With the Treasury Department's August auction of T-notes fast approaching, the producers of The Money Gang, a program on CNNfn (the CNN Financial Network), hunted for an expert who could give a little zip to the eyelid-drooping topic of bond investing.

Jeff Mutterperl '92, one of the show's producers, had done his homework, albeit in an unlikely area -- Bates Magazine class notes. He recalled that Sharon Saltzgiver Wright '83 had written a layperson's investing guide, Getting Started in Bonds (John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1999, now in its second edition), and has been sought out by media outlets including the Washington Post, Kiplinger's Personal Finance, and NPR's Marketplace.

"I thought she would make a good segment for the show, since we often do personal finance stories," said Mutterperl, a nine-year CNN veteran who first got hooked on the idea of a media career after taking Professor of Political Science Mark Kessler's "Media and Politics" course.

Mutterperl pitched Wright as a possible segment to his colleagues, and on Aug. 5, coinciding with that week's auction of various Treasury securities, including three-, five-, and 10-year notes, Wright appeared on the New York-based The Money Gang. She explained how individuals can participate in Treasury auctions and offered insights into bond market goings-on.

"What she talked about is what our show covers," Mutterperl said. "We were really pleased."

As was Wright, who lives in Byfield, Mass., and was interviewed from a Boston studio. "One afternoon I get a call from a Bates person who identifies himself as Jeff Mutterperl '92," she recalls. "He says he read about my background in Bates Magazine, that he's a producer of a show on CNNfn, and would I like to appear as a guest and speak about bonds?"

She was hardly fazed by the cold call. "I'd never met Jeff before -- still haven't, in person -- but our Bates connection, as well as his personality, made it feel like I was speaking with a friend, a fact that made appearing on live television productive and comfortable."

It's been Wright who's made bond investors comfortable ever since Getting Started in Bonds was published four years ago. At the time, she was a  fixed-income analyst at Fidelity Capital Markets and traveled the country giving bond-investing seminars. Ironically, while bonds don't quicken the investor pulse ("Just mention bonds at your next soiree and watch people's eyes glaze over," she says), she often heard horror stories surrounding this supposedly mundane investment.

"Here were bright, experienced investors who didn't understand how the largest investment sector in the world worked," she says. "I decided to write a book because everything out at the time was high-level and dry."

Her approach -- using anecdotes, cartoons, and a conversational voice -- made the material fun for the reader. "No one ever learns anything when they are asleep," she says. (Her publisher, Wiley & Sons, also now publishes the "Dummies" guidebooks.)

"It seems to have worked because the book is now in its second edition," says Wright, who these days speaks about bonds at colleges and universities and has a novel in the works. "Of course the financial markets have had more than a little something to do with it."

Reflecting on the Bates connection that runs through her story, Wright concludes that "Bates may be a small college in Maine, but it's a powerful player when it comes to the social and professional connections that can shape your life -- sometimes when you least expect it."