The Handiest Girlie Of All

French Movie "Les Intouchables" touches global audience

 

 

"Les Intouchables,” having broken box office records in France, arrives in the United States with a faithfully translated title — “The Intouchables” — that is not quite English. American audiences looking for a suitable French name for this ingratiating comedy of cross-racial friendship might settle on “Déjà Vu,” since it is a story we have seen many times before.

Though maybe not quite like this, or at least not in a while. “The Intouchables,” directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano and based on a true story, is about two men — one rich, uptight and white; the other poor, exuberant and black — who become best pals in spite of their differences. In place of the customary spoiler alert I will post a cliché warning, since some of the movie’s groan-inducing turns of plot may require equally groan-inducing turns of phrase. I wish I could say them all in French. Or maybe I don’t.

But anyway. The pallid aristocrat, Philippe (François Cluzet), is paralyzed from the neck down as the result of a hang-gliding accident and lives in a state of opulent ennui attended by a nervous staff and is ignored by his petulant adolescent daughter. He is a difficult boss, and his newest employee, a streetwise hoodlum named Driss (Omar Sy) does not look as though he will last long in the job. Not that Driss has much ambition to play nurse for some grouchy old invalid; he applies for the position only so he can continue to collect government benefits. Moving into Philippe’s mansion, Driss steps away from a background of poverty, family dysfunction and trouble with the police. Under his boss’s stern gaze and imperious tutelage he starts to acquire a work ethic and a sense of discipline. In exchange, he helps Philippe discover his appetite for life and his capacity for joy.

How does Driss do this? In the usual ways. He flirts shamelessly with the boss’s secretary and gives Philippe’s daughter the stern talking-to she needs. He introduces Philippe to the pleasures of marijuana, encourages him to start dating and loosens up a stuffy chamber-music soiree with some funky music. Sacre bleu! Nothing is funnier than watching a roomful of buttoned-up white people trying to shake their booties. Look at them! It’s like they have no natural rhythm at all.

It is possible to summarize the experience of watching “The Intouchables” in nine words: You will laugh; you will cry; you will cringe. The caricatures are astonishingly brazen, as ancient comic archetypes — a pompous master and a clowning servant right out of Molière — are updated with vague social relevance, an overlay of Hollywood-style sentimentality and a conception of race that might kindly be called cartoonish.

You can easily imagine this movie — you probably have already seen it — with Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy in Mr. Sy’s role. In the post-civil-rights, post-blaxploitation era, entertainments based on the clash of white squareness and black soul had a certain novelty and charm. Nowadays they are more likely to be layered with self-consciousness, winking at their own conventions.

In the old days the French view of America’s race problem (as it used to be called) was tinged with pity and superiority. African-American artists and intellectuals — Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and too many jazz musicians to name — went to Paris to find respect and relief from the bigotry at home, and many contemporary French observers took this fact as confirmation of their own country’s relative innocence. More recently, as France has grappled with immigration and its rapidly evolving identity as a multicultural society, such smugness has dropped away, and much of the best recent French film and literature grapples earnestly with this new situation.

What “The Intouchables” does cannot exactly be called grappling, and its genial parade of stereotypes may be more regressive than liberating. It is certainly possible to be offended by the broad, silly aspects of Mr. Sy’s performance. An English-language remake might be perfect for Tracy Jordan of “30 Rock,” the star of such nonexistent, barely exaggerated blockbusters like “Who Dat Ninja” and “Black Cop, White Cop.” But it is equally difficult to resist Mr. Sy’s charm and inventiveness, or to ignore the sensitivity beneath them.

It is too much to say that he and Mr. Cluzet, a crafty and insightful actor, rescue “The Intouchables.” They do provide it with humanity and idiosyncrasy — with the sense that Philippe and Driss might be real people rather than sociological ciphers — but this film can only be described, in the context of French cinema and global popular culture, as an embarrassment.

Given its subject, embarrassment may be both inevitable and forgivable. Race, in France as in the United States, is a perpetual source of confusion and discomfort; to address it is always, in some way, to get it wrong. “The Intouchables” sets out to convert that anxiety into easy laughter and also, like “The Help” and “The Blind Side,” to replace antagonism and incomprehension with comfort and consensus. Like those movies, it courts (and deserves) a skeptical response. Yet it also solicits a warm tolerance that it would be churlish to withhold. The film’s brain is hopelessly addled — if you want to see a smart movie about French society, there are plenty of other choices — but its clumsy heart is somehow in the right place.

L.A TIMES

 

Katie Beckett, Who Inspired Health Reform, Dies at 34

Katie Beckett, 3, in 1981 leaving a hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with her parents after a victory over health care red tape.

Katie Beckett, who was 3 years old and had been hospitalized almost since birth when President Ronald Reagan invoked her case as an example of irrational federal regulation in 1981 — a crucial moment in the movement toward government support for home health care — died on Friday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the hospital where she was born. She was 34, more than three times the age her doctors had predicted she would reach

The cause was a digestive disorder not related to the brain inflammation that led to her lifelong respiratory difficulties, her mother, Julie Beckett, said.

On Monday, the secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, called Ms. Beckett “an inadvertent pioneer in the civil rights movement for people with disabilities” and the inspiration for regulations that have allowed more than 500,000 disabled children to live at home since 1981.

Four months after her birth at St. Luke’s Hospital in 1978, Katie contracted viral encephalitis, leaving her partly paralyzed, unable to swallow and barely able to breathe on her own. Her parents found themselves in a bureaucratic trap. They wanted to manage her care at home with a ventilator and began lobbying politicians and bureaucrats. The case led to what is known as the Katie Beckett Waiver.

Katie qualified for Supplemental Security Income, a Medicaid program run by the Social Security Administration. Under the old rules, if she had been taken home, her parents’ incomes would have been counted against her, and she would have lost eligibility for the aid. Yet her hospital care was costing $12,000 a month, six times as much as home care would have cost.

President Reagan heard about Katie from Vice President George Bush, who been told about her by Thomas Tauke, a Republican congressman from Iowa. At a news conference on Nov. 10, 1981, Mr. Reagan cited Katie’s case as an example of “hidebound regulations” that caused “tremendous expense to the taxpayers.” The rules, he said, forced her to stay in the hospital even though she would be better off at home.

A day later, the secretary of health and human services, Richard S. Schweiker, waived the rules to let Katie return home without the loss of federal support. He also created a review board to handle similar cases. When she left the hospital a week before Christmas in 1981, Katie received a rag doll from the Reagans and a note wishing her and her family “the loveliest holiday ever.”

Ms. Sebelius said that “thanks to her mother, Julie’s, tireless advocacy, in 1982, Medicaid policy fundamentally shifted” toward supporting home heath care.

Mary Katherine Beckett was born in Cedar Rapids on March 9, 1978, to Julie and Mark Beckett. Besides her parents, she is survived by a stepsister, Chelsea.

Home care worked for Katie Beckett, her mother said. Although Ms. Beckett required nursing care an hour a day, five days a week, and 12 hours a day on a ventilator, she graduated from Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids in 2001 with a degree in English and creative writing. She held several jobs over the years, including one as a secretary in a homeless shelter.

There were extended hospital stays, but she had applied to graduate school and was writing a novel. “She wouldn’t let me read it,” her mother said, “but she loved young-adult romance novels.”

She added: “She lived a fairly normal life. She wasn’t homebound.”

 

NY Times

Investigation on e Disabled Veterans National Foundation group

Washington (CNN) -

   

- The Senate Finance Committee is launching an investigation to determine whether a charity intended to help disabled veterans deserves its tax-exempt status after doling out millions of dollars to a direct-mail company.

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, chairman of the committee, announced the investigation into the Disabled Veterans National Foundation on Wednesday. He said the committee will seek to determine whether the foundation, the subject of a two-year CNN investigation, should keep its status as a 501(c)3 charity under Internal Revenue Service guidelines.

"Our veterans should never be used as pawns in a scheme to exploit the taxpayers," Baucus said in a Wednesday news release announcing the investigation. "The tax exemption for charities exists to promote worthwhile causes like assistance to veterans, not to provide tax loopholes to abuse. DVNF has a responsibility to show it's genuinely helping veterans and playing by the rules."

CNN's investigation into the foundation, part of "AC360's" "Keeping Them Honest" series, played a major role in prompting the committee's investigation, according to a committee staff member who did not want to be identified.

CNN found that the charity's tax records and other documents showed that little of the nearly $56 million raised by the Disabled Veterans National Foundation over the past three years has gone to direct aid to veterans.

The group has paid nearly $61 million to Quadriga Art and its subsidiaries, one of the world's largest direct-mail providers to charities and nonprofits, and its subsidiaries over the past three years, according to publicly available IRS 990 tax forms. The Disabled Veterans National Foundation still has a business relationship with Quadriga Art through 2013, with Quadriga Art saying the foundation has acquired nearly 2 million donors through its direct-mail program.

CharityWatch, the nation's largest charity watchdog group, has given the Disabled Veterans National Foundation an "F" grade since 2010 because of the miniscule amount the charity actually spent on veterans -- which CharityWatch estimates to be 2%.

In addition to its questionable finances, the Disabled Veterans National Foundation has provided massive amounts of unnecessary items to veterans aid groups, including candy, hand sanitizer and dress shoes -- all surplus items that the charity receives at no cost.

In one instance, St. Benedict's, a small veterans shelter in Birmingham, Alabama, received an unsolicited shipment of goods that included 2,300 emergency blankets that were "heavily used" after last year's devastating tornado, according to the shelter's director. But the charity also sent St. Benedict's more than 11,000 bags of coconut M&M's candy and more than 700 pairs of surplus Navy dress shoes, which the shelter's president said he could not use.

 

The Disabled Veterans National Foundation also claimed in its tax filings more than $838,000 in fair market value donations to another charity, although the bill of lading obtained by CNN showed that the donations -- which included chefs' coats and aprons -- was valued at about $234,000.

CNN attempted to get a comment from the Disabled Veterans National Foundation for more than a year but received no replies to specific questions, even after submitting several questions in writing.

When approached by a CNN crew at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Disabled Veterans National Foundation President Precilla Wilkewitz rebuffed questions. Later, after being approached at a public event, Vice President Valerie Conley responded that "not all the funds" raised by the Disabled Veterans National Foundation go to fundraising.

'"The cost of fundraising is high, as you know," she said. "And it has been for many veteran service organizations who use this kind of direct paying approach."

On Wednesday, Wilkewitz released a statement saying the foundation "will happily answer the questions posed by the United States Senate Finance Committee and provide it with information that others have sadly, chosen to ignore."

The Disabled Venterans National Foundation "has helped tens ouf thoustands of veterans with direct financial aid and supplies that have made a difference in their lives. Media reports about our activities have been plain wrong and we welcome the opportunity to set the record straight," Wilkewitz said in the statement.

Two-thirds of the more than 30 veterans charities rated by CharityWatch were given a "D" or "F" grade based on the amount they spend on fundraising compared with actual donations, according to CharityWatch President Daniel Borochoff.

A small charity called the National Veterans Foundation, also connected to Quadriga Art, gets an "F" grade as well. Its officers say they have been trying to cancel a contract with Quadriga Art since August.

"It's as if you're looking at these ratios through a funhouse mirror," Borochoff said of the National Veterans Foundation.

"It really ought to be reversed. It ought to be flipped. They ought to be giving 80 or 90% to helping veterans, not 12%. It's pathetic."

 

CNN

An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny

Overview

An Invisible Thread tells of the life-long friendship between a busy sales executive and a disadvantaged young boy, and how both of their lives were changed by what began as one small gesture of kindness.

When Laura Schroff brushed by a young panhandler on a New York City corner one rainy afternoon, something made her stop and turn back. She took the boy to lunch at the McDonald’s across the street that day. And she continued to go back, again and again for the next four years until both their lives had changed dramatically. Nearly thirty years later, that young boy, Maurice, is married and has his own family. Now he works to change the lives of disadvantaged kids, just like the boy he used to be.

An Invisible Thread is the true story of the bond between a harried sales executive and an eleven-year-old boy who seemed destined for a life of poverty. It is the heartwarming story of a friendship that has spanned three decades and brought meaning to an over-scheduled professional and hope to a hungry and desperate boy living on the streets.

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

When advertising executive Laura Schroff was approached by 11-year-old panhandler Maurice, at first, she ignored him: "His words were part of the clatter, like a car horn or someone yelling for a cab. They were, you could say, just noise—the kind of nuisance New Yorkers learn to tune out." A moment later, when she came to, she returned and invited her new acquaintance to lunch at McDonald's, the beginning of a human connection that would change both their lives. An Invisible Thread picks up the progress of two very different people with strangely parallel stories of "complicated pasts and fragile dreams." Uplifting, without an ounce of pretension.

 

 

Kirkus Reviews

A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.

When advertising executive Schroff answered a child's request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to "two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams" that were "somehow meant to be friends" to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a "substitute parent," and she does not judge Maurice's mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice.

For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.

 

 

Barnes&Noble

In tune, without limits

 

 

Positive psychology guru Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines his concept of “flow” as a seamless connection between body and mind. Elite athletes call it “being in the zone,” a hyper-focused mental state resulting in streamlined, streaming movements.

“It’s when there is no resistance between work and what you are,” said Adrian Anantawan one morning, as he played a passage from Claude Debussy’s ethereal “Clair de Lune” in the still of Adams House’s Lower Common Room.

For many top musicians, such a feeling often only comes after years of practice. For Anantawan, who was born without a right hand, developing that type of powerful concentration with the violin took extra resolve, a dose of ignorance, and a spatula — a specially designed attachment made of plastic and Velcro that allows him to hold his bow.

After years as a professional musician, the gifted violinist is enrolled in the Arts in Education Program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE), with the goal of helping other disabled students in their artistic and creative development.

“The opportunities,” Anantawan said, “are limitless.”

While investigating the role of adaptive musical instruments in a universally designed music curriculum, Anantawan has connected with scholars at Harvard and beyond, such as music and technology guru Tod Machover, considered the grandfather of “Guitar Hero,” and head of the MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future group, and members of the Harvard Medical School community, for lengthy discussions on rehabilitative science.

He has also brought his talent and drive to the classroom, helping students in an inclusive school in Boston with a variety of musical and arts projects.

“If you want to be able to design curriculum or to create new musical instruments for any child, you have to understand how they work … their behavior, their decision-making processes, the interplay between imagination, play, and learning. That’s what fascinates me.”

Anantawan’s own artistic journey began in large part because his parents “didn’t know any better.” Realizing their young son was unable to play the recorder, which requires the use of the fingers on both hands, they quickly sought another musical option.

“We were successful because of that ignorance,” he said. “We came from the premise of ‘why not?’”

With input from Anantawan, a rehabilitation center in his native Toronto helped to create his adaptive device for the violin. The Canadian’s dedication and talent ultimately gained him entrance to Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute of Music for his bachelor’s degree, and later to Yale University, where he received his master’s degree in music in 2006.  His professional career has included performances at the White House, the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, and Carnegie Hall. But for Anantawan, something was missing on stage.

“I just felt,” he said, “like there needed to be something more.”

That something more first took shape during a tour of the same rehabilitation center years after it had first helped him as a child. There for a concert, Anantawan was introduced to a virtual device that translates a person’s movement into sound. Intrigued, he sought a grant from Yale and used the funding to assemble a team of psychologists, music therapists, doctors, researchers, and musicians to explore the connections among music, technology, and health care, using the virtual tool. The project culminated in a recent performance given by a former violinist paralyzed from a neurological disorder, and now a quadriplegic, who played with the Montreal Chamber Orchestra.

“Music was such an important part of his life growing up, and to see technology used to give him access to performance once again, but also at such a high level, makes me optimistic of the future for young children with disabilities.”

Inspired by the experience and eager to offer children with disabilities the chance to “communicate their stories to a wide audience,” he turned to the HGSE’s Arts in Education Program. “I realized this was the place I needed to be,” said Anantawan, who sent Harvard his only application. It was Harvard, he said, or nothing.

After graduation, he hopes to teach in a similar inclusive environment where he can work on leveraging the implicit strengths in every child, “regardless of ability.”

For Anantawan, the work is also deeply personal. He recalled being “marginalized” in school for being “slightly different,” and how his world opened when he joined a chamber orchestra at age 12.

“It was one of the first times I was accepted within a peer group, mainly because it’s how you sound; it’s not how you look. It’s how you express and communicate.”

With his future work, he hopes to help children “feel included and be able to express themselves on an equal level with their peers.”

He is well on his way. On his tablet computer, he proudly played a video of his fifth-graders at the Dr. William W. Henderson Inclusion Elementary School performing a dance routine to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” A third of the students there have some type of cognitive, behavioral, or physical need. But on stage they were a polished unit, and they were having a blast.

“This is as fulfilling as any concert that I have given in my life,” said a beaming Anantawan. “Carnegie Hall can’t beat these kids.”

The violinist happily admits there are two types of flow in his life now. One involves playing his instrument, the other his work with children.

“I could do this work for hours nonstop,” he said, “and still be happy.”

Harvard Gazatte

Experimental drug helps the brain recover from stroke -- in mice

In mouse experiments, an experimental drug helped repair damage in the brain induced by a stroke, according to a new study.

 

Scientists have developed a “proof of concept” drug for stroke patients that helped afflicted mice recover the ability to walk normally. In laboratory experiments, the researchers also found biological evidence that the drug helped grow new neurons in the brain, according to a study published online Tuesday by the journal Stroke.

An estimated 795,000 Americans have a stroke each year, according to the National Stroke Assn. in Centennial, Colo.  They occur when the brain is suddenly deprived of oxygen and nutrients, either by a blockage in a vessel (which causes an ischemic stroke) or due to a burst vessel that causes bleeding in the brain (a hemorrhagic stroke). Either way, a stroke can leave patients with weakness or paralysis on one side of the body and “cause problems with thinking, awareness, attention, learning, judgement, and memory,” among other problems, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Though stroke is a major cause of long-term disability, the only proven treatment for patients is to dissolve a clot or stop the bleeding in the brain while the stroke is happening. Once it’s over, doctors and therapists can only offer rehabilitation to minimize the damage. The experimental drug being developed by scientists from Stanford University School of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College and UC San Francisco aims to change that.

The drug is designed to mimic a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which is thought to help stimulate growth of new neurons and make the brain “plastic,” or able to adapt to changes. BDNF works in cooperation with a receptor in the brain called TrkB. So the scientists set out to find a way to activate TrkB in hopes that doing so would mimic the action of BDNF and promote actual healing in the brain.

The researchers turned to a small molecule called LM22A-4 that – like BDNF – is known to bind to TrkB. The compound was made by a company called Ricerca Biosciences.

To test its stroke-healing powers, the research team used 4-month-old mice and trained them to perform several physical tasks. Then they induced strokes by blocking the right carotid artery in the animals. This caused the mice to perform worse on tasks that they used to do with ease, such as walk across a horizontal ladder and keep their balance on a spinning rod (picture a lumberjack in a log-rolling competition).

Three days after the strokes, some of the mice were treated with LM22A-4, delivered through their noses, while others got a placebo. Mice in both groups recovered well enough to walk across a horizontal ladder, but the animals that got the experimental drug recovered significantly faster, according to the study.

Looking at another mobility measure, the researchers found that the mice in the placebo group saw their “swing speed” decline by 50% and stay there. But mice who got LM22A-4 were able to regain their pre-stroke swing speed.

In the brain itself, the scientists found twice as many new neurons growing in the treated mice compared with their untreated counterparts. Those extra neurons were concentrated around the site of injury, according to the study.

Not only did LM22A-4 help, it did so without causing any harm. The researchers said the drug did not prompt scar tissue to form, boost inflammation or affect the growth of new blood vessels, among other things.

A summary of the study is available online here.

UCSF and the University of North Carolina have already patented the use of LM22A-4 for stroke treatment. One of the Stanford-based study authors has formed a company that is working to turn LM22A-4 and other small molecules into drugs to treat neurological disorders. Of course, any treatment for human stroke victims is still years away.

L.A.TIMES

Medical Documentery 200 years of Medicine

This 45-minute documentary explores three remarkable stories of medical progress that have taken place over the course of the long history of NEJM.  In 1812, we had no understanding of infectious disease, surgery was unsanitary and performed without anesthesia, and cancer was unrecognized. Two centuries later, this film tells the story of research, clinical practice, and patient care, and of how we have continued to get better over the last 200 years

 

 

Getting Better is a short documentary that explores three remarkable stories of medical progress: Cancer, HIV/AIDS, Surgery. The film looks at the role of researchers and clinicians, of patients, their families and their advocates, and how information is translated into action. It is the story of research, clinical practice and patient care, and how we have continued to get better over the last 200 years.

In 2012 the New England Journal of Medicine celebrates 200 years of publishing practice - changing medical advances. NEJM brings together a global community, from researchers to clinicians, to improve the health of people around the world. The 200th anniversary of NEJM honors all who contribute to this mission.

 NEJM

Senate Passes Cuomo's Bill Creating State Agency to Police for Disabled Care

ALBANY NY

The State Senate unanimously passed Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s legislation to protect developmentally disabled and mentally ill New Yorkers on Wednesday, but some high-profile advocates have been unnerved by what they perceive as flaws in the bill. Assembly Democrats have said that they intend to pass the bill, but will negotiate some changes before the legislative session ends on June 21.

The centerpiece of the governor’s legislation will create a new state agency — the Justice Center for the Protection of People With Special Needs — with prosecutorial powers, giving it authority concurrent with local district attorneys to bring cases against those who abuse people with special needs. The Cuomo administration contends that the new agency would provide vulnerable populations with a dedicated force of investigators and prosecutors who can handle often-complicated cases involving victims who in many cases cannot speak.

The biggest concern among some advocates is that the legislation would continue to give a state agency primary control over reports of abuse and neglect, leaving outside law enforcement and district attorneys beholden to the state’s good faith and competence. They believe that local law enforcement agencies would not be given enough direct access to information under the new system.

Many advocates have a deep distrust of the state, which has for decades failed to adequately monitor lapses in care.

“This program will make this system more dangerous and give the state more power to cover up abuse and neglect,” said Michael Carey, an outspoken advocate whose son Jonathan died while in state care five years ago. He said the legislation would “keep vital cases and information from the police and district attorneys, which will continue to violate the constitutional rights of the disabled.”

Joshua Vlasto, a spokesman for the governor, countered: “The entire purpose of the Justice Center and the special prosecutor/inspector general is to ensure that every case is pursued, even if local officials do not want to pursue it.”

Mr. Carey said he would prefer that caregivers be trained to call 911, even in instances of psychological abuse, including times when workers call developmentally disabled individuals by derogatory names, an approach administration officials view as impractical. The legislation does require that any report of an incident that “may constitute a criminal offense” be forwarded to law enforcement. But while that language seems broad, similar language already in state law has been frequently ignored in the past.

Mr. Vlasto said, “The Justice Center’s 24/7 hot line will be a far more comprehensive resource for reporting every level of abuse and neglect than 911.”

He said hot line attendants would be trained to report cases needing immediate attention to the police, while members of the center could follow up on less severe cases.

That kind of judgment call concerns Mr. Carey, who also believes the administration is doing too little to prevent abuse before it happens. He has pushed a number of proposals, including installing cameras in group homes, placing tight limits on overtimeto reduce worker fatigue and increasing staff sizes.few advocates are as hostile to the legislation as Mr. Carey, but others also see flaws.

 

Bridgit M. Burke, the director of the Civil Rights and Disabilities Law Clinic at Albany Law School, said she was concerned that a new nonprofit group being set up to monitor the state’s handling of vulnerable populations would have little access to documents related to abuse and neglect, according to the legislation’s fine print.

“Over all, I think there are a lot of positive things, but I am also very concerned and therefore would encourage people not to vote for it right now, the way it is,” she said.

Cuomo administration officials aid they believed that federal laws would ensure that the new nonprofit agency, which would be federally financed and which is being created at the urging of federal regulators, would have access to documents.

The governor has said passing the legislation is his highest priority over the remainder of the legislative session. On Wednesday, he traveled to Syracuse to promote the bill.

“If we are in charge of caring for human beings with special needs, they are going to get the best treatment we can get them,” Mr. Cuomo said in remarks to reporters. “They are certainly not going to be abused in our care, not while I’m governor.”

He has rallied more than a hundred groups behind him, though many are nonprofit providers of services to disabled people who are regulated by the state.

The administration’s proposal comes in response to articles in The New York Times last year describing widespread problems in the care of people with developmental disabilities. The state had been transferring abusive employees from group home to group home, abuse cases were rarely referred to the police, and employees with criminal records were hired.

Executives of nonprofit groups caring for disabled people have also been reaping seeven-figure compensation packages, in some cases. The Cuomo administration announced Wednesday the details of a new regulation to limit the amount of state aid that could be used for executive pay.

 

New York Times

Paralyzed woman gets robotic arm she controls with her mind

In a clinical trial, Cathy Hutchinson, who has been paralyzed for more than 14 years, used the BrainGate system to mentally control a robotic arm and reach for a drink. 

 

The stroke that disconnected Cathy Hutchinson’s brain from her body has kept her silent and unable to move for more than 14 years. But science is starting to change all that.

Researchers have connected the 58-year-old woman’s brain to a computer that runs a robotic arm. As Hutchinson sits at a table staring at a bottled drink and imagining the robot grabbing the bottle and bringing it to her mouth, the robot arm begins to move.

The robot is running on signals detected by sensors implanted in the part of Hutchinson’s brain that would normally control the movements of her right arm. The sensors pick up the sparking of nerve cells and send the signals to the computer which then translates them into commands for the robotic arm. Suddenly Hutchinson is able to do something she could only dream of before: As she thinks about getting herself a drink, the arm reaches over to the bottle and brings it to her lips, where she is able to sip the drink from a straw.

It’s the first time Hutchinson’s been able to do anything for herself since the stroke.

Hutchinson’s experiences, along with those of another quadriplegic patient, were described in a groundbreaking paper published Wednesday in Nature. Both patients are part of an ongoing government funded trial that is testing the new brain translation technology, BrainGate, which one day may free “locked-in” patients like Hutchinson and give functional limbs to amputees.

It will be years before BrainGate could be available to the general public. But Hutchinson’s happy to enjoy the future today. After realizing she could control the robot arm, she said she was “ecstatic.” Though Hutchinson cannot speak, she can type her thoughts through a device that takes its cues from her eye movements.

She’s optimistic about what the research might one day bring. “I would love to have robotic leg support,” she says.

 

What’s amazing is how researchers have “taught” their computer to essentially read Hutchinson’s thoughts.

The baby-aspirin sized sensor implanted in Hutchinson’s brain contains 96 hair-thin electrodes that record the sparking of neurons in the movement control center, the motor cortex.

The first step in the learning process is for the computer to “see” which neurons spark, and in what pattern, when a person picks up a bottle and brings it to her lips, explains the study’s lead researcher, Dr. Leigh R. Hochberg, a professor of engineering at Brown University, a researcher at the Providence VA Medical Center, a critical care neurologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital/Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and a visiting associate  professor of neurology at the Harvard Medical School.

Fortuitously, it doesn’t matter whether the person actually moves their limb or whether they’re merely imagining themselves doing it. So, for several trials, Hochberg and his colleagues had the computer observe the sparking patterns of neurons in Hutchinson’s brain as she watched the robot arm pick up the bottle and bring it to her lips.

Once the scientists had taught the computer which patterns would normally make Hutchinson’s arm reach out for the bottle of coffee, they hardwired them as the command for the robot arm to do the same thing – but with the signal coming directly from Hutchinson’s brain as she imagined herself grasping the cup and bringing it to her lips.

“Beyond this, our real dream for this research is for people with paralysis — from a brain stroke or spinal cord injury — to be able to one day reconnect the brain to the limbs,” Hochberg says.

Those kinds of injuries often leave a healthy brain disconnected from a healthy set of nerves that would normally control the movement of the limbs. So, the hope is that someday doctors might be able to reconnect things, like an electrician replacing a bit of shorted out wire.

For her part, Hutchinson is hoping that the researchers come up with a permanent, wireless implant and a way to reconnect her brain to her body.

She imagines what it would be like to cook and garden again. “I know that someday this will happen again,” she says.

 

MSNBC

Mitt Romney’s prep school classmates recall pranks, but also troubling incidents ( is this who you want to represent the U.S?)

Bully's come in all shape and sizes!  This one should not be allowed to WIN.

 

Campaign officials denied a request for an interview with Romney. They also declined to comment further about his years at Cranbrook.

In a subsequent interview Thursday morning with Fox News Channel, Romney said he didn’t remember the incident but apologized for pranks he helped orchestrate that he said “might have gone too far.”

After the incident, Lauber seemed to disappear. He returned days later with his shortened hair back to its natural brown. He finished the year but ultimately left the school before graduation — thrown out for smoking a cigarette.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, David Seed noticed a familiar face at the end of a bar at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

“Hey, you’re John Lauber,” Seed recalled saying at the start of a brief conversation. Seed, also among those who witnessed the Romney-led incident, had gone on to a career as a teacher and principal. Now he had something to get off his chest.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t do more to help in the situation,” he said.

Lauber paused, then responded, “It was horrible.” He went on to explain how frightened he was during the incident, and acknowledged to Seed, “It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.”

Lauber died in 2004, according to his three sisters.

Romney came of age during his six years at Cranbrook. First as a day student and later as a full-time boarder, he embraced and became emblematic of the Cranbrook way — a strict disciplinary code and academic rigor that governed the school by day and a free-wheeling unofficial boys code of “Crannies” at night. Wherever the action was, so was Romney. He wrote the most letters to the girls at the sister school across the lake and successfully petitioned to get placed in the top classes. He was not a natural athlete but found his place among the jocks by managing the hockey team and leading megaphone cheers for the football team. Although a devout Mormon, one of the few at the school, he was less defined by his faith than at any other time in his life. He was a member of 11 school organizations, including the Spectators’ Club and the homecoming committee, and started the school’s booster outfit, the Blue Key Club.

It was at Cranbrook where he first lived on his own, found his future wife and made his own decisions. One can see the institution’s influence on his demeanor and actions during those years, but also how it helped form the clubbiness and earnestness, the sense of leadership and enthusiasm, apparent in his careers as a businessman and a politician. “He strongly bought in to community service,” said Richard Moon, a schoolmate at the time. “That hard work was its own reward.” What is less visible today is what was most apparent to his prep-school peers: his jocularity.

Now, nearly half a century later, Romney’s presidential campaign has turned to the candidate’s youthful antics as evidence of his capacity for harmless, humanizing pranks and as an indication of his looser, less wooden self.

“There’s a wild and crazy man inside of there just waiting to come out,” Romney’s wife, Ann — a graduate of Cranbrook’s sister school, Kingswood — attested in a television interview this month, evoking what she saw as his endearing and fun-loving prep-school persona. Many of Romney’s peers from his high school days echo that version of the candidate, describing him as the humble son of an automobile executive-turned-governor who volunteered at the nearby mental hospital. They recall an infectious laugh, a characterization first documented in his senior yearbook.

“If you should ever by chance be walking down the [Stevens Hall] corridor at 2:00 a.m. and hear rising tones of boisterous, exuberant laughter, you are almost sure to find its source is Mitt Romney,” the yearbook reported. “A quiet joke, a panicky laughter and another of the Friedemann-Romney all-night marathon contests has begun.”

But Friedemann and several people closest to Romney in those formative years say there was a sharp edge to him. In an English class, Gary Hummel, who was a closeted gay student at the time, recalled that his efforts to speak out in class were punctuated with Romney shouting, “Atta girl!” In the culture of that time and place, that was not entirely out of the norm. Hummel recalled some teachers using similar language.

Saul, Romney’s campaign spokeswoman, said the candidate has no recollection of the incident.

Teachers were also the butt of Romney’s brand of humor.

One venerable English teacher, Carl G. Wonn­berger, nicknamed “the Bat” for his diminished eyesight, was known to walk into the trophy case and apologize, step into wastepaper baskets and stare blindly as students slipped out the back of the room to smoke by the open windows. Once, several students remembered the time pranksters propped up the back axle of Wonnberger’s Volkswagen Beetle with two-by-fours and watched, laughing from the windows, as the unwitting teacher slammed the gas pedal with his wheels spinning in the air.

As an underclassman, Romney accompanied Wonnberger and Pierce Getsinger, another student, from the second floor of the main academic building to the library to retrieve a book the two boys needed. According to Getsinger, Romney opened a first set of doors for Wonnberger, but then at the next set, with other students around, he swept his hand forward, bidding the teacher into a closed door. Wonnberger walked right into it and Getsinger said Romney giggled hysterically as the teacher shrugged it off as another of life’s indignities.

“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and said he has been “disturbed” by the Lauber incident since hearing about it several weeks ago, before being contacted by The Washington Post. “But I was not the brunt of any of his pranks.”

In later years, after Romney went on a Mormon mission, married and raised five sons, he seemed a different person to some old classmates. “Mitt began to change as a person when he met Ann Davies. He gradually became a more serious person. She was part of the process of him maturing and becoming more of the person he is today,” said Jim Bailey, who was a classmate of Romney’s at Cranbrook and later at Harvard.

By the 1950s, George and Lenore Romney had cracked the Motor City firmament and made their home in the exclusive enclave of Bloomfield Hills. When it came to educating their children, the clear choice was Cranbrook.

Built in 1927 by George Booth, publisher of the Detroit News, and named after his father’s alma mater in Kent, England, Cranbrook stood out as an architectural gem in the Michigan woods. Modeled on British boarding schools with “forms” instead of grades, “prefects” instead of RAs, “masters” instead of teachers, it also boasted the work of famed Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen. Cranbrook had all the trappings of an elite school where kids walked around like junior executives and, as Tom Elliott, Class of 1966, recalled, learned mantras such as, “Remember who you are, and what you represent.”

If you went to Cranbrook,” said a classmate, Peter “the Bird” Werbel. “You were creme de la creme.”

The Romney children walked under arches reading “A Life Without Beauty Is Only Half Lived”; past a field overlooked by Greek-style sculptures where the Detroit Lions practiced; and then a statuette of the school’s symbol, the archer from Book V of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” who “aimed an arrow high.” (In the mug honoring Romney’s Class of 1965, a naked woman replaced the aiming archer.) They looked out of leaded-glass windows in the academic buildings, crossed the spruce-spotted quad lined with modernist fountains and sleek statues of coursing hounds. They studied in reading rooms featuring frescoes and marble friezes. In the chandeliered dining room, students waited on fellow students and sat on straight-backed spindle chairs bearing the school’s insignia of a proud crane. After dinner, they wiped their mouths with cloth napkins.

In 1959, Mitt Romney enrolled at Cranbrook as a 12-year-old seventh-grader.

For the most part, the school broke down along the usual lines of jocks and brains, popular kids and introverts, all trained with the expectation of joining the next generation’s elite. The students gave one another chummy nicknames. There was Moonie and Butch, the Kraut and Flip. Romney, his name short to begin with, was playfully teased with chants of Wiiillard, Wiiillard by his friends.

Ron Sill, a Romney classmate especially attuned to the counterculture of the 1960s, rolled his eyes at the dance instruction and lessons on how to hold a teacup and properly shake a man’s hand. He preferred to listen to folk music in the coffee shops of neighboring Birmingham. Taro Yamasaki, the son of the architect of the World Trade Center and several Bloomfield Hills houses, then went by the name Michael and encountered what he called a “veiled racism.” “I was a linebacker in football,” said Yamasaki, who went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer. “And the coaches would call me Kamikaze.” Sidney Barthwell, the son of a prominent Detroit pharmacist, was the only African American student in Romney’s class from the seventh through 12th grades. Now a Detroit magistrate, he said he tried to introduce some west Detroit swagger to the school, but it was, he said, “pretty Republican and pretty WASP-y.”

There was a significant Jewish contingent, and several of those students said they never sensed any obvious prejudice. During Romney’s tenure, there were also Middle Eastern exchange students, usually from Kuwait.

Abdulhadi M. al-Awadi, a Kuwaiti student, had fond memories of the school and the respect and special attention he received from teachers. He recalled Romney as the “son of Governor Romney” who was “very sociable.” When some students put up pictures of Israeli statesman David Ben-Gurion in the hallway near his room, he did not believe it was meant intentionally to offend him, but he was bothered by it. “It’s human nature. But they did it. That’s their right.”

Faisel F. al-Abduljadir, a Kuwaiti student spending his senior year at Cranbrook in part to improve his English, said the teachers and students went out of their way to treat him with respect, showing consideration for his celebration of Ramadan and bathing requirements. But he acknowledged being “angry” about a caption under his picture in the senior yearbook that read, “Take a left at the next Synagogue.”

Religion was not much of an issue for the students. There was mandatory chapel time on Tuesdays and Thursdays when they sang Episcopalian hymns and the school song, “Forty Years On,” but it was studiously nondenominational. The campus’s elegant Christ Church had a Star of David, an Islamic crescent, and yin-and-yang sign above its wooden door. The Mormon Romney joined Jews and Protestants on Cranbrook’s Church Cabinet, which focused on community service.

 

Some students admired Romney for what they saw as his lack of airs, saying he did not trade on his father’s status as an auto executive and governor. Romney even came in for teasing because American Motors, the company his father ran, was considered at the bottom rung of the big-auto hierarchy, below General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

“Boys in a boys’ school can tease and make fun of almost anything,” said Bailey, a scholarship student and head prefect of the school who described Romney at the time as an awkward adolescent with a penchant for practical jokes. The children of other auto executives would taunt Romney for the Ramblers he and his father drove. “That’s not a car, that’s a bicycle with a dishwasher for an engine,” Bailey recalled them saying.

Others noticed a distance between themselves and Romney. “I was a scholarship student, and he was the son of the governor,” said Lance Leithauser, now a doctor, who attended the school with his brother, Brad, now a noted poet. “There was a bit of a gulf.” Even a close pal like Friedemann felt that distance; their friendship was confined to the dorms. When Romney left the campus on weekends, he never invited him. “I didn’t quite fit into the social circle. I didn’t have a car when I was 16,” Friedemann said. “I couldn’t go skiing or whatever they did.”

Lou Vierling, a scholarship student who boarded at Cranbrook for the 1960 and 1961 academic years, was struck by a question Romney asked them when they first met. “He wanted to know what my father did for a living,” Vierling recalled. “He wanted to know if my mother worked. He wanted to know what town I lived in.” As Vierling explained that his father taught school, that he commuted from east Detroit, he noticed a souring of Romney’s demeanor.

Romney was bowled over by the wealth of some of his friends. He briefly dated Mary Fisher, the daughter of the philanthropist and diplomat Max Fisher, who acted as a finance chairman to George Romney’s political campaigns. At her house, he watched the James Bond film “Goldfinger” in the family’s private theater before it was widely released. He reported excitedly back to Friedemann about the theater, noting that the seats even had numbers.

The largest chasm of all at Cranbrook was between the boarders and the “day boys.” Students within the limits of Detroit’s Eight Mile Road had the option to attend the school without boarding. The requirements for enrollment as a day student were generally tougher, leading day boys to consider themselves academically superior. Day boys also had the freedom to leave campus when school let out late in the afternoon. Often those with cars would gas up at nearby service stations, cruise Woodward Avenue and plot “how and where we could get some beer,” said Gregg Dearth, who went by the nickname Daiquiri Dearth. Drugs were generally unheard of, but day boy parties often included someone downing beers or toting bottles of scotch.

Romney began his Cranbrook career as a day boy and quickly adapted to the school’s unofficial code. He was prohibited by his religion from drinking alcohol but excelled at elaborate practical jokes.

During spring break of his senior year, when most of his friends went to Florida for vacation, Romney stayed behind to make movies for an upcoming Cranbrook talent show. For one, he filmed his friends Stu White and Judy Sherman seated at a table to dine on fine china on a Woodward Avenue median as their friend Pike John, now deceased, acted as the waiter. Romney filmed the luncheon until a police officer pulled up. “And that was it,” Sherman said.

But in a well-known prank in which Romney flashed a police siren and, bearing a fake badge and cap, approached two friends and their dates parked on a dark country road, there was a stronger undercurrent of fear to the incident than commonly conveyed. Candy Porter, a Kingswood boarder from a small town in Ohio, had a strict 11 p.m. curfew. As Romney and his Cranbrook pals played out the joke, pretending to be shocked over empty bourbon bottles in the trunk, Porter thought of the dorm mothers waiting at the door and the threat of expulsion. “I just remember being like a deer in headlights,” she said. “I just remember being terrified.” Once she realized it was all a prank, and was safely back at her dorm, Porter joined in the laughter.

Romney’s sense of humor ran through his family.

Sherman, a friend of the Romneys from high school, recalled Ann telling her about the time Romney and his older brother, Scott, dressed up in white coats and wheeled a gurney up to the Birmingham train station to meet their aunt. When she got off the train, they rushed her away as if to a madhouse.

* * *

By the time Romney started dating Ann in his senior year, he had immersed himself into the Cranbrook culture. In 1962, when his father won the governorship and his parents moved to Lansing, he entered the boarding life as a resident of Stevens Hall, named after the school’s first headmaster. From the inside, Cranbrook was an entirely different place.

“The day students,” said Steph Lady, a boarder and now a screenwriter in Hollywood, “it was like they didn’t even go there.”

Romney breathed Cranbrook day and night.

He met the Kingswood girls at the Get Acquainted Dance in the school gym. There was the Chateau de Noel girl-ask-boy dance at Christmas, and the World A-Fair, in which students dressed up in the garb of other nations. He sang in the Glee Club and started the Blue Key Club, an organization of students who “know the campus and Cranbrook traditions well” and served as ambassador to parents and prospective students. The school newspaper noted that his “diligent and capable leadership” of the homecoming weekend, where he delivered a “brilliantly hilarious monologue,” earned him a citation reserved for “students whose contributions to school life are often not fully recognized through already existing channels.” He was co-chairman of the Speculators Club and played a leading role in the American Field Service, which helped bring foreign students to the campus. He also served a leadership role on a student cabinet organization and during his senior year took a bus with some Kingswood girls to volunteer at the nearby state mental hospital. There, he danced to spinning 45s and talked and ate chips with the young patients.

“His altruism was apparent then and is apparent now,” said Candy Porter, who volunteered with Romney at the hospital. “I just remember him being really nice,” said Mary Fisher.

Romney also found time to contribute to the school paper as a special correspondent at the funeral of President John F. Kennedy. “Mitt Romney Comments on Kennedy Funeral,” read the front page headline on the Dec. 17, 1963, edition of the Crane. “Note: Personal comments and observations made by Mitt Romney in Washington, Nov. 25, 1963.”

“The old Washington theory of relativity, briefly: one is important only until a bigger brass appears, was blatently [sic] obvious for whenever before have we had the top potentates of the world here to outrank our dignitaries? We all recall the day when we saw a senator of the like in some big, black limosine [sic] drive through our town. Most likely our mouths were hanging wide open as our Mommies and Daddies told us the man out there was a very important person who worked in Washington.”

* * *

Even without extracurricular activities, Cranbrook demanded long days. The morning bell rang at 7 and breakfast was served in the dining hall at 7:30, coat and tie required. After breakfast, students returned to clean their rooms in anticipation of white-gloved senior prefects who scoured the bed frames for dust. After classes and study hall at 9:30, students could go beneath Stevens Hall to the school store, where the boys received letters, via an inter-school postal service, from the girls at Kingswood. Some were perfumed.

The letters Romney wrote were delivered to the Green Lobby in Kingswood. Around 10:15 every morning, the girls, all wearing saddle shoes, hoped to hear their names called amid walls of rich green tile, and banisters, benches and clocks all in the art deco style.

“The person who wrote the most consistently was Mitt,” said Lyn Moon Shields, who dated Romney in the fall semester of 1964. Gentlemanly and fun, Romney was her best date in her six years at school. He called every evening and picked her up in his powder blue Rambler and drove her up and down Woodward Avenue on weekends, and to school dances where she wore blue-green formal dresses and he a dark suit and tie. “Things were so innocent,” she said. “We kissed each other, I think Mitt would admit to that.” One day, she said, Romney just stopped calling. He had taken an interest in a Kingswood sophomore. “They got intentional about their relationship very soon,” Shields said of Mitt and Ann.

Like every other student, Romney completed a rigorous workload that made most college requirements seem easy by comparison. Between the seventh and eighth grades, the faculty selected a dozen or so students to enter an advanced-placement program. Romney at first was not among the chosen, and he objected. “He went into the headmaster and convinced him that ‘I should be in this,’ ” John French, who had been friends with Romney since they served together as Cub Scouts, recalled Romney telling him. “He had gumption. He had his sights on what he wanted to achieve.”

The time after class was set aside for sports. Romney was not a natural athlete, according to classmates. He wore the Cranbrook “C” on his white tank top as a cross-country runner, but the greatest impression he made in that pursuit was collapsing near the finish line during a meet — although his perseverance won him admiration and applause. He was more at home on the sidelines, cheering the football team on as a member of the Pep Club, chanting such cheers into a megaphone as “Iron them out. Iron them out. Smooooth.”

He participated on the school’s hockey team as its manager, lugging a duffle bag full of pucks and sticks. Dressed in suit and tie and three-quarter coat, he rode the bus with the uniformed players and kept stats in the coach’s box at the cold outdoor rink. The team’s senior year began with promise, but ended badly. The players took out their frustration on the ice, getting into brawls with Lakeview and Catholic Central. During one fight, Maxwell pulled the jersey over the head of an opposing player and pummeled away. Romney dashed onto the ice, slipping and sliding in his Brogan wingtips in an apparent attempt to break up the fight.

During the winter of Romney’s sophomore year, the faculty assigned him and Maxwell to mop the floors of the academic halls, part of a World War II-era program meant to instill a work ethic in the students. During their six-week detail, the two old friends had long, rambling conversations about religion, and Maxwell pressed Romney on how he could believe in Mormonism.

As Maxwell later recalled their discussion, he asked Romney, “How can you believe that thing about the tablets?” referring to the divine gold tablets Mormons believe were discovered in New York and translated by Joseph Smith.

Romney, he said, responded, “What about the Virgin birth and the holy trinity?”

“I don’t believe that, either,” Maxwell responded. The discussions ultimately came down to a faith vs. reason equation.

“You simply have to have faith,” Romney concluded.

“That’s a cop-out,” Maxwell said.

While there were seeds of Romney’s future devoutness at Cranbrook, he was then more interested in goofing off. In the evenings, he cut loose with Friedemann, a scholarship kid from the small town of Romeo, dubbed the Kraut. The two boys stayed up late, joking around and racing mops like racehorses up and down the hallway.

One regular in the Stevens Hall revelry was the school’s security guard, Chester. In police uniform, chubby and middle-aged, Chester would let Romney and Friedemann examine and play with his gun. In the student yearbook, Romney posed with his arm around Chester wearing thick black glasses, similar to those the guard wore, but also a ski hat and a silly Jerry Lewis expression. At the Swingin’ Sweeney Dance, Romney pointed a toy gun under his chin as two girls shook hands in front of him. A photo of the pose ran in the yearbook above the caption, “Give a guy enough rope and he’ll hang himself.”

Romney spent months trying to convert Friedemann, the son of New Deal-worshiping Democrats, to the Republican Party. He asked to meet his friend’s grandmother, so that he could convert her, too. “He talked politics all the time,” Friedemann said. “It was more big government versus small government. He was a business guy back then.”

Romney’s political and personal idol, George Romney, was never far away. Once Crawford Elder, a student a year behind Romney, saw the governor in the basement under Stevens Hall getting a haircut from Everett Arthurs, the school barber and part-time bartender at faculty cocktail parties. When Ev, as he was widely known, dropped dead after a round of golf, Gov. Romney eulogized him at a tree dedication ceremony on the quad, a few steps away from his son’s room.

After lights out, John Lauber often left his door open. Larry Olson and some other boarders would check for the hall monitor they called Sneaky Pete and slip into Lauber’s room. From there, they would crawl out his window, climb over the bushes and scurry off campus to Lone Pine Road, where a pizza truck regularly parked. Sated, they would climb back through the window and check on the bottles of apple juice that they hoped fermenting grapes would turn into hard cider. Then Lauber and his friends played poker until the early morning.

When Lauber’s younger sister, Betsy, visited the campus, she said she found him happy and sporting a preppy look. He took her to an off-campus party at a fellow student’s house where they danced to Motown records and laughed.

But he was always a bit different from the rest. During breaks from school, he worked as a mortician’s assistant. He spent more time devouring books than making friends in clubs.

“He was very quiet, not a jock,” said Steph Lady. “Very soft-spoken. I know nothing, probably gay, but who knows. We were so stupid and naive. I know there was homosexuality there, but we didn’t even have a word for it. And there was homophobia then, too.”

On an overcast Saturday, David Craig, a senior prefect and day student, drove his car down Martell Drive along the school grounds and saw a figure duck into the hedges. He thought the person might be trespassing and stopped, only to find Lauber puffing on a cigarette. In a move that he said he later regretted as an excess of the “dorm trooper” mentality instilled by Cranbrook, Craig reported Lauber to the headmaster. Soon after, Lauber was expelled.

“He just disappeared,” Lady said.

Sudden disappearances at Cranbrook were not unheard of. Students might pass a dorm neighbor on the way to class and come back hours later, with all their belongings gone and their beds stripped by maintenance staff. Bad behavior and bad grades were not tolerated.

Ben Snyder, who as an assistant headmaster later spearheaded the school’s effort to recruit inner-city students, said Cranbrook in Romney’s time “had its standards and applied them briskly when needed.” As chairman of a group of faculty members and students who were in charge of discipline, he described a strict school in which offenders could be “dismissed, period.” Snyder could not recall dealing with any transgressions involving Romney. “I wouldn’t expect to see him,” Snyder said of the disciplinary tribunals. “The family was so straight, they don’t do those types of things.”

On June 12, 1965, Romney concluded his Cranbrook career at a commencement ceremony at the Christ Church, in which his father delivered a keynote address reported on by the local papers.

“This is a special occasion for us as a family,” George Romney told the gathered boys before emphasizing that religion and “the one girlfriend whom you finally take the greatest interest in” and good health habits were critical for a successful life. So, he said, was character. “Developing character is going to be more important than your education from now on.” The ceremony concluded with all the boys singing a final rendition of their school song, “Forty Years On.”

Forty years on, when afar and asunder

Parted are those who are singing today,

When you look back, and forgetfully wonder

What you were like in your work and your play,

Then, it may be, there will often come o’er you,

Glimpses of notes like the catch of a song –

Visions of boyhood shall float them before you,

Echoes of dreamland shall bear them along,

Follow up! Follow up! Follow up!

Forty years on, Mitt Romney accepted the school’s 2005 Distinguished Alumni Award.

A year earlier, John Joseph Lauber died at a Seattle hospital.

The boy few at Cranbrook knew or remember was born in Chicago, grew up in South Bend, Ind., and had a hard time fitting in. He liked to wander and “had a glorious sense of the absurd,” according to his sister Betsy. When the chance to get out of Indiana presented itself, he jumped at it and enrolled at Cranbrook. He never uttered a word about Mitt Romney or the haircut incident to his sisters. After Cranbrook asked him to leave, he finished high school, attended the University of the Seven Seas for two semesters, then graduated in 1970 from Vanderbilt, where he majored in English.

He came out as gay to his family and close friends and led a vagabond life, taking dressage lessons in England and touring with the Royal Lipizzaner Stallion riders. After an extreme fit of temper in front of his mother and sister at home in South Bend, he checked into the Menninger Clinic psychiatric hospital in Topeka, Kan. Later he received his embalmer’s license, worked as a chef aboard big freighters and fishing trawlers, and cooked for civilian contractors during the war in Bosnia and then, a decade later, in Iraq. His hair thinned as he aged, and in the winter of 2004 he returned to Seattle, the closest thing he had to a base. He died there of liver cancer that December.

He kept his hair blond until he died, said his sister Chris. “He never stopped bleaching it.”

 

WashingtonPost