Groton School Quarterly, Spring 2019 by Groton School

Groton School The Quarterly • Spring 2019

ON WRITING

Essays and insights to celebrate our new alumni book collection Revenge by Pen by Ben Coes ’85 Write What You Know and What You Don’t by David Cleveland ’70 Q&A with Curtis Sittenfeld ’93 The Groton Quest, in Words by Michael Knox Beran ’84

Groton School

The Quarterly

Spring 2019 • Volume LXXX, No. 2

ON WRITING Ever since William Amory Gardner encouraged the literary sensibilities of Groton’s boys, the school has produced fine, and even famous, writers. Now more than six hundred books, written by Groton graduates, fill a special collection in the McCormick Library. Read essays, written for the Quarterly, by featured authors Ben Coes ‘85, David Cleveland ‘70, and Michael Knox Beran ‘84, and a Q&A with Curtis Sittenfeld ‘93.

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D E P A R T

Message from the Headmaster

Circiter / Around the Circle

10 Personae / Profiles 30 Voces / Chapel Talks 38 De Libris / New Releases 40 Grotoniana / Athletics 48 Grotoniana / Arts 52 In Memoriam 55 Form Notes

Photo by Michael Barley

Cover photo by Christopher Temerson

Annie Card

Message from the Headmaster AS A SCIENTIST, I am often reminded of a sad truth when

I look at our students: my generation has looted, plundered resources, and overpopulated the earth. From fires and floods to mudslides, hurricanes, and cyclones, evidence accumulates that our planet is not merely warming; thermodynamically, it is heating up. The generations who walk Groton’s hallways today will inherit the consequences of our failure to require meaningful and intentional global engagement. This is an ethical dilemma facing those of us charged with preparing our students for the real business of living and existing on our planet. Educators have a moral obligation to intentionally teach topics that demonstrate commitment to a sustainable future. Our schools must serve as exemplars of how to turn the tide against rampant consumerism. Groton has taken some small steps, and we can do more. Lithium-battery-assisted solar power is being planned to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Geothermal wells provide energy to the Schoolhouse and the Headmaster’s House. And the school, which over the years has helped preserve significant portions of the town’s open spaces that abut our campus, recently purchased sixty-six acres to prevent developers from constructing up to eighty housing units, which would have increased traffic and associated pollution on our northern border. When it comes to environmental sustainability, our global leaders could be better exemplars. All citizens of the world, not just scientists, must question the wisdom of the U.S. pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, as well as China’s unceasing dependence on coal under the guise of employing “clean” coal technology. Rather than underscore the need for global

Editor Gail Friedman

Senior Editorial Advisor Elizabeth Wray Lawrence ‘82

Design Irene HL Chu

Form Notes Editor Jessica M. Hart Photographer/Editorial Assistant Christopher Temerson

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cooperation, and measures to reduce environmental impact, these actions disregard the pressing need for collaboration and the imperative to severely reduce our dependence on coal in particular, and on fossil fuels in general. Perhaps most important, these actions disregard scientific evidence. Even after the hottest U.S. weather in fifteen years; fires in California; floods in the Midwest; powerful storms in Florida, Texas, and Puerto Rico; and cyclones in impoverished countries such as Mozambique, no disaster seems to spur action. Scientifically, the term “global warming” is soft. When heat is continually supplied to an object without its being lost at the same rate, the temperature rises and we say the object is heating up. Why can’t we say that about the Earth, and perhaps act with the same urgency that the world employed when scientists found an ozone hole accelerated by chlorofluorocarbons? The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer achieved universal ratification in the United Nations. It is considered the most successful environmental global action. Can we learn about the ethics of how this was achieved? Global cooperation was tried and tested with the Montreal Protocol, and the U.S. stance was decisive. On December 21, 1987, President Reagan sent the ratification for the Montreal Protocol to Congress, writing: “Early ratification by the United States will encourage similar action by other nations whose participation is also essential. I recommend that the Senate give early and favorable consideration to the Protocol and give its advice and consent to ratification.” We now know that the ozone hole is slowly getting repaired, although it will take hundreds of years to restore it to its previous, relatively safer levels. This kind of global cooperation among nations is needed again. One of our Sixth Formers has popularized the phrase “turn up or transfer,” which he uses to motivate students to attend sporting events. It is time for all of us to turn up. If we don’t slow down the use of fossil fuels, we may have to transfer to another planet.

Temba Maqubela Headmaster

Advisory Committee Amily Dunlap Kimberly A. Gerighty Allison S. MacBride John D. MacEachern P’10, ‘14, ’16 Kathleen M. Machan

Editorial Offices The Schoolhouse Groton School Groton, MA 01450 978 - 448 -7506 quarterly@groton.org Send feedback, ideas, or letters to the editor to quarterly @groton.org.

Other School Offices Alumni Office: 978 - 448 -7520 Admission Office: 978 - 448 -7510 Groton School publishes the Groton School Quarterly three times a year, in late summer, winter, and spring, and the Annual Report once a year, in the fall.

A NEW CFO FOR GROTON experience and outlook. “Julie’s extensive experience in finance and education, including initiatives she has worked on to promote affordability for diverse student populations, will be hugely beneficial to Groton in the years ahead,” said James Windels ’82, a Groton trustee and CFO search committee member. Diana Ferguson ’81, treasurer of Groton School’s Board of Trustees and search committee member, agreed, adding, “I Julie Dolan was struck by her enormous intellect, high energy, and interpersonal warmth — things immediately obvious to me conceived by Headmaster that align well with our values what a special place Groton is. Temba Maqubela, which froze around the Circle. I think she’ll The faculty and staff are deeply tuition for three years and be a wonderful addition.” committed to developing and ensured that applicants are Ms. Dolan holds an bringing out the best in their chosen without regard to their MBA from the University students. The trustees are pasability to pay. of Pennsylvania’s Wharton sionate about the school and “Diversity and socioecoSchool and a bachelor’s in stand behind their commitment nomic inclusion go hand in political science from Stanford in thought, word, and deed. glove,” said Mr. Maqubela. University. She replaces current “And finally, Temba’s bold “Julie will be embraced by the GRAIN initiative — and the Groton community as she ably CFO Arthur Diaz, who is retirprospect of helping make that manages the school’s finances ing. Among his many accomvision a reality for generations while shepherding the sustainplishments, Mr. Diaz helped to come — is an irresistible ability phase of our affordability implement the GRAIN initiative. opportunity for me.” Ms. Dolan and inclusion efforts.” Groton School looks forwas referring to the mile Members of the search ward to welcoming Ms. Dolan stone GRoton Affordability committee praised variwhen she joins the Groton and INclusion (GRAIN) initiative, ous facets of Ms. Dolan’s Circle on July 1. Clark University

roton School has announced the appointment of a new Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Julie Dolan, currently the executive vice president and treasurer of Clark University in Worcester, MA, was selected after an extensive search; she combines deep experience in finance and administration with a commitment both to education and to the mission of Groton School. At Clark, Ms. Dolan has shown strategic leadership in areas including finance, capital projects, and human resources. Prior to working at Clark, she was vice president for finance and treasurer at Fairfield University (CT); associate vice president of fiscal affairs at Dartmouth College; CFO and director of operations at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College; and assistant dean for finance for Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She also held financial positions at Tufts University and the University of Pennsylvania. “I am thrilled to be joining the Groton community,” Ms. Dolan said. “It was

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THE HOLOCAUST: A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT

arion Blumenthal Lazan was just a girl when the Nazis took her and her family to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Northern Germany. In early February, she stood before Groton students, recounting not just her horrors from the Holocaust but also how she survived there and in the seven-plus decades since. Despite stories of hunger and fear, she carried a message of tolerance and responsibility, leavened with wisdom and cheer. She talked about the twelvefoot-high walls with barbed wire the Nazis constructed, and the effects of

scapegoating an entire people, noting that the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws prevented her and other Jews in Germany from entering parks, pools, or public schools, and prevented non-Jews from patronizing Jewish-owned businesses. “We must never generalize, or judge an entire group by the actions” of a few, said Blumenthal Lazan, author with Lila Perl of Four Perfect Pebbles: A True Story of the Holocaust. “Let us treat people as individuals. Look for similarities.” In her absorbing hour-long talk, Blumenthal Lazan described her journey, which began with a four-year-old’s

comfortable life in a home above her father’s shoe store and disbelief that nascent Nazi actions in Germany would build. “Never did we think the antiSemitic incidents there would ever lead to very much,” she said. She described her family’s escape to Holland, where they led a humble, peaceful existence with other migrants until Germany’s invasion of that country; their deportation to the concentration camp, in crammed cattle cars with no sanitary facilities; and the constant struggle to maintain their family. She and her mother were confined (continued on page 4)

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(continued from page 3) to the women’s portion of the camp and her father and older brother to the men’s; they struggled to survive on small pieces of bread, as others died of typhus, dysentery, and malnutrition. When they were freed at the end of the war, Blumenthal Lazan was ten years old and weighed thirty-five pounds. Her mother weighed seventy. Her father succumbed to typhus six weeks after their liberation. During her talk, Blumenthal Lazan held up the yellow star that she, like all Jews, was forced to wear. “It was just another way to denigrate us, to isolate us, and to separate us from society,” she said. What got her through the Holocaust? Without paper, pencils, books, or games to amuse her, she focused on tasks, such

as picking off lice, and created “games,” such as searching for a tiny piece of glass or shattered mirror and considering its sunlit reflection her “pet.” She dreamed of the three “B’s” — a freshly made bed, a warm bath, and an ample supply of bread. And she obsessed over the need to find four perfect pebbles, convincing herself that recovering those tiny identical stones would mean that the four members of her family would survive. With her mother and brother, Blumenthal Lazan eventually made it to America and settled in Peoria, Illinois, thanks to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. (The same group helped Groton Headmaster Temba Maqubela when he fled persecution in South Africa and immigrated to the United States with his wife, Vuyelwa, and

their infant son; the headmaster and the Holocaust survivor bonded over this shared connection after the talk). In a grandmotherly tone, Blumenthal Lazan repeatedly urged kindness, asking

ON A MISSION: TO UPLIFT THROUGH EDUCATION

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Christopher Temerson

demonstrated to his descendants how to use education as a weapon to regain his dignity.” Schools built by missionaries had educated Bokwe, as well as revolutionaries such as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Steve Biko. The missionaries did not realize that “those like Jacob Bokwe, who were among the first to get a high school diploma in the early nineteenth century, would use their education as a spear against the settlers, whose sole aim was to occupy and plunder,” Mr. Maqubela said. “Imagine the juxtaposition of the British settlers using weapons of mass destruction against the natives, and the missionaries, who gave us weapons of mass instruction.” Education, he explained, became “a tool of liberation”— and still can serve that purpose today. Mr. Maqubela provided snapshots of his own story of liberation, beginning in his native South Africa: he described his arrest for anti-apartheid activism in 1976 while in his high school biology class, which was taught by his mother; his exile to Botswana and how he escaped death during the infamous raid on Gaborone, despite being on a South African “hit list”; his immigration to New York, where he, with his wife and infant son, first lived in a homeless shelter; and, ultimately, how they lifted themselves from poverty through their education. Mr. Maqubela also explained the tool used by Groton for change and inclusion — the GRAIN initiative, which has ensured that all applicants are considered without regard to their ability to pay and which froze tuition for three years, resulting in a precipitous drop

Gail Friedman

ducators are missionaries, and they become more relevant when they realize their mission: to provide dignity and uplift people through education. Headmaster Temba Maqubela drew on his own family’s history in apartheid-era South Africa to deliver that message to the Independent Schools Association of the Central States (ISACS) Heads Conference in Chicago on February 1. “Let us really do the work we set out to do when we took up the mantle,” he urged about one hundred heads of school attending the ISACS conference. ISACS, which invited Mr. Maqubela to deliver the keynote address, represents schools in thirteen Midwestern states.

His address, titled “From Apartheid to Inclusion: Regaining Dignity through Education,” covered stories of his ancestors, his personal history, Groton’s story of inclusion and its GRAIN (GRoton Affordability and INclusion) initiative, and the appeal that educators build more inclusive communities. John Strudwick, head of Lake Forest Academy in Illinois and a former teaching colleague of Mr. Maqubela’s at Phillips Academy (Andover), provided the introduction, recalling Mr. Maqubela as a “young, fresh-faced chemistry teacher” and describing a summer science program in South Africa, “highlighted by a personal tour of Soweto from Temba, including him showing me the various houses that he had hidden in back in the 1970s.” Mr. Strudwick suggested that the headmaster’s work at Groton serve as a model. “Since arriving in Groton in 2013, Temba has made it his mission to focus on inclusion at U.S. schools. His work, I believe, is an example for all of us in independent schools.” Mr. Maqubela began his talk by transporting listeners to the town of Alice, in South Africa, where his great-great-grandfather, Jacob Bokwe, sued a white man for publicly calling him a “gross liar.” He was the first black to sue a white for defamation. Because Bokwe was educated, he declined the services of a white translator. “The twin act of being the first African to take a white man to court and dismissing a white translator was a humanizing act for the colonized and dehumanized Africans,” Mr. Maqubela said. “While he lost the case, he had

STUDENT ART DISPLAYED AT MUSEUM The art works of four Groton School students were on display at the Worcester Art Museum throughout March, as part of the celebration of Youth Art Month.

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from #1 highest tuition among forty peer schools to #38. “Here is a scary statistic,” Mr. Maqubela told the educators. “Since 1983, the consumer price index is 250 percent whereas the higher education price index is 350 percent.” He urged the school heads to “form a vanguard of dedicated educators who will answer the question of access, affordability, and inclusion — especially the inclusion of the talented missing middle.” He explained strides Groton has taken to admit families in the middle of the socioeconomic spectrum, strengthening the center of what is sometimes referred to as a “barbell,” with the rich and those of very modest means on the ends and a slim “missing” middle. As he often does at Groton gatherings, the headmaster repeatedly asked the crowd, “Who is here and who will not be here?” referring to their school populations. At one point, he asked conference attendees to look at themselves and ask that question. “I am making a case for our schools to agitate for positive change in order for us to be relevant,” he said. “In particular, heads like you who have a bully pulpit should use it for inclusion rather than to maintain the status quo.” Inspiring the heads of school to take steps, even small ones, to offer broader opportunity within their communities, Mr. Maqubela admitted his own desire to move quickly, and his hope that others will do the same. “I guarantee when I look at every one of your missions, it’s calling on every one of us to be missionaries,” he said. “… We’re just missionaries. Let’s just get on with it.”

Art teacher Jennifer Ho chose works by Annie Fey ’20, Bensen Han ’23, Amelia Lee ‘22, and Phoebe Shi ’19 to represent the school in the exhibit, which featured art from schools in the region surrounding Worcester, Massachusetts. Each student, said Ms. Ho, “pushed the assignment beyond the expectation.”

From top: “Road to the Future” by Phoebe Shi ‘19, “Pink Mask” by Annie Fey ’20, self-portrait by Bensen Han ‘23, and advertising poster by Amelia Lee ‘22

students to warmly welcome new arrivals in school — as she was welcomed in Peoria, even though a language barrier at first forced her into a class with children several years younger. She also asked students to be kind on social media and reminded those far from home to check in from time to time with their mothers. Blumenthal Lazan expressed hope that her young audience would carry forward the message and memory of Holocaust survivors when they are gone — the reason the speaker has told her story to more than a million students all over the country. “When we are not here anymore, it is up to you to bear witness,’’ she said, adding later: “I hope that you prevent our past from becoming your future.”

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1 2 4 1 Speaker Rosa Clemente 2 An afternoon workshop

Photos by Christopher Temerson

3 A studentchoreographed dance accompanying comments about diversity and inclusion 4 Groton step group Essence

HONORING DR. KING

roton School remembered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on January 21 with a provocative talk by activist Rosa Clemente, student music and dance performances, and afternoon workshops that encouraged deep discussion on difficult topics. Clemente prodded students to take action to repair a broken political and economic system, sending the message “to speak truth to power” in both her speech in the Campbell Performing Arts Center and in a smaller question-and-answer session afterward. Part history lesson, part plea for justice and equity, the talk covered topics ranging from slavery and the Jim Crow era to white supremacy and fascism. Clemente, who was the vice-presidential candidate for the Green Party in 2008, seeks dramatic change. The “revolution” she described would include, among many goals, student debt forgiveness. “Everybody has a right to a good job,” she said. “Everybody has a right to affordable housing — college being free, health care being free as a human right. We have to demand that.” Some of her comments generated controversy, which students unpacked in workshops and meetings with advisors later

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in the day. In the well-attended Q&A in the black box theater, students more than once pressed Clemente on how she could effect change without reaching out to the other side. In her speech, she had said: “In this moment of history, we’ve got to make a choice. There’s no middle line. There are not two sides to every story. We’ve got to reject a narrative that says we can work with our enemies.” Student pushback was not surprising given Groton’s frequent discussion of inclusion and understanding. “It’s a reflection of how salient inclusion is as a core value in our community,” said Assistant Director of Admission and Director of Inclusion Outreach Carolyn Chica. “This was meant to be thought-provoking and spark conversation, and it’s doing that.” In fact, some afternoon workshops focused on gaining understanding by listening to other people’s stories. The workshops covered everything from law to language, from housing to Hollywood. A few examples: In the “Living in the Hyphen” workshop, students focused on immigrant stories and how national and racial identity can conflict. In “But That Doesn’t Affect Me!” attendees explored how to approach

issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism as allies, when they’ve never experienced the “isms” firsthand. “Appropriation versus Appreciation of Asian Culture” looked at popular culture, discussing whether a non-Chinese girl who wore a traditional Chinese dress to her prom was appreciating or appropriating; they also discussed Indian clothing that Beyoncé wore during a performance at a wedding in India and Coldplay’s culturally confused “Princess of China” music video. Another workshop, “Of Pigs and Pollution: Environmental Justice Through Case Studies,” demonstrated the inequitable impact of environmental problems, while “Mass Incarceration and Family Structure” addressed the history of mass incarceration, what some call “the New Jim Crow,” and its connection to disenfranchisement. Earlier in the day, student performances introduced the speaker: a dance by a Groton step group known as Essence, revived from the 1990s; a rendition of “Man in the Mirror” by Groton’s jazz ensemble; and a student-choreographed dance to a soundtrack composed of student comments about diversity and inclusion.

ON HUMANITY AND GENDER IDENTITY

Christopher Temerson

uthor, professor and New York Times columnist Jennifer Boylan captivated the community on April 16 with a frank and enlightening Circle Talk about her journey as a transgender woman. Peppered with clever asides and selfdeprecating humor, the lecture frequently had listeners laughing, yet consistently transmitted a clear message about understanding the various ways that people might express their gender identity. “There’s no one in this room who doesn’t have something in their heart that they have to keep hidden,” said the Barnard College/Columbia University professor and author of fifteen books. Her heart carried her secret until she was forty. “That was too late,” she said, then quickly corrected herself. “It’s never too late to be yourself.” Informing her 85-year-old mother, a conservative Evangelical, was terrifying — and also surprising. “It was hard to tell her the thing I’d known in my heart since I was six years old,” she said. “I was afraid she wouldn’t love me.” Her mother reaffirmed her unconditional love, said she would never abandon her child, and promised to adjust. She then recited a passage about faith, hope, and love from 1 Corinthians, which says, “the greatest of these is love.” The importance of loving others was a recurring theme. “We’re here to love each

other and to be loved. If there’s another reason to be here on Earth, I don’t know what it is,” Professor Boylan said. Part of the talk was a primer on gender-related terminology. The speaker acknowledged that discourse was changing quickly, and that the word “trans” connoted many things. “Transgender,” she said, is generally an adjective and refers to “lots of different kinds of people who are working through all kinds of gender stuff.” “Transsexual” generally means someone who has had surgical intervention to transition, she explained, while drag queens are gay men who present as female, sometimes for entertainment; cross dressers tend to be

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straight men; and gender queer or gender nonconforming want to get away from the male-female binary and live along a spectrum. Gender identity and sexual orientation are separate topics, she warned. “If you’re gay or lesbian, it’s about who you love,” she said. “If you’re trans, it’s about who you are.” Gender identity, she said, is “who you know yourself to be” while gender expression is “who people see when they look at you.” The morning after her Circle Talk, Professor Boylan held an open Q&A in the Sackett Forum, where students crowded in to hear her outlook on everything from her marriage to femininity, which she explained was especially important to her right after her transition “because I hadn’t been able to express that before.” Eventually, she said, some aspects of femininity struck her as oppressive. Students absorbed her message of love and acceptance, hanging on every word. “Trans people exist,” she concluded. “We’ve always been here and we’re not going to go away.” The choice is to ostracize people who aren’t like you, she said, or to show them love and respect. Listeners left understanding that that was not a choice at all.

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Alden Alijani ‘20 and Brian Xiao ‘19

or the past fourteen years, Groton’s jazz ensembles performed at Ryles, a storied jazz club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With the club now closed, “Soul Sauce,” the school’s jazz ensemble, and Groton’s smaller jazz combos headed elsewhere this year for their annual gig at a live-music club. On Sunday, January 27, twenty-two musicians boarded buses for the Hard Rock Café in Boston, a venue chosen after extensive

research by Director of Performing Arts Mary Ann Lanier and Director of Jazz Ensembles Kenji Kikuchi. Students representing every form performed to a packed house that included alumni, locals, parents, faculty, students, and Mr. and Mrs. Maqubela. Audience members traveled from Colorado, North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania, and towns all over Massachusetts for the performance.

Kenji Kikuchi

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Award-winning works by (from left) Yuen Ning Chang ‘21, John Donovan ‘20, and Wren Fortunoff ‘22

A WHOPPING 25 SCHOLASTIC ART & WRITING AWARDS

Scholastic Award winners (front row) Eliza Powers ‘20, Wren Fortunoff ‘22, Isabel Cai ‘21, Yuen Ning Chang ‘21, and Elbereth Chen ‘21; (back row) Joshua Guo ‘20, Mikayla Murrin ’21, Yumin Shivdasani ‘20, John Donovan ‘20, and Rajit Khanna ‘19; not pictured, Angela Wei ‘21

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earned a silver key and an honorable mention for poetry. Eliza Powers ‘20 won a silver key in humor, Wren Fortunoff ‘22 won a silver key in painting, and Elbereth Chen ‘21 won an honorable mention in short story. Many of these works are beautifully conceived and executed, but also trigger emotion. “The writing is less about the plot and characters and more about the emotions and ideas behind it,” explained Mikayla. Writing for the humor competition was entirely different; Eliza made her point through a satirical job rejection letter. “I wrote this to satirize the job and resumé process,” she said, “and to use exaggerated stereotypes to explore the tension between baby boomers and millennials.” Yuen Ning’s gold key–winning photographs captured the free spirits and joy of children in the Tibetan highlands, where Yuen Ning spends her summers. “The tranquility of the children there isn’t something

I see every day,” she said. “People are constantly changing, and I thought it would be meaningful to keep a record of the children’s growth as I continue traveling to the Tibetan highlands each year.” All in all, Groton’s student painters, filmmakers, illustrators, photographers, writers, and poets won twenty-five Scholastic awards — eight gold keys, seven silver keys, and ten honorable mentions. Below is one example of a gold key winner: “Solstice in Vienna” by Yumin Shivdasani. She said it was inspired by “a winter walk through the woods, during which I saw a tree frozen in a curve that reminded me of a ball gown’s hem. From there, I had the foundation and title of my poem, and tried to write the rest intuitively rather than systematically.” Yumin added, “I think poetry is one of those things that often steps beyond the bounds of reason.”

Gail Friedman

leven Groton School students won regional Scholastic Art & Writing Awards this winter, including eight gold keys, the highest honor. Six gold keys were in the visual arts and two in writing. Yuen Ning Chang ‘21 brought in five awards herself, including three gold keys — two for photography and one for drawing/ illustration — and two honorable mentions, in photography. Joshua Guo ‘20 earned four awards, straddling the arts and writing categories: in visual arts, he earned a gold key for film/animation, and in the writing category, he earned a silver for memoir as well as honorable mentions in memoir and short story. Other gold keys in the visual arts went to John Donovan ‘20 and Isabel Cai ‘21 for painting; Isabel also earned an honorable mention in mixed-media. In writing, Mikayla Murrin ‘21 and Yumin Shivdasani ‘20 earned gold keys for flash fiction and poetry, respectively. Mikayla also won a silver key in science fiction and an honorable mention in short story, while Yumin brought in two silver keys for her poetry. Gold keys go to “the very best works submitted to local programs,” according to the Scholastic organization. Other students earning multiple awards were Angela Wei ‘21, who earned two honorable mentions in painting, and Rajit Khanna ‘19, who

1 Isabel Cai ’21 playing the guzheng Photos by Gail Friedman

2 Annabel Lee ‘21, Chinese teacher Shannon Jin P’19, and Elbereth Chen ‘21 3 Gili Canca ‘20 and Lwazi Bululu ‘20 1

4 Playing Carrom, an Indian board game 5 Morayo Fernandez ‘19

6 Elyse Cabrera ‘22 and Emily Perez ‘22

A GLOBAL (AND VERY LOCAL) EXPERIENCE

t was a chance to travel the world without stepping outside the Circle. Groton School’s third annual Cultural Day, on January 26, celebrated our globally diverse student body by transforming the Sackett Forum into a colorful carnival of food, games, music, and dance. Students immersed themselves in the cultures of their peers, meandering from table to table and country to country. They sampled spring rolls from Thailand; orange-flavored chocolates from Bulgaria; and koeksisters, a traditional fried dough from South Africa. They tasted Great Britain’s clotted cream, Canada’s poutine, South Korea’s spicy ramen, and Indian samosas. From the Philippines came paksiw na lechon, a dish of pork, vinegar, and liver; manok ng adobo, chicken with soy sauce and vinegar; and spring rolls known as lumpia. On the menu from Vietnam were crepes known as bánh xèo and a sweet

dessert drink known as chè Thái. Among the other countries offering a taste of their culture were Colombia, Japan, Ghana, China, Peru, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Germany, Jamaica, and Brazil. When the eating paused, some students played unfamiliar games from India and Peru, while others sat patiently as a henna artist decorated their hands. Food and games weren’t the only attractions. In the first half of the event, a band brought Caribbean flavor to the Forum; during the second half, students performed. Dancers Neha Agarwal ‘20 and Yumin Shivdasani ‘20 brought Bollywood to Groton; Ben Reyes ‘22 sang traditional love songs of the Philippines known as kundiman; Isabel Cai ’21 and Elbereth Chen ‘21 played the guzheng and erhu respectively, two traditional instruments from China; and Lwazi Bululu ’20, Gili Canca ’20, Zenande Mdludlu ‘21, and Ayanda Tambo ’19

performed a South African gumboot dance. “Groton Cultural Day has become an evening of fun and festivities that many students and faculty look forward to all year,” said Director of Diversity and Inclusion Sravani Sen-Das. “Every year we think it can’t get better and it does — thanks to the imagination and energy of our students and faculty!” The energy remained high throughout the evening, with spontaneous dance erupting to the music piped into the Forum. The space itself looked festive, surrounded with flags representing the countries and heritages of Groton students. Groton Cultural Day was a joint effort by the Student Activities Committee, the International Community Advising Program, and the Diversity and Inclusion Group, with help from the Art Department and Global Education program.

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Chris Thoms ’99

IN SCORING POSITION

FOR THIRTY GAMES each Major League Baseball season, Chris Thoms ’99 sits in the press box at Oracle Park, the

home of the San Francisco Giants, or at the OaklandAlameda County Coliseum, the home of the Oakland A’s. This privileged seating is more than an honor. Chris has a job to do—and he is the only one in the whole stadium doing it. By day, Chris is a senior data scientist for LinkedIn. But since 2013, he has also been an official Major League Baseball (MLB) scorer, responsible for recording statistics and making important calls. He determines the difference between a hit and an error, a passed ball and a wild pitch. While umpires are responsible for calling balls, strikes, and outs, all the decisions about the game statistics fall to scorers like Chris. “When you’re on, you are the guy. You make the call: hit or error,” he said. “All that stuff that gets announced, it’s your decision and yours alone.” He calls an error if he determines the play “could be made with ordinary effort by an average player at that position for that level of play.” Baseball has been an important part of Chris’ life since he was a kid surrounded by the Cape Cod Baseball League. When he was about fourteen, his father became the volunteer general manager of his hometown team, the Chatham Anglers. It wasn’t long before Thoms was volunteering, too. “I used to run the scoreboard when I was sixteen years old, putting the balls and the strikes up there,” he said.

Chris Thoms at Fenway Park, where he once scored a Cape Cod League All Star game

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statistics could apply to everyday life. “They asked me, ‘Do you actually use this stuff?’” Thoms said. “I was like, yeah, I really do. We do experiments every single day … This stuff is the foundation for anything that you do, especially if you work in tech or any big company.” Eddie Harvey, the AP Statistics teacher, said he appreciated how Chris tied classroom topics with reallife scenarios. For example, Chris told students that he uses “t-tests” (which test hypotheses) every day at work, and that A/B testing helps LinkedIn drive more viewers to pages. While at Groton, Chris played varsity baseball, basketball, and soccer. While scoring baseball combines his passions for sports and statistics, he is much more

personae

Chris worked his way up to official scorer for the Cape Cod Baseball League. He says he’s particularly fond of the amateur level of play, calling it the last time players can compete “before it turns into a business.” After building his passion for baseball statistics with the Cape Cod League, Chris aspired to be an MLB scorer, but found no openings in Baltimore or Washington, DC, where he was living. His luck turned when he moved to California: he landed a position six years ago as official scorer for the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. Once, Chris was able to score at Fenway Park, when the Cape Cod League had an All Star game there, an experience he described as his “dream.” Despite scoring in the big leagues, Chris remains the

His luck turned when he moved to California: he landed a position six years ago as official scorer for the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. league statistician and head of official scoring for the Cape Cod Baseball League. Every summer, he travels to Massachusetts to train new official scorers and then monitors game statistics electronically from his home in San Francisco. He recently received the Executive of the Year Award from the Cape Cod League at its Hall of Fame ceremony. In addition to reviewing stats, Chris has added a few features to help team managers track their players’ performances. “We use a third party program called Pointstreak that gathers all the stats,” he said. The software didn’t display stats as easily and he would have liked, so he rewrote some of the code. “I send a daily stat sheet out to the teams that they can print out and give to their fans,” he said. He is also in the midst of digitizing old records and stats that were printed on paper but never recorded online. Chris returned to the Circle this winter for the alumni-student basketball game and took time to teach his favorite class from high school—AP Statistics. He said his goal was to show Groton students that statistics is useful, no matter what path in life they take. Teaching an unusual statistical phenomenon known as Simpson’s Paradox, he used data from two MLB players who once played in the Cape Cod League. “I looked at three years of stats, and Buster Posey had a higher average than the other player all three seasons,” he said, explaining the paradox. “But if you take their entire average for those three seasons, the other guy’s average is actually higher for the period despite every year having a lower average.” (In this case, the number is thrown off because the batting averages doesn’t take into account the number of at-bats, the denominator.) After the class, students seemed amazed that

than an armchair athlete today. When he’s not caring for his infant daughter, Tenley, he not only plays basketball and football, but runs distances. He revised his goal to run one thousand miles in 2018 because it wasn’t challenging enough. “I blew past the thousand miles, so I updated it to 2,018 kilometers in 2018.” he said. It’s no surprise that he also served up some stats about his personal running. “I made a heat map of my routes from 2018,” he admitted. After all, the analysis is part of the fun. —Eli Mansbach, faculty

Chris with Tiffany and baby Tenley

www.groton.org

Lindsay A. Thompson ’89

Dr. Lindsay Thompson ’89 is a pediatrician with a

unique specialty, one that may seem unrelated to the physical wellness of her patients: health data, and how it is communicated. Making sure children and teens are thriving and that their immunizations are up to date certainly are priorities. But Lindsay’s caretaking goes beyond seeing young patients to seeing that their electronic health data remains confidential and private— even, sometimes, from their parents. This focus was inspired, at least in part, by a troubling phone call. Back in the days before smartphones, when voicemail was essentially a party line open to anyone in the house, a doctor’s job was complicated enough getting

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private information to adult patients. It was virtually impossible to get it to teens. Consider the challenge of communicating the results of a pregnancy test, or a screening for sexually transmitted diseases, to minors. Legally, this is protected information covered under the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship. Yet imagine calling the house and asking a parent to please hand the phone to their child. This situation did in fact arise while Lindsay was young and supervising a resident. From across the room, she listened as the resident navigated the shaky terrain then managed to speak to the teen alone. As the conversation came to a close, the resident’s face went ashen just before she hung up the phone.

Mindy Miller/UF Health

A Pediatrician’s Fight for Patient Privacy

error with someone or at work, and I credit that to the training by Burch Ford, then the school counselor.” From Brown University as an undergraduate, she went to Columbia for medical school, then Dartmouth for her residency, where she spent an extra year of research completing a master’s degree in epidemiology. She returned to New York to teach at Columbia’s medical school for two years, before joining the medical staff at the University of Florida in 2006. For fourteen years, Lindsay has been in Gainesville, where a significant population of her patients receive their insurance through Medicaid. In addition to seeing patients, she conducts her own research, supervises residents, teaches, and mentors others in their research. She also finds herself offering guidance to physicians who, drawn by her 2015 article “Meaningful Use of a Confidential

personae

“I asked her what was wrong, and safe portal for getting young people she said she heard an extra extension messages and test results and access of the phone hang up after she said to their own documents and tests on goodbye to the patient,” Lindsay their phones.” said, recalling the terrible moment Her team worked with one of the when they realized the parent had country’s largest providers of health likely been listening in the whole information technology to customtime. “I was so worried for this ize their popular patient portal. She child—that there’d be repercussions. admits there was initially a mixed Sometimes parents can be aggressive reception to getting it off the ground. when they learn something they “The University of Florida is a don’t want to hear. Plus we had fabulous institution but this was a inadvertently broken the law by pretty radical concept. We had to breaching the patient’s privacy. After bring attorneys, techies, and providthis, I became interested in finding ers into the same room to get on the other ways of providing the care, and same page, make sure everything communicating it.” we were doing was legal and safety A few years later, she was sitting oriented and kid-oriented,” she said. in a meeting at the University of “We all came to the agreement that Florida, where she is an associate pro- it’s an important learning avenue for fessor of Pediatrics, Health Outcomes, kids to have about their own medical and Biomedical Informatics as well as records, and understanding routes assistant director for research for the to getting their prescriptions, so it’s Institute for Child Health Policy. She not this overwhelming surprise of a

want to provide teens with the best avenue to get in touch with » “Itheir doctors if they need to, for anything they’d rather not talk about with their parents.” listened to colleagues complain about system to them as a high school stuAdolescent Patient Portal” in the the amount of personal information dent heading off to college.” Journal of Adolescent Health, are intrigued that students and young professionals When Lindsay herself was a young by the prospect of a youth portal for were sharing online. An unfamiliar student heading into high school, she electronic health care records. product name came up—Facebook. was already interested in medicine, “Right now, what I am most capAs she learned more about this and and had a notion that she wanted to tivated by is drawing on the training other forms of social media, on went work with underserved children. At I’ve had to make sure the healthcare the light bulb. Lindsay decided she Groton, she was given permission we’re providing is actually getting the wanted to make accessing one’s own to change her schedule to take AP outcomes we think it does,” she says. electronic health records as appealing Biology early, giving her exposure to “It may come as a great surprise to hear, as Facebook, as agile as an app. what she wanted to do—and enabling we’re not that good.” An area she “I want to provide teens with the her to take more advanced classes like particularly wants to see improved is best avenue to get in touch with their Genetics in her Sixth Form year. She electronic medical records, along with doctors if they need to, for anything also volunteered as a peer counselor the impact of new technology on the they’d rather not talk about with their in her final year, an experience she effective delivery of primary care in parents. Every state has different laws, credits with impressing upon her the pediatrics. but every state has some carve-out importance of active listening, so If that’s a broad sidewalk to hopwritten differently that usually gives critical in patient care. “I remember scotch, so be it. “Anyone who looks at kids twelve to eighteen years old prilearning during training that if somethe career path I’ve taken or the artivacy if they need to access to family one comes to you, you really need to cles I’ve written, it might seem kind of planning or pregnancy counseling,” put down what you’re doing and listen, patchwork. But it’s been so much fun she said. “It’s very complicated getand that listening skill has really to follow what rattles my brain.” ting to kids and not the parent, so we helped me be successful,” she says. —Nichole Bernier were trying to create a responsible, “I’ve never had a big communication

www.groton.org

Christopher Temerson

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Revenge by Pen by Ben Coes ‘85 PAGE 16

Write What You Know and What You Don’t by David Cleveland ‘70, P’05, ‘07 PAGE 20

Q&A with Curtis Sittenfeld ‘93 PAGE 24

The Groton Quest, in Words by Michael Knox Beran ‘84, P’20, ‘23 PAGE 26

On Writing Groton’s literary sensibilities, cultivated since the days of William Amory Gardner, are celebrated in a new book collection featuring authors who were shaped by the Circle.

www.groton.org

Melinda Maguire

GR OTON W R I TE R S

Ben Coes ’85

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REVENGE

BY PEN BY BEN COES ’85

here was a Groton teacher you might remember or have heard of. His name was Todd Jesdale and Fifth Form year he awakened in me a desire to write. I was a student of his for an entire year at Groton. There were eight students in the class, yet even at the end of the year he still called me either “Dan” or “Bob.” He could tell you some obscure character’s name in some crappy book but he couldn’t remember my three-letter, rather uncomplicated name. I stopped correcting him around Christmas. During one class, Mr. Jesdale brought out mimeographed copies of a typewritten short story, maybe eight or nine pages long, and we read it. It was the most beautiful short story I have ever read, before or since. The story was beautiful on a level with The Snows of Kilimanjaro or A Perfect Day for Bananafish, which by then I’d already memorized. The author was a Groton student. It was first person and he was describing a life of privilege — the Country Club, boarding school, the Gold & Silver Ball, debutantes — and yet the author came from humble means. At one point in the story, he’s standing outside in the rain. He’s in a tuxedo, staring in through a window at a dance. Several people in class were crying. It was the elegance of Fitzgerald and the sadness of Salinger. The author of the short story had slipped it under Mr. Jesdale’s door one night. He didn’t put a name on it. It haunted Jesdale. He tried to find out who the author was. He would opine endlessly. “The author of this magnificent story has been ordered by his father to be a lawyer, doctor,

or one of those bastards who manipulates money!” Jesdale declared with outrage. “We must find him!” In that short story, he’d created a masterpiece, in secret, in high school at that. I wandered around Groton for weeks looking for the genius, all of us did, but no one ever found him. A year later, in the spring of my Sixth Form year, my English class was given an assignment to write a short story. We were given several weeks but, as of the night before the story was due, I hadn’t written a word. I finally sat down around midnight in front of the computer. My roommate, Goodale, was snoring loudly. I wrote a short story about getting dumped by my girlfriend. The next morning, I turned it in, then, a week later, my English teacher, a 22-year-old Middlebury graduate, approached me in the hallway. “Can we put this in the Grotonian, Ben?” she said, referring to the literary magazine. “Sure,” I responded. When it came out, the girl I wrote the story about came over to me at sit-down dinner and started screaming at me. “Have you no self-respect??!!” she shouted, pointing at me. “That’s private information!! I hate you!!!” “True art cannot be silenced, my dear,” I replied calmly, with a hint of boyish insouciance. The next day, a spry Second Former came up to me in the Schoolhouse. I had never seen him before, despite

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GR OTON W R I TE R S

his having been there almost a year. He told me how much he loved the short story. He asked if I would read something he’d written. Needless to say, I recognized my responsibility as an older student and mentor. “Cui servire est regnare,” I said to myself. I immediately started shouting at him, telling him to drop and give me fifty push-ups, then I made him run around the Circle three times with a paper bag on his head. The last lap, me and my friends were allowed to try and tackle him. He

BETTY EVISCERATED EVERY SPEECH I WROTE LIKE IT WAS THE FRENCH ROYAL FAMILY IN 1792 AND SHE WAS THE BLOODTHIRSTY MOB. was a fast little guy. This was Endicott Peabody meets SEAL Team 6, and I believe he emerged a stronger citizen, especially after his injuries healed. The story I wrote wasn’t very good, mind you. I reread it a couple years ago and was shocked at how bad it was, though that story started everything. I was amazed at how one little slice of words could impact people so much. At Columbia, I tried to write more, even though I knew it wasn’t a career choice and I was wasting time. While all my friends were gearing up for Wall Street, I applied for admission and was accepted into a graduate-level creative writing class taught by Raymond Kennedy, a well-known author, New York Times bestseller, and contemporary of Jack Kerouac, Raymond Carver, and Richard Brautigan. Based on his tattered wardrobe, I’m not sure how many books he sold but he was one of the real downtown New York City literary writers. He was a war veteran and had thick brown hair. His face looked like a baseball mitt. He chain smoked during class, and we debated about what liquor his coffee cup was filled with that week. We were required to write a short story every week. Each class, we read our stories to Professor Kennedy and each other, as a bluish cloud of cigarette smoke cantilevered across the classroom. Even though we all needed lung transplants the following semester, we loved Professor Kennedy. It was highly competitive. There were no metrics then, there still aren’t, for determining if one story is better than another. Our only guide was Professor Kennedy, who, at the conclusion of every class, had a vigorous coughing fit then declared a winner. Kennedy was one of the University judges who awarded Columbia’s writing prize, the Bennett Cerf Prize, and my senior year they gave it to me. Before you think

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I’m tooting my own horn, please know that several of my classmates from Kennedy’s smoke-clogged writing salon went on to great success. One was nominated for an Oscar, another won The Booker Prize, and still another was a founding writer of The Simpsons and retired at age thirty. Meanwhile, my main source of income is from writing essays for the Groton School Quarterly. Kennedy was the one who made us understand the importance of writing every day. Inspired or not, if we didn’t show up with a story every week we were out of the class. After Columbia, I was a White House speechwriter and was dispatched to a member of the Cabinet, the U.S. Secretary of Energy, Admiral James D. Watkins, a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who pretended, or actually believed, I didn’t exist. The head of speechwriting was a formidable gray-haired woman named Betty Nolan. She could look at a banana and it would start peeling. Betty eviscerated every speech I wrote like it was the French royal family in 1792 and she was the bloodthirsty mob. At first, I thought to myself, in a British accent, “How dare you, Madame! Do you know who I am? I won the Bennett Cerf Prize at Columbia!” I thought about orchestrating an internal putsch, daydreaming of having Betty assigned to run speechwriting in Samoa and turning her office into a bar/pool hall, all at taxpayer expense. But after a while I saw how her editing improved and changed what I wrote. Betty taught me how to be brutally criticized, even yelled at, for mistakes or flaws in my writing. I emerged with thick skin — and I learned how to be edited because ultimately it would make the final product better, a product with my name on it. I penned the Commencement address at the University of Alabama that year and flew down with the Admiral to Tuscaloosa. He made me fly down duct-taped to one of the wings. That’s when I realized he did know I existed. I watched as the Admiral read my words to a crowd of 50,000 people in what turned out to be my last speech for him. Because the Admiral basically just read whatever I wrote, I chose that day to have him advocate for various pet projects I was working on at the time, including America’s need to conquer Jamaica, the dangers of stop signs, why Gummy Bears are chewy, horse breeding, and free love. The fact that the crowd was booing by the end was not my concern. If anything it showed me the power of words. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three fundamental rules to writing: 1. You must write every day. In this way, writing is selfselecting. Writers write. Those who don’t and just talk about it aren’t writers. Whenever I meet someone who

says, “I’m a writer, Mr. Coes,” or “I want to be an author, Mr. Coes,” or “Why are you wearing women’s lingerie, Mr. Coes?” I ask if they write every day. I have several friends who are amazing writers but don’t write every day. It’s a blue collar job, like laying bricks. It’s not about inspiration, what mood you’re in, or how busy you are. You need to lay down bricks. I write five pages a day even if that means writing while I’m watching one of my kids play sports, while I’m sleeping, while a very close friend is asking me for serious marriage advice, or while I’m performing heart surgery. 2. Listen, understand, process, and above all use criticism. That doesn’t mean accept everything, but don’t take it personally. Be humble enough to learn. This applies to any career, not just writing. It even applies to life. Most authors take criticism personally and it hinders their ability to grow and improve. Fortunately for me, I have a lot of room for improvement and have been getting that message for a very long time, from a lot of people, including every teacher I had at Groton. Apparently, I have

HIS TRIUMPH WAS MET WITH APPLAUSE AND A PRIZE; MINE WAS MET BY THE GROTON POLICE DEPARTMENT. lots of “upside potential.” Even now, as I write this, my wife, Shannon, is reminding me of just how much room for maturity and progress I still have, though she puts it in different words, words perhaps not appropriate for a respectable alumni magazine. Finally, my fellow Grotonians, I’m going to leave you with one other anecdote from my time at our beloved alma mater. It illustrates my last and perhaps most important point about writing, and that is: 3. Don’t get jealous, but if you do, take appropriate measures to “negate” or “snuff out” the individual you’re jealous of. Sixth Form year, at Prize Day, I eagerly awaited the announcement of my name for the literary prize. A bemused, sardonic, Hemingway-esque grin inhabited my handsome face. I turned and saw my English teacher a few rows back, trying to control her passion for me by not looking at me and holding hands with her varsity football boyfriend from Middlebury. When the winner was announced, I climbed to my feet, then realized that

someone else’s name had been called. I sat back down, pretending I had rickets. I felt shocked and confused, saddened and bereft. Was life now really worth living? I sulked through the handshaking line, feeling betrayed. “Who makes these decisions?” I whispered to a Godless universe. In catatonic silence, I ate lunch with my fellow graduates in the Dining Hall as my grandmother fell asleep on top of the salad bar. Later, as I was packing up to leave and take hold of my bright future, I saw the winner of the literary award coming out of one of the dorms. He was carrying a box loaded with copies of the Grotonian, where his prize-winning poem had been published. I paused as I had an internal moral debate, then removed a set of nunchuks and let out a high-pitched Shotokan Karate howl. I moved in as he adjusted his glasses, then rained Okinawan Kobudo down on his unsuspecting, prizewinning ass. Yes, he won the award, but I would always have the satisfaction of knowing that I rose above the sort of reaction that might indicate an ongoing obsession. After I stuffed him in the trunk of his dad’s BMW, I felt at peace with my failure. I looked around the Circle, eyeing the Chapel, the Schoolhouse, and the playing fields, perhaps for the last time. I realized that though I had only just graduated, I was already being of great service to humanity. I was teaching someone a valuable lifelong lesson, that with any victory in life comes the jealous, psychotic wrath of delusional would-be prize recipients intent on revenge and mayhem. We were both winners that day, just at different times. His moment of glory came earlier, mine later. His triumph was met with applause and a prize; mine was met by the Groton Police Department, a Taser-gun, a mag full of rubber bullets, a broken leg, and a set of flex-cuffs. We each learned something important. I learned that perchance a life of service and letters beckoned me forth. He learned his dad’s 7-series had a rabid possum hiding near the spare tire. Together, we started a boy band, Non Sequiturial Railroad Crossing, and have sold over six dozen albums. He still lives in the trunk of his dad’s car, and I still bring him food and water almost every week or month. I should probably check on him now that I think about it. Anyway, it all started at Groton.

Ben Coes ’85 is the author of Power Down, Coup d’État, The Last Refuge, Eye for an Eye, Independence Day, First Strike, Trap the Devil, Bloody Sunday, and the upcoming The Russian.

www.groton.org

GR OTON W R I TE R S

WRITE What You Know and

by David Cleveland ’70, P’05, ’07

What You Don’t YOUNG WRITERS are always

encouraged to write about what they know — good advice, obviously, since what else are you going to write about when you’re young, unless you venture into historical fiction, science fiction, or the various genres, or whatever the latest publishing fads might favor (memoirs of grievances and disappointments). In my experience, both as a novelist and art historian, “writing about what you know” only really resonates and produces exceptional work — of literary value — in retrospect with the passage of time. Experience of life matters, but almost more importantly, the past experienced through the distorting, yet sharpening and enlarging lens of memory gives experience the breath of life. This is a lesson I learned from many readings of Proust, perhaps our greatest poet of time and memory, especially the way his retrospective gaze, his sensuous detailing of his childhood and youth, shapes his hero’s future and gives his character’s life a deeper, more universal meaning. The geography of memory, those sensuous moments engendered by landscapes, places, taste, smell, colors, light, and sound — the map of visceral experience — is what excites me about writing. If I’m not inspired by memories of place, if I can’t feel the place, I can’t write about it and set my characters free to roam. The

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reader needs to feel that same experience while reading, otherwise the writing sits heavy and moribund on the page. Only feeling is memorable. In my latest novel, Time’s Betrayal, I drew upon memories of Groton in the late sixties: the world as we then found it. This would have been impossible for me ten or even twenty years out. For I discovered that although time had dimmed many specifics — and perhaps for the best — what did shine through the mists of imagination and craft were the enduring bits of gold in the slurry of life that offered both themes to be plumbed and characters to be engaged with — characters taking on roles never dreamed of in real life. Strangely, time and memory elicited something even deeper about my characters as human beings: a power, a resonance, even a symbolic essence that in some respects honors their lives in ways unimaginable to me in their salad days. In most cases, when basing characters on real people or people I knew and admired, personas have evolved on their own and, I hope, illuminated their times in ways unexpected, while adding a measure of meaning to our life and times. In so doing, these literary specters preserve something even more elusive: their spirit to touch the lives of later generations who never knew them. It was not my intention to honor or preserve individual lives in the

pages of Time’s Betrayal, but I have found to my chagrin and, yes, gratitude to the literary gods that they do live on. This has been confirmed by many of my Groton readers and others who never met them as living, breathing individuals. Something Proust, too, often noted: his gratification that something of the world of his childhood was saved from the ravishments of time. I dedicated Time’s Betrayal to Charlie Sheerin ’44, a beloved teacher of English, chaplain, and spiritual guide for our Groton generation. I spoke to him many years later at reunions about my ideas for a book touching on Groton in our day, when it was still regarded as a bastion of the Eastern Establishment. But I kept putting off the venture to write other books first — until I was ready. I only wish Charlie were still here with us to read Time’s Betrayal — he kept asking me about it — and only hope that his somewhat disguised portrayal as the character Charlie Springfield would catch his fancy. I can still hear his hearty laugh at such possibilities of literary legerdemain. As a literary novelist, I believe the writer’s responsibility is not just to entertain but to elucidate themes that we contend with throughout our lives — and hopefully to find meaning in both our disasters and triumphs, those twin imposters, in Churchill’s moving words.

Joshua Nefsky

David Cleveland ’70, P’05, ’07

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GR OTON W R I TE R S

Time’s Betrayal, as the jacket blurb states, moves from the battle of Antietam to the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it focuses on my father’s generation (the Greatest Generation) and my generation (the Baby Boomers, Vietnam, the Sixties) and how we have tried to live up to the generation that came before us — how we have been shaped by the world we inherited, while searching for our own place — and live by the wisdom of the past. The novel is fundamentally about the Cold War legacy that still haunts us today—a Cold War legacy that in my day at Groton was front and center in all our lives, with Vietnam and the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, some of the most traumatic life-changing events that filled our early years. The title, Time’s Betrayal, I hope reflects this reality, as it does for all of us who live through a certain era. We all grow up thinking the world is the way it is — well, because it is. It seems seamless and comforting and makes sense until we grow older and things change, or until we discover that the past wasn’t exactly the way we thought it was, and we’re forced to rethink what we knew or thought we knew, and so begin to see the past in a different light, sometimes flattering, sometimes not—as we try to make better sense of it all. So the title is a bittersweet reflection on our life and times, even a meditation on our shared human nature and the past: and sadly, how our best intentions can lead to hell. This is a story about how little of what we think we know turns out to be the case. How if one or two things change in our understanding of the history of the past, it can change everything. It can literally reshape your world — something

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my protagonist, Peter Alden, learns as he discovers the truth about his father, John Alden, an archaeologist and OSS officer in Greece during the War and later in the CIA, who suddenly disappeared into East Berlin in 1953 never to be seen alive again. The lessons of Peter’s quest to find the truth about his father (think Telemachus in search of Odysseus) resonate even more today — with the ever-present threat of Putin — than they did six years ago when I began the book. (Yes, history repeats itself!) It is not a story I could have written until forty years after my days at Groton,

Experience of life matters, but almost more importantly, the past experienced through the distorting, yet sharpening and enlarging lens of memory gives experience the breath of life. because that world — as we had once known it — no longer exists. Not because time changes everything, not because we also change, but because we had no idea about the underlying realities shaping the immediate present of our youth. As my protagonist learns to his heartbreak, his father’s generation was betrayed by inept leadership in high places and by Soviet spies, both American and English, who sold out the interests of the West to Stalin and the Soviet Union. He learns that Vietnam was a mistake, not necessarily because it was an

unnecessary war in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because it was disastrously led by the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations (some of them filled with Groton grads) and incompetent military leadership. Our saving grace is that even with all time’s disasters, the wonders of the human condition come shining through, as I hope does our empathy for others, especially for my father’s generation, who were faced with a very difficult challenge in the wake of the Second World War. That is why we read and study history, why literary novels steeped in history endure and so offer wisdom to the young and consolation to the old. Such truth-seeking affords us a chance to honor the sacrifices of those who have gone before us, who gave us life and made our world. For me, this is the writer’s job and challenge: to delve deeply into the human heart and its many gifts of grace; where love, wisdom, humanity — and solace — abide; whose gift of humility is best plumbed by the exploration of time and memory and the vitalized imagination that lies fully unfurled within. As the great historian G.M. Trevelyan wisely noted: “The past was once as real as the present and as uncertain of its future.”

In addition to several books on art, novels by David Cleveland ’70, P’05, ’07 include Time’s Betrayal, Love’s Attraction, and With a GemLike Flame: A Novel of Venice and a Lost Masterpiece.

The New Alumni Book Collection

609

TO TAL B OOKS IN COL LEC TION

B OOK S WR IT T E N B Y R O O S E VE LT S (though eight of those are posthumously published compilations of FDR writings)

280 AUTHOR S I N COLL EC TION

1919 EARLIEST P U B LIC AT ION Y E A R

8 MO ST AUT HOR S IN A FOR M

“Wade in, Sanitary!” Richard Derby 1899 War in the Garden of Eden Kermit Roosevelt 1908 Letters of an American Airman Hamilton Coolidge 1915

Form of 1981

P UL I T Z E R P R I Z E FOR FIC T ION , 1 9 30 Laughing Boy Oliver La Farge 1920

Rev. Fletcher Harper Paul B. Jaskot Marichal B. Monts Daniyal N. Mueenuddin Dr. Mildred Bynoe Osborne

2016

Starr Collins Osbourne

YO UN G E S T F O R M T O P U B LIS H

Scott C. Steward

Candace Tong-Li

M O S T B O O KS WR IT T E N

William M. Tsutsui

Angus C.B. Warren

Louis S. Auchincloss ‘35, P’82

www.groton.org

Jo Sittenfeld

GR OTON W R I TE R S

Curtis Sittenfeld ’93

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G R OTO N W R IT E R S

an unromantic view of writing A Q&A with Curtis Sittenfeld ’93

What is your writing routine, if any? I usually write in the morning, at my house in Minneapolis, after my kids go to school. The better the writing is going, the later I eat lunch, meaning some days I eat at 2:00 p.m. and others at about 11:15 a.m. What have you found sparks the best bursts of writing? Being out in the world — whether that’s traveling to somewhere I’ve never previously been or doing something more mundane like going grocery shopping— can spark ideas. Often, an idea for fiction is the more dramatic version of a real thing I’ve seen or heard about, or it’s making a thing happen in fiction that almost happens— but doesn’t— in real life. For example, if there’s some tension at a dinner party where two acquaintances almost get in a physical fight, if I wrote a version of that in fiction, I’d make the fight actually happen. I also completely make things up, and I’m not really aware in the act of writing about what I’ve “borrowed” from real life versus what I’ve made up. If you asked me afterward, I’d be able to tell you, but as I’m writing, I’m just trying to incorporate whatever I think best serves the story. Is there a difference for you between what sparks creativity and what sparks productivity? For me, creativity is about having ideas and productivity is about discipline— about sitting at my desk and writing sentences, whether or not that’s the place I most want to be in that moment. I don’t have to try to be creative, and I have more ideas for novels and stories than I’ll ever be able to finish, but I do sometimes have to force myself to write.

When you just don’t feel like writing, how do you put yourself back on track? Simultaneously, I feel very lucky to be a writer and I have a pretty unromantic view of writing. I don’t really ask myself if I feel like writing. That would be like asking if I feel like doing laundry. But the more nitty-gritty answer of what I do when I feel especially unfocused is that I make changes in a document based on marked-up earlier drafts. This allows me to enter the story without demanding too much of my brain. Which book did you most enjoy writing and which was most challenging or difficult? It was a lot of fun to write Eligible, which is a modern version of Pride and Prejudice (which I first read at Groton in Fifth Form English). I enjoyed trying my own version of Austen’s arch commentary and sometimes-romantic scenes. And yet, immediately after that, in reaction to those constraints, I went on a short-story-writing binge where I was writing in the language that most bluntly reflects the way I think. The most challenging novel I’ve written is the one I’m writing now (and I wouldn’t always say that). In real life, Hillary Rodham said “no” the first two times that Bill Clinton proposed to her, then she said “yes” the third time. The premise of my current novel is, what if she’d said “no” the third time, too, and gone her own way? It’s challenging because it involves a lot of factual research and because Hillary isn’t someone I’ve invented— if I get the tone wrong, plenty of people will let me know. But I once heard the writer Jennifer Egan say she wouldn’t want to write any book she knew from the outset she was capable of executing— where’s the fun in that?— and I agree completely.

What writers inspire you (besides Jane Austen)? My favorite writer is the Canadian shortstory writer Alice Munro. Her stories are so richly complex and so insightful about human nature. Fun fact: I also first read a collection by her when I was a Fifth Former at Groton, though I read it on my own and not for English class. You won a Seventeen magazine fiction award while you were at Groton. What was that story about? It was about a teenage girl who goes with her family to watch the sunset from the house of her father’s acquaintance. The girl thinks thoughts and feels feelings. My writing has changed a lot in the twentysix years since then because now I write about adult women thinking thoughts and feeling feelings. You’ve had two Jeopardy answers about you. If you were writing the next item about you for Jeopardy, what would it be? Curtis Sittenfeld’s first novel, Prep, while not autobiographical, borrowed its setting from this boarding school about forty miles northwest of Boston.

Curtis Sittenfeld ’93 is the author of American Wife, Eligible, Prep, The Man of My Dreams, Sisterland, and You Think It, I’ll Say It.

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GR OTON W R I TE R S

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The Groton Quest, in Words BY M ICHAE L K NOX B ER A N ’8 4 , P ’2 0, ’2 3

MANY YEARS AGO, when I was a new Second Former,

I was struck by the stained glass window, a relic of Groton’s first Chapel, which illuminates the little foyer of what was then the New Lecture Hall and is now the Gammons Recital Hall. Given in memory of Warwick Potter 1889, it depicts a sleeping figure against a background of angelic and seraphic figures in an Art Nouveau style.

When Warwick Potter died in 1893 at the age of twenty-two, his Harvard teacher George Santayana, the philosopher, expressed his grief in the sonnet sequence “To W. P.”: “With you a part of me hath passed away.” Warwick had, Santayana knew, been profoundly affected by Groton: he and his brothers, he wrote, “had been among the very first pupils of Mr. Peabody, on founding the Groton School, so that they received the fresh imprint of all those high and amiable intentions, and all that personal paternal care and spiritual guidance which it was Mr. Peabody’s ideal to supply. School had been a second home to Warwick, and a real home.” Santayana saw Warwick as the product of a school intended by its founder, Endicott Peabody, to be different from other schools, a school

that had taught him “to prefer the better to the worse,” a school whose masters had cared for him and made him “civilized.” Peabody’s favorite poem, which he quoted even more frequently than Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” that Victorian standby, was Matthew Arnold’s “Rugby Chapel,” in which the poet depicts his father, Thomas Arnold, the Rugby School headmaster, as a faithful shepherd extending a loving hand to his sheep. It was Peabody’s ideal of what a school should be. Arnold’s Rugby fell a little short in this respect: the great headmaster “ruled remotely,” as Bloomsbury Group iconoclast Lytton Strachey observed, and “it would often happen that a boy would leave Rugby without having had any personal communication with him at all.”

Groton, the Rector vowed, would be different. George Rublee 1886, who transferred to Groton from Exeter in 1884, was astonished by the degree to which Peabody made his vision a reality. The “controlling principle which underlies the whole system of the school,” Rublee wrote in later life, when he was a Progressive-era reforming lawyer, is “the principle of love.” A principle not without danger. You can’t be part of an enterprise like Groton, with its aspiration, in the words of William Amory Gardner, to be a school unlike “any in England or America,” and fail to see how difficult it is to live up to one’s rhetoric. The devil takes a special interest in those who would create an ideal community. Peabody knew it. As an old man in retirement, living in the big house on Joy Lane, he spent many hours in conversation with an instructor in the school’s English department, the Reverend Malcolm Strachan, and confessed to him that he had not always been the good shepherd he had hoped to be. If at times

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G R OTON W R I TE R S

he had resembled Dostoevsky’s Alyosha, talking as tenderly of Christian compassion to his boys as Dostoevsky’s hero does at the end of The Brothers Karamazov, in other moments he had more than a little in common with the novel’s Grand Inquisitor. “At times I seem to get a glimpse of the Beatific Vision,” he confessed, “and then all is earthly and my thoughts as selfish as ever.” The tension between the aspiration and the reality is probably the great Groton drama, and it can hardly fail to have its effect on Grotonians who are drawn to words as a means of getting at truth. Malcolm Strachan himself wanted to write a book that would illuminate the inner drama of Peabody’s soul, the struggles that have done so much to shape Groton’s quest for a purer common life even as the world got in the way. He never wrote it, but he confided the idea to his student Louis Auchincloss ’35, who gave it memorable expression in his 1964 novel The Rector of Justin. Three decades later, Robert Bingham ’84, in his novel Lighting on the Sun, showed how those who have been part of the Groton experiment have been changed by their experience of a place different from other places. His book came to mind, one gray Sunday morning not long ago, when I stood once more before the stained glass window depicting the dark-robed figure of Warwick Potter. Another Groton student, who perhaps knew nothing of Warwick or Rob but who was part of the same experiment—the same family—was practicing Chopin on the piano in Gammons Hall, and I felt the truth of Rob’s insight that the Groton quest is for many of us one of the great shaping influences of our lives—that the Circle really does draw us all, the living and the dead, to one center.

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Michael Knox Beran ’84 and family

Mr. Gardner … believed, as the Greeks had before him, that literature, for all its liabilities, could change the soul, and that a great writer was in the deepest sense the educator of a people, a faith that has been transmitted by generations of Groton teachers to their students.

From the mysteries of Elliott Roosevelt ’29 to the foreign policy insights of Dean Acheson 1911, the literary fiction of Oliver La Farge 1920 to that of Daniyal Mueenuddin ’81, the Alumni Collection abounds in books that are absorbing to read and bear witness to a high degree of literary sensibility.

WITH “AESCHYLUS OR HOMER

doubled back in his pocket to keep the place,” Ellery Sedgwick 1890 said of William Amory Gardner, “he would hover about the school he loved beyond all earthly things, kindling the brains of the intelligent to a pure flame …” When the Rector got carried away with football and muscular discipline as a means of establishing the ideal community, Billy Wag (as his students called Mr. Gardner), who stood for art and sensitivity, emphasized the virtue of words. This was possibly the most radical aspect of the Groton experiment. The humane education invented by the Greeks, so powerful in intention, was, when Groton was founded, almost a dead letter—a thing being carried on mechanically, a rote exercise in the learning of dead languages with little appreciation for their living power. Mr. Gardner wanted to recover the original purposes of this education. He “poured his whole soul into his teaching,” one of his students remembered, “and wore himself out in the classroom.” He believed, as the Greeks had before him, that literature, for all its liabilities, could change the soul, and that a great writer was in the deepest sense the educator of a people, a faith that has been

transmitted by generations of Groton teachers to their students. Some of the fruit of that faith is evident in the new Alumni Book Collection, recently assembled by Groton’s librarian, Mark Melchior. Associate Head of School Andy Anderson and Betsy Lawrence ’82 of the Alumni and Development Office asked Mark to create a collection that would reflect Groton’s contribution to letters, and the result can be seen in the more than four hundred volumes that have been brought together in the McCormick Library. From the mysteries of Elliott Roosevelt ’29 to the thrillers of Ben Coes ’85, from the prep-school fiction of Louis Auchincloss ’35 to that of Curtis Sittenfeld ’93, from the insights into American foreign policy of Dean Acheson 1911 to those of Walter Russell Mead ’70, from the literary fiction of Pulitzer Prize– winner Oliver La Farge 1920 to that of Daniyal Mueenuddin ’81, from the recovery, by Andres Reyes ’80, of C. S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid to the threnody for the WASP establishment of Joe Alsop ’28 in I’ve Seen the Best of It, the Alumni Collection abounds in books that are absorbing to read and bear witness to a high degree of literary sensibility. Mr. Melchior wants students at

the school today to obtain, through these books, the “long view of Groton,” and to understand that they are part of a place that “values writing and authorship.” In many of these volumes they will find, too, revealing traces of the community to which they belong, one that is shaping them even as it shaped the authors, a place somehow different from other places.

Michael Knox Beran ’84, P’20,’23 is the author of Pathology of the Elites: How the Arrogant Classes Plan to Run Your Life, Jefferson’s Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind, Forge of Empires: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made, 1861-1871, The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy, and Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome Crimes Behind Our Romance with the Macabre.

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A C H A P E L TA L K

by Montanna Riggs ’19 March 29, 2019

Choosing

Our Memories

n my earliest memory I’m in the back of a car on the verge of sleeping, peering out the window at the green trees whipping past. I can feel a seatbelt around my waist, but it’s pulled slack so I can lie down in a way that’s comfortable but useless. And that’s that. But that memory is closer to a sensation than a picture. It’s all shadows and motion and pressure and green. Now, I’ve deduced from stories and photos that I’m in a white pickup truck. For some reason, I know I’m either heading toward or leaving Six Flags. I wouldn’t be surprised if my twin cousins were in the car and I’m positive that my father is driving. But all I know for sure is that I’m lying down looking at the wall of green trees whipping past to the rhythm of the speeding car. What we remember is fascinating. I wonder how much of my eighteen years I actually remember—I mean without photos, or videos, or journal entries as a reminder: 75 percent, 50 percent, maybe 10 percent. When I searched online for a tested percentage, Google came up blank for a definitive answer, but the number .001 percent appeared as a guess. And out of that tiny percentage, how well can we really remember things as they actually happened? Are they fuzzy or fleeting? Do they still have dialogue or color? If the sun is shining can you feel it? And how often do subsequent experiences influence those memories? There are days and weeks and months of my life that are just lost—completely gone, almost as if they were never lived in the first place. My family tells me stories about my father and the childhood that I wish I could remember, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to pull these moments out of my head. Recently, I can’t even picture his face without

looking at a photo … out of all the things I could possibly remember in this world, that should take priority. I realize a substantial part of my audience today has never been to a chapel talk,* and maybe you’ve never even heard of one. Generally, some common topics include an existential crisis or worldly phenomena explained well and effectively in ten minutes, or advice for younger peers such as “remember that it’s the little, happy things that count” instead of the long nights of homework or high school tragedies. Now, I’ve already introduced the first one in typical chapel talk fashion, so that leaves the latter. To me, “remembering the little things” raises some major issues. Not to say it’s wrong in its entirety, but the advice is too perfect to be realistic. In truth, I will remember the little things, and I will remember things I want to forget, and I will remember things that have no effect or use in my life and just sit in my head taking up space. Ultimately, memories will be lost and seared into our brains whether we like them or not, based on a subjective mix of impact and randomness. I mean, I don’t think I’ll ever forget how I saw a boy eat a replica of Mount Kilimanjaro completely made of raw lasagna in sixth grade or when Chewy Bruni thought the long mark accents in Latin 1 were called lawn marks up until about spring term. That is L-A-W-N. But it’s not like I chose to remember those little things and chose to forget the tough times, like how I spelled vas deferens wrong on my third form pig practical or watched 2012, an end-of-the-world movie, in 2011 and couldn’t sleep for weeks. The truth is, we have little control over what we remember without help, and it’s overwhelming to think about whether we’ll even remember the things we hold dear. While I do believe things we see as important take

* Montanna delivered her chapel talk on Revisit Day for students newly admitted to Groton. 30

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It’s so easy to forget both days that were ordinary and days that were extraordinary. Friends that made me smile. Moments of uncontrollable laughter. The contours of my father’s face.

Left, Montanna with her parents; above, with her mother, Nadine Poindexter Riggs

precedence, we only have so much space. It’s so easy to forget both days that were ordinary and days that were extraordinary. Friends that made me smile. Moments of uncontrollable laughter. The contours of my father’s face. When I was younger, this unsettled me because it seemed like the memories I wanted the most danced away from my fingertips. Sometimes still I lie in bed at night staring at the ceiling reaching into darkness to find some semblance of my dad, but the multitude of facts and stories and photos makes distinguishing between fallacy and truth difficult. Why do I know the car was white or a pickup? How did I know we were going to Six Flags? These are all facts I learned later that wove their way into my brain, coloring a fading memory of green. Will I even remember today as it really was? Who knows? When I sat down to write this talk, my entire Groton career came flashing through my head in a nostalgic silent movie. The first one that stuck began when the clock chimed 12:00 the night before my physics exam this fall. In exasperation and fatigue, my eyes wandered from my online textbook to my desktop, where an old GarageBand file peeked out from behind the window— bearing the elegant title “Yeast.” With one single glance, physics was forgotten (figuratively of course, don’t worry, Mr. Hall). “Gloria, want to help me finish my dubstep song? I never got the drop just right,” I asked my roommate, who, if Mr. Spring is wondering, sat on the opposite couch passionately reading her U.S. textbook for fun. Inspiration for “Yeast” had struck the previous summer while I was making cinnamon buns. The recipe called for yeast, an ingredient that I didn’t think my household would have on hand, but much to my delight,

when searching through the fridge, I found not one but five packets of yeast. And thus, the song seemed to flow out of nowhere and went a little something like this: “Five packets of yeast in the fridge, five packets of yeast; take one out, let it ferment, four packets of yeast in the fridge,” and so on. Under the shock of my own genius, I felt inclined to record my tune in an EDM track. Three months later, I handed my work over to Glo, a mix and master legend, for fine tuning. “It needs bass,” she said when she heard it. And thus the creative juices flowed. Around 12:30 we unanimously decided the track needed a rap. But don’t fear, while you may know us as Montanna and Gloria, we are equally notorious as Lil Tan and Lil Cotan. Now I won’t recount the sixteen bars I dropped that night, but just know that by the time the clock struck 2:00, we had a minute and a half of Grammy material, complete with two Latin references and a full explanation of Fleischmann’s active dry yeast. This memory feels like it’s branded into my mind forever, but the reality is that despite the seeming clarity of recollection, I can’t remember the majority of the rap that we wrote, and the tune of the epic beat drop is elusive. Honestly, many of the words I just told you are inflated and hyperbolized. Gloria filled in some gaps, and some of it is just in there for the gigs—I mean, we all know Gloria was not reading her U.S. history textbook for fun. So, it brings up the question of what I’ll remember when I leave this campus, which, however infuriating it may be, is an impossible question. While I’m pretty sure that’s a scary thought, I also know that I’ve made it to eighteen with the memories I have without any deep emotional distress, so I guess maybe I’m doing something right. But if I could just decide what

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memories to keep and which to discard, would I choose the right ones and delete the right ones? Should only the good ones be kept anyway? That seems pretty dangerous. So, I don’t know if I agree with only remembering the little happy times as much as I’d like to. There’s a certain naïveté to the phrase that aligns perfectly with an eighteen-year-old giving other teens and adults advice. The ultimate, absolute truth is that Groton is really hard. It is hard emotionally, academically, and mentally, and I’ve had both some of my lowest and my highest points here and I’ll remember both. Even the nights I’d love to forget, the feelings of doubt, pressure, and tears that I’d love to forget, deserve to be remembered. While coming to Groton was the best decision I could’ve made for myself, it isn’t perfect, but both the good and tough memories I’ve had here have taught me so much. My first birthday here at Groton on November eleventh, 2015, I cried in the bathroom of a local Korean restaurant with my mom and grandparents waiting outside. I cried because I was tired, I was out of my comfort zone, and because it was my first birthday away from home— a place that I missed more than I thought I could. If you’ve met my mother you might’ve heard this story. It seems like she tells everyone. I used to be furious about that, because that was a memory I’d tried to suppress, because who likes to remember being lonely? But mom, I forgive you for spilling my personal secrets, and I’ve come to terms with the idea that I had warranted homesickness. While that was perfectly

normal, I don’t think I would’ve come to terms with it— had I successfully forgotten it. And now I’ll be leaving again soon and starting anew and I’ll be homesick for two homes now and I hope I remember both with the same perpetual balance of joy and struggle that I experience day by day. In my second earliest memory, my mother and I are crammed into my twin bed, and she’s holding me in a vice-like grip with my afro puffs pressed against her chest. We’re reading a book about a hotel with a winding red carpet, and I can feel the warmth of her embrace. That’s not a memory I like to relive often and for a time I hoped that one day I would forget it because it’s in the days after my father’s death. Even though I’ve been told that I didn’t understand death at age three, in the memory there’s a certain sadness felt deep in my core. And it frustrated me because I couldn’t remember my father at all—not his face, not his feel, not his voice—but I was so upset anyway. But that memory with its red winding carpet is also where I remember feeling the most love, closely seconded by the blurry green memory in the probably-white pickup truck. I can’t see my mother or my father but I know she’s there and he’s there and the cocoon of warmth that surrounds me is comforting. So, I guess in my mind something knows how to do something right when deciding what things to remember, in whatever perspective or clarity, out of the billions upon trillions of random seconds that I’ve seen pass by. And that’s that.

Montanna with friends after her chapel talk; Gloria Hui ‘19, Eliza Lord ‘19, and Montanna; Montanna on cello at the 2018 Parents Weekend concert Adam Richins

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by Ann Gildroy Fox ’94 January 25, 2019 voces

Woman Warrior, Woman Savior

nd so the decision was made; we would run an IV to push fluids into my system. It was just

too unsafe to leave me at the team house with a splinter force of Kurds. The Operational Detachment Alpha team I was living with, or the A-Team of Green Berets, typically twelve-men strong, was located near the border with Iran in a place called Al Kut. I lived with them in an old home of a high-ranking, ex-Iraqi military officer, and we were on a remote piece of land that at one time was an Iraqi military base but hadn’t been operational for years now. All major American combatant forces had left the area, and so we were exposed without any real quick-reaction force. The mixed units that guarded the far perimeters of the base could sometimes be trusted. And sometimes not. I was ill. The medic didn’t know why, maybe just a virus or something I ate. At this point it didn’t matter; I had to go on the mission, which was a far distance from the house. Every trip in our Humvees* on our roadways filled me with anxiety; I was always dreading hitting an explosively formed penetrator. Our brothers and sisters in arms to the west, fighting in Fallujah and Ramadi, had to deal with massive improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers. The Shiah militias we were fighting didn’t typically blow themselves up, so we didn’t have that threat in my area of operations, but they did have a very good handle on how to make roadside devices that used a type of cone shape on the end that somehow went from concave to convex gaining massive force along the way, and these cones were often coated with accelerants to incinerate whatever was in their path. These devices killed anything they hit with great success. So in theory I would have a long time to rest in the back of the Humvee

since our mission was far from the house, but I just could never get comfortable on the roads. Perhaps my body would secrete some adrenaline helping me overcome whatever was making me so sick. We would run the IV once in the vehicle and hang it in the back to get a slow drip for the journey. I strapped on my SAPI [Small Arms Protective Insert] plates, filled my magazines with ammunition, grabbed my helmet and my weapons. I also put some extra Beanie Babies a church group had sent me in my ammo dump pouch at the side of my hip, in case I needed to calm any small children down in the house. Often times when you entered one of these homes in the middle of the night, the families would sleep in groups and the great task was taking children in shock and separating them in order to remove them from harm’s way. In these tense situations where we needed to “raid” a house, which often was also very loud due to the screaming and crying, I would try to get the attention of these children in shock with a Beanie Baby toy, which almost always was so unexpected to them in the middle of complete chaos that it allowed me to get them to think, even if just for a split second, and this way I was able to gesticulate to them which way to go in order to

*High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles, commonly known as Humvees www.groton.org

“

She was gyrating on her feet, almost hovering it seemed, moving back and forth screaming in a state of some type of shock. Multiple weapons pointed at her, and it was in this moment I knew she was about to lose her life.

get them into the correct room. I will pause here and ask you to remember that you can never ever underestimate the suffering of innocent children in war and conflict. The damage to them is horrific. The anguish is unspeakable, and I could see this in the eyes of so many children I came in contact with during my time in Iraq. It bothers me to this day. I know some of you in your future will find yourself in enormous leadership roles, similar to those of so many Grotonians before you, where you will have the gray and complex decisions that come with the burden of command. Groton will prepare you for so much in life, but just know that power, if you wield it, must be done with the most extreme care. So back to this particular evening . . . This is just my recollection of events, and so much of the war is still blurry to me. My teammates may not remember it to have been as messy as I do, but a lot of things went wrong operationally on this given night. We did not link up with our Iraqi counterparts on time, causing us to come under time pressure from the sunrise. Our strongest position for this type of operation was during the night, in the cover of darkness, because the technology on our side far surpassed our enemy’s and allowed us a significant competitive advantage. But our greatest weakness was the relatively new, undertrained, and ill-equipped Iraqi unit we had to operate with in order to try to find these particular insurgents on our target list. This was not a Delta Force precision strike, where heavily armed and highly trained men quiet as mice would place the muzzle of their rifle under their target’s throat using the complete element of surprise, with the least disruption to the surrounding areas. Far from it: this was loud, and friendly fire was a great danger to the U.S. forces operating with Iraqi counterparts, who often were very heavy on the trigger and extremely reactive. Communication was difficult in such a kinetic situation, when your best translators cannot be everywhere at once. It was hard to control the newer, less trained Iraqi units once inside the house; they were often destructive, stole from their own people, and abused their power terribly. Multiple houses were being hit at once on this night, in a neighborhood

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known for harboring insurgents. Our communications with our air support was interrupted and, compounding this problem, we had lost communication with some of our adjacent Iraqi units. We closed the distance across the front yard space of the particular house we were responsible for searching and quickly gained access to the inside of the home. It had two stories, multiple families, and most of the occupants were asleep. Our FID [Foreign Internal Defense] force, the Iraqi unit we were with, was particularly egregious and began in effect ransacking the home, breaking furniture, and creating a very dangerous situation for everyone. It felt like being in a blender on high speed. I remember it being so loud with kids, their parents, and soldiers moving everywhere. I made my way upstairs and turned the corner into a room. The bed was already smashed into two large pieces, and other furniture and clothes were everywhere. A woman was in the corner. She was standing. I remember that she was tall and thin. She was screaming in a pitch that is hard to articulate, and it felt almost generated from some primal instinct. She had a large object underneath her dress, right below her breasts; it was covered by her clothing and her arms were wrapped around it, almost as if she were giving herself a bear hug. She was gyrating on her feet, almost hovering it seemed, moving back and forth screaming in a state of some type of shock. Multiple weapons pointed at her, and it was in this moment I knew she was about to lose her life. Everything suddenly slowed to a halt for me. It was as if I were standing outside of myself in a way, and I could see the whole situation clearly. The time that passed was likely a matter of seconds, but it seemed still and almost calm for a moment. The “blender effect” of the action around me went away in this moment, and everything in my mind quieted. Was it a matter of seconds before she blew us all up? I could see this thought on the sweaty faces of my counterparts, both American and Iraqi. I was in a room with all male soldiers, and then there was me, an American woman with this Iraqi woman in the corner, who was about to lose her life. Or were we about to lose ours? Growing up, my parents never seemed to give me pink things, Cabbage Patch dolls, or Barbie dolls, and I always wanted them. My father was adamant that I never felt like I had to “be a girl” or “have kids” or “get married.” However, I identified as a girl and grew up in a small town near Groton named Westford. I still had some things that in our culture were traditionally given to girls, right or wrong, and one of those was a small jewelry box which, when it opened, had a tiny little ballerina that would pop up and twist around with a music box built in that would accompany her dancing. My second memorable jewelry box was a milky, white leather, larger square box with

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Captain Seth Moulton and Captain Ann Gildroy Fox ’94, members of the select Team Phoenix in Iraq

gold trim that belonged to my grandmother, and inside it there were multiple compartments and slots to hold rings and earrings. The neat part about this box is that it had some treasures she had left in it, which were wildly colored brooches and fun big pieces of jewelry. I spent so much time opening and closing and interacting with these boxes. Jewelry boxes were something I had and continue to have to this day. These objects were part of my life experience. So when I rounded that corner that night in the middle of central Southern Iraq, I knew instantly what was under her dress. I was no better than my American counterparts and no smarter than anyone in the room. In fact I wasn’t nearly as well trained; I didn’t have their courage or their experience, But I did have a different perspective. I had a shared experience with this woman I did not know. The next actions taken are not important, but what is important is that an innocent life was saved that night, simply because of my time playing with something most of the men in the room had not done as part of their life experience. We are always better as a community, a country, and a world with diversity. Even in the most difficult moments of life, and in the most unexpected ways, diversity can make a positive difference. The ability for us to listen and not to label first will dictate the level of violence in the

future. Your character as future leaders will set that tone. Dialogue and understanding of differences are critically important to charting a better future. So how do you get there? I share today with you a piece of my own approach to bending people’s minds and thoughts. There is no right or perfect way to collaborate or to approach conflict resolution. I have always thought about it in the form of a branch or a small twig. If the branch reflects people’s thoughts or preconceived ideas that you do not agree with, then you must bend it, but if you snap it then it is broken. My time in Iraq was marked by so many different experiences. I ended up working closely with Iraqi forces and tribes. My relationships with some of them and the key leaders I engaged with were deep, and it literally crushed my spirit to leave them, and left me in a terrible state of depression for a long time. Some of these great men I worked with had never worked side-by-side with a young American woman, and I had never been immersed in their Shia Muslim culture. My job in Iraq was so varied that I would have to traverse in non-kinetic situations, often building deep relationships and helping to support and foster our key leaders with constant engagement. I knew their families, their communities, and I knew their bravery. I traversed from the front of the house where

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“

I was blocked from the majority of the jobs on the list open to my male counterparts. Infantry, tanks, and artillery of course were all out of the question, and no human intelligence, no ground intelligence, and on and on.

my male military counterparts and I would eat with no women present, and then due to my gender I was allowed in the back of the home, too. No males outside of the family were allowed in contact with the females of the home. I loved and respected many of the Iraqi men I worked with, but some of the traditions and habits were extremely difficult for me to reconcile in my head. I believe deeply in women’s equality and right to freedom. Women were not treated well where I was in Central Southern Iraq. They treated me in a gender-neutral way, almost as part man and part woman. I had flexibility and freedom of movement with the Iraqi families that my male American counterparts were not offered. I remember when one of my Iraqi key leaders’ sons was killed. The women mourned in one part of the mosque and the men in another. Where was I going to go? The Iraqi General pulled me into the male side, and I sat with my team and hundreds of Iraqi men passing cigarettes, quietly mourning the loss of this man’s son. I hated the forced separation of men and women. I know I started to bend the views of many people in that faraway land, and equally they bent my views. I didn’t do it by spitting on the Quran, disrespecting them, or harshly critiquing them or their ways of life. When you disrespect something others care deeply about, you snap the branch instead of bending it. You push them further away from your thinking instead of drawing them closer. You create hate and anger where you could have had compassion and understanding. Perhaps there are times that warrant extreme behavior or symbolic moves, but I think often the result of disrespecting those things sacred to others is polarizing. In August 2001, when I contracted with the United States Marine Corps, it was illegal for women to be assigned to combat roles. One of the reasons I chose the Corps over other services was due to the fact that every Marine officer was first and foremost a rifle platoon commander. The Marine Corps was the only service at the time that sent women and men together through their “Basic School.” It was a six-month school for officers, to teach the basics of being an infantryman. We were still not allowed to go on to the advanced Infantry Officers’ Course.

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In the Basic School, if you graduated in the top 10 percent of your company, you could choose your “job” or occupational specialty in the Marines, and if you didn’t it was chosen by the needs of the Corps. I worked very hard during those six months. I spent tireless hours after scheduled training in the armory learning my weapons systems, I studied hard, and I committed myself completely. I was selected as one of the commanders for our final war simulation exercise. I was proud to graduate in the top 10 percent of my company, and very proud to represent women there. So on the day of selection we lined up in order of graduating rank along the walls of a dingy old Marine Corps building. It felt good to be toward the top. However, it was frustrating for me since half of what I was interested in doing was blocked due to my gender. We had so many tests so constantly, physical and mental; so why bother doing all this testing if none of it mattered in the end? Well, I would make the best of it. I loved my squad and platoon, and I really respected my fellow Marines. They knew how committed I was and they also knew I wanted to be in the combat roles. The only remotely interesting thing on my job list was signals intelligence. I can still remember standing behind Lieutenant O’Connor, a tall and jovial-looking Marine with a big toothy grin. He graduated ahead of me by one slot, also in the top 10 percent. There were only two signals intelligence slots, and again I was blocked from the majority of the jobs on the list open to my male counterparts. Infantry, tanks, and artillery of course were all out of the question, and no human intelligence, no ground intelligence, and on and on. Somehow this signals intelligence field was left out of those things not available to females. One of the slots had already been taken. “Lieutenant O’Connor,” boomed the captain’s voice from inside the room where we stepped, came to attention, and requested our job. I was sure Lieutenant O’Connor would pick ground intelligence. I was one step away from the last signals intelligence slot. He came out of the room happy with his accomplishments, with a spring in his step and a couple of high fives. “What d’ya get O’Connor?” “Sig Int.” My heart dropped. He had taken the last slot. My palms were sweaty as I came to attention in the room. “Well, Lieutenant?” The captain was scribbling some jobs on a piece of paper. “Here is what you have to choose from.” I scrolled down the short list. I walked out of the room with aviation maintenance. It didn’t matter at that point; nothing open to me was remotely what I wanted. Maybe Dad was right. Maybe the Marines would be a waste of my time. How could this country I was willing to die for preclude me from these

jobs when I had proven myself? I walked back down the hallway past the 250 or so mostly male Marines. When I passed the last one, who had graduated last in the company, I felt for the first time discriminated against based on gender. Surely I was more talented mentally and physically than the man graduating last, and surely I would have been just as good if not better than the Marine who graduated last in the company, and yet he was able to legally do any job. Over the next couple of days a lot of things swirled through my head. Should I make a stand? I was so filled with anger. At the same time, we had to fill out peer evaluations. I wish I had kept those. So many of my fellow Marines wrote me notes like, “I would have you on my left flank any day, Gildroy.” If I could choose you over others, it would be you, Gildroy.” “You are a great Marine.” And on and on and on. Somehow, I knew minds were bending. I didn’t need to not salute the flag or disrespect the Marine Corps hymn to impact these Marines, and in fact if I had done that I am not sure they wouldn’t have snapped. Instead, some of them are in key leadership roles in Congress and in senior positions in the military. Some of them lost their lives in the war, but I am sure none of them whom I served with would treat women Marines in any way that wasn’t equal to the men—and with great respect. I also knew the majority of them thought the system was unfair. I knew that change was coming. On December 3, 2015, fourteen years and one day after I received my commission in the U.S. Marine Corps, Defense Secretary [Ash] Carter made the announcement about women in U.S. combat roles. “There will be no exceptions …” “They’ll be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars, and lead infantry soldiers into combat. They’ll be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers, and everything else that was previously open only to men.” I was thinking the other day, as we celebrated Martin Luther King Day, about Rosa Parks. The impact she had on the nation is lasting. She defined her rights. She demanded what should have been hers. The right to sit where she wanted on a common bus. She never desecrated anything. She never tore apart, burned, or destroyed something. These quiet and strong actions are the most powerful and lasting. Hate does not end hate. Anger does not give rise to peace. The importance of inclusion cannot be underestimated. When I was younger, I used to hear this old cliché all the time: “Step into their shoes.” Yes, let’s do that more often. Let us truly step into the shoes of even those we think we may have no common ground with and try to understand them and appreciate their perspective. When I left the Marine Corps and started business school I was “fresh off the boat,” as they would say, with

hardly any distance between sleeping with a loaded weapon every night and suddenly walking along the privileged brick and ivy campus of Harvard Business School. I felt guilty for leaving the war, and for surviving it. My passion for America and service to her was heightened. One evening at dinner, several of my section mates and I got into a discussion about the war and service. My friend turned to me at one point in the conversation and said he would never do what I had done. I said back to him, “Oh, I am sure you could do it.” He said, “No, Ann, I mean I wouldn’t want to do it. I don’t feel like I owe anything to the country. “ My other friend at the table chimed in and said, “I don’t either.” This stung me so badly. It made me angry. I didn’t share their perspective, but I had learned sitting at Groton School how to listen and how to deeply consider the opinion and thoughts of others. When we celebrated African American history in our section that year, we were all able to hear my friends’ stories and their perspectives and stories of their grandparents’ experiences. My context growing up as a little white girl in my home town of Westford, riding ponies around in the corn fields, was radically different than the context of some of my classmates. All that I attributed to the red, white, and blue had to do with freedom and liberty, and nothing associated with oppression. My experience is just one life experience, which obviously is not the experience of everyone, and it is the weaving together of those experiences that creates a better future for us all. Anyone can spit venom. You all sitting here have the obligation to take the many gifts that Groton gives you and to use your ears first. You may feel under pressure to perform here. You may feel stressed at times to achieve. In some moments, the weight of what you are under as teenagers will seem useless to you, needless, overwhelming, and you will want to shrug the burden away. Please trust me, it is not at all useless to learn to operate in intense environments. For some of you, this is preparation to be able to bear the weight and stress of not just making decisions about your own performance or success; the decisions many of you will make will have consequences for many people. You will need to be ever mindful of the needs of others, and you will need to put others before yourself in the very same servant-leader way you do at Groton. Cui servire est regnare will help define your character. Groton shows us the ideal. It proves to us that character matters always, and you live inclusion and diversity each and every day here. You cannot let hate and anger populate your dialogue once you leave these gates. Always listen, do not label, and deeply consider the thoughts of others, being ever conscious of their dignity. And please, just remember, bend it—do not break it.

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new releases

â&#x2013;ş Please send information about your new releases to quarterly@groton.org.

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Marshall Highet ’95 and Bird Jones

Hold Fast: A Boy’s Life Aloft

Hold Fast, a young adult, historical novel, combines maritime adventure, brutal storytelling, and a poignant sense of humor. In 1761, two young cousins are impressed into the English navy on the man-o-war Deptford and never see their home in Italy again. They travel across the ocean and survive countless threats, eventually making their way to the colonies.

2 Thurston B. Clarke ’64

Honorable Exit: How a Few Brave Americans Risked All to Save Our Vietnamese Allies at the End of the War

launches into a narrative that is both a thrilling race against time and an important corrective to the historical record. For what is less known is that during those final days, scores of Americans—diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, missionaries, contractors, and spies—risked their lives to assist their current and former translators, drivers, colleagues, neighbors, friends, and even perfect strangers in escape. By the time the last U.S. helicopter left Vietnam on April 30, 1975, these righteous Americans had helped to spirit 130,000 South Vietnamese to U.S. bases in Guam and the Philippines. From there, the evacuees were resettled in the U.S. and became American citizens, the leading edge of one of America’s most successful immigrant groups.

Jonathan D.T. Ward ’02

In 1973, U.S. participation in the Vietnam War ended in a cease-fire and a withdrawal that included promises by President Nixon to assist the South in the event of invasion by the North. But in early 1975, when North Vietnamese forces began a full-scale assault, Congress refused to send arms or aid. By early April that year, the South was on the brink of a defeat that threatened execution or years in a concentration camp for the untold number of South Vietnamese who had supported the government in Saigon or worked with Americans. Thurston Clarke begins Honorable Exit by describing the iconic photo graph of the Fall of Saigon: desperate Vietnamese scrambling to board a helicopter evacuating the last American personnel from Vietnam. It is an image of U.S. failure and shame. Or is it? By unpacking the surprising story of heroism that the photograph actually tells, Thurston

China’s Vision of Victory

From seabed to space, from Africa to the Antarctic, from subsurface warfare to the rise of China’s global corporations, China’s Vision of Victory illuminates the challenge of our lifetimes—the Chinese Communist Party’s ambition to end the American-led world and to bring about a century defined by Chinese global power. Jonathan writes that the Chinese Communist Party, working from a deep sense of national destiny, is guiding a country of 1.4 billion people toward what it calls “the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation” and, with it, the end of an era of American power. Across numerous geographies and industries, and with a strategic vision of dominance in every military domain, commercial sector, and emerging technology, the goals held by China’s leaders have set us up for the contest of the

twenty-first century. The long-term vision of China’s ruling Communist Party is to achieve unrivaled power in world affairs by the year 2049, the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. However, the next ten years, 2020–30, will be the decisive decade. After a generation of unimpeded globalization, U.S.–China competition will now define global politics, security, and commerce, as the U.S. must respond to China’s comprehensive challenge.

de libris

Erin Pennington Wood ’96

Women Make Arkansas: Conversations with 50 Creatives Meet fifty Arkansas women who will challenge the way you think about identity, entrepreneurialism, community, and what it takes to lead a creative life. Erin shares conversations with women of diverse and dynamic pursuits who refuse to be bound by category, including the Arkansas poet laureate, a kombucha brewer, a fire performer, a film production designer, a hatter, a drag queen, an aspiring time traveler, the state’s first certified chocolatier, and a ceramicist who has made more than one hundred thousand blades of porcelain grass. Together, these women bravely reveal how they quiet negative voices (whether from critics’ mouths or inside their own heads), channel their intuition, and work to bear out their visions. The book aspires to guide readers, as they consider their own expressive potential, to let the failures, victories, and wisdom of these bold creatives to open infinite possibilities and a path toward creative freedom.

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Adam Richins

winter SPORTS Girls Basketball 16 – 9 New England Champions! This year’s team was determined to make the holiday tournament, after nearly missing it last year. With some talented newcomers joining three returning starters, it was an achievable goal. The season started off with a thrilling overtime win against Class A St. Paul’s, 61–58. The team entered the tournament with a 2–2 record and faced a tough task — two games in one day versus two Class A schools, Taft and Exeter. Both games were very close, but Groton won both to earn a spot in the championship game the

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next morning — but not without some key injuries to two starters. The championship game pitted Groton against crosstown rival Lawrence Academy, who had beaten us by two points earlier in the season. The injuries sustained the previous day proved too much to overcome, and LA won the holiday championship game by twenty-four points. Coaches hoped and expected the team would return healthy after the long winter break, but unfortunately that was not the case. The injured players were not quite ready to play and missed the next four games, resulting in a 1–3 record during that time span. With four games remaining

in the regular season, the team had a 9–9 record and was in jeopardy of missing the playoffs for a second year in a row. But the team won those last four games; in the final game, they beat longtime rival St. Mark’s for the fourth year in a row! Finishing the season at 13–9 resulted in a Class B tournament #5 seed out of eight teams. To start the tournament, the team made the long trip to #4 seed St. George’s. Despite a regular-season loss by four points, Groton returned back to the Circle with a hard-earned, four-point victory, 62–58. A couple days later, the team battled #1 seed St. Luke’s. In a back-and-forth contest, Groton’s girls beat St. Luke’s 58–50 to earn a

grotoniana Ebullient girls varsity basketball players on March 3, after clinching the NEPSAC Class B championship title in a hard-fought final against Lawrence Academy

spot in the New England class B finals, versus, once again, Lawrence Academy, the #2 seed. The finals were played at a neutral site, Loomis Chaffee, and the team went into the finals feeling confident as they were playing their best basketball of the season. The championship game was exciting from start to finish, with neither team holding more than a six-point lead throughout the whole game. The game was tied at 54 with thirty-one seconds remaining when superstar Calie Messina ’22 hit a three-point shot with 6.8 seconds left in the game. Lawrence Academy’s half-court shot at the buzzer fell well short of the rim, and the celebration began. The Groton girls basketball team

had won the first basketball championship in recent memory, and perhaps in school history. — Coach Joe Crail

Boys Basketball 2–15 The 2018–19 basketball season included a series of ups and downs. The boys came into the season with energy, determined to improve upon our previous year together. At the end of December, we had won three games in a row in the Huckins Rouse Holiday Tournament and played some of our best basketball.

After winter break, the boys had some tough games against teams in our league, but we were still competitive and moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, the injury bug hit us hard, and the team limped through the remainder of the season. Though we fell short of our team goal to make the playoffs, I am proud of the way this group stayed together. Many teams would have folded from the adversity; however, thanks to the leadership of our Sixth Formers, this team never gave up and I am proud of how they competed in every game. The future is bright for Groton basketball, and I look forward to next season. —Coach Harold Francis

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Photographs by Jon Chase

Boys Ice Hockey 19 – 8 –2 The boys varsity hockey team started the 2018–19 season with a goal to have the most successful season in Groton School history. In 1957, the varsity hockey team was undefeated with a 10–0 season, so we weren’t able to match their winning percentage, but we did win more games than any Groton hockey team has won since the school started competing in hockey in the early part of the twentieth century. This season, our focus was on family, preparation, knowing your role, commitment, positivity, grit, accountability,

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and fun. We finished second in the ISL Eberhart Division and earned a fourth-place seed in the New England Small School Championship. One season highlight was winning fourteen games in a row. It was a wild ride, and the boys thoroughly enjoyed it. We had great balance with our offense, defense, and goaltending, and we managed to score ninety-six goals this season, or 3.31 goals per game, and only allowed fifty-six goals, or 1.93 goals per game. The season started off with two wins against North Yarmouth Academy and Roxbury Latin. In December, we played seven eventual playoff teams, earning a victory against Exeter and squeezing out ties

against Lawrence Academy and Holderness. During that stretch we fell short against Andover, Rivers, Pomfret, and Deerfield, but the high level of play served us well when we returned from the winter break. During January, we won ten out of eleven games and added six more wins in February. We earned big wins during that time against Rivers, St. Mark’s, Governor’s, Middlesex, St. George’s, Roxbury Latin, BB&N, and others. It certainly was a season to remember. The boys believed in each other, played for each other, and supported each other in ways I hope to see again. Next year, we will greatly miss the Sixth Formers: Drew Burke, Jonah Gold, Noah Kader, Joey Schiavone,

Brandon Slawaska, and Will Torriani. All have left an indelible mark on the program. — Coach Bill Riley

Girls Hockey 10 –11– 4 Girls varsity hockey had another successful season, narrowly missing a playoff berth and finishing the season 10–11–4 in the league and 8–5–4 in our division. Though we finished tenth in our league, of the top eight teams who made the division playoffs, we tied the #3 and #4 seeds (St. George’s and Worcester Academy), lost in overtime to the #1 seed (Brooks), split games with the #5

seed (Berwick), and obliterated the #7 seed (Thayer). The league formula left us a mere four points from earning the #8 seed. One of the highlights of this season was our victory against Lawrence Academy, 7–3. I’ve been told that this was our first victory against LA since the eighties. This win was a turning point. In the week after the LA triumph, the team achieved two come-from-behind wins, one in overtime, against Middlesex and Governor’s. Karenna Beckstein, our only Second Former, scored the game-winning goal in both games. Most special about our team this year was its balance of joy, intensity, respect, and commitment. It was fun to watch the girls

grotoniana

From far left, Caleb Coleman ‘20, Jonah Gold ‘19; right, Elena Junkala ‘21; below, Aaron Jin ‘19

come together around these core values and build a culture that propelled us to a fulfilling season. — Coach Randi Dumont

Girls Squash 8 – 6 We were really looking forward to an exciting season, with the same team as last year. Indeed, having every team member with at least one other season of experience paved the way for some good results. We started off by beating Taft in a close opening match. We lost 5–2 to Exeter, losing three matches in five games, so the end

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result could easily have been reversed. The first couple of weeks of the season flew and, before we knew it, it was winter break. The team put a lot of effort into their fitness and were keen to get back into their groove when they arrived back. We beat Brooks, Squashbusters, and Tabor before losing disappointingly close matches to St. Paul’s and Andover. Then it was off to Connecticut to play in the Nationals. The team spirit among the girls was fantastic, and we earned ninth in Division 2, which equates to twenty-fifth in the country. There were some really close matches, with two wins by Shirley Li ’19 sealing the team win. Kat Sapinski ’21 (at

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#1) and Lily Kempczinski ’21 (at #7) were our anchors, winning four out of four. During the last few weeks of the season, we lost a nail-biter to Milton but had good wins over St. Mark’s and St. George’s. Throughout the season, the other team members — Caroline Wilcox ’20, Sarah Conner ’19 (captain), Amy Lu ’19, Ishana Sen-Das ’19, and Willow Irving ’20 — all had their moments in the spotlight, pulling through for the team in some brutally physical matches. We ended third in the ISL with a league record of 5–2. We had a memorable weekend at the New England Championship in Connecticut, trying not to think too much about the four

seniors who would be graduating from our tightknit team. We ended a very commendable twelfth. Outstanding individual records of the season were from Kat, 14–7, and Lily, an incredible 20–3! I look forward to next season, but it will feel peculiar without our stalwarts Sarah, Amy, Ishana, and Shirley. — Coach Mike Tootill

Boys Squash 8 –7 This year’s boys squash team exceeded all expectations. After graduating last year’s top three players, the coaches anticipated a winter of struggling to measure up to the

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Opposite page, clockwise from top left: Walker Davey ‘19, Cassidy Thibodeau ‘21, Tristan Mecenas ‘21. This page, Roshan Palakkal ‘21, Rachel McMenemy ‘20, Amy Lu ‘19.

Adam Richins

stiff competition we would face throughout the season. The players, however, saw it otherwise. Led by Captain Walker Davey ’19, this team improved from week to week and competed with great confidence and determination. Tate Burgin ’21 spent the whole season in the hot seat at the top of the ladder, but a combination of the players’ competitiveness and the depth of the team earned us a winning record and fourthplace finish in the ISL. The first promising sign came in December, when we faced a tough team from Brookline High School and came away with a hard-earned, 4–3 win. Then, in early January, our 4–3 victory over Brooks

included a match in which Aaron Jin ’19 won by the narrowest of margins, 12–10 in the fifth game. We were simply out-gunned in some matches against more experienced teams, but the Groton boys continued to win every match possible and ultimately produced two more sensational highlights with wins over Tabor and St. Mark’s. Both of these could have gone either way, but the Groton players fed off each other’s confidence as one after another came through to win a close match. The season was punctuated by two tournaments: The Groton players earned valuable experience by competing in the High School Nationals (placing twelfth in Division

III) in early February, and our unexpectedly strong season record led us to the Class A New Englands (where we placed sixteenth). That season finale was an uphill battle, but our presence in the top division, in a year that began with such modest hopes, was a testament to the hard work, poise, and maturity of Sixth Formers Walker and Aaron as well as Gus Vrattos, Gabe Scholl, and Cal Wilson. Next year’s team will be decimated by these graduations, but we hope that returners Tate Burgin, Garrett Johnson ’20, and Tyler Weisberg ’22 will continue to exceed expectations as they carry the Groton squash torch forward. — Coach Dave Prockop P’15, ’17

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Sophia Wu ’21

Swimming 4 –4 It was a winning season in Groton’s pool this winter, with highlights including some decisive victories and two new school records. Team captain Riya Malhotra ’19 led the girls relay team to two new records — Riya, Katie Reveno ’20, Sophia Wu ’21, and Olivia Fayemi ’23 cruised past the previous record by a whopping nine seconds in the 200 medley relay, setting the new standard at 1:57.48. The same swimmers also broke the 200 free relay record by 1.5 seconds, coming in at 1:53.87. The boys 200 medley relay team — team captain Derek Chang ’20, Teddy Deng ’20,

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Sebastian El Hadj ’22, and Andres Kaneb ’20 — came within a heartbreaking second of breaking the school record, while the boys 200 free relay group of Derek, Andres, Foster Waxman ’21, and John Donovan ’20 also missed a record-breaker by a single second. Overall, the swimmers tallied four wins (over Milton, Pingree, and St. Paul’s twice) and four losses. The final meet, a loss to Exeter, included standout swimming by the girls, who dominated Exeter 92 to 72. Leading the scoring this season were Riya (102 points), Katie (98), Derek (84), Olivia (73), Sophia (72), and Sebastian (62). We will miss Riya and fellow Sixth Former

Fran Saldivar, but with so many swimmers returning, we are poised for a winning season in 2020.

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Caroline Wilcox ‘20

Jon Hahami ‘20

BOYS VARSITY BASKETBALL

GIRLS VARSITY BASKETBALL

BOYS VARSITY ICE HOCKEY

GIRLS VARSITY ICE HOCKEY

BOYS VARSITY SQUASH

GIRLS VARSITY SQUASH

VARSITY SWIMMING

ISL Team Sportsmanship Award

Most Valuable Players Rachel McMenemy ‘20 Lyndsey Toce ‘19

Most Valuable Player Drew Burke ‘19

Most Valuable Players Bridget Cornell ‘19 Lily Delaney ‘19

Most Valuable Player Aaron Jin ‘19

Most Improved Players Amy Lu ‘19 Ishana Das ‘19

Most Valuable Swimmer Olivia Fayemi ‘23

All-ISL Robbie Stankard ‘21 All-ISL Honorable Mentions Jon Hahami ‘20 Johnny Stankard ‘19 Coaches’ Award Bennett Smith ‘19 Johnny Stankard ‘19 Most Improved Player Andrew Yang ‘19 Captains-Elect Caleb Coleman ‘20 Jon Hahami ‘20

All-ISL Rachel McMenemy ‘20 Calie Messina ‘22 All-ISL Honorable Mentions Meghan Carney ‘19 Lyndsey Toce ‘19 Coaches’ Award Angelika Hillios ‘19 Most Improved Player Calie Messina ‘22 Captains-Elect Mary Collins ‘20 Rachel McMenemy ‘20

All-ISL Drew Burke ‘19 Thomas Dempsey ‘21 Brandon Slawaska ‘19 Will Torriani ‘19 Trey Whitehead ‘21 All-ISL Honorable Mentions Luke Beckstein ‘20 Marc Borghi ‘20 Jonah Gold ‘19 Joey Schiavone ‘19 Coaches’ Award Joey Schiavone ‘19

All-ISL Lily Delaney ‘19 All-ISL Honorable Mentions Bridget Cornell ‘19 Nicole Pollis ‘19 Coaches’ Award Nicole Pollis ‘19 Captains-Elect Neve Ley ‘21 Emily Pollis ‘21 Madelyn Son ‘21 Cassidy Thibodeau ‘21

Most Improved Player Cal Wilson ‘19 All-ISL Honorable Mention Walker Davey ‘19 Coaches’ Award Walker Davey ‘19 Captain-Elect Garrett Johnson ‘20

All-ISL Kat Sapinski ‘21 All-ISL Honorable Mention Caroline Wilcox ‘20 Coaches’ Award Sarah Conner ‘19 Shirley Li ‘19

Most Improved Swimmer Sebastian El Hadj ‘22 Coaches’ Award Foster Waxman ‘21 Captains-Elect Derek Chang ‘20 John Donovan ‘20 Katie Reveno ‘20

Captains-Elect Willow Irving ‘20 Caroline Wilcox ‘20

7th Player Award Gabriel Lamothe ‘20 Captains-Elect Luke Beckstein ‘20 Marc Borghi ‘20 Thomas Dempsey ‘21 Gabriel Lamothe ‘20

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Christopher Carey Brodigan Gallery SPRING EXHIBIT

Invitation Paintings by Mirland Terlonge Through May 26, 2019

isual and performance artist Mirland Terlonge, the child of first-generation immigrants from Haiti and Jamaica, investigates social politics and its consequences through her art. Much of her work is influenced by her childhood experiences working alongside her mother, an event florist. Terlonge exposes harsh realities hidden within props from weddings, parties, and funerals and relates the residue of elaborate social events to distorted public perceptions, recontextualizing these items into a critique of her social experience.

Ripened, 2017 oil on paper

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The Brodigan Gallery, located on the Dining Hall’s ground level, is open 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on weekdays (except school holidays). It is free and open to the public.

de Menil Gallery SPRING EXHIBIT

Gathering Beauty: Tribal Artifacts & Textiles

grotoniana

The de Menil Gallery, open 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on weekdays (except Wednesdays) and 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on weekends (except school holidays), is free and open to the public.

Selected Objects from the Elizabeth Van Gelder Collection Through June 3, 2019 Reception: May 11, 2019, 2 – 4 p.m.

ormer Groton art teacher Beth Van Gelder developed a serious interest in tribal artifacts and textiles during travels on sabbatical in 1989. Curious about non-Western cultures, she made intentional connections with people who invited her into their lives, including their art, daily rituals, and sacred ceremonies. Drawn by artifacts’ design, motifs, colors, and patterns, she began collecting handmade objects that each conveyed a visual narrative. Utilitarian objects were often elevated from ordinary to extraordinary through labor-intensive ornamentation. “I was filled with awe by the amount of detail that would embellish a common utilitarian object such as a spoon, a comb, or a basket,” Ms. Van Gelder said. Studying non-Western art, she says, challenges Western notions of beauty and permanence. Sometimes the objects’ creation, as an offering to the divine, is more important than the object itself. “With my collection,” she explains, “I hope to demonstrate the variety and commonality of artifacts across various cultures and the myriad ways that they reveal our common humanity.”

Artifacts from Beth Van Gelder’s collection

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Photographs by Adam Richins

Little Women Louisa May Alcott’s classic, Little Women, came to life on the Campbell Performing Arts Center stage in February. The musical, based on Alcott’s life, follows the adventures of four sisters — Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy March — in Civil War–era America. Brave Jo impressed with her empowerment as themes emerged about independence, family, determination, growth, and love. Top: Dagla Rodriguez ‘19, Caroline Drapeau ‘21, Katherine Johnson ‘20, and Maya Luthi ‘23; Julien Alam ‘19 and Dagla. Left, Dagla, Griffin Elliott ‘22, Jane Park ‘21, Lilias Kim ‘19, Annabel Kocks ‘20, and Lauren Clark ‘23 Opposite page, row one: Lilias, Sophie Conroy ‘19 and Maya, Caroline. Row two: Griffin, Lily Cratsley ‘19 and Dagla. Row three: Lauren, Griffin on top of Anuj Agarwal ‘21, Lilias, Annabel, and Jane; Caroline and Julien. Row four: Julien and Dagla; Dagla, Claire Holding ‘21, and Vladimir Malashenko ‘19.

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Donald White ’53 1935 –2018 by Peter Nitze ’53, P’91, ’94

onald White (“Donny”) was one of the first formmates I met after my arrival at Groton as a Second Former in the fall of 1948. It was immediately apparent that he was a person of great presence. Before learning that both of his older brothers (Peter ’48 and Frank ’51) had been senior prefects, I recognized that our formmates expected that Donny would be our leader. My understanding of Donny deepened as I came to know his family on visits to Holly Hill, their farm in Cohasset. Donny’s father, Richardson White 1923, operated the farm in the manner of the late nineteenth century, employing up to sixteen draft horses and oxen. Machinery was used only when absolutely necessary—and Mr. White often designed and built his own machines, using a blacksmith and machine shop located on the property. Mr. White had a deep affection for all animals, particularly horses. He became a renowned sculptor of horses; one of his works is in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. While an active member of his community, Mr. White had no taste for the bright lights and commercial ways of Boston. Mrs. White (Cornelia Hallowell) was Mary Crocker’s cousin. She, like her cousin, possessed an abounding, welcoming warmth, and was admired and loved by all who knew her. She also resembled her cousin in her ability to soften her husband’s occasional sharp edges and gently fill in when his memory lapsed. She shared her husband’s love of animals. Donny was a wonderful combination of his parents. He inherited both his mother’s warmth and his father’s fierce independence. Although Donny would later have a distinguished

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academic career, at Groton he was not one of our form’s few academic stars. He showed his capacity for leadership on the river, where he was captain of the crew, and on the football field, where he played halfback for both Larry Noble and Jack Davison. In the winter term of our Fifth Form year, the dramat mounted a production of Henry IV, Part 1. Herr Hawkes directed; Donny was cast as Hotspur against my Prince Harry. I immediately cast Donny as Hotspur in my imagination, and that is how I continue to think of him— independent and fierce (but capable of great kindness). After graduation from Groton, Donny and I sailed to Europe on the SS Maasdam, the first of our many travels together. Following this summer of shared adventure, we entered college as roommates. At Harvard, Donny began educating us on the pleasures of less well-known composers. Mahler was already in vogue, but we were wholly ignorant of Bruckner’s music until Donny’s introduction. Our musical education at Harvard was limited to records and occasional trips to Symphony Hall. Donny’s son Arthur reports that Donny continued to love classical music and expand his already prodigious knowledge, even auditing college classes as a professor. Although Donny was first exposed to Classics at Groton, where he tackled Greek, his interests truly burgeoned at Harvard, where he prepared himself well for what would become his life’s work. In 1957, Donny graduated from Harvard, married Sarah Melhado (they had two sons, Malcolm and Owen) and spent six months on Army active duty. Following this, Donny pursued his doctorate at Princeton, excavating at Morgentina, Sicily. Donny accepted a joint teaching appointment in

in memoriam

Classics and art history at the University of Michigan in 1963 and started excavations in eastern Libya (Cyrenaica) at the port city of ancient Appolonia the next year. In 1967, Donny was forced to evacuate on the last plane leaving as the Six-Day War broke out in Israel. In 1968, he married Joan Sheinberg (with whom he had a third son, Arthur), and a year later he returned to Libya to start excavating the Demeter and Persephone Sanctuary at nearby Cyrene. Donny joined the University of Pennsylvania as professor of classical archaeology in 1973. He taught undergraduate and graduate students and led excavations in Libya. Joan reports that he was particularly gifted at moving heavy stones and larger-than-life-size marble statues, using the mechanical principles and skills that he learned from his father on the farm at Holly Hill. His team unearthed an enormous quantity of fantastic artifacts. After U.S.–Libya diplomatic relations broke down in 1981, Donny shifted his attention to coastal Egypt, where he conducted excavations on an island near Marsa Matruh (seat of Field Marshal Rommel during World War II). He redefined the location as an important western distribution point along the Southern Mediterranean coastline for Minoan, Mycenaean, and Cypriot pottery. He also repatriated the remains of an unknown WWII German soldier whom he discovered buried on the island. In 1990, Donny was appointed chief curator of the Mediterranean section at the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. He spent the next thirteen years undertaking an ambitious set of renovations to the Greek, Etruscan, and Roman galleries;

these are still regarded as one of the museum’s most successful re-installations. Although Donny was closely tied to Holly Hill throughout his life, Philadelphia became his home. Together with Joan, they bought a house not far from the Penn campus, which was convenient to work and to the Vesper Boat Club and Undine Barge Club where Donny continued his passion for rowing and vigorous exercise. He was also an active member and former President of the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia, and a member of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia and the Archaeological Institute of America. His love of horses and all domesticated animals was a lifelong passion. He was surrounded by a peaceable kingdom of cats and dogs at home, and even tamed a wild Sicilian horse (as reported in memoirs of the Morgantina site in Sicily). Donny was a prolific writer. He edited five monographs on his work in Libya and authored three more, plus two volumes on his work in Egypt and countless articles and papers on a vast range of topics, such as “Roman Athletics: Classical Antecedents to the National Mania” and “Of Coffins, Curses, and Other Plumbeous Matters.” He recently completed his eleventh book, a historical overview of the horse in North Africa from the Bronze Age to the twentieth century. Those of us who remained close to Donny in his later years enjoyed summer visits with him at Holly Hill. I am sure that we have yet to discover all of the many ways in which we will miss him. Donald— Fabula acta est, in pace requiescas. The play is over; rest in peace

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Peter A. Magowan ’60, P’85 1942 –2019 by William A Nitze ’60

he death of my friend and formmate Peter Magowan is a great loss to his family, the Form of 1960, the whole Groton community, and the many people whom he touched during his extraordinary life. Peter came from a privileged background, but his real good fortune was to be passionate about something from an early age and to be able to fulfill that passion in the most wonderful way over the course of his life. That something is baseball. Peter’s leadership in acquiring the San Francisco Giants, hiring Barry Bonds, assembling a grand coalition to construct what is arguably the most beautiful ball park in the world, and transforming the Giants into one of the most successful and respected teams in the league has profoundly changed both San Francisco and the sport itself, both for the better. Peter and I were friendly, but not all that close, during our years together at Groton. I envied his insouciance and ability to get away with escapades that I would not dare even to attempt. In one instance, Peter arranged to meet a girl in Boston and miscalculated the time for getting back on the bus to the school. Peter and his girlfriend walked up the block hand in hand, and Peter was aghast when he finally noticed the waiting bus, his formmates staring out the windows. His charm dependably extracted him from all kinds of trouble. Following a bachelor’s in literature at Stanford, Magowan received his master’s degree in politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford and later did postgraduate work at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Our lives became truly intertwined when we were at Oxford together in the mid-1960s. During our many adventures, I became close to his first wife, Jill, and remember the births of their three wonderful daughters. I am godfather to the eldest, Kim, Form of 1985, and Peter was godfather to my eldest son Paul, who took full advantage of his godfather’s generosity in providing good tickets to Giants’ games during the year that Paul worked in San Francisco. Peter was always a warm and generous friend with an unfailingly positive attitude toward life. But it is through

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The Magowans at the 2012 World Series: Margot, Kim ’85, Hilary, and Peter ’60

his interactions with the broader community that Peter exemplified the school’s motto, cui servire est regnare. As I listened to speakers at his memorial celebration, ranging from Willie Mays, the former mayor of San Francisco, and sports announcers to Giants’ employees and members of Peter’s and his wife Debby’s families, I realized that Peter not only cared deeply for everyone who became part of his life, but that he never put himself first, always gave and seldom took, and had an uncommon ability to bring people together in pursuit of higher goals beyond themselves. To the extent that Peter’s life was shaped by what he learned at Groton, we should all be very proud. CAREER HIGHLIGHTS • 16 seasons as president of the San Francisco Giants • Helped save the Giants from moving to Tampa Bay in 1992 • Spearheaded a plan for a 41,000-seat ballpark, now considered one

of the nation’s best • Spent thirty-seven years with Safeway, including fourteen as CEO

During his tenure, the Giants: • Made it to the 2002 World Series and three other post-season runs • Became the first pro team to hold a benefit game for AIDS

Form notes

R Form Notes are now password-protected. Members of the Groton community may read them online by signing in at www.groton.org/myGroton.

Jon Chase

One easy way to support Groton is to name the school as a beneficiary of your:

A simple way to make a difference.

• Retirement plans, such as an IRA, 401(k), or 403(b) • Bank and brokerage accounts, or • Paid-up life insurance policy

Beneficiary designations let you specify the individuals and charities you want to support and the percentage of assets you want each beneficiary to receive, all while providing income and estate tax benefits. You can control the disposition of these assets without changing your will or living trust. It’s as easy as filling out a form, available through your plan administrator. To learn more about life insurance or retirement plan gifts, or planned giving generally, please visit:

Legacy.groton.org/beneficiary The Circle Society recognizes those who have provided for Groton School’s future through their estate plans. Groton is grateful to each Circle Society member for their thoughtful planning, which ensures future support for Groton’s mission to foster a diverse and intimate community devoted to inspiring lives of character, learning, leadership, and service. Questions? Please contact Kate Machan in the Office of Development and Alumni Affairs, at 978-448-7581 or kmachan@groton.org.

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Groton School • The Quarterly

Groton School

A SMALL ANTIQUE

table in English teacher Martha Gracey’s classroom (which used to be Elson Harmon’s classroom) sheds light on the maladies, and boredom, of students stuck in Groton’s infirmary years ago.

FOLLOW GROTON:

Spring 2019 • Volume LXXX , No. 2

The drawer is carved with inscriptions about pinkeye, the grippe, and other sicknesses that kept students at rest. Carvings in the Schoolroom desks are readily apparent, but few know of the secrets carved inside this wooden relic. Still a secret: why a table from the old infirmary landed upstairs in the Schoolhouse.