Muhlenberg college

Donald Reilly, a prominent cartoonist best known for his four-decade-long association with The New Yorker, died on Sunday in Norwalk, Conn. He was 72 and lived in Wilton, Connecticut. Mr. Reilly, who began drawing for the New Yorker in 1964, did 1,107 cartoons and 16 covers for the magazine. His work also appeared in Playboy, Colliers, Look, Saturday Evening Post, Mad, Harvard Business Review and elsewhere. Mr. Reilly's artwork, typically line drawings with a touch of wash, was known for its directness, said Lee Lorenz, a former art editor of the New Yorker. 'Most artists sketch things out, make preliminary drawings,'' Mr. Lorenz said in a telephone interview yesterday. ''Don liked his work to be as spontaneous as possible, and he was one of the few artists who would sit down and just do a drawing.'' Together with their captions, which Mr. Reilly wrote himself, the drawings are anthropology in microcosm. Over the years, he wryly dissected the manners and customs of Homo sapiens…. Reilly was born on Nov. 11, 1933, in Scranton, Pa. He graduated from Muhlenberg College in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in English.

If you want to go into business, for example, what should you study? Might it help to think some more about "King Lear" and a little less about linear programming?"

- "Vocational School for the Elite" by Daniel Akst WSJ 8/11/2005 D8

More M.B.A.s who can compose a cohesive memo or letter would make investment banker Darren Whissen of Ladera Ranch, Calif., happy. "I have found that many seemingly qualified candidates are unable to write even the simplest of arguments," says Mr. Whissen, who is director of research at Waveland LLC. "No matter how strong one's financial model is, if one cannot write a logical, compelling story, then investors are going to look elsewhere. And in my business, that means death."

- "How to Get Hired" by Ronald Alsop WSJ 9/22/2004 R8

At the annual dinner of the Harvard Business School Club of Greater New York at the Waldorf-Astoria on Thursday, Henry M. Paulson Jr., chairman and chief executive of the Goldman Sachs Group, fell back on his college skills to deliver a speech that - gasp! - he had written himself.

"I like to write," he said in an interview after receiving the club's award as the business statesman of 2003. "I was actually an English major."

So how did he get into investment banking? "I went to Washington, and I ended up working on a number of economic issues," said Mr. Paulson, class of 1970. "It was a good fit, and I've enjoyed it."

Imagine yourself a senior partner in a large accounting firm that has just hired a promising analyst from a top-tier college. You negotiate a generous salary and spend a fortune moving the new employee to an office in a distant city - only to find that he can't write a lick. He crunches numbers well enough and clearly knows the principles of accounting. But like many otherwise bright, well-educated people, he was never trained to express his thoughts in words. The blood drains from your face as you read that first audit report, which is so poorly structured as to be unintelligible. These kinds of disappointments have a long history in the corporate world. Companies once covered for poor writers by surrounding them with people who could translate their thoughts onto paper. But this strategy has proved less practical in the bottom-line-driven information age, which requires more high-quality writing from more categories of employees than ever before. Instead of covering for nonwriters, companies are increasingly looking for ways to screen them out at the door.

This was clearly the subtext message of a report released last year by the National Commission on Writing, a panel of educators convened by the College Board. At the heart of the report - titled "Writing: A Ticket to Work ... or a Ticket Out" - is an eye-opening assessment of corporate attitudes about writing, surveying members of the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives from the nation's leading corporations. The findings, though given a positive gloss, were not encouraging. About a third of the companies reported that only one-third or fewer of their employees knew how to write clearly and concisely. The companies expressed a fair degree of dissatisfaction with the writing produced by recent college graduates - even though many were blue-chip companies that get the pick of the litter.

McCallum has the write stuff-- Basketball Hall of Fame award to SI writer

As a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, Jack McCallum's aim each week is to compose a story that has relevance and staying power.

He can only wonder if the sport he covers still has each.

An SI staffer since February 1981, the Bethlehem resident (and Muhlenberg College graduate) has most notably covered the NBA. Did it from 1985-93, when the league was amid its Bird/Magic/Jordan-powered renaissance. Returned to it in 2001, only to find that the sport's popularity had sagged. Whether that's indicative of a lull or permanent decline, he's not sure.

His own fortunes have never been better. His coverage was judged to be so exemplary that last month he was named the print winner of the Basketball Hall of Fame's Curt Gowdy Media Award, presented each year to a reporter ''whose efforts have made a significant contribution to the game of basketball,'' according to a news release.

McCallum and his electronic counterpart, longtime Philadelphia broadcaster Bill Campbell, will be honored Sept. 8-10 in Springfield, Mass., in conjunction with the enshrinement of Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun, former LSU women's coach Sue Gunter, Brazilian star Hortencia Marcari and coach and television commentator Hubie Brown.

McCallum, who will turn 56 on Monday, was in Detroit for the league finals last month when he learned of the honor. Got a call in his hotel room. His first reaction was surprise.

''I didn't know there was a Curt Gowdy Award,'' he said with a laugh earlier this week.

The enormity of the honor began to sink in when he considered all the other writers who are just as deserving. It sank in a little more when last year's winner, Phil Jasner of the Philadelphia Daily News, told McCallum that his name would be part of a permanent display in the Hall of Fame.

''That's pretty cool,'' McCallum said. ''That was the first time I was genuinely — for want of a better word — overwhelmed by it, so that if my kids ever have kids, my name will be in there. So that's pretty amazing.''

His weekly mission is a challenge, in large part because he must file a story on Sunday for a magazine that will not hit the streets until Thursday. As a result he must dig a little deeper for something — a quote, a kernel of information, an anecdote — that will stand the test of time, that will not have appeared on the Internet or in a daily newspaper beforehand.

''It's a little bit of a difficult job,'' he said. ''I have to get something that holds up three or four days. … This is not brain surgery, but it's something you've got to do.''

He manages to surprise in ways great and small. He noted in his wrap-up of the finals that Spurs star Tim Duncan, playing on two bad ankles, had 16 shots blocked by the Pistons.

He also had this quote from Duncan, normally the blandest of interviews, about his teammates: ''There's a group of guys that I'm in love with.''

At other times McCallum has betrayed his background as an English major at Muhlenberg, as when he quoted Dickens in a feature story about Kobe Bryant earlier this year. Bryant, he wrote, is like Jacob Marley: ''secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.''

Finally, there was his story about holes-in-one, which was anthologized in the 1997 edition of Best American Sports Writing. McCallum noted that Kim Jong-il — then as now North Korea's ruler — was credited with five aces in a single round.

''Incidentally,'' McCallum wrote, ''according to his biography Kim, 54, also can produce rice bumper crops at will, so this golf thing is kind of a sidelight.''

McCallum began his career at the now-defunct Bethlehem Globe-Times after graduating from Muhlenberg in 1971. He went from there to The Morning Call, then made brief stops at two other papers that have since folded, the Baltimore News-American and the Philadelphia Bulletin, before moving to SI in '81.

Four years later he was on the NBA beat. If he believes that the exploits of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan and others ''masked'' the league's problems then, he now believes everything has been laid bare.

'I'm somewhat defensive about it,' McCallum said, ''because I haven't heard one or two positive comments about the NBA [from outsiders] in all the years I've done this.''

But he is also realistic, wondering whether the league can reclaim its lost glitter. Perhaps, he said, the increasing influence of foreign-born players like San Antonio's Manu Ginobili will help. Perhaps the sorry showing by the NBA-laden U.S. Olympic team last summer has raised a big-enough red flag.

''I do think the alarm has gone out,'' McCallum said, ''but I think [a revival is] a lot of years away.''

It's a matter of relevance, a matter of staying power.

McCallum knows something about each.

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