Ahead of the Curve
by Stephen Collins '74
San Francisco is famous for many things: a bridge, fog, a former prison, cars on cables, and very steep hills. It has as many personalities as neighborhoods.
Perhaps the quality that best distinguishes this most progressive of American cities is the pioneer spirit that endures here. It continues to attract people seeking new opportunities.
In San Francisco, innovation is indigenous to the culture. The city that nurtured London, Steinbeck and Kerouac, that birthed the beat generation and hippie movements and spawned psychedelic music, today cradles computer wizardry and Pacific Rim trading. It remains a romantic outpost in an America supposedly gone to seed.
Colby alumni in the city reflect both its cosmopolitanism and its commitment to keeping ahead of the curve. They are business entrepreneurs and artists, public service leaders and industry consultants-an eclectic group with lives as distinctive as the city they call home.
The thing they share is the place they began-and the cadre of people who helped shape their futures.
Liquid Assets
A philosophy major at Colby in the early 1960s, Peter G. Gordon recalls his liberal arts experience as a rich opportunity to explore new ideas. "At Colby I learned not to be afraid to try new things," he said from his office in San Francisco.
Co-founder and co-owner of one of the nation's leading natural beverage companies, Crystal Geyser Water Company, Gordon is a testament to the value of fearless innovation. Ignore for the moment that in 1977 the notion of selling small bottles of drinking water was literally foreign-a European phenomenon little known in North America. Gordon and his partner at Crystal Geyser, Leo Soong, pioneered the addition of natural flavors-and later the addition of vitamins-to sparkling bottled water and juice.
It began with kitchen counter experiments that Gordon and Soong conducted with bottled water and flavorings. Today, they are selling somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million worth of water, juice and tea drinks annually. Gordon and Soong were the first to add citrus flavors to bottled mineral water and the first to market a non-citrus flavor. Crystal Geyser Cola Berry, introduced in 1985, became the best-selling flavored sparkling water in its first year. On the other hand, Cherry-Chocolate, introduced a year later, was an experiment to test "How far could we go?" Gordon said. "It had a strong core following, but . . ."
Gordon came to Colby from New York City in 1961. He remembers it as a time of personal growth and maturation. Philosophy provided both the discipline and the process to investigate and understand ideas, and exposure to the sciences, to literature and to art and music broadened students' perspectives and challenged them to higher achievement and a better understanding of the world, says Gordon. "The range of courses that I had allowed me to open my mind to new ideas."
The importance of opening up in college was underscored by his experience after graduation. "As time goes on you increasingly have to narrow your focus," Gordon said.
After a brief period of traveling, he enrolled at New York University, taking courses in business. He spent several years doing investment research on Wall Street for Merrill Lynch, where he found his undergraduate philosophy education as valuable as his business school training. "Again," he said, "it was the thought process that was valuable-taking all this information and making sense and order of things."
The desire for a more agreeable environment and a healthier lifestyle sent Gordon west. He landed in San Francisco as a securities analyst for Wells Fargo, where he met Soong, also a securities analyst. The pair struck up a friendship and discussed various business ventures. "We decided it was time to create something, to try something on our own," Gordon recalled. "We wanted a challenge, a hands-on situation where we would be involved, immersed, stimulated."
While the pair looked at existing business opportunities during the mid-1970s, several seemingly unrelated ideas percolated in Gordon's mind and kept leading him to water. "Part of my assignment on Wall Street was to try to understand the rules and regulations of the new Environmental Protection Agency," he said. That work revealed to him the widespread problems with water in the United States-poor management of water resources, spot problems with inadequate treatment and the use of treatment technologies that were worrisome to increasingly health-conscious Americans. It was a time when consumers were choosing products labeled "all natural" and were trying to moderate their consumption of alcoholic beverages and highly sweetened soft drinks.
Research in Europe revealed that per capita consumption of bottled water was very high and growing, even where public water supplies were good. Gordon and Soong launched a new business to sell bottles of water to Americans who had taken for granted that drinking water came from a tap. "Each time we came back to this it piqued our curiosity again and seemed like a good idea," Gordon said.
To succeed, they needed a source of water in a remote area not threatened by development. They spent a year and a half "networking" to find the right water sources-an alpine spring 4,000 feet up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and a mineral spring in Napa Valley-and figuring out financing, production and distribution. They built a bottling plant near the spring "in the middle of nowhere" to ensure the purity of their product, Gordon says. "We think that's important. It's fundamental."
They incorporated Crystal Geyser Water Company in 1977, and their first product, sparkling water, hit the shelves a year later. The co-chief executives took on a myriad of responsibilities, including riding in the beer trucks that distributed Crystal Geyser, driving the forklift in their Calistoga bottling plant, and offering free samples at supermarkets. "In the early days we were really missionaries because the idea of bottled water was strange," Gordon said. But not for long.
"The timing was very good," he said. "After we got ourselves organized, suddenly the idea of bottled water became very popular." Aided by an advertising blitz by their competitor Perrier, the French granddaddy of sparkling mineral waters, Gordon and Soong soon were running to keep up with sales figures that doubled each year through much of the 1980s. Their own innovations, adding natural flavorings and vitamins and branching out into juice and tea drinks, sustained the growth and elevated Crystal Geyser to one of the top five natural beverage brands in the U.S. Now, with some 200 employees to drive the forklifts and so on, Gordon is responsible for sales and marketing while Soong handles finances and operations, but the two collaborate on all decisions. Crystal Geyser products are available in all 50 states and in several Asian and Latin American countries.
The future of the industry, Gordon feels, is promising. He predicts that Crystal Geyser will continue to be an innovator. While the company has a "very good, very productive source" of water, finding and developing another source is a possibility.
Gordon and Kristin Meyer Gordon '64, who live in Mill Valley, celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary in January. Kristin, who majored in English at Colby, is an artist who has worked in sculpture, carving, casting, welding and painting and helped with some of the early signs and label designs for Crystal Geyser products. The couple raised two children, now grown.
Three years ago, "after a hiatus of about 25 years," as Gordon put it, he renewed his ties to Colby, and he currently serves as an overseer. "The broad-based education that a place like Colby provides is essential," he said. "The exposure to many disciplines and cultures, the way it provokes, pushes, challenges students, the way it tests them and tests their values [is important]. The role of Colby is essential to what happens to us as a nation in the future."
Vintage Colby
Jon Fredrikson '64 knows wine, and he's had the purple teeth to prove it.
Fredrikson-a principal in the respected wine industry consulting firm of Gomberg, Fredrikson & Associates, a professional wine taster, former executive vice president of Paul Masson Vineyards and the Seagram Wine Company, an expert source for The New York Times and a bilingual financial analyst who's consulted in Spain and Egypt-is, above all, an oenophile. So devoted is he to his favored beverage that he once tasted 625 wines in four days at the California State Fair. When it was over he traveled to San Jose, purple teeth and all, to attend-what else?-a wine sampling.
Fredrikson is a classic product of an interdisciplinary education, combining interests in two fields with an entrepreneurial spirit to create a successful career. An economics major at Colby, Fredrikson remembers emeritus professors Robert W. Pullen '41 (economics) and Henry Holland (Spanish) as major influences on his career. He participated in a summer Spanish institute at Colby in 1961, and Holland persuaded him to apply for a Fulbright scholarship. He got it, attended the National University of Nicaragua for a year and traveled throughout Central and South America.
After studying international business and accounting at Columbia University-he earned an M.B.A. in 1967-and serving a tour of duty as a naval officer in Hawaii, Fredrikson was hired by Seagram in 1970 as an international financial analyst to keep track of its Latin American interests. Monitoring the wine industry became part of the job, and he quickly evolved into "the wine guy" on Seagram's New York staff, Fredrikson says, eventually moving up to run the international group. As part of the job, he went back to school to learn more about wine. "They sent me to graduate courses, including one that was held in the wine cellar of the St. Regis Hotel. That's when I became a wine fanatic," he said. "We tasted some great wines in there."
In 1972 Fredrikson went to San Francisco to analyze Seagram's California operations and was hired by the company's wine division there. Over the next decade he helped run several of Seagram's wine subsidiaries, including Paul Masson. When Seagram reorganized and moved its wine operations to the East Coast in 1983, Fredrikson and his wife, Eileen, decided to stay in San Francisco and go into business as consultants. They bought the venerable Louis R. Gomberg & Associates and continued to work with Louis Gomberg-a founder of The Wine Institute and a pioneering industry analyst-until his death last year. Gomberg, Fredrikson & Associates, as the firm is now known, publishes the monthly Gomberg-Fredrikson Report, which Jon edits, as well as the WINEDATA sales and pricing monitors. The firm, which has four employees, offers services that include economic and marketing studies for the wine industry, expert testimony, wine and winery evaluations and real estate brokerage for wine properties. Eileen Fredrikson, who has a business degree from the University of California at Berkeley, is the firm's director of client services.
The Fredriksons' timing could not have been better. Their entry into consulting coincided with the explosion of the premium domestic wine market in the mid-'80s, spurred by American consumers' increasing knowledge. They had a couple of years of experience to prepare for "the real action," Fredrikson said. "Looking back now over the last twelve years, we were fortunate to get started when we did."
One measure of the ascendance of California wines is the extent to which imported wines, even French table wines, are now emulating their look and marketing style. Instead of pushing the traditional European appellation system, imports are now labeled as varietals such as Chardonnay and Cabernet, Fredrikson says.
There has been little planting or expansion at California vineyards recently because growers are dealing with root louse, an insect that is threatening grapevines, Fredrikson says. The slowdown has created space for a new wave of imports as more Spanish, Brazilian, Australian and eastern European wines appear on shelves.
Among California wines, Fredrikson said he's partial to red Zinfandel. "We get wine as gifts, we buy it, sometimes we're paid in wine, so we have a huge wine cellar," he said. "And with all the choices, very often I pick up a red Zinfandel because it goes well with pasta and light meats like chicken."
Among white wines, Fredrikson recommends a couple of Chardonnays and Robert Pepi Sauvignon Blanc.
Fredrikson's avocation as a wine taster has turned him into an authority. When the California State Fair decided to resurrect professional judging of wines in the mid-1980s, Eileen signed Fredrikson up as a judge-"unbeknownst to me," he notes. He sweated, but passed, a rigorous exam to qualify and was chosen to taste Sonoma County wines at the 1985 State Fair. "It sounds like fun," he said, "but the first year it was four days. You're sequestered like a jury, and we tasted 625 wines-everything from Sonoma County. You can't imagine what your mouth feels like; it feels like your teeth are ready to fall out," he said.
Occupational hazards of the business notwithstanding, Fredrikson has no regrets about taking the plunge into consulting. "It's a long way from the corporate world," he said. "I like to say that you go from riding in the corporate jet to taking out your own trash."
Making a good living indulging his passion for grapes and wine, Fredrikson particularly values the hours he spends outdoors in the vineyards. Then, every evening, he returns to the "dream house" he and Eileen built amongst the redwood trees in the Santa Cruz Mountains, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The family-Jon, Eileen and two high school-age daughters, Jenny and Erica-drops everything for a traditional sit-down family dinner, usually gourmet food, almost always with a bottle of wine. "I might go back to work after dinner until one in the morning, but the two hours around dinner are very important," he said.
Fredrikson is a long way from his native New York and the corporate career that initially sent him to California, and he is happy with the path he's taken. "My wife said I stopped grinding my teeth the day I stopped working for Seagram's," he said.
New Age Activist
In a lighthearted essay about how she is an embarrassment to her two sons and a worry to her long-suffering mother, Nancy Kudriavetz Ramsey '62, a long-time Washington political activist now courting a mellower lifestyle in San Francisco, describes herself as "an unreconstructed radical in post-modernity."
As an anti-war activist in the late 1960s she handed out leaflets urging a boycott of Wonder Bread because its parent corporation made weapons. In 1969 she chained herself to the White House fence to protest the Vietnam War. She worked in the National Welfare Rights Organization and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and had her house under round-the-clock protection in 1972 when she went to Moscow to meet with Palestinian women. She was director of Americans for SALT, co-founded and ran the influential Committee for National Security and co-wrote Nuclear Weapons Decision Making. She spent four years in the mid-1980s as legislative director for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and was a Distinguished Resource Fellow at the Center for Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. All of this fails to acknowledge a master's degree in social work from the University of Chicago and her early efforts setting up the first Community Action and Head Start programs in Massachusetts.
Seven years ago Ramsey decided it was time to exercise another part of her brain. She left the nation's capital for California with her then partner, now husband, Russell "Rusty" Schweickart, an Apollo 9 astronaut and commissioner of energy in California during Edmund (Jerry) Brown, Jr.'s, administration.
The transition from Beltway insider to Sausalito-based world traveler wasn't without its bumps. "I spent the first year [in California] thinking, 'What have I done?'" said Ramsey. She says she's very happy in California and claims, "I can now get through a day without reading three newspapers."
She now operates Morning Star Imports, serves on the board of the Fund for Constitutional Government and is a member of The Global Business Network, a cutting-edge consulting consortium that WIRED magazine called "a world leader in futurism." Futurism describes the process of anticipating world events; in this case the process is based on data obtained from and analyzed by a worldwide network of highly placed, technologically sophisticated people.
It's a long road from growing up a Ukrainian Catholic in West Hartford, Conn., through the corridors of influence and power in the nation's capital to importing jewelry crafted by the Tuareg nomads of West Africa. Ramsey points to a year in Germany as an American Field Service (AFS) student as the entrance ramp. Witnessing from abroad how people viewed Americans and how Americans viewed themselves had a profound impact on how she saw the world and how she wanted to change it, she recalls.
Ramsey was a history major at Colby. A dyslexic, she says she had to work harder and longer to keep up with the reading. She recalls "the pleasures of essay tests" and says she valued the intellectual respect implicit in professors taking time to read and evaluate essay answers. "They were trying to get at whether we were thinking, not whether we were reading and memorizing," she said.
She calls the early 1960s a great time for Colby's history department, mentioning Clifford Berschneider in particular as a professor who pushed students to learn. She won the William J. Wilkinson Prize in history as a senior.
She planned to go to law school-until she showed up at Dartmouth to take the law boards, that is. "I think there were five women there. All the men had on, I remember it very clearly, khaki pants and yellow shirts with beige sweaters or gray pants with pink shirts and gray sweaters, and I thought 'I can't live my life like that.' I wanted things to change! In that moment I had to rethink what it was I wanted out of my work."
Two things high on her list were racial justice and an end to poverty. "You can institutionalize change," she said. "If you believe in those things, you have to make a commitment to make them happen."
She was interested in the University of Chicago because of a law scholarship available at Colby, but the epiphany at the law boards sent her instead to the university's school of social work. A year in the field convinced her that she wasn't going to be satisfied making changes one case at a time, so she shifted her emphasis and eventually graduated with a concentration in community organization.
"Politics, for me, started out as public service, and I still consider it a high honor to serve the public good," she said. While there are people in Washington who manipulate the political system for self-aggrandizement, "I was never corrupted, and I know a lot of people who were never corrupted," she said, scoffing at the widespread disrespect for politicians in America today.
Regarding her acts of conscience and civil disobedience during the Vietnam War, she said, "When the system isn't listening, one has to ask how to get its attention. With a mule you hit it over the head; with the political system, if they're not listening when you come to the door, you have to go to the streets. It seems hard to remember that people took what they believed in seriously enough to risk their personal security, but it was that kind of willingness that saved us from a worse debacle in the war."
Coming from a background like that, Ramsey never would have predicted that fashion would play such a big role in her future. "When I came out here [to California]," she said, "I owned a wardrobe of dark suits and white shirts, little bow ties, and white earrings. When a friend said to me, 'Would you like to borrow something of mine to wear to our dinner party?' I knew I was in trouble."
A few months later, accompanying Schweikart to a meeting of the Association of Space Explorers (an organization he founded) in Saudi Arabia, she encountered the country's distinctive silver jewelry. In that moment Morning Star Imports was conceived, and her first contacts were made for a business that has taken her from Riyadh to Bangkok to Timbuktu. "I didn't know the difference between silver and gold, but I figured if I could write a book about nuclear weapons decision making, how hard could jewelry be?" she said.
She describes Morning Star Imports as a small jewelry business that sells to individuals, designers and shops mainly in California and Colorado. The Saudi connection lasted only until the Gulf War began, whereupon she shifted her attention to Southeast Asia. Safety concerns prompted by Cambodian activity in an area of northern Thailand where she was working precipitated another change of venue, and she now concentrates on geometric silver designs created by Tuareg artisans. She visits their homelands south of the Atlas Mountains every year and has contacts who also bring items to her.
While she still sees herself as an unreconstructed radical, Ramsey is amazed by her transformation from political animal to businessperson over the last six years. (Her initial reaction to the Gulf War, she admits, was concern for her business interests in Saudi Arabia.) But the business leaves room for a variety of other activities and interests as well. This winter she was headed east for a couple of months with Schweikart, who is developing one of the first low earth-orbiting satellites for mobile digital communication-e-mail's answer to the cellular phone. The satellite, slated for launch in January, will enable people with an antenna and a laptop computer to log onto computer networks from anywhere in the world. That's important for one whose primary business contacts are in central Niger. It's also critical for keeping in touch with members of the Global Business Network, who play e-mail tag from the world's most remote locations.
While she has consulted on a variety of issues with GBN, her major effort there has taken her back to an earlier interest-women's issues. Last year she helped science writer and author Pamela McCorduck organize and run a six-week, GBN-sponsored, on-line conference and subsequent two-day meeting on "Women As a Driving Force in 2010: A Window on Change."
"Being on the ground in Africa and other places, I was concerned the GBN's scenarios weren't reflecting the depth of change happening around the world," she said, explaining how she pushed for including more diverse views in the group's deliberations. "They were missing the changes that are happening with women, and for international corporations it makes an extraordinary difference." An article about GBN in the November WIRED magazine pointed out a tiny example-that no one foresaw the increase in urban traffic jams when American women entered the workforce en masse in the 1970s and '80s. Ramsey insists that, on an international scale, the changes in women's roles portend more fundamental and far-reaching shifts in society.
The economies of the Pacific Rim countries are being carried on the backs of women laborers, she says. They are educating each other and they are receiving more formal education, often staying in school while the boys "drop out to play with guns," she said.
"There's a theory that unless women take their clothes off or scream at men, they aren't really noticed," she said. "But there is a corps of international women's leadership emerging that's incredible." She used last year's summit on population in Cairo to illustrate. "Women from around the world came together to reconceptualize a problem and came up with potential solutions. It's one of the most exciting changes I've seen in my lifetime, because it's people who are committed to change who are doing it-working together and doing it professionally."
In the wake of the GBN conference on the future of women, and in anticipation of a women's summit in Beijing next fall, Ramsey and McCorduck are co-writing a book tentatively titled The Futures of Women: A Window on Change. Ramsey said it will be published after the Beijing conference, probably in April 1996.
She says she has good Colby company in the realm of women's advocacy. Lael Swinney Stegall '62, Ramsey's freshman-year roommate at Colby and one of her best friends, is running a comprehensive program for women's needs in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia and stays in touch via e-mail. Ramsey also regularly sees another freshman roommate and close friend, Gillian Lamb Butchman '63, a special education teacher in suburban Washington, who also operates a camp on Martha's Vineyard for persons with cerebral palsy.
Ramsey says she is convinced as ever that her principles are worth fighting for. "So, here I am . . . a never-was Communist, an unreconstructed radical in post-modernity, lighting candles of my own, and praying to the Goddess for the future."
From the Hill/Table of Contents/So Farr, So Good