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40 Acres and a Horse I read with interest and pleasure the story related to Thorncrag Nature Sanctuary (“Carnegie’s Half Horse,” Winter 2013). Around 1930, Alfred J. Anthony, a Bates trustee and professor who authored the college history Bates College and Its Background, wrote a letter to the Stanton Bird Club summarizing his role in giving the initial parcel of land that created the sanctuary. Anthony recalls how, in the early 1900s, he found it increasingly uncomfortable to ride his horse on the “harder surface of macadamized and paved streets” in Lewiston. So he took to riding in rural areas, but after being shooed away by a property owner, he decided to buy land where he could ride his horse “free from objections and the perils of trespass.” The 40 acres that he purchased, off outer Sabattus Street, had most recently been used as a tuberculosis sanatorium, since shuttered. Anthony knew that the owner was “probably carrying a load of taxes without return and would be glad to sell the property.” After moving from Lewiston to New York City in 1918, Anthony donated his land to the Stanton Bird Club, a similarly egalitarian organization that he described as being open to “persons of different races, religions, professions and callings in a broad and inclusive manner.” Today, the sanctuary comprises 372 acres, having grown through subsequent gifts of land from other benefactors, including Anthony himself, and through land purchases supported by gifts. It may be an historical leap, and I have no knowledge of documents that support this notion, but I wonder if the horse whose skeleton was retrieved from Thorncrag and now displayed in Carnegie Science Hall belonged to Alfred Anthony himself? Susan Hayward
Nothing like seeing your birth year on a 4-by-6 class banner to make you muse. The banner in question belonged to the Class of 1963, and it was carried by Howie Vandersea, Web Harrison and Thom Freeman, who led their class in the Alumni Parade at Reunion. You do the math. If 1963 is my birth year, and the Class of ’63 had its 50th Reunion this year, then it follows that 50th birthdays are in store this year for me and for all you alumni who were born in 1963. I’ve seen this birth-year cohort at four prior Bates Reunions, the first time when I was 30. So they’re a touchstone of sorts, but, dammit, this touchstone keeps moving. We’re both five years older each time we meet. Of course, we all still look great. (A few years ago, the Class of 1965 walked the parade with their mugbook photos in hand, wearing T-shirts saying, “Isn’t It Funny: We Still Look the Same.”) The late Peter Gomes ’65 talked about gaining alumni seniority by pointing out how his class notes had moved ever deeper into the magazine and were now “on the left side of the staple.” It’s an effective image (even if it doesn’t quite work now that this magazine has no staple). As alumni are borne across the staple, and propelled ever closer to the venerable front of the Alumni Parade, they also beat on against the current, sometimes in ways that mock the math of aging. For example, Tom Brown ’63 is 72 years old. But his heart is 45 — it was removed from a deceased 21-year-old man and placed into Brown’s chest back in 1989. Brown looks great, too, and he’s one of the world’s longest-living heart transplant recipients. But he doesn’t gloat. “No one gets out of this life alive,” he said at Reunion. “I accept whatever comes next.” In hopeful fashion, the class titled its 50th Reunion Class Book The Next Chapter, a nod to Thomas Jefferson’s comment that his election as president was just the first verse of a chapter. “What the last may be nobody can tell.” At Commencement, the next chapter was on the mind of another Thomas, Tommy Holmberg ’13, the senior chosen to give the first student address at Commencement in at least 60 years (see page 21). The next chapter, Holmberg said, is written when you renew the present. Just as Bates alumni, through gifts of treasure and time, help students have the same great experience they did, older students “invest in the happiness” of younger students by sharing and instilling their love of Bates. “You see, it’s a beautiful cycle we’ve got here,” he said. “The goodness of Bates is passed on, out of admiration and gratitude for what was and excitement and pride for what will be.” “What will be” has been on my mind lately. My daughter, Audrey, joins the beautiful Bates cycle as a member of the Class of 2017 this fall. H. Jay Burns, Editor magazine@bates.edu
Lewiston, Maine
Please Write
The writer is a longtime volunteer for the Stanton Bird Club. Her husband, Tom, is club president and, as of this summer, retired as the college’s humanities reference librarian and lecturer in classical and medieval studies. — Editor
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Summer 2013
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