70
CLASS NOTES
st. george’s school
// FA L L 2 0 1 7
Top to bottom: Matt Hall ’76 recently took a photo of a friend who was being approached by a very large Manta Ray off the Pacific coast of Mexico. / Bill Clark ’76 in gem of a picture from 1976 at the start of the 220-mile hike from south to north Pennsylvania with Toby Welch ’76. / Katie Pratt ’76 and her mother in Puebla, Mexico in January 2017. / Marian Smith ’76 with son, Theo, in South Africa in January 2017. / Robin Howe ’76 with her daughter in South America near Lima, Peru in February 2017.
and has been quite successful in using her own methods — so those who want to benefit from my experience can either take this advice or leave it, as you see fit. So here is how I formulated it for a classmate who asked me ‘How do you do it?’ ‘The ‘secret’ is (1) tenacity, (2) make it look like fun and (3) be part of a cohort with unusually high competitive juices … Set it up as a competition (‘honor roll’) … Make it sound like fun (‘a party’) … Keep calling, emailing, pm’ing, snail mailing and comparing people (‘peer pressure’) … And the final magic — really like/love and respect your classmates/schoolmates … It’s not a recipe, but it sure seems to work like magic.’ So I’m sharing that in order to spur others on to successfully sharing as well in the spirit of ‘win-win’ — when one of us succeeds, we all succeed, and I would personally like to hear from more schoolmates I knew from the Classes of ’74, ’75 and ’79, as well as others. ■ “The biggest event for our class since the 40th reunion last May was the meeting of the steering committee — Luke Durudogan, Marian Smith, Abby Ehrlich, Alan Fleisig, Jon Meredith and Charlie Gledhill — to address issues of sexual abuse at St. George’s School. Abby has provided a short summary of what the steering committee has been doing in her update — but some members of the steering committee may have to scale back their involvement because of outside commitments, so it is essential that those of us who can contribute in some way step up to the plate. I am considering joining the committee myself in order to be more
active in helping to reconcile past and present, and to help provide safeguards for the future of our high school alma mater. ■ “In my personal life, I have moved from teaching third grade to middle school, and I am currently teaching sixth-grade science at a charter school in Phoenix. As I deal with topics in biology, chemistry and physics, I often think of my science teachers at St. George’s School — and though they all have passed on, I think that they would be proud of me now. I have scaled back my activities with Uber, Lyft and Amazon Prime as a driver, but I am still engaged in income tax preparation and other incipient entrepreneurial activities, which I hope will pan out well enough to help my fiancée move from Texas to Phoenix so that we can get on with our lives and (I hope!) get married in the not too distant future. The most recent excitement in my life was reconnecting with an old graduate student buddy of mine — academic, author, radio/TV host and public intellectual Michael Eric Dyson. Mike’s graduate school career at Princeton and mine overlapped — we actually met as SAT prep tutors in 1986, and became fast friends over the ensuing couple of years. Mike audited a couple of my German classes at Princeton, and I tutored him well enough to pass his German reading exam — which he had to pass in order to continue with his doctoral studies. Mike and I had a joyous reunion after he gave a brilliant talk at an educational conference at a local Baptist church here in Phoenix. Mike greeted me like a long-lost brother — and quite unbeknownst to me, he has been telling stories of our academic adventures in his speeches to audiences across the country for the last couple of decades. He even related one of these adventures in the speech at the educational summit — without knowing that I (his ‘German teacher’) was actually in the audience at the time. It is humbling to know that my activities in helping out a fellow graduate student 30 years ago are now nationally famous. Mike’s repeated exclamation, ‘This is the MAN! THIS is THE MAN!’ at the book signing — referring to my being ‘the man’ to whom he had been referring in his speech — almost made me blush (which is rather difficult when you have a ‘manly tan’ like me). I continue to be involved with the Alumni Board of Visitors