Hollywood producer Sam Sokolow grew up in Manhattan, where his parents worked in the film and publishing worlds. Summers meant the Hamptons and playing in a celebrity-studded summer softball league on Long Island with literary lights whose names meant nothing to young Sam.

“To me they were just my parents’ friends who played softball,” Sokolow (COM’91) says with a laugh. “When I was 10 years old, they let me pitch in this game, and my catcher was Carl Bernstein. And we went into the dugout and I said to him, ‘Carl, what is it that you do?’ This was like five years after Watergate.”