Groton School Quarterly, Fall 2018

Groton School The Quarterly • Fall 2018

A GROUNDBREAKING MISSION How GRAIN Took Root and Grew

Groton School Fall 2018 • Volume LXXIX, No. 3

The Quarterly

A Groundbreaking Mission GRAIN (GRoton Affordability and INclusion) resonated so deeply that it raised funding in record time, helping to bring Groton closer to the inclusive meritocracy that it aspires to be. page 10

Prize Day page 24

Reunion Weekend page 40

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Message from the Headmaster

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Circiter / Around the Circle

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Personae / Profiles

55 Voces / Chapel Talks 67 De Libris / New Releases 70 Grotoniana / Arts 76 Grotoniana / Athletics 83 In Memoriam 87 Form Notes

This photograph, by Tom Kates, was used on several GRAIN materials and inspired the cover illustration by Aldo Crusher.

Annie Card

Message from the Headmaster SINCE MY first days on the Circle, I have been buoyed

by the support of this community. You not only welcomed Vuyelwa and me—you also welcomed our ideas.

GRAIN (GRoton Affordability and INclusion), the main topic of this Quarterly, is the embodiment of ideas and ideals—that Groton become a place of belonging, welcoming applicants without regard to their families’ financial standing, and, importantly, working to ensure that all students feel included once they are here. Thanks to GRAIN, we are well on our way to realizing these ideals.

No one is celebrating GRAIN’s success more than I am.

I am enormously grateful to the board of trustees for their support, and to all of our generous donors, who seemed to understand instinctively the importance of GRAIN. In a vote of confidence, by donating $53 million for GRAIN, the trustees, alumni, parents, faculty, and staff of Groton School voted for access and inclusion at Groton—exemplifying how capital can be used for the greater good. This is among the largest validations—perhaps the largest—for any single cause in the history of our school, and is rivaled by few if any institutions when it comes to investment per student.

The gift of inclusion benefits all current and future students: GRAIN allows us to have a rich tapestry—a diverse mix of learners—at Groton. And the results are longlasting: tuition is waived for some, but was frozen for three years for all, lowering ongoing tuition going forward. Current and future generations of Grotonians are indebted to those who supported GRAIN. So is this American-African, eighth headmaster of Groton School.

Editor Gail Friedman

Senior Editorial Advisor Elizabeth Wray Lawrence ‘82

Design Irene HL Chu

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

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GRAIN became quickly ingrained in all of us: at its essence, it says that everyone who is here belongs. Still, it’s worth noting that GRAIN would be unfinished business without GRACE (GRoton Accelerate Challenge Enrich).

GRACE, a four-week summer program for rising Fourth Formers, began in 2016 and allows students to accelerate their academic progress. For some, GRACE provides access to the most advanced courses; for others, it fills a preparation gap and builds a foundation for high achievement.

It’s a given that Groton students are smart, motivated, and talented. However, they come from a wide variety of schools, with a wide variety of pedagogies and priorities. If students arrive with uneven preparation, GRACE can fill educational gaps through classes in writing, math, science, or Latin.

Students, both well prepared and less prepared, jump higher than they otherwise might through GRACE: for example, they can take Chemistry B in the summer and jump ahead to AP Chemistry that fall. GRACE lets Groton tailor learning to a student’s individual needs.

Our faculty has seen GRACE graduates tackle academic work with newly found skill and confidence. I’ve seen the effect in my own Organic Chemistry class, too, where several GRACE Scholars increased the pace of learning for all of the students. On surveys, GRACE participants have overwhelmingly praised their experience: they are surprised at how much they can achieve in a relaxed environment—with plenty of entertaining summer excursions—while focusing intensively on only one or two subjects.

As students go from Lower School to Upper School, GRACE is both a launchpad and a safety net. Once a student feels behind in class, that feeling can linger, sometimes affecting the overall Groton experience. GRACE has proven its worth, and my next goal is to extend the success of GRAIN by raising endowment for its worthy counterpart. Moving from GRAIN to GRACE means—for our students and for Groton—moving beyond access to success.

Temba Maqubela Headmaster

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

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

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

Convocation Unites Community, Cultures at School’s Opening n Sunday, September 9, students celebrated Groton’s globalism and cemented a new tradition by once again carrying flags from St. John’s Chapel to the Schoolhouse after the opening Convocation service. In all, students carried thirty-six flags representing their own countries and countries important to their families’ heritage. Their other “homeland” was on display too, in the Groton School flag.

In some cases, single flags were carried on behalf of numerous students — including the American flag, which represented thirty states and 90 percent of the student body.

The flag processional began last year, when students marched from the Chapel with twenty-eight flags. In the weeks before school begins, students are asked to share which flags they would like to carry.

The lineup on Sunday night included a colorful array representing Armenia, Barbados, Bermuda, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, the Dominican Republic, Eritrea, France, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Israel, India, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, North and South Korea, Peru, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United

States, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. The flags, a reminder of our many backgrounds and perspectives, remained on display in the Schoolhouse’s Sackett Forum throughout the week.

The flag processional followed a Convocation service that marked the community’s first formal gathering as one, with new students, returning students, and faculty joining in St. John’s Chapel.

At Convocation, Headmaster Temba Maqubela’s often humorous words of welcome also included a warning about what can happen — and does happen — when inclusion is allowed to move out of the public’s focus. “If we are not vigilant, our country, which supported and welcomed immigrants who contributed to it, will continue taking its eyes off the ball, and inclusion in our dynamic democracy will become more fragile,” he said.“… Our forebears struggled with dynamic inclusion and the idea of what it means to be an open America. We need to stick to our roots of an Open Circle and an Open America.”

He then shared his “personal motivators” for inclusion — all phrases from the lyrics of “America,” written by Samuel Francis Smith. Mr. Maqubela related

each phrase to a form: for Second Form, Groton’s eighth graders, he chose the phrase, “Let all that breathe partake.” New to the Circle, the Second Formers breathe in their share of the Circle’s embrace. For Third Form, the message was, “Let rocks their silence break.” “With strength in numbers on their side, they have finally found their voice,” the headmaster explained.

He directed the words, “Whose bounties all may share,” at the Fourth Formers because they become the bridge between Lower and Upper Schoolers. For Fifth Form, it was, “The school shall ever be our nation’s pride.” Fifth Formers, Mr. Maqubela said, “have to be exemplary as they prepare to receive the baton from the Sixth Form and become the custodians of this dynamic place.”

Finally, the phrase applied to the Sixth Form was “the hope of all the world.” Said Mr. Maqubela: “We have bigger dreams for them than they have for themselves.”

The Convocation service concluded with all joining to sing “America.”

After Convocation and the flag processional to the Schoolhouse, students gathered for their first Roll Call announcements of the year.

Christopher Temerson

Students volunteered to carry flags representing the countries where they were born, currently live, or that have special significance to their families or heritage. The flag processional, part of Convocation, moved students from Chapel to the Schoolhouse for the first Roll Call of the year.

www.groton.org

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Preparing Students to Serve the Public Good eadmaster Temba Maqubela welcomed back Groton’s faculty on August 30 with a chapel talk that emphasized the impact teachers can have on tomorrow’s leaders and the hope that education may be the answer for our troubled, divisive times.

The opening faculty chapel service — an annual tradition held several days before students arrive — allows for contemplation before the bustle of the school year begins.

Educating Grotonians, the headmaster told the faculty gathered in St. John’s Chapel, means nurturing not only the students’ intellect, but also their potential to serve and become community builders.

“Education should be viewed as the new frontier for diplomacy,” said Mr. Maqubela, echoing a message he had heard, at a strategic planning retreat, from James Montoya, an executive at the College Board and former dean of admission at Stanford University. By college, it may be too late to plant the initial seeds of public service. High school, Mr. Maqubela said, “is where the most resilient seeds of diplomacy are sown and nurtured.”

Mr. Maqubela spoke from personal experience: a student he taught (at Phillips Andover) is a U.S. Congressman and another former student ran for Congress. “One of the highlights of the summer was attending a house party where

Gail Friedman

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“Education should be viewed as the new frontier for diplomacy,” said Headmaster Maqubela in his opening chapel talk to faculty, a few days before the opening of school.

Congressman Seth Moulton spoke about serving America, and later on Vuyelwa and I attended another one where Dan Koh was speaking about diversity and inclusion.”

Congressman Moulton represents the sixth district of Massachusetts. Mr. Koh, former chief of staff to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, lost a close race for the state’s third district.

“Vuyelwa and I had the great fortune of teaching Seth and Dan, and both are committed to public service,” Mr. Maqubela said. “They are examples of how our schools can be places that serve the public good.”

Currently, three Groton graduates serve in the U.S. Congress, representing Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina.

Groton Grants Support Summer Experiences

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Eliza Lord ’19 and Montanna Riggs ’19 used a grant from the John Endicott Lawrence 1927 Global Issues Scholars Fund to spend three weeks in a marimba-based learning experience at the Maru a Pula School in Botswana.

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en Groton students worked around the world this summer with the support of grants from Groton School. Funding from both the John Endicott Lawrence 1927 Global Issues Scholars Fund and the George H.P. Dwight 1945 Internship Fund this year supported student experiences at schools abroad — one in Botswana and the other in Thailand.

Eliza Lord ’19 and Montanna Riggs ’19 used the Lawrence grant to spend three weeks at the Maru a Pula School in Botswana, where they taught marimba to middle

school-aged students, played with the school’s marimba band, and studied physics. The idea for this summer experience took root after Eliza, an experienced marimba player, saw the Maru a Pula marimba band perform at Groton in 2016.

Meanwhile, Kittipak “Land” Tantichot ’19 and seven other Groton boys were using the Dwight grant to work at the Bangkok School for the Blind in Thailand. Land had helped at the school since he was in Second Form and said he sought the grant

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wenty-one students completed GRoton Accelerate Challenge Enrich (GRACE) from July 1–28—the third summer of a program designed to boost students’ readiness for Upper School and propel them toward higher levels of study.

GRACE Scholars choose to reinforce skills or prepare for higher-level courses in one or two subjects, including math,

chemistry, English, and Latin.

With three years of experience to assess, GRACE Program Director Dave Prockop P’15, ‘17 can point to evidence of the summer session’s value.

Based on pre-GRACE grades and Fourth Form grades, those who attended GRACE in 2016–17 and 2017–18 and took “A” courses (those designed to fill a preparation gap) saw significant improvement: their grade averages for Fourth Form moved from the lower end toward the class median. “Those grade differences appeared in the fall of Fourth Form and continued throughout the year,” said Mr. Prockop. “That shows that coming into a course with a good foundation can influence success in the entire course.”

Students taking B courses (designed to propel them into a higher-level course) also have done extremely well in their more advanced courses in Fourth Form, he added.

GRACE teachers, all fulltime Groton faculty members, praise the more relaxed summer

Christopher Temerson

A Third Successful Summer for GRACE

GRACE faculty are all full-time Groton teachers, such as English teacher John Capen P’17, ‘22, above. Besides academics, GRACE includes plenty of summer fun, with excursions such as ziplining; even GRACE Director Dave Prockop (below left) participated.

environment. Like the students, they marvel at how much material can be mastered when focusing on only one or two subjects.

The program is not all academic: weekend and evening trips, plus regular afternoon activities, lend an element of summer camp. Excursions off campus this summer included whitewater rafting, an amusement park, ziplining, and an improvisational theater workshop. On-campus activities

included games, swimming, and s’mores by the campfire.

On a concluding survey at the program’s end, students reported a fun and worthwhile experience. “You have fun with your friends both in and out of class,” commented one student.

Said another: “I was genuinely excited to go to class, and the trips were also fun.” Perhaps the most important sentiment: “I definitely feel comfortable and generally good heading into the fall term.”

Cort Pomeroy

Right: It was a zebra welcome for new students, courtesy of Charles Wahba ‘20, Henry Hodde ‘20, Brooks Anderson ‘20, Ishana Das ‘19, and Amy Lu ‘19; masquerading as the zebra: Andrew Mazza ‘20.

so he could share the experience with other Groton students. ​The Groton group, including Sixth Formers Lars Caspersen, Brent Gorton, Rajit Khanna, Gabe Scholl, Gus Vrattos, Cal Wilson, and Andrew Yang, taught English and ran critical thinking exercises with the students at the Bangkok School for the Blind. In addition, they assisted the children with a map of the Bangkok Mass Transit system ​that Land had designed.

“The blind need to memorize their stations or depend on others while traveling on this crowded system,”

Land explained. “Therefore, I designed a map to offer the blind a way to travel and explore Bangkok with less concern.”

Teachers at the school and Groton ​ s​tudents taught the blind students how to use the map and collected​ feedback so Land can improve future versions of it.​ Groton students are invited to apply for summer grants each year.

In prior years, Groton grants have funded efforts in Rwanda, China, India, Hong Kong, and other countries, including the United States.

www.groton.org

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Katharine R. Wolf ’98

A Statement of Grit KATHARINE WOLF ’98 always wanted to change the world, a vision that was almost derailed by people who told her she had big limitations. Now Katharine has launched an innovative business concept that is proving them wrong. Her company, Odetta, which recently moved from Jordan to the San Francisco area, offers clients on-demand technology solutions delivered by a remote team of highly educated and talented women who might otherwise be unemployed.

Katharine originally decided to base her business in the Middle East, where she was living, and still finds her contractors there because that’s where the talent pool— and the need—is. According to a 2015 Brookings Institute report, once Arab women graduate from school, they are less likely than men to get a job. For example, in Jordan alone, the report stated, “female college graduates are almost three times more likely to be unemployed than their male counterparts.”

The reason? Largely cultural, as young, highly educated women (and thus desirable marriage partners) marry and 6

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customarily start families at a young age and either cannot find jobs, have no transportation, or are relegated to childrearing in the home. It is these women who form a sleeping giant of talent, one that Katharine is tapping to staff Odetta, her remote data collection and analysis firm.

Odetta allows its workers the freedom to work from home, according to their schedules—taking advantage of a work force perfectly positioned to deliver top quality data analysis. The women are productively employed, yet able to honor their domestic demands through the flexible work model.

When she’s recruiting talent, Katharine asks for a “statement of grit” from job candidates, which she defines as “a level of internal drive and motivation.” It helps her understand her talent pool, and it powers the success of her business.

“You can tell me where you went to school, where you were born, what you think you are good at, and I can see your resume, but part of our on-boarding process is understanding what you understand about yourself,” she

which may have been the genesis for what she would do later with Odetta.

She ultimately landed a job at Behalf, a financial technology start-up, which she would keep for four years. She knew she wanted to work in way “that made good business sense, while making the world better.”

Katharine launched Odetta in May; within four months, she had ten clients (including Google) and fifty freelancers. She has plans to expand management, hire more, and develop a technology platform that will allow thousands of women to work simultaneously on several projects—a longterm goal she estimates will require years of focus and dedication. She admits she is still trying to prove herself, still driven by the idea that people can overcome preconceived notions of who they are. And Odetta is living proof that it’s working.

“It’s clear to me that everyone I work with has been told there is this certain limitation on what they can achieve,” she says. “And they are all out to disprove that—and to make their own money and to be independent and to be smart and to have their kids and also have their jobs and feel accomplished. That’s what we’re really all about.”

—Marie Speed

may have » Someone that ability and that motivation, yet they might be in an environment where they’re told they are not good enough, that they can’t do this or they can’t do that— these are the people we are attracting to our platform.

Katharine meeting in Amman with Hiba and Basima

www.groton.org

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says. “The people who have a high better than those who started out level of grit can accomplish anything, with no problems at all.” especially if you believe that abilities That has fueled the rest of Kathaare internationally distributed, as I do. rine’s story, starting with a transfer to Someone may have that ability and Groton in 1996—joining her brother that motivation, yet they might be in and fellow quadruplet Jeffrey ’98 an environment where they’re told on the Circle—which she says was they are not good enough, that they transformational. can’t do this or they can’t do that— “I’m so happy I got to Groton … these are the people we are attracting You are surrounded by really smart to our platform.” people who are thinking about the Katharine knows that story well. world in a very big way,” she says.

Her life is her own statement of grit, “That was inspiring to me—the teachstarting with a childhood marked ers and the people in my class, unlimby undiagnosed ADD. “I believed ited big dreams and ambitions. It was for many years that I was not smart shocking and amazing at first. And because I had teachers who told me then it rubbed off on me.”

She credits one teacher in particuthat and standardized tests that confirmed that,” she said. “I really didn’t lar for an important confidence boost. want it to be true, and I had amazing “It was at Groton where I had a teacher, parents who also believed in me.”

Mr. [Ralph] Giles, who changed my She says her reaction was to fight course,” she says. “He told me I could back, to “overcompensate” for what major in math, which I had never conothers labeled as a weakness. sidered, and that simple ten-minute “In third grade I was up until mid- conversation and vote of confidence night studying, hiding in my bathroom from someone I trusted opened up my so I could pass the test. I had to work world.”

Katharine went on to Middlebury three times harder than anyone else and I knew that. I also didn’t know College in Vermont, did graduate what was wrong with me. Sometimes work at Stanford and Harvard (where these experiences are really favorable she got a master’s in economics), and in having you build a compensating in between worked at Deutsche Bank structure to overcome it. Sometimes as an investment banker and started a you build it so strong that you’re microcredit organization in Vietnam,

Tony on the Tigris River, Baghdad >

Anthony Borden ’79

Fighting Words TONY BORDEN ’79 remembers his days at Groton when

he was a “press jockey” for the school literary magazine, the Grotonian. The school had an ancient but “gorgeous” Heidelberg printing press and a monotype casting machine, so once the publication was printed, the editors were left with piles of lead type. “We had fights with fistfuls of lead type in the evenings—we literally fought with letters,” he recalls. “It was hysterical.”

Forty years later, you could say Tony is still fighting with letters—the kind that compose news—as founder and executive director of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR). A nonprofit headquartered in London, IWPR has field offices and representatives around the world in conflict zones—visible and less so—and a mission to fight oppression by helping train journalists and civic activists so that more people in challenging environments can speak out. The goal: to cultivate free expression by building up local media, sparking debate, and getting the word out on what’s happening in conflict zones from the people closest to the frontlines.

Empowering people in global crisis areas is a far cry from Tony’s childhood in Westchester County, New York, his years at Groton and Yale, and a series of editing and writing jobs with the Nation and Harper’s magazines, various publishing houses, and the trade publication the American Lawyer under the legendary Steven Brill. Tony describes his stint with Brill as “the alternative to going to journalism school.” It may have been the genesis for his later work.

“It taught you that if you are gutsy enough and patient enough and driven enough and compelled enough, you can pretty much find out anything. But you have to really want to do it. And you have to believe you have the right to do it. Those of us who worked for [Brill] learned the incredible value of reporting and what it can achieve.”

After a few years, Tony had a chance to move to London for a year to work on an American Lawyer newsletter.

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being in London changed. The passion for journalism, however, remained.

A meeting at the National Union of Journalists that Tony happened to attend resulted in a short-term newsletter project around the first Gulf War; through that and a series of sessions with other young journalists at a Soho pub, the idea arose to launch a newsletter on global wars.

“We had grand ideas about doing an international conflict report—none of us ever having been to a war zone or having been war reporters. The conflict in Yugoslavia started, we had some connections in the region, and we had raised a little money by then and started a newsletter on the conflict in the Balkans. For ten to twelve years that’s what we did.”

The Institute, which was founded in 1991, grew out of that newsletter and its expansion. The newsletter became a magazine called WarReport. A first field office opened in Bosnia after the 1995 Dayton peace agreement. “Back then, we were really focusing on ethnic conflict in disintegrating post-communist states,” Tony explains. IWPR quickly expanded its work to the post-Soviet Caucasus and Central Asian states.

Then came September 11.

The events of that day galvanized the group to expand to Afghanistan and then Iraq. Now IWPR operates in two dozen countries, and Tony has traveled to nearly seventy.

“Our work has evolved,” he says. “The choice of country reflects places we think are important, places of conflict and political challenge, places where we think we can make a difference, places where we think there are groups and individuals we can help.”

The work has expanded to social media, monitoring and analysis, and working with local women’s groups. But Tony says the fundamentals of the Institute’s work still hold, decades later. “We still do basic journalism training.

We still support investigative reporting. We still work on

personae

around the world are » Countries getting better and better at restricting freedom of expression, and it is vital for both democratic values and international stability that this be challenged.

the basic components of professional journalism because we think that is crucial—not only for journalism but for a style of discourse which helps conflicted societies take a breath, chill out, move forward.”

The underlying principle always has been to cultivate voices on the ground and give them an international platform—and some very famous voices have emerged from it. One is Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, an early student and then peer educator in the Institute’s Open Minds youth civic education program in Pakistan. (The project has also been implemented in Afghanistan and Nigeria.) Another is IWPR’s Syria project coordinator, award-winning Syrian journalist Zaina Erhaim, who once told Tony that she preferred to live on the very frontlines in Aleppo because that was safer than further back, due to the natural trajectory of the shelling.

The work is dangerous for its people, and the Institute has lost some colleagues and friends around the world—very painful experiences.

Growing extremism and digital insecurity make it tougher, as well as what Tony says is “a major political vacuum of Western leadership on these issues, including democracy and human rights. Countries around the world are getting better and better at restricting freedom of expression, and

it is vital for both democratic values and international stability that this be challenged.”

Yet there are notable successes.

“Cuba is a place that is very inspiring,” he says. “Deeper changes on the island are moving very slowly.

But at the same time we found almost a tabula rasa in media terms … Working with young Cuban reporters, we were able to help foster a new generation of journalism and a new concept of proper, fact-based reporting in Cuba for not much money and in a very short time. In Rwanda, we were able to help launch the first independently produced news program aired on the Rwandan state TV. We have fifteen social media ‘opinion formers’ in Iraq, now reaching an audience in the country of several million every day. And one of our largest programs now is in Libya, a very dangerous environment but with enthusiastic partners getting on with the work.”

The haunting aftermath and rebuilding of war-torn countries drives Tony’s efforts, as evidenced by a moving article he wrote for a 2004 Groton School Quarterly, describing a visit to postwar Iraq. He described a poignant tableau of family members retrieving the remains of massacred Shia Muslims from a mass grave in the vast Iraqi desert. The scene underscored the pointless horror of war, and how its victims managed

to carry on. Near the end of the article, he says: “There are many mechanisms for dealing with war—wit, cunning, and—especially if you are in the field—luck. Or distraction and outright denial: these are not bad approaches either. Engagement, too— in a world of activism that can make a difference—can be very rewarding, if exhausting, as has been my experience.”

That experience continues to grow.

New projects continue to develop worldwide. But Tony would like to see IWPR expand its private funding and establish a more robust structure so it can become more effective. (“The Groton network has been a great help. But if you went to school with me, I would advise you not to pick up the phone when I call,” he jokes.) He feels the burden of the management, the administrative work, and the fundraising, and wishes he wrote more.

But then he goes out into the world again.

“When you get out to the field it is immediate and incredibly inspirational. These are really courageous people in their own countries trying to speak out, trying to make a difference in spite of serious challenges. The inspiration you get from them sends you back to the home office, and you are compelled to keep going because you know what a difference it can make.”

—Marie Speed

www.groton.org

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A GROUNDBREA

How GRAIN Too December 2017

50M milestone reached

$

GRAIN total gifts June 2018

53M

$

$

50M

$

40M

$

30M

$

20M

June 2017

32.4M

$

June 2016

21.4M

$

June 2015

14.6M

$

10M

$

November 2014

5M

$

NOV 2014 JUNE 2015 NOV 2015 JUNE 2016 NOV 2016 JUNE 2017 NOV 2017 JUNE 2018

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JAN 2019

AKING MISSION:

ok Root and Grew Early projections estimated that GRAIN donations would total $50 million in six years.

Due to GRAIN’s success, the original target date was moved up to January 2019, as seen on the chart (opposite page). GRAIN donors beat that deadline, too, contributing $50 million

by December 2017, just over three years after GRAIN’s launch.

BY GAIL FRIE DM AN

It had been a long trip around New England for one prospective student, as she toured and interviewed at school after school. She was talkative on the six-hour ride home, but her parents, expecting a vibrant discussion about all the schools, were surprised when she focused on only one. The message was clear: their daughter’s first choice was Groton.

They loved Groton too, but they faced a tough decision. Should they let their child apply to any of these schools, when they could not afford the full tuition? What if she were admitted to her top choice, but couldn’t go because of the cost? On a leap of faith, they let her apply.

When the acceptance to Groton arrived, this mother and father might have felt elated. Instead, they felt queasy. “While it was like a dream come true for her,” the father said, “our hearts had sunk thinking we may have led her down a path of disappointment.”

They needn’t have worried. Thanks to GR AIN (GRoton Affordability and INclusion), the Admission Office did not consider family finances when they admitted this student—or for that matter, any other student—and more aid than ever before was available to make Groton affordable.

GR AIN may be Groton’s most successful fundraising initiative to date—it combined the commitment to inclusion that helped bring students like this to the Circle with a determination to rein in spiraling tuition costs. The GR AIN effort made clear that affordability and accessibility are vital components of inclusion.

The unattributed quotes on these pages are from GRAIN donors who have asked to keep their gifts anonymous.

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Who Gave to GRAIN After the Board of Trustees adopted GRAIN in November 2014, the effort took off and exceeded expectations quickly: of how much was raised, how fast both pledges and cash came in, and—perhaps most notable—how much the effort meant to those who supported it.

The initiative appealed to those who understand the meaning of inclusion. Come to find out, virtually everyone does. Anyone who has sent a young child off to school, moved to a new town, or started a new job understands.

The person who has felt excluded due to race or religion or financial standing understands. The parent who sees how much a child can learn from peers with different backgrounds and perspectives understands. So does the person who rarely felt excluded and fully comprehends that privilege.

GRAIN was essentially a two-pronged commitment: 1) to ensure that admission decisions never consider an applicant’s financial situation, and 2) to keep Groton’s tuition under control.

The combination of a three-year tuition freeze and the decision to meet admitted students’ full financial need set GRAIN apart. “This is an institutional endeavor as good as any that have been done in private education, whether in a high school or college or university,” said Peter Ramsey, a consultant with Marts & Lundy and a former senior development executive at Phillips Academy (Andover), Wellesley College, Babson College, and Harvard Business School. “This is the kind of initiative that some of the wealthiest schools, colleges, and universities in America should emulate. Some have done elements of this, but I don’t know of an institution that has capped tuition and fees for three consecutive years to reduce the sticker price and raised enough financial aid to meet 100 percent of financial need.”

Conceived by Headmaster Temba Maqubela and enthusiastically embraced as the Board of Trustees’ number-one strategic priority, GRAIN struck a chord with members of the extended Groton family, who stepped up quickly and generously. But it also resonated with non-Grotonians: heads of some other institutions began discussing GRAIN-inspired changes at their own schools, and a few leadership gifts came in from parents whose children were admitted but chose not to attend Groton.

When fundraising formally closed on June 30, 2018, GRAIN had raised just over $53 million, exceeding the original $50 million goal and well ahead of the anticipated timetable. The original hope was to hit $50 million by 2020—a six-year plan. Enthusiasm for GRAIN had slashed that timeline in half. Equally impressive is that, as of late September, approximately 60 percent of the total pledged was already paid in full and actively working for affordability and inclusion on the Circle.

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By Participation ALUMNI

56%

OTHER

(faculty, friends, foundations)

9% PARENTS

35%

By Dollars OTHER

ALUMNI

(faculty, friends, foundations)

5%

42%

PARENTS

Alumni who are current parents are included with alumni.

53%

Throughout GRAIN’s 3.5-year run, the Board of Trustees was acutely aware that it was making an important statement about the school’s values and its leadership in the areas of inclusion and affordability. It was also clear to the headmaster and trustees that they were building on Groton’s long history of innovation and principled leadership. Board of Trustees President Jonathan Klein p’08, ’11, ’18 explained the weight of history that permeated GRAIN discussions. “As trustees of Groton School,” he said, “we are acutely conscious of the fact that we are standing on the shoulders of those who came before us and must also prepare foundations for those who follow. It also struck us as essential to be relevant and conscious of the broader issues impacting the country and the world.”

One GRAIN supporter who served on the board in the eighties noted that while GRAIN was fresh and innovative, it channeled an ethos long engrained at Groton. “The headmasters that I’ve known, starting with Jack Crocker, all had a sensitivity to diversity and inclusion, along with affordability and accessibility,” said this former trustee. “They’re not new issues.”

“

How can independent school students have a real-world experience, if we omit the talent from an enormous socioeconomic group?”

Thomas Kalaris p’05, ’07, ’12, who served on the board from 2008 to 2016 and chaired the Investment Committee, summed it up: “Groton has always been a school with a conscience.”

He believes that GRAIN has altered the culture of the school. “The question is, is it returning the school to its roots, or has it changed the school? I would say it’s a bit of both.”

An Immediate Embrace Under the headmaster’s leadership, and with zealous support from the Board of Trustees, the idea caught fire immediately. GRAIN took root with a $1 million gift in early 2014, intended to jumpstart the initiative while endowment was still building. In November 2014, a $5 million power pledge followed, turning any doubters into believers.

GRAIN raised funds faster than any effort before it, and pledges turned to cash at an unprecedented pace. Gifts, including a $5 million challenge, steadily accumulated—from parents, friends, and alumni. Alumni gifts poured in from every decade, from the 1930s to the present, and graduates from five decades made sevenfigure donations.

The board’s embrace of GRAIN was called “gutsy” by some donors—not only because it dared to take on inclusion and spiraling tuition costs, but because the endeavor launched while fundraising still remained for the extensive renovation and expansion of the Schoolhouse. That, however, didn’t seem to slow things down. Some Schoolhouse donors also lined up behind GRAIN, and others who had not been motivated by a building project were moved to support an initiative focused on inclusion and affordability.

The Schoolhouse renovation was critical, and its donors—understanding the need for better science and

math facilities and communal gathering spaces—helped transform the hub and heart of campus. The two efforts co-existed amiably in 2015, when donors added $4.9 million to the already substantial Schoolhouse project’s coffers and a separate $14.5 million to GRAIN. By 2016, the Schoolhouse had met its goal with an additional $1.8 million raised, while GRAIN collected $6.8 million.

Overall, the Schoolhouse effort raised $30.3 million in forty-one months with sixty-seven gifts of $100,000 or more, while GRAIN raised $53 million in forty-three months with eighty-one of these leadership gifts. GRAIN attracted sixteen gifts of $1 million or more compared to eight for the Schoolhouse project.

For some donors, the timing felt right to stand up for inclusion. “It was a bit of a counter-reaction to the world we’re living in,” said Trustee Will Gardiner ’82, p’19, who was board treasurer at GRAIN’s inception. “It protected a little bit of the sanity of the world.”

Why They Gave Motivation among donors varied: one graduate of the 1950s wanted a Groton unlike the school he attended.

“The school should mirror society,” he said. “It shouldn’t be a separate enclave of privilege.”

Many said they wanted a more inclusive school now and were inspired by the headmaster. Thanks to Mr. Maqubela’s personal story of success through education, he was uniquely qualified to talk about inclusion and GRAIN. It was easy to understand why he carried the message with such passion and persistence: when still a high school student, he had fled his native South Africa after fighting apartheid, a rigid, state-sanctioned exclusion policy that stripped blacks of power and dignity.

The headmaster’s own experience—of landing in New York as a political refugee, supported by the generosity of sponsors, and building a career that rested on innate integrity and teaching talent—showed an irrefutable understanding of inclusion, and served as a symbol of what could be achieved by those whom society might otherwise overlook.

One early GRAIN donor described his support for the headmaster’s goals in business terms. “I viewed it as an opportunity to invest behind an entrepreneur, a social entrepreneur,” he said. “I shared and believed strongly in Temba’s vision, but I was concerned it would be seen as unrealistically ambitious and not get off the ground. I thought that if I could just inject enough seed capital to make it believable, that might be enough to establish the continued on page 16

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A BOLD TUITION FREEZE TO SOME, the most important Gray P’15 was among those who part of GRAIN was the tuition helped reframe the conversation. freeze. Most would agree that it “A tuition freeze isn’t a cost,” he was the boldest. pointed out. “It is a forgone rev For years, the Board of Trustees enue opportunity. Raising tuition had talked about controlling creates an opportunity cost that is tuition, but didn’t devise a coneven more significant, in the form crete plan. Former Trustee Thomas of a more restricted and therefore Kalaris P’05, ’07, ’12 said the lower quality applicant pool.” board had long grappled with Trustee Franz ColloredoGroton’s high cost. “Sometimes Mansfeld ’81, P’09, ’13, ’15, ’18 you look at a set of facts, accept found the concept compelling. them, wring your hands, and “We had to do something to make don’t know what to do,” he the school more affordable. We’d said. “Then there is a single idea been talking for years about what that frames everything— and that to do about high tuitions. We changes your perspective.” felt we could trust our leaders When the headmaster sugwith this program and support gested a tuition freeze, some them.” Key to the plan was the trustees were skeptical that it school’s solid financial footing, could succeed without disruptthanks to decades of discipline: ing Groton’s careful budgeting. the endowment was strong and Groton School Trustee William the school had covered important

capital needs, namely the extensive expansion of the Schoolhouse.

“The financing of private education is off the rails in this country,” said Peter Ramsey, a consultant with Marts & Lundy who advised Groton during GRAIN’s early stages. “The cost of private education in this country is out of control and has been for twenty-five or thirty years.”

In the sixties and seventies, the cost of college tuition and the cost of a Chevy Impala rose at about the same rate, he said. Then college tuition started to outpace inflation, never hit the brakes, and ultimately spun out of control. The same could be said of independent schools.

Mr. Ramsey pointed out the difference between Groton and schools known as “need blind.”

GRAIN’s Impact Positive, near-immediate impact from GRAIN went far beyond the plunge in Groton’s tuition ranking.

T

HANKS TO an early gift specifi-

cally intended for immediate use, the Admission Office was able to select students without considering their families’ ability to pay, eliminating once and for all a financial aid wait list. Thanks to GRAIN, for the last two school years, Groton admitted the same percentage of students (about 12 percent) who applied for financial aid and those who did not.

“Very few institutions admit without considering a family’s financial need,” said Board of Trustees Development Committee Chair Franz Colloredo Mansfeld ’81, p’09, ’13, ’15, ’18. “To be

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in that league is pretty amazing because we weren’t there before. The fact that we can now talk about affordability and what we’ve done to address that issue—to freeze tuition and then to have a continued focus on what we can do to slow the rate of tuition growth going forward— that was very appealing to me.”

The effect of emphasizing the “middle”—those of neither high nor low income—was striking. In 2017–18, the largest percentage of financial aid recipients—52 percent—was from families earning between $120,000 and $200,000. Forty-five percent of those

The term “need-blind” means admission officers don’t read applicants’ financial records before making their decisions, which doesn’t necessarily mean they meet 100 percent of a student’s need, he explained, adding, “Very few schools, colleges, and universities are able to meet 100 percent of need.”

One GRAIN supporter wondered aloud whether Mr. Maqubela felt compelled to rein in Groton’s tuition because he saw the high fee as a symbol of elitism, incompatible with a school that embraces inclusion— an observation the headmaster has since confirmed. “There’s nothing more antithetical to the liberation movements than elitism,” this GRAIN supporter observed, referring to movements in the headmaster’s

receiving aid were from families earning between $80,000 and $120,000.

Groton continues to waive tuition for families earning under $80,000, thanks to a policy implemented in 2008.

Groton’s financial aid decisions take into consideration a variety of factors, including a family’s need to save for college and current tuition obligations for siblings at other schools and colleges.

Without GRAIN, a Groton education could be out of reach for many, including some children of Groton graduates who have heeded the school’s ethos of service and pursued careers at nonprofits and in government.

In many cases, professionals who could have afforded Groton years ago would find it out of reach today without generous aid for the “middle.” In fact, based on median U.S. household incomes, the cost of boarding tuition thirty years ago was less than half the burden it is today.

Ann Bakewell Woodward ’86, board

40 Peer Schools Groton School

A Precipitous Plunge native South Africa. “It’s not authentic for a community that embraces inclusion to also carry that type of symbol of elitism.”

Mr. Colloredo-Mansfeld says he knows many people over the years who opted not to apply to Groton because other excellent schools cost substantially less. “The affordability issue was an important factor — we saw that. I personally knew people for whom that was a factor,” he said. Groton’s tuition now ranks thirty-eighth of forty among peer schools.

The tuition freeze is over, but its intent remains strong. In the first year after the freeze ended, the board raised tuition by only 1.5 percent. The plan, said Mr. ColloredoMansfeld, is “to continue to hold tuition back and really address the affordability issue for the school.”

vice president and GRAIN proponent, said she might have been an Inclusion Scholar if that opportunity had existed in the eighties. “I would have been the missing middle,” she said. “My dad worked for the government and affording Groton would have been out of the question without financial aid.”

GRAIN Scholars, she added, are destigmatizing financial aid: “We want you, and we believe in you; it doesn’t matter what color you are or how much money your parents make, you can be a part of the school.”

Groton’s attention to the “middle” encouraged some other independent schools to adjust priorities. “Many of us have medical doctors who technically qualify for financial aid,” Taylor Stockdale, head of the Webb Schools in Claremont, California, said of applicants’ parents at independent schools. Among the forty ABOPS (Association of Business Officers of Preparatory Schools) members, the average 2018–19 boarding school tuition

2018–19 $

65K

Groton School $

60K

Groton School The headmaster and trustees agreed that bold action was needed to dramatically improve Groton’s tuition ranking.

In 2014–15, Groton tuition was #1 among forty peer schools, an unappealing distinction.

The effect of the freeze was somewhat unpredictable because it relied upon tuition decisions at other schools.

2014–15 $

55K

$

50K

was $60,381. “When you get to $60,000plus, it’s a capital expense,” said Mr. Stockdale. “It’s no longer an annual expense.”

From the beginning, Headmaster Maqubela hoped not only to affect Groton, but to provoke thought about affordability and inclusion at other schools. “The answer for all of us isn’t the same, but the statement about affordability—and commitment to it—was heard far and wide,” said Mr. Stockdale. “The example of other schools being not only aware and very concerned about affordability but also acting on it is very powerful. We all have to act on it in different ways, depending on our different circumstances.” Webb has significantly increased its financial aid budget since 2014, from $4.2 million to $5.2 million, and aims to spend $7 million on aid by 2022. Another California school intrigued

by GRAIN, the Cate School, invited Mr. Maqubela to meet with its Board of Trustees in September.

Marts & Lundy consultant Peter

The tuition freeze had immediate and conclusive impact: after one year of the freeze, Groton’s tuition retreated from #1 to #14 among forty peer schools; after year two, tuition dropped to #29 of forty; and after year three, to #37.

Today, after a 1.5 percent increase in the first year post-freeze, Groton is #38 of forty and committed to holding down future tuition increases.

Ramsey urged schools to take note of GRAIN. “You can see what this resourceful institution has done,” he said of Groton. “It’s a model for some other places—to at least consider if not all of the strategy, parts of it.”

GRAIN, Mr. Stockdale said, “got a lot of schools off the dime in terms of building resources for accessibility and affordability. GRAIN definitely shifted the conversation from, ‘wouldn’t it be nice?’ to ‘let’s make this happen, let’s make a plan. Once you plan for something, oftentimes you can make something good happen.”

Headmaster Maqubela said that some GRAIN donors told him they got behind the initiative because “it feels bigger than Groton.”

Indeed it is. “The national conversation recently has moved toward issues of access, affordability, and inclusion,” Mr. Maqubela said. “Independent schools should not just join the conversation, but also propel it forward.”

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continued from page 13

momentum Temba needed. He could leverage the impact of what little difference I could make many times over.”

How key was the headmaster to GRAIN’s runaway success? To Trustee Will Gray p’15, Mr. Maqubela exemplifies the qualities of a visionary leader. “Could somebody else have achieved what Temba has achieved?” he pondered. “Temba inspired and led us to achieve things that the community would otherwise not have imagined possible.”

It was not unusual for GRAIN support to come from a very personal place. One early donor, Pete Briger ’82, had felt excluded because of his religion while attending Groton; he found joy in propelling the aspiration that all students can feel they belong on the Circle. Another major GRAIN donor said that—despite his child’s decision not to attend Groton—he was motivated by a memory of his own father explaining why he could not attend the high school of his choice: “He said, ‘If you go, I won’t have the money to send you to college. If I made a lot less money, you’d have a chance of going. If I made

GRAIN would not have been possible without the support of Groton’s Board of Trustees, who proudly and emphatically welcomed the chance to champion a cause that would make Groton more affordable and accessible.

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The fundamental reason for having a strong financial position is that when a strategic opportunity comes along, you can jump at it.”

a lot more money, you’d have a chance of going here. But where I am, you don’t.’”

That story encapsulates the dilemma faced by what Mr. Maqubela often calls “the talented missing middle.”

GRAIN emphasized inclusion of that “middle”—those of neither high nor low income—and the need for Groton’s community to reflect reality. “How can independent school students have a real-world experience,” the headmaster has asked, “if we omit the talent from an enormous socioeconomic group?”

“The ‘missing middle’—that resonated deeply with our alumni and parents. It seemed to be something that everybody got; everybody nodded,” said Director of Development and Alumni Affairs John MacEachern p’10, ’14, ’16. “That was the most resonant idea—the fact that the middle group was priced out of opportunities like Groton.”

The Pace of GRAIN 3.0M

$

$2.5M/ month 2.5M

$

$2.1M/ month

2.0M

$

1.5M

$

$1.2M/ month

1.0M

$

0.5M

$

NOV 2014

JUNE 2015

NOV 2015

JUNE 2016

NOV 2016

JUNE 2017

NOV 2017

JUNE 2018

(Monthly Average)

Often assuming that they will not qualify for aid, these families are squeezed by burdensome loans at the college level and rarely even think of independent schools like Groton. “We were responsibly supporting families of lower income but forcing out the $250,000 family that by every measure is in the 1 percent but can’t afford two to three $50,000/year tuitions,” said Mr. Kalaris.

Distinctive, intentional, and with a leader who authentically carries the message of inclusion, GRAIN attracted supporters quickly, for they recognized that Groton’s initiative tackled problems that stretch well beyond the Circle.

Could We Afford It? While Groton’s trustees rapidly embraced GRAIN, they were far from impulsive. Discussion and financial modeling were meticulous, thorough, and downright exhaustive.

“The pressures were obviously about how we were going to fund this,” said Board of Trustees Vice President Ann Bakewell Woodward ’86. “To me it was a no-brainer: why wouldn’t we do this? I credit Temba for bringing it to the board; he was gutsy enough, and enough trustees said it was worth trying—that we should be doing something like this as a school of our financial wherewithal.”

Will Gardiner had been board treasurer for three years when the headmaster proposed GRAIN and its

boldest feature, the three-year tuition freeze. Long before GRAIN, the school had developed a careful and deliberate approach when considering ideas that demanded substantial funding: various financial models were built, analyzed, and re-analyzed. “Could we afford it?” Mr. Gardiner asked himself as he plotted ways to accomplish the freeze.

Would the school cut parts of its academic or extracurricular program? Decrease salary hikes? Increase the number of students? The answer to those options was a resounding and unanimous “no.”

“One fundamental,” Mr. Gardiner said, “was that we would not make those compromises.”

That meant GRAIN would have to rest upon only two possible sources: fundraising and the endowment—if more could be drawn from it responsibly.

Groton School, carefully tended by responsible trustees over many years, was drawing slightly more than 4 percent from the endowment each year to fund the operating budget. For an institution with a large endowment, Mr. Gardiner explained, 4 percent was considered low, providing flexibility.

Temporarily nudging the endowment draw closer to 5 percent would help fund GRAIN, but the custodians closely guarding Groton’s resources, such as Mr. Gardiner and other trustees, could tolerate that approach only if it included a plan to bring the endowment draw back down again. Mr. Gardiner, along with then Chief Financial Officer Hale Smith, modeled six scenarios predicting

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17

“

when the endowment draw would revert to its starting level.

The endowment draw today, according to Mr. Gardiner, is on the road back to where it was when GRAIN began—significantly outpacing expectations, thanks in part to a cooperative, booming stock market and how quickly pledges were paid. He expects the draw to be back at its starting point within no more than ten years of GRAIN’s launch.

At the beginning, few would have predicted quite this favorable an outcome. At board meetings, questions were numerous and discussion intense. Mr. Gardiner worked hard to persuade trustees who raised fears that the tuition freeze could put Groton at risk, and he backed up his opinion with the extensive financial models, easing concerns by providing a play-by-play outline for risk management. “Will provided that framework so trustees who struggled to get over the idea conceptually had something they could put their back up against and say, ‘he’s done the modeling; as trustees, we can support this and be responsible fiduciaries,’” said Mr. Kalaris.

Mr. Gardiner had no hesitation. “I was personally quite comfortable that if we raised the money at a reasonable rate, the endowment draw could get back down in a reasonable time,” he said. “I felt like we were not taking an undue risk.”

It quickly became clear that raising money at a reasonable rate was a modest goal. The rate of fundraising was unreasonable—unreasonably fast. “I think we all expected Temba to have a passion for inclusion,” said Mr. Gardiner.

“What we may not have expected was his steel—Temba has no problem doing difficult things—and that he’s the world’s best fundraiser.”

Today, the school is on solid ground, unshakable in both its finances and its principles. “By so many metrics, the school today is even stronger than it was before GRAIN,” said Board of Trustees Development Committee Chair Franz Colloredo-Mansfeld ’81, p’09, ’13, ’15, ’18—first listing the intangibles. “I think the alumni are proud of the school, the students feel pride in this initiative, certainly the faculty embraced this program,” he said.

The tangibles? “Our tuition is actually more affordable on a relative basis than before. The number of students on financial aid has increased significantly. The overall amount of money allocated to financial aid increased significantly. And the number of admission inquiries increased.” The last is true both of students applying for aid and those who can afford full tuition: GRAIN was announced during the 2014–15 school year; applications for 2015–16 jumped by about 8 percent.

In the end, Groton could afford GRAIN. The program rests not only on the work of Mr. Maqubela 18

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Fall 2018

There’s nothing that compounds more effectively than a young person with untapped potential. The difference you make over a lifetime is massive.” and fundraisers in Groton’s Department of Alumni Affairs and Development, but also on decades of sound management over many boards of trustees. Without realizing it, trustees over the years were laying the cornerstone for GRAIN by bolstering the endowment that made GRAIN possible.

Board President Klein pointed out repeatedly that there was little point in having significant financial resources if Groton wouldn’t use them for key strategic objectives. “Groton has to remain relevant, and to do so we need to embrace bold and difficult initiatives that speak to the place of Groton in a changing world,” he said. “Including only the families of the very wealthy and those of limited financial resources and leaving out the ‘missing middle’ is unsustainable and also not in the best interests of educating our students to be ready for the work of life. We are blessed with significant resources, and they should be used to enhance the experience for current and future generations.”

Mr. Gardiner agrees. “The fundamental reason for having a strong financial position is that when a strategic opportunity comes along, you can jump at it,” he said.

In this case, the students were at the center of that opportunity. Said Mr. Gray: “This is an investment in the children, in the mission of empowering young lives with extraordinary potential that would otherwise go unfulfilled.”

Moving Forward With GRAIN’s runaway success, some are questioning, what’s next?

“I don’t think of GRAIN as a completed effort,” said Board of Trustees Treasurer Diana Ferguson ’81. “I think of it as a step on the continuum.”

One donor, who believes that inclusion brings great benefits to his own child, wonders how to ensure true inclusion after students of varied backgrounds are admitted. “Kids like our children grow up in a bubble,” he said. “When people are able to relate to people with continued on page 20

Tangible Evidence: Our Inclusion Scholars Walking the Schoolhouse hallways every day are twenty students, quietly known as Inclusion Scholars, who exemplify the ideals of GRAIN. One facet of the GRAIN initiative was a tangible increase in the number of students on financial aid — including the addition of twenty Inclusion Scholars over four years, five students per year.

The 2018–19 school year marks the first with the full twenty Inclusion Scholars — a number that the school plans to maintain.

Inclusion Scholars have come to the Circle from as far as China and as near as central Massachusetts.

They are fully involved in the life of the school, and many are demonstrating leadership qualities in dorms, clubs, sports, and as prefects — building skills that they will carry throughout life. Their impact will be one of GRAIN’s legacies.

As one Inclusion Scholar from the Bronx, New York, put it: “I want to use my Groton education for all the practical things that every student aspires to — to get into a good college and eventually get a good job — but also to help kids from backgrounds like mine have easier access to wonderful opportunities like Groton, because, frankly, they’re life-changing.”

The students admitted as Headmaster’s Inclusion Scholars have expressed how honored they felt to receive this recognition, along with the distinction of admittance to Groton. “I read the letter, and I cried. I was really overwhelmed with emotion,” said one Inclusion Scholar from New Jersey. A Scholar from Massachusetts said: “I don’t think I can overstate how much Groton has changed my life. I know I am headed on a path toward success, and I know that it is because your generosity gave me that opportunity.”

All Groton students not only hear the message of inclusion that these Scholars embody, but also live it. As one Inclusion Scholar, an international student, observed, “This sense of inclusion helps us keep in mind that, in the end, we’re really not that different, and if you reach out to other people, they’ll respond back. And that’s what makes us a community.”

One GRAIN donor referred to Inclusion Scholars as “ceiling crushers.” They are driven and talented, and GRAIN helps them meet their potential. Quite simply, the Inclusion Scholars’ presence improves Groton. “When I look at who is here in terms of the kids,” said Headmaster Maqubela, “we are all a better school because of the Inclusion Scholars.”

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One Family’s Story The parent of an Inclusion Scholar spoke to GRAIN donors last spring, sharing the following words …

I would like to begin by saying that words cannot truly express how grateful and honored we are as a family to be a part of GRAIN. Beginning in the summer of 2016, our daughter was in the process of researching secondary schools. [She] selected a handful of schools she thought would be a good fit, and we arranged tours and interviews in the fall.

Groton was the last tour and interview before heading back home. I clearly remember our sixhour drive home that day. As we started off, we all talked about the beauty of the campus, how inspirational the Chapel was, and, of course, that the food at lunch was fantastic. However, almost all

of our conversation was directed toward how caring and genuine the people were. There was this feeling that was hard to describe, a sense of comfort and belonging. It wasn’t until later that we learned that there was a term to capture this feeling; it is called the Groton Embrace.

During this drive, I also noticed that there was very little discussion about the other schools. This led me to believe that Groton was where [she] wanted to be. When we arrived home, my wife and I had a difficult discussion: whether we should allow her to apply knowing that if she were to be accepted, it would be impossible

for us to afford the full tuition.

We decided to take it one step at a time and encouraged her to apply.

On March 10, [our daughter] opened her email and was greeted by an astounding YES! While it was like a dream come true for her, our hearts had sunk thinking we may have led her down a path of disappointment.

After much prayer, God responded with the letter informing us that [she] was selected as a Headmaster’s Inclusion Scholar.

For this, my entire family thanks all of you for making the dream come true and changing our lives.

I would like to share a quick personal story. Just two days

before my fifteenth birthday, my mother passed away of a heart attack. She was only forty-three years old. My father, an electrician in a paper factory, was left to raise three teenage boys by himself. We had a small family, leaving very little support for him through those tough times. But as tough as it was, I experienced something very special over the next few years. My community became my extended family. They brought me into their homes, fed me, and believed in me. Simply put, they gave me a chance.

These people were friends, parents of friends, teachers, neighbors, and sometimes people I didn’t even know, all of different

continued from page 18 different backgrounds, that’s a huge positive factor.” The real challenge, he believes, lies not with fundraising for initiatives like GRAIN, but with day-to-day programs and practices. “How does a school integrate people from different socioeconomic backgrounds?” he asked. “Once you have those students, how do you make sure they’re truly included?”

That challenge is easier to meet at a small school like Groton, where students can’t help but interact with students very different from themselves. This donor’s child attended the GRACE (GRoton Accelerate Challenge Enrich) summer program, which serves students from a wide range of backgrounds. For some, GRACE fills a preparation gap; for others, it provides a boost toward higher-level courses. This child told his parents about a casual conversation with a friend, who explained the racial pressures that he routinely faces as a black member of society. Such conversations provide an important education well beyond what can be achieved through textbooks and classes, and, as this donor observed, help diminish the hierarchies that can become instilled in many schools.

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Groton already ensures that students receiving aid enjoy the same opportunities as full-pay students— from Global Education Opportunities (GEOs) and weekend excursions to textbooks and spending money— but another key GRAIN donor would like to see the support continue beyond the Circle. He said that his “spine shivers” when he thinks of the broad societal ramifications of the connections that open doors—and jobs—for students of parents with that access. “A lot of the Inclusion Scholars won’t have access to a support system like that,” he said, advocating for a network of Inclusion Scholars, who would mentor and act as a resource for the Scholars. “It would be fantastic to have a GRAIN network.”

Describing his commitment to GRAIN, he applies the “magic of compound interest”—a concept routinely discussed in the financial world—to people. “There’s nothing more powerful than changing the trajectory of a young life.” he said.

“There’s nothing that compounds more effectively than a young person with untapped potential. The difference you make over a lifetime is massive.”

colors, financial means, and religious backgrounds. To this day, I am fully aware that these people helped influence who I am and are part of the reason I am able to enjoy the life that I live today.

I feel that that time in my life is a bit of a parallel to what GRAIN provides not only for its recipients but also for the greater community. Groton students are spending the most influential times of their lives caring for and being cared for by people from all walks of life. They are living with and interacting with people who are not like them, therefore allowing them to change perceptions and dispel stereotypes. GRAIN has given them the gift of empathy.

At a time when there is such an abundance of egocentrism and a lack of personal connectivity, GRAIN sets the example that it is OK to put others before yourself.

What is most important is that all

of this is happening in a community that is truly—the key word being truly—inclusive, which ultimately makes GRAIN so unique.

There are two things I am certain that everyone in this room can agree on. One is that everything you have achieved in your life was not completely on your own merit. Someone took a chance on you, and you seized it.

Secondly, there is no greater feeling one can have than when you pass that chance on to someone else who may need it. As time moves forward, my biggest hope for all GRAIN students is that they fully understand the gift they have received and the responsibility that comes along with it. I am confident that when they fulfill the Groton motto and become leaders, they will carry the principles of GRAIN in their hearts and share them with the world.

In closing, I would encourage

all of you who have not had the benefit of meeting these students to do so. Come share their talents at a concert, art exhibit, play, or sporting event. Share a meal with them to get to know what Groton saw in them. And when you do this, remember that without you not one of these students would be at Groton. [Our daughter] would certainly extend this invitation to any of you.

Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Maqubela, thank you so much for your vision. Knowing your life experiences makes GRAIN even more meaningful to us. Your ability to connect with all people is the driving force that makes Groton so special. Board of Trustees, thank you for your willingness to support an initiative that freezes tuition, supports middle class families and children of professionals, and raises [the number of] financial aid

recipients. And last but not least, to all who have given to GRAIN, thank you!

Your actions speak for themselves. Without you, GRAIN would not exist. You have and continue to cultivate a community at Groton which is honest in its diversity and inclusion. Your selflessness will benefit society as a whole for many future generations. Thank you for allowing us to be part of the Groton family!

MINDING THE GAP

The Headmaster’s Captains Society IT’S NO SECRET that every child at Groton School, in a sense, receives financial aid. That’s because

yearly tuition only covers part of the cost of a child’s education — approximately 60 percent. That’s where the Headmaster’s Captains Society comes in. Introduced as a component of GRAIN, it gave parents the opportunity to close the difference between the cost of full tuition and the actual cost of educating one Groton student. Their yearly contributions were in hand and working for GRAIN and its Inclusion Scholars immediately, unlike some deferred long-term pledges.

In 2014–15, the first year of the Headmaster’s Captains Society, twenty-seven “captains” each stepped up and filled the gap between tuition and the cost of educating a child, $31,243. The following year, thirty captains made gifts of $32,984, and the next year, thirty-five donated $34,050 to fill the gap. Last year, in the 2017–18 school year, there were forty “captains” filling a gap of $35,500.

Not surprisingly, the overwhelming number of captains are current parents, but several alumni and trustees have put on their captains’ hats as well.

FY 2015 $

31,243+

27 CAPTAINS

FY 2016 $

32,984+

30 CAPTAINS

FY 2017 $

34,050+

35 CAPTAINS

FY 2018 $

35,500+

40 CAPTAINS

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GRAIN BY THE NUMBERS

1.2M

$

Average amount raised each month Number of gifts of six figures or more

81

Groton tuition ranking before GRAIN

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Groton tuition ranking after GRAIN

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A Global Collaboration THE CALL to support inclusion at

Groton rang throughout the world.

Gifts came in from parents, alumni, and friends on five continents, with international and U.S. donations split about fifty-fifty.

The cities tallying the highest gifts from multiple donors were New York, Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, San Francisco, and London. Three of the top seven donor cities are in Asia, a powerful geographic cluster.

The donors’ stories in this region reveal that their giving should have been no surprise. Nearly every donor in China had grown up under humble circumstances and, through their own intellect and academic might, tested into top colleges. When they went on to pursue graduate studies in the U.S., they received financial aid packages themselves.

These successful Chinese executives and entrepreneurs understand the transformational power of a top education because they experienced it firsthand—and most would not have had their education without the generosity of

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donors at their respective U.S. universities. In a sense, through GRAIN and their other educational philanthropy, they are paying it forward.

“It’s all about my personal experience,” said one major GRAIN donor from China, a Groton parent who received full tuition while studying at Harvard Business School. “I know how big an impact education has on people’s lives. I myself benefitted from the philanthropic efforts of various people.”

Another donor, who has earned several degrees, said that his parents didn’t finish primary school. He tested into a boarding school in Northeast China, and academic success propelled him into a top college and graduate school. Working in a global economy, he understands the need to communicate across cultures; he called the multicultural experience that GRAIN supports “mutually beneficial for American students and international students. It opens the window for their life careers.”

Another GRAIN supporter, Fred Hu p’21, a highly regarded economist in China, also received aid during his graduate studies at Harvard. He considers his birth year lucky—he was born

just late enough to benefit from the first national college entrance examination that China implemented after the tumultuous Cultural Revolution.

Part of the very first class admitted to college through the national exam, he left his “village with rice paddies” and stepped into an exciting new world of learning, discovery, and “dreaming big.”

“I grew up at a time when China was very much like North Korea today,” he said. “China was so closed, isolated and impoverished. There was no social mobility.” He explained that Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s reforms, recognized that education was key to China’s modernization. Fellow villagers, just a year or two older, had no choice but to finish high school and move into careers at factories or farms.

The college exam opened the path to college and “whole new horizons” for Dr. Hu. Knowing firsthand the impact of education, he and his wife, Abby, decided to support GRAIN as soon as the headmaster described it to them.

They said they found Mr. Maqubela’s personal story “so touching, and his vision for Groton so resonating.” And as Groton parents, they saw the value

GRAIN TIMELINE $1 million gift solidifies idea that would become GRAIN

Number of Inclusion Scholars reaches 20

June 2017

December 2017

September 2018

GRAIN

GRAIN

June 2015

June 2016

gifts total $14.6 million

February 2014

gifts total $32.4 million

$1.4 million gift brings GRAIN funds to $50 million

GRAIN

gifts total $21.4 million

November 2014

September 2015

May 2017

July 2017

June 2018

GRAIN

First five Inclusion Scholars arrive at Groton

$5 million challenge grant issued

Third $5 million gift pledged

GRAIN

adopted by Board of Trustees

GRAIN receives

fundraising concludes

a $5 million gift

IMPACT GIFTS CAME from …

H BOSTON AREA H NEW YORK / NEW JERSEY

H H

H HH

H SAN FRANCISCO HH H H

H

H

H WASHINGTON, DC H BEIJING H BERMUDA H HONG KONG H JOHANNESBURG

H H

50% gifts from the U.S. 50% gifts from other countries

H LONDON H MEXICO CITY H SANTIAGO H SEOUL H SHANGHAI

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of “Second and Third Formers meeting preserving China’s traditional culture, Among donors from around students from different backgrounds— emphasizes the importance of diversity. the world, motivation came from future citizens and leaders they’ll “I’m interested in preserving diversity personal stories, from children’s partner with or compete against—at a in all types of things—intellectual experiences, and, in many cases, Inclusion Scholars Donors whodiversity, are TUITION YEARS formative age.” cultural diversity, religious from the headmaster himself. Many Groton alumni Dr. Hu also thought GRAIN was diversity,” he said, and referring to donors said they were moved by Mr. simply right. “At a school like Groton, GRAIN, added, “We want to support Maqubela’s story and saw him as the you want to continue to uphold the socioeconomic diversity, too.” His personification of a simple key message: highest possible academic standards family was not the only one moved by access to education can change a with no compromise,” he said. “At the Groton’s choice of a Chinese student life. Groton trustee Nancy Yang p’18, same time, you can be an elite school to be an Inclusion Scholar, and he says who grew up in the U.S. and now with a soul, with a generous heart. I he would have supported GRAIN even lives in Hong Kong, summed up the believe GRAIN represents the spirit if his child hadn’t attended Groton. motivation for Asia’s GRAIN donors: Donors who are of equal opportunity and inclusive That is not a far-fetched notion: two “There is not one of us whose lives have Groton parents 2015-16 2016-17 2017-18 meritocracy.” families whose children chose other not been fundamentally changed by Another donor, who devotes schools still supported GRAIN because access to a good education.” considerable time and philanthropy to they believed so strongly in the effort.

3

56%

FROZEN

53%

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Photographs by Adam Richins

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PRIZE DA The message was serious and urgent: before the graduates in the Form of 2018 received their diplomas, before they tossed their boaters in the air, and before Headmaster Temba Maqubela sent them off with the traditional “Go well!” they listened to a mission and a plea: 24

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AY 2018 their generation can—and must—change the world. ¶ Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka— undersecretary general of the United Nations, executive director of UN Women, and former deputy president of South Africa—expressed hope and high expectations when she www.groton.org

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addressed Groton School’s 133rd Prize Day, imploring Groton’s graduates to tackle the world’s most entrenched problems (see page 28).

Headmaster Temba Maqubela opened the commencement with a welcome and spoke about the graduating form, many of whom started on the Circle at the same time as the Maqubelas.

“They knew us as rookies,” he said of a group extraordinarily “convivial, inclusive, and affable,” but also one that leaves a lasting imprint through their advocacy for change. Mr. Maqubela also feted retiring teachers: Hugh Sackett, a Classics teacher who completed sixty-three years at Groton; Jonathan Choate, with a fifty-two-year career in mathematics; Beth Van Gelder, who taught art at Groton for thirty-nine years; and Bill Maguire, who taught math for thirty-three years.

Also speaking was Board of Trustees President Jonathan Klein p’08, ’11, ’18, who reflected on the value of a Groton education this year from the unique perspective of a graduate’s parent. “As you leave the Groton bubble,” he said, “we hope that you will take with you what you have learned here—I am not referring to your encyclopedic knowledge of the various subjects that you have studied or your expertise in many academic disciplines. I am referring to what we hope you have absorbed more than anything else—that is, judgment and discernment . . .

“Be tolerant, be compassionate, try to walk in the shoes of others and treat them as you would hope to be treated,” he continued. “This will enable you to lead a life of meaning, no matter what you do in your life beyond the Circle.”

Mr. Klein also noted milestones that the Form of 2018 experienced: the completion of the Schoolhouse expansion and the success of GRAIN (GRoton Affordability and INclusion), which has resulted in equal acceptance rates for students needing financial aid and those who don’t. “You’ve lived and breathed inclusion,” he said.

The only student speaker, selected by his peers, focused on his realization that the caring shown at Groton might not be quite so prevalent in college and beyond (see page 31). “I realized that . . . the mindset of expecting to be cared for is an eminently Grotonian one,” said Christian Carson ’18. “I’ve observed that just about everyone in this community defaults to a state of caring about other people.” In Christian’s eyes, caring itself is the Form of 2018’s legacy to the school. There may be no better way to “go well!”

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1. Maggie Cheever and Richard Santry 2. Annie Colloredo-Mansfeld taking a selfie with Olivia Potter, Layne McKeown, and Elle Despres 3. Ousmane “Malik” Gaye 4. Graduate Max Klein (center), with Adam ‘11; his mother, Debbie Klein; Alex ‘08; and his father, Board President Jonathan Klein 5. Angelina Joyce 6. Cam Schmitt, Nailah Pierce, and Greg Segal 7. Becky Zhang and Thomas Steere 8. Rose Gil and Elechi Egwuekwe 9. Rohan Varkey, Jonathan Lamson, and Alex Waxman 5 6

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“Fulfill the Mission of Your Generation” Keynote speaker Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, undersecretary general of the United Nations and executive director of UN Women, delivered the following address:

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eadmaster Temba Maqubela, the Board of Trustees, and those who serve schools and institutions like this as a matter of public service, thank you for this tradition.

To the graduates, faculty and staff, families and friends, and well-wishers who are here, ladies and gentlemen, I would like all of us to say congratulations to the Form of 2018!

Today we celebrate the culmination of your years of hard work.

We thank the parents, families, peers, and friends who have supported you along the way; the teachers and staff who enhanced your learning experience; your Headmaster and trustees for their leadership; and of course, we celebrate you and the many other people who have inspired you along the way.

I am a teacher by training, even though my career path has taken me in directions I could never have imagined.

But my few years of teaching were my best years ever. So, being here today for me is very nostalgic.

I am also a lifelong learner, which you also must aim to be—so that today you graduate, but you never stop learning. Because, in a radically changing 28

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world, there will always be something you need to learn and discover in order to be the best version of yourself.

I went back to school in my late fifties to do my doctorate—after I had been a member of Parliament, a deputy minister, a minister, and a deputy president—with a lot of young people in my class and a lot of stairs to climb on aching knees! But when I was in class I was inspired, especially by young people, and I am better for that.

So, this is a commencement, not an end. Your exciting journey is just beginning.

And may I recommend that whatever life throws at you, you stay a learner and always reach for real knowledge, for truth, and for depth, and that you do it with humility and integrity.

Remember that life is more nuanced than what can be understood from a few characters on social media— and far too complex to rely on information sources you cannot always verify.

Take time to consider facts, and use these facts to make the world a better place for yourself and for those around you.

But, all in all, what a time to live in and what a time to be young!

Your generation already has many names—Gen Z, iGen, post-millennials—and is the first generation born into technology who may not even know what it is like to be unconnected.

Do you know what it is like to be unconnected? No? Well, we do.

You are living with other generations who had different experiences

Keynote speaker Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

growing up. Respect and embrace those experiences, because they are part of your heritage.

Learn to communicate, making time to be close to people you care about and those who care for you. Be sure that you communicate beyond tapping the screen. Be interested in their wellbeing, so that you will enjoy lasting and deep friendships and family ties.

There is a much bigger world out there that you are part of. Be part of defining the path and the purpose of your generation in that new world.

Remember that in every generation the world has a possibility to redefine itself and to be better.

In 2015, the world came together to adopt 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which will help us to make our world better together.

These goals were meant to achieve peace, to protect the planet, to realize prosperity for many more people, and to enhance and improve power relations between men and women.

We now have only twelve years left to achieve these Goals, which means that much of their success will depend on you, who are now going to be young adults, working together with determined adults and “oldies” like ourselves.

The United Nations needs you as partners to help us implement these Goals. I do not have to convince you, I’m sure, about the need in the world for peace, for better caring of the planet, for ending poverty, and for much better gender relations. These Sustainable Development Goals, the

Eric Yang, followed by JJ Cheng and other members of the Form of 2018, greets the headmaster in the faculty handshaking line.

Right, An Nguyen.

“

You, more than any other generation, understand that you do not have to live in a war zone to be exposed to deadly violence, and that the absence of a war is not equal to peace, safety, and security.

SDGs, become part of your heritage.

Today you will receive pins that represent the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. We give these to you to give the world to you, so that you remember this day as your passport to a bigger world.

Now, one of the important and most compelling reasons to develop these goals was to fight together to end poverty. This is because collectively—as the generation that comprises your grandparents, your parents, and your peers—we are the first generation ever with the real possibility to end extreme poverty. And this includes poverty in the U.S., which, with 25% child poverty, has one of the highest rates in the developed world, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

We are also the last generation with a possibility to address climate change,

and to mitigate the impact that is on the horizon, because there isn’t a Planet B. We need everybody to work together on this endeavor. And you are the first generation with a real possibility to change gender relations in a systemic and sustainable way.

In the midst of the #MeToo movement, you have seen the prevalence of sexual exploitation of women and sexual harassment. You have seen how even the most famous celebrities are not safe, and you have learned that there is a price to pay for such behavior.

So, as young women, you know that no one has a right to exploit or abuse you. As young men, you also know that you do not embark on any actions that would put you in disrepute, and that there are consequences for such behavior. Together, you make a team of young people, and a generation, that can

redefine these relations.

You, more than any other generation, understand that you do not have to live in a war zone to be exposed to deadly violence, and that the absence of a war is not equal to peace, safety, and security. So together, with your participation, we have to attend to those who feel disaffected in society and who may be prone to violent behavior.

These are the actions that make you part and parcel of implementing the SDGs. You are also privileged to have received a good education that enables you to reflect on these challenges and contribute to change the world for the better.

At the same time, you must also enjoy being young. As a young person, you are not required to shoulder all the problems of the world and put your own life on hold.

Nelson Mandela once said that people must stop treating him like a saint. He was only a sinner who was trying. He said, “Saints are boring.” This was vintage Mandela, being humble and also legitimizing work-life balance and insisting that he is not perfect. He is just an ordinary human being. www.groton.org

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So, we are not asking you to be a saint. We are just asking you to be good human beings, to be kind, to care for others, but also to have fun.

We also ask you to be interested in deliberations on questions that are important for society, such as the environment, feminism, peace, and matters of faith, and also to take part in sports [and] in activities that bring out your creativity, and to have a love life. Parents agree, all of it is important to your growth.

Above all, remember that, when you are in college, academic excellence is a priority.

As young people you are a power block, which means that you can force change in the world. There are 1.8 billion young people in the world today— the biggest population of young people ever in history.

Right now, young people are leading extraordinary movements around the world, and advocating for an end to “business as usual” on all fronts.

Here in the U.S., we have seen in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting how young people have made their voices louder.

In the Gambia, a young woman, Jaha Dukureh, UN Women’s Regional Goodwill Ambassador for Africa, who is a survivor of child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM), has stepped out to protect other women from these harmful practices and violations. When she lived in the U.S. she engaged the Obama administration, and because of her, a law was passed making it illegal for parents to bring children to the U.S. for female genital mutilation. In her own country of the Gambia she has also made the same contribution, ensuring that a ban was passed on FGM. Malala Yousafzai, who I’m sure is known to many of you, survived gunshots from extremists who wanted to prevent girls from having access to education. She became a fighter for girls’ education, and because of her fight many other girls around the world are now in school.

Just last week, Ireland voted to 30

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repeal the eighth amendment to their constitution, which effectively banned abortion. Exit polls showed that it was young people who participated in large numbers and influenced the vote.

And when the UK had a referendum on whether they should remain in the EU, young people did not participate in their large numbers. As a result, we now have Brexit and this is detrimental and worrisome to young people.

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Your voice, your vote, and your activism count. Make the fight for justice part of your value system.

So, whether you are active or inactive as a young person, with the numbers you have, there are consequences.

You can change history and make your views and your vision a part of society.

We also know of the high prevalence of violence against women. This includes sexual harassment, domestic violence, cyberbullying, and child marriage. In this generation, we have to commit to end all these practices.

We have to make sure that the more than 150 million additional girls at risk of being married [before] their eighteenth birthday by 2030 have a different future altogether.

In the U.S., there are only three states in which child marriage is illegal—Virginia, Texas, and New York— and we have seen an increase in the number of girls who are married as children. Between the years of 2000 and 2015, 200,000 girls were married in the U.S. before the age of eighteen.

The consequence of that is that they are destined for poverty, especially when they become mothers.

This is a fight for your generation.

We must make sure that we turn it around. In Malawi, it was the young girls and women who fought, who protested until the constitution was amended to end child marriage. We

must make sure we are fighting for this in the U.S., just as we are all over the world, and that states pass the necessary legislation.

In all of these issues there is a big role for men and boys. So, we invite you as young men to step up and also fight for equality. We have a campaign called HeForShe which is about men taking an equal stand for gender equality; men like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, who is part of this movement and who is proud to say, “I am a feminist.” Are you guys proud to say that?

Good. So, just for that, I have brought you HeForShe pins, which you will have, for every nice guy in this [tent].

So, here we are. We are in a position as this generation to reduce poverty, to participate in working for peace, to protect our planet and environment. You have to make the choice of what it is that your generation will focus on. The Sustainable Development Goals provide you with a menu that you can choose from.

Frantz Fanon said, “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” We hope you can choose a mission of your generation and fulfill it, to align with the aspirations of the Sustainable Development Goals.

[As for] parents and grandparents, I feel it is our responsibility to make sure that, when you enter the labor force, there will be no unequal pay between men and women. Am I right, parents? This we owe you.

We also expect that, on your part, you will be high achievers, so that when you become managers and leaders in institutions, you will lead with integrity, and equality will be high on your agendas.

Your voice, your vote, and your activism count. Make the fight for justice part of your value system. But remember, you don’t have to be boring and you don’t have to be a saint, and you can still be as great as Mandela.

You are the generation that will change the world. You have the power, the technology, and the numbers.

Go out now and fulfill the mission of your generation.

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Care, Given and Received Members of the Form of 2018 chose Christian Carson ’18 (below) to deliver the student Prize Day speech:

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ood morning. To our headmaster, Board of Trustees, distinguished speaker, parents, faculty, students, and friends: thank you being with us today. I promise to keep this brief, so you can spend your afternoon doing more important things like taking seven trillion photos of your nephew or daughter. I’d also like to thank whoever decided for some godforsaken reason not to vet this speech before I delivered it. For all you know, I’m about to stand up here and launch into an hour-long advertisement for breakfast cereal. But that’s a speech for another time, preferably one when I am supported by a hearty and nutritious breakfast of Kellogg’s All-Bran.

So: the day has arrived. We are a scant hour away from proudly

Jamie Jiang, Michael Xiao, Kevin Xiao, Christian Carson, and Layla McDermott

brandishing our diplomas on this stage.

We have reached the one time in life where I will ever need or want to wear white pants. All indicators point to graduation, yet I hope I’m not alone in saying that it doesn’t quite feel like our Prize Day. It feels like today is some sort of cosmic-scale, clerical error, as though at any moment someone might tap me on the shoulder and tell me there has been a grave mistake. And I’d accept that without a second thought.

If, however, we put aside for the moment the question of whether it’s truly our Prize Day, today has been excellent. It’s finally our turn. For one day, the brilliant spotlight of the school’s attention turns onto our form. We are now judged to be so important that we get to sit in our very own little island of white folding chairs and turn our noses up at you plebeians in the other white folding chairs.

But enough wallowing in the ceremony. We can all take a moment now to look back, inhale proudly, exhale even more proudly, and reflect on this form and the times we’ve had here. I happen to believe that the best way to do this is to examine the things we’ve cared about.

The nature of Groton is that we will dedicate ourselves to many things—academics, of course, but also to our passions and to the school itself. As Paul Michaud said in his chapel talk, whether or not we admit it, what lies underneath that dedication is caring, often quite deeply.

I first began to think about this on a cold, sunny winter morning in Cambridge. It was long weekend, and I had called a friend of mine from the Form of 2017 to meet for breakfast. When we

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The people we have become are shaped almost entirely by those who cared about us and those we cared for.

had ordered our coffees, we sat down.

I asked her how college was going, and she said—very pleasantly, I might add— quote, “Nobody cares about you at college. I’m pretty sure I could die in my dorm room without anyone noticing,” end quote. Now, I was taken aback, because that sounds horrifying to me.

And I get that part of the appeal of college is living independently, but from where I’m standing that kind of independence sounds positively heartless.

Later that day, I got to thinking about that conversation. I realized that that mindset—the mindset of expecting to be cared for—is an eminently Grotonian one. I don’t know where it happens, whether sometime in Third Form or before the admission process even begins, but I’ve observed that just about everyone in this community defaults to a state of caring about other people. We all know the sorts of care I’m describing: roommates who can always find time to talk; English teachers who write full-page comments on essays regardless of the amount of effort we put into them; a history teacher who took time out of his sabbatical year to exchange emails with us about what turned out to be our astonishingly mediocre research paper, not that we’re bitter—the point of all this being that it is impossible to escape being cared about here. Because it seems to be a graduation speech tradition to extend an insignificant turn of phrase into a metaphor, I will do so here: we cannot drop dead in our rooms because there is a seemingly 32

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never-ending line of students and faculty with defibrillators in hand. And every time we nearly see the light, there is a loving yet firm slap to bring us back to the realm of the living. And when we are cared for like this we learn somehow to turn our own care towards others.

I happen to believe that the Form of 2018 stands out in this respect. We care for one another deeply. I say this not because of any particular great act of caring but rather because of the small ways we show care for one another. Take the way just about everyone in our form eats together at the long table in the Dining Hall. Or the way we closed ranks and maintained solidarity in the trying times of Fifth Form. These are all quite small gestures of care, but they make me proud to be a member of a form that is so considerate and so candidly kind.

This is the point where convention would dictate that I come up with some tenuous justification to tell a funny story with minimal relation to the point of this speech. But I, being a teenager with a wired-in hatred of convention, will give it to you straight: here is a stupid little anecdote from my time at Groton with just about zero significance beyond the fact that I find it incredibly funny. You can try to dissect this story until you can drag some battered pulp of a meaning out of it.

Or you could just enjoy the story. I’ll leave it up to you.

This story begins on the night of the 2016 presidential election in

Fernandez dorm. It also happened to be George Altshuler’s birthday, and he had just provided Mexican food for a feed. At the end of that night, it happened that there were around twelve servings of flan left in squat, plastic deli containers. (For those of you who don’t know what flan is, it’s sort of a firmly set custard topped with caramel.) Since the polls were just starting to close, George said that he would eat one flan for every swing state that Trump won.

It was funny—at first. As the first couple of states went red, George, ever the trooper, laughed and dutifully ate his flan. As we entered the wee hours of the morning and more results came in, George’s amusement turned to horror as he looked at the thoroughly red electoral map and the corresponding tower of flan he had promised to consume. You could actually pinpoint the exact moment on George’s face when he realized that he was in for an unpleasant evening. Meanwhile, the rest of us in the common room were alternating between thinking about the election itself and laughing at George.

Sometime around flan number six, we absolved George of his flan-eating duty, lest we become complicit in what was rapidly developing into a localized health crisis.

So there is my story that really isn’t about caring. For you literary types, good luck trying to find meaning in that. And now, if you’ll indulge me in another change of topic, I’ll return once more to wallowing in the ceremony because I want to talk about what comes after today, namely that things here pretty much go on the same as normal. Groton’s blisteringly efficient schedule halts only briefly before lurching back into exams for lower formers and the like.

That’s part of the reason that Prize Day is so sad for the senior class. It’s the first time we confront the fact that we never owned this place—we’ve only had a four-year lease on it. Take our dorm rooms. We talk about “our rooms” and we decorate them and fill them with all the detritus we heap

up over our time here, but when the posters come down and the cardboard boxes are filled, we have to realize that we didn’t own the rooms to begin with.

Our perception of uniqueness, the idea that our form is the eternal focal point of the school, is shattered. It’s a tough thing to realize that we aren’t at the center of anything at all, save our own subjective existences. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to that in this past week and wondering how to reckon with it.

Now, just about every literary reference that could conceivably describe high school or high school graduations has been bludgeoned to death by eighteen-year-olds like me who take it upon themselves to describe life in tenminute speeches. It is with pleasure and a brick in my hand that I will bludgeon one more. It’s something Kurt Vonnegut wrote that I’m partial to: “Life is not

over, but the story is.” I find this quotation to be of great use in making sense of Prize Day. Today is not death. It is not the end. We will continue living.

But it’s a disservice not to acknowledge the end of the story, the end of these four years that have shaped us and developed us and given us so many memories with which to move forward.

The story, I assert, is one shaped by caring. The people we have become are shaped almost entirely by those who cared about us and those we cared for.

The times we chose to invest ourselves in things and people are the ink with which these stories are written.

Please don’t get the idea that I am up here to dispense advice. That would require a longer life than mine and an amount of existential cachet that I can’t hope to accumulate anytime soon. My giving advice would be the

rhetorical equivalent of a first grader feeding paste to his eighty-three classmates. What I will say is something I know to be absolutely certain: that our form, the Form of 2018, will pay forward the gift of caring that we have been given here. Through college and later, we will keep one another from a collective death in our rooms by choosing to care. We will continue life but keep the story in our back pockets. And when we have left here, when nothing remains but our names engraved on a couple of plaques, we will be able to take solace in the fact that the care that we have both given and received will live well past us. To the form I am so lucky to call my own, thank you for everything. Please continue to be your brilliant selves. Keep living, keep loving, and keep caring.

Thank you.

Joe Collins, Cam Schmitt, Paul Malone, Tyler Forbes, Sam Girian, George Zhai, Randeep Grewal, Ryan Carr, and Nicholas David

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Groton trustees giving diplomas to their children: Annie with Franz ColloredoMansfeld ‘81, Charlie and Bill Vrattos ‘87, Eric with Nancy Yang, and Yan Davidoff with Stacey Symonds ‘84 5.

The Altshuler brothers: clockwise from top left, Ben ‘13, Noah ‘15, Douglas ‘20, and graduate George ‘18 6.

Noelia Carbajal, Mary Sabatelle, and Imani McGregor

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7.

Candilla Park, Blair Donohue, and Catherine Qiao

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8.

Noah Aaron, Kate Hyde, Josie Fulton, and Myles Maxson 9.

Daisy Fey and JJ Cheng 10.

Kai Duenez 11.

Sunhoo Park 7

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ZE D PRI AY 2

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2018 Groton School Prizes The Charles Lanier Appleton Prize Awarded to members of the Sixth Form who have greatly served the school Elechi Cherie Egwuekwe Ousmane Malik Gaye

The Dennis Crowley Drama Prize Given by Todd C. Bartels ’01 to a member of the Sixth Form who has made the greatest contribution to the theater program James Cook Hovet

The Bishop Julius Atwood Literature and History Prize Created by the late Right Reverend Julius Atwood for the best scholar in the combined fields of history and literature

The George Livingston Nichols Prize Awarded for the best essay on a historical subject

Christian Lee Carson

The Isaac Jackson Memorial Prize Awarded to the best mathematics scholar in the Upper School

The Rogers V. Scudder Classics Prize Given in memory of Rogers Scudder, a distinguished teacher of Classics and a much loved member of this community Maximilian Joseph Klein The Perry History Prize Given by Mrs. Eliza Endicott Perry to the best scholar in the field of history Roselle Mary Odeyne Lovell Smith Eric Ching Yuan Yang The Thorpe Science Prize Created by Mrs. Warren Thorpe for the member of the Sixth Form who has been the most successful in developing an appreciation of the spirit and meaning of science

Garvel Cassamajor

An Dieu Nguyen

Jiayi Qiao The World Languages Prize Yan Andres Davidoff The Hudson Music Prize Given by the friends of William Clarke Hudson ’56 to recognize effort and progress in music during the school year Maximilian Joseph Klein Candilla Grace Park

Charles Robert Vrattos

The Anita Andres Rogerson Dance Prize Candilla Grace Park The Photography Prize Benjamin Joseph Calmas The Franklin D. Roosevelt Debating Prize Given in memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt 1900 by W. Averell Harriman 1909 Kevin Gu Xiao Michael Gu Xiao The Endicott Peabody Memorial Prize Given in memory of the Reverend Endicott Peabody by the Sixth Form of 1945 for excellence in the field of religion and ethics Paul Powers Michaud

The Butler Prize for Excellence in English

The Reginald Fincke Jr. Medal Given by the Sixth Form of 1928 in memory of First Lt. Reginald Fincke Jr. and awarded to a member of the Sixth Form who has shown in athletics his qualities of perseverance, courage, and unselfish sportsmanship

Paul Powers Michaud Nailah-Imani Sekayi Juliette Pierce

Noah Augustine Aaron Alexa Beckstein www.groton.org

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The Cornelia Amory Frothingham Athletic Prize Given by her parents and awarded to a girl in the Sixth Form who has demonstrated all-round athletic ability and has shown exemplary qualities of leadership and sportsmanship Alyna Christine Baharozian The Tronic Award Given in honor of Michael G. Tronic and awarded to a member of the Sixth Form who has made especially good use of the resources of the library and has shown strong interest in the life of the mind Jamie Jiang

The Elizabeth and Margery Peabody Award Given to a member of the Sixth Form, other than a school prefect, whose contributions to the community demonstrate sensitivity, strength of character, leadership, and integrity Josie Drake Fulton The Asma Gull Hasan 1993 C IRCLE V OICE Journalism Prize Acknowledges outstanding leadership in creating, editing, and producing the school’s newspaper Christian Lee Carson Anne Peabody Colloredo-Mansfeld

The Upper School Shop Prize Timothy Rimmer Hoopes The Laura J. Coolidge ’85 Poetry Prize Given in her memory by her husband, Peter Touche, to a member of the Upper School who has shown a love for the power of poetic expression and a sustained interest in writing and reading poetry Charles Michael Senko The New England Science Teacher’s Award James Cook Hovet

Andrew Pearson

The following awards were presented on the Saturday evening before Prize Day: The Choir Cup Awarded to the Sixth Form chorister who has exhibited musical growth in sight reading and vocal technique Christian Lee Carson Charles Michael Senko The Heard Poetry Prize Amy Huijie Lu

The Carroll and John King Hodges Prize Given in memory of Carroll Hodges, Form of 1905, and John King Hodges, Form of 1910, to a Sixth Former who has distinguished him- or herself in a capacity to be designated by the headmaster Charles Robert Vrattos The William V. Larkin ’72 Award Given to the Groton student who best exemplifies uncommon courage and perseverance in meeting a challenge or overcoming adversity Benjamin Charles Milliken

The G ROTONIAN Creative Writing Prize Given by the Grotonian Board of 1946 to a member of the Upper School for the best example of prose fiction written in the past year Sarah Robbins Conner The Bertrand B. Hopkins Environmental Sciences Prize Given by the Form of 1948 Sandra Cutler Redjali The John Jay Pierrepont Prize Given to the best mathematics scholar in the Lower School Jane Park

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The Lower School Studio Art Prize Yuen Ning Chang The Lower School Shop Prize Zoe Liesl Colloredo-Mansfeld The Lower School Creative Writing Prize Mikayla Bea Murrin Potter Athletic Award Tyler Lockwood Forbes Imani Miriam McGregor The Roscoe C. Thomas Mathematics Prize Given by the Form of 1923 and awarded to a member of the Fifth Form for excellence in mathematics Brian Xiao The Reverend Frederic R . Kellogg Upper School Art Prize Given in his memory in recognition of distinguished work in art John Matthew Donovan Yichuan Shi

ZE D PRI AY 2

Derek S. Chang

The Gadsden Prize Given in memory of Jeremiah Gadsden of the Form of 1968 by his classmates and friends to a member of the Fifth Form who has demonstrated inspirational leadership, encouraging social and interracial understanding in the Groton community Kochoe Akosua Aflasu Nikoi

The Richard K. Irons Public Speaking Prize Established in 1972 by McGeorge Bundy ’36 and Arthur T. Hadley ’42 in honor of their teacher Richard K. (Doc) Irons, presented to the student who most logically and effectively presents his or her ideas during the R.K. Irons Speaking Contest, held at Groton each spring James Cook Hovet

The Harvard Book Prizes Awarded to two members of the Fifth Form who exemplify excellence in scholarship and high character combined with achievement in other fields The first Harvard Book Prize, given by Harry Eldridge 1920 in memory of his brother Francis H. Eldridge 1924 Montanna McKenzie Riggs

University of Rochester Honorary Science Award Given to the member of the Fifth Form who demonstrates exceptional promise in the sciences

The second Harvard Book Prize, given

by Mark A. Medlinsky ’76 in memory of his father

Alison Martin Brown The Rensselaer Medal Awarded to a Fifth Form student who has distinguished him- or herself in mathematics and science

The Williams Book Prize Given to a member of the Fifth Form who has demonstrated intellectual leadership and has made a significant contribution to the extracurricular life of the school

Brian Xiao

Elizabeth Dwight Lord

Brian Xiao

The Jefferson Book Award Given to a member of the Fifth Form the faculty considers to best represent the Jeffersonian ideals of scholarship, leadership, and citizenship Sandra Cutler Redjali The Dartmouth Book Award Given to a member of the Fifth Form who is of strong character, has made a positive impact on the life of the school community, and has excelled in at least one non-academic area Julien Gregoire Alam The Wellesley Book Prize Given to young women who have been top scholars in high school as well as talented performers in extracurricular areas Lily Abha Cratsley The University of Chicago Book Prize Given to a member of the Fifth Form the faculty considers most dedicated in deep intellectual inquiry in a range of academic disciplines Leo Dixon McMahon The Frederick Greeley Crocker Memorial Award Luka Bakic

The Fels Science Prize Given in honor of Stephen B. Fels, Form of ’58, awarded to a member of the Lower School who has demonstrated exceptional enthusiasm for and proficiency in the experimental aspects of scientific inquiry

Sangah Lee and Kate Hyde

Nicolas Alan Bowden Katherine Jane Clark The O’Brien Prize Given by the Hoopes family to a member of the Lower School who has shown qualities of integrity, loyalty, enthusiasm, and concern for others Zoe Liesl Colloredo-Mansfeld

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The Monte J. and Anne H. Wallace Scholar Given to a student who has completed the Fourth Form in recognition of scholastic excellence, as well as those qualities of character and commitment so important to the Groton community

The Form of 2018 Noah Augustine Aaron Cum laude

Kai Robben Dueñez Magna cum laude

Roselle Mary Odeyne Lovell Smith Magna cum laude

George W. M. Altshuler Magna cum laude

Elechi Cherie Egwuekwe

Samir Kumar Malhotra Cum laude

Margaret Mather Fey

Alyna Christine Baharozian Magna cum laude

Tyler Lockwood Forbes

Paul Gerard Malone III Cum laude

Alexa Grace Beckstein Cum laude

Margot Elliott French Cum laude

Myles Emerson Maxson

Brianna Marie Calareso Magna cum laude

Josie Drake Fulton Cum laude

Liam Murray Calder Magna cum laude

Ousmane Malik Gaye Rossely Alleyxa Gil

Benjamin Joseph Calmas Magna cum laude

Samuel Richardson Girian Cum laude

Noelia Denisse Carbajal Cum laude

Randeep Alexander Singh Grewal II Magna cum laude

Benjamin Zhu Cardinal Magna cum laude

Daniel James Herdiech Cum laude

Ryan Edward Carr

Mark Edward Herdiech Cum laude

Christian Lee Carson Summa cum laude

Joseph Lyle McCalmon Magna cum laude Layla Camellia Suzuki McDermott Magna cum laude Imani Miriam McGregor Cum laude Lanston Grace McKeown Cum laude Paul Powers Michaud Magna cum laude Benjamin Charles Milliken Magna cum laude Jason Carl Louis Montima Cum laude

Timothy Rimmer Hoopes Cum laude

Addison Grace Newsome

James Cook Hovet Magna cum laude

An Dieu Nguyen Summa cum laude

Martha Katherine Hyde Magna cum laude

Nina Antonia Norton Cum laude

Jamie Jiang Cum laude

Claudia Ho-Ching Oei Summa cum laude

Joseph Arthur Collins

Angelina Josephine Joyce Magna cum laude

Candilla Grace Park Magna cum laude

Anne Peabody Colloredo-Mansfeld Magna cum laude

Maximilian Joseph Klein Magna cum laude

Sunhoo Park

Nicholas Carlos David

Jonathan Stuart Lamson Cum laude

Charles Bonner Pearce Cum laude

Sangah Clara Lee Summa cum laude

Andrew Keith Pearson

Garvel Selve Cassamajor Jr. Cum laude Lucy Patricia O’Hagan Chatfield Summa cum laude Margaret Aldrich Cheever Summa cum laude Jonathan Cheng Jr. Magna cum laude

Yan Andres Davidoff Summa cum laude Gabrielle Xian-ning Despres Cum laude

Macy Star Lipkin Cum laude

Blair Naomi Donohue Magna cum laude 38

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Arabella Ward Peters Cum laude Nailah-Imani Sekayi Juliette Pierce Cum laude

ZE D PRI AY 2

Gregory David Segal Cum laude

Alexander Gray Waxman Magna cum laude

Jiayi Qiao Summa cum laude

Charles Michael Senko Magna cum laude

Kevin Gu Xiao Summa cum laude

Andrew Ottavio Rasetti Magna cum laude

Dongmin Shin Cum laude

Michael Gu Xiao Summa cum laude

Aidan Christopher Reilly Cum laude

Thomas James Steere

Eric Ching Yuan Yang Magna cum laude

Mary Margaret Sabatelle

Charles Xu Sun Summa cum laude

Richard Timmins Santry Cum laude

Rohan Rubin Varkey Summa cum laude

Cameron James Schmitt Cum laude

Charles Robert Vrattos Summa cum laude

College

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Olivia Wilde Potter Magna cum laude

George Haoxuan Zhai Cum laude Becky Xinyue Zhang Summa cum laude

Number attending

University of Chicago

Emory University

Brown University

Northeastern University

Georgetown University

Pomona College

Dartmouth College

Purdue University

Hamilton College

Rice University

Harvard University

Santa Clara University

Middlebury College

Skidmore College

Duke University

The University of Edinburgh

McGill University

Trinity College

New York University

Tufts University

Northwestern University

Tulane University

Princeton University

University of California, Santa Barbara

Scripps College

University of Cambridge

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

University of Hartford

Wake Forest University

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Yale University

University of New Hampshire

American University

University of Pennsylvania

Babson College

University of Rochester

Bates College

University of Southern California

Bentley University

University of St Andrews

Boston College

University of Vermont

Bowdoin College

University of Washington

Carnegie Mellon University

University of Waterloo

Colorado College

Washington University in St. Louis

Connecticut College

Wellesley College

Cornell University

Xavier University of Louisiana

Elon University

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Betsy Wray Lawrence ‘82

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Groton School Quarterly

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Fall 2018

Photographs by Matthew Healey Opposite page: 1953 formmates heading to Friday’s dinner — Wright Palmer, Sam Chauncey, Laury Perera, Ty Minton, David Rhinelander, and Donald White This page: 1993 formmates Andrew Nkongho, Ham Hadden, and Tanya George Kent at the playground; Nick Williams, Fred Whitridge, and Frank Eagle ‘73; education panelists Lori Hill ‘88 and Charlotte Lysohir ‘08

REUNION WEEKEND 2018

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raduates from years ending in 3 and 8 returned to Groton’s Circle for Reunion Weekend May 18–20, an event characterized by nostalgia, enduring friendships, and the chance to experience Groton today.

Nearly five hundred visitors enjoyed events that ranged from panel discussions and athletic contests to student recitals and form dinners.

For old time’s sake, many alumni visited Groton classes, sometimes seeing the very teachers who influenced their own lives.

One highlight of the weekend was a Sunday luncheon honoring five retiring faculty: Classics teacher Hugh Sackett, mathematics teacher Jonathan Choate ’60, art teacher Beth Van Gelder, science teacher Bill Maguire, and librarian Steve Marchand, whose combined time at Groton exceeds two hundred years. During his Saturday welcome remarks, Headmaster Temba Maqubela referred with reverence to the departing faculty, noting that Classics teacher Hugh Sackett, during his sixty-two years at Groton, worked under seven of the school’s eight headmasters. “I cannot imagine that feat ever being repeated,” Mr. Maqubela said.

Another moving event was the Sunday Chapel sermon delivered by Reverend John Finley ’88, who discussed—with humor, humility, and gratitude—the Epiphany School that he founded and the schools and children it has inspired.

Reunion Weekend always celebrates recipients of two of Groton’s most esteemed honors: the Cui Servire and Distinguished Grotonian awards. The Distinguished Grotonian Award recognized Mr. Choate for his fifty-two years of dedication to Groton students (see page 47).

The Cui Servire Award, reflecting the school’s ethos of service, went to Lisa Abbott ’88, www.groton.org

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who, through community organizing and leadership, has helped bring clean energy, improved health, and opportunity to many in rural Kentucky (see page 45).

Other highlights of the day included the headmaster’s welcome and two panel discussions—the first dedicated to building connections through the Groton Women’s Network (GWN) and the second focused on trends in education. GWN panel members Lydia Cottrell ’88, Sarah Eaton Stuart ’83, Bradaigh Flor Wagner ’93, and moderator Polly Cross Reeve ’78 discussed their approaches to networking, noting that the word itself can sound “transactional.”

Bradleigh said her “eye-opening moment” was when she realized that building relationships is fun. “Get out of your head this ‘networking’ concept and just get to know people,” she advised. Polly agreed: “Networking sounds calculating. It is about authentic relationships.” Lydia shared a surefire conversation starter and networking primer: “Ask people about themselves and how they came to their jobs.” Four younger graduates from the Form of 2013—Nimesha Gerlus, Starling Irving, Alice Stites, and Anita Xu—joined the second half of the panel, sharing insights into challenges they’ve faced and how Groton helped prepare them for college and the workplace.

The afternoon panel, “Trends in the Field of Education,” featured panelists Charles Fox Congleton ’03, Michael Gnozzio ’03, Julia Halberstam ’98, Charlotte Lysohir ’08, Latoya Massey ’98, and moderator Lori Hill ’88. Much of the conversation centered on technology, including the threat computers pose to “thinking skills” and the unequal access to technology among schools.

Besides these informational and inspirational panels, those at Reunion ran the Triangle (despite the rain), rang bells in the Chapel, spent time with friends, and attended the annual induction into Groton’s Athletic Hall of Fame (see page 48). One special highlight of the weekend was the dedication of a classroom in the Athletic Center to former Headmaster William Polk ’58.

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Mark your calendars for next year’s Reunion Weekend, May 10–12, 2019.

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1. David Lawrence ‘63, John Maynard ‘58, Davis Pike ‘58, Betsy Rand, Susie Lawrence, and Bill Polk ‘58 2. Some of the hardy Triangle Run team: Sage Mehta ‘03, Nancy Calhoun ‘03, John Capen (faculty), Erik Caspersen ‘88, Swift Edgar ‘03, Tom Bannard ‘03, Hugh McGlade ‘13, Chris King ‘13, and Bill Maguire (faculty) 9

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3. Martha Mercaldi Kim ‘98, with daughter Romy and Bryan Kim 4. Ivar ‘58 and Patricia Schacke 5. Participants on the Groton Women’s Network panel: Polly Cross Reeve ‘78, Sarah Eaton Stuart ‘83, Lydia Cottrell ‘88, Bradaigh Flor Wagner ‘93, Anita Xu ‘13, Alice Stites ‘13, Starling Irving ‘13, and Nimesha Gerlus ‘13 6. Bill ‘58 and LuAnn Polk looking at the plaque for the athletic classroom dedicated in former Headmaster Polk’s honor 7. Charlie Congleton ‘03 sharing insights at the afternoon education panel 8. 1968ers Alec Steele and Jon Dedmon 9. 1958ers Dick Rand and John Trask 10. 1998 formmates Hunter Pierpont and Latoya Massey 11. Miguel and Jen Lipkowitz Eaton ‘93 with daughters Vivien and Wynn

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12. 1983ers Chris Wu, Tyrone Void, and Fab Rasetti reading the Circle Voice and catching up in the Schoolroom www.groton.org

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Henry Davis ’84 4

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Cui Servire Est Regnare Award

Elizabeth G. Abbott ’88, P’18, ’21 Lisa Abbott ’88 was honored with the Cui Servire Est Regnare Award— named for the school’s motto, which celebrates a long-engrained ethos of service — for dedicating her career to the well-being of residents in rural

Kentucky. Through community organizing and leadership, she has worked with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth to improve the health and living conditions of the poor and to bring them opportunity and justice.

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Lisa accepted with these remarks:

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HANK YOU, Temba, and thank

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you, Groton, for this honor. I’m happy for any recognition given to younger alumnae, and I’m humbled to receive this Cui Servire Award. I’d also like to wish my son Myles, a Groton Sixth Former, a very happy eighteenth birthday.

I’m also delighted to be part of a day honoring Jonathan Choate ‘60, who was a central part of my own Groton experience. I’ve never worked harder for any coach, and gradually I learned to work that hard for myself and the team. Thirty years later, his chapel talks are among the handful I still remember. He modeled what it

1. A 1998 reunion at the playground: Kris Pitney, Danielle Nunez, and Clayton Peterson with Christine and Hugh 2. Drew Oliver ‘88 and Tia Dennis ‘88 3. Jute Ramsay ‘93 chatting with Stanley Spence ‘22 4. Retiring faculty legend Hugh Sackett with Sam Waterston ’58 5. Monifa Foluke ’13 and Alice Stites ‘13 at a panel discussion 6. Byron Fuller ‘98 and Liz Laws Fuller ‘01 with daughter Etta Si 7. Birge Albright ‘53 chatting with Tim Vreeland ‘43 8. John Wulsin ‘68 with Heidi and Frazier Eales ‘68 9

9. Angus West ‘73

means to be vulnerable and strong, to love deeply and to grieve loss. Thank you, Jon, for your gruff affection, brilliance, and dedication.

I believe my grandfather, Nathaniel Abbott, is smiling today. He taught Latin at a small boarding school in rural New York, where he helped to craft their motto: Non Sibi, Sed Cunctis; Not for Oneself, But for All. That expression, and the many ways it was demonstrated through the lives of my grandparents and parents, shaped who I am.

Groton’s own commitment to service and inclusion were key reasons why my fourteen-year-old self was drawn so strongly to be part of this remarkable Circle. Witnessing how this institution continues to live out these values in 2018 makes me deeply grateful to be here with you today.

For nearly twenty-five years, I’ve worked as a community organizer for a grassroots social justice organization in Kentucky. For many of those years I’ve worked in and with rural Appalachian communities, places where the economy and culture has been shaped by 150 years of extraction of timber, coal, oil, gas, and human labor.

My grandmother used to introduce me to her friends as “a teacher,” because explaining community organizing took (continued )

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too long and was too complicated. line. And it’s why Kentucky has a law, justice, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After the election of President Barack meager though it is, allowing people to once said. I simply know what is Obama, the term became more install rooftop solar and connect to the likely to happen—and what keeps familiar, but no less complicated. grid. happening—if many people turn away, Organizing is the process of We also lose a lot, as you can shrug our shoulders, and deny our building power among people affected imagine. Those losses hurt, and they own power and responsibility to try to by injustice to solve community are intensifying. In Kentucky, as make things better. problems and shape a better quality of elsewhere, our immigrant neighbors I must have been thinking along life for all. You might say community live in daily fear of deportation and these lines even as a Sixth Former at organizers practice democracy—the the white vans rolling through their Groton. My yearbook page features way other people practice medicine, neighborhoods and workplaces. Half a a single quote, which I attributed to art, or teaching. million Kentuckians who have health “anonymous” because I did not know or Organizers work with individuals insurance today, many for the first time, remember the source. It reads: “I will to build their skills and confidence are likely to lose coverage starting act as if what I do makes a difference.” to be effective leaders. We help Over the years, I have found diverse groups of people craft a that to be both a liberating and shared vision a challenging notion—liberating and goals and because it helps free me from wrestle with paralyzing doubt. I can choose differences. to act as if what I do matters.

We help build On the flip side, believing my a shared actions matter means accepting understanding responsibility. And if I’m about the responsible—if together we world as it is, are all responsible—then we’d and the world better summon all the intensity, as we want love, skill, creativity, and it to be. And we support people strategy we’ve learned from Mr. in taking non-violent actions to Choate, Mr. Maqubela, Ms. Van create change for the better.

Gelder, Mr. Polk, Ms. Leggat, Over twenty-five years I’ve and so many others here at helped communities fight for and Groton. win guard rails on dangerous roads, Last year our family visited water lines to communities whose the U.S. Holocaust Memorial groundwater has been polluted, Museum in Washington, D.C. protection of family cemeteries Among the many stinging issues from strip-mining, funding raised by this memorial is the for affordable housing, and an question of our individual awesome program that weatherizes Cui Servire Award winner Elizabeth G. Abbott ’88, P’18, ’21 responsibility for the well-being and Headmaster Temba Maqubela; at left, Elizabeth with people’s homes with no upfront of others, particularly in the her son, Myles Maxson ‘18 costs. We’ve helped pass state laws face of violence and repression. to raise the minimum wage and After lingering in the Hall of strengthen our social safety net for Remembrance, we eventually emerged people who are low income, disabled, July first of this year. Kentucky has into the lobby and gift shop. There I and sick. Our grassroots organization the highest rate of African-American was astonished to learn that the motto is the reason why coal companies disenfranchisement in the nation, due of the museum is a simple, vaguely in Kentucky pay property taxes on to a provision in our state constitution familiar, and provocative phrase: the value of their minerals. It’s why that permanently takes away a person’s “What You Do Matters.”

Kentucky no longer imposes the right to vote if convicted of a felony.

What we do matters. Thank you highest state income tax in the nation To be honest, I’m not sure if the for all that you do. And thank you for on people below the federal poverty long arc of history bends towards this honor.

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Fall 2018

Distinguished Grotonian

Jonathan Choate ’60, P’85, ’88, ’88 Since 1977, Groton School has presented the Distinguished Grotonian Award to a graduate whose life of highly distinguished service reflects the essential values of the school.

Few have devoted both their lives and careers to Groton students as Distinguished Grotonian Jonathan Choate has.

With patience and dedication, he nurtured students, advisees, athletes he coached, and students he neither coached

nor taught, through his understanding, support, and accessibility. Many former students say that Choatie changed their lives.

Choatie accepted his Distinguished Grotonian honor with these words:

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ANY THANKS to those respon-

sible for my being given this wonderful honor. I’ve had quite a ride during the past fifty-two years. If you had told me the day I graduated in 1960 that I would be standing here today I would have asked you what you had been smoking. Groton has come a long way during my time here. When I started teaching in 1966, the school was pretty much the same as the one my father attended in the ’30s. Given all that was going on in society at that time, we all realized that the school had to change, and change it did. Bert Honea’s vision of how Groton should change was way ahead of his time, and it cost him his job. Paul Wright took over and had the wisdom to guide us as we changed, carefully. Groton finally went co-ed in 1975, and the school became bigger in size and less of an island. Thanks to Bill Polk [’58], the school started the process of slow but deliberate change in the composition of the student body. Rick Commons took over and, with Jamie Higgins and the Board of Trustees, made possible the changes in the physical plant that led to the magnificent new science and math addition, featuring this Sackett Forum.

And now, we have a school that, thanks to Temba Maqubela, has become even more diverse and inclusive while incorporating the goals of scholarship, spirituality, globalism, and service.

It has been an honor to play a small role in helping the school become one

that everyone in the alumni body should be proud of. Enough history.

It may sound trite, but Newton had it right when he said he stood on the shoulders of giants. That I am standing here is due to the work of all the wonderful colleagues and mentors I have had the pleasure of working with.

Many thanks …

To Phil Nash, who, when I was a student here, instilled in me a love for mathematics that I didn’t know I had until after I graduated from Colby.

To Jake Congleton, who treated me right away as a colleague and taught me to love the game of football and its coaching.

To Roger Jarvis, who had the wisdom in 1966 to advise me to find out something about computers.

To Junie O’Brien, who helped me both as a player and as a coach, and who was responsible for making ice hockey take on a major role in my life.

To Charlie Alexander, who taught me what it meant to be a first-rate school person and who let me know at times that it might be worth rethinking some of my more outrageous curriculum ideas.

To Frank White [’51], who taught me the meaning of the word service.

To Bill Polk, who in 1982 suggested that I should spend more time in the world

of mathematics outside the school and let me know the school would support me.

To Bill Hrasky, for all he did to help make the Applied Math course a success.

To David Bannard, for the many conversations we had about mathematics and its teaching. He has yet to outdo me in the acquisition of math toys and gear, though the race has always been close.

To Cathy Lincoln, for all her support for so many years and for all she has done to make our department a strong one that supports all levels of students.

To John Tulp, for inviting me to coteach Modes of Order and Disorder and showing me how so much of the work I was doing in fractals and chaos had its intellectual origin in the work of the Greek philosophers.

To Cindy Choate and our children for all their support, and for putting up with all that I did to meet the demands that teaching at Groton put on me and the demands I put on myself.

Special thanks to Kathy Leggat, who has done so much to make the last twentyone years so very, very special.

Finally, many thanks to all the wonderful students and athletes I have had the honor to work with. Without you, I would never have been able to do all that I have done.

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Athletes Inducted into Groton Hall of Fame

Far left, Jonathan Choate ‘60 and Kathy Leggat, LuAnn and Bill Polk ‘58; left, Katherine Oates Sweeny ‘93 with Michael, Grace, and Macy; below left, Bill “Fire” Maguire; below, emcee Sarah Eaton Stuart ‘83 with Andre Parris ‘93 and Dane

The 2018 inductees into Groton’s Athletic Hall of Fame include three Olympic rowers, standout college players (including one beloved headmaster), and two memorable coaches.

Donald A.E. Beer ’53 and Charles L. Grimes ’53 Donald Beer and Charlie Grimes both learned to row at Groton, then went to Yale and became the “engine room” (fourth and fifth seat, respectively) of Yale’s 1956 varsity eight, which won gold for the United States at the Melbourne Olympic Games.

The Yale 1956 crew was notable for several reasons. No other U.S. eight had ever lost an Olympic race before: they came in behind Australia and Canada in a preliminary heat, shocking rowing enthusiasts. But Yale took revenge in the secondchance race known as the repechage and earned a spot in the four-boat finals. In the race that would determine medals, Yale rowed at an unusually fast thirty-six beats per minute and

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won the gold medal — the only boat ever to win gold by going through the repechage. Yale’s 1956 crew also was the last college crew to win an Olympic gold medal.

With picture-perfect form, Don was the consummate oarsman — a quiet, reliable, and steadying influence in three Yale varsity crews. Charlie was a force of nature both physically and intellectually, and his athletic ambitions extended beyond crew. Much to the consternation of Yale crew coach Jim Rathschmidt, Charlie played football in the fall and basketball in the winter. Coach Rathschmidt was reluctant to put Grimes in the varsity boat, but every boat he was in seemed to win, so the coach had no choice.

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Both athletes passed away after battles with cancer, Don in 1997 from brain cancer and Charlie in 2007 from pancreatic cancer. Charlie’s gold medal now hangs in Groton’s boathouse and his oar in the Athletic Center lobby, inspiring generations of Groton’s rowers.

Jonathan Choate ’60 — Coach 1964–2016 A legendary athlete and coach, Choatie played varsity football, hockey, and baseball for three years at Groton and was captain of the hockey team. His hockey career began when, as a six-foot Second Former, he was cut from the basketball team and friends urged him to come across the street to skate. He continued hockey at Colby College, playing

freshman hockey then spending three years on the varsity team. He was a stalwart member of Colby’s 1962 team, one of the best in the college’s history.

In 1964, Choatie began his legendary coaching career as Groton, spending three years as the JV hockey coach. After a year coaching Bowdoin College’s freshman team, he returned to Groton and went on to spend twelve years as head coach for boys varsity hockey and another twenty-three years as assistant coach. He then coached girls varsity hockey for five years, guiding an undefeated team in 1983. In addition, Choatie was an invaluable assistant coach of the varsity football team for twenty-four years. In 1993, the Massachusetts Football Association honored him with the Assistant Coach of the Year Award.

A gifted teacher, Choatie approached coaching as an opportunity to help students develop their skills, selfconfidence, and enduring values — while experiencing the joy of the athletic experience.

Alexander E. Karwoski ’08 Alex’s Olympic rowing career started at Groton in the spring of 2005; he credits his coaches, teachers, advisors, friends, and family for his success.

After Groton, he rowed for Trinity College during his freshman year, then transferred to Cornell University, where he rowed in the varsity boat as a junior and senior. After graduation in 2012, Alex made his first national team and competed at the U-23 World Championships, finishing fourth in the men’s straight four.

After working and coaching at Kent School in 2012–13, Alex began to train with the U.S. Rowing Training Center and competed at the 2013, 2014, and 2015 World Championships in the men’s pair, double, and eight respectively. In 2016, he was selected to the men’s eight and competed in the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, finishing fourth.

Post-Olympics, Alex was an assistant coach at Cornell in 2016–17, then was selected to row in the men’s eight at the 2017 World Championships, where the boat finished second.

Alex was a talented and wellrounded athlete at Groton, earning nine varsity letters — four in cross country, three in crew, and two in basketball. He captained both the cross-country and basketball teams in his Sixth Form year and led the crosscountry team to a New England Championship.

William F. Maguire — Coach 1985–2017 Bill “Fire” Maguire was a teacher and cross-country running coach for over thirty years at Groton.

From 2008 to 2017, he also created, led, and grew the spring track program. During his time as cross-country coach, he achieved a remarkable record of 256 wins with only sixty-three losses. His teams won the ISL championships twice and the New England championship thirteen times. His was a constant presence in the woods of the Triangle and the surrounding trails.

Like all great coaches, Fire achieved success in part by teaching students the value of perseverance and training. Perhaps more importantly, however, he created a supportive culture that naturally led to wins. His teams developed a camaraderie that enabled a group of students in the most individualistic of sports to come together and achieve success. Whether on distance runs along the Nashua River or during intense interval workouts around the Circle, his teams managed both to have fun and work hard at the same time.

Ultimately, through humor, sarcasm, and a genuine, easy friendship with students that would span decades, he fostered a passion and reverence for the sport. As described by a fellow coach, “Fire coached as a good teacher teaches, through relationships and humor and delight and faith that the seemingly absurd act of running through the wood has intrinsic merit — which, of course, it does.”

Andre F. Parris ’93 Andre Parris earned nine varsity letters in three sports at Groton, but left an indelible mark on the soccer field. As a midfielder and forward on one of the school’s most successful boys soccer teams, he led a memorable campaign

that took the team all the way to the Independent School League tournament. In that magical year, Andre scored the winning goal against a powerhouse Belmont Hill squad that was both undefeated and in the process of winning five league championships in a row. As a result of that being a weekday make-up game, the entire school was on hand to watch. Andre won numerous All-League honors, was named Boston Globe Player of the Year, was a member of the United States Under-18 National Team, and was a Parade All-American before attending Princeton University.

At Princeton, Andre continued to leave his mark on the pitch.

In his freshman year, he led the Tigers to their first playoff win since 1979 and ultimately to their first-ever Final Four, while collecting numerous awards and accolades along the way. The NCAA Rookie of the Year in 1993, Andre still holds Princeton’s record for assists in a season (12), the alltime Princeton career assist record (27), and the NCAA post-season assist record (6). He was also a member of the United States Under-20 National Team.

William M. Polk ’58 — Headmaster 1978–2003 Bill Polk epitomized the notion of a well-rounded athlete: as a Groton student, he played varsity football, hockey, and baseball, then went on to play all three sports at Trinity College.

At Groton, he was captain of the football team and goalie on the undefeated 1957 hockey team, which scored fifty-one goals and held opponents to nine goals and four shut-outs. Bill received the Reginald Fincke Jr. Medal and earned eight varsity letters; he would have received three more had there been letters in hockey.

At Trinity College, Bill played on the freshman football and

baseball teams, then played on both varsity teams for three years. A founding member of Trinity’s hockey program, he was the team’s goalie for four years.

As a senior, he received Trinity’s McCook Trophy for athletic achievement.

As headmaster, Bill would occasionally assist with coaching the football and baseball teams and was supportive of all athletic teams. His afternoon runs took him past nearly every practice, and in conversation it was clear that he knew what was happening with players and teams at all levels of every sport.

Katherine Oates Sweeny ’93 Kate was a three-sport athlete during her five years at Groton, earning ten varsity letters in field hockey, ice hockey, and lacrosse. As a Sixth Former, she co-captained both the field hockey and ice hockey teams, and went on to receive the Cornelia Amory Frothingham Athletic Prize, given to a Sixth Form girl who demonstrates all-round athletic ability and exemplary qualities of leadership and sportsmanship. Kate also received All-League honors in field hockey and an honorable mention in ice hockey while at Groton.

After Groton, Kate played varsity ice hockey for three years at Middlebury College, where she earned the school’s Panther Award in 1997. Her Middlebury teams earned back-to-back Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) championships in 1996 and 1997.

Kate went on to earn a master’s degree in early childhood and elementary education from New York University; she teaches and continues to coach, now working with grade schoolers, including her daughters, Macy and Walker.

Kate also heads the youth lacrosse program in her hometown of Dedham, Massachusetts.

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1943 Cecilia Hoyt, Jean Crocker, Bill Hoyt, Bill Crocker, Tim Vreeland, Judith Searle, Nick Witte, Paul Russell

1953 Wright and Anna Maria Palmer, Sam Chauncey, Joan and Donald White, Lizzie Perera, Birge Albright, Laury Perera, David and Ann Rhinelander

1958 Front row: John and Pepe Maynard, Ivar Schacke, Marion and Ed Robbins, Bill Polk, Neville Powers, Betsy and Dick Rand, Jae Roosevelt Middle row: Pat Case, Patricia Schacke, Sloan Simmons, LuAnn Polk, Tom Schmidt, Mary Goldschmid, Tom Wright Back row: Jim Case, Bonnie Selfe and Ralph Esmerian, Wick Simmons, Davis Pike, Jill and John Trask, Sam Waterston, and Lynn Woodruff

1963 Ed Yasuna, David and Susie Lawrence, Peter Rousmaniere

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1968 Front row: Guliz Kuruoglu, Jane Wulsin, Joanne Gannett, Colin Cabot, Kitty and Charlie Berry, Terce Dines, Sandy Eshleman with Susana and Rick Davidson, Lydia Winter, Jim Pabarue Middle row: Peter Bundy, John Wulsin, Watty Watson, Scott Thacher, Tom Higginson Back row: Bob Gannett, Chris Kennan, Jon Erichsen, Dan Godfrey, Ben Bingham, Jay Ehle, Alec Steele, Jon Dedmon, Frazier and Heidi Eales, Andrew Capitman

1973 Front row: Rick Doyle, Greg Pleasants, Maria Pedreira, James King, Joey Odim, Jon Lozier, David Gardiner, Sam Hoar, Win Warren, Fred Morgan Back row: Tom McHenry, Angus West, Mike Klebnikov, Rick Chadwell, David Poor, John King, Bill Sheeline, Fred Whitridge, Nick Williams, Betsy Gardiner, Tizzie and Whitney Hatch, Frank Eagle

1978 Front row: Douglas Wu, Denley Poor-Reynolds, Angelo Reyes, Amy Frothingham Ford, Hilary Fowler Northrop Back row: Catherine and Grant Rogers, Matt Reynolds, Andrew Greene, Herb and Ranna Smith, Polly Cross Reeve

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1983 Front row: Fabrizio Rasetti, George Jensen, Sarah Eaton Stuart, Brooke Howenstein Fink, Adrian Jones, Jon Potter Back row: Tyrone Void, Sarah Barnes Jensen, Chris Wu, Jessica Chen

1988 Front row: Evans McMillion and Lang, Gerry Pearce, Ben Powell, Karen Ford, Tia Dennis, Erik Caspersen, Cate Nickson Back row: Margot Pearce ’89, Lydia Cottrell, Stan McGee, John Finley, Steve Theobald, Lori Hill, David Manugian, Drew Oliver, Mike Nickson, Julie Nickson

1993 Front row: Isaac and Sam Lopez, Eliza Tripp, Rose Korper, Evie Kent, Anne and Tom Korper, Caroline Atwood, Amos Donn, Lily Hegener, Phoebe Donn, Peter Hegener, Aksel Wagner Second row: Whitney Chatterjee with Xander and Cecilia, Grace Lopez, Zach Tripp and Kate Demong with Annika, Jack Perry, Peter Atwood, Alex Donn,

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Anat Grosfeld, Alison and Peter Hegener, Isa and Nico Hadden Third row: Alicia Brownell Korper, Raja Chatterjee, Ingrid Reynoso-Lopez, Jen Kim Cutie, Emily Spiegelman, Joseph Michniowski, Catherine New, Tod Perry with Bud, Sarah DiMare Atwood, Mitch and Tanya George Kent with Zoe and Annabel, Kate Oates Sweeny, Bradaigh Flor Wagner with

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Imogen, Patricia Hadden with Hammy Back row: Remington Korper, Ghani Raines, Curtis Sittenfeld, Consuelo Henderson Macpherson and Ian Macpherson, Jen Lipkowitz Eaton and Miguel Eaton, Josh Hubball with Sofia, Victor Nunez, Andrew Nkongho, Pete Atwood, Jute Ramsay, Tucker Golden, Brendon and Caron Chiou with Mina, Ham Hadden with Vivi

1998 Front row: Hunter Pierpont, Nancy and John Rossi with Jake, Isabelle Kinsolving Farrar with Celeste and Maya, Pam Howard Emo with Sloane, Cici, and Brenner, Romy Kim, Percy Johnson with Caroline Braga, Julia Halberstam Harvey with Beatrice, Christine and Clayton Peterson with Triston and Hugh, Byron and Liz Laws Fuller ’01 with Etta Si, Larrison Campbell

Middle row: Jamaal McDell with Gigi, Jonathan Farrar, Letitia Hall Johnson, Bryce Emo, Martha Mercaldi Kim, Charley Aldrich with Leo, Hiram Powers-Heaven with Charlie, Grayson Murphy, Gardner Ellner ’99 with Madison

Back row: Danielle Nunez with Xavi, Matt Johnson with Zelda, Dan Wilson with Stella, Latoya Massey, Bryan Kim, Meg Aldrich, Jess Powers-Heaven with Walter, Philip and Carolyn Chen Warner

Middle row: Margo Danielson Hofbauer, Tes Siarnacki, Rachel Eschle, Nancy Calhoun, Caroline Hamilton Langerman, Rachel Amory, Caroline Hoch, Carlo Scott, Ben Flatgard

Back row: Buck Fletcher, Charlie Congleton, Mike Gnozzio, Devin Demers, Eliza Gray, Mark Butler, John Nagler, Nick Roper, Carl Balouzian, Pete McNamara

2003 Front row: Sage Mehta, Annie Erdman Wernig, Rebecca Ackroyd, Lourdes Fernandez, Stephanie Midon, Louisa Gehring with Caroline and Marianna, Lily Lyman with Lincoln, Annie Blaine, Sarah Kelly with Nina and Lily, Tom Bannard

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2008 Front row: Tucker Fross, Manasa Reddy, Clarissa Perkins, Haruka Aoki, Adetoro Adeyemi, Mary Cooper, Emma Goodlander, Ward Goodenough

Middle row: Ceci Nicol, Wyatt Hong, Theo Frelinghuysen, Desiree Vodounon, Tyler Rodriguez, Caroline Boes, Hannah Cheever, Lauren Garey, Django Broer-Hellermann, Molly Steim

Back row: Matthew Midon, Chris Ahn, Stephanie Hanson, Charlotte Lysohir, Rodney Smith

2013 Front row: Loulie Bunzel, Hugh McGlade, Tom Santinelli, Cher Lei, Vicky Zhang, Chinedu Okorafor, Anita Xu, Analia Del Bosque, Maria Jose Herrera, Johnathan Terry

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Middle row: Chris King, Monifa Foluke, Dan Glavin, Devan Malhotra, Peter Mumford, Catherine Walker-Jacks, Madeleine Cohen, Suzanna Hamer, CC Ho, Danielle Kimball, Nimesha Gerlus, Gus Eleftherio

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Back row: George Wells, Christina Napolitano, Starling Irving, Francisco Fernandez, Mitchell Zhang, Mike Somerby, Adam Hardej, Lucy McNamara, Bridget Bousa, Carolyn Grenier, Olivia Bono, Aria Kopp, Alice Stites, Ihu Erondu, Marianna Gailus, Johann Colloredo-Mansfeld

A C H A P E L TA L K

by James C. Hovet ’18 May 3, 2018 voces

Dear Christopher “People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron … If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life.”

—British explorer George Mallory

Dear Christopher Hovet, “WOULD YOU SEND your kids to Groton?” It’s a topic

of conversation that seems to come up a lot at this place.

Knowing what you know now, knowing what kind of challenges this place throws at you, would you still send your own flesh and blood through it all? For most, it’s a hypothetical—another way of asking if you think you made the right choice in coming here. But for me, it’s a pretty real decision, because I’ve got you, Christopher, my little eleven-year-old brother, and you want to come to Groton.

The thing that people often say when asked this question is that they would send their kids here because of the people, because they’ve developed relationships with the students and teachers they’ve met here that make the long nights in the library or the all-nighters before a research paper worth it. Most answers to this question follow this same formula: Groton is hard but is made worth it by … :

by Sunday mornings on the Circle, walks down to the [Nashua River], or nights spent up late chatting idly in the

dorm. These things have even become chapel talk tropes at this point.

And yet, while I agree that these are all things that make Groton better, and while I hope that all these things would be part of your Groton experience, Christopher, I think that these answers are all flawed, or at least incomplete—because, and realize that this is by no means the prevailing opinion on the topic, I do not think that Groton succeeds in spite of the long nights in the library, but because of them. Not in spite of the hours lost to Saturday morning classes, but because of them. Not in spite of the challenge, but, perhaps almost entirely, because of it.

Over Christmas break I ended up having a long chat with someone I thought I would never really see again. His name is Marco, and he was a senior at Groton last year. When I ran into him, he was halfway through his first year as a plebe at the Naval Academy, and while our conversation started with general questions about the academy and where he wanted to be assigned come

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Gail Friedman

Clockwise from far left: James with friends after his chapel talk; cooking crepes on Cultural Day with Paul Michaud ‘18; as the horse in Equus, with Josie Fulton ‘18; and (from left) Alex Waxman ’18, Caroline Drapeau ‘21, Michael Senko ’18, and James, after their one-act play, which James directed

Ellen Harasimowicz

commissioning, it quickly turned to a conversation about Groton.

I asked him if the Navy was hard, and he said that yes, obviously it was hard, but that it was never anything he couldn’t get through. He said that without his even knowing it, Groton had been training him to be a plebe since Third Form. Getting through a hard drill, he said, just wasn’t that different from getting through Fifth Form spring. Whatever his superiors threw at him, he knew that he could finish it—with enough effort. Groton, it seems, had given him the most valuable gift a school could give: persistence.

My mind often comes back to that conversation any time you and I talk about Groton. I think it is fair to say that I have hidden from you those parts of Groton that nobody mentions on the tour. Whenever you’ve asked me the quintessential tour question: “Is the work hard?”, I have given you the quintessential tour guide answer: “Yeah, it’s hard, but it’s never unmanageable.” That’s a lie— it is often unmanageable. It is also often stressful, and I can promise you that on more than one occasion you will feel like you are being asked more than you can give. Now, there are many here who would disagree with me when I say this, but I think that’s the point.

I think that what a Groton education teaches, more than any actual marketable skills, is the ability to do hard 56

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things for a goal you are committed to. This is what is at the heart of all of Groton’s challenge.

First, on the ability to do hard things: Back in Third Form, I was taking French II with Madame [Stanton].

Now Christopher, you probably already know this, but if you’re from New Orleans, people for some reason think you magically already know how to speak French, so I think that Madame probably had some high expectations of me after the first day of introductions. Oh, how I would come to disappoint her.

After I finished the fall term with an 82 in the class, Madame wrote in her comment that she hoped I would “reveal [my] full potential in French” come next term. I think she was hoping I would raise my grade ten points— instead I dropped it by that amount. After I handed in my spring exam, Madame wished me luck in Latin III next year. I had to break it to her that I would in fact be dropping Latin and continuing into French III. She then told me something that I still think about to this day. She said, “James, you have no excuse for why you are doing poorly in this class. It’s a language: you just have to do the work and learn it.” And she was right. After a year of making excuses for myself, I was forced to realize that it was much simpler than any of my rationalizations: I just wasn’t trying hard enough.

You get good at doing hard things by being asked

voces

to do hard things—and I am not just talking about academics. In fact, this is the basic concept behind all of exercise: you break muscle down so that it can be rebuilt with stronger stuff. You train so that next time you can do a little better, run a little faster, last a little longer. Living a life of purposeful self-challenge trains your mental endurance. Groton trains that part of you that doesn’t give up.

Second, on the ability to commit to your goals: Now, Christopher, here is where I draw a distinction. As much as it may sound like it, I’m not trying to convince you to continue Latin after two years, I’m not. There is a difference between self-challenge and self-punishment.

And those people that say that learning Latin is somehow better for your brain than learning anything else are lying to you; don’t listen to them. Because the other side effect of living a life of self-challenge is you pretty quickly learn what you care about—or at least how you want to spend your time. If, after Latin II, you would rather defenestrate Caesar than read him, by all means, drop Latin. But find something that you can commit to.

Because if you do end up coming here, you will find that what sets apart the adults at this school more than anything else is a strong and infectious sense of commitment. You have already met Mr. Maqubela. He is wholeheartedly committed to his goal of diversity and inclusion, not only for the school, but for the world as a whole. His focus and drive to that end is remarkable.

If you end up here for Third Form, I will force you to take ecology and you will meet Dr. Black, whose goal of educating students about the innate beauty and ultimate frailty of the natural world shines through in every one of his classes. You have met Laurie and Brandt, both of whom consistently give so much of themselves so that students here can learn what art can do for the soul. And these examples are the rule, not the exception.

As a student here, it is impossible not to be inspired by that dedication and to aspire to have as much dedication and drive as those adults who teach you, and to aspire to challenge yourself and work hard in the same way that they challenge themselves and work hard.

There is almost certainly an easy path through Groton.

If you make it your goal to scrape by in every way, never to push yourself to try harder in a class, never to try to make a varsity sport, never to take an elective that is viewed as “hard,” then you may well go through Groton without feeling like it was a challenge. And yet, there are so few people who do that. To return to the question of “Is the work hard?”, the real answer is that yes, the work is hard, but only because it is near impossible to come to Groton and not want to push yourself.

The last thing Marco said to me in our conversation about the Navy, he meant as a line to try to convince me to enlist there, but he could just as easily have been talking about Groton. He said, “It was the greatest decision I ever

James with his brother, Christopher

“

I do not think that Groton succeeds in spite of the long nights in the library, but because of them.

Not in spite of the hours lost to Saturday morning classes, but because of them. Not in spite of the challenge, but, perhaps almost entirely, because of it.

made to challenge myself every day.”

That is what Groton has been to me, an opportunity to challenge myself every day, and that has been a great privilege.

As you know, Christopher, I have a bit of an obsession with the space race, so I hope you’ll pardon me if I’m being predictable with my choice of quote, but I think that JFK telling us why we should go to the moon is as fitting a way as any to tell you why you should apply to Groton.

“We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

I wholly wish for you to apply to Groton, Christopher.

I believe it would make your life better, and I believe that it would make you a better person. And if you do end up sitting in the Chapel as a student one day, I wish you luck on the greatest adventure on which you will ever embark.

Godspeed.

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A C H A P E L TA L K

by Nancy Yang P’18, Trustee May 3, 2018

A Personal Theory of Change WHEN I ASKED my son Eric what topics or themes

he would suggest I speak on for my chapel talk, he said, “Ma, honestly you can speak about anything because no one really remembers what the chapel talk is about.”

Eric’s slightly flippant but likely accurate comment on expectations of chapel talks prompted me to think about the broader topic of goal setting, expectations we have in our life, and the eventual outcomes.

A lot of my work over the last ten years has been in advising NGOs to think through their own goals and outcomes and, perhaps even more importantly, how to develop plans to better realize their vision for social change. There are many approaches to doing this type of work; one way an NGO can define its major objectives and plan for the future is to establish a Theory of Change.

Generally, an NGO will set up a grand social vision—a way for them to define long-term success—and then identify specific activities they can participate in to reach their goal. For example, at one point, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation established an audacious goal “to reach a day when no human being has malaria.” The foundation then created a framework of activities and a large-scale plan for making this goal a reality, which included funding research, the development of cures, and diagnostics.

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, each one of us has probably tried to develop a Theory of Change about our own life. We try to set goals in our lives and then plan out the “how,” the specific activities that will help us to get there.

As a business consultant by training and a planner by nature, I have always found comfort and even enjoyment in detailed goal-setting and planning. At the same time, I recognize the human limitations of doing so in the 58

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wisdom of King Solomon in the book of Proverbs. “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” (Proverbs 19:21) Ten years ago, I founded a Hong Kong NGO, Asian Charity Services, which provides pro bono business consulting and training to local NGOs. Today, we manage almost 2,000 volunteers, who advise hundreds of grassroots organizations each year. I can’t remember my specific goals in high school, but I’m pretty sure I could never have dreamed of eventually running an NGO in Hong Kong. As the child of first generation Taiwanese immigrants, I had a relatively comfortable and conventional childhood growing up in the suburbs of Houston.

After getting a business degree and working as a financial analyst, I later moved to Hong Kong to explore the world of management consulting. My original goal was to stay for two years and put some international experience on my resume. I could never have planned that I would live and work in Asia for almost twenty-five years.

I spent much of my first seven years earning Cathay Pacific frequent-flyer mileage, commuting every week to my consulting clients in mainland China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore. I covered a broad range of business sectors, from mobile networks to automotive parts to children’s milk powder. I was intellectually energized by my work as a consultant but did feel the constant pressure to learn quickly and develop solutions in industries where I had no specialist skills.

After consulting, I joined my brother in a new adventure—starting a mobile gaming company in Beijing. We worked with companies like EA and Nintendo to localize their games and distribute them to mainland Chinese consumers. I was given the title of Chief Strategy Officer, not because I knew a lot about gaming or mobile phones

Adam Richins

“

My recommendation to you would be to prepare for your future by maximizing your experience on the Circle today: practice scholarship, practice spirituality, and practice service.

Eric ‘18 (center), with his parents X.D. and Nancy Yang

but because the CEO and COO titles were taken and the next title down was receptionist. For the next seven years, I learned a lot about managing the ups and downs of a tech startup in Beijing. Once again, I was a generalist in a specialist field. My role always seemed to be equipping and enabling the dreams of others, my consulting clients, or our tech company management team. Eventually, I felt it was time to run my own organization.

After we sold the company to the Walt Disney Company in 2007, I started Asian Charity Services.

God’s purpose and perhaps sense of humor prevailed in that ACS grew to become one of Asia’s largest pro bono volunteering platforms. We train business professionals to act as generalists in a specialist NGO sector, to equip and enable the dreams of NGO leaders serving Asia’s neediest communities. This outcome was unexpected but has given my life tremendous meaning and purpose.

Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.

I think that your own journey will be even more unpredictable than mine and the underlying reason is the magnitude and rate of political, social, and economic change in the world today.

Gail Friedman rediscovered and recently published a forgotten Groton Prize Day Speech by FDR from 1931. I find it interesting that FDR referenced a similar phenomenon of change to Groton students at that time, stating “in the next fifty or sixty years we are going to

have more opportunities for interesting lives in this country and all over the world than we people who were born forty-nine or fifty years ago ever had.” I could echo his words to you but would change the time period to “the next five or six years.”

And now you may be thinking about developing your own Theory of Change. So, how do you set goals and make plans for your future against this backdrop of great change and uncertainty? My recommendation to you would be to prepare for your future by maximizing your experience on the Circle today: practice scholarship, practice spirituality, and practice service.

My first recommendation to you is to practice scholarship.

When I was your age, I would define scholarship as a series of goals to be attained: a portfolio of test scores, grades, and academic degrees—and even the types of careers they equipped you for later in life. Great scholarship resulted in being able to get a particular job at a particular company. Today, I believe true scholarship is learning how to learn.

At Groton, each one of you is a student of privilege.

You are privileged to have some of the most dedicated and experienced teachers I’ve ever come across in my life.

Your teachers care enough about you to get to know you deeply as an individual and to challenge you as a student.

They challenge you to be curious and always analytical; they challenge you to take risks, to come up with new

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perspectives on old problems, whether in organic chemistry or in English class.

We are living in a time of exponential change. As one example, almost every sector worldwide today, including and in fact especially the NGO sector, is analyzing how to leverage the new tools of technological change: AI (which can be used to drive mobile literacy apps), crowdsourcing (which can be used to raise awareness and drive global fundraising efforts for local causes), and block chain (which can be used to address issues of cross-border identification in human trafficking).

As a matter of reference, when I was your age, I was also looking at how to leverage new technological tools: floppy discs, Lexus Nexus, and Lotus 1-2-3. Most of you here today won’t have any idea what I’m talking about. In this environment of accelerating change, I believe how open you are to new ideas and co-creating with others is more important than setting a goal of a particular degree or job title. In fact, popular research tells us that the majority of the jobs you will choose from in twenty years haven’t been invented yet.

Practice scholarship at Groton. Rejoice in learning how to learn.

My second recommendation for setting goals and making plans in your life is to practice spirituality. Even though my life has taken many unforeseen turns, one constant has been my faith in God. I love studying the Bible. I find it “alive and active. Sharper than any doubleedged sword.” (Hebrews 4:12). For me personally, my faith and the word—and my faith in the word—have been a lifelong guide for my goal-setting and planning. In the Bible, my brother and I even found practical teaching on how to address many of our business challenges in China: how to compete in a market with integrity when those around us were not, and how to handle a hostile takeover by one of our founding partners. My own faith has helped me to determine my greater purpose in the world and given me comfort and guidance in challenging times.

Practicing spirituality is not picking a weekly religious service based on the types of snacks being served, opportunities for socializing, or pressure from parents.

Spending time at Groton to study and deepen your understanding of different worldviews can help you on your journey to answer some of life’s big questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? How do I determine right from wrong? What is my purpose in life?

Practice spirituality at Groton. Lead the examined life.

My third recommendation is to practice service.

Service is finding ways to use your gifts and opportunities 60

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to make a difference in the world for good. Where and how you serve in your local community will definitely change over time and may even surprise you.

When I first started ACS, the use of business professionals as volunteer consultants was a means to achieving our goal of scaling our NGO services platform in a cost- effective manner. What I failed to properly anticipate was that, after working with our NGO beneficiaries, our volunteers would become their donors, board members, advocates, and eventually change-makers and social entrepreneurs in their own right. One of our volunteers left his job in investment banking to join the Nature Conservancy in China. Another volunteer was so inspired by the opportunity to use her professional skills for the greater good that she left a lucrative position in consulting to run a social impact fund for the Singapore government.

I had the chance to sit next to Wendy Kopp at a charity dinner five or six years ago. Wendy designed Teach for America (TFA) as part of her senior thesis at Princeton in 1989, with a goal of sending fresh college graduates to teach in low-income schools across the U.S. What she shared with me was that she had originally set as her audacious goal a certain number of school placements per year. In fact, over time Wendy found that more than 60% of TFA alumni would work in education-related programs after leaving TFA. She then shifted some of her organization’s focus to establishing an education advocacy movement by strengthening the TFA alumni network, which now numbers over 50,000.

Your time, talent, and treasure can all be used to make the world a better place. Each one of us has the opportunity to serve others today, whether in small or large measure. In this regard, I’m reminded of a quote from Helen Keller. “I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty and joy to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.”

Practice service at Groton. Accomplish humble tasks.

When you are ready, you can and will establish a Theory of Change for your own life, set big, audacious goals, and plan your activities for the future. I would suggest you can start today by Doing Groton Well.

Practice scholarship. Learn how to learn. Practice spirituality. Lead the examined life. Practice service.

Accomplish humble tasks.

Thank you, and God bless you.

A C H A P E L TA L K

by George W. M. Altshuler ’18 March 30, 2018 voces

The Friends I Left Behind “See, in the perfect world, I would be perfect, world / I don’t trust people enough beyond they surface, world / I don’t love people enough to put my faith in man / I put my faith in these lyrics, hoping I make amend / I understand I ain’t perfect” —Kendrick Lamar

NEXT TO THE kitchen table where my family used

to eat there is a wall decorated with drawings and a few photos. The drawings were made by my three brothers and me in our early years and they mostly consist of ill-proportioned stick figures and crayon marks that indicate a severe lack of artistic ability. It is a remarkably embarrassing set of drawings. The only thing that is possibly as cringeworthy as the artwork itself is one of the photographs that hung beside it. It was a Polaroid picture of a four-year-old me, standing in a bathroom, with all my clothes on the ground, and a toilet seat around my neck. One strange thing about this photo, among many, is that I don’t even recognize the bathroom. So, whatever happened, happened in someone else’s house.

Nonetheless, this photo does not wrench my stomach the way those kitchen drawings do. However, Pablo Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” So, in a sense, I was ahead of the curve, drawing like a child from the beginning.

As convenient as this excuse is for my kitchen art, it did not quite work for my visual studies teacher. In the untalented corner of the room, consisting of Christian Carson, Matt O’Donnell, and me, she, looking at our art, would say things like, “if you hand this in now, it’s not going to be good.”

Anyway, next to the toilet picture on the kitchen wall, there also used to hang a photo of me that featured my friend Owen. He had dressed up in my kitchen as the

Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. He held a large spoon in one hand and a near-empty container of Betty Crocker’s “Rich and Creamy” chocolate frosting in the other. And his face, splattered with frosting, showed no sign of regret.

In the following years our friendship changed. We were no longer in the same classes and we naturally developed our own friend-groups separate from each other. By sixth grade we were no longer waking up at four in the morning to play NASCAR on the PS2 (a game that has sucked away more of my life than I would like to admit), nor were we dressing up and eating chocolate frosting by the container. (I guess that one’s probably for the better.)

But Owen and I went our separate ways. He became the captain of a baseball team, I became a guest producer for my friends’ album, Straight Outta Newton, a town that not many brag to be “straight outta.” As far as the rapping goes, I’d say Jay and Mike were at the “don’t quit your day job” level. Nevertheless, while Owen was raking in wins for his baseball team, with Straight Outta Newton, Jay, Mike, and I were raking in six views on SoundCloud. But as things tend to come and go, our fame proved ephemeral and the group dissolved.

By seventh grade, with the days of chocolate frosting and Straight Outta Newton behind me, I developed a friendship with a fellow student named Sam. We happened to play at the same level of soccer, which was the lowest level possible. And while he had higher ambitions in the sport and the athletic ability to back them up, it

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I think it is more challenging and worthwhile to examine yourself not necessarily through the times that you have acted wrongly, but in light of the times that you have not acted at all.

Ben Calmas ’18

was a fitting place for me, who, when playing basketball in eighth grade, was benched for every single jump ball despite being the tallest member on the team. But, through our mediocre soccer abilities, a shared passion for Minecraft, and attempts at learning and reciting The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments,” Sam became one of my closest friends out of the sixty or so who were in my grade. He had a way of supporting people through humor, occasionally rooted in deep sarcasm. He never took himself or anything around him too seriously, which is a pleasant and refreshing trait that I attempted to adopt myself. When I knew him, he was a genuinely hilarious individual. And that never came at anyone’s expense. The way Owen and I would do the ridiculous things that first-grade friends do, Sam and I would freestyle. While he was no Big-T, his rhymes would get us laughing hysterically. I don’t remember them well—I assume they weren’t that great—but it didn’t matter to us. It is fair to say that he made the last two years at my former school more enjoyable than they would have been without him.

At the end of my eighth-grade year, when I graduated from middle school, I remember thinking to myself, “I will probably never see most of these people again.”

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thought. Most of my classmates, even those who weren’t friends of mine, I had known for years and years and I guess I felt oddly at ease with letting them just fade out of my life. Of course, I wouldn’t forget the containers of Betty Crocker, the tens of views on SoundCloud, or freestyling on the bus. But as the months progressed, even the relationships I cared about, with friends like Sam, began to fade, as communication tapered from seeing them in person to Skyping every now and then to the occasional tag or comment on Instagram. And the only thing I thought of it was, eh, we’ll meet up again sometime, maybe after we graduate from high school.

During the school year I was too caught up in the monotonous routines of early high school to think anything else. And on vacations, something held me back from seeking out old friends. Maybe I just didn’t feel the urge to do so the way others seemed to. Independence was nothing new to me, so spending vacations with the family or alone was manageable. And only a couple of years into high school, neglecting my friends from home had become a habit that I was numbly content with.

While I was in my own world doing my own things, I consistently paid no attention to the friends I had left behind. And it had been years since I had really talked to any of them when, one Wednesday morning, last fall, late

years ago in Heathrow airport when I was asked to take off my jumper. And thinking that the term “jumper” had something to do with legs, I began to unbuckle my pants in front of a crowd of travelers. The little moments like that are embarrassing when they happen; the big ones are too. But in my experience, they don’t leave you with the lasting regret that you feel when you know that you should have done something or said something but didn’t.

I considered Sam one of my best friends. But as a friend, I failed in a way that I can no longer make up for. I never tried to reach out to him in our high school years and, because of that, it’s hard not to put some blame on myself. That is not to say that a single phone call could have changed anything, but it might have been worth a shot. And even if I knew that it could never have helped, at least I would have been there with him. I don’t consider myself a particularly religious individual, but every time I think of him, a Christian confessional phrase comes to mind: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done.” Every time I hear it in Chapel, it taunts me in a way that it never had before. And that is not how anyone should feel, especially in light of their relationships to the people around them.

Personally, I fear that I may leave here in a few months with an experience heavily characterized by missed opportunities, opportunities to benefit myself as well as my community. And I fear that I may be passive enough to let such inaction become a habit in my life.

And this was not a fear that developed until I felt the detriment of it. So, if I were required to suggest one thing to any of you right here, right now, I’d probably say it’s worth considering not your actions, but the way in which your inactions reflect upon you as an individual and the community that surrounds you.

To a certain extent the only thing that keeps us all sane here is the presence of each other. And I like to think that that is true in the real world as well. The only problem is it’s easy to forget that. Things come and go. Friendships change. Shared memories of chocolate frosting, trashy mixtapes, low-level athleticism—they all inevitably fade away, maybe to be evoked one day by a photo or drawing on a kitchen wall. But maybe not. Loss happens. And letting something go doesn’t always mean it sits around waiting for us. It’s on each individual to cherish what they have, but that can be difficult. After all, you are never taught how to properly appreciate a friendship.

Or maybe that’s just something I missed out on.

Names have been changed to protect privacy.

voces

September, I think it was, I was informed that Sam had killed himself the night before.

It is hard to describe such a deep feeling of loss to someone who has not experienced it. But if you have yet to undergo the death of a close friend (especially to suicide), it’s a particularly bizarre experience—and one that is difficult to put into words. But such an event leads to many questions: Why would he want to do that to himself? Could anyone have been aware that this was going to happen? To what extent am I responsible? Oddly enough, that last one really got to me. Every now and then you hear a story about someone who was on the edge of suicide, but a simple conversation with a friend changed their fate. And it felt like I had an opportunity and responsibility to be that individual. But I failed for three years in a row. It’s a blame from which I wish I could absolve myself as well as everyone else who knew him.

But as much as I would like to say that no one could have known that he felt whatever it was that led him in front of the train that killed him, how would I ever be sure? I had not spoken to him in years. And the last conversation the two of us had, I cut off short because of “important” schoolwork. After that conversation, which was almost three years ago, I remained idle.

I used to live by the simple theory of “no regrets.” I mean that I always tried to learn something from my mistakes. And I would tell myself that my wrongdoings had some positive impact on the individual I was in the present. But my neglect and inaction when it came to my friendship with Sam seemed inexcusable in a way that made me re-examine myself as I never thought I would.

Many have and will continue to tell stories about the “L’s” they have taken, the times they have screwed up with the central message being something along the lines of “Everyone makes mistakes. Everybody screws up.

Don’t worry about it.” Of course, that is an important lesson to learn and understand, but I think it is more challenging and worthwhile to examine yourself not necessarily through the times that you have acted wrongly, but in light of the times that you have not acted at all.

The things I don’t do, my idleness, in other words, is part of who I am. I don’t mean it is all that I am, but in that part of me I see a person that I rarely wish to be—a person with a strong sense of regret that came to light not through my wrong actions, but my inactions: the times I should have spoken up, but remained silent, the times I should have reached out to a friend, but held back. Those are the things that keep me up at night. Not the times that I’ve screwed up or done something wrong, but the times I did nothing at all. We all do screw up, we all make mistakes. Some are big, like saying something mean to someone you care about, and some are small, like a few

A C H A P E L TA L K

by Maximilian J. Klein ’18 May 21, 2018

The Buzzards Hovering Over Us AFTER FIVE YEARS at Groton, there are almost no

classes that I’ve taken here that I’ve gotten absolutely nothing out of. There are many that I took just for requirements and many for which my only focus was getting homework done on a nightly basis. But all of them gave me at least something more to carry around in life. The classes I would say have given me the most have been my various literary classes: English, Spanish, Latin, and Greek. And of all the works I’ve read, analyzed, and written papers about, the most powerful for me was As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.

I won’t reveal what happens, but for those who haven’t read it yet, the plot is essentially about a family’s journey to go bury the recently deceased mother. I liked this book so much, because it portrays psychology at its purist. Every chapter is told in a stream of consciousness from a different character’s point of view, and the essential job of the reader at the end is to piece together the disjunction of experiences in order to find out what the true story is and what is still lacking at the end.

Last week, the night before my AP literature exam, I reread all of my essays from the past two years so I could have something interesting to write about on the test. I found the paper for As I Lay Dying that I wrote for Mr. Goodrich last year, and I was reminded of a powerful image from the book. While they are transporting their mother’s body on a wagon, her week-old corpse releases the stench of death, attracting vultures, which fly above the wagon. But only one family member, Darl, acknowledges them. The rest sit around, contemplating their own goals, not mentioning a word of the buzzards or the horrendous smell coming from the coffin. Then Darl leans over to his brother and tries to alert him to the reality of their situation: “See them? High above the 64

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house, against the quick thick sky, they hang in narrowing circles. From here they are no more than specks, implacable, patient, portentous.” Instead of snapping out of his “self-imposed immaturity” as Immanuel Kant would put it, Darl’s brother gets angry and unresponsive.

Seeing this again also reminded me of a joke told by David Foster Wallace in a speech entitled “This Is Water:” “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’” These two anecdotes got me thinking that the ultimate purpose of a critical, questioning, and subversive life must entail first to ask what is the water we are all swimming in, and then to point out the buzzards that are constantly flying above us.

I feel these two anecdotes describe very well how much mental effort people can go through to avoid facing problems straight on. This exists quite obviously on the personal level in normal, everyday interactions, such as if someone blames failing a test on how much sleep they got the night before, without realizing that it was because they were underprepared. But this exists on the macrolevel in culture, politics, economics, and other large realms of society. This is not necessarily always bad. But we do have to honestly face the consequences of such evasive action and name the buzzards in the sky for what they are.

And on the political realm, these buzzards do have a name: capitalism.

Now, so that I don’t alienate too many of you, I want to emphasize that I do not think capitalism is some culmination of all evil. On the contrary, capitalism has indeed been the most liberating force in human history

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Though we consider ourselves relatively progressive in questions of race and gender, we haven’t even scratched the surface of class and economics.

Photos by Adam Richins

until now. What I want to point out now is the ways we avoid talking about capitalism and its problems. This is an area where, as much as I admire the ways Groton has changed in my five years, Groton culturally remains almost as ignorant as when I got here with regard to class.

Though we consider ourselves relatively progressive in questions of race and gender, we haven’t even scratched the surface of class and economics.

And there are many examples of this. Multiple times, when I have written words such as class, capitalism, bourgeois, proletariat, etc., in essays, I’ve been told that I should change them to terms like “socioeconomic status, inequality, rich people, and poor people.” It’s not like this only happens to me. A couple of my friends told me about how their teachers forced them to get rid of the word “capitalism” from an essay. Last year, I read a student response to a question about class at Groton where they said that class is unimportant and that Groton should only talk about matters of gender and race.

I violently disagree with this statement. We should no longer avoid discussions about the fundamental nature of our economy, which drives all other aspects of society.

This is better than ignoring the roots of our problems.

And I could talk for hours about why I think traditional

Above, Max at Prize Day; left, on the clarinet. Also a gifted pianist and composer, he wrote music for the school productions of Equus and Twelfth Night, as well as chamber music for his senior recital.

conceptions of economics are about as scientific as praying to the sky for rain. But it’s still more productive to talk about it and make incorrect conclusions than not to talk about it all.

The ways we ignore talking about capitalism are extremely numerous and even embody whole political movements. A large aspect of this is the way we confront climate change. Practically all sane people recognize that we are heading towards a crisis of proportions we have never seen before. But the mainstream solutions offered are incredibly lacking. Most suggest small action by regular people: take fewer showers, recycle when you can, use the bus, don’t eat meat one day of the week.

While none of these are negative solutions, I doubt the extent that this will genuinely change anything. When even most of the First World is a couple paychecks from homelessness, how can we really expect mass participation in these efforts? It’s ridiculous to think that having a lot of people change small aspects of their lives can reverse climate change.

This is because capital, at its core, only seeks constant creation of value at maximum productiveness, regardless of the consequences. So instead of putting a few solar panels on our houses and then feeling like good people

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Advertising — or, as I like to think of it, ‘legalized brainwashing’— is so prevalent that it forms the backbone of companies more powerful than most governments.

afterwards, let’s put in an honest effort to analyze how our economic system, capitalism, created climate change and is unable to fix it.

In America, to me the clearest way we avoid talking about capitalism is gun control. Whenever a mass shooting happens, we all come out and talk about gun regulations. Instead of questioning what drives somebody to commit a crime of this stature, we focus only on the method. As my brother Adam once said to me, when we live in a world where one can take the train and not make eye contact with anyone, in a world where more and more of our lives are spent alone on phones, in a world where authentic communities like Groton hardly exist anymore, are we really surprised that people commit mass murder? Are we really only going to talk about regulating the weapon used? I think both liberals and conservatives are distracted by the gun control debate, which diverts attention from real issues of poverty, depression, and race.

The reality is that gun violence stems from large-scale poverty, anxiety, and depression, which is caused by a commodified world.

Our lives are more commodified than at any point in human history. Markets and commodities were very useful to a point, as they played large parts in much of our technology, and they have helped bring more people out of poverty than any system in history. But with problems of ecology, inequality, poverty, stagnating wages, and depression, both economic and emotional, it is more and more clear that we must at least question the ways in which capitalism works. Similarly to how Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in schools negatively affects people’s minds, a similar thing can be said about economic inequality today.

Aside from just ecology, we are going through massive changes of behavior itself and life as we know it. The places that we regarded as safe from commodification and deemed as holy and untouchable are now being absorbed into the realm of profit. Our minds and health are now influenced by all sorts of medicine: medicine for anxiety, sleeping, addiction, etc., all of which changes how we think and all of which is exchanged as commodities in a capitalist market. Advertising—or, as I like to think of it, “legalized brainwashing”—is so prevalent that it forms 66

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the backbone of companies more powerful than most governments, like Facebook and Google.

This all comes as a result of centuries of political and economic history, but is also linked even more to the fall of communism in the Eastern Bloc. We supposedly reached the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama famously stated in the ’90s. This ideology, combined with the massive catastrophes of ecology, inequality, and the Great Recession, have created a very strange world.

To quote philosopher Slavoj Zizek, “Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept that global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with catastrophes, such as all life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is that it’s easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a modest change in capitalism.” Essentially, we view human annihilation itself as more likely than something as easy and simple as universal healthcare or college education. And these comments are sadly right. Critique and discussion of our economic system are absent, especially here at Groton.

The antidote to this dilemma lies partially in—to refer again to literature I’ve read at Groton—making sure we are not “men who have no entrails,” to quote from Heart of Darkness. Essentially, the entrails we must have are critical capacities. Many things can help us find our entrails. Philosophy is one, literature of course another, art and music too. I have always found that though music may not always be offering a direct critique and analysis of society, good music reminds us that there is something other than the mere appearance and alienation of our everyday lives. But whatever your passion is, it should be a force that pushes you to question the ways in which we talk about the world. For it is very easy to get caught up in the rhetoric and sophisms that dominate societal discourse. It takes courage to look up and point at the buzzards hovering over us.

Thank you all for a wonderful five years.

book review

Hunter Lewis ’65 Review by the Reverend Stephen McCarthy ’06

What is a chef doing among the intellectual luminaries, authors, and Nobel Prize winners collected in The Secular Saints: And Why Morals are Not Just Subjective? Following chapters exploring the thought of Aristotle, Spinoza, and Ludwig von Mises, among others, the inclusion of chef Edna Lewis (no relation to the author) came as something of a surprise.

For those unfamiliar with her (as I was before reading this book), Edna Lewis did more than anyone to put the cuisine of the American South at the forefront of the nation’s culinary scene. And if you share doubts of the kind I once had as a New Englander dispatched to Alabama for his first job after seminary, I can assure you hers is an enduring legacy; just this year the James Beard Foundation named Highlands Bar & Grill, a Birmingham restaurant with a gourmet take on Southern classics, the most outstanding in America.

Yet, in an important way, Edna Lewis’ labor and distinguished life are perhaps most suited to a book which, much like an excellent dinner party, gathers interesting personalities and invites them to engage with one another — in this case over the perennial question of how an individual is to lead a good life, a moral life.

Hunter Lewis does not limit his invitation to “secular sainthood” to those with animosity toward revealed religion — indeed, several of those featured expressed Christian commitments. Rather, he makes his criteria that they lived their lives and expressed their thoughts in ways independent of organized religion. Collectively, the author poses this motivating question: “Is it possible to establish a credible moral, ethical, philosophical system outside of religion? And if so, what would

it look like?” The human tendency to seek group identity through adversarial self-definition, or what Mr. Lewis calls “tribalism,” has given rise to an environment in which this project feels especially pressing. The public has a strong appetite for such exploration — whether approached from the right, as

by University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson, or from the mainstream left, as by Columbia Professor Mark Lilla. The Secular Saints has a distinctive contribution to make to this discussion, firmly situated as it is in the tradition of classical liberalism.

The Secular Saints does not merely introduce various figures and their biographies; more often than not, it includes salient quotations from their writings. The ad fontes spirit of this approach should feel familiar to Grotties of all generations. The result is that, as at any good dinner party, different guests sparkle to varying degrees, often depending more on the incidentals of company and conversation than on their own innate character. We can thus experience them in unexpected ways, as when we discover economist Adam Smith on the defensive, or hear philosopher David Hume expound on economics and religion, rather than epistemology more generally. Among the philosophers, Montaigne positively dazzles with the appeal of a bon vivant; and Epicurus speaks with the same verve Mr. Tulp communicated when I first encountered him by way of Lucretius in Fourth Form Latin; while Immanuel Kant remains as implacably earnest and Teutonic as he ever was in Mr. Seeley’s Sixth Form Ethics course.

Establishing the objectivity of morality is a tall order for any volume and, while advocating for this, The Secular Saints leaves it up to the individual reader to draw conclusions about details — befitting its classical liberal affinities and whetting the reader’s appetite for more. Happily, the first chapter offers a concise introduction to some of the leading ethical theorists of the present. Although, with the exception of Alasdair MacIntyre, the book passes over those whose approaches are more engaged with the Christian tradition (e.g. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Charles Taylor). Those stimulated to seek further programmatic treatment of these themes might turn to Hunter Lewis’ A Question of Values: Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives; or the Dutch legal theorist Andreas Kinneging’s The Geography of Good and Evil. Accepting the invitation to spend time with The Secular Saints affords readers the opportunity to meet historical personalities whose relevance remains undiminished today.

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The Secular Saints: And Why Morals are Not Just Subjective

new releases

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► Please send information about your new releases to quarterly@groton.org.

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George Whitney ’64

The Wargod’s Apprentice

At fifteen, Lex, who has been homeschooled his entire life, begins attending high school. Although he is gifted and ahead of his peers academically, he’s awkward and uncomfortable socially—that is, until he discovers football and its violence, and it seems he has a gift for both.

When Lex’s family dies in a fire, Lex goes to live with his fabulously wealthy grandfather, who apprentices 68

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him to an eccentric named Dr. Bernard Polemarchos. Bernie is a Wargod, one of a race of aliens who travel in time, refighting the great battles of history to protect earth from the evil Others—who, Lex discovers, are responsible for his family’s death. As Bernie teaches Lex how to be a warrior, soon the time will come for the young man to avenge the murders of his loved ones and take his place in history.

Fall 2018

Frank Blair ’62

The Schooner Maggie B

A true, southern ocean circumnavigation, around the great capes, fills the imagination of every serious and armchair sailor. In 2005, Frank Blair built a sixty-three-foot wooden schooner in Nova Scotia and, with an all-volunteer crew, set off on her two-year maiden voyage around the world.

Many sailing books tell of racing hardships, disasters at sea, days adrift in a life raft, or being

3 Ben Coes ’85

Bloody Sunday

North Korea, increasingly isolated from most of the rest of the world, is led by an absolute dictator and a madman with a major goal—he’s determined to launch a nuclear attack on the United States. While they have built and continue to successfully test nuclear bombs, North Korea has yet to develop a ballistic missile with the range necessary to attack America.

But their missiles are improving, reaching a point where the U.S. absolutely must respond.

What the U.S. doesn’t know is that North Korea has made a deal with Iran. In exchange for effective missiles from Iran, they will trade nuclear triggers and fissionable material. An exchange, if it goes through, will create two new nuclear powers, both with dangerous plans.

Dewey Andreas, still reeling from recent revelations about his own past, is ready to retire from the CIA. But he’s the only available agent with the skills to carry out the CIA’s plan to stop North Korea. The plan is to inject a singular designer poison into the head of the North Korean military and, in exchange for the nuclear plans, provide him with the one existing dose of the antidote. But it goes awry when Dewey manages to inject a small amount of the poison into himself. Now, to survive, Dewey must get into North Korea and access the antidote and, while there, thwart

the nuclear ambitions of both North Korea and Iran. And he has less than twenty-four hours to do so.

4 Christopher T. Rand ’55

The Oraman Road

In The Oraman Road, Christopher T. Rand brings readers a dramatic and complex story of strategy and intrigue set within the film industry and the Middle East drug world.

Bernie Vreeland is a freelance filmmaker soon to start a documentary on the international drug trade for a wealthy movie buff. One of the documentary’s funders believes the key to its narrative lies in the Middle East. Bernie had worked in the Middle East as a CIA case officer with a man named Rich Leonard, who was fluent in Kurdish and knowledgeable about drug routes throughout the region. Bernie wants Rich on the project, but doesn’t know if he’s still alive.

Winding through complex characters and subplots, Bernie mounts his quest for Rich, as others strive to undermine the drug documentary and see that it never gets made. After Rich’s emergence, a showdown and a shocking expose unravel the saga of the Middle East drug world in a drastic climax.

5 Anson Montgomery ’90

Your Grandparents Are Ninjas

Your Grandparents Are Ninjas is an interactive, multiple-ending story of a superstar wedding gone awry at a fancy inn in California. You are the main character of the story, a young ninja-in-training who must help your grandparents keep their secret ninja identities under wraps when the Jewel Ninja robs the famous bride of her jewel-studded tiara just before she’s

Book summaries were provided by the authors and/or publishers.

set to appear at the altar.

Growing up, Anson’s father, the founding author of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, encouraged reading and creativity, and Anson contributed ideas to early books in the series. Anson is the author of fifteen Choose Your Own Adventure novels, including Escape from the Haunted Warehouse, Your Grandparents Are Zombies, and Your Grandparents Are Spies.

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DeSales Harrison ’86

The Waters & the Wild

Daniel Abend is a single parent in New York City with a successful therapy practice and a comfortable life: an apartment on the Upper West Side, a teenage daughter, a peaceful daily routine. When one of his patients commits suicide, it is a tragedy, but one easily explained: the young woman suffered from depression and drug addiction.

But soon after, Daniel receives an ominous note that makes him question the circumstances surrounding his patient’s death.

He is provided with a provocative series of clues—a mysterious key, a cryptic poem, a photograph with a chilling message. A few days later, his daughter abruptly disappears.

Daniel is swept into an increasingly desperate search for his daughter, and for the truth—a search that stretches back decades, to when he was a young man living in Paris, falling in love with a woman who would ultimately upend his life. As he is tormented by a steady flow of anonymous letters, Daniel recognizes that he must confront the secrets of his past.

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dismasted off Cape Horn. This book is about a great success: a sailor’s dream voyage well executed. The Schooner Maggie B tells of breakdowns but also recoveries, great ports, surmounted bureaucracies, and the sublime pleasures of a clear night-watch and days with fresh gales. Come along for the apprehension and joys of a four-thousand-mile, blue water passage!

Photographs by Ellen Harasimowicz

THE WOMEN OF

LOCKERBIE The McBaine Studio Theater provided an intimate setting for the story of a mother searching for remains of her son, who died in the terrorist downing of Pan Am flight 103, and her interaction with the women of Lockerbie, who were determined to win the right to wash the victims’ clothing, an act of love and healing.

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The cast of The Women of Lockerbie, including Eliza Powers ‘20 (opposite page); Lucy Chatfield ‘18 and Christian Carson ‘18, right; Claire Holding ‘21, Amy Lu ‘19, Angelika Hillios ‘19, Katherine Johnson ‘20, and Eliza Powers, below left; and Josie Fulton ‘18, below right and bottom left.

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Photographs by Laurie Sales

OneAct Plays

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Clockwise from top left: George Kingsland ’21, Vlad Malashenko ’19, and Alexandra Kirchner ’22; Kellen O’Donnell ’22 and Jay Montima ’18; Jay; Yan Davidoff ’18 and Patrick Ryan ’19; Mary Sabatelle ’18; Johnny Stankard ’19; Caleb Coleman ’20; Vlad and Eleanor Dunn ’20; Alex Brown ’21 and Lucy Chatfield ’18; Abby Kirk ’19 and Angelika Hillios ’19

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Christopher Carey Brodigan Gallery FALL EXHIBIT

Artists Around the Circle Through November 10

THE FALL EXHIBIT, celebrating the artists right here on campus, includes paintings, photographs, pastels, ceramic pottery, handmade books, video, and even a terrarium—all courtesy of Groton’s talented faculty, staff, and families.

Clockwise from top right: Ellen Rennard, English teacher Deedee Toned silver gelatin print Lorayne Black, faculty spouse Beaver Tails Pastel on sanded paper, acrylic underpainting Mark Melchior, librarian Stoneware with applied glazes

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

de Menil Gallery FALL EXHIBIT

It Ain’t Necessarily So Margaret Bowland Through November 12

From the artist’s personal statement: “I have long been fascinated, as a woman, at how much we must disguise ourselves to be attractive.

Do we then have a clue as to what we really look like or who we really are?

[In the] Velasquez masterpiece, ‘Las Meninas,’ the center of the painting shows a blond child being offered a terra-cotta vial by a lady-inwaiting prostrate at her feet. That vial contained a ‘whitening solution.’ Why was this the moment Velasquez chose to depict? He is painting a child who embodies the ambitions of other people’s projections in the royal court.

Painting on skin is by intent a metaphor to expose basic questions of self-identity, which all people undergo internally as a part of the maturation process. It is also reflective of the last five hundred years of global cultures, who sought to cover their women in make-up, powders, paints, even mud. This painting on skin dates from ancient times to the fashion houses of Paris, New York, and Los Angeles.

Psychologists have learned that at about the age of seven children become aware of the fact that they are not truly unconditionally loved. The lucky ones have known unconditional love from a parent but all must soon face this fact. So begins the time when looking into the face of a stranger, many ask: “Whom do you wish to see when you look at me?

What does it take to earn your love?”

In many of my paintings I have depicted both Caucasian and African Americans involved in what I see as a struggle to express the ‘self.’ My subjects triumph. They look back at you through all the make-up, the costumes, the times in history in which they are placed, completely whole.

Their eyes hold their unique souls and stare you down. None of my subjects are ever victims.”

Someday My Prince Will Come

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The de Menil Gallery, in the Dillon Art Center at Groton School, is open 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on weekdays (except Wednesdays) and 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on weekends (except school holidays). The gallery is free and open to the public.

Photographs by Jon Chase

Tennis ace Matt Kandel ‘20; opposite page, Leah Pothel ‘21 and Shane Kim ‘19

SPRING SPORTS

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Boys Tennis 19– 0 It was a season for the ages. The boys varsity tennis team recaptured the ISL Championship for the first time since 2002, completing the season with a perfect 15–0 league record.

In addition, they beat Andover, Exeter, and Deerfield in outside dual matches. Groton won the Kingswood-Oxford Tournament in Connecticut as the season began, and they were finalists in the “A” Division of the New England Championships, where they were the #1 seed.

The squad featured three All-ISL Players.

Number-one player Matt Kandel ’20 established himself as one of the very best players in New England. His play was spectacular, and he did not lose any singles matches, splitting

only twice with ISL players and beating all other opponents. Number-two player Sam Girian ’18, a team captain, completed his fifth year playing on the varsity; his dazzling efforts over the years in both singles and doubles made him a force with which to be reckoned.

Number-three Andrew Yang ’19 also was named to the All-ISL team. He had one of the best records at his position and was a graceful player and model sportsman.

In the middle and bottom of the line-up, #4 Aaron Jin ’19, #5 Gabe Scholl ’19, and #6 Powers Trigg ’20 played some remarkable tennis. In fact, Powers was 30–0 in the ISL, while Gabe was 28–2. The Scholl/Powers doubles tandem was also undefeated.

Charlie Vrattos ’18 and Jared Gura ’22 proved themselves to be valuable utility players, always ready to do anything to improve

Groton’s chances. “All-Star” managers Arabella Peters ’18 and Garvel Cassamajor ’18 completed their second tour of duty working behind the scenes to help mold this championship team.

When the Form of 2002 recently returned to campus to be inducted into the Groton School Athletic Hall of Fame, I wondered how long it would be until Groton would get back to the top. At the time, little did I realize that this year’s team would match many of that squad’s accomplishments. They were fearless competitors. I will long remember this amazing team. For me, nothing is more special at Groton than a team that dreams big and works as hard as possible to make that dream come true.

— Coach John Conner P’11, ’14, ’16, ’19

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Clockwise from right: Paul Malone ‘18, Angelina Joyce ‘18, Shane Dennin ‘21, and Rajit Khanna ‘19 Opposite page: Thomas Steere ‘18, Richie Santry ‘18, Liam Calder ‘18, and Clement Banwell ‘19; Andrew Yang ‘19; the boys varsity tennis team with the Richard K. Irons Championship Trophy — manager Arabella Peters ‘18, Garvel Cassamajor ‘18, Aaron Jin ‘19, Gabriel Scholl ‘19, Sam Girian ‘18, Coach John Conner, Matt Kandel ‘20, Powers Trigg ‘20, Charlie Vrattos ‘18, and Jared Gura ‘22; Gloria Hui ‘19

Girls Tennis 13 – 4 The varsity girls tennis team had another very strong season and came within a hair’s breadth of having a sensational one. The team’s strength was no surprise: with seven returning players, all of whom grew in ability and confidence, this was bound to be a terrific season.

Groton was not the only team having a banner year, however, so the competition was stiff. An early-season match with Andover resulted in a loss, but the very competitive match against the two-time defending New England champions built even more confidence among the Groton players.

After an ugly, heartbreaking loss at Nobles, the Groton girls pulled together, practiced with focus, and ran off a series of decisive wins.

Then, with our seeding for New Englands

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on the line, all the players stepped up and supported each other through an 8–1 win over Exeter. Doubles was played first on that day and Groton took all three sets, including a win by Sangah Lee ’18 and Marianne Lu ’19, who were on their way to a season record of 15–0. In singles, the Groton players showed their poise and determination as Elechi Egwuekwe ’18 and Marianne both lost their first sets but came back to win their matches. That victory over Exeter secured another invitation to the Class A New England Championship, where Groton lost narrowly to Milton.

These same teams met again four days later, this time for the regular-season match, with a share of the ISL title hanging in the balance. Marianne and Sangah took care of business on their singles courts, as they did so

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often this season. (Sangah was entirely undefeated, earning records of 17–0 in singles and 16–0 in doubles). Both Elizabeth Girian ’20 and Gloria Hui ’19 lost their first sets but fought back and kept the team in the match.

With the score tied at 6–6 coming out of singles, the stage was set for exciting doubles sets. The level of play was high on all three courts, but it was Milton who eventually took two of the three to secure the team win.

With losses to only the top four teams in New England, this Groton squad earned a record to be proud of. More importantly, this close-knit group of athletes practiced well together and competed hard for each other, resulting in another terrific season for Groton tennis and a wonderful experience for those involved. Next year’s team will sorely miss fouryear varsity players Catherine Qiao ’18, Elechi

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Egwuekwe, and Sangah Lee, but the high standards they set for hard work, impeccable sportsmanship, and focused competition will surely carry on.

— Coach Dave Prockop P’15, ’17

Boys Lacrosse 8 – 9 Tri-captains Charlie Pearce ’18, Tyler Forbes ’18, and Pat Ryan ’19 were exemplary leaders, bringing a young team together and teaching us about teamwork, sacrifice, spirit, and work ethic. As a result, we gritted our way to a 6–9 slate in the uber-competitive ISL. Coaches Greg Hefler, Andrew Zincke, and I emphasized strong technical lacrosse, basic tactical concepts, and commitment to fitness. As a result, we were able to compete

with some of the toughest programs in New England.

Injuries and lack of depth, however, once again kept us from cracking the top half of the league. Middlebury-bound Tyler Forbes proved to be one of the best players in the league as he quarterbacked the offense, while Charlie Pearce (Boston College) was a workhorse in the midfield. Their fellow Sixth Formers were an enthusiastic, tightly knit group — Ryan Carr, Joe Collins, Kai Duenez, Tim Hoopes, Andrew Rasetti, and Ethan Walsh. Fifth Form tricaptain Ryan was as durable and skilled as any goalie in the league. Several Third Formers saw considerable playing time, and 2019 captainselect Ryan and defenseman Anders Orr ’19 will be carrying the torch next year. Though we lose a terrific Sixth Form, a competitive, talented group will take the field next spring,

eager to build on the foundation laid by the Form of 2018.

Many thanks to team managers Sara Glawe ’19 and Shirley Li ’19, as well as JV coaches Jamie Funnell P’13, Aram Jeknavorian, and AJ Twogood for their support and dedication. We are also so fortunate to have such positive parental and alumni support.

— Coach Bob Low

Girls Lacrosse 3 – 13 The girls varsity lacrosse team came into the season with a growth mindset that carried us through some tough games. The girls were highly coachable and excited to learn new defensive systems, mid-field transition patterns, and attack plays. We

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Russell Thorndike ‘21; opposite page: Sophie Conroy ‘19, Layla McDermott ‘18, Nailah Pierce ‘18, and Bridget Cornell ‘19

quickly learned from our mistakes on the field and looked for ways to improve on our successes. The team that ended the season was vastly improved from where it began.

Individual players enhanced their skills and the team refined its systems and tactics, allowing us to use different game plans based on our opponents’ strengths and weaknesses.

While we would have preferred a better winloss record, we felt satisfied with the progress we made as a team and are looking forward to more measurable achievement next spring.

We started this year with a trip to Florida for pre-season training camp. The girls could not have been better travel companions, and we got to know each other well before we returned to campus. We had a strong showing early in the season against Governor’s, but lost in overtime by one goal. We had great wins against Dana Hall, St. George’s, and BB&N. Groton’s greatest accomplishment this year was the marked improvement we made as a team. The Zebras never gave up, even when down many goals; with strong mental determination, we battled back game after game, often winning the second half of our games. I expect next season we will turn a corner and be able to close out more games as wins in the league. We will miss our Sixth Formers Alyna Baharozian, Elle Despres, Angelina Joyce, Imani McGregor, Layne McKeown, Addie Newsome, and Mary Sabatelle.

— Coach Annie Kandel P’20, ’23

Baseball 5 –11 The varsity baseball team finished the 2018 campaign with an overall record of 5–11 and an ISL record of 5–10. Although the win total was not where we wanted it to be, the team worked very hard throughout the spring and pushed each other to improve each day.

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Playing in one of the toughest baseball leagues in New England, there is no break from strong competition. As is typically the case for the Groton Nine, a lot of younger players earned significant playing time and gained valuable experience.

The team stayed up north during the annual pre-season spring training, at the beautiful, state-of-the-art New England Baseball Complex turf facility in Northborough, Massachusetts. Three full days of practice were followed by three games in the Prep School Jamboree, and the season was quickly upon us. Late March workouts in New England can be rather frigid and unpredictable. The weather wasn’t our friend early on, as the late snow and cold temperatures pushed our season back a week right out of the gate. The first game was a 3–0 victory over crosstown rival Lawrence Academy. Strong pitching from Fourth Former Josh Nam, tremendous defense, and timely hitting helped the Groton Nine get off to a great start. After a few close losses and tough defeats, the team bounced back in a historic way against Nobles. Fifth Form pitcher Shane Kim threw a no-hitter, and we got back on the winning track, 2–0. It was a masterful performance from Shane as he struck out nine hitters, recording the first Groton no-hitter since 2008. This tremendous day, as well as the triple play we turned against BB&N, proved to be the biggest highlights of the season.

Looking ahead to 2019, Groton will return a lot of valuable, experienced players, who will be primed and ready for another tough ISL schedule. We would like to thank the Form of 2018 (Nick David, Dan Herdiech, Paul Malone, Jason Montima, Aidan Reilly, and Cam Schmitt) for their tremendous work ethic, dedication, and leadership over the past four years.

They will be missed! Follow us on Twitter at @GrotonSchool9 for updates, scores, and highlights.

— Coach Glenn DiSarcina P’13, ’17

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Boys Crew 8 – 4 – 2 This was a trying season, but the boys kept their senses of humor and kept working hard, although we did not have our customary success. Three nor’easters hit the campus in March, and trees fell into the Nashua River, making anything after a thousand meters impassable. This meant very little open water during preseason; we headed into Boston to row on the Charles a few times and worked hard indoors. After about three weeks, our Buildings and Grounds crew cleared the river, but losing that much water time put us in a hole from which we spent the season trying to recover.

Our early races showed promise. Although we lost to Nobles, we swept BB&N, St. Mark’s, and Middlesex. Then at the Pomfret regatta, Deerfield once again showed its strength, winning all races and looking powerful. We split races with Taft and beat Dexter and Pomfret.

With the Wayland Weston Regatta canceled, we faced Nobles and St. Mark’s at Lake Quinsigamond. Our second boat rowed the best race of the year, beating previously undefeated Nobles by five seconds in a masterful race. Our other boats, however, lost to Nobles for the second time. We couldn’t keep pace with Belmont Hill on the surprisingly placid Lake Cochichewick, but we did beat Brooks and split with Choate. We closed our season at home for Reunion Weekend by sweeping upand-coming Berwick.

The NEIRA was a disappointment. The best Groton finish was the second boat’s fifth place.

In the team totals, we slipped to sixth place in New England overall. Next year’s captains, Clement Banwell ’19, Finn Lynch ’19, and Johnny Stankard ’19, will try to get us back into the medals.

— Coach Andy Anderson P’15, ’17, ’20

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BASEBALL

BOYS LACROSSE

GIRLS LACROSSE

BOYS CREW

GIRLS CREW

TRACK & FIELD

Pitcher of the Year Shane Kim ‘19

Most Valuable Player Tyler Forbes ‘18

Most Valuable Player Mary Sabatelle ’18

Most Improved Player Jimmy Sullivan ‘19

Most Improved Player Ted Carlin ‘20

Rookie of the Year Grace Mumford ‘21

Captains-Elect Clement Banwell ‘19 Finn Lynch ‘19 Johnny Stankard ‘19

Captains-Elect Bridget Cornell ‘19 Lily Cratsley ‘19

Most Valuable Players Noah Aaron ‘18 Montanna Riggs ‘19

Coaches’ Award Cam Schmitt ‘18

Fred Beams Award Tim Hoopes ‘18 Charlie Pearce ‘18

Most Improved Player Margot Ferris ’21

ISL All-League Shane Kim ‘19 ISL Honorable Mention Luke Beckstein ‘20 Josh Nam ‘20 Captains-Elect Drew Burke ‘19 Shane Kim ‘19 Bennett Smith ‘19

ISL All-League Tyler Forbes ‘18 Patrick Ryan ‘19 Russell Thorndike ‘21 ISL Honorable Mention Charlie Pearce ‘18 Anthony Romano ‘21 Captains-Elect Anders Orr ‘19 Patrick Ryan ‘19

Girls Crew 9 – 2 – 5 It was the season of many obstacles for the crew team this spring — cold temperatures, an impassable river, high water, swift currents, thunderstorms, injury, and illness. It seemed as if we were lucky to get five days in a row on the water. The girls’ enthusiasm was not dimmed however, and the spring started in late March with many returning rowers and a few novices ready to learn how to row. Tricaptains Layla McDermott ’18, Nailah Pierce ’18, and Olivia Potter ’18 kept spirits high and led with confidence as we struggled with the various obstructions Mother Nature threw at us.

ISL All-League Angelina Joyce ‘18 Mary Sabatelle ‘18 Captains-Elect Lily Delaney ‘19 Frederika Tobeason ‘19 Lyndsey Toce ‘19

GIRLS TENNIS BOYS TENNIS ISL All-League Sam Girian ‘18 Matt Kandel ‘20 Andrew Yang ‘19 ISL Honorable Mention Charlie Vrattos ’18 Captains-Elect Aaron Jin ‘19 Gabe Scholl ‘19 Andrew Yang ‘19

The girls team added an early-season race this spring against Newton Country Day School and Lincoln School down on Narragansett Bay, which we swept across all four boats. We continued a strong early season with wins over BB&N, Middlesex, and Pomfret. We split races with St. Mark’s, which had a very fast fourth boat this year, but our first and third boats beat St. Mark’s! We also split wins with Deerfield, Taft, Brooks, and Choate. Winsor and Nobles beat all of our boats in a mid-season race and proved to be two of the top finishers at championships.

Our final race was also a new addition to the schedule: Berwick Academy came down from Maine for our only home race. It was a nice

Coach’s Award Elechi Egwuekwe ‘18 Sangah Lee ‘18 Catherine Qiao ‘18 ISL All-League Catherine Qiao ‘18 ISL Honorable Mention Sangah Lee ‘18

Most Improved Player Leo McMahon ’19 Coaches’ Award Paul Michaud ‘18 Kochoe Nikoi ‘19 Captains-Elect Leo McMahon ‘19 Kochoe Nikoi ‘19 Montanna Riggs ‘19 Brandon Slawaska ‘19

Captains-Elect Gloria Hui ‘19 Marianne Lu ‘19

way to end our regular season — with a complete sweep.

The season ended (as it always does) with NEIRA Championships on Lake Quinsigamond, which gets more competitive every year as more schools join the league.

Groton School continues to be one of the few schools whose four varsity crews are all invited to the regatta, and as a team we finished seventh overall, an improvement from our tenth-place finish last year.

— Coach Tiffany Doggett P’17, ’19, ’22

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Follow Groton Athletics on Twitter:

Above, Karla Sanford ‘19; right, Lyndsey Toce ‘19

Track and Field GIRLS: With only six girls on the track team and seventeen events to cover, our team record looked unimpressive. But our individual performances improved all season long. Our two Third Formers, distance runners Aisling O’Connell and Yizhen Wu, ran hard every day and showed promise. I am looking for big things from these two girls next year.

Our 4x100-meter relay team had one of the top three times in New England this year (51.7). The four relayers — Montanna Riggs ’19, Kochoe Nikoi ’19, Evie Gomila ’19, and Karla Sanford ’19 — will be returning next year. Everyone should keep an eye open for this team.

At the New Englands, Montanna took third in the high jump and also placed fourth in the 100-meter hurdles. She is always going the extra mile for teammates and coaches and giving her best. Just point her in the right direction, and she does the rest.

Kochoe has been improving all season long in all of her events, including as the anchor of the 4x100-meter relay. She also runs (and

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dominates in) the 100- and 200-meter sprints.

Midway through the season, she inquired about the 300-meter hurdles. So, one day at practice, we put her to the test and were all greatly surprised with the results. From that point forward, she became a hurdler. By the end of the season, Kochoe qualified for the track and field championship at New Englands and took second place in the 300-meter hurdles, after running this race only two times all year. I am already looking forward to next season.

— Coach Jamie Lamoreaux BOYS: The highlight of the season was winning the “Homeless Track Meet” — a track meet with all the ISL teams that don’t have their own track. The team results were as follows — Groton 114, Concord Academy 113, Rivers 48, Dexter 24, and Holderness 14.

I would like to recognize our graduating Sixth Formers and wish them the best of luck: Noah Aaron, Mark Herdiech, Paul Michaud, and Andrew Pearson will be missed greatly.

By far, Noah was our best track-and-field athlete, consistently scoring in four events all

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season long, which is no easy task. One of the premier sprinters and jumpers in the ISL, Noah dominated in the 100- and 200-meter sprints and also high-jumped over six feet on many occasions and long-jumped 19’6”. Watch out for him on Yale’s football team.

I was very impressed as well with newcomer Brandon Slawaska ’19 and his accomplishments in his very first track-and-field season. In my thirty-eight years as a coach, I have never had a shot-putter throw 37’3” and also throw 131’6” in the discus, and then go out and jump 16’5” in the long jump. This is someone to keep an eye on.

Other promising track athletes to watch for next year include Gilintaba Canca ’20, who will be running 100- and 300-meter hurdles; Rajit Khanna ’19, 300-meter hurdles, shot put, and discus; Jay Fitzgerald ’20, 200- and 400-meter; Joshua Guo ’20, 400- and 800meter; Oliver Ye ’20, 400-meter and javelin; PK Baffour-Awuah ’20, 100- and 200- meter; Tyler Weisberg ’22, 1,500- and 3,000-meter; Aroon Sankoh ’21, 800- and 1,500-meter; and Leo McMahon ’19, 1,500- and 3,000-meter.

— Coach Jamie Lamoreaux

in memoriam

Ferdinand Colloredo-Mansfeld ’57, p’81, ’83, gp’09, ’13, ’14, ’15, ’18, ’21, Trustee ’81–’88 September 19, 1939 – December 26, 2017

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erdinand Colloredo-Mansfeld, known as Moose, carried the cui servire ethos throughout his life. He lived a life looking outward toward others—from those early days as a Dining Hall prefect to his years serving on the boards of numerous nonprofits, including Groton’s Board of Trustees from 1981 t0 1988. His desire to help was hard-wired, and he became a quiet leader and steadfast advisor to many, both institutions and individuals. The leader of a multi-generational Groton family, Moose was recognized for his dedication and good works with the 1997 Distinguished Grotonian Award.

It was fitting that friends and family celebrated his life right on campus, at St. John’s Chapel.

Following are excerpts from the tributes delivered by his children on April 14, 2018.

My father’s life followed a remarkable trajectory. Just think of how his life began. He was born at the eve of World War II in London in September of 1939. The family had been exiled from Austria by the Nazis.

Moose and his siblings were sent on the last passenger ship from London to Boston to live with their grandparents. My father remembers the telegram and his grandmother’s reaction to the news that his father had been killed in action as a spitfire pilot in January 1944.

Ultimately my father found his place at Groton—it was, as he said, the most important community during the first twenty years of his life. My mother was the most important feature in the next fifty-eight years of his life.

Marrying my mother was the best decision he ever made—although my mother would note that it was her decision! My father was married at the age of twenty-two, and he needed a job. His first job was as an x-ray technician in a factory in New Hampshire. With my mother minding the home front, my father could and did work his tail off. By the time he was thirtyseven, he was the CEO of one of the largest real estate companies in the country.

Moose’s career in business would be cut short by his health issues. His dedication to service and charity lasted right until the end. For about a thirty-year period, he served on numerous charitable boards. In addition to serving the the boards, he helped many, many people on an individual basis—with loans, gifts, and advice. His determination to help was a trait he

shared with my mother.

In closing I have one final observation about my dad. Bill Polk, when he was my headmaster, would say the measure of a man is how he behaves when he thinks no one is looking. By this or any standard, my father always did the right thing—in business, with his family, and in life, day after day for seventy-eight years.

—Franz Colloredo-Mansfeld ’81, P’09, ’13, ’15, ’18 Over the years, our father enjoyed his time in Wyoming and in Maine, sailing and riding. However, if I had been asked if he had a hobby, I would be hard pressed to identify it. In our efforts to prepare Dad’s obituary last December, I discovered part of the problem as we read dad’s Harvard reunion updates.

In those miniature biographies, the editors ask for reports of “avocation.” Here, graduates can share their hobbies. For avocational interests, Dad wrote, “healthcare and healthcare reform,” “environmental concerns and conservation of our natural resources,” “educational reform in elementary through high school education.”

It is common to talk about this civic or community work as giving back. But I never heard Dad talk about his commitments that way. For me, his generosity seemed automatic, a part of him and a part of the home he and my mother made for all of us in Hamilton, Massachusetts. My mother would get to know all kinds of people: folks trying to get to the next level of their career, people at a crossroads, some who had suffered a

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Moose working on his grandfather’s railroad in West Virginia, the summer before starting at Groton; the extended Colloredo-Mansfeld clan in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, 2007

setback. She would take them in.

And Dad was there too. Before long, these sojourners would seek his advice. Others, he found a way to support financially. And just as his work in Boston wasn’t really giving back, he would not have seen this as charity. He was investing, ready to back you, whatever it was: to finish college, to row across the Atlantic, to build a business for small dairies, to treat children born with clubfoot.

For each person it was different; for Dad it was all interesting.

Dad used to quote a line from one of the obituaries that was written for his grandfather, J.G. Bradley, or Grumpy. According to Dad, the writer said, “Some men are hammers and some men are anvils. J.G. Bradley was a HAMMER.” He always raised his voice as he quoted this.

It was like the hammer striking.

If those are the two choices, then Dad would not be a hammer. He would be an anvil. He would be the overlooked steel upon which all else is forged.

—Rudolf “Rudi” Colloredo-Mansfeld ’83, P’14, ’21 I could always find my father in a crowded room. I could look above the heads of the crowd and there, head and shoulders above the others, was his face. To a small child, this ability to locate him was security, and it gave me the confidence to roam the room.

When I was a teenager, my father traveled a lot, but we rode together. On family rides or in the hunt field, I worked hard to keep up with his pace. Herculus, Kaiser, Big Jerry, Winston, and Mortema were the names of my dad’s horses. Big names for big horses for a big man. I was determined to stay with him.

When my father was diagnosed with cancer in 1993, we all flew home to visit with him before the start of his chemotherapy. In the photo from that weekend, we are

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all on horses, my father wearing an eye patch to quiet the double vision caused by the tumor in his head. We are all smiling, that moment on horseback, together as a family.

Following that visit, I returned to Jackson Hole. I was living and working in Wyoming, and my dad was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatment back in Boston. I wanted to find some way to connect, and to support him, and so we wrote to each other.

On, Sunday, June 6, 1993, from Ellison 1418 at Massachusetts General Hospital, he wrote: “There have been many unexpected changes in my life, but if there are plus columns and minus columns, the pluses seem to be far more numerous. You, Rudi, and Franz are certainly the most enormous pluses: I think you all are so capable, so responsible, and so able to deal with the world and your own lives—that doesn’t mean things will be easy.

“In my business life there have been a number of things we tried quite hard to change, to reform or make a difference: youth employment, issues of poverty in Boston, education and school reform. It appears that we’ve made very little headway—I only regret we didn’t try harder.

“Can I help others? Can I contribute back to this place, and this company of people? People have helped me—how can we help alleviate their tribulations and support the good in this world?

“Your dreams and hopes are the future; I am the past.

I think that what my children are doing now and will be doing in the future is most exciting and fascinating and important.”

My father—he stood head and shoulders above the rest. And now we, his children and grandchildren, stand on his shoulders and carry on the work. From his shoulders, we have the confidence to roam the world.

From his shoulders, the view is great and promising.

—Anne E. Penfield

in memoriam

Meredith Mason Brown ’58 October 18, 1940 – April 19, 2018

by Ralph O. Esmerian ’58, Trustee ’93–’06

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ODAY’S KEYBOARD culture of instant

knowledge could reveal Meredith Brown’s dazzling accomplishments: summa cum laude at Groton; Debating Society president; first team varsity soccer and tennis; summa cum laude at Harvard [three-year matriculation]; Sheldon Fellowship for year’s worldwide travel; clerk for judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit; partner, Debevoise and Plimpton, co-chair of Corporate Department and Mergers and Acquisitions Group; adjunct professor, Columbia Law School; committee chairs, New York Bar Association; author of law articles, four history books. The list goes on.

An Internet dating service would go ballistic, trumpeting the mating potential of this scholar, sportsman, and solicitor. But such a profile lacks substance, unable to convey those spiritual qualities of the boy’s intensity and the man’s humanity.

Although a Buckley School education and New York’s feast of museums, theaters, and cultural activities contributed to the foundation of young Meredith’s prolific intellect, it was family life at 89th Street that formed his social instincts and introduced him to quality lives and individuals. His father, John Mason Brown— the noted drama critic, author, and lecturer—and his mother Catherine provided intellectual as well as downto-earth homelife sensibilities for Meredith and his older brother, Preston ’54. Family friends included presidential candidates Eisenhower and Stevenson, Vincent Astor [Meredith’s godfather], and Broadway and intellectual luminaries of the day. The art of conversation and socializing would not be wasted on the boys.

The Browns were steeped in American history with the roles prominent ancestors had played over three centuries. At an early age, Meredith became fascinated

with objects, weapons, and journals the family had inherited as evidence of the lives of forebears. The lone non-family item was the infamous porcelain fragment of Hitler’s toilet bowl given to him by another godfather.

He appointed himself curator of these “relics”—as he called them—later in his retirement, when he would carefully research their provenance and commemorate their stories in his book Touching American History.

Meredith’s concept of relics precluded any designation of art—no such pretension of decoration or manifestation of human creativity. Their serving a practical purpose in people’s lives appealed to Meredith’s sense of his own achievement and straightness of conduct, evident by the incident in Buckley’s staircase that drew the attention of the headmaster: Meredith had physically fought an older, taller student who was bullying a younger one on crutches.

Meredith was impatient with idle conversation; nor did he tolerate the fatuous and pretentious. Conscious of his intellect, he did not lord it over others; rather there was a cadence of the voice, a hesitancy as he groped to organize thoughts and words to express an opinion without sounding superior and pompous.

Throughout his life, the charming seventeenthcentury seaport of Stonington, Connecticut, provided a haven of relaxation from Meredith’s self-imposed academic and professional standards. The town’s prehistory first introduced him to Native American cultures.

Prior to the seventeenth-century English incursion, the Algonquian tribes had settled on town land, resulting centuries later in arrowheads surfacing on adjoining fields as lone survivors to a tribal past. Meredith’s relics of arrow and ax heads with adze tools were few, but inspired his passion for eastern and western tribal

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Meredith Brown ‘58 with his granddaughter, Alison Brown ‘19

Meredith’s relics of arrow and ax heads with adze tools were few, but inspired his passion for eastern and western tribal cultures — pushed to an extreme when he convinced his newlywed, sophisticated bride that they should honeymoon in a primitive Hopi village.

cultures—pushed to an extreme when he convinced his newlywed, sophisticated bride that they should honeymoon in a primitive Hopi village.

During one Stonington summer, he had met Sylvia Barnard and was felled immediately by her stylish beauty and creative leanings in painting and writing. Sylvia had no chance at spinsterhood as Meredith gathered all his powers, rivaling any historic blitzkrieg. Their wedding followed his law school graduation. With marriage, the 1967 birth of son Mason, and the partnership at Debevoise and Plimpton in 1973, Meredith thrived.

Retirement to Stonington with Sylvia in 2004 afforded him the time to serve as president of the Historical Society and to write articles, books, poetry, and hymns. He took joy in Mason and Karen’s family, watching grandchildren John and Alison mature—Alison carrying on the Groton legacy. He took joy in Mason’s career as a stand-up comedian and author. There could be no joy, however, in sensing an agonizingly slow loss of faculties—of memory and of body and mind articulation— wasted away by Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Meredith Brown died on April 19, 2018, at home in the loving care of Sylvia. Empty classrooms will celebrate his intellectual prowess; echoes of his lusty voice booming

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Groton School Quarterly

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Fall 2018

out hymns will resound in the Groton Chapel; and gatherings of friends will remember his telling retorts, his wit, and his raucous laugh. Meredith Brown remains unique in a world of encroaching sameness.

Sequence

I don’t know why I live and I’ll die.

On this I don’t dwell Penitentially.

But I’ll certainly try, As I live and I die, To do The two Sequentially.

Meredith Brown, 2011

Form notes

R Form Notes are now password-protected.

Members of the Groton community may read them online by signing in at www.groton.org/myGroton.

The TheLegacy Legacy ofofUnderstanding Understanding When When Ed Ed Yasuna Yasuna ’63’63 arrived arrived at Groton at Groton School School as aasnew a new Third Third Former Former in 1959, in 1959, he he initially initially feltfelt a bit a bit outout of place. of place.

Groton Groton waswas hishis firstfirst experience experience with with independent independent school school and, and, apart apart from from a few a few weeks weeks of summer of summer camp camp in Maine, in Maine, alsoalso hishis firstfirst time time away away from from hishis Worcester, Worcester, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, home. home.

Ed Ed spent spent hishis firstfirst fewfew days days on on thethe Circle Circle fearful fearful of of breaking breaking a rule a rule andand being being sent sent home. home.

OnOn hishis firstfirst Sunday Sunday morning, morning, he he noticed noticed thatthat most most boys boys in the in the dorm dorm were were heading heading to the to the early early service service andand followed followed hishis formmates formmates to St. to St. John’s John’s Chapel.

Chapel.

At At thethe service, service, Ed Ed stood stood when when others others stood, stood, sat sat when when others others sat,sat, andand took took Communion Communion when when thethe time time came, came, despite despite notnot having having been been confirmed confirmed in the in the Episcopal Episcopal Church.

Church.

Upon Upon returning returning to the to the dorm, dorm, he he waswas scolded scolded forfor taking taking Communion, Communion, andand when when he he waswas summoned summoned to the to the headmaster’s headmaster’s study study later later thatthat day,day, he he waswas certain certain hishis fearfear of being of being sent sent home home would would come come true. true.

ButBut thethe Reverend Reverend JackJack Crocker Crocker quickly quickly putput Ed Ed at ease at ease and, and, without without anyany anger anger or disappointment, or disappointment, kindly kindly explained explained Communion Communion andand its its importance importance to members to members of different of different churches. churches.

“He“He then then shared shared with with meme thatthat he he feltfelt himself himself to be to be as much as much a Jew a Jew andand a Muslim a Muslim as aasChristian,” a Christian,” Ed Ed recalled, recalled, “and “and thatthat all these all these religions religions share share thethe same same values.” values.”

The The lesson lesson concluded concluded with with Headmaster Headmaster Crocker Crocker telling telling Ed Ed thatthat although although thethe Third Third Former Former waswas welcome welcome to attend to attend thethe early early service, service, he he could could alsoalso enjoy enjoy hishis Sunday Sunday mornings mornings by sleeping by sleeping a bit a bit later. later.

This This moment moment of understanding of understanding marked marked thethe beginning beginning of of Ed’sEd’s long-standing long-standing lovelove andand gratitude gratitude toward toward Groton.

Groton.

OnOn thethe Circle, Circle, Ed Ed waswas challenged challenged academically, academically, butbut managed; managed; fearless fearless on on thethe field, field, he he contributed contributed enthusiastically enthusiastically to athletics. to athletics.

HeHe made made lifelong lifelong friends friends at Groton, at Groton, andand hishis connections connections with with thethe school school opened opened doors doors throughout throughout hishis life.life.

Following Following graduation, graduation, Ed Ed attended attended Columbia Columbia University University andand then then found found himself himself back back on on thethe Circle Circle in the in the fallfall of 1979, of 1979, filling filling in in as an as an English English teacher teacher forfor an an unexpected unexpected faculty faculty departure. departure.

Teaching Teaching at Groton at Groton waswas pivotal pivotal forfor Ed,Ed, andand a long a long andand successful successful teaching teaching career career would would follow. follow.

Beyond Beyond hishis gratitude gratitude forfor all that all that Groton Groton hashas given given him, him, Ed Ed is impressed is impressed

by the by the direction direction of the of the school school andand thethe quality quality of today’s of today’s students. students.

In particular, In particular, he he enjoys enjoys reading reading thethe students’ students’ chapel chapel talks, talks, published published regularly regularly in the in the Quarterly.

Quarterly.

“Their “Their speeches speeches demonstrate demonstrate thatthat Groton Groton students students areare willing willing to take to take risks risks andand express express their their ideas ideas publicly. publicly.

As As a a lifelong lifelong educator, educator, I believe I believe thisthis is important is important forfor thethe health health of our of our country,” country,” he he said. said.

Throughout Throughout thethe years, years, Ed Ed hashas supported supported Groton Groton by volunteering, by volunteering, attending attending events, events, andand loyally loyally giving giving to to thethe Groton Groton Fund.

Fund.

Joining Joining thethe Circle Circle Society—adding Society—adding Groton Groton to his to his estate estate plans plans through through a bequest—was a bequest—was a a logical logical extension extension forfor Ed.Ed. “In“In making making thethe commitment commitment to to leave leave a legacy a legacy gift,” gift,” he he said, said, “I trust “I trust thatthat Groton Groton willwill useuse thethe money money wisely, wisely, helping helping generations generations to come.” to come.”

ForFor Ed,Ed, it all it began all began with with thatthat firstfirst experience experience with with Mr.Mr. Crocker, Crocker, when when thethe headmaster headmaster showed showed kindness kindness andand understanding understanding toward toward an an insecure insecure thirteen-year-old thirteen-year-old boy.boy.

“Reverend “Reverend Crocker Crocker always always seemed seemed likelike thethe ideal ideal person, person, justjust what what God God would would want want a person a person to be to be like,” like,” recalled recalled Ed.Ed. “And “And in many in many ways, ways, hishis persona persona andand influence influence have have stayed stayed with with me.” me.”

ForFor more more information information about about thethe Circle Circle Society, Society, please please contact contact Kate Kate Machan Machan in the in the Office Office of Alumni of Alumni Affairs Affairs andand Development Development at kmachan@groton.org at kmachan@groton.org or 978-448-7581. or 978-448-7581.

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GRAIN, the GRoton Affordability and INclusion initiative, dates only to 2014, but grain — the actual crop — goes back much, much further at Groton. During World War I, the school grew wheat right on the Circle and harvested it to help produce food for the war effort.

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