Class notes features
A peak experience
Climbing 29,028 feet and returning with trash
A few minutes before 11 p.m. last May 20, Judy Demarest, wife of Chuck Demarest
'64, was at home in Boulder, Colorado, when the phone rang. Answering, she heard
her husband's voice, faint and fragmented, but unmistakable. "Guess where I am!"
said Chuck.
Judy knew in an instant. "I was hoping he'd call," she says. "But I didn't think he'd get through."
All things considered, it was a pretty good connection. Chuck was speaking into a two-way radio while standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, 29,028 feet above sea level, halfway around the world. Eleven thousand feet down the mountain, at Everest's sprawling, crowded base camp, another climber had patched Chuck's call through to Judy, holding the radio up to the receiver of a satellite phone. "We talked for about a minute," says Judy. "He sounded good."
"I felt great!" says Chuck, who made his ascent as part of Everest Environmental Expedition '98, an 11-member noncommercial group dedicated to recovering debris discarded by previous Everest teams. "I stayed up there for half an hour," he says. "It was calm and fair and not too cold, about 10 degrees. I turned off my oxygen, took some photos, and just drank it all in."
The first known Princeton alumnus to reach the summit of the world's highest peak, Demarest had been heading there pretty much all his life. As a youngster in far-from-alpine Glen Ridge, New Jersey, he read a book on the Himalayas and became fascinated with mountaineering. He recalls the dismay he felt in 1953 when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norkay conquered Everest. "I was only 10," he says, "but I remember thinking, Darn! I won't be the first."
Demarest climbed his first "real mountain," 14,255-foot Longs Peak in Colorado, the summer before his freshman year at Princeton. He returned to Colorado each summer during college to work on farms and ranches and, as he puts it, "to answer the tug of the mountains." After earning a degree in philosophy, Demarest headed to Boulder for graduate study in nuclear physics--and for more climbing. He joined the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, learning to bring injured climbers down from high altitudes and honing his own mountaineering skills. In the years since, while founding and running several companies (he recently stepped down as head of Kryptonics, Inc., a firm that makes inline skate wheels, and in September launched Tekquity Ventures, a company that will seek out and package new technologies), Demarest, a father of four, has climbed some of the world's most formidable peaks, from 20,500-foot Chimborazo in Ecuador, to 18,000-foot Chimtarga in Tajikistan, to Tibet's Cho Oyu, at 27,901 feet the sixth-highest on Earth. He has also continued to work with the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, participating in more than 1,000 rescues. Always, though, Everest cast its shadow.
He made his first attempt in 1995, as a member of an earlier Everest Environmental Expedition. He came to within 300 feet of the summit before bad weather forced the team to turn back. Demarest, whom his wife calls "one of the most cautious people I know," downplays the danger and the "agony" of Everest celebrated in recent bestsellers such as Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. "Krakauer exaggerated the pain of climbing," he says. "I never experienced altitude sickness or any of the memory loss you hear about. I never even had a headache." The near miss hurt, though. "I said to myself, If I ever get back here, Iıd like to finish this."
Three years later he did, on that bright, clear May morning. A quiet look around, a few snapshots, a call home, and then he was on his way back down "to continue the business of the expedition." Demarest's team carried down more than 400 pounds of trash and 150 empty oxygen containers left behind by earlier climbers. The oxygen tanks, Demarest says, are currently in storage in a Bangkok warehouse, awaiting delivery to individuals and groups in the U.S. who pledged money to help defray the costs of the expeditionhigh-altitude souvenirs for a good cause. "The mountain is getting cleaner," says Demarest, who explains that the Nepal government has become much stricter about environmental matters in recent years, even as it has permitted more climbers on the mountain. "Base camp's not a garbage dump anymore," he says.
Back home in Boulder, Demarest has thrown himself into his latest challenge, getting Tekquity up and running. "I like to concentrate on other things for a few months after a big climb," he says. As for what it feels like to have realized his lifelong dream, Demarest says simply, "I don't feel let down at all. I feel inspired."
--Richard O'Brien
TigerNet techie
Jolanne Stanton '77 put together a vast computer network that keeps alumni connected
"One word, Dan, e-mail." With this pithy observation to Dan White '65, the director of the Alumni Council, Jolanne Stanton '77 launched in 1994 an extraordinary new way for more than 14,000 Princeton alumni, faculty, staff, and students to get together: Tigernet. With chat groups ranging in topic from the Asian experience to venture capital and women's issues, Tigernet offers a new community through not only the discussion forums, but also an e-mail service, an on-line directory, and, coming soon, the potential for courses delivered over the Web.
The occasion that sparked Stanton's comment was a visit by White to the Princeton Club of Western Washington, of which Stanton was president. White was drumming up business and soliciting ideas for ways to celebrate the 250th. Specifically, he asked the assembled group for ways to bring widely scattered alumni together. Tigernet, itıs fair to say, has succeeded beyond anyone's imagining. Through Tigernet, Princetonians are finding internships, jobs, and apartments, setting up seminars on the arts, and getting reconnected over issues like single parenting and fathers staying at home. The new technology thus serves a very old need: keeping Princeton alumni connected to the university in ways that transcend time and distance.
Stanton became a high-tech apostle to the university through a decidedly circuitous, low-tech route. After a brief stint at Scribner's as a reader, she landed in Business Week magazine's international advertising department, designing multipage advertorials. She married Jim Stanton, then one of the ad reps, and moved with him to Singapore, where she worked as a freelance writer, photographer, and consultant. Two kids and nearly a decade later, in 1985, they moved back to the U.S. looking for a place to call home.
"We went on a city-shopping tour," recalls Stanton, "and we picked Seattle as the best place to live."
For several years, Stanton worked with the Seattle Art Museum developing curriculum on Japan for elementary-school aged students, and other educational ventures. Today, she is president of Musements, a consulting company that specializes in new media strategy, marketing, and training. Stanton got reconnected herself with Princeton in 1994 through the local alumni association. And then came the 250th, Dan White, and Tigernet.
"My relationship with Princeton had been through my class," she says, "but I knew that there were a lot of Princetonians I had an affinity with that weren't necessarily in my class. It was my kids who taught me about computers and e-mail." She spent many hours proposing, designing, discussing, and modifying the original idea after that fateful remark, until it was launched with the technical help of the Alumni Council and several university departments. CIT did the programming.
The first group established was one on career networking. Now, there are more than 20 groups, and new ones are being added all the time. And Tigernet's influence has spread well beyond the Princeton community itself. Stanton presented the concept to a college and university association, and a number of universities have begun similar on-line groups including Harvard Business School and Harvard College.
Stanton today is the chair of a technological advisory committee at the Alumni Council, but in spite of the increased formality of her role, she works to maintain the grass roots origins of Tigernet.
"We added a note to the opening page that read, 'if you want to start another group, call me,'" Stanton says. "They did." The discussion groups are managed by alumni volunteers, not the university, and the reach of Tigernet is thus limited only by the time and interest of the whole alumni body within reach of a computer.
--Nicholas Morgan '75
In his words: Life in the swim lane
The siren smell of chlorine lures a swimmer back into the pool
My competitive swimming career officially ended a little more than two years ago. At the end of the season, my roommates and I nailed our bathing suits to the mantle of our Little Hall dorm room and unanimously swore that we would never race again. For several months the suits hung limply over the fireplace, acting as reminders of past accomplishments, nylon symbols for a stage of life we had gladly chosen to leave behind. Having been a distance swimmer at Princeton, I was more than happy to begin my new life as a "normal" person. I heartily embraced an existence without morning workouts, and simultaneously embraced the concept of dessert. For some unfathomable reason I decided that it would be interesting to weigh 200 pounds. Considering that my normal racing weight had been about 170, I had my work cut out for me. In order to achieve this goal I had to be disciplined. I swore off all forms of exercise, and vowed to eat only before, during, and after meals. I had to resist the temptations of my fellow retirees, who for some reason felt the need to hit the weight room or go for a run. That was not for me. DeNunzio Pool was strictly off limits. I was no longer an athlete, and certainly not a swimmer.
As you would expect, I grew steadily more rotund on the Ultra Fat Fast diet. This did not bother me at all. It was new and different. After all those years of near-continuous exercise I was entitled to take some time off, wasn't I? For three months I floated blissfully along in my self-imposed state of sloth. Then one day in late summer I looked at myself in the mirror. Staring back at me was a flabby stranger. Muscle tone had been replaced by muscle none. Eight pounds short of my goal, I broke down and abandoned my pursuit of the double century mark. I began to exercise, but I still steadfastly refused to swim. During my career I had been loath to even look at the water during my short summer break from training, and now that I had "officially" retired I was certainly not going to go running back to the chlorinated confines of the swimming pool. No, other kinds of exercise would be my path back to fitness. Anything but swimming.
At the end of that summer I moved to Montreal to begin graduate school at McGill University. I had few friends and needed to do something in my spare time to relax and recharge from my classes. After much soul searching, I broke down and ventured out of my athletic exile to the university pool. The varsity team had already been practicing for a week by the time I set foot on deck. My previous vows broken, I greeted the coach with a handshake. Smiling, he said, "We've been expecting you." I later learned that the coach from my former summer team had let it slip that I would be on campus. I guess he figured that it was only a matter of time before I showed up at the pool. He was right. He knew me better than I knew myself. It was impossible for me to say goodbye to something that had been such a huge part of my life for 15 years. I couldn't just quit cold turkey. I needed my swimming fix. The victim of an apparent conspiracy, I succumbed once again to the evil clutches of aquatics and began to train with the team. My first practice was awkward. I was the "fat old guy" at the ripe old age of 23, and everyone swam circles around me. Added to this was my anxiety over compromising my sworn allegiance to Princeton by swimming with a team at another university. In the end I decided that since it wasn't Harvard, it would be all right.
Free from the competitive pressures that accompanied my high school and college swimming careers, I discovered that swimming offered other benefits, things that I had taken for granted. Besides keeping me in shape, it gave me a group of friends in a strange city, people whom I could count on seeing every day, and whom I could share experiences with. I could have a conversation with someone who understood what it was like to dedicate inordinate amounts of time each week to the pursuit of one elusive 10th or 100th of a second. I got to meet and know fantastic new people, and I was able to stay in touch with a world that had been my own for more than half my life. Reflecting on my time at Princeton, I now see clearly that swimming was the anchor around which my experiences revolved. My best friends were people I met between the orange-and-black lane lines at Dillon and DeNunzio pools. The long walk to the pool after classes and the scramble to the dining hall after practice, the unsightly orange parka, visible on even the dreariest New Jersey winter day, and the ever-present scent of chlorine are all indelibly etched in my memory of Princeton.
This year I was one of two official assistant coaches at McGill, and now I even swim a few times a week on my own simply because I enjoy it. It has taken me two years, but I have finally accepted the fact that I am still and always will be a Princeton swimmer. For the past two years I have returned dutifully to campus and participated in the alumni swimming meet during Reunions. It just goes to prove that you can take the swimmer out of the pool, but you can't take the pool out of the swimmer.
--Matthew McWha '96