Pursuits

GEORGE WHITE ’57 has jumped out of planes a whopping 1,958 times and has no plans to stop skydiving. “It is more fun than anything else I’ve ever done,” he says. The retired nuclear-fuel broker and consultant made his first parachute jump in 1959 while in Army Airborne School. White likes formation skydiving best, and in 2012, with Skydivers Over Sixty, he participated in an age-group world-record formation of 55 men and five women that, he says, “looked like a doily.” 

Filmmaker and playwright DOUGLAS MCGRATH ’80 wrote the book for Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, about the singer-songwriter’s rise to stardom, which opened on Broadway Jan. 12. In working on the production, McGrath interviewed King, her ex-husband Gerry Goffin, and their fellow songwriters and friends Barry Mann (played by Jarrod Spector ’03) and Cynthia Weil. “It was quite emotional for all of them at different points, because they are talking about their youth, they’re talking about triumphs, and they are also talking about a lot of things that went wrong in their lives,” says McGrath. He hopes younger people see the show, because “in many ways it’s a girl-empowerment story.”