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ALUMNI IN THE NEWS
Like Father, Like Son—Eventually Bill Clough ’86 Last September Bill Clough ’ was named Head of the Nichols School. Heads of School run in the family, but the younger Bill got around to that only after washing a few windows. Bill Clough’s mother Ki once told him while he was young that he would make a great teacher. “So by the time I got to Colby College,” Bill says, “the only thing I knew for certain about my career plans was that I did not want to be a teacher.” The problem wasn’t with the job itself. It had more to do with being young and finding out who he was—and having that process complicated by the circumstance of sharing his name with a father who had built, let’s say, quite a name for himself as a teacher. Young Bill Clough was a “faculty brat,” the son of Bill Clough ’, who taught and held administrative positions at Holderness for two decades—from to , with one year three-year hiatus in between—before leaving Holderness to become the long-time Head of Gould Academy. Of course for much of young Bill’s time here, education was beside the point. “I thought Holderness was just a big playground that had been built for me and my friends,” Bill says. “It had a hockey rink, a basketball court, trees to climb—I was generally oblivious to the fact that it was a school. As I got older, I began to understand that I was growing up in an extended family of teachers, and I just can’t imagine a better place to grow up.” Bill did his best, though, to not just grow up, but to grow away into what he describes now as “that other life.” He met a girl while he was studying history at Colby—Nannie, now his wife—who traveled the country with him in an old Toyota after graduation. Once they reached the Pacific Northwest, they set up a windowwashing business—work-force of two, with a ladder and some squeegees and soap. The best thing about that enterprise was its portability,
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and it went with Bill and Nannie as they wandered from Portland to Seattle to Boulder. They liked the Rockies well enough for Bill to take a “real job,” he says, in with the Colorado Rockies, the Major League Baseball club then in its first year of operation. Bill was in marketing and sales, trying to persuade local businesses, for example, to buy blocks of seats. “I drove into the office before light, drove home after dark, and I found that I lacked the patience to sit at a desk all day,” he says. By then he was thinking that Mom might have been right. He remembered all the things his father had done at Holderness besides sit at a desk. He remembered the satisfaction his father had taken in working with kids, and also with like-minded adults, in being part of an independent school’s extended family. So he and Nannie came back East for a teaching job at the Kents Hill School, and then at Tabor Academy. He earned Master’s degrees from Harvard (in education) and the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury. In Bill joined the Berkshire School as the Dean of Faculty and a year later became the Assistant Head of School. During that time, Berkshire experienced what has been described as a renaissance in its fortunes: three fully-funded building projects, a doubling of the school’s endowment, a growth in application numbers by percent, an increase in annual parent giving by percent, an increase in annual giving to over . million, and the assembly of a highly regarded faculty and administrative team. “Well, the truth is that any success we have had at Berkshire has been because of the efforts of so many great people,” Bill says. “It’s been a team effort all the way, and most important, it’s been a great deal of fun.” And it’s that sort of fun that helped him to become—like that other Bill Clough—a Head of School. In September the Nichols School of Buffalo, New York, named Bill its twelfth Head beginning on July , . “Bill’s personal ease
Bill Clough.
combined with his thoughtful answers impressed each of the advisory groups,” says Jane Cox Hetrick, president of Nichols’ board of trustees. “In his initial letter to the committee Bill wrote, ‘Young people won’t risk anything worthwhile unless the adults in their lives model the way, so their teachers must be risk-takers themselves, committed to excellence, willing to try and even fail.’ This deep commitment to students and to teaching resonated with all who met Bill.” Founded in , Nichols is a co-ed day school with an enrollment of , and one not unlike where he grew up. “It has the same combination of high achievement on the one hand, and this real sense of humility, on the other hand, that you see at Holderness,” Bill says. At this point in his life, Bill Clough is no less grounded himself. He took some risks and gave that other life a good college try. He got into the Toyota, he wielded that squeegee, he jockeyed that desk. But his commitment to excellence led him back to his old playground, or some good facsimile of it, and an extended family big enough for two great teachers with the same name.
HOLDERNESS SCHOOL TODAY | WINTER 2013
Holderness School Winter 2013 Holderness School Today magazine. F