Groton School Quarterly, Winter 2018

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Winter 2018 • Volume LXXIX , No. 1

UNTIL THE latter half of the twentieth century, each dorm lavatory had a long soapstone sink with a shelf above. On a hook from that shelf hung tin wash basins.

When the boys wanted to wash their faces, they would take down the tin basin and fill it with water.

GOODBYE CITY LIFE

Farmers, Ranchers & Vintners Living Off the Land

Christopher Temerson

Headmaster Temba and Mrs. Vuyelwa Maqubela celebrate Groton’s 133rd birthday with Mrs. Maqubela’s advisory group.

Give2Groton Soars FOR THE FIRST TIME, Groton hosted a community day of giving, known as Give2Groton, in conjunction with the school birthday, celebrated on October 17. The effort, supported by alumni, parents, faculty, staff, and friends, was a runaway success.

The one-day goal of 380 gifts, one for each Groton student, was surpassed mid-morning. Donations poured in from everywhere, with supporters giving from across the country and around the world. By the time Give2Groton ended, the donors—trustees, alumni, parents, grandparents, faculty, staff, and friends—had given 940 gifts and $694,708, and inspired excitement throughout the community.

As gifts were tallied, activities built enthusiasm on campus. During the morning conference period, students competed for their dorms to “pin the candle” on the birthday cake, walking blindfolded amidst cheers and blaring music. At lunchtime, students gathered to write notes of thanks to those who were making donations. The usual Groton birthday dinner moved to a more festive setting in the gym, where Fifth Formers belted out a raucous rendition of “Blue Bottles,” led by Preston Bannard ’01.

Thank you to all who participated and made the day such a success!

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2006

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Groton School Winter 2018 • Volume LXXIX, No.1

The Quarterly

GOODBYE CITY LIFE They are growing crops, raising cattle, and chasing precious water.

Meet Groton’s farmers. page 18 cuptatur, conse volentem es ut expel

Parents Weekend page 14

Lessons & Carols page 16

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Message from the Headmaster

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Circiter / Around the Circle

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Personae / Profiles

34 Voces / Chapel Talks 42 Grotoniana / Athletics 50 Grotoniana / Arts 54 In Memoriam 57 Form Notes

First snowstorm of the season, by Ben Calmas ’18

Cover photo by Julia Vandenoever

Annie Card

Message from the Headmaster THE IDEA of Groton, an original since its founding,

remains as dynamic and vital as activated oxygen molecules.

This mission-driven vigor was evident to me over the past three years, as donors to GRAIN (GRoton Affordability and INclusion)—with eagerness and generosity—dug deeply into their pockets to shore up the idea of socioeconomic inclusion.

Groton’s trustees knew that funding for the Schoolhouse was still underway in late 2014, when the GRAIN initiative was gaining momentum. Still, they did not waiver when considering this simple question: Who is at Groton today, and who will be at Groton tomorrow?

The answer from trustees and from the larger Groton community was resounding: the school should provide equal opportunity to students from all socioeconomic cohorts as long as they have the talent and fit to advance the ever-dynamic Groton idea of an Open Circle. That Vuyelwa and I, as well as our family, call the Circle home is evidence of this dynamism.

As tuition growth in independent education far outstrips income growth, Groton, through the GRAIN initiative, is attempting to answer with intentionality the call for accessibility. In 2008, the school declared that tuition would be waived for families who earn less than $75,000 per annum (now $80,000). A big part of the GRAIN initiative is the recognition that the

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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socioeconomic spectrum includes the talented missing middle. Intentionally targeting the talented missing middle is an enhancement of Groton’s enduring values.

Despite the relatively modest incomes they may earn, those with careers in nonprofits or public service will now know that their talented offspring will have as good a shot as anyone else in accessing a Groton education. While some call this groundbreaking, I prefer a phrase coined by one of our benefactors—“an inclusive meritocracy.”

Led by the Board of Trustees and a forward-looking Groton community, far and near, you came with ideas, talent, time, and treasure in supporting our school’s continued relevance in our country and beyond. We set an ambitious goal and achieved it in half the time expected. This is what Groton does.

With a dose of humility and a larger dose of appreciation, we celebrate this extraordinary achievement.

The greater Groton family always shows up and did so again. Thank you!

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.

Tom Kates

GRAIN

Reaches $50 Million O

circiter

n Christmas Eve, Groton School received the ultimate gift on its holiday wish list: a donation, fitting the spirit of the season, pushed fundraising for GRAIN (GRoton Affordability and INclusion) to $50 million, ensuring that students at Groton today and tomorrow will benefit from an inclusive and accessible community.

GRAIN reached this milestone well ahead of the anticipated timetable. The original hope was to raise $50 million by 2020 — a six-year plan. Enthusiasm for the values behind GRAIN cut that time frame in half — despite the fact that GRAIN fundraising began while the school was completing major fundraising for the Schoolhouse addition. GRAIN fundraising is not over: the effort will continue through June 2018.

“In my thirty-five years of teaching, this has been one of the most important and humbling educational initiatives in which I was privileged to be a part,” said Headmaster Temba Maqubela.

“To all who supported GRAIN with their treasure, time, ideas, or a simple nod in the boardroom — there is no greater satisfaction for Vuyelwa and me than supporting the education of all children regardless of their ability to pay. It is a privilege to serve this cause on the Groton Circle and beyond.”

The initiative, conceived by Mr. Maqubela and formally embraced in November 2014 as the Board of Trustees’ numberone strategic priority, seemed to strike a chord among donors, who stepped up quickly and generously, understanding the school’s commitment never to deny admission because of a family’s financial standing.

“Groton School is an extraordinary place with extraordinary leadership striving to do extraordinary things,” said Trustee William Gray P’15. “This is an investment in the children, in the mission of empowering young lives with extraordinary potential that would otherwise go unfulfilled. It is inspiring to see how the broader Groton community has rallied around the mission of GRAIN. I can’t wait to see what the school does with the opportunity it has been granted.”

GRAIN was committed to ensuring accessibility while containing tuition costs, which were curbed through a threeyear tuition freeze. In addition, one of GRAIN’s primary goals was to address the talented missing middle — the children of professionals, neither high- nor low-income, who are saving for college and may not have funds available for independent school tuition. Thanks to GRAIN, the 2017–18 school year marks the first time that the largest percentage — 52 percent — of financial aid recipients came from families earning between $120,000 and $200,000. Forty-five percent of those receiving aid were from families earning less than $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 as well as current tuition obligations for siblings at other schools and colleges. The school realizes that 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.

GRAIN rests upon a foundational belief that inclusion benefits every member of the community and that exposure to multiple backgrounds and points of view is, in fact, an essential component of a good education. It was a belief that immediately inspired the Board of Trustees — and the extended Groton family.

“As trustees of Groton School, 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,” said Board of Trustees President Jonathan Klein P’08, ’11, ’18. “Making Groton accessible to all has become the numberone strategic priority of my term as president, providing our headmaster with strong trustee support for this crucial initiative.

By freezing tuition for three years and setting an ambitious fundraising goal, which we have met in record time, Groton has sent a message to independent schools that we are open to all.

We are enormously grateful to our donors, who embraced GRAIN wholeheartedly.”

GRAIN’s impact quickly became apparent. The admittance rate for those who receive aid and those who do not was exactly the same in 2017–18, at 12.6 percent. Notably, applications from both financial aid and full-pay families increased after GRAIN’s launch, bucking a national trend of declining applications from those who can afford full tuition and demonstrating the broad appeal of a sincere effort to build a truly inclusive community.

“GRAIN has been the most significant and gratifying initiative that I have been a part of in my ten years as a trustee and the almost fifteen years we have been parents at the school,” said Franz Colloredo-Mansfeld ’81, P’13, ’15, ’18, chair of the board’s (continued on page 4)

www.groton.org

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Christopher Temerson

A Celebrity Chef’s Delicious Circle Talk

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onathan Waxman P’18, ’21 — renowned restaurateur and chef — presented an all-school cooking demonstration on October 2, filling the Campbell Performing Arts Center with mouth-watering aroma.

Mr. Waxman worked with Jed Coughlin and Julie Larocque of Groton’s Dining Hall to turn an array of farm-fresh vegetables into succotash. The cooking demonstration, one of the school’s Circle Talks, was tied to a summer community read, The Town that Food Saved by Ben Hewitt.

The lighthearted demo offered a steady menu of humor and helpful cooking tips — how to hold a knife, the best way to cut corn off the cob (onto a wet towel, and not too close to the cob) — while also offering a little bit of science. “Sugar plus heat equals caramelization,” Mr. Waxman explained, as he sautéed onions and used their caramelization to coax flavor from the other ingredients.

“Onions are the magic ingredient,” Mr. Waxman said. “Onions make the world happy.”

So, apparently, does food, and this chef has built a close relationship with it. “Food does talk to you,” he remarked. “What it’s saying to me right now is, ‘Stir me, stir me.’”

Chef Waxman, who is widely credited with bringing California cuisine to New York, told his own story of giving up life as a musician to study cooking in France. He has owned a number of popular restaurants over his career, and currently owns Barbuto and Jams in New York, Adele’s in Nashville, and Brezza Cucina in Atlanta.

Mr. Waxman, a Top Chef semifinalist himself, fielded several questions about the famous chefs he knows. Bobby Flay, of Food Network fame, worked for Mr. Waxman for several years early

in his career. Chef Waxman called Gordon Ramsay, a TV tyrant on Hell’s Kitchen, “a nice, sweet guy.” During the Q&A he also called his biggest challenge over the years “self-doubt” and said he was most impressed by Chinese cuisine, which he hopes to study in more depth.

As Mr. Waxman turned corn, beans, onions, and tomatoes into a succulent succotash, he continued the cooking lesson.

Explaining deglazing to students, he said, “Water does something interesting to vegetables. It leaches out all that caramelization.”

Nimble chef and food philosopher, Mr. Waxman shared insights that help explain the passion that has driven him in the world of food. The word “restaurant,” he said, means “restore your spirit.”

And cooking itself? “Cooking is about building flavor. Just like life.”

Watch Jonathan Waxman’s cooking demonstration at www.groton.org/waxman.

GRAIN (continued)

Development Committee. “Not only have we dramatically increased our capacity to provide financial aid to many deserving students, but we have also made a broader statement about making the school accessible to all families by seeking to address the high cost of private school tuitions.”

The generous donors behind GRAIN heeded the call to be impatient for inclusion: of the $50 million committed, more than half already is in hand, working to support Groton’s Inclusion Scholars. GRAIN is adding five Inclusion Scholars — applicants who particularly embody the goals of GRAIN — each year for four years, increasing financial aid students by twenty by 2018–19.

“This effort had deep and broad appeal among our alumni and parents,” said Director of Development and Alumni Affairs John MacEachern P’10,’14,’16. “Time and again we heard from donors how much

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they believed in GRAIN’s objective of accessibility and how they wanted to see it working now.”

The initiative was announced in November 2014 with an initial $5 million gift. By June of 2015, donors had given $14.6 million to GRAIN. A year later, in June 2016, the total was at $21.4 million, and by June 2017, $32.4 million. In recent months, GRAIN’s message caught fire, thanks in part to a $5 million challenge grant, igniting the rush of gifts that pushed fundraising to $50 million just over three years since GRAIN’s inception. Current parents, who see firsthand the value to their children of an inclusive community, contributed approximately half of the funds raised.

Two parents of children who chose to attend a different school gave to GRAIN nonetheless, inspired by the message.

Another major donor, a parent new to the community, made a generous gift and

Winter 2018

a few months later decided to double it. “The grand idea of inclusion will bring the best talents to the Circle,” he explained.“ … More importantly, it will set an example for educational institutions globally so that more and more talented children will have access to a top-level education, thereby creating value for society for the long term. …

“It is not only about Groton,” he wrote to the headmaster. “It is about our children and about what message we shall send to the world.”

Another GRAIN donor summed up his motivation to give in terms of Groton’s values — the emphasis on service, excellent education, meaningful faculty-student interaction, and the lasting friendships formed.

“If people really think about what Groton stands for,” he said,“… the importance of supporting it financially to the fullest extent possible becomes a total no-brainer.”

Never Too Old W

atch your local PBS schedules this spring for Still Dreaming, an award-winning documentary directed by Hank Rogerson ’85 about the powers of creativity and how making art can deeply enrich our lives at any age.

Set at the Lillian Booth Actors Home just outside New York City, Still Dreaming follows a group of long-retired Broadway entertainers as they dive into a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and find that nothing is what it seems to be. With a play that is usually about young love and sex farce, this ensemble finds that, for them, the themes of perception, reality, and dreaming resonate deeply.

This wistful, honest, and frequently hilarious documentary follows the rehearsals as opening night approaches. Tempers flare, health concerns abound, and disaster seems imminent.

But as these former entertainers forge ahead, they realize that creativity is a magical force of renewal.

Learn more at stilldreamingmovie.com.

CORRECTIONS In the Winter Quarterly’s list of Prize Day speakers, Groton parent years were missing for the 1961 speaker, Newbold Morris ’21, P’51, and for the 1958 speaker, John Mason Brown P’54, ’58. Thank you to Harold “Harry” Pratt ’55 for pointing this out.

The 1940 Prize Day speaker was not Beverly Tucker (nor was it Beverley Tucker, the correct spelling). The speaker was Henry St. George Tucker, then presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. Both Tuckers were greatuncles to Maria Eddy Tjeltveit ’77.

Several people reported that the 1962 speaker, John H. Finley, was misidentified. He was a Classics professor and master of Eliot House at Harvard.

This member of the Form of 1962 expounded upon Professor Finley’s importance to the lives of Grotonians and to Groton School itself: Professor Finley was a Classics professor and master of Eliot House at Harvard. But his significance to Groton goes way beyond that. He and his family have had a long and close affiliation with the school. He sent his son, John H. Finley III, to Groton — he was a member of the Form of 1954. (John was my sister’s and my babysitter that summer, when we were ten, and that’s how I first learned about Groton!) His grandson John H. Finley IV graduated from Groton in 1988 and is a distinguished Episcopal priest and educator — he founded and

is the head of Epiphany School in Dorchester [which holds a program at Groton each summer].

I was in Eliot House at Harvard for three years (1963 to 1966) when Professor Finley was the master. Many other Groton alumni, before and after me, were also fortunate to live in Eliot House during his tenure. He thought very highly of Groton, and had many friendships with Groton graduates. For example, in February 1965, at the beginning of the escalation of the Vietnam War, William Bundy (Groton 1935 and the uncle of my formmate Harvey Bundy), who was then Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, spoke at Eliot House at Master Finley’s invitation.

He delivered an articulate and confident defense of the Johnson Administration’s conduct of the war, which many of us found as unpersuasive as it was forceful. For me that was a personal watershed event of the 1960s.

I have a vivid, if distant, recollection of Professor Finley’s talk at the 1962 Prize Day. I remember that he likened Groton to Arcadia, that mythic domain of pastoral simplicity inhabited by gods and heroes. He was a master (pun intended) of hyperbolic metaphor who saw the world through the prism of classical mythology. We won’t see his like again.

Christopher Angell ’62

Hank Rogerson ’85, on set

Pennies Add Up for Hurricane Victims

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uring the last week of September, tensions between students ran high as a sort of war took hold of the Groton campus. In an effort to raise money for the communities in Texas and Puerto Rico that were struck by Hurricanes Harvey and Maria, the Groton Community Engagement (GCE) board organized a penny war for Groton’s students.

GCE created the penny war so that dorms would compete with each other to see who could “score” the most points. Large jugs with each dorm’s name were left on the battlefield (outside the Dining Hall) for a few hours on various days. The rules for the penny war were as follows: any coin in a dorm’s jug added one point to that dorm’s score, and any bill in a dorm’s jar took away one point. Students could stuff bills into other dorm’s containers to lower their opponents’ score, while putting coins in their own dorm’s jar to rack up points.

All coins added one point and all bills subtracted one point, regardless of the monetary value of the bill or coin.

With points for the Dorm Olympics and a check-in feed on the line, students emptied their wallets, checked between couch cushions, and hurried to the mailroom to make withdrawals to fill the large jugs.

Though there was a competitive aspect to the penny war, in the end, it didn’t matter which dorm won. What mattered was that the GCE organized an activity that ultimately unified the campus and got everyone thinking about the importance of donating to those in need. It raised not only money — $364 — but also awareness. For those as fortunate as Groton students and faculty, it is important to realize how crucial it is to help those in need, because the fact is, we are able to help and that is a blessing in itself.

Of the money raised, every penny was sent to help hurricaneravaged communities via the One America Appeal, which gives 100 percent of donations to charities involved in the recoveries in Houston, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

—Andrew Rasetti ‘18

www.groton.org

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G circiter

roton students cleared trails, landscaped, performed, socialized, sorted donations — and recognized the value of reaching beyond the Circle — during two Community Days of Service this fall. The Fifth and Sixth Formers’ Community Day of Service fell on a Monday in mid-September, while Second, Third, and Fourth Formers volunteered on a Tuesday in early October.

Top, Halle Livermore ’19 and Sarah Conner ’19; second row, Caleb Coleman ’20 and Assistant Athletic Director Harold Francis, Kamsi Onwochei ’20, Lily Kempczinski ‘21 and Neve Ley ’21; third row, Grace Mumford ’21, Erin Dollard ’20, Gili Canca ’20, Henry Kuck ’20, Jack Sperling ’22, Margot Ferris ’21, Lexie Steinert ’21, and Aine Ley ’22; bottom, Vlad Malashenko ’19, Groton students doing a theater workshop with students from the Epiphany School

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Photos by Christopher Temerson

Cui Servire On Campus and Off

Adam Richins

Lessons in Religious Pluralism on Global Ed Day

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arvard Professor Diana Eck introduced Groton to the plurality of religions all over America — and right in our back yards — during an all-school lecture on Groton’s Global Education Day, November 3.

The founder and director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard, Professor Eck explained what pluralism is, and is not. It is not simply diversity, she said, but “the energetic engagement with diversity.”

Not just tolerance but “the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference.” Pluralism, she

Professor Diana Eck

Christopher Temerson

went on, does not mean that people hide their commitments and beliefs, but hold them deeply while relating to those of different beliefs.

Finally, she pointed out, pluralism is based on dialogue.

In a lecture covering historical pivot points in the nation’s religious pluralism, Professor Eck pointed to the impact of a 1965 law, signed

by President Johnson at the Statue of Liberty, that changed the face of America. The Immigration and Nationality Act, she said, “opened the door to people from all over the world.” The profound effect of the law really dawned on the professor when she noticed, in the early 1990s, markedly different faces in her own classes. The demographics of Harvard College had changed because students of all the world’s

religions were growing up all over the U.S. Flipping through photos of Hindu temples in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and Ashland, Massachusetts, she discussed the influence of that multiculturalism on the nation. “How are these traditions taking root on American soil, and how are they changing as they do so?” she asked.

“And how is America changing?”

She shared example after example of religious pluralism: the Mother Mosque of America, built for Muslim worshipers in 1934, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Buddhist communities thriving in Lynn and Quincy, two cities in the metro Boston area; the largest Thai temple in the world outside Thailand in Raynham, Massachusetts; and houses of worship built side by side by the Methodist Church and the Islamic Society on the same plot of land in Fremont, California.

The speaker also reviewed the history of Sikhs, who came to the U.S. in 1903 to work in farming and forestry; because they were not allowed to bring their wives, many married Mexicans, resulting in a melding of vastly different traditions. Because the Sikh religion requires men to wear turbans, the workers were derisively called “ragheads.” Professor Eck told the story of one particularly noteworthy Sikh, Bhagat Singh Thind, who was denied citizenship for most of his life even though he fought for the U.S. in World War I. “We need to remember some of these racist aspects of American history,” she said.

An expert on India who grew up mainstream Protestant, Professor Eck also described her “life-changing” study abroad in Varanasi (also called Banaras), one of the most sacred spots in India, where she first came to admire and understand the Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

During her visit, she also presented a lecture dedicated to the city: “Varanasi: Ancient City of Life, Lights, and Death.”

Impassioned Speech Inspires on Parents Weekend

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udge less and love more!” So ended Headmaster Temba Maqubela’s Parents Weekend address. He delivered a heartfelt message of inclusion and tolerance that touched many listeners, who found his words particularly welcome amidst so much news of division and hate.

In a talk sprinkled with references to science, Mr. Maqubela (who teaches organic chemistry) praised parents for imparting good values to their children. He told of one student’s response when he asked his class what inclusion means to them. “All opinions matter,” she said, “as long as they are expressed with kindness.” That child, the headmaster observed, “captured the essence of our democracy better than our current politicians often do.”

Good messages said with frequency eventually resonate, he told the parents gathered in the Sackett Forum.

Mr. Maqubela went on to outline how Groton’s values took root at the school’s founding and continued through the years. “Imagine the founder of the school, Rector Peabody, inviting a freed slave, Booker T. Washington, not only once but twice, in 1899 and 1905, to address the students. In this awakening, he was saying to the students, ‘the ideas of former slaves matter.’ In 1899, one of those students was FDR.” Headmaster Jack Crocker admitted Groton’s first black student, invited Martin Luther King Jr. to campus, and took students to march with Dr. King in Boston. “Imagine the courage of those acts at that time,” Mr. Maqubela said.“… How many of us would have been that courageous?”

He praised the headmasters who laid the groundwork for coeducation in the 1970s and Headmaster Bill Polk’s determination to create a climate where girls were not just present but included. Mr. Maqubela also mentioned the four current student prefects, elected by their peers to help lead the school, of whom two “are at once African, Latino, Senegalese, Nigerian, and American. And it is your children’s judgment that they chose them by the content of their character rather than how much melanin they have.”

See photos from Parents Weekend on pages 14 and 15.

www.groton.org

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Prominent Groton Presence at Language Conference

S circiter World language teachers Rebecca Stanton, Fanny Vera de Viacava, John Conner, and Luis Viacava

ix members of Groton’s World Languages Department attended the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages convention in Nashville, and three of them headlined well-attended workshops.

Dean of Faculty and Spanish teacher John Conner presented “The Ideal Lesson Plan,” Department Head Rebecca Stanton offered “The French Media Connection,” and Fanny Vera and Luis Viacava led a presentation on Peru’s national dance, “La Marinera.” Chinese teacher Renee Bai and French teacher Franck Koffi joined the delegation, attending numerous workshops.

“It was a memorable three days sharing the department’s passion for languages with a national audience,” said Señor Conner. The annual convention attracts more than seven thousand educators.

A Master Storyteller

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he audience learned a lot about the speaker in the first few minutes: • His grandmother evicted him.

• His Uncle Jimmy was not a smart criminal.

• He fell in love with women, but never at the same time that women fell in love with him.

Emmy-nominated comedy writer and storyteller Brian Finkelstein shared both stories and the art of storytelling in mid-January, spinning tales during an evening Circle Talk and working with students in classes and workshops over two days.

To Finkelstein, just about everything is storytelling. “Writing scripts is Second Formers Rami Hahami, Stanley Spence, Ella Ferruci, and Maya Varkey in an improv storytelling,” he said. “In every job workshop with storyteller Brian Finkelstein interview, you have to tell a story.” Even Not long! “Whatever your dinosaurs are, show me your dinosaurs,” those college essays: stories. Self-centeredness may be a lousy trait he urged. For serious and sad stories, he added, insert some levity: in a friend, but it’s key to good storytelling, according to Finkelstein.

“You have to let people off the hook.”

“Make yourself an important character,” he said. “You can talk Finkelstein described a tough and unforgiving world inside TV about other people — but your perception of them.” comedy writing, where often times a flat, dispassionate “that was The comedy writer, who regularly hosts The Moth and performs funny” was high praise. Not so at Groton: the audience in the at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City, advised Campbell Performing Arts Center laughed readily, appreciating Groton storytellers not to wait to hit their high points. “How long every sarcastic aside and humorous story. did Jurassic Park take to show the dinosaurs?” he wondered aloud.

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Professor John B. Goodenough ’40

Charles Tate of the Welch Foundation, with John Goodenough ’40, recipient of the Robert A. Welch Award in Chemistry

Professor John B. Goodenough ’40

recently received the 2017 Robert A. Welch Award in Chemistry. If the professor’s name sounds familiar, it may be because he developed the rechargeable lithium-ion battery still used today (either that, or you had a Goodenough in your form). These batteries enabled the widespread adoption of wireless technology and also power your smartphone, your tablets, your laptops, and more.

Professor Goodenough is currently the Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. At the age of 95, he is still contributing to humanity’s knowledge of science and engineering; last year, his team filed a patent that will allow batteries to be safer, cheaper, and faster to charge. This discovery could have huge environmental implications, with applications such as electric cars.

The Welch Award, which comes with a $500,000 prize, is meant to promote chemical research and to honor research that has significantly and positively advanced humankind.

Professor Goodenough was kind enough to take the time out of his busy day to answer the questions of this fellow Groton and Yale alum and science enthusiast. Given Professor Goodenough’s highly acclaimed scientific background, I wondered how fully he might respond to questions based on my somewhat limited scientific perspective.

He did not disappoint on the scientific details, and I was also moved and happily surprised by the holistic nature of his answers. The following interview offers a chance to discover an individual who, through a principled life of hard work and pure motivations, has developed a deep and multifaceted view of both scientific inquiry and life. www.groton.org

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personae

Fully Charged

by Genevieve Fowler ’12

What motivates you? How has your source of motivation changed throughout your career?

In my Fifth Form year, I was awakened spiritually as well as intellectually. I came away with four guidelines for life: 1. The sacredness of dialogue for learning and reconciliation 2. The art of metaphor and parable for the communication of wisdom 3. The beauty of truth, whether it is intellectual or moral truth. Beauty is the hallmark of the holy.

4. What gives meaning to life is our service. What we serve determines what we become. Our clarification of what it is we serve takes time.

My motivation as an undergraduate was to find my calling. After graduation, I soon found my scientific motivation.

At the end of the war, I was given the opportunity, through the G.I. Bill and a fellowship, to obtain a PhD in physics from the University of Chicago. When I graduated, I accepted a job in the MIT Lincoln Laboratory; its original mission was to develop a radar system to detect Russian aircraft and transmit the data to a command center that would process the data with a digital computer. When I arrived at MIT in 1952, the digital computer did not have a memory that was fast enough, and the arithmetic

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component running on vacuum tubes filled a very large room. Today, you have more computing power in your pocket or purse.

I was assigned to a small group given the responsibility to develop a magnetic memory element for the first randomaccess memory (RAM) of the digital computer. We were to do this with a ferrimagnetic ceramic, considered impossible by the magneticians of the day; we managed to deliver the specified RAM in four years. During that experience, I found my own scientific voice. I developed a desire to gain a fundamental understanding of the properties of solid materials in order to engineer their chemistry and structure so as to enable technologies that benefit society.

What drew you to your specific field of research: developing lithium-ion batteries?

After we developed the RAM, we were thanked and asked, “Now that you have worked yourselves out of a job, what are you planning to do?” Most of the group took jobs in industry; I went home to develop my next project. Two years later, one of the experimentalists I had hired to help with the project asked, “Please let me have the project; I want to become famous.” I gave it to him and took over the remnants of the ceramics laboratory with a chemist

“Mr. Peabody understood that I would probably have to finance myself through college, so he arranged for me to tutor his grandson the summer after graduation without my knowledge of his role.

Cockrell School of Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin

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and a technician. I then had nearly ten years to do fundamental research on the physical properties of transition-metal compounds by developing chemical experimental strategies.

In 1970, Congress decreed that fundamental research should not be done in a government-supported laboratory unless it targeted the mission of the laboratory, and my fundamental research program did not target directly a mission of the Air Force. At the same time, the first energy crisis exposed the western world to its vulnerability to dependence on imported oil. Because of my background in ceramics, I was asked by the government to help monitor a program at the Ford Motor Company that was developing a battery that used a ceramic electrolyte and molten electrodes—rather than a liquid electrolyte and solid electrodes.

This assignment introduced me to the rechargeable battery. Also, because of my work with solid-state chemists, I was invited to be the chemistry professor in charge of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory of the University of Oxford. My Groton years and my wife’s Canadian background had prepared us for life in England.

Charging Exxon Mobil’s 1976 battery caused buildup that led to fires and explosions. You replaced the material in that battery to avoid the buildup (dendrites), leading to a battery that could be safely recharged. Can you tell us more about this?

A rechargeable battery stores electric power as chemical energy in two electrodes, the anode and the cathode.

It delivers electric power in an external circuit as an electronic current at a voltage for the time it takes for the chemical reaction to be completed. In 1976, while moving to England, the Exxon Mobil Corporation had decided to develop a lithium rechargeable battery. Their battery had a flammable organic-liquid electrolyte, the material that transports the ionic component of the chemical reaction between the two electrodes and forces the electronic component to traverse the external circuit. The negative electrode (anode) was metallic lithium and the positive electrode (cathode) was composed of strongly bonded sulfur-metal-sulfur

I see. The difference in the number of charged particles in the anode and cathode of a battery is part of what makes it able to create current, or power things, and in the case of a lithium ion battery, the charged particle is the lithium ion. Being able to safely move the lithium ions around without creating a short circuit is essential to charging and discharging the battery, in other words, actually using it. So were you curious if you’d find materials to create a battery that did charge and discharge without a short circuit forming?

strategy was proven to work and the development offered a battery of highenergy density.

Your battery, your scientific discovery, enabled the widespread adoption of wireless technology?

food. Some found Peabody austere; I found him disciplined and kind. The school provided structure, the camaraderie of sports, and the discipline to focus effort.

My formation was largely made at Groton School.

The Sony Corporation licensed the lithium-ion battery that uses a carbon anode and the layered lithium-cobalt oxide as the cathode to launch the wireless revolution.

Has the nature of research or your field changed much throughout your career? I’d be curious about the motivations you see for funding research, the types of research people are interested in, etc.

Did Groton influence you? Do you have any interesting or funny memories — I’m sure younger alumni would be eager to get a glimpse into the life and character of Endicott Peabody.

My form graduated in 1940, and Endicott Peabody also retired that year.

I remember he and his wife one evening that May on horseback preparing for his ride to the Groton cemetery, leading his troops in a straw hat, blue blazer, white ducks tucked into Spanish War puttees, school tie, and hat ribbon with the fifeand-drum corps behind Peabody. On that evening, I thought to myself how privileged I had been to have known a family that embodied the best of the I realized that layered oxides would give Victorian era in England. Peabody, as a larger voltage than layered sulfides well as his school, was disciplined; he and allow development of a safe anode. was up early each morning to pray for Although layered oxides similar to the his boys and his school. He was not a layered sulfides do not exist, I knew that gifted preacher; his preaching was his layered oxides interspersed with lithium personal example and his articulation do exist, so I decided to see how much of moral principles. He encouraged lithium could be removed from layered scholarship and the development of lithium-cobalt and lithium-nickel personal talent for the service of society, oxides. This was a purely scientific but he appreciated effort where talents question, but when we found that over were modest. One of his sayings was, half of the lithium could be removed “Goodenough is not good at all; we all reversibly at 4 volts, we patented the know what we think of an egg that just concept of fabricating a discharged gets by.” I keep a picture of him walking battery rather than a charged battery. back from the Schoolhouse to Hundred In the meantime, positive lithium ions House for lunch the spring morning he were being interspersed reversibly into encouraged me to go into the ministry. graphite, which removed the problem My parents were divorced that of anode dendrite formation during spring. Mr. Peabody understood that I charging if the charge was not too fast. would probably have to finance myself through college, so he arranged for me And the breakthrough moment? to tutor his grandson the summer after graduation without my knowledge of When I developed the oxide cathodes his role; the next summer I was tutoring for the lithium-ion battery, I had in a family outside Chicago. These no idea how the electrical engineers jobs gave me money for my room in would use it. Therefore, there was no a dormitory at Yale; I had a tuition breakthrough moment for me aside from the satisfaction that a scientific scholarship and a bursary job for my 11

Solid-state science has been transformed from curiosity-driven research into application-driven research. Physics, inorganic chemistry, polymer and biological chemistry, and materials engineering have coalesced to enable the emergence of the field of Material Science and Engineering. This evolution has been driven by (1) new instrumentation and the advent of the low-cost digital computer, (2) changing national and opportunistic priorities, (3) the advent of government funding, and (4) the introduction of national laboratories for the generation of intellectual property and its development for transfer to industry.

Nevertheless, scientific discovery still requires individuals driven by curiosity who are willing to risk challenge of the dogma of authority, who have developed the skills to design and carry out strategies to test new concepts, and who are alert to recognize and to entertain surprises.

Natural scientists are motivated to explore creation and to understand how it works, from cosmology to biology, from health to invention. They are also concerned about conservation of natural resources and the sustainability of modern society. Understanding of the different responsibilities of those who support, those who execute, and those who exploit the fruits of science must be continually cultivated as our challenges evolve.

What is the most important thing you have learned?

The need to listen for the still, small voice of the heart and to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit; the joy of discovery; and the satisfaction of enabling a technology that empowers people of the global society of mankind. I also learned that life is a journey and that we must make choices at forks in the road. www.groton.org

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personae

layers held together by weak inter­ actions across sulfur-sulfur bridges.

Positive lithium ions could be inserted between the layers in a process that can be reversed.

Within a year, Exxon Mobil had encountered fires, even explosions, in their batteries because it was not possible to plate positive lithium ions back onto the anode during charge without the formation of whiskers (dendrites) on the anode. The dendrites grew across the thin electrolyte to the cathode to create an internal short circuit, resulting in thermal runaway and heat that ignited the electrolyte.

Mitzi Bockmann ’83

Finding Her Voice Mitzi Bockmann ’83 stands in front of two hundred people, about to tell them the deepest secrets of her life, including the Big One: that she is bipolar. And that she has found a way to live with mental illness—and thrive.

Mitzi is a trained presenter for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) program, “In Our Own Voice.”

The program features speakers who are successfully living with mental illness and delivering no-holds-barred presentations at schools, police departments, in-patient units, and family groups. Speakers like Mitzi discuss their own struggles in an attempt to help remove the stigma of mental illness, help people recognize it in themselves,

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and educate police and others on how best to address it.

As a trained presenter, Mitzi speaks frankly, from the darkest details of her own life to her own experiences, treatment, and coping skills. She answers questions. She listens. She does not judge. She does not advise. She simply offers her own story as a means to help others find hope.

“Everything is out in the open,” she said. “We are all open books. I have co-presenters who have been raped, sodomized, abused—and we just lay it out there.

Everybody has a story, and some people’s stories are just like mine. I have had a regular life. I went to boarding

personae

school, went to college, and had a good career. I’ve been a mom, but I lived with this. And I didn’t tell anybody.”

Mitzi said the response she gets is “amazing,” from parents who gain insight into their children, to individuals who start believing it’s all right to take their meds, to police officers who take away new tools to use in a crisis situation. And finally, she hears from people who are suffering and see that it’s possible to get better.

“When I started doing the programs, I realized how life-changing they were for me and for everybody we speak to. It has motivated me to keep doing it and expanding my life around it as much as I could. It gives me a huge sense of purpose.”

But it was not always this way. Ten years ago, Mitzi had the meltdown that would change her life forever— and eventually lead her to share her story with others.

She recalls walking her dog that morning near her home in Maine, running into a friend. Her mind raced as she made her way into her house. But the next thing she remembers is being curled up in the closet, crying, banging her head against the wall.

“I was there for fifteen or twenty minutes,” she said, before she managed to pick up a phone and call a friend who helped her get in to see a doctor that afternoon. In twenty minutes, he had diagnosed her as bipolar.

listens. She does not judge. She does not advise. She simply offers her » She own story as a means to help others find hope.

“I’ve had it my whole life,” Mitzi says today. “But it was undiagnosed. Back in the seventies, people certainly did not talk about mental illness.”

Mitzi said she has felt a sense of “hopelessness” and “dread” for as long as she can remember.

“From my earliest memories I never liked my life,” she said. “When I was young I would just hole up in my room and when I went off to Groton—my parents were getting divorced—I was getting really depressed. I was drinking, I discovered boys, and I did all the things one does to self-medicate.”

She said she always did well in school and continued functioning, but “it was like having a gorilla on your back.”

The same pattern held true after she was married (she is now divorced) and had children; a suburban mom and volunteer, she worked hard to do it all, and do it all perfectly. There was still the deep sadness, however, interspersed by brief periods of mania. Mostly, Mitzi said, “I just stayed ahead of it.”

“I’m bipolar 2,” she explained. “Bipolar 1 is characterized by great big manic highs and great big wrenching lows. Bipolar 2 is characterized by long-term feelings of depression, with little bleeps of hypomania.”

Upon calling her mother the day of her breakdown,

Mitzi learned that both her grandfather and greatgrandfather were bipolar; the latter had been institutionalized for forty years. She was immediately put on medication and said that within a month, she was not depressed for the first time in her entire life.

“It was life-changing,” she said, “It was freeing, it was lovely—it was a new lease on life.”

Now fifty-two, Mitzi says the meds have not cured her, but she is “baseline stronger” than she has ever been in her life. She also credits cognitive behavioral therapy with giving her the tools to manage the illness when it begins to manifest, requiring her to monitor her thoughts and feelings carefully at all times. She is also a life coach, but it’s her work for the “In Our Voice” program that sustains her.

“I feel I am where I am today because of my mental illness,” she said. “I feel as if I am making a huge difference in the world.

“I know exactly who I am. I know I am living a good life. I am a good parent, a good woman, and a good friend. I feel very proud of the life I am living. I do.”

—Marie Speed

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Photographs by Adam Richins

PARENTS WEEKEND

Parents Weekend, October 26–29, drew parents to the Circle from all over the nation and the world. Autumn set a perfect backdrop with colorful foliage and sunny, mild temperatures, as parents spent time with their children, met one-on-one with teachers and advisors, cheered on athletic teams, watched performances, and got to know fellow Groton parents.

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Photographs by Adam Richins

LESSONS & ONCE AGAIN this

year, Groton’s Lessons & Carols services celebrated the season with beauty and joy. The first service welcomed our neighbors in the Town of Groton, the second filled St. John’s Chapel with parents and alumni, and the final service gathered the school community for a festive prelude to Christmas vacation.

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CAROLS 2017

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CHASING T 18

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Lander Burr in his field of blue corn

BY LANDER BURR ’00 PHOTOS BY JULIA VANDENOEVER

MY CORN WAS DYING. Maybe. Actually, I

had no idea. Before 2016, I had never grown anything outside of a pot, let alone a plot of blue corn, winter squash, and pinto beans, all irrigated by an acequia. All I knew was that one chilly mid-September dawn, the ends of my corn leaves drooped and their color had turned an ashen yellow.

Looking at the calendar, my stomach dropped. It had now been a month since I had irrigated my plot, and I wasn’t scheduled to receive water for another week. The corn was parched.

I could have uncoiled a hose right then and slaked my babies’ thirst. Except I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had sown my plot to learn about our local acequia, a centuries-old irrigation ditch. I had already hosed the beds once after the seeds were in the ground, and it felt like cheating. I wasn’t about to do that again.

I texted Dave Kraig, a neighbor who coordinated our section of the ditch, and pleaded for extra water. He replied that the water was flowing to another section, but that he would contact Mario Romero, the man who oversaw that part of the acequia. The next day, I received another text from Kraig.

HE WATER This article first appeared in New Mexico magazine titled “An Apprentice in the Acequia” and is reprinted with permission. www.groton.org

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NO WORD FROM MARIO. In the winter of 2014 my wife, Tracy, and I bought a home in the Pojoaque Valley. Until then we had been living in Santa Fe, but we craved more space and less bustle, a homestead where we could raise our twin girls, so we moved to a plot of land twenty miles north of town.

We had met in New Mexico while Tracy was working at an animal sanctuary, and she longed for farm animals to accompany our four yappy little mutts. It never occurred to us that we should have farming experience before purchasing a farmhouse. Tracy had grown up in a West Texas city, while I had been raised preppy in small-town New England. She had learned to mow the lawn; I had grown sprouts in third-grade science class. The rest we figured to pick up on the fly.

We found our dream house and eight acres at the end of a dirt lane that butted up to the Pojoaque Pueblo’s bison range. We loved the orchard, the adobe chicken coop, and the field where we envisioned goats romping.

We were less sure about the Acequia de las Joyas. We lived at the end of this four-mile ditch, and it cut through our backyard like an odd relic before completing its journey at our driveway. Ancestral Puebloan peoples began diverting water for their crops nearly three thousand years ago. New Mexicans have irrigated from acequias like ours for more than four hundred years, diverting water from rivers and springs to grow orchards, pasture grass, gardens, and crops. Acequias have created verdant valleys and riparian habitats in the desert. They have bound communities together as neighbors cleaned ditches and shared water in times of drought. More recently, acequias have persisted in the midst of tumult, even as people have stopped farming, the climate has changed, and urban centers and industry have clamored for more water.

To us, the acequia was just an empty, homely ditch.

That is, until it teemed with water. “Baby, come here!”

Tracy yelled to me that first time. “The acequia’s flowing!”

We stood there smiling, feeling the humidity rise above the banks, and listening as 45,000 cubic feet of water coursed through the ditch and onto our field.

Excitement tingled the nape of my neck, but at the same time, my chest felt heavy. This abundance of water was a blessing, a luxury—and a huge responsibility. I feared squandering it, yet I didn’t know what to do with it.

I spent that first summer trying not to screw up, to make sure the orchard trees stayed alive, our young goats had fresh weeds, and I didn’t flood the house. Once, I forgot to open the irrigation gates and awoke the next morning to water streaming down my driveway and pooling at a neighbor’s front door. I scrambled to avert disaster. By the end of the season, my wife and I often 20

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lost the goats in chest-high wild lettuce.

In the spring of 2016, as my second irrigating season loomed, I felt compelled to do more. To be a good steward, I reasoned, I needed to learn something about acequia farming. I needed to grow more than weeds.

AT ONLY THREE HUNDRED YEARS OLD, my

acequia is a youngblood. Acequias have spanned five continents over the past ten thousand years, beginning in the Middle East, where the Arabic as-saquiya translates to “the one who gives water.” Acequias traveled with the Moors across North Africa and into Iberia, and conquistadors later brought their knowledge to the Americas. In 1598, when Don Juan de Oñate founded the first Spanish colony in present-day New Mexico, one of his first decrees was to dig an acequia. A few years later, Oñate relocated the colony to what is now the village of Chamita, sixteen miles northwest of my home, and that ditch still flows today.

Unlike most other irrigation ditches, acequias are entirely self-governed. Members come together to clean their ditch, elect officers, and vote on improvement projects. The term acequia refers to not just the irrigation system but also the community that cares for it.

This may sound quaint, but in practice, neighborhood democracy can also be rather dull. Weed mitigation and flume repairs don’t make for scintillating cocktail party chatter. When I attended my acequia’s annual meeting, most of the members, or parciantes, played hooky. Before the meeting could begin, Dave Kraig and the other commissioners had to make a flurry of last-minute calls to wrangle a quorum.

That was where I first met Ed Romero, my acequia’s mayordomo, or ditch boss. He wore a straw cowboy hat, scuffed boots, and a rodeo buckle, and he carried the gravitas of a field general. When someone suggested raising membership fees, Romero said that doing so would be onerous for many parciantes. He gave a little dismissive shake of his head. End of discussion.

As the elected mayordomo, Romero was responsible for running our acequia. He distributed water among the parciantes, organized cleanup crews and restoration projects, and decided whether to shut down the ditch if a storm carried too much silt.

In the spring of 2016, I visited Romero at his home, a one-story adobe at the end of a dirt road across the highway from me. While Romero’s cow and thirty-fouryear-old horse grazed in a small fenced lot, we sat at a table on his immaculate lawn, near an almost life-size tin horse sculpture. At sixty years old, Romero still looked solid. He wore the same getup, and I learned he had won

IT NEVER OCCURRED TO US THAT WE SHOULD HAVE FARMING EXPERIENCE BEFORE PURCHASING A FARMHOUSE.

his buckle in 1988 as a team roper. The land had once belonged to Romero’s grandfather, Teodoro Trujillo, and across the field I could see the beige roof of the original farmhouse. Romero remembered when there were no other houses, just alfalfa fields, and the night skies were darker. “You wouldn’t even see a light,” he told me, except from fireflies.

Trujillo made his living as a farmer. He had an apple orchard on one acre, and because he lacked front teeth, he had to squash the fruit against a tree trunk before eating it. Hulking forty-foot semis from Texas used to rumble up the dirt road to buy his produce in bulk.

Romero’s parents lived in Santa Fe, and his mother was county treasurer in the 1960s. Many from that generation left farming to pursue more secure jobs, and later Romero’s peers would do the same. But his parents couldn’t keep him from the farm. “They’d take me over and I’d be crying and they’d have to bring me back. I don’t know why or what—I just enjoyed it here, I guess.”

During those dark nights, Romero went with his grandfather to irrigate the field by lantern light, until Trujillo sprang for a flashlight. The field had a system of lateral ditches, and Romero sometimes catnapped as he waited for the water to reach the next section of field.

With his bare feet in the ditch, the water was his alarm clock.

Trujillo served for years as mayordomo, presiding over the acequia’s annual cleaning, the limpia. Parciantes gathered in the ditch with shovels, and often fathers brought their sons when they reached a certain age, marking a rite of passage. Trujillo would pace off, drawing a line in the dirt every six feet or so with a long stick.

Each parciante was responsible for cleaning out the weeds and silt in his section, or tarea, making sure to level the ditch bottom.

Once Trujillo had inspected each tarea, the party moved on to the next stretch of ditch. I’ve never been part of a limpia. For several years, Romero has been hiring work crews rather than trying to round up parciantes for cleanings. In Trujillo’s time, there were some thirty parciantes, all with large tracts of farmland. Now there are roughly one hundred.

As I looked across Romero’s field at the cluster of houses, I wondered how many of the newcomers were like me, people who didn’t know how to level out a ditch, let alone fix a baler. I asked Romero if farming knowledge was disappearing along our acequia. “Oh yeah,” he said.

“There’s a lot that’s been lost.” www.groton.org

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THE PLOT SOON DRIED OUT. THE BEDS NEEDED TO STAY MOIST FOR THE SEEDS TO SPROUT, BUT I WAS ONLY SCHEDULED TO RECEIVE WATER EVERY SIXTEEN DAYS.

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I inquired what a novice like me could do to help preserve acequia culture. I was thinking of growing a farm plot, but I didn’t tell him this. On some level, I feared he would shoot down the idea. Romero cleared his throat. “It depends on people’s initiative,” he said. “You think it’s important and you’re interested and so you’re willing to take the initiative to move forward.” Until my mayordomo said so, I wasn’t sure I had that initiative. But his words felt like a blessing. Time to get to work.

I DECIDED TO GROW A modest fifty-by-fifty-foot

plot of blue corn, beans, and squash. Native Americans have been growing these three, known as the Three Sisters, for thousands of years. They had withstood the test of time, and now I hoped they could withstand my greenhorn farming.

While most local farmers planted in May, I didn’t start on my plot until June. I needed to have my seeds in the ground on June 22, two days after the summer solstice, when I was scheduled to have acequia water. If I waited any longer, my crops would be nipped by frost before they had a chance to mature. Now my whimsy turned to worry.

I had a lot of help from a young man working for me at the time. But feel free to imagine me bathed in golden light, cinematically sweating as I tilled, fertilized, dug furrows, and broadforked beds, all to a John Denver soundtrack. For what it’s worth, I did manage to wrench my shoulder slinging a trailerload of manure.

On the big day, I witnessed a small miracle as water moved where I had intended it to go. A trench carried the flow south through the goats’ field to a corner of my plot.

From there, a lateral ditch took the water along the plot’s upper side, and using sandbags, I could dam this ditch to irrigate a couple furrows at a time.

After a few hours, all the beds were soaked and the seeds dibbled. I had only two hours left to irrigate the goat pasture before another neighbor would have rights to the acequia water. It dawned on me then that most of my field would stay dry. For the first time, the water that had seemed so abundant felt scarce.

The plot soon dried out. The beds needed to stay moist for the seeds to sprout, but I was only scheduled to receive water every sixteen days. To learn about acequia farming, I reasoned, I should depend on the ditch alone and not resort to my garden hose. If these crops were going to survive, they needed Mother Nature’s help.

It wasn’t forthcoming. Three days after irrigating, a scant shower darkened the beds for just a few hours before the sun sucked them dry once more. The following evening, heavy clouds appeared to the south. A band of purple light glowed beneath them, and as I watched,

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a southwesterly wind picked up, carrying a solitary raindrop to my cheek. I couldn’t turn on the faucet now.

This wasn’t just an attempt at farming. It was an exercise in faith. I didn’t wake to rain in the night, and as I walked to the field in the morning, my nose detected no sweet scent of wet earth. I rested a hand atop one of the beds, feeling the fine parched soil already warming in the early sunlight. My stomach fluttered. My faith crumbled. This was no time for hubris. It was time to fetch that hose.

That afternoon, thunder rumbled to the east and dark clouds hid the sun. It began to drizzle, and then rain came in forceful bursts until rivulets streamed off our metal roof. Another shower rolled through that evening, and after putting the goats up, I walked up and down the moist furrows.

Little flecks of green poked through the darkened soil. Some were weeds, but I also saw furled shoots that looked like corn. I knelt down and touched a squash sprout with round symmetrical leaves. It sprang back with vigor. As another mass of clouds hovered above, I vowed never again to resort to using the hose.

FOR THE REST OF JUNE, the rain came every few

days. I spent the early mornings plucking the bindweed that I could now distinguish from pinto bean sprouts.

One dawn, the clouds turned reddish purple as the sun crested the Sangre de Cristos, and raindrops fell on my shoulders. The air was cool and mild, and I looked up to see the goats grazing the bottom of the field. Two nearby rabbits launched flying kicks at each other. I felt like part of the landscape.

Normally July kicked off the monsoon season, when regular thunderstorms rolled through in the afternoons and evenings. This year, no rain came. The sun was constant, bullying me during the day and leaving me cowed at night. My hands and lips chapped. The county banned fireworks.

The Three Sisters persevered until the acequia flowed again, but once more I stiffed the goats’ pasture.

As I walked through the field, parched grass crackled underfoot. The idea struck me that I could take my neighbor’s water for an hour or two without her noticing. I thus contemplated a timeless tradition. Or perhaps a timeless treason. Throughout the history of acequias, neighbors have robbed one another’s water.

Confrontations often turned ugly, especially if the aggrieved party had a shovel. Or a shotgun.

In one sense, my idea was novel, perhaps adding to its stupidity. People at the end of ditches tended to have water stolen from their upstream neighbors, not the

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I WASN’T SCHEDULED TO GET WATER FOR ANOTHER THREE DAYS, BUT IT WAS FLOWING NOW, AND I HAD TO HURRY TO DISTRIBUTE THE WATER TO MY THIRSTY FIELD.

other way around. One of those victims was Bob Short, the original owner of my house. An octogenarian from Texas, Short had developed a bad back and a shuffle in his step, but his forearms were still thick and bulging with veins. He grew alfalfa for his cows on the field where my goats roam. He would get three cuttings during the season, and he packed the fodder so tightly into his barn that he needed a chainsaw to get it out.

“I was always chasing the water,” Short told me with a raspy chuckle. When the acequia stopped flowing during his irrigating time, he’d follow the ditch until he found the thief. Once a neighbor chased him off with a shovel.

Others played dumb, claiming they had the time or even day of the week mixed up. Short then told me the legend of a woman who irrigated from a neighboring acequia and patrolled her ditch with a shotgun, lantern, and bottle of whiskey.

“Nobody got her water,” Short said.

To my knowledge, my water has never been hijacked, but the tradition continues on our ditch. I joined Dave Kraig sometimes when he went to open our acequia’s headgate. On one trip, he noticed that the ditch was dry along another parciante’s property when it should have been flowing.

“There’s nothing,” Kraig said. A retired physicist specializing in radiation hazards, Kraig had never raised his voice during our drives. But now he sounded excited. “Someone’s snagging that water!” Kraig called the parciante and told him, effectively, to go chase the water. My neighbor’s tone was polite, but I sensed an undercurrent of frustration suitable to a harried smalltown sheriff. “If you find somebody, please let me know; we’ll take it from there.”

By that evening, the case was solved. The culprit turned out to be another ditch member notorious for stealing. Kraig wrote him a citation. If caught again, the thief would face a fine. I never did take my upstream neighbor’s water. It wasn’t that I feared a patroller with a lantern and a shotgun. I just knew, despite my twitchy thirst, that it wasn’t the neighborly thing to do.

AFTER A FEW IRRIGATING SESSIONS, I realized

my plot had problems. The ground was lopsided, so the beds nearest the trench received a torrent of water, while only a weak stream reached the beds farthest away. The gradient was also too steep. The bottom of the plot became submerged before I could soak the top part. I tried putting sandbags halfway down the furrows to act as dams, but then I’d get distracted by a mass of weeds or a gopher hole sucking water. By the time I remembered my barriers, the water was already cascading over the 24

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sandbags and carving channels along the bed tops. I’d move the bags a few feet upstream, and the dim process would repeat. With a dozen beds, two aching arms, and one frazzled head, I felt like a single parent of twelve, and at least half of my charges were always clamoring for attention. Sometimes I just had to tune them out. I’d grab a handful of purslane from a furrow and munch on the tart weed as I gazed east to the mountains from whence my water came. Once, I looked down to see a gopher’s trembling head poking out above the entrance to a hole, his escape routes flooded. With one finger, I reached down and touched his crown. He trembled and blinked his eyes but remained still. I stroked the soft fur a few more times, unaware that this meek little creature might harbor the plague. This time, at least, Mother Nature showed mercy to the neophyte.

In August, the monsoons finally came. More than once, I woke in the night to thunder clapping and water streaming off the roof. In the mornings, beads of water still clung to the corn leaves, leaving my clothes soaked and heavy after I walked through the furrows.

The goat field grew lush, and my crops flourished.

The corn rose to my waist, then my shoulders, and, by the end of the month, overhead. Little shocks of silky purple hair stuck out from the cobs. The squashes bloomed orange flowers that gave way to plumping fruit, and the runners tangled with mats of pinto bean plants and snared my feet. My project, with the modest aim of feeding family and friends, was coming along.

I charted my farming progress through my weeding.

In June, one bed yielded a fistful of bindweed. In July, I came away each morning with a plastic five-gallon bucket filled to the brim. And now I had to get on my hands and knees and use the bucket to bulldoze a path through the jungle of bunchgrass, willow shoots, dandelions, purslane, and bindweed.

ON A PLEASANT MORNING after yet another

storm, I got in my car and headed north past Española, toward Taos. Like a pilgrim seeking out the mystic on the mountaintop, I was headed to Dixon to see Stanley Crawford.

In 1988, Crawford published Mayordomo, an account of his experience as ditch boss while garlic farming in Dixon. The book won the Western States Book Award, and I can offer my own acclaim. The writing is caustic and soulful, a cross between Edward Abbey and Wendell Berry. The community Crawford depicted was rough around the edges—workers smoked dope during limpias, parciantes scuffled in the school parking lot after annual meetings, and a commissioner brought a

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loaded .45 to collect delinquent dues. It all made me yearn for a wilder West.

The book also warned of the threats facing acequias.

Chief among Crawford’s fears was the possibility that parciantes would sell their water rights, leaving the farmlands dry and the irrigating communities diminished.

As a fan, I was eager to meet Crawford, but I also wanted to know whether he thought acequia culture could endure.

As I turned into El Bosque Garlic Farm that morning, I could hear the Embudo River gurgling. Crawford’s property teemed with all the markings of a working farm—piles of firewood, sheds brimming with farm implements and crates of garlic and shallots, a hoop house, a greenhouse, a duck pen, and a field with rows of lettuce, spinach, arugula, kale, endive, carrots, sweet onions, beets, and radishes.

Crawford and his massive Anatolian shepherd mix greeted me outside his house. While Crawford stood nearly six feet four inches tall, he had a disarming slouch that went along with his shorts, sandals, and partially unbuttoned short-sleeved shirt. His quizzical expression was just as I had seen in his book jacket photo—the corner of his mouth hinted at a smile as he raised one eye and crinkled the other.

Crawford was seventy-eight years old, but he ambled with a teenager’s loose-limbed gait as he led me into a cozy sitting room that he and his wife built. The Anatolian and a mother-son pair of heelers were sacked out on the mud floor. I sat on a couch next to a dormant Heatilator fireplace while Crawford took to a chair turned ninety degrees from me. While I looked at him in profile, a hummingbird flitted in and out of phlox growing just outside the window. Crawford waited for me to speak. So, through a long-winded introduction punctuated by “ums,” I asked how his acequia was faring. The answer, it seemed, was complicated.

In a deep voice reminiscent of Johnny Cash without the Arkansas drawl, Crawford told me his acequia community was vibrant. Properties had changed hands since he wrote Mayordomo, but the newcomers were respecting the tradition. Crawford had stepped down as mayordomo in 1996, but the current officers kept him informed. He’d been told that during recent droughts, the various acequias fed by the Embudo River cooperated to distribute the trickle fairly.

On the other hand, climate change threatened to make acequia irrigating unpredictable and untenable.

Crawford foresaw a future of erratic water flows —“huge runoffs and then nothing.”

Most acequia water begins as mountain snowpack.

Good forest cover is critical for keeping the snow from melting too fast, allowing the water to seep into the

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ground and feed springs and streams gradually. But severe fires and pests thriving in warmer weather could soon decimate these forests, leaving acequias with summer shortages.

Other reports predict severe storms followed by droughts. A decade ago, a massive tempest silted up a host of ditches, including Crawford’s. The acequias eventually received money from the Federal Emergency Management Administration, and a miniature track hoe had to maneuver into Crawford’s ditch to dig it out.

The last “desperately dry” years occurred in 2004 and 2005. “I go down to the river every afternoon and sit in the water. It’s not a swimming river, but it’s a nice cooling-off river. Well, it was so bad those two years— there wasn’t enough water, and what water there was was stagnant—that I did not go in the river.”

Still, Crawford said he was uncertain how climate change would continue to play out in northern New Mexico, since the Sangre de Cristos and the rest of the Rockies lie at the confluence of four major weather systems. “Things kind of collide here,” he said. “It’s very hard to predict what’s going to happen.”

I sank into the couch, my head hurting. The future of acequias felt precarious, regardless of what anyone did to steward them. Before parting ways, I asked Crawford whether he missed being mayordomo. “Oh, not now,” he said, chuckling. “I enjoyed it in a way I didn’t expect to.

Now I think I enjoy not doing it.”

I drove down a single-lane road to the Embudo, hoping to clear my head. I crossed a bridge with warped ties for guardrails, parked, and found a path down to the water. As Crawford had advertised, the narrow river was not deep enough for swimming but fine for sitting. I rested on the bank with my feet in the shallows and noticed a little school of hatchlings hovering above their shadows. As the water washed over my toes and I watched those flickers of life, my headache began to lift.

In the midst of so much uncertainty, this water held life. I could not help but find hope in it.

IN THE FIRST HALF OF SEPTEMBER, Romero

briefly shut down the ditch in order to remove licorice, an invasive plant, and western water hemlock, a poisonous one. The monsoons had ended, but with all the rain in August, I figured I could coast through the rest of the growing season.

I was inundated with squash. By this point, I had given up on weeding, so I shuffled through the furrows like a bushwhacker, feeling for rinds with my toes. I filled my five-gallon bucket with delicatas and buttercups, heaving the twenty-pound loads into a sunny hallway 26

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to cure or into the arms of any willing takers. Even my mayordomo took two delicatas home after paying a visit.

But on September 19, my idyll ended and I faced the corn crisis—the drooping, dead-looking leaves. Six days later, I learned from Kraig that the other section coordinator had lost his phone, so he had never received my plea for more water. There had been no word from Mario because Mario had never received the message.

That evening, as I went to put the goats up, I heard an unmistakable gurgling sound. I rushed to the acequia and paused for only a second at the lovely, brimming sight. Run, you fool, run! I bolted back to the house to grab my flannel shirt, and my fingers trembled as I put fresh batteries into my headlamp. I wasn’t scheduled to get water for another three days, but it was flowing now, and I had to hurry to distribute the water to my thirsty field.

The rosy dusk gave way to night as I entered the plot. Almost immediately, a corn leaf skewered my eye. Half-blind and weeping, I thrashed through the furrows, inadvertently slugging cornstalks with sandbags.

Each time I landed a haymaker, the dry leaves shook like rattlesnakes as the plant fell to the ground. Tiny bugs swarmed to my headlamp and my one good eye.

Bewildered moths bedding down on the surviving stalks gave me wary looks. All the while, the water flowed unabated.

Two hours later, I once more gave up trying to soak the beds farthest from the trench. The thighs of my jeans were wet and sullied. My stomach grumbled from missing dinner. I put on my warm shirt, turned off my headlamp, and looked up. The evening clouds had thinned, and I could see the Big Dipper low on the horizon, Polaris suspended above it.

It was early October, and the first hard frost was due in a week or two, around the time the acequia would shut down for the rest of the year. I needed to gather the beans and the rest of the squash soon, and once the corn had dried on the stalks, I would harvest it, too. The season would be over.

Memories from the acequia flickered before me, vivid little moments juicy with life. I knew I would keep stumbling on, chasing the water and the life it held.

Someday, perhaps, I would learn to flow along with it, too.

“

I DON’T CAMP, FISH, HIKE, OR HUNT. THAT IS WHAT NORMAL PEOPLE DO AROUND HERE.”

HENRY “HANK” GALPIN ’63 © Sparky Barnes Sargent

A Sensitive Farmer IT WAS A relief to Hank Galpin ’63 when he decided, in 1979, to turn his livestock ranch in Kalispell, Montana, into a wheat farm. He had raised 320 Hereford and Angus beef cattle on the 1,380 acres. “You calve them in the winter and sell them in the fall,” he explained, making the process sound routine.

Yet Hank could never bring himself to look at the animals strictly through a business lens. “You feel responsible for every critter,” he said. “During calving season, you can lose a calf or two by not paying close attention. That bothered me; I felt responsible for every calf that was born on the place.”

The ups and downs of planted crops are a breeze by comparison. “A couple of hail storms come through and you lose $75,000 in crops in thirty minutes — I can tolerate that,” he said. “I can tolerate weather problems. You take it personally when a calf dies.” That sometimes happened because of illness, or from cold if calves were born in a snow bank. Losing 1–2 percent of a herd of newborn calves is considered normal among ranchers, but, said Hank, “it still hurts.”

Now Hank grows primarily wheat, and since 2016 he has cultivated a substantially smaller plot of land. He sold several hundred acres—in part to put his resources toward a lake house, in part because

farming had become less predictable and worldwide wheat supplies abundant.

Consider the business in 2008: due to extreme weather in other wheat-producing countries, Hank’s crop went for $11/bushel.

Now he gets about $4/bushel. “The hardest part for most farmers,” he said, “is figuring out when to sell their crops, because prices can be volatile.” He muses that he should have quit farming in 2012, yet said he has experienced only “three instances of serious loss in forty-five years.”

Economics is not the only uncontrollable factor affecting Hank’s farm. He has witnessed an undeniable effect of climate change. “We used to feel lucky to get into the fields on April 10,” he said. “Now we’re normally in the fields on the 28th of March. We’ve gained two weeks on both ends of the growing season since I’ve been farming. We’re planting and harvesting earlier.”

It was the late sixties when Hank’s brother first suggested an investment in Montana real estate. Hank was just out of Yale and serving in the Navy. They bought a 3,300-acre ranch (at $60/acre) near Helena, the state capital. After leaving the Navy, Hank formed a corporation with his father and three brothers, eventually purchasing various properties — including the Kalispell ranch, about two hundred miles from Helena.

Hank knows his way around farm machinery, but he would not call himself a skilled farmer. No matter: since the first days of that cattle ranch, expertise was easy to come by. “This is a farming community,” he said. “A lot of qualified people are willing to give advice. We hired a manager who was a competent herdsman.”

Hank learned to oversee the operation — at times in the fields and often from his office, from which he can see Glacier National Park in the distance.

He loves the outdoors but says he is not a typical Montana outdoorsman. “I don’t camp, fish, hike, or hunt,” he said. “That is what normal people do around here.”

What he does instead is fly. Farming allows him five or six slow months a year, which he dedicates to his true passion — building, restoring, and piloting planes. “I learned to fly at Yale and I’ve owned airplanes ever since,” he said. He once ran a medevac helicopter company, but today is more likely to go to purely social events called fly-ins.

Hank realizes his path to remote Montana was the road less traveled from Groton. When approached for the Quarterly, he responded, “You’ve got to be kidding! Farming? Here I am feeling like an outcast from the Groton community because I was never Secretary of State.” He describes his own family as filled with lawyers and bankers. Not all those who invest in farming choose to live in the wilds. “To become a farmer,” Hank admitted, “was probably out of character for the family.”

A brief summary Hank wrote for his fiftieth Yale reunion sheds light on Hank’s temperament as well as his ease shifting from his life in New England to a much slower pace in Montana. “I realize that joining the Navy shortly after graduation was the moment,” Hank wrote, “when I escaped the Eastern establishment.”

— Gail Friedman

www.groton.org

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JEM MACY ’87

“Gem” of

The

Italian Wine Guido Stazzoni

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GRAPE VINES thrive or produce their best grapes in terroir — soil, topography, and climate — that is unsuitable for most other agriculture. Jem Macy ’87, the new Amministratore Delegato (CEO) of Tenuta di Mansalto e Montemaggiore winery in Tuscany, is similarly thriving: cultivating grapes and change in an ancient business unsuitable to all but the hardiest, sincerest oenophiles.

“My first love was France. Italy was accidental,” Jem confessed, acknowledging the influence of former mentors and Groton faculty Micheline Myers, a French teacher, and the late Rogers Scudder, who taught Classics. However, like a struggling vine searching for sustenance, Jem’s path appears to have been anything but accidental.

Working as an au pair in Bordeaux one summer, Jem encountered a winemaker in Pomerol and fell in love with the scent of the cellar. During her Sixth Form year, Mr. Scudder had encouraged her to spend winter term in Rome, where he was teaching at the American University, and she began studying art history at St. Stephen’s boarding school. This led to an art history degree from Trinity College with a focus on the Baroque because, as Jem put it, “Rome had its way with me.”

Jem’s first job out of college was working as a legal assistant at Shearman & Sterling LLP in New York, during which time she lived for a few years with formmate Laura Knapp Davidson ’87. Uninspired and pining for Europe, Jem followed the advice of her boss and uprooted to pursue a graduate business degree at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France. Business school failed to charm her, but at least she was in Europe.

Upon graduating from INSEAD, Jem married a German classmate and accepted a business development job in Munich

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JEM SEES ITALIAN WINEMAKERS AS TOO RISK-AVERSE, RELYING EXCESSIVELY ON RECIPES, UNNECESSARY TECHNOLOGY, AND COSTLY, UNIMAGINATIVE CONSULTANTS. for a U.S. software company. Five years in, she took a family vacation to Castello Poggiarello near Siena in Tuscany — after which she once again uprooted, taking her daughter and leaving her life in Germany.

She left a German for an Italian. She quipped wryly, “I went on vacation and it changed my life.”

Jem married the Italian lawyer who owned Castello Poggiarello. She gave birth to a second daughter and settled into family life in a nine-century-old castle.

Then she began looking for something to do and realized there were only two choices in Siena: work for Monte Dei Paschi (the world’s oldest surviving bank) or farm grapes. Although she received a job offer from the bank, Jem persuaded her husband to plant a vineyard on Poggiarello’s eight hectares and invest their savings in winemaking.

Jem’s small new vineyard would not generate revenue until it yielded grapes suitable to produce wine, so she took a job as a buyer/manager of the Italian wine portfolio at North Berkeley Imports to fund her new vocation. Serendipitously, this job’s intrinsic value would far exceed its salary, for it enabled Jem to spend several years visiting Burgundy and learning from accomplished winemakers Cyprien Arlaud, Frederic Magnien, and Gerard Raphet. They taught her wine-tasting and Burgundian-style winemaking. Jem acknowledges that, as with most successes in life, “finding good mentors and taking risks are vital.” Her advice: “Internalize a philosophy of ‘don’t be cautious.’”

In 2006, Jem produced her first wines (all Toscana IGT classifications): a cabernet sauvignon named Montebruno, a cabernet franc named Montechiaro, and a 50/50 blend of cabernet franc/merlot named Collerosso. The vineyard yields only about five hundred cases of wine, so profits are scarce. In addition to business challenges, Jem and her second husband separated in 2010. Still, she produced wine at Poggiarello through 2015. Her wines garnered industry praise and good marks — though it is unlikely these things matter much to her. She projects a sincere, almost pedestrian “drink what you like” perspective, commendable in an industry that loves conjuring complexity, seeping sophistication, and putting on airs.

As a Burgundian-style winemaker, Jem is a purist who takes an organic, laissezfaire approach to winemaking. She harvests at ripeness. This sounds obvious and simple, but few people do it. It is impractical to harvest one’s entire vineyard all at once, and it is extremely risky because it exposes an entire crop to potential ruin from rain. Jem also uses quality French oak barrels. Her mantra is, “Don’t touch the wine, and use French oak!”

Jem is sublimely driven by her passion to make quality Italian wine. Great barrel tastings elicit happy tears. She thinks that, overall, Italy’s wine quality would improve if its winemakers grasped cellaring techniques and ceased practices that are detrimental (such as excessive pour-overs and using Slovenian oak barrels) or deceptive (adding chemicals,

flavors, or tannins). Italian winemakers feel compelled to use governmentsubsidized agricultural equipment and technology, she said, but often misuse them. Jem sees Italian winemakers as too risk-averse, relying excessively on recipes, unnecessary technology, and costly, unimaginative consultants, all to produce a consistent product. The result is an abundance of low-priced, poor-quality wines of indistinguishable character and taste. Jem insists, “Mother Nature isn’t that consistent,” and finds this behavior disheartening; she believes Italy’s terroir is equal to France’s, and both are in a class by themselves.

The CEO job at Mansalto presents a meaningful opportunity for Jem. While there is still room for expansion, Mansalto’s current vineyard, at sixty hectares, is 7.5 times bigger than Poggiarello — planted with cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, merlot, sangiovese, and sauvignon blanc. The vineyard has the potential to produce more than 12,500 cases per year. Jem is thrilled to be working with varietals she has yet to produce, namely sangiovese and sauvignon blanc, and she relishes her new role as much to realize the vineyard’s potential as to leverage its greater visibility to influence and elevate Italian winemaking. She certainly possesses the passion, grit, and skills — including an uncommon comfort with uncertainty and change — to accomplish both.

As Jem noted, “Great wine is made at the limits of what is possible.” Indeed, and we should look forward to drinking the limits of what Jem proves possible at Mansalto.

— Will Knuff ’85

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GEORGE DENNY III ’63

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Wild Rice, Wild Ride GEORGE DENNY COULD catalog a lengthy list of his investments over the years, many of them successful. But one became an unanticipated runaway hit — and turned George into one of the world’s largest wild rice farmers.

Early in his career, modest investments in agriculture — primarily in pecans, cattle, and sod — introduced George to farming.

He liked how tangible it was, unlike his other investments. “I liked the fact that the people working on these farms could point physically to what they’d gotten done and take tremendous pride in it,” he said.

In 1986, when agricultural land prices were down, George decided to buy a ranch. “It had been a hard-luck ranch for the previous owners, but it had terrific water rights,” he said. Knowing that his own strength was in finance and strategy, George hired a young farmer to manage the property. Three decades later, that farmer remains in charge of operations.

In the early years, George’s staff tested a variety of crops on the land, known as Goose Valley Ranch. They discovered that Goose Valley was particularly well suited to growing wild rice, which is actually an aquatic grass. Primarily grown in Minnesota and Canada at that time, wild rice was a new crop in California.

George says the perfect combination of environmental factors helped his rice farm take off. Wild rice needs cold weather — sixty to ninety days of freezing temperatures — and Goose Valley, at 3,300 feet, complied. “Out of pure luck, the rice

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from our ranch is grade A jumbo rice, the highest quality,” he said. “It’s not because we’re so smart. We had the right soil, sun, water.”

Gradually Goose Valley planted more and more rice, pushing out other crops.

Currently, the farm’s only other significant crops are orchard grass and timothy hay (serving what George called “fancy people’s horses”). Goose Valley still grows some wheat, barley, and corn as rotation crops, to rest the soil that produces the wild rice.

One key to the wild success: a partnership with a customer who

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processes rice and who facilitated sales to Uncle Ben’s, General Mills, and other food giants. Still, wild rice represents less than 1 percent of California’s rice acreage, a niche market. “It’s so tiny and therefore so scary,” George said. “It’s a very volatile little specialty.”

Goose Valley, despite its prominence in the market, remained a sideline for George. As the farm grew, he maintained his day job, as managing director for Bain Holdings and then partner at Halpern, Denny & Co., a private equity investment firm. And he kept buying land. “I got into buying ranches and improving them and reselling them,” he said. One of his ranches is a substantial cattle operation — one of the largest in California — that breeds Beefmaster cows and sells calves.

Both the cattle enterprise and the wild rice farm fall under the Denny Land & Cattle Company.

Owning vast swaths of the nation’s most beautiful scenery has inspired ways to look out for both the environment and the business. George is particularly determined to use water efficiently: he has installed two solar fields on Goose Valley Ranch to power pumps and other electrical needs. In some years, the farm produces more energy than it uses.

Notably, in a move important to the state’s environmentalists, the 36,000-acre Denny Ranch signed one of California’s largest private conservation agreements in 1999, selling conservation easements that preserved land for vernal pools

Frances Denny

Goose Valley Ranch, blessed with the soil, sun, and water that wild rice needs

“ and several rare and threatened species.

The land has been called “one of the largest and most biologically diverse unfragmented landscapes in California.”

His environmental stewardship earned George an invitation to serve on the Trust for Public Land; he was a member of its national board of directors for twenty years and its chair for seven.

“Overwhelmingly, people who are making their living out of dirt have enormous respect for preserving the environment because they understand it, they live in it,” he said. “It has to be cared for and tended to make their livelihood. It’s different than developing farm ground into suburbia.”

Ultimately, George’s success depended upon resilience. “At our ranch, which

OVERWHELMINGLY, PEOPLE WHO ARE MAKING THEIR LIVING OUT OF DIRT HAVE ENORMOUS RESPECT FOR PRESERVING THE ENVIRONMENT BECAUSE THEY UNDERSTAND IT, THEY LIVE IN IT.”

has terrific water, this recent drought in California ruined our cost structure. The weather — things you don’t control — has a huge impact on your profitability,” he said. “The only way to survive is to be exceptionally low-cost and high-quality.”

The formula isn’t as easy as it sounds, but it does pay off. “Every now and then,” said George, “there’s a great year.”

— Gail Friedman

www.groton.org

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COLIN CABOT ’68

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Hand-Wrought HE THOUGHT HE wanted to study urban planning. At least that was the second career in the back of Colin Cabot’s mind in 1996 when he moved from Milwaukee, where he had run an opera/ music theater company for two decades, to rural New Hampshire.

With somewhat nebulous notions about commuting from New Hampshire to Boston, Colin and his wife, Paula, traipsed around with friends and realtors, seeing one grand winterized summer home after another. They knew they were in the wrong place when someone asked, “Are you golf people or boat people?”

It turns out that Colin and Paula were farm people.

Fellow New Hampshire resident David Howe ’43 (a formmate of Colin’s father, Frank Cabot ’43) had shown a real estate magazine to the house hunters, and Colin fixated on a particular ad. It was for a farm with a working grist mill, saw mill, and blacksmith shop, all from the 1830s. “It wasn’t true,”

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Colin said. “None of it was ‘working.’” They bought Sanborn Mills Farm anyway, from descendants of the family that had stewarded the land since the 1770s.

Their new property was a derelict relic from preindustrialrevolution, nineteenth-century New England. The good news: it had only recently been neglected. Colin could tell because growing out of the dams were thin, new saplings, not robust mature trees.

So began a project that dissolved all thoughts of future graduate degrees. “Paula was going to study Celtic languages and literature and I was going to study architecture and urban planning,” Colin mused. “The farm got us instead.”

Many of Colin’s friends were surprised when he left the theater world for rural New Hampshire. They shouldn’t have been. Yes, Colin had worked for composer Gian Carlo Menotti in Scotland and Italy, had run the Skylight Opera Theatre in

WHILE THE FARM SELLS HAY AND LUMBER, RAISES ANIMALS, AND GROWS VEGETABLES, ITS FOCUS IS ON EDUCATION—A BRAND OF AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION VIRTUALLY UNAVAILABLE ELSEWHERE.

Milwaukee, and had even produced an off-Broadway show (he muses that he could have paid the entire cast to tour the Midwest for a year with the losses incurred in New York over eleven weeks).

But growing up amidst the magnificent gardens of Stonecrop (now a public garden) in Cold Spring, New York, and Les Quatre Vents in Quebec, Canada, he felt at home in the country. And his father — a gardener so renowned that a new documentary chronicles his work at Les Quatre Vents — had left the New York business world to immerse himself in the land.

“Because of his garden, I had always been in the dirt, even though I ran an opera company for twenty-five years,” said Colin.

Still, his calling to the land was stronger than expected. “We were

looking for a bucolic place to live in the country, and we planned to commute to Boston,” he said. “We never did that.

Our home was supposed to be an escape from city life, but it became an obsession.”

The obsession has centered on preserving the crafts all but forgotten outside Sanborn Mills Farm. No stranger to big corporate agriculture through his family’s business interests, Colin had other ideas for the rundown property in Loudon, about seventy-five miles north of Boston. While the farm sells hay and lumber, raises animals, and grows vegetables, its focus is on education — a brand of agricultural education virtually unavailable elsewhere. Classes include Blacksmithing Basics, Oxen Basics for the Teamster and Team, Ox Yoke Making, and

Blacksmithing: Forge Welding.

Colin can go on and on about oxen: “The only people who train oxen in the country are 4-H’ers,” he said, describing “quite an active culture of oxen-pulling at state fairs.” Alas, the 4-H’ers grow up and don’t use their training. “It’s one of those threatened New England crafts that we’re dedicated to saving before they vanish altogether,” he said.

Which begs the question … why?

Why craft an ox yoke? Why maintain a water-powered saw mill when a modernday mill works a hundred times faster?

Colin thinks for a moment, then sums up his motivation: “It came from a time when people knew how to do things for themselves with their own hands.”

If it’s up to Colin, these crafts will never be lost entirely. “I see us helping people to reconnect with the land and the seasonal cycles of farming,” he said, “as well as developing skills that can be salutary in ways that typing on a computer keyboard isn’t.”

— Gail Friedman

Among the Sanborn Mills Farm classes: Ox Yoke Making

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A C H A P E L TA L K

by Myles Maxson ’18 October 19, 2017

The Step

in Front of You Backpacking on the John Muir Trail in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains

I

despise change. Actually, that’s not fair, let me try and put this in perspective for you. I hate change with the same burning passion Red Sox fans feel towards Yankee fans, or the rest of the world feels towards the New England Patriots. When I was little I would cry when the sun went down. I would cry when I flushed the toilet. I would cry whenever my parents had to leave the house. It wasn’t just that I was a particularly agitated baby, but rather I hated the idea of anyone or anything having to leave. I lived in the same home, in the same town, with the same friends, until I was 14.

School had always been easy for me. I had attended the same Kentucky public school all my life, slowly climbing the ladder from obscurity to the top rung in eighth grade. I had the same set of friends since kindergarten and never had to study for a test in my life. Groton began as a daydream, a fanciful “what if ” to occupy my time in math class. I didn’t think I was going to get in and my family wasn’t sure how we would afford it. However, thanks to what can only be attributed to sheer dumb luck, I, like all of you, got the big “YES!” at the top of my screen at 5:00 p.m. on a Monday afternoon. At first I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go; a change as big as this one represented everything I was afraid of. However, the opportunity for a Groton education,

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combined with a generous financial aid package from the school, made it too good an opportunity to pass up.

To say ninth grade was a change would be a gross understatement. The shift from poor, rural Kentucky to the diversity and affluence of Groton was overwhelming. The friends I had had since I was six suddenly vanished, and I struggled to make new ones. My grades began a free fall and I didn’t know how to catch them. I managed to limp through the year, however, secure in the knowledge that being at Groton was my choice. No one was forcing me to be here, and if things ever got unbearable I could return home to the safety of what was familiar, what was easy.

However, in the spring of my ninth grade year my parents dropped a bombshell on me. My dad had gotten a new job in North Carolina. We were moving at the end of the summer. Gone would be the only home I had ever known.

Gone would be my friends and neighbors. Gone would be the safety and security my life in Kentucky had represented.

No longer could I return to home if Groton ever became too tough. Groton was now the only option, and home was just as confusing and unknown as school had been.

In addition, that summer my mom had planned a twoweek backpacking trip on the John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. As soon as we returned from the trip we

We woke up at 1:30 in the morning to hike the last eight miles to the summit of Mount Whitney, to watch the sun rise from the highest point in the continental US. There were four of us, and we woke up that morning to discover we had only two working headlamps. So, we hiked slowly; my visibility was limited to only the small patch illuminated by my dad’s light from behind me. Looking back, I think it’s a good thing it was dark, because we were unaware that the trail we were walking along dropped nearly a hundred feet just a few inches to our right. We made it just in time, and as we stood at the summit watching a pink glow begin to spread across the valley we had just marched out of, I thought of all the little steps that had led me to that incredible place.

Today, with the end of my time at Groton on the not-sodistant horizon, I find myself in a similar situation. Looking back, I can see how far I have come. I have friends I care deeply about; and although progress has been slower than I, or my college counselor, would have liked, I’ve made huge progress in my schoolwork and regained confidence in my value as a Grotonian.

In my parent-teacher meeting, Mr. Goodrich, my Third Form English teacher, described Groton as a four-act play.

While I think there is some truth to that, I think a better metaphor is this: Groton is a hike. It is long and hard, and the path doesn’t always go where you expect it to. Some people will seem to fly up the mountainside, while others will focus on putting only one foot in front of the other. The one thing that is common for everyone, however, is the view from the top; and while I’m not there quite yet, I have to say: from where I’m standing now, it’s gorgeous. *Nathan Lamarre-Vincent, Ultimate Frisbee coach; Jonathan “JJ” Cheng ’18; and Harold Francis, assistant athletic director Myles, hiking with his friend Will

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would be moving. This trip had been a lifelong dream of hers, and my brother and my dad shared her excitement. I was much less enthused. I wanted to be excited, but all I could think about was that every step along the trail would be a step away from home, and that reaching our destination would mean that everything I knew was about to change.

I expressed these feelings to my mom one night as we sat on the edge of her bed folding laundry, and she gave me some advice that will stick with me for the rest of my life. “There’s no one part of this you can’t do if you focus on only the step in front of you,” she said. In other words, the hike would be long and hard, but if I broke it down and focused on only my next step, it would be doable.

The hike ended up being incredible. The landscape was breathtaking, with soaring peaks and staggering cloudscapes.

And whenever I was standing at the bottom of one of those impossibly high mountains, I would look up and think of my mom’s advice. Trying to approach the climb as a whole was overwhelming, but by focusing on only the next small step in front of me it became infinitely more doable.

I tried to apply this same advice to my life at Groton on my return. Rather than viewing the next three years as some insurmountable mountain I had to climb, I found ways to break it into smaller, more easily achievable steps. I took small steps, like starting a Frisbee team, to come out of my comfort zone and build relationships. Huge thanks to Mr. LV, JJ, and Mr. Francis* for making that a reality. In my schoolwork, I tried to focus on only the next test in front of me, and— perhaps most importantly—I learned to ask for help.

One day on the hike, as I struggled slowly up the side of a steep cliff face, I looked over and saw a marmot, which is a small, furry mammal about the size of a groundhog, tearing up the side of the mountain. It looked over at me and seemed to smirk before continuing its rapid ascent up the mountain—leaving me behind, rattled and a little upset. During my time at Groton, my roommates, Kevin and Michael Xiao, have seemed to me like marmots. While I struggled and sweated over every test and quiz in Latin 1, Michael seemed to skate over them flawlessly. Kevin would return to our room bemoaning his A- in a class I was struggling to pass. Everything seemed to come naturally to them. I say this not to undermine or diminish the amount of hard work and dedication they have put into their schoolwork, but rather to demonstrate that it is easy at Groton to lose track of your worth when you are constantly comparing yourself to the incredible people around you. I fell into this trap in Third Form and, especially as a student on financial aid, I began to feel like I was a burden on those around me. On my return in Fourth Form these feelings began to diminish. By focusing on only the next test in front of me, the one thing I could control, I began to make progress in the areas I had previously struggled in. I stopped constantly comparing myself to those around me and I finally began to feel like I belonged at Groton.

The culmination of our hike was the last night of the trip.

A C H A P E L TA L K

by Gardner Mundy ’59 October 17, 2017

Amidst Change,

Groton’s Constants

W

HEN I WAS invited to give this chapel talk, I wondered what I could possibly say that would be interesting and relevant to a school audience almost sixty years after my graduation. So much has changed here. Fortunately, some very important things have not changed, and I realized that I am among the dwindling number of graduates with the requisite antiquity to help make sure they aren’t overlooked or taken for granted. I call them Groton’s constants—things about the school that have been continuous and constant not only since when I was here, but all of the way back to its founding in 1884. I am going to talk briefly about both: some of the changes that have occurred since my day and four constants that have followed me all through my life.

The fact that the school’s birthday is being celebrated today is a helpful coincidence, because birthdays are a time for different generations of a family to communicate about shared places and experiences. Therefore, please think of this talk as a message to you, the Forms of 2018 through 2022, from my form, the Form of 1959, with some thoughts about why you are here and what I hope you will take away from here when you graduate.

My first school birthday was on October 15, 1955— sixty-two years ago, when I was fourteen and the school was seventy-one. I hesitate to admit that at my present age, I am older now than the school was then.

On that day in 1955, Groton was a school of two hundred boys, with a faculty of thirty-five men. A lot of other things were also very different. Here are just a few examples: We slept in cubicles instead of the bedroom/studies that most of you occupy. Cubicles were spaces with varnished-wood walls, a steel-framed bed, a chair, a wall mirror, hooks for hanging jackets and pants, and a bureau for storing all other clothing. Nothing else was permitted.

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The cubicles were in dorms, all but one of which were located on what now are the second floors of Brooks House and Hundred House. Most dorms were presided over by bachelor masters, whose own living quarters were integral or immediately contiguous. Between twenty and thirty boys resided in each dormitory.

Then there was the dress code. Despite what you may think looking at me, I haven’t dressed up for this occasion.

What you see me wearing now is what I was required to wear as a student throughout the day: coat and tie, grey flannel or khaki trousers, and polished brown leather shoes. On Sundays, dark suits and polished black shoes replaced this combination. Incidentally, the faculty observed the same dress code.

Our desks for studying were in either school rooms or studies. Studies were small rooms with a desk, a chair, and sometimes a built-in sofa, located beneath the dormitories in long hallways on the first floors of Hundred House and Brooks House in space that is now part of various dorms.

First and Second Formers studied in the Hundred House Schoolroom, which was located near the present Hundred House Reading Room. Third Formers studied in the Brooks House Schoolroom, which was located in the corner of the building nearest the Chapel, which now is part of Riley’s Dorm. Upper Schoolers (Fourth Form up) studied in their studies—a term that I use to this day to describe an important room in our home—over the objections of my wife, who thinks it should be called an office.

Breakfast was cafeteria style, but lunch and dinner were sit-down meals in what now is the Hundred House Reading Room. We sat by form in assigned seats at long tables, with a master at each end and others in the middle. All boys took turns as waiters, bringing the food from the kitchen and doing the cleanup. Waiters wore white jackets, eating their meals hurriedly before everyone else arrived.

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Vuyelwa Maqubela, Gardner ’59 and Diana Mundy, Temba Maqubela

“

If you are already feeling an enormous sense of relief that

you are here today rather than then, I understand.

That’s just a glimpse at how my form and I lived in pre-history. It only scratches the surface. If you are already feeling an enormous sense of relief that you are here today rather than then, I understand. The conditions unquestionably were Spartan, but they were survivable and actually beneficial. My form and I survived and benefited together, and we forged close ties doing it.

Now for what hasn’t changed: Groton’s constants.

The first is a commitment to excellence. Schools such as Groton are often called “elite,” “exclusive,” “expensive,” or some such word. These terms inevitably appear in news media reports following an unfortunate event. They miss the point entirely. If an e-word must be utilized, it should be “excellent,” because excellence is what Groton strives for and stands for. High personal standards are an integral part of it. Here, you are exposed to this commitment throughout every day, in everything you do. You won’t be penalized for failing to achieve it, but the faculty won’t let you not try.

Among other things, excellence at any institution of learning translates into the opportunity to acquire a superior education. But you have to remember always that the purpose of this education is not to make you comfortable, or complacent, but to learn how to think and how to keep on learning throughout life. And if you acquire this benefit, you need to be humble about it and never flaunt it, because in the world ahead of you, it won’t be what you have that counts, but what you do with what you have. Take full advantage of this opportunity.

Close friendships with members of my form are my second Groton constant. You may not realize it now, but

lifelong relationships are started here, even with members of your form with whom you may not think you have very much in common now. The intense shared experience of this place will transcend personal differences to a degree that will surprise you. Indeed, my closest friends are members of my form. The Boston luncheon last month that the headmaster mentioned illustrates this bond. It is not too soon for you to start nurturing similar bonds.

My third constant relates to the second and, like it, is a byproduct of the school’s small size: an unusually close relationship between students and faculty. From my description of the school’s daily routine, you know that members of the faculty were involved in every aspect of my form’s life here and knew what we were doing every minute of our waking hours. Despite this fact, perhaps because of it, lifelong friendships between many of our teachers and us also started here.

I am acquainted with only a few members of the present faculty, but I know that, like the faculty of my day, they are exceptionally qualified academically. However, also like the faculty of my day, they are here to be educators rather than academics. They are here to do what they choose to do with their own lives. Never again will you be surrounded by so many who are so committed to your intellectual and personal growth, so ready to rescue you when you stumble, so encouraging when you need it, so admonishing when you deserve it. Don’t resist this involvement.

My fourth constant is the concept of service. Compared to any other educational institution that I know of, it is distinctive to Groton. It is expressed in the school’s motto:

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cui servire est regnare. I’ve never been completely sure of the proper English translation for those four Latin words, but I know what they mean.

Service has been in the school’s DNA since its founding.

For most graduates, it becomes a life force. Theodore Roosevelt was born too early to be able to attend Groton, but he sent his sons here, including while he was president. They were in the Forms of 1906, 1908, and 1909. When he visited them, he would speak on all manner of subjects, because he loved to talk. Transcripts and descriptions of these talks document that the theme of service was already deeply implanted at Groton.

The same was true of his cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, Form of 1900, who also sent his sons here. They were in the Forms of 1926, 1928, 1933, and 1934. Your headmaster has given me a transcript from the school’s archives of FDR’s Prize Day talk in June 1931, when he was governor of the state of New York and just seventeen months away from being elected president of the United States. I learned yesterday that this speech is going be published in the next issue of the Quarterly. I am delighted with that news, because this document is an historian’s treasure trove that deserves far more attention than it has been given. Be sure to read it when it comes out. About service, FDR had this to say: “We have all heard a great deal at school—I suppose you hear it still, the way we did—about service. There are some boys in the school who get a little tired of this preaching about service and come to regard it as some kind of a duty, as something that has to be done, an obligation. I think most boys who graduate from this school look on service perhaps a little bit more from the point of view of privilege—as something that we as Americans have a right to take part in.”

Like FDR’s form, my form heard about service all of the time—in chapel sermons, in class, in dorm and dining room discussions. It was in the air, in the very walls of the school— literally, like the names carved in the wood panels on the Schoolroom and Schoolhouse hallway walls that you walk by every day listing all graduates, many of whom achieved great distinction in their lives by embodying a sense of worthwhile purpose that was imparted to them here and applying it for the benefit of something larger than themselves.

I said earlier that the school’s motto becomes a life force. I could give you many examples, but here’s one that is particularly meaningful to me. About ten years ago, a member of my form was dying of cancer, and I visited him in his home during his final weeks. When I arrived at the house for these visits, his wife and children would depart for a few hours, because they needed a break from the stress of caregiving. So he and I were left alone to talk about anything we wanted to. (Incidentally, he was married in this Chapel at a small family service in 1970.) In one of our conversations, he speculated about what he would have said in a chapel talk, had he ever been invited to give one. The following words are recorded in a letter written to our form after his death. It was published in the February 2008 edition of the Quarterly.

Of his hypothetical chapel talk, he said: “You will forget everything that I say here today.

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However, you will always remember that you were here and, hopefully, you will retain a small, flickering glimmer of the truth that life involves more than mere service to your own personal appetites and instead should lead to a meaningful adult life of service to those less fortunate.”

For him, “service to those less fortunate” meant serving as a lawyer—often for no fee—for people of limited education, skill, and means living around him in West Haven, Connecticut, a small city with a diverse population and a declining industrial job base.

I didn’t tell him this at the time, but I thought his reference to “service to those less fortunate” was a pretty tall order, because to my simple mind those words describe a very large group of people—like just about everyone else on this planet. In my own life, I have interpreted service more modestly. To me, it has meant trying to have a beneficial impact on other people and trying to make a difference in their lives by applying some of the values encountered here, such as being generous and having generosity of spirit; knowing the difference between right and wrong; exhibiting moral courage; being willing to stand up and be counted when others hesitate, or run, or hide; and having a sense of personal responsibility.

These values hopefully start with your parents, but here they are drilled into your very bones. They will guide you in any task you may undertake in your lives, especially where you are responsible for the welfare and well-being of other people.

I close with a topical comment about something that nowadays all of us must worry about whenever we read or watch the news. This comment is totally nonpartisan.

I often think about the quality of political leadership at all levels of government in this country that I have witnessed during most of my adult lifetime, and I ask myself how different things might have been, or could be, if more of the people who occupy high political office, like the president and vice president, members of Congress, Cabinet secretaries, governors of states, members of state legislatures—you name it—if these people had been exposed even a little bit during their formative years to the influences that everyone who attends or works at Groton School experiences daily.

If only they had not missed out on Groton’s constants.

A final note. In FDR’s 1931 Prize Day address, he also describes a highlight of his student days that will be relevant for all of you very soon, especially the new Third Formers—a certain football game that occurred when he himself was a new Third Former in the fall of 1896, 121 years ago next month. Of this game, he says: “And then I remember what I think to me was the thrill that comes once in a lifetime: my first St. Mark’s game, right here in school, down where the old Chapel was.

And I remember two things about that game: Groton 46, St. Mark’s 0.”

I think we all know how FDR would conclude his talk if he were here today instead of me. He would say very simply: Beat St. Mark’s.

A C H A P E L TA L K

by Nicholas Burgin ’92, P’21, Trustee November 10, 2017

Crowd. Ever.

D

espite possible photographic evidence to the contrary, I’m going to be insisting repeatedly going forward that this is the largest crowd ever to witness a chapel talk. Gail 1, if you’re here, be sure to publish that in the next Quarterly as though it were a fact.

I used to have to do the occasional speech to a group of finance folks, but they were always all just staring down at their Blackberries. Students probably don’t even know what those are anymore, or maybe are wondering why finance types like to look at small pieces of fruit during a speech, and I’m sorry for the dated reference (the first of many today, you’ll be forewarned). Anyway, I could say whatever I wanted during those speeches, and no one knew the difference because no one was paying attention. Looking around here, though, people are actually sitting up and listening—or, at least, doing one or the other, and maybe even a few people, both. This is a refreshing change, but it does have me a little nervous.

One thing I do know right now is that I’m glad I scrapped my initial plan to continue Steve Hill’s recently established tradition of trustees freestyle-rapping their chapel talks. My son Tate can attest to my love for nineties rap, but he’s heard me rhyming along in the car with Tupac, Biggie, and Dre, and it’s not a pleasant listening experience—we can leave it at that.

On the subject of past trustee chapel talks, I was talking to Bill Vrattos [’87, P’18, ’19] after his fantastic talk last year, and he mentioned that giving the talk was a great way to address one’s kid (or kids) without giving them the ability to pop in earbuds, or just get up and leave mid-lecture, as my kids do. That seemed like reason enough to do this, so here I am. And thank you, Temba, for delaying me from talking last spring and putting me in this time slot instead,

since it would have been a tactical blunder on my part to use the talk to get my son’s undivided attention, but to accidentally do so five months before he even attended Groton. He’s here now (I think?), so my plan is coming off without a hitch thus far.

Unfortunately, my life has been boring enough and conventional enough that it’s not easily mineable for chapel talk material. Or, maybe that’s actually fortunate, since a lot of what makes for a good story or a good lesson after the fact is pretty tough while you’re going through it.

Bear with me for a minute while I try to figure out whether the fact that I don’t have much to talk about up here is a good thing or a bad thing. I realize that by talking about how I don’t have a lot to talk about, I’m entering meta territory more suited to a Charlie Kaufman screenplay than an actual chapel talk.

I grew up in a privileged environment, following in family footsteps when I came to Groton—my mom is a Bundy, so we’re talking about a lot of footsteps, whole WASPish armies of loafer-wearing feet (boat shoes on weekends)—and I did well enough here at Groton because that was what was expected of me. I spent a lot of time down at the boathouse even though I didn’t always love rowing because I knew rowing could help me get into college. Sure enough, it did, and I ended up at an Ivy League school (now there’s a better plug for you, Andy 2 ).

I rowed there for long enough not to disappoint parents and coaches but, in truth, I wasn’t totally committed to it— rowing had already served its primary purpose of helping me get into college.

1

Gail Friedman, director of communications and Quarterly editor Andy Anderson, assistant head of school and crew coach

2

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Biggest Chapel Talk

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The rest of the time at college, I was again trying to plan one further step ahead, aware that any future success I might have would likely hinge on academic achievement and cultivating social networks—and I’m talking about oldfashioned networks of actual real people, not colorful icons on your phone that pretend to be all happy and inclusive but are actually malicious and anxiety-provoking, not to mention capable of swinging presidential elections in undemocratic ways. I should probably save that rant for my next turn up here speaking. That is, if it’s even still human beings delivering the chapel talks at that point.

Anyway, I proceeded carefully and uneventfully through college, and, only a few weeks out of college, scuttled along to Wall Street with a huge chunk of my graduating class. And then, pretty quickly, life starts moving faster and faster—more responsibility at work, fewer opportunities to try something new, and no easy way to step off the treadmill.

Anyway, to get right to the point—well, not right to the point since I’ve managed to waste a big chunk of my talk already—to get eventually to the point, what I want to say here is that part of me regrets being so rational and goaloriented while at school. For me, and I’m guessing for many of you, if it didn’t help get into college, or it didn’t help get the right job—or, let’s be honest, if it wasn’t incredibly fun and at least 99.7 percent likely to result in not getting caught—then I probably didn’t do it. Under some pressure from my parents and a lot of self-inflicted pressure, I picked classes that I thought I could do well in, picked extracurriculars more based on what I thought college admissions officers might think than based on any passion I had for them, and then, once I was at college, lined up boring internships over summers, again took classes I could do well in, and chose a major—economics—because I thought it might help get a high-paying job.

And, in a bit of a twist from how these cautionary tales usually go, it largely worked out OK, and the results mostly made me happy. But, had I not been so focused on everything being a means to an end, I know I could have still ended up these twenty or twenty-five years later in a good place—maybe a similar place, or maybe a better place— but in a less linear fashion, having had broader exposure to different things, a richer overall experience, and probably having had a positive impact on a larger number of people in the process.

In Frank Bruni’s book Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, which, more important than you all reading it, make sure your parents read (and, to be clear, when I say, “make sure your parents read it,” I’m talking to students; I’m not sure how much an 87-year-old parent-of-faculty member or fossilized parent of trustee would care about the book at this point). Anyway, in this book, Frank Bruni points out that a recent glance at the CEOs of the top ten companies in the Fortune 500 shows alma maters of Arkansas, University of Texas, UC Davis, Nebraska, Auburn, Texas A&M, something called the General Motors Institute, 40

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Kansas, Dartmouth, and Missouri. If your goal is success in the professional world, as mine was, these folks can all be said to have done well, and none of them did it by resumebuilding their way into the most prestigious schools—except maybe the Dartmouth guy, if you want to count that (Bill, you can count that, don’t worry). Do this exercise for Pulitzer winners, or MacArthur Genius Grant recipients, or what have you, and you’ll see the same thing.

The point being, there are lots of different paths to success, and most of them don’t run through Cambridge or New Haven or Palo Alto. Some even occasionally run through Hanover. These varied paths are less linear, have lots of peaks and valleys, lots of stopping and starting, and lots of risks taken that don’t pan out. And those ups and downs are normal and natural, and absolutely nothing to fear. As Erica Jong said, “The trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.” That line of thinking works well when applied to a great many things. Although, to be clear, probably not to future decisions some of you may make about whether or not to rap your chapel talks.

While I followed a conventional, risk-averse route at school and in choice of career, one thing I did that took me a little off the well-worn path was go work abroad for fifteen years, first in Japan, then in London. While those travels didn’t help me achieve any unusual professional successes, they were a valuable experience because of the people I met, the broader worldview they afforded me, and the added perspective they gave on the rest of my life.

As Nathaniel Hawthorne tells us, “It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.”

By bringing myself into habits of companionship with the Japanese and English for fifteen years, what did I learn?

I learned that in Japan, quite a few chairs are not capable of supporting my body weight and eventually end up as piles of kindling on the floor—frequently happening after a large meal, but in one mortifying case, happening during my first time at a high-stakes poker game with a bunch of serious, intimidating locals. Doing something to break the ice when you meet new people may be a good thing, but doing something to break their chair, I can assure you, is not.

I learned that in Tokyo noodle shops, it’s considered rude not to loudly slurp your noodles, as failing to do so would suggest that the noodles weren’t sufficiently delicious.

Since I’ve left Japan, this has been an embarrassingly difficult habit to break, so cut me some slack if you hear any untoward noises coming from the trustee table in the Dining Hall.

I learned that my last name—Burgin—reads in Japanese characters exactly the same as the English word “bargain,” and, thus, given my job as a currency trader, there was never going to be a bilingual Japanese person who could look at my Japanese-language business card and not crack a joke

“

There are lots of different paths to success, and most of them don’t run through Cambridge or New Haven or Palo Alto. about “bargain prices from Burgin.” They were usually my clients, so I had to laugh, even the 489th time. Don’t be afraid to extend similar courtesies to me up here.

Switching to my time in England, I learned driving through the countryside that when early Massachusetts settlers borrowed all the British town names—names like Groton, Dunstable, and Littleton—we took the wrong ones. How could we have passed on Upton Snodsbury, or Great Snoring, or Scratchy Bottom? There are a bunch of other, shall we say, even more colorful ones that require real restraint on my part not to include … see me later if you want a fuller list.

I learned that, despite my eagerness to embrace British culture and learn about their traditions and pastimes, cricket was a bridge too far. The rules remain totally impenetrable to me. I think a “wicked googly” is something, but I have no idea what.

I learned that calling someone “guv’nor” or “geezer” is some sort of term of endearment there. Or, maybe people were insulting me when they called me that? I’m actually not sure. Forget that one—I never really learned what those words meant.

These may be lighthearted examples, but I know that being brought into companionship with individuals unlike myself, who cared little for my pursuits—and me for theirs, in the case of cricket—gave me a new perspective on so many things and enriched my life experience in countless ways. I wish I had taken a few more risks like this along the way, done a few more things that I was likely to fail at, a few more things that weren’t calculated to pay tangible dividends down the road. As Amor Towles wrote in his book A Gentleman in Moscow, “For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.” I know at Groton, and beyond, I was always assessing the likelihood of acclaim and applause before doing any venturing, and you miss out on so much that way.

When my son Tate has occasionally underachieved in academic pursuits in the past, he has heard me threaten him with apocalyptic scenarios that run something like: “If you don’t do well in this class, you won’t get into a good school, and then you won’t get a good job, and next thing you know, you’ll be homeless, living under a bridge.” When parents push you like that—or perhaps in slightly more humane ways—to work hard and be a high-achiever, it’s partly

Nick Burgin ’92 with his son Tate ’21

because they view hard work as a path to happiness, but it’s impossible to deny that part of the motivation is typically a desire for their child to reflect well on them, to provide some sort of evidence of their superlative powers as a caregiver or perhaps the richness of their DNA, and that’s not fair to their child.

Reflecting on all of this, as I thought about how to conclude this moderately coherent collection of thoughts, I am moved first to note how overbearing, constricting, and generally lousy much of the advice I give my kids when I’m not up at this podium is, and, second, to tell you all how lucky you are to be here. Groton provides you with so many opportunities to try new things, and an experience that can be relished for its own intrinsic merits rather than for whatever it might be a springboard to. No matter what your parents might tell you, the most important part of this experience is to have fun. Enjoy your all-too-brief time in this wonderful place!

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Photographs by Jon Chase

Fall SPORTS

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Wilson Thors ’21 and Ben Calmas ’18

The 2017 Zebra gridmen, led by tri-captains Noah Aaron ’18, Greg Segal ’18, and Bennett Smith ’19, went through a tough ISL slate — from the curtain-raiser versus St. George’s to the historic finale with archrival St. Mark’s— maintaining a competitive spirit in each ballgame and finishing the year with a 4–4 record.

In the opener against St. George’s, Greg started the season off with a display of his passing proficiency, spinning three TDs in a 34–0 rout of the Dragons, while the defense, anchored by Bennett, a two-time ISL First Team All-Star linebacker, pitched the first of two shutouts on the season.

After playing both Brooks and Nobles in tough losses, the Zebras went on a three-game winning streak, topping rival Middlesex in another shutout, 28–0, easily handling Rivers 35–6, and dusting Roxbury Latin 35–8.

Noah, who is headed to Yale to play receiver for the Bulldogs, was instrumental in the three wins, running, receiving, and playing a key role in the secondary. Fourth Former Caleb Coleman, a two-way starter, scored three TDs on the ground to help put the Middlesex Zebras away, while Sixth Former Jay Montima helped in the Rivers win with a solid game running the speed sweep and sterling play in the defensive backfield.

Though the season ended with tough losses to a strong Thayer squad and a 25–7 defeat at St. Mark’s, 2018 looks promising with nine starters returning on defense and eight on offense. Two-way, two-year starters Jake Kissell ’19 and Clement Banwell ’19 return to anchor the line of scrimmage, along with Brent Gorton ’19 and Teddy Carlin ’20, while the returning safety tandem of Third Formers Robbie Long and Anthony Romano and inside linebacker Nick Beck ’20 will be key on defense next season.

— Coach Jamie Lamoreaux

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Football 4–4

grotoniana Clockwise from left: Lyndsey Toce ’19, Steven Perchuk ’19, Sangah Lee ’18, Katie Reveno ’20, and boys cross country

Boys Cross Country 11– 4 Groton’s boys varsity cross-country runners finished the season 11– 4 and then surged ahead of Belmont Hill and Tabor Academy to earn third place in the ISL Championship. Lawrence Academy’s championship course is composed of four loops — offering great places to view the racers swirling around and hurling themselves up and down the hills. The most satisfying view was of the smiles on the faces of our racers after they earned their third-place plaque.

Our varsity runners in this final race were Paul Michaud ’18, Sammy Malhotra ’18, Leo McMahon ’19, Aroon Sankoh ’21, John Michaud ’20, Derek

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Chang ’20, and Joshua Guo ’20. Paul placed ninth and Leo nineteenth in a field of 109 runners, with Aroon right behind them, finishing in twenty-first place.

This successful season started, as all of them do, after a summer of running. By the time eleven of our runners convened for our annual pre-preseason retreat up to the coast of Maine, we were in great shape to intensify our training. It became clear that the team was off to a strong start when they all beat their coach in the half-marathon run on the Around Mountain trail in Acadia.

Part of the secret of our success this year was not only the infusion of new and returning runners, but also the addition of

Winter 2018

coaches Jake Kohn and Matthew Reichelt.

Both had run recently as undergraduates at Stanford and Trinity, and both of them brought to the program not only racing experience but also tremendous enthusiasm. We surely have benefited from their spirit and wisdom.

— Coach John Capen P’17, ’22

Girls Cross Country 7– 5 After graduating thirteen runners last year, including three of our top seven, we came into the season knowing that we had spots to fill and needed people to step up, both in terms of places and also in terms of leadership and building a culture of teamwork, positive attitude, and willing-

ness to compete. Several of our veterans returned ready to run much faster than they had at the start of previous seasons, and we benefited from the contributions of some talented newcomers, too.

The result was a fast start, going 6 –1 in the league over the first four weeks of the season. In the last three weeks of the regular season, we raced the top four teams in our league, including eventual ISL champion Nobles and eventual NEPSTA Division II and III champions Thayer and Middlesex. Along the way, twelve different runners filled varsity spots for us. On the bright side, that number speaks to our depth; on the other hand, it also shows that we had some trouble with the injury

bug throughout the season, and in fact our fastest seven girls only raced together four times this fall.

With five of our top seven returning next year, the future looks bright, and we’re excited to see what the girls can do next fall.

— Coach Michael O’Donnell

Boys Soccer 7–6–4 Coming out of a strong preseason and having shown well in their first two scrimmages, the boys varsity soccer team looked poised to start their 2017 campaign on the front foot. With a 2–2 tie against a strong St. Paul’s side and a solid win against St. George’s, it seemed that things

were going as planned. However, although the league campaign was just underway, the team was facing the most challenging part of their schedule. With early-season games against perennial powerhouses Belmont Hill, Milton, Brooks, and Rivers, Groton’s young squad would learn quickly that they needed to perform consistently and at their best in order to compete with the best the ISL has to offer. As the season progressed and the squad began to congeal, performances became more consistent and results more favorable.

In the last five games of the season, boys varsity soccer was undefeated; the streak culminated in a fantastic team win against a very stingy St. Mark’s team in the

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last regular-season game. As a result of this end-of-season run, Groton received the seventh seed and was selected to play in the post-season Class B tournament.

As the seventh seed, Groton traveled to Brooks to face a very talented team on their home pitch. Though the Zebras showed great resolve and continued to press after giving up three early goals, the boys came up a little short, going down 3–1 to the 2017 ISL and Class B champion, Brooks.

Graduating only one starter from the 2017 campaign, Groton’s boys varsity soccer team is looking forward to another successful season in 2018.

— Coach Dave Pedreschi P’21

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Girls Soccer 6–7–3 We knew that this year would be one of transition, having graduated a large Sixth Form group in the spring of 2017 that included six starters, two of whom went on to start at the Division 1 level and earn recognition as members of the all-rookie teams in their respective conferences this fall. Yet — even though the league grew stronger — this year’s team won more matches than we did last year and finished four spots higher in the ISL table.

Early in the season we learned how to be resilient and disciplined defensively, while also opportunistic offensively. These traits led to a 1–0 win against Brooks (dedicated to the arrival of Linley LeRoy,

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newborn daughter of Coach Tim LeRoy and his wife Kristen) and a 1–0 upset victory at Rivers. Later in the season, we became a more balanced team, highlighted by a 2–0 win over Lawrence Academy in the last home match for Sixth Formers Alexa Beckstein, Elle Despres, and Addie Newsome.

Our returning players set a positive and purposeful tone, and our newcomers brought humility, toughness, and talent to the mix. As a group, these girls worked tirelessly together to improve the team and make it far greater than the sum of its individual parts. Different players emerged in each match to play decisive roles. While we will miss our three Sixth Formers next

Clockwise from far left: Maggie Cheever ’18, Robbie Long ’21, Jack Goodrich ’20, girls cross country, Chioma Ilozor ’20, and Alexa Beckstein ’18

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year, we are excited to return to the field next fall with this promising group.

— Coach Ryan Spring

Field Hockey 2–13–2 Though the record sounds grim, 2–13–2, the season was better and more promising than the numbers suggest. Eleven games ended with either ties or one- or twogoal differentials; on turf, those are very close games. One other game was a distinctive 5–1 victory. The team played three overtime games, ultimately losing to Exeter and Nobles and maintaining a tie against Cushing. The Nobles game was particularly exciting and perhaps the team’s shining moment of the season:

Nobles is a perennial powerhouse and ultimately finished second in the league, earning a spot in the Class A tournament.

From the opening whistle to the eighth minute of OT, this was a game of guts, determination, energy, enthusiasm, and skill on the part of every girl on the field.

Other highlights from the season included the 5–1 scoring bonanza against St. George’s; holding on to a lead against Proctor with the girls remembering that they had squandered a two-goal lead last year; a handful of simply spectacular goals resulting from complete team play, skill, and anticipation; and the 1–2 game against Middlesex, always a strong team and always a tough game as all are slightly

distracted by a much anticipated and needed long weekend.

There are always highs and lows in a season, with the lows consisting of slow starts or discouraging outcomes. But this was a team that never quit and, even in the games that were not close, gave full effort and enthusiasm, led ably by captains Alyna Baharozian, Maggie Cheever, and Layne McKeown, as well as fellow seniors Imani McGregor and Angelina Joyce. Those five girls have been a solid part of the team for three to four years and will be missed next fall. Luckily, a strong returning core will fill their spots and take on the leadership mantle as the team looks to build on the growth it has experienced in the past

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Right, Freddie Tobeason ’19; below, Nick Beck ’20, Brooks Anderson ’20 and Teddy Deng ’20. Opposite page, girls cross country.

several years, thanks to the turf field and some strong coaching, this year in the form of new science teacher Ali Hamlin.

— Coach Kathy Leggat

Volleyball 1– 8 The varsity volleyball team had a challenging but rewarding season. It was the first year that we had a varsity team after four years of preparation, and the 1– 8 record doesn’t tell the whole story. With five returning players from the JV team and the rest new to volleyball, the team battled on each match and concluded the season with promising results. All team members played significant roles and developed solid skills

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on the ball during the season.

The season was preceded by one week of preseason, when team members got to know each other and learn basic skills and strategies. Then they got right into matches against other ISL teams, picking up their first win against Thayer.

In that match, the captains, Montanna Riggs ’19 and Evie Gomila ’19, led the team to fight hard for each point. Chioma Ilozor ’20 and Gloria Hui ’19 contributed many points with their powerful serves. Montanna had some great spikes, and the setters, Katie Chung ’19 and Kamsi Onwochei ’20, set up the attacks.

The match was close, with deuce points on two sets, but we eventually achieved

Winter 2018

the 3–1 win. We also had some very good chances to win other matches, such as those against BB&N and Governor’s; despite good strategy and solid play, we succumbed mainly to lack of experience. In a non-ISL match, we had a 3–1 victory over Beaver Country Day. With valuable experience gained and skills developed during this season, and the fact that only two players are graduating this year and potentially strong new players joining, the girls have every reason to look forward to a successful season next fall.

— Coach Shannon Jin P’19 Follow Groton Athletics on Twitter:

@GrotonZebras

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BOYS CROSS COUNTRY

GIRLS CROSS COUNTRY

FIELD HOCKEY

FOOTBALL

BOYS SOCCER

GIRLS SOCCER

VOLLEYBALL

Most Valuable Runner Paul Michaud ’18

Most Valuable Runner Abby Kirk ’19

Most Improved Player Eleanor Dunn ’20

Most Valuable Player Walker Davey ’19

Most Improved Player Angelika Hillios ’19

Most Improved Runner Tyler Weisberg ’22

Most Improved Runners Sophie Park ’19 Catherine Qiao ’18

Coaches’ Award Alyna Baharozian ’18

Coaches’ Award Ben Calmas ’18 Bennett Smith ’19

Coaches’ Award Tim Hoopes ’18 Russell Thorndike ’21

Coaches’ Award Alexa Beckstein ’18

Coaches’ Award Gloria Hui ’19 Chiara Nevard ’21

Coaches’ Award Brianna Calareso ’18

All-ISL Honorable Mention Alyna Baharozian ’18 Freddie Tobeason ’19

Coaches’ Award Sammy Malhotra ’18 All-ISL and All New England Leo McMahon ’19 Paul Michaud ’18 All-ISL Honorable Mention Aroon Sankoh ’21 Captains-Elect Leo McMahon ’19 Gus Vrattos ’19

All-ISL Abby Kirk ’19 Captains-Elect Abby Kirk ’19 Marianne Lu ’19 Riya Malhotra ’19

Unsung Hero Award Imani McGregor ’18

Captains-Elect Sarah Conner ’19 Freddie Tobeason ’19

Charles Alexander Award Noah Aaron ’18 Greg Segal ’18 All-ISL Noah Aaron ’18 Greg Segal ’18 Bennett Smith ’19 All-ISL Honorable Mention Clement Banwell ’19 Caleb Coleman ’20 Brent Gorton ’19 Jacob Kissell ’19 Captains-Elect Clement Banwell ’19 Bennett Smith ’19

All-ISL Walker Davey ’19 Charlie Pearce ’18 ISL Honorable Mention Jack Goodrich ’20 Max Strong ’20 NEPSSA Senior All-Star Team Charlie Pearce ’18 NEPSSA Junior All-Star Team Walker Davey ’19

Sixth Form Award Elle Despres ’18 All-ISL Alexa Beckstein ’18 Grace Travis ’21

All-ISL Montanna Riggs ’19 Captains-Elect Evie Gomila ’19 Montanna Riggs ’19

NEPSWSA Junior All-Star Game Ali Brown ’19 Captains-Elect Ali Brown ’19 Angelika Hillios ’19 Lyndsey Toce ’19

Captains-Elect Walker Davey ’19 Pat Ryan ’19

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Christopher Carey Brodigan Gallery WINTER EXHIBIT

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.

Weight of the World

LightWeight Video, sound art, performance, and sculpture by Kledia Spiro Through February 16, 2018

Backpacking, video still, 2017

“IF THAT WERE a story, what kinds of themes would you draw from it?”

English teacher Jake Kohn was pressing his students to ponder what they had just witnessed in the Athletic Center’s weight room. Artist-in-residence Kledia Spiro, this year’s Mudge Fellow, had taught students the proper form for weightlifting and hoisted a very heavy load—the students’ backpacks.

The symbolism was not lost on the class.

Two students had acted as “Olympic loaders,” placing the weights on Ms. Spiro’s barbell. The weights—the backpacks—were heavy with books and, for some, with less tangible academic burdens. When the backpacks became too much to lift, Ms. Spiro called on students to help, which surprised observers expecting the weightlifter, who was on a national Olympic weightlifting 50

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team, to prevail unassisted.

Ms. Spiro loves art and weightlifting and, as a performance and visual artist, combines the two. Her work touches on themes including immigration, female empowerment, family, fitness—and the “weights” we all carry in one form or another.

Ms. Spiro worked with Groton’s English, science, and art classes from December 4–13. The Mudge Fellowship was established by the Mudge Foundation in 1992 to enhance students’ exposure to the arts. Art teacher Beth Van Gelder, who organizes the fellowship and curates the Brodigan Gallery, recognized the interdisciplinary potential of this visiting artist and encouraged teachers in all departments to consider working with her.

In Ms. Van Gelder’s Second Form Visual Studies class, Ms. Spiro began by asking students to name something

Winter 2018

LightWeight, a multimedia and multisensory exhibit, questions what weighs us down or lifts us up. Part of the exhibit is a video, “Learning How to Draw,” that Kledia Spiro created with Groton students using a technique called “bar path analysis.” Students studied Ms. Spiro’s form on an Olympic-style weightlifting move, then tried their own; as they stepped onto a platform, a white line tracked their movement with the barbell. Athletes use bar path analysis to perfect their form; Ms. Spiro uses it to show how unique and perfect each student’s drawing is, just like each student’s story. The exhibit also includes a recording of students stating what weighs them down: “expectations … pressure … family … vulnerability.” In a campus performance, Ms. Spiro sat atop a barbell with chairs on each end as Andrew Lei ’19 improvised an interpretive piece on cello in reaction to the students’ lamentations.

that brings them joy. Puzzles, writing, golf on the beach, organ music, hiking … the students went on and on … building computers, writing, hockey. “What you love to do can lift you up,” the artist explained, touching on the metaphor that permeates her work. In future classes, those students would create mixed media works that symbolize what lifts them

de Menil Gallery WINTER EXHIBIT

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.

Useful Stories grotoniana

Sculptural assemblages by Lorraine Sullivan Through February 27, 2018 up—the things they love—or the burdens that can weigh them down. Some student works are part of Ms. Spiro’s installation in the Brodigan Gallery.

The Groton community had the opportunity to learn about Ms. Spiro’s art as well as her life. During an artist talk in the Schoolhouse’s Sackett Forum in early December, she introduced the school to her childhood in wartime Albania, where she would paint in the hallway because it was an area safe from bullets flying outside. Years later, the sharp sound made by a barbell during Olympic lifting would remind her of the gunshots in Albania.

“For the first time, I had control of that sound,” she said. “I wasn’t the victim of it anymore. I was the one producing it.” Much of Ms. Spiro’s art struggles to reconcile the weight of all that her parents sacrificed on her behalf.

The importance of lifting burdens together came up repeatedly in the presentations. At various times, the artist stopped to ask for help with her loaded barbell, sparking discussion about how difficult, or even impossible, it is for one person to lift the weight of other people. In that unusual classroom, surrounded by equipment designed for physical challenge, students were thinking about how to properly lift a barbell while also contemplating weighty lessons about vulnerability, teamwork, empowerment, and life.

Lorraine Sullivan’s playful narratives and masterly assemblages have the power to make us think deeply about life, art, and psychology. Using old photographs, ephemera, antique machine parts, and a vast array of curiosities, Ms. Sullivan shapes memories into totems. These in turn become markers and celebrations of our shared human history.

Her artist’s statement explains her passion for collecting and connecting seemingly disparate oddities:

I love rust That blue-green color of an old toilet float Broken things Parts of things Lots of the same thing Things with numbers and parts of words Things used to bind other things together Things used to measure something Things by the side of the road and Things washed ashore I collect Sort Arrange And connect forms, surfaces and colors I set up small relationships and then Try to fit them into larger relationships There is no big plan It’s more like a puzzle I work several at the same time And when it’s “right” I’ll know it I rearrange Now this thing reminds me of . . .

It makes me think of something else This could be used to . . .

It looks as if it once worked But in some mysterious way I am making something new From objects of uncertain provenance Their purpose often a mystery And yet together they look so familiar It looks like it has been here all along I just never saw it before From another place Another time Something new

The Other Side Sucks

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Photographs by Ellen Harasimowicz

grotoniana

TWELFTH NIGHT Groton’s fall mainstage show, an offbeat production of Twelfth Night, made William Shakespeare’s classic hilarious, creative, modern, and musical.

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Top, from opposite page left: Malik Gaye ’18, Lily Cratsley ’19 and Josie Fulton ’18, Lily and Mikayla Murrin ’21, Julien Alam ’19, and Malik Bottom, from opposite left: Lily and Michael Senko ’18; Max Klein ’18 (who composed and played an original score); Alex Waxman ’18, Malik, Michael, Christian Carson ’18, and Jane Park ’21

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David E. Howe ’43, p’75, ’80, gp’14, Trustee 1972–96 July 6, 1925 – October 25, 2017

by William M. Polk ’58, Former Headmaster

P

T

HE CULTURAL critic Suzy Kassem once

wrote, “Teach all [people] to fish, but first teach all [people] to be fair. Take less, give more. Give more of yourself, take less from the world.”

This is a fitting description of David Howe ’43, who died at the age of ninety-two on October 25, 2017. His family, always his highest priority, knew so well that he believed that all people should learn how to fish, and they often accompanied him on fishing expeditions to remote parts of Quebec and Alaska. To know his devotion to fishing, one only had to look at his Tyrolean hat, bedecked with fishing flies, which was as much a part of his head as his hair, just as halfmoon glasses were as much a part of his face as his nose.

“To be fair” and “give more of yourself, take less from the world” were part of David’s genetic makeup. The list, impressively long, of nonprofit organizations to which David gave of himself attests to this: Groton School, the Dublin School, Fairfield Country Day School, the Apple Hill Music Institution, the Mayhew Program (formerly the Groton School Camp), the Dublin Lake Club, the New York Lighthouse for the Blind, the Sharon Arts Center, Yankee magazine, and St. James Episcopal Church in Keene, New Hampshire.

The list does not do justice to the quality of involvement and the time David devoted to these institutions. In addition to his wise counsel, often supported by charts of relevant data, he infused his participation with enthusiasm and optimism, which encouraged others to join the cause.

In his 1937 letter of recommendation of David to Groton, the headmaster of the Short Hills School wrote, “His honesty and common sense are outstanding. He has a well-balanced disposition, is capable of assuming responsibility, and [is] a very good sport.” David lived out that recommendation at Groton, Harvard, in the Army, in business, and in his personal life.

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I always admired David’s unhurried pace and the way he would engage with people. In taking time, he reminded us what time was for: he always had or made time for others. If he didn’t know someone in the room, he made it his business to get to know that person. For my children, Malinda and Gillian, David’s kindness stands out in many of their early Groton memories. He was, they report, interested in them as individuals and not as the headmaster’s daughters. Rita Lalli, assistant to the headmaster, writes: “What I remember most about David is that he was a genuinely nice person. Whenever he was on campus, he always took a moment to stop by my office to say hello. He was thoughtful and kind, and I can’t say enough about the great maple syrup!” And this from Tim Dumont, the director of Buildings and Grounds: “We were both on the Staff Benefits Committee. David never failed to greet me, and the committee, with a warm smile and a sincere, open approach.

He was a very good listener and by his words and actions showed a genuine care and concern for the staff. Whenever he was on campus, he always took time to say hi and chat.”

Gordon Gund ’57 remembers working alongside David on Groton’s Board of Trustees.

“I had the great privilege of presiding over the [board] for ten years during the early part of Bill Polk’s tenure as headmaster,” Gordon says. “One of the many true delights I had during those days was working with board member David Howe, who was president of the school’s Alumni Association and became chairman of the board’s Executive Committee. David joined Headmaster Polk and me to work as a team to ensure a balanced relationship between the board and the school administration that was focused on a mutually agreed-upon vision for the school with the headmaster as its leader.

“Those were wonderful days and wonderful deliberations, to which David brought terrific organization, insight, strategic and financial discipline, and a great sense of humor. I really enjoyed time with David off the Circle as

Two stories illustrate David’s resourcefulness, calm under pressure, humor, and ability to hit the mark and rally people to his side.

Story one, told by David’s son, David Jr. ’75: “Dad was a big fan of the New York Rangers and also fatherson activities; I was eleven and a big fan of my dad. So it was that on a Saturday morning we drove to Madison Square Garden, parked, and walked in a long line of ticket holders toward the Garden. The weather was warm and the previous night’s snowfall was melting rapidly. As we trod carefully in the footprints of those ahead of us on the sidewalk, a car rounded 34th Street and approached the pedestrians doing eighteen knots in the slush. This created a sternum-high bow wave that spared none of us and left all of us cursing the departing vehicle. Except for dad. Who instinctively reached down, formed a tight snowball, and hurled it at our retreating assailants. His snowball caught the top of the half-open driver’s window, fragged, and sprayed the inhabitants of the car. Which was cool. Until the car lurched to a stop and four angry young men began marching purposefully through the ankle-deep slush toward my dad. Which was not cool. But dad held his ground. And I saw that the other pedestrians began to cluster around my dad as the men came closer. With half the distance closed, the men thought better of their plan and turned tail while dad’s new fans burst into applause.”

Story two, which David enjoyed telling about his experience as a counselor in the early 1940s at the Groton School Camp (now the Mayhew Program), as reported by Jim Nute, Mayhew executive director: “As Dave was walking with one of the campers—let’s call him John—from the lodge to the ball field for a softball game, John turned to Dave and growled, ‘I don’t like you.’ Typical Dave—even teenage Dave—he didn’t let this ruffle him, and he responded with a lighthearted, ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that, John.’ John then growled back, ‘No, I mean, I really don’t like you. I want to knock you out.’ Now, while Dave was a few

years older than John, he was also about six inches shorter and several pounds lighter. There was definitely some inner ruffling going on at this point, but he volleyed back, ‘I guess we ought to head back to the lodge then, John, so we can put on the boxing gloves and settle this.’ Dave then turned his back and John followed right along with a noticeable zip in his step. A few moments later, Dave took another turn: ‘You know, John, I probably ought to let you in on something before we put on those gloves.

You need to know that I’m the current Golden Gloves champion for the state of Rhode Island.’ John pondered this for a few moments as they continued walking and then he turned to Dave with a new idea: ‘Hey, let’s go play some softball.’”

Groton School honored David for his accomplishments with the Distinguished Grotonian Award in 1993, at his fiftieth reunion. David received a citation from Jacques Poillon ’43, then president of the Alumni Association, which read in part: “David Howe’s loyalty, support, and dedication to this wonderful institution is hard to top.

In years past, he has served as a form agent. In 1965 he became treasurer, and in 1972 president and treasurer, of the Alumni Association and served in that capacity until 1980; during and since that time, he has been a trustee of Groton, and I must say not just a trustee but a leader within that prestigious board. Perhaps not the president of the board, but one whom the president depended on to present analysis of important issues to the trustees and to be a key player in the budget process. His service and support to this school, in a word, has been prodigious.”

In my mind, David gave more than he took because at his very core he was animated by service; and in the best of times and the worst of times, this commitment spurred him to action and attracted others to follow his lead.

When I heard that David had died of old age, I was reminded of a passage from Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. It is announced that the Archbishop has died of pneumonia, but his doctor says, “The Archbishop did not die of pneumonia; he died of having lived.” So it is with David. He did not die of old age; he died of having lived.

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in memoriam

well, with his wife B, the queen of Whippoorwill Farm in Marlborough, New Hampshire, where he was king and where, under his watchful eye and diligent hand, extraordinary maple syrup was produced. We also shared many glorious fly-fishing trips to Canada and Alaska. He was a wonderful Yankee who always tried to get full value out of his fishing gear, occasionally pushing it beyond its limits.”

Charles P. Rimmer ’44, p’79, ’81, gp’18 in memoriam

July 11, 1926 – May 30, 2017

by Jonathan Choate ’60, p’85, ’88, ’88

P

W

HEN I SAT down to write about Charlie Rimmer and his career, both at Groton and at Pingree, the first thing that came to my mind was that, in 1966, Charlie hired me to teach math despite my having flunked Second Form algebra. Because of his patient mentoring, I developed the confidence to do all that I have done mathematically over the past thirty-five years.

Charlie first came to Groton as a First Former in 1938.

In 1950, after four years at Harvard and two years in the Army serving with the U.S. occupation forces in Germany, he returned to Groton to teach French and to run a dormitory. Being multitalented, Charlie switched from teaching French to teaching mathematics after one year; he headed the Mathematics Department for his last ten years at Groton.

Charlie gave so much to Groton. He loved the order and precision of high school math and eagerly passed that love on to his pupils. Patient and always willing to help, he was at his best working with those who found mathematics a challenge.

“Mr. Rimmer was kind and gentle with an underprepared Southern First Former in 1960,” remembered Joesph B. Cheshire ’66. “The effect that had on my life is incalculable and will never be forgotten or underappreciated.”

During the memorial service, Charlie’s son, David ’79, described all that his father did and stood for—including his dedication to struggling students. David explained that Groton School’s motto, cui servire est regnare, often translated as “for whom service is perfect freedom,” originally related to faith-based service. “This motto,” said David, “later became more widely accepted to connote service to faith and community, both locally and globally. Dad took this motto to heart and always gave of himself, whether through his faith, his commitment to his community, his country, or—more than anything—to other people. His four-decade career as a math teacher and headmaster were really in service to young adults—helping them navigate the twists and turns of adolescence—especially those students who didn’t quite grasp the Pythagorean theorem or isosceles triangle. He dug the deepest for the students who needed 56

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Winter 2018

the most help. That was classic Dad.” Charlie also loved coaching crew, which he did for most of his Groton career, and he loved working in the shop.

Many of his woodworking projects remain in the family. He was always willing to do the extra things that make prep schools work, like playing the trombone in Groton’s marching band.

Edward Robbins ’58 pointed to another example of Charlie’s willingness to do something extra. “The twelve First Form members of the Form of 1958 [thus in fall of 1952] all received a copy of the 1944 yearbook from an anonymous source,” he remembered. The mysterious sender, he surmised, was Charlie. “Perhaps the game was to highlight his engagement to Clare … It certainly highlighted [Charlie] for me, and I went on to enjoy his geometry class in later years.” Charlie had married Clare Curtis in 1953 and she, along with Junie O’Brien’s wife, Muffin, set the standard for how faculty wives could serve the school.

Over the years, Charlie received several offers to become a head of school, but he had turned them all down until Pingree finally lured him away in 1974. On its website, Pingree School paid tribute to its second headmaster, saying: “He stewarded the school through coeducation, the building of the Weld Gym, and the expansion of the athletics program. The consummate school person, Charlie was as comfortable in a math class as he was in a board meeting.”

Charlie retired from Pingree in 1984. Retirement gave him the time to spend with his four children, David, Chris, Andrew, and Mollie ’81, and eventually with his ten grandchildren. It also gave him the chance to pursue his many interests, which included hunting, sailing, and gardening— but hobbies never took precedence over those grandchildren. Throughout Charlie’s life, the Episcopal Church also played an important role, and he served as warden for many years at St. Ann’s Church in Kennebunkport, Maine.

I know I speak for many of us who had the good fortune to have Charlie as a teacher, as a coach, as an advisor, or just as a good friend: he helped make the Groton experience one that we will never forget.

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.

Christopher Temerson

Headmaster Temba and Mrs. Vuyelwa Maqubela celebrate Groton’s 133rd birthday with Mrs. Maqubela’s advisory group.

Give2Groton Soars FOR THE FIRST TIME, Groton hosted a community day of giving, known as Give2Groton, in conjunction with the school birthday, celebrated on October 17. The effort, supported by alumni, parents, faculty, staff, and friends, was a runaway success.

The one-day goal of 380 gifts, one for each Groton student, was surpassed mid-morning. Donations poured in from everywhere, with supporters giving from across the country and around the world. By the time Give2Groton ended, the donors—trustees, alumni, parents, grandparents, faculty, staff, and friends—had given 940 gifts and $694,708, and inspired excitement throughout the community.

As gifts were tallied, activities built enthusiasm on campus. During the morning conference period, students competed for their dorms to “pin the candle” on the birthday cake, walking blindfolded amidst cheers and blaring music. At lunchtime, students gathered to write notes of thanks to those who were making donations. The usual Groton birthday dinner moved to a more festive setting in the gym, where Fifth Formers belted out a raucous rendition of “Blue Bottles,” led by Preston Bannard ’01.

Thank you to all who participated and made the day such a success!

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78

%

73% 66

67%

%

2022

2021

2020

TOP ALUMNI FORMS

2019

29

2006

64%

PARENT PARTICIPATION

BY FORM

2018

31

2016

1995

19

1999

19

2008

18

1981

17

2001

16

2015

16

2014

16

2004

16

NUMBER OF DONORS

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The Quarterly • Winter 2018 Lander Burr ’00, Tracy, and their children, Rumi and Sabine

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Groton School • The Quarterly

Groton School

FOLLOW GROTON:

Winter 2018 • Volume LXXIX , No. 1

UNTIL THE latter half of the twentieth century, each dorm lavatory had a long soapstone sink with a shelf above. On a hook from that shelf hung tin wash basins.

When the boys wanted to wash their faces, they would take down the tin basin and fill it with water.

GOODBYE CITY LIFE

Farmers, Ranchers & Vintners Living Off the Land