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Titulli Hap njė temė tė re    Pėrgjigju brenda kėsaj teme
peshtimi
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Early Life


John, the son of Adam and Agnes Belushi, was born January 24, 1949. He graduated from Wheaton Central High School, which is in Illinois, in 1967.He was very popular, being voted the Homecoming King and Most Humorous. He was the co-captain of the football team and at 5' 9" tall and170 lbs, an all-conference middle linebacker known to his teammates as"Killer Belushi." While in high school, John did a a variety show in which he played a Nazi camp counselor. His performance caught the eye of Judith Jacklin, who not only became his high school sweetheart, but his wife as well.

John turned down a football scholarship at Western Illinois and decided to attend Illinois Wesleyan. He wasn't accepted there and ended up at the University of Wisconsin at White water. He stayed there for a year and in the Summer of 68 came back to Wheaton. In the fall he enrolled at the College of Dupage, which is a 2 year junior college. On January 5, 1970 he graduated with an associates of the arts degree in general studies.


(Click the images for a larger picture)

John's father , Adam, came to America from Albania in 1934. He owned and operated two restaurants which took up most of his time. Adam believed it to be tradition for the father to give his son the family business. He had offered them to John several times but he refused. John had other things in mind.

In February of 1971, John went to Chicago to audition for the Second City Comedy Troupe. Second City gotits start in Hyde Park in 1955, in 1959 they began use the name Second City. They did shows that featured rehearsed skits followed by an improvisation hour. John got the job and at 22 years old was the youngest ever. The other members of the Troupe soon realized that John could easily steal a scene. He played many different characters ranging from the mayor of Chicago to Hamlet. As John would say as Hamlet:

"To be, to be
Sure beats the shit

out of not to be."



In the fall of 1971, John was getting a lot of attention. His impression of Joe Cocker was flawless, filled with jerky body movements and great facial expressions, it alone was paving the road for things to come. John did the Second City show six days a week, and was experimenting with drugs. He tried marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, amphetamines, peyote, and acid. Belushi didn't seem to be using any more drugs then anyone else that was in his generation. Everyone was experimenting. John was now the star of the show.When a former Second City actor asked John how he was so totally relaxed on stage, John replied, "Because that is the only place I know what I am doing." The Spring of 1972 marked 14 months with Second City, it was time to move onto other things.

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Mesazh i vjetėr 28 Dhjetor 2005 18:29
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Biografi eshkurter e Xhonit.

Biography for
John Belushi

Birth name
John Adam Belushi
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Height
5' 8" (1.73 m)
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Mini biography
The son of an Albanian immigrant restaurant owner, Adam Belushi, and his vivacious wife, Agnes, John Belushi was born in Chicago, Illinois, USA, on January 24, 1949. He grew up in Wheaton, where the family moved when he was six. Though a young hellion in grade school, John became the perfect all-American boy during his high school years where he was co-captain of the Wheaton Central High School football team and was elected homecoming king his senior year. He also developed an interest in acting and appeared in the high school variety show. Encouraged by his drama teacher, John decided to put aside his plans to become a football coach to pursue a career in acting. After graduation in 1967, John performed in summer stock in rural Indiana in a variety of roles from Cardinal Wolsey in Anne of a Thousand Days to a comic detective in Ten Little Indians. In the fall of his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, John changed his image into a bad-boy appearance by growing his hair long and began to have problems with discipline and structure of attending classes. Dropping out of Wisconsin, John spent the next two years at the College of DuPage, a junior college a few miles from his parents' Wheaton home, where his father began persuading him to become a partner in his restaurant, but John still preferred acting. While attending DuPage, John helped found the West Compass Players, an improv comedy troupe patterned after Chicago's famous Second City ensemble. In 1971, John made the leap to Second City itself where he performed in various on-stage comic performances with others who included Harold Ramis and Joe Flaherty. John loved his life at Second City where he performed six nights a week, perfecting the physical "gonzo" style of comedy he later made famous. A year later, John and his live-in girlfriend from his high school years, Judy Jacklin, moved to New York because John had joined the cast of National Lampoon's Lemmings, an off-Broadway rock musical revue that was originally booked for a six-week run but played to full crowds for nearly 10 months. In 1973, John was hired as a writer for the syndicated National Lampoon's Radio Hour which became the National Lampoon Show in 1975. John's big break came that same year when he joined the ground-breaking TV variety series Saturday Night Live which made him a star. The unpredictable, aggressively physical style of humor that he began on Second City flowered on SNL. In 1978, while still working at Saturday Night Live, John appeared in the movie Goin' South which starred and was directed by Jack Nicholson. It was here that director John Landis noticed John and decided to cast him in his movie National Lampoon's Animal House. John's minor role as the notorious, beer-swilling Bluto made it a box-office smash and the year's top grossing comedy. Despite appearing in only a dozen scenes, John's performance stole the movie, which portrays college fraternity shenanigans at a small college set in the year 1962. In 1979, John along with fellow SNL regular Dan Aykroyd quit the series to pursue movie projects. John and Dan Aykroyd appeared in minor roles in Steven Spielberg's financially unsuccessful 1941 and the following year in John Landis' The Blues Brothers. Around this time, John's drug use began escalating. Cocaine, which was ubiquitous in show-business circles in the 1970's, became his drug of choice and he almost immediately became addicted to it. His frequent cocaine sniffing binges became a source of friction between him and Judy, whom he married in 1976. John's love for blues and soul music inspired the Blues Brothers. He and Aykroyd first appeared as Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues, a pair of white soul men dressed in black suits, skinny ties, fedora hats and Rayban sunglasses, as a warm-up act before the telecasts of Saturday Night Live. Building on the success of their acts and the release of their album "A Briefcase Full of Blues" John and Dan Aykroyd starred in the movie, which gave John a chance to act with his favorite musical heros including Ray Charles, James Brown and Aretha Franklin. Although John's reputation for being an off-screen party animal is legendary, his generous side is less well known. Using some of his money, be bought his father a ranch outside San Diego, help set up some of his Chicago friends with their own businesses and even helped his younger brother Jim Belushi, who followed his path to both Second City and Saturday Night Live. In 1981, John appeared in the movie Continental Divide playing a hard-nosed Chicago newspaperman who finds romance in Colorado with eagle expert Blair Brown. That same year John and Dan Aykroyd appeared again in the movie Neighbors which gave them a chance to reverse roles, with John playing a straight-arrow family man whose life is turned upside down when a wild family man (Aykroyd) moves in next door. In January 1982, John began work on the screenplay for another movie, Noble Rot. Also, John had checked into a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, a popular celebrity hotel in Los Angeles. John's drug use had been steadily increasing for over a year now, which alarmed his wife and friends, but he continued to promise Judy that he would quit someday. On March 5, 1982, John Belushi was found dead in his hotel room at the age of 33. The local coroner gave the cause of death as a lethal injection of cocaine and heroin. Several years later, John's drug dealing/drug user companion during his final weeks, Cathy Smith, was tried and sentenced to three years in prison for supplying John with the drugs. Close friend James Taylor sang "That Lonesome Road" at a memorial service at Martha's Vineyard cemetery where John was buried.


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Mesazh i vjetėr 30 Dhjetor 2005 15:42
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historiani
Anetar i pa konfirmuar

Regjistruar: 11/11/2004
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peshtimit

Me vjen mire qe ke hapur kete teme dhe pergezime .
Xhon Belushi eshte padyshim shqiptari me i njohur ne USA pas Nene Terezes . Edhe ne nje film te hollivudit nje nga aktoret beri cudi kur mori vesh qe xhon dhe xhejms belushi jane shqiptare pasi ata jane te medhenj ne kinematografi . Per ne eshte fatkeqesi vdekja e parakoheshme e xhonit .
me respket
historiani

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Mesazh i vjetėr 05 Janar 2006 12:40
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SHKODRANI I QESHUR
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Duke ju uruar per temen qe keni hapur, deshiroj te ju bej nje sugjerim.
Meqenese personalisht nuk me rezulton qe vellezerit Belushi te kene dimostruar nacionalitetin e tyre haptasi,apo te kene shfaqur ndonje interes per Shqiperine--Do ju lutesha qe nqs keni informacione te tilla ti shkruani.

Ktu kam parasysh aktoren Eliza Dushku qe ka debutuar ne nje film te saj ,e veshur me nje bluze te bardhe, me shqipen dykrenare te stampuar.

Duke shpresuar se do te keni argumenta te tilla ,pres me kuriozitet shkrimet tuaja.

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Mesazh i vjetėr 05 Janar 2006 13:11
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peshtimi
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Xhon Belushin e njihnin te gjithe per shqiptar.

Shume nga yjet e Hollivudit ose te Saturday Night Live,mesuan se c'ishte Shqiperia nga Xhoni.
Aktori shume i njohur dhe shoku i tij me i mire Dan Akroyd e quante "lisi shqiptar".
Ne shume web site historike ne USA,kur flasin per Shqiperine,permendin vetem Xhonin.
Sigurisht,po te mesosh me shume rreth tij,do ta shohesh ne jeten e tij nuk kishte shume kohe per te tundur flamurin shqiptar....Ishte jeta tipike e nje artisti te viteve '60-'70 te periudhes te "sex,drugs and rock'n'roll".
Por karakteri i tij i vrullshem,bujar dhe i drejtperdrejte(teper shqiptar)i ka lene atij nje vend te vecante ne mendjet dhe zemrat e atyre qe e kane njohur.(Emrat fillojne me Xhek Nikelson dhe Bill Meri dhe vazhdojne me Lorni Majkells e te tjere autoritete te artit ne SHBA).
Ne Amerike dhe Kanada mund te thuash me krenari qe jemi nga vendi i origjines se Nene Terezes dhe Xhon Belushit.

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Mesazh i vjetėr 05 Janar 2006 13:38
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Cindi
larguar

Regjistruar: 01/09/2005
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Ferid Murat- Nje tjter shqiptar me fame

Ferid Murad – Autobiography

My father, Jabir Murat Ejupi, was born in Albania in 1892 and was the oldest of four children. His mother died when he was 13 years old. He and his family were shepherds and he subsequently ran away from home to sell candy in the Balkan countries as a teenager for several years. Although he had less than a year of education, he learned to speak seven languages before he died at the age of 84 in 1976. He met a group of other teenagers in Austria and they immigrated to the United States. The immigration officer at Ellis Island, August, 1913, asked his name, after which the officer declared him to be John Murad and stamped his papers. It was not uncommon to have names changed and abbreviated upon immigration. After working briefly in the steel mills and factories in Cleveland and Detroit, he settled in Chicago where he had several friends. His career was quite diverse and although he never admitted it, I learned subsequently from some of his colleagues that he was quite a playboy with fancy automobiles, perhaps the reason for my love of nice cars.

My mother, Henrietta Josephine Bowman, was born in 1918 in Alton, Illinois and was the third of six surviving children of Elizabeth Lillian and Andrew Orvie Bowman. My grandmother was a kind and wonderful woman. Only six of her eleven children survived due to stillbirths and some died of diseases and other conditions of poverty. My mother went to grade school for several years before she too quit to help her mother and younger siblings while her mother and two older sisters went to work. My grandfather was a carpenter who generally worked part-time and frequently spent his modest paycheck at the local bars before going home. The childhood poverty of both my parents and their minimal education did much to influence me and my two younger brothers in our education and career choices. One brother became a dentist and the other a professor of anthropology with a PhD degree.

My mother also ran away from home at 17 in 1935 to marry my father who was 39. I was born September 14, 1936 at home in their hot and small apartment over a bakery in Whiting, Indiana. My brothers John Abderhaman and Turhon Allen were born in 1938 and 1944. We were raised in a four room aparttment behind my parents' restaurant in Whiting, Indiana. This small apartment undoubtedly influenced my desire for large expensive homes.

The restaurant business had a profound effect on my future and that of my two brothers. When we were able to stand on a stool to reach the sink we washed dishes and later when we could see over the counter, we waited tables and managed the cash register. I did this throughout grade school and high school each evening and on weekends. I created a game from those chores and learned to memorize all of the customer's orders in our restaurant with a capacity of 28 customers and before they left I would tally their bills mentally and meet them at the cash register. I met a diverse and wonderful group of customers that ranged from laborers in the local refineries and steel mills to local bankers, businessmen, families and school teachers. My parents worked long hours as is typical of a family business, particularly a restaurant. My father worked 16 to 18 hours daily while my mother put in similar hours between the restaurant and raising three children. They owned the building that also included two other small apartments, another small business and 21 sleeping rooms upstairs. Many of the tenants were old and retired and my mother would often care for them and prepare their meals when they were sick. I learned from my mother and grandmother Bowman about compassion and generosity for people and this in turn influenced my career choice in medicine. My father taught me some business skills and how to repair numerous items that were continually breaking down in this old building. He was quite good at remembering how he took anything apart in order to repair it and reassemble the pieces as I stood at his side as a youngster passing him tools.

With this background I knew that I wanted considerable education so I wouldn't have to work as hard as my parents. Also, I knew at the age of 12 that I was going to become a doctor. My parents always encouraged us to get an education and establish a profession. However, my brothers and I grew up with considerable freedom whether it was saving or spending our tips from the restaurant or our career choices. This was also applied to our religious choices as my father was Muslim, my mother Baptist and we were raised in a Catholic community. Subsequently, my brothers became Catholic when they married Catholic wives and I was baptized Episcopalian in college. My wife of more than forty years is Presbyterian, two of our daughters married Jewish men and one married a Catholic man.

In eighth grade the class was asked to write an essay of our top three career choices. My choices were 1) physician, 2) teacher and 3) pharmacist (in 1948 clinical pharmacology was not yet a discipline in medicine). Today I do just that, as I am a board certified physician and internist doing both basic and clinical research with considerable teaching in medicine, pharmacology and clinical pharmacology and with a PhD in pharmacology. While I am probably working much harder and longer hours than my parents, I certainly love my profession and have considerably more enjoyment and disposable income than they did. Until my graduation from high school only three of my cousins had finished high school and no relatives had ever gone to college. Grade school, middle school and high school were relatively easy for me and with little studying I was an honor student every semester graduating 5th in my high school class. Fortunately several high school teachers, some of whom frequented our restaurant, Jack Taylor in Spanish and history, LaDonna Thue Elson in art, Bernard Quebeck in music, Jesse Allen in math, and coach Peter Kovachic convinced me I had some potential and were wonderful counselors and advisers. I lettered in track and cross country as a distance runner in the one and two mile events and music. I also played football and basketball but spent most of my time keeping the bench warm. I played offense and defense left guard at 5'11 " and 140 pounds. After three monsters ran over the top of me I spent more of my energy with distance running in cross country. While I started to play golf in grade school, I stopped playing for many years during college and medical training and I continue to struggle with my game after I began playing again about 20 years ago.

There was one notable friend since kindergarten, Ronald Delismon, who influenced me considerably. We competed constantly with everything: grades, chess, fencing, sports, etc. Today he is an aeronautical engineer recently retired from Boeing. His projects were always top secret such as the stealth bomber and some of the star war defense projects. He would never discuss his work with me for security reasons and often joked with me by saying, "if I told you, I would then have to kill you". After 57 years we remain the best of friends and still compete, generally at golf, skiing and more pleasant encounters. His recent comment was, "one Nobel to zero".

The University of Chicago had a new program in the 1950s that accepted students after three years of high school and friends in the restaurant who were alumni from the University of Chicago encouraged me to apply. However, after considerable thought I decided not to enter college prematurely but rather completed my senior year in high school. In retrospect, this was the correct decision for me as my senior year in high school was wonderful. I coasted through the year with excellent grades and lots of fun participating in the school's chorus and took the lead in several operettas. This was probably the only year in school where I wasn't compulsive about grades and didn't study constantly.

Since my parents couldn't afford to help me with my college costs, I looked for a school that offered the best scholarship. I considered the military programs at the Naval Academy and Westpoint, but I knew I wouldn't have received the biology training for medical school since these were primarily engineering programs with a requisite four years of military duty afterwards. I competed successfully for a Rector Scholarship at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, a small and excellent liberal arts university and went there from 1954 to 1958 on a tuition scholarship. The first year my grades were okay but not great with several A's, one C and the rest B's due to the hazing and distractions of being a pledge in the fraternity. In subsequent years my grades progressively improved as I was developing more self confidence and better study habits. I lived in "annexes", or small apartments with other fraternity brothers since the fraternity couldn't accommodate all of us and I generally chose other premeds as roommates. We often studied together and competed for grades. I was the scholarship chairman of the fraternity and remained a premed major with a second major in chemistry as I enjoyed both biology and chemistry. Throughout college I waited tables, taught the anatomy and embryology labs and worked one and sometimes two jobs during the summers to cover my expenses. If I had only one summer job I would take additional classes at one of the local extensions of Indiana University for additional math or literature classes in order to take more courses in biology, chemistry, physics or Greek and Latin at DePauw. The Greek and Latin courses in high school and college were of great value subsequently in learning the root derivatives of many scientific words.

In the spring of my junior year in 1957 on spring break in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I met Carol Ann Leopold, my wife to be. She and her family were from St. Louis. We were at DePauw together where she was an English and Spanish major planning to become a teacher. Although she dated many of my fraternity brothers, I had not met her previously. After spring break we began to date and I gave her my fraternity pin a month later. Our dates were primarily "study dates" at the library (the only thing I could afford) and after mostly A's in my senior year I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. At Christmas we were engaged and married within several weeks of graduation from DePauw on June 21, 1958.

During my senior year of college I began to apply to medical schools and planned to go to Washington University Medical School in St. Louis. However, my faculty advisor Forst Fuller, a professor in the biology department and also my mentor during an elective research project to understand how fish managed calcium metabolism without parathyroid glands, suggested that I consider a new MD-PhD program at Western Reserve University. A fraternity brother, Bill Sutherland, also advised that I consider this new combined degree program that his father Earl Sutherland, Jr initiated in Cleveland in 1957. The program paid full tuition for both degrees and provided a modest stipend of $2000 per year. I quickly applied and was interviewed on a Saturday morning in February of 1958 by the entire Pharmacology Department. Needless to say, I was awed by the attention they gave me and decided immediately to accept their offer. Carol, my fiancée, was somewhat concerned that I was now planning seven more years of education but she has always been understanding and supportive of my training, career path and numerous moves around the country. The game plan was to have Carol teach high school English as I went through the combined degree program. These plans abruptly changed within three months when Carol became pregnant. After teaching for only one semester, she was asked to resign when the pregnancy "began to show". Subsequently, she was a substitute teacher, part time secretary and hospital clinic coordinator as we progressed with our family; four girls, including a set of identical twins before I finished medical school and graduate school in 1965. Number five, the first boy, was born as I finished my residency in 1967. Fortunately, we didn't stop as planned after number four was born.

As I entered the new combined degree program my mentors were Earl Sutherland, Jr. the chairman of the Pharmacology Department and Theodore Rall a new young assistant professor and collaborator of Sutherland's. The year before I arrived they had discovered cyclic AMP as a "second messenger" of epinephrine - and glucagon-mediated effects on glycogenolysis in liver preparations. My assignment was to show that the catecholamine effects on cyclic AMP formation were due to effects through the beta adrenergic receptor. Alquist had previously reported that adrenergic effects could be classified as alpha or beta depending on the relative potency of several catecholamines. The new and only beta adrenergic receptor antagonist, dichloroisoproterenol, had also been just described and was to become a useful antagonist in our work. We found that catecholamine effects on adenylyl cyclase activation in both heart and liver preparations were, indeed, due to beta adrenergic effects as shown by the relative potencies of l-isoproterenol, l-epinephrine and l-norepinephrine with inhibition by dichloroisoproterenol and failure of alpha blockers and agonists to have effects. I also found that acetylcholine and other cholinergic agents inhibited adenylyl cyclase preparations, the first description of hormones, inhibiting cyclic AMP formation. I then became interested in agents that could block the effects of cyclic AMP on phosphorylase kinase and phosphorylase activation. This required some novel assays and an acquaintance with numerous cyclic AMP analogues and other nucleotides including cyclic GMP, cyclic IMP, cyclic CMP, etc. Many of these nucleotides and their analogues were synthesized by Theo Pasternak, a professor from Geneva who was on sabbatical collaborating with Sutherland and Rall. This work subsequently influenced my desire to work with cyclic GMP as described in my Nobel lecture. Later I again played organic chemist to make some nucleotides.

I was first in my class every year in medical school and graduate school. This was a wonderful and exciting time in my life working with these mentors, watching a new area of biology develop and actively participating in the work. I loved research as Earl Sutherland was quite a visionary who was able to bring together multiple disciplines and areas to apply to his work. Ted Rall taught how to do those fool proof "Sunday experiments" as we came to call them. It was on Sundays that I could design and conduct those large and complex experiments with all of Ted's required controls such that the data were "publishable". We and others in the department were able to determine that multiple hormones including catecholamines, cholinergics, ACTH, vasopressin, etc. could increase or decrease adenylyl cyclase activity and cyclic AMP formation. Prior to this the view of Sutherland was that receptors and adenylyl cyclase were a single macromolecule or a tightly associated complex in cell membranes. My work as a student and the work of others questioned this hypothesis and suggested that different receptors for this growing list of hormones must be coupled to adenylyl cyclase in yet to be determined complex ways (see Gilman's and Rodbell's Nobel lecture of 1994 for a greater description of their subsequent work).

I also enjoyed medical school and found myself learning everything presented before me. I knew that I couldn't determine what was to be true and important and many of our faculty acknowledged this as well. Since anything could be important, I began to learn everything taught. The new experimental integrated organ-system approach to medical education at Western Reserve permitted me to assimilate and integrate information more readily. I also thoroughly enjoyed my clinical rotations in medicine, surgery, OB-GYN, pediatrics, orthopedics, neurology, etc. There were few clinical rotations that I didn't think about as a possible discipline for my future academic career. I subsequently learned that I was at the top of the medical school and graduate school class each year and received prizes at graduation for both clinical medicine and research. I was in my element and loved it. There was no doubt in my mind about an academic career in medicine, research and teaching.

In order to supplement my stipend with so many children, I moonlighted at the Cleveland Clinic working one or two nights per week on the OB-GYN service to follow mothers with pelvic exams as they progressed through labor, assisted in deliveries and Caesarian sections and then scrubbed tables and floors after each delivery. All of this for $20.00 per night for 12 hours of work from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. one or two nights per week for four years. On slow evenings I was able to study, analyze lab data and write research protocols. Some nights required that I work all night and then attend a full day of classes the next day. I continued this during my clinical clerkships requiring my absence from my family as often as 4 to 5 nights per week. However, I tried to have dinner with my family as often as my schedule permitted. My wife and children were very understanding. They grew up as wonderful children and adults in spite of my absence, obviously due to a devoted wife and mother. My current fetish is my 5 grandchildren who I try to spend as much time with as possible, undoubtedly due to my guilt as an absent father. I did manage to spend several weeks each summer with my family as we took them camping all over the U.S. to various scientific meetings. There are only a few states where we have not camped together as a family and they all became proficient swimmers at a young age.

I decided to go to Massachusetts General Hospital for my internship and residency in medicine (1965-67). What a wonderful experience this was with some of the worlds' leading scientists, teachers and clinicians. Our group of 14 housestaff included exciting bright minds such as Tom Smith, Tony Gotto, Jim Willerson, Ed Scolnik and others that had considerable influence on me. My attendings and chief residents included Alex Leaf, Dan Federman, Roman DeSanctis, Frank Austen, Sam Thier, Ken Shine and others. As a resident Joe Goldstein and Mike Brown were two of our interns. I couldn't have asked for a greater introduction to medicine in spite of being on call every other night and weekend. I did, however, miss the laboratory and each spring I found myself in the library reading many of the abstracts of the Federation meeting (currently FASEB meeting) to see what I was missing in "second messengers and hormone signaling". I generated a notebook that contained numerous "obvious experiments" to be done. When I subsequently went to NIH as a clinical associate in the Heart Institute I was able to do many of the planned experiments in Martha Vaughan's laboratory. She too was an excellent mentor with a style different from either Sutherland or Rall. She gave me considerable freedom to pursue a number of areas related to cyclic AMP and hormonal regulation. Her husband, the late Jack Orloff, while superficially a gruff and tough man, was a sensitive person and talented scientist. I was indeed fortunate that they and many others at NIH influenced my thinking and career planning. I soon learned that I had numerous role models and attempted to extract the best features of each as I planned my career path and future.

I remained at NIH for more than three years (1967-70) when the University of Virginia called to recruit me to develop a new Clinical Pharmacology Division in the Department of Medicine with an appointment as an Associate Professor in medicine and pharmacology. I couldn't resist the offer from Ed Hook, the new chairman of medicine and Joe Larner, the new chairman of pharmacology. Other faculty such as Tom Hunter, the Vice President of Medical Affairs, Ken Crispell the Dean, Bob Berne, Bob Haynes and others influenced my decision to leave NIH. I had known Larner, Berne and Haynes since they were faculty at Western Reserve when I was a student. Charlottesville was also an appealing place to raise my five children. Some colleagues around the country, particularly David Kipnis, another one of my role models, questioned me about going to Charlottesville. Just the previous year I called him to apply for a fellowship in endocrinology at Washington University. I was then 33 years old with 5 children and his advice was appropriate. He said, "Fred, time for you to get a job and support your family", and I took his advice to heart.

I joined the faculty at the University of Virginia, September 1, 1970 and nervously thought about how I could launch my own independent research career. I decided to work with cyclic GMP as it was beginning to emerge as a possible new "second messenger" to mediate hormone effects. This is detailed in my Nobel lecture. I remained at the University of Virginia from 1970 to 1981 where I was promoted as one of the youngest professors in 1975; I was also asked to become the Director of their Clinical Research Center in 1971 and the Director of Clinical Pharmacology in 1973. I built a research program with both clinical and basic studies and started to recruit many exciting students and fellows to work with me. Of the 82 fellows and students I have trained and collaborated with to date twenty are professors, chairmen, research directors and division chiefs around the world. I view them as offspring and keep in contact with most of them in my travels. There is no question that one of my greatest accomplishments is to have participated in the training of such successful scientists in my own laboratory and also influenced the careers of many talented medical students, graduate students and housestaff.

After looking at many university positions around the country as a chair of medicine or pharmacology and industrial positions, I decided to go to Stanford in July 1981 as Chief of Medicine of the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, a Stanford affiliated hospital. I was a professor of medicine and pharmacology and the associate chairman of medicine. While it was difficult to leave many friends and colleagues at the University of Virginia where we conducted the first experiments with the biological effects of nitric oxide, I couldn't turn down this exciting opportunity at Stanford. Ken Melmon was chairman of medicine and during our first three years together we recruited about 30 new young faculty. Inspite of the large administrative and clinical teaching demands, I continued to supervise a large and productive laboratory with about 15 students, fellows and staff. Trainees continued to come to our laboratory from all over the world. Some of my students and fellows subsequently went to medical school and after completing residencies have become very productive physician scientists at a number of institutions.

After a stint as Acting Chairman of Medicine at Stanford (1986-88), I left to become a Vice President at Abbott Laboratories as I was becoming concerned about managed health care on the horizon and its possible effects on patient care, research and education. After considering several industrial positions, I chose Abbott primarily because of its president Jack Schuler, a sales and marketing person with an MBA from Stanford who also had considerable vision. We worked well together as he taught me many business principles and I taught him about drug discovery and development. I enjoyed the access to all of Abbott's resources, scientific staff, instrumentation and what initially seemed like an unlimited research budget. I eventually learned that one can never have enough resources when one looks for novel therapies of major diseases; it's an expensive undertaking. Nevertheless, in four years of directing their pharmaceutical discovery and development programs we were able to discover many novel drug targets and we brought forward about 24 new compounds for clinical trials for various diseases. I continued to have a very productive lab with two NIH grants, some outside funding for fellows and about 20 scientists working with me on nitric oxide and cyclic GMP. The administrative demands and travel were considerable since I was a corporate officer, vice president and also overseeing many industrial collaborations around the world. When I left Abbott I was supervising about 1500 scientists and staff and probably earned the equivalent of an MBA from the experience on the job plus periodic management courses required by the company. Before my arrival at Abbott the company had no postdoctoral fellows or extramural funding. When I left we had about $3.5 mill. per year of extramural grant support and about 35 fellows in pharmaceutical research. Unfortunately, Abbott reorganized its senior management and my business roll models were asked to leave. As Abbott's senior scientist I found myself wedged between upper management, the marketing staff and the scientists and constantly was defending my decisions about the research programs. There were always considerable marketing pressures on me that in my opinion were often the wrong decisions to develop novel therapeutics for diseases without adequate therapy.

I left Abbott in 1993 to be a founder, President and CEO of a new biotech company, Molecular Geriatrics Corporation. The plan was to create another intensive research-based biotech company. Unfortunately, my investment banker never raised the amounts of money promised and he eventually lost a major personal fortune with his leveraging tactics. I found myself skipping around the world to find investors and partners to keep the company afloat and pay the bills. After a partnership with a major pharmaceutical company and some more financing as a private company, I left to rejoin academics, hopefully much wiser.

After considering a number of Vice President, Dean positions and Chairmanships, I realized that such positions would probably totally remove me from the laboratory, fellows and students, things I could not give up. In April 1997, I became the University of Texas-Houston's first chairman of a newly combined basic science department, Integrative Biology, Pharmacology and Physiology. I am also creating a new Division of Clinical Pharmacology jointly between our department and medicine. I plan to continue an active basic and clinical research program and will participate in clinical medicine and teaching again. Thus, I have come full circle. I am back in my academic element again and I love it. I also expect to continue some business adventures and exercise my entrepreneurial skills, areas that I also enjoy and view as lucrative hobbies. The freedom and intellectual environment of academic medicine and bright young students and fellows are exciting and a daily joy for me. After all, I hope to tell Ron Delismon some day "Two Nobels to zero".

From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1998, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1999

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.



Addendum September 2005
It has been seven years since receiving the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for my work with nitric oxide and cyclic GMP. Life has been extremely busy. I have continued as chairman of the Department of Integrative Biology and Pharmacology at the University of Texas – Houston. I have expanded the department with the recruitment of six new, young, faculty, but some retirements and one death in the department kept us about the same size until some of the Dental School faculty joined us to consolidate some of the Dental School.

My laboratory has been very active with about 15 to 18 scientists which is our usual size for the past 25 years. We have found ourselves redirecting some of our research interest with nitric oxide and cyclic GMP into some new directions to maintain our lead in the field and address new challenging questions with soluble guanylyl cyclase regulation, and the role of nitric oxide and cyclic GMP in mouse and human embryonic stem cell proliferation and differentiation.

While research grant applications and support are always a nervous and time consuming process, several foundations and donors have generously supported our work and provided me with a handsomely endowed chair. These flexible and discretionary research funds have been most appreciated to pursue some of our research ideas, or accept another outstanding young scientist and trainee.

The academic world like the business world is busily involved with layers of review and compliance. With about one-half of the number of scientists in our department that I had as Chairman of Medicine at Stanford University the paper work has probably tripled. The developers of e-mail should be admonished for destroying so much paper and trees and wasting hours and hours of my time. It seems that everyone in the University feels obliged to send me all of their email copies, often after four pages of addresses, followed by a brief useless message. Perhaps all employees should be allocated some annual allotment of emails which, if exceeded, results in salary reductions.

Shortly after the Nobel Prize, I was asked to become the Director of our Institute of Molecular Medicine which I also accepted. For the past eight years I have held two senior positions in the University, as Chairman of the Department and Director of the Institute, each normally a full-time position. While at the University of Virginia, Stanford University, and Abbott Laboratories I also held two positions simultaneously. This is perhaps due to my workaholic tendencies.

Being the Director of the Institute has also provided me with a significant building and recruiting opportunity. I was able to convince the University President to engage in a major fund raising campaign of $200 million. About half was used to build a new research building, of about 230,000 sq ft for the Institute, and the other half to recruit new faculty and scientists. The state of Texas, the Houston community, and local foundations have been most generous and we will be moving into our new research building in mid-2006. We expect to recruit 30 to 40 new faculty over the next three to five years, plus their research staff and trainees. We expect to triple our current number of scientists.

A very time consuming activity in the past seven years has been my travel and lecturing. I have visited about 35 to 40 countries during the past seven years and traveled about 100,000 to 150,000 miles per year. I am invited to all sorts of meetings and functions around the world to dedicate buildings, hospitals, participate in conferences, scientific meetings, university seminars, consult for companies and governments, etc ... Presumably, it is assumed that by having received the Nobel Prize you are automatically an expert on all topics, fields and disciplines. I have even been invited on panels of Nobel Laureates to discuss methods to promote peace and education around the world. While participating in these many travels and meetings, I have also declined many invitations because time does not permit the travel or because of conflicts in scheduling. After all, I do have a day job and must be home occasionally to pick up my paycheck. I have had many memorable experiences and meetings and fortunately my wife, Carol, accompanies me on much of my travel. I have had meetings with Palestine’s Chairman Yasser Arafat, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, Presidents Lee and Chen of Taiwan, Chief Executive Tung of Hong Kong, President Medani of Albania, President Trajkovski of Macedonia, Premier Wen Jiabao of China, President Clinton, President Bush, many congressman and senators, governors and mayors.

I have also met dozens of Nobel Laureates and attended conferences and meetings with them. Carol and I have become friends of many Laureates and their spouses and many travel and lecture as much as I do. For those who are retired, it hasn’t been quite so demanding or difficult.

My office and home are filled with artifacts, photographs, plaques, medals, statues, gifts and memorabilia. You receive numerous honorary degrees and certificates to wall paper your office at both work and home. We have run out of wall and surface space in my office and home and have begun to create piles to organize in the future. Since I have no plans for retirement, my children and grandchildren will probably have to organize the materials some day. One of the more humorous and memorable events was being grand marshall of the fourth of July Parade, with my wife and some of our grandchildren on the float, in my home town Whiting, Indiana. I have also given lectures to children in schools, churches and mosques. After a number of such requests, I prepared a children’s educational video that can be viewed on the Nobel website that discusses the Nobel Prize and nitric oxide.

On one of my several trips to Macedonia, my father’s homeland, Carol and I arranged for one of our daughters to adopt a three-month-old Albanian baby girl. The trip, at our expense, required that I give several lectures and meet with many dignitaries. I consider this one of my best honorariums.

The Nobel Prize has also influenced my grandchildren who have been asked to discuss nitric oxide and the Nobel Prize in their classes after a classmate’s new premature sibling required inhaled nitric oxide for pulmonary hypertension. Press conferences with the media and radio, and television interviews are frequent. The media often wants to talk about Viagra, while I attempt to lead them into more medically significant areas: such as, pulmonary hypertension in premature babies, wound healing, endothelial dysfunction with atherosclerosis, hypertension, or diabetes, where nitric oxide can be much more important medically.

While the Nobel Prize ceremonies in 1998 in Stockholm were quite a treat, the 100th anniversary Nobel Reunion in 2001 allowed me the opportunity to participate in the ceremonies and festivities, again, with less anxiety and an opportunity to absorb and savor the activities and functions. Life after the Nobel Prize is quite exciting, interesting and also demanding. I thought the attention and notoriety would subside within several months after receiving the Prize. However, there is no indication that this is the case seven years later. Wherever you go you can’t escape the media and the attention. The numerous invitations to travel, lecture, attend conferences, consult for governments, universities, and companies have not subsided. It is exciting, rewarding, educational, lucrative and exhausting. You can rarely let your guard down and hide or relax. You don’t dare pick your nose or scratch in some places for fear that someone will catch you on camera or video. When you travel, you often feel like you are on “Candid Camera”.

Although I receive multiple faxes, phone calls and FedEx’s when I travel, when I return there are stacks of correspondences and long lab meetings with my staff to review our research progress before preparing for the next trip.

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Eliza Dushku

Biography
Full Name: Eliza Patricia Dushku
D.O.B: 30 December, 1980
Place of birth: Boston, Massachusettes.
Eyes: Brown
Hair: Bown
Height: "I'm 5'9" - OK, fine 5'8 1/2". OK, really I'm at a lovely medium, that's all I'll say."

Eliza Dushku was discovered at the age of 10, when she went along with her brother to a commercial audition, tripped on the stairs, turned into an drama queen and came to the notice of the casting agents. She was selected after a five month search throughout the US for the perfect girl to play the lead role of Alice opposite Juliette Lewis in the film "That Night" when she was 12. In the 1993 film "This Boy's Life" she was cast as Robert De Niro's daughter and it was a role that she said opened a lot of doors for her. In the following year, she played Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis' teenage daughter in "True Lies." She then had parts as Paul Reiser's daughter in "Bye Bye, Love" and as Cindy Johnson with Halle Berry and Jim Belushi in "Race the Sun" as well as playing parts in a television movie and a short film.

Eliza took time off from acting to finish her junior and senior years of high school. She was accepted into Boston, George Washington and Suffolk Universities (where she wants to study something other than acting.) She has said in the past that she was deciding between going to college or going on with her film career, and it seems like school is on hold for now.

After high school, her foray back into acting was with the role of Faith in "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer." Though initally planned as a five episode role, Faith (and Eliza) became so popular with the fans, cast and crew that she stayed on throughout the whole of the third season. She has made guest appearances in both "Buffy" and it's spin-off "Angel" during the important May 2000 sweeps, and is currently planning on a return to both shows for the 2003 season.

Her part in a show popular with both viewers and critics, made sure that Eliza won't be lacking for work any time soon. In 2000, she starred with Kirsten Dunst in the cheerleading comedy "Bring It On." It was a surprising success at the box office, and Eliza played her role as the audience surrogate with particular distinction.

She has since starred in a varied range of films such as "Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back," "Soul Survivors," "The New Guy" and in the Robert De Niro drama, "City by the Sea." Eliza is also currently filming another leading role in "Wrong Turn", and is sure to be in discussions for many more films. But, aside from a return to television, it is unknown where her diverse career path will take her next.

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Agim Kaba

~*~ Agim's Biography ~*~

Agim Kaba joined the cast of As The World Turns on April 5, 2002 in the role of Aaron Snyder. Newly reunited with his father, Holden Snyder, after being raised by his mother and stepfather in Seattle, Aaron is attempting to adjust to his new life - and his new family - in Oakdale.
Kaba hails from Tampa, FL with his family. Kaba has two passions: soccer and acting. After graduating from high school, Kaba moved to Queens, NY to play collegiate soccer at St. John’s University, where he majored in Fine Arts. Although his dreams of becoming a professional soccer player didn’t pan out, Kaba’s exotic Albanian features caught the eye of a modeling scout. His short stint as a model helped jump-start his acting career. As the World Turns marks his television debut.

Provided By CBS.com


Quick Facts

Birthday: February 16

Born: New York

Raised: Florida

Heritage: Albanian (His name means Sunrise.)

He attended St. John's University in Queens, NY

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Edi Rama - kryebashkiaku i Botes

PAINTING THE TOWN
— JANE KRAMER

How Edi Rama reinvented Albanian politics.
Issue of 2005-06-27
Posted 2005-06-20



Edi Rama is the mayor of Tirana, Albania, and it’s safe to say that the Balkans have never produced a politician so beguiling. You see him everywhere: six feet six, three-day beard, baggy black pachuco pants, funky black vest, red shirt, red socks, and the kind of shapeless black frock coat that East German clergymen used to wear. You hear him everywhere: a gravelly basso exhorting the lazy, seducing the skeptics, booming his way through a hip-hop track about Tirana that half the city seems to own. He is inexhaustible. He spends his days repairing the body and soul of a shattered capital and his nights prowling its streets, seeing that the work got done, and that no one has been stealing street lights or dropping beer bottles or cigarette wrappers—that people are behaving like citizens. Rama is a Balkan original, and maybe the most original thing about him is that he isn’t really a politician. He is an artist who, you might say, took Tirana for his canvas.

Rama has been in office for nearly five years (he was elected in 2000, at the age of thirty-six, and reëlected three years later), and the first thing he did as mayor was to order paint. He blasted the façades of Tirana’s gray Stalinist apartment blocks with color—riotous, Caribbean color—turning buildings into patchworks of blues, greens, oranges, purples, yellows, and reds, and the city itself into something close to a modern-masters sampler. (Art in America put a Tirana façade on its December cover; it looked like an abstract painting.) It was an extravagant gesture, but Rama thinks in extravagant gestures. “The city was without organs,” he says, meaning that it was a dump, and that nothing in it functioned. (“Kandahar” is how he usually describes it.) “I thought, My colors will have to replace those organs. It was an intervention.”

The interventions continued. Within a few years, Rama had managed to clear the choked, riverine city center of two thousand illegal kiosks and bars and cafés and shops and whorehouses and sleeping barracks and traffickers’ storeroom “motels”—the detritus of a decade of post-Communist freedom frenzy on city property. He carted away a hundred and twenty-three thousand tons of concrete and ninety thousand tons of garbage. He dredged Tirana’s Lana River, seeded thirty-six acres of public parks, relaid old boulevards, and planted four thousand trees. He lit the city—literally, since only seventy-eight street lights worked when he took it over. He cajoled the money for all this transformation out of the World Bank and the European Union and the United Nations Development Program and George Soros and the score of foundations and aid agencies and N.G.O.s that had set up shop in Albania in the early nineties. And he cajoled the work out of local contractors: anybody who wanted to build anything in the capital had to “contribute.” People enjoy Tirana now. They stroll and shop on the shady streets of what used to be their Politburo’s version of a gated neighborhood. They read the paper and drink espresso under the white umbrellas of cheerful, sprawling cafés. There is nothing remotely like Tirana in the rest of Albania. Most of its cities are still Kandahar. And its politicians, as often as not, are the clan bosses who control the contraband.

“People can say that my color is only makeup,” Rama told me, as we walked through town one mild February night, stopping on an old stone Ottoman footbridge he had just restored. “But suppose all makeup disappeared. Suppose all women had no makeup, no pretty dresses, no pretty hair.” It is Rama’s belief that Albanians are somewhat aesthetically challenged—and his mission is to meet that challenge. “These are not Parisians,” he said. “They can be calmed by beauty.”



Not long ago, Edi Rama was living a happy, hardscrabble artist’s life in the City of Light. He was a good painter, not a great one, and the only real difference between him and hundreds of other young painters making their vie de bohčme in Paris then was that Rama was an Albanian painter—a breed not much seen in the West, or, for that matter, in most of the East, in the half century since a Communist Party Secretary named Enver Hoxha put Albania in the deep freeze of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and shut the door. Rama had come to Paris in 1995 on a two-year fellowship to the Cité Internationale des Arts, and stayed. He didn’t have much, but it was pretty much all he wanted: a cheap apartment on the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine; a friendly neighborhood café; a great-looking German girlfriend; an old laptop; and his paints. He had had some shows, his paintings were selling, and he was feasting on Western art. He had fallen in love with Picasso on a trip to the Kunsthalle Bremen (“I saw my first Picasso; I thought, I’ll die”) and then with Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon and Max Ernst. Now he was in love with the Louvre and its Paolo Uccellos, and was working day and night on a series of new paintings. “Edi was a free spirit,” his friend and occasional Paris roommate, the Albanian video artist Anri Sala, says. “He was never interested in things, only in things that brought him closer to his vision.” He certainly wasn’t interested in trading Paris for Albania.

People were leaving Albania then (nearly a million, by the end of the nineties), not returning. The country was in chaos. Depending on whom you asked, it was “recovering from fifty years of Communism” or “making an irrepressible transition to democracy” or “being its Balkan self,” which, for practical purposes, meant that it was held hostage to a collection of traffickers, mobsters, hustlers, money launderers, and politicians who were bent or brutal (or both). Albania’s last Communist Prime Minister, a born-again Socialist Party leader named Fatos Nano, had been thrown in prison on unsubstantiated (if unsurprising) charges involving eight million dollars that had gone missing from an emergency food-aid deal with Italy a few years earlier. Albania’s President, an old Politburo doctor and new Democratic Party leader named Sali Berisha, was extolling the purity of Albanian money while two-thirds of the people—united, briefly, in a mass hysteria they took for capitalism—sank their pensions and their life savings into pyramid schemes that left the country bankrupt, its arsenals looted, and close to civil war.

The choice between Albania’s new “Socialists” and its new “Democrats” (two misnomers, used mainly because they sounded Western) amounted to what one Albanian called the poison or the axe, and it was not a choice anyone should have had to make. Rama’s own politics then were, by his description, “Paris left and Tirana troublemaker radical.” He had put in time as a leader of Albania’s young democracy movement in the early nineties, and had sat on Soros’s local Open Society board with a group of like-minded intellectuals determined to open their country to the West and escape what the anthropologist Mariella Pandolfi calls the Balkan conundrum of “permanent transition.” He had left a reputation, and a following, behind him—a reputation he maintained in Paris by writing columns for a Tirana paper on the subject of what was wrong with Albania. (“My bottles in the sea,” he calls his dispatches.) Safe in Paris, he was making the satraps tremble. In the winter of 1997, when he was home visiting his parents, two thugs rumored to be Berisha hitmen intercepted him on a dark road, beat him senseless with lead pipes, and left him for dead—an event he commemorated, in what has come to be known as “the Edi Rama style,” by staggering to a photographer’s house, on his way to the hospital, and posing for pictures of his cracked skull and his smashed, swollen, bloody face. “Thirteen blows,” he told his friends when the doctors removed his feeding and breathing tubes. (Berisha denies having ordered the attack.)

A year later, Rama flew home for his father’s funeral. He told his girlfriend, “I’m back in four days.” By the next morning, Fatos Nano—fresh from jail, Prime Minister again, and looking for a clean face to decorate an otherwise murky cabinet—had named him Minister of Culture. (His first “intervention” as a minister was to underwrite a movie theatre for Tirana, telling his colleagues that in terms of public morale and safety “a dark theatre with a good movie is more effective than an unlit street with a thousand police.”) In two more years, he was Tirana’s mayor. This spring, he was travelling to meetings every Sunday, and people said he was weighing the chances of becoming Prime Minister himself—something that most Albanians would welcome. Rama said no, that he had made a “moral contract” with Tirana, and that he “would not tear up this contract, even if they offered to make me king, let alone Prime Minister.” (Elections are in two weeks, and he is campaigning for the Socialists.) But the pols were already so alarmed at even the thought of an Edi Rama government that they had been doing all they could to derail him. Months before Tirana’s last mayoral election, Berisha had produced a dossier of Rama’s “crimes”—trafficking, laundering, mob connections, drug connections, terrorist connections, everything bad he could think of—and demanded a parliamentary investigation. Rama’s response was to wrap City Hall in sheets, like a Christo, with the accusations printed across them in big red letters. He called it “Happy April 1st from the Doctor.”

“Going from art to politics—I wouldn’t in any normal situation have done this,” Rama told me. “It’s impossible, it’s Kafka, it’s like changing sex. But I wanted to leave my name in the history of this city, this country. On the day of his funeral, my father gave me his most important lesson. I saw the crowds”—his father, Kristaq, had been Albania’s favorite sculptor, an inventive master of what could be called socialist-realist Baroque—“and I saw the respect they paid him. I saw that nothing is as valuable as leaving a good history behind you. I went to his grave and made a promise.”



Tirana was a small city of two hundred and fifty thousand people until the Communist regime unravelled and hundreds of thousands of northern clansmen, from near the Kosovo border, began to descend to its outskirts. Fifteen years later, more than seven hundred thousand people live in and around the city, but the original Tirana is still small, and the original families are still there. Edi Rama comes from one of those families. The Ramas were a Balkan mix, but “southern” in spirit—southern, in Albania, being a code for urban and (at least in origin) Christian, closer in culture and temperament to Greece, to the south, and Italy, just across the Adriatic, than to anyone in the largely Muslim north, much of it as primitive as it was when Lord Byron visited Ali Pasha. They were also part of that cautious, curious East European élite that had survived, shabbily but comfortably, during the Communist years by joining the Party and doing whatever complaining they did in private. They had considerable privilege: a roomy apartment; a studio for Kristaq; the use of their old family villa, south of Vlora, where the Adriatic meets the Ionian Sea. They were educated and, to an extent, travelled. Rama’s father had studied art in Leningrad. His mother, Aneta, who was one of the country’s first women dentists, had trained in Lodz. His younger brother, Olsi, who, like Edi, studied at home, now lives with his own family in a Detroit suburb and is part of a research team at the Karmanos Cancer Institute.

Rama was born during Albania’s “Mao years,” after the country broke with Russia and attached itself to China. And it may be a measure of how bleak and isolated life in Albania was then that people remembered the Russians with something close to nostalgia. For Rama, it was a drama played out at home: “My father was a Communist. For him, Communism meant studying art in Russia, it meant Mayakovsky and the spirit of that moment—it was like being completely drug-addicted. He came slowly down, making a balance between disillusion and fear. He was decent, quiet, he never had many words, but he was a hostage of the need to keep his family safe. He became more and more silent. In our family, it was always possible to argue. But the feeling was: ‘What for?’ ”

When Rama talks about the family, he prefers to start with his father’s mother, who arrived in Tirana from Durres after the Second World War. His grandmother was a Catholic (most Albanian Christians are Orthodox), and he says that, for him, she was a glimpse into a forbidden world. He remembers her during the Mao years, when religion was a constitutional offense, whispering her rosary at night in the nursery, where he and Olsi slept. “After lights-out, I would hear that low voice, making her prayers. She was my night music.” He says that she planted the seeds of “an alternative way of thinking in me, an alternative to what Communist ideology meant by ‘love’ and ‘values.’ ” When he was a baby, she brought a priest into the apartment and had him baptized secretly; she gave him “shelter against everything that was taught out loud.”

At eighteen, Rama entered the Albanian Academy of Arts—a place where “painting stopped at Courbet.” But by then he was lost in another forbidden world, a world he had discovered, as a boy, in clandestine chance encounters—a book or a journal here, a picture there, a smuggled tape, an instrument. He remembers hearing a saxophone for the first time. Saxophones were banned in Albania, which may be why the day a school friend whispered, “Want to see a saxophone?” is as memorable to him as the day he saw his first nude drawings. He says that the sound of that saxophone—a few notes, played in his friend’s attic, with lookouts posted on the stairs—was “like a strange amplification of the miraculous,” and started him wondering “why all these beautiful things were bad.” Beautiful things were hard to find in Albania then. Rama took to visiting one of his father’s old art professors who had studied in Florence in the thirties and was said to own two volumes of Impressionist prints. (“They were like pearls, like nectar,” he says.) He started hanging around the National Library, staying late to help the maids clean; his pay was five minutes alone with a banned book of Georges Braque’s paintings. “A spiritual sandwich,” he calls it.

No one knows how Rama survived Communist Albania. His friends claim it was because he was tall—“Nobody in Albania is that tall,” one of them told me—and was kept safe for the greater glory of the national basketball team, which he joined for a while in the late eighties, perhaps the only player in its history who could dunk. His brother says he survived on eloquence, intensity, and a gift for bullsh*t. He managed to graduate from the Arts Academy, in 1986, and even to be asked to stay on as an assistant professor. But he was also known for having the two most dangerous enthusiasms in Albania—God and art—and he was fast becoming a public figure. He started lecturing on Bauhaus principles. He embraced Expressionism. In fact, he introduced Albania to Expressionism, taking a Party commission for a forty-foot mural at a museum built to commemorate the draining of swampland for collective farms, and, with a painter named Vladimir Myrtezai, turning out “a work of Expressionism hiding in the theme of darkness” (Rama’s words). “It created a lot of noise and disappointment” in the Party, he likes to say.

Rama celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall by opening an arts conference with smuggled tapes of Joe Cocker and Prince. He was premature. Albania’s Communists clung to power for two more years, and during those years Rama and his friends began to organize big open meetings, which they called Reflections, in a darkened Arts Academy auditorium where “everyone was equal.” They invited old political prisoners—“the buried-alive people”—to the Academy to tell their stories. They went to political rallies where ex-Communists like Berisha, trying to invent new parties, talked endlessly about democracy but never about the past, never about the fact that Enver Hoxha had led Albania astray. According to Rama, Berisha accused them of “opening the sewers of our society,” and when that happened he got on the phone to Voice of America and said, “Listen, we want to make a declaration. We are not flinging mud at the memory of Enver Hoxha. We are just starting to wash off the mud he flung on us.”

Rama says, “For me, it was as if Hoxha died at that moment. I thought, I’m a free man. I want the world.” He was on his way out of a brief and unhappy marriage. (He has a son, Greg, who is nearly fifteen.) He took the money he had just made from a show in Corfu, his first outside Albania, and started travelling—to France, Germany, England, Brazil, wherever he got a grant or an invitation or a cheap ticket. And he started thinking about the cities he saw and what made them work and what made them interesting. “Rome, for instance. I thought, This is the end of history, it’s where things ended, where the sun went to bed. Paris—well, there was the beautiful, transparent life of the Paris miracle, but it’s there for you, nothing comes out of it. The most impressive place was London. I felt the freedom, the energy of London.” He didn’t know why Albania couldn’t produce a great city.



“When I think about governance—about how easy it is—it makes me sick,” Rama announced one night over dinner at his favorite seafood restaurant, about a half hour out from Tirana. The Albanian soccer team was eating at the next table. Some of the players had just trooped over to shake hands with Rama, and one had mentioned that the Prime Minister was offering a four-hundred-thousand-dollar bonus if they beat Ukraine in a World Cup qualifying match scheduled for the next night. (They didn’t.) Rama was uneasy about the offer. He talked for a while about how well most young Albanians could do if they were simply left alone. Albania, with a population that is seventy per cent Muslim, remains, at least for now, a secular country, free from the kind of violence that ravaged Kosovo, next door. “We have no religious problem, no ethnic problem, only ourselves,” Rama said, finally. “And it would be so easy to be ourselves.” The problem was how.

A few days earlier, Rama had downloaded an Internet test that was going to read his “political compass.” It had a horizontal axis from “left” to “right” and a vertical axis from “libertarian” to “authoritarian,” and Rama had made his dot about halfway down the “left libertarian” quadrant, just to the right of Nelson Mandela and a bit more authoritarian than the Dalai Lama. He was satisfied, but he wasn’t sure. He said that the experience of running Tirana had convinced him that there was “nothing left or right in the way I deal with the world,” that the real divisions in Albania had less to do with politics than with honest and corrupt, peaceful and violent, and, especially, with “the hard-working people and the people who don’t respect work.” Right now, this is his only politics. “If I lived in Germany or France or England, no doubt I’d be totally with the left wing,” he told me. “But there is a huge difference in the situation there. At the end of the day, the ideology we need to embrace is the ideology of work. Right and left are only a question of how you distribute. For us, the key is to have something to distribute.”

Rama works all the time. His friend Dashi Peza—who put in a few years with him at City Hall and left, exhausted, to go into the hotel business—told me, “When I met Edi, we were boys, but he was more disciplined and devoted than a priest. I said, ‘Edi, relax, try some sin!’ ” Edi has tried. He learned to smoke in Paris. He developed a taste for wine. But, once he was mayor, he stopped, and now even a big meal can make him feel guilty. He goes on crash diets, some of them mystifying (“Days 12-13: white cheese, French fries, boiled vegetables”) but, he claims, punishing enough to make him feel “less spiritually heavy.” Even his old girlfriends—he introduced one of them to his aunt as “my fourth victim”—say that they had no chance against his passion for Albania. Today, he lives with his son and with his partner of five years, a preternaturally patient young television hostess and producer named Rudina Magjistari, who, he says, understands that passion. Magjistari says, “Well, to stay with Edi, you must understand him, you have to accept him as he is. Obsessive. Preoccupied. At first it was a bit strange.” Rama comes home at night and collapses on the couch, his head in Magjistari’s lap, never speaking, reading the Italian papers, surfing the local news, and text-messaging half the people he knows to see what they think of the news or, more accurately, the news about him, and what he should do about it. Text messaging is his addiction: he thinks of something, and he starts tapping. “Am I pissing you off?” he asks cheerfully whenever a friend complains. “Doing nothing makes me nervous.”

This year, Rama has been giving himself a crash course in economics. It’s a fairly haphazard exercise, inasmuch as most of the reading list, the advice, and, often, the books themselves have been supplied by visitors from abroad. Three years ago, the United Nations honored Rama for his work in Tirana. And last year, up against mayors from places like Athens, Rome, and Mexico City, he was chosen World Mayor 2004. (A city-watch group based in London took the poll.) Now everybody who comes to Albania wants to meet Edi Rama, and they bring books. “I’m always with a book, I’m reading about economy all the time,” Rama says. Todd Buchholz, Thomas Sowell, Hernando de Soto’s “The Other Path” and “The Mystery of Capital.” Hardly a left-wing list, but Rama, somewhat to his surprise, has become not only a law-and-order politician but an eager disciple of a group of unconventionally conservative economists—especially De Soto, whose books have convinced him that “the poor are not the problem but the solution to the problem.” De Soto comes from Peru, and it was his fairly successful theory that you could salvage the Peruvian economy by folding the poor into the propertied classes—turning squatters into owners, formalizing their titles to create a property-tax base that would open credit sources for them and turn dead capital into working capital.

This is Rama’s prescription for Tirana. He says that it fits Albania’s historical givens, the most important being that people who have lived through Communism, where everything belonged to the state, want to take back possession of their own lives—their land, their businesses, their homes. Some Tirana intellectuals call this a fetish of private property, but Rama points out that those intellectuals are not running a city with more than a quarter of a million people building illegally on its periphery. He has been constructing roads and schools and playgrounds, and laying power cables and water mains, in those outlying zones. It is part of his plan to engage the northerners living there—a snarly collection of mountaineers who tend to look more like extras from a Gypsy movie than like eager students of the mortgage system—in what he calls “turning piles of bricks into legal property.”

It’s not evident that the politicians will even let him try. Tirana’s squatters were first courted by Berisha, who, according to Rama, told them they didn’t have to buy their land, or pay for anything, or even register as residents, as long as they voted for him. Then they were courted by Nano, who had a keen interest in complicating Rama’s work—which is to say in doing whatever he could to keep Rama from succeeding him. Rama has been running out of things to offer. For one thing, the N.G.O.s are leaving, and taking their money with them. For another, Albania remains a thoroughly centralized country. The state decides how many policemen Tirana gets to patrol its streets and enforce its property-tax laws (a hundred) and how much water it deserves (twelve hours’ worth, on a good day) and whether its electricity arrives (off and on) and its schools and hospitals function (often, they don’t).

Tirana’s budget is small—about sixty-seven million dollars last year. (Baltimore, with roughly the same population, has a budget of more than two billion.) Rama raised thirty-seven million of that himself, from city licenses and service taxes. But the subsidies he used to receive from the state have dropped by half since he first took office, and he figures that this year, once he covers his costs—salaries, social services, maintenance—he will be left with only twenty-six million for his Tirana projects. His staff works mainly for love. His own salary is fifteen hundred and eighty-two dollars a month, and he rents his apartment. He and Magjistari used to get by living in two small rooms and eating at his mother’s, but four years ago a sniper fired through the kitchen window, missing Magjistari by a few feet. Eventually, they moved to a four-room walkup at the back of a closed courtyard, with a guard stationed at the gate and no window access from the street. Rama’s only perks are his Italian papers and his security detail. One Saturday when we drove to Vlora, a car with a couple of bodyguards joined us. They got out whenever we did. He never explained why.



Tirana’s City Hall sits in the middle of town, at one end of a group of Italianate government buildings that flank the entrance to an empty piazza called Skanderbeg Square—an enormous space that once housed most of the city’s sprawling Ottoman bazaar. The bazaar was nearly as old as Tirana. It managed, at least in part, to survive its occupiers of the past century—the Hapsburgs, the northern chieftain King Zog, the Italians, the Germans—but in 1959 the Communists razed it. They put up the obligatory Palace of Culture you found in most Communist capitals, and, eventually, a gloomy National Historical Museum, and then they stopped. The big roads into the city still converge on Skanderbeg Square, but there are no trees, no benches, no children playing, nothing but a flat, paved space that leaves you feeling vulnerable and exposed, which is just how Hoxha wanted you to feel in the presence of state power. “Tirana’s empty heart,” Rama calls it.

Rama restored the government buildings when he was Minister of Culture, along with an eighteenth-century mosque—the Mosque of Ethem Bey—next to City Hall, and a rare Ottoman clock tower behind it. His mission now is to rebuild the city center, and to bring Skanderbeg Square to life by pointing the life of the center toward it. He has invited some of Europe’s best architects to submit plans and to sit on juries, and has made the competition “transparent,” opening the process to the public and asking his judges to explain their choices—something unheard of in Albania and, in fact, in most of Europe. More to the point, he is trying to civilize the speculators and developers who now own most of central Tirana’s real estate, working openly with them, claiming whatever land he needs from them for public space—for a municipal pool, say, or a concert hall—and demanding that they use the rest according to very specific guidelines. What they get, in return, is a measure of status, a chance to look civic-minded and respectable, and maybe even to become respectable.

Right now, according to most estimates, at least a quarter of the Albanian economy is “informal,” which is to say, fuelled by crime and by improvised black markets. Construction is the country’s biggest legal industry and, as everywhere, the conduit of choice for most of the illegal ones—the time-honored way for getting dirty money into a safe Swiss bank. (Al Qaeda allegedly bought into Albania’s construction racket in the nineties, filtering Saudi money through an Egyptian investment group and into a stake in two exceptionally ugly black Tirana office buildings.)

Rama is a realist—“a realist who dreams,” he says—and he knows that his success with Tirana may depend on some of its least reputable people. Tirana’s developers and contractors have astonishing power. They control the press; there are seventeen dailies in the country, and they own all but a few of them. They own most of its seventy television stations, too. And they make their own political choices. One of Rama’s most ardent supporters is a contractor and businessman named Koca Kokedhima, who owns, among other things, Shekulli, the country’s biggest and best newspaper. (Rama, who likes him, describes him as thinking like a fox and looking like an “old-time Russian gangster.”) “Edi is a simple person, like me, a concrete person, a person who wants to build things” is how Kokedhima explains their friendship. He is proud of it, perhaps because Rama may be the first politician in his experience who doesn’t expect kickbacks: “I’m not entering inside his head. I’m not opening his heart. But he has been my best relationship in all these years.”

Rama makes no excuses for his belief that, if he wants to rebuild Tirana, he needs private investment in public projects—which means some sort of working partnership with the developers. He thinks he can control them. Some people are worried that the developers will end up controlling him. They say that, for all his new economic theories, Rama is an innocent among sharks. “It’s like when Edi would fall in love with a woman,” Dashi Peza told me. “He’d get on the phone with you for hours, explaining how intelligent she was, how passionate about people—how she was so great. Now he’s in love with politics, and so everyone is great.” But most of his friends think he’s shrewd. Ardian Klosi, a writer and translator who organized the Reflections with him, says, “Edi knows it’s not to his credit to deal with some of those businessmen, but he does it to build his roads, his city. He can speak their language when he has to. He’s a real politician.” One old friend has broken with him completely. Fatos Lubonja, a writer (and former political prisoner) of uncommon talent and huge resentments, rails at him on television shows, in newspaper columns, to just about anybody who will listen. “Rama, for the moment, is the focus of all the money interests in Tirana,” he told me. “Why doesn’t he construct through the banks, like people in Europe did?” Once, he said, “Rama’s biggest illusion is that he can work his way out of the system. Here, for honest people, it’s impossible to survive.”

In fact, it may not matter what anyone thinks about Rama. He is thin-skinned but headstrong. “Edi is a loner, a solitary fighter, not a team player,” Genc Ruli, an economist who is running for parliament on Berisha’s ticket, says. “He’s like the Balkans, which has lords, not leaders.” Mustafa Nano, the political columnist for Shekulli, puts it this way: “I have a fear that Edi’s democratic formation is a little deficient.” Even his friends admit that Rama runs the city by a kind of papal seduction. (His speeches could melt a stone.) But they say that he has no choice—that it is pointless to open more of “the Tirana discussion” to Tirana until what Rama calls “habits of citizenship” are in place and laws respected. Rama himself says, “This business of my always acting alone is a big myth! Sure, I go strongly for things. I have a strong personality. You know me, I’m always talking and talking, arguing and arguing. But in the end there has to be a decision.”

The master plan for Tirana—the winning design came from the French firm Architecture-Studio—calls for ten two-hundred-and-eighty-foot office and apartment buildings (skyscrapers, by local standards) to demarcate and punctuate two boulevards that run parallel to the park he plans for Skanderbeg Square. The jury liked the plan for its drama. The urbanists liked it for its density. The developers liked it for the shopping spaces reserved for the towers’ lower floors. But a lot of people claimed that it wouldn’t be “European” or that it would block their views of the mosque and the clock tower and out to Mt. Dajte, or that it would destroy Tirana’s “historic center”—though that center is, of course, long gone. After the vote, Rama told everybody what he told me: “Popes put up obelisks. These towers will be our obelisks. They are acupunctural!”

The jury for the first tower met in January of this year, and in February I sat in on the meeting where a new jury of architects chose the second one—a beautiful concrete-and-glazed-terra-cotta design by a group of young Belgian architects. It was muted, modest, and sensitive to what one of the Belgians nicely called “Tirana’s very difficult relationship with its history.” The developer who owns the land for it sat in on the meeting with me. He is an ex-bodyguard named Fidel Ylli, whom Rama has known since the days Ylli ran an illegal kiosk café that Rama frequented as a young radical and razed as mayor. Now Ylli’s company controls more than an acre of central Tirana, including a piece of land near Skanderbeg Square that Rama recently claimed for the city as “green space.” (“Do I look like someone who pays three million dollars for a park?” Ylli joked to a friend.) He didn’t like the Belgians’ tower; he wanted to build one that included a bigger shopping mall, and was made of glass and steel, materials that wouldn’t require special craftsmen. The jurors listened to him politely. They tried to soothe him, saying that with the Belgian design he would be giving Tirana a major European building. He wasn’t happy, but he stopped complaining when Rama raised his hand and said,“Well, gentlemen, we don’t need to dance anymore.”



Rama works in a vast and extremely eccentric office on the second floor of City Hall. He designed it himself. He put in marble floors with the Tirana seal in the center, and an elaborate white-and-gold coffered ceiling that he had had copied from an old Tirana hotel. The walls are covered with a blurry, blown-up sepia panorama of the old capital. Everything else is red. Red armchairs you can wheel around in. A red-stained desk. A red-stained conference table with a centerpiece platter of dried Albanian plants and flowers that a friend collected and Rama sprayed red. (“My Max Ernst,” he calls it.) When Rama isn’t messaging someone or writing something, he sits at his desk, feet up (“for lumbago”), and makes fantastical Magic Marker drawings on the backs of discarded memos. He hasn’t painted in seven years, but he never stopped drawing. He does his thinking that way. Often, his only company is a pair of large turtles, in a glass terrarium, which were prescribed as a cure for asthma by a doctor in Beijing.

People who knew Rama as a young man worry that politics has isolated him. He came to City Hall as an independent on the Socialist ticket—“collecting opinions,” he likes to say. But two years ago, a few weeks after his reëlection, and against the advice of many friends, he joined the Socialists, hoping to take over the leadership, or, as he puts it, “to have an independent position within the whole left-wing family.” It may have been his first serious miscalculation as a politician, given that the Party blocked him: the Socialists liked his lustre, but not many of them wanted an Edi Rama cleaning up their turf. Mustafa Nano, who calls Rama “the most bizarre Socialist in the world,” told me, “Edi rang. He said, ‘In two hours, I’ll be a Socialist. Is this right?’ I said, ‘What will happen if I say no?’ ” And Vladimir Myrtezai—the painter who worked with him on the mural—said, “Edi wants to be a protagonist, whereas I want to live my dreams in my painting. We have stayed friends, but we don’t see much of each other now.” Even Aneta Rama, whom I saw in Detroit when she was visiting Edi’s brother, told me that he had changed, that he often seemed tired, fragile, and distracted, that he wasn’t the same person who had always needed her.

Maybe not. Maybe he’s protecting a world he loves from a world he hasn’t had time to mend. Or maybe he has moved on. “I have always had a few people as points of reference,” he told me, the night before I flew home. “Now it’s these architects. My project is them. And, to be frank, maybe it’s also to fulfill my own ego, to be identified with something big in the eyes of everybody. I know that this obsession I have to make a big work, this identification with this city—I know it makes problems for me with my family, my friends. But for me Tirana is a mirror, an affirmation, a confirmation of my vision, or call it my will, or my person. This is something that comes from far away, like a destiny. . . . As for the rest, I’m not off message. I’m outside.”

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Anthony Athanas

Anthony Athanas*
Anthony's Pier 4, Inc.
President & Chief Executive Officer
Boston, MA


Anthony Athanas was born in Albania, where his father was a building mason, and the family lived in poverty. When Athanas was very young, the family emigrated to the United States, settling in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Athanas' father sold fruits and vegetables from a pushcart to support his family. Later, he was able to buy a horse, then a truck. In helping his father, Athanas learned how to sell and how to deal with customers. He also sold newspapers and shined shoes to pay for his own expenses.

At 14, Athanas left school to work in a restaurant, where his job was lighting the wood and coal fires for the chefs. Later, when the chefs arrived, he watched them and wrote down their recipes. Soon, he learned to cook himself and became very skilled. Throughout the Depression, he always had a job. "Restaurant people used to seek me out," he says.

Athanas was 20 and working in a restaurant in New York when his father died and he was called back to Massachusetts. For the next several years, he supported his mother and younger siblings, paid off his father's debts, and saved to buy his own restaurant. In 1938, with $1,800, he bought a restaurant on auction. "It was just a little place, about 50 seats," he says. "I pretended there was a cook, but it was just me. I'd take the order, shout it into the kitchen, cook it, and bring it out." Nine years later he bought a second restaurant; and years later, his third.

A big gamble for Athanas was the restaurant Athanas started on an abandoned pier, Anthony's Pier 4. He staked everything on the conviction that a waterfront seafood restaurant in a neglected part of town could be a success. He threw a party for all the city's cab drivers, and for years afterward the cabbies could be counted on to suggest Pier 4 to out-of-towners. When Athanas received his Horatio Alger award in 1978, he was named one of America's most prominent and successful restaurateurs. Anthony's Pier 4 continues to thrive today, and has won many awards for excellence. With the help of his four sons, Athanas continues to run his five restaurants.

Active in civic and community affairs, Athanas has been a leader in fundraising efforts for the American Cancer Society and for what he does for schools, hospitals, religious, and other groups. Although he never finished grammar school, Athanas has been a popular lecturer at Harvard Business School, Cornell, and the University of New Hampshire, and has received five honorary degrees. "I had no formal education to speak of," he says, "but life is an education. I'm still learning today."

His own experience in America has convinced him that opportunity is available to a great many who are willing to sacrifice for it. Determination and endurance are the key, he says. "You have to want to make it work. Not for an hour, a week, or a month, but all the time." He adds that the Horatio Alger Association is filled with people like this. "The true definition of success," he says, "is someone who never gives up."

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