Eric Brown ’78 and Renee Cottrell-Brown ’78 laugh a lot. Remarkable, some might say, for a couple who live and work together as CEO and executive vice president of sales and marketing, respectively, at the Dallas-based Johnson Products Company Inc. But talking to the Browns, who have run two global ethnic hair-care companies for 25 of their 31 years of marriage while raising two daughters, it’s easy to see the friendship they share. It all began with a chance encounter at USC.

“Renee was the very first person I met coming to Los Angeles,” says Eric, a Portland, Ore., native, recalling his first week of student orientation at USC. He hopped on a USC-sponsored tram that, back then, shuttled students to and from the south side to Westwood. “Coming back, I was the last one on. The only seat available was next to this lovely lady. I’ve always said it was fate. I just looked at her and said, ‘I’m done!’ ”

The ride revealed shared interests in photography and jazz and, although it was clearly not love at first sight in her mind, Renee knew she had found a friend. “We truly had a friendship because, quite frankly, I was dating other people at the time I met him,” she says.

The admission prompts the now familiar laughter and knowing glances between them. Renee, daughter of Los Angeles African-American business pioneer Comer J. Cottrell Jr., who founded the hair-care company Pro-Line Corp., was expected to date budding doctors and lawyers at ’SC - supposedly more suitable mates than Eric, who was from modest means and tooled around town on the RTD bus. She lived in a cushy campus dormitory; he in an abandoned fraternity house on 32nd and Vermont in a dilapidated room he furnished with crates, a hot plate and a toaster oven.

Even then, Eric and Renee seldom were away from each other, as both were part of the same clique of African-American students. But before leaving USC, Renee began seeing something special in the “shy kid” from Oregon.

“I always told my dad, ‘Eric has great potential,’ ” Renee says. The couple married and went to work at Pro-Line, and Eric became vice president of finance in 1986. Eventually, Renee’s father named Eric to succeed him as president in the late 1990s.

In 2009, with investors from California, the couple led a winning buyout of Johnson Products Company, one of the first African-American-owned businesses publicly traded in the United States, from Procter & Gamble Co. Now private, the company reportedly earns more than $25 million in revenues annually. And it is growing its philanthropic initiatives to promote ecological responsibility, empower local schools and raise awareness of domestic violence through its “No Excuse! STOP the ABUSE!” campaign, which also supports women’s shelters and foundations through multiyear grants.

“Most people say, ‘There’s no way I could work with my spouse.’ I think that is driven from the inability to allow the other to have their freedom to win on their own terms. The passion for the business - that’s what drives it 24/7. It’s not necessarily the work itself,” says Eric, who together with Renee indulges in travel, food and, yes, photography, in his spare time.

Boris Dramov ’66 has designed numerous buildings, parkways and plazas, including Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade and the America’s Cup Village in Auckland, New Zealand. But now he has designed something few architects in the United States can match: a monument on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Towering 30 feet high and stretching across four acres, the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial is one of the creations of which Dramov is most proud. Out of nearly 1,000 submissions to an international design competition, San Francisco-based ROMA Design Group - where Dramov and Bonnie Fisher, his wife and longtime professional partner, are principals - was chosen for the prestigious commission. Last October, thousands of revelers lined the Tidal Basin to witness the dedication of the first memorial on the Mall honoring an African-American.

“We tried to reflect what he stood for and who he was,” says Dramov, who pored over King’s speeches and listened to recordings of his sermons for inspiration. “It’s not easy to translate a person’s spirit [into a physical structure], especially someone like Dr. King.”

The granite monument features fountains, inscriptions and two cleaved boulders - the Mountain of Despair and the Stone of Hope, metaphors that the civil rights leader used in his “I Have a Dream” speech. A colossal statue of King partially emerges from one of the boulders. His figure is unfinished, like the civil rights movement itself, Dramov explains.

“We took a layered approach,” he adds, “so the final product wasn’t just one single element but a full environment that would inspire those who came to the site.”

The natural elements incorporated in the memorial’s design are a tribute to King’s use of landscape imagery in his speeches. They’re also signature features of Dramov’s work; he strives to create enjoyable urban environments - a value he learned as an undergraduate at the USC School of Architecture.

“Our professors gave us the broader sense that we shouldn’t just be designing objects in space but designing buildings in ways that create better spaces,” he says. By way of example, Dramov points to his favorite place at USC - the shaded courtyards around Watt and Harris halls.

Incidentally, Dramov and Fisher (pictured flanking Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute) first met at the adjacent USC Fisher Museum of Art, named for her great-grandmother, Elizabeth Holmes Fisher, who donated her art collection to found that institution.

After graduating from USC, Dramov earned his master’s degree in architecture from Columbia University in 1970. He landed at Harvard 10 years later as a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies. Dramov worked with a number of architecture heavyweights - including Lawrence Halprin, who designed the National Mall’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, and Ian McHarg, a pioneering landscape architect - before taking the helm at ROMA in the 1980s.

Under his and Fisher’s leadership, ROMA has transformed the San Francisco waterfront, created transportation hubs like the Downtown Transit Mall in San Jose, Calif., and designed sports complexes in San Diego, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. Their work also can be found in places as far-flung as China, Russia and the Philippines.

James “Jimmy” Reese ’46 is a busy man. He’ll do some stock market trading, arbitrate a dog bite case and set up meetings for a new education intervention program at USC - all in a day.

At 92, Reese doesn’t plan to slow down any time soon.

“You have two choices when you wake up in the morning: Live life or stay in bed,” he says with a chuckle. “I choose to stay busy and enjoy every day. You never know if it’ll be your last.” Reese, an active member of the State Bar of California for 66 years, currently is helping USC to launch an intervention program for 7- to 10-year-old, low-income boys attending public schools in Los Angeles. He has pledged $100,000 to the effort..

““Many of them are in fourth grade and can’t read,” Reese says. “If you can’t read, you can’t write and you can’t communicate. I think we have given up on these boys, and eventually they wind up incarcerated. I think a case may be made that their constitutional rights to a good education are being violated. I want to create a program that will teach these boys once and for all how to read.”..

Reese grew up in racially segregated New Orleans. A pivotal moment came when he was about 10 years old, and his father made an ugly, drunken scene at his elementary school.

“My teacher took me in her arms and said, ‘Jimmy, you’re not your father. You can really be someone one day.’ I always remembered that. It carried me through,” Reese says, tearing up.

“I came out to California while I was on active duty in the military during World War II, and I met Crispus Attucks Wright [class of 1936 and 1938], who was one of about a dozen black attorneys in Los Angeles. I talked to him and saw what he did and wanted to do the same thing.

“I said I wanted to go to law school,” Reese says, recalling a visit to USC Gould School of Law dean William G. Hale’s office in 1943, the Friday before classes were scheduled to start. “The dean’s secretary looked at me and gave me a test and told me to show up for classes on Monday. That was that.”

After graduating from USC Gould, Reese opened his own firm. In 1952, legendary singer Ray Charles asked him to work on retainer and later persuaded him to join Ray Charles Enterprises as in-house counsel.

Reese worked for Charles through the 1960s, although from 1965 to 1967 he received a special assignment from former Gov. Edmund G. Brown to head California’s Office of Economic Opportunity. In this position, Reese increased free legal aid from two programs to more than 100.

“This is one of the proudest accomplishments of my career,” he says.

In 1970, Reese became the first African-American Los Angeles Superior Court commissioner. Five years later, Gov. Jerry Brown appointed him as judge to the Municipal Court and, eventually, Superior Court.

At 70, he retired from the bench to work for Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services Inc., where he has heard more than 1,000 cases and developed a reputation as a skilled mediator.

Your membership in the USC Alumni Association is free and automatic! After your degree has been conferred, your alumni card will be mailed to your preferred mailing address approximately 3 months after graduation, which means you should expect your welcome package by late July.

Please note as well that you will receive an e-mail in early summer with more information on registering for your free e-mail forwarding address and accessing the Online Community. There is no need to register beforehand.

For information about your student e-mail account, please contact the USC IT Department at (213) 740-5555.

Thank you and Fight On!

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Club Leadership

First Organizing Chairman - Bahjat M. Zayed
Core Team Member - Karam Al Yateem
Core Team Member - Ahmad Al Kudmani

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Click here for information about the kick-off of our 2012 Weekenders in New York, when the Men of Troy take on the Syracuse Orange!

Kathy (Keeler) Seid ’80 can’t pop into a dry cleaner’s, step onto a golf course or set foot in a doctor’s office without sensing untapped potential.

“There’s just not any place I go that I don’t see an opportunity,” she says.

Seid is enthusiastic about a new product that she and her husband, David, created out of their printing business: the MiniBük. The pocket-sized books are proving popular as a tangible and clever way for businesses and individuals to market themselves. Customers are using the format to create compact how-to guides, industry primers and product explainers.

“It’s little and cute, but people are intrigued by how much focused information you can get in a small package,” says Seid, who has printed 200,000 MiniBüks since starting the venture in 2010.

Drawing on skills she learned majoring in marketing at the USC Marshall School of Business, Seid doesn’t miss a chance to spread the word. She has engaged potential customers in elevators, on airplanes and at museums.

“When I took our dog to the vet,” she says, “I sold her on the value of doing a MiniBük about the importance of dental health for pets.”

Hailing from a family of entrepreneurs and Trojans (“I was indoctrinated very early,” she jokes), Seid entered USC as an accounting major but switched to marketing after a life-changing class taught by the late Ralph Carson. In 1947, Carson co-founded the Carson/Roberts agency, which grew into Los Angeles’ largest advertising firm until it merged with Ogilvy & Mather in 1971. He later founded USC’s Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.

“I don’t think there was a person in the class who wasn’t inspired by him,” Seid recalls. “His passion about business, marketing and advertising was infectious, and he made you feel you could be successful at whatever your passion is.”

She and David launched their printing business in 1985, publishing mainly software manuals until a customer made a special request: He wanted to print a very small book. David, the engineer of the operation, made it happen, and they soon began offering the minibook to other clients. It took off.

Customers have ordered MiniBüks on topics ranging from social media to event planning to emergency preparedness. They’ve used the books as table favors at fundraising events and as ski-trip guides, complete with maps and roommate assignments. The IT company Oracle recently used MiniBük as part of a nationwide direct-mail campaign, and a trio of authors hired by Facebook wrote a miniguide on using Facebook for teaching and learning.

And Seid convinced USC alumnus John McKinney ’74 - co-founder of the USC Hiking Club and author of several books about hiking - that MiniBük was the perfect size for his new trail guides, starting with Hiking 101: Great Trails and Beach Walks Surprisingly Close to USC.

Entrepreneurship, Seid says, “is not for the timid or shy. You must wear many hats and network all the time. You need to be a multitasker and have a team of competent people behind you.”

Even 30-some-odd years later, the enthusiasm modeled by Carson still fuels her. “He had fun with being an entrepreneur,” she says. “And that’s what I’m having.”

On his business card, Brandon Stauber MPP ’95 identifies himself as “Agent White.”

Relax. He’s talking about wine.

In 2007, the 41-year-old oenophile launched The Wine Spies LLC, with partner Jason Seeber, who goes by “Agent Red.” The company’s ecommerce site (thewinespies.com) sells a different wine each day, offering wine lovers a “confidential wine dossier” on each daily pick. Dossiers include a review, an interview with the winemaker and background information on the vineyard. Featured wines, produced in small quantities and usually not found in grocery stores, are sold at a discount for one day only.

“We came up with the concept of ‘spying out’ family wineries and introducing them to a wider public,” Stauber says, explaining his company’s cloak-and-dagger conceit. The website plays the espionage theme to the hilt. Members are called “operatives,” and they can earn “spy points” by contributing wine reviews, inviting friends to join or buying wine. As they accumulate points, operatives can be promoted to “field agent” or “station chief,” making them eligible for special promotions and gifts.

The Tom Clancy-esque trappings of the site reflect its founders’ belief that wine should be fun, not intimidating. “The ultimate goal is to make wine accessible, to get it off the pedestal and into the glass, where you can enjoy it,” Stauber says.

Since going live, the site has attracted nearly 30,000 members, and its 2010 sales were about $1.5 million, according to Stauber. It moves 15 to 25 cases a day, with most bottles selling between $20 and $50.

The Wine Spies is the second entrepreneurial venture for Stauber, who credits USC’s Master of Public Policy program at the School of Policy, Planning, and Development for teaching him the strategic thinking necessary to succeed in business. “It’s given me a framework for looking at challenging problems and finding effective solutions,” he says.

In 1999 the Los Angeles native, who also holds a B.A. in public administration from San Diego State University, launched an online event-management firm. After selling that company in 2004, he worked as a business consultant. In 2006, a friend from the Sonoma Valley asked Stauber to write a business plan for a venture exporting California wines to Europe. Although that business never got off the ground, the friend - Seeber - partnered with Stauber to create The Wine Spies.

It remains a small enterprise, with Stauber and Seeber the only full-time employees. An operations whiz, Stauber works remotely from his Exeter, N.H., home, while creative guru Seeber oversees marketing from the company’s Santa Rosa, Calif., headquarters.

Sharing an equal passion for wine, the partners personally taste and review each vintage they sell, Stauber says. If one of them doesn’t like a wine, they won’t sell it.

“We’re actually taking a lot of time with each wine to try to give it its due,” Stauber says. “Every wine has a story, and winemakers are in the business because they have a particular skill and passion for a product. If we can reveal what that passion is, then we’ve done a good job.”