In its endorsement of her candidacy for U.S. Congress in New Hampshire’s 2nd District Democratic primary, the Concord Monitor wrote that Anne McLane Kuster ’78 “has the skills to help do what’s sorely needed in Washington: convincing people on all sides to come together, end the gridlock and get the nation moving again.” Kuster now faces former three-term Congressman Charlie Bass ’74 (the Monitor’s pick in the Republican primary), who began campaigning against her the next day: “We will stand to be sure that Nancy Pelosi and this president do not have in Anne Kuster a voice that will further propel their failed policies,” Bass told NHInsider.com.

Time magazine referred to Sandy Alderson ’69 as Major League Baseball’s (MLB) Dominican Republic “czar” in a July 26 piece. The former CEO of the San Diego Padres and executive vice president of baseball operations for MLB was tapped in March by commissioner Bud Selig to reform the league’s Dominican Republic operations—“baseball’s puppy mill,” according to Time—where young prospects are often exploited by local buscones (agents) who encourage steroid use and help perpetrate age and identity fraud. “We need to provide educational opportunities for players who have signed contracts,” said Alderson, who has instituted drug testing and fingerprinting for the top-40 unsigned prospects.

The violent deaths this past summer of two James P. Timilty Middle School students made former students such as Marzuq Muhammad ’05 question whether they could be doing more to help youngsters in their old Roxbury, Massachusetts, neighborhood, The Boston Globe reported. Muhammad used Timilty as a springboard to the private Noble and Greenough School and then Dartmouth, where he took part in the College’s Marshall Islands teaching program. Now when he’s not working as a senior research analyst for a commercial real estate firm in Boston, he teaches real estate design to Roxbury middle-school students and pitches in at an architectural workshop for local high school students. “This is an internal struggle I have. Have I turned my back on my community, especially when I heard about people like Steve Odom [one of the murder victims]?” said Muhammad, who wants to create a network of young professionals from his former neighborhood to mentor teens.

As a director of commercials Dan Rush ’92once shot an ad in Toronto for Dell Computers. In September he returned to premiere his first feature film, Everything Must Go, starring Will Ferrell, at the Toronto International Film Festival. Rush adapted the film from Raymond Carver’s 1,500-word story “Why Don’t You Dance?” which he read as an undergrad. Rush told the Los Angeles Times he was intrigued by the question, “What do you do if everything in your life is stripped away? You’re at this crossroads when all you’re left with is who you are.”

High school chemistry teacher Karen Lewis ’74, the daughter of two Chicago public schools teachers, was elected president of the Chicago Teachers Union last June. “Our plans are to defend public education—that’s what it’s always been from the very beginning,” Lewis told the Chicago Sun-Times following her victory by a 3-2 margin over leadership that had been in place nearly 40 years. “She will lead the union through the worst financial crisis since Mayor [Richard M.] Daley won control of the city’s public schools 15 years ago,” the Sun-Times noted. Lewis, who has called mayoral control of schools “an abomination” and a “failed experiment,” will soon work with a new mayor; Daley announced in September that he won’t seek a seventh term.

“I can’t remember a summer when I didn’t work on the [Parks Pond] campground,” Harearl “Buzzer” Moore ’88 told the Bangor Daily News in July. When he returned home in the early 1990s to help run the business his family opened in 1968 in Clifton, Maine, the golf enthusiast dreamed of building a golf course on its more than 450 acres. He began clearing the land around 1994 and built a nine-hole track with ­­­assistance from a small contractor, financing the project with the salary he made as an assistant headmaster at nearby Lee Academy. After opening Sawmill Woods Golf Course in 2004, Moore and his mother sold the campground to focus on running the golf facility. “It’s a fun course to play,” said Moore.

Following the death in 2007 of Betty Koop, his wife of 70 years, former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop ’37 traveled to Philadelphia for the dedication of a church organ in her memory. While at the Tenth Presbyterian Church, Koop shook hands with Cora Hogue, the church’s longtime director of adult education. “We’ve known each other for years, but we passed as ships in the night,” Koop told the Valley News in June. After a long distance courtship Koop and the 69-year-old Hogue were married last April at the Philadelphia church and now live in Hanover.

Oh, Light, the latest album by Eric Lindley ’05, who records under the name Careful, was selected as a “Critic’s Choice” by The New York Times in July. The release comes from Sounds Super Recordings, a label owned by Rizwan Mahmud ’04.

Joe Mendes ’42 is on a mission, noted Wall Street Journal columnist Ralph Gardner last summer in an “Urban Gardner” column. For the past 30 years the former investment banker and Marine colonel has been helping to clean the Central Park drinking fountains as a volunteer with the Central Park Conservancy. Mendes, who served in the Pacific in World War II and trained and flew missions in the Korean War with baseball legend Ted Williams and astronaut and U.S. Sen. John Glenn, originally cleaned two dozen concrete drinking fountains on his route. All but two have crumbled and been replaced by metal fountains. But Mendes still can be spotted about once every three weeks at the reservoir’s south entrance, cleaning those two fountains with a can of Comet and three scrub brushes, including “a metal one that will get into the grooves,” he said. “People drinking out of the other fountain will look up and thank you for it.”