Writer Monica Wood.

Monica Wood, author of a popular memoir about growing up in a small Maine town in the early 1960s, reads from and discusses When We Were the Kennedys聽 at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 28, in Olin Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Admission is open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required — please visit . The event is sponsored by the Office of the President with support from the Dean of the Faculty’s and Dean of Students’ offices. For more information, please call 207-786-6067.

Watch a livestream of the event: Live from 乐播传媒.

When We Were the Kennedys聽(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) is the story of how a family, a town and then a nation mourn and find the strength to move on. Living in Mexico, Maine, in 1963, the Wood family is much like its close neighbors, Catholics and immigrants dependent on the fathers’ wages from the Oxford Paper Company.

But when Monica’s father suddenly dies on his way to work, her mother and the four deeply connected Wood daughters are set adrift.

This wrenching memoir has gotten attention nationwide. The Washingtonian wrote, “Wood’s gorgeously wrought new book . . . is a sharp, stunning portrait of a family’s grief and healing, and it also offers a refreshing lens through which to view the [assassination of President John F. Kennedy], as his family’s loss helps the Woods feel less adrift in their own sea of anguish.”

As this year’s assigned reading for the incoming first-year class at 乐播传媒, Wood’s book was a good fit. “Wood’s thoughtful and affecting memoir gives marvelous insight into a community similar to Lewiston-Auburn, with vivid depictions of the multiple cultures that coexist in the area,” says Kirk Read, associate dean of the faculty and professor of French and francophone studies.

“She gives particular insight into the lives of working-class families who depended on the mills and who survived the boom and bust over decades.” Wood contemplates French Canadian and Irish immigrant cultures, the health of the Androscoggin River and the role of the Catholic church in a mill town, all relevant to 乐播传媒’ surrounding communities.

Wood also examines the iconic status of the Kennedys during the 1960s and the Maine politics that played out in parallel to the national scene. Figures such as U.S. Sen. Edmund S. Muskie, a member of the 乐播传媒 class of 1936, figure in the background of Wood’s memoir.

Winner of the 2013 Maine Literary Award for When We Were the Kennedys, Wood explains her storytelling roots: “My father and my mother’s parents came from Prince Edward Island in Canada, and brought with them the island tradition of storytelling,” she says.

“Although my sisters and I were the first generation in the family to go to college, I think of my background as a literary one. My father had a lilting island brogue and beautiful grammar; the notion that stories had to be told in a certain way was something I learned early. My grandfather used to sing long, melodramatic, novelistic ballads, another island tradition.”

Wood’s other books include Any Bitter Thing聽(Ballantine Books, 2005), Ernie’s Ark聽(Ballantine, 2002) and My Only Story聽(Ballantine, 2000).

Albie Sachs.

South African human rights activist Justice Albert Sachs, a foe of apartheid and key player in overturning South Africa’s ban on gay marriage, offers a talk at 乐播传媒 at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 24, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Part of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships’ Civic Forum Series, Sachs’ talk is titled Ubuntu: An African Contribution to the Universality of Human Rights. Admission is open to the public at no cost.

The event is co-sponsored by the Office of Intercultural Education; the Multifaith Chaplaincy; the departments of politics, African American studies, anthropology and sociology; the divisions of social sciences and humanities; the Program in Women and Gender Studies; and the Justice for Women Lecture Series of the University of Maine School of Law.

For more information, please call 207-786-6202.

An African National Congress activist during the apartheid years in South Africa, Sachs went on to play an important role in the creation of the country’s first democratic constitution. He gained international attention again in 2005 as the author of the Constitutional Court’s holding that overturned South Africa’s ban on gay marriage.

In 1955, at the age of 21, Sachs opened a law practice. He represented South Africans charged under racial statutes and security laws, with many of his clients risking the death penalty. As a result of this work, his practice was restricted, he was arrested, and was put in solitary confinement for 168 days without a trial.

Sachs went to England in 1966, later moving to Mozambique to teach law. In 1988, while he was teaching in exile, South African agents planted a bomb in his car. The explosion killed a passer-by and cost Sachs an arm and the vision in one eye.

Though he never quit working against apartheid in exile, the bombing moved him to fully devote himself once again to effecting democracy in South Africa.

With regime change achieved in 1990, Sachs served on the Constitutional Committee and advocated strongly for the inclusion of a Bill of Rights and an independent judiciary, as well as rights to housing, health care and other essentials. In 1994, after the first democratic election, President Nelson Mandela appointed Sachs as a justice in the Constitutional Court.

Sachs led the creation of the 1996 South African post-apartheid constitution and was involved in several landmark rulings for the new country, such as the overturning of the gay marriage ban.

Sachs has traveled all over the world to speak about human rights and how to achieve them in partitioned societies. He juggles his passion for human rights with interests in art and architecture, and had a voice in the design of the Constitutional Court Building and the creation of its art collection.

He has written several books, including The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs聽(Harvill Press, 1966), published during his time in exile in England but banned in his home country. In 1991, Sachs won the Alan Paton Award for his book Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter (University of California Press). His most recent title is The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law, published by Oxford University Press in 2009.

Former Nordic skier Kaitlyn McElroy ’07 has found new purpose in kayaking.

ESPNW features the story of Kaitlyn McElroy 鈥�07, a former Nordic skier at 乐播传媒 College, who is competing at the kayak world championships in Germany after a skiing training accident forced her to switch sports.

After breaking an arm and a few ribs and injuring her back in the accident, McElroy attempted to return to skiing but could not perform at the same level she had before the injury.

The native of Bethel, Maine, found it difficult to move on from skiing but has found new purpose in the sport of kayaking.

鈥淚 missed skiing tremendously, and I still do, but I definitely fond something I love just as much if not more,鈥� McElroy tells ESPNW.

The Boston Globe Magazine features a story by journalist Jon Marcus ’82 about his uncle, Arthur Marcus, who from the 1950s to the 1970s was one of the best at his job: providing timely sports results, especially results from Suffolk Downs, to various illegal gambling operations in the Boston area, all the while eluding authorities determined to catch him in the act.

Bookies and other gamblers used to depend on skilled “line men,” like Uncle Arthur, for timely sports results, including race results from Suffolk Downs in East Boston, shown here in the 1930s. Photograph courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

“Uncle Arthur ‘dry-cleaned’ himself every day,” . “He moved his operations around the city, right under the noses of the people watching him…. He took bets on water soluble paper that could be dissolved instantly. He led buzz-cut Joe Fridays the right way down one-way streets in his midnight-blue 1967 Lincoln Continental, then spun around to the wrong way, knowing that the G-men wouldn’t follow.”

U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins arrives at the White House for a Cabinet meeting in September 1938. Photograph by Harris & Ewing/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Laura Fortman, executive director of the Frances Perkins Center and Maine’s former commissioner of labor, gives a lecture titled Frances Perkins: New Deal Legacy and Lessons for Today at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 10, in the Benjamin Mays Center at 乐播传媒, 95 Russell St.

This lecture is the autumn’s fifth Civic Forum Series event, presented by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the 乐播传媒 office responsible for the college’s community-based learning, environmental stewardship and volunteer programs. The talk is open to the public at no cost. For more information, call 207-786-8283.

Perkins, the nation’s first secretary of labor and the first female Cabinet member, is credited as the architect of much of President Franklin Roosevelt’s most significant New Deal legislation. She proposed and helped implement major reforms dealing with labor and working conditions that we take for granted today, such as child labor laws and workplace safety laws. She is also the “mother” of Social Security.

Perkins was the daughter of Maine-born parents, and the family residence, the so-called Brick House on the Damariscotta River in Newcastle, was her beloved vacation retreat. Today the house is the site of the , dedicated to the history of Perkins’ career and the New Deal era, to carrying on her work and to interpreting her vision for a healthy and productive workforce.

Fortman served as Maine labor commissioner in the Baldacci administration from 2003-2010, administering the very laws and regulations protecting Maine workers that Perkins set in place. Fortman, who became the Perkins Center’s second director in October 2011, will focus her 乐播传媒 talk on Perkins’ enduring legacy and its relevance to the United States today and to this November’s election.

From left, Convocation speakers Umar Khan ’13, professor Stephen Engel and 乐播传媒 President Clayton Spencer chat prior to Convocation 2012. Also shown are professors Sawyer Sylvester and Thomas Tracy. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College.

Telling the Class of 2016 that there is no higher reward than to work with passion and purpose, President Clayton Spencer offered as an example a mentor from her own past: the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“He was meant to be a senator, and he was lucky enough to figure that out early and throw himself into a career that he approached each and every day with passion, diligence and joy, and with a lot of laughs — not all at my expense,” said Spencer, who worked for Kennedy as chief education counsel for the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources in the 1990s.

Read the full texts of Convocation remarks by President Clayton Spencer and Assistant Professor of Politics Stephen Engel.

Learn more about the Class of 2016.

Having moved into Lane Hall just two months ago, Spencer was among the newbies during Tuesday’s Convocation as she gave her first speech as president to the 乐播传媒 community. She addressed 503 first-year students and 17 transfers, along with hundreds of upperclassmen, staff and faculty in Alumni Gym. (For the second year in a row, the ceremony opening the new academic year was forced inside by weather, this year by rain from the remnants of Hurricane Isaac.)

Assistant Professor of Politics Stephen Engel connected political compromise with the characteristics of a 乐播传媒 education in his Convocation address. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College.

Kennedy was an apt choice of subject for Spencer’s talk. Yes, the Massachusetts senator afforded her the opportunity to share a bit of her past with a community that’s just getting to know her. More importantly, though, the senator was renowned for his effectiveness in crossing ideological boundaries in the Senate in order to get things done — in short, he was a master of compromise. And compromise was the theme of Convocation 2012.

Both Spencer’s remarks and the Convocation address by Stephen Engel, an assistant professor of politics who started at 乐播传媒 in 2011, explored that theme. (The other Convocation speakers were Dean of the Faculty Pam Baker ’70, student government President Umar Khan ’13 and Multifaith Chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace.)

Their words fell on receptive ears, or so it was hoped, as the new students’ summer reading assignment was the political study The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It, by Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson (Princeton University Press, 2012).

The book argues that political campaigns, on the one hand, and governing, on the other, require antithetical mindsets and skill sets. In particular, the art of compromise is essential to effective governance, as it must satisfy diverse stakeholders. But the political establishment has lapsed into a “constant campaign” mode, a sort of wartime mentality whose extreme and unwavering positions leave no room for compromise, making good governance next to impossible.

Quoting columnist Robert Kuttner, President Spencer described Kennedy as a politician who “would work with the Devil to produce progressive legislation to better the condition of regular Americans.” In other words, he practiced what Gutmann and Thompson are preaching, and Spencer offered three anecdotes illustrating how “compromise played out in the legislative process before my very eyes.”

A little rain didn’t dampen student spirits on Convocation Day 2012. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College.

In two of her stories, Spencer played the zealous policy analyst raring to bend the Senate to the inevitability of her expertise — until Kennedy showed her a better way that would honor the sensibilities of their opponents and lead to legislation that would still advance the cause, while minimizing wounded feelings and keeping a light in the window for future collaborations.

Effective compromise, she told the Alumni Gym audience, “involves personal relationships, flexibility and a sense of timing” — when to press a point and when to wait. Moreover, because all people construct personal narratives that help them make sense of their lives and work, Spencer said that “part of working effectively with people is understanding that, and respecting the narratives of others.”

Spencer’s third vignette seemed especially relevant as, 830 miles away in her native state of North Carolina, the Democratic National Convention was getting under way. She recalled the aftermath of the elections of 1994, the year of the Contract with America and the Republican ascent in Congress. As Kennedy sought to preserve education funding in the face of budget-cutting pressure, he eschewed dialogue in favor of hardball tactics (such as importing Bay State students for a demonstration on the Senate floor) not to advance a specific bill, but to reframe the dialogue itself.

The lesson for the Class of 2016? “Always keep your larger goals in mind. And remember that you have to step back sometimes to reframe a problem in order to make progress.”

Making some historical detours to remind listeners that, though American politics seem dire right now, they鈥檝e actually been worse, Engel related lessons of the assigned reading to the rewards of a 乐播传媒 education.

If 乐播传媒 isn’t a legislature, he said, it shares with such bodies the imperative of engaging actively with ideas. “To do so successfully, to make good on the promise that the college makes to you, our community requires the very same foundation underlying the spirit of compromise, most notably mutual respect” — a concept that he took pains to distinguish from tolerance.

“Live and let live” is one thing, but mutual respect is more: It’s a consideration based on active engagement with the ideas of others, and on the willingness to re-examine our own ideas.

“So what we at 乐播传媒 ask of you — what we challenge you to do; what we give you the support to achieve — is that you seize opportunity to scrutinize the ideas and values you hold today, to test them against others and to listen intently to people different from yourselves,” he said.

“At 乐播传媒, you have the freedom to develop your ideas, to speak and to write with conviction and depth. But that freedom demands a simultaneous commitment to be responsible for the consequences of that speech, for the impact that your ideas and actions have on those around you.”

Nate Boone’s yearbook photo in the 1952 Mirror.

As he and his fellow Marine Corps veterans prepared to receive the Congressional Gold Medal in June, Nathaniel Boone ’52 recalled for the media his experiences as one of the first black U.S. Marines.

Twenty thousand African-American Marines, including Boone, went through basic training at the racially segregated Montford Point facility at Camp LeJeune, N.C., between 1942 and 1949.

To honor their pioneering achievements, Congress presented Boone, a retired lawyer who lives in Manchester Center, Vt., and his fellow 367 surviving Montford Point veterans the nation鈥檚 highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, on June 27.

Sixty-six years ago, Boone was a Marine recruit traveling by train from his home in Englewood, N.J. to Washington, D.C. There, in the nation’s capital, Boone entered the segregated, Jim Crow South.

Nate Boone stands outside his home in Manchester Center, Vt. Photograph by Patrick McArdle/Rutland Herald.

鈥淚 knew what was going to happen because my mother and my aunt, her sister, were born and raised in Georgia,”聽Boone . “They told me what to expect and told me I would have to get in the back of the bus when I reached Washington, D.C., which was true. That鈥檚 where the segregation started: In our nation鈥檚 capital,鈥� he said.

From there they headed to the Montford Point facility, which was more like a “rattlesnake-infested swamp,” Boone tells CBS affiliate WCAX-TV in Burlington.

The rattlesnakes weren’t the only ones hostile to the black recruits.

As he tells Manchester Journal staff writer Brandon Canevari, “The whites were suspicious of you…. And there was a point where if you wanted to go on liberty, you had to be escorted by a white officer.”

The indignities of racial segregation didn’t sway him from his goal: a college education via the GI Bill, and with it a better life.

that “I had made up my mind that no matter what the circumstances were, no matter how badly I was treated, no matter how badly I might have felt, I had a mission. And the mission was to go to college,” he says.

Listen to Nate Boone articulate his life mission for WCAX:

He tells the Rutland Herald that 鈥淚 had made up my mind that I was going to take whatever the South gave me. Whatever the Marine Corps gave me I would endure, because it meant so much to get to college.”

It was a risk-reward gambit Boone knew would turn out right.

“I don鈥檛 regret any moment of it because of the fact that it allowed me to do what I wanted to do,鈥� he said.

At 乐播传媒, he met his wife, Harriet Howell Boone ’52. (Nate and Harriet’s daughter Daryl ’82 is an alumna, as is Nate’s brother David ’62; his wife, Carol Huntington Boone ’63; and their daughter Karin ’87.)

Marine Col. Stephanie Smith ’87 poses with her father, Ernest Smith Jr., and Gen. John Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps. Photograph by Aimee Smith-Bywater.

乐播传媒 has yet another connection to Montford Point in Marine Col. Stephanie Smith ’87. Her father is a Montford Point Marine, and she is collecting oral histories of the veterans in her capacity as a special project officer for the Montford Point Project.

• View CNN highlights of the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony.

Students in the Short Term course "Making African American History: Preserving the Archives of the Portland NAACP" examine documents during a work session at the University of Southern Maine. From left: Joncarl Hersey '12, Tasheana Dukuly '聙聶12, professor Mollie Godfrey, Munroe Graham '聙聶13, Brad Reynolds '聙聶14. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College.

A placard inviting people to join the NAACP chapter in Portland, Maine.

A letter from NAACP leadership decrying the city government’s silence after a racially motivated assault in Portland.

A photograph of Coretta Scott King with U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Hillary Clinton taken at the Portland chapter’s 40th anniversary celebration, in 2004.

These are among the papers of the NAACP’s branch in Portland, Maine — documents that, thanks to a two-year collaboration among the association, the University of Southern Maine and 乐播传媒, are being made accessible to researchers and the public for the first time.

The exhibition shows through June 8 at the Glickman Library, sixth floor, University of Southern Maine, Portland campus.

Stored for years at the home and office of NAACP President Rachel Talbot Ross, the materials have been processed and arranged for archival storage by students in 乐播传媒 Short Term courses in 2011 and 2012. While there is still work to be done with the materials, they now constitute the Maine NAACP Collection at the University of Southern Maine 鈥� whose Glickman Library, at the Portland campus, is showing highlights from the collection through June 8 in an exhibition curated by the 乐播传媒 students.

Membership cards and informational materials from the Maine NAACP Collection, shown while 乐播传媒 students were processing the documents for archival storage. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College.

The NAACP project was the brainchild of Mollie Godfrey, visiting assistant professor of English at 乐播传媒 and an authority in African American literature and politics of the Jim Crow period. It was a collaborative effort involving not only Susie Bock, head of special collections at USM and director of the university’s Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, but staff at 乐播传媒’ own Edmund S. Muskie Archives, who trained the students in working with archival materials.

They ended up going through 20 boxes of papers, photographs, videotapes and so forth documenting about two decades of NAACP activities in Maine’s largest city, starting in 1987.

Like the countless bits of ceramic that make up a mosaic, such materials are among the constituent parts of what we understand as history. And what story can someone draw from the Portland NAACP collection about the African American presence in Maine?

The biggest lesson, as Ross points out, may be simply that such a presence even exists. “A lot of the secondary sources Mollie had us read, before going to the archives at USM, were saying that African Americans don’t exist in Maine,” the whitest state in the union, says Munroe Graham ’13, a history and politics double major who was one of the nine students in Godfrey’s Short Term course this year.

“But you look at these materials and you see that there was huge attendance at these events held by the NAACP, or that there were protests and articles in the newspaper every day. It’s completely different from how people perceive African American history in Maine.” And now researchers will be better equipped to change that perception.

From the academic standpoint, the project gave the students an opportunity to satisfy the history faculty’s eternal cry of “primary sources!” Sam Wood ’12, a history major from Waterville, Maine, found himself relishing the opportunity to get his hands on the NAACP materials.

Jamilia Davis '15 and professor Mollie Godfrey look at a file of NAACP documents. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College.

“It’s a very different kind of research than, you know, what you鈥檙e most exposed to in college,” says Wood. “You feel like you鈥檙e actually discovering things, as opposed to being told what was discovered. It makes it just that much more fun and exciting.

“When you鈥檙e actually digging through the archives, you鈥檙e eager to find the next thing,” he says. “You鈥檙e trying to make sense of it and place it in context, and it鈥檚 a much more active process” — all the more so because of the detective work that’s part of piecing together a bigger picture from scraps of information.

“It poses a lot of challenges, because a lot of the time the context isn鈥檛 given, or these documents could be misfiled or you don鈥檛 know what these notes are referring to. So it鈥檚 difficult, but it requires more investigation and, I think, is much more rewarding and fun.”

“I think the students can see, more than they might have before, really how ambiguous and unshaped history is, and the kind of work that historians have to do to make sense of it,” says Godfrey.

“By the end of the course they were actually able to see a history just by arranging the material that they had not been able to see at the beginning.”

If raising awareness of Maine’s African American community is one goal of this archival project, another is to raise awareness, among that community, of the value of archival preservation.

Munroe Graham '聙聶13, a member of the 2012 Short Term class "Making African American History: Preserving the Archives of the Portland NAACP," looks at an Martin Luther King Jr. Day event program during a work session at the University of Southern Maine. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College.

Ross is acutely cognizant of that worth: She’s a daughter of Gerald Talbot, Maine’s first African American legislator and the first president of the current Portland chapter of the NAACP. His papers constituted the first donation to the African American Collection of Maine at USM’s Sampson Center, to which the Maine NAACP Collection also belongs. (A pioneer of civil rights in Maine, Jean Byers Sampson was married to longtime 乐播传媒 math professor Richard Sampson.)

And Ross knows that, as so often happens with members of grassroots organizations, many NAACP people in Maine have — as she did until recently — valuable documents sitting in their houses gathering dust.

“We want them to understand that their contribution is so meaningful,” she says. “If they donate these materials, we can acknowledge that, and it’s for the betterment of the organization and then the public.

“To have your history be visible, particularly African American history, civil rights history in Maine, that has a real value,” she adds. “This feels like a rarity, and it feels like an amazing statement.”

Her experiences working with a pioneering antiwar organization led author and 乐播传媒 College professor Melinda Plastas into the research that has resulted in a recent book.

Melinda Plastas, visiting associate professor of women and gender studies. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College.

Offering new insights into the complex currents of racial politics between the world wars, A Band of Noble Women: Racial Politics in the Women’s Peace Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2011) is an engaging, surprising exploration of the convergence of two progressive forces: the women’s peace movement and the black women鈥檚 social reform and racial justice movement.

Plastas, visiting associate professor of women and gender studies at 乐播传媒, uses portraits of movement leaders and case histories of their work — such as a multi-year effort to pass federal anti-lynching legislation and a 1926 investigation of the U.S. occupation of Haiti — to illustrate the tangled difficulties of working for social change.

In the tumultuous years after World War I, white and black female advocates for peace and racial justice realized that ending war must also entail an end to institutionalized racism. “They were committed to a social justice approach that says, you can鈥檛 just look at one issue,” explains Plastas, who has taught at 乐播传媒 since 2005. “You need to look at systems of power.”

Or, in the words of African American social reformer Addie Hutton, one of the leaders Plastas profiles, “There can be no world peace without right local relations.”

At the heart of Noble Women is the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which between the world wars became a widely influential peace organization. Half a century after the events described in her book, Plastas herself worked for WILPF, first as an intern, later as an employee, rising to the rank of national program director.

That experience launched her toward the research represented in the book, Plastas’ first. “I hope the book will show that the way race works is really complex,” she says. “I tried to convey a sense of the different planes on which race was at work — the ways it shapes intellectual thought, domestic and international politics, who has access to which institutions.”

Even as white and black women began collaborating within WILPF, prejudice among some white leaders left black activists sidelined. In fact, black women in this early and formative phase of the long civil rights movement often found themselves doubly marginalized, as the black men leading a newly assertive civil rights movement also discounted their contributions and capabilities.

“They came from an era in which black women鈥檚 reform work was central to black resistance politics,” says Plastas. But after the war, “black masculinity became a symbol of resistance and white feminist internationalism became a symbol of resistance” — leaving black women “astutely aware of how the ground shifted between these two populations, populations that they wanted to be allies with.

“I was really compelled by that.”

The hopes and frustrations of black women like Hunton and Alice Dunbar-Nelson become clear as Plastas profiles them and four other leaders — in total, three white and three black. The profiles create telling contrasts among the motivations, resources and methods of such influential figures as Hunton and white racial justice advocate Emily Greene Balch, the second woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (the first being WILPF founder Jane Addams).

For Plastas, researching the book was a way of comprehending the roots of a compelling life interest. As an undergraduate at Ohio Wesleyan University, she majored in political science and social welfare and minored in women’s studies. “As a budding young feminist, I was really interested in how race and racism functioned in women鈥檚 movements,” she says.

WILPF, still robust in the 1980s, gave Plastas hands-on involvement in social justice advocacy. “Not just in its mission statement, but through its actions on the ground, it was WILPF that really allowed me to understand how all these issues are connected.”

Her projects, reflecting progressive flashpoints of the time, included campaigns to end the arms race, South African apartheid and militarism in Central America. All the while, she says, “I was reading and discussing with WILPF members the writings of people like anti-racism and prison activist Angela Davis.”

Plastas adds, “The other thing that sparked my imagination and confidence was the fact that the WILPF leaders, primarily much older women, really listened to me, a young twenty-something.” One of those leaders, by then in her 90s, was Mildred Scott Olmstead, whose efforts to initiate interracial peace committees are described in Plastas’ book.

“She listened to me and cared about what I, and other young staff and volunteers, thought about contemporary politics and strategy.”

Pianist Frank Glazer in 2006. Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College.

Public radio listeners now know that pianist and 乐播传媒 artist-in-residence Frank Glazer is looking ahead to 2014-15: He plans to perform a season-long survey of preludes and fugues by J.S. Bach, and the complete mazurkas by Fr茅d茅ric Chopin.

The occasion? His 100th birthday.

Glazer revealed this idea — along with his intentions for the 2012-13 season, news of a forthcoming book and much more — in a wide-ranging interview with Dick Gordon on American Public Media’s popular program .

Broadcast March 2, the piece follows Glazer through a musical career reaching back to the 1920s, looks at the pianistic technique that has served him so well for so long and divulges his thoughts about what awaits after an extraordinarily long and productive life. (Available on the website for The Story, the piece will also be transmitted by Maine Public Broadcasting at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 14.)

Glazer himself, in fact, raised the subject of his passing. “My wife [Ruth Glazer] died five years ago, and I know that I’m going to be put as close to her as can be done — I already told the fellow who takes care of that kind of thing — so once more I’ll be with her,” he told Gordon.

“And you might say, ‘Well, you can’t converse and what not.’ But when you are asleep in bed, and you’re alive, you can’t converse with each other anyway. But at least I’ll be next to her, so it will be a long, long, long sleep. And that is consoling to me.”

• .