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Privilege, tragedy, and a young leader
By Neil Swidey and Michael Paulson
Globe Staff / June 24, 2007
BERNOS-BEAULAC, France—By the time he saw the black Mercedes barreling into his lane, there was nothing Mitt Romney could do.
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He was 21, buoyed by a recent promotion, a young man finally on his way. Two years of getting doors slammed in his face as a Mormon missionary in France had tested him like nothing before in his privileged life, revealing a drive and seriousness that had been absent during his breezy childhood. Now he was the assistant to the president, a top job in the French mission, and behind the wheel of a luxury silver Citroen packed with church officials visiting congregations in southern France.
He knew these roads were dangerous. That very afternoon in June of 1968, on the way from Pau to Bordeaux, he had pulled over to remove a roof rack lying in the middle of the road, a remnant of an earlier accident.
His own crash was swift and brutal. The Mercedes, driven southbound by a Catholic priest, passed a truck, missed a curve, and shot into the northbound lane at a high rate of speed.
Part 1Privilege, tragedy, and a young leader
Survivors recall tragic car crash Map
Church obtained draft deferrals
photo galleries
Man on a Mission
Father and Son
photo: Who's who?
video
From Boy to Man
More on Romney / ''It happened so quickly that, as I recall, there was no braking and no honking, it was like immediate,'' Romney said in a recent interview. ''I remember sort of being hood-to-hood. And then pretty much the next thing I recall was waking up in the hospital.''
Trapped between the steering column and the driver's-side door, Romney lost consciousness. The mission president, Duane Anderson, was seriously injured on the other side. Anderson's wife, Leola, who had been sandwiched between them, bore the brunt of the impact. Crushed in the wreckage, she survived long enough to speak her dying words in an ambulance to a Frenchwoman who couldn't understand what she was saying.
Sister Anderson, as she was called within the small world of Mormons in France, was a beloved den mother to the 200 missionaries. Her husband was physically and emotionally broken, and returned to the United States to bury his wife and salve his wounds.
Romney responded differently. Since birth, his parents had invested great ambition in their youngest child. Yet his sheltered life had given him few opportunities to show himself worthy of such expectations. Now, with tragedy in the French mission, and chaos in the late 1960s air, Romney emerged as a leader. In President Anderson's absence, the 21-year-old helped direct the mission.
He launched an effort to accelerate the conversions of French people, complete with more ambitious numerical goals. And he kept his anguish to himself.Continued...
- See more at: http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/specials/romney/articles/part1_main/#sthash.OuakhIa8.dpuf
A Muslim Leader in Brooklyn, Reconciling 2 Worlds
By:
Andrea Elliott
March 5, 2006
An Imam in AmericaThe imam begins his trek before dawn, his long robe billowing like a ghost through empty streets. In this dark, quiet hour, his thoughts sometimes drift back to the Egyptian farming village where he was born.
"Here you don't know what will solve a problem. It's about looking for a key." Sheik Reda Shata, the imam of a thriving mosque in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. (Photo credit: James Estrin/The New York Times)
But as the sun rises over Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Sheik Reda Shata's new world comes to life. The R train rattles beneath a littered stretch of sidewalk, where Mexican workers huddle in the cold. An electric Santa dances in a doughnut shop window. Neon signs beckon. Gypsy cabs blare their horns.
The imam slips into a plain brick building, nothing like the golden-domed mosque of his youth. He stops to pray, and then climbs the cracked linoleum steps to his cluttered office. The answering machine blinks frantically, a portent of the endless questions to come.
A teenage girl wants to know: Is it halal, or lawful, to eat a Big Mac? Can alcohol be served, a waiter wonders, if it is prohibited by the Koran? Is it wrong to take out a mortgage, young Muslim professionals ask, when Islam frowns upon monetary interest?
The questions are only a piece of the daily puzzle Mr. Shata must solve as the imam of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, a thriving New York mosque where several thousand Muslims worship.
To his congregants, Mr. Shata is far more than the leader of daily prayers and giver of the Friday sermon. Many of them now live in a land without their parents, who typically assist with finding a spouse. There are fewer uncles and cousins to help resolve personal disputes. There is no local House of Fatwa to issue rulings on ethical questions.
Sheik Reda, as he is called, arrived in Brooklyn one year after Sept. 11. Virtually overnight, he became an Islamic judge and nursery school principal, a matchmaker and marriage counselor, a 24-hour hot line on all things Islamic.
Day after day, he must find ways to reconcile Muslim tradition with American life. Little in his rural Egyptian upbringing or years of Islamic scholarship prepared him for the challenge of leading a mosque in America.
The job has worn him down and opened his mind. It has landed him, exhausted, in the hospital and earned him a following far beyond Brooklyn.
"America transformed me from a person of rigidity to flexibility," said Mr. Shata, speaking through an Arabic translator. "I went from a country where a sheik would speak and the people listened to one where the sheik talks and the people talk back."
This is the story of Mr. Shata's journey west: the making of an American imam.
Over the last half-century, the Muslim population in the United States has risen significantly. Immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa have settled across the country, establishing mosques from Boston to Los Angeles, and turning Islam into one of the nation's fastest growing religions. By some estimates, as many as six million Muslims now live in America.
First Place Writing Winner
On-the-spot assignmentNews article
Personality/Profile article
Personality/Profile article
Three times a week, a truck putters 45 miles south from a farm in Sonoma County, headed for Berkeley’s North Shattuck neighborhood, filled with plump, corn-bred, nine-week-old ducks.
The ducks, better known as Liberty Ducks, are descended from Denmark and destined for a two-story, vine-covered culinary Mecca. The birds are bred, nurtured and sold by a Northern Californian fourth-generation farmer, and they represent a nearly four-decade-old philosophy of the restaurant Chez Panisse and its founder, Alice Waters.
“We ended up very quickly on the doorsteps of the organic farmers,” Waters said of her first years in the restaurant business.
Fresh fruits, vegetables and meats organically cultivated by local growers, like the ducks brought from Sonoma County Poultry, pepper a menu as focused as Waters’ passion. One of the most decorated, respected and renowned chefs in America, she is credited by many with re-popularizing the old idea of serving unaltered, garden-fresh foods, an effort that has influenced places far beyond Chez Panisse’s white-clothed tables.
Dressed in a shin-length charcoal dress and wrapped in a multi-colored scarf, Waters sat in a back room on the second floor of her restaurant and, as she talked about her ongoing love affair with clean, healthy foods, sipped on a Blue Bottle Coffee latte splashed with organic Straus Family cream made 60 miles north of San Francisco.
She talked in a soft, elegant tone but glowed with excitement when she mentioned straight-from-the-garden ingredients, helping children eat healthier diets or her long-term relationship with California farmers – her “friends,” she said.
“Every time I’m buying food, I’m supporting those people who are taking care of the land,” the 64-year-old Waters said, brushing back her short, maple-colored hair as a chef in the kitchen behind her chopped fresh shallots.
“I couldn’t have done what I do in another market just because she’s really created the drive for everyone to do similar things and to have the same sort of attention to products,” said Jim Reichardt, owner of Sonoma County Poultry. “She created the market.”
Reichardt and farmers like Karen and Ben Lucero, owners of Lucero Organic Farms about 75 miles northeast of Berkeley, talk about Waters with reverence, almost as if they owe their livelihoods to her work.
“It’s a blessing to everyone,” said Karen Lucero, who supplies Chez Panisse with strawberries. “She’s buying the produce and doing lovely things with it.”
When Waters, who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967, opened the restaurant in 1971, full of ideas and dreams from her time spent studying in London and traveling in France, she said she didn’t have the same commitment to sustainable products that she does now, instead focusing just on serving French-inspired “delicious food.” She even grimaced when asked about the wooden panels made from redwood trees outlining Chez Panisse’s second-floor walls, although she quickly added that the bottom floor was made from recycled lumber.
Waters’ search for those delicious ingredients eventually led her to the local farmers and their organic produce like the strawberries from Lodi and the ducks from Sonoma County.
“She’s so keen on the prime ingredient and cooking as a simple process,” said Paul Bertolli, a Chez Panisse chef from 1982 to 1992, current book author and owner of California salumi producer, Fra’Mani. “The stuff that used to come in the door was such that you just didn’t want to screw it up.”
Bertolli said that although his time at Chez Panisse launched his career, and he loved working for Waters, she was, at times, challenging.
“When I was working with her in the kitchen, she’d say ‘Paul, make this taste good.’”
Bertolli remembered one occasion when Waters wanted to serve anchovies even though they were still mostly frozen, making them almost impossible to scale, clean or cook. He said they stacked grills on top of each other because the fish kept slipping through the grates.
“I looked at her and said, ‘Alice, this is crazy. Then she said, ‘as Elizabeth David said, ‘good cooking is trouble’” Bertolli remembered, laughing. “She would ask me to do crazy things.”
Michael Bauer, the San Francisco Chronicle’s food critic since 1986, said that drive for perfection and sometimes impractically high standards have made her successful in the restaurant business and beyond.
“What Alice has done really well is stick with Chez Panisse. She’s had basically a singular message,” Bauer said. “I think the other thing is that so many other chefs have cashed in monetarily on their vision. She’s really stuck to her vision.
“Her restaurant has become a platform, but not a platform to line her own pockets,” he said. “It’s a platform for her own visions.”
Bauer also said Chez Panisse is one of seven restaurants – among thousands – he has awarded four stars.
“I gave her four because she does what no one else does,” he said. “I think that it’s still magical.”
Chez Panisse has also been included among S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants since Restaurant Magazine began the rankings in 2002, and they awarded Waters the S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants Lifetime Achievement award in 2007.
Other awards include the 1997 James Beard Humanitarian Award, Bon Appetit magazine's 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award and most recently the 2008 Global Environmental Citizen Award she received along with Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations.
“We felt like Ms. Waters’ work with sustainable food has been groundbreaking,” said Kathleen Frith, associate director at the Center for Health and the Global Environment, which gives out the award. “I think she has done a great job helping people understand how our food choices are linked to both our health and the health of the environment.”
Beyond the lofty awards and international praise, Waters’ love always leads back to the beauty of pure, simple food, like her favorites – garlic and parsley – and a desire to share that “deliciousness” with the rest of the world.
“You have the opportunity of awakening your senses. You have the pleasure of eating with your family and friends,” she said. “You have a sense of time and place. You feel connected to a community.”
First Place Writing Winner
On-the-spot assignmentNews article
Personality/Profile article
Profile Article of Delancey Street’s Director, Dr. Mimi Silbert
Thousands idolize Mimi Silbert for her contagious spirit and persistent belief in self-sufficiency.
Her following includes ex-convicts, former gang members, heroin and crack addicts and prostitutes.
Silbert, 65, founded the Delancey Street Foundation — a rehabilitative home for hundreds of people with troubled pasts— in 1971 with the late John Maher, who was an ex-felon.
They wanted to create something “that would be run entirely by the people who were the problems in society” to provide an alternative to prison, said Sandra Munõz, a 10-year resident of Delancey Street and former heroin addict and ex-convict.
Silbert, a criminal psychologist, lives within the Delancey Street complex and works with its residents daily.
“She’s like an angel. She does it because it’s truly in her heart. She could be anywhere in the world … but Mimi chooses to live here with us, be here with us and teach us,” Munõz said. “I want to be just like her.”