Dog Days | THE VET COLLEGE STRUGGLES TO SAVE POISONED CANINES

VETERINARY LIVER SPECIALIST Sharon Center is on her cell phone, answering questions from yet another reporter as she pulls into the parking lot of Cornell's Companion Animal Hospital. It's a Friday morning in mid-January; in three days, she's going to Japan to meet with colleagues before heading to Cambodia for a much-needed birdwatching vacation. She doesn't have much time to talk--a blind woman is bringing in her seeing-eye dog's canine companion, the latest in a series of animals Cornell has been treating for aflatoxin poisoning. "There were so many of them," says Center, "and their lives were just dangling."

Since mid-December, the Vet college has fielded hundreds of calls from worried doctors and hysterical owners whose dogs had eaten tainted chow made by Missouri- based Diamond Pet Foods. Professors, students, and residents cancelled their holiday plans; Center has worked eighteen- hour days and been interviewed by media from NBC News to the New York Times.

Cornell had been involved in the case from the start, when Stuart Gluckman, DVM '72, who has a private practice outside Rochester, sent in a liver sample after six dogs from one kennel fell ill on the same day. Cornell established that it was a toxin rather than an infection, and Gluckman scoured the kennel for its source without success. Then a colleague, Sara Yarnall Sanders '81, DVM '98, mentioned she was treating two dogs for liver failure. "She told me what food they were eating, and it was the same thing the kennel was feeding," says Gluckman, who immediately informed Diamond. "That was the beginning of it."

Back at Cornell, Center went straight to the Vet library and dug up the definitive work on aflatoxin poisoning: a thesis written by John King, PhD '63, who had been Gluckman's pathology professor. "The problem with aflatoxin is, after it's eaten it metabolizes fast," says Center. "Once it binds to the DNA in liver cells, you can't do anything about it--there's no antidote. I looked at my students and said, ‘Guys, this could get really tough.' "

It was every pet owner's nightmare. Well-regarded dog food sold under the Diamond, Country Value, and Professional brand names was causing deadly liver damage. Due to a "perfect storm" of hot, humid weather conditions during the growing season, several shipments of corn sent to the Diamond plant in South Carolina had been contaminated with the fungi Aspergillus flavus and A. parasiticus. The toxin had gone undetected until December, when the company recalled about 1 million pounds of dog food. It didn't help that it happened during the holidays, and many consumers didn't hear about the recall. Despite an official FDA notice, weeks later the food was still filling dog dishes in twenty-three eastern states. (The company has since announced that it has adopted new, more rigorous testing procedures.)

One of the sick dogs was Tavi, a fouryear- old standard poodle owned by Cornell religions professor Jane Marie Law and her family. As they were lighting Hanukkah candles on the night of December 29, Tavi became lethargic and refused to eat. By New Year's Eve, she had collapsed and was suffering tremors. "Our dog was at death's door," says Law. Their vet, Brian Collins, DVM '94, advised bringing her to Cornell. Tavi stayed for ten days, receiving intravenous plasma, glucose, vitamins, and antioxidants, among other treatments. "Cornell impressed me so much," says Law, who was allowed to spend hours comforting Tavi in the intensive care unit. "The people were so intelligent, and they took such incredible care of my dog."

Tavi was one of the lucky ones. Although she could suffer life-long effects of the aflatoxin--including a higher risk of liver cancer--she recovered. About twothirds of the dozens of dogs who fell ill did not. "It was absolutely ghastly, and a very costly thing to deal with," says Center, who put treatment guidelines online to help vets and owners identify cases.

Minnie, a four-year-old golden retriever belonging to Janice and Robert Lugo of Catskill, New York, appeared asymptomatic when her owners happened to hear about the Diamond recall on New Year's Eve. The couple, special education teachers who own a coffee company dubbed Retriever Roasters in honor of their dogs, took her for a checkup just to be safe. "The vet took one look at her jaundiced eyes and gums and said, ‘She has it,' " Robert Lugo recalls.

Minnie spent the day at the vet receiving IV fluids. But when she came home, she started throwing up blood and became totally unresponsive.With their vet at a loss, the Lugos decided to drive to Ithaca despite a blinding snowstorm. "We just picked her up off the table and put her in the car," Robert Lugo says, "and four hours later we were at Cornell." They brought along their other golden, seven-year-old Jasper, who seemed to be fine--but he soon fell ill as well.

A few days later, the Lugos got a latenight call at Law's house (the professor, a total stranger, had met them in the waiting room and offered to house them while their dogs were in the hospital) to come back to the clinic immediately. "We walked in, and there were five doctors trying to keep Minnie alive, so we could get there and say goodbye," Lugo says. They disconnected her from the IVs, and she was euthanized; the Lugos decided to donate her body for a necropsy, or veterinary autopsy, in the hope of helping other dogs.

Then Jasper got sicker, vomiting and experiencing a dangerously low platelet count. "We really thought we were going to lose him, too," Lugo says. But after two weeks in the hospital, Jasper went home. "We can't say enough about Cornell," Lugo says. "These people love animals. You knew that their hearts were being torn out as well. They were doing everything they could for these poor creatures."

-- Beth Saulnier

Family Pictures | DOCUMENTARIAN DOUG BLOCK'S JOURNEY INTO THE SECRET LIFE OF PARENTS

aFTER DOUG BLOCK'S mother died suddenly in 2002, he visited his eighty-three-year-old father at his family's suburban Long Island home and asked him whether he missed his wife of more than fifty years. The answer was no.

A documentary filmmaker based in New York City, Block '75 filmed the moment for what he thought would just be a private video record of his last visit to the house in which he grew up. Instead, his father's startling admission became the catalyst for 51 Birch Street, a documentary exploration of his family history and his own reconciliation with his parents' lives. The film chronicles Block's return to his family home, 51 Birch Street in Port Washington, New York, as his father,Mike, prepares to move to Florida with his new wife, Kitty, who had worked as his secretary forty years before. Through the discovery of his mother Mina's diaries and interviews with siblings and family members, Block learns of her dissatisfaction with her marriage and life as a suburban mother, and her infatuation with another man. In turn, his father slowly reveals the true nature of his decades-long relationship with Kitty. "When it comes to your parents," Block says as he narrates the movie, "maybe ignorance is bliss."

It's an intensely personal film, but Block claims to be a reluctant tell-all memoirist. "The thing that helps me reveal personal things publicly is I try to focus on how it can help others by sharing it as opposed to trying to glorify myself through it," he says. "People are constantly coming up to me and saying how courageous I was to open myself up like this. I just don't see it that way.My focus is on a story about an ordinary family, and ordinary family dysfunction. I felt it could be enormously helpful to other people to tell the story of the kind of miscommunication and silence and secrets that goes on in every family."

The process also proved therapeutic for Block himself, helping him to heal a rift with his once-distant father. Mike Block has become an ongoing part of the film's story, accompanying his son to film festivals and answering audience questions after the screening.Members of the audience in turn have shared their own stories about their parents with the filmmaker. "I've never had a reaction with a film like this that seems to be hitting people so emotionally," he says.

Confronting the issues the film raised led to "endless sleepless nights," but Block approached 51 Birch Street in the same way he has every other project. "When you make documentaries, I really believe you have to love your characters and feel protective of them," he says. "You want to honor them as human beings. In that sense, I don't think I treated my family and myself any differently than I would if I were doing another film."

51 Birch Street has played at festivals in Toronto and Amsterdam, and Block is working on a distribution deal for a U.S. theatrical run. The film is also slated to air on HBO in about a year. "It's a very unusual film--I feel privileged to have been associated with it," says Sheila Nevins, president of HBO/Cinemax Documentary Films, which helped produce 51 Birch St. "He went into the battlefield of his childhood and his life, and I think that takes a lot of courage."

Block's love of filmmaking dates from his teenage years on Long Island, when he'd take frequent train trips to see movies in New York City. A communication major in CALS, he ushered at the Cornell Cinema so he could see every movie for free. With Dana Polan '75, now a professor of cinema studies at New York University, Block established a student-run theater in Risley Hall, where he once projected films on bed sheets attached to the wall. It would be the closest he'd ever come to film school: Block says that he didn't have the patience for formal training, and decided that the best education for a filmmaker was to go out and make films.

After graduation, he worked as a production assistant and assistant editor, eventually landing a job with the broadcast department at Newsweek. He shot newsmagazine stories around the world for a few years until the division disbanded, and then embarked on a freelance career, making films that reflect his personal interests. His first, The Heck with Hollywood (1991), follows a group of struggling first-time independent filmmakers, while 1999's Home Page focuses on online self-expression among the first generation of Internet users, the precursors to today's bloggers. As a producer, he's also helped create several award-winning feature documentaries, including Silverlake Life: The View from Here (1993), Jupiter's Wife (1995), and Love and Diane (2002).

Block isn't finished exposing the mysteries of family life, or his own marriage. He interviews his wife, Marjorie Silver, a professor of law at Touro Law Center in Huntington, New York, about their relationship in 51 Birch Street, and he says he would like to make another personal documentary with their teenage daughter, Lucy, about the bond between fathers and daughters. He jokes that he'd burn his diaries if Lucy approached him in thirty years to make a film about her parents. But, of course, he'd still cooperate. "I don't think we ever acknowledge our parents enough and what they did for us," he says. "Even if we had a hard time with them, on the most basic level, I think it's important to acknowledge that they did the best they could and appreciate all they gave up for us. For me, the film is my way of sharing my appreciation."

-- Lewis Rice

Shantytown Revisited | REMEMBERING THE SOUTH AFRICAN DIVESTMENT PROTESTS OF 1985 AND 1986

ONE APRIL DAY IN 1985, AS TULIPS bloomed in front of Day Hall, students gathered at the building to demand that the University divest its holdings in companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. "About 200 people showed up for that first protest and more than 100 got arrested," remembers Matthew Lyons '86, one of the organizers. "There was a sense we'd tapped into something, struck a chord." For Lyons, the event was a personal watershed as well. "I had spent most of that year feeling quite isolated and alienated from the student culture around me--the fraternity scene, the general party atmosphere," he says. "All of sudden, there was this whole other culture, politically minded and with a sense of shared goals."

It wasn't the first time that Cornell students had asked the trustees to divest, nor would it be the last. But the scale of the protests that spring was dramatic and unexpected: over 1,000 would ultimately be arrested for sit-ins at Day Hall. The arrests at Cornell followed closely on the heels of protests at Columbia and Berkeley, and anti-apartheid demonstrations soon spread to campuses across the country.

On April 20–22, faculty and former students will come together on the Hill to commemorate the protests of 1985 and 1986. According to English professor Paul Sawyer, one of the event's organizers, there will be a photo exhibit and a series of events centered around the divestment movement and other moments in the history of Cornell activism, from the Straight takeover to Redbud Woods.

For many of those involved, that surge of activism twenty years ago had a profound influence on their lives. Lyons, an archivist at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, is also an independent historian who studies social movements and systems of oppression. Kelly McGowan '85, who was a spokesperson for the divestment activists, now consults with organizations serving disenfranchised communities. "They were definitely formative years," she says. "South Africa was such a glaring example of injustice, a movement that needed support. It was a unique and rare experience to really make a difference."

McGowan is part of a group of roughly twenty alumni who met during the movement, have remained active in social justice issues, and stay in touch with each other. Among them is Joan Meyers '88, who is at the University of California, Davis, finishing a dissertation on workerowned cooperatives. "Having friends doing good work supports us and keeps us going,"Meyers says. "The anti-apartheid movement brought us together."

Matthew Lyons also maintains friendships forged in that era. He was politically active before the divestment protests, he says, but joining that movement shifted his focus. "A lot of the people I felt connected with believed that, well, the next step is looking in a serious way at racism and class oppression in the U.S. I'm talking mainly about white activists--activists of color had been doing that all along. It wasn't that I hadn't been concerned about racism before then, but I hadn't made it a focus of my work."

The movement also changed how Lyons approached activism. "It was a different style of protest than I'd been involved in before--the sit-ins, being ordered to leave Day Hall at the end of the day, being dragged out," he says. "People participated in spur-of-the-moment ways--you didn't know what was going to happen. There was a sense of the energy of the crowd. It was a spontaneous, openended style of activism."

One innovation of that spring was Shantytown, a collection of shacks that students built to symbolize the living conditions in South Africa and serve as an information center. Students at Berkeley erected a similar encampment around the same time; according to Lyons, the publicity inspired imitations around the country. "That was probably our doing--getting Shantytown into the culture," he says. "We helped to pioneer that."

Early on,Matthew Lyons had asked his father, David--then a professor of law and philosophy at Cornell--to join the student protests. "His response was that he liked to save himself for emergencies," Matthew recalls. "So I said, ‘If I call you from Day Hall and say this is an emergency, will you come?' He said yes, and he did."Matthew Lyons, Meyers, and McGowan were each arrested multiple times for remaining in Day Hall after closing time, and David Lyons was among the first of about twenty-five faculty members to be arrested. All charges against them were ultimately dropped, as were the charges against nearly all of those arrested for trespassing that spring; no one was convicted.

David Lyons, who now teaches in the law school at Boston University, says that he and other Cornell faculty members were struck by the divestment coalition's emphasis on equality. "We were so impressed by them, having as our benchmarks the student political organizations of the Fifties and Sixties," he says. "They were such an egalitarian and reasonable and non-hierarchical, non-sexist group." The divestment movement had widespread support across the campus community: large numbers of students participated in the protests, a faculty referendum overwhelmingly supported divestment, and unionized staff voted unanimously in its favor. The Board of Trustees, however, was less receptive. Soon after the 1985 sitins began, then-President Frank Rhodes told a group of protesters that the trustees believed investing in socially responsible corporations doing business in South Africa was the best way to aid non-white South Africans.

In 1986, faced with escalating opposition, the trustees relented somewhat and adopted a policy of selective divestment. That year, the University held about $146 million of stock in companies doing business in South Africa; by late 1988, the figure had dropped to about $42 million. In January 1989, despite weekly divestment pickets the previous fall, the trustees declined to reduce the University's South African holdings further. The question became moot in the next year, as the South African government fell and the apartheid system was dismantled.

Though the protesters could claim--at best--only a partial victory, Matthew Lyons remembers the spring of 1985 as a pivotal moment. "Here was an opportunity to be part of this larger movement that may at least in some small way help to free South Africa," he recalls thinking. "It was a charge to be part of those protests. It may or may not have had a large effect on the greater issue, but it did on those who were involved."

--Kathleen Kearns '85
with research assistance from
Annie Kearns '09

A League of His Own | GUIDEBOOK AUTHOR MARC ZAWEL '04 TAKES THE IVIES TO SCHOOL

the summer before Marc Zawel's senior year, the guidebook company College Prowler approached him with an offer. College Prowler produces a line of books written and compiled by undergraduate contributors, and Zawel '04, then a Daily Sun editor, jumped at the opportunity to helm Untangling the Ivy League 2006, an indepth guide to the Ancient Eight. He even convinced Vice Provost Isaac Kramnick to support a semester of independent study researching Ivy lore. "Besides offering guidance and ideas," Zawel says, "he provided me with a lot of statistics on admissions and demographics across the Ivy League, and Cornell in particular."

The resulting book offers Ivy hopefuls a look at college life that "goes beyond the typical regurgitation-of-information sessions that you attend at these schools," says Zawel. A student correspondent created each entry, blending facts and tips with quotes that offer blunt assessments of academics, housing, and social life. (Cornell gets a B+ for academics but a C– for "Girls": "I hope you like books, snow, and alcohol because the girls offer very little at Cornell," one student declares.)

The project not only gave Zawel a crash course in publishing and marketing, it offered some perspective on the limits of the Ivy mystique. "The Ivy League to a lot of people means academics, prestige, and competitiveness," he says. "But if you say ‘Ivy League' in Utah or Texas or Florida, if they don't know it's an athletic conference, then they don't know anything about it."

-- Jill Weiskopf '06