Leonore Annenberg

Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa

She has slowed down a little in the past few years, but Leonore Annenberg, with her well-trained eye for fine artwork, is still active as a member of the acquisitions committees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum, and she still studies the applications that arrive at the foundation that she and her husband, Walter, administer.

“There’s a lot of reading involved,” she said, in an interview from Sunnylands, the Annenbergs” winter home in Rancho Mirage. “You can’t just hand out funds. You have to understand an organization and what it believes in.” Leonore Annenberg is the vice chairman of the foundation.

One of the institutions Annenberg read up on five years ago was USC, which became the recipient of a $120 million gift to create the Annenberg Center for Communication. The gift became a major boost in morale for the Los Angeles area, which was reeling from civil unrest and destructive fires.

That was followed a few months later by the announcement of a $500 million K-12 challenge grant program, including $53 million for Los Angeles public schools. The grant program was the largest single gift ever made to American public education.

Education is an obvious goal for the Annenberg Foundation, which is endowed by billions of dollars earned by the Annenbergs’ broadcasting and publishing investments. In 1988, Walter Annenberg sold his Triangle Publications – including TV Guide, Seventeen and The Daily Racing Form – to Rupert Murdoch for $3 billion.

“Education is the way of the future,” Leonore Annenberg said. “If you want people to live peacefully and harmoniously, they have to have understanding, they have to be educated. We thought that it was certainly one of the most important things for the country.”

Annenberg, 80, is former chief of protocol for the White House during the Reagan administration and a board member of premier arts organizations coast to coast.

She was born in New York City and raised by her paternal uncle, Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Her Uncle Harry and Aunt Rose took in Leonore and her sister, Judy, in their Los Angeles home when both were very young. Annenberg went to Los Angeles High School and attended USC before graduating from Stanford in 1940, where she majored in history and minored in political science.

In her 46 years of marriage to Walter Annenberg, Leonore Annenberg has become a passionate art collector. In 1991, the Annenbergs designated the Metropolitan Museum as recipient of an estimated $1 billion in impressionist and post-impressionist paintings. The gift, to be made as a bequest following Walter Annenberg’s death, came after years of speculation and lobbying by numerous museums.

Why the impressionists? “They’re so nice to live with,” Leonore Annenberg said with a laugh.

The collection, packed in traveling crates provided by the Metropolitan, goes to Rancho Mirage every winter. When the Annenbergs return to their home in Wynnewood, Pa., most of the collection returns to New York for display in the museum’s impressionist wing.

Aside from her long-standing in-volvement at the Metropolitan and the Philadelphia, Annenberg is a managing director of the Metropolitan Opera, honorary governor of the Los Angeles Music Center and a member of the Academy Music Committee. She is also an active member of the American Associates of the Royal Academy Trust and the Trust Council of the National Gallery of Art.

While her husband was ambassador to England, between 1969 and 1974, she led the effort to renovate Winfield House, the distinctive residence of the American ambassador.

She and her husband, who recently turned 90, agree on most of the work of their foundation. “We discuss the grants,” Leonore Annenberg said. “We believe in the same things.”

An Entertainment Pioneer

Quincy Jones

Doctor of Music, Honoris Causa If future historians were to try to chart the connections between all the important personages in music in the last half of the 20th century, somewhere in the middle of everything would stand Quincy Jones.

The arranger and producer, who has been in the music business for more than 50 years, can reminisce about playing backup for Billie Holiday, the soulful jazz ballad singer, and about studying string composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, the astringent French pedagogue and composer.

Jones – with 76 Grammy nominations and 26 awards, the all-time most-nominated artist – wrote arrangements for Ella Fitzgerald and produced Michael Jackson’s mega-platinum album “Thriller.” He has worked with, among many others, Sinatra and Vaughan and Horne, some of the premier vocalists of the post-war years. Then there’s his work on film and television scores – and the story of how he cut his musical teeth with Ray Charles at the age of 14.

In a field known for career flame-outs, his is long-lived. Jones talks about how he got into the music business – in the post-war years, it was exploitative and segregated, and drug addiction was an occupational hazard. “Some-times I look back over my shoulder and wonder how I could even go into a business like that,” he said.

The answer is apparent. Young Quincy Jones, a Chicago-born resident of Seattle, a trumpet player, was just plain hooked on music. When he and fellow teenager Ray Charles decided to form a band in the mid-1940s, they threw themselves into it feverishly.

“On a typical night,” Jones recalled, “we’d start out playing dinner music. You know, white cardigans, bow ties, cup mutes. Then we’d hit the black clubs, which were jumping in those years. Finally, around 3 in the morning, we’d end up in the red-light district, playing bebop with the visiting musicians from all the road bands coming through.”

For Jones, the object was never money or glamour. “All we ever talked about was the pure passion for what we were into,” he said. “All we cared about was just about how good we could be.”

At 18, Jones won a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, but dropped out abruptly to go on the road with the Lionel Hampton band for three years. By 1953, he was living in New York, writing charts for many of the big bands of the day, including Count Basie and Dinah Washington, as well as his old friend Ray Charles.

“A good arranger has to have the skill to make anything he hears totally transparent,” Jones said. “He has to be able to quickly identify what’s not working – a key that’s too high, a tempo that’s too fast.”

In 1957, he went to Paris to study. “I was already pretty eclectic, but a lot of the bands were incorporating string sections, and they weren’t letting too many black guys write for them,” he said. “I went to Paris to study because I always wanted to do movies.”

Jones’ first film score was for Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. There have been 32 others since, including In the Heat of the Night, In Cold Blood, and Cactus Flower. He also wrote the theme music for television shows like “Ironside” and “The Bill Cosby Show.”

By 1969, Jones was also recording his own chart-busting albums, like “Walking in Space,” “Smack-water Jack” and “Body Heat.”

In 1985, Jones co-produced the film The Color Purple with Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy. In 1990, Jones formed his own production company, QDE, a co-venture with Time-Warner Inc. Jones is founder and chairman of Vibe magazine, and along with partner Robert Miller purchased Spin magazine; a third, Blaze, is coming this fall. Jones has also produced television shows, like “Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” invested in television stations in Atlanta and New Orleans and established his own record label, Qwest.

But Jones has always remembered his heritage, actively supporting Martin Luther King’s Operation Breadbasket and the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s People United to Save Humanity. In 1984, he brought together a diverse group of artists on the immensely popular record “We Are the World,” whose proceeds went to the humanitarian efforts of the USA for Africa project.

Jones is awash in projects, like producing the celebration of Nelson Mandela’s 80th birthday July 18 in South Africa.

He is piecing an opera together for the celebration, and he describes a trip to Robben Island, the prison, now a museum, where Mandela spent most of his 26 years of incarceration. “The foghorn went off every day at 6 o’clock, reminding him of his loneliness and oppression. Then there was the sound of the blue train, the hoot of the horn [bringing Mandela back to the prison after he was elected president].”

Jones thinks that young musicians, with their home synthesizers and electronic machines, don’t hear enough live music. “You have to see the interaction of a Nat Cole or a Frank Sinatra in the studio, see them looking straight at the brass and rhythm sections and inspiring each other with that juice.”

There has to be room for that sort of passion in music, Jones said. Passion and the divine.

“You always have to make space for God to walk through the room,” Jones said. “You have to let that magic happen.”

A Leader Who Gets Results

Roy A. Anderson

Doctor of Laws, Honoris Causa Roy A. Anderson, the former Lockheed Corp. chairman who steered the aerospace giant out of financial turmoil in the early 1980s, will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree at commencement.

“I’m greatly honored that USC will bestow this degree on me,” Anderson said. “It is such a prestigious university.”

In addition to his deft leadership at Lockheed, Anderson has played a major role in philanthropic, cultural, civic and educational realms.

“Anderson represents the kind of leader who is able to make a lasting and positive impact in his community, in his profession and in his nation,” said Randolph W. Westerfield, dean of the Marshall School of Business. “The Southern California business, education and philanthropic communities have benefited greatly from his leadership.”

After serving in executive positions with Westinghouse Electric Corp. and Ampex Instrumenta-tion Products Co., Anderson joined Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. in 1956 as a staff ac-countant. He soon advanced to assistant director of financial operations and director of financial and management controls in the company’s Space Systems Division.

In 1965 he transferred to the Lockheed-Georgia Co. as director of finance, and in 1968 he was appointed treasurer of the Lockheed Corp. In 1969, he was named vice president, and two years later he was promoted to senior vice president for finance. He was also appointed in 1971 to the corporation’s board of directors, on which he served actively until 1990.

Anderson’s most important contributions to Lockheed came during his tenure as chairman and chief executive officer from 1977 through 1985. During those years, Anderson guided Lockheed through tumultuous times. In particular, Lockheed faced a number of financial setbacks, which saw the company drop from the nation’s No. 1 defense contractor to No. 6 by 1976.

Probably the most dramatic crisis involved a deficit-ridden aircraft project that nearly landed the company in bankruptcy court. The L-1011 Tristar, a technologically advanced aircraft, lost the heated marketing race for jumbo jet orders to the Boeing 747 and to McDonnell Douglas’ DC-10. With the company facing long-term debt and record-high interest rates, Anderson finally decided to phase out the Tristar project and concentrate on other product lines in order to beat back the company’s debt ratio.

“I suspect that was the toughest decision I’ll ever have to make or participate in making,” Anderson said in a 1982 interview in the New York Times.

Anderson is also chair and chief executive officer of the Weingart Foundation, one of the nation’s leading philanthropic organizations. The foundation focuses on the needs of disadvantaged young Southern Califor-nians.

In addition, Anderson served on the board of the Los Angeles Music Center and is a past chair of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council and Greater Los Angeles United Way. He has been active in the Los Angeles Area Cham-ber of Commerce, Project California and the Christopher Commission, which examined the Los Angeles Police Depart-ment in the wake of the 1991 Rodney King beating.

A graduate of Stanford University, Anderson co-chaired Stanford’s highly successful centennial campaign. He served as a trustee of Occidental College in Los Angeles until Stanford invited him to serve on its board of trustees. He remained on that board until 1990.

Anderson acquired strong values at a young age; he was the fourth of six children raised on a small farm near Ripon in central California. “We had a rough go,” he told the New York Times. “My parents were hard-working,

honest people. But it was the Depression, and times were hard for everybody. You learn certain values that stay with you.”

Unable to afford college, he studied bookkeeping and enlisted in the Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Impressed with his facility with numbers, the Navy sent him to Kansas State Teach-ers College, Tulane University, and, finally, Harvard, for training as a supply officer. After the war, he finished an undergraduate degree in economics and business at Stanford, then received an M.B.A. from Stanford in 1949.

Anderson has earned widespread honors for his contributions, including honorary degrees from the Polytechnic Institute of New York and Pepperdine University, and a Manufacturers of the Year Award from the California Manufacturers Associ-ation.

A Down-to-Earth Scientist

Edward C. Stone

Doctor of Science, Honoris Causa

Is there life on other planets?

If there is, Ed Stone is determined to find it.

Stone is the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, a vice president at Caltech and the David Morrisroe Professor of Physics there. He is Edward C. Stone, Ph.D. – Dr. Stone – but when he answers the telephone he is simply, “Ed Stone here.”

On Friday morning, USC will honor him with a doctor of science honoris causa degree. And by Friday afternoon, this affable, plain-speaking scientist with strong Midwestern roots will return to exploring the universe.

Stone was born and raised in Iowa, earning his associate of arts degree in 1956 from Burlington Junior College. From there he traveled to the University of Chicago, where he received his master of science in 1959, following that with a Ph.D. in 1964. Both degrees were in physics, and shortly thereafter Stone joined Caltech as a physics research fellow.

Stone became a senior research fellow and assistant professor in 1967, an associate professor in 1971, a professor of physics in 1976, chairman of Caltech’s Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy in 1983 and vice president for astronomical facilities in 1988. He became the director of JPL in January 1991.

He is also chairman of the board of directors of the California Association for Research in Astronomy, which built and operates the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. He has been a director of the W. M. Keck Foundation since 1993.

In 1961 when he was still studying at the University of Chicago, Stone performed the first of his cosmic-ray experiments on the Discoverer satellites. Since then, he has been the principal investigator on nine NASA spacecraft missions and a co-investigator on five others.

Stone is best-known for developing high-resolution instruments that measure the isotopic and elemental composition of cosmic rays, and he performed some of the first studies of the composition of cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are high-energy particles that fall to Earth from space. They come from the sun, from the interstellar medium in the vicinity of the solar system and from nearby regions of our galaxy. The particles consist mainly of protons or hydrogen nuclei, but also include electrons, positrons, neutrinos and gamma-ray photons.

Stone jointly developed a large-area electronic satellite instrument that measures the quantities of very rare heavy galactic cosmic-ray nuclei such as lead and platinum, and he was a collaborator in the development of an imaging gamma-ray telescope.

Stone’s instruments have been used for studies of planetary magnetospheres and helped discover the energetic sulfur and oxygen ions emanating from Jupiter’s moon Io.

Since 1972, he has been the project scientist for the Voyager mission. Following the launch of the twin Voyager spacecraft in 1977, he coordinated the efforts of 11 teams of scientists in their studies of Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune.

One of the major themes emerging in space exploration today is the search for life, he noted.

“If there is water, there is life. Mars may have water and Europa (another of Jupiter’s moons) may have an ocean beneath its surface,” he said with excitement, adding that our moon appears to have some water as well. “The search for life has become a search for water.”

Why should we explore space when there are so many problems here on Earth? Stone says it is important to understand our own neighborhood, and our neighborhood includes the solar system and its immediate environs.

“We live on the most complex planet known, because there is life,” Stone said. “Our planet is evolving and we have many problems. Understand-ing the underlying processes of the universe will help us solve our problems here.”

Stone has received numerous awards and honors, including the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal in 1985 and 1995, the National Space Club Science Award, the Leroy Randle Grum-man Medal and the American Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award. He is in the Aviation Week and Space Technology Hall of Fame, and in 1996 an asteroid was named after him.

He has also received honorary degrees from Washington Univer-sity at St. Louis, Harvard University and the University of Chicago. Stone said the USC degree is a reflection of the many strong bonds between JPL and USC.

He noted that there are 364 USC alumni working at JPL and that JPL master’s and doctoral candidates are taking USC courses, utilizing distance-learning techniques. The two institutions, through the Southern California Earthquake Center, are deploying a Global Satellite Positioning integrated network to measure the distortion of the tectonic plates in Southern California.

“It is clear that USC has been dedicated to creating the future in Southern California for over a hundred years,” Stone said. “This recognition by the USC faculty and board of trustees is certainly an honor and much appreciated.”

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