Bailey, Unveiled | HISTORIC HALL REOPENS AFTER LENGTHY RENOVATION

tHE OPENING AND CLOSING EVENTS OF PRESIDENT David Skorton's inauguration had another guest of honor: a newly renovated Bailey Hall. The historic building played host to the academic symposium that kicked off the inaugural festivities, as well as the concert--featuring the new president's flute rendition of "My Funny Valentine"--that wound them down.

Many visitors got their first glimpse of Bailey's $17.3 million facelift, in the works since March 2004. Improvements included the restoration of the concert hall's original eleven-foot-high front doors; a $1 million audiovisual system; acoustic panels that can be flipped from reflective to absorbent surfaces, depending on the event; and handicapped access throughout. The hard, narrow wooden seats that so vexed the posterior of many a Cornellian have been replaced with seating that's both wider and cushioned, with robin's-egg blue upholstery. (The added comfort came at a cost: seating capacity dropped from 1,948 to 1,324.)

Named for beloved agriculture professor Liberty Hyde Bailey, the hall was designed by Edward Green, a prominent Buffalo architect and member of the Class of 1878. When it officially opened in June 1913, wrote Cornell historian Morris Bishop '14, PhD '26, it "conferred a boon on the whole University." Since then, Bailey has been the setting for countless displays of pomp and circumstance, as well as rock concerts, political events (it hosted a New York State gubernatorial debate this September), and academic lectures, including Professor James Maas's everpopular Psych 101 course.

While planners sought to maintain the building's historic atmosphere, the new Bailey does have a more modern feel: the huge chandelier is gone, and an acoustic apron of sleek, burnished metal curves above the stage. "We have a mixture of old and new," says project manager Rick Gellert, noting that the historic elements that were removed went to a local preservation agency for reuse in other buildings. "The goal was to preserve the basic aesthetics."

The biggest changes came behind the scenes. An addition at the rear of the building made it possible to install air-conditioning--a Bailey first--as well as improvements in heating and noise reduction. And performers, rejoice: you can now exit stage right and enter stage left without running downstairs and through the basement. The addition provides crossing space as well as dressing rooms and a green room, all wired with monitors to observe the action onstage. Also housed in the addition, nestled in a custom storage room, is a new Steinway grand piano. The instrument prompted its own minor renovation: when architects mocked up the building design, they realized that a stairway would block the piano from being wheeled from storage to the stage.

They moved the stairway.

-- Beth Saulnier

Life During Wartime | ONE STUDENT'S SUMMER JOB IN BEIRUT TAKES AN UNEXPECTED TURN

In July, Hotel student Ethan Hawkes '07 traveled to Lebanon for a summer position with the International Executive Service Corps, a nonprofit contracted by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to provide managerial and technical assistance to developing countries. Hawkes met with hotel owners and government officials to help assess the Lebanese tourism industry, which was finally recovering from a civil war that ended in 1990. One of his fellow volunteer consultants was Doug Fuss '61 of Savannah, Georgia, a former IBM executive. The two alums formed a close friendship during their stay in Beirut, particularly after Hezbollah fighters based in southern Lebanon kidnapped a pair of Israeli soldiers on July 12, touching off a month-long Israeli military offensive that effectively trapped Hawkes and Fuss in the besieged city. They were evacuated by U.S. Marines on July 19. After returning to Ithaca in August to resume his studies, Hawkes recalled the experience for CAM.

oN MY FIRST NIGHT IN BEIRUT, I knocked on the door of the hotel room next to mine, and this guy in a Cornell T-shirt came out. Doug and I were the only two Americans on the assignment, and we bonded immediately. He'd been to Lebanon before, which proved to be very useful.

Beirut is a heady mix of East-meets- West. It used to be called the Paris of the Middle East, and the Lebanese were hellbent on restoring that image. I counted at least twelve construction cranes on the skyline. You could tell that times had been rough--all the buildings more than fifteen years old were pockmarked with bullet holes. But these places were right next to new apartment buildings. Lebanon was expecting 1.6 million visitors in 2006--a record.

I'd been up in northern Lebanon on the morning that the two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped. At first nobody told me anything.We were listening to an Arabic radio station on the drive back to Beirut when they announced the news. I could tell it was bad from my driver's reaction. When he finally told me what happened, my stomach jumped.We arrived in Beirut that afternoon. Already they were putting up roadblocks, checking everyone on the way in. Doug and I decided to wait and see what the situation was in the morning.

That night, I woke up at about 3 a.m.; the windows were shaking and there was this really loud noise--four F-16s flying low over the city. I ran to the window and could see them dropping bombs on the airport--you can see little lights on the ends of the bombs. I ran over to Doug's room.We got out the maps, and he said, "OK, things are going to go downhill pretty quickly."

At first we looked at the roads to Syria--it's the only other viable border-- but then we thought there must be a ferry to Cyprus. The next morning we heard that there was a naval blockade and Israel was cutting off all shipping, so Plan B was out. At that point, we figured the safest thing was to lay low, because the U.S. was blaming Syria for funneling weapons to Hezbollah and we weren't sure we'd get across the border.

Initially, daily life was much the same--people were out on the streets, restaurants were open, and there was a sense of,We've been through this before. But after Hezbollah started firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel, the bombs came back. Sometimes we'd hear huge explosions and go downstairs to ask the hotel staff what was going on. They'd say, "Oh, those are just percussion bombs." One day the bombs would go off at night and then the next they'd hit at 1 p.m., when everybody was outside. It was clearly planned for maximum psychological impact.

For the next six days, we lived on CNN.We'd see the shots of smoke coming up from the city, and you could look out your window and see the same thing. Our hotel was in a Christian area of the city, and it was flooded with Muslim families from southern Beirut because it was safer. We were a bit concerned about stray bombs. And two days after we left, Israel did bomb the district we'd been in.

Doug and I spent a lot of time together that week because we couldn't go to work--they had dropped concertina wire all over downtown and there were military guys with machine guns everywhere. We'd be out having lunch and a bomb would explode in the area. It was good to have Doug around, just to help take my thoughts off it, share stories about Cornell, and figure out what our plan was going to be.

USAID sent in a team from Dubai and offered the option of getting out on a bus to Damascus. The UN also tried to send in a bus, but it was turned back when the eastern roads were bombed. At that point, things were deteriorating quickly, but Doug and I decided that we'd wait for the official U.S. government evacuation. The U.S. Embassy had sent us an e-mail that said they were working on a plan and told us what the bill for our evacuation would be.

By day four or five, all the restaurants had shut down. The American ones--we had a Chili's next door--were the first to close. Every day Doug and I would walk around the block to see what was going on and build up our courage.We'd go to the grocery store, which fortunately stayed open. All the liquor stores were cleaned out the first night. Life on the streets got pretty quiet by the end--everybody was hunkering down, watching their country go up in smoke on TV.

In the hotel we watched the Hezbollah station. It was like watching Nazi propaganda films. The only words I knew were "Israel" and "United States of America," but you could feel the hate. And then tanks blowing up, Hezbollah fighters crouching with their weapons, guys marching in the street wearing yellow headbands. Even regular TV news was very different from the Western media-- it was much more graphic. They would be holding up dead children with their faces completely burned off, one after another.

What struck me about the ordinary Lebanese was how little they felt they could do about the situation. There was a sense of frustration and helplessness. I wouldn't say people were angry. A little dismayed--certainly at Israel but also at the U.S. for allowing them to continue the attacks. It was tough watching CNN in Beirut and seeing the president essentially give Israel the green light, despite the international community's outrage. I apologized to as many people as I could.

Finally, we got a call: "This is the U.S. Embassy and we'd like you to be here in one hour." They told us to take only one small carry-on and bring enough food for three days. We had no idea if we were being evacuated or if we'd just be held there. It was level-one security at the embassy: they'd scan your car for bombs and there were snipers on the buildings. At the front gates there were about forty tourists locked outside, waving their passports. The embassy officials told them to find somewhere safe to sleep. Doug and I later figured out that they prioritized the evacuation. First to go were non-essential U.S. government employees, which included us. We were among the first sixty-four evacuees out of the country, out of about 12,000 Americans. It was hard to see the families with young kids as we breezed by, but at the time we didn't know if we were being evacuated.

When we got inside, the embassy was having a pizza party, with an open bar.We could look out at the Israeli warships in the harbor and see the smoke rising from southern Beirut. It was surreal. Doug and I bought U.S. Embassy T-shirts. On the back they said, "U.S. Embassy in Beirut: the best place to get bombed," with a picture of a martini in a bunker.

After a half hour, we were handed earplugs, helmets, gas masks, and life preservers, and told that the helicopters were coming.We hustled out to the helipad, just like the movies. The helicopter was a CH- 53, a well-armored carrier-based helicopter with a huge gun mounted on the back and two machine-guns pointing out the sides. The Marines were ready for action-- they had the safeties off. Once we got out over the Mediterranean, the gunners took the metal plates out of their flak vests.

The flight was about an hour and a half.We flew to a British Marine base in Cyprus, on the Greek side. They had buses there that took us to a hotel in Larnaca; then we were on our own. Someone from CBS News asked if I could stay an extra day to do an interview--they were sending in a team--and they'd pay for my flight home. I called my mom and asked her if I should stay. She said,"No!" So I told them, "That's OK. I think I should go home."

-- Ethan Hawkes '07,
as told to David Dudley

Forbidden Fruit | IS THE MANGOSTEEN THE NEW POMEGRANATE?

sINCE THE 1600s, EUROPEAN EXPLORERS HAVE written about a strange fruit they found in Southeast Asia. It has a thick purple rind, juicy white flesh sectioned like an orange, and a taste that inspires something close to poetry. "A delicate, delicious flavour, which recalls that of a fine peach, muscatel grapes, and something peculiar and indescribable which no other fruit has," was how Italian naturalist Odoardo Beccari described the fruit he tasted in Borneo. Centuries later, opinions about the mangosteen haven't changed. Gourmet magazine in 2003 described its flavor as "almost unbearably exquisite--a sweet-tart melding of elegance and opulence that had echoes of fruit of every climate . . . mingled into one soft, moist, fragrant mouthful."

Despite the rapture they inspire, fresh mangosteens (which are unrelated to mangos) have not been available in the continental U.S. for decades. But not for much longer, if Ian Crown '73 has his way. The U.S. Department of Agriculture forbids importation of the tantalizing fruit from Southeast Asia or Hawaii, for fear of invasive fruit flies. But Puerto Rico and eighteen Caribbean and Central American countries face no restrictions. That's where Crown comes in: his Panoramic Fruit Company in Puerto Rico is poised to become the first producer to ship fresh mangosteens to the U.S., as early as June 2007.

The financial stakes are high. Experts predict mangosteens could initially sell for $40 per pound at gourmet shops, and Crown estimates he'd easily have buyers for five tons every week or two.

If only he could grow that many. Native to Indonesia and Malaysia, mangosteen trees are a sensitive species of evergreen that require an extremely tropical, humid climate. They're difficult to propagate and when raised from seed take eight to ten years to bear fruit. "It's called the ‘Queen of Fruits' "Crown says, "because it's a royal pain to grow."

Cultivating coffee, not mangosteens, was what Crown and his wife, Susan Cohen Crown '73, had in mind in the early 1990s. By the time the couple, who spend most of their time in Connecticut, bought a former livestock farm in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, in 1994, they had turned their sights to tropical fruit. "We said, ‘Let's go with something totally high risk and not sure-fire.' It seemed like a good idea at the time," says Crown, who drew on his background as a horticultural broker turned commodities broker. "If I could succeed where so few had bothered to try, we'd have a monopoly-- or at least I'd be the first." They planted rambutan, longan, mangosteen, and durian, eliminating those that didn't grow well.

Mangosteen stuck, almost in spite of itself. Crown spent two years coddling seeds and seedlings collected from Hawaii and Florida. But when he transplanted them to the fields, about 25 percent died from lack of proper irrigation. A fire destroyed the rambutan plants in 1997. A hurricane damaged much of his farm a year later. After starting over from scratch, he now has 1,000 trees, thirty-five of which are bearing fruit. "I basically approached it with the conviction ‘I can do it,' "Crown says. "That turned out to be the case, but it still didn't make it easy. It's a miserable plant."

Tell that to millions of rabid fans in the U.S., from foodies to health buffs. Gourmets drool over the mangosteen's rhapsodic flavor--and the cachet that comes from limited availability. Crown's entire 2006 crop, about 200 pounds, could have been sold several times over to highend shops in New York City, says Erwan Landivinec, a vice president at International Produce Exchange, a division of Baldor's, one of two specialty food distributors that will carry Crown's harvest next summer. "I could have put it on eBay and gotten $100 a pound."Mangosteens would offer a profitable return even if marketed solely to Asians and Asian Americans, Landivinec says, since they comprise 11.9 million people in the U.S.

Thirst for the juice, which is legal to import, is even greater. Sales of mangosteen supplements in juice form quadrupled in two years, shooting from $30 million in 2003 to $120 million in 2005. Its market is now comparable to that of such nutraceutical all-stars as ginkgo biloba or saw palmetto, says Grant Ferrier, editor of Nutrition Business Journal.

The buzz stems from the fruit's supposed health benefits. Juice manufacturer Naturally Thai Mangosteen claims that only prunes have more antioxidants per 100 grams. Although there is little research on the specific properties of mangosteen antioxidants, that isn't slowing sales. Ferrier predicts the market will continue to flourish, perhaps reaching $350 million by 2010. "Five years ago, you couldn't get mangosteen juice anywhere," Ferrier says. "This year, you can buy it at Costco."

For now, it's the gourmet fresh fruit market that Crown is focusing on. But before he can cash in, he faces several more challenges--like competition from Thailand. The USDA is considering a proposal to allow Thailand, a major producer, to sell mangosteens that have been irradiated to kill insect pests. Crown hopes to fight Thailand's quantity with quality, selling fresher, non-irradiated fruit. If the USDA requires he irradiate his fruit as well--a problematic proposition, since Puerto Rico lacks the facilities--he plans to drop the U.S. market and sell to the Caribbean, Canada, and Europe. Or he could forego the cost and hassle of shipping altogether and sell his entire harvest in Puerto Rico at a handsome profit.

So why bother exporting to the mainland U.S. at all? The answer lies on your tongue, Crown says."Have you ever tasted a mangosteen?"

-- Susan Kelley

Space Shot | STUDENT SATELLITE READIED FOR COMPETITION

during Spring Break 2007, while many of their fellow students sunbathe on the beach, eighty-five undergrads will be sprinting to finish their entry in a three-year competition to design and build a working satellite. The prize? The chance to see their orbiter launched into space, with the $3 million tab picked up by the federal government.

Sponsored by NASA, the Air Force, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the University Nanosatellite-4 competition pits eleven student teams in a contest to design a satellite no more than eighteen-and-a-half inches high or wide and weighing less than thirty kilograms. The Cornell University Satellite (CUSat) team plans to field not one but two identical satellites, stacked atop each other. Their goal is to demonstrate that one spacecraft can diagnose damage in another--a subject of great interest to the team's lead investigator, Mason Peck, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

One of the key features of CUSat is a global positioning system algorithm, written by engineering professor Mark Psiaki, that can measure distance to the millimeter in real time, keeping the satellites properly oriented toward each other. Such technology could make spacecraft inspection safer and cheaper, says project manager and selfdescribed "space dork" Kris Young '06. "Whenever you send an astronaut outside the vessel, there's a huge risk," he says. "With this, you throw it out the window of the space shuttle and it does everything autonomously for you."

The competition ends in March, when aerospace industry experts gather to judge the satellites on feasibility, documentation, relevance, and student participation. Before the winning satellite is launched, it must pass several rigorous reviews, including one by the Department of Defense. "We spend a lot of time at the lab and don't get much sleep," says Young. "But people aren't here just for course credit--they're here to build a real spacecraft."