He keeps retiring, but Ambassador R. Barrie Walkley MA ’75 just can’t seem to make it stick.

The 68-year-old career diplomat is on his third diplomatic assignment since his official retirement as ambassador to Gabon, São Tomé and Príncipe in 2008.

Walkley had hoped to retreat with his
 wife, Annabelle (left), to their home among the redwoods on Northern California’s Smith River — “one of the cleanest rivers in America,” he says wistfully, speaking by telephone from his office in Washington, D.C.

But a year into retirement, Walkley was called back into service. He became interim chargé d’affaires to the island nations of Mauritius and the Seychelles, both beset by Somali piracy issues. He retired again in 2010, only to be called up to assist the birth of the world’s newest nation.

On July 9, 2011 — South Sudan’s independence day — Walkley directed the opening of the U.S. embassy in the capital, Juba.

His retirement plans receded yet again when, immediately upon his return from South Sudan, he was tapped for his current assignment as special adviser for the African Great Lakes region — an area comprising the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and parts of Kenya.

Walkley never set out to be a diplomat; he was supposed to be an English professor. It was a doctoral program in British literature that first brought him to USC. During his studies, he was teaching at College of the Redwoods when the Foreign Service unexpectedly came knocking in 1982: Would he be interested in a cultural affairs posting in Cameroon?

It wasn’t a random question. Fifteen years earlier, he’d volunteered for the Peace Corps in Somalia. After returning home, he’d earned a master’s degree in African studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and, on a whim, took the Foreign Service exam.

But that seemed so long ago. Suddenly Walkley found himself at a crossroads: academia or foreign affairs?

He’s never regretted his choice.

“It’s an honor to represent the U.S. abroad. And it’s a fantastic career, an absolutely astonishing career,” says Walkley. “Every day there’s something different.” Among his highs: serving as embassy spokesperson in Pretoria, South Africa, during the demise of apartheid. There were lows, too. In 1993, he was in Somalia as United Nations spokesman for the ill-fated peacekeeping mission that ended with the Battle of Mogadishu.

Other assignments took him to Guinea as ambassador, Congo, Pakistan (twice) and the United Kingdom’s royal court.

The U.K. was where it all started for Walkley, who was born in Preston in England’s industrial northwest. The family moved to Santa Barbara, Calif., when he was in high school. “I’ve always thought of myself as an American who just happened to be born someplace else,” he says, with the faintest trace of a British accent.

When his assignment ends, will Walkley finally move to the redwoods? Don’t bet on it.

“There are days when I think I’m ready to retire,” he says, “and there are days when I crave being back at work doing the things I love to do, helping advance U.S. interests in the world.”

Lizette Salas ’11 was only 7 when her father showed her a proper golf swing. Being head mechanic at the public Azusa Greens Golf Course had some perks, and Ramon Salas made sure his kids learned to play. But Lizette, his youngest, was special. One day, head pro Jerry Herrera offered to coach the girl. Unable to pay for lessons, Ramon bartered his services as a handyman.

Pretty soon Lizette was unwelcome at her dad’s friendly Thursday game with the rest of the grounds crew. “When I started taking their money, they didn’t let me play anymore,” recalls Salas, 23, who would go on to win the national championship as a USC freshman, captain the team her senior year and become a four-time All-American — the first in Trojan golf history.

Salas made it to the 2012 LPGA tour a year out of college, climbing from 240th in the world to 89th over the course of the season. She finished as the 51st biggest earner on tour. Salas is one of 11 Trojans on the LPGA tour, the most players from any university. “That says a lot about the program and about Coach Andrea,” she says, referring to USC women’s golf head coach Andrea Gaston, now in her 17th year with the Trojans.

Her meteoric rise has made news. She’s been featured in media from the New York Times to ESPN, not just because she’s a terrific young golfer but because of her inspirational story. The daughter of Mexican immigrants and first in her family to attend college, Salas speaks lovingly of a father who was “my caddie, my chauffeur, my coach, my everything” and a mother who was “big on education and kept my head in the books.”

Salas first shared her personal story at the 2011 graduation ceremony for USC student athletes. “Where I come from,” she told the large Galen Center crowd, “people don’t expect much of a person — especially a young Latina. There were countless times I was told that I wasn’t going to make it.”

Salas teared up when she mentioned setting an example for her niece and two nephews.

"They are the most precious things ever. They are my biggest motivation, " she says. "My goal was to show them that anything is possible: you just have to work for it. That's a big role, to have three little kids look up to you."

All three have accompanied their aunt on tournaments and now play golf. Salas also trains and mentors some 80 other youngsters through San Gabriel Junior Golf, a group founded by her father and Herrera, the Azusa Greens golf pro.

Asked how learning golf benefits low-income kids, Salas responds with passion: “Golf teaches so much! It teaches discipline, concentration, proper etiquette. You have to be quiet; you have shake a player’s hand after you’re done; boys have to take off their hats; everything has to be neat and tucked in. It motivates them, too, and gives them self-confidence.”

The Southern California native who came to USC on a golf scholarship and majored in sociology is no less passionate about her alma mater. “If it wasn’t for USC, if it wasn’t for my Trojan Family, I wouldn’t be on tour today and living my dream,” she says. “It’s just a great place to learn and grow up.”

Her regret: missing out on the new John McKay Center. “I’m so jealous,” she says with a laugh. “The fitness center, the rehab center. I wouldn’t mind getting injured right now. The underwater treadmill. That would be fun!”

Edward Loh ’98 is all about speed. And he’s driven.

One day he’s flying to the
 Motor Show in Paris, the next
 day he’s zipping around the 
back roads of Seville, Spain, in 
a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport. He’s putting out a magazine 
a month, pushing his team
 to finish a book about car
 designer Carroll Shelby and 
tweeting a mile a minute for his publication. “The goal is not to make the most money,” Loh says, talking so fast he drops words, “but to live the most interesting life.”

Loh, 37, has the boyish, buttoned-down appearance of a prep school student. “I look like an engineer from Toyota,” he admits. Truth is, he’s the editor-in-chief of Motor Trend magazine, an El Segundo, Calif.-based publication with a printed monthly circulation of more than a million. It’s been a surprising career for a man who, after high school in Camarillo, Calif., set out to become a physician and enrolled in USC’s Baccalaureate/MD program. So what happened?

He spent much of his college time taking sports photos for the Daily Trojan. He would shoot games at the Coliseum, run to campus, develop 15 rolls of film, clip and print. “It was addicting,” he says. “I was on the field for football games; there’s a guy from Sports Illustrated on my right, a guy from the LA Times on my left.” After graduating from USC with a biology major and a business minor, Loh instructed high schoolers in Pasadena, Calif., through Teach for America. Those two years turned out to be pivotal. “I remember telling my students to follow their dreams,” he says, “and realizing, I’m not following mine.”

Loh’s big break came in 2001 when a USC alum needed a photographer and writer for a small, family-owned publication in Orange County called Import Racer! “Next thing I know I was hired as associate editor,” Loh says. Four years later, Loh switched to Road & Track, then to Sport Compact Car and, in 2007, to Motor Trend, which named him editor-in-chief in 2011.

The fascination with the hectic world of journalism, with access to celebrities and big events, seduced Loh. Now he’s proud to report that he’s had well-known car collector Jay Leno on the phone and that he’s chatted with model Amber Valletta about a Tesla review. “This is so bizarre,” Loh says, squeezing his eyes shut. “What planet am I on?”.

It’s been a fast career. So fast that Loh, who will fearlessly slam down his foot to make a Veyron go 180 mph or more, admits: “It scares me.”

Follow Loh on Twitter at @edloh.

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Thank you and Fight On!

When Lizette Zarate ’02 looks at students in USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI), she sees herself almost 20 years ago — an academically gifted young girl who was getting an education that she otherwise wouldn’t have received in her inner-city Los Angeles community.

“It completely changed my life,” says Zarate, who attended a Catholic school in her neighborhood before enrolling in NAI in 1995 and is now a curriculum and instruction specialist for the program. “I was building my cultural and social capital with exposure to field trips, museums and different parts of L.A., and engaging in meaningful discussions. NAI pushed me to excel, finish well and be competitive when I applied to college.”

After earning a bachelor’s degree in English from USC, her first job was coordinating a literacy program at a Los Angeles high school, where many students were reading at an elementary-school level and couldn’t write even a paragraph, she says.

“That’s when I decided that I wanted to dedicate my work to improving the education of urban students, ultimately offering opportunities for them to learn and go to college — to give them what I was given,” Zarate adds.

She went on to hold several administrative positions with after-school programs before landing back at NAI. She also obtained a master’s degree in education from Loyola Marymount University, and soon expects to complete a doctorate in the field with a concentration in leadership for social justice.

“I’m serving the community I’m passionate about in a program that transforms lives. Being a part of that means the world to me.”

“Intuitive design” — design with a user-friendly feel — is a topic that landscape architect James Lord BArch ’90 thinks about a lot.

“He’s won national and international awards for designs that successfully mold earth to structures in many landmark green projects. And recently, Lord’s San Francisco-based firm, Surfacedesign — which he founded in 2006 — built the new visitor plaza for the Golden Gate Bridge’s 75th anniversary.

“Design is also a way he thinks about his life: the fact that he comes from a USC-strong family (his father was at the engineering school, his mother a staff librarian), and landed on campus during the heady, progressive days of USC’s mid-1980s Architecture program.

“He remembers his professors as including “modernists who cracked the whip, and then this fresh influx of disciples of Frank Gehry. You also had characters who were more socially oriented, who designed multiple housing, and emphasized that [it] could be elegant. It was a pivotal moment.” Topping off his education was a scholarship to the Artists-In-Residence program at Pasadena’s historic Gamble House, with its coterie of visiting architects.

“Graduate school in landscape architecture at Harvard followed. Later, he teamed up with architect George Hargreaves, with whom he won a competition for the design of World Expo ’98 in Lisbon on a “denigrated site,” and learned all about environmentally conscious building. Lord also was inspired to enter his architectural team in the competition to design venues for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games — the “first green games.” Lord and his colleagues won, and the Sydney Olympic Park they designed became the third-largest plaza in the world, behind Red Square and Beijing.

““But it was a huge toxic site,” he explains. “We were cleaning up everything while building, and putting in things like permeable unit pavers, which allow water to more quickly enter the water table and benefit tree roots. This was the first time pavers were utilized on a grand scale. [They’re] commonplace now.”

“On another project, a water drainage system for Mumbai’s streets, he worked in tandem with the office of venerated architect I. M. Pei.

“Today, Lord’s own firm is winning kudos for his challenging latest project.

““The Golden Gate Bridge plaza was a former military [site] that had been bare since the Civil War,” he says. “The site was a mess … But this was an icon for the country — we didn’t want a design for a plaza that was going to compete with the bridge.”

“Lord says he is proud of the praise the Golden Gate project has garnered from often-critical observers such as SFCurbed.com. Describing the project’s intuitive design as built-in “poetry of the plaza,” he considers it to be “like a new living room for the bridge! Now you can spend time there and, literally, watch the fog roll in.”

When Paula Daniels ’77, Broadcast Journalism, was growing up in Hawaii, her grandfather taught her about malama aina — stewardship of the land. “He said, ‘We don’t own this land, we’re just taking care of it for the next generations,’” Daniels recalls. “This made a big impression on me.”

So it’s no surprise that when Daniels came to USC, she brought a strong interest in environmental issues, along with hopes of becoming a documentary filmmaker. In 2012, 35 years later, she was named one of LA Weekly’s “Ten People Making L.A. a Better Place” for her lauded environmental work at Los Angeles City Hall. During her undergraduate years, she never would have imagined the winding road she’d take to get there.

Her USC experience included being a photographer for The Daily Trojan. “I covered every sport and did my own photo essays,” Daniels says. She also remembers her freshman-year photos of streakers, and the Symbionese Liberation Army shoot-out on nearby East 56th Street. In her sophomore year, she was accepted into the Semester of the Arts immersion program. “We had the best of the arts education on campus,” she says. “It opened me up completely.”

But after graduation, Daniels took a less-than-passionate detour into a legal career focused on entertainment law and litigation. “Options for documentary film were incredibly limited then,” she explains. Still, in her spare time Daniels was active in local water and food policy issues. She became president of the Heal the Bay board, and later was asked by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to serve on the city’s Coastal Commission.

In 2003, Daniels was appointed by then-Governor Gray Davis to the California Bay-Delta Authority, the state water resources board, which spurred her interest in food and agribusiness. Her current position as Mayor Villaraigosa’s senior adviser on food policy — and, as part of that, founding chair of the new L.A. Food Policy Council — is “the best job I’ve ever had,” she says. Daniels describes her policy work as “a multi-layered strategy” built on 28 priorities. It includes providing disadvantaged neighborhoods access to higher quality food, and developing an institutional food-procurement policy that embraces local, sustainable and fair labor practices; animal welfare; and health and nutrition initiatives. Some of this work is also being reviewed as a model for other cities and states.

As for her career, Daniels has no regrets about its unexpected turns. “Everything in my background is coming together,” she says. Everything includes acting on her grandfather’s advice about malama aina.

On March 1, 2013, Daniels will take her message home to USC in a panel discussion on “Just Food and Fair Food: A Multidisciplinary Exploration.” It will be held in Doheny Memorial Library on the University Park Campus as part of Visions and Voices, the university-wide arts and humanities initiative.

He may be best known as the founder of the much-imitated Wine of the Month Club, but Paul Kalemkiarian Sr. ’50, MS ’52 is also a successful pharmacist who ran the first drugstore on the USC campus and discovered domestic plant sources of an antidote to nerve gas.

Kalemkiarian, who turns 84 in October, is the son of refugees who fled the Armenian genocide in Turkey early last century. He grew up in Egypt, became fluent in five languages and studied pharmacognosy (the science of plant-based medicine) at Cairo University. Motivated by political unrest in Egypt and encouraged by an aunt who lived in Los Angeles, he came to Southern California in 1949 and pursued both a bachelor’s and a master’s in pharmacy at USC.

Kalemkiarian researched two southwestern plants — Datura discolor and Datura meteloides — for his thesis. During those days of the Cold War, he made a hot discovery: Both plants, more commonly known as jimson weed, contained atropine and hyoscyamine, the only known antidotes at the time to deadly nerve gas.

After completing his master’s degree in 1952, he stayed on as a lecturer and was soon chosen to manage USC’s very first pharmacy — or dispensary, as it was then called. USC’s primary reason for establishing the dispensary was to give pharmacy students the opportunity to fulfill their required 1,900 hours of retail pharmacy experience, Kalemkiarian says.

Alvah G. Hall, then dean of the pharmacy school, charged him with opening the dispensary within 90 days. “Within 60 days, I had solicited $18,000 of inventory from pharmaceutical companies at no cost to the university — a very good number in those days,” says Kalemkiarian, adding that managing the pharmacy and training its student workers al- lowed him to stay on campus and continue teaching.

Kalemkiarian left USC in 1955 to open his own pharmacy and eventually expanded to five before retiring from the business in the early 1980s.

He acknowledges a debt of gratitude to USC and in particular to Hall. “He was a wonderful man and opened many doors for me. I owe a lot to ’SC.”

It was in 1957 that Kalemkiarian’s lifelong passion for wine was ignited. He read that, at a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth II, President Eisenhower served a Charles Krug 1953 Cabernet Sauvignon Special Selection. Curious, he bought a bottle of the Napa Valley wine — and loved it.

Thereafter, he immersed himself in oenology. “I became a knowledgeable critic of wine,” he says. In 1971, he bought a liquor store next door to his Palos Verdes pharmacy and found himself frequently beckoned by customers seeking advice on wine. But the pharmacist could not be in two places at once. His solution? “I would pick two wines — one red and one white — each month and feature them as having my stamp of approval.” The popularity of his monthly selections inspired him to found the Wine of the Month Club, which he describes as the oldest mail-order wine club in the United States, in 1972. The company, now operated by his son, Paul Kalemkiarian Jr. ’81, is also the administrator of the Trojan Wine Society.

Kalemkiarian is the first of 11 Trojans in his family, but his wife, Rosemarie, is not among them. “Unfortunately, she’s a Bruin,” he jokes. Miraculously, they celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary last year.

“They’re sitting backwards; they’re on their hands and knees; they’re standing on the horse. We’re throwing balls back and forth; we’re blowing bubbles; we’re shaking things.”

Cassandra Sanders-Holly DPT ’04 isn’t recounting a Cirque du Soleil spectacle. She’s describing a typical session at Leaps & Bounds Pediatric Therapy, her hippotherapy clinic in Norco, Calif. (leapsandboundspediatricpt.com). The riders are kids with cerebral palsy, spinal cord injuries, Down syndrome or autism. They ride horses without saddles, stirrups or reins mostly at a walk, but in some cases at a trot or even a lope.

“We have one little boy who drives a motorized wheelchair. He has no independent movement at all. We’ve got 2-year-olds walking with walkers, braces and crutches. It’s pretty powerful to see what these kids can do when they’re up there on the horse,” says Sanders-Holly, an adjunct instructor in USC’s Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy.

Hippotherapy is a treatment that uses the movements of a horse to promote balance and improve gait mechanics. Research shows the biomechanics of a horse’s gait closely mimic those of a human’s walking pattern. Sitting on horseback, the trunk, arms, head and hips experience the same movement as if one were walking.

In a 30-minute hippotherapy session, a rider experiences 2,500 perturbations — unique jolts to which the balance and postural control systems must react. “That’s just impossible to replicate in a clinic,” Sanders-Holly says.

Hippotherapy isn’t new — it’s been around since World War II, when horses were used to rehabilitate wounded veterans. The results are well documented. “It’s the most evidence-based type of treatment in all of pediatric therapy,” Sanders-Holly says. “The demand is huge.” Unfortunately, not many therapists have the wherewithal to offer it. It takes three people to run a hippotherapy session: A skilled handler leads the horse; a therapist walks alongside, working one-on-one with the patient; and a “sidewalker” serves as spotter. The staffing costs pale, however, next to the cost of operating a professional equestrian facility. Still, Sanders-Holly wanted to try. So four years after finishing her doctorate, she decided to leave her pediatric practice in Orange County and return to her hometown of Norco.

Nicknamed Horsetown USA, Norco is zoned for horses, with trails substituting for sidewalks, public stalls in the parking lots, and hitching posts in front of the bank and grocery stores. After Sanders-Holly completed hippotherapy training in 2008, the mayor of Norco introduced her to Sharon Smith, who lives on a private ranch with her daughter, a developmentally disabled adult who rides for pleasure. Smith offered Sanders-Holly full use of her facility — gratis — including all 27 horses, five of which are used in hippotherapy. In less than a year, Sanders-Holly’s hippotherapy practice has grown to 30 patients.

On the days when Sanders-Holly comes to USC to teach courses, she and her husband, Greg Holly ’98, make the two-hour commute together. “It’s a bit of a drive, but it’s my passion,” she says. “I love working with the [doctor of physical therapy] students,” she adds, noting that many drive to Norco to volunteer in hippotherapy sessions. “I’ve got a great life.”