How Do You Play Football in a Pandemic?

Varsity Football seniors (left to right): Will Hyde, Beau Keough, James Gillespie, David D'Alessandro, Aaron Shlayen, Frankie Lonergan

a season’s recap by head varsity coach mike tomaino

Football is unique in the sense that a large aspect of the game is contact—blocking and tackling. In many ways boys who play football enjoy those aspects of the sport, some may even yearn for the contact. It’s difficult to imagine a fall season without those key components of the game, but over the course of the fall, Roxbury Latin’s football team embraced new guidelines and continued to develop individually and collectively.

With the uncertainty of competition, and the strict nature of the cohort system, our challenge this fall became how to develop our athletes and also get better as a team. Furthermore, how would we do so with significantly less practice time? Our overall theme this fall was: Control the controllables. As a team we remained focused on putting forth a great attitude and great effort every day. We focused on becoming a faster, quicker, and more fit team with specific speed and agility drills. As we adhered to guidelines and worked to mitigate the spread of the virus, we began these drills completely distanced and individually. As competition became more likely, a new challenge presented itself: How do we continue to get better for the future, while fulfilling our athletes’ desire for competition? On top of that, how do we do so in a safe way? Our solution was to continue to incorporate the fitness aspect of practices, while adding in some individual skill work. Over time, we began to add more football-specific team activities, such as implementing and running our offensive and defensive playbook. Fortunately, we had some new students join us this fall, so this gave us an opportunity to introduce schemes to newcomers while serving as a refresher for returning players.

Toward the end of the fall, we were given the opportunity to compete against other schools, which was a relief for our athletes. At the end of the day, they love to compete, and while all the other stuff is important, playing in contests was at the forefront of their minds. Due to cohorts, our team was split into two “teams,” which presented a unique situation in which one of the cohorts had to have a “quarterback by committee.” Nevertheless, we played 7-on-7 games, which consisted of only skill position players—no pads, and only passing plays. Think of it as football without linemen and without contact—without blocking and tackling, the two major components of the game. While it wasn’t “real” football, it was competition and a step toward normalcy, which we all certainly appreciated. For our coaches and players, it was certainly a disjointed and unusual fall season, but as the theme went, we could only control how we reacted to the situation that was presented. Like our community members always do, we put our heads down and went to work. //

Be Both Tough and Tender

Headmaster Brennan Opens the Winter Term

Be Both Tough and Tender

“Mr. Brennan, you cry, too?”

I was outside the temple where the funeral of the beloved mother of one of my students had just taken place. I waited around to greet him. I was quite moved by the service. The mom was a wonderful person; she had long been separated from her sons’ father and had been battling cancer for the past six years. The boys’ remembrances of their mother were touching and especially meaningful given they in essence were signaling that she had taught them well, but that now they just had each other. I responded to my student with a hug and more tears. And he was crying, too.

This boy of 15 was a much admired scholar-athlete at his school. He exuded confidence and had been consistently elected to the presidency of his class. He had it all going for him. He was smart, personable, balanced, and a friend magnet. Throughout his young life, however, he recognized that his family structure was different from most other boys’. With an inattentive father, he was left to rely yet more than usual on the love and care of his mother. She was a ferocious protector of her three cubs. And now, she was gone. What would they do? What would he do? In fact, living among various relatives, he blazed through high school starring in three sports and earning honors grades. He went on to a prestigious college and is a successful man with a wonderful family of his own today.

“You cry, too?”

In fact, I do cry. Not always, but sometimes. And I always have. Thankfully I had parents and grandparents who didn’t mind shedding a tear acknowledging some overwhelming emotion. I am part Irish after all, and some say our bladders are located just behind our eyeballs! I cry when I am sad. I have cried when I was hurt or in awful pain. But I also cry when I am overwhelmed with joy. When someone I care deeply about does something extraordinarily kind. Or expresses love for me. I also have cried when I am overwhelmed with something that is exquisitely beautiful. Thankfully I am not riddled with the question that I believe

too many people are, especially too many men, and that is “Should I cry?” “What will people think of me if I do?” “Will I appear weak if I cry?”

Today I am using crying as a pointed example of feeling, and expressing feeling. How often we have been in situations in which we find ourselves wanting for words. It’s cliché, I suppose, to say that words are inadequate, and sometimes they are. One of our goals as a school is to teach you how to find the words to describe what is true and deserves to be said. But sometimes even the specific, powerful words we teach you are not up to the task. Sometimes what we think, and, especially, what we feel cannot be captured in words. Since humans have roamed the earth they have searched valiantly for ways in which to express themselves. Sometimes with words—spoken, printed in books, attached to valentines, or scrawled on cave walls. But other times with expressions, with hearty laughter, or hugs and kisses, or even by striking someone. Playwrights and novelists and composers and poets have left us with countless reverberating evocations of their feelings. Shocking. Inspiring. Reassuring. Provoking. Affirming.

Many works of art are intended to move us, to find the spot deep within in which feeling resonates. As I get older that place often has to do with days gone by, and places I have loved, and people I have loved who are now gone. Smells. Tastes. Sounds. I want to be open to those sensations. They remind me of remarkable people. Of remarkable times and places. They remind me of my younger self. They remind me I was loved. They strike a nerve. They remind me I can be tender.

Often the rhetoric of our school goes whizzing by. Uttered but not felt. Today I want to pause on a phrase that can be found in our publications and on our website, but on which we rarely dwell. I say it when we are hosting prospective students and their parents at open houses. Others of us utter it, too, as we describe our school: “We want our boys to be tough and tender.” Tough and tender. Today I shall dwell on that unlikely pair.

An Exemplar

Several years ago there was a boy in the school who ended up being quite memorable. Through the admission process we knew that he was poorly prepared for the academic rigors of RL. He had had an unfortunate start to his life with a dysfunctional family and schooling to that point that had neither taught him all he should know at his age or demanded much of him. But as we got to know him, we saw something special in him. A spark. Desire. Openness. We accepted him and the boy could not be happier. He had no idea what he was in for.

The happiness the boy felt in anticipation of his starting RL dissipated on about the second day of school when he realized he was clueless about how to do the kind of school that RL was demanding of him. He had never done a minute of homework in his life; his classmates at his old school couldn't care less

for what they were all doing; and he had never felt stretched, challenged, inspired, or, for that matter, affirmed. At RL, all that changed. The work rolled over him relentlessly. He didn’t know how to start. He couldn’t put three sentences together. Kids’ hands were flying up in every class while he was still trying to understand what the teacher had asked. He got the sense that everybody else knew the inside secret. And that he was an outsider, woefully unprepared for this assault. He was bloodied.

Every report meeting which the faculty holds at the end of each marking period, this boy was discussed. Some faculty rolled their eyes. Others explained all they had done to help this boy to succeed. His advisor reported on what he had tried. Everyone knew that this boy was unlikely to make it. He was over his head. And despite all the extra help—tutoring with each of his teachers and with older boys every free period and after sports—there was a feeling that this poor boy would grow weary and, understandably, give up. The first two summers he was at RL were booked with all kinds of extra support—summer school and more tutoring. This boy had hardly a minute to play. To hang out with the kids in the neighborhood. To bolster his reputation among a different group that he also cared about.

At several points along the way, the adults who wanted him to succeed so badly wondered if they were in fact acting cruelly toward this poor kid. Someone who had been involved in the admission process asked if the “spark” that had been seen early on was, in fact, being snuffed out. Another teacher said, “I submit that it is burning brighter than ever. This kid wants it. He’s tough.”

He was tough all right. With no academic role models at home, he was flying blind. But he was determined not to squander the chance he had been given. He was determined to make up for his previous seven years of school in which he was asked to do little. He was determined to put himself in a position to take advantage of all that RL had to offer— including setting him up for a very different life from the ones members of his family had available to them for generations. Round about Class IV, the D’s and C-minuses began to disappear from his report card. He emerged as one of his class’s best athletes. And he decided to try a few more things— debate, Glee Club, theater. Some worried that he would be needlessly distracted. In fact, he became more organized, more energized. In each of those areas, this boy’s potential began to emerge. He was tough. He could do it. By the time this boy was a senior, he had amassed an all-honors record and was a leader of various aspects of school life. He was tough all right. We asked a lot of him. We did not give up on him. More important, he did not give up on himself. And whatever we asked of him, he asked more.

Tough Guise

When I was growing up, back in the Dark Ages of the mid-20th century, we had plenty of role models for what it meant to be tough. I loved a TV show called The Untouchables, which chronicled the lives of gangsters and their inevitable demise at the hands of astute, earnest, good-looking FBI agents. The gangsters—part of what I later learned was an extensive, intricate network of crime families throughout the U.S. called the Mafia— were unattractive human beings; they were ruthless killers, not seeming to mind destroying who or what got in the path of their seizing for themselves whatever it was they wanted. They were ceaselessly self-interested. The allegory of the gangster morphed into something different when The Godfather movies came along. In these film classics the Corleone family was portrayed as three-dimensional, with characters who went about their sinister business in subtler, more sophisticated ways. Often the dirty work was accomplished by underlings while the leaders of the extended family “kept their hands clean,” although one always had the idea that any one of the most effective leaders could at a moment’s notice resort to a more primitive self in which he effectively, violently and physically could do in, likely kill, an adversary. Last year, another wonderful movie appeared, The Irishman, in which the great Robert DeNiro, through his character, reminds us that well into the 20th century an underclass of people benefitted from their intimidation of more upstanding types.

What the more modern depictions of these gangster characters showed was that they were not just tough. They were also human, and to be human meant that they had feelings, that they cared about particular other people (usually their own family members), and that when they harmed, or even killed, they were sometimes capable of remorse. Masculinity, the essence of being a man, however, was always defined by being a certain kind of tough. It seems quaint or

even absurd now to be reminded of the role models we had in the mid-20th century. I can talk about them because they constituted many of my cultural, public reference points. The pervasive sense of what it meant to be a man in those days had to do with physical capability—to be athletic or strong was even better, as was a capacity for tolerating pain, and never showing emotion or feelings. Men were judged by what they did, not usually by what they thought or felt. Of course, there were public figures, Presidents or other elected officials, as well as certain prominent intellectuals, teachers and writers who were respected for their ideas and capacity to reason and to wield language, but they, too, usually did not convey emotion or betray any weakness. It goes without saying that most of these role models were also white, of European origins, and straight. That of course was the ideal, and those who were not those things felt even more challenged.

The George Bailey Man

Long before television became a constant presence in our lives, the movies wielded an outsized influence on shaping culture, and, especially shaping people’s ideas of what it meant to be a man or a woman. The archetypes presented on film affected countless Americans, and boys and men inevitably were motivated to emulate the usual masculine role models they saw in countless cops, cowboys, soldiers, and successful businessmen. These role models were often one-dimensional, usually tough enough but not very tender. Over the holidays I had occasion to watch again a Christmas classic film, It’s a Wonderful Life, a movie that offered a different perspective. The protagonist is George Bailey, who operates a familyowned bank, but is victimized by the incompetence of a fellow worker and relative and the greed of the town’s miserly, mean, most powerful citizen. There are plenty of lessons suggested by this story, including the possibility of divine intervention during George’s lowest moments, but, also—and in the spirit of what I talked about in the Opening of Fall Term address— the force of community. In effect, in a response to George’s lifetime of kindness, his fellow townspeople rallied around and figured out a way to save the bank and to save George. In the concluding scene of the film, George is seen weeping tears of joy and wrapping his children in his loving arms. George seemed temporarily tough and, at the end, mostly tender. Though this was a popular movie in its time, I don’t know to what degree George, played by James Stewart, a “different” kind of man had much impact on the cultural biases about what characteristics were expected and celebrated in a man, a real man. But there he was. He was seen unfortunately, I believe, as a novelty, as not the kind of man one would ultimately want to be: he made mistakes, he signaled despair, he cried, he was indebted to others, he loved and was loved.

Because you are boys, real boys, from time to time we should step back and consider what men—what real men—you are growing into. Tough and tender. What does it mean for you?

These days, I hope, we are defining toughness differently. No longer are we expected to be like gangsters or teenage thugs. Our signals about toughness don’t come from idolized movie characters or even the actors who played them. We search differently, desperately among the diverse media available to us and long for fictional characters, or even live people, who embody character traits that we would choose to honor. For our purposes today, I will not cite these potential influencers but remind you of what we mean by being “tough.” Thankfully, our understanding of that term and our capacity for embracing it has to do with the realization that to be tough does not require that one not be tender. Not only are both possible; both are preferred.

Tough

To be tough these days, for my money, means to have grit. How often have you heard how important it is to persevere, to show resilience, to suck it up and move forward? All of us suffer through disappointment. We lament not getting our dream job, or finding our ideal partner, or making the varsity team, or gaining admission to a prestigious college. We could feel sorry for ourselves. We could blame someone for the unfairness of things. We could wallow in self-pity and imagine that it’s not worth noting an ideal and working hard to achieve it, if we are not rewarded by getting it. We might as well quit because the deck is stacked against us. Given what we have experienced, nothing will ever change, and we will always be disappointed, victimized, screwed.

Or we could imagine our place in the world another way. We could resolve to do things differently, to continue to

“We have had to withstand dramatic alterations to our lifestyles. We have had to endure separation from ones we love. We have had to adjust to new rhythms in our lives. We have had to live with the specter of possibly getting sick, of possibly dying, or of losing people we love to the same fatal conspirator. We have had to do without countless pleasures that are possible thanks to boundless freedoms and abundant resources. We have had to be tough.”

work at getting better at something, or finding a different path. We could engage others hoping their perspectives and talents will help us be better at what we wish to do. We could be undeterred by disappointment or results we didn’t want to have. We can try, try again. We can develop different strategies. We can work harder if that’s what it seems is needed. Or we can work smarter. Or, in a decision that some would contend was selling out, we could decide to devote our talents and industry elsewhere. We can change course. And pursue other passions. And go after other goals. Someone who is resourceful, someone who is optimistic, someone who perseveres, someone who withstands disappointment is tough.

Tender

Despite the example I gave at the beginning of my talk today, I don’t believe that to be “tender” means that you always cry. I used that example of what I believe to be the courage of acknowledging authentic feelings. But to be tender is not always about that dramatic result; in fact, it rarely is. To be tender does not mean that you are sensitive, that you are hurt easily, or that you wear your heart on your sleeve. Rather, I think, to be tender means to identify authentically and sympathetically with others. It’s one thing to own our own feelings—to allow our own feelings to be named and expressed. But it seems more important to provide affirmations for others as they are experiencing their own selves—perhaps enduring grief or disappointment or great joy. Empathy is an elusive, too often misappropriated quality these days. But to walk in another’s shoes, to feel his or her pain, to acknowledge another’s philosophy of life, sadness, satisfaction, frustration, or joy suggests an outwardly looking view of the world in which each of us is not exclusively tuned in to each of our own situations—our psyche and emotions—but rather is attuned to others. And as family members, friends, partners, co-workers, neighbors, countrymen, or fellow humans our tenderness is manifested in the degree to which we love others—caring for them and about them, suffering their agonies, supporting their dreams, offering reassurance and a hopeful vision. What has allowed us to be tough, also allows us to be tender. The toughness requires that we act; the tenderness suggests that the act signals that we care, that we feel, that we want to help. To be tender means that we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. And to honor others’ vulnerabilities as well.

Managing the Pandemic

So much about the past nine months has required us to be tough and to be tender. We have had to withstand dramatic alterations to our lifestyles. We have had to endure separation from ones we love. We have had to adjust to new rhythms in our lives. We have had to live with the spectre of possibly getting sick, of possibly dying, or of losing people we love to the same fatal conspirator. We have had to do without countless pleasures that are possible thanks to boundless freedoms and abundant resources. We have had to be tough.

We’ve also had to be tender. To reach out. To give generously. To suffer through others’ illnesses and deaths. To forgive more quickly. And to love more freely. No one has combined these traits of toughness and tenderness more compellingly over the past nine months than our healthcare workers who have relentlessly cared for our sick loved ones. They are tough to put themselves on the line, enduring long hours, and tempting the fates in regard to their own health. They scramble and strive to save lives. Because families cannot gather to support their loved ones, healthcare workers have had to take their places comforting their patients, caring for them until the end, and loving them best at the moment of their deaths. They have been tender. They have been tough and tender.

Birth

Finally, today we begin a New Year, and not long ago ended another. As the Queen of England would say, our “annus horribilis” is over. But in taking stock, in making resolutions and in anticipating with hope what is to come, we are always also aware of our existential beginnings and endings—our personal Alphas and Omegas.

Though it was a long time ago when I was present at a birth, I know what a dramatic moment it was. You see I was there, but I wasn’t doing much of the work. My mother was. Because I am a man and because I have not been blessed with children of my own, the only birth I have witnessed was my own. But I have heard

from plenty of my friends that the process of birth is the most dramatic, traumatic, exuberant experience of their lives. Life is given. Life comes into being. But in order for that to happen, the mother endures an unspeakably painful transformation. Millions of mothers deliver children every year. It seems to be taken for granted. But each of those mothers exhibits toughness in enduring pain, persevering, finding strength, willing life, delivering the baby. Each is tough. And, in her offering life to the newborn, she is offering her unconditional love. She is tender. She is reassuring. She is caring. She is supportive. She is loving. She is tender. She has been tough and tender.

Death

The joy that accompanies the birth of a child is matched in apprehension and agony in the death of a person. I was present for the deaths of both my mother and father. The death of anyone, and especially the death of someone you love deeply, requires distinctive strength. It requires strength from you as a witness to your loved one’s ordeal—it requires you to be focused, positive, affirming. It requires you to be tough. And it requires you to be kind, to be sweet, to be reassuring, to be loving. It requires you to be tender. All that is required of the caring bystander cannot begin to rival what the dying person is going through. Each of us will die. Millions died last year and millions will die this year. We cannot know when our time will come. And we cannot know what it will feel like. But I have experienced people I deeply love being tough and tender at that imminent moment. It’s almost as if the muscle that was so well exercised in life—the will to be tough and to be tender—finds its most profound and final expression at the moment of death. I knew my father was afraid of what was happening to him, of the unknown that would follow. And as he valiantly struggled for his last breath, I got the sense that he was channeling all the discipline, hard work, sacrifice, and challenged trust into that final moment. He was tough. At the same time, it almost seemed as it always was: that his greater concern was for me and my brother and that we not be sad, that we not be worried, that we could go on and live lives of purpose and hope. He was tender.

Tough and Tender at RL

While it is not usually a matter of life and death, you exhibit toughness by persevering at RL through seemingly endless days with outsized demands of you physically, intellectually, emotionally. As I have said before, I do not know if at your age I would have had the strength to push through the countless tough times and taxing demands that RL represents. You seem to know that you can do it, and surely show that you want to. And somewhere within us there is the faith that whatever we suffer now will be in service to greater goals realized later, and, in part, the result of what we have been trained to withstand— with focus and determination and without complaint. Additionally, you are often tender. You dare to give evidence of being moved—at the Glee Club senior concert, at the end of a memorable athletic season (whether in the waning moments of a victorious or losing contest), in the way you reach out to reassure a down classmate, in choosing not to boast of an accomplishment—like a college admission—because that might be hurtful to those whose results were less sunny, and in countless other moments when, usually privately, you express discouragement, sadness, hopelessness, doubt. You also are spectacular at signaling a concern for a classmate who himself is on the brink of despair. You are tough in your willingness to make the classmate mad by reaching out to a helpful adult, but appropriately tender in your eagerness to right a sinking vessel, to save a friend’s life.

When we say that RL boys are tough and tender, we are not saying that each one of you is as tough or as tender as you are going to be, or as you would ideally be. As with all things, we are works in progress. Our aim is in the direction of becoming our best selves. And these qualities would contribute unfailingly to the realization of lives lived with purpose, with conviction, with compassion, and with effect. Having made the case for why it is best to be tough and tender, I not only hope that you will be both. But I give you permission to be that very thing. On the threshold of the New Year, what more could I wish you than that? //

Headmaster Brennan delivered the Opening of Winter Term Hall virtually on January 5.

Historic Election A Virtual Founder’s Day for a

Historic Election

On October 29, students and faculty gathered not in Rousmaniere Hall, but over Zoom, tuning in from home for an unusual—but edifying—Founder’s Day celebration. In this historic year, with a consequential Presidential election forthcoming, the day’s programming focused on various elements related to the election process in the United States—both in this year, and in decades past. Topics ranged from the Electoral College to polling, from the 19th Amendment to running a campaign, from the right to vote to what to look for on Election Night in 2020.

The day began with a pre-recorded rendition of “For All the Saints,” featuring the vocals of former RL boys, and with a traditional Founder’s Day introduction by Headmaster Kerry Brennan, which honored Roxbury Latin’s founder, John Eliot, and his legacy. Dr. Alex Keyssar—the Matthew Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School— began the day with a keynote address focused on two foundational topics: the history of the right to vote in the United States, and the Electoral College—its origins and its viability today. A historian by training, Dr. Keyssar specializes in the exploration of historical problems that have contemporary policy implications. His book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, was named the best book in U.S. history by both the American Historical Association and the Historical Society and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2004-2005, Dr. Keyssar chaired the Social Science Research Council’s National Research Commission on Voting and Elections, and he writes frequently for the popular press about American politics and history. Dr. Keyssar’s latest book, titled Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? was published this year by Harvard University Press. Dr. Keyssar delivered a rich and engaging address, and stayed on for a lively and extended Q&A session with the students.

After lunch, students heard from Dave Paleologos, longtime director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, where he leads efforts to conduct statewide polls and bellwether survey analyses in Massachusetts

and elsewhere. Suffolk’s presidential primary polls have predicted outcomes in many key battleground states, and their survey results have been reported on by hundreds of major news organizations. Its bellwether model, authored by Mr. Paleologos, is used both locally and nationally and has an 85% accuracy rating in predicting winners. Mr. Paleologos talked with students about how polling is done, as well as what to look for in battleground states—and what towns and counties, in particular, to keep an eye on as bellwether voting areas, as we anticipated results on Election Night.

Later in the afternoon, students and faculty enjoyed a panel discussion on what it takes to run for public office, and how to run a successful campaign. Panelists included Former Massachusetts State Representative Marie St. Fleur; former Massachusetts State Treasurer and former national chairman of the Democratic National Committee and RL grandfather Steve Grossman; and RL alumnus Dennis Kanin ’64, who served as campaign manager for the presidential campaign of former U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas and served as Tsongas’s Chief of Staff in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives. After the panelist presentation—and after our guests answered lots of good questions from the boys—Mr. Kanin treated all to a preview of “What to Look for on Election Night.” His presentation focused on key battleground states; the various pathways to the presidency—to securing the required 270 electoral votes—for both Trump and Biden; and the potential scenarios if the election remained contested for many days or weeks.

Rounding out the day was a session—and various online media—related to the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment and the Women’s Suffrage movement, led by Erin Berg, as well as a report on the results of RL’s own mock election by Nate Piper. Students competed in Kahoots! quizzes throughout the day in homerooms, testing their knowledge on past presidents and national elections through questions crafted by Mr. Brennan. In the closing moments of the day’s program, the top winners in each class competed for the Kahoots! championship, which was secured by Frankie Gutierrez (II). //

Founder’s Day 2020: Dave Paleologos

Founder’s Day 2020: Marie St. Fleur

Founder’s Day 2020: Dennis Kanin ̛64

©2018 Harvard University by Derek G. Xiao

A Science Is Born

The “yeasty” times when computer research grew at Harvard by HARRY R. LEWIS ’65

We have—collectively, globally—perhaps never been more dependent on computers and the internet as we have been this past year. We are honored to include in this issue of the Newsletter an article by Harry Lewis '65, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, which chronicles his experience of, and role in, the early days of this novel and emergent technology. This article originally appeared in the September-October 2020 issue of Harvard Magazine (123:1; 42-47, 65f).

Thirty veterans of Harvard’s Aiken Computation Lab reunited on January 19, 2020, some 50 years after each of us had a role in creating today’s networked, information-rich, artificially intelligent world. Rip van Winkles who had never fallen asleep, we gathered to make sense of what had evolved from our experience as undergraduates and Ph.D. candidates during the decade from 1966 to 1975. One thing was clear: we hadn’t understood how the work we were doing would change the world.

Harvard didn’t even call what we were doing computer science; our degrees are mostly in applied mathematics, mathematics, or physics. The University remained blind to the future of computing for a long time. I joined the faculty in 1974, right after completing my graduate work. Four years later, as a stilljunior faculty member, I tried to get my colleagues in DEAP (the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics, now SEAS, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) to create an undergraduate computer-science degree. A senior mechanical engineer of forbidding mien snorted surely not: Harvard had never offered a degree in automotive science, why would we create one in computer science? I waited until I had tenure before trying again (and succeeding) in 1982.

But there we were, in our teens and twenties in the Aiken lab, laying some of the foundation stones on which the field has been erected.

No information infrastructure has been more consequential than the internet—arguably the most important information technology since Gutenberg made movable type practical. And Harvard fingerprints are on the internet’s embryo. As with so many critical advances, the circumstances were somewhat accidental.

Notwithstanding the pioneering work of professor of applied mathematics Howard Aiken in the 1930s on the Mark I, his massive electromechanical calculator, by 1960 Harvard was not a place to study circuitry or computer design. The action in hardware had moved, first to Penn and then to bigger engineering schools and industrial organizations.

So when Ben Barker studied hardware design as a Harvard sophomore, his instructor was a part-time adjunct faculty member named Severo Ornstein. Ornstein was an engineer at the Cambridge firm of Bolt Beranek and Newman. BBN won a contract from ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense) to design the first Interface Message Processor. The IMP (which Ted Kennedy once hilariously mischaracterized as an Interfaith Message Processor) was the electronic switching device that would glue heterogeneous host computers together to form the ARPAnet. Ornstein became the hardware engineering lead and brought his Harvard students Barker and Marty Thrope onto the team (see the photo on page 40).

The IMP project was interesting work, but no one thought they were changing the world. Ornstein remembers that when the Request for Proposals for designing the IMP and building the first part of the ARPAnet first arrived on the project manager’s desk, “He handed it to me and said, ‘Take this home and read it and let me know what you think.’ I did so, and next morning I put it back on his desk, saying, ‘Looks like a straightforward engineering job; we could certainly do it, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want such a thing.’” High up the chain of command there was a vision—in 1963, while he was head of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office, former Harvard research fellow J.C.R. Licklider had grandly touted the idea of an “Intergalactic Computer Network.” But the most obvious actual utility of the first IMPs was to enable a printer attached to one computer to print a document from another.

While working for BBN during his Harvard graduate studies, Barker installed the first IMP at UCLA in September 1969. Thrope, employed full time at BBN after finishing his undergraduate degree, installed the second IMP a month later at SRI (originally the Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park). On October 6, Barker sent the first message to Thrope across the network, which at that point consisted of nothing but those two IMPs. From two nodes the internet has grown to tens of billions of computers.

Barker does not remember what his message said. The fact that it arrived was miracle enough.

“Those were yeasty times,” one of our group said. Big things grew quickly out of next to nothing and shape-shifted in reaction to their environment. John McQuillan wrote an important dissertation laying out the way the ARPAnet could, without any central control, figure out which parts of itself were broken and route data so neither sender nor recipient would notice the failures in between. Some at ARPA viewed the internet’s capacity to survive failures as a central feature, because that promised to harden the network against nuclear attack. Others looked at the network and had other ideas.

Bob Metcalfe started graduate school at Harvard in 1969 after earning undergraduate degrees in engineering and business at MIT. When Harvard got its ARPAnet node in 1971, Metcalfe wanted to manage it. Harvard rebuffed him: that was a job for a professional, not a grad student. So Metcalfe talked his way into managing MIT’s node instead, and thereafter was seen only rarely around Harvard. Then one day in 1972 shocked whispers raced through Aiken: Metcalfe had failed his Ph.D. defense. Nobody ever fails their Ph.D. defense; it’s a symbolic and celebratory occasion, with champagne chilling outside the examination room. But somehow Metcalfe had fallen so far out of touch with his faculty committee that they walked into that room with different expectations. Metcalfe had already accepted a job at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he moved while changing dissertation

The Interface Message Processor team at BBN in 1969 (from left to right): Jim Geisman, Dave Walden, and Will Crowther crouch in the center; surrounding them are Truett Thach, Bill Bartel, Frank Heart, Ben Barker, Marty Thrope, Severo Ornstein, and Bob Kahn. (One key member of the team, Bernie Cossell, missed the photograph.) | Photograph coutesy of Frank Heart

advisers. Almost simultaneously with successfully defending his revised thesis, he and a co-author at PARC published the design of the Ethernet, the networking protocol that provided connectivity to computers scattered around a building at a fraction of the cost of the IMPs that connected large systems located hundreds of miles apart. Metcalfe left Xerox in 1979 and founded 3Com to commercialize Ethernet, which became ubiquitous. (Now a professor in both the engineering and business schools at the University of Texas, he is a writer, mentor, and visionary on technology.)

Our reunion group members are mostly third-generation computer scientists. Aiken was Harvard’s first generation; Claude Shannon was MIT’s. These men were already legends—we never saw them during our years at Harvard. (First-generation pioneer Grace Hopper did give a memorable talk at Harvard in the early 1970s, fuming because the cabin crew on her flight had mistaken her Navy admiral’s uniform for that of a retired stewardess.) The second generation of computer scientists included Anthony Oettinger, who was Aiken’s student, and Ivan Sutherland, who was Shannon’s. Sutherland spent three remarkable years on the Harvard faculty from 1965 to 1968 and, among other more important things, advised my undergraduate thesis.

The language of generations makes the succession sound too tidy. In the 1970s Oettinger shifted his interests toward matters of national security. Except for Sutherland, the only tenured computer scientist during our years was Tom Cheatham, who had no doctorate. He learned about computing in the army, having made the most of his assignment to keep the books at an officers’ club. Our small group inherited some intellectual traditions but also a sense that there wasn’t that much to know about the field, so anyone could contribute to it. Some walked in the footsteps of their advisers, while others came into computing from left field and brought some of that sod with them.

Cheatham had the most students, in part because he had the most money to support them, but also because his tastes were catholic and his turf was unfenced. He advised 36 Ph.D. theses, including that of Ben Wegbreit, who joined Cheatham on the faculty. Cheatham’s group worked on programming languages and the systems that made them usable. It was a hot research area because software development projects were becoming enormously expensive and might nonetheless fail spectacularly. In that environment there were established rows to hoe, if you were the row-hoeing type, but almost anything that might help could be a good thesis topic.

Cheatham set the tone for the Harvard style: bring in good people and give them a lot of responsibility and a lot of freedom—a method that one of our group reported using successfully later as a hiring strategy. Cheatham’s students had a profound influence on language design. In 1977-78, when the Department of Defense launched a competition for the design of the DoD standard language Ada, three of the four competing designs were headed by Harvard students of our era: Ben Brosgol, Jay Spitzen, and John Goodenough (who also was on the faculty for a time).

Cheatham’s students built tools: new languages, compilers, verifiers, anything to improve the ease and quality of programming. That orientation, combined with the very primitive computing facilities available to us, oriented the non-theorists among us toward tool-building and proofs-ofconcept. None of us had the ambition to build payroll systems or avionics software; we just wanted to make software that would help other people make systems like that. And nobody launched a company straight out of school—“start-up” was something you did to your car. So most of our group who did not go into academia went to companies that made software tools. It took several years before some realized that they could make a good living by building products for people who were not themselves computer geeks. Rob Shostak, having established a strong theoretical reputation during his years at SRI, launched the Paradox database system in 1985—for a while a personal computer database system very widely used in offices, including Harvard’s.

Bill Bossert, Arnold professor of science emeritus, is not a computer scientist and supervised none of our Ph.D. theses. He is a mathematical biologist who uses computers. But in the words of Pat Selinger, who took his course as a junior at Radcliffe, he was “heart and soul committed to inspiring people to use and appreciate the capability of computers.”

In 1968 Bossert had the idea to teach a computer course for everyone as part of Harvard’s General Education program. It was called Nat Sci 110. The point of the course was to teach students what computers could do, not to make them skilled or employable programmers. He hired one of our group, Mark Tuttle, as head teaching fellow (TF)—not because Tuttle knew much about computer programming (he didn’t), but because he had been an undergrad at Dartmouth, which was already evangelizing computing for everyone. In its first year Nat Sci 110 drew 350 students—more than twice what had been anticipated, and too many for the lecture hall. Bossert responded not by capping enrollment, but by repeating the lecture each class day, giving it once at the scheduled hour of 11 A.M. and then again at the overflow hour of 1 P.M. Some students wanted to come to both lectures—which Bossert said was OK as long as they laughed at his jokes both times.

Tuttle recalls being invited, as TF in this phenomenal new course, to tea at President Pusey’s house. “I’m introduced to the president,” Tuttle recalls, “who started peppering me with questions—`Why do we need computers? Why are they so expensive? Why is the faculty complaining?’ and so on. He listened intently but got quite emotional and ignored the others in the receiving line. I answered as best I could, but I am not sure how much got through. Later I learned that Oettinger and others were putting pressure on him.”

The course was a success, even though it was taught in FORTRAN, a poor instructional language, and used rented time on a commercial timesharing system. The following year Tim Standish joined the faculty, and Bossert leapt at the opportunity to use the highly flexible language Standish had designed, called PPL, for Nat Sci 110. Getting the language up and running over the summer fell largely to undergraduate Ed Taft, who went on to a long career at Adobe Systems.

Nat Sci 110 changed lives, Selinger’s for one. Bored in her introductory logic course by the eminent but mumbling Pierce professor of philosophy Willard V.O. Quine, Selinger

looked for a course that met in closer proximity to her 10 A.M. physics lecture so she would not always be arriving late, relegated to the back row. Thus she stumbled into Bossert’s passion for making computing interesting and fun. A few years later she finished her Ph.D. on programming languages and systems under the direction of Chuck Prenner, a student of Cheatham’s who had moved on from being his TF to assistant professor. Then Bill Joyner, another member of our group who had gone to work at IBM Research, aggressively recruited her. At IBM Selinger made fundamental contributions to database query optimization—the technology that makes it possible to find needles in haystacks without going through every stalk. In 1994 she was awarded IBM’s highest scientific honor, IBM Fellow. All because Nat Sci 110 was taught in a lecture hall near the physics building. Geography is destiny.

A few years later Prenner took the course over, and then I inherited it from him. I gave a shopping-season lecture in a Santa suit and drew 500 students my second year on the faculty. But in the late 1970s the Gen Ed program was disbanded and Nat Sci 110 with it; computing wasn’t a “Core Curriculum” subject. Instead, Harvard instituted a joyless and trivializing programming requirement. Students hated “the computer test,” which had the opposite effect from what Nat Sci 110 had done—and Lady Lovelace had also done more than a century earlier: show people that computers could be useful for lots of things.

Yet ghosts of Nat Sci 110 live on. Eric Roberts was a Nat Sci 110 TF under Bossert, Prenner, and me while he was an undergrad and grad student. He took his amazing pedagogical skills to Wellesley and then to Stanford, where he shaped the undergraduate computer-science program. Mark Tuttle took his experience to Berkeley, where starting in 1973 he taught a course on “The Art and Science of Computing” to audiences of hundreds. Now Bossert’s pedagogical grandchildren are teaching the fun of computing everywhere. Even at Harvard: Henry Leitner, who was my Nat Sci 110 TF when he was in graduate school, delights students every year with his Computer Science 1, and the dramatic flourishes in David Malan’s hugely popular Computer Science 50 can also be traced back to Nat Sci 110. When some have suggested calling our field “computer sciences,” I have protested that the totality of what is known amounts to at most one science. In the 1960s the field was too small to have well-defined subdisciplines, though speciation was starting to occur. For example, computational linguistics, which has brought us Alexa and Siri, was evolving from three roots. Linguists were trying to use mathematical methods to make sense of human language. Designers of programming languages needed an engineering toolkit with which to build interpreters and compilers, so that the higher-level codes programmers wrote could be executed on real machines. And logicians had for decades studied the limits of computability, and what sorts of decisions could and could not be made by automata. The specific research problem of automated translation of Russian texts financed Cold War attempts to integrate these directions and develop new ones (though the fear of Soviet scientific supremacy ended before much success had been achieved in language translation).

These roots were all sprouting at Harvard. Oettinger worked on Russian translation. His student Susumo Kuno wrote his dissertation on automatic syntax analysis of English and became a professor in Harvard’s linguistics department. Kuno’s student Bill Woods wrote his dissertation on semantics and question-answering, and then developed his work at BBN into a system that was used during the Apollo space program to answer questions about moon rocks. In the meantime, Sheila Greibach, a Radcliffe summa, wrote her Ph.D. dissertation under Oettinger on automata and formal language theory. It was not only an important contribution to the design of parsers and compilers for computer programming languages, but a founding document of theoretical computer science— one of the first success stories of the science of computing.

With both Woods and Greibach teaching at Harvard and with BBN nearby, computational linguistics and theoretical computer science began to emerge as identifiable disciplines. Bonnie Lynn Webber was Woods’s Ph.D. student and followed him to BBN, where she continued working on semantics of natural language while remaining part-time in the graduate program. Harvard finally pressured her to finish or drop out. She chose to finish and began an extraordinary academic career, first at Penn and then at Edinburgh. My recently retired colleague Barbara Grosz, Higgins research professor of natural

“No information infrastructure has been more consequential than the internet—arguably the most important information technology since Gutenberg made movable type practical. And Harvard fingerprints are on the internet’s embryo. As with so many critical advances, the circumstances were somewhat accidental.”

sciences, a leader in computational discourse analysis, has been a collaborator of Webber and of Webber’s eminent student Martha Pollack, who is now president of Cornell University.

Another of Woods’s students, Lyn Bates, arrived as a graduate student at Harvard knowing no one, and happened to find Woods’s door open while she was wandering the Aiken hallways. She finished her dissertation on syntax and then joined her adviser at BBN, initially sharing an office with Webber. Her research interests broadened over time; she was involved in early projects on speech understanding, use of natural language for database query, and an award-winning language synthesis project for use by the deaf. So the research that eventually gave us talking appliances was aborning under our noses 50 years ago, but the linguists in our group emphasize that the problem of language understanding and synthesis is not nearly solved yet. Woods himself spent most of his career in industry and says he is still trying to figure out how to get computers to think.

Henry Leitner was another Woods Ph.D. student; he is now acting dean of Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education at the same time as he teaches computer science. Bill Joyner was a Woods student, too. Now retired from his long career with IBM, he provided to the reunion group his complete graduate-adviser ancestral chart, 100 percent Harvard, back not just to Aiken but another five generations before him: Aiken’s adviser was Emory Chaffee1911; Chaffee’s was George W. Pierce, Ph.D. 1900; Pierce’s was John Trowbridge, S.D. 1873; Trowbridge’s was Joseph Lovering, A.M. 1836; and Lovering’s was Andrew Peabody, A.M. 1829.

Ivan Sutherland’s group was full of people doing things that had never been done before. For my undergraduate thesis I wrote a processor for ordinary algebraic notation: if the user wrote an equation using superscripts and division bars, the computer would interpret it as an instruction to transform one geometric figure into another. The PDP-1 computer was a disused hand-me-down from an Air Force lab, but it had unheard-of affordances: you could sit down at its console, flip its switches, and type on its keyboard and get it to type back, with no ritual passing of IBM card decks to data processing officiants as was customary with big machines of the day. A room-sized “minicomputer,” the PDP-1 had a tablet with a stylus for writing the equation, a display for showing the equation as interpreted, and two more screens for showing the shape before and after its transformation. The code that recognized handwritten characters was written by Ken Ledeen; we would today say that it did machine learning, extracting features and learning by reinforcement to classify its inputs. Ken was an English major, so instead of proclaiming that it was 92 percent sure that what you had written was a “G,” his program reported in mock-Shakespearean diction “Would that it were ‘G’”— and then invited you to correct it if your scrawl was meant to be a “C” instead.

The masterwork of Sutherland’s Harvard tenure was the first virtual-reality system. It consisted of a head-mounted display attached to a helmet that was in turn connected to the ceiling by telescoping tubes used to detect the position and orientation of the viewer’s head. The PDP-1 was programmed to display a 3-D object that seemed to hang motionless in the air while the viewer’s head moved around and through it. Wearing it was a magical experience, even though the computer was too slow to display anything more complicated than the 12 edges of a wireframe cube.

While still an undergraduate, Bob Sproull helped design a critical part of Sutherland’s head-mounted display system. He went to Stanford for graduate school, and when BBN shipped an IMP to the university in 1970, it arrived with a note from Ben Barker to Sproull scrawled on the shipping crate. In 1973 Sproull co-authored an early and highly influential computergraphics textbook; while at PARC he was part of the team that designed the first networked personal computer system. As part of a distinguished career in academia and industry, he was for 20 years in a leadership role at Sun Microsystems Laboratories.

Sutherland’s student Danny Cohen joined the faculty and kept Sutherland’s graphics program alive at Harvard for a few more years. Cohen’s great achievement was a flight simulator. Using switches and a joystick, you could try to land a schematic airplane on a schematic landing strip. It was a fun game that spawned hugely profitable businesses building realistic flight simulators. Commercial airlines and the military, it turned out, would pay a lot of money to have their pilots crash-land a simulator rather than an actual airplane. Cohen had been a paratrooper in the Israeli military and said he built the simulator so he could learn to fly. As it was, Barker insists that he was the first one ever to land a simulated airplane safely.

Like Barker’s first ARPAnet message, it was amazing any of this worked at all. Computers were slow, expensive, and unreliable. Cohen collaborated with Bob Metcalfe to split the flight simulator’s computing load between Harvard’s PDP-1 and a faster computer at MIT, using the nascent ARPAnet to exchange partially constructed images. Even the basic ARPAnet protocols were not yet in place, so Cohen and Metcalfe had no toolkit to work with: they were pushing bits through a network that was little more than bare metal. Cohen went on to use the same real-time engineering skills for internet voice communications. Internet telephony and video (including Zoom calls) all stemmed from Cohen’s primitive flight simulator running at Harvard and at Metcalfe’s MIT node.

All PDP-1 users remember the “yen board.” We each got a certain number of yen—grad students more than undergrads, and so on. The yen board showed the hours we could sign up to use the machine—a week’s worth of 24-hour days—and we could spread our allotted yen over a segment of time, on the understanding that someone else could outbid us by allocating more yen per hour, and none of us could have more yen outstanding than our quota. Among the high-yen crowd was the visionary J.C.R. Licklider, by 1968 a professor at MIT. In our ignorance we took him for a superannuated graduate student and helped him debug his code. Naturally, those of us at the bottom of the totem pole claimed blocks in the 2 A.M. to 5 A.M. range, when our yen went the furthest, and we emerged best friends with those who had the blocks before and after us.

And friends we were, all of us. We supported each other, not because anybody was against us, just because we all got along. We dressed up for dinner parties together, with Julia Child prepping the chefs from her TV screen. We climbed mountains in New Hampshire, not always wisely: Peter Downey, now professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Arizona, remembers realizing, rather too late, that he might better have worn orange during hunting season and could have turned back sooner in the face of an incipient Mount Washington blizzard.

Joyner had never lived outside Virginia until he came to Harvard, and had trouble making himself understood. It was worse for his wife, Mary Brenda, a fellow Virginian whose job entailed reading numbers over the telephone—mostly to northerners. Joyner claims I discovered a bug in his dissertation, which he was able to fix at the eleventh hour, and also that Rob Shostak and I tried to teach the Greek alphabet to his two-year-old daughter. I know for sure Joyner taught me his mother’s whisky-sour recipe: a can of frozen lemonade, a canful of Rebel Yell bourbon, and ice, mixed in a blender to the consistency of melting snow. Drinking was a great

deal more casual then, before alcohol became a controlled substance on college campuses. Wine and cheese parties every Friday afternoon in the basement of Aiken brought together undergrads, graduate students, staff, and faculty.

The group of women in our cohort was large for the time. Judy Townley, from the University of Texas, worked in Cheatham’s programming-languages group and joined him for a time in a software consultancy. Emily Friedman from Atlanta, via Cornell, became a professor at UCLA before spending most of her career at Hughes Aircraft. Radcliffe grad Brenda Baker also wrote a theoretical dissertation, but took a position at Bell Labs expecting to work on speech synthesis. She soon found “the freedom to do curiosity-driven research” and became a jack-of-all-trades in the design of algorithms for mathematical problems. During a career spanning several decades, she has published on program analysis, computer-aided design, and robotics, among other subjects. Nancy Neigus joined Ornstein, Barker, and Thrope at BBN. Miriam Lucian, from Romania, was one of only two international members of our group; she went on to a long career as an engineer at Boeing, but her Harvard dissertation research in mathematical logic earned her an adjunct philosophy professorship at the University of Washington. The other immigrant in our group, Peter Chen from Taiwan, was inspired to attend Harvard by the example of industry pioneer An Wang, inventor of magnetic core memory and founder of computer company Wang Laboratories.

For a time, the women in our group had a faculty mentor and role model in Greibach, who taught many of us. The women generally remember having been treated as equals—by us, though not always by others at Harvard, and certainly not after they left Harvard and moved into academia and industry. Independently, three different individuals in our group reported having been told by a Radcliffe dean that “girls” weren’t good at science or shouldn’t be majoring in math. It was typical of the time—as was Greibach’s departure in 1969 for a permanent position at UCLA when Harvard didn’t offer her tenure. Greibach’s student Ron Book took over theory teaching from her until he too left for California, having advised six Ph.D.s as a junior faculty member, including four women: Baker, Friedman, Lucian, and Celia Wrathall (who married him). We were privileged to work with one more underappreciated giant in those days. Ugo Gagliardi never held a ladder appointment on the Harvard faculty. He had his own consulting firm and, like Woods, taught in an adjunct role as professor of the practice of computer science. Educated in Italy at a university older than Harvard and experienced with the early computer company Olivetti, Gagliardi brought a wealth of practical wisdom to the courses he taught on operating systems and related software. His student Jeff Buzen was a founding figure in the statistical modeling and analysis of computer systems; only after Buzen’s work did it become possible to estimate accurately where to spend money to expand an overloaded computer system. Buzen too joined the faculty and several of us learned computer-system design from him and Gagliardi—and from Metcalfe, when he was Gagliardi’s TF and Buzen’s reassigned Ph.D. student. Buzen and two other Gagliardi students, Bob Goldberg and Harold Schwenk, eventually started their own very successful business, BGS Systems. Peter Chen, who studied under Gagliardi, Buzen, and industry veteran George Mealy, passed on the opportunity to join the BGS team and went on to receive broad acclaim as a database scholar for his EntityRelationship model.

And that is a good place to end the chronology of that period, because the computing world started to change dramatically soon after I joined the faculty. A smart sophomore named Bill Gates took a course from me in 1975. A building named for the mothers of Gates and his poker buddy Steve Ballmer would eventually replace Aiken, but at this point Gates was spending most of his time on Harvard’s PDP-10 writing code for a microcomputer he neither owned nor had ever seen. Some on the faculty discouraged him; the intellectual challenges, they said, were in disk scheduling, and here he was toying with code for a machine that didn’t even have a floppy. And so, for a second time the action in computer science moved away from Harvard, this time to the West Coast, where many of our group, students and faculty alike, had already emigrated. I stayed and started to bring order to the undergraduate curriculum, while a series of junior faculty came and went, including one who later won the Turing Award but Harvard judged not promising enough for tenure. A serious intellectual resurgence would not take root at Harvard until Barbara Grosz, Michael Rabin,

©2015 Harvard University by Madeline R. Lear

Watson professor of computer science emeritus, and Leslie Valiant, Coolidge professor of computer science and applied mathematics, arrived in the early 1980s.

So what made Aiken so generative in those days?

Part of the magic was that it was full of smart students, and the faculty “stood back and let you go,” as one of us said. But we also remember Tom Cheatham’s benevolent generosity. Tom was “an academic magnet” and “a river to his people”—in particular, he funded students’ travel. Those trips, and the regular visits to Harvard by Cheatham’s scientific collaborators, opened students’ ears to intellectual hatching noises coming from the world beyond Harvard. Tuttle remembers a specific incident that exposed a tension with which the field of artificial intelligence is still struggling. Data rules in AI today; systems get smart by generalizing from millions of examples. But for the first generation of researchers, whose computers were not large enough to store or process large data sets, AI was all about symbolic logic and automated reasoning. So when Tuttle was able to attend an AI conference in California, he witnessed “an open battle between the AI speakers—symbol manipulators all—and those in the audience from Silicon Valley who foresaw the role of statistics and probability.… [Marvin] Minsky and Seymour Papert tried to prevent their field from engaging in empirical—data-driven—approaches to problems. Obviously, their efforts were successful only in the short term.” What an educational experience! (What logic-based systems could do that remains a challenge for data-driven systems is to explain their decisions. It is morally untenable to have judgments about human lives—how long to incarcerate a criminal, for example—emerge from inexplicable numerical parameters magically distilled from mountains of training data.)

Colloquia with outside speakers were important for us. Big names—and names like Alan Kay that later became big— came by and talked to our little group of faculty and students. Bates and Selinger remember Hopper’s dramatic talk, with a fistful of wire segments representing nanoseconds, at a time when female speakers were rare. I remember Edsger Dijkstra, who like Kay would later win the Turing Award, advocating formal thinking with the commitment and the intolerance of a religious zealot. Mark Tuttle made sense of the principles presented at a colloquium by Jim Gray, who also would win the Turing Award, only decades later when a situation required him to make use of them.

Ironically, the growth and professionalization of our discipline and of the Harvard program have made such memorable encounters less frequent today. Theorists go to the weekly theory talk and an almost disjoint set of people go to the weekly talks on computation in society; assemblies of the whole are infrequent and unwieldy. Fifty years ago, smallness and immaturity fostered cross-fertilization and excitement.

Everybody seems to remember deeply meaningful acts of kindness by each other or by our faculty mentors. And everyone has such a story about Pauline Mitchell, the DEAP administrator who ran everything having to do with students. Mine is typical. In those pre-cell phone, pre-email days, Mitchell figured out that I was abroad, that I needed money, and that there was a postal strike in Italy. She called her brother (who worked in Harvard’s bursar’s office) and her sister (who worked at the bank in Harvard Square) to get Harvard to wire me the funds. No wonder Harvard felt like family. And that sense of security spawned freedom and creativity.

We talked a lot. Perhaps the southerners loosened the tongues of the northerners, but I remember endless banter and chatter, sometimes idle and sometimes about ideas. “Each of us was working on something very different,” Emily Friedman wrote, “but listening to the progress of the others pushed me on.” We did not hesitate to tell the others what we were doing or to acknowledge what we didn’t understand. We could open up because we were not in competition. Skepticism of intellectual property prevailed, perhaps an inheritance from Howard Aiken: as his student and Turing Award winner Fred Brooks put it, Aiken thought “the problem was not to keep people from stealing your ideas, but to make them steal them.” And most of us knew how to write; we were largely alumni of liberal arts colleges, and several had been humanities majors before falling into computing. Those term papers, gabfests, and teaching fellowships yielded success in countless technical pitches we gave over the years.

I am glad to have had tenure and I have defended it as essential to academic freedom. But our experience in Aiken provided little evidence that the institution was either useful or rationally awarded. Our cadre of part-time faculty with one foot in industry and the other at Harvard provided not only superb teaching but exactly the sort of continuity and institutional loyalty that tenure is supposed to promote. Woods, Gagliardi, Buzen, Mealy, Ornstein, McQuillan, Dave Walden from BBN, and others made major contributions, both scientific and educational. And some of our most memorable faculty mentors, not just Cheatham but my own Ph.D. adviser, Pierce professor of philosophy Burt Dreben, had gained permanent positions without a Ph.D. and seemed no less professorial for that deficit. The untenured “professor of the practice” title still exists, but none of today’s incumbents split their time with industry. Faculty hiring has become vastly more competitive, specialized, and systematic—and, to be sure, less inbred. Yet I am not confident that, all things considered, today’s students find their more objectively selected faculty “better” than we found our devoted irregulars.

The last word goes to the Harvard bean counter who was keeping the books on the PDP-10 in 1975 and noticed that a sophomore had used more connect hours in the month of February than there were in the month of February. Bill Gates had, it seemed, invited in some programming assistants. Concerned about how this could be explained to a federal auditor, the administrator summoned Gates for an interview and reported the outcome of his cross-examination in these deathless words: “He did not understand the ramifications of his activities.” Perhaps true of Gates and perhaps not; but the same could be said of most of us who were in Aiken during that momentous decade. And it was true of Harvard, too. //

Harry Lewis ’65 is Gordon McKay research professor of computer science at Harvard, and former President of RL’s Board of Trustees. His collection of classic computer-science papers, Ideas That Created the Future, will be published by MIT Press in 2021. Four former RL teachers (the first four listed below) are among those to whom the book is dedicated:

Naming of O’Keeffe Field

William Bernard O’Keeffe, Class of 1957, passed on May 26, 2019, but his name and legacy will live on at Roxbury Latin. The following statement was written by his classmates in the Yearbook Bill’s senior year: “Working on one committee or another, Bill is known for his hard work and cheerful attitude. We are sure that Bill’s sly smile and friendly ways will continue to win him friends at college and in the future.” These words foreshadowed his lifetime of service to Roxbury Latin. He worked as class agent for more than 60 years and chaired the Annual Fund. He was a longtime 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 and continuous service to Alma Mater. 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 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 Bill’s 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 Roxbury Latin, the school has named the recently renovated football/ lacrosse field in honor of his family—now named O’Keeffe Field.

The O’Keeffe family’s commitment to and relationship with RL has deep roots as four generations, totaling ten members, have attended or are attending the school. The official dedication of O’Keeffe Field was slated to occur during Reunion Weekend in the spring of 2020, but COVID-19 delayed that ceremony. The O’Keeffe family visited campus this fall for a photo under the field’s newly installed scoreboard, and we look forward to honoring Bill and his family at a future date.//

Photo: Bill's sons Ian O’Keeffe ’86 (left) and Tim O’Keeffe ’89 pictured with their mother, and Bill's widow, Paula O’Keeffe.

©2013 Harvard University

Former Trustee David Evans Retires after 50 Years in the Harvard Admission Office

The following article, “Changemaker in Admissions” by Matteo Wong, appeared in the September/October 2020 issue of Harvard Magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.

The fourth of seven children, David L. Evans grew up in Arkansas in one of the nation’s poorest counties. His grandmother was born into slavery, and his parents, who died before Evans graduated from high school, were sharecroppers with little formal education. “It’s strange how they believed that there were two sources of magic in the world: education and religion,” Evans recalls. He says he is not as religious as he “should have been,” but he did spend six decades in education, retiring this year after five in the College admissions office.

Evans joined the admissions staff in 1970, entering a very different—and for many, far less welcoming—university. It had not merged with Radcliffe, did not offer such generous financial aid, and had hired its first black admissions officer only two years earlier. (Evans was the second.) In the 100 years since the College graduated its first black alumnus— Richard T. Greener—in 1870, Evans estimates Harvard had admitted fewer than 300 black students. During his 50 years there, approximately 6,000 black students were admitted. The Harvard Alumni Association awarded him a 2020 Harvard Medal in part to recognize his role in that change.

After earning his bachelor’s from Tennessee State University and a master’s in electrical engineering from Princeton in 1966, Evans lived in Huntsville, Alabama, working for IBM on the Saturn-Apollo project to send U.S. astronauts to the moon. There, he started a college-placement program for black teenagers and helped several enter elite schools, drawing

attention from college administrators. In 1970, Harvard offered him a two-year contract as an assistant director of admissions. He became a senior admissions officer in 1975.

During sometimes 16-hour workdays, Evans recruited and selected Harvard applicants of all backgrounds and sought to make the campus more supportive. He became a freshman proctor, living in Wigglesworth Hall alongside students and serving as their academic adviser; from 1973 to 1977 he was also an assistant dean of freshmen. His efforts have earned praise from both Harvard—an administrative prize from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, in addition to the Harvard Medal—and former students: black alumni endowed a scholarship fund in his name in 2003, exceeding a fundraising goal of $250,000 by more than fourfold.

Evans came to Harvard at a racially fraught time—not long after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and amid disproportionately high death rates for black soldiers in Vietnam. In the 1970s, the campus saw “ugly confrontations” between black and white students— partly, Evans says, because Harvard lacked a structure for grievances and dialogue. In 1981, the University created the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, where Evans served as an adviser.

He sees similarities between then and now, as the nation faces disproportionately more black deaths from COVID-19 and police killings. But recent protests have given him “great hope.” He leaves Harvard a more welcoming and diverse campus, he says, because faculty, administrators, and students “pushed to make it happen.” Such change, he hopes, can happen again. As for himself, Evans hopes retirement will give him more time “to contemplate and convey” the meaning of his journey from a family of black sharecroppers to a Harvard Medal. //

David Evans served on The Roxbury Latin School Board of Trustees from 2011 to 2014. For 30 years he served as the Harvard Admissions Office Representative for RL.

RL Launches ART@RL, an Online Gallery

While the pandemic prevents guests from coming to campus, it also prevents the student artwork that reliably lines the halls from benefitting a broader audience. Arts Department Chair Brian Buckley and Headmaster Kerry Brennan were intent that the school still share students’ impressive work, despite the logistical constraints. With the helpful cooperation of art faculty members, students from all classes, and other colleagues, Roxbury Latin launched this fall its online art gallery, ART@RL, found at RLArts.org. We hope that virtual visitors will enjoy the various galleries, which include works—paintings, drawings, sculptures—created by students from Class I through Class VI, as well as faculty and alumni artists. //

Faculty Flashback: Ken Conn

faculty member from 1973 to 2009

interview by tom guden ’96

“The contact we have with the boys is the most important role we have as faculty.”

Hired in 1973 by interim Headmaster Bill Chauncey, Ken is known by most alumni as a teacher of French, but he also taught history and English in his early years at RL. In 2004, he was named the inaugural Stanley Bernstein Professor of French. In addition to his brilliant work in the classroom, Ken effectively guided hundreds of boys as the Classmaster of Class II. He showed a special devotion to those boys who were experiencing tough times or who might not be noticed as easily. Ken also loved encouraging and molding students out on the athletic fields, acting as a junior lacrosse coach for most of his career and honing the skills of generations of RL linemen on the gridiron. Ken retired in 2009. You really understood RL boys. What would you say were their most appealing qualities? Comparing the typical RL boy at the start versus the end of your career, how were they different? What did they have in common? RL boys have always been our treasure and the abiding strength of our school. Those who work at RL know that their efforts as teachers, coaches, and advisors are rewarded by the chance to watch the kids grow and develop. For me, the one constant throughout the years was always the boys. Times have changed since the first year I spent at the school, but I believe that the changes are mostly superficial. Hair-dos, fashion, music, even slang are mutable aspects of our world. Our fluid, dangerous, and demanding time has forced us to redefine who we are and what we do. It has always been the challenge of the school to help the boys develop skills to cope with what they will meet beyond those brick walls.

The boys are not homogenous. They come from many different backgrounds and cultures, which I feel is a great strength of the school, yet they are thrown together, and over the time they spend together become the unifying

element that defines Roxbury Latin. Their shared experience becomes the strength of their friendships and love of their classmates. The common experience, so different from many other educational experiences, becomes a bridge from the past to the current day. When they—their former, youthful selves—are rekindled, they talk a jargon incomprehensible to others. Who else knows the “Founder’s Song” or Latin phrases that are the currency of their past? They have long felt the sense of accomplishment that they survived the crucible of their teenage years and the demands of the school. They have memories of certain situations, teachers, experiences that provide a commonality for the diverse nature of their lives. Roxbury Latin has always stated that it stands for helping kids reach their potential. We care, most of all, what kind of person a boy is. Looking back at it all, I believe that we have succeeded in reaching our goal. The boys that we teachers worked so hard to teach and to help grow are the products of a school that cares about them as people.

What are your fondest memories of RL? Some of my fondest moments were the times I spent with my advisees and with all the other boys I met along the way. I hope I brought value and meaning for them. I loved speaking with groups of kids gathered around my desk. The contact we have with the boys is the most important role we have as faculty. I would like to think that I had memorable classes and opened the boys to the wonders of learning as a life-long pursuit. Teachers try to touch their students, to open their minds, to foster confidence, and to help them believe in themselves. But the impact we have can be invisible; after spending half my life at RL, I cannot state with any certainty what impact I had on the kids I worked with. A seed was planted that might have bloomed later on. An idea that comes to mind cannot be imputed to a specific event or experience. A teacher’s reward is not seeing the result of his student’s growth but rather knowing that the impact is in there, invisible but real.

Your enthusiasm rubbed off on your students. What was your approach with them in the classroom? I was originally hired to teach history and French. I taught Western Civ and European and American History. Along the way I spent years teaching English. I always enjoyed my time in the classroom. I tried to involve the kids in their education, to get them to certify that learning is a two-way street. I had, over the years, terrific colleagues—people who were dedicated, disciplined, and fun to work with. RL has blossomed, and much of its success can be attributed to those wonderful people. It’s certainly a tough and demanding job, requiring the individual to wear many hats, to go full-tilt from class to field for the entire day.

You coached football and lacrosse during your RL years. What did you enjoy about coaching at RL? I always felt that sports were an integral part of the RL experience. Practices were usually the highlight of the day. It was a chance to blow off steam and get together with friends. I cherished working with the line. Linemen are a special breed of athlete. I have nothing against the backs (better known as “the glitter boys”—the guys who get all the limelight), however my heart is with the guys in the trenches. They may never get the glory, but they are the soul of the team. They make the team work. I also enjoyed coaching “little guy lax.” Many of them were first-year players who had to learn skills from scratch. We had many years of success getting the youngsters to learn and enjoy the fastest game on grass. I was blessed to have worked with many fine coaches whose dedication and enthusiasm was inspiring. Coaching was one of the highlights of my time at RL. These memories are enough to fill a lifetime.

What are your reflections on your teaching career at RL? I couldn’t possibly pinpoint one memory, one event, or one person that stands out for me. There is rather a flood of people I have known, of experiences we have shared, that made the time I spent at RL so telling, so deep. I never lost my desire to help the boys. Roxbury Latin always demanded much from all of us, and success was based on how well we responded to the many challenges we faced. It was never easy, but it was always worth the effort to stay the course. I felt that the boys who came through to arrive that Saturday in June will always find the strength to face their challenges. These days there are more challenges to face than ever before, and so our efforts to build confidence in the boys are more critical than ever.

Apart from the regret of growing older and farther away from my years at RL, I feel lucky to have been with all of you. I am reassured with the school’s current administration and the ways they are continuing despite the difficulties and tragedies we all deal with. There are surely better days to come. //

Class Notes

Charles Halsted ’54 reports, “After two years at RLS, my family moved to Los Angeles where I completed high school. With my rigorous RLS standards of scholarship, I attended Stanford where I majored in modern European history with a minor in pre-med. After spending the summer of 1958 hitchhiking through western Europe, I obtained my medical education at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, followed by internship and residency training at the Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital. My two-year military obligation was spent performing clinical research at the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit in Cairo, Egypt, where I witnessed firsthand the Arab/Israeli War of 1967. Subsequently, I completed specialty training at Johns Hopkins and embarked on a career in academic medicine. Due in large part to my scholarship grounding at RLS, my medical research output exceeded more than 200 original research papers, book chapters, and reviews up until my retirement five years ago. Since then I have embarked on a new career in poetry, with two published books, a third in press, and two more ready to go early next year. Looking back I can fairly attribute most, if not all, of my achievements to the intellectual grounding I received at The Roxbury Latin School.”

John Kenney ’81 published his fourth book of poetry titled, Love Poems (For the Office…or Wherever). John reports, “My publisher is calling it ‘the wrong book for the wrong time by the wrong author,’ which I’m excited about.”

The photography of Chris Payne ’86 was featured in a double spread of The New York Times Magazine on November 28, 2020 for a feature, How to Make a Guitar, documenting the Martin Guitar factory for The New York Times for Kids publication.

Tino Poggio ’96 is a professor of physics and chair of the Physics Department at the University of Basel, where he leads a group focusing on nanomechanical sensing, nanomagnetism, and sensitive scanning probe microscopy. Tino is a winner of a 2013 ERC Starting Grant and serves on the board of the Swiss Nanoscience Institute.

Tim Pingree ’02 and Lucas Robertson ’00, co-founders of SHAKE Architecture: Construction, were featured on the cover of The Boston Globe Magazine in October, for a recent renovation project in Charlestown. Zack Hardoon ’05, Kevin Mullin ’10, and John Noonan ’10 have worked in the past at SHAKE with Tim and Lucas.

John Lawrie ’03 and his wife, Courtney, welcomed their first child on November 28—a boy, John Robert Lawrie, III. Mom, Dad, and baby Jack are all doing well.

Richie Iskra ’08 shares that his “extraordinary wife, Tatum, gave birth to a baby boy—Samuel Patrick—on October 29. Mum, Dahd and Big Sister, Etta, are all happy and healthy.”

Rishabh Sinha ’08 and Simran Virk were married in a small, COVID-safe ceremony with parents and siblings present, overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Southern California. The couple looks forward to having a big wedding celebration in 2022. //

The RL Alumni in Education Group met on November 12 via Zoom to discuss ways to maintain motivation and morale in the midst of hybrid and remote learning. Participants included Jean-Pierre Jacquet ’01, Jakub Lau ’02, Peter Simpson ’01, David Hershenson ’51, James Colbert ’56, Richard Bloom ’67, Greg Spiedel ’06, Mike Lawler ’06, Daniel Wulf ’88, Sam Fitzgerald ’07, Michael Bear ’77, Luke Joyner ’05, Alessandro Ferzoco ’14, Tom Guden ’96, Dave Cataruzolo, and Headmaster Kerry Brennan.

The RL Alumni Commercial Real Estate Group met via Zoom on December 2. Participants included Dan Botwinik ’98, Colin Flynn ’01, Jeffrey Ganem ’77, Jacob Grossman ’00, David Grossman ’97, Chuck Katz ’80, Peter Mahoney ’98, Paul Massey ’78, Mike McElaney ’98, Joe Mulligan ’83, Jerry Murphy ’01, Bob O'Connor ’85, John O’Loughlin ’08, Greg Petrini ’82, Michael Price ’77, Dan Rea ’05, Chad Reilly ’85, Sean Rose ’15, Alan Schlesinger ’64, Mike Shepard ’12, John Thomsen ’15, Jordan Warshaw ’83, Alessandro Ferzoco ’14, Tom Guden ’96, and Dave Cataruzolo.

The RL Alumni Council held its quarterly meeting on January 21.

In honor and in place of RL Homecoming, the 1970 Roxbury Latin Football Team via Zoom on Wednesday, October 21, celebrated the 50th Reunion of their Prep School Championship season. The fourteen teammates were joined by current RL football coach Mike Tomaino. Present were Brian Crowley ’71, Steve Kaitz ’71, Roger King ’71, Dan Williams ’71, Jonathan Olch ’71, Charles David Lee ’72, Mark Rubin ’71, John Rodman ’71, Bob Allen ’71, Jim Hill ’72, David John ’72, Steven Simoni ’71, Dick Carroll ’72, Bill McCarthy ’71, and Dave Cataruzolo (adjacent photo: Dan Williams ’71, Jonathan Olch ’71, Steven Kaitz ’71, and Roger King ’71).

In place of the typical Young Alumni Holiday Party that Headmaster Brennan hosts each winter season, the Alumni Office sponsored two young alumni calls to connect classmates, to share an update of the school, and to provide information about professional and networking opportunities and resources. At the end of each call, the Alumni Office passed the hosting privileges to a member of the class so that the conversation could continue among peers in a more informal fashion.

The Class of 2017 Holiday Gathering was held via Zoom on December 29. Attendees included Joe Lomuscio, Fran Rose, Andys Gonzales, Michael Rounds, Oliver Booth, Mike Healy, Mike O’Grady, Aidan Burke, Neema Zarrabian, Felix Wang, Adam Banks, T.J. Silva, Hamilton Coiscou, Jack Ricciuti, Chris Jimenez, Andrew Talcott, Darcelis Worrell, Ian Kelly, Jack Colavita, and Xander Boyd.

The Class of 2018 Holiday Gathering was held via Zoom on Dec 30. Attendees included Zach Milton, Jake Wexelblatt, Dylan Zhou, Grady Hayes, Zach Levin, Harris Foulkes, Ahmed Abdelrahman, Will Connaughton, Zander Keough, Andrew White, Reis White, Conor Dowd, Tyler Wolfe, Gabriel Grajeda, Ayinde Best, Evan Lim, Eoghan Downey, Carson Straub, Andrew Steinberg, Robert Crawford, Cole Englert, John Philippides, Matt Sheehan, and Ben Lawlor. //

Civil rights activists remind us: There is no democracy without the right to vote

by PETER G. MARTIN ’85

We are honored to reprint this article by alumnus Peter G. Martin ’85—about his alumnus father Gordon A. Martin Jr. ’53, a former member of the Board of Trustees, who pursued racial justice as a Gordon A. Martin, Jr. lawyer and a judge beginning in the 1960s, when he worked in the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in Mississippi. Gordon made it possible for one of the movement’s great litigators, John Doar, to speak to the school several years ago. This article originally appeared on November 2, 2020 in America: A Jesuit Review. Peter serves as Special Assistant to the President of Boston College, after more than 20 years spent in the U.S. Foreign Service. Peter’s two sons currently attend Roxbury Latin—Nicholas, Class III, and Xavier, Class V. In October 2016, I came home from my diplomatic assignment overseas to see my father, Gordon A. Martin Jr., whose health was failing rapidly. It was during the lead-up to the presidential election, and he was worried about the trend he was seeing toward voter suppression, especially among people of color.

He was particularly sensitive to this issue, as he had spent much of his career in the pursuit of racial justice as a lawyer and a judge. This began in the 1960s, when he worked in the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in Mississippi. It was there that he helped bring to trial the United States vs. Theron Lynd case in 1962, an important step toward the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

My father always told me the heroes of U.S. vs. Lynd were the brave African-American witnesses who came forward at great personal risk to demonstrate the unfair voter registration practices that had made Forrest County, Mississippi, one of the most egregious examples of white

“A question for Black registrants to determine if they were qualified to vote: ‘How many bubbles in a bar of soap?’”

supremacist rule in all of the South. He later wrote a book about their stories, Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote, which includes many of the details recounted below.

The county’s registrar of voters (Theron Lynd at the time of the lawsuit and Luther Cox before him) was the omnipotent arbiter of voting rights, and he systematically excluded Black citizens from the voter rolls with a combination of avoidance, hostility, cynicism, and dishonesty. In 1961, 30 percent of the county’s population of roughly 53,000 was Black, but the Justice Department found only a dozen African-Americans registered to vote.

White voters breezed through the registration process. If they were asked to interpret a section of the Mississippi Constitution (state law gave the registrar the right to demand this), they never seemed to have a problem with it. The women who worked as clerks in the registrar’s office often took care of the white applicants. But they were instructed that only registrar Theron Lynd could see the Blacks.

Prospective Black voters were often told Lynd was “not available” or to “come back later.” If, after long periods of waiting, they finally saw Lynd, he might tell them there wasn’t enough time left that day to fill out the paperwork. If he did allow a prospective voter to apply, he or his clerks were often able to find an error that invalidated the registration. Perhaps the applicant had signed in the wrong place or had written down the wrong precinct number. Lynd’s predecessor had his own favorite question for Black registrants to determine if they were qualified to vote: “How many bubbles in a bar of soap?”

“Unqualified” was invariably Lynd’s verdict. Would-be voters were told they could come back in six months to try again. As John Doar, my father’s lead prosecutor for the Lynd case, put it: “No matter how educated a black person was in Mississippi, it was very unlikely that he would get a chance to vote. [But] if you could breathe and you were white, you voted.”

David Roberson was a Black college graduate and a Korean War veteran when he came to Forrest County to teach science at Hattiesburg’s segregated Rowan High School in 1958. He saw that out of the 27 teachers at Rowan, including “10 or 11 [with] master’s degrees,” very few had successfully registered to vote. “How can we be qualified to teach, yet we’re not qualified to vote?” Roberson asked.

Lynd rebuffed Roberson several times. He “had a real sour personality,” Roberson later told my father, “sour in the kind of stare he gave you when you walked in: What are you doing here? You have no right to even request to register to vote.”

Roberson persevered, ignoring the threat of violence against Blacks who tried to exercise their legitimate rights. When he had a chance to work with the Civil Rights Division on a lawsuit, he later said, “We really couldn’t believe it, because in our whole lives, none of us had ever experienced any kind of thing like that from the government, where the results might be some positive advance for Blacks.”

Roberson, who passed away in May at the age of 86, was just one of the brave witnesses in the Lynd case:

• Addie Burger, another teacher, had studied at Alcorn State and New York University. In response to the section of the Mississippi Constitution Lynd gave her, she wrote an eloquent statement on the duties of citizenship. It took her several days to track down Lynd in his office to get an answer from him. “Unqualified,” he told her. Burger testified in the trial that when she asked Lynd where she had gone wrong, he walked away without a word.

• T.F. Williams was a World War II veteran who worked at Hattiesburg’s Hercules Powder Company. He had first tried to register under Luther Cox, who repeatedly kept him waiting and told him to come back another time. Lynd disqualified him when he took out a pocket dictionary to look up one of the words in the passage of the Constitution he was given.

• Sherman Jackson, a custodian at Hercules, was told to interpret the phrase “duties and obligations of citizenship.” He wrote: “Uphold and defend all laws of city, county and state government.” Not qualified. One of Jackson’s sons went to the courthouse when his father testified in U.S. vs. Lynd. He was turned away by the police and didn’t get the chance to see his father take the stand.

• The Rev. Sam Hall repeatedly tried to register, but to no avail. When the Forrest County defense lawyers implied that he was a pawn of the U.S. Justice Department and that he had been pressured to come to the courthouse in Jackson, he defiantly told them, “I came to Jackson today myself.”

As I sat with my father in 2016, I did not fully appreciate the extent of the ongoing challenges to voting rights that worried him. I had tended to regard the election of an AfricanAmerican president as symbolizing the triumph of the civil rights movement. But my father’s perspective was like that of others who had been in the trenches. He knew the fight was not over.

As civil rights icon John Lewis expressed just before his death earlier this year: “Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.”

My father died in late 2016. He was spared from having to see the further restrictions to voting rights in this country that have occurred over the last few years. I hope the example of the freedom fighters he worked with inspires today’s voters to do anything they can to have their ballots counted and continue a struggle that is clearly not over. // Going Above and Beyond for Faculty

On March 4, 2021, Roxbury Latin will host the school’s third annual Giving Day—24 hours in which we will ask alumni, parents, students, faculty, staff, and friends to express their love for and belief in RL by making a donation, of any amount. We are dedicating the upcoming Giving Day to our talented and dedicated faculty who continue to go above and beyond to advance RL’s mission. While we hold our annual Exelauno Day competition on campus, we hope that you will “March Forth” with us by making a gift, telling your friends, and spreading the word on social media. Please join us by taking part in this exciting day and expressing what Roxbury Latin means to you.

Call for Trustee Nominations

The Committee on Trustees is seeking recommendations from any member of the Roxbury Latin community for trustee candidates to serve a six-year term on the Board of Trustees. Please forward such recommendations by March 1 to the Committee on Trustees at nominations@ roxburylatin.org.

Annual Fund Update

The 2020–2021 Annual Fund is making great progress toward achieving its goal of $3,800,000 thanks to the generosity of our alumni, parents, and friends. We have already received gifts and pledges totaling $3,085,321. We are 81 percent of the way there, but we still need your help!

Thank you to all who have already made a commitment to the 2020–2021 Annual Fund. If you have not yet contributed, please consider supporting Roxbury Latin. Every gift helps RL maintain tuition that averages $16,000 less than that of other local independent schools. Every gift helps bridge the $26,350 gap between the cost of tuition and the actual cost of an RL education. Every gift supports the admission and enrollment of qualified boys, regardless of their family’s ability to pay, and every gift helps retain and attract a faculty that is second to none.

Gifts, large and small, from each and every donor, make a tremendous difference to the talented young men who study here. Please join your classmates, fellow parents, and friends by making a gift today. Thank you for doing your part to ensure that Roxbury Latin can preserve its distinctive quality and character. //

Stories to Kick Off the Year’s Annual Fund

In a typical year, donors to the school are invited to campus in October for an Annual Fund Kick-Off event, where they enjoy dinner and hear from several speakers who talk about the ways in which Roxbury Latin has positively affected their lives. Given the restrictions of the pandemic, and our inability to gather in this way, RL launched this year’s Annual Fund with a pre-recorded video message on October 8, which included remarks of gratitude from Headmaster Kerry Brennan, and compelling, personal stories from Associate Headmaster Mike Pojman, and senior Esteban Tarazona, who joined RL in Class IV. Their stories and examples serve as reminders of RL’s mission in action, and what gifts to the Annual Fund help to perpetuate, and preserve. Included below are excerpts from their remarks.

KERRY BRENNAN, HEADMASTER We’re all in this together. You’ve heard me say that, or you’ve read it when I’ve written it. We find ourselves in unforeseen, utterly distinctive circumstances. Nothing like this has ever happened in world history. Or has it? The spectre of the COVID-19 pandemic is different, but these circumstances are not unique. How many times in the past have honorable, community-minded people joined together on behalf of worthy causes, or simply their shared survival. Thanks to its longevity—and, dare I say, its resilience—Roxbury Latin itself has withstood numerous threats to its survival and certainly threats to its ability to honor a rare mission. The Revolutionary War, The Civil War, The Flu of 1918, the World Wars. Good people rose up, were counted, and rowed in the same direction.

One thing different from Roxbury Latin’s experience during the two World Wars, and the Depression in between, is that in those days we did not depend much on the generosity of the community beyond the tuition parents paid. Now, of course, we could not open the doors—or at least not open the doors to the parade of talented, worthy students and teachers as we do today—without the annual infusion of resources through the Annual Fund. This past spring and summer, we reached out—as a family would do—to ensure that all of our family members were well and able to keep roofs over their heads and food on the table. That outreach went far beyond simply checking to see if people needed more financial aid for RL; it suggested a kind of community concern for people struggling to live their lives that is emblematic of a united, caring, extended family. And the struggles continue. Is it fair to say that we need your help more than ever? As we extend our web of concern to compromised families of students, and care about teachers who are challenged to deliver an educational program even when their own children are out of school and at home, it’s clear that RL will need to be more generous. As always,

we are managing our finances with careful consideration, but it’s likely demands on our resources will be greater and more persistent.

I’m asking you then to continue your help— both financially and otherwise—in order that we can continue to offer a rigorously imagined program for all our students, and one that takes into account, first and foremost, the health and wellbeing of all our community members. Those of us responsible for leading the charge and running the school could not be more grateful for your unflagging support. As always, we have tried to be worthy of your trust and affection. Please join us during these challenging times. Our mission remains unchanged. And it can only be realized if you join us, generously, in affirming our good work.

ESTEBAN TARAZONA, CLASS I What truly makes RL unique are the faculty and the students. I will never forget Mr. Quirk, our Director of Admission, coming all the way to East Boston just to personally hand me my acceptance letter. I remember almost crying that night because I knew then that RL had to be the school for me. I had never encountered a teacher who cared enough to take a 30-minute drive to personally deliver a letter. That is something I will never forget and that really reflects that RL is a school that cares about every boy. The faculty truly want us to succeed, and I am not just saying that because it’s what the school aspires to do, but because it has been manifested throughout my RL experience. Before coming to RL, I went to a charter school for low-income students. At that school, I didn’t have to work hard for straight A’s, so when I entered the academically rigorous RL environment, I struggled a lot. I had neither the study skills nor time management skills necessary to succeed here. When my teachers noticed that I was drowning in my studies, they talked to me and set up times for us to meet to give me extra help. Because of the vocabulary-driven nature of Mr. Diop’s French class, I struggled a lot freshman and sophomore year. I simply didn’t know how to manage my time and study for quizzes, but with the generous support of Mr. Diop, I learned that it wasn’t a bad thing to ask for help. He gave me tips on how to use my time effectively to get my work done. Since then, not only has my French grade improved, but all of my grades have improved and I’m learning more due to the help of such an amazing RL teacher. I have also grown to love the class and, because of him, I plan on continuing my French studies into college. Also, my advisor freshman year, Mr. Quirk, suggested I get a planner and then taught me how to use it effectively. Before that, I would go into class not knowing if I had a quiz, and then being rudely surprised by an assessment that snuck up on me. Since the addition of a planner, my overall organization has improved so much.

Before coming to RL, I would never have thought I would sing in an all men’s Glee Club, in front of a full Rousmaniere Hall, much less perform a solo. Before coming to RL, I would never have thought that I would be able to go to a foreign country as I did in 2019 on the French immersion trip and speak calmly and clearly to the native French-speakers there. Before coming to RL, I would never have thought that I would make the final pin on the wrestling mat at Winter Family day in 2018, in front of the whole school cheering inside of the Palaistra… RL has taught me to have the confidence to step out of my comfort zone and to try new things.

MIKE POJMAN, ASSOCIATE HEADMASTER I’m calling this talk “Aging in Place” because that is what I have been doing at Roxbury Latin for the last 40 years—and I have not regretted it for one minute. Tony Jarvis, never one to mince words, would frequently remind the boys, “This is your one and only life. Don’t screw it up!” Well, this is my one and only life, and I made up my mind long ago that I would not squander it doing something that I did not love, for a cause that I did not cherish. I believe in this school, and I believe that I am doing something worthwhile for these kids. How could I ever regret that?

Not so long ago, when my four siblings and I had gathered for Christmas dinner at my parents’ house, the conversation made its way to the subject of childrearing. I don’t remember how we got there, but I do remember that at one point my mother said, “If push ever comes to shove, I would give up my life for any one of you kids, without a moment’s hesitation.” The words were barely out of her mouth when my father said incredulously, “You would?” Now, I have no doubt that my dad, like my mother, loves us more than life itself, but at that moment…. Well, I guess it’s a mom thing. I’m devoted to these kids, and I want to believe that if I were ever to find myself in that metaphorical lifeboat, I would give up my seat for any one of them. (But I have to say, if it ever came to that, I can only hope that it will be for a kid that I actually like.)

Let me tell you why every one of these boys deserves a spot in that lifeboat: They are fun and funny—and quick. As you know, we are following a hybrid learning model this fall, with half the boys in school in “neighborhoods,” as we call them, by grade level, and the other half Zooming in from home. I was walking down the hallway the other day when I ran into three Class IV boys social distancing at the outer reaches of their neighborhood. A bit of backstory: As part of our safety protocol, every boy must take a daily health assessment and submit it to the school nurse before coming to school. Now, when I heard these boys bantering about how each of them had done on a recent quiz, I naturally said, “Are you guys comparing grades on your COVID test?” “Yeah,” said the wise guy in the group, “and I didn’t do very well. I only got a 98.6!” (Let that sink in for a moment.)

RL boys are sensitive and empathetic. Some time ago, I was feeling uncharacteristically low. I had had an off day, for a reason that I cannot now recall, but I do remember feeling quite frustrated, and more than a little inadequate. Those of us here know that in times of distress, we can count on our kids to buck us up. As I say, I don’t know why I was feeling subpar at that particular moment, but in my state of melancholy I must have projected some degree of self-doubt, because one of my students—a lovable eccentric in the group—picked up on it. “Mr. Pojman,” he said sympathetically, “you look a little down. Are you OK?” “Yes,” I responded, “it’s just one of those days.” “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” he said reassuringly, “I’m an odd person, and I like myself!” Thanks a lot, kid!

RL boys are self-aware and trusting, and they’re coachable.

This is a story from many years ago. The father of one of our seniors had died of a heart attack the previous spring. Months later, the boy was working at a Tripod layout session with several of his classmates, when he blurted out of nowhere, “Mr. Pojman, sometimes I hear my father speaking to me—in my head. Do you think that’s strange?” Startled, the other boys dropped what they were doing and looked up at him amazed. I was just as shocked, but gathering myself, I finally said, “No, Tommy, I don’t. You meant the world to your dad when he was alive. Don’t you think he will always be with you, even now that he’s gone?” Not long after, this same boy got into a battle of wills with his English teacher over a poorly written term paper. The teacher had given him the opportunity to do it over, but he refused. “Mr. Smith graded me unfairly. I’m not rewriting it,” he said defiantly, looking down from his high horse. “It was a good paper, and he just didn’t appreciate it. He’s the one in the wrong, not me.” I thought for a moment before responding. Clearly, the boy was dug in. Finally, I said, “Tommy, you once told me that you hear your father speaking to you, isn’t that right?” He nodded. “What do you think he is saying to you now?” The indignation immediately drained from the boy’s face. And after a moment he responded softly, “I think he’s saying, ‘Tommy, fix this mess.’ I’ll rewrite the paper.”

And just one more story: There was once a wonderful kid who lived near my house in Natick. He is now a fully functioning adult, and a proud alumnus. Even as a boy, he was an affable sort and very good company, so I gave him a ride to school every day for a couple of years. He was a good conversationalist, too, even at 7:30 in the morning, and he was always ready on time, so driving him was no chore—especially since almost every day he would reach into the car before getting in, handing me a warm, butteredand-jellied English muffin with his outstretched arm. I never asked for it, and he rarely made one for himself, especially during wrestling season when he was watching his weight. One Founder’s Day—a dress-up day—he climbed into the front seat wearing a tattered sport coat that may have fit him when he was a Sixie, with missing buttons and sleeves that didn’t extend past the middle of his forearms. I don’t know where he came up with that jacket—his mother would have been horrified—but clearly he was feeling his oats. I didn’t say anything at first, but as we headed down Eliot Street, I became more and more agitated. Finally, I pulled over to the side of the road and said, “Jason, I’m on the faculty of Roxbury Latin. I cannot deliver you to school looking like that. So, here’s your choice: we can go back home so you can put on a different sport coat, or I can drive you to the commuter rail, and you can take the Needham train the rest of the way in.” I half expected an argument, but nope. Without hesitation, he smiled and said, “I’ll change.” And that was that. No explanation necessary. He got it. RL boys generally get it—and usually without a fuss.

I have no doubt that you get it, too. I don’t need to lecture you about why supporting the Annual Fund is so important— more critical than ever this year when the world seems to be coming unglued, and we’re all afraid that the “new normal” may become the normal for many months to come. You already know that it’s about the boys. It has always been about the boys, and it always will be about the boys. More than ever they need the normalcy—the stability—that Roxbury Latin can provide for them. RL is not coming unglued, and with your help it will remain firmly attached to its fundamental mission: to meet these boys where they are and to take them farther—farther than they would otherwise go—so that in the years ahead, each of them will have the opportunity to make the most of his one and only life. These Roxbury Latin boys are aging in this place, year by year becoming better students, better sportsmen, better readers, better writers, better debaters, actors, and journalists. Better people. Those of us who labor in the trenches are committed to nurturing their growth throughout their four-, five-, or six-year journey here, and we are honored to be entrusted with the care and feeding of the most important thing in their parents’ lives.

It goes without saying that we can’t do any of this without you, every one of you. You are the faithful, and we depend on your generosity to make all of this possible. You have never let us down, and in this age of uncertainty, I am certain of one thing for sure: that this year, too, you will come through for us—and for them—so that 40 years from now these boys will be able to look back on their lives with the same satisfaction with which I can look back on mine—each a better man for having been a Roxbury Latin boy. //

In Memoriam

Robert “Bob” E. Gibbons ’46 died on November 9, 2020 at the age of 91. He was born on March 30, 1929, the son of Ruth Cummings and James Edmund Gibbons. He grew up on Bellevue Hill Road in West Roxbury and attended the Randall G. Morris School prior to gaining admission to Roxbury Latin.

At Roxbury Latin, Bob served as Class V President, Class II Secretary, and President of the Student Council. He was an associate editor for Tripod and won the Fowler Prize for Creative Writing in Class II. He was an active contributor to the Debate program. Bob played football at school, and during the summers he enjoyed playing golf and sailing. His final years at Roxbury Latin were tumultuous ones, as many (more than one third) of his schoolmates left school early to participate in the war effort. Nonetheless, Bob remained an active alumnus throughout his life.

Headmaster Northrop wrote, “Gibbons is an attractive person with sound judgement for one so young... [he] has developed a good deal of keenness in judgement and an unusual sureness in analysis of character. His classical studies have done much to give him excellent standards of scholarship. He will do well in college, I believe, and develop into an excellent citizen. I find him very understanding in his reactions to our best literature. He has high standards and uses them intelligently.”

Although Bob struggled academically, he recalled his time at Roxbury Latin with fondness. On one occasion, Bob was caught smoking in the boiler room. As punishment, Headmaster Northrup made him wax and polish the ancient English benches that adorn the corridor of the Perry Building with a big ball of beeswax. Bob recalled how much of a nightmare it was to wax all the crevices of the carvings in those benches, but he laughed as he remembered how his attitude shifted from one of resentment to one of pride as he completed his task. He delighted in knowing that those same benches remain in view today.

Bob matriculated at Harvard College, where he earned his AB in economics in 1950. He served in the United States Army, and married his first wife, Katherine E. Noonan, in 1956. In 1958, the couple welcomed a daughter, Lorren. Bob was predeceased by Katherine in 1984. He had a lengthy and successful career in the investment industry. For many years he worked as vice president of Foster, Dykema, Cabot & Co., a Boston-based firm. He also served as a trustee of the Cohasset Savings Bank and the director of Hyer Industries.

Bob remarried and spent many wonderful years with his wife, K. Ruth DeLay, who, along with his daughter, survives him. In his retirement, Bob took up French and Italian lessons, building on the interest in languages he developed as a student of Ancient Greek under “Doc” Van Courtlandt Elliot, Classics master at Roxbury Latin from 1939 to 1964. Bob and his wife made frequent trips abroad to Africa and Europe in retirement.

Bob was a lifelong supporter of Roxbury Latin and a proud alumnus. In 1965, he established a scholarship in memory of his late father to support financial aid at Roxbury Latin. For his service to the school, Bob was awarded the Wellington Prize in 1971. Subsequently, from 1979 to 1984, Bob served in a variety of capacities as a Trustee at Roxbury Latin. Notably, Bob was an inaugural member of the Thomas Bell Society, providing in his estate planning for the support of Alma Mater.

Peter A. Ulin ’49, of West Newton, died at home on November 5, 2020 of Parkinson’s and dementia at the age of 89. He was born on December 20, 1930, the son of Rebecca Cantarow and Benjamin Ulin. Peter grew up in Chestnut Hill and attended the Weeks Junior High School in Newton Centre before gaining admission to Roxbury Latin.

Peter’s older brother, Jeremy Ulin, was a member of RL’s Class of 1946.

Peter was broadly involved in school life while a student at Roxbury Latin. Beginning as a Sixie, he was a class reporter for Tripod. He participated in the school spelling contests and the play. As a sophomore he also sang in the Glee Club, debated, and played baseball. As a member of Class II, Peter worked on the Prom Committee, served on the Student Council, and assisted as an usher for the school play. He also contributed on the football, tennis, and baseball teams. In Class I, he was the president of Debate and staffed Tripod and the Yearbook.

In Peter’s college letter, Headmaster Weed wrote, “This boy is distinctly able. He absorbs ideas readily but accepts nothing without personal evaluation. This acceptance with his mind, rather than on faith, also causes his rejection of many conventional views. He has proved a fair athlete, a good debater, something of an organizer.” Headmaster Weed further lauded Peter as a “sound, thoughtful, and imaginative” student. Peter was chosen by his peers to deliver the valedictory address at graduation. A half century later, Peter reflected in an alumni survey, “My six years at RLS were the most formative of my life.” He wrote, “RLS taught me the virtue and rigor of the Classics and imbedded in me the desirability of a totally mixed economic and social group of school mates… the older I get, the smarter I think my parents were to send me to RLS—and the more I appreciate those at the school who taught me.”

Peter followed in his older brother’s footsteps and matriculated at Harvard College, where he studied government and earned his AB in 1953. Subsequently, he attended Columbia’s Graduate School of Business, where he earned his MBA in 1954. He then served for three years in the United States Army, during which time he was stationed in Tokyo. In 1958, Peter married Bonnie Handmaker, with whom he shared 62 loving years of marriage.

After a few years spent running the family business in retail men’s stores, Peter worked on Wall Street for several years. In the early 1980s, Peter worked as Vice President in Corporate Finance and Director of Mergers and Acquisitions in the Northeast for E.F. Hutton & Company. He was Managing Director for Ulin, Morton, Bradley & Welling, Inc. from 1984 to 1990, and later Managing Director at Advest Inc. from 1990 to 1992. Peter and Nicholas Holland later founded their corporate finance firm, Ulin and Holland, in Boston specializing in mergers and acquisitions. In retirement, Peter served on the boards of Jewish Community Housing for the Elderly and Beth Israel Hospital, among others. Peter loved volunteering, and in retirement he worked as teaching assistant at the Angier School in Waban. Peter was a published columnist, loved to discover new restaurants and bakeries, cooked avidly, and traveled the world with his wife. His favorite saying was “Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.”

He is remembered for his quick wit, generous mentoring, fine character, and deep devotion to his family and friends. A private graveside service was held at Temple Israel Cemetery in Wakefield. In addition to his beloved wife, Peter is survived by his daughter, son, daughterin-law, and two grandchildren. Charles “Charlie” F. Barry ’51 died on November 13, 2020 at the age of 88. Born May 5, 1932, son of Virginia White and Charles Barry, Charlie attended the Randall G. Morris School in West Roxbury prior to gaining admission to Roxbury Latin.

As a schoolboy, Charlie loved sports and participated in football, baseball, hockey, tennis, and wrestling. He also sang in the Glee Club and participated in the Camera Club. Although he left Roxbury Latin in his Class II year, Charlie always considered himself a member of the Class of ’51. He attended reunions and stayed in touch with classmates for many decades.

Charlie attended Massachusetts Maritime Academy, and after graduation served as an officer in the United States Navy for five years. He subsequently worked in sales management at IBM for 30 years before retiring to Dawson County, Georgia. Charlie was a mentor in Dawson County Schools for many years and participated as a member of the Dawson County Lions Club, where he held several offices and was the recipient of many awards. He spent many years

©1954 Mass Maritime Academy

volunteering at the Ric Rac Charity Thrift Store and Food Bank in Dawsonville and was a board member there for over 15 years. He is survived by his beloved wife of 60 years, Carol, his two daughters, and four grandchildren.

William “Bill” S. Callanan ’58 died on April 30, 2020 at the age of 79, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was born on November 21, 1940, the son of Frances (Shea) Callanan, a young widow. His father, Dr. Francis J. Callanan (Class of 1910 and school physician from 1921 to 1929), died tragically at the age of 44, seven months before Bill’s birth. Bill was raised by his mother and stepfather, Charles Curran, and attended the Angier School in Waban prior to gaining admission to Roxbury Latin.

As a student, Bill participated in a host of school activities. He wrote for Tripod, helped with the stage crew for plays, occasionally acted, and assisted as a scorekeeper and manager for several teams. In the winters, he played basketball and volleyball. As a senior, Bill also wrote for the Yearbook. While athletics were not Bill’s strongest endeavor, he participated in a variety of capacities. Famed RL wrestling coach and longtime master Bert Kelsey praised Bill’s “remarkable spirit” as a wrestler, and commended him for his presence on the mat for the sake of being on a team.

Headmaster Weed reflected in Bill’s college letter that he was a “serious student” who “[took] part in many activities with an interest and [made] a contribution.” In addition to Bill’s father being an alumnus, his uncle was also a member of the Class of 1909. Bill recalled that those Callanan predecessors were students under RL’s longest serving headmaster, William Coe Collar, and that Onsville Farnham, for whom the Farnham Room was named, was their Class VI Classmaster. Bill once wrote, “What a privilege it was to be admitted to Roxbury Latin and to be able to continue a family tradition.”

Like his father before him, Bill matriculated at Harvard College where he earned his AB in history in 1962. He then served in the United States Army for three and a half years. While in the army, he was stationed in Berlin as a translator of German. Upon his return to the United States, Bill worked briefly as a sales representative for a publisher in Boston and then spent a semester in Ohio as a secondary school teacher. He ultimately settled in Washington, D.C., where he earned his master’s in financial management from George Washington University. He worked for the federal government for more than 33 years, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, and then the Library of Congress, where he served for many years as a benefits counselor and as a liaison to other federal agencies. In 1971 he married Mary Karen Grier, with whom he shared 49 years of marriage. Bill wrote in his 50th college anniversary report that “his greatest accomplishments have been his family and the opportunity to be of service to others.” Bill was a devout Catholic and held many intellectual interests. He amassed an encyclopedic knowledge on many subjects, particularly U.S. and European political history. As an amateur historian, he took up genealogy and traced his ancestry to the 17th century. He spoke French, German, and Spanish fluently and loved the arts, often attending concerts at the Kennedy Center and National Cathedral. Bill also was a lifelong fan of the Boston Red Sox. A private burial was held at Holyhood Cemetery in Chestnut Hill. In addition to his loving wife, Bill is survived by his three children, his siblings, a sister-in-law, and many friends and relatives, including six nieces and six nephews. He will be remembered by many as an exceptionally warm and kind man.

Robert “Bob” A. Magnuson ’61 died unexpectedly of a heart attack on December 24, 2020, at the age of 77. He

was born on August 24, 1943, the son of Elsa Holmgren and Carl Magnuson. He grew up on Howitt Road in West Roxbury and attended the Randall G. Morris School prior to gaining admission at Roxbury Latin.

Bob’s classmate and lifelong friend Phil Ferrara ’61 wrote, “While at RL, Bob was a solid student, ultimately achieving the National Merit Scholarship Letter of Commendation. Always competitive, he enjoyed success as a catcher for the RL baseball team. He loved a wide variety of school activities, and participated in the school play, played the trombone, and worked on the Tripod staff. Many happy hours of recreation with his friends were enjoyed at Billings Field in West Roxbury, whether ice hockey or baseball or basketball or tag football. Forever displaying a dry, quick wit, Bob was the master of humorous one-liners. Along with that, his classmates were all introduced to Bob’s seemingly infinite storehouse of sports trivia. No matter the obscure fact or statistic, Bob seemed to have the answer. And, all of that before the Internet!” As a student, Bob also played soccer, tennis, and basketball at various points and sang for the Glee Club. Headmaster Weed described Bob in his college letter as “A fine boy in all ways… he is always willing, well mannered, and respected for his complete integrity and conscientious endeavors.”

Bob matriculated at Tufts, where he earned his BA in economics in 1965. He later attended Boston University where he earned his MBA in 1968 with a focus on quantitative methods. Bob’s studies and interest in finance and accounting led him to a long career with Northwest Orient Airlines. During those years he resided in Minnesota, New York, and Tokyo. He ultimately served as vice president of finance and treasurer of the corporation. He was responsible for union negotiations in Asia and North America. Bob was quite proud that he completed his career with this one employer.

Bob was an avid sports enthusiast, loyal to all of the Boston professional sports teams. Early retirement brought him to Cape Cod where he occupied his time with regular golf matches, photography, and planning future adventures. (He often quipped that he only needed 24 hours’ notice to go anywhere in the world.) Bob established an annual golf tournament that eventually grew to involve as many as fifty friends each year. The tournament has been played near Gilbert, Minnesota, every summer for more than three decades, providing enjoyment and camaraderie for his many friends while also supporting local charities with a large portion of the proceeds. Bob, affectionately known as the “Golfmeister,” will long be remembered. He was known for his eccentric sartorial splendor; golfing in bright, Red Sox knickers, unmatched socks, and a Roxbury Latin hoodie was not unusual attire. Golf, cycling, card playing, and cigar smoking were among his hobbies. His genius at crossword puzzles and seemingly infinite knowledge of trivia was renowned and astounding. He leaves friends scattered all over the world.

In addition to his many friends, Bob is survived by his sister, a nephew, and his extended family. A memorial golf match in Bob’s memory will take place when possible, complete with cheap cigars and spicy Bloody Marys on the menu. Bob’s friends and family know that he awaits them all on the 19th tee.

David “Dave” F. McCarthy ’68 died on May 9, 2020, at the age of 70. He was born on April 8, 1950 in Boston and was raised in Dedham. At Roxbury Latin, Dave played football, soccer, and lacrosse. He was president of the Outing Club and served on the stage crew. In Class I, Dave was co-captain of soccer, co-captain of lacrosse, vice president of his class, Student Action Committee member, and part of the school Business Committee. In his college letter, Assistant Headmaster and College Advisor Warden Dilworth wrote, “All of David’s teachers agree that he has a great deal of intellectual ability coupled with an independent spirit… His Greek teacher wrote that David was ‘a sheer delight in class and full of insights which can spark a class.’ He is well respected by his classmates who have elected him their vice president. He has the potential to be a great asset to any college.”

Dave matriculated at Hamilton College where he continued his study of the Classics and earned his BA. As a senior at Hamilton, he met Carol Kennedy,

whom he later married and with whom he spent the rest of his life. Dave later attended Boston College Law School, where he earned his JD at the age of 36. A newly minted lawyer, he and his wife moved to Binghamton, New York, where they made their home and developed countless friendships over the years.

Dave worked as a litigation attorney for Levene, Gouldin & Thompson for thirty years. He also coached Mock Trial for both Binghamton High School and Seton Catholic and coached for Two Rivers Soccer Club. His team appreciated his creative approach. They will remember his sense of humor. He loved the outdoors and helped beautify his town, landscaping the West Side of Binghamton. He collected push lawn mowers, with an impressive assortment available for viewing. Dave was an avid runner, easily recognized for his white gloves, and he successfully completed three marathons. Dave was quick witted, a terrific host of many parties. He was an active member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, where he was known as a bartenderextraordinaire. He leaves his many friends with fond memories.

Dave was predeceased by his brother, two brothers-in-law, two nephews, and a grandson. He is survived by his wife, three children, two sisters, and eight grandchildren. Dave was also the loving uncle to many nieces and nephews. A private funeral Mass was offered at St. Patrick's Church, Binghamton, followed by burial at Calvary Cemetery, Johnson City. Timothy “Tim” F. Bilodeau ’68 of Hull died peacefully on January 9, 2021, at the age of 70. He was born on July 10, 1950, the son of Jane McLaughlin and Thomas Bilodeau. Tim grew up in Milton and summered in Hull with his family as a boy.

As a Roxbury Latin student, Tim played baseball, football, and basketball. He acted in the play and was vice president of his class as a freshman. In his sophomore year, he also sang for the Glee Club. Later he co-captained the football team, captained the baseball team, and participated on the Student Council. He was widely considered to be one of the best RL athletes of his generation. As Tim was applying for college, Headmaster Mayo-Smith wrote: “Tim is a very capable, interesting boy. He has a good mind and uses it efficiently and effectively, so that his record is consistently good. Indeed, his efficiency in learning and producing leads one to believe at first that he is primarily an achiever, that is, he works to achieve certain results and not to satisfy any intrinsic intellectual interests. This is misleading, for he does have genuine intellectual interest.” He continued, “I recommend Tim highly as a college candidate, with work habits and basic curiosity to benefit greatly from a college education, not to become a scholar but to become a very effective person.” Headmaster Mayo-Smith’s words were prophetic indeed; Tim went on to lead a life as a “very effective person” in the years that followed.

Tim matriculated at Harvard, where earned his AB in economics in 1972. There he played football and captained the baseball team. After college, Tim spent a year with Danny Danforth ’67 doing a teaching fellowship in Greece— an experience from which he “barely escaped with his life” after protesting against the Greek military regime, which left him imprisoned for a short stint in 1973. Upon his return to Boston, Tim attended Harvard Divinity School, where he earned his master’s degree. Religious education and administration became his passion for the subsequent six years. In 1981, Tim relocated to California and attended Stanford Business School. Recently, Tim received an honorary doctorate degree from Canisius College.

Upon graduating from business school, Tim began working for a healthcare consulting firm, and spent the subsequent years doing financial and strategic planning studies for hospitals before deciding to become an entrepreneur. In 1988 Tim founded his own firm, T. Bilodeau Associates, and worked as a headhunter for healthcare companies, consulting firms, and hospitals. In 1992 he became the executive director for Por Christo, a nonprofit organization that sent medical teams to Ecuador. He also served as special projects director for the Catholic Relief Service. In 1997, Tim founded Medicines for Humanity—his most significant project yet—to attack the issues of child mortality

in impoverished communities around the world. After learning that millions of children were dying from preventable causes, Tim set his mind to righting this wrong and used his gift of storytelling to unite his friends and family behind his vision. Together with incredible health care partners, Medicines for Humanity continues to provide critical health care services to more than one million children and mothers each year in some of the world's most underserved places. Tim called himself the luckiest man in the world for being able to devote his life to this essential work. Thanks to Tim’s infectious enthusiasm and pure sense of service, Medicines for Humanity became a favorite cause of RL’s boys, faculty, and staff. Tim’s life was filled with love, laughs, and adventure. He was a man of great ability and greater purpose. He deeply loved his family and friends and was incredibly grateful for their commitment and support of his life’s work. Beyond his professional work, he loved sports and coaching and was a fixture on the sidelines and in the bleachers at his sons’ games, where the creativity and consistency of his referee heckling became the stuff of legend. He had a razor-sharp wit and was ready with a joke for every circumstance. All those who knew him will recall his infectious laugh. His family recalled, “To spend time with him was to get caught in fits of laughter that would consume the entire room. His trademark chuckle and unmistakable voice will be sorely missed.” Tim loved the natural world. He was an avid fly fisherman and, later in life, a keen bird watcher. He enjoyed competition and conversation, and his greatest joy was spending time at his home on Nantasket Beach with his family.

Tim is survived by his cherished wife, Cathy Burger, his four sons and their wives, six grandchildren and his sister, his father and mother-in-law, and a large extended family, countless friends, and his family dog. In addition to his parents, Tim was predeceased by a brother and sister. Tim’s legacy of saving the lives of some of the world’s most vulnerable children lives on through Medicines for Humanity and all of the people he inspired to make a positive difference in the world. //

A Simple Gift, a Lasting Impact

The Thomas Bell Society honors those members of our community who have made a planned gift to Roxbury Latin and have indicated to the school that they have done so. Planned gifts provide flexibility and possibility for those donors who are eager to support the ongoing legacy of a Roxbury Latin education in creative, meaningful, and affordable ways. Here are some easy ways to make a planned gift:

1. A Bequest: Include a gift to RL in your will or trust. Make your bequest unrestricted or direct it to a specific purpose. You can indicate a specific dollar amount, a particular asset, a set percentage of your estate, or the residual amount of your estate.

2. Charitable Gift Annuity (CGA): Make a gift now with cash or appreciated securities, receive tax benefits, and enjoy guaranteed income for the rest of your life.

3. Memorial Gifts: In addition to these planned gifts, many families choose to designate Roxbury Latin as a charity to support in the name of a deceased loved one (in lieu of flowers). Often the deceased alumni and parents have made it clear in their plans that RL is the memorial destination of choice. By designating Roxbury Latin as the charity of choice upon their passing, they are providing immediate and meaningful support to the boys, faculty, and program, and honoring their connection to the school. Families of the honored deceased are informed of those thoughtful memorial gifts.

As is always the case when seeking legal and financial advice, we recommend you speak with your attorney or estate planner to learn about the many benefits and possibilities of philanthropic estate planning. More information is also available at roxburylatin.plannedgiving.org. There you will also find information about other ways to make a gift to Roxbury Latin that will cost you nothing during your lifetime and that will provide crucial support for the school in perpetuity. If you have already made provisions for Roxbury Latin in your will or estate, or if you have questions about making a planned gift to Roxbury Latin, please contact Dave Cataruzolo, Director of Alumni Affairs and Planned Giving, at david.cataruzolo@ roxburylatin.org or 617-477-6314. We would like to show our appreciation for your commitment and welcome you into the Thomas Bell Society.

It’s the Simple Things in Life that Keep Us Going

by MIKE POJMAN

I don’t know about you, but the pandemic has been taking its toll on me. I knew it when facial recognition didn’t know it was me when I powered up my iPhone this morning. These are tough times.

Oddly, however, I’m still feeling upbeat—even optimistic—in the midst of all this mayhem, and for the most part, so are my students. Roxbury Latin boys are known for their resilience, for their adaptability in the face of challenges and uncertainty. It’s in their DNA. It’s also in the Student Handbook. Recently, I spent a little time contemplating this wonderful aspect of their personalities, and I’ve come to the conclusion that beyond their constitutional sturdiness, there is something more fundamental—even simpler—that carries them through their day. And that’s when it hit me. It’s the simple pleasures that provide the spiritual comfort food that keeps these boys emotionally nourished and steady. To test my theory, and to satisfy my curiosity, I’ve been interviewing boys and compiling a list of their simple pleasures. “So how about it?” I queried boys at random from every grade level. By the looks on their faces, I could tell they thought the question itself was random, but most humored me with an answer—some immediately, others after a moment or two of reflection. Their answers were as unalike as they are, and in many cases just as charming. So here goes. (I couldn’t resist adding a few editorial comments along the way.)

My simple pleasure is:

• “Feeling the salt in my hair after a swim in the ocean.” • “A piece of dark chocolate and a glass of whole milk.” • “A catnap on the window seat with my dog curled up beside me.” (Right out of Norman Rockwell.)

“It’s the simple pleasures that provide the spiritual comfort food that keeps these boys emotionally nourished and steady.”

• “Making a To Do list and checking it off at night.” (That’s on my To Do list.) • “Reading a book by flashlight under the covers.” (Or perhaps, for us Ohioans, a dime novel hidden in the corncrib.) • “Messing with my internal clock by staying up until 2 a.m. and sleeping until noon.” • “When my dog wakes me up at six in the morning.” • “Playing my guitar.” • “Doing pullups in the doorway.” • “Any time Netflix adds a new season of my favorite show.” • “Sipping eggnog with my family at the holidays.” • “Cooking spaghetti with my mom.” (Chef Boyardee!) • “A crisp high five.” (Here’s longing for a return to normalcy.) • “Finding loose change between the sofa cushions.” • “Going for a drive on the day I got my license.” (With the windows down and the radio blaring.) • “Shooting baskets with my AirPods on.” • “Listening to a song that matches my mood.” • “Playing video games with my friends on a Friday afternoon.” • “The sound of boots on the trail during a late fall hike, sipping a mug of hot chocolate while sitting in the snow, lying in a grassy field on a warm spring day, and going for a run at sunset on a summer evening.” (This guy’s a man for all seasons.) • “Taking a hot shower and climbing under the covers at the end of a tough day.” • “Having a quiz cancelled unexpectedly.” (Especially when he hasn’t studied.) • “Making 3D models during woodworking class.” • “Finding a surprise cookie in my lunch bag.” • “Playing a sneak game of Minecraft during an online

Physics exam.” (Which was the better score?) • “Closing the tabs on my browser when I’ve finished my homework.” • “Making it to the weekend!”

I don’t know what to think of these last few, and I was reluctant to ask:

• “When a pair of dice roll a 2 and a 3.” • “Eating peanuts with the shells on.” • “Packing and unpacking my hockey bag.” (That boy also enjoys four-day-old fish.) • “A good sneeze.” (Socially distanced, of course.) • “Watching the faculty struggle with technology.” (As

Classics master emeritus Ned Ligon was fond of saying,

“All nice boys at Roxbury Latin….”)

And what are my simple pleasures, you ask? (You did ask, didn’t you?)

• A Jamocha shake at Arby’s. (Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.) • A stroll through downtown Natick. (Add to that a medium decaf from Dunkin for the walk home.) • Counting my “likes” on social media. (For obvious reasons, I’ve given up on social media.) • An email from a long-lost alum. (Here’s your chance, boys!) • Grading Fifthie English essays on my iPad. (Yes, really!) • Watching a pro hockey game and having a tooth pulled on the same day. (Not really.) • Dashing off a fluff piece like this one for the Newsletter. (Any time I can make it past the censors.)

No doubt you have your own list, and we could Zoom to compare notes. But maybe let’s just add one more entry to both our lists and let it go at that. So write this down: The ultimate pleasure for me is imagining that reading this trifle is actually a simple pleasure for you. Wuddaya say? Hey, a man can dream. //

from the archives RL’s Musical Legacy

by CHRIS HEATON

One of the joyous occasions lost this winter to the pandemic was the collective singing of Handel’s Messiah—an annual, community event initiated early in the tenure of Kerry Brennan’s headmastership, which began in 2004. Mr. Brennan had been Roxbury Latin’s music director from 1978 to 1986, fresh from Amherst College, where we also got the tune to the Founder’s Song, put into lyrics in 1912 by longtime faculty member Clarence Gleason. When Mr. Brennan first started at RL, he wanted “to offer a different pitch, literally and figuratively” to the choral program. Under his leadership, the Glee Club doubled in size and began its annual performance tours. While Recital Halls have long been a feature of RL, Mr. Brennan sought to bring in more professional musicians to perform for the boys and faculty. He said, “We have the opportunity with the Hall program to have excellence of all kinds, including from professional musicians.” He wants the boys to “develop a standard of musicianship that enables them to appreciate quality music.”

Christmas gift record of Francis Rogers to alma mater.

Handel composed Messiah in 1741 while he was in England, and it was first performed in Dublin the next year. While there were no grads in 1741, two RL boys from the Class of 1740 were then at Harvard. And what a pair they were: Sibley’s Harvard Graduates slams Isaac Bowles as “not a man of regular or sober habits.”1 Perhaps he partnered too much with his RL classmate, Thomas Brinley, a loyalist during the American Revolution, who owned a distillery. Both boys had fathers who served in the Roxbury militia, and Brinley’s eponymous grandfather helped found King’s Chapel, Boston. During the American War of Independence, Brinley fled to Canada, then England, and his property was seized by Massachusetts.2

Messiah was premiered in this country by Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society in 1818, “the oldest continually performing arts organization in the United States.” It’s been performed every year since, making it the longest consecutive annual performance in

continuous existence in....3 There were also no grads in 1818, but William Bradley Dorr, Class of 1817, was then at Harvard with Ralph Waldo Emerson (Harvard Class of 1821). One score later, the latter climbed the literary ladder and wrote Self-Reliance, an admonition that Harvard didn’t take literally when in 1869 it asked Emerson—in effect the class agent—to solicit funds from his classmates, including Dorr. Harvard’s Houghton Library has the letter Emerson wrote to Dorr.4

A century later, Jason Newell Chase, Class of 1922, performed a piano solo at the Closing Exercises of 1918. He dropped his first name and became a noted jazz composer. Another alumnus whose rich, baritone voice would stand out at the Messiah sing is Francis Stetson Rogers, Class of 1887, a noted opera singer and professor at Juilliard, which was founded in 1905. That’s the graduation year of Philip Greeley Clapp, who served as Director of the School of Music at the University of Iowa from 1932 to 1953. He composed twelve symphonies, two of which were performed by the BSO. He also put Helen Keller’s poem “A Chant of Darkness” to a musical score, and during a tour of Europe received “advice and counsel” from Richard Strauss.5 Clapp was from a distinguished Roxbury family. One of his relatives, a former Trustee, bears my all-time favorite RL name: Supply Clapp Thwing.

1Shipton, Clifford. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, Vol. 11, 1741-1745. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1960, pp. 365-367.

2“Brinley Family Papers, 1643-2005.” Finding Aid.UMass, Amherst Special Collections and Archives. Web. http://findingaids. library.umass.edu/ead/mums161.pdf.

3“History.” Handel and Haydn Society. Web. https://handelandhaydn.org/about/history/.

4 “Emerson as Fundraiser for Harvard College.” Harvard University’s Houghton Library, Modern Books and Manuscripts. Web. https://blogs.harvard.edu.

5 Holcomb, Dorothy R. “Philip Greeley Clapp.” University of Iowa. Web. https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1342.

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