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Give a rouse to Dartmouth grad John Stanton '93, who isn't one to back away from a challenge. Curious? Read on.Stanton walked on to the freshman Pea Green football team as an undersized 6-foot, 200-pound outside linebacker from Pacific Palisades, Calif., and Harvard School, where he was an all-league defensive lineman He played on the Dartmouth junior varsity and was a member of the scout team for the 1990, '91 and '92 championship teams.
Ask him about his career and he'll answer modestly.
"The guys ahead of me on the varsity were just better," he'll say. "I traveled for the 1991 game against Lehigh (Jay Fiedler's first collegiate varsity start), but didn't get in. After we kicked a field goal in the fourth quarter against Columbia in 1992, Coach (John) Lyons put me and a few other benchwarmers in for the kickoff coverage. I had the misfortune of lining up against Des Werthman, who would have gotten the Defensive Bushnell Cup if it were awarded back then. He tied me up enough that other guys made the tackle before I got there."After college he earned a law degree from Georgetown cum laude.
All impressive, but read on.
Today he is being sworn in to the U.S. Supreme Court bar "in a first-ever mass event that symbolizes the strides lawyers with disabilities have made," according to the National Law Journal.
That's right.
Ivy League student. Dartmouth football player. Decorated lawyer. And John Stanton is deaf.
He is one of 13 deaf or hard-of-hearing lawyers being sworn in to the U.S. Supreme Court bar today.
A regular follower of the Dartmouth football program who was in town for the 1990 team's reunion last November, Stanton knows of just two other players with significant hearing impairments who have played in the Ivy League: Dan Giovacchini, Brown '15 and Nathan Walcker, Columbia '09.
Stanton works for the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and is the author of the Valparaiso University Law Review article, Breaking Sound Barriers: How the Americans with Disabilities Act and Technology Have Enabled Deaf Lawyers to Succeed.
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If there were a Mount Rushmore of former Ivy League football players who have made an impact on the world of business, Bill Campbell would be on it. Campbell, who starred and later coached at Columbia before being recognized as a "Coach to Silicon Valley's top executives," including Steve Jobs, has died at age 75.
A story in the San Jose Mercury News includes this:
With bachelor's and master's degrees from Columbia, he coached the Columbia football team from 1974-79 before coming to Silicon Valley. He memorably told The New York Times that his transition to tech was mildly bumpy. "You know, when they hear you've been a football coach," he said, "they think you're going to swing into the room on a vine."The Mercury News piece also includes this:
He and Jobs lived near each other in Palo Alto, and Jobs would often walk to Campbell's house for long discussions.
One day in 1997 Jobs came by and asked him to join Apple's board. "The only time I had a rush like that was when I was asked to be a trustee of Columbia University," Campbell told Forbes in a 2014 interview when he stepped down after 17 years as an Apple board member. "I said, without hesitation, 'For sure.' "FootballScoop writes about his football side and Fortune has a wonderful remembrance that shows his personal side.
