CA Magazine Spring 2015

spring 2015

SERIAL THRILLER

The podcast that captivated millions

Editor

Editorial Board

Contact us:

Jennifer McFarland Flint Associate Director of Communications

Ben Carmichael ’01 Director of Marketing and Communications

Design

Karen Culbert P’15, ’17 Leadership Gift and Stewardship Officer

Concord Academy magazine 166 Main Street Concord, MA 01742 (978) 402-2200 magazine@concordacademy.org

Irene Chu ’76

John Drew P’15 Assistant Head and Academic Dean

Letters to the Editor Do you have thoughts on this issue?

We’d like to hear your suggestions and responses. Please write to us at magazine@concordacademy.org.

Hilary Wirtz Director of Development Billie Julier Wyeth ’76 Director of Engagement

© 2015 Concord Academy

Committed to being a school enriched by a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, Concord Academy does not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, color, creed, sexual orientation, or national or ethnic origin in its hiring, admissions, educational and financial policies, or other school-administered programs. The school’s facilities are wheelchair-accessible.

spring 2015

Contents 2 Message from the Head of School 6 Campus News 10 Arts 12 Athletics 14 Faculty 16 Creative Types 18 Alumnae/i Profiles

by Nancy Shohet West ’84 ► Maud Smith Daudon ’73 ► Gabe Greenberg ’98 ► Emma Thorne ’07 ► Daniel Coppersmith ’11

F EATURES 24 Serial Thriller

by Jennifer McFarland Flint Sarah Koenig ’86 had been producing stories for the popular public radio program This American Life for a decade when she embarked on an experiment in podcasting. In a few short weeks, Serial snowballed into a cultural phenomenon.

28 The Finish Line

by Eric Nguyen ’00 Finishing what you’ve started in a 100-mile race

30 The Last Best Hope ABOVE Students in the Literature of Concord class visited the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods last fall. They passed from hand to hand the original daguerreotype pictured here, which Henry David Thoreau commissioned. For more about the students’ reflections on the author and the course, please see page 8.

Photo by Kristie Gillooly

by Jennifer McFarland Flint When a patient’s survival depends on a bone marrow transplant, and the anonymous donors who supply hope

36 In Memoriam 37 Class Notes

On the cover: Sarah Koenig ’86 and the Serial podcast. Illustration by Daniel Bejar

me s s ag e f ro m t he h e a d o f s c h o o l

Kristie Gillooly

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CON CORD AC A DEM Y M AG A ZINE SPRING 2015

n a recent trip to Asia, during which I visited a number of CA families, I found myself at a dinner table sharing news about the school. I was asked a question about how the school deals with the atmosphere of competition, specifically how it prepares students for the very competitive world beyond our campus.

I thought about that question for a few moments—it’s one that comes up with some frequency these days, needless to say. Then I reflected aloud about the nature of the classroom, of what happens between a teacher and a student there. That meeting place is about engagement in a subject—in my case as a career English teacher, a work of literature; or a piece of student writing, that essential task of articulating an idea for a reader—engagement that, when captured well, is deep and powerful. I turned to the students around our table and said, “You know what this feels like, yes?” They nodded. It’s that feeling of losing oneself in the endeavor.

That engagement is not about winning or losing. It’s about allowing students, encouraging them, to put their hearts and not just their heads into something. It’s an opportunity for them to take risks, to make mistakes, to learn from those mistakes, and to try again. I recalled an essay by Jacques d’Amboise, the former principal dancer and teacher for the New York City Ballet, in which the writer characterized his approach to teaching novice dancers. The teacher’s attitude should invite students to engage, to try, to risk, by communicating the teacher’s belief in their ability to do all those things, d’Amboise says. “You can do this. You are wonderful. Let’s try together.”

From there, the student must step out on his or her own: “Now do it yourself.” In that moment,

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where one lets go and risks, that is engagement.

Not thinking about failing, just trying, doing, and at moments succeeding. Trying and trying and trying again.

That, I said, is my answer. The best way to prepare students for the world beyond our campus is to engage them in trying, in risking, in making mistakes, and in trying again.

My travel to this corner of the world reminded me once again about what students from other countries do in studying at CA so far from home, living and learning in a language that is not native to them or their culture.

Extraordinary. That’s the word for it. Talk about making a leap.

I am proud of these students, proud of and grateful to them and their parents for this leap. It is emblematic of the courage we ask of every one of our students: to set aside worry and fear about not knowing the outcome, to try, to take risks, to make mistakes, to believe in engagement, to throw one’s heart into that work.

How does one succeed in our hypercompetitive world? Through engagement, which is its own success.

Sincerely,

Rick Hardy Head of School Dresden Endowed Chair

NORMAN ROCKWELLIAN WINTER

Cole + Kiera Photography

Before the historic snows this winter, there was glorious ice: Cory Chapman, a mathematics teacher and house faculty member, built and maintained an ice rink on the old tennis courts on the west side of campus. In the evenings, on the ice, students twirled under the stars and warmed themselves by a fire to fend off the frost.

Just One of the Gang Since its welcome return last fall, the chameleon has been settling back into life on campus, catching up on coursework, and honing new skills across the curriculum. And, just like any other student here, the chameleon packs a bit of adventure into every last day.

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Photographs by Cole+Kiera Photography

campus news O

n a Sunday afternoon in April, CA partnered with Stop Hunger Now to package meals for undernourished populations around the world. The event, which drew about 250 students, alumnae/i, faculty, and families, was the first CAService initiative, intended to harness the energies of the wider community toward projects that benefit others. The event was hosted by CA Parents Association in partnership with the engagement and community life offices, with sponsorship by Sodexo, and with support from many others along the way.

In the span of an hour and a half, 40,176 meals were assembled.

Stop Hunger Now distributes them to partner organizations in as many as 65 developing countries.

Wit and Grit 2015 Hall Fellow Howard Gardner

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sked what it takes to succeed in life, most people would say you have to be smart and work hard, says Howard Gardner P’87, ’90, ’94, who is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “That’s called wit and grit,” he says, “and my work has been to complexify those notions.”

Gardner, who delivered the 2014–15 Hall Fellow lecture in April, is best known for his work on the notion of multiple intelligences, which expanded the notion of wit. Grit is having its turn in the limelight, as researchers such as Angela Duckworth at Penn look into how grit can be a predictor of achievement. “But Hitler and his storm troopers had plenty of grit, and the people who ran Enron had plenty of grit,” Gardner says. “So what I’ve been trying to do is nudge value-free grit toward good grit. We want people to be good persons, good workers, and good citizens.”

These are a few of our favorite things: Advisor meetings, the hug line, David Rost, and varsity soccer bus rides.

We asked the CA community what your favorite things about CA are, and those are some of the responses that have come in so far. We’re collecting a list of 100, which we will ultimately post on concord100.org, the site devoted to the school’s plans for its centennial. We’d love to hear from you. Please go online and tell us what it is about CA that makes your heart sing, whether it’s a person, place, or ring: www.concordacademy.org/100-things

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Jay Gardner

An Afternoon of Service

Tracing Islamic Influence

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Lodovica Illari and MIT’s Weather in a Tank project

hen John Vernaglia ’18 boarded a plane bound for Italy over spring break, his itinerary was packed with sites illustrating Islamic influence on Venetian architecture.

His photographs became part of an exhibit on campus called Seeking the Divine, created by Vernaglia and fellow classmates in Making of the Muslim World. In the images below of Doge’s Palace, Torre dell’Orologio, and the domes of St. Mark’s, Vernaglia captures design elements whose roots can be traced back to mosques and minarets in Damascus and Cairo.

Earth, Wind, and Primer: Coriolis Force

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o why do rotating weather patterns,” John Pickle begins, his voice rising with hopeful expectation, “never move across the equator?” The students in his meteorology class shout back, “coriolis!”

Victory. It’s February, and this is a big moment. “This lesson is essential,” Pickle says.

“There are two things that create our weather: the uneven heating of the earth’s surface by the sun, and the fact that we’re a rotating sphere. That’s it.” Coriolis force explains how the flow of ocean water or the movement of air are affected by the shape of the Earth. The further you are from the poles, your rate of change of the speed of rotation decreases and the coriolis effect — the deflection of something moving in a straight path, such as wind, relative to

the Earth’s surface — decreases.

The lesson is much more complicated than that, but it is made less complicated by the use of the rotating tank of water with a camera above it, a gift from Lodovica Illari and John Marshall P’06. The tank simulates the Earth’s rotation, making it easier to visualize the theory.

“Ed Lorenz used a similar device to come up with chaos theory, so it has an amazing history,” Pickle says. It became a teaching tool for graduate students, then undergrads; now the lessons are being brought to the high school level. “It helps students get a foothold on the complexity by having physical examples, rather than talking about the theory and expecting application from just that,” he says.

Winterfest

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he fact that New England was in the whiteblanketed midst of one of the snowiest winters on record did nothing to cool enthusiasm for this year’s Winterfest. The Jan. 31

event, designed to raise awareness and funds for financial aid (about $10,200 this year), featured a talent show of dancers, singers, and musicians, as well as the traditional pie-throwing. It

was all a welcome break from the weather. “We thought about canceling it because it was so cold outside,” Dean of Students David Rost says.

“But then we said, ‘Nah, let them eat pie.’”

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campus news

Kristie Gillooly

Reflections on Walden For their final exam, students in the Literature of Concord, taught

by Leigh Gilmore, walked around Walden Pond, reflecting on what Thoreau would have seen in his day and what has changed since then. Abraham Lyon ’16 and Ben Glass ’16 discussed first impressions of Thoreau, black holes, and the town’s most famous body of water.

Abraham Lyon ’16: I didn’t know much about it before this class, but I really enjoyed Walden. It taught me a new way to think about living my life, and in that way it introduced an entire universe of ideas for contemplation.

Ben Glass ’16: I agree. At first I was just reading what was on the pages, and it was cool, but I didn’t really get it. Then I think we had a class on evanescence, and that’s when it all clicked, that there was so much more.

Fourth dimension, black holes, time, space: Walden brought it all to the table. Henry was a pioneer.

AL: It’s like Interstellar, which was a game changer: It helped me make the leap between living deliberately and the infinite expanse of the unknown. As humans, we know nothing about higher dimensions, about the true nature of time and space, and I think Thoreau understood some of those limits. He understood that our knowledge is limited, and yet there is an entire frontier waiting to be breached.

BG: The frontier, time, space, black holes. Since we are three-dimensional objects, a black hole is very much three-dimensional to us, although it looks distorted around its edges. However, it is not threedimensional. Time and space warp inside a black hole, and therefore it is beyond what humans can see.

So we live in the fourth dimension, because we are 3D objects moving through time. We can’t see it, but we can experience it.

AL: So in essence is time just an object that can be molded?

BG: To me, time is a human invention. It exists, but beyond our comprehension. Therefore, it can be molded and shaped.

AL: So what is time but an infinite, an infinite of the large? But isn’t there also an infinite of the small, the infinitesimal moments of time that rush by, unseen? We can’t touch time, but we can try.

That’s why Thoreau wanted so desperately to live in the moment.

With such vast ideas, one can waste one’s life away wondering, so I guess what we are trying to do is grab onto to those moments of time before they rush on past.

Thoreau thought the pond was an eye, it’s a reflection, we can try to look into its infinite depths, but all we will see is ourselves.

BG: But Walden’s just a pond, Abraham.

Visit www.concordacademy.org/dr-grass for a video about Dr. Grass and some of the creative work

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Kristie Gillooly

UPCOMING EVENTS May 29

Commencement Chapel Lawn, 10 a.m.

June 5 – 7

Reunion Weekend June 6

Joan Shaw Herman Distinguished Service Award Elizabeth B. Hall Chapel, 9:30 a.m.

“There’s no lack of demand for good information. There’s no lack of demand for news. It’s just not in the formats and on the platforms that we’ve all become used to,” says Sarah Bartlett ’73, who spoke both to students as the 2014 Davidson Lecturer and to alumnae/i and parents gathered in Boston last fall for a CATalk. The challenges ahead for journalism are bifurcated, she says: Mainstream outlets need to adapt as quickly as possible to digital media, and startups need to embrace the traditional values of journalism, such as fact checking. As dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Bartlett says: “It’s a whole new set of skills that journalists need to be effective now, and that’s what our school is trying to do.”

Memorial Service Elizabeth B. Hall Chapel, 11 a.m.

Alumnae/i Discussion: A Look at the Experiences of Students of Color at CA Moriarty Athletic Campus, 4:30 p.m.

June 22

Summer Camp opens September 1

Convocation First day of classes

he has done on the athletic fields and grounds.

October 8

The Lawn Doctor

Class Socials for Parents

Grounds Manager Brad Nartowicz on keeping CA green

October 9 –10

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October 17

six inches of rain, and you have to work around it,” he says. “It’s taking what’s been given to you and trying to work with that.”

Over the winter months, Mother Nature gave him snow. More than 100 inches of it. Keeping the campus safe and accessible through February and March was no easy task for the grounds crew, but it was a different story at the athletic campus. “There’s actually no ice beneath the snow so the grass can still respire,” he says. If there had been a sheet of ice beneath that blanket, it could cause the plant to ferment. “As it is, the snow protects it from lower temperatures and wind. So you can actually just shovel it off and the grass will look like it did last fall.

It was almost a blessing.” We like the optimism, doctor.

A CA Homecoming with Reunion 2005 and 2010

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s Brad Nartowicz drove westbound along Route 2 on his way to his first day on the job as head of grounds at CA, he peered over the guardrail at the fields at the Moriarty Athletic Campus and thought … oh no. It was June 9, 2014, and the grass was definitely not greener on the other side of the fence. It was brown.

Dr. Grass, as Don Kingman dubbed him, spent his first few weeks learning the ins and outs of the pump that runs the irrigation system, which had been experiencing failures. Once he had the irrigation up and running, it wasn’t long before the fields had their healthy green glow back.

That is the kind of challenge Nartowicz faces every day. “One day you could come in and find that the irrigation didn’t run and you have the driest turf on the planet. Or, one day you could come in and you have

Family Weekend

arts

The Performing Arts Department presented Woyzeck, directed by Mauri Trimmer ’15, in December. The most famous of Georg Buchner’s three plays, Woyzeck asks the question: What drives an ordinary man to do something extraordinarily terrible?

Please visit our website for more about the cast and crew of this production and others this year.

David R. Gammons

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Works of Art

Cole + Kiera Photography

At right, faculty members Ross Adams and Diana Thompson with the Vocal Jazz and Pop Ensemble at February’s Music Café. Below that, the visual arts were on display at the fall student art show in the Math and Arts Center. Bottom row: Two guests from Mali, Africa, Bazoumana Kouyaté and Naomi Fall, introduced popular dance forms in a workshop with live drumming by Robert Bellinger.

athletics

CA AT PLAY The winter and spring seasons featured outstanding performances by student-athletes, who brought their best to their respective fields of competition. Please visit our website for individual team results and season highlights.

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PA S S I N G T H E B AT O N

Cole + Kiera Photography

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he end of the spring athletic season represents a big moment for Jenny Brennan (pictured above, center), who is stepping down as athletic director in June after 13 years of service at CA. Of her various roles as coach, advisor, house parent, and athletic director, Brennan says she feels fortunate to have gained “a ton of experience here,” she says. “It’s where I grew up professionally.”

Under her direction, the athletic program grew up, too. “I’m proud of the ways in which we created more success within the program without ever losing track of what makes CA great,” she says. “We managed to build this great program that has awesome recognition on the league and conference levels, but we’ve done it in the right way, every step of the way.” She has “a huge amount of respect” for Sue Johnson, who will take over as athletic director after Brennan’s departure.

“She’s going to continue to enhance this program in all the right ways,” Brennan says.

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Chris Rhodes, Jr.

faculty

Coming Soon Justin Bull takes on a feature film

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collaborate on a semester-long production. t is all coming together for Justin Bull this summer: The film teacher will be Bull isn’t new to directing — it was the focus shooting a feature-length film with some of his master’s degree — but in recent years of his current and former students, as well he has invested his nonteaching time in as professional actors and crew, on a topic screenwriting. “With three small children at that’s been a fascination of his since he was home, writing has been more accessible,” a child. He had already applied for a summer he says. “But now that they’re getting to sabbatical with the intention of shooting the age where I can get five hours of sleep the film this summer, “but on a very small, a night, I’m getting back to directing.” micro budget,” he says. In February, CA With this particular project, he’ll also be appointed him the Katherine Carton Hamgetting back to a story that first captured his mer ’68 Endowed Faculty Chair, a three-year attention as a child in the Adirondacks: fellowship that he says “makes the realizaBetsey Hays was a local legend in the tion of that project much more within reach.” 1800s who claimed to have not taken food or drink for a period of almost two years.

This will be Bull’s second spin in the She said she was fed by the providence of director’s chair of a feature-length film.

God. “There were many questions about This spring, he directed the final project for whether this was a fraud,” Bull says. “In Improvisational Film: The Feature Project, hindsight, it looks like the first documented the capstone course where students

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case of anorexia in America.” Bull’s plan for his film is “to take those circumstances and update them to a story that wrestles with the same ideas of science, faith, doubt,” he says. “I’m most excited that I can do something that I’m passionate about every day in the classroom, and now I can do it outside of the classroom and carry students along with me on that adventure.”

Jenny Chandler, dean of faculty, says Bull was selected for the Hammer Chair for a number of reasons, including his “methodical, patient, and unassumingly dogged” approach to his work. The chair, established in 1998 to honor former Board of Trustees President Katherine Carton Hammer ’68, supports midcareer faculty by providing recognition and support for developing skills.

In Student Shoes When teachers take classes

by Julia Shea ’16 Cole + Kiera Photography

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the hallways, even as students had to move on to the next class. That helped Engerman realize “just how much CA students juggle on a daily basis.”

Roorbach has tried her hand at ceramics, fiber arts, and painting at CA. As an undergraduate, she double majored in visual arts and premedical programs, with a focus on medical illustration. Eventually she became “distracted by science,” and left her dream of professional art behind.

Returning to the studio in 2009 for Painting 1, Roorbach sought a “break from the normal day.” Although her first canvases

were “disasters,” she nevertheless considers her time well spent. “Sitting next to my students, turning to them to say, ‘I have no idea what the teacher just explained,’ I was a learner with them. They saw me struggle and sometimes fail, and most students don’t get to see their teachers that way.”

Roorbach considers her ceramic plates and quilt more successful than her paintings; they serve as mementos of her success, just as her paintings serve as mementos of failure. Collectively, her artwork demonstrates that at CA, teachers and students alike are learners.

Taking the Leap David Gammons, on leaving CA and the adventures to come

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verything about CA is hard to leave, says theatre teacher David Gammons about his home for the last 15 years. “I fell in love with this place right off the bat, and I have been so profoundly happy here ever since,” he says. Beginning next fall, he will be teaching in the theatre arts department at MIT. When he took over CA’s theatre program in 2000, Gammons says he knew he wanted to make Theatre Company a laboratory, a place where students could discover experimental theatre and “what being an artist really is.” In part, he says, students

learn from the experience that being an artist can be difficult: “But your creative muscles get stronger by leaning in to resistance and facing challenges, having the courage to share ideas and creative responses.”

A busy director, designer, and artist in his own right, he was the SpeakEasy Stage Company’s Artistic Visionary Honoree in 2014, among other awards for his work in the Boston theatre scene. It’s time, he says, for new opportunities to grow his own creative and pedagogic practice. “I’m feeling quite excited about seeing what adventures are ahead,” he says.

< David Gammons bungee jumped from New Zealand’s Kawarau Bridge in March.

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fter auditing five courses at Concord Academy — two arts and three academic subjects — math teacher Mark Engerman says, “I think I am almost a sophomore now!” He and science teacher Gretchen Roorbach are among those who have taken advantage of the opportunity to learn from their colleagues and experience CA from the student perspective.

Engerman had attempted to teach himself the basics of drawing with “how-to” books in the past. Then it occurred to him that people are learning how to draw here every day. Why not take a class? Inspired by the displays he passed in the hallways of the MAC, Engerman enrolled in Drawing 1.

He savored his hours in the drawing studio, focused solely on developing skills and “more pure relationships with students.”

In students’ shoes, Engerman gained “a deeper understanding of love of learning”— one of the core tenets of CA — and its limitations. Making a conscious effort not to dominate class discussions during Parkman Howe’s Bible and Journeys courses, Engerman observed animated debates about interpretations of biblical stories and books of The Odyssey. Unfinished class discussions sometimes spilled into

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M U LT I M E D I A

Angelicum, a Pontifical University, Zurlo includes explorations of the sacred spaces in and around Rome, Naples, and her ancestral lands of Otranto and Foggia. Highlights include

and later the Mexican government. Unlike other indigenous peoples, the Yaquis found ways to work with and fight against empirical powers, allowing them to coexist and retain many of their most valued traditions.

Laura Foley ’75 Joy Street Headmistress Press, 2014 Foley crafts a fifth collection of poems, marking the next chapter of her life. As she moves from the grief following the passing of her husband, a surprising new relationship ushers forth a mirthful reconnection to life. Within this newly shared love, Foley celebrates the everyday joys of grown children, pets, and the splendors of her rural Vermont home.

Marian E. Lindberg ’72 The End of the Rainy Season: Discovering My Family’s Hidden Past in Brazil Soft Skull Press, 2015 What could be the harm in researching the origins of the man who provided his surname to three generations to follow?

As a young girl, Lindberg was enraptured by particular aspects of a tale her father often told.

Her grandfather, Walter, led an adventurous life, eventually meeting an untimely end in the Amazon. When pushed for more specific details, her

Raphael Brewster Folsom ’92 The Yaquis and the Empire: Violence, Spanish Imperial Power, and Native Resilience in Colonial Mexico Yale University Press, 2014 Entrenched degrees of determination, fortitude, and willfulness enable the Yaquis to hold on to many of their traditions and substantial tracts of homelands through centuries of interactions with Spanish conquerors

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father could offer no more than the elaborate story, rotely told like a bedtime classic. Through painstaking research, countless follow-ups, and dashing dead ends, it is the realization of an on-the-ground trek to Brazil where the interwoven stories finally not only reveal answers to the questions that have gnawed at her for a lifetime, but radically alter her perspective on family.

Aaron Worth ’89 Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination, 1857–1918 The Ohio State University Press, 2014 As the Victorians expanded their empire through India and South Africa, they also introduced the latest technologies of the time, such as telegraphy, rail, and the telephone.

Intended to spread the message of imperialism, the tools also fed the literary minds of H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan, and others who were shaped by these modern devices. These technologies, and later radio, appeared frequently in their works of fiction.

Ironically, these very communications initiated the stirrings for independence and selfgovernance of the people under Victorian rule, something many authors of the time neglected to mention in their fictional works.

Luanne D. Zurlo ’83 Fifteen Feet From the Pope: Dispatches from a Sabbatical in Rome Archway Publishing, 2014 Zurlo captures life in and around the Vatican through selected daily dispatches written to family and friends during her four-month residence. In addition to detailing her workday life and theology classes at the

attending Christmas Eve Mass with Pope Francis, seeing him in St. Peter’s Square, visiting the tombs below, and viewing the Sistine Chapel with a seasoned guide. All bring her closer to her Italian roots and strengthen an abiding devotion to the Catholic faith.

Also Noted: Frances Jensen P’06 with Amy Ellis Nutt The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults HarperCollins, 2015 Jensen draws on her neurology research, clinical experience, and experiences as a parent of two teenagers to examine the adolescent brain and its wiring.

Have you published a book or released a film or CD in the last year? Please contact martha_kennedy@concordacademy.org and consider donating a copy to the J. Josephine Tucker Library’s collection of alumnae/i authors.

creativetypes

by Library Director Martha Kennedy

FI Life on the Line is a cinema verité documentary that follows a year in the life of 11-year-old Kimberly Torrez, as she and her family hope for permission to return to the United States after unforeseen circumstances trap them in Nogales, Mexico. Living literally steps from the border, Kimberly crosses every day to attend school across the line in Arizona. While Kimberly’s father finds himself unemployed, stricken with hepatitis C, and in need of a liver transplant, Kimberly’s mother desperately awaits the visa that will allow her to live in the United States with her American-born children if her husband dies. A slice-of-life portrait film told through Kimberly’s eyes, Life on the Line illuminates the changing face of America through the story of this one family.

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Sally Rubin ’95 Life on the Line: Coming of Age Between Nations Fine Line Films, 2014

Maud Smith Daudon Class of 1973

ALUM NAE I PRO FILES

by Nancy Shohet West ’84

T H I S

I S S U E

► Maud Smith Daudon Class of 1973 ► Gabe Greenberg Class of 1998 ► Emma Thorne Class of 2007

Building Better Community Finding the balance for business and community in Seattle

► Daniel Coppersmith Class of 2011

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verseeing the needs of a major American city’s business community is about more than just attracting new business and nurturing those that already exist, says Maud Daudon ’73, CEO of Seattle’s Chamber of Commerce. “We believe that we need to make business a problem-solver,” she says.

As an example, she cites last year’s groundbreaking change in the minimumwage laws in Seattle. “We needed to get

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to a place where there was compromise that could work both for businesses and the community. We recognize that businesses are certainly not eager to have the problem of income equality impact their ability to prosper in the future,” she says. And yet income equality benefits the entire community, “which is critical to the health and prosperity of our businesses.”

Overall, the minimum wage issue was “very tough,” Daudon admits.

Alabastro Photography

“Businesses are not going to be enthusiastic about being told how to pay their employees. Minimum wage has been around for a long time as a tenet, and people do support the concept, but to increase it 60 percent was hard for businesses to swallow.

Through engagement and negotiation, we were able to find a middle ground.”

But it wasn’t the only tough issue that Daudon, who served as deputy mayor of Seattle from 1998 to 2001, has addressed since taking on the Chamber of Commerce role in 2012. “An issue that arose when I first started was whether the Chamber would support the statewide initiative for marriage equality. There was a bit of disagreement as to whether it was a business issue at all, but eventually we concluded that it was, because our goal is to draw talent to our region, and the more inclusive

and welcoming you are, the broader the range of talent you can attract.”

It was the kind of complex issue that Daudon has come to appreciate. “We took a lot of time and had a lot of robust conversation around the questions that arose,” she says. “It was really very meaningful.”

In recent months, a major challenge for the Seattle Metro Chamber was getting the Boeing Company to commit to manufacturing its newest aircraft, the 777X, in Seattle. “We worked very hard on a set of tax incentives through the legislature in order to secure Boeing’s commitment to build the plane here,” she says. “It was a way of retaining a very important part of our industry sector and keeping great jobs here — the middle-class jobs that are the envy of the nation.”

Before this role, Daudon was chief

financial officer of the Port of Seattle and CEO of Seattle-Northwest Securities Corporation, which specializes in public financing. That background in finance is one of the factors that makes her such a strong advocate for the business community, whether the issue under discussion is affordable housing, education, or transportation. She also brings to the table a sense of perspective and equanimity, as well as diplomacy.

“The Seattle Chamber comprises 2,200 businesses,” she says. “The challenge is to focus on what the most important things are. You can’t do everything or save every issue. A lot of it is prioritizing. But the fun of it is meeting people, working through issues together, becoming good friends, and building a stronger community as a result.”

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At the Seattle Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting, Maud Daudon interviewed Satya Nadella in his first public appearance in the area after assuming the role of CEO at Microsoft.

Gabe Greenberg Class of 1998

Making Fine Art Finer The behind-the-scenes work of a fine-art printer

V CON CORD AC A DEM Y M AG A ZINE SPRING 2015

isitors to a photography exhibition might well imagine that the artistic judgment involved in the project begins and ends with the photographer taking the picture. But Gabe Greenberg ’98 knows there’s much more to it than that. Through his studio, Greenberg Editions, he works with photographers and other artists to create fine-quality prints of their work for museum exhibitions, galleries, professional portfolios, and books.

He recently helped mount a show for photographer Laurie Simmons at the Jewish Museum in New York. How We See is on exhibit through Aug. 9. “Her work is very contextual,” Greenberg says. “With that show, it was really about establishing the style. I’ve been working with her for over a year and was able to come up with some ideas that she loved. Once we figured out how we wanted to do the first portrait, 20

the rest fell into place. These are portraits that are printed at about 5 by 6 feet, so even larger than life-size. When you walk into the exhibit space, I want them to be as striking as possible.”

Ultimately, Greenberg says, the challenge comes down to making a twodimensional picture appear three-dimensional. “When you view an object or person or landscape, it’s three-dimensional,” he says. “When you shoot it with a camera and print it, you reduce it to two dimensions.

My work is to add three-dimensionality back to the image. That might mean pumping up a background color, softening one image, making another one pop out. That interplay is what adds dimensionality.”

Photographers and artists aren’t always aware of the options Greenberg can provide them, especially in the case of artists still accustomed to developing prints in a darkroom. He might start out suggesting

to print on a textured or watercolor paper instead of the white fiber paper or high gloss that artists expect to use. “We can experiment with wood, with metal, with canvas, and make an image more painterly or more subtle or more interesting,” he says.

Greenberg also teaches at the International Center for Photography. In the spring, he welcomed a group of CA students into his Chelsea studio for a special presentation of his work.

He admits to sometimes fantasizing about doing his own “before and after” exhibit to demonstrate how much his efforts enhance his clients’ artistry. In reality, his job is to remain essentially invisible.

And if he’s hit the mark, Greenberg says, “There’s a huge difference between what comes into my studio and what goes out.

My role is to collaborate with the artists to make their work look even better than it otherwise would.”

Emma Thorne Class of 2007

On Broadway An actress gets her first big break

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f the many phone calls Emma Thorne ’07 received on her 25th

out. “When I was younger, I just wanted to be so good in every role,” she says, referring to theatrical roles both at Concord Academy and at Brown University. “Now, the focus is not so much on being good as on the story being told, the group of people I’m telling it with, how to make the relationships among the different people on stage work artistically. As a student, it was always about being a better actor myself. Now it’s more about being better as part of a group. Relationships on stage are much more interesting to watch than people acting by themselves.”

At this point, Thorne sees her life as a dream come true. But she has little time to dwell on the excitement of the present when there’s a future to think about, as well. With The Elephant Man drawing to a close later this summer, she’s thinking about what’s next. More Broadway? A TV role? A film part? Thorne hopes the answer is yes, to all of the above.

Emma Thorne, front left, with the rest of the cast of The Elephant Man

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Joseph Marzullo/WENN.com

birthday last year, one in particular stood out: A casting director called to inform her that she had landed a role in a Broadway play, barely a year after she moved to New York to embark upon a professional acting career.

Thorne plays the nurse in 101 Productions’ revival of The Elephant Man, starring Bradley Cooper, which played on Broadway from November to February and is now in the middle of a run in London.

“The whole idea of being an actor is different from what you imagine when you’re 16,” Thorne says. “It’s really hard.

There’s a lot of rejection. Just getting an agent is harder than you expect. And even when you do succeed, it’s a lot of work, even for a tiny role. But every role, no matter how small, is a chance to keep learning and improving.”

The same is true of auditioning, she says. “I’m gradually becoming more comfortable with the audition process. You have to see it as this one little moment in which you get to go onstage and perform. I enjoy reading scripts and trying out for shows. It’s still all so new to me. But you also have to be prepared for the fact that the vast majority of the time, the answer [on an audition] is ‘No.’”

One major advantage to being in a Broadway production while auditioning for future parts is that she has a built-in network of colleagues, Thorne says. She draws heavily upon the other actors in The Elephant Man for advice and refers to those colleagues as “an invaluable resource.”

In the months since taking on her first professional role on the stage, Thorne says, she has changed significantly as an actor.

Her focus is more trained on fitting in with an ensemble than on making herself stand

Daniel Coppersmith Class of 2011

Daniel Coppersmith and Ph.D. students from the mental-health epidemiology program at Addis Ababa University, the oldest and most prestigious university in Ethiopia

Research Trials Summer internships shape interest in global health studies

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CON CORD AC A DEM Y M AG A ZINE SPRING 2015

But most of the existing data come from he summer after his freshman year in high-income countries.” As a result, he says, college, Daniel Coppersmith ’11 “understanding of the problem is somewhat did two research internships in the field of mental health. “One was in a lab that limited. There’s a cultural stigma. There’s the fact that suicide is a criminal offense in studied happiness,” he says. “The other was many developing countries and considered in a lab that studied suicide. They were at opposite ends of the spectrum, yet the one I a sin in many religions.” Additionally, the limited resources that exist for research are really enjoyed was the suicide research.” likely to go to a more visible problem like

This paved the way to an ongoing interest in the etiology of suicide. The folHIV/AIDS, Coppersmith says. lowing year, Coppersmith had an internship “What surprised me the most was the at Massachusetts General Hospital in the rigor and the quality of the research that division of global psychiatry. When it drew existed in Ethiopia,” he says. “People have to a close, his mentor suggested that Coppreconceived notions about what might persmith travel to Ethiopia, a country with be the state of scientific research in subsignificantly more data on suicide and affec- Saharan Africa, but this was very humbling. tive disorders than most developing nations. Addis Ababa is a bustling, fast-growing In June of 2014, he departed for Addis metropolitan city. Yes, you see poverty and Ababa on a Royce Fellowship. inequality and people living on the street, but you also see a land of complexity and

“There’s still a real lack of knowledge growth.” about suicidal behaviors in developing countries,” Coppersmith says. “The World

Though much of his work involved Health Organization estimates that approxi- combing through existing studies, he also mately one million people die of suicide had occasional opportunities to shadow every year worldwide, and the majority of colleagues at clinics, where mental illness is suicides happen in low-income countries. frequently the province not of psychiatrists 22

but of nurses or other medical generalists.

“I realized how incredibly difficult it is to do suicide intervention in a place like Ethiopia, but there are two ways to interpret that,” he says. “Either you can find it really upsetting and say, ‘I might as well just go into private practice in New York City,’ or you can say ‘Wow, this is really hard but it is also incredibly rewarding.’”

At the end of his stay in Addis Ababa, one of Coppersmith’s mentors hosted a farewell dinner. “She gave a toast in which she thanked me for never complaining about the food or water or rainy season and always having a positive attitude. I realized that what matters most in global health, just as much as the research, may be how you act and behave and form partnerships,” he says. “And my hope is simply that the work I did there will lay a foundation for more impactful work in suicide prevention in the future.”

In April, Coppersmith was selected for a Fulbright Award: He’ll be studying youth suicide and self-injury at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

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CON CORD AC A DEM Y M AG A ZINE SPRING 2015

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SERIAL THRILLER How a public-radio producer brought old-school reporting to a new medium, captured the attention of millions, and reminded us of a thing or two about good journalism

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hen Sarah Koenig ’86 and Julie Snyder, longtime colleagues at the popular radio program This American Life, set out to find a little experimental side project, they couldn’t have hoped it would come to this. They had decided on a story with what seemed like the right amount of complexity to support a serialized documentary: the now-famous case of the 1999 murder of a Baltimore-area high-school student, Hae Min Lee, and the conviction of her former boyfriend, Adnan Syed, who maintains his innocence.

Koenig had investigated the story for a year before Serial’s pilot aired on Oct. 3, 2014, on the 500-plus public-radio stations that broadcast This American Life (TAL). From there, Koenig and her team reported the story in real time, releasing a new podcast every Thursday. Audience numbers snowballed. By November, when the producers announced there would be no Thanksgiving Day episode, at least some listeners were probably pounding their holiday tables with turkey legs in hungry protest.

“To call something the most popular podcast might seem a little like identifying the tallest leprechaun, but the numbers are impressive for any media platform,” media critic David Carr wrote in the New York Times that week. He reported that Serial had been downloaded or streamed on iTunes more than 5 million times. By December, Saturday Night Live and the website Funny or Die had parodied the show; there were weekly podcasts about the weekly podcast. Serial emerged as a cultural phenomenon — a first, it seems, for a podcast. By April,

downloads hit 80 million, and Serial received a Peabody Award — also a first for a podcast. Kaboom.

“We were astonished by the numbers,” Koenig says.

In some ways it seemed no different from what they had been doing on the radio. Koenig, Snyder, and Dana Chivvis (also from TAL) pored over all the evidence that was presented at trial, plus a mountain of other information that the jury never saw. Koenig spent more than 40 hours on the phone with Syed, as well as friends, family members— anyone who was willing to talk about the murder. Koenig’s premise was that, with enough good reporting, they might be able to settle lingering doubts about the case.

To present their findings, Koenig employed the story­ telling structure that Ira Glass and his TAL staff have patented, with carefully paced elements of tension, revelation, and authentic human sentiment. This recipe is TAL’s “secret sauce,” as Carr said in the panel discussion “Serial and the Podcast Explosion,” at the New School, a week before his death in February.

For the substance under the sauce, Koenig says their goal was to be fair, responsible, and respectful, above all. “The thing that we had in mind — and this is no different than any investigative reporting that anyone would do — is that you have to have high standards. We tried to be very transparent about our reporting, and I think that was different for people. They weren’t used to hearing the process in the way we laid it out,” Koenig says. That process looked like this: “I’m going to tell you guys what I have. Here’s everything I can responsibly present. There’s 25

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by Jennifer McFarland Flint

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Elise Bergeron

CON CORD AC A DEM Y M AG A ZINE SPRING 2015

Syed’s innocence or This technique of putting the guilt might shift. As reporter at the center of the story is EPISODE 1 a result, Read says, reminiscent of the New Journalism, Koenig became the Read says, referring to the avantprotagonist of her own garde movement from the 1960s and “If you’re wondering why I went so nuts story: “When you ’70s, when writers such as Hunter S. on this story versus some other murder think about it, she’s Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and case, the best I can explain is this is the main factor, she’s Joan Didion experimented with literary the one driving the techniques for nonfiction storytelling. the one that came to me. It wasn’t halfway plot. Sure, the story is “Their reporting could be as rigorous across the world or even next door. It about the murder, but and thorough and every bit as factual as came right to my lap. And if I could help the story is really about a conventional news story, but it was her journey trying to much more entertaining to go along with get to the bottom of it, shouldn’t I try?” solve the murder, or at the reporter on the journey as he or she least shed more light figured out what was going on,” Read on it.” Read points to says. “I think what the New Journalists the definition in Storywere showing us is that no reporter craft, by writing coach is objective. Every reporter comes to Jack Hart, where he says a story “begins a story with experience and a point of some stuff that I couldn’t corroborate, with a character who wants something, view. In the New Journalism, the idea so you can’t put that in. But everything struggles to overcome barriers that stand was: Why hide that? Let’s celebrate it.” we were allowed to weigh, here it is, so in the way of achieving it, and moves let’s weigh it and see where we are,” These liberties afforded writers new Koenig says. through a series of actions — the actual ways to engage with their audiences.

For example: “When Sarah figuratively This transparency wound up being story structure — to overcome them.” turns to you and is literally speaking to a hook for listeners. Rich Read ’75, a That, in essence, is the roller-coaster arc you, telling you her thought process, senior writer and two-time Pulitzer of Koenig’s journey through the first seait’s like you’re having a conversation Prize-winner for his reporting at The son of Serial.

Oregonian, says people always want to know how reporters work. “They’re curious about how reporters get their information, how they decide what details are important enough to put in a story, how to be fair and conscientious A former in presenting a story,” he says. “I think newspaper reporter, Sarah was showing people a bit of what Sarah Koenig that’s like. She was bringing them along investigated with her through the whole process, Adnan Syed’s and I think it pulled people in.” case for a Listeners held on tightly as Koenig year before dove down deep, dark reportorial rabrecording the bit holes. She spent significant time first episode investigating whether or not the Best of the podcast Serial.

Buy in Baltimore had a pay phone in 1999. Whether 127 feet into the woods is a reasonable distance for a roadside pit stop. Pulling apart timelines, charting them against cell phone records and changing testimony: “I’m trying to think of an analogy of ... the uselessness of what we’re trying to do by recreating something that doesn’t fit,” she says in episode five. “It’s like trying to plot the coordinates of someone’s dream.”

Small nuances and big questions alike, these inquiries gave listeners the opportunity to hear Koenig weigh facts and process doubts. With each new layer of discovery, her perspective on

represents perhaps the first effort to bring a piece of long-form narrative journalism to the medium. But Serial’s success might have less to do with the fact that it finished first in the race; it showed us what best in class could look like. Even though podcasting is still young enough that there are no rules to dictate what you can or cannot do, Koenig applied all the old-school journalism fundamentals to the project. The team “fact-checked the crap out of every single thing I say,” she said on the New School panel, because of the risk of putting something out there that isn’t true. (For all of its benefits, a listening community of millions would not allow an error to slide by gracefully.)

The grand experiment seems to have paid off for Koenig and her team, who have promised — and crowd-sourced funding for — a second season. The subject of the next series remains up for grabs, much like the future of podcasting itself. But don’t ask Koenig what the secret sauce is. “The truth is that I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about why people tuned in in such numbers,” Koenig says. “What I liked about the fact that so many people listened is that I hope it means that all kinds of other media outlets will think about, instead of getting shorter and quicker and pithier and less, that people will invest in more long-form investigative stuff. Because people will listen. People will follow.

It’s not true that all we have patience for is Twitter. It’s not true, and that makes me happy.”

----------------------------------------

Sarah Koenig ’86 is a producer at This American Life and host and executive producer of Serial. Before working in public radio, she was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun and the Concord Monitor. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2014.

In May 2015, she spoke at CA’s Commencement exercises.

Richard Read ’75 is a senior writer at The Oregonian.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 1999 for his story about the global effects of the Asian financial crisis, in which he tracked a container of french fries from a Washington farm to a McDonald’s in Singapore. In 2001, he was on a team of four reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their reporting on the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

EPISODE 6 “I see many problems with the state’s case. But then, I see many problems with Adnan’s story, too. And so I start to doubt him, I talk to him and talk to him, and I start to doubt my doubts. And then I worry that I’m a sucker — that I don’t know. That’s the cycle.”

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with her,” Read says. “It reminds me of House of Cards, when Kevin Spacey’s character is confiding in you, which is also unusual for a TV drama, and you love it because you get this inside view into how he thinks.”

Certain aspects of New Journalism live on in television, documentary film, and print, but at least in the case of longform narratives, “the industry has moved very much in the opposite direction,” Read says. “Nowadays everything is driven by clicks on a story.” Word counts, like newsrooms, have contracted. Readers are now consumers, gulping down their news content in 140-character morsels on a cell phone, while waiting for the subway and texting a friend.

Sarah Bartlett ’73, dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, says the prevalence of these devices and mobile communications has “transformed the way we consume media. It’s much easier for this generation to listen to a podcast while they work out or walk down the street than it is for them to sit down and read a magazine piece for 30 minutes,” she says. “There’s a lot of multitasking that goes on.”

These attitudes toward technology are reflected in the audio program at CUNY’s journalism school, which has grown exponentially in recent years in response to interest in podcasting as a form of expression. Students are “drawn to the podcast format because it’s flexible and open-ended. It’s a voice that they can express that they wouldn’t be able to in other formats. There’s no limit on what you can do or where you can go with your reporting and your narrative,” Bartlett says. “That’s what’s so exciting about it.”

It’s precisely what interested Koenig at the outset of this project: “In terms of the thing that I wanted to do — which is make a serialized documentary, a weekby-week, tune-in-next-week thing — that’s very hard to program on the radio. You’d be asking people to tune in at a specific time each week. For the radio, every episode has to be a uniform length, or it gets hard for stations to program it. So it offered a lot of flexibility and freedom in that way, where we could do anything we want.”

For all the experimentation going on in podcasting today — and there is more and more of it every day — Serial

Sarah Bartlett ’73 is the dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. She joined CUNY in 2002, as the Bloomberg Chair of Business Journalism at Baruch College.

She has worked for the New York Times, Fortune, BusinessWeek, and Oxygen Media. She has published hundreds of articles and two books. She spoke at CA as the 2014 Davidson Lecturer and gave a CATalk in Boston called “Whither Journalism.”

by Eric Nguyen ’00

THE FINISH LINE An ultrarunner confronts the physical and mental challenges lining the trail of a 100-mile race

I REACH the southern end of the outand-back race course; 13 hours in, I’ve covered 67.5 miles. My headlamp illuminates a narrow section of trail ahead of me, and as I near the aid station table, someone approaches from my left. I recognize the maroon puffy L.L. Bean jacket before I realize it’s my wife. With difficulty, I muster a smile and update her on my progress. The whole interaction is one big blur. I attend to the tasks I need to complete, refilling my water bottles and grabbing some food, then continue my journey. Behind me, the stillness of the night swallows the commotion and lights of the aid station, and I am alone again.

••••

CON CORD AC A DEM Y M AG A ZINE SPRING 2015

For years after my two marathons, I mused about ultra­running but never got In November of 2005, I ran the Philavery far. In the spring of 2012, I ran my delphia Marathon, my first foray into first trail race, a 10-miler in the Blue Hills long-distance running. The next fall, I ran outside of Boston. Rocks, roots, steep 26.2 miles again, this time at the Marine climbs, sketchy descents—I loved it all, Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C. In and within 24 hours of finishing that race, the midst of all my training, I discovered I signed up for another. I headed to ConDean Karnazes’s Ultramarathon Man. I necticut to run the Soapstone Mountain read and learned as much as I could about Race. That course humbled me in many this crazy, eat-pizza-on-the-run guy and ways, but I was hooked. Over the next began to have ideas of my own. I wasn’t few months, the Blue Hills became my very fast, but I certainly could run for a second home, and the Trail Animals Runlong time. I decided that I, too, would run ning Club became my second family. ultramarathons.

One day a colleague pulled me aside and •••• ultimately changed my running trajectory.

He’d been trying to qualify for the Western •••• It’s now past midnight; I recently crossed States 100, the holy grail of ultrarunning, the threshold between Saturday and SunThere’s a desire to confront the self, to and he hoped to have his name in the race day, and yesterday morning seems like a know and understand it in a way that lottery that December. “If I get in, I want distant past. I remember feeling so fresh, can only happen after removing all that is you to be my pacer,” he told me. That was fast, light, able to continue indefinitely. unnecessary, when one has completely all I needed to hear. I knew that I needed The seconds, minutes, and hours kept disconnected from all else that exists, to begin logging miles, and I needed to ticking by on my watch, and my legs carwhen one knows no attachments, when figure out what this whole ultramarathon ried me along. I remember telling myself the past stays in the past and the future thing was all about. that I was running too fast, that I was doesn’t yet exist, when the present is too far ahead of my goal time. I needed all there is. And in that present, there is •••• to slow down, but I didn’t. And now, all the self, stripped raw of pride and ego, I want is to lie down and take a nap. I engaged in its own battle of existence I started power-hiking around mile 70, direct my headlamp at the edges of the and survival, in which moving forward when my quads unexpectedly tightened trail, seeing nothing but trees, bushes, and and reaching some arbitrary terminus up. Despite many hours of training, which darkness. And then, just as I spot a bench is seemingly all that matters. The body included back-to-back long runs, night runs, and contemplate a break, a cold drizzle passes over land and through time, in hill repeats, and speed sessions, nothing begins. I know better than to stop now. fully prepared me for what I experienced daylight and darkness. The mind travels Grudgingly, I continue. its own journey of highs and lows, joy and during this race. I had been so certain that I wanted to run this race solo, but sadness, confidence and doubt, courage •••• and fear, self-love and self-loathing. now, at 3 a.m. and 83 miles in, I begin to question my decision. My left ankle has 28

Bonnie Nguyen

••••

my world has shrunk, defined by a circle whose radius is traced by the beam of my headlamp. I’ve named every section of the course, the result of a game I’ve been playing all night to keep my mind occupied and to reduce the distance between recognizable landmarks. There is the tunnel, the hill, pothole city, the swamp, and pumpkin bridge, a wild display of jacko’-lanterns lit with scented candles, one of which smells like a teenage boy who has just discovered AXE body spray. But now that list needs additional refinement.

I begin to walk from one tree to another, just 10 to 20 yards separating them. Why am I doing this again?

Twenty-seven hours after he began, he was a 100-mile finisher. Having seen firsthand the effort it takes to complete the distance, I decided to give it another go.

••••

I reach mile 90 and look at my watch. It’s 5:07 a.m. I’ve been out here for 20 hours.

With 10 miles remaining, I know now that I can complete the race, and that thought nearly breaks me. I plead with myself, “I know I can finish, so what’s the point in actually doing so? What do I have to prove?” My mind conjures game after game to play with me, yet through sheer will, I persuade myself to keep moving. At mile 92, still questioning the purpose of all of this, my mind again entertains the idea of a nap. I look around and, seeing no one, I sit down at the base of a large tree.

I lean against the tree’s trunk, put my head back, and close my eyes. Sleep enters my body quickly, too quickly, and the shock of it snaps me awake. I yell at myself to stand up and continue. I rise slowly, clawing at bits of bark to hoist myself up, and I hobble on my way. I will finish this race.

I made my first attempt at 100 miles in June of 2013. I went in healthy, feeling confident, and ready to burn up the course.

But Mother Nature had other things in store for us. Torrential downpours in the days before the race transformed the •••• course into a mucky mess, at times requiring thigh-deep mud and water crossings. I Earlier in the year, my friend Jeff ran covered the first 25 miles in five hours but his first 100-mile race, and I paced him slowed considerably in the ensuing miles. starting at the race’s halfway point. We An inflamed Achilles tendon eventually moved at a decent pace from miles 50 reduced me to walking, and soon after, my to 70, a mix of running and walking. But knees and hips began to bother me, too. I then Jeff’s Achilles tendon tightened to was defeated, and I gave up after 53 miles. the point that he could barely run anymore.

Our fleet-footed trek became long and As an adult, I rarely put myself in a posiarduous, slow and painful. I had no idea tion to fail, and so I struggled to come to what was going through Jeff’s head, but terms with the race’s outcome. I created there were so many moments when the all sorts of reasons why I didn’t finish, but thought of power-hiking 30 miles through simply put, I did not possess the mental the night made me want to stop. I stayed When not thinking up creative ways to strength to finish what I had started. with him, though, and we focused on teach math, Eric Nguyen ’00 enjoys trail making forward progress. He earned a running, rock climbing, cycling, completnew personal record with every step he ing crosswords, and watching Jeopardy!

•••• with his wife, Bonnie. This year, Nguyen took beyond 50 miles, the farthest he aims to run every street in Natick, Mass., had ever run before that day. I will always I approach mile 90. I’ve been walking for remember the look of relief and pride on where he lives. Follow his progress at almost five hours in the dark, and I’m no his face when he crossed that finish line. longer having fun. Over the last 19 hours, http://bit.ly/runnatick.

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started to act up, the soft tissue at the joint feels bruised, battered, and swollen.

I think that maybe I should have lined up a pacer, someone to run with me and help take my mind off of the pain, misery, and the occasional bouts of self-loathing. But then again, I knew this would happen. This is what I signed up for, and I want to face it all head-on, by myself.

THE LAST

BEST HOPE

When a stranger’s decision to donate bone marrow gives a patient life-saving hope — by Jennifer McFarland Flint —

I CON CORD AC A DEM Y M AG A ZINE SPRING 2015

t had been an otherwise average Tuesday afternoon for David Cavell ’02, a newly minted attorney at his desk in Boston’s financial district, until he got the call. “Is this the same David Cavell who registered with the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation at Tufts in 2005?” the caller asked. At first, Cavell had no recollection of any of it. Then shards of memories came back to him: a cheek swab, a free cookie, maybe three or four minutes of his time buried nine years in the past. “It seemed unlikely that it wasn’t me, so I said, ‘Yes, why?’” From the other end of the call came the response: “Because I think we need you to save someone’s life.”

Until that call in February 2014, asking if he would consider donating bone marrow, Cavell had been busy balancing life as a first-year associate and preparing for his wedding that summer. The 29-year-old had never spent a day in the hospital. The phone call seemed

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“surreal,” Cavell says. “It just wasn’t something that I ever expected to be asked. I didn’t understand the first thing about what the process would mean or what I’d be asked to do. In many ways it felt moving and exciting, and in other ways a little bit daunting.”

In the weeks that followed, Cavell learned about cancers of the blood. He absorbed survival and mortality statistics. Through it all, he learned nothing about his match, except that he or she had some form of blood disease. The anonymity did nothing to hamper his empathy: “It was clear to me that I’d go through with it as soon as they told me I was a match for someone,” he says.

The procedure to harvest his bone marrow took place in March 2014. During his recovery, friends showered him with letters, an effort his fiancée orchestrated, and personal visits. When the publicradio station WBUR ran a story about his donation,

iro on-Schap

Cavell’s inbox swelled with messages of thanks.

Among them, Peter Jennings, from CA’s College Counseling Office, and Patty Hager, who was academic dean during Cavell’s time on campus, shared their families’ histories with bone marrow donations.

The outpouring of support surprised him. “I feel like all I did was be born with the right genes, and the doctors took care of the rest,” he says. The message from Hager struck a nerve, though, and helped him understand the bigger picture. In 1997, she explained, her own brother’s life had been saved by a bone marrow transplant. “Really, I have no words to express what it means to me that you made this donation,” she wrote. Hager had been a particularly important influence on him as a teenager.

“Hearing from Patty and how moved she was by it, someone I respected so deeply—that was one of the moments that really helped me understand what this meant,” Cavell says.

T

here are many different indications for bone marrow transplants—from sickle cell anemia to leukemias and relapsed lymphomas—and the prognosis and process vary widely. The procedure is most invasive for patients with a malignancy. “In those cases, we don’t typically use bone marrow transplants unless we feel like they’re going to be the last or best option,” says Peter de Blank ’92, who practices pediatric hematology and oncology at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

To help families understand the goal of a bone marrow transplant for those patients, de Blank employs a garden-variety metaphor: Flowers are the healthy cells, and the weeds are leukemic cells.

“So some flowers are growing, as some of your cells are normal, but they’re being choked out by the weeds,” he says. Chemotherapy is like spraying weed killer on the whole garden, hoping to kill more weeds than flowers. “But think of a stem-cell transplant as uprooting all the plants in that garden— the flowers and the weeds—and planting a whole new garden from another source,” de Blank says.

The new garden, with all of its healthy flowers and good soil, is from the donor’s healthy bone marrow. “And hopefully, if you plant enough of the new garden, it also chokes off any new little tiny weed seeds.”

Those life-saving cells can come from a variety of sources—the patient’s own bone marrow, a donation from a family member, or an unrelated donor—depending on a number of factors. For patients requiring a donor, seven out of 10 do not find a suitable match within their family, according to the registry Be the Match. Peter Jennings’s mother, Christine, found herself within that 70 percent when she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, which affects the blood and bone marrow, in the summer of 2000.

It was right around that time that Peter Jennings had moved from Los Angeles to start a job at CA, joining the rest of his family back East.

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M. Davids

DAVID CAVELL ’02 (center) was living the life of a happy, healthy 29-year-old in his first job out of law school and preparing for his wedding when he was asked to donate bone marrow.

“It was clear to me that I’d go through with it as soon as they told me I was a match for someone,” he says.

DAVID CAVELL ’02 Bone Marrow Donor “What for me what was an overnight in a hospital and a week out of work, to them and their loved ones was a life-altering experience.”

PETER de BLANK ’92 Pediatric Hematology-Oncology Physician at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine “I’m on the registry, but I’ve never been called. I hope that someday I will be.”

CON CORD AC A DEM Y M AG A ZINE SPRING 2015

His mother’s health had been declining for some time before her diagnosis. For Christine, who had been a nurse for many years, the uncertainty of not knowing what she was facing proved almost as challenging as the physical symptoms. The certainty of a diagnosis, particularly given her access to some of the world’s best physicians and hospitals here in Boston, was significant. “For my mother, that was a moment that ‘It seemed to me changed her outlook,” Jennings says. like such a beautiful

The next big moment arrived illustration of modern when a donor was found, a gift for which the family felt incredibly lucky. medicine, which is “But then there’s the debate,” Jennings both making the says: “Do you go on living like this, or world smaller and our do you get a transplant?” For Christine sense of possibility Jennings, the risks of a transplant were significant and the guarantees were few, larger.’ but the procedure also represented the — David Cavell ’02 only hope for a cure.

The transplant was scheduled for December. After what is called the conditioning treatment, when every last abnormal cell in the body—as well as the patient’s immune system—is destroyed by chemotherapy and radiation, even the smallest infection could be dangerous. So the Jennings family threw themselves into the necessary steps of making the home as clean as a hospital isolation unit. “Then, in early December, we got a call saying the donor had decided not to donate that month,” Jennings says. “There was a complication 32

PATTY HAGER Former Academic Dean “The experience of having your brother’s life saved by a stranger — and a lot of supremely skilled, brave doctors and nurses — takes you beyond language.”

in their life.” The family felt disappointed that their plans had been derailed, their hopes diminished.

But the donor never backed out, and fortunately Christine had not yet started the chemo and radiation. The procedure was moved to early January. In the end the family was able to enjoy a wonderful holiday together, Jennings says—both his parents, brother, sister, and her son, the family’s first grandchild. “In a funny way, it ended up being a blessing,” he says.

W

hen Patty Hager thinks back to the day before her brother checked into the hospital to begin his conditioning treatment, her voice quiets.

Kip Cleaver, who had always been strong and fit— until his bolt-from-the-blue diagnosis a few months before—took his children ice skating on Macones Pond in Concord. His children, who were 7 and 9, glided along the ice under a January sky, in the happy company of cousins. “He’s a beautiful skater,” says Hager. “And you can just imagine what it’s like to watch your brother skate around the pond with his children, knowing that the next day would be the beginning of a very risky procedure.”

The next morning, he walked under his own power into the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to begin a course of chemotherapy and radiation that would bring him “to the brink of death,” Hager says. For a patient like Cleaver, with chronic myelogenous leukemia, the goal was to apply the heaviest dose of treatment the body can

Eighteen years after his successful bone marrow transplant, Cleaver and his family still celebrate January 17 as his second birthday — the date his transplanted stem cells began reproducing and cured him.

“That’s the moving piece of it for me: just to see the hope that comes along with that bag.”

withstand; the bone marrow transplant, which also came from an anonymous donor, then restores the patient’s immune system. The process was harrowing.

Hager and her family would take turns in Cleaver’s room in the isolation ward at the hospital, so that he would never be alone. “In the evenings, I would scoop up my papers from CA and make my way to Kip’s room at the Brigham. Often he had no idea I was even there, he was in a really bad place.

And I would cry, while trying to get a little bit of work done.” The tears, she says, were “partly out of seeing what he was going through, and partly out of gratitude that he had a donor.”

Hager spent many of her hours in the hospital trying to imagine who the anonymous donor was.

The wave of gratitude overwhelmed her at times, and it was frustrating to have no way to channel it, she says. Confidentiality policies limit the extent and timing of communication between the donor and recipient to protect both parties’ privacy. Some registries allow anonymous letters within the first year, others require both parties to wait a year or more for any contact and then, only if both consent.

A

CHRISTINE JENNINGS Mother of Peter Jennings

PETER JENNINGS College Counseling Office

s he prepared to go through with his donation, Cavell thought about the anonymous individual at the other end of the transaction. “I assumed that whoever this person was, it was likely someone who had been stricken by what I assumed to be a long-term illness or at least a terrifying

A former nurse, Jennings was treated at Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center in Boston.

The nurses there “are just some of the toughest, bravest people I’ve met,” says Peter Jennings.

diagnosis. It was someone who, as I imagined it, didn’t have that many options left,” he says. As he was learning, the procedure takes a significant toll on the recipient and is not one to be undertaken lightly.

“So I knew that somewhere in the world, someone was very sick and needed this procedure very badly.

And if I could help, I needed to help.”

After a thorough vetting, Gift of Life, a bone marrow registry that tries to diversify the donor pool by recruiting individuals with Jewish heritage, flew Cavell to Washington, D.C., for the procedure.

A surgeon harvested about 10 ounces of bone marrow from his lower back. He spent the night in the hospital and wound up missing eight days of work. As he slowly regained his strength, he reflected on the fate of his stem cells: He imagined them being rushed from the hospital in Washington and put on a plane to a patient, who might be anywhere in the world. “It seemed to me like such a beautiful illustration of modern medicine,” Cavell says, “which is both making the world smaller and our sense of possibility larger.”

P

eter Jennings was with his mother the night her donor cells arrived at the hospital. Especially after the grueling chemo and radiation that precede it, there is an unexpected simplicity to the transplant itself: “It arrives in a little bag,” Jennings says, “like an IV bag, and they hang it up and plug it into your port. From there it just goes into the bloodstream and does its magic.” The patient is fully awake 33

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KIP CLEAVER Brother of Patty Hager

CON CORD AC A DEM Y M AG A ZINE SPRING 2015

throughout the process and, from appearances, might as well be receiving something as banal as a bag of saline.

Belying the simplicity of that little plastic bag is what it represents to the patient and his or her family. “That moment for me was a real step forward in being hopeful. That’s when you feel the power of the gift that someone has given. It’s just amazing to think about how those donations change someone’s whole ‘You can’t really outlook. That’s the moving piece of it process having a for me,” says Jennings, “just to see the gift from a stranger hope that comes along with that bag.” like that.’

The day of transplantation is known as “day zero,” the patient’s — Peter Jennings second birthday. Celebrations, though, are muted; hopes are guarded. Patients have to wait as much as a month to see if the new stem cells will start reproducing, which is the next major milestone, know as engraftment.

They’re also waiting to see whether the newly transplanted cells will attack the patient’s own body, a complication known as graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). For patients receiving cells from an unrelated donor, the chances of developing GVHD run between 60 and 80 percent.

Christine Jennings was in the hospital for about 40 days before succumbing to another risk of the procedure: complications from the toxicity of the anti-rejection drugs. Even if it ultimately wasn’t successful, Jennings says the donation was invaluable. “There’s that moment when you’ve lost a family member, yet you know that they’ve had every advantage along the way—that’s powerful,” he says. “Knowing someone with no relationship to the family was willing to go through that, without really knowing what a gift they’ve given.” There were conversations about the donation that his mother wasn’t able to have, in part because of her fragility at the time and “in part because you can’t really process having a gift from a stranger like that,” Jennings says.

E

ven now, 18 years later, Kip Cleaver’s mother, now 89, still picks up the phone every January 17 to call Richard Tack, the donor who gave her son a second birthday. The two families met for the first time about a year after the transplant—a year full of physical and emotional turmoil for the family. Cleaver’s parents invited Tack and his family

34

PATTY HAGER with husband Brad and their daughters, Emily Hager ’06 and Annie Hager ’08, on the Mackenzie River. Below, Patty’s brother, Kip Cleaver (left), met his donor, Richard Tack, in person for the first time a year after surviving his bone marrow transplant.

How You Can Help percent of registered donors are Caucasian, and the other is that the more complicated your ancestry, the more difficult it is to find someone whose markers match yours.

Families who have been through the experience of looking for a match often become advocates for donor drives, in an attempt to give patients greater access to donors.

During his pediatric training, de Blank organized a donor drive in predominantly African-American neighborhoods of Philadelphia.

CA helped Hager’s family

organize a donor drive in the MAC on campus, just one of the ways colleagues supported her through the experience.

Peter Jennings and both of his siblings joined the bone marrow registry after their mother’s death; his brother has donated twice. Jennings says he’s still hoping to get the call.

Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation giftoflife.org

Be the Match bethematch.org

to their home in Maine. “You can imagine the kind of celebration that was,” Hager says. “Richard has always been a no-big-deal, I’d-do-it-again, very low-key, modest guy about it. But meanwhile, our family was profoundly affected by what Kip went through. To have this transformative experience of his survival, to have this new life given to us, it’s astonishing,” she says.

“But for many donors, I think their response is, like, you’re kidding, right?”

He and Cleaver both have two children, born in the same years, but beyond that the families “don’t have a huge amount in common in many ways,” Hager says. “Yet there’s always been a very strong connection and concern for him and his family.”

When Tack’s son, Richard, served two tours in Iraq with the Marines (for which he was awarded a Purple Heart and the Navy Commendation Medal for valor), “my family was obviously very interested in his safety,” Hager says.

‘Our family was profoundly affected by what Kip went through. To have this transformative experience of his survival, to have this new life given to us, it’s astonishing.’

— Patty Hager

D

You can join the registry with a simple mail-order cheek swab. Most people who join the registry are never called upon to donate; 90 percent of those who are called are between the ages of 18 and 44. Fore more information, contact a bone marrow registry, such as those listed below.

avid Cavell passed the one-year anniversary of his donation in March; no word, so far, from the patient who received his stem cells. But a month after the procedure, the registry notified him that the recipient was showing no signs of rejection and seemed to be on the road to recovery. “Which left me speechless,” he says. “To know that somewhere

in the world there’s a person, maybe with a family or friends, finally celebrating after a long time of not having much to celebrate: That was deeply touching.

There was an overwhelming sense of relief.”

Reflecting on the experience, Cavell says he was struck by the notion that “this opportunity had come out of nowhere, that this is an easy way to make a profound impact on another person, another family, or for a complete stranger.” It also surprised him to realize that, while he initially thought he had no connection to leukemia or blood cancers, “the more I heard about these diseases, I realized that everyone in my community had been affected by them.” He learned that his own grandfather had died of leukemia before Cavell was born and before a donor was found.

These families tend to feel a natural affinity toward one another, like members of a heartbreaking club to which they’d rather not have paid dues. It’s why Hager and Jennings, like others in their shoes, can’t help but reach out and give thanks when they hear a story like Cavell’s, even if they can’t quite communicate the fullness of what it means to them. “When I hear about donors like David, I think they know what it means to the families,” Jennings says. “But then again, I don’t think they really do.”

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F

inding a bone marrow donor is much more complicated than matching blood types. A patient’s best hope is to find someone whose human leukocyte antigen (HLA) is a close match for his or her own. HLA is a marker found on most cells in your body. The heartbreaking fact is that “if you’re Caucasian, you have a substantially greater chance of finding a donor than if you are an African American or any other ethnicity,” says Peter de Blank. There are two reasons for that: One is that 60

IN MEMORIAM

b Susan Whitmore Allan ’59 Joyce Bisbee Andrews ’49 sister of the late Alice Bisbee Zamore ’42 and cousin of Margaret Winsor Stubbs ’48 Jessica Stone Baker ’92 Eleanore Barnes mother of Julia Preston ’69, former mother-in-law of Jenny Childs Preston ’67, aunt of Margaret Preston Beck ’67 and Marion Preston ’69, and grandmother of Zoe Preston Spring ’01 and Nicola Preston ’05 John Burr father of Evelyn Burr Brignoli ’62 Robert Cipriani father of Timothy Cipriani ’86 and Karen Cipriani ’87 Olivia Constable ’78 Richard Cook husband of Helen Locke Cook ’56, son-in-law of the late Mary Trumbull Locke ’35, and brother-in-law of Miriam Locke ’64 James Culbert grandfather of Samantha Culbert ’15 and Allison Culbert ’17 Anne McLean Dorr ’57 John Denardo father of Lisa Denardo Tingue ’73 and Nancy Denardo ’76, and grandfather of Julia Denardo Roney ’08 CON CORD AC A DEM Y M AG A ZINE SPRING 2015

Douglas Dunbar father of Amy Dunbar ’74 and Jean Dunbar Knapp ’77 Abbott Fenn brother of Margaret Fenn Borden ’42 and the late Edith Fenn Hanly ’40, and former husband of Gale Hurd ’61

36

Sarah Garth mother of Susan Garth Stott ’59 Samuel Goldwyn father of Elizabeth Goldwyn ’94 and grandfather of Stephanie Burton ’97 Georgia Gosnell mother of Robin Gosnell Travers ’73 and grandmother of Philip Gosnell ’10 Virginia Tripp Gray ’45 Jocelyn Fleming Gutchess ’38 Cedric Harvey, Jr. ’97 George Hebb, Jr. father of Sarah Hebb Carpenter ’83 Anita Wilson Norseen Hooker mother of Hannah Norseen McClennen ’62 and Elizabeth Norseen Boritt ’63, aunt of Amanda Wilson Curtin ’68, Cynthia Wilson ’71, and Christina Wilson ’74, and grandmother of Alexandra McClennen Dohan ’85 and Aaron McClennen ’88 Robert Huntoon father of Amy Huntoon ’70, Laura Huntoon ’73, Irene Huntoon ’75, Dinah Huntoon ’78, and Sarah Huntoon ’84 Raouf Ismail father of Lara Ismail ’92 Ati Gropius Johansen ’44 Bruce Kafka grandfather of Neta Kafka ’18 June Koss, former faculty Benjamin Kripke father of Andrew Kripke ’82 and Jeffrey Kripke ’85 Elizabeth Faulkner Latuch ’50 sister of Lucy Faulkner Davison ’52 Shelagh Muyskens mother of Sarah Muyskens ’72, Alison Muyskens ’78, and John Muyskens ’78

Svend Nielsen husband of Caroline Craven Nielsen ’59 and brother-in-law of the late Olga Craven Huchingson ’55 Onder Olcay husband of Phebe Miller ’67 and son-in-law of the late Mary-Dixon Sayre Miller ’40 Lucy Richardson Rand ’40 sister of Laura Richardson Payson ’47 George Reichenbach father of Heidi Reichenbach Harring ’78, uncle of William Kingsbury ’82, and brother-in-law of Judith Littlefield Batesman ’54 Phillip Seibold-Leaf son of Elspeth Wooster-Bigelow Seibold-Leaf ’89 Monica Wulff Steinert ’57 grandmother of Tessa Steinert-Evoy ’10 and Sophia Steinert-Evoy ’13 Edgar Stephens husband of Muriel Desloovere ’67 and brother-in-law of Joelle Desloovere Schon ’69 Larry Strasburger grandfather of Gabriel Strasburger ’16 Elizabeth Sweeny grandmother of Quinn Sweeny ’12 John Taylor, Jr. grandfather of Alexander Berry ’17 Margaret Peters Urquhart ’41 Judith Harris Watriss ’58 sister of Susan Harris Curtin ’56 and stepmother of Rebecca Watriss ’95 George West husband of Susan Kemble West ’62

• 1920 • 1930 • 1940 • 1950 • 1960 • 1970 • 1980 • 1990 • 2000 • 2010 •

CIRCA Readers, please pull up a chair and tell us what you can about the people pictured here.

Do you see familiar faces or places?

Please send names, dates, stories, or caption suggestions for the images seen here to magazine@ concordacademy.org. We’ll publish select responses in the next issue.

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