gatorsightings
Alum oversees ports’ security
Paul Anderson
One of five commissioners appointed by President Bush, Paul Anderson, PR 1982, or Paulito, as the president calls him, is serving a five-year term in Washington, D.C., with the Federal Maritime Commission.
Anderson served as co-chair of the Florida Finance Committee, chairman of Broward Community College, and vice president for public affairs at JM Enterprises Diversified Auto Co. He also worked as special assistant and district representative in South Florida for Sen. Paula Hawkins.
Working with Hawkins, Anderson met Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who, in 1999, appointed him to the state’s Board of Trustees. Anderson then raised funds for George W. Bush.
Since his appointment in 2003, Anderson has been overseeing international ocean transportation – imports and exports that go through the ports. He’s also been creating maritime regulations for companies shipping their products overseas.
“It’s hard, after Sept. 11, to go from the most open society in the world to implementing all this security,” Anderson said. “What keeps me up at night is wondering whether or not I have done all that I can to keep America safe.”
Horsing around
Different direction: Lisa Carnes, TEL 1981, breeds horses.
Horses are like potato chips, says Lisa Carnes, TEL 1981. “You can’t have just one.”
A thoroughbred breeder, she bought her first horse in 1994. She and her husband, Lloyd, live and work on a 20-acre farm in Ocala. They have seven brood mares they call “baby machines.” They sell the offspring at auctions in Florida and Kentucky.
They also consult aspiring breeders.
“I’m living my dream,” Carnes says, “but it took a long time to make that circle.”
The Carneses owned and ran the Hoola Hoops Diner, a 1950s-style restaurant in St. Augustine, for 10 years. After a particularly stressful day in 1998, they looked at each other and said, “What are we doing?” They sold the restaurant in a week.
“We moved into the country,” she says, “and have been raising horses ever since.”
Carnes attended shows and bought a horse before they decided to close the diner. She based her knowledge about thoroughbred breeding on trial and error and talking to other breeders.
“I didn’t set out from college to be a horse breeder,” she says, “but I’ve loved it all my life.”
Christening a newspaper
Lucy Chabot Reed, JM 1990, worked for the Los Angeles Times and the South Florida Business Journal. Now she’s putting her J-skills to work as an entrepreneur. She and her husband, David Reed, started the Fort Lauderdale-based Triton: Nautical News for Captains and Crews a couple of years ago.
Lucy Chabot Reed
Triton, which has a distribution of 12,000, is a free monthly paper that caters to the crews of luxury yachts (more than 100 feet in length). David, who has a finance degree from Florida Atlantic University, serves as publisher, while Lucy is editor.
“We didn’t want to send [daughter] Kenna to daycare, so we decided to start our own paper,” she said. “David and I are tag-team running the paper and caring for her.”
The paper is on yacht captains’ radar screens.
“We all tend to come and go, but the Triton keeps us informed about what is going on,” said mega-yacht captain Chris Berg. “They even hold monthly captains’ lunches and seminars to tell us what we need to know.”
Finding safety in Beirut
The word “security” rarely comes to mind when Americans think of Beirut. But Corbis photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair, JM 1998, who was the Department of Journalism’s Hearst Visiting Professional in fall 2005, sees the Lebanese capital as her safest home-base option.
The civil war that ravaged the country for 16 years ended in 1991. Now, Beirut is a candidate for the 2018 Winter Olympics. “There’s no street crime here, no murders, no stealing, no rape,” said Sinclair, who addressed 800 students in four sessions.
Sinclair, a member of the Chicago Tribune team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000, travels the Middle East on assignments for such publications as Time, National Geographic and The New York Times. She considered living in Israel, the region’s most modern society, but realized it would raise suspicion in Arab countries.
“I can’t live in Jerusalem,” she said. “They’ll Google you and kidnap you.”
