“Earle Brown always mentioned his connection to Northeastern,” says Paul Beaudoin, a lecturer in the Music department. And the university is proud to claim him. By the time of his death in 2002, the former NU student had been a leading composer and major force on the avant-garde music scene for five decades.

Born in 1926 in Lunenberg, Massachusetts, Brown enrolled at Northeastern in 1944 to study mathematics and engineering, with an eye toward becoming an aeronautical engineer. On weekends, he performed as a jazz trumpeter. But the military beckoned, and Brown joined the Air Force in 1945. Stationed in Louisiana and Texas, he played more jazz, got his pilot’s license, and met a musician who introduced him to a complex method of composition developed by Russian-born Joseph Schillinger, which reduced all music to mathematical formulas.

Brown was fascinated. When he left the military, he returned to Boston—not to Northeastern, but to the newly opened Schillinger House of Music (now known as Berklee College of Music). After working as a Schillinger teacher in Denver in 1950, he moved to New York to collaborate with experimental composer John Cage. Music critics quickly labeled Brown, Cage, and three other composers the “New York School.”

An inventor of open-form composition, where parts of a piece are left to the discretion of the musicians, Brown was interested in changing how music sounded—and appeared. He was a painter by avocation. “His musician manuscripts and his draftsmanship were extraordinary,” says Beaudoin, who calls Brown “an exceptional artist.”

Like his heroes Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock, Brown looked at traditional form in new ways. “When I was still studying in Boston, I used to haunt a little poetry bookshop on Boylston Street,” he remembered in a 1995 interview with conductor John Yaffe. “I found a book called Vision in Motion by [László] Moholy-Nagy, a visual artist—highly experimental stuff. There were also Museum of Modern Art booklets on Calder. And I remember that, in 1949, Life magazine came out with the first major color spread of the abstract expressionists—which was where they called Jackson Pollock ‘Jack the Dripper.’”

Immediacy and spontaneity inspired Brown. “I would like people,” he told Yaffe, “to realize the range, the aesthetics, and the optimism of my work.”

Rolling on the River

No decent equipment? No competitors?

No problem, say Gracio Garcia, BA’01, and Allan Gehant, AS’01. Gliding past obstacles, these Northeastern varsity crew graduates have started their own rowing program, codirecting the 300-member recreational and competitive Gentle Giant Rowing Club (GGRC), based in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Garcia, originally from soccer-loving Recife, Brazil, where underfunded rowing programs struggle with substandard equipment, learned to row on the Brookline (Mass.) High School squad after his family immigrated to America. Gehant learned in Loyola, Illinois, where for years, he says, his high school team was state rowing champion by default: At the time, there were no other teams in the state.

Both still have their oars in the water. Garcia and Gehant started GGRC two years ago with a business plan that doubled as Gehant’s honors thesis and $40,000 in seed money donated by avid rower Larry O’Toole, E’76, president and founder of Gentle Giant Moving Company. Explains Garcia, “Our base was established from the NU summer rowing program,” a group he and Gehant formed during their middler year for adult rowers from the Somerville/Medford/Malden/Everett area.

Everything has gone swimmingly. Club enrollment started at seventy-five members and grew exponentially. In October, a competitive GGRC team placed third out of fifty-three boats in the men’s club eight event at the Head of the Charles.

The program welcomes rowers of all fitness and experience levels, ages, shapes, and sizes. Practices are run out of the Blessing of the Bay boathouse on the Mystic River, upstream from where the blockbuster of the same name was filmed. Garcia and Gehant, who work full time as a financial representative and a teacher, respectively, spend their nights and weekends on GGRC.

“It’s a sacrifice, but I see a lot of value for the community,” says Garcia. “People stop to tell us, ‘You don’t know how much rowing has impacted my life.’”

Commerce Claws

It’s no fish story. A Cape Elizabeth, Maine, venture can deliver “hand-selected lobsters caught daily” straight to your front porch. Forget the pizza.

Lobster to Your Door is the brainchild of business major John Ready. When he graduates this month, he will have owned the retail company two years. “I take orders in the boat,” the twenty-three-year-old says. “I’ll be on the [cell] phone all day.” Back on shore, a same-day-service truck takes the catch to addresses in New England; those farther afield can have their lobsters shipped to them. The company delivers some 2,000 pounds of crustacean every week.

Ready, a Cape Elizabeth native, has owned a lobster boat since he was in elementary school. He’d use his $45 daily profits to buy more equipment. “It was more entertaining to have traps than money,” he says. At twelve, Ready bought his first fiberglass craft, an 18-footer with a 10-horsepower motor. “My parents trusted me enough to let me go lobstering alone,” he says. “They’d watch me through binoculars.”

When he entered Northeastern, Ready was fishing up to 500 traps a season. In between netting profits, he kept his studies on track, which wasn’t always easy. Ready also runs a wholesale business that sells lobsters to Martha’s Vineyard restaurants. That meant going back to Maine twice a week during lobster season to pack a truck at 3:30 a.m., in time to get it on the 8:30 a.m. Vineyard ferry. Even so, he says, “I made it to every single class.”

Concentrating in marketing and entrepreneurship, Ready developed Lobster to Your Door as a self-designed co-op (and won a Cooperative Education Award this year). “Northeastern was ideal,” he says. “There couldn’t have been a better match. I could take all my experience and relate it to the classroom.” Next step: More market research. Ready is serious about expanding his catch.

— Katy Kramer, MA’00