CA Magazine Winter 2008

winter 2008

Remember When?

Karen Mandelbaum ’07 Untitled, Oil on Masonite, Painting 3, 2006

C O N C O R D A CA D E M Y M I SS I O N Concord Academy engages its students in a community animated by a love of learning, enriched by a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, and guided by a covenant of common trust.

Students and teachers work together as a community of learners dedicated to intellectual rigor and creative endeavor. In a caring and challenging atmosphere, students discover and develop talents as scholars, artists, and athletes and are encouraged to find their voices.

The school is committed to embracing and broadening the diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, and talents of its people. This diversity fosters respect for others and genuine exchange of ideas.

Common trust challenges students to balance individual freedom with responsibility and service to a larger community. Such learning prepares students for lives as committed citizens.

winter 2008

Editor Aaron Freedman ’08

Gail Friedman Managing Editor

Tara Bradley Design

Irene Chu ’76 Editorial Board

Tara Bradley Director of Communications

Gail Friedman Associate Director of Communications

Pam Safford Associate Head for Enrollment and Planning

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Carol Shoudt

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Major Gifts Officer

Lucille Stott Advancement Writer

Meg Wilson

F E A T U R E S

Director of Advancement Director of Alumnae/i Programs

Editorial Interns

Samuel Kim ’08 Alexis von Kunes Newton ’08 Christeen Savinovich ’08 Photography Interns

Henry Butman ’08 Clara Dennis ’08 Jiyoon Lee ’09 Write us

Concord Academy Magazine 166 Main Street Concord, Massachusetts 01742 (978) 402-2200 magazine@concordacademy.org www.concordacademy.org © 2008 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.

9 The Upside of Adversity Bill Frusztajer, 2007 Davidson Lecturer

16 Remember When?

Evolving Traditions and a Rich History Create Timeless CA Memories

by Gail Friedman

D E P A R T M E N T S

INCLUDING:

In The Beginning: 2007 Convocation Speech

by Sylvia Mendenhall Leapin’ Lizards

by Ingrid von Dattan Detweiler ’61 Top This: The Class of 2002 Ring Hunt

by Maria Harris ’02

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Message from the Head of School

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Letters to the Editor

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Campus News

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Alumnae/i Profiles Jonathan Nelson ’76 Penelope Weadock Slough ’46 Sophronia Camp ’67 Betsy Blume ’82

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Alumnae/i Association Update

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Arts

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Athletics 2007 Fall Highlights Profile: Coach Tim Hult

31 A New Arena for Concord Academy Land Purchase Will Solve Many of CA’s Space Problems

by Lucille Stott

34 Who’s New?

by Nancy Shohet West ’84

Meet the Latest Additions to CA’s Board of Trustees

36 Why Access Matters

by John McGarry, Director of Financial Aid

38 CA Bookshelf

by Martha Kennedy, Library Director

by Gail Friedman 48

In Memoriam

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Elizabeth “Billie” Julier Wyeth ’76

message from the head of school

An Innovative Take on Tradition

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CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

or most of my adult life, I have been keenly aware of the power of traditions. I grew up in a home where our family celebrated our national roots and the traditions that were part of our heritage. Then, when I left home to attend college in the 1960s, I discovered that traditions that had functioned for decades, if not centuries, were coming under scrutiny and criticism—from “traditional” views of gender and race to established religious, moral, and political practices. These challenges to the established order caused significant strain on many people, but they were exhilarating to an eighteen-year-old working on forging his own values and beliefs.

Throughout that socially turbulent era and into the 1970s, when I began teaching history, many of my early beliefs were changed or influenced by what I was seeing and experiencing. But there was one belief that never wavered, and it concerned what makes education work.

While a variety of experimental teaching methods began to supplant older styles, I never stopped believing that the core of a great education consists of a teacher and a student learning together. I had valued the close relationships I had had with my teachers, and now I was enjoying such relationships with my own students. For me it was—and still is—about inspiring each other to learn for learning’s sake.

So when I first came to CA and observed the school in action, I knew it was committed to one of the most important traditions in education, and one that would not yield to the whims of fashion: the student-teacher bond. Now that I have experienced life at CA for eight years, I see the larger context in which this bond is allowed to form. It has to do with the school’s special relationship to traditions. CA students and faculty value established patterns of thought and action and seek to learn why they have been

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effective. Yet the CA community has always been known for its open and questioning environment, which often leads to the questioning of traditions and the breaking of patterns.

This coexistence of tradition and innovation enriches all that goes on here.

CA traditions connect today’s students to yesterday’s students, all of whom share many common feelings about what it’s like to learn at CA. These shared practices also provide students with the assurance that there is a timeless quality to their learning—a universal aspect to what they do here. On the other hand, I enjoy seeing students question what we all might consider “givens.” It’s this questioning that leads them either to a deeper understanding of what is important or to a firm determination to make change happen.

Both of these impulses—the desire to feel part of something bigger than themselves and the desire to have an impact—are important qualities of an education that lasts for life.

As you read this issue of the magazine, know that its theme of CA traditions captures what is best about the school, its habit of looking outward as well as inward, of looking back as well as forward. The stories of creative adaptations of cherished traditions might also remind you of why the chameleon is still our mascot.

I hope you will enjoy the issue and that you let us know of any traditions we may have left out that were important to your own CA experience.

Guess whose core beliefs were influenced by the socially turbulent sixties and seventies: Head of School Jake Dresden’s (pictured with son Josh in 1972).

Tim Morse

magazine that Dr. Teichgraeber is retiring and enjoying Alex Berlin’s apt tribute, I’m offering a hail and farewell from another grateful student.

Dr. T is the best teacher I’ve ever had.

His classes inspired me to make a life grounded on words. Now a rhetoric and composition professor, I write about how to help students think with complexity and craft with care. And so, since Dr. Teichgraeber is one of my role models as a teacher, I’ve been pondering his pedagogical frameworks. What is the stuff his magic is made of? Yet I can’t pinpoint anything, only describe my own experiences.

First of all, Dr. Teichgraeber was the first English teacher who pushed me to the limit. Meticulous, maddening, and mesmerizing, he assigned hard reading and expected students to understand it.

The texts he chose grabbed wordobsessed adolescents. Like most teenagers, we percolated with angst, desires, silliness, and rebellion. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for example, reflected my internal muddle. In a way, I felt the poem mirrored my attempts to forge a transformed (if tenuous) whole, blending my past with the new experiences, concrete knowledge, and ways of thinking that CA offered.

Then there were those essay comments. I was used to a short evaluation scribbled on the top of a paper. But the polyphiloprogenitive Dr. T interacted

with our efforts. We grinned at the pictures even while cringing at the words.

The good Doctor once called my writing either “torpid” or “turgid.” It stung. I’ve struggled for clear, precise, and vigorous prose since. Countless college students have heard me squawk “Omit needless words!” like a parrot raised on Strunk and White. They might not thank Dr. T for it, but I do.

A quotation from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (Teichgraeber required reading) has stuck with me for twenty-eight years. Frye writes, “We begin to wonder if we cannot see literature . . . as spread out in conceptual space from some kind of center that criticism could locate.” He’s arguing that only through systematic criticism can we tease out the countless converging patterns in “masterpieces” (Frye’s word)—patterns I’d sensed but couldn’t articulate. Literature study didn’t have to be mushy! According to Frye, it should be as “coherent and progressive as the study of science . . . [with a] precisely similar training of the mind.” Voilà—an academic was spawned. (I’m not sure this was ever Dr. T’s intent . . .)

Perhaps twisting Frye impermissibly, I’d say that, for many students, Dr. T’s classroom constituted Frye’s quasimystical “center.” I can visualize the room now, air warm and stagnant in the late afternoon sun. Yet its atmosphere—the interplays of text and criticism, questions asked, answers offered, ideas generated, possibilities evoked—spread out through alumnae/i’s lives and careers like ripples on Walden Pond.

But are we then so serious? Thanks, Dr. Teichgraeber. Enjoy whatever comes next!

LETTERS

AFTER READING in the alumnae/i

Concord Academy magazine welcomes letters to the editor.

Please send correspondence to magazine@concordacademy.org or to Concord Academy, 166 Main Street, Concord, Massachusetts 01742.

Corrections

Dr. T: Meticulous, maddening, and mesmerizing

In the 2006–07 Report of Giving, Stuart Warner should have been listed as cochair of the Class of 1977 Reunion Committee and as an Annual Giving donor. We’d like to express our thanks to Stuart for her generosity and for her hard work on behalf of the reunion.

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Julia Garbus ’81

Rose Lincoln / Harvard News Office

CAMPUS NEWS Jon Chase / Harvard News Office

Faust Invites CA Teachers to Harvard Inauguration

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hen Drew Gilpin Faust ’64 was inaugurated as president of Harvard University in October, she invited several of her favorite teachers to participate, including three from Concord Academy: English teacher and advisor Sylvia Mendenhall, math teacher Audrey “Didi” Stod-

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

• “. . . by 1960 Elizabeth Hall had injected into the school a new spirit and sense of purpose. No longer were the girls focused on the upcoming debutante world and a lifetime focused solely on marriage and family. Instead, women were viewed as active do-ers for whom all possibilities were open.

• In the summer of 1956, Hall, together with a group of faculty and a student, dismantled a chapel in . . . NH, board by board and rebuilt it board by board (including the labor and encouragement of all the classes) on the Concord Academy campus. With Hall as head, Concord students learned that women could run tractors, paint clapboards, participate in town meetings, pursue dreams. The possibilities of action were unlimited. It was this spirit that attracted Drew to Concord Academy.

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dard, and history teacher Jim Parker.

“We were in a group called ‘special friends,’ said Mendenhall. “We got to march in the rain, in the procession, from Boylston Street to right in front of the church.” Special friends also included teachers from Faust’s elementary

• At the opening faculty meeting in the fall of 1960, the Concord Academy teachers were alerted to the arrival of a new freshman boarder from a small town in Virginia. She was only twelve years old, about to be thirteen. It seemed likely that she would be homesick, unsure of herself, slow to make friends. Drew Gilpin — known in high school simply as Drewdie — was none of those things.

• Confident, independent, eager to try new activities, and filled with the spirit of fun, she launched herself into life at Concord with enthusiasm. As a student, she was exceptionally thoughtful and intelligent, quick to pick up academic challenges in class and explore new ideas. As a writer, she learned to express herself clearly and directly, skillful in putting criticism to good use. Interested in ideas for their own sake,

school, from Bryn Mawr College, and from the University of Pennsylvania.

The Harvard Crimson asked Mendenhall to write about Faust. Following are excerpts from “Drew at Concord,” published in the campus newspaper on Faust’s inauguration day.

she was able to excel in all areas — math, science, languages, history, and English.

• Other than her outstanding academic record, several of Drew’s achievements stand out from her years at Concord. First come her intuitive sense and how much she cares about how others feel. Second comes her talent in steering others toward more productive and harmonious directions.

Especially important, we see how she has developed the readiness to perceive new ideas and the initiative to seize the opportunity to use them in moving both people and institutions forward. Although I never dreamed in the 1960s that Drewdie might one day become president of Harvard University, I believe that Harvard has chosen well . . .”

Lessons from Liberia

by Alexis von Kunes Newton ’08 Things Fall Apart: Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa.

One of Seyon’s goals seemed to be to clarify common misconceptions about Africa. One of the first things he told the students was, “If you don’t remember anything [from our discussion today], this you must not forget: Africa is not a country,” emphasizing that it is a continent four times the size of the United States with fifty-four independent countries.

Seyon, currently the dean of academic affairs at Roxbury Community College and a research fellow at the African Studies Center at Boston

Mike Wirtz

he history students sat together in the darkened room, whispering about the blank map of Africa projected on the wall. “This is Liberia,” said one student, pointing to the map. “No, that’s Ghana.

Liberia’s over there,” a classmate corrected her, pointing slightly west.

Dr. Patrick Seyon, former president of the University of Liberia, stood patiently as the students successfully labeled the African countries he had asked them to identify. Seyon had been invited by history teacher Stephanie Manzella to speak to two sections of an upper-level course called

Science teacher Matt Shapiro helps students understand why a can of Coke sinks in water while a can of Diet Coke floats. It was one of the daily demonstrations conducted during National Chemistry Week.

Moles and Guacamole

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nce again, CA celebrated National Chemistry Week with daily demos during morning break (sending Mentos skyward, for instance, thanks to what happens when Diet Coke hits the candy). The week centered around Mole Day, October 23 (in chemistry a mole is 6.022 x 1023 objects — hence 10/23, the date for Mole Day).

During afternoon snack on Mole Day, CA snacked on — what else? — guacamole.

Science Department Head

Mike Wirtz explained why that was the food of choice: “Italian scientist Amedeo Avogadro was honored posthumously for his work with the number of gas molecules in a fixed volume by having the number 6.022 x 1023 named after him; it is called Avogadro’s number.

And Avogadro sounds a lot like avocado,” he said. Furthermore, he added: “You can’t have guacamole without the mole.”

Dr. Patrick Seyon, Eva Yuma ’08, Aidan Hanlon ’08, Mathis Bauchner ’08, Joshua Reed-Diawoh ’09, and Alexis von Kunes Newton ’08

University, described his experiences in Africa and his thoughts about the past, present, and future of the continent. During the map exercise, he explained that the “crooked lines [which were drawn on the map of Africa by colonial powers] have been the subject of much debate, pain, and agony.” These “lines,” Seyon said, were artificial, implemented to define people and groups, and ultimately caused much of the conflict in Africa’s history — themes heavily studied in Manzella’s course.

Seyon went on to describe the series of major changes the continent has seen since 1885, most important the shift from colonial power to independence. He talked about Africa in the context of the global economy today, describing some of the valuable natural resources that initially influenced the “scramble for Africa,” which attracted colonizers years ago. Seyon also questioned Africa’s future and talked about his experience with education in Liberia.

Seyon received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Liberia and went on to earn his PhD at Stanford University.

Seyon ended his talk with a moving personal story about leaving Liberia for the United States in 1996, saying that the night he left, the “warlords who wanted my head . . . set

my house on fire,” because they felt threatened by his desire to educate the people.

Following his talk, Seyon encouraged comments and questions, and spoke further with a number of students who stayed to hear more about his experiences and thoughts, particularly about the importance of educating Africans. Manzella’s students left the lecture enlightened by Seyon’s words, ready to apply his insights to the remainder of their course work.

Dr. Seyon with history teacher Stephanie Manzella

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Photos by Gail Friedman

CAMPUS NEWS

By George!

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ho knew George Washington could grow tentacles representing the stock market, pop culture, and other facets of American society? Who knew he could wear a midriff and a cheerleader’s skirt?

Concord Academy students were invited to participate in a documentary about presidential portrait artist Gilbert Stuart by using colored markers and some imagination to complete unfinished portraits of our first president.

Stuart is best known for creating the image on the dollar bill.

Filmmaker James Wolpaw brought unfinished portraits of Washington to CA and unleashed the students. Free from firm direction, they could turn George into anything they’d like. One portrait became George as octopus — with each arm representing a piece of American life.

Another showed George wearing a ruffled shirt and pink boxers covered in dollar signs.

The third was the cheeky cheerleader outfit.

Wolpaw plans to include the finishing of the unfinished portraits in his documentary, Stuart’s Washington: The Life of an American Image, created for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He also filmed first graders, senior citizens, art students, and other groups completing the Washington portraits.

CA’s Director of Academic Technology Ben Stumpf ’88 filmed the CA portion of the documentary. All the “finished” portraits — including the three from CA — were displayed in early October on the Boston Common.

Visiting Prof

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CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

atherine Bucknell ’75, author of What You Will, Canarino, and Leninsky Prospekt, visited CA in October and spoke with two English classes: The Hidden Luminous: Writing and Reading Poetry, taught by Cammy Thomas, and Sophomore English, taught by Ayres Stiles-Hall.

An expert on the works of W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Bucknell first taught a lesson on Auden, then discussed her fictionwriting — her curiosity about finding her own voice while writing her first novel, and her realization that she could write in more than one voice.

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“Now,” she said, “I just try to be inside a character’s head.”

Bucknell, who shared excerpts from her third novel, What You Will, also responded to a student’s question about the common suggestion that emerging writers write about what they know. “I think writing what you know is scary,” Bucknell said, explaining that she seeks “a place between uncomfortably personal and too remote.” There’s a difference, she went on, between writing about a personal experience and putting yourself in the story. “I can put something really personal into one of my woman characters, but I know she isn’t me.”

A founder of the W. H. Auden Society, editor of Auden’s Juvenilia: Poems 1922–1928, and coeditor of Auden Studies, Bucknell lives in London and is widely published in England. She also is the author and editor of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries: Volume One, 1939 –1960; Lost Years: A Memoir, 1945 –1951; and the forthcoming Diaries: Volume Two, 1960 –1983.

Bull-ish on Homefront

by Christeen Savinovich ‘08 oncord Academy film teacher Justin Bull presented the short film Homefront, which he wrote and directed, to the CA community during a fall assembly.

Bull (left) worked on Homefront, a personal response to the events of September 11, while completing the American Film Institute’s directing program.

But it went on to premiere in December 2006, to be chosen for screening at the Seattle Film Festival and the Durango Independent Film Festival, to become a finalist

in the 2006 Moondance International Film Festival, and to win the 2006 Second Annual Short Film Competition, sponsored by the China-America Festival of Film and Culture.

The film deals with issues of racial profiling and patriotism through the eyes of a veteran and father of a fallen soldier. During a question-and-answer period after the film, Bull explained that it took two years and many drafts for Homefront to develop from idea to final product.

Henry Butman ’08

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Our Trash, Their Treasure

by Alexis von Kunes Newton ’08 he vegetables in a Concord nonprofit farm are blooming a little easier now — thanks to a special breed of CA trash.

In September 2006, Concord Academy’s Green Club advertised an idea new to the school: to collect compostable food in the dining hall.

This caught the attention of Amara Frumkin ’09, who, with other members of the Green Club, quickly began turning the composting idea into action. CA’s composting program began that same fall.

Composting in a school, they learned, is not easy. First, the community must understand what items can and cannot be composted. For example, fruit can be composted, while meat cannot.

Second, and more important, the compost needs a place to go.

The Green Club gave the CA community a quick lesson on composting, encouraging everyone to embrace the program with humorous announcements and attention-

grabbing signs in the dining hall. When a separate garbage bin was designated for compostable products, the club watched proudly as the compost piled up.

But the Green Club had to decide where to put the bags upon bags of compost they collected. They explored different locations on campus, but the same problems arose at each: not only is compost rather unsightly, it is not particularly pleasing to the nose.

So the Green Club approached Gaining Ground, a Concord farm that grows organic fruits and vegetables for the needy. Fortunately for both CA and the farm, the Green Club’s proverbial trash was Gaining Ground’s treasure. Verena Wieloch, Gaining Ground’s farm coordinator, explained that compost is essential in sustaining the soil on Gaining Ground’s six acres of farmland. The farm is “always looking to replenish the ground with more compost,” she said, because it “dramatically changes the

Waste not: Amara Frumkin ’09 and Zoë Mueller ’08, coheads of Environmental Affairs

quality of the soil.” She called the farm’s need for compost “bottomless,” and added that, shortly before the Green Club’s offer, a nearby restaurant that had long provided compost stopped contributing.

CA delivered its first load of compost to Gaining Ground in the spring of 2007, and it was a success both for the school and the farm. This year, Amara and Zoë Mueller ’08, the current coheads of Environmental Affairs, are continuing the work that they and other students initiated last year.

Because Gaining Ground uses the compost for specific purposes, “they have regulations about what can be in it,” Zoë explained, so “our program is based around their needs.”

Amara and Zoë have encouraged even more composting with professionally designed instructional signs.

And Gaining Ground is excited about further contributions from Concord Academy.

Compost is “so necessary” at the farm that Wieloch said, “We wouldn’t be a farm anymore without it.”

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Several CA students and Academic Dean John Drew braved a frigid Walden Pond in early December, all in the name of the fight to reduce global warming. The Polar Plunge was part of protests organized worldwide to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali.

A L U M N A E / I U P D AT E S Doris McMillon ’69, right, president and CEO of McMillon Communications, in October received the Top 100 Minority Business Enterprise Award. Chosen by the University of Maryland University College, the Governor’s Office of Minority Affairs (GOMA), and the Maryland Chamber of Commerce, award recipients are selected for achievement in business development, client satisfaction, professional affiliations, and community outreach.

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

The Park School chose Adam Goldman ’04 to be its 2007 Commencement speaker “because of his wit, his intellect, his leadership (both at Park and CA), his passion for life and for the theatre, his warmth as a person, his love for Park, [and] our deep affection for him,” said Wanda Holland Greene, Park’s assistant head. The preK–9 school, located in Brookline, Massachusetts, chooses a Park graduate and rising college senior to speak each year. Goldman is completing his studies at Bard College.

University of Denver sophomore Jessica Stone ’05 qualified for the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association national finals.

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Sam Kittner/kittner.com

Photos by Clara Dennis ’08

More than one hundred grandparents of CA students visited campus on Grandparents’ and Friends’ Day in November. They attended classes with their grandchildren, met with Head of School Jake Dresden, heard insights from a student panel, and listened to the Chameleons, CA’s a cappella group, perform.

The day ended with a reception at the Concord home of Barbara and David Southwell P ’06, ’09.

Below, clockwise from top left: Marie Hammond, grandmother of Nora Normile ’11 and Chessy Normile ’09, sketches Nora in a drawing class; Elise Wallace and Marlana Wallace ’08; Winifred Ewing, Lily Lousada ’10, and Patricia Lousada; Nancy Simches and Jeremy Owades ’10; Jeanne and Bill Donahue and Drew Keegan ’10.

Aaron Freedman ’08

CAMPUS NEWS

Grandparents’ Day

THE UPSIDE OF ADVERSITY

Frusztajer laced his midNovember talk with unbridled patriotism, rejecting any popular notion of America’s decline.

London to live with an uncle and earned a degree from the University of London. A pioneer in the field of transistors, Frusztajer opted to further his career in the U.S., arriving in America in 1956 with one trunk of belongings and less than $100.

Now known as an entrepreneur and hi-tech visionary, Frusztajer is not just a survivor, but a thriver, refusing to be sullen or blame his experi-

Davidson Lecturer Bill Frusztajer

ences. On the contrary, he credited his wartime youth and his work in Siberian work camps for making him stronger, teaching him how to turn adversity into success.

Frusztajer laced his mid-November talk with unbridled patriotism, rejecting any popular notion of America’s decline. “The capitalist system has risks, sometimes it goes up and down,” he said. “America will pull through.”

With optimism apparent throughout his presentation, Frusztajer stressed that “every situation has plusses,” and summed up his message for CA students: “Don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to bad things that happen.”

Frusztajer, the author of Surviving Siberia and Thriving Under Capitalism, is also known for leading CA capably when he served on the Board of Trustees from 1978 to 1984, the last four years as board president. His two daughters, Lisa Frusztajer ’80 and Nina Frusztajer Marquis ’82, attended CA, and his granddaughter, Marina Long ’10 is a current student.

The Davidson Lectureship was established in 1966

by Mr. and Mrs. R.W. Davidson in honor of their two daughters, Anne E. Davidson Kidder ’62 and Jane S. Davidson ’64. Each year, the lectureship enables a distinguished guest to speak to the CA community.

Teacher Emeritus Philip McFarland, Bill Frusztajer, and Helen Whiting Livingston ’41

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“MY TASK IS TO TAKE YOU to a world which is very different from Concord Academy.”

And so he did. Bill Frusztajer, CA’s Davidson Lecturer, spoke of his happy childhood in Poland and the abrupt turn of events in 1939, when two million German troops poured into the country, armed with tanks and weapons.

Frusztajer and his family fled to eastern Poland; his extended family was murdered in Warsaw, he said, “along with the rest of the Jewish community.”

Frusztajer had survived that Nazi invasion, but his trauma had just begun. He described being ordered into a cattle car “the size of a small bedroom,” crowded with thirty-two men, women, and children. It was 1940, and Frusztajer spent much of the day killing time, the rest of it killing lice. The “mobile prison” took him to a concentration camp; from there he was transported, mainly on slave ships, to the far reaches of Siberia. By age twelve, Frusztajer was working in a mine, underfed, underclothed, and surrounded by prisoners, a third of whom didn’t make it, including his mother.

But a resilient Frusztajer ended up living the quintessential American dream. Several years after his liberation, in 1946, he moved to

Photos by Tim Morse

Bill Frusztajer: 2007 Davidson Lecturer

ALUM NAE I PRO FILES

Jonathan Nelson Class of 1976

Maximum Minimalism

BYNANCYSHOHETWEST’84

T H I S

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Jonathan Nelson Class of 1976

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Penelope Weadock Slough Class of 1946

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Sophronia Camp Class of 1967

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Betsy Blume Class of 1982

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CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

riginally, the plan was to be an architect. But a stint at a graduate program in Milan convinced Jonathan Nelson ’76 that he was more interested in what went on inside buildings than in the structures themselves. Although he still dabbles in architecture, Nelson has built a career as a designer of high-end modern furniture.

After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, Nelson spent a few years as a practicing architect with a firm in downtown Boston. He also taught at the Architectural Association of Boston, and then decided to enroll at Domus Academy in Milan.

“I was at Domus when it was still a brand new program,” Nelson says. “It’s an academy that was set up by Domus Magazine, an international design publication. This was the mid-1980s and we were in the midst of what was termed the Memphis Movement. It was a pretty exciting time. There was a lot of whimsical, wild stuff going on in the design world.”

When Nelson returned to the States, he devoted the bulk of his time to furniture design, and moved with his wife to Manhattan, where he lived and worked for nine years.

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Nelson’s designs: the Astrogami chair, the Uovo étagère, and, below, the Vortex table

manufacturer of accessories. If people are already drawn to that line, they are likely to appreciate our work as well.”

Nelson’s favorite piece from his own portfolio is one he designed when he was first starting out: the Astrogami chair. “It actually looks like a piece of origami in metal,” he said. “It is a minimal piece, but has a lot of character. And that’s really what I’m striving for.”

Nelson explained that pure modernism scares off a lot of people.

“Our company is called Nelson Bridge because we’re a bridge to modern design,” he said. “Modern design does not have to be boring or oppressive or standoffish. What we’re doing is keeping the lines pure, but also making it soft, comfortable, and fun.”

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“Now I live in New Hope, Pennsylvania, which is basically the heart of colonial America,” he explained. “So when I say I’m a furniture maker, people from around here generally picture me in a workshop carving wood all day. In reality, what I do is not like that at all. I work occasionally with wood but also with metal, glass, upholstery, and some synthetic materials such as Kevlar. And I don’t actually craft the pieces myself: I am normally only directly involved in the construction of the prototype, and then I turn it over to the fabricators.”

In mid-2006, after two decades of having their work sold by other shops and vendors, Nelson and his wife Denise, a fashion designer, decided to open their own boutique, Nelson Bridge, in Frenchtown, New Jersey. Nelson says Frenchtown occupies a cosmopolitan niche on the Delaware River near his Pennsylvania home. “We get a lot of New Yorkers who come to Frenchtown for the weekends,” he said. “We’ve developed a following. And of course our Web site (www.nelsonbridge.com) allows our work to be seen all over the world.”

Working out of his own storefront gave Nelson the opportunity to hear live reviews of his work from passersby. “Sometimes people walk by our window and point and say, ‘Oh, that’s that modern crap.’

And that’s OK, because they’re right: my work is clearly modern,” he said. “I make a point of discouraging the word ‘contemporary’ because it’s a word that enables people to put a slightly modern tinge on a mixture of design elements. I don’t attempt to equivocate between modern and other stylistic themes.”

The Nelsons have developed a loyal clientele for their own work as well as other lines that they sell. “Some people come into the store because they recognize designers we carry, such as Alessi, an Italian

Penelope Weadock Slough Class of 1946

Cataloguing the Ancient World

Penelope Weadock Slough ’46 in Turkey, 1989

P CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

enelope Weadock Slough’s earliest memories of archaeology date back to her childhood. “I was always fascinated with the ancient world,” she recalled. “In the fourth grade, I learned about ancient Greece and Rome, and I thought I would study those civilizations. But as I got older, my interests slid back in time. For a while I thought my focus would be on Biblical archaeology of the Old Testament era, but archaeology from that time period tends to be all pots, and I found I wasn’t all that interested in pots.”

After spending her high school years at Concord Academy, Slough attended Smith College and then embarked upon a graduate degree from the Oriental Institute, which is

12

affiliated with the University of Chicago. She settled on Mesopotamian archaeology as a specialty and went on her first and only archaeological expedition in 1957. “We were working in the south of Iraq at a site called Warka, which according to the Bible was part of the Kingdom of Nimrod,” she said. “The site dated back to early Sumerian times, about 3200 BC.” As a doctoral student, Slough did not take part in the hands-on work, but mostly observed.

“It was fascinating to see how the work was done,” she said. “We were there at the end of winter. When the excavation was finished, it was spring and the desert bloomed for about three days before the hot season began.”

Slough completed her doctorate from the Oriental Institute and then found employment as an educator, bringing slides and exhibits to schools in the Chicago area. After getting married in 1961, she and her husband moved back to Michigan, where she found her way to the Detroit Institute of Arts, working first as a volunteer, then, by the early eighties, as a paid employee.

Almost by default, Slough took charge of the ancient coins in the collection. At the time, Slough explained, her department at the Detroit Institute of Arts was engaged in acquiring pieces of ancient art. “I became the keeper of the coins because no one else was interested in that job,” she said. “We had a collection of 1,400 coins, ranging from the most ancient examples to pennies that children tossed into the museum’s fountain. They all ended up in the same vault, and it was my job to catalogue them.”

Her career has never yielded any high drama, Slough said. “We didn’t find the equivalent of Rembrandts in the attic or anything like

that. But I’ve always loved doing research. I loved burrowing away in the stacks of the museum’s library, trying to find out what a certain coin or ancient object was. Members of the public would bring in items they had inherited from a relative. Sometimes it was an antiquity and other times it was a tourist souvenir their grandmother had bought on a vacation.” During her years at the Detroit Institute of Art, she was promoted from research associate to associate curator.

About five years ago, Slough retired from her position in Detroit, but instead of leaving the profession, she started volunteering with the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “It’s a long commute, so I go only one day a week,” she said. “They have a very large collection of fragments from excavations in the Near East and Egypt. A lot of it has never really been catalogued. So I am chipping away at that project.

It’s a lot of glass shards, some ancient coins, and some unidentifiable blobs. But after all these years, I still love burrowing away with reference materials to find out what things are.”

Slough also likes knitting, reading historical novels, and traveling. In earlier years, she visited the Near East many times, traveling with university or museum groups to Syria, Iran, Turkey, and Egypt. These days, she says she is not so inclined to travel to exotic places and is in the midst of preparing for a slightly less strenuous trip, which she described with unmistakable delight: “I’m taking a Caribbean cruise with my old CA classmate, Cory Benson Johnson!”

A miniature flask, third or fourth century AD

Glass artifacts photographed by Kathryn Carras/Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan

Left: A glass flask excavated at Karanis, Egypt by the University of Michigan in the 1920s

Sophronia Camp Class of 1967

40 Days and 40 Nights Sophronia Camp ’67 with her daughter, Ada McMahon, in 2003 at the end of a six hundred-mile walk

eacher Emerita Janet Eisendrath has inspired countless students of her art history classes to visit museums, explore cathedrals, seek out artifacts, and even select graduate study topics based on what they learned in her class.

But Sophronia Camp ’67 did something more. She walked five hundred miles along the Camino pilgrimage route in Spain because of Eisendrath’s influence.

“While at Concord, I fell in love with the Romanesque churches of France and learned that they were spaced about fifteen to twenty miles apart, so that a pilgrim following the Camino could walk from one to the next in a day’s time,” Camp recalled. The fascination with these churches stayed tucked away in her subconscious over the next three decades, years in which Camp studied filmmaking at Boston University, raised five children, became an advocate for special needs in the Cambridge public schools, and worked in the field of street ministry for the homeless in Boston.

By early 2001, her work with the homeless had exhausted her.

With a sense of vague unhappiness and depletion, Camp contemplated her next step. The idea of a spiritual pilgrimage had always intrigued her, and suddenly it seemed like the right time. “My husband’s response to everything is to buy a book about it,” Camp laughed. So when she mentioned the idea to him, he came home with a book — The Pilgrimage Route to Santiago: The Complete Cultural Handbook, by David M. Gitlitz and Linda K. Davidson — and a flyer publicizing a talk by the authors later that week.

“I went to their talk not thinking that the pilgrimage was something I would necessarily do, but I was very interested to hear what they had to say,” Camp said. “And then the idea that I would actually do it sort of bloomed from there.” Her children ranged in age from thirteen to nineteen that spring, and were independent enough that they could spare her for six weeks.

Pilgrims can follow several routes along El Camino de Santiago.

Camp opted for the most popular one, called the French Route. Her trip would cover five hundred miles in forty days, beginning — as many of the routes do — at the base of the French Pyrénées and ending at Santiago de Compostela.

Before Camp left, friends asked whether she was worried about not knowing where she’d end up each day. “I think this points to the anxieties that lots of folks at my time of life feel,” she said. “We think we’ve lost our ability to be spontaneous. That was actually the most appealing aspect of the Camino — the not knowing in advance.”

Camp admits to some frustration with the many times she’s

been asked what she learned from her journey. (“Damned if I know,” she confesses to having answered, albeit silently.) “They had the expectation that somehow I’d come home having experienced great revelations, a guru with all kinds of knowledge,” she said wryly. “But no, I came home with sore feet. What was wonderful though was the camaraderie. We’d stay in refugios along the way with people from all different countries, eating meals at which three or four languages were being spoken at once. That part was delightful.” Arriving back home, Camp immediately set about turning her journal entries into a book, A Pilgrim’s Journal: Walking El Camino de Santiago (available through www.partnersvillagestore.com).

The Camino continues to exert a gravitational pull on Camp: she has returned six times to travel segments of varying distances. Her husband and children have accompanied her on some of the trips.

“A pilgrimage is much more about the process of walking than the destination itself,” Camp said. “You’re walking the face of the earth.

That doesn’t mean you’re always experiencing natural beauty or solitude. We passed through agricultural centers and towns and villages and cities; we even walked along highways sometimes. Doing a pilgrimage is about being in and of the world, not getting away from it.”

Clockwise from left: Sophronia Camp ’67 at Pico de la Dueña, halfway along her pilgrimage; with sons Julius and Henry McMahon; Camp on the last day walking the Via de la Plata, outside of Santiago de Compostela

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Betsy Blume Class of 1982

“You get such a strong sense of hope from the kids in here.

The patients give us all the courage to keep going.”

Fixing Hearts, Saving Lives

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CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

uring a cardiology fellowship at Children’s Hospital Boston, Betsy Blume ’82 first met Erin—a one-year-old with a virus so serious that a machine was keeping her alive while she waited for a heart transplant. Blume’s involvement in Erin’s critical medical care resulted in a lifechanging career decision: Blume would focus her efforts on children with severe heart failure, many of them requiring transplantation.

As the medical director of the Heart Failure/Transplant Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, the world’s premier facility of its kind, Blume sees some of the most gravely ill children anywhere. And yet she refers to the hospital as a happy and inspiring workplace.

“You get such a strong sense of hope from the kids in here,” she said. “The patients give us all the courage to keep going.”

Children’s Hospital implements a longitudinal approach to patient care, which means that physicians follow the cases of most of their patients over a long time period and in great detail. “Along with the nurses, social workers, and other hospital staff, doctors and parents are the patient’s team,” she said. “My most important job is educating the parents on the details of a complex medical procedure. Regardless of what their level of education might be, we have to involve them as part of the team, in order to figure out the best treatment for their child.

Depending on the case, the best action might be a heart transplant, it might be a mechanical heart, or it might be more of a palliative care approach.”

Blume’s patients range in age from newborns to adults in their thirties. The adults are generally patients who have been visiting Children’s Hospital Boston since childhood and want to

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Betsy Blume ’82 with her husband Ben Willwerth and their children Sarah and Andrew

stay with the facility, which makes sense medically as well as sentimentally, Blume explained.

Cardiologists who ordinarily treat adults tend to be more knowledgeable in cardiac issues that arise in adulthood, rather than congenital problems present from birth. Approximately half of Blume’s patients are being treated for a heart condition they were born with.

Perhaps the greatest challenge the cardiologist faces is not in the intensive care unit, but in the need to bridge her workplace and her home life. Blume and her husband Ben, a pediatrician, are parents to two children, eight-year-old Sarah and six-year-old Andrew. “When my child is complaining about an ear infection, I have to

remember that it might be the most pain she has ever experienced and it’s very serious to her, even though compared to what I deal with at work, it seems like just an ordinary ear infection to me.”

Blume said that separating her feelings about her patients from those for her own children has gotten easier with time, but that it is still heartbreaking to experience a bad outcome, particularly when the patient is of similar age to one of her children.

“Once you have kids, you realize what it would be like to sit in the hospital with a critically ill child. Becoming a parent changed me as a physician in huge ways,” she said. Blume’s children occasionally come to the hospital with her so they have a sense of the literally lifesaving work their mother does—such as her work with Baby Erin.

Blume saw Erin—now fourteen and a lacrosse player—a few months ago for a routine check-up. While Erin was there, she interviewed Blume for a science report. Despite years of experience with gravely ill children who recover and lead normal lives, Blume admitted that each encounter with this first transplant patient still makes a profound impression. “I am amazed at the way that she and her family can still inspire me,” she said.

More Than a Number

ONE OF THE MOST animated

Marion Odence-Ford ’82 President, Alumnae/i Association

CA FACTS A N D F I G U R ES

1922

One house on Main Street and

1956

50 students 2007

Eleven houses on Main Street and

First service in the newly constructed Chapel; a service of carols

1984

360 students

Chapel dedicated to Elizabeth B. Hall (headmistress from 1949 – 63)

2004

Renovation and expansion of Chapel

1922

6-acre campus

2006

26-acre campus

1959

1 international student enrolled

2007

38-acre campus

2007

25 international students enrolled

1927

The Chameleon was founded

1964

The Centipede was founded

1928

Tuition for boarders: $1,500

1970

Tripe Night tradition ended after 48 years

2007

Tuition for boarders: $40,100 1970

143 day students and 98 boarders

1928

20 faculty and staff

2007

203 day students and 157 boarders

1984

99 faculty and staff

2007

200 faculty and staff

1983

Endowment: $1.5 million

2007

Endowment: $48 million

1928

Lights out for grades 8-12: 9:30 p.m.

2007

Lights out for grades 9-10: 11:00 p.m.

Lights out for grade 11: 11:30 p.m.

Lights out for grade 12: Midnight

1955

2 endowed scholarships available

1970

8 endowed scholarships available

2007

34 endowed scholarships available

Endowment per student: $129,863

1994

Gnome Week tradition, begun during the tenure of Elizabeth B. Hall, ended

2007

4,850 living Concord Academy alumnae/i 35 percent of alumnae/i gave to the school 62 percent of alumnae/i gave to the school in the last 5 years

1956

First year of the Annual Fund

1979

Annual Fund raised $145,000

2007

Annual Fund raised $1,954,506; provides 11 percent of CA’s operating budget

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ALUMNAE I ASSOCIATION UPDATE

conversations I’ve ever witnessed at an Alumnae/i Council meeting was last fall, when we were invited to date and otherwise clarify traditions and historic details from Concord Academy's past. This inspired us to research facts about CA over the past eighty-five years, and resulted in the snapshot, at right, of how the school has evolved.

We hope you will enjoy all that we've uncovered; we also hope the Concord Academy Facts and Figures will inspire you to reminisce and tell us about your years here. The picture the statistics show is clear: although traditions (and lights out!) may change, the school’s essence remains strong and steadfast.

Remember When?

Clockwise from top center: Commencement 1925; Commencement 2003; archery competition, 1952; Kiefer Roberts '07, Shami Bery '07, and Jared Pimm '07 get their mugs; May Day, 1928; May Queen Mary Leigh Morse Houston ’47

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

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Evolving traditions and a rich history create timeless CA memories.

— BY GAIL FRIEDMAN —

W

hen Teacher Emerita Sylvia Mendenhall gave the Convocation speech in September, it whetted our appetite for reminiscences. So we started asking

around: what do you remember about May Day, Tripe Night, ring begs, gnoming, and other rituals that have lived (and sometimes died) at CA? We pored through scrapbooks, with brittle pages full of news clippings from the twenties and thirties. We called alumnae/i from every era.

Mary Stewart, Rosalie Fiske, and Lucy Pierce at their commencement, 1955

We learned that CA’s early years were steeped in tradition, from elaborate May Day celebrations to Christmas caroling and citizenship awards. By the seventies, the school was changing rapidly, as was the country. According to longtime science teacher Madge Evans, “We used to say if we did something two years in a row, it was a tradition at Concord Academy.”

Despite that, many longstanding CA traditions live on today. Girls still wear white at Commencement and carry flowers, rings are still worn with the chameleon’s tail turned in until graduation, the Chapel remains the heart of the campus, and, perhaps most important, CA’s young men and women remain In these pages you’ll find nostalgic musings—wistful, funny, and joyful—as well as Miss Mendenhall’s speech, which inspired it all.

Moving Day, 1980

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unafraid to question and challenge.

Convocation photos by Tim Morse

In The Beginning Convocation is a new tradition at Concord Academy, a formal heralding of the school year that Head of School Jake Dresden began to continue the sense of community that developed after the 9/11 tragedy. During her Convocation speech on September 4, 2007, Teacher Emerita Sylvia Mendenhall (left) shared stories about her start at CA in 1957 and how the school had changed by the time she retired in 1993. Following is the full address:

My subject today is beginnings.

One of the great things about being a student is that each September one has the opportunity to make a new start. To be sure, one builds on past experience and learning; nevertheless, the pens and pencils are new, the notebooks, the texts—and the expectations. It is the proverbial clean slate.

This does not happen in the same way in the so-called real world of business, politics, and labor.

My first knowledge of the existence of Concord Academy occurred at the beginning of my freshman year at Smith College. As I arrived at my first lecture in European history, next to me sat another freshman, clad in a dark green blazer.

In those days students from fancy prep schools all wore blazers displaying the prepschool crest on the pocket. But this blazer was different, for it sported on its sleeve, just above the cuff, a three-and-a-half-inch embroidered lizard. In the days that followed I learned that Lucia Lee Cabot had just graduated from a school called Concord Academy, and the lizard was a chameleon. Weird.

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

As the years continued, I graduated from college, traveled in Europe for a year, held a series of jobs in various publishing and publicity offices to earn enough money to travel again. One day, I looked at myself in the mirror and said, “Sylvia, this has got to stop—enough of writing about chocolate marshmallow pancakes and how to reupholster a chair with granny’s old shawl.” So, in 1955—seven years after I had graduated from Smith—I made a new beginning. As I completed my master’s degree at Harvard, I dreamed of saving the public school system.

However, teaching jobs in the Boston area were scarce in those years, so when the vocational office at Smith let me know about the opening in the English Department at Concord Academy, I decided it would be a good idea to see what a teacher interview might be like. Thus one day in February, dressed in my proper charcoal gray suit and silk blouse, I left my practice teaching job at Newton High School—a dark, brick, prison-like building where they locked the students’ coats in cages during the day so they wouldn’t leave school. I arrived at CA, amazed at the carved antique applewood chairs in the Hobson House living room, the tall grandfather’s clock in working order, and the painting over the mantel. Then I met Mrs. Hall, and we hit it off immediately. I realized that CA was more than a snobby private school and decided to try it for a year, maybe two, because it would look better on my record.

As I arrived at the beginning of school in the fall of 1956, fifty-one years ago, there, at the end of the lawn, stood the rough shell of the Chapel. The windows and doors were irregular dark gaping holes soon to be protected by flapping pieces of plastic to keep out the autumn rains. Piled over to the right was a heap of 18

(continued on page 20)

Misbehaving

O

nce the sole responsibility — and sometimes at the whim — of the headmistress, discipline became a more structured process over the years.

The Woodpile Stories of wood-sawing are legend from Mrs. Hall’s era; it seemed her preferred form of punishment, generally after a good talking-to in the green chair in her office. When Russell Mead was headmaster during the early seventies, he handed some disciplinary responsibilities to the head of boarding.

That led to the beginning of the Discipline Committee as we know it today. CA students who violate rules today are “DCed”— considered by a Discipline Committee comprising faculty, students, and an administrator.

(Students do not participate in hearings involving violations of academic integrity.)

Such a committee probably would have been superfluous during the earliest days of Concord Academy, when societal norms were strict and girls were trained to know their place. “I don’t think there was much discipline,” said Betsy Doughty Debevoise ’30. “I don’t think there had to be — we all behaved ourselves.”

MEMORIES:

Many thanks to those who helped us reminisce and research the history of Concord Academy: Mary “Molly” Shaw Beard ’50, Lauren Bruck ’85, Sophie Carlhian ’79, Alice Hutchins Clark ’34, Judy Carpenter Clark ’61, Betsy Doughty Debevoise ’30, Ingrid von Dattan Detweiler ’61, Madge Evans, Deborah Gray, Ellen Smith Harde ’62, Gale Hurd ’61, Sandra Willett Jackson ’61, Janet Lovejoy ’50, Angelique Marsden Yen ’86, Philip McFarland, Sylvia Mendenhall, Anne Chamberlin Newbury ’29, John O’Connor, Marion Odence-Ford ’82, Lisa Jenney Paige ’53, Laura Richardson Payson ’47, Helen Reynolds Smith ’36, Merrie Crafts Thorpe ’61, and members of Concord Academy’s Alumnae/i Council.

The Debut

C

A’s early scrapbooks are filled with newspaper stories about various cotillions and the CA girls who made their formal social debuts, a practice then called “coming out.” Left, news of debutante Elizabeth Enders Costikyan ’47 and right, an announcement about Olga Craven Huchingson ’55.

Glee Club

“EVERYBODY WAS REQUIRED to be in the Glee Club. Nancy

Loring made us sing the Bach “B-minor Mass” and Brahms “Requiem” and Beethoven. I thought, ‘I can’t possibly sing Bach’s B-minor Mass,’ but somehow we did it. It was thrilling! . . . We’d have concerts. We’d get on a bus, all dressed up, and go to the boys’ schools, and they would come to Concord. After the concerts, we’d have dances. To make sure everybody danced, we’d have dance cards . . . it was a way to mix the young men and women together to get to know each other.”

Nancy Loring leads the 1959 Glee Club. Top right: The tradition continues in the 1980s.

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—Sandra Willett Jackson ’61

(continued from page 18)

1960s Hangouts

clapboards waiting to be painted by the four upper classes.

Sally Ann Food Shop

I have to confess, as a newcomer to the school the building of the Chapel made me nervous. Had I, a closet agnostic, gotten myself into a job full of holy prayers and a Sunday school approach to life? Fortunately not, but those first few days, even weeks, I was not sure.

Snow’s Pharmacy Woolworth’s soda fountain

LOOK:

everal orties, s f ly r a e In the British, rs were e d r a o b CA ts to eir paren h t y b s a war. se sent over avoid the CLOSER

Since my beginning days at CA, the school has changed enormously. Here is a quick list of examples: • In 1956, CA was all girls—seventh- to twelfth-grade, about 220 students, forty of them boarders who squeezed nicely into Mrs. Hall’s living room for Sunday night readings from Wind in the Willows.

• There were no photocopiers, no computers—just a hand-cranked ditto machine with purple ink.

• Almost all the parents and faculty voted Republican.

(I was one of three closet Democrats.)

• At age sixteen, all students at CA qualified for smoking permission—smoking allowed in the so-called Purple Oyster or “Purp” in the basement of Mrs. Hall’s house on Main Street. Actually, after the woodcarving in the Chapel and the steeple, the next Molly Gregory project was the Smoking Pavilion or “Pav,” which lasted until at least the late eighties. The Chapel and the “Pav”—both sacred spots.

Above: A sociable, circa 1940s. Below: A CA formal, 2000.

MEMORIES:

Dances

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

David Rost

“WE WOULD HAVE sociables with Middlesex—three a year, in the fall, winter, and spring—at the country club, except in the winter it was at Town Hall. Boys wore tuxedos; we all had to wear evening dresses.”

Well before the dance, the girls would parade in front of teachers to be approved; dresses too low in the front or back wouldn’t make the cut. —Betsy Doughty Debevoise ’30

• In 1956, all seniors took biology with Miss Morse and the climax of the course was the dissection of a cat, including a life-sized drawing of its innards.

• Everyone was required to sing in Nancy Loring’s Concord Academy Chorus, whether you liked to sing or not. This took place in the Assembly Hall, the present library. Nancy Loring was an extraordinary person, a sizable lady. My favorite Nancy Loring story tells of the time she was leading up to a crescendo, and as her arms raised, the elastic on her underpants broke, but agilely she stepped aside as they dropped to her ankles, never missing a beat.

• Was there diversity? Of temperament and character, yes. But the year I arrived, there was only a handful of Jews and Catholics—no Asians, no Hispanics, no African Americans.

Nevertheless, life at CA under Mrs. Hall was never boring. She reduced the pages of written rules to only five unbreakable ones. Each day began with the Lord’s Prayer, then a hymn sung as we faced the pyramid of the ten deadly virtues she had carved (the virtues you can still see in the library today). With Mrs. Hall, anything could happen. If you did something bad as a student, you ended up sitting in the green chair—the chair in her office across from the desk. Whether you felt ashamed or rebellious, her punishments were often creative: sawing fireplace logs for lateness and minor crimes; a house party in June for those who had committed a major offense, including good talk, good fun, and even a trip to the beach to escape the heat. In those days there was no DC. All discipline came from the head of school.

David Aloian, as new head of Concord Academy in 1963, brought a new beginning. He was the first male head, and his passion was academic excellence. Not only did he continue the growth of the music and art departments, he introduced

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(continued on page 22)

MEMORIES:

UNTIL 1970 , new boarders were told of the sacrifice they were expected to make the night before Thanksgiving. Instead of turkey, the school would serve tripe—basically a cow’s stomach lining—and donate the savings to charity. Dreading the meal, but understanding the noble and necessary gesture, the girls were so surprised when the turkey actually appeared on the table that some wouldn’t believe it was turkey and refused to eat it. By 1970, some were criticizing the tradition as mean-spirited and a violation of common trust. A midnight chapel service that year replaced the prankish tradition. Above, dinner in 1942.

The Pav, 1968

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Then and now: 1950s and 2000s

Tripe Night

1970s Hangouts

(continued from page 20)

Friendly’s (for Monday morning breakfast club) Brigham’s Eden The Lantern

Lee Wilson ’76

LOOK: CLOSER

d

ceive arders re o b e h t Half g aid durin financial ession. the Depr

Moving Day

M

any boarders thought of Moving Day as a CA tradition; they would change rooms twice a year, to vary both roommates and the lucky recipients of the most desirable rooms.

In later years, boarders moved just once a year, and today don’t move at all. Below: Moving Day, 1980.

subjects such as calculus and physics to the curriculum. No more kitty diagrams.

A whole new group of boarders from Washington, DC and New York arrived at the school as a result. During his time, the science building and the P.A.C. were built. He appointed a group of department heads to meet to consider the future, and out of this came CA’s first computer, linked to the one at MIT; the start of a filmmaking course; and a program to attract African American students to CA. He was the ultimate in pursuing the highest standards, and one of my favorite David Aloian stories concerns the night his house—now Lee House—caught fire. There, at 4:00 in the morning, were his wife and children standing in the street along with the boarders from Wheeler House, all shivering in their pajamas.

Then out came David Aloian clad in his impeccable headmaster’s suit, clean shirt, and silk tie, ready to assume his role for the day.

With Russell Mead as his succeeding head, there was yet another new beginning after the faculty and administration voted to make CA go coeducational. During the past three to four years various boys’ schools had been trying to woo CA— Groton, St. Paul’s, Middlesex. I’m afraid their propositions were motivated by greed to double the admissions pool, not equal opportunities for women. However, CA did not wish to be swallowed up by a boys’ school as Abbot had been swallowed by Andover, or Rosemary Hall by Choate. We were too independent for that. Instead, we chose to go it alone.

The seventies was a unique period in schools such as CA. Along with a new interest in coeducation, all the basic school structure seemed open to question. Nationally it was a time of protest, student sit-ins, freedom marches, and such. At CA, students were challenging everything: Why are classes required? Why do we have to study grammar? All of a sudden the curriculum was dominated by electives. The school was full of creative energy, but all of it divided, lacking coherent direction.

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

I don’t remember the exact year, but Headmaster Rus Mead, during announcements in the P.A.C., (1) committed a nearly fatal error, and (2) introduced a phrase to describe an essential principle in support of the community of CA. First, the mistake—there had been a rash of minor offenses afoot: filching from cubbies, behavior bordering on hazing in the dormitories. Expressing his displeasure, Rus Mead announced that he would rather have amusing pranks afoot in the school than that sort of behavior. And so the pranks began: the next morning all the classroom chairs had been neatly arranged on the lawn at 8:00 a.m. Then one evening a house director’s bathtub was discovered filled to the brim with light blue Jell-O, and some months later a cinderblock wall blocked the North School from the Middle School. Fortunately the cement had not fully hardened. But Mr. Mead and the maintenance crew were not amused. Nevertheless, the same behavior criticized by the headmaster also inspired the phrase that came to be known as “The Common Trust,” first articulated by Rus Mead who declared that adhering to “The Common Trust” had become the sixth unbreakable rule of Concord Academy, and it was then and is now an important, enduring legacy.

Starting with Phil McKean and then especially with the arrival of Tom Wilcox, came a new beginning, and a new order evolving out of the chaos of the midseventies. The curriculum was redesigned, including electives but also prerequisites.

The Dining Hall and Stu-Fac evolved out of what was the old gym, and the new gym opened in 1978. Tom Wilcox’s vision of a traditional quad was fulfilled with

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(continued on page 24)

An I-gnome-inious Fall he practice known as gnoming began in the sixties at Concord Academy as an opportunity to offer a kind gesture to another student.

“You would go take your shower and come back and find someone had made your bed,” said retired science teacher Madge Evans. “You did something nice for somebody. You neatened up somebody’s cubby or you put a chocolate on the shelf.” Gnomees would try to guess who their gnome was, until a final reunion when all gnomes were revealed.

Marian Ferguson ’63 used to leave a cookie or a flower for a favored teacher, and she wonders whether that spawned the gnoming tradition, which began at CA the year after she graduated.

MEMORIES:

Picnics

“ON SATURDAYS boarders had picnics. Various people in the town turned over their farms to us for our picnics. We had a picnic club; I was head of that at some point.” —Betsy Doughty Debevoise ’30

Over the years, gnoming became more elaborate— and costly. “The people being gnomed would get notes asking what they wanted. Gnoming became a real financial burden,” Evans said. In the seventies, it also got out of hand. Gnomees might have a tequila sunrise in their cubby; pornography was not unheard of. Finally, after much discussion about whether gnoming could be saved, the practice was eliminated.

Still, gnoming remains a fond memory for many alumnae/i, even to gnomees from the seventies and eighties. “I still have a pot that Jonas Geduldig [’81] made for me,” said Marion Odence-Ford ’82. “It says on the bottom, ‘From your gnome.’”

Far left, top and bottom: Saturday Picnic Club, 1927.

Left: Jocelyn Fleming Gutchess ’38, Persis Metcalf Plaisted ’40, Katharine Tryon Bradley ’38, and Harriette Abbett Keator ’40 at a picnic in the late 1930s. Below: Picnic and swimming at Hutchins Farm, 1931.

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T

Living History

A

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

nne Chamberlin Newbury ’29 — believed to be Concord Academy’s oldest alumna — started at CA in 1922 when she was eleven; her mother helped start the school.

During a visit with her in New Hampshire this past September, Newbury (above) remembered a vibrant musical life at CA, and her leading roles in Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, including The Gondoliers and Patience. She also reminisced about athletics, when the school would split into two teams, the Nashawtucs and the Punkatassets, for internal competitions. Headmistress Elsie Hobson, she said, didn’t like the team names and changed them to the Reds and the Blues. Newbury also recalled playful Hare and Hound chases.

Students designated as Hares would be given a head start, sent off to hide anywhere in town.

“They could go way up to Fairhaven Hill, all over the town,” Newbury said. “And then the Hounds would go out and try to find them.”

Classrooms during CA’s early days were located in a renovated barn. “Whenever it rained we always knew it was a barn because it smelled like a barn,” Newbury said. During her CA days, May Day was a major school event. “It was wonderful. It was out in the garden below the steps.

And everybody was in it,” she said. “We’d do all these folk dances. We rehearsed for months before. It was a big thing.” Another big event was a dance with Middlesex School. Newbury described how boarders would have to parade before Miss Hobson the week before the dance to have their dresses approved.

When the Class of 1929 graduated from Concord Academy, women weren’t expected to attend college. Many spent a year preparing to make a formal social debut, known as coming out (see page 19). “This was the period where it was just beginning to be the right thing for women to do, to go to college, which is what my mother was so pushing for: to make the school an academic school,” she said. “I guess about half of my class went on to college.”

Living in Concord for eighty years (“I think that’s a record”), Newbury saw the town transform from small farming community to Boston bedroom community. “It was after the First World War that it started to be suburbia and people realized they could commute to Boston by train,” she said.

Newbury’s family goes so far back that her father, a physician, worked with the medical practice of Dr. Edward Emerson, Ralph Waldo’s son.

Newbury, 96, now lives at an assisted-living facility in Hanover, New Hampshire; at least two other CA alumnae also live there. Her daughter, Nancy Newbury-Andresen ’57 and granddaughter Elizabeth Newbury ’98 attended CA, as did her sister-in-law, Frances Newbury Roddy ’33.

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(continued from page 22)

the building of the MAC. At this time arrived the expansion of the library, computers, photocopiers, and more important, a commitment to diversity. Under Tom Wilcox, the school finally became fully coed. The boarding/day student ratio also became stabilized at approximately fifty-fifty. A new order had been ushered in, giving Jake Dresden a solid base on which to build.

Yes, there have been many new beginnings at CA, but something about the spirit of this place has remained the same through all these years. And this is what draws me back to the school: • I revel in the spirit of fun and spontaneity that makes this a special place.

• I treasure the sense of excitement about learning.

• I respect the honoring of the individual and how the debate between the good of the individual and the good of the community energizes the school.

Now as the year begins, what lies in your future? The possibilities are legion. Among our graduates we find a queen, at least one princess, and now the new president of Harvard. There is an unusually high number of successful published writers—not necessarily those who got As in English, but those who had something to say. And there are doctors, lawyers, artists, business people, and those who have served on school boards and town committees to improve the quality of life surrounding them.

So what would I want to know if I were starting the year at CA for the first time?

Number one: Expect the unexpected. You have no idea your first year how many unexpected moments exist in the dailiness of CA. And who knows when Thursday will be Monday until 3:00 p.m.? Number two: Take the courage to ask questions.

Questions, rather than correct answers, are often the best route to knowledge.

Number three: Remember that the only difference between a crisis and an adventure is the way you look at it. As I was reading Al Gore’s book, The Assault on Reason, I learned that the written Chinese word for crisis is made up of two characters: danger, then opportunity. I like that—out of danger comes opportunity.

Finally to begin the new year, I should like to read a short poem written in Sanskrit by a fifth-century Indian poet named Kalidasa. It goes as follows: Look to this day!

For it is life, the very life of life In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence: The bliss of growth, The glory of action, The splendor of beauty; For yesterday is but a dream, And tomorrow is only a vision; But today, well lived, makes every Yesterday a dream of happiness And every tomorrow a vision of hope Look well, therefore, to this day.

Happy beginning of school!

Field Days

I

n the early decades of Concord Academy, every student participated in sports. Two teams, the Punkatassets and the Nashawtucs, competed against each other. Later the team names became simply the Reds and the Blues. An article from the 1930s refers to competitions in archery, baseball throw, the fifty-yard dash, broad jump, hurdles, and high jump. It’s not clear when competitive silent marching joined the athletic lineup, but Sandra Willett Jackson ’61 remembers leading the synchronized routine, which was judged by a faculty committee, when she was captain of the Blues.

CA teams were participating in interscholastic sports by the late fifties. CA joined the Eastern League in the mid-seventies and the Eastern Independent League (EIL) in the mid-eighties, and in 2007– 08 thirtyfour teams participate in twenty-two sports. Today, students are no longer required to play on a team, as they were in the early days, but about 80 percent do.

Clockwise from top left: CA baseball, 1924: Mrs. Howell at bat and Janet Smith ’26 catching; javelin throw at Field Day, 1928; archers (from left) Addie Eicks Comegys ’48, Peggy Whitney Moreau ’48, and Nancy Bird Nichols ’48; the fifty-yard dash, 1942

Left: Field hockey players Jane Vance McCauley ’58, Caroline Murfitt-Eller ’58, Nancy Moses Dechert ’58, and Elizabeth Moses Baker ’58. Below: Marching, 1962

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Blue team member Dorothy Arnold ’63 with Red opponent Mary Allen Rowland Swedlund ’63.

Right and below: The Reds and Blues in 1966.

Tim Morse

MEMORIES:

WWII

“WE USED TO GO UP to Miss [Mercelia]

Wagner’s house to have tea and knit afghan squares for war relief.” — Mary Leigh Morse Houston ’47

PATCHES AND PINS

Photos by David Rost

1942 Civil Defense

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

Mug Shots

During the early 1950s, the chameleon was awarded in recognition of good citizenship and athletic ability. Lisa Jenney Paige ’53 recalls students gathering in the gymnasium — now the StudentFaculty Center — with great anticipation at the end of the year. “The first year you were eligible for an award was in eighth grade,” Paige said. “I believe that’s the year I received a chameleon patch, which I sewed on the sleeve of my green blazer.” Students during those years wore green blazers with white piping on the lapels and pockets, which could have been considered an unofficial school uniform.

“In ninth grade a ‘CA’ made out of green and white felt letters was awarded and sewn onto the pocket of the blazer,“ Paige recalled.

“Then, in sophomore and junior year, you could receive a CA pin; I think one was silver and one gold. Senior year only one person received the citizenship award, which was a white blazer with a gold CA on the pocket.”

F

or about the past thirty years, seniors have badgered the Alumnae/i Association to hand over their mugs.

Students have created skits, films, and works of art to demand the CA mugs. Once they get them, the seniors decorate the mugs and earn the privilege to fill them with drinks in the dining hall at any time of day. Above: Kristian Shaw ’07, Soo Park ’07, and Mary Shen ’07 decorate their mugs.

Right: Capitalizing on a high-profile marketing campaign that terrorized Boston by putting blinking devices all over the city, the Class of 2007 mugged CA with similar devices.

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CLOSER

LOOK:

nal internatio t s r fi s ool’ The sch nover, from Ha student, 59. olled in 19 r n e , y n a Germ

Leapin’ Lizards

CRAFTY CRITTERS Merrie Crafts Thorpe ’61, who was a volunteer at CA in the late 1960s, recalls searching for a chameleon image that could be used to make a needlepoint sampler. She found the image she wanted in a book, blew it up, and added the CA at the end of the curled tail. She then used the chameleon on a needlepoint pillow and gave it to Mary Leigh Houston ’47, who in 1972 was completing her term as president of the Alumnae Association. A similar pillow adorns the sofa in the Aloian living room today.

In the seventies, needlepoint kits to make the pillows were assembled and sold by the Alumnae/i Office.

by Ingrid von Dattan Detweiler ’61

C

BIRTH OF THE RING In the 1930s and ’40s, each class designed its ring.

Helen Reynolds Smith ’36 recalls that her class created a chameleon intaglio in green onyx set in gold. It’s unclear whether rings featured the chameleon through the thirties and early forties. But Anna Borden Sides ’44 says the chameleon ring still used today was created by her class—a plain gold ring with a chameleon image etched in a recess of the rectangular top. Sides said other classes admired the design and decided to make it official and permanent. In later years, rings were made out of a variety of metals, but the image of the chameleon etched in the ring has not changed.

TURNING TAILS Since at least the sixties, the chameleon ring has been worn tail-in until graduation, when it is turned to face the world.

✆ Want to order a CA ring? Call Josten’s at (508) 248-9095.

What else do you remember about the chameleon?

How was it used when you were at CA? Write magazine@concordacademy.org.

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oncord Academy has evolved from a small, local, all-girls’ school into an internationally known coeducational school. The curriculum has changed to reflect the times. The school’s logo has changed—from a sketch of Haines House to a Chapel window. Over the years, the campus, the dining hall, and the Chapel have changed.

But the chameleon—CA’s symbol of adaptability— has not.

It’s unclear how or why the chameleon was chosen, or exactly when that happened, but “the critter” has been associated with the school for more than eighty years.

When Philip McFarland was researching A History of Concord Academy and The Wilcox Years, alumnae told him that the chameleon dates from the era of Elsie Garland Hobson, who was headmistress from 1922 to 1937, and that it was used as a symbol before becoming the title of the school’s literary magazine, first published in December 1927.

Those not familiar with Concord Academy might refer to the image as a lizard, as Teacher Emerita Sylvia Mendenhall first did when she saw one embroidered just above the cuff on a fellow Smith College freshman’s blazer. Later Mendenhall would join the faculty at Concord Academy and, after teaching for fifteen years, receive her own lizard: a circular gold pin, about an inch in diameter, with a C and an A and a curly-tailed chameleon with green eyes.

Over the years, the chameleon has been used in a variety of ways—most notably on the school ring, but also on the cover of the literary magazine, in recognition of contributions to Annual Giving, on stationery, pillows, bags, pens, mugs, and clothing. More recently, the chameleon has become the school’s mascot and is used on athletic uniforms and equipment.

True to its nature, the chameleon has adjusted with the times. It remains an important part of CA—an enduring legacy and a symbol of how adaptable the school’s graduates can be while still maintaining their individuality.

Dressing Up, Dressing Down

Fall 1955 at Mills College: Betsy Piper Harder '49, Betsy Moizeau Shima '55, unidentified, and Sarah Burley Birkett '55 1927 1929 Miss Pride and Mrs. Morse

The Chapel Talk Evolution

H

ow did chapel talks evolve from meetings of prayer and announcements to forums for free expression? Teacher Emerita Sylvia Mendenhall remembers when chapels met in the assembly hall, before the Chapel building was erected. Meetings would begin with the Lord’s

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

Rachel Coppersmith

Signs of congratulations now routinely decorate the Chapel during seniors’ chapel talks.

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Prayer and include a hymn or two. When the Chapel building was complete, Mrs. Hall began assigning seniors to lead chapel services, Mendenhall said.

Those services remained religious—girls would lead the Lord’s Prayer, hymns, sometimes give a reading, and occasionally interpret it.

Things began to change when English teachers brought literature unrelated to the Bible into chapel time. “Very safe stuff like Robert Frost,” Mendenhall recalled. By the sixties, students were reading non-Biblical texts and substituting various songs for hymns.

One day, probably in the late sixties, Mendenhall remembers a student handing out the words to “Puff the Magic Dragon.” The faculty, who then sat in the balcony, sang dutifully along. “I did notice the seniors kept looking up at us,” Mendenhall said. “The faculty had no idea this had anything to do with drugs, and of course the kids did.”

Around that time, students began not only to read material during chapel time, but to speak in their own voices. They sometimes pushed the envelope. Mendenhall remembers one senior reading a profanity-laced excerpt from Catcher in the Rye and a teacher walking out. On another day, a senior lined the Chapel beams with beer bottles.

Chapels today remain forums for free expression, but have largely lost their rebellious edge since the tumultuous late sixties and early seventies. Students today might philosophize, or share memories and insights. Some talks are painful and revealing, others upbeat and thankful.

Occasionally students use untoward language, though they are warned not to. Some use the time to perform. Regardless of what students choose to do, chapel talks remain the essence of CA, an important and inspiring start to the day—just as they were decades ago.

1960

1950

1948

1940

1930

1920

May Day 1938, the first year that plain pastel colors were not required for the festivities

1970 Proletarian pantsuit

1988

2000

1990

1980

1970

1975

Recited during an assembly in 1969:

Skirts or Pants Some say the school will end in skirts And some say pants.

From what I’ve seen of jeans and shirts Stained and spotted by sundry dirt I’d hold those who favor skirts.

Yet in the months of winter’s freeze When snow slants through one’s frozen knees, My heart does melt, and then, perchance, I’d side with those who favor pants.

Shall CA legs be skirted or panted?

Shall scant skirts now be supplanted?

Proposal vetoed or granted?

Let me now say that in the ice (Mark my words, they are concise.)

Pants are nice And will suffice

1982 1981

(If you know who penned this poem, write magazine@concordacademy.org.)

1980s Hangouts

MEMORIES:

Film

Balcony off batik room Brigham’s Cemetery Boat house Eden Elysian Fields Friendly’s Harvard Square Mill Dam Store The Pav Pottery shed Train depot Walden's Sub Shop (John O'Connor staged a raid there to catch students cutting assembly.)

CLOSER

LOOK:

all living Half of e/i y alumna m e d a c A .

Concord after 1982 graduated 29

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RALPH GOES TO SCHOOL, a short film cowritten by and starring David Kissinger ’79 (right), was screened at the beginning of school for several years in the late seventies. Filmed in grainy black and white and accompanied by ragtime music, the Woody Allenesque silent film follows Ralph, a bumbling schlemiel who can’t get a grip on his life as a new Concord Academy student.

It was filmed under the guidance of media teacher Jean Morrow. See the film at www.concordacademy.org/ralph.

Ring Sing

Top This: The Class of 2002 Ring Hunt

by Ingrid von Dattan Detweiler '61

by Maria Harris ’02

T

he tradition of seniors giving the chameleon rings to juniors goes back at least several decades. In early May, members of the junior class would start “begging” for their rings. Ellen Smith Harde ’62 remembers a sunny day in May 1962 when a group of seniors who lived in Lincoln decided to walk to school singing:

It’s May, it’s May, the very first day of May The seniors come to sing this song and give the rings away.

We’ve come, we’ve come, to end your ceaseless call.

Count your blessings everyone That we have come at all.

Ring Story

I

n 1999, CA received a letter from Darcy Brown-Marin ’84. Her cousin had found a chameleon ring on the streets of Berkeley, California. Brown-Martin, recognizing the ring, sent it to CA and asked the school to hunt down the person whose initials were inscribed inside. Success: Elissa Lin Meyers ’86 got her ring back.

Do you have a CA ring story? Write

magazine@concordacademy.org.

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

The Class of 2002’s circuitous hunt

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It’s not clear exactly when juniors started begging the seniors for their rings. But the tradition has taken some elaborate turns over the years. Rings have been swathed in a barrel of Jell-O, and tied to silk flowers and “planted” behind the tennis courts. They have even been dropped from a helicopter, courtesy of pilot Tully Foote ’02. In the following article, adapted from a piece written for the Centipede in 2001, Maria Harris ’02 recalls her elaborate ring hunt.

O

n a mid-May Wednesday morning in 2001, during a week already tainted by AP exams, the junior class arrived to find the furniture from our pit replaced by two rowboats filled with murky river water. The seniors had boarded up the pit, and through the windows we could see our beloved ceramic dog and fisherman holding signs displaying a simple phrase: “Beg.” The Class of 2001 was begging us to beg for rings.

The next morning the begging began. We rang bells, threw Ring Pops, and held poetry slams. Our begging efforts were rewarded on the

second-to-last day of classes, when we were informed that we should meet the seniors after school on the quad. Upon arrival, we were presented with a sheet of paper containing a fifteendigit number and no explanation. We puzzled over it for a while, before a few sympathetic seniors took pity on us. “Forget it,” they said, “just head toward the river.” (We later learned that the number was the product of two eight-digit primes, and we were meant to discern those and then feed them into a GPS unit to give us the precise location of a point on campus. The Class of 2001 may have overestimated us . . .)

Near the river we found a tree with a white ribbon tied to a high branch. Alex Nichols fearlessly scrambled up the tree and cut down a plastic bag attached to the ribbon. Inside, we discovered a wooden puzzle piece and a clue that eventually led us to the gym, where a ball of shoelaces was hanging from the ceiling. We used a table, a trash can, a knife, and Sam Donovan to reach it. With the ball unraveled, we found another puzzle piece and a clue, directing us to the senior pit.

At the pit we were met with a pile of boxes wrapped in purple paper, and we proceeded to tear them open. Inside one of the largest boxes we found a smaller box, and inside that one, a still smaller box. Two more nesting boxes later, we discovered our fourth clue and another piece of the puzzle. The hunt continued from there, involving a trip to CVS to buy M&Ms and a clue baked into a cake. We were unfazed by a clue encased in cement, which was dealt with by enthusiastic sledgehammering by Brian Kanda and Matt Bassett. We took Polaroids of five seniors and ransacked David Rost’s office, and upon completion of the puzzle, were led to the SHAC pool.

Floating in the pool was a large block of ice, which Kian Wilcox valiantly retrieved and smashed open. Plastic bags containing ring boxes spilled out. Hours after we had started the hunt, we finally had our senior rings.

How would the Class of 2002 be able to top an indecipherable fifteen-digit number and a block of ice in the pool? Our very own helicopter pilot had a few ideas. . . but you’ll have to ask the Class of 2003 about that one.

A New Arena for Concord Academy Land Purchase Will Solve Many of CA’s Space Problems

by Lucille Stott

David Rost

C

Rains flooded CA fields over the years, hindering athletic schedules. Above, the river overflows its banks onto the middle athletic field.

Operations Don Kingman and Chief Financial Officer Judi Seldin to complete a site study and negotiate the August 20 closing.

The $3.6 million purchase happened because of a combination of a gift and loan from Carol and John Moriarty and their family. The Moriartys are the parents of three Concord Academy graduates. Carol has been an active volunteer for the school, and as president of CA Parents served on the Board of Trustees; John is a longstanding member of the Board of Trustees.

CA is continuing to raise funds for the remainder of the acquisition cost, as well as for the eventual development of the property.

“We’re very grateful to the Moriartys for taking the lead on this,” said Dresden. “Their support was pivotal in allowing us to move

ahead, and it’s already generating a lot of excitement and inspiring others to join in.”

In the fall, CA’s trustees and administrators began the process of deciding how best to use the newly acquired land. A working group, cochaired by Kingman and trustee and CA parent Tony Brooke, will develop a master plan that considers not only the new land, but the Main Street campus as well. They will hire a consultant to help them gather information and coordinate the work. “To do this right we have to think about the future of CA and reimagine the ways we use the entire campus,” said Kingman.

“Implementing the whole plan will definitely be a gradual, multistage process.”

Jeff Eberle, parent of three CA graduates and a trustee member of the working group, said the

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oncord Academy’s Main Street campus fits snugly on twenty-six acres of beautiful real estate. The village setting and Sudbury River backdrop have helped shape CA’s character over the years, but they have also put natural limits on the space available for academics, arts, athletics, and housing. To complicate matters, more than a quarter of the campus— about seven acres—lies in the river’s floodplain.

Every spring, and lately in the fall as well, a portion of those seven acres disappears under water, including two of CA’s three athletic fields.

About seven years ago, the trustees’ Facilities Planning Committee urged the board to consider all new real estate opportunities that could help CA address its space constraints. Since then, two houses across Main Street have been purchased, providing nine new faculty apartments, six new offices, and two new meeting spaces.

Then, early last summer, twelve acres of dry, flat farmland, located a mile from campus, came on the market. Recognizing a rare opportunity to meet many of the school’s longstanding needs, board members acted quickly to gather information and reach consensus, and by summer’s end, CA had acquired the commercial property known as Arena Farms.

“This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for CA, and the board acted as well as any board I’ve ever seen,” said Head of School Jake Dresden. “They were very aware of our needs and how much this additional space would mean to CA’s life. There was plenty of informed dialogue, but everyone understood that quick action was necessary to make this happen.”

The property, which is located on the corner of Route 2 and Fairhaven Road in Concord, had gone into foreclosure and was slated for public auction in July, but Concord Academy’s interest kept it off the auction block. After the Town of Concord declined to exercise its right of first refusal (allowed on an agriculturally zoned property), trustees worked with Director of

Illustrations by Nicholas Reed CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

CA Connections After purchasing the Arena Farms land, the school discovered it had once been part of a very large, agricultural property owned by the ancestors of Emily Wheeler ’70. The Wheelers farmed the property beginning in the midseventeenth century and sold part of it to the Arenas during the first half of the twentieth.

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Photos by Don Kingman

committee will do its job “in typical CA fashion.

This will be a transparent, all-inclusive process, and there will be lots of opportunity for input before any action is taken,” Eberle said.

Brooke added that he has been struck by the strong sense of excitement from alumnae/i on the board. “These graduates have been supporting the school generously for a long time,” he said. “They’ve been hoping for some improvements in space use, especially in the area of athletics, and now we have a way to make that happen.”

New athletic fields are the only definite use identified for the property thus far. The land is clearly suited to provide the reliably dry fields CA has never been able to count on. Director of Athletics Carol Anne Beach, who arrived at CA in 2001, said the problem with unusable fields has gotten even worse in recent years. “When I first got here, the problem with wet fields occurred only in the spring, but for a variety of reasons, we’ve been unable to use at least one field in the fall as well, and we’ve had to cancel too many games and practices.”

In addition, participation in all team sports has increased, forcing the school to find practice and playing spaces in the town of Concord.

Currently, the baseball team practices on a West Concord field and plays its home games at Emerson Field, which is available only when the Concord-Carlisle Regional High School team is not using it. CA’s Ultimate Frisbee team practices and plays on a town field about a mile from campus.

Beach said CA has had to disappoint senior athletes during the past four years because of the need to relocate their last scheduled home soccer games to off-campus fields. “When you’ve been

on a team and felt the pain of cancellation after cancellation, you can’t help but be excited by the prospect of new fields that will stay playable,” she said. “It’s been a great morale lifter.” Beach said that in drier years, when the home fields have been more available for practices and games, teams have had stronger seasons. “It makes a big difference to these young athletes to practice and play consistently on the same field.”

The working group, with the consultant’s input, will decide the type and number of fields to be developed and where they will be placed on the property. Those and other decisions about the many potential uses remain open for discussion.

Brooke stressed that there is no intention of increasing the size of the school because of this purchase. “We’re going to develop an integrated campus plan to better support the work our students and faculty are doing now,” he said.

There is a large, partially completed barn on the site, and the working group will need to decide whether to refit that structure for CA use or raze it. It is likely that the new fields will be the first part of any plan to be implemented; a master plan is expected to be finalized in 2008.

Meanwhile, U.S. History and Geology students have already spent class time on the property. “CA’s teachers have always considered the town of Concord to be an extended classroom, and this land offers more chances for experiential learning,” said Dresden. In addition, he said, “CA enjoys very positive relations with the Town of Concord, and that has continued throughout this acquisition process. We hope to allow the town to use the land in ways that strengthen the bonds we already have. That private-public partnership is very important to us.”

Early in the process of acquiring the new land, as the board wrestled with its decision, there was some debate about how this purchase would fit in with the other important goals for CA's future. Board President Ellen Condliffe Lagemann '63 said that her excitement about the purchase was based on her strong belief that it would serve CA in many positive ways. “The possibility of acquiring land we urgently needed was extremely exciting,” said Lagemann. “I am also keenly aware of the other priorities—especially financial aid and faculty support—and I knew we needed to keep those priorities clearly in sight and use this great opportunity to advance them as well.”

Eberle agreed with Lagemann and said he backed the purchase because it would support both students and faculty by enhancing the educational program and enlarging the scope of work they can do. “The board is very committed to using this purchase to fulfill many strategic goals that the school has identified,” said Eberle.

“I also think the excitement that this purchase has generated will call attention to the other important goals of the school, in particular scholarship funds and faculty compensation. We can’t take our eye off the ball.”

Lagemann said she believes the acquisition will, in fact, bring all eyes back to the ball. “CA has engaged in a lot of strategic thinking over the past several years. The new land purchase gives us a compelling reason to return to our 2002 strategic plan, renew our commitment to it, and uncover areas that need updating. Thinking systematically about current and future directions will keep CA vibrant, so I welcome this exciting new era in CA’s life and the great planning to come.”

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Members of Concord Academy’s Board of Trustees toured the newly acquired property last fall.

Who’s New? Meet the Latest Additions to CA’s Board of Trustees

Valerie Cummings P’05, ’08

served as a CA trustee from 1978 to 1984, the last four years as the board president.

V

Elizabeth Ballantine ’66

E

lizabeth Ballantine’s tenure as a trustee is an encore: she served on Concord Academy’s board from 1987 to 1992, and has chaired the boards at Grinnell College and the National Cathedral School, where she headed the team that searched for a new head of school.

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

An executive with EBA Associates, a consulting firm in Washington, DC, Ballantine has been a director of the McClatchy Company and Cowles Media Company and practiced law with Dickstein, Shapiro, Morin, and Oshinsky, a Washington, DC firm. Ballantine holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Yale University and a law degree from American University. Ties to CA run deep: family members among CA alumnae/i include her sister Helen Healy ’69 and cousins Elizabeth Bullitt ’67 and Ruth Radin ’96.

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alerie Cummings joins the board as the president of CA Parents, which she has served since her son Brett Andrews ’05 entered CA in 2001. Cummings, a graduate student learning specialist at Harvard University, lives in Concord with her husband, Timothy Andrews, and her son Tyler Andrews, who graduates from CA this spring.

Cummings, a graduate of Dartmouth with a doctorate

from Harvard, brings her expertise as a psychologist and CA volunteer to the board.

She has cochaired two financial aid benefits, served on CA Parents’ executive board, and participated in various committees.

Thomas “Tom” First ’85

T

om First brings the creative energy of an entrepreneur and the experience of a seasoned board member to CA. Founder and

Frusztajer, currently at a small software company, has experience in technology, finance, and marketing. She holds degrees from the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics, and Columbia Business School.

CEO of O Beverages and cofounder and former CEO of Nantucket Nectars, First served on CA’s Board of Trustees from 1998 to 2004, cochairing the Program Policy Committee and serving on the Executive Committee. After his board term ended, he stayed involved as a member of the Communications Planning Task Force and the Institutional Identity Task Force. A graduate of Brown University, Tom lives in Concord with his wife, Kristan, and their children, Timothy, Olivia, and Luke.

Tom’s sister, Allison Rose Beakley, graduated from Concord Academy in 1987.

Elisabeth “Lisa” Frusztajer ’80, P’10

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isa Frusztajer returns to CA’s Board of Trustees, bringing with her abundant experience in the worlds of education and business—as well as a strong heritage of family involvement at CA. Lisa’s father, Bill Frusztajer,

Frusztajer’s long volunteer career at CA includes serving on the Board of Trustees from 1989 to 1995; she has also been an Alumnae/i Council member, class agent, class secretary, and, most recently, freshman and sophomore class chair for the Parent Annual Giving program.

Outside CA, she has served on the Lexington Montessori School Board of Trustees and the Board of Overseers of the New England Conservatory.

Lisa lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, with her husband, Larry Tye, and her children, Marina Long ’10

Sarah E. Muyskens ’72

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Keith B. Gelb ’88

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eith Gelb shares his keen investment, management, and business acumen with CA’s Board of Trustees.

As a cofounder and managing member of Rockpoint Group, a real estate private equity firm, Gelb oversees the company’s activities, which currently include the management of approximately $6 billion of equity. He also is a managing member of Westbrook Real Estate Partners (WREP), a real estate investment management company. Before Rockpoint and WREP, Gelb worked in the corporate finance department within Morgan Stanley’s investment banking group.

The Wharton grad is involved in several nonprofit interests outside CA, including Children’s Hospital Boston.

He lives in Weston, Massa-

management consultant with a specialty in nonprofits, Sarah E. Muyskens joins CA’s board with extensive prior board experience.

She serves on the boards of the National Audubon Society, Smart Growth Vermont, the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation, the Vermont Children’s Hospital Advisory Committee, and the Governor’s Council of Environmental Advisors. She has chaired the Board of the Vermont Natural Resources Council.

A staunch environmentalist, Muyskens has been deputy director of the Environmental Defense Fund and New England director of the Wilderness Society. At the Leahy Center for Lake Champlain, she chaired a $14.7 million effort to launch ECHO, an education-oriented lake aquarium and science center.

Muyskens has been a class secretary and admissions representative for CA; she also brings strong family connections to her tenure on the board. Her father, John Muyskens, was CA’s director of college placement from 1974 to 1977 and served as trustee from 1972 to 1974.

Her siblings, Alison ’78 and John, attended CA. Sarah Muyskens, a Yale graduate, lives in Burlington, Vermont, with her husband, Michael Green, and their children, Benjamin, Alexandra, and Elizabeth.

ber of the Alumnae/i Council.

Solares-Parkhurst lives in Bronxville, New York with his wife, Karina Cisneros-Solares.

Jorge Solares-Parkhurst ’94

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senior managing director in the Financial Institutions Group at Bear Stearns since 2006, Jorge SolaresParkhurst brings expertise in finance and investment strategy to CA’s Board of Trustees.

Before Bear Stearns, SolaresParkhurst spent nine years with UBS Investment Bank, where he was a director of the Financial Institutions Group and a senior member of the investment banking coverage team for specialty finance clients.

A graduate of Georgetown University, Solares-Parkhurst serves on the Board of Directors of Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO), a high school mentoring program for minorities in New York City. He has been a class agent for CA and a mem-

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chusetts, with his wife, Debbie, and their sons, Max, Nate, and Tyler.

Photos by Tim Morse

and Alec Long. Her sister, Nina Frusztajer Marquis, graduated from Concord Academy in 1982.

“CA does such a great job of attracting and enrolling a full class of strong students who seem to be such a super fit for our school—I don’t understand why we spend so much money on financial aid.”

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his recent observation came during a conversation with someone new to the CA community. He had just learned that the second-largest line item in the CA budget after faculty compensation was financial aid for families in the form of need-based tuition grants. At just over $2 million, it’s no small example of Concord Academy putting its money where its institutional mouth is. But why such an investment in something that at first glance doesn’t seem to be so pressing? Well, consider this: As Concord Academy’s current director of financial aid, I happen to be left-handed and have blue eyes. Approximately 15 percent of the population on our planet is left-handed. About one in six Americans (17 percent) will be born with blue eyes this year, and that number happens to be going down at a swift rate as the ethnic diversity of our country increases. This means that I represent about 3 percent of our country’s population.

Why Access Matters

Now let’s suppose that I decide to open my own independent high school with plans to populate it with a certain kind of student—my kind. The only admission criteria will be that a student, male or female, be left-handed and have blue eyes. If you qualify, you’re in—no application to fill out, no test scores, just look us in the eye and show us

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

by John McGarry, Director of Financial Aid

John McGarry, cloned

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Such is the case for an independent school that offers no financial aid.

According to statistics provided by the National Association of Independent Schools, with CA’s day school tuition at $32,425 and boarding tuition at $40,100, 97 percent of the U.S. population earns

Adding Quantity to Quality Tuition grants are the largest line item in CA’s financial aid budget. However, to enhance a sense of equity among all CA students, substantial funding is also available for additional aspects of the CA experience, including textbooks, computers, private music lessons and instrument rental, student health insurance, academic tutoring, athletic equipment, and all schoolsponsored trips. In addition, the parents of students on aid are given necessary help with transportation and lodging for key CA events. This equitable and comprehensive approach to the challenge of funding a CA student sets our financial aid program apart. To this quality, we seek to add quantity.

Where we are: 72 students receiving just over $2 million in need-based financial aid among a student population of 360 (20 percent)

Our interim goal: 108 students receiving just over $3.1 million in need-based financial aid without growing the population (30 percent)

Where we’ll be when we arrive: 145 students receiving just over $4.2 million in need-based financial aid among a student population of 360 (40 percent)

20%

30%

40%

The most effective way to ensure this growth in the group of students on financial aid is to endow it. A $1 million contribution to endowment creates two permanent additions to the financial aid student population (assuming each student is receiving the average aid package of $25,000). Our interim goal that 30 percent of students receive financial aid can be achieved by adding $17 million to the endowment. Concord Academy will become a truly need-blind school, whereby the best-matched students will be able to enroll without concern for ability to pay, when the portion of the endowment devoted to financial aid grows to $35 million. When we reach that goal, 40 percent of CA students will receive financial aid.

less than the income required to afford this quantity of post-tax, disposable income annually. In other words, very few people in the country earn enough each year to afford an independent school education.

So how does Concord Academy fill the seats in our Chapel each fall?

In some cases, families save for many years to realize this opportunity.

In other cases, extended family members have accrued wealth and offer to defray the cost. Other families take out loans, trim luxuries, and reduce or temporarily eliminate retirement planning. The combined effect of these creative funding efforts raises the number who can afford our tuition to more than 3 percent, but not by enough. Not a month goes by before another article appears in the national media about the paltry national savings rate and the fact that the overwhelming majority of households in this country are spending just about what they earn each month—with little or nothing left over for education costs.

Independent schools also struggle against a popularly held national opinion that while saving for college is wise, saving for high school is less practiced and prudent.

Financial aid comes to the rescue of Concord Academy’s mission statement—to a limited extent. As an admissions office, we seek to realize the mission of our school by enrolling a student body “animated by a love of learning, enriched by a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, and guided by a covenant of common trust.” Each year a crosssection of the financial population is represented in the applicant pool, and each year many of those students who are offered acceptance also qualify for financial aid.

Unfortunately, one half of accepted students who qualify for financial aid are not offered aid and therefore are not able to enroll. In other words, demand outstrips supply by a factor of two to one. On average, about 20 percent of each class receives some level of financial aid at Concord Academy, and this percentage has remained steady over the last fourteen years or so, despite average annual tuition increases of 6 percent. While aiding 20 percent of our population is a start, it pales in comparison to the demonstrated need; CA’s figure also lags far behind some of our peer schools, several of whom are offering needbased financial aid to more than 45 percent of their student population.

It is all too common for Concord Academy to offer admission to a terrific new student who qualifies for financial aid, then be forced to waitlist that student. We then learn that this student must decline our offer and will enroll in a competitor school that was able to offer financial aid. This is why we in the Admissions Office are so passionate in our belief that financial aid is both a powerful and effective tool in fulfilling the goals of our mission-driven enrollment plan each year.

Just as one would never hope to enroll an entire school of blue-eyed, left-handed students, we hope to offer more students the chance to consider admission to Concord Academy without concern for their family’s ability to pay. Our goal is to become a school that is able to enroll an entire class of students because we feel they are the ones best suited both to contribute and to benefit from all that Concord Academy has to offer. Financial aid gets us closer to reaching that goal, and increasing aid will get us closer still. We can take pride in the fact that a primary goal of the current capital campaign is to substantially increase the level of financial aid at CA. It is a goal that will bring us significantly closer to fulfilling our mission.

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your best left-handed lay-up to earn that acceptance letter. Certainly I would be ill-advised to summarily exclude 97 percent of our population from even considering the new “LeftBlue Academy,” right? No doubt it would be extremely difficult to enroll a class of intelligent, dynamic, and qualified students if I couldn’t consider the vast majority of the population.

Barney Backhoe and the Big City Dig Susan Knopf ’74 Running Press, 2006

Mapping the Fourth Dimension: Poems Laura Davies Foley ’75 Harbor Mountain Press, 2006

Barney Backhoe and friends are about to embark on a big downtown project. On the way to the city, Barney encounters roadside challenges he can’t ignore. With a can-do attitude, the determined backhoe digs right in to save the day. But will he make it in time for the groundbreaking dig? Colorful illustrations and clear language make this an ideal choice for the early reader who is fascinated by big trucks.

Poetry is the medium in which Foley expresses extreme grief following the death of her husband.

By guiding readers through the emotional fourth dimension, she reveals the depth of her loss and the cathartic power of the written word.

From “A Circle of Ravens: the Mountain”

The beloved is within my soul, the one for whom my heart makes breath and sings.

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

Barney Backhoe and the Big City Dig

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To the Last Salute: Memories of an Austrian U-Boat Commander Georg von Trapp, translated by Elizabeth M. Campbell ’73 University of Nebraska Press, 2007 Well before his family’s daring departure from Austria in 1938, Baron von Trapp earned fame and recognition as the top submarine commander in the AustroHungarian navy. Translated into English for the first time is his account of a life under the sea in the early years of U-boat warfare.

Campbell notes that she undertook the translation to “let my children become acquainted with the extraordinary man who was their great-grandfather” and “to rectify the false image of him portrayed onscreen and onstage” in The Sound of Music. (Read about Elizabeth M. Campell in Alumnae/i Profiles, Concord Academy magazine, Spring 2007, online at www.concordacademy.org.)

What Children Need Jane Waldfogel ’72 Harvard University Press, 2006 All working families face tough decisions regarding child care, but for low-income families, choice is nearly nonexistent. Despite the Federal Family and Medical Leave Act, only 50 percent of working parents in the private sector are covered, and the leave is unpaid. Of low-income parents, more than half have no paid time off from work, and only 30 percent have more than five days of paid time off per year. Waldfogel examines the essential needs of children throughout all phases of life and details how child-rearing options in the United States have not kept pace with the rapidly changing work environment. She draws comparisons with other developed nations and believes the essential keys to workfamily issues are “respecting parental choice, promoting quality care, and supporting employment.”

As the founder and director of the Project on Global Working Families, Heymann set out to collect the stories of working families around the world. The extensive findings of her team’s decade-long research are presented in this comprehensive report. Its international scope is especially groundbreaking, as previous employment and child-rearing studies focused primarily on the United States and Western Europe.

Despite the grim situation, Heymann offers solutions, such as the establishment of minimum standards in the workplace for parents and caregivers.

100 Questions from My Child Mallika Chopra ’89 Rodale, 2007 Informed by questions from her two young daughters and their friends, Chopra addresses both the heartwarming and heart-wrenching inquiries of children with depth and compassion. From “Where did I come from?” to “Are there children in space?” this young mother responds to the inquisitive nature of children in her followup to 100 Promises to My Baby.

The End as I Know It: A Novel of Millennial Anxiety Kevin Shay ’91 Doubleday, 2006 What’s Randall, the Wacky Singing Puppet Guy, to do when the end of the world is imminent? Spread the Y2K gospel to impressionable young audiences with the help of his furry companion, R.K. Raccoon.

Family and friends look on in horror as the possessed puppeteer makes a desperate dash cross country as the final day approaches. Will this overwhelming obsession with impending doom lead Randall to the brink?

Butch Is a Noun S. Bear Bergman ’92 Suspect Thoughts Press, 2006 As a playwright, storyteller, and seasoned college lecturer, Bergman has enlightened students across the country to the complexities of gender identity and has helped draft institutional policies regarding the fair treatment of transgendered and transsexual persons. The essays within Butch Is a Noun provide readers with a lifetime exploration of self-identity that forcibly challenges established assumptions and perceptions of gender in the twenty-first century.

CA Bookshelf

by Martha Kennedy, Library Director

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Forgotten Families: Ending the Growing Crisis Confronting Children and Working Parents in the Global Economy Jody Heymann ’77 Oxford University Press, 2006

Korea Style Unsoo Kim ’86 Tuttle Publishing, 2006 Within the leaves of this largeformat volume are striking images of twenty-four locations where traditional artifacts merge with ultramodern design — each combining to create a unique “Korea style.” From a gallery of antiquities in Tokyo to a Confucian seowon (academy) overlooking the verdant Byeong Mountains, the Korean perspective is widely represented.

While the director of the Kukje Gallery in Seoul, Kim curated exhibits by video artist Bill Viola and sculptors Anish Kapoor and Richard Long.

Coming in the spring issue of Concord Academy magazine, works by: Julie Agoos ’74 Katherine Bucknell ’75 Sheldon Culver ’66 Sam Davol ’88 Drew Gilpin Faust ’64 Robert Pierce Forbes ’76 Jane Fletcher Geniesse ’54 Claudia Gonson ’86 Faculty Emeritus Philip McFarland David Michaelis ’75 Ruth Lounsbury Ozeki ’74 Andrea Silverman ’87

Send your book and music news to magazine@concordacademy.org.

Musical Notes

Joyful Sign

by Girlyman Featuring Nate Borofsky ’93 Girlyman Inc., 2007

Selected photos from Korea Style

Quartet

by Larry Goldings ’86 Palmetto Records, 2006

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

Quantum Leap by the Matt Savage Trio Featuring John Funkhouser ’84 Palmetto Records, 2006

Ooh La La, Sha Sha

by Miss Fairchild Featuring Sam Posner ’99 and Schuyler Whelden ’98 MF Live Sucka!, 2007 40

A RT S Photos by Jason Cotting

Yaliza Bacchus ’10, Eva Yuma ’08, Jee Hee Yang ’10, and Daphne Kim ’10 in a scene from Blood Wedding

n December, the CA Chorus sang in two family concerts with the Concord Orchestra (below), which has performed in the town of Concord since 1953. The CA Chorus sang Irving Fine’s “Three Choruses from Alice in Wonderland.“

Dance Partner: Baryshnikov

Blood Wedding

ummer Stages Dance, directed by CA’s Performing Arts Department Head Amy Spencer and dance teacher Richard Colton, has partnered with the Baryshnikov Arts Center to create a six-week residency, designed to support an outstanding choreographer as he or she prepares a new work for his or her dance company.

The residency began last July and August at Summer Stages Dance at Concord Academy. The winner, Chris Elam and the Misnomer Dance Theater, continued its residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York in September and October.

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S

lamenco-drenched and sultry, Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding hit CA’s mainstage in November. The play was directed by Megan Gleeson and produced by David R. Gammons, with musical direction by Peyman Farzinpour and choreography by Amy Spencer.

Below: Jannie Kitchen ’09, Emily Cole ’09, and Grady Gund ’08.

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Pamela J. Marshall, Honeycreeper Images

CA in Wonderland

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Old North Bridge No. 3 (top) and Old North Bridge No. 4, by visual arts teacher Antoinette Winters

isual Arts teacher Antoinette Winters exhibited her drawings in the show, “From a Fixed Point: New Art from the Old North Bridge,” at the Concord Art Association in October. Ilana Manolson P’11 curated the exhibit, and another CA parent, Liz Awalt P’10, also displayed her works.

Winters and other visual arts faculty also showed personal works throughout the Boston area during open studios this fall. Winters has a studio in Waltham Mills in Waltham; Visual Arts Department Head Cynthia Katz exhibits in the ARTspace building in Maynard; Jessica Straus in Brickbottom in Somerville; and Jonathan Smith at Emerson Umbrella in Concord.

Images from Chiapas

CA’s Big Bang

CA-Cambridge Connections

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hen the Bang Group presented Nut/Cracked, a twisted take on the Christmas classic, at the Boston Center for the Arts in November, Concord Academy was along for the irreverent ride. Among the dancers were Emma Patterson Ware ’09, Marissa Palley ’04, and Kate Cross ’95.

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CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

hen Carlota Duarte wanted to capture the life of Chiapas, Mexico on film, she didn’t take photos.

She gave villagers the cameras.

The result is the Chiapas Photography Project and the Indigenous Photography Archive. A selection of the photos was on display in CA’s Ransome Room during much of October, and Duarte spoke at an assembly and during a reception at CA that was open to the public. She was brought to CA with the help of CA parent Liz Awalt P’10 and Visual Arts Department Head Cynthia Katz. The exhibit, called “Nuestra Comida, Our Food,” captured the ingredients that make up the daily lives of the residents of Chiapas.

Ken McGagh

ARTS

Winters’ Season

— CA’s Theatre Program Director David R. Gammons, who is on sabbatical, was invited to direct the New College Theatre’s inaugural production, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad

by Arthur Kopit.

— Both Gammons and Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust ’64, attended the theatre’s gala grand opening.

— CA’s new playwriting instructor, Melinda Lopez, spoke on a panel of distinguished playwrights including John Guare, Adam Rapp, and Paula Vogel. The panel, moderated by American Repertory Theatre founder Robert Brustein, discussed the topic, “Does Playwriting Have a Future?”

Melinda Lopez

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t was hard to miss CA’s presence around the opening of Harvard University’s New College Theatre this fall:

Matt Samolis

What did John Funkhouser look like at CA? See page 19 — he is at the top left of the 1980s choral photo.

Have you always leaned toward jazz?

Jazz is my deepest interest, but part of what I love about jazz is that there is room in it for all kinds of other music. I hear Bach in Keith Jarrett, twentieth-century composers in Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, Spanish influence in Jelly Roll Morton. My roots are in classical music, rock, blues, and funk. I’m also very into Indian classical music and the music of Brazil, Cuba, and Bulgaria, and to a lesser extent many African, Asian, European, and Latin American countries. I’m always on the lookout for music I have yet to digest and make part of myself—I want to be a truly global musical citizen.

How old were you when you began studying music?

John Funkhouser ’84

John Funkhouser ‘84 played with the Matt Savage Trio at an assembly in September. Matt, 15, is an autistic savant who recorded his first solo album in 1999, played with jazz great Dave Brubeck in 2000, and has appeared on numerous television shows and in noted jazz clubs.

Funkhouser, an associate professor at Boston’s Berklee School of Music and leader of his own band, FunkHouse, has played with Matt since the prodigy was eight.

Funkhouser had a lot more to say than space allows; see the entire interview at www.concordacademy.org/funkhouser.

How did you get involved with the Matt Savage Trio?

I was in the house band at a jam session at the Acton [Massachusetts] Jazz Café, and Matt came to sit in. He was eight and was already wowing people with his prodigious piano playing. Afterward Matt’s mom asked if I would be interested in doing a benefit concert with him. I said I’d love to, and it just went on from there.

What has been your favorite moment in a Matt Savage concert?

Usually my favorite moments are when Matt does something I haven’t heard him do before. In one recent concert, we played (continued) 43

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Q&A

I started music in second grade as a classical pianist, but my first piano teacher always insisted that her students improvise, even in recitals. This was always my favorite part of the lesson, because I could just play anything that popped into my head—it was easy! But I started to really love music only when I discovered ragtime, thanks to the movie The Sting. So from fourth grade on, I would get through my classical practicing as fast as possible so I could get on to the ragtime and improvising (which my mother called “fooling around”). My father was a jazz fan, and I loved a Benny Goodman record he often played, but it never crossed my mind that jazz was something I could do seriously, because I thought it was just “fooling around.”

children. My first paying jazz gig outside of school was as the bassist with Larry Goldings.

I was terrible—no, I was horrible—and it was surely only out of decency and restraint that he didn’t fire me after the first tune!

an older song that we hadn’t played in about six months, and suddenly he was putting all kinds of Rachmaninoff and Bach in there. It’s easy to hear what classical music he is working on, because it comes out in his jazz playing. Last year, there was a lot of Debussy.

Do you remember other serious jazz musicians at CA?

Can you describe your relationship with Matt? You seemed to be beaming at points during the assembly, almost like a proud father.

My relationship with Matt is complex and multifaceted. I am at once his teacher and mentor (though not officially—he has a legendary piano teacher named Charlie Banacos), something like an uncle or all-around role model and advocate, sideman (which really means employee!), and increasingly as the years go by, musical colleague and equal. I love to see him growing up. He used to be like a beautiful, delicate, and somewhat fragile flower, and every time I see him, a few more petals have opened and his world encompasses more and more.

What would you say you’ve learned from Matt?

sense of fun. He’s not encumbered with the usual worries about whether he’s being cool or hip enough, or right or wrong, or appropriate or inappropriate—he just plays.

Did anything at CA put you on the road to being a professional musician?

Absolutely. I remember clearly that the idea of becoming a music teacher first occurred to me in my AP Harmony class with Vicky Sirota.

Mrs. Sirota was a wonderful role model on many levels, partly because she was so much fun. I also had great experiences with Keith Daniel (particularly the musicals, music history class, and a private composition tutorial I did with him) and with Ross Adams, who took over the Jazz Ensemble my senior year. I got to play jazz bass for the first time, and it was a great band, with Larry Goldings, who was then only a sophomore but already a musical giant among

Photos by Clara Dennis ’08

He’s one of the most gentle people I have ever known, and I try to emulate that gentleness in my own life. I have learned patience and perseverance, because when he was younger, it was very difficult to communicate with him because of his autism. Another thing that inspires me about Matt is his unabashed imagination and

Matt Savage

The other musician I became very close with at CA was a freshman when I was a senior—Bill Kitses ’87. He and I were both insanely into Led Zeppelin. We formed a short-lived band called X.S. that performed a couple of times—once at a CA assembly. I was the bassist and lead singer, and Bill played guitar. My parents came to the assembly and were shocked! My mother still talks about it because she had never heard me scream like that before. Bill got serious about jazz only after we were at CA together, but his career was cut short by his tragic and untimely death in 1993. It was so sad because he was such a great, fun guy, and he had a great career ahead of him.

What recent works of yours should we know about?

I’m most proud of the two CDs I have made as the leader of FunkHouse, which are called simply FunkHouse and FunkHouse II. I play bass in a band called the Sonic Explorers, which has a new CD out that I’m very happy with (see www.sonicexplorers.com). I’m a guest on a hip-hop CD with a band called Elephant House.

I have several CDs out with other bands as well—two with Pierre Hurel’s Trio, several with the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, two with Katahdin’s Edge, one with Steve Thomas.

Is there anything else we should know about you?

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

I’ve been married for twelve years to a woman who does cancer research, and I have an eightyear-old daughter who studies tabla (drums in North Indian classical music) and hip-hop dance. My four years at CA were among the happiest of my life, and were unquestionably the best time I ever had in any school.

If you were composing a piece for CA, what would it be like?

Intelligent, open-minded, fun, and carefree, with plenty of personality.

John Funkhouser ’84, center, during the assembly at CA with the Matt Savage Trio

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Photos by Dan Sanford

FA L L H I G H L I G H T S

The boys soccer team’s season ended on a high note, with a second consecutive bid to the NEPSAC tournament. The team completed its best record since Head Coach Adam Simon took over in 1999, finishing 8–3–3. Each of the three losses was by just one goal, and the team yielded only 15 goals in 14 games, giving senior goalkeeper Joe Shapiro a 1.07 goals against average this season and a spot on the Eastern Independent League (EIL) All-League team. The team earned a number-eight seed to the New England Tournament, where they faced number-one seed Tilton School. In a hard-fought game, CA fell 2–1. Joining Joe on the All-League team were senior tricaptains Henry Butman, Nathan Coppersmith, and David Noam.

Head Coach Adam Simon was named EIL Coach of the Year The girls field hockey team finished with an impressive 6–2–2 league record. Senior goalkeeper Joy deLeon maintained a 91 per-

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Above: CA runners Duncan Sherwood-Forbes ’08 and Tyler Andrews ’08. Below: Lizzie Durney ’10.

The boys cross country team finished a stellar season with a fourthplace finish at the New England championship meet. During the season, the runners went 15–1, earning the regular-season EIL championship title. With their superb pack running, the team also won the EIL Championship meet, a two-banner season. Four runners placed first during the season: Patrick D’Arcy ’08, Tyler Andrews ’08, David Wilder ’08, and Aaron Freedman ’08. David and Duncan Sherwood-Forbes ’08 were named EIL All-League runners, and firstyear Head Coach Jon Waldron was named EIL Coach of the Year.

AT H L E T I C S

cent save average, allowing just six goals throughout the season. The team went into overtime five times during the season. EIL All-League recipients included Joy deLeon ’08, Tania Torres ’08, Hannah Kaemmer ’09, and Olivia Pimm ’10.

Soccer players Joshua Reed-Diawuoh ’09 (below), Rutledge Chin-Feman ’08 (left), and Renee Leatherman-Aelion ’08 (right)

The girls cross country team finished seventh in New England this season and fifth in the EIL. Rachel Frenkil ’08 was the top New England finisher for CA, in seventeenth place, followed closely by Kyra Morris ’11, in twentieth place.

During the EIL Championship meet each member of the team ran a personal best, helping the team to their fifth-place finish.

The girls soccer team posted an overall record of 6–9, 4–8 in the league, finishing in seventh place in the EIL. The team was led by three EIL All-League players: Frances Bothfeld ’08, Mary Matthews ’08, and Fannie Watkinson ’08.

The golf team enjoyed another solid season, led by two-time EIL AllLeague player Justin Stedman ’08.

The team finished the season with the EIL tournament, held at Nashawtuc Country Club. The highlight of the season was a win over Pingree School 3.5–2.5, after suffering a 1.5–4.5 loss earlier in the season.

F Golf Coach, Life Coach Dan Sanford

AT H L E T I C A C C O L A D E S EIL Regular Season Champions CA Boys Cross Country EIL Championship Meet Winner CA Boys Cross Country NEPSAC Tournament Qualifier CA Boys Soccer

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

NEPSTA Invitational Division 2 Cross Country Championship CA Boys Cross Country — 4th CA Girls Cross Country — 7th EIL Coaches of the Year Adam Simon — Boys Soccer Jon Waldron — Boys Cross Country NEPSAC Senior All-Star Henry Butman ’08 — Boys Soccer

(continued next page) Tim Hult

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or Tim Hult, coaching has a lot to do with life and a little to do with golf.

When he describes his goals for CA’s golf team, he mentions skills first, but in the same breath speaks of golf etiquette and sportsmanship, which he measures by whether both winners and losers have enjoyed the match.

Notice how much Justin Stedman ’09 says about golf technique when he describes what makes Hult special: “Coach Tim has a great ability to put things in perspective. He’s always teaching us about life outside of CA. His sense of humility and humor are invaluable for the team’s cohesiveness.” Justin went on to say how much Hult is respected as golf commissioner for the Eastern Independent League (EIL), how he brings snacks after matches so the team members will socialize with their competitors, and how he invites everyone who helped out with the team to a postseason party. Not a word from Justin about improving his golf swing.

He did, however, mention the coach’s generosity and his foster children. In fact, Hult and his wife Mary have opened their home to more than fifty foster children since 2000. Most are referred by the state Department of Social Services, usually because their parents have

Photos by Dan Sanford

Clockwise from top left: field hockey player Isabel Walsh ’10; runners Olivia Fantini ’10, Caroline Howe ’10, Haesung Kim ’08, Bonnie Cao ’09, Sarah Wilker ’11, and Cathy Nam ’09; soccer player Monica Stadecker ’09; and soccer player David Noam ’08

EIL All-League Frances Bothfeld ’08 — Girls Soccer Mary Matthews ’08 — Girls Soccer Fannie Watkinson ’08 — Girls Soccer Joy deLeon ’08 — Field Hockey Hannah Kaemmer ’09 — Field Hockey Olivia Pimm ’10 — Field Hockey Tania Torres ’08 — Field Hockey Henry Butman ’08 — Boys Soccer Nathan Coppersmith ’08 — Boys Soccer David Noam ’08 — Boys Soccer Joe Shapiro ’08 — Boys Soccer Justin Stedman ’09 — Golf David Wilder ’08 — Boys Cross Country Duncan Sherwood-Forbes ’08 — Boys Cross Country EIL Honorable Mention Rachel Frenkil ’08 — Girls Cross Country Chelsey Bowman ’08 — Girls Soccer Tyler Andrews ’08 — Boys Cross Country Aaron Freedman ’08 — Boys Cross Country Max Silverman ’10 — Golf Max Rater ’08 — Boys Soccer Patrick Walker ’08— Boys Soccer

ALUMNAE/I CORNER Liz Mygatt ’99 (below) won gold medals in the Canadian Henley Regatta last summer, in the senior women’s single and the championship women’s single events.

Selectmen in Carlisle, Massachusetts, and he and Mary have long been involved at Concord Academy — Mary has chaired CA Parents, cochaired Friends of Concord Academy Athletics (FOCAA), and served on CA’s Board of Trustees.

The Hult children attended CA: Lauren ’98, Erin ’00, and Jason ’02.

To Hult, coaching is another face of service.

He led soccer and basketball town and travel leagues for years and began coaching at CA — first JV basketball, then golf — after Jason graduated.

One of Hult’s most satisfying moments with the golf team has little to do with the sport.

It was a few years ago, when a CA player and someone from another team were both considered for a Player of the Year distinction. “Make sure the other kid gets it,” the CA student told Hult. That player had fought back after cancer in his leg, and the CA student realized that any golf match paled beside a cancer battle.

It was a meaningful moment — for Hult the coach and Hult the role model.

— by Gail Friedman

Susan Ford, a former girls lacrosse coach at CA, was recently inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame.

Ana Luderowski ‘06 ran on a Carleton College cross country team that placed fourth in its region.

Sam Smith ‘04, rowing on the first varsity boat for Williams College, helped her team finish third of forty-four at the Head of the Charles.

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substance abuse problems. Hult often brings the kids to CA with him. The life lesson is not lost on the golfers. “CA kids have great expectations from day one,” Hult said. “For these other kids, you really want to foster expectations.”

The Hults have given a home to children from birth to age eighteen, including nine babies.

They stay from a few weeks to several months.

The Hults raised one little boy, whose mother was a heroin addict, from birth until he was adopted at seven months. They have hosted several Cambodian children through the Sharing Foundation, an organization in which the Hults are particularly active. “We’re specialists in short-term,” Hult said. “When there’s danger of abuse or neglect, kids are removed from the home, and we get them while [authorities] figure out what’s going to happen.”

When the first child arrived in 2000, Hult had ten weeks of training under his belt but couldn’t help feeling scared. “You don’t know what it’s going to be like. How traumatized are they going to be?” he said. “After a few kids, you realize they’re pretty much kids, and they want everything to be normal.”

When Hult sold his company, Tessera, in 2000, he and Mary decided to devote their lives to service. Hult also chairs the Board of

www.bythewaycards.com

IN MEMORIAM

Harry L. Barrett, Jr., father of Sarah Barrett-Page ’64 and Jane Barrett ’65 Sheryl A. Blair, mother of Blair Jesse Ellyn Reich ’98 Sally Davis Brett ’34 Mortimer Buckley, father of Deirdre Buckley Clark ’82 Rachel Burrell, grandmother of Harvey A. Burrell ’09 Adeline Cabot, mother of Lucia Lee Cabot Cipolla ’44 Ethan A. Dennison, father of Diana Dennison Smith ’64 and grandfather of Cecilia F. Roussel ’01 Henry S. Drinker, husband of Ruth Brooks Drinker ’31 and father of Ann Drinker Retherford ’62 Frank Hale Ellis, father of Gay Ellis ’66 and stepgrandfather of Ezekiel W.P. Brown ’87 Marian Merrill Ferguson, mother of Marian R. Ferguson ’63 and grandmother of Lydia R. Hawkins ’01 Jeannette Cannon Glaws ’42 Laura B. Gordy, sister of Emily P. Gordy ’76 Norman Greenman, grandfather of Dylan Morris ’06 and Kyra Morris ’11 Edmund G. Hamann, brother of Joanna Hamann Shaw ’53 George H. Hart, grandfather of Anna W. Myers ’95 McGlachlin Hatch, father of Dede Hatch ’71 Nancy B. Hector, mother of Heyden White Rostow ’67 and grandmother of Theodore Rostow ’08 Richard Herold, father of Karen B. Herold ’71 and grandfather of Will Herold ’09 Joel Kukla, son of David J. Kukla ’82 Eve Curie Labouisse, stepgrandmother of Evgenia S. Peretz ’87 Daniel Mahoney, father of Hannah Mahoney ’77 and the late Matthew Mahoney ’82 Martha Borden Moss ’46, sister of Anna Borden Sides ’44 and Ethel Borden Wood ’47 and stepsister of the late Joan Merrick Neider ’43 Thurman Jack Naylor, stepfather of Julie Starr-Duker ’78 and Enid Starr ’81 and stepgrandfather of Sierra Starr ’08 William D. Nichols, husband of Nancy Bird Nichols ’48 John W. Obbard, husband of Evelyn Gordeychuk Obbard ’50 Dorothy Johnson Piper, mother of Elizabeth Piper Harder ’49, Judith Piper Lipman ’52, and Gwenyth Piper Bassetti ’54

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

Cynthia Fletcher Robinson ’43 Caroline Wilson Rogerson ’46 Jane Rule, former faculty Barbara Sisson, mother of Emilie H. Osborn ’65 and Margaret Sisson ’69 Peter M. Standish, grandfather of Hannah Kaemmer ’09 Jill F. Starr, stepmother of Julie M. Starr-Duker ’78 and Enid L. Starr ’81 and stepgrandmother of Sierra Starr ’08 William A. Thornton, Jr., grandfather of Sarah L. Thornton ’09 Photographs by Miphi Hall ‘57

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Man Kwang Yung, grandfather of Eileen Yung ’10

Family Connections The Aloians Support Today’s CA “We are hoping our gift will make a real difference to a motivated student who wants to attend CA but can’t afford to pay. CA is a great school, and we want our gift to be seen as support for today’s faculty and students and as a way of helping the school stay strong.”

— D. Pike Aloian

W

room; canoeing on the river; and welcoming to the Aloian home interhen it comes to Concord Academy traditions, Pike Aloian esting speakers such as Marian Anderson, John D. Rockefeller III, and has lots of lively stories to tell. From the sublime (helping Dean Acheson.

Molly Gregory carve Corinthians) to the silly (warning More recently, Pike watched from the Chapel lawn as his son gullible freshmen of the tripe they would enjoy at Thanksgiving dinAndrew graduated with the Class of 2003. “One of the things his ner), Pike’s memories of CA date back to the days when CA was home. mother and I appreciated most as CA parents was the school’s willingEven before his father David took over as headmaster in 1963, ness to allow Andrew every opportunity to pursue things he was interPike was a frequent visitor to campus. His mother, Mimi Frankenberg ested in and to express himself,” said Pike.

Aloian Kissling, had grown up in “I think that’s one of the great strengths of Concord and was herself a 1948 graduate the school.” of CA. His grandmother, Patricia E. Currently, Pike serves on the Frankenberg, lived in Bradford House as Investment Committee of CA’s Board of a house parent and became CA’s director Trustees, which oversees management of of admissions in 1954. So by the time the school’s endowment.

Pike, his sister Holly, and his brother When Patricia Frankenberg Michael moved to the headmaster’s digs retired as director of admissions in 1970, at Phelps House, Pike was very familiar the Board of Trustees established an with the CA landscape and culture. “I endowed scholarship fund in her name to remember noticing how bright, motihonor her long service to the school. vated, and excited the students were, and Following the death of Mimi Aloian in late I feel the same about the students I meet 2006, the Aloian siblings added to the today,” said Pike. “CA students have Patricia Frankenberg Fund as a way to always left the school eager to do somehonor their mother and grandmother and thing meaningful with their lives.”

David and Mimi Aloian with their children, Michael, Pike, and to help CA reach its goal of offering aid to During the Aloians’ eight-year Holly, in 1963 more students. stay at CA, the family moved from Phelps “I think there are two things we can do to keep CA a great House to a new headmaster’s house at 128 Main Street (now Lee school: encourage faculty to want to live and work here, and encourage House),which allowed more room for the family and for entertaining. students to want to learn here,” said Pike. “So it was a difficult choice “My mother was the hostess with the mostest,” recalled Pike, but added between a contribution benefiting faculty or one benefiting students. that Mimi’s central role was that of art teacher, a career she would purBut adding to the fund that had already been established seemed like a sue well beyond her CA days. He recalled enjoying watching his father nice way to honor both our mother and our grandmother and all the teach students how to change a tire in “Stuff ” class; looking on as the connections our family has had with Concord Academy. I think our Arts-Science wing and Performing Arts Center were constructed; helpmother would have been pleased.” ing paint “the Jabberwocky,” the little cottage that served as the faculty For information on how you can make a difference, contact Meg Wilson, Director of Advancement, at meg_wilson@concordacademy.org or (978) 402-2240.

Non-Profit U.S. Postage PAID Hanover, NH Permit No. 8 Concord Academy 166 Main Street Concord, MA 01742

Address service requested

Assemblies Special Events

Performing Arts Center, 2:10 p.m.

Assemblies Performing Arts Center, 2:10 p.m.

February 21

April 26

February 28

Winter Athletic Celebration Student Health and Athletic Center, 5:15 p.m.

Spring Alumnae/i Council and Annual Meeting of the Alumnae/i Association Ransome Room, Math and Arts Center, 9:30 a.m. to noon

Dr. Chi Huang, Director of the Boston Medical Center Pediatric Global Health Initiative, on the Bolivian Street Children Project

February 22 – 23

The Beaux’ Stratagem Winter Mainstage Theatre Production Performing Arts Center, 7:30 p.m. $10

March 6 May 16 –17

The House of Oudh An original work inspired by Sophocles’ Electra Theatre 3 Company Show Performing Arts Center, 7:30 p.m. $10

February 23

Eastern Independent League Tournaments: Boys Basketball at Concord Academy

May 20

Patrick Cook-Deegan, a senior at Brown University, who toured Southeast Asia on bicycle to raise funds to build schools April 3

Ishmael Beah, a child soldier in Sierra Leone who has spoken at the United Nations General Assembly and served on a UN panel

Spring Vacation

CA Orchestra Performing Arts Center, 8:00 p.m.

March 30

May 22

CA Jazz Ensemble

Summer Stages Dance Gala Student Health and Athletic Center Dance Studio and Atrium 5:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Spring Athletic Celebration and Senior Recognition Event Performing Arts Center, 6:15 p.m.

May 15

May 29

May 22

Baccalaureate Elizabeth B. Hall Chapel 7:30 p.m.

CA Film Assembly

March 8 – 24

April 1

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2008

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Fen Directors Seminar Theatre Festival

Tim Morse

April 11–12

CA Chorus

May 30

Commencement Chapel Lawn, 10:00 a.m.

The Thoreau Project Performed by the CA Dance Company Henry David Thoreau Birthplace June 13 –15 For more information, check www.concordacademy.org.

341 Virginia Road, Concord, Massachusetts Reunion Weekend April 24 – 27

Parents of alumnae/i: If this magazine is addressed to a son or daughter who no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please email magazine@concordacademy.org with his or her current address.

Thank you.

For 50more information, check

www.concordacademy.org.

Parents of alumnae/i: If this magazine is addressed to a son or daughter who no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please email magazine@concordacademy.org with his or her current address. Thank you.