SUMMER 2019 THE NEWSLETTER
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The Roxbury Latin School publishes The Newsletter quarterly for alumni, current and former parents, and friends of the school.
Michael T. Pojman
the newsletter
©2019 Roxbury Latin
The Trustees of The
Thomas R. Guden ’96
Marcus C. Miller
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Erin E. Berg
Kerry P. Brennan
Suzanne Camarata Ball, Gretchen Ertl, John Gillooly, Mike Pojman, Adam Richins, Evan Scales, John Werner
Erin E. Berg
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The Roxbury Latin School 101 St. Theresa Avenue West Roxbury, MA 02132 617-325-4920 Grass farewell
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RL’s
30 Swim
The Newsletter SUMMER 2019 | VOLUME 92 | NUMBER 4 16Features
40 Reunion 2019 58 Great
Pete
4 RL News 12 Athletics News 38 Arts News 46 Class Notes 54 In DepartmentsMemoriam
34 Embrace
newest alumni gather for pictures outside Rousmaniere Hall following the school’s 374th Closing Exercises on June 8.
Photo by Suzanne Camarata
Excellence in a Global Context | Professor Krishna Palepu delivers Cum Laude Day address | With final exams in the rear view, Class II students explore different career paths Day and Valete Greatly | Professor Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. delivers Commencement Address Exercises the Discomfort | The Valedictory Remarks of Ethan Kee ’19 was the Murmur of the Mountain| Myette ’68 on the Events of 1968
24 Prize
32 Closing
Ball
20 RL@Work
Sometimes expert speakers came in the form of RL faculty and staff. When the course turned to the topic of the legal system, for example, Mrs. Berg, Mrs. Dromgoole, and Mr. Lieb shared their experiences and insights having performed jury duty. In a second RL panel, Mr. Diop, Mr. Roumally, and Elias Simeonov of Class I shared their own personal immigration stories and paths to citizenship. This particular presentation followed the perennial favorite “May Madness” competition,
which mirrors the U.S. Citizenship test. Matt Hoover and Tyler Duarte (top photo) placed as Runners Up, and Nicholas Martin and Bobby Zabin (bottom photo) were Champions of May Madness this year (though all boys were allowed to maintain their citizenship).
As a capstone of the course, each boy became a campaign spokesperson for a candidate in the 2020 presidential election, presenting on his candidate’s political platform for his peers. It is fitting that this Civics course relied on so many teachers— including, with final presentations, the students themselves. To rely on the collective efforts of many individuals is in itself a lesson on the American government and civic responsibility. //
For four concentrated weeks each spring, Class V students convene every F Block for a lesson in what it means to be a responsible, engaged, informed citizen of the United States. This Civics mini-course, conceived of by Headmaster Kerry Brennan, has been a hallmark of the Class V program since 2011. It provides students early in their RL tenure with a lesson on the inner workings of the United States government, their own civil rights and responsibilities, and the many forms service to country and commonwealth can take.
4 Summer 2019 rl news
A Focus on Civics Concludes the Class V Year
The course is team-taught by Kerry Brennan, Stewart Thomsen, and Chris Heaton. Throughout the month, they cover topics like the American election process, our branches of government, and immigration and naturalization. But more often, the three of them step back, handing the class over to an impressive collection of guest speakers who offer first-hand accounts of public service.
This year’s speaker series began with Captain Colin Murphy, Class of 2005, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2011 to 2015. Colin gave an overview of the structure of the U.S. Military; the extensive training that is required to join; the reality of active duty; and the many paths that veterans follow after service. Colin was followed by RL past parent and Boston City Councilor Mark Ciommo and his associate Daniel Polanco. They spoke with the boys about serving in the legislative branch at the city level. Finally, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gareth Cook (father of Aidan Cook ’20) walked the boys through an exercise designed to help them identify “fake news.”
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Dr. Steven Lockley Wraps Up Wellness Series With Sleep Health
Hari Narayanan (II)
Dr. Lockley shared with students and faculty theories for why we sleep, characteristics of our stages of sleep, and findings from a variety of studies on the ideal amount of sleep. Many biological and social factors affect sleep in adolescents, he explained, including a naturally evolving circadian rhythm, evening lights, school start times, and caffeine. But the impact of poor sleep can be quite harmful, causing poorer mental health, decreased academic and athletic performance, impaired immune systems, and increased risk of heart disease or diabetes. Studies even show that sleep deprivation is more harmful than starvation.
A lively Q&A after Dr. Lockley’s talk spurred conversations about sleepwalking and night terrors, polyphasic sleep cycles, and lucid dreaming. And the conversation did not end once Hall was over; boys, faculty, and staff discussed their own sleep habits for the rest of the day. //
Awarded Telluride Summer Scholarship
This summer, rising senior HARI NARAYANAN was awarded a full scholarship to attend the Telluride Association Summer Program (TASP) at Cornell University. Hari is one of 60 participants chosen from an applicant pool of 1,500 impressive high school juniors from across the globe. The six-week educational program, titled Negative Capability in Art and Culture: Romanticism to the Present , will explore notions of value and meaning in contemporary culture through college-level seminars. TASP courses prepare students for college work, with in-class discussion, heavy reading loads, and a number of written assignments over the six weeks. Prominent guest speakers also enrich the experience; in the past, TASP has welcomed a Nobel laureate physicist, a prominent poet, and a lawyer who worked at Guantanamo Bay to speak to their students. //
On April 11, Roxbury Latin welcomed DR. STEVEN LOCKLEY to present the final Hall in the school’s new series on Health and Wellness. Dr. Lockley is a neuroscientist in the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has studied circadian rhythms and sleep for 25 years and has published more than 150 original reports, reviews, chapters, and editorials. His book Sleep: A Very Short Introduction was published in 2012. He currently advises NASA on how to alleviate jet lag for astronauts.
Economics as a Force for Good: Iqbal Dhaliwal Delivers Wyner Lecture
fellow economist, Gita Gopinath, is chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. Their son, Rohil, just completed his Class III year at Roxbury Latin.
6 Summer 2019
The Wyner Lecture was established at Roxbury Latin in 1985 by Jerry Wyner, Class of 1943, and his sister, Elizabeth Wyner Mark, as a living memorial to their father, Rudolph Wyner, Class of 1912. Past speakers in the series include historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin; “Schindler’s list” Holocaust survivor Rena Finder; Billy Shore, founder of Share Our Strength and the No Kid Hungry campaign; and Mark Edwards, founder of Opportunity Nation. This spring Mr. Dhaliwal continued the tradition of shedding light on important social issues through the generous benefaction of the Wyner Lecture. //
What is poverty? With so many organizations aimed at combating poverty, how do you measure impact? These were the two critical questions posed to students on April 16 by this year’s Wyner Lecturer, IQBAL DHALIWAL—executive director of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). J-PAL is a global antipoverty center, founded in 2003 and based in the economics department of MIT.
To date, J-PAL has conducted nearly 1,000 evaluations in more than 80 countries—focused on agriculture, education, energy, gender, health, labor markets, governance. Programs evaluated by J-PAL have scaled to reach more than 400 million people. “It is a false choice that you must focus either on science or the humanities,” Mr. Dhaliwal concluded. “You can do so much good when you choose a career that engages both the head and the heart.” After his Hall presentation, Mr. Dhaliwal joined Erin Dromgoole’s senior elective Contemporary Global Issues to continue the conversation.
A career economist, Mr. Dhaliwal earned his degree from the University of Delhi; his master’s from the Delhi School of Economics; and a master of public affairs from Princeton. He serves as a board member of J-PAL and of two international NGOs—Noora Health and Evidence Action. His wife and
Mr. Dhaliwal began his Hall talk by stating what his presentation would and would not be about: “This economic approach is not about inflation, interest, production, or profit maximization. However, it is about supply, demand, cost, and human behavior. It is about doing something about poverty, and doing it now.” Mr. Dhaliwal shared troubling statistics about the number of people living in poverty around the world, and what their daily struggles entail—that 50% of the world lives on less than $2.50 a day, and that poverty is a vicious cycle that keeps people in a trap of deprivation when it comes to food, shelter, health care, and education. “So, what do we do? And better yet, how do we do it? How do we know what actually works? That’s where the work of J-PAL comes in.” Using economic strategies and research, randomized evaluation and counterfactuals, J-PAL can help to accurately assess—and then enhance—the efficacy of anti-poverty initiatives around the world.
Each year, pathologists from all over North America convene to share innovative research in the world of diagnostics at the Annual Meeting for the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology (USCAP). This year’s meeting took place in National Harbor, Maryland, in March. Practicing pathologists, PhD candidates, and graduate students shared more than 3,000 abstracts and posters, representing some of the most cutting-edge research in the field.
MILAN ROSEN ’19 was the youngest individual to co-author one of these abstracts. His project, which he completed with two MIT PhD candidates, won an award from the Renal Pathology Society at the USCAP Meeting.
Milan, who also co-authored a paper on this topic, hopes to continue work with Lucas and Tadayuki on future nonlinear imaging projects and looks forward to studying biology or chemistry in college. //
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Milan Rosen ’19 Co-Authors AwardWinning Pathology Abstract
In the hopes of making tissue analysis more accurate and efficient, MIT PhD candidates Lucas Cahill and Tadayuki Yoshitake built a two-photon microscope, which uses a short pulse laser to examine tissue specimen from multiple subsurface depths. Current diagnostic technology requires tissue sectioning—the slicing of blocks of tissue into thin sections—so that pathologists can examine the specimen with a traditional microscope. Nonlinear microscopy (NLM) with the two-photon microscope would allow pathologists to examine an entire block of tissue—called a paraffin block—at one time. This would eliminate the need for meticulous sectioning, making the process more efficient. Milan joined Lucas and Tadayuki to perform comparative data analysis using NLM and traditional tissue examination; his research has shown that NLM may facilitate more accurate quantitative analysis than traditional histology.
At a Model UN conference last year, ANDREW ZHANG, Class II, was placed on the World Health Organization Council to discuss possible solutions to antimicrobial resistance (AMR), or the ability of bacteria to resist antibiotics. A global health crisis, AMR kills millions of people each year. As he learned how dangerous AMR was, Andrew became interested in the possibility of using big data to solve the problem. He approached Dr. Gil Alterovitz from Harvard Medical School about the idea. Dr. Alterovitz serves as Andrew’s advisor for PRIMES, MIT’s after-school research program for high school students. Dr. Alterovitz was enthusiastic about the idea, and so Andrew began an ambitious project which, on May 4, won a first place award at the Massachusetts Science and Engineering Fair (MSEF) at MIT. MSEF is one of the nation’s premier STEM education and competition programs; more than 300 students participated.
Andrew Zhang (II) Wins State Science Fair at MIT
Andrew’s project, titled “Antimicrobial Resistance Prediction Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks” used deep learning, a frontier in artificial intelligence, and whole genome sequence data to create a framework to predict AMR reliably and quickly. Current prediction methods, which involve growing bacteria in a lab, are very slow. Andrew’s model is able to predict AMR in less than a second with 98 percent accuracy. Andrew is continuing to refine his model, testing with more antibiotic and bacteria pairs, and submitting his research for publication in a scientific journal. //
MILIT RANJITH and BOGOSI MABAILA love soccer. At home, in Botswana’s capital city of Gaborone, they play on the Maru-a-Pula School team and they can often be found on the weekends with a soccer ball at the ready for spontaneous games with Uponfriends.theirarrival
in their new gloves on the baseball diamond, Milit and Bogosi shadowed Ian Balaguera and Liam O’Connor through the typical schedule of a Class II boy. Milit particularly loved math class, where Mr. Bettendorf gave him calculus problems, as well as Spanish with Dr. Guerra. “Dr. Guerra lets me read a book called 1776 in Spanish,” Milit said. “The book is really interesting because it is about the history of Boston.” Milit and Bogosi were also assigned a coding project with Mr. Poles in Computer Science. In the evenings and on weekends, the school and the boys’ hosts ensured that Milit and Bogosi saw
For Ian and Liam, this exchange has shed a new light on their school and hometown. “It was a really good experience for me… introducing Bogosi to teachers and realizing how close-knit the community is here,” said Liam. “To see Boston as a tourist has also been interesting.” Ian has most appreciated the ease with which he and Milit have connected. “The fact that we can relate on more overarching things about being a teenager is just nice,” he said. Both RL boys recently returned from their one month stay in Botswana—a highlight of which included being guests of the First Lady of Botswana, Mrs. Neo Masisi, for afternoon tea.
Before Milit and Bogosi departed on May 3, Coach Quirk made sure they got some playing time in a JV game. And who knows, maybe next time they’re on the sidelines of their own soccer games they’ll have one earbud in, listening to the Red Sox game more than 7,000 miles away. //
to RL for what would be a nearly month-long exchange, Milit and Bogosi joined the JV baseball team. Neither had played the sport before. Outfitted with gloves from the RL Yard Sale and eased into batting practice by Coach Quirk on Whittemore Diamond, they began to appreciate the rules and rituals of the game. They even made it to Fenway Park to watch the Sox take on the Tigers from box seats. It’s safe to say that by the end of their first week in the U.S., they had developed a deep appreciation for baseball. Admittedly the pair spent the JV game against Nobles sharing a pair of headphones in the dugout so as not to miss a European soccer match, but still, Bogosi will tell you, “baseball has kind of stolen my heart.”
RL Welcomes Maru-A-Pula Students In Long-Standing Exchange
as much as possible: Fenway Park, the MFA, the New England Aquarium, even a weekend in New York City with Mr. Sugg. But the boys are actually quicker to talk about smaller things like family dinners, trips to the movies, and a night of bowling as memorable experiences from their time here. “Apparently I’m really good at bowling!” said Bogosi.
The relationship between Roxbury Latin and the Maru-a-Pula School in Botswana dates back more than 30 years. Since the 1980s, RL students, faculty, and staff have raised thousands of dollars each year for Maru-a-Pula through the fall fundraiser and Maru-a-Pula Day in the spring. In 2007, Roxbury Latin sent the first pair of Class II boys to do a month-long exchange at Maru-a-Pula. This spring, RL returned the favor of offering a cultural exchange for Maru-a-Pula boys, and Milit and Bogosi were the first at bat, so to speak. They arrived on April 8 and moved in with their generous host families, the Balagueras and the WhenO’Connors.notbreaking
8 Summer 2019
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 9
Father John Connolly Delivers Holy Week Hall
After walking the boys through the liturgical history of Jesus and his disciples, and what they experienced in those days leading up to the Resurrection, Father Connolly tied together the relevance of those stories—from more than 2,000 years ago—to our lives in Boston, in 2019: “What we believe as Christians is that these stories are not consigned to the dustbin of history, but that what they represent is alive and active and real here in the 21st century, right where we are, and in all of our lives.” On the six year anniversary of the Boston Marathon attacks, Father Connolly likened the love of Jesus and his disciples to that exhibited in the wake of those attacks. “In the immediate aftermath of those explosions, we saw men and women, the Boston Police Department, the Boston Fire Department,
Boston's emergency medical services, and countless folks who had no professional training or responsibility, step forward and help those who were injured. They cleared a path, they did whatever they needed to do. Men and women bravely ran toward that place of attack, not knowing whether there was yet another device ready to explode. That’s love, my friends. It may be other things, like bravery and commitment and courage, but at the root of it, that’s love. And that’s a love that supersedes the most natural human instincts to preserve one’s self, that reflects the love of God, put into practice.”
Father Connolly is the administrator of RL’s neighboring parish, St. Theresa of Avila. Prior to his role at St. Theresa, Father Connolly was the administrator of West Roxbury’s St. John Chrysostom Church, where he served as the main celebrant at Mayor Tom Menino’s funeral, and where he won the hearts of countless parishioners with his warmth, friendliness, faithfulness, and commitment to his ministry. A Boston native and proud son of the City, Father Connolly was raised in Blessed Sacrament Parish in Jamaica Plain and is a graduate of Boston Latin School, Dartmouth College, and St. John’s Seminary. //
Central to Roxbury Latin’s mission and tradition is tending to the spiritual growth of its boys, and students hear throughout the year from a variety of speakers about topics of faith, religion, spirituality, and living with meaning. These speakers represent a variety of faith traditions, and on April 18 we welcomed FATHER JOHN CONNOLLY to talk with students about the history and meaning of Lent, Holy Week, and the celebration of Easter.
Chris Zhu (II) Wins Bronze in U.S. Physics Olympiad
Izzy’s passion for civic engagement has also fueled a serious commitment to his Jewish faith. This year, he completed the yearlong Himmelfarb Fellowship with the Tikvah Fund, which included two national conferences and 50 hours of learning on Jewish philosophy. He was the selected speaker this spring for the Jewish Teen Foundation of Greater Boston’s Teen Grant Maker program. On the leadership council there for three years, he has helped to develop grant processes that funded programs addressing domestic violence, opioid addiction, and child abuse.
10 Summer 2019
This spring, ISAIAH GOLDSMITH ’19 won first place in the state at the Sons of the American Revolution Oratory Contest. On July 7, he represented the Commonwealth of Massachusetts at the National Contest in Santa Ana, California. The topic of his essay is the long history of mistreatment of U.S. veterans throughout American history.
In January, Chris and his fellow Science Club members took the preliminary F=ma qualifying competition on campus. The F=ma competition is a 75-minute multiple-choice exam focusing primarily on the Mechanics side of physics. Qualifying as a semi-finalist in the F=ma, Chris advanced to the final USAPhO competition on April 2. The USAPhO is a three-hour, freeresponse, and calculus-based exam covering Mechanics, Electricity and Magnetism, Thermodynamics, Fluids, Relativity, Waves and Optics, and Nuclear Physics. F=ma and USAPhO form a series of two highly competitive physics competitions for high school students and serve as the basis for the selection of U.S. Physics Team members for the International Physics Olympiad (IPhO). More than 6,000 high school contestants across the country participated in the preliminary round this year. Chris scored in the top 150 in the nation to become a medalist. //
His hometown of Brookline has also recognized Izzy this year (and not for the first time) for his social impact. In large part because of his role on the planning team for the March for Our Lives Boston after the Parkland shooting, Izzy won the Brookline Community Service Award and was nominated for Brookline Youth of the Year this spring. Izzy’s significant contributions to his town, state, and faith are remarkable, particularly given his many commitments at RL. //
CHRIS ZHU, Class II, was awarded a Bronze Medal this spring in the 2019 U.S. Physics Olympiad (USAPhO), a national competition sponsored by the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Institute of Physics. Chris is one of four medalists from Massachusetts.
This is not Izzy’s first trip to the National Oratory Contest. Last year, he represented Massachusetts with an essay on the modern history of taxation without representation with a focus on the U.S. response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Izzy served this year as president of RL’s Model United Nations and is a longtime member of the Debate team. A young man dedicated to social activism, Izzy tended to deliver speeches covering topics of injustice and individual struggle.
Isaiah Goldsmith ’19 Competes in National Oratory Competition
Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby Speaks from a Conservative Perspective
Avi Attar (II) Competes in Public Speaking World Championships
These days Mr. Jacoby considers himself politically homeless. A staunchly conservative man who does not see his own ideals reflected in today’s Republican party, he lives in the in-betweens, he says. But he does not feel discouraged; political parties change over time, he told the boys, and our job as citizens is not to remain loyal to any one “team” over another. It is instead to uphold the values we feel are most important. In Hall, Mr. Jacoby shared three of these values— what he considers the three pillars of conservatism: Humans are not inherently good. Results matter more than intentions. Government does not know best.
Though Mr. Jacoby does not feel the current leadership of the Republican party is aligned with his idea of conservatism, he ended Hall on a message of hope. He recalled the Republican Party under President Ronald Reagan, and noted that history has shown us that young people can rally around conservative values in a powerful way. He hopes that the same can happen with young people today. //
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On May 10, JEFF JACOBY spoke with students and faculty as one of the year’s final Hall speakers. Mr. Jacoby has been an op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe for 25 years; he will tell you he is “the only identifiable conservative writer in a newspaper overwhelmingly staffed by liberal journalists.” Before entering journalism, he briefly practiced law at the prominent firm of Baker & Hostetler, and worked on several political campaigns in Massachusetts. For years, Mr. Jacoby was a political commentator for WBUR, Boston’s National Public Radio affiliate, and hosted “Talk of New England,” a weekly television program. In 1999, he was the first recipient of the Breindel Prize for excellence in opinion journalism, and in 2004 he received the Thomas Paine Award of the Institute for Justice.
Rising senior and public speaking star AVI ATTAR traveled to Toronto in April to compete in the world championships in public speaking, after qualifying earlier in the year for this culminating international competition. In Toronto, Avi competed in Impromptu Speaking, After-Dinner Speaking, Parliamentary Debating, and Interpretive Reading. More than 125 competitors from Australia, Canada, South Africa, U.S., Hong Kong, U.K., Bermuda, South Korea, Lithuania, China, and Cyprus, competed at Worlds this year. Avi finished 37th overall at the competition, making it into the finals for Impromptu Speaking, having placed fifth in that event after the regular rounds. He also finished seventh in After-Dinner Speaking, narrowly missing the finals for that event. The competition took place at Branksome Hall and included addresses from keynote speakers George Elliott Clarke, Canada’s former poet laureate, and Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Member of Parliament for University-Rosedale. //
12 Summer 2019
Varsity Track and Field celebrates a season of team victories and individual champions.
RecordSetters
ecently concluding another successful season—with a 10-2 record, including late-season wins over league powerhouses Belmont Hill and Milton Academy— Roxbury Latin’s Track and Field team has much to celebrate. With individual winners at both the Independent School League and New England Championships, the team includes both seasoned and developing athletes who achieved personal and school records this year.
In Class IV, five boys set class records at the annual Hillside Jamboree on the same day the rest of the team was competing at the New England Championship. Those boys included ARMANDO WALTERS, who set a long jump record of 19’ 1.5”; and BEN KELLY, ALEJANDRO DENIS, SUNIL ROSEN, and RAMI HAYES-MESSINGER who set a class record of 49.5 seconds in the 4x100 meter relay. In Class III, BEN BRASHER set the sophomore triple jump record at 42’ 1.5”; and Class I pole vault star MILAN ROSEN set the senior record of 13’ 0” at this spring’s New England
REID CORLESS (II) set personal bests in all four of his events: triple jump (42’ 4.25” for 4th place); 110 meter hurdles (16.29 for 2nd place); 300 meter hurdles (42.88 for 5th place); and 4x400 relay (54.3 split for 5th place).
Championship meet. Milan is already the school record-holder at 13’ 3” and made a heroic late-season comeback from a back injury in order to win the ISL and New England Championship pole vault—his third consecutive event win at each meet.
RL’s 4x400m relay team ran the school’s fastest time in four years at 3:35.73; the relay team included NATE UKOHA (II), REID CORLESS (II), ERIK ZOU (I), and AIDAN BOWEN (I), securing a 5th place finish.
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At the New England Championship meet, the team had two individual champions—junior Ejiro Egodogbare (discus at 145’ 10”) and senior Milan Rosen (pole vault at 13’ 0”). QUINN DONOVAN (III) pulled the “distance double,” scoring in both the 1500 (3rd in 4:21) and 3000 meter (4th in 9:34). Senior COLIN MILLER heaved the javelin 153’ 0”—a 9-foot personal best and good for 6th all-time at Roxbury Latin, for which he secured 2nd place. //
“I tend to judge a team’s success not just by how many wins it has, but also by how it competes, how it handles adversity, and how it forms—how the players identify as a team,” says Coach Dave Cataruzolo. “This group represented their school and themselves with class at all times, and they left it all on the field. I will miss this group of seniors who gave so much to help create a culture of success and enjoyment for the game of baseball.”
This year’s varsity baseball team finished with an overall record of 14-3, earning a second place finish in the Independent School League. This effort included wins over tough competitors like Dexter, BB&N, Belmont Hill, and two-time defending champions St. Sebastian’s in the final game of the season.
Four members of the Class of 2019 plan to play baseball at the college level: They include WILL GREER (Bucknell), BEN ROUNDS (Harvard), JOHN FRATES (Harvard), and SEAN RUSSELL (Trinity). //
EJIRO EGODOGBARE (II) in the discus (153’ 1”, good for 2nd all-time at RL and 2nd place).
BEN BRASHER (III) in the 110 meter hurdles (17.29 for 7th place) and triple jump (42’ 1.5” for 6th place)—a new personal record by over a foot, and a new sophomore record, ahead of the distance jumped by school-record-holder Aman Stuppard ’13 when he was a sophomore.
Second Place Finish for Varsity Baseball
In addition to Milan’s individual ISL Championship pole vault win, several other RL track and field athletes had tremendous success at the culminating league meet:
Significant personal bests were also set:
SAM MORRIS-KLIMENT (III) in the 200 meter (23.84 for 5th place).
AIDAN BOWEN (I) in the 800 meter (2:05.94, a new personal best by three seconds for 9th place).
14 Summer 2019
by MERE dith RE ynold S
The Varsity Tennis team reflects on its undefeated season and finishing as ISL and New England Champions.
“Win it All”
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Looking ahead to next year, Coach Diop knows that replacing co-captain Brendan Jimenez ’19—the sole graduating member of this year’s team—will be impossible. But with nine out of ten varsity players returning next year, the team is in a great position to achieve the annual goal: “To win it all.” And the school has excellent new talent to celebrate as well: The junior tennis team also had a successful season, taking home the team prize at their invitational middle school tournament at Fessenden School for the first time in school history. The future of RL tennis is bright! //
S
pring of 2019 was a great season for varsity tennis at Roxbury Latin. The squad, arguably the best in RL history, finished its season with a 15-0 record and two titles. In defeating final opponent St. Sebastian’s, RL claimed its seventh Independent School League title in nine years. Competing in 90 singles matches this year, RL lost only three, scoring an incredible 87 points over the course of the season. Guided by longtime Coach Ousmane Diop, the team also won the New England Class B Tournament, which gathers the best teams from Massachusetts and Connecticut. Though RL had reached the final rounds in this tournament in 2017 and 2018, this was the team’s first New England title win since 2013. “It’s always hard to come in as ‘the team to beat’ and then to deliver on that expectation,” says Coach Diop. “We had a lot of goals for ourselves from day one of this year, and I am so proud of the team’s ability to finish the way they did.”
While the varsity crew knew coming into the season that the ISL title would come down to a match between them and Groton, and though they were the number one seed in the New England tournament, Coach Diop is quick to point out that these two big wins were not easy. “This year’s team worked really hard during the off-season,” he says. “We were prepared this year, and we wanted it badly.” The secret to their success, he believes, is a pervasive team spirit and sense of family. “We are so supportive of each other,” he says. “It was never about an individual kid. Our players would always say, ‘Coach Diop, if you think it’s best for the team, I will do anything.’”
Professor Krishna Palepu of Harvard Business School delivers the Cum Laude Day address
16 Summer 2019
“Pursuit of excellence in a globalized context”
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morning to all of you, and congratulations to the new inductees into the Cum Laude Society. You worked hard and aimed high, and today we are here to celebrate your accomplishments. Your families too deserve to be honored for all their support.
Congratulations also to all the seniors who will be celebrating their graduation shortly. To be a graduate of this wonderful school is a real honor. And I want to salute all the amazing students and teachers who are in attendance. Your dedication to excellence, humility, and service is remarkable. I am proud to be associated with this community as a parent.
I am honored and humbled to be the guest speaker on this wonderful occasion. While you may look at me as a Harvard professor, you may not realize how unlikely it is that someone like me is standing in front of you. I grew up in a little village in the southern coast of India. It had one street. It had no electricity. My school had three teachers for five grades. Since there was no power, I had to finish all my homework before sun down. I did not learn the English alphabet until I was 10. My schooling was nothing like yours.
Innovation is no longer the monopoly of the West, as it was during the previous century. At Harvard Business School, our students not only learn from innovations from Boston and the Silicon Valley, but also from social entrepreneurs like Dr. Devi Shetty, who developed innovative processes in India to perform high-quality heart surgeries at a fraction of the cost in the U.S. We take this idea so seriously that, to study innovations around the world, Harvard Business School established research centers in 10 different locations across the globe. Our faculty travel to do research and write about organizations around the world.
At Harvard College, for example, the incoming undergraduate students will be from nearly 80 different countries. At the Harvard Business School, where I teach, 40 percent of the faculty were born outside the United States. You are likely to find similar demographics in almost all the leading universities Globalization,today.atopic
However, an equally important driver of my journey is the commitment to learning and passion for excellence that my parents instilled in me. My father was a teacher who dedicated his life to helping his students see the power of education. I grew up in a culture where academic excellence was encouraged and celebrated. I was also the beneficiary of merit-based admissions processes and financial aid all the way to graduate school.
that I study as a scholar, has been generally a force for good in recent times. Over the past 40 years, as many countries, including China and India, opened up to global commerce, close to a billion people have been lifted out of poverty. Hundreds of millions attained middle-class living standards for the first time.
“I am a fortunate product of a world that recognizes that academic excellence has no particular geographic origin, and that talent should be sourced and nurtured globally.”
So, what brought me from my humble start in an Indian village to graduate school at MIT, to the faculty of Harvard University, and today to the Cum Laude Day induction here at RL? There is no doubt that I am lucky. Luck plays a critical role in all our lives.
And I am a fortunate product of a world that recognizes that academic excellence has no particular geographic origin, and that talent should be sourced and nurtured globally.
As you graduate from RL, it is this globalized world that you will be entering. As the graduating seniors will find out this fall, American college campuses today are truly global communities.
Good
You are fortunate that the modern language department at RL, requiring you to become fluent in either French or Spanish, sets you up very well in this respect. The department’s webpage paraphrases the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, as follows:
I hope you will build on the foreign language foundation you developed at RL in college and beyond. Whatever
Globalization is also increasingly tying the fate of all the people in the world. It is impossible to study and address the greatest challenges of our day—climate change, terrorism, cross-border migration, just to name a few—in the context of a single nation. As a result, leading scholars in many fields are, by necessity, casting their work in the widest geographic frame possible. Climate scientists at Harvard, for example, are collaborating closely with their colleagues in China to study the impact of air pollution in Africa and South Asia.
To illustrate this, let me recount a New York Times story about a high school student from Mongolia, named Battushig Myanganbayar. As you may know, Mongolia is still primarily a nomadic society where a third of the population lives in tents. When MIT launched its free online education platform called EdX, 15-year-old Battushig enrolled himself in an MIT sophomore-level online course called Circuits and Electronics.
To be an effective global citizen, you must also embrace cultures other than your own. In today’s world, it is quite possible that you may end up working for an organization headquartered outside the U.S., or residing for a while in a country other than the U.S. Even if you spend your entire life in the U.S., you will certainly have friends and professional associates from many different countries. You may even choose to marry someone born in a different society from you. All these exciting possibilities await you—if only you are prepared to embrace them.
18 Summer 2019
There were 150,000 students from around the world who took this class. Battushig was one of the 340 students in the course to earn a perfect score. Battushig’s spectacular performance in the EdX course was noticed by the MIT admission officers who invited him to apply to MIT. He enrolled as a freshman at MIT in 2017. Prepare yourself to compete and collaborate with, and to learn from, people like Battushig. These young men and women will be your peers in college and beyond.
Embracing other cultures should be viewed as augmenting your current identity, not replacing it. This is often challenging for many. Some find it challenging because they are too proud of their own culture and identity. Some find it challenging because they are afraid to try new things. This is a common challenge faced by migrants, so I am deeply familiar with this fear.
However, embracing other cultures will give you an opportunity to examine which parts of your own culture are truly important to you, and therefore, strengthen your commitment to those values and practices. As a result, you not only learn and grow, but also develop a core set of values and beliefs that make you more authentic.
“To know another language is to have another soul, to develop another persona, and to come to understand more fully and appreciate the differences that exist among people and nations.”
Globalization increases our opportunities to make an impact on the world. Look at what Bill Gates has been able to accomplish in his life. He first founded a company whose software products have changed how people live all over the world. And more recently, through the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates is contributing in a very significant way to alleviating poverty and disease across the world. Or look at the impact of Malala Yusufzai, born in a small town in Pakistan. The courage she showed in the face of adversity inspired millions of people around the world, earning her the Nobel Peace Prize at the tender age of 17.
The first prerequisite to being a successful global citizen is that you redouble your commitment to excellence in whatever endeavor you pursue. Excellence has always been key to making an impact, but in a global world, the bar for excellence is going up. You are fortunate that the RL education emphasizes not only excellence, but also humility. While you are at an amazing school like RL, do remember that there are young men and women all around the world who are highly motivated and committed to achieving excellence.
To seize these global opportunities, however, you have to prepare yourself to be an effective global citizen. Luckily, there are a lot of things in your RL education that give you a head start. Your job is to build on this foundation.
Another important way you can become an effective global citizen is by consciously experiencing the challenge of being in a minority group. In a globalized world, you will be working in situations where the dominant paradigms that you grew up with may not be the accepted way to work or live. You will also be in situations where you will be required to show empathy for those who are in the minority. In my own professional and personal life, I have experienced both sides of this challenge many times—when I migrated from India to the U.S., and when I lived in Shanghai and in Barcelona as a visiting professor.
field you choose to study in college, make sure you carve out some time to focus on mastering a foreign language, understanding the history of the world, and engaging in conversations about current global affairs.
As you go to college, be sure to build on these experiences. Hang out at least some times with people different from you— don’t fall prey to the all too common temptation of just seeking
Once again, your RL education lays a good foundation for dealing with this challenge. When you, who might be a math whiz, are required to play a sport that you are not good at, you are experiencing being in a minority. When you lived in France or Spain as part of the language immersion program, I am sure you had the experience of being in a minority.
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 19
In summary, redoubling your commitment to excellence, embracing other cultures, and seeking out minority experiences—these are the elements of becoming a successful global citizen. Fortunately, your RL education already gives you a head start in all three areas. It is important that you continue this journey as you go to college and beyond.
I hope you will embrace pursuit of excellence in a globalized context as enthusiastically as I have done. The rewards can be rich and exciting. As a scholar of globalization, I have had the privilege of traveling to over forty different countries, and making friends all over the world. In the process, I was able to become a better human being, a better teacher and scholar, and a better global citizen. And I have been able to get the opportunity to stand in front of you on this stage, and celebrate the excellence of the RL community. Best of luck to this year’s exceptional graduating class and to the Cum Laude inductees. We are all looking forward to seeing the great things you accomplish in the world in the years to come. Thank you. //
the company of people similar to you. And seek out experiences that place you in a minority, whether by pursing an activity that you are not good at but would love to learn, or by seeking internships and study abroad opportunities that take you away from your comfort zone.
Keynote speaker Dr. Krishna Palepu and inductees Lucas Zheng, Gil Rosenthal, Rohan Sheth, Erik Zou, Kalyan Palepu, Ethan Kee, Dominic Gaziano, Ben Morris, Milan Rosen, and Makoto Kobayashi
20 Summer 2019 RL @ Work Hold a Gallbladder? Build a Bike? Compete a la Shark Tank? Take a Trip to Mars? It’s All Possible Through RL@Work. by MERE dith RE ynold S
This year, Class II traveled all over Greater Boston to explore professions in health, entrepreneurship, engineering, law, finance, and more. Students observed an open-heart surgery, held a human gallbladder, practiced intubation, and performed arthroscopic surgery on medical models. They built ten bikes to be donated to the organization Bikes Not Bombs. They learned the physics behind the ultrasound machine at MIT’s Beaver Works; operated a backhoe at Consigli Construction; and heard from a panel of lawyers and public servants at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office. At Fenway Park they learned about sports management and operations. At the Harvard Visualization Lab they donned 3D glasses in front of a state-ofthe-art immersive screen, which brought them to two planets, the original roof of the Notre-Dame cathedral, and the back of a Mason
InnovativeBee.technology,
It was not a typical week at work for me; nor was it a typical week at school for RL juniors. Just after their final exams, Class II spent four days exploring different career paths with RL@ Work. Led by Director of Studies and Strategic Initiatives Andy Chappell, RL@Work provides Class II boys with an offcampus experience of discovery and growth through visits to places of work, encounters with professionals, facilitated group exercises, and engagement in hands-on design challenges and case studies. Consistent with the school’s mission, the program helps boys imagine how they might “lead and serve” in the years ahead. RL@Work offers boys exposure to various professions and types of leadership, challenging real-world problems, and solutions in-the-making, preparing them for citizenship, service, work, and the world.
his week at work, I did the rounds at the NICU and dabbled in intellectual property law. I built a bike and operated a robot dog. I agonized over whether I should invest in GrubHub or AllTrails. I went to Fenway Park and the moon (though the latter only virtually).
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 21
human organs, and tours of Fenway Park are exciting and cool, to be sure. But as I went through my first RL@Work experience, I found the most valuable piece outside of “wow” moments in operating rooms and cuttingedge visualization labs. For boys about to enter their last year of high school, the future is for the first time nebulous and
22 Summer 2019
completely open. So many options exist, and this can feel overwhelming, even paralyzing. RL@Work made it exciting, tangible, and empowering instead. I could see the wheels start to turn and things start to click into place for so many juniors. “I could do that with an engineering degree?” “He majored in what?” “I never thought I’d like that kind of job, but wow!” These were phrases I heard over and over again this week. What an energizing way to end the year. We also know that RL@ Work launches a culminating “season” for our boys, leading to jobs and internships over the summer and ideas for ISP pursuits during senior year.
The sheer manpower that RL@Work requires deserves to be acknowledged. To witness so many men and women with fast-paced, all-consuming jobs take whole hours out of their schedules to talk to a small group of high school juniors about what they do and why was remarkable and humbling. At one point in our morning, at Brigham and Women’s Neonatology unit, Dr. Annette Scheid had to sprint away from our group to respond to an emergency page for a preemie on the NICU floor. She came back afterward and spoke to the boys about how her work can turn on a dime. Chris Mitchell ’89 and three of his associates at Spectrum Equity created an entire Shark Tank-inspired private equity game for the RL boys. At the end of that visit, I had to drag our boys out of the room so we wouldn’t miss the train home; Chris would have stayed there with them until they had run out of questions. John Werner at Cogo Labs brought in countless impressive professionals to speak with us, including a future Olympic track star and a retired army sniper. Jonathan Richardson, who works at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, commuted to Cambridge instead of Lexington for the day because RL boys didn’t have the security clearance to come to him. What a privilege it was to spend my work week this way; I know the Class II boys felt the same. //
If you would like to discuss being part of the RL@Work program in the future, please contact Andy Chappell at andrew.chappell@roxburylatin.org.
• Matt Engler ’94, Wells Fargo
• Nathaniel Weinstein ’10, Boston Dynamics
• Dave Friedman P’21, ’25 and Mike Regan ’04, Red Sox Foundation
• Rus Gant, Harvard Visualization Lab
• Scott Streckenbach P’19, ’22, ’24, Cardiology, Mass General Hospital
• Paul Evans ’03 and Bob O’Connor ’85, DLA Piper
• John Werner P’21, Cogo Labs
• Sandro Santagata P’24, Pathology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
• Vickie Henry P ’22, Associate Justice, Massachusetts Appeals Court
• Matt Consigli P’24, Consigli Construction
• Tyhesha Harrington, P’20, ’21, State Street Global Advisors
• Tim Silva ’88, P’17, ’22, ’24 and Arjun Jaikumar ’01, WilmerHale
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 23
• Gavin Murphy ’98, Annkissam
Thank you to the more than 40 men and women who generously shared their time, talents, and spaces to provide our boys with an insider’s view on so many possibilities and paths toward meaningful pursuits:
• Frank Kanin ’06, Gavin Pittore ’12, Rob Settana ’01, and Ed Zabin P’23, Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office
• Greg Schmergel ’86 and Rahul Sen, Nantero
• Julie Joyal and Britt Lee P’22, ’23, MEDscience Simulation Lab, Harvard Medical School
• Jonathan Richardson P’20, MIT Lincoln Lab
• Dave Giordano ’96, Giordano and Chavous
• Doug Drachman P’23, Cardiology, Mass General Hospital
• J.P. Chilazi ’06, Brendan Hanrahan ’09 and Robert Shaw ’14, Bain Capital
• Greg Noonan ’94, Hogan Lovells
• Andrew Eyre ’02, Stratus Center for Medical Simulation, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
• Mark Balthazard P’13, ’14, Assistant U.S. Attorney
• Michael Berk P’19, ’21, TA Associates
• Chris Mitchell ’89, Spectrum Equity
• Paul Weitzel ’86, P’16, ’18, ’20, ’22 Boston Sports and Shoulder Center, New England Baptist Hospital
• Dave Grossman ’97 and Jake Grossman ’00, Grossman Companies
• David Wilkinson P’21, ’23, ’25, Barrett Technologies
• Guy Green ’13, Peter Rosenberg P’05, ’09, and John Wang P’24, Ropes and Gray
• Annette Scheid P’23, ’25 Neonatology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Andrew Zhang (Dartmouth Book Award), Jonathan Weiss (Brown Book Award), Collin Bergstrom (Holy Cross Book Award), Avi Attar (Harvard Book Prize)
Class I Athletics Prize Winners
Nate Lopes (Scholar-Athlete), Alvin Massenat (Sportsmanship), Kevin Demore (Sportsmanship), Will Greer (Best Athlete), Director of Athletics Tony Teixeira ’93, Liam Rimas (ISL)
24 Summer 2019
On June 5, the Class of 2019 took their front row seats in Hall for the last time as the First Class, and anticipated, along with the classes behind them, this year’s roster of prize-winners and their plaudits. As Headmaster Kerry Brennan began, “Our purpose for gathering today is to recognize discernible excellence in all areas of school life—academic and extracurricular. In singling out certain prize winners, we are intending to affirm the highest standards of schoolboy endeavor. We do this even though we know that others in your seats may be more deserving of congratulations for they have struggled mightily, come far, taken risks, and been honorable boys. To you goes the faculty’s admiration and congratulations.” Pictured below are the day’s major prize winners. (A complete listing of the 2019 prize winners is available on the RL website.) //
Prize Day
Class II Book Award Winners
Orlando Patterson
Mr. Patterson joined RL in the fall of 2017 from a successful run coaching and serving as an admission officer at Tabor Academy. He took hold of RL’s football program, incorporating a new philosophy and preparing our team to compete in the up-tempo ISL. This past fall we gave teams runs for their money and earned the notice of schools throughout the league, with a .500 season. A well-prepared and thoughtful coach, Mr. Patterson ensured that we were ready for the challenges we faced and valued the contributions of every single player. Mr. Patterson also directed our summer programs, working to establish those programs in the broader universe of Boston’s numerous summer offerings.
Mr. Snider joined RL in 2016, fresh from an undergraduate career at Penn and a program that had him teaching in a Philadelphia public school as he also earned his master’s. A memorable teacher of English, Mr. Snider brings a quirky passion to his classes, eager to empower students to make important discoveries about themselves through the literature. Mr. Snider has been a patient, helpful advisor. A star schoolboy wrestler himself, Mr. Snider offered valuable perspective to the program as the head junior wrestling coach. At this year’s RL Arts Night, the community enjoyed hearing from students and adults reading their works of prose and poetry, to which Mr. Snider was an impressive contributor. Next year, Mr. Snider will commit himself full-time to earning an MFA in creative writing.
Valete
Mr. Kingsley came back to Roxbury Latin in 2016, after completing a distinguished undergraduate career
Dr. Kate Stearns
Dr. Stearns came to Roxbury Latin in 2014 after a full career spent teaching at the college and secondary school levels. RL had enjoyed the irrepressible company of her two sons—Nate ’04 and Sam ’07—and we were delighted when Dr. Stearns then joined the English faculty in a part-time capacity and to serve as our first writer-in-residence. For these past five years, Dr. Stearns has taught a senior elective in writing; advised colleagues on how to bring more writing into their classes;
Cary Snider
at Dartmouth. In that first year he taught sixie English and shadowed Mr. Cervas. Given Mr. Kingsley’s stellar contributions to various areas of school life when he was a student here, it seemed natural that he would make an impact in different ways: as a coach of soccer and basketball; as the founder and operator of the Film Club; as one of our talented crossword builders; as an effective coach of standardized test takers; as an admission officer; and as an advocate for all kinds of boys. Mr. Kingsley’s focused, energetic manner informs a teaching style that is risk-taking and effective. As a result of his training here, and as an inaugural RL/Penn Fellow, Mr. Kingsley is well prepared to take on his next assignment as a teacher at the Riverdale Country School in New York City.
Kyle Layne-Allen ’09
Prize Day is also the moment that the students, faculty, and staff recognize those adult members of the community who are leaving us. This spring, we bid farewell to nine members of the faculty and staff—four of them as retirees. The Headmaster offered these tributes:
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 25
Andrew Kingsley ’12
After an impressive schoolboy career at RL, Mr. Layne-Allen went on to Colby College, from which he graduated with a degree in Classics. He returned home in 2015 to serve as RL’s development and alumni affairs associate. Mr. LayneAllen helped establish new, more meaningful connections to younger alumni as they forged links to each other and back to the school. After two years of that work, he began studies as one of the inaugural RL/Penn Fellows. During his fellowship, Mr. Layne-Allen taught three different sections of Latin. He has also coached varsity football, j.v. basketball, and j.v. lacrosse. Mr. Layne-Allen is a man of deep conviction, creativity, and energy. He has served Alma Mater well in his various capacities and leaves us to take on a teaching/ coaching/counseling position at Worcester Academy.
Peter Shea
For the past nine years, in her role as Assistant Director of Admission, Ms. Schuyler has often been the face of RL—in her warmth and energetic personality suggesting to newcomers the integrity and welcoming spirit for which we are known. Ms. Schuyler first came to know RL thanks to the odyssey of her own son, Nick Hrenchuk ’10. This experience as a parent gave her remarkable empathy for what others are going through and the capacity to reassure and assist. Ms. Schuyler has worked so effectively alongside three admission directors—first Mr. Guden, then Mr. Chappell, and, most recently, along with Mr. Quirk—in order to help determine for what boys RL would be a good fit. She is well-informed, hard working, and charming, and families who come to us are immediately impressed by how she represents our mission and values. She has been an understanding, reliable colleague to the rest of us involved in the admission process, and she has earned her retirement.
Dr. Phil Kokotailo
Anyone who has been lucky enough to be in Dr. Kokotailo’s English class knows what a master teacher he is. His inspiration as a teacher comes from his keen sense of the world and his passion for untangling tough subjects. As a teacher, Dr. Kokotailo assesses the skills and motivations of each student fashioning in his own mind an ambitious program for each boy’s progress. He loves what he does, and it shows. Taking on the twin leadership duties of chair of the English department and as the first Deane Family Dean of Faculty, Dr. Kokotailo has wedded his fine mind and teacherly instinct to leadership responsibilities that have allowed him to help shape the English Department—what’s read at each level and who will teach what—as well as issues of pedagogy and the trajectory of the curriculum. As Dean, he has imagined and realized countless programs for the betterment of the faculty as a whole and, also, attended to the specific professional and personal needs of individual faculty members. He has good judgment and an avid work ethic. He has been an effective, attentive advisor. That our boys since Dr. Kokotailo’s arrival in 2007 speak better is a result of the public speaking program he has designed and the care he has taken to ensure that student speakers do their very best on the podium. Dr. Kokotailo is a man of unassailable integrity, impeccable judgment, loyalty, sensitivity, with an outsized capacity for friendship. As we bid him farewell in his retirement, we also thank him for twelve years of peerless work on behalf of RL boys and our distinctive mission. //
counseled burgeoning student writers about opportunities for greater training and publishing; attracted guest writers and poets to the school to edify and entertain us; and to work specifically with the creative writing class. She has founded and organized a Creative Arts Night in which plenty of our boys and a handful of faculty and staff have presented their works. Dr. Stearns is a celebrated poet, and in addition to being an inspiring teacher, she is a clever, kind, resourceful, generous fellow traveler eager to help where she can; to affirm those who deserve it and need it; and to challenge (ever so gently) the wooly headed notions of many of us.
Lindsay Schuyler
Matt Dinger
Mr. Dinger first came to us in 2012 and took the place by storm. After three years, his wanderlust overcame him and off he went to the U.K. Thankfully this year, when we needed him desperately, Mr. Dinger agreed to return to RL to teach math and science, and to coach varsity wrestling and sixie baseball. He is a remarkable teacher, a savvy coach, and a caring advisor. We have benefited greatly from his good will and brilliance. Now he heads off to Harvard Law School to push himself in a new direction. Undoubtedly, Mr. Dinger will be a highly effective lawyer reflecting always the social justice issues about which he cares so fervently.
26 Summer 2019
When Mr. Shea arrived at RL in 2012, he had already done a career’s worth of work. For many years, Mr. Shea served Amherst College as its Treasurer. Soon after his joining RL, the school would embark on the largest construction project in its history—raising and spending millions of dollars; devising financing schemes; dealing with neighbor relations and city bureaucracy; and anticipating a series of improvements that would change our collective lives. Mr. Shea helped guide us through that process in a wise, confident manner, and we are all the better for the improvements to our campus that resulted from that effort. RL’s financial model is distinctive and precarious; at every turn, in order to affirm our demographic, to ensure our need-blind admission and enrollment policy, we have to pay attention and behave responsibly. Mr. Shea has led us in those convictions. Working closely with the Board of Trustees, he has conscientiously operated our Bursar’s Office and ensured the health of our enterprise. Mr. Shea—a professional, friendly, funny, hard working colleague—has earned his retirement.
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 27
Photos: (top to bottom, left to right) Orlando Patterson, Cary Snider, Andrew Kingsley ’12, Kyle Layne-Allen ’09, Dr. Kate Stearns, Matt Dinger, Peter Shea, Lindsay Schuyler, Dr. Phil Kokotailo.
Diane Young-Spitzer
A member of the Class of 1988, and a member of the Board of Trustees since 2013, Bill served as chair of the Annual Fund for five years. With his financial acumen and enthusiasm, Bill led the Annual Fund to new records every year during his tenure. Bill served on the Development Committee and Resource Strategies Committee for the board. He was a founding member of the Alumni Leadership Giving Committee, has been a stalwart supporter of the Joseph Kerner and Jack Brennan professorships, and has served as Class Agent for many years. We have benefitted from Bill’s analytical skills and passion for preserving the availability of Roxbury Latin to all students, regardless of their financial ability. Although he is retiring from the board, we know that Bill will stay close to the school and continue to contribute his many talents for years to come.
28 Summer 2019
Front Row: Bryan Anderson ’88, Paul Spinale ’81, Chris Mitchell ’89, Jim Frates (Treaurer), Mike Giarla ’76 (Vice President), Bob O’Connor ’85 (President), Paul Massey ’78 (Chairman), Larry Lebowitz ’78, Ethan Berman (Assistant Treasurer), Bill Maffie ’88; Back Row: Jo Tango, Marlyn McGrath, Diane Young-Spitzer, Pamela Everhart, John Connaughton, Jim Hamilton ’91, Michael Berk, Kent Sahin ’91, Gene Lambert ’87, Roberto Goizueta, Ellen Berkman, Jack Englert ’77. (Missing from photo: Anne McNay (Secretary), Ian O’Keeffe ’86, Ron Sullivan.)
Diane has been a reliable and clear thinking member of the Board of Trustees since 2013. Mother of Garrett, Class of 2005, and Reid, Class of 2010, she has served on the Campus Planning and Operations Committee and chaired the important Conflicts Committee. Diane has also served as Secretary Pro Tem numerous times during her tenure. While her sons were in school, Diane served as a parent agent for the Annual Fund and has been a supporter of the Steven E. Ward Professorship. We are grateful to Diane for her love of the school and unwavering dedication of her time and talents. //
Bill Maffie
Trustees
the roxbury latin board of trustees 2018–2019
Liam Rimas - Connecticut College
Doevy Estimphile - Bowdoin College
Sean Russell - Trinity College
Enrique Sanchez - Harvard College Rohan Sheth - Harvard College
Elias Simeonov - St. Lawrence University
Matthew Fumarola - Belmont University
Ronald Sullivan - Harvard College*
Eric Zaks - Tufts University
National Merit 47 percent of the Class of 2019 received some level of recognition in the National Merit Scholar program, including five finalists and 20 Letters of Commendation.
Isaiah Goldsmith - Brown University
Lourenco Monteiro-Clewell - Seattle University
Tomas Gustafsson - University of Southern California*
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 29
Lucas Streckenbach - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Deven Varney - University of Pennsylvania
Raphael Deykin - Tulane University
Cameron Croce - Colby College
Makoto Kobayashi - Brown University Nathaniel Lopes - Brown University Aidan Lovett - Tufts University*
Charles Mazof - Dartmouth College
Alvin Massenat - Brown University
Class of 2019
Aidan Bowen - Roger Williams University
Gilbert Rosenthal - University of Chicago Benzan Rounds - Harvard College
Zion Mascall - Howard University
Class of 2019 Matriculation
Coleman Smith - College of the Holy Cross
William Greer - Bucknell University
Benjamin Morris - Dartmouth College
Brendan Jimenez - Skidmore College
Ethan Kee - Harvard College Cameron Keough - Tufts University*
Joshua Morris - Tufts University
Lucas Zheng - Yale University
Erik Zou - Eton College/Harvard College*
First row: Coleman Smith, Colin Miller, Ben Morris, Taalin RaoShah, Luke Streckenbach, Ben Rounds, Cameron Croce, Milan Rosen, Myles Davis, Aidan Lovett, Zion Mascall, Doevy Estimphile, Kyle Cloherty, Lo Monteiro-Clewell, Josh Morris, Elias Simeonov, Brendan Jimenez; Second row: Daniel McElroy, Aidan Bowen, Erik Zou, Rohan Sheth, Trey Sullivan, Cameron Keough, Brendan Gibbons, Nate Lopes, Sebastian Borgard, Alvin Massenat, David Meneses Ontiveros, Johnny Ryan, Izzy Goldsmith; Third row: John Frates, Eric Zaks, Lucas Zheng, Gil Rosenthal, Tomas Gustafsson, Adam Berk, Kalyan Palepu, Rafi Deykin, Jack Luca, Dominic Gaziano, Quito Sanchez, Ethan Kee; Back row: Will Greer, Sean Russell, Charlie Mazof, Makoto Kobayashi, Kevin Demore, Liam Rimas, Jackson Roberts, Deven Varney, Jared Brosnan, Matthew Fumarola, Brendan Lovett
Myles Davis - Trinity College
Adam Berk - Harvard College
John Frates - Harvard College
Dominic Gaziano - University of Notre Dame
*Indicates gap year Accurate as of June 30, 2019
Jackson Roberts - Tulane University
Jared Brosnan - Boston College
Brendan Lovett - Bates College
Colin Miller - Washington University in St. Louis
John Luca - Trinity College*
Sebastian Borgard - Howard University
Kevin Demore - Elon University
Kalyan Palepu - Harvard College
Taalin RaoShah - Duke University
Milan Rosen - Georgetown University
Kyle Cloherty - Syracuse University
John Ryan - Boston University
Brendan Gibbons - Georgetown University
Daniel McElroy - College of the Holy Cross David Meneses Ontiveros - Connecticut College
“Swim
30 Summer 2019
Harvard Law School Professor Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. delivers the Commencement Address Greatly”
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 31
• The William Coe Collar Award , for achievements and contributions to the school that are deemed by the faculty as most deserving of recognition, was presented to ETHAN KEE .
Class I Prize Winners Quito Sanchez, Rohan Sheth, Ethan Kee
The commencement address was delivered by Roxbury Latin trustee and parent Professor Ron Sullivan. Professor Sullivan is the Jesse Climenko Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard University. He is a leading theorist in the areas of criminal law and procedure, trial practice and techniques, legal ethics, and race theory. At Harvard, he serves as faculty director of both the Criminal Justice Institute and the Trial Advocacy Workshop. He is also the first African American appointed faculty dean in the college’s history. In his address to the graduation class (which includes his son Trey) he shared a little known anecdote about John F. Kennedy, who—as a swimmer at Harvard—was noted in the school’s records as a “swimmer without distinction”—in other words, “a good swimmer, but not a great one,” Professor Sullivan asserted. The speaker then went on to share a story of JFK as an active duty member of the Navy, when he saved the life of an injured, fellow naval sailor by clutching the man’s life vest strap in his teeth, towing him as JFK swam them both to safety for more than three miles. “So you see, JFK was perhaps not a great swimmer, but he swam greatly.” Professor Sullivan implored the members of the graduating class to do their own versions of “swimming greatly” in their lives— stepping up in the moments when they see a need, feel called to duty, and have the ability to do something great with the gifts they’ve been given.
• The Class of 1913 Award , for significant contributions to the life of the school, was presented to ROHAN SHETH .
• The Richard A. Berenberg Prize , for generosity of spirit and concern for others, was presented to QUITO SANCHEZ
Three major senior prizes were awarded during Closing Exercises:
32 Summer 2019
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 33
34 Summer 2019
Ethan Kee ’19 delivers the Valedictory Address
“EmbraceDiscomfort” the
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 35
For us sporting red roses on our lapels, comfort has become these small yet oh-so-large brick buildings and the indescribably amazing people who make them pulse and breathe. It’s the creak of Rousmaniere’s chairs; it’s the Pepsi bottle in Mr. Reid’s room; it’s belting out “o clouds unfold.” It’s the sights, sounds, and routines whose constancy in our lives has not been questioned until today. Yet I am sure a lot of you internally scoff at the word comfort, and rightfully so. Back-to-back double test days, long drives to the outposts of civilization such as Tabor or St. George’s, slushing through thick snow to sing Gaudeamus Igitur at 8:20 in the morning while other students with more sane-minded administrators sleep soundly in bed. These experiences can be described in many ways, but comforting is hardly one of them. Nonetheless, despite any adversities and annoyances, we are still here, at the end of our RL campaigns: proud, smiling, together, and maybe, just maybe, even sad to wish it all goodbye. We all managed ultimately to shape an RL experience that is, if nothing else, fraternal and familiar, and so I’ll stick with the word comfort.
This comfort, however, is a special sort, and it is definitely not the menial comfort attained by simply showing up to homeroom every morning. It is no participation trophy. The comfort with which we walk these halls today was forged from experiences: hardships and successes, risks and rewards, conflicts and resolutions. We’ve reached this proverbial destination together by intimate—and sometimes comical— encounters with cold, sweaty-handed discomfort.
think that the difficulty of a goodbye is mainly dictated by two factors: who or what you are saying goodbye to, and when you might see them again. As it pertains to the goodbye we seniors are saying today, the “when” likely varies from person to person. For some of us this may be one of the last times we lay eyes on this place and on each other. For others, we may find ourselves someday set up in an office here, with seniors of our own to guide and care for. The “who and what,” on the other hand, remains fairly universal. Of course, we are all saying goodbye to teachers and advisors, classmates and teammates, stages and studios, classrooms and playing fields—the people and the places that have meant and provided so much for us over our RL careers. Less obviously, we are also saying goodbye to comfort—that baseline sensation of contentment and familiarity which has allowed us to walk with certainty, to talk with conviction, and to act with initiative.
36 Summer 2019
We have all weathered the frequent academic discomforts: From sludge labs and Civ projects to Bio tests and Heaton essays. We’ve learned that an Archimedes screw can really be made of anything if you have enough imagination, and we’ve seen numbers at the top of assessments better suited for the back of a baseball player’s jersey.
We have all braved heartbreaking athletic discomforts. A devastating loss to Nobles in basketball, a one-point loss to Milton in football. For hockey guys, discomfort might have been when Coach Cat wouldn’t come into the locker room between periods. For soccer guys, it might have been heading down to practice to see Coach Solís laying down training cones. (Well, those moments might be better described as terrifying rather than simply uncomfortable.)
Surely, these moments of discomfort did not pass by unscrutinized, without a response. So we studied better, practiced longer, went to bed later, woke up earlier, and eventually the moments of failure and defeat were countered with ones of resilience and success. Most importantly, in the times of our greatest discomfort, we found the most genuine moments of camaraderie. Having realized that we weather the storm better together, we decided for ourselves that the quality of our years here would not be determined by the grades on papers or numbers on scoreboards or names on awards, but rather by who stood by our sides through it all. Many of the incredible friendships we share today were founded on small gestures of consolation and simply-expressed sympathies, the pillars of lifelong bonds, what Wordsworth called “the simple, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” Today, these moments of true compassion and fraternity constitute the tremendous warm knots in our chests that we identify as Needlessnostalgia.to
We have even experienced painful physical discomforts. From the second day of school and a very fast treadmill, to fielding fly balls with a braces-filled mouth. From shoulder-dislocating games of fishy-fishy, to underground conflict resolution methods, our class has certainly been prone to bodily harm as well. The list truly does go on and on.
say, next year a lot will change. Much of what we have learned and grown accustomed to will vanish almost unapologetically. The sights will become foreign, the faces unfamiliar, the walls a new and different color. We will be confronted again with waves of, at times, suffocating discomfort—socially, academically, athletically, personally. But this sensation should not feel so daunting. Our first steps into a strange new lecture hall will not differ too greatly from the first steps we took into this Hall. Our first conversations with our new roommates will not be too dissimilar to those that we had amongst each other, crammed in small tents at Beaver Brook many years ago. Although the nature of our challenges will take new forms, the feelings of discomfort that they may arouse in us will be merely echoes of feelings we have already conquered here at 101 Saint Theresa Avenue. If there is one thing our experience among these brick buildings has taught us, it is to embrace these discomforts knowing not only that they will dissipate as they have for all of us today, but also knowing that
“The RL boy in all of us who remembers that awkward slow dance, that bad physics test, that season-ending tear, will remind us that every wave of discomfort is a molding hand, polishing our resilience, smoothing out our compassion, refining our ability to succeed.”
If I am going to speak about a molding hand, about guidance, I must give thanks to those of you here today, you who deserve far more gratitude than any words could possibly denote.
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 37
Lastly, I would like to give a special, concluding thank you to my friends, the Class of 2019. Thank you for the bellyaching laughs, the long bus rides, the groggy homerooms. We have quite literally travelled the world together. I think that is something special that many other people cannot say even about their closest friends, and yet I am able to say it so directly and so sincerely to all of you. Most of all, thank you for sharing with me—and with each other—this amazing chapter of our lives. Thank you for exponentially brightening mine, and thank you for entrusting me to help cap it all off today. I hope every meaningful moment we have spent together remains as crystal clear as they are right now, and I know that there are many more to come. //
these discomforts will foster some of the most cherished aspects of our lives. This task is easier said than done, but the RL boy in all of us who remembers that awkward slow dance, that bad physics test, that season-ending tear, will remind us that every wave of discomfort is a molding hand, polishing our resilience, smoothing out our compassion, refining our ability to succeed.
Thank you to Mr. Brennan and the faculty and staff. Thank you for making us feel known and loved. Despite the many challenges we may have confronted, your selfless care and your fidelity to the great values of this school have imbued us with confidence and capability that will serve us a lifetime. Thank you for the late night emails, the extra help, your patience, your support, and your friendship. The lessons you have taught us resonate far beyond the classroom walls.
Thank you to our siblings. Thank you for being understanding when we missed your game or your recital because we had RL commitments of our own. Thank you for being forgiving when we came home in our dirty, red and black sports gear complaining about our criminally hard tests, unfathomably busy schedules, and torturously long classes, and we didn’t even stop to ask how your day has been. In more ways than we
may be able to feel or express, you are our constant reminder of what it means to love unconditionally.
Thank you to our parents. Not just for your cheers at sports contests or your help at receptions and events but for rushing us home in a nervous panic when we realize, five minutes from homeroom and 20 feet away from the front door, that it is, in fact, a dress-up day. This RL experience certainly brought you all some great discomforts as well. For all the times we were too prideful, too stubborn, or too naive to say so, thank you. Without your sacrifices and your unqualified love, which we are maybe still not mature enough to understand fully, my classmates and I, 53 sons, would never be sitting in this beautiful Hall today.
Production photos by Mike Pojman
38 Summer 2019
he Comedy of Errors, one of Shakespeare’s early plays—also one of his most farcical comedies—brought slapstick antics and blank verse to the Smith Theatre over the first weekend in May. Set in the Greek City of Ephesus—at the crossroads of commerce, culture, and leisure—the play, as director Danny Bolton writes, “is about a universal quest—the glorious and challenging adventure we all undertake to find our place in the world. The characters in Shakespeare’s comedy have set out on this journey to find their families and their proper homes. Along the way, they encounter foibles, complications, and
questions that prompt them to challenge their preconceived beliefs. Familiar notions are shaken and challenged, names are confused and relationships re-examined. But these very same misunderstandings lead to understandings; challenges lead to insight; and an open heart leads to new discoveries. The symmetry in the play’s wonderful hijinks urges us not to take anything for granted. In the festive, seaside tourist town of Ephesus, human emotions are explored, carried out, and embraced. ‘I to the world am like a drop of water, that in the ocean seeks another drop,’ Antipholus of Syracuse laments early on in his quest. Like Antipholus, we navigate the world in the manner we know best and try to relish each moment.” //
Comedy of Errors
T
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 39
Reunion
40 Summer 2019
On May 4, Reunion 2019 began for members of the “4s and 9s” with a return to the RL classroom. Morning “back to school” classes were taught by veteran faculty members Mo Randall and—from out of retirement—Steve Ward, as well as newer faculty members Dr. Sue McCrory (art history) and Nate Piper (technology and woodworking). From there, alumni were formally welcomed back to campus by Headmaster Brennan; learned about RL today from a panel of Class I students; and enjoyed lunch in the new Indoor Athletic Facility, prior to an afternoon of home athletic contests. The celebration culminated in a cocktail hour on the Senior Grass followed by a dinner in the McNay Palaistra. Some 300 alumni and guests returned to Alma Mater, representing the classes of 1954 on. During dinner, the Wellington Prize—given annually to a member on the 25th Anniversary Class in memory of Stanwood Gary Wellington (1896)—was awarded to Matt Engler ’94 for his loyalty and devotion to the school. //
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 41
Front Row: Jon Goldstein, George Khouri, Marie DaLeo, Gail Marcus, Stephen Callahan, Stephen Gerritson, Dennis Kanin, Sue Ferguson; Back Row: Guy Abbate, Marie Abbate, Michael Marcus, Kermit Smyth, Steve Hahn, John Kerrick, Carol Kanin, Bruce Ferguson
Avi Nelson, Lucille Batal, Meredith Fowler, Bob Fowler
Front Row: Jared Diamond, Robert Ricci, Marie-Claire Valtz; Second Row: Robert Valtz, Jerry Murray, Mary Bernsen, Harold Bernsen
42 Summer 2019 The Classes 1954 • 1959 • 1964 • 1969 • 1974 • 1979 • 1984 • 1989 • 1994 • 1999 • 2004 • 2009 • 2014 195919641954
Front Row: Alan Stone, Marla Stone, Peter Shelton, John Burgess, Nancy Adams, Douglas Quine, Richard Gumpertz, Kathleen Colbert, Michael Colbert, Susan Rosenberg, Robert Rosenberg; Second Row: Alan Shapiro, Eileen Atwood, Dan Tarullo, Louisa Tarullo, Jon Welch, Bill McAvinney, Carolyn Fuller, Ann Bilodeau; Back Row: Marie Lee, David Bong, Sheila Bong, Bob Jorgensen, Jack Woods, Ted Don, Chris Don, Bill Bilodeau, Thomas Mahoney, Mark Feldberg
Front Row: Dwight Heiman, Rich Habib, Tim Osborn, Scott O’Gorman; Second Row: Chuck Farrington, Anne Farrington, Neil Savage, Nancy Powell, David Powell; Third Row: Bruce Landay, Kerry Brennan, Neil Duffy, Carol Duffy; Fourth Row: Karen Pelto, Gene Berkowitz, Susan Walsh, Tom Walsh, Bruce Cohen, Tova Mirvis
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 43
19841979 19741969
Front Row: Kerry Brennan, Joe Kerner; Second Row: Mike Pojman, Jonathan Parker, Scott Roberts, Jonathan Karp, PJ Haskell
Front Row: Debby Steigman, Dan Steigman, Gloria Lara, Milton Roye, Robert Cannon, Jim Rappaport, Cecilia Rappaport, David Jernigan, Dante de Tablan, Elaine Driscoll, Dan Driscoll; Second Row: Mim Van Orman, Bobby Jorgensen, Scott Schnapp, Heidi Almy, Alvin Powell, Tracey Powell; Third Row: Wayne Van Orman, Bob Jorgensen, Nancy Hosay, Elinor Nelson, Robert Bargar, Stephen Ehrenberg, Temah Higgins, Amy Murphy, Bob Murphy; Fourth Row: Elizabeth LeBlanc, Paul LeBlanc, Amy Crowe, Jeff Crowe, Jack Asher, Chris Dowd, Richard Morrissey, Jim Washington Jr., Mary Lu Washington, Dean Jorgensen, Lee Malone, Joe Malone
44 Summer 2019 198919941999
Front Row: Matt Bagnell, Lauren Bagnell, Steve Eyre, Amy Brehm, Sabrina Tharani, Oliver Libby, Erin Casselman, Ben Casselman, Brian Hern, Erin Joyce (with Teddy), Michael Joyce; Second Row: Eli Lederman, Brett Brehm, Pasha Hamed, Andrew Wang, Michael de Guzman, Kristin de Guzman, Scott Fruhan; Third Row: Kevin O’Connell, Bart McMahon, Megan Govin, Greg Johnson, Eric Cadin
Front Row: Steve Popeo, Ryan McDonough, Kerry Brennan, Chip Rosetti, John Kelleher, Fred Martin, “Fritz”, Katherine Fisher. Second Row: Susie Mitchell, Michaela Popeo, Phil Alphonse, James McDonald, Mike Clancy; Third Row: Chris Mitchell, Christine Ruddy, Kevin Ruddy, Mike Cassidy, John Powell, Susan O’Keeffe, Tim O’Keeffe, Mo Randall
Front Row: Josh Plotkin, Concetta Marfella, Brian Petroni, Tracey Roiff, Chris Kolovos, Joe DeCristofaro, Barbara DeCristofaro, Yael Sage, Jesse Sage, Dawn MacDonald, Greg MacDonald; Second Row: Amy Barri, Matt Engler, Kristin McCambridge, Marlena Shin Madden, Justin Madden; Third Row: Jim Barri, Beth Altschuler, Matt McCambridge, Phuc Truong, Sherri Truong, Adam Robertson, Darci Robertson, Maria Cassidy, Jason Cassidy; Back Row: Jamie Conroy, Nancy Conroy, Zach Altschuler, Greg Noonan, Tiffany Donaldson, Keith Donaldson, Jon Curran, Katie Curran, Tom Federico, Brett Alessi, Tom Turner
Front Row: Andrew Berry, Woody Tunnicliffe, Pat Murphy, Jordan Leites, Ryan Thompson, Sam August, Tim Norton, Ryan Kelleher; Middle Row: Kyle Layne-Allen, Nick Poles, Andrew Vincent, Paul McCabe, Roberto Goizueta, Kerry Brennan, Brendan Hanrahan; Back Row: Mike Pojman, Carl Senecal, Alex Raffol, Arya Alizadeh, Jake Hasson, Thad Kull, Tommy Moriarty, Scott Martin
Front Row: Greg Lee, Olivia Linney, Scott Sayare, Caleb Ballou, Sam Jacobs, Ben Davis; Second Row: Rick Dower, Jon Cunningham, Emily Lau, Carly Conelli, Matt Brownell, Ousmane Diop; Third Row: Billy Quirk, Mike Regan, John Snyder, Matt Yogg, Sam Miller
Front Row: Jim Conley, Matt Ellison, Ryan Sewall, Robert Shaw, Joey Martin, Brendan Mullan, Maher Colaylat, Matt Gattozzi, Harry Doernberg, Andrew Wang; Second Row: Duncan Finigan, Johnny Driscoll, Zach Gardner, Ben Zheng, Brendan Barron, Charlie Hyman, Zack BennetEngler, Patrick Casey, Kerry Brennan, Andrew Fumarola, Cole Garvey; Back Row: Jonathan Marchetti, Andrew Yeager, Wesley Berry, Christian Hasiotis, Tevin Barros, Kevin Cohee, Alessandro Ferzoco, John Baron, Scott Frankenthaler, Hansy Piou, Lev Mamuya, Henry Booth.
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 45 200420092014
1959
Carl Uehlein has been fully retired for three years and travels frequently, having visited all seven continents and 40+ countries over the years. He spends several months each year in Australia and a month or so in Dornoch, Scotland, residing full-time in Alexandria, Virginia. Carl does “as much golfing as the old bones (with various joint replacements) will stand, plus local charitable activities, trying to keep the mind functioning well.”
John Kerrick is the father of four grown children and is still working a
moderate amount, doing individual leadership coaching. Adventure travel is a rich part of his life; over this year he has eight trips planned, culminating in a self-guided paddling trip through the Grand Canyon. “I am very grateful to be healthy and active,” says John.
Stephen Gerritson’s first book, The Portapotty Ploy, was published in November 2018. His second book, another murder mystery, is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2019.
David Bong became fascinated with Japan at Wesleyan, studied Japanese, and then worked in Tokyo for 10 years and in Hong Kong for two. In Tokyo he met his wife, Sheila; they have two sons. In 1992, David established and managed the Tokyo office of Kroll Associates, the only international investigative firm in Japan. The Bongs moved to Eugene, Oregon, in 1999, where David and Sheila started the company they lead today: Avant Assessment, a leader in online tests of language proficiency, delivering tests in 32 languages to over 1,000 schools, universities, municipalities and companies, as well as a U.S. Government agency. Having become hooked on the running culture of
1964
For 20 years, Jack Woods has been working in information management for a power plant company—mostlyconstructionnuclear—out of Charlotte, North Carolina, a role that has taken him to the former Soviet Union, Canada, and Eastern China. He
Tracey Zellmann and his wife, Susan, are “happy together and in good health after 36 years.” Tracey is principal engineer at a software company in Boston’s Seaport District. “Susan works at the same company, and it is a boon that we can spend that much time together. I am paying a lot of attention to my well-being, nourishing friendships and vigorous exercise, hoping this will give me at least another 20 years together with Susan. I still look at the fellow in the mirror each morning and smile!”
1969
After focusing on Chemistry and Biochemistry at both Harvard and MIT, Tom Mahoney had a 43-year career in investment banking on Wall Street, interrupted by stints as a senior executive in the high technology and hedge fund industries. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Emily Chien, and their two daughters, Grace and Elizabeth. Tom is a Strategic Advisory Board member at StratiFi Technologies, a fintech SaaS provider co-founded by his family; and Forepont Capital Partners, an early-stage life science venture fund. He is an increasingly avid amateur classical pianist.
John Fowler enjoys his two daughters and sons-in-law and four grandsons— including Jake Sheer ’20—as well as his two stepchildren, Elizabeth and Tom Driscoll. John and his wife, Mary, enjoy traveling and spending time with their family in Woods Hole, playing golf, enjoying their boat, and spending some time in Palm Beach. This year John was involved in the sale of his company— Holiday, Fenoglio, Fowler—to Jones, Lang, LaSalle, both NYSE companies.
Prize-winning author Jared Diamond published his most recent book Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis in May 2019.
Eugene, David also completed the Boston Marathon in 2013.
Pulitzer1954
46 Winter 2019
class notes
Alan Stone has created and maintained a legal recruiting presence in Boston/ New England for more than 35 years. He took a four-year hiatus to help bring professional baseball to Worcester and then ran the club as President for several years, proudly overseeing the Worcester Tornadoes win the CANAM League championship in 2005. He and his wife, Marla, have four sons who are thriving in their various entrepreneurial pursuits. Alan’s father, Nelson Stone ’44—who was the last surviving member of his RL class— passed three years ago.
1993
Shawn Zeller ran his first Boston Marathon on April 15, 2019, finishing in 3:14:53. He had an enthusiastic cheering section, including Andrew Zeller ’99 and Samuel Oates ’02.
Chris Kolovos has been appointed as the next Head of School at Boston University Academy. BU Academy is an independent, co-ed day school located on the Boston University campus, serving just under 200 students in grades 9 through 12. The school’s curriculum combines liberal arts coursework with classes at Boston University. Chris serves currently as the Associate Head of School at Greens Farms Academy in Westport, Connecticut. He will assume his role as BU Academy’s Head of School in the summer of 2020. Chris is also newly engaged, living in New York City, with plans to marry this summer.
1994
Journalist2002
2013 Michael Chilazi , Amir Ameri , and Michael Hughes graduated from Harvard Medical School in May and are all headed to Johns Hopkins for training in internal medicine.
1961
Howard Shecter received the prestigious Ellis Island Medal of Honor at a gala ceremony at the Ellis Island Museum on May 11. Howard is senior M&A counsel in Holland & Knight’s Philadelphia and New York offices. According to the foundation, recipients are “individuals who have made it their mission to share their wealth of knowledge, indomitable courage, boundless unique talents, and selfless generosity with those less fortunate.”
Jamie Kirchick appeared on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher on May 17, along with fellow guests Fran Lebowitz, George Packer, Neera Tanden, and Jonathan Metzl.
David Jernigan is a professor in the Department of Health Law, Policy and Management at the Boston University School of Public Health. He is also the senior policy advisor for CityHealth, a project of the de Beaumont Foundation and Kaiser Permanente that advances evidence-based policy solutions to help people live longer, better lives. His life-partner, Dante de Tablan, is vice president of United Way of Central Maryland. Their two children and grandchildren live in California.
finally gave up ice hockey three years years ago: “Now I root for the Bruins,” he says. Jack is looking to retire to the South Carolina coast soon, where his six grandchildren can visit and enjoy the 1974ocean.
After 30 years in London, Rich Morrissey has relocated to Washington, D.C.
Rob Cannon has spent his years since RL earning his BA, JD, and MBA; running a law firm on Cape Cod; starting a virtual law firm that went nationwide; serving as CEO of a bank; and starting up several companies. His current day jobs are as a Business Law Professor at UMASS and CEO of Graybord, a tech start-up for online learning. His real love, however, is rehabbing old houses. Rob is engaged to author Lisa Yee, who, he says, “likes to remind me that anything that happens between us is book material.”
Now that their triplets are grown and launched, Bob Bargar and his wife, Ellie, are enjoying more frequent travel, leisure, and daily swims. “Retirement appears on the near horizon with migration to southern California the goal,” shares Bob.
six years as Commissioner of Social Security, Mike Astrue took early retirement and is now poetry editor for a religious/ cultural journal called First Things Mike’s eighth book (all published under a pseudonym), The Elegies of Maximianus, was published by UPenn Press in 2018, and his next book, a translation of John Milton’s Book of Elegies, was due out this spring. Mike and his wife, Laura, celebrated their 40th anniversary this spring.
Jack Asher and his wife, Nancy, love their life near Stanford, “but remain loyal to Boston sports teams!” Their youngest has recently graduated from college and their oldest lives in San Francisco working at a software firm. Jack still plays tennis “despite the usual age-appropriate aches and pains!” RL-based friendships with the Steigmans, Crowes, and Dowds continue to be an important part of their lives. Jack is looking to where he can next apply his health insurance management expertise to improve patient outcomes and Afterexperience.completing
48 Summer 2019
Five years ago, Dan Driscoll moved his primary care internal medicine practice to Quincy, in collaboration with Tufts Medical Center, where he enjoys his practice and role as Medical Director. “My ‘old fashioned’ practice treats my patients like family. I find the relationships to be an antidote to burnout.” Dan’s wife, Elaine, is entering
Chris remains active, going to the gym most days, sneaking in a round of golf when possible, and making at least one ski trip each year. He has also developed some expertise as a high school sports photographer. He and Dawn travel back to New England several times a year.
Paul LeBlanc and his wife, Betsy, have five grandchildren: Brendan, Curran, Jane, Ann, and Andrew. They spend their free time visiting the grandchildren (and their parents!) or enjoying their beach house.
Joe Malone’s six-year, overseas tour in Ethiopia ended in 2015, highlighted by his malaria and Ebola work, and his wife Lee’s U.S. Embassy Consular work for U.S. citizens in facilitating visas and adoptions. Their three adult children are “gainfully employed and have left the nest.” Joe and Lee live in Bethesda, Maryland, and are semi-retired, doing some volunteer work. Joe works parttime at a large County Public Health Department doing tuberculosis work.
her ninth year as Assistant to the Headmaster at RL. Of their four grown children, two live in California, one lives in New York City, and one is in Boston. They have the good fortune of seeing them all frequently.
Chris Dowd has been on the medical school faculty of the University of California, San Francisco for 32 years, where he’s busy in the practice of Interventional Neuroradiology. He and his wife, Dawn, spend much free time volunteering at their children’s high school. Daughter, Maddie, and son, CJ, are both enrolled at Harvard—Maddie in her first year, and CJ as a junior.
Ryan McDonough made a short film called Last Night in Roslindale and is developing the feature version, which began filming in Boston in June 2019.
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 49
1979
1983
Milton Roye and his wife, Gloria Lara, live in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Since our last Reunion,” Milton writes, “I have worked for both a European and an Indian parts supplier; served on the MIT Board of Trustees; launched two start-ups, in the automotive ignition space and in marketing analytics strategy; served as Interim CEO of a Boys & Girls Clubs chapter; and am now launching the engineering and IT vertical of a boutique recruiting firm.” Their daughter Katherine lives with them, working in executive coaching and finishing school.
1994
Stephen Zilber is the principal physician at the Allergy Relief Center of Sonoma County where he helps adults and children with a wide range of allergies and autoimmune conditions. He and his wife, Sivi, love living in the beautiful wine country of northern 1989California.
1984
Paul Provost will begin his new role as CEO of Art Bridges this summer. Art Bridges is a new foundation dedicated to providing access to outstanding works of American Art to those who otherwise have limited access to them. Paul writes, “I’ll be scaling up the foundation’s operations and its engagement with collectors, museums and their staff, and with the visiting public—all with the objective of providing access for everyone to American art in all its wonderful complexity and diversity.”
Joe Saint lives with his family in Stratford, Connecticut, where he runs his own company, continues to play soccer and basketball, and coaches his son’s soccer team.
investors in a broad range of disputes. Peter is also involved in public policy, having worked on several presidential campaigns, including serving as the Executive Director of the 2004 Democratic Party Platform.
Jon Curran and his wife, Katie, live in Cohasset with their two boys, Chase (10) and Connor (8). Jon works as a bond portfolio manager in Boston. “As staid as my job in bonds is, Katie works at Fidelity and does a lot of cool, cutting-edge stuff, including running the blockchain incubator within Fidelity’s Center for Applied Technology.”
Jim Rappaport and his wife, Cecelia, split their time between Boston and Manhattan Beach, California. Jim worked as a consultant with families and family businesses, helping with conflict resolution, boundaries and good governance; is now on the board of several fintech firms; and is still involved in real estate. He is a founding director of the Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Foundation, which focuses on supporting emerging leaders in public policy, medicine, and art. He and Cecilia love traveling, having visited more than 25 countries in the last five years. They also enjoy being grandparents to three—Wylie, Lucy, and Maya.
Tim Dorsey, his wife, Jenn, and their son, Mike, live in Swampscott. Tim has been with PowerAdvocate—which delivers market, spend, and cost data to energy companies to drive enterprise improvement opportunities—for more than 15 years and has been involved in growing it from a 13 employee company to 173 employees today.
Frederick Martin and his spouse, Katherine, welcomed a son, “Fritzie,” in November 2018. Fred continues as financial administrator at the regional denominational association of Quaker churches/meetings. He and Katherine are both active as volunteers in their local Quaker congregation. Frederick published a book chapter on early Quaker history several years ago, and is now researching early colonial Quaker interactions with local Native people, “so I cross paths with John Eliot occasionally,” he writes.
Burt Granofsky has been a curriculum developer-now-writer at Education
Peter Choharis married Liliana Ubillus in December 2015. Together they have two daughters—one two years old, and one born this summer. Peter’s growing boutique litigation and international law practice serves major clients including U.S. and foreign companies, foreign governments, and
John Whitehead enjoys building new technologies for journalism as part of the R&D Lab of The New York Times.
Mike McElaney and Dan Findley ’09 both competed in the Haymakers for Hope charity boxing event Rock N Rumble IX held at House of Blues in Boston on May 15. All of the money raised supports cancer research, care, awareness, and survivorship; Mike and Dan raised a combined total of more than 1999$66,000.
50 Summer 2019
Kevin O’Connell lives in Weston with his wife, three kids (ages 9, 6, 2)
Justin Jagher and his wife, Stacy, live in Framingham with their two daughters, “who keep us extremely busy! We are all lucky to have good health and happiness.”
Society and the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society. This summer he began his residency in psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco.
2006
Development Center in Waltham (where Ben Chauncey also works) for the past 15 years. Burt has three children; runs youth ultimate frisbee leagues in Newton; and does a bit of sports photography on the side.
Professional2013 soccer player Andrew Wheeler-Omiunu recently joined the new USL League One, which began its inaugural season in 2019, playing for FC After2014Tucson.graduating from RL, Matt Gattozzi spent two years dancing and performing in Seattle before dancing in Austin, Texas, for another two years. After sustaining a career ending back injury, he has shifted to starting his
1998
Paul Wallace graduated from the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in May with the distinction of having been inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor
and two dogs. “I’ve enjoyed staying connected with RL as president of the Alumni Council and supporting the school’s Annual Fund and athletic teams,” writes Kevin.
Colin Allen moved from San Diego to Santa Monica, Los Angeles, to pursue a role at Dimensional Funds. He serves as a Regional Director for Southern California, helping financial advisors improve the experience they provide to end 2005clients.
Coleman Walsh has accepted a sales role with EverTrue. He will be serving as a business development representative working on outbound prospecting and communication with potential new clients.
Jose Streeter met his wife while living in Lethbridge, AB, Canada and attending the University of Lethbridge. They have two children, Miguel and Maya. In 2012, Jose founded the Lethbridge Electronic Music Festival, a free, nonprofit event sponsored by the City of Lethbridge and various local businesses; he served as president and head organizer until 2016. In 2017, his family relocated to New Hampshire where he works for Community Finance LLC and provides home inspection services through his company, Brookview Home Inspections.
James Astrue, who survived hearing loss in one ear from his combat duty in Afghanistan, is leaving the Army National Guard, working at Lockheed, and starting an executive MBA program at the University of Virginia.
2004
Brett Brehm and his wife, Amy, got married in July 2018. After a postdoc at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College, Brett is an assistant professor of French at the College of William and Mary where he enjoys teaching courses on Paris, modernity, the historical avant-garde, and media studies. He is working on a book about the connections between literature and the invention of sound recording. Brett and Amy enjoy walking trails in Williamsburg and Jamestown and going to the theater and museums in DC. Brett still plays the piano when he finds the time.
Michael Zellmann-Rohrer is a Research Fellow at Oxford pursuing his love of Classics, founded during his time at After2009RL!working at Harvard’s Alumni Association for three years, Andrew “Vinny” Vincent has moved to the Kennedy School, where he works on special events at the Institute of Politics. “Many interesting people visit and speak to our students, inspiring them to pursue politics and public 2012service.”
This2017spring, Brown University baseball sophomore Joe Lomuscio earned CoSIDA First Team Academic All-District accolades, starting all 39 games this season as the team’s center fielder. Joe led the Bears in
own company building audiences for other companies through social media.
Ian Gershengorn ’84 Delivers Alumni Luncheon Keynote
Practice and one of the nation’s premier Supreme Court and appellate advocates. Prior to this role, he served in the Office of the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice— first as Principal Deputy Solicitor General and then as Acting Solicitor General of the United States under President Obama. While at the Solicitor General’s Office, Mr. Gershengorn argued more than a dozen cases at the Supreme Court. He also supervised the government’s briefing in a range of highprofile cases, including those involving the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank, election law and redistricting, immigration reform, the Fair Housing Act, Title VII, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and same-sex marriage. In these positions, Ian led the development and execution of legal strategy in the Department of Justice’s most important litigation matters, providing advice to the White House and to DOJ leadership, and appearing regularly in the U.S. Supreme Court, the federal courts of appeals, and district courts around the country.
An2015essay by Philip Balson on the decline of the history major, was recently published in The Wall Street Journal as part of its “Future View” series. This spring Philip received his AB in history from Harvard.
After post-grad work at Northwestern researching bioinspired water harvesting technology and publishing his findings, Shaan Savarirayan is now working for a creative design agency in the D.C. area, specializing in product design, hardware engineering, and firmware development. “I enjoy deep diving into new technologies and developing at the intersection of the physical and digital,” he says.
Mr. Gershengorn is a partner at the law firm Jenner & Block, where he is chair of the firm’s Appellate and Supreme Court
several offensive categories, including a .339 batting average, as well as hits (59), runs (32) and at-bats (174). He added four home runs, nine doubles and drove in 26 runs from the leadoff spot. The CoSIDA First Team Academic All-District recognizes the nation’s top student-athletes for their combined performances on the field and in the classroom.
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On April 10 more than 100 alumni joined this year’s seniors to hear from former acting U.S. Solicitor General, IAN GERSHENGORN ’84, at RL’s annual Alumni Luncheon. Mr. Gershengorn shared with fellow alumni and students insights on recent changes in the Supreme Court and some of the most interesting cases now pending.
Introducing Mr. Gershengorn—a former student of his— Headmaster Kerry Brennan said, “We are proud of this son of Roxbury Latin, who has a long and illustrious record of service to this country and to vigorously upholding the laws that guide us. God knows we need the likes of him now more than ever. We thank him for being with us this afternoon.” //
David Lourie ’89 Appointed Head of Collegiate School
David will begin his tenure at Collegiate, founded in 1628, as of July 1, 2020. //
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David currently serves as Head of School of St. Anne’s-Belfield, a pre-K-through-12 day-andboarding school of 900 students in Charlottesville, Virginia, a position he has held for more than a decade. David has also served as the head of two other schools, while also teaching, coaching, and directing theater. Although committed to independent schools, David has learned and worked in a variety of educational settings. He earned a BA in History from Yale University in 1993 and an MA from Teachers College at Columbia University in 2005, where he was also a fellow at the Klingenstein Summer Institute. Since 2006, David has served as St. Anne’s-Belfield’s Head of School, where he has also consistently taught upper-school history. This past winter he directed the school musical, Beauty and the Beast. Prior to St. Anne’s-Belfield, Mr. Lourie served as Head of School of the Midland School in Los Olivos, California, and prior to that he founded and led a charter school in Tampa, Florida. He began his career teaching and coaching directly out of college at Tampa Preparatory School. David will leave St. Anne’s with a long list of accomplishments, including the adoption of two strategic plans, the innovation of the K-12 curriculum to focus on 21stcentury learning, the creation of an annual summer professional-development program, and significant growth of the school’s endowment. David has been active in the Virginia Association of Independent Schools and currently serves as its President.
DAVID S. LOURIE, Class of 1989, has been appointed as the 29th Head of School at Collegiate School—a private, boys’ K-12 day school on the Upper West Side of New York City. (Kerry Brennan served Collegiate as its 27th Headmaster prior to beginning his duties at RL in 2004.)
40 parent volunteers and 30 boys accepted carfuls of donations on the two drop-off Saturdays (in the pouring rain!).
40 trash bags full of clothes were donated to Savers.
50 boxes of books were donated to More Than Words.
Yard Sale
Before the sale began, the Varsity Lacrosse team set up more than 150 tables in under 45 minutes.
$30,200Whilesalesarenottheprimarygoal,thesaleofdonatedtreasuresgeneratedmorethan
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More than 100 volunteeredandstudents,parents,alumniparentsonsaleday.
One truck load of furniture was donated to Habitat for Humanity.
On April 27, the Roxbury Latin Parents’ Auxiliary held its 41st Annual Giant Yard Sale. Here’s a look at this longstanding tradition by the numbers. Thank you, Parents’ Auxiliary and all the volunteers, for another successful event! //
all across the board [in college].” Bill’s extracurricular passions were wideranging. He played varsity football and baseball, sang in the Glee Club, was a member of the Tripod sports staff and Yearbook Committee, participated in Student Council, and also found his way on the stage. He exemplified the generalist spirit of using one’s talents broadly that we still strive to instill in RL students today.
After graduating from RL, Bill earned an AB in Philosophy from Dartmouth College (1961) where he rowed crew and then his law degree from Boston College (1965). He started his career at Lyne, Woodworth, & Evarts, specializing in corporate law with an emphasis on new or start-up corporations. He rose to the position of partner. He worked at the law firm until
WILLIAM BERNARD O’KEEFFE ’57 of Boston passed away peacefully on May 26, 2019, at his home at the age of 79. Born on November 11, 1939, Bill grew up in West Newton and attended the A.E. Angier Elementary School in Waban before following in the footsteps of his father (Bernard O’Keeffe ’24) and enrolling at Roxbury Latin in the fall of 1951.
1988, when he became the Chairman of the Board and CEO at Symmons Industries, a manufacturer of commercial and residential plumbing products that still exists today. Bill lived in downtown Boston for over 50 years while also spending his summers in Osterville on Cape Cod. When he retired in 2010, he spent most of his free time reading, sailing, enjoying his grandchildren, and creating havoc with spirited debates at the dining room table.
in memoriam
As a young professional, Bill immediately showed his desire to serve others by becoming a member and then director of the Beacon Hill Civic Association. Over the course of his life he became treasurer and director of Hill House, Inc.; a board member at the Museum of Science; general counsel
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At RL, his academic interests were in history and French, and Headmaster Weed had great admiration for Bill’s resilience as a student. Despite some academic struggles in his early years at the school, Bill turned his academic career around resulting in these words from the Headmaster to the colleges to which Bill applied: “I have considerable respect for his come-back and for his present state…and I think he’d do well
In 1984, Bill became a trustee and served in that capacity for three decades. Vice president and secretary of the Board for many years, Bill served on various committees, including Development, Campus Planning, Strategic Planning, Executive, and the most recent Headmaster’s Search
Bill is survived by his wife, Paula, son Ian and wife Katherine of Boston and son Tim and wife Susan of Hingham. He was the proud grandfather of Fiona, Annie, Ben, Liam, Maggie, and Eliza.
Edna (Smith) Stein, he was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on February 2, 1937. Bob grew up in Brookline and attended the Runkle School before enrolling at RL as a Sixie in the fall of 1949. He followed in the footsteps of his brother, Peter ’48. At RL, Bob displayed varied interests, participating in varsity football and tennis, acting in the school play, singing in the Glee Club, and showing his passion for photography in The Tripod and Yearbook. Academically, he excelled in math and science; he attended MIT for his college experience.
Committee. In addition to his service, Bill was an ardent supporter of the school philanthropically. He was a generous contributor to the Annual Fund throughout his life and also spearheaded the effort of his class to establish an endowed scholarship fund in honor of their 50th Reunion. He and his wife, Paula, established their own endowed scholarship fund in honor of Tony Jarvis. Before his passing, he concluded his lifetime of giving by donating $1,000,000 to the school. In honor of his dedication of time, talent, and treasure to Alma Mater the school has decided to name Schoolhouse Field after his family. The school was the better for Bill’s stewardship, humor, friendship, and loyalty.
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Bob retired in 2000 as a vice president of Raytheon where he managed their Advanced Systems Office. At Raytheon he was responsible for developing the original concepts for the Patriot Missile, for which he was awarded the Thomas L. Phillips Award for Excellence in Technology, Raytheon’s highest recognition for technical achievement. He held patents in multi-beam radar antenna techniques, published numerous articles on defense technology and taught a wide variety of courses on radar and information theory. As a member of the Defense Science Board he participated in more than 25 studies and, in 2014 was awarded the Eugene Fubini Award by the Secretary of Defense for his unique contributions to defense related systems engineering. He was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Bob was active in Brookline town government and served as a Town Meeting Member, a member of the Advisory Committee, and on the Board of Selectmen, which he chaired for two years. In 1979 he designed and, with
and director of the Greater Boston YMCA; and the president of Oyster Harbors Services and Homeowners Association. In short, Bill embraced the words etched into a frieze in the Jarvis Refectory: “From those to whom much has been given, much will be expected.”
Bill’s commitment to giving back shone most brightly at Roxbury Latin. He served as class agent for over 60 years and chaired the Annual Fund. He was also a long-time member of the Alumni Council and won the Wellington Prize, given each year to a member of the 25th Reunion Class in recognition of his outstanding continuous service to Alma Mater. Even though his student days were challenging at times, Bill was thankful for the education he received, once writing in a note to the school, “The significance of an RLS education cannot be summed up herein and perhaps is not always appreciated by its graduates, but when fully viewed you realize it is responsible for much of the decent thinking one does and none of your lesser thoughts.” Bill’s love for RL grew over the years, especially when his sons, Ian ’86 and Tim ’89, were students. With his grandson, Ben, a member of Class VI, four generations of Bill’s family have attended Roxbury Latin.
ROBERT MERRITT STEIN ’55 died at age 82 on April 2, 2019 of metastatic melanoma. Son of the late Michael and
COLONEL ALPHONSUSNORMAN“BUTCH”
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his sons’ help, built a vacation home in Vermont which remained his favorite retreat for the rest of his life. When he retired in 2000, he fulfilled a lifelong dream when, with his indulgent wife, he took a ten-thousand-mile motorcycle ride across the country. He continued to ride until he put his bike away for the winter in October.
Division, 25th Division Tropic Lightning, and 29th Infantry Division Association and graduated from the U.S. Army War College. Over the years he taught business courses at Anna Maria College and Western New England College. After retiring from the Army in 2000, he worked at StorageNetworks in Waltham as Director of Procurement.
Butch’s interests included genealogy, traveling in his R.V., history, gardening, and coaching Plymouth Youth Baseball and Softball, where he was the Director and Coach of the Senior Girls’ Softball League of Plymouth. Butch tracked his genealogy through Prince Edward Island back to Ireland and Scotland. His dogged research helped him to connect with distant cousins in PEI where he spent many wonderful family trips. Butch was a die-hard New England and Boston College sports fan. As a BC “Superfan,” he was a long-time football and hockey season ticket holder who rarely missed a home game and traveled all over supporting BC, including at Bowl games and Frozen Four tournaments.
Born on May 1, 1945 to Dr. Norman and Katherine (Hayes) Welch, Butch grew up in West Roxbury and attended St. Theresa’s School before enrolling at RL in the fall of 1957. During his student days Butch excelled in athletics, earning varsity letters in football, basketball, and baseball. He also contributed to other areas of school life, working on the stage crew for plays and serving as the sports editor for The Tripod . A trip to the United Nations with his Current Events class was one of his fondest memories of his academic experience. In later years, he recognized Hugh Campbell, Bill Chauncey, Jim Maguire, and Warden Dilworth as influential teachers, but he was most appreciative of the lifelong friendships he made with his peers. After his graduation, he gave back to Alma Mater by serving as a long-time class agent.
WELCH, JR. ’63 of Plymouth, formerly of Sagamore Beach, died peacefully on April 14, 2019, at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital Plymouth after a courageous 15 year battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was the beloved husband of Linda (Mallers) Welch and loving father of Meridith Welch and her husband, Mark Fine of Newton; Heather Welch and her husband, Jason Murphy of Southborough; Brandon “Boomer” Welch of Plymouth; and Sarah Welch of Plymouth. Butch loved sharing life’s joys and adventures with his cherished grandchildren: Nora, Rowan, Colin, Elisabeth, Neve, and Aiden.
He went on to earn his BA in Political Science from Boston College and then enlisted in the U.S. Army, proudly serving in Vietnam. His awards include the Bronze Star Medal, Good Conduct Medal, Vietnam Service Medal, Vietnam Campaign Ribbon with 6 devices, Legion of Merit, and Order of St. Martin award. Butch earned his MBA from Babson College while he continued working for the Massachusetts U.S. Army National Guard. He spent over 33 years serving his country, earning the rank of Colonel and becoming Chief of Staff. During that time he was a member of the Military Officer Association of America, 26th Yankee Infantry
integrated transportation, smart growth, and sustainable development. His projects won awards from the American Planning Association and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He also won an award for excellence in leadership for the development of Greenroads, a global rating system for sustainable roadway design and construction. He led the development of Mosaic, an innovative system and projectplanning method and tool for Oregon Department of Transportation. For the Federal Highway Administration he led the development of the first national guidance document focused on sustainable roadway planning, development, operations, and
He was a storyteller, a poet, a nature lover, a photographer, a music connoisseur, a loyal and committed professional, a mentor, a cyclist, a friend, a partner, dad and grandad, and so much more. Sam’s sharp intellect, honesty, integrity, and kindness leave all who knew him with a lasting memory of a person committed to and proud of his family and his professional work, of a mentor always there to inspire and encourage others, and of his wide interests and opinions. Sam spent his last several months working on a series of poems in which he explores his personal journey of confronting and accepting his disease and finding equanimity along that journey. His book, To Have Been Snowed On , was published in September 2018 by The Inflectionist Review. //
Professionally, Sam was the Director of the Center for Economic Development at the University of Massachusetts. The Center advised public and non-profit groups on techniques to create new jobs and bring about desirable development throughout Massachusetts. He also worked at Cambridge Systematics, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in economic and real estate research. As he once said in a Reunion class note, his vocational interest was “the ways people use land, studying and preaching and writing about this.”
After RL, he earned a BA in American Studies from Yale University, an MA in Public Administration and Land Use Planning from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Administration at Princeton University, and an MFA in Writing from Pacific University. Sam and Andrea Cohen married in 1979 and lived in Amherst and Harvard, Massachusetts, before moving to Portland in 1992. Their son, Adam, daughter, Elana, and grandson, Mikaiah, live in Portland.
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assessment of Sam his senior year: “Sam has impressed both the faculty and his fellow students with his friendly, cheerful attitude. However, he is more than just a pleasant person; he is highly respected by his classmates who have elected him to the Student Council…Sam has been an asset to this school and will be an asset to the college he attends.”
SAMUEL NELSON SESKIN ’68 passed away at the age of 68 at home in Portland, Oregon, on September 24, 2018. Born in Boston on July 21, 1950, Sam grew up in Newton and attended the John Ward School. He entered Roxbury Latin in the fall of 1962 and immediately displayed a love of learning, performing well in all academic disciplines, especially in Latin, Greek and French, and graduating Cum Laude . He also showed a passion for drama, participating in the Drama Club throughout his RL career and becoming its President in Class I. In addition, he played soccer and baseball and acted in the Senior Play. The school offered this glowing
Sammaintenance.lovedlife.
He was a transportation consultant for more than 40 years, and worked with organizations nationally and internationally on projects that
Great was the Murmur of the Mountain
1968 was the year The Rolling Stones unleashed Crossfire Hurricane into the collective consciousness, long before it re-emerged as a metaphor for the pernicious atmospheric turbulence of our current worst of times. The many days of rage that howled across America in 1968 reflected a deepseated discontent. Recent graduates of RL joined other college students in protesting the immorality of the Vietnam War, which, at that point, had caused the deaths of over a hundred thousand Vietnamese civilians and forced half a million more into refugee camps. They marched to advance civil rights and to shed light on the pervasive economic inequities experienced by people of color. Demonstrations drew upon the idealism at our nation’s core in questioning policies deficient in fairness, decency and justice. “We can do better” was a common refrain.
At RL the late Sam Seskin ’68 was singular in tapping the winds of change to propel revisions in the school’s extracurricular activities. His advocacy produced elements of renewal in age-old traditions that attached to publications, clubs, events, and other pursuits. In one
instance, as leader of the drama club, Sam respectfully presented the faculty advisor with a choice: either the seniors would produce a meaningful drama—after years of social comedy relics whose long-ago satiric bite had fewer teeth than a stegosaurus—or the Senior Play would go on without seniors. Moreover, Sam made clear that the dramatic tension of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge required young women for the female roles, breaking the school’s long tradition of Class II and III boys portraying ladies, young and old. The end result was production of a play that could stand beside the ancient texts we studied in class, thereby enhancing an essential tradition of the school—critical engagement of a sublime work on a profound theme.
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The school was fortunate to have a faculty that was not only open to new directions but often initiated them. Headmaster Richmond Mayo-Smith supported Ralph Farris, the Glee Club director, in developing an RL chorus that performed at other venues for the first time in ’68, eventually extending to international tours, and was soon widely recognized as top tier. The headmaster encouraged the formation of a t E M y E tt E ’68 on the events of 1968, in response to the Winter 2019 Newsletter
p E
In 1968 Mr. Mayo-Smith himself taught an experimental course for seniors on “Lincoln and Emancipation” produced by The Amherst Project. The course used primary source materials from before and during the Civil War—newspaper articles, eyewitness accounts, court documents, government records, correspondence, legislative speeches, public addresses, debate transcripts, election data—to uncover the scope and tenor of the far-reaching dialogue on slavery in which Lincoln participated. The material revealed widespread social antipathy toward blacks despite the generally pro-abolitionist views of most northerners. In rewriting their state constitution in 1847, Illinois legislators included a clause prohibiting free African-Americans from settling there; in addition, the state imposed “Black Codes,” circumscribing the lives of people of color already in Illinois. The open expression of anti-black attitudes contained in the source materials and the extent of them across northern society was revelatory. Consensual racism certainly contributed to the ultimate failure of will by the North to enforce Reconstruction and, subsequently, to allow the imposition of Jim Crow, the rewriting of the war’s causal narrative, and the complete subjugation of political participation by African-Americans in the South. In that context Mr. Mayo-Smith guided discussion on the ability of Lincoln—despite the undertow of significant northern racism—to put into words the overriding will of his age regarding slavery, tell his age what its will was, and act on that convincing argument. Seeing Lincoln as a man who knew himself, holding fast the fixed principle that slavery was an abhorrent evil, Mr. Mayo-Smith pointed to Lincoln’s strengths as a discerning listener and astute poser of insightfully loaded questions, rhetorical zingers that carried their own answer. The concluding session of the course focused on processing the lesson of Lincoln into the conduct of our lives. Mr. Mayo-Smith prompted dialogues on personal responsibility, interpersonal relations, and staying true to ourselves, drawing on experience to advise us that we would often need to function as our own Socrates as we pondered the right thing to do.
Newsletter of The Roxbury Latin School 59
weather club, as well, which first focused on the mechanics of meteorology but later studied the environmental impact of the toxic brown smog then hovering over New York City and Los Angeles.
That same year Warden Dilworth originated an urban affairs course for seniors titled The City. Assigned reading included The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Other America, by Michael Harrington, which made the case that 25 percent of the country was living in poverty, and The Airtight Cage, by Joseph Lyford, an analysis of entrenched poverty on Manhattan’s upper west side. Students wrote term papers on current issues or recent events, such as the Grove Hall Riot on June 2, 1967 in Roxbury. The event had started as a peaceful sit-in at a government office by thirty women organized as “Mothers for Adequate Welfare,” but the forced removal of the women by police sparked street agitation among their supporters. Mr. Dilworth encouraged us to get “the story behind the story” by interviewing participants, other leaders of the community and reporters who had more to say than what was published in the papers. We all had subscriptions to The New York Times and in March read the findings of the Kerner Commission on urban riots that the U.S. was moving toward “two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.” President Johnson’s total rejection of the Commission’s recommendations on new housing and job programs convinced Robert Kennedy to finally enter the presidential race. RFK called out the comfortable for the chasm between those who see life as a mandate to give and those who expectantly take, forging lives on the backs of others. In May, Mr. Dilworth took the entire class of The City to Yale to hear Saul Alinsky expound on his yet-tobe-published rules for radicals and exhort us to reduce the power of the “Haves.” Many of us that year participated in a tutoring program at the Bromley-Heath Housing Development in Jamaica Plain organized by Mr. Dilworth. The example he set in the course and related activities underscored RL’s mission “to fit students for public service.” Everyone should contribute, however little.
In a year of tragedy for our nation, Richmond MayoSmith and Warden Dilworth led with assurance and acted with faith in the future. And this I know: Anything of value I’ve managed to do has been informed by the teaching and discernment of Mayo-Smith and Dilworth, each a guiding peak on the horizon of life’s path. Magno cum murmure montis. //
101 Theresa Roxbury,
The Roxbury Latin School
St.
Avenue West
MA www.roxburylatin.org02132-3496 Change Service Requested Roxbury Latin's 375th Anniversary Kick-Off Celebration SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5 Join us on campus for an afternoon of varsity contests, followed by an evening of good food, live music, and fun games and activities for all ages. SAVE DATE!THE
