-brother Michael, an optician who waits tables a few nights a week.

These days, Ovando says keeping the menu creative is probably her biggest challenge. "My customers have come to expect constant change, so it's demanding." Her effusive presence has also become a big draw; she will usually come out to the seating area to chat with customers. Ovando, wrote one critic, is "a free spirit, loosey-goosey in the best possible way."

"They expect to see me now, which ties me to the restaurant," Ovando says. "I've built the restaurant on the personal experience. This is my house. That's how I feel when I walk in the door."

-- Louis Jacobson '92

When Peter Bell *64 has cared all his life, and now his life is CARE

Peter D. Bell *64, president of CARE, one of the largest relief organizations in the world, jokes that his entire professional life, which has been dedicated to fostering development in the poorest countries, may have been, "in part, a perverse reaction to the McCarthy hearings."

He's referring, of course, to the 1954 Senate hearings chaired by the later discredited Joseph McCarthy, who charged that Communists had infiltrated the government. It was Bell's first encounter with television and made an enduring impression. "I remember his cross-examination of the China hands," he says, referring to intelligence officers, and "remember thinking that what they were doing was right, and what he was doing was wrong.

"From an early age, I have always seen the world -- with its diversity of human beings -- as one," he says, noting that he's always had a strong interest in issues of poverty and development, conflict and peacemaking, and social justice.

Before he turned 21, Bell was an experienced world traveler. As a high school student in 1957, he took part in the first American Field Service exchange program with Japan, where he stayed with a family that had lost relatives in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. "They were seeking some sort of reconciliation with the U.S. through their experience with me," he remembers. In 1960, as an undergraduate at Yale, he was a member of a team that traveled to the Ivory Coast to help construct a school -- a visit that coincided with the former French colony's declaration of independence.

Bell came to the Woodrow Wilson School in 1962 to study international economic development. While at Princeton, he says, he was influenced by Professor W. Arthur Lewis, a Nobel economist. Among other things, says Bell, Lewis taught him "the importance, when going into public and international affairs, of personal and professional integrity, a strong sense of independence, and developing an ethical calculus for decision making."

Bell's own calculus might be paraphrased this way: "I believe that the fate of all of us, and of this planet, is bound to each and every human being. I also believe deeply in the dignity and worth of every individual. I think there are many pragmatic arguments for social and economic development, but most of all, each human being who is born has enormous potential. And each of us, insofar as we can do so, should be contributing to making the world better."

He continues, "What the Woodrow Wilson School especially did for me was to provide multidisciplinary lenses through which to examine social and public problems. That has been very important to me for every professional challenge I have had since then."

Those challenges have included executive positions with the Ford Foundation; service as deputy secretary for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; and the presidency of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation from 1986 to 1995. But none have been greater than those he faces at CARE.

As he sees it, the organization now confronts two major difficulties. The greatest, he reports, is "the proliferation of what are being called "complex humanitarian emergencies" in places such as Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and Afghanistan. "We have to determine how to respond effectivelyand ethicallyto these very turbulent and complex crises, where often there is little distinction between combatants and civilians, and where relief workers themselves have become targets."

The second difficulty, he says, is solving the first difficulty in the face of a "flagging U.S. commitment to development assistance." While retaining its status as a private entity, CARE has in years past relied on the U.S. for half its overall funding. As that well dries up, he says, CARE is forced to look for ways to "broaden and diversify" its funding.

The challenges are great, but Bell is no less enthusiastic about the job than he was in 1995, when it was offered to him. "When the board asked me to take on these responsibilities," he remembers, "I couldn't think of a better way to make a difference in the world at this point in my life."

Bell's desire to make a difference remains the main motivation in his career, and it doesn't waver on those days when he wakes up seeing the proverbial glass half empty. As a young man in Japan, Bell remembers being impressed by his Japanese host mother, Mrs. Okajima, who had her life's motto, "To make the world more wonderful" displayed on a scroll in her home. He also recalls a philosophy professor named Weiss from his undergraduate days, a holocaust survivor who urged his students on the last day of class to "Go out and make the world less miserable."

He took both sayings to heart, and they remain with him still. "On my better days, I think of Mrs. Okajima," says Bell. "On my notsogood days, I think of Professor Weiss."