Milton Magazine, Fall 2005

Milton Magazine

Fall 2005

Journalism in 2005 Milton graduates describe the world through print, broadcast and the Web Plus Graduation Awards and Prizes, 2005 Graduates’ Weekend, 2005

Contents Features Journalism in 2005 3 To Continue This Conversation, Go to Our Web Site

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A lifetime writer, Jesse Kornbluth ’64 sees the Web as a dynamic agent helping a planet’s worth of people find information and connection.

Cathleen Everett

6 New Media: Touchpoints As a matter of his own past and future, Zander Dryer ’00 is a student of “new media.”

Cathleen Everett

7 What’s a News Magazine to Do Today?

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The weekly news magazine fits securely within today’s timeframe for news delivery, and has surrendered neither its niche nor its clients, according to George Hackett ’71.

Cathleen Everett

Editor Cathleen Everett Associate Editor Heather Sullivan 18

Photography Michael Dwyer, Milton Academy Archives, Nicki Pardo, Martha Stewart, Heather Sullivan, Greg White Design Moore & Associates llustrations Page 2 © The New Yorker Collection 1991, Robert Weber from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

Page 4 © The New Yorker Collection 2005, Jack Ziegler from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

Page 8 © The New Yorker Collection 1989, Frank Modell from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

Page 9 © The New Yorker Collection 1993, Arnie Levin from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

Page 10 © The New Yorker Collection 2001, Pat Byrnes from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

Page 12 © The New Yorker Collection 1993, Peter Steiner from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

Page 14 © The New Yorker Collection 1984, Charles Saxon from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

Page 18 © The New Yorker Collection 2005, Lee Lorenz from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

9 Urban Investigator In the few short years since she graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism, Cynthia Needham ’95 has gained attention for breaking tough, complicated stories.

Rod Skinner ’72

12 The Web Journalist Jesse Sarles ’93 manages and maintains cbs4denver.com, the Web site for KCNC-TV, a CBS station in Denver.

Cathleen Everett

14 Broadcast News: Where We Are Now Felicia Taylor ’82, Ned Roberts ’93 and Caroline Cornish Kmack ’94 describe their experiences in broadcast journalism.

Heather Sullivan

18 Media as Social Force Milton graduates active in the world of national print media use the force of their inquiry, writing and editing to shape ideas.

Heather Sullivan

Milton Magazine is published twice a year by Milton Academy. Editorial and business offices are located at Milton Academy where change-of-address notifications should be sent.

As an institution committed to diversity, Milton Academy welcomes the opportunity to admit academically qualified students of any gender, race, color, handicapped status, sexual orientation, religion, national or ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs and activities generally available to its students. It does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, color, handicapped status, sexual orientation, religion, national or ethnic origin in the administration of its educational policies, admission policies, scholarship programs, and athletic or other schooladministered activities.

Printed on Recycled Paper

Departments Journalism at Milton

45 The Head of School Milton’s Magazine Robin Robertson

24 Student Journalists At Milton, the student publications are as much a draw for student energy as ever.

Cathleen Everett

46 Faculty Perspective An Odyssey: Embracing Life During a Time of Loss David Peck

28 Magus-Mabus 28

This student literary magazine exemplifies the best of Milton talent and tradition.

Heather Sullivan

48 Post Script Milton Is Far from Hollywood: The Making of a Screenwriter Hadley Davis Rierson ’89

30 La Voz La Voz is a student-run Spanish newspaper, rare among school publications across the country, as is its continuous publication since the first edition in 1986.

50 Post Script Treasures in Unexpected Places: Caring for Discoveries at Harvard Emmy Norris ’62

32 Aché

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This magazine was launched in 1993 as a forum for all students to discuss experiences and ideas relating to people of color throughout the world.

33 The Asian This graphics-rich publication handles topics as varied as street fashion, Korean war art, the new prevalence of plastic surgery in Asia to Ramen noodle-eating in Milton’s residential houses.

52 In•Sight 54 On Centre News and notes from the campus and beyond

68 Sports Greg White

70 Class Notes

34 The Dedication of Norris House 36 Commencement and Prizes, 2005 40 Graduates’ Weekend, 2005 40

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“Timothy, if you never watch TV you’ll never know what’s going on in the world.”

Journalism in 2005 Finding out what’s true, what’s new, and what to think about the world is an interesting proposition these days. Journalism is bursting with energy, redefining the package of resources we consumers use, and creating pathways and connections by the day. The Internet and satellites have rendered the old rules of the game irrelevant.

As our choices proliferate, as consumers become more—pick your adjective(s)—lethargic, activist, partisan, savvy, or dumbed down, Milton graduates who are journalists sketch the details of their landscape.

What are their ideas about their chosen field?

How do they describe what they do?

Are the old principles that attracted people to journalism still at work?

Is the road ahead predictable?

Cathleen D. Everett

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Jesse Kornbluth ’64

“To continue this conversation,

Go to our Web site” “What I find heartbreaking is that there’s more and more differentiation between the kinds of media that are accountable and those that aren’t, and people who have integrity and those who don’t—and the irony is: I find more integrity on the Web than I do in traditional media.”

H

ow often do you hear, “To continue this conversation, go to our Web site”? The conversation is the point, Jesse Kornbluth ’64 would say.

A lifetime writer whose first work was published in Look magazine when he was a teenager, Jesse says he was “teed up to write for print.” He spent years writing in every genre, publishing books and contributing to the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and New York Magazine, culminating in five professionally exciting years (1987–1992) with Tina Brown at Vanity Fair. (“Like playing on the 1927 Yankees,” Jesse describes that time. “You had to pinch yourself—the masthead had everyone you admired.”)

Now Jesse has almost completely migrated to the Web, which he saw in the mid-’90s —and now sees even more fervently—as a dynamic agent helping a planet’s worth of people find information and connection.

Engagement, community and interaction are, Jesse feels, hallmarks of a new kind of journalism happening first on the Internet.

Perhaps that is why, despite nearly four decades as a writer for some of the nation’s slickest magazines, Jesse predicts “the Internet Tail Will Come to Wag the Magazine Dog, [www.mediabistro.com/ articles/cache/a4349.asp ]” in his essay at mediabistro.com, a Web site for media professionals.

His view that in magazines, “the articles exist to keep the ads from fighting,” is not only what made Jesse lose interest in glossy monthlies. It’s a question of values: His strike him as being labeled “nostalgic” by traditional media. For Jesse, writing is a calling rather than a career (“because as a career, it’s a terrible one,” he says).

“Journalism for me has been like writing a series of term papers for A. O. Smith for which you get paid,” according to Jesse. “I had (and have) a deep sense of mission that comes right out of the ’60s, a clichéd ’60s mission that is about pushing for equal rights, telling the truth about the war, creating a better society, and actually daring to be true. When writing is your life, the things you do are you. You’re total-

ly accountable: You can’t say ‘someone else wrote this.’ What I find heartbreaking is that there’s more and more differentiation between the kinds of media that are accountable and those that aren’t, and people who have integrity and those who don’t—and the irony is: I find more integrity on the Web than I do in traditional media.”

Jesse’s “reinvention” began with some AOL funding in 1996, when he cofounded bookreporter.com; it became the biggest non-commercial book site on the Web. Old friend Bob Pittman, then president of AOL, requested help “changing a tech company into a media company,” and Jesse came on as editorial director. The heady time of creative work was shortlived, as AOL “couldn’t find the business model” that supported Jesse’s core idea: community-driven content—that is, citizen journalism. “It wasn’t easy for ‘The Suits’ to see the potential of this kind of collaborative creativity in 1998,” Jesse says. “Now it is the single most powerful concept in online programming.”

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One piece of AOL programming that he created during this period proves the point. Jesse’s memorial to Princess Diana invited emotion-charged participation by AOL members and drew 4.5 million of the 10 million AOL subscribers within four to five days. “Identifying an issue that has potential to inspire sharing, and then to provoke people to respond, is not that difficult. People tend to talk about the Internet in ‘masculine’ terms, as a provider of data. But I see artistry in the feminized part, making connections, feeling deeply, sharing. And I think the importance of the Internet as an encyclopedia and data mine is a distant second to that.”

When his AOL stint ended in 2002, Jesse looked for more intimate ways to use the Internet to form global communities of caring people. He launched a cultural concierge site called HeadButler.com. Its mission: to promote the great, not just the new. HeadButler.com, he says, tells you about “books, music and movies you might never hear about from anyone else…stuff that came out last year or the year before or even decades ago…stuff you might cherish for the rest of your life.” On any given day, he might urge you to read Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale (1930), watch William Wyler’s Dodsworth, or listen to Green Day’s “American Idiot” (2004).

Just as he was putting on his butler’s suit, Beliefnet.com, the largest spiritual site on the Web, asked him to be its liberal blogger, so he signed on for a year’s tour of duty as Swami Uptown [http://www.beliefnet.com/story/145/ story_14546_1.html ]. The experience was

“I’m going back to my room, where the media is a little less mainstream.”

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there’s equal value in hearing from readers who have fresh information and new points of view. That’s the single biggest reason why so many traditional journalists and media potentates hate (and fear) the Internet. Internet technology makes journalists accountable, and the community’s judgment can be swift and harsh.

Jesse Kornbluth ’64

not a happy one: “Five days a week I put my head into the Iraq war and the damage it does to our spiritual and emotional lives. I believe in posting my email address; I got a lot of anguished mail. I answered it all. And it burned me out.

Now I do one Swami a week, and I feel I’m more effective.”

Jesse still writes columns for magazines and is working on a book, but the Internet is where he finds his greatest satisfaction.

“The Internet is the Maginot Line—the one completely free, global source of information and opinion,” Jesse argues. “It’s all that stands between us and the complete dominance of corporate news sources, which are understandably slow to annoy their well-connected owners. But on the Web, anyone can be Tom Paine: You don’t have to be hired or hyped, you just have to be forceful, factual and lively. I can have 100 times the impact online than I can in print. I can be emotional and I can be honest. I can do advocacy without violating any code. I can absolutely be who I am and I can also find out who I am— because, as every teacher who welcomes honest exchange knows, no one gets more value out of a class than the instructor.

“The huge advantage of the Internet is the death of the old top-down communication, the ‘celebrity voice.’ My readers, not individually, but collectively, are smarter than I am. People like me take great pains to be accurate, to link to good sources. But

“It’s a big issue for media that the young live online, and that there’s widespread disrespect for traditional media among smart young people. Well, the kids are on to something: They can find better stuff on the Web. The classic example is the Downing Street memo, buried in the Washington Post, two weeks late and on page A18; the coverage wasn’t much better in the New York Times. It was the Web that drove that memo into the news in America.

“Our destiny as a species is to seek light and radiance, to love the truth. Talking about that in terms of journalism is odd, but the media is an agent of all of it. On the Internet—not so much in print, never on TV, and rarely in the movies—you can feel a desire for unity, peace, compassion and understanding. That’s why I love this medium like I’ve never loved anything else.”

Cathleen Everett

Editor’s note: Over the 18 months leading up to May 2005, Jesse wrote for Tina Brown’s Topic [A] “views magazine.” The show was doomed, Jesse feels, in part because it was hosted by the wrong network, the businessoriented CNBC. “I love working with Tina,” he says. “I’m not going to work with or for anyone smarter, any time soon.” In an article for mediabistro.com, Jesse explained that he is now turning his energy back to his novel, finding a credible resolution for his characters’ “achingly plausible” situation. “The paradox of fiction is that, at least for the author, it is reality.” [www.mediabistro.com/ articles/cache/a4528.asp]

Zander Dryer ’00

NEW MEDIA: T

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s a matter of his own past and future, Zander Dryer ’00 is a student of “new media.” After graduating from Yale University, Zander wrote for Slate magazine [ Slate is an online magazine only], then continued to freelance for Slate as he moved to write for The New Republic (TNR—print and online). He still writes for both journals, but is working with Peter Beinart, editor of TNR, on Peter’s book about the history of liberalism in the United States over the last century.

From Zander’s perspective as a practitioner, certain facts about new media are worth pondering:

1. For people my age, the Internet makes it easier to break into the [ journalism] business. The appetite and need for online content is a bottomless pit.

2. The immediacy of the Web (to and from) is the important thing. For instance, President Bush mentioned in a press conference last spring that he might not necessarily appoint a judge to the Supreme Court. My editor asked me to research a list of the non-judges he could potentially appoint. Within 24 hours an article was posted. Writing is posted constantly, within moments of an event; uploading occurs anytime and all the time.

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4. On the other hand, we have an even

7. Accountability? The whole computer

more serious need for journals like Newsweek and other newsweeklies because there’s SO much opinion. I can read 300 different people’s opinions, but not many are thorough, reflective, fact-checked summations of the facts.

revolution has increased accountability: vast databases; powerful, quick, userfriendly search engines; hyperlinks; being forced to see who’s writing the opposite— what arguments they use and what facts they cite. I’m working with Peter Beinart, whose book is based on a magazine piece he wrote. We looked to Google to find out reaction to the article when it was published: the reaction then informs the shape of the book that is growing out of the article. Add to that the fact that information can’t be “lost” anywhere (e.g., transcripts nailed Trent Lott; attention to his past life and records were driven by bloggers). The Downing Street Memo exposure was driven by blogs.

5. Is the public lethargic? Will they take the time to gather news facts? In a way I’m lucky; scanning blogs is part of my job. But on any given day I’ll scan three papers and several blogs, online and many other people my age do the same.

6. Screens are ubiquitous. People my age are completely comfortable and happy reading on the screen. I don’t want the extra clutter of daily newspapers piling up around my apartment. (A Washington Post survey among young people found they wouldn’t want a paper even if it were free.

They prefer to read it online.) Screens, in the form of laptops that use wireless technology, are everywhere; people can always print out what they want to save.

8. Right now, the line between blogging—offering your opinion—and blogs driven by a serious political agenda, powerful political groups, is not necessarily clear enough.

9. A blog about someone’s social life can gain a larger readership than some of the medium-sized city newspapers in the country.

10. People my age are used to being presented a New York Times article and a blog entry on the first screen in response to a Google request. Both are presented democratically, and both have the chance of eliciting equal attention.

3.

In Washington, D.C., at least, Weblogs like John Marshall’s and others drive the news cycle. Weblogs raise issues; the mainstream media find it necessary to respond. Anyone can start a Web site.

TNR and other print publications can’t wait until the next print cycle to react to today’s questions and assertions.

11. About the audience: Mike Kinsley, the founding editor of Slate, and former editor of TNR, said, “Our market is the thinking man’s solitaire.” If you have 15 minutes to kill—click over (you’re already at a com-

Zander Dryer ’00 5

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puter) and read a piece. Bored? Procrastinating? Click over and read. Follow the hyperlinks. Computers are in most everyone’s general environment.

Web Touring with Alice Dubois ’95

12.

Length of articles: In spite of the open-endedness of Web (length or articles can be unlimited), editors are very conscious of attention span. Short (800 words, about the length of a New York Times op-ed piece) is the goal. Does the piece need to be longer? It can be broken into two installments (the Web is not bound by a print schedule), or broken apart in subsections, linked by hyperlinks.

13. You always hear from readers.

Readers write a blogpost or send an email.

The friction level between them and a response is so low, they’ll click and comment. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, and here’s why.” Web writers are not different from print writers: they enjoy heady satisfaction in having their writing stimulate response. And—the interaction is often valuable.

14. Where are the female bloggers or op-ed writers? Because the currency of the Internet is the hyperlink, and writers are connecting to one another in what are developing as groups and networks, are we witnessing the emergence of a new “old boys club”?

Alice DuBois ’95 is a senior producer at the New York Times Travel Web Site.

Until this point, our job has been to present the Times’ stories in ways that break through the constraints of the print version and exploit the Web’s capabilities. We use audio (often interviews of the author, or interviews of the people the author has featured in his piece) and video—slide shows that expand the reader’s sense of place and experience. Each of the stories that we feature on the Web site has previously been printed in the paper, vetted by the paper’s editors. We maintain archives of the New York Times articles and we license venue information from Fodor’s and want people to be able to use the site as a planning center. Along those lines we are also developing multimedia destination guides: insider’s guides to cities. The Paris guide is done; the Beijing guide is nearly done; one on New York is in the works.

15.

The promise of the Internet was that it was a democratic medium; as established thus far, there’s a clear hierarchy.

If your blog is linked from MSN, it gets multiples of the highest level of connection you typically experience on your site.

If you’re linked often, you’re big-time.

Writers see numbers of click-throughs to their articles. Those, plus numerous responses, feed the journalistic ego.

Alice DuBois ’95

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The drop in readership experienced by all major city newspapers makes other revenue sources, like the Web, important. The Times’ Travel Web site always has more ads available than we do page views, and there’s great potential. I can see plenty of opportunities that would open up if the paper and the Web site approached story ideas together and planned joint coverage.

The ways in which the paper and the Web site are integrated remains to be seen. The staffs are in two different buildings now, and the plan is for us to be in the same new building by 2007. Being in the same space will change things.

I never worked in journalism when I was a student, but I’ve worked for the Travel Web site for five years. It’s stimulating and fun; I work with interesting, smart people and can combine a number of skills I enjoy— writing and photography—and gain technical proficiency as well. At this point, the site’s potential to grow seems guaranteed.

Cathleen Everett

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The Web site has been a “take it or leave it” proposition for many of the Times department heads, but we all received a message from Bill Keller, editor in chief, that beginning now, the Web and the paper will be working much more closely together.

The initiative to link the two strategically has been assigned to John Landman, deputy managing editor in charge of digital journalism.

George Hackett ’71

What’s a

News Magazine to Do Today?

G

eorge Hackett has been a senior editor at Newsweek for 13 of his 25 years with the magazine. During his career, George has edited some of Newsweek’s most popular features, including “Periscope,” “Perspectives,” “My Turn” and “Conventional Wisdom Watch.” He has also been an entrepreneur as well as an editor.

George launched both “Cyberscope” and “Focus: On Technology” during the ’90s, before becoming Newsweek’s science and technology editor in 1995. Add an early period writing in the “National Affairs” section, and you have a well-qualified commentator on the state of news gathering and reporting in 2005.

The weekly news magazine fits securely within today’s timeframe for news delivery, and has surrendered neither its niche nor its clients, according to George. News magazines offer accuracy: they have the time and the drive to check facts; and reflection: in a relatively compact format, they can gather, organize and digest major news events, and questions or trends that interest the public. News magazines have value-added aspects: color features, opin-

The agent most responsible for driving many of the recent changes in the world of journalism is the speeding up of the news cycle, according to George. Network TV news and newspapers, not so long ago, were the reliable delivery vehicles for upto-date and even breaking news within a 24-hour news cycle. Today, events explode visually all over the world, as they happen, on cable and Internet outlets. Furthermore, bloggers broadcast their analyses without a pause. The “commentary” on events accompanies the viewing of them, as they happen in real time.

ion and humor, length and context, and portability. People still do like to have something physical to hold.

Public attitudes toward the press have been on a downward track for years according to the Pew Research Center.

George notes that the public seems to feel that the mainstream media are behind the times, and perhaps not transparent; the public suspects partisan views may be shaping the coverage. The center’s June 2005 survey verifies the recent trend—it shows the public to be critical of the press, yet still favorable in its overall view of news organizations themselves. “In fact, the public has long been two-minded in its views of the news media, faulting the press in a variety of ways, while still valuing the news and appreciating the product of news outlets,” according to the report released June 26, 2005 [http://peoplepress.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=248].

Several issues contribute to the syndrome documented by the Pew survey, George feels. “There are very few news organizations that spend the money necessary to gather the news well,” he says. “It’s expensive and tricky. The network news ratings are down, and there’s a corresponding

George Hackett ’71

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decrease in the amount spent on research and travel. Yet the costs are up, and stories are more expensive to cover. Just think about Iraq. The presidential campaign is another example. It lasts much longer than campaigns in the past; the candidates travel so much; and airfare to travel with the president is one and a half times what a first-class ticket costs.”

Another issue undermining the public’s confidence—one mentioned by all the student editors at Milton—is the rise of news as entertainment, rather than information.

George points out that “when 24 hours of news is covered every day, that represents a lot of air time to fill. CNN, for instance, relies on repeated video clips and talking heads; it feeds on the back-and-forth of arguments. Coverage of the death of John Paul II and the election of his successor is a good example. Newsweek recognized those events as major news, and devoted two magazine covers to it. There were long periods of time when nothing was happening that were filled with video reruns and commentators giving analysis and predictions. Eventually the whole process was treated almost as a festival.

People in St. Peter’s Square were referred to as ‘the faithful,’ or ‘pilgrims.’ Who knows if that is what they were? They were people who gathered there for many reasons. The whole process could have come across to the viewers as entertainment. They assumed that the public was

in favor of the notion that this man, as a Christian, was a great person, when that was not the universal view. They lost sight of the controversial aspects of his leadership; his views on birth control and HIV/ AIDS were buried in the celebration of the crowds.

“Then of course,” George says, “there’s the ‘news’ that is really only entertainment, like Michael Jackson’s trial, or Martha Stewart’s imprisonment.

“Does the ‘news as entertainment’ issue spread to news magazines?” George asks rhetorically. It does, he acknowledges.

Everything is competitive. Newsweek has 3.1 million subscribers; the magazine must cater to some extent to the mass market.

While the Milton student journalists complain that the “mass market” is lethargic in its pursuit of the truth, the Pew

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“The level of knowledge and professionalism in large news outlets is quite high, and the job of journalists is ultimately to search for, and be accountable for, accuracy. People seem to think that writing about bad things that happen during a war is unpatriotic, that any criticism is antiAmerican. But Newsweek, as is the case with other major news outlets, is not full of liberals or leftists. You can’t put a generic label on the press. The notion of journalism is to find out the news, to question authority, to look for things going wrong.

Journalists have always operated according to the theory ‘It’s better that you know.’”

Cathleen Everett

“What’ll it be—entertainment news or entertainment?”

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Research Center finds a large segment of the public active in consulting many sources for their information, conducting much of that searching and reading online. George doesn’t see the public as apathetic, necessarily; rather he sees the country as much more divided than in past eras. “They are less willing to read and try to understand what is different from what they believe. News fatigue is a big factor, too. The presidential campaign was exhausting, lengthy and divisive. It’s just difficult to keep your eye on the ball of a troubling, divisive story. People grab for the simple side of a story, and are not interested even in listening to different points of view.

Cynthia Needham ’95

Urban Investigator “I

have always been attracted to stories,” says Cynthia Needham ’95, a news reporter for the Providence Journal. In the few short years since she graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism, Cynthia has gained attention for breaking tough, complicated stories. She loves the work. “I like the straightforwardness of print journalism.

Last spring, one of Cynthia’s stories—a piece related to the crime committed by an alleged serial killer—earned first place in the news story category from the Rhode Island Press Association. The story was about Jeffrey S. Mailhot, who police allege, over the course of about a year, solicited three prostitutes, lured them to his apartment and strangled them.

moment to back up and think much about how disturbing the whole story was until things slowed down. Along the way, I was too busy interviewing prostitutes to see who knew what, getting inside the suspect’s apartment and traipsing around the dump, learning how police had located the remains of one of the woman who had been killed.”

“I want to investigate stories about peoples’ lives. That’s what drives our world,” Cynthia says. Getting the full story requires a mix of idealism and healthy skepticism. Cynthia remembers working on a story about a middle school. The officials she talked with wanted to keep the story small, “but I kept looking and thinking that this wasn’t fair to these children.

There was more to this.” Eventually Cynthia ended up writing a five-part exposé about the school and its mistreatment of students.

“It’s obvious this isn’t a pretty tale,” Cynthia says, “but for a rookie reporter it was a bit of a break. The story blew open late on a sweltering Saturday last July. I was working that day, but was rushing out the door to get to an engagement party that started an hour later. When I got the call, I knew this was what I signed up for when I decided to go into journalism. So I traded my heels for a pair of sneakers, got out there and started reporting. I don’t think I stopped (or slept much) for two weeks after that. I didn’t really have a

For reporters, Cynthia says, “objectivity has to be possible. You have to focus on the facts. The minute print journalists stop trying, we’ve given up on the idea of what we’re trying to do: vigorously report stories. Anything less is a disservice to the stories.” On her first day of journalism school, Cynthia’s professor handed each person in the class a brown bag “as a reminder to pack our own lunches, never to accept a free lunch. People make fun of me about that bag, but I will always have it above my desk.” In fact, Cynthia argues

“And what’s the story behind the story?”

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“The biggest change is corporate interests. Editors do not have the same sense of autonomy.

Budgets are being cut. With fewer reporters, newspapers have less manpower to follow leads.”

“Actually, I work for a newspaper, but people won’t talk to me without it.”

that reporting, in and of itself, makes her more objective: “Over time you see that everyone is playing games on some level.

As a result, I have become more and more apolitical as I’ve gone along.”

Cynthia does recognize that print journalism has lost some of its power and reach.

“The biggest change is corporate interests.

Editors do not have the same sense of autonomy. Budgets are being cut. With fewer reporters, newspapers have less manpower to follow leads. Old-timers used to be able to pursue documentdriven, long-term stories everywhere. The biggest pieces could have teams working for years. Those sorts of stories represent the free, vigorous press we like to talk about.” This immersion process, this freedom to take the time needed to tell the whole story, leads to “good, powerful stories,” the lifeblood of print journalism.

Budget cuts are only part of the story.

Caught, herself, on the generational cusp between print and Internet new sources, Cynthia sees the need to appeal to people who use both. “It is so frustrating to see a Reader’s Digest of the news; you can’t box stories that way. At the same time we [in

Cynthia Needham ’95

print] have to convince people to come up with the time, a day after an event, to read the whole article, the full, in-depth version. In the corporate sense, I don’t know the answer to the dilemma.”

Web sites ultimately have to support and complement the print news coverage, Cynthia thinks. Recently the Journal has run online surveys soliciting input from

About his beat: Fred Melo ’94 in St. Paul Minnesota Fred Melo ’94 is a beat reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in St. Paul, Minnesota. He covers the suburban community of Dakota County, south of the city. “Some of this work is in my blood, “ he says. My father was a reporter in the Dominican Republic and also worked for a small weekly newspaper outside of Boston, so I grew up drowning in stacks of newspapers. I’ve always enjoyed learning and storytelling…so this industry allows me to open a lot of doors and peek into many rooms and experiences without getting stuck in any particular one. Everyday, work is varied and forces me to turn on a dime. The deadline pressure gets my blood flowing, and writing is its own reward. There’s also the gratification of seeing your byline in print the next day.

Sometimes, something you wrote actually helps people.

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“People are nervous around reporters now. I’ve had friends clam up around me in mid-conversation, worried they may be revealing too much about their workplace.

“We compete directly with the Minneapolis Star Tribune (the Strib), and your heart sinks when you see a piece in the Strib that could have, should have been yours first. I open the newspaper every morning with a little bit of apprehension. “…My audience is an older, suburban crowd, mostly property owners and people with children. The growth of the suburban audience is increasingly true across the industry. Core readers are less likely to be city workers. Instead, they work in suburban office parks and commute from suburb to suburb. Making a metropolitan newspaper relevant to such a non-centralized audience is a tall order.”

Fred Melo ’94

readers about social issues under debate.

By and large, the surveys work and Journal Web editors have told Cynthia that they are always surprised by the thoughtfulness of the comments they receive. “Hearing from the extremes of our readers has been fascinating. When people are charged up by a story, they love to post their feelings and thoughts. Surveys may be a way to connect readers.”

For Cynthia, Milton was “a great steppingstone for this kind of work because you’re trained to seek the full answer. There everything is challenged; the overall environment makes you question everything.”

John Charles Smith, she says, gave her a love of English and taught her how to ask questions that push the envelope. Debbie Simon was another significant influence.

“Being thrown into an environment like the speech tournaments, even though I wasn’t a current events competitor, makes you hyper-aware of current events and the world at a time when most teenagers are

not ready to touch on those serious questions. When you leave, you realize how far Milton pushed you.” Cynthia learned to take nothing on faith but to believe that the fact, if found and respected, would reveal the true story.

Rod Skinner ’72 Director of College Counseling

About his beat: David Colbert ’95 in Gardner, Massachusetts David reported for metropolitan Boston weeklies, and edited a weekly paper, before reporting for the Gardner News, a small daily serving Gardner, Massachusetts, and surrounding towns. Along the way he earned the 2003 New England Press Association Award for Special Features.

“I share Gardner coverage with one other reporter,” David says. “My beat consists primarily of crime and politics, but lucky for Gardner there isn’t enough of either to occupy all my time, and I have to dig for other stories.

“The frustration is that a beat reporter at a small paper doesn’t have time to do much investigative journalism, or to really work a topic over. I do like how well you get to know the community in which you work. You find out its history, the nice neighborhood and the one on the other side of the tracks, what people do for a living, which ethnic groups live where, everything that former politicians messed up. Every community, no matter how simple on the surface, has fascinating stories. Unfortunately, at a small daily, you don’t always get the chance to tell them.

“Gardner used to be the chair manufacturing capital of the world, but is now one of the poorest communities in the state. Most of its factories have been torn down or stand empty. City officials are trying to get the owners to tear them

down because they fear a major fire, and neighbors complain that teenagers and homeless people break into them. Still, it’s a relatively safe and tight-knit community; many people are working to improve it, and people are moving in to new expensive houses. Tracking the city’s changes would be nice—what pressures to go in different directions. It would be great to find out why so many people in their teens and twenties are using crack and heroin. Unfortunately, I’m usually limited to reporting on the mayor’s initiatives or the latest drug bust.

“Still, I always feel that I’m providing an important service, that in an open society there is news that someone has to report (accurately, free of the spin that somebody always wants you to add), no matter how unglamorous. Beating the competition to a big story (two other dailies cover the city) is a thrill, but for me the best part is just talking to people. The mayor (a guy who kept a grinch doll named after the school superintendent hanging on a noose in his office) tells me his wheeling and dealing. A city councilor tells me about the French-speaking test you used to have to take to join the Acadien Club. The deputy police chief complains about the time he caught two kids, literally red-handed, after spraypainting their names in a playground, only to have a judge nicknamed ‘Let ’em Slide’ dismiss the charges because

nobody witnessed the vandalism. An elderly woman stops me in the courthouse to tell me about how some kids who knocked over gravestones should be sentenced to cleaning floors with a toothbrush.

“If I had to pick one story of which I am most proud, it would be a feature I wrote on two Muslim families. I spent a day with them talking about their customs, the differences between their home countries and the United States, what it was like to wear a veil after September 11. One of the men told me he liked the article so much he sent it to his father in Egypt. That was flattering for me, personally, but also a chance to show the world what a free press can do.”

David Colbert ’95

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Jesse Sarles ’93

“It’s a flexible medium, and with the right level of commitment a Web site can become the ultimate authority for any particular news story.”

The Web Journalist cbs4denver.com Jesse Sarles ’93 manages and maintains cbs4denver.com, the Web site for KCNC-TV, a CBS station in Denver. The station bio describes Jesse as a “classically trained journalist,” who “worked in radio and TV news” before “jumping into the new world that is the Internet.”

What about your transition to Internet journalism: How or why did it happen and what are the significant changes from a journalistic point of view. At this point, do you consider your role—an online journalist—is new and evolving, or is it welldefined and stable?

I knew I was interested in journalism early in college. It hadn’t hit me at Milton.

In journalism schools, such as the one I attended at the University of Wisconsin, they set you up in sequences; essentially you can choose to prep for several years to work in public relations, newspapers or TV and radio. The Internet wasn’t really a medium for news then, and there certainly wasn’t a class where all you did was publish news online. I think a lot of JSchools around the country are still lagging in this area, actually. Enough online news jobs are out there to warrant a separate online sequence.

I quickly found out that learning to work with no deadlines was only the first in a series of drastic shifts I would need to make to my journalist’s mindset if I was going to make it in this medium.

I also had no idea about the rough road that was ahead in terms of employment.

After the dot-com bubble burst I was laid off two different times, and it was only with luck that I landed this job in Denver.

Within the past two years, I’d say online news jobs have grown more stable, and there are more positions every day.

However, journalists looking for online jobs should know that things are still very fluid with the Web and new technology and software is cropping up around every bend. One must not fear change if he or she is working in an Internet position.

Out of college I found work in radio and then moved on to TV in an assignment desk role. At that time my TV station was hiring for the Web, and I decided I wanted to switch gears. The concept of being able to publish news online whenever it broke was appealing to me.

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

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How would you describe your job?

My job has changed drastically just this year. For three years I was our TV station’s “Webmaster,” meaning I was the only guy whose full-time concern was to keep our Web site going. This year, as Web manager, I’m leading a team of people we’ve hired who are all devoted to online news.

All Web sites are different, but I’d say most online news gigs require a certain amount of ego-letting; your face isn’t going to be on TV and your byline won’t be plastered on top of a news story each day.

This doesn’t mean the Web doesn’t have its rewards. Our news director comes to me daily with questions about what we can do with our Web site (Can we live stream our helicopter’s footage over a wildfire? Can we post a 50-minute-long one-on-one interview a reporter did with a notorious convict? Can we present an allnight Web-exclusive broadcast on election night?) I almost always am able to smile and say, yes, we can do just about anything you’d like on the Web. It’s a flexible medium, and with the right level of commitment a Web site can become the ultimate authority for any particular news story.

On a nuts-and-bolts level, my job is essentially that of an aggregator—someone who disassembles what we put to air and rebuilds it, enhances it in some way, and repurposes it for our online audience. It takes a different skill set from your more traditional journalist, but a lot of the traditional skills do transfer.

What are your professional priorities?

A) To remain employed. (Hopefully another dot-com crash isn’t in the works.)

B) I’d like to think that in five years, instead of managing a team of three or four people, I’ll oversee a Web team of 20 or 30. At whatever Web site in the future, I want to present the news with as much thought and care as possible.

Who is your audience and what do you know about them? Are they the same folks who watch the station, for instance?

How do they use the site?

The majority of people visiting our Web site are from the area, and they are concerned about breaking news and local issues. We try to accentuate the unique local angles of our site for that reason.

Because it’s a very competitive market for news, we know that we have to be just as aggressive in publishing our news online as we do on-air.

We drive people watching our TV news to our Web site frequently, but at my site (and for other media outlets this is also true) a large number of people who never watch our TV station rely on the Web site.

The majority of our traffic comes from the working public. It’s just so easy for someone to take a quick break from what they are working on at their desk in the office to check our headlines and see what the weather forecast is.

We’re also seeing growth in our online video, which is increasingly becoming a source for ad revenue and is a feature that gives us a big advantage over newspaper Web sites. Despite all the text out there on the Internet, there are still a large number of people who want the news to be told to them. Online video is perfect for these types of news consumers.

sound ethical judgment should be the centerpiece of any news Web site that strives to be a leader in the field.

The Web is exciting, and possibly overwhelming at times, because of the limitless opportunities to enhance and expand any simple news story. We aren’t limited to a number of inches, and there are no time limits for a video report. I’m fully aware that I could spend all day on one story—adding online polls, posting the unedited original interviews, adding links and resources as well as other multimedia elements. For the most part, though, Web teams are pretty small and we have to be wise when choosing which stories to expand.

The way in which people get their news online is also a point of study. Many times people are looking for the latest updates and only want to skim through a few stories that matter to them. For this audience, a long newspaper-type story doesn’t work. I’ve found that concise, tight writing and headlines that draw you in to the story are very helpful in building an online audience. Posting breaking news items is also an invaluable practice.

What are your predictions about the direction of broadcast stations and their related Web sites?

Broadcast stations are admittedly behind the curve when it comes to devoting resources to their Web sites. Newspapers, which have already faced declining ad revenues, generally have created larger Web staffs. They sell more ads online and they tend to dominate markets for online news.

What are the important characteristics of your medium (Internet) that redefine old notions of journalism?

A person pursuing a position as an online news editor might want to prepare himself in some non-traditional ways. A Computer Science 101 course might come in handy.

So might some basic advertising classes.

And then there’s also graphic design. I’ve found that it’s necessary to be a jack-of-alltrades in my position. The core tenets of journalism are still in play on sites like mine, though, and good writing skills and

Jesse Sarles ’93

Many TV stations’ Web sites are now playing catch-up. At this time, declining on-air revenue is starting to affect TV stations, and as they seek out new ways to make money, I think they will increasingly turn to the Web. Having meteorologists and expanded onair reporters who know their turf are clear competitive advantages for TV station Web sites, and I think doing exclusive online newscasts and live streaming news events is going to be more and more common.

Radio stations don’t have these assets at their disposal, so I think they’ll have a much tougher time keeping up in the digital world and making money from their Web sites.

People will likely be watching our news and getting the weather in their cars, iPods or wireless devices in the near future. So much is still set to change with the way people consume news. We’ve got to be ready for it.

It’s an exciting time for me. The Internet is really starting to boom. With the rise of blogging, advertisers pouring money into online ad campaigns and rapidly growing broadband connections, it’s a great time to get into online news.

With what kinds of issues is the Poynter Institute’s program for Internet leaders involved? [The Poynter Institute is a resource for journalists.] Has participation there affected your professional growth?

In May of 2004 I attended a lengthy seminar for online news leaders at Poynter. It covered a whole range of topics, from the separate set of ethics involved in publication of news online to effective strategies for laying out news on a homepage while still pleasing advertisers who want substantial visibility. The seminar leaders also introduced us to a study called Eyetracker [www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004 ], a massive research project devoted to analyzing how study participants viewed and consumed news online. This was a big confidence booster for me: this and other online behavior studies are helping to take a lot of the guesswork out of online news presentation online. I want to make it as simple as possible for people to get the news and information they need, and it’s becoming less of an experiment every day.

Cathleen Everett

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Felicia Taylor ’82 Ned Roberts ’93 Caroline Cornish Kmack ’94

“Glad you brought that up, Jim. The latest research on polls has turned up some interesting variables. It turns out, for example, that people will tell you any old thing that pops into their heads.”

Broadcast News: I

n the 21st century, the landscape of broadcast journalism includes not only local and network news, but also cable channels and related Web sites. The reach expands even as the ownership of outlets contracts. The 24-hour cycle of today’s news drives the new engines: time and space must be filled. Viewers can watch the video clips online—the same clips endlessly, if they desire. Entertainment news and hard news blur. Speechwriters craft messages mindful of the potential for soundbites to resonate indefinitely.

According to a June 2005 Pew Research Center Survey report, most Americans say that they like mainstream news outlets. By wide margins, more Americans give favorable than unfavorable ratings to their daily newspaper (80%–20%), local TV news (79%–21%), and cable TV news networks (79%–21%), among those able to rate these organizations. The margin is only slightly smaller for network TV news (75%–25%).

In fact, the favorable ratings for most categories of news organizations surpass positive ratings for President Bush and major political institutions such as the Supreme Court, Congress and the two major political parties.

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Milton graduates are among those who capture and broadcast the nation’s news.

They believe strongly in the power and importance of their work to help Americans acquire the information they need to lead productive lives.

Name: Felicia Taylor ’82 Station: Co-anchor, NBC 4, New York “If my stories can inform, shape your day or somehow help people, I’m satisfied. If watching a story [about a financial issue or product] gives you a leg up and makes an opportunity available to you, then I’ve done my job.

“At the end of the day, I love what I do,” Felicia says, “There’s no such thing as a typical day.”

Felicia looks at delivering news as a way to serve the community; capturing those stories often requires assertiveness.

“If you’re talking to the media, make sure you know what you want to say,” she says, “then say only what you intend.”

Felicia doesn’t make apologies for going after her story. To her, it’s a job and a profession in which luck and perseverance helped her succeed: to capture the story and, now, to share it from the anchor’s desk.

Where We Are Now

“Yesterday [July 27], I watched the shuttle launch and it brought back to me the day when I was at WLS in Chicago [as an intern], the day of the shuttle Challenger disaster. I remember sitting in the newsroom, watching this thing go up and just thinking that something didn’t look right,” she says. “It was my first taste of breaking news. I remember feeling fear, uncertainty and adrenalin. I remember thinking, ‘What is the story? What do we need to tell people?’ And that was before the Internet; we didn’t have the same resources.”

In Felicia’s early news experience, she witnessed disaster—she later reported on 9/11 and the first Gulf War, too—but business and financial news reporting have shaped much of her career. Felicia started at the Financial News Network (FNN), a cable station, in New York before cable was relevant and before business news had emerged as “the next big thing.”

Felicia had always thought of herself as a producer. Her first airtime came when the anchor seat of “This Morning’s Business” became vacant, and the program’s managing editor suggested that Felicia might sit in. The show’s general manager thought his girlfriend might do as well in the seat—but an independent analyst of the audition tapes chose Felicia. There, in the basement of New York’s old Exxon building, the producer became an anchor.

The first person she interviewed was Larry Kudlow, a business legend. “I hadn’t studied business and barely knew the difference between a stock and a bond,” Felicia says. “Larry gave me my reading list, which included the Wall Street Journal and Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”— a tome that introduced Felicia to the concept of bubbles, among other financial phenomena (the tulip bubble in Holland in the 1600s—when tulips traded at a higher price than gold—was one of the 1841 book’s case studies).

Felicia hit her first bump when CNBC bought FNN and the supply-demand balance left Felicia without a job. She moved to London, signed on for a few classes at Sotheby’s and made a list of just about every producer in London. Before she’d exhausted her list, a friend’s husband mentioned that the Financial Times planned a new business show, and Felicia got her break in London. She joined CNBC in 1992 as London correspondent from the Financial Times, where she anchored three business shows seen on Sky Television and Superchannel.

Since 2003, Felicia has been co-anchor of NewsChannel 4. Prior to that, she was the co-anchor for NewsChannel 4’s “Weekend Today in New York,” the station’s top-rated weekend morning news programs. She joined News Channel 4 in October 1998 from CNBC, where she was co-anchor of “Today’s Business” and “Market Watch.”

While at CNBC, Felicia also served as a contributor to the weekday editions of “Today” in New York, providing daily business and stock market updates. She also has contributed reports to NBC “News at Sunrise.”

One of Felicia's most important tenets in preparing and delivering the news is this: “If I give my word to somebody, I stand by it,” she says. “ [But] the news is never about me. The news is the news: a bombing in Egypt, an explosion in an apartment building in Queens. I like to tell stories that affect a great number of people; I like to tell them as much as I can.”

Over a year ago, Felicia broke a story about ”naked shorts”—a stock is sold short without any ability or intention to ever cover the sale, a crime according to the SEC regulations, but a crime that has not regularly been punished. That story has since held server space on financial Internet sites and blogs, and in publications such as the Wall Street Journal.

Felicia claims that her only formal training for becoming a broadcast journalist came from Dale Deletis, former Milton Speech Team coach. “The gift of being able to write well has also been very important.

A news story should be simple to digest,” she says.

Felicia applied to Milton late and enjoyed the unusual experience of living as a member of the Pieh household with former Headmaster Jerry Pieh and his family. “I spent two great years there with them and their slobbering dog,” she laughs.

“In local news, I think that writing is an important piece that often gets overlooked,” he says.

Finding a compelling story is another must-have, like Ned’s story about Amos King, an inmate of the Florida prison system who was scheduled to be put to death until Governor Jeb Bush granted a temporary stay after Ned contacted the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic that handles cases where postconviction DNA testing of evidence can yield conclusive proof of innocence. “I asked if they were looking at the case,” Ned recalls. He explained the lack of conclusive physical evidence against King in stories that traced King’s plight. In the end, most physical evidence had been lost or destroyed, and Ned witnessed King’s execution on February 27, 2003, but Ned maintains that it was right to pursue the story and bring the issue of DNA evidence in old criminal trials to people’s consciousness. “The real power of local news is to spur government and community action,” Ned says.

Ned’s continuing coverage of Death Row inmate King earned him an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2003. Also that year, he won an Emmy Award for his live report from a hurricane simulator. In 2002, his report on the U.S. Coast Guard tall ship Eagle earned him an Emmy Award nomination. When Ned pursues an assignment or an idea, he’s “thinking about what story I can tell and whether it’s something that I might want to know about.

Felicia has been nominated for an Emmy five times.

Name: Ned Roberts ’93 Station: Reporter, WTSP-TV News, Tampa, Florida Ned believes that the best television news pieces let the characters tell the story. “The power is hearing directly from the source.

In a well-done piece, you use everything you have. TV is a visual medium, so it pays to maximize what you get on tape.”

Ned has been telling the stories well, as evidenced by an Emmy—one of two—he won in 2004 for writing “Homecoming” about a soldier’s return from Afghanistan.

Felicia Taylor ’82

Ned Roberts ’93 with Michelle Jordan (see page 78) 15

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“I don’t go through a lot of mental preparation [even for difficult stories]. On some level, a lot of people want to talk to us. It’s a catharsis [if they’re in a crisis]. There are ways to be kind and understanding when you approach someone with hard questions. The bottom line is that if people want to tell their stories, I can help them.”

Ned realized the power of storytelling at an early age: “When I was a kid, I watched a lot of local news. I did speech team and knew that I wanted to apply those skills directly—that I wanted to follow this path.

“I think that [TV news] often gets a bad rap for not being serious enough. A ton of really conscientious people are in this business for the right reasons.

“People in the audience really develop a connection with the people who bring news into their homes. In the end, what wins out is good storytelling. What I love about my job is that I learn something new every day and can share it with the community.

“I become a mini-expert.”

Ned Roberts joined Tampa Bay’s 10 News as a general assignment reporter in May 2000. Before moving to the Bay Area, he worked as a reporter in Jacksonville, Florida, at WJXX-TV. Prior to his time in Florida, Ned reported for the CBS affiliate in Lexington, Kentucky, during a fellowship. His work there earned him national recognition for excellence in broadcast journalism. He won a first-place award for Spot News from the Society of Professional Journalists, as well as a first-place award from the Hearst Foundation.

Ned graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in June 1998.

Name: Caroline Cornish Kmack ’94 Station: Reporter, WSCH, Portland, Maine A Milton assignment brought Caroline to the decision to become a journalist.

“In Mr. Fricke’s non-fiction English class, we had to write an article about anything we wanted. I loved the Red Sox and watching the news, so my father suggested I write my article about television sports

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reporters. I called channels 4, 5 and 7.

Bob Lobel invited me to the station for an interview. I talked to him for 20 minutes, and then he let me watch the 6 o’clock news from the studio. Afterward, he told me I asked some very good questions and he gave me his scripts.

“At the time, it didn’t occur to me that anchors toss their scripts out after every broadcast, so I thought he was the greatest guy I had ever met. I still have the scripts.

I think I got a B on the paper, but I realized then that not only was I capable of becoming a reporter, I was going to become one.” As her advisor and speech coach, Dale Deletis helped her gain confidence to speak in front of crowds and in almost any other situation, she adds.

“Milton gave me the tools to think critically about the world and encouraged me to think about issues that may not affect me directly,” Caroline says.

Now Caroline helps other think: “In the broadest sense, my job is to keep people informed about what’s going on in the world. But my goal also is to get people to care about what’s going on in their communities.

“My first priority is to get the facts right.

Your writing or your pictures don’t matter if the story is wrong. You have to do everything you can to represent the truth. To that end, I feel my job is always to be fair.

Sometimes you interview people you don’t like, but that can’t affect your reporting.

My job is to present all sides fairly.

“My best moments come when I try to do a little extra to help the story. A couple times, my photographer and I have gone out of our way to get one more picture or one more interview that ends up leading us to a treasure that makes the story 100 times better,” she says. “For instance, one day we heard that police were going to search the home of the estranged husband of a murder victim, Chellie Calloway. We had no idea where the house was in the town. But as we searched, we ended up finding the victim’s brother, who gave us insight into who Chellie was. That interview allowed our viewers to see her as a person, not a statistic.”

Caroline loves her work, but the public’s perception that TV news reporters care more about the story than about people is

Caroline Cornish Kmack ’94

frustrating, she says. “I think the most difficult part of my job is going out to a story that’s sad or upsetting, like a murder or a drowning, and having people act as though I am purposefully antagonizing them. I ask questions because those people can help you understand the victim, and sometimes people want to talk. It’s my job to let people know what’s going on, whether it’s good news or bad.”

As a reporter for five years, Caroline says she is witnessing a shift in the way news is collected and broadcast. “I hear people talk about how the 24-hour news cycle puts more pressure on journalists to get their work done quickly, and that pressure can lead to mistakes. That’s true, but the biggest challenge reporters face is separating facts from rumors. Many blogs out there give information that may or may not be accurate. No one wants to be behind the pack, but now we need to be more careful than ever that our information is correct before we go with it.”

Caroline Cornish Kmack (who does not use “Kmack” professionally) joined the News Center team in January 2004. She began her reporting career at WNNE in White River Junction, Vermont, and then moved to WPTZ in Plattsburgh, New York. She earned a bachelor’s degree in communication studies and a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University.

Heather Sullivan

Daily Financial on CNBC from Bertha Coombs ’80 Bertha Coombs ’80 is a reporter for CNBC, covering business and financial news stories throughout the business day. Her working lens now is narrower than it had been in the past. In earlier days, Bertha was an ABC News reporter and anchor for “ABC News One” in New York. Her stories were as diverse as the Kosovo crisis, the Clinton impeachment case, and Hurricane Floyd, and she anchored the network’s report on John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane crash.

She misses aspects of the daily news work that were appealing: talking to people with the idea of coaxing out a story, writing, pulling together the sound and the visual components—“crafting the composite” as Bertha says. As a financial reporter, she’s interviewing and covering events in real time, following how individuals sort through information and make decisions. She witnesses, on a daily basis, the “wisdom of the crowd” as it is expressed in the efficiency of the market.

Differences in her audiences are meaningful. Local news serves such a wide range of people, that some simplification of the issues is inevitable, Bertha explains. Viewers of CNBC are a selfselected group, who have already developed a context for the information they seek. Still, simplifying well enough to achieve clarity is important. Several key skills have served Bertha in both roles.

Flexibility, for instance, allows her to respond to answers, shift questions and move toward the fullest expression of the story. “You start out with an idea,” Bertha says, “but you need to go with the flow or the research and the interview.

“Listening,” Bertha adds is a crucial but underrated skill. “You need to listen for what people don’t say, and listen while they speak through body language.

There’s always plenty of background— gratuitous ‘noise’—but if you listen carefully, something breaks through the cover.”

Her immersion in the financial world has given Bertha a new appreciation for the relationships among things, a “new framework” for looking at economics.

She’s noted public sentiment moving from lionizing corporation CEOs to assuming that they are universally not to be trusted. She has responded to the public’s attempt to discern what these corporations are, what the leadership issues they face are, what the implications are of decisions they make, and what the real meanings are of the many “reports” that are announced. Companies are taking a long-term view when they restructure, or refocus, but what are the human dimensions of those decisions? Employees are skittish, for example, about the fallout of a merger: two organizations with vested interests and a rooted culture—can they really integrate, and what kind of chaos may follow?

“Making money is obviously how corporations keep score, but I am very interested in the behavioral aspects of finance, and of economics in general,” Bertha says.

when our sense of the world was shaken, we had to once again figure out how to navigate in the world, with no ability to predict what would happen next. Things work themselves out and people move forward.

“The divisiveness we talk about also has to be seen in context. Is it worse than during the Civil War? Is it worse than all the conflicting points of view when quotas were applied to people trying to come from my country, when the quota laws would have affected my ability to vote, or to have this job? As Dickens wrote, “It is the best of times and the worst of times.”

“As a Milton student, I had the privilege of learning how to ask good questions, how to think critically. If you are at Milton, that environment is the norm.

So it is in journalism. The great thing is to realize the skills that different people bring to the job. Journalism, particularly television, is very collaborative. I love working with people who bring curiosity and passion to their work.”

Bertha is sanguine about the transitions playing out in journalism. “The Internet, cable and other advertising-based media just bring a bigger audience into the tent. We have to let go of the monolithic news source. When something happens that affects us all, we all pay attention.

We had many more news sources and all kinds of partisanship 100 years ago; the irony is that this new technology brings us back to where we were long ago, when there were many highly partisan sources to choose from, and they were not necessarily accountable for being accurate. People have to weigh the information they get, just as a trader or an investor would weigh his research before making a decision,” Bertha argues.

“The search for historical context goes on forever. I often wondered how people made it through 1968, with the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. After 9/11,

Bertha Coombs ’80

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J. Peter Scoblic ’92 Jeanne McCulloch ’75 Ty Burr ’76 Vick Boughton ’73 Evan Hughes ’94

“No, thanks—we’re here to flush the media out of our systems.”

Media as Social Force “T

he first myth is that the media do not matter that much—that they merely reflect reality, rather than shape it,” writes media expert Robert W. McChesney in The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century. “In fact,” he says, “media are a social force in their own right, and not just a reflection of other forces.”

Milton graduates active in the world of national print media use the force of their inquiry, writing and editing to shape ideas.

They work to influence how we think about government, why we pay to see a movie, what we read, or who should become a hero.

As acting editor of The New Republic (TNR) and former editor of Arms Control Today, a magazine covering efforts to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, Peter speaks about nuclear proliferation in Asia, international treaties, and the danger of espionage among friendly nations with the understated assurance that comes from deep competence. Add to that an uncommon adherence to the truth—even when it is awkward—and Peter’s mission and style begin to emerge:

J. Peter Scoblic ’92, Acting Editor The New Republic At Brown University in the mid-’90s, Peter Scoblic helped found the Brown Journal of World Affairs. Establishing a student publication is not typically adequate training for leading one of America’s most thoughtful weekly magazines, except that the Brown Journal included contributors such as Madeleine Albright, John Shalikashvili, Lawrence Eagleburger, Al Haig and John Kerry—and it drew a national audience.

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“I’m not sure it’s my ‘best’ moment exactly, but I’m proud of how I handled an embarrassing mistake I made in an interview with John Bolton [ former State Department under secretary and President Bush’s appointee as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations] that I published in Arms Control Today.

“We ran a direct transcript of the interview, warts and all, and I had to write an editor’s note explaining that I had gotten a fact wrong in a question. I still cringe a little when I think about what readers may have thought,” Peter says. “The good news is that the thrust of my question was right, and Bolton’s answer revealed his desire to change U.S. policy on whether we’d ever nuke a non-nuclear country. The State Department was none too happy about that, but it provided a useful window into Bolton’s thinking.

“My priority is to put out the most intellectually provocative, intellectually honest magazine possible,” Peter says of his Washington, D.C.–based periodical, The New Republic. “We look to provide smart arguments, backed up by original reporting.”

J. Peter Scoblic ’92

This summer, Peter was in the midst of a nine-month stint as acting editor of TNR—he’s usually the magazine’s executive editor—when we talked with him: President Bush announced the nomination of Judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court on a Tuesday night, and TNR went to press on Wednesday night—with a package of four stories and an August 1 cover story dubbing Roberts, “The Chosen One.” Just as Roberts, the man that Sandra Day O’Connor calls “perfect in every way, except that he’s not a woman,” is hard to label confidently, so TNR is a tough publication to categorize ideologically. “New Republic readers are an interesting lot,” Peter says. “Unlike many ‘media consumers,’ they either defy easy political categorization or they enjoy having their views challenged. They’re looking for a deeper level of analysis than what they’ll get on the op-ed pages or CNN or the blogs. We serve them by providing smart, well-written, tightly argued articles that inform, surprise and sometimes shock.”

For example, Peter wrote the August 8 cover story on the relationship between conservatism and nuclear terrorism: “The war on terrorism is, at some level, a war of ideas: To the extent that we can substitute democracy and liberal values for autocracy and Islamic fundamentalism, we will probably improve our security—and we should therefore try to do so. But freedom—as Richard Haass, Bush’s former director of policy planning at the State Department, has written—is not a doctrine.

“That is, the spread of freedom cannot be our guiding principle [as President Bush has suggested] in the war on terrorism, because the spread of freedom cannot protect us from all terrorist threats, particularly the immediate ones. In fact, in the short term, democratization appears to exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, terrorism.”

Peter explains further that experts believe that the likelihood of a successful nuclear terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the next five to 10 years is between 30 and 50 percent or higher. This kind of attack could truly “change everything,” Peter writes, altering the economic and political landscape of our country.

“The Weekly Standard and National Review have a clearly conservative readership, The Nation a very liberal one. TNR is different in this regard—we’re generally considered

left of center, but the magazine’s hawkish foreign policy stands have alienated a lot of liberals. We also publish a range of views. You might think this would make us appealing to a broader range of folks, but it actually makes us even more niche because the country’s political polarization has left relatively few people who take seriously opinions that dissent from their own.”

If Peter could change something about his readership, he might add to its ranks.

Many publications don’t reach their potential level of public discourse because only “the choir” read them. “[Don’t] confine your reading habits to publications that reflect your ideology—branch out,” Peter suggests.

The value in reading (or watching or listening) beyond your comfort zone is learning something new, or deepening your understanding. “The fact that, as of summer 2004, more than half of Americans still thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction is indicative [of a knowledge deficit],” Peter says. “And of course the further you get from the events, countries, and phenomena that directly impact Americans, the worse their understanding of those things gets.

“Major changes have been less in what we consider news than in how we consider it and how it’s delivered to us. Obviously, there’s been an enormous acceleration in coverage—first with the 24-hour news channels, then with the Internet, and now, more specifically, with blogs,” Peter says.

“This means that the narrative surrounding events develops very rapidly, as well as the arguments that various political interests make about the significance of those events. There are positive aspects to this, but really thoughtful analysis and opinion has definitely suffered for it. There’s less of what you might call long-form thinking—and its relative influence on the political discourse has declined.”

To get at what readers might want to know, TNR’s writers and editors gather at editorial meetings to deliberate the week’s news, Peter explains, and what the magazine ought to say about it. “I tend to find arguments about the magazine’s editorial position the most fun: we had a very animated series of discussions last year about whether the magazine had been wrong to support the Iraq war.

“We’re not audience-driven at all, in the sense that most magazines would use that term. We look for story ideas that interest us, that have a fresh and clever take. And, if they interest us, we think they’ll interest our readers.”

The simplicity of that editorial mission plays out in the magazine’s editorial rhetoric —naming what has happened, regardless of party politics, as when Peter railed against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “Faced with soldiers asking for the bare minimum from their leadership—the tools with which to do their jobs [properly armored vehicles]—Rumsfeld managed to be at once callous, selfdeluding, and dishonest,” Peter wrote in “Incorrect Answer,” a December 2004 TNR piece.

Peter’s work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor and other publications. He says that Jim Connolly (English department) “is one of very few teachers he’s known who could teach writing, while J. C. Smith cultivates the kind of smart analysis that TNR loves.”

Jeanne McCulloch ’75 Former Paris Review Managing Editor; Editorial Director of Tin House Books; and Novelist Cocktails with the Grateful Dead in George Plimpton’s apartment sounds like the stuff of postmodern fantasy. For native New Yorker and writer-editor Jeanne McCulloch, such moments were familiar.

Jeanne McCulloch ’75

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While at the Paris Review, Jeanne published the early stories of many young writers of her generation, including Jeffrey Eugenides, Susan Minot, Nancy Lemann, and Jay McInerny, while enjoying the salon of George Plimpton at his height of cultural importance.

Her path to the Paris Review and beyond is one that most aspirant writers only dream of: honors at Brown University, followed by an interview with former Vogue features editor Leo Lerman (known for always wearing purple). “Leo said to me, ‘I have a feeling about you,’” Jeanne recalls and he handed her a job as a Condé Nast rover— meaning that she helped out at whatever publication needed it at the moment— organizing shoes for a photo shoot at Self, for instance. Shortly after, Lerman moved Jeanne to features assistant, which allowed her to write short pieces as well as edit.

Throughout her career, she’s enjoyed the good fortune of great mentors, she says.

Lerman also sent Jeanne to film screenings, to try out new restaurants and to literary events, opening wide New York’s cultural and social world to a 23-year-old young woman. At 24, Jeanne’s next break came when Vogue editor Amy Gross, now editor of O, The Oprah Winfrey Magazine, asked her to write one in a series of women’s essays. “I was 24, and suddenly I had clips,” Jeanne says. After graduate school in English literature at Columbia, Jeanne, who had long been interested in the more literary side of publishing, interviewed with the late George Plimpton, actor-writer, and editor and cofounder of the Paris Review, which he devoted to finding unknown authors and running interviews with authors such as Ernest Hemingway.

“During my interview, I told George that to me this job would feel like being in a sandbox with all the best toys.” Plimpton, noted for his sense of childlike adventurousness, appreciated the sentiment, and Jeanne moved from the world of glossy magazines to a new workspace: Plimpton’s basement.

As managing editor at Paris Review for five years and editor at large for another five, Jeanne calls those days working at “a special place at a special time.” She interviewed playwright Sam Shepard and became great friends with novelist Mona

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Simpson. And Plimpton was always near, helping the Paris Review staffers—and the world—look at the world upside down and sideways.

“Crazy extracurricular events kept happening there. When George was writing his novel on Sidd Finch, the fictional baseball player, the plot called for someone to drop a ball from a blimp to the ground to clock how fast Finch could throw. George wanted to go up in a blimp and describe what it felt like, what the dashboard looked like, how it landed, et cetera. He invited us along,” Jeanne says. And then there were the drinks with the Dead: “George came in one day and said, ‘I met the Grateful Dead backstage after their concert last night, and they are all coming over for a drink.’” When Plimpton wanted pieces from the “Writers at Work” series to be online free of charge, he spoke of “the guy in Bangladesh” who might want to read them. He asked his editors to appreciate good writing even if it wasn’t in their own style or voice.

Jeanne left the Paris Review to focus on writing rather than intense editing work.

She then began teaching fiction-writing at the New School in New York. In 1998, publisher Win McCormack called Jeanne from Portland, Oregon, wanting her advice in how to start a literary magazine, Tin House. “I wasn’t interested at that time in doing another lit magazine; instead, Win hired one of my colleagues, Elissa Schappell, and her husband, Rob Spillman, to do the job. I went on as contributing editor to Tin House.”

A few years later, when Jeanne was on bed rest while pregnant with her second child, she got a call from Tin House to edit an especially tough 80-page interview with Edward Said, after which she joined the staff more formally as a senior editor.

Karen Rinaldi, editorial director of Bloomsbury Publishing and a longtime friend, helped Jeanne establish a Tin House book imprint at Bloomsbury. Under that imprint, Jeanne first edited a fulllength memoir by AJ Albany, daughter of Joe Albany, jazz musician, a father of bebop and a drug addict.

Now, Jeanne has just finished a book of her own—a novel—and she’s at work on an oral biography of George Plimpton, whom she credits with teaching her to edit an interview. He also taught her, she says,

to be a good listener and to get writers and others to talk about their craft. “Fiction writers work in mysterious ways,” she says, recalling that E. L. Doctorow conceived of Ragtime as he stared intensely at the wall of a house, considering the era when it had been built. On the opposite side of the desk, Jeanne talks of editing as developing the ability to see the sculpture within the big, rough block.

Jeanne’s favorite magazines are The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Harper’s and the Paris Review. She thinks that the big problem for small circulations, even though the readership is generally committed, is that their publication is often reliant on grants or university funding. “I would call [literary magazines] a triumph of idealism over commerce,” she says.

When Jeanne wrote the piece on success for Vogue shortly after graduating from Brown, she contrasted her 24-year-old self—toting manuscripts in her bag—with the Jeanne of two years before, toting school books. She talked about success as measured by enlightened women of the ‘80s: friends, career and motherhood way down the road.

“I guess it was about how one little word could have so much meaning, so many different meanings. What it really means is that you’re fulfilling your dreams.”

That idea of success has shifted throughout Jeanne’s career; her next possible moment of success will be hearing what publishers might be interested in her justcompleted novel: “It’s about becoming an adult, about reestablishing ‘home’ when you can’t go home again, or, to paraphrase Elvis Costello, when home isn’t where it used to be,” Jeanne says.

Ty Burr ’76 Film Critic Boston Globe Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr calls the late 1960s and the 1970s the golden age of film. Directors took chances and artistic vision was, of necessity, valued above special effects. Remember that John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy won an Oscar for best picture, he says. Then along came Jaws and Star Wars, and the blockbuster was born.

Dartmouth and New York University’s film school, he continued his preparation for his role as cultural critic.

“It’s silly to compare a movie like Sideways or Vera Drake to a big-budget entertainment like Wedding Crashers or Batman Begins. I try to judge any movie against the movie that it wants to be. This seems only fair: Is Wedding Crashers as good a nobrainer fratboy farce as it aspires to? (No, but mighty close.) Is Vera Drake effective both as drama and pro-choice provocation? (Yes.) At the same time, you have to indicate to the reader that while honest entertainment tastes better, artistic and/or narrative ambition is more filling.”

Ty Burr ’76

“On one level what I do is a service job,” Ty says. “People want the market report.

‘Should I spend my nine dollars to see this movie?’” In July 2005 alone, Ty delivered more than 20 such “consumer reports.” But thanks to former New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who revolutionized the art, film criticism now rivals literary criticism in its sophistication and cultural significance.

“Movies don’t take place in a vacuum,” Ty explains. “They’re informed by all sorts of cultural assumptions, whether they’re brain-dead Hollywood product or intellectual art house fare. In fact, I’d argue that mainstream studio movies say more about how our society views itself—socially, politically, sexually—than independent movies do, if only because studio films take such assumptions for granted and aren’t aware of them. But I am: It’s my job, among others, to pick apart the strands of movies and examine what they say about the people who made them, about the audiences that watch them. This is especially important given how successful American movies are around the world.

“I think this country’s most effective import, for better and for worse, is its popular culture. But what does it say about us? That’s both fun and necessary to figure out on a movie-by-movie basis,” Ty says.

Ty says that he learned to write and analyze at Milton—think Kay Herzog, A. O. Smith and Paul Monette and, later, at

In a December 2004 column, Ty points to an interesting cultural phenomenon: political polarization in choosing films. A microcosm of the now well-noted polarization of the country appears in audiences of Hollywood: He notes how anyone who didn’t swallow The Passion of Christ was deemed godless, while anyone who didn’t buy all of Fahrenheit 9/11 was considered hopelessly conservative. He argues that we’re missing out by choosing sides.

“Not only did it become possible in 2004, even acceptable, to avoid completely points of view other than your own, the rise of partisan forms of media made it simpler to do so. Real liberals don’t listen to talk radio; true conservatives don’t go to the Coolidge [arts cinema in Brookline, Massachusetts]. Religion, politics, what about the eternal verities of the heart?

Could we at least believe in love?” That, too, is hard in movieland, but Ty gives examples such as Million Dollar Baby as remarkable attempts.

In a July 15, 2005, column, Ty goes well beyond his customary 700 or so words to praise Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. His praise for films is far from universal, however. He bashed 2003’s The Cat in the Hat, lamenting that bad reviews don’t always kill bad movies: The Cat in the Hat grossed over $100 million, even after Ty deconstructed it: “At one point in The Cat in the Hat, the Cat, played by Mike Myers, is mistaken for a piñata by a group of children at a birthday party. One by one, they line up to smack him, and the scene culminates with a husky lad swinging a baseball bat directly into the unfortunate feline’s cojónes.

For Your Netflix Queue: Ty’s Top 20 “Sometime I have trouble with the ‘What’s your favorite movie?’ question, if only because I get asked it so often.” Ty says “But I do have a sort of rolling top 20 [see below].

“I do think that Hollywood has gotten away from craft in the past 20 years, so that a movie like Chinatown today looks like a model of streamlined narrative and characterization,” Ty says. “And, yes, there are plenty of unknown great films. One of my favorites is a 1972 French film, Celine and Julie Go Boating, a dreamlike fable about life and art that few people know—and those who do tend to prize it. It’s not an easy movie, but it sticks with you for a long time.”

Bringing Up Baby Aliens The Godfather Celine and Julie Go Boating Aguirre, the Wrath of God I Know Where I’m Going Rear Window Written on the Wind Pierrot le Fou Proof The Seven Samurai The Decalogue Dazed and Confused Being John Malkovich L.A. Confidential Babe My Neighbor Totoro Re-Animator Sweet Smell of Success Pulp Fiction

“That’s a remarkably precise metaphor for what this movie does to the memory of Dr. Seuss. If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel’s body and hung it from a tree, they couldn’t have desecrated the man more,” Ty wrote.

“I can’t say that I have a favorite review— the job is mostly a case of 20-20 hindsight. I’m extremely glad when I’m able to get people to a movie they might not otherwise see and that might challenge their ideas of what movies and life are for, Broken Flowers, Before Sunset, movies like that.

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“I’m glad when I touch a nerve and get readers to think twice about something— I called out the recent Stealth for what I perceived as an extremely callow portrayal of war during a time of war, and got a pile of email in response. Half was positive, half was negative, and the one that meant the most was from an army intelligence officer saying I’d nailed it.

“In a sense, I’m most proud of an interview I did for the New York Times with director Godfrey Reggio about how much trouble he was having getting his final film in his Koyaanisqatsi trilogy made. The article was read by director Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies, and videotape, Ocean’s 11), who immediately picked up the phone and offered Reggio 100 percent funding.

Having been the link that got a film made is arguably more satisfying than writing any review.”

The prominence and professionalism of criticism has risen but, Ty wrote in a July 2005 column, the number of bodies in seats at the cinema has dwindled. When considering why Americans shun cinemas, Ty wonders what could replace the experience: “How would movies make that necessary mass-market splash before fragmenting onto DVD, cable, and ondemand? More critically, what would we do as a society without the shared narrative experience? Since before we started taking notes and calling it history, human beings have felt a yearning to sit in a crowd of ecstatic strangers and be awed by the bigness of stories. DVDs and a $4 bag of M&Ms aren’t going to make that need disappear.”

Before writing for the Globe, Ty wrote for HBO and Entertainment Weekly. He began writing about the movies when he began watching them: While at Milton, he filled his journal with essays about his experience as a movie-watcher. Despite his adoption of a critical language and his academic study of Hollywood, Ty says, “I have to watch a movie the way most people do. I can’t overthink it.”

Vick Boughton ’73 Senior Editor People Magazine In a trivia game, before becoming a senior editor at People magazine, Vick Boughton was the only player to know that Mia Farrow, as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy 22

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Vick’s department, separate from but working in tandem with the People staff who develop weekly news and human-interest stories, produces the issues that focus on a special topic (hence, “specials.”) While they might put out an issue focused on anything from a hot television show such as “Desperate Housewives” to a “how-to” holiday entertaining guide, most magazinebuyers will recognize “Sexiest Man Alive” and “50 Most Beautiful People” or “Best and Worst Dressed” or “50 Hottest Bachelors” as among the favorite special issues. Orlando Bloom was last year’s hottest bachelor, in case you missed that one.

Vick Boughton ’73

Buchanan, was on the inaugural 1974 cover of People. Vick’s affinity for celebrity news, she says, began as a student at Wellesley and continued at Oxford University, where she scoured England for her favorite magazine and remembers being “crushed” when People was no longer imported.

As a leader of the magazine’s “specials” sections—she helps manage a staff of 25— Vick is happily immersed in celebrity and America’s fascination with it. Vick’s graduate work at Oxford was in ethnology, and she says that that background has some bearing on her current work.

“My sense is that readers think of the magazine’s coverage of celebrity-studded events, fashion and even beauty as entertainment. I hope so—it is entertaining.

But, of course, one hallmark of People is that along with the glossy fun stuff, there are stories about real people going through difficult or interesting or joyous times.

Some aren’t household names, but their stories resonate with us. They educate us, infuriate us, inspire us. Who doesn’t want to be involved with or feel a connection to the subject they’re reading about? Otherwise, why bother?”

Life inside People is also engaging. Vick points to Oscar night—during which staffers watch the broadcast and work for at least 18 straight hours—as a highlight.

“You haven’t lived until you’ve experienced Oscar night around here,” says Vick. “You have all these smart, funny people in one room making hilarious observations. It’s the ultimate Oscar party.”

Vick says that while many top picks are entertainers or athletes of note—Johnny Damon, who Vick says has the “best hair in baseball,” made the cut last year, and having a recent notable project helps one’s chances—not all of the men featured are rich and famous. (She says that for someone to earn a “sexiest man alive” designation, however, it really “has to be the guy’s moment.”)

The magazine also likes to introduce fresh faces, according to Vick. She tells of one of the “regular guys” who made the list recently. Last year, a top aide of Condoleezza Rice was featured among the bachelors. The piece quoted the nowSecretary of State as saying that her aide should spend more time out of the office having a little fun.

“We think a lot about our audience—what we feel we owe readers, what we think they should know about,” says Vick. With a readership of nearly 40 million, which surpasses that of Newsweek or Time, People’s audience clearly likes the magazine’s mix of news, features and celebrity tattle.

“Our celeb coverage offers readers a lot to chew over. I think a lot of people can relate, say, to Jennifer Aniston’s recent breakup with Brad Pitt. Theirs appeared to be the perfect marriage, they seemed devoted to one another, they were both huge stars with plenty of work on their plates. And yet, things ultimately fell apart,” Vick says.

“They’re human—they go through crises like the rest of us. Again, there’s that engagement, that involvement along with the entertainment.”

Besides her tenure at People, Vick is a 13year veteran of Sports Illustrated, where she worked as a reporter and senior editor.

Later, she enjoyed stints at Working Woman and Child magazines, all in preparation for her study of celebrity and writing “the snappy, punchy, creative” copy that makes it come alive.

“It’s particularly gratifying to be paid to talk about the things people talk about anyway. We’re also lucky in that we have the Time, Inc., reputation working for us,” Vick says. “Readers trust that we have our facts straight; what we print has been researched and carefully checked for accuracy by fact-checkers as well as by correspondents in any one of our eight news bureaus here and abroad.” (Several of the larger Time, Inc., magazines rely on bureaus for research, reporting and interviews; writers and editors in New York then pull stories together.)

When Vick was at Milton, she served as the co-editor of Milton’s student paper. “I always enjoyed writing,” she says. “As an editor, I get to shape ideas and think about how best to package a story.”

Evan Hughes ’94 Assistant to the Editor New York Review of Books In conversation with Heather Sullivan, associate editor of Milton Magazine.

HS How would you describe your job and how you got there?

EH The two editors who founded The New York Review of Books in 1963, Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, are still at the top of the masthead, and I am Barbara’s assistant. Because the editorial staff is small— around 12—and jobs here are sought after, mine is not really an entry-level position, as editorial assistant jobs are at book publishers and some other magazines. Prior to working here, I was an editor for two years at The New Leader, a political magazine small enough that I was given a considerable amount of experience editing and working with writers. Now, in addition to handling Barbara’s correspondence, faxing proofs to our writers and taking corrections from them, ordering review copies of books, etc., I edit some pieces (by writers you probably know about) and play a large role in sorting through the many books that come in to us—sometimes 100 a day—and deciding what we ought to review and to whom we should assign it.

My job is an editorial one, not a writing one, but I have just completed in off hours

HS This issue of Milton Magazine focuses on the media. Do you think that more literate periodicals face pressures similar to those of mainstream media (e.g., consolidation, fewer resources, etc.), or are they outside of that fray?

Evan Hughes ’94

my first piece for the magazine, which should be published this fall. It’s about a novelization of the Patty Hearst saga, Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance. Other recent work includes a review of James Frey’s two memoirs of addiction and recovery and a piece about the sexual politics of the lap dance. Seriously.

HS From whom have you learned the most about your craft?

EH My boss at The New Leader, Mike Kolatch, was a stern instructor, to put it rather mildly, but I learned a great deal from him about the way sentences ought to work. Much of what I know about writing, though, came from my teachers in Milton’s English and creative writing departments, more so than Yale’s. Many thanks are owed, not just by me, to David Britton, Kay Herzog, Doug Fricke, J. C. Smith, Rick Hardy and the creative writing golden god, Jim Connolly. The man who hired most of them, former English chair Guy Hughes, had some additional influence on my life and education. He’s my dad.

HS My impression is that you’re a writer first and editor second. Can you comment on the relationship between those two selves?

EH I write and edit both, and hope to continue to do so, but I’d like to add more writing to the mix. Sometimes one finds the two roles battling. It’s hard to write freely with a critic and editor staring over your shoulder.

EH Most intellectual publications are money-losing operations and face great pressure to improve the bottom line, particularly when they are owned by larger (and publicly held) corporations. The New York Review is independently owned and, remarkably, is a profitable enterprise, from what I understand. I’m not privy to the math, but I think our success owes something to our crossover appeal to the academic world. Many professors read it to keep up with new work in their fields.

HS What are some of your favorite newspapers or magazines, and what makes them valuable to you?

EH I’m addicted, despite reservations, to the New York Times. I don’t know what I’d do if they tripled the price. My other priorities are The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic, although employed people who say they read them all every issue are lying.

HS Career highlights?

EH Highlights of my short career mostly involve talking to people I’ve long admired from afar. A few articles the NYRB has published since I’ve been here (two years) have been particularly exciting for me, though I played no role in editing them: Two of these were Michael Massing’s “Now They Tell Us,” about the press’s failures in Iraq, and Tony Judt’s “Israel: The Alternative.” The feisty letter exchanges that followed each were a kick.

HS I’m reading The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. In it, a character always turns to the text of Robinson Crusoe when he needs guidance or inspiration. Is there a book, story or poem that functions that way for you?

EH I don’t know about guidance, but for inspiration: Joan Didion’s justly famous personal essay about being young and in New York, “Goodbye to All That.” Can I go on? Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems. Then there’s David Foster Wallace’s essay about going on a cruise, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” In its sometimes cruel way, it is probably the funniest thing I’ve ever read.

Heather Sullivan 23

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Journalism on Campus

A

t Milton, the student publications are as much a draw for student energy as ever: • the number and diversity of publications has increased • entrepreneurial efforts at new publications regularly surface—some stay, some disappear • online publications attract an audience The aspects of the field that are alluring, challenging, gratifying—the reasons students devote passionate effort to publications—reads like a lexicon of the journalism we remember, but whose essentials may be changing. Are students naïve, or have they experienced a basic training that will anchor an ocean’s worth of changing currents in the years to come?

Milton Measure and the Milton Paper are the two major news journals on campus, and during their Class I year, members of their editorial boards live out an intense commitment to the field. What do their reflections on that leadership experience reveal?

Power attracts “I remember, in my Class IV year, Milton Paper co-editor Charlie Riggs says, getting the Paper in the basement of Ware on Fridays. This was one of the cooler institutions at Milton, I thought—those were cool people, handing out the Paper, and they seemed to know everything that was going on, and have their own cool inside jokes about what they knew. Of course, now I see that as sort of self-indulgent, but at the time it made me want to be part of the whole thing.”

“The work you do, for a high school student,” says Dan Corkum, co-editor of the Milton Measure, “is almost unnaturally consequential. When our first issue arrived at School—the stack of hundreds of papers—the sheer mass of them drove home what we do.”

“That really did hit home from the get-go,” Siobhan Atkins of the Measure agrees. My first article was about how the non-faculty staff felt about working at Milton. I was passionate about the subject and really liked my article; Mr. Pollans (history department and Measure advisor) warned that I needed to be sure of my sources

because the article would have a big impact. It did. I’ve written about lots of issues like that one.”

“If you have a complaint, you don’t feel helpless,” Liz O’Neil, Measure editor, points out. “You can take on those substantive issues that bother you; it’s the antidote to lethargy.”

“I like when people say, ‘I’ve read about it in the Milton Paper,’ editorial board member Molly Cohen says. From an overall sense of the pulse of the community, the editors think it’s their job to get people talking about what’s important. “I like getting reactions from people,” says Abby Padien-Havens, also of the Milton Paper, “you know you have an effect on the community.” “Even if we don’t do it perfectly,” says Charlie, “we get people talking, because this is a small community.” The editors believe that faculty and students often take the same position on an argument, but don’t “get it coordinated.” Both groups use the papers to back up what they think.

Legacies are at work, as well: Numerous students on the two boards heard from older brothers and sisters that the papers

Student Journalists

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were what to get into at Milton. Many students admired the people ahead of them: the style, dedication, awareness level and prominence of other editors in the Milton community. Sometimes the models had even greater stature. Noah Lawrence, Paper co-editor, aspires to the gravitas accorded Walter Lippmann’s comments, and admires the trust Mr. Lippmann earned from the public. All the students admire the persuasive force of numerous op-ed writers from the New York Times, the L.A. Times and the Globe, as well as on the Web.

“Arranging ideas” for the community “We have the potential to play the gadfly, like Socrates, ” says Noah, Milton Paper coeditor. “Loving it from the inside, you want the School to be so perfect you end up criticizing it. Milton is a two-newspaper School; there are two response outlets.

The Paper has to be responsible, but it should urge creative, edgy conversation.

Its editorials should unearth ideas people would otherwise not think about. The editors should stake out a position on prickly issues; you have to be very careful with that and being careful takes energy. A journalist has to exist in a community, though. He’s working for something bigger than himself. Journalism is a community in conversation with itself. Because the Paper is weekly, it’s embedded in the fabric of the community.

“We try to cover the facts, quickly,” Noah continues. When we do, it’s with the goal of starting the conversation about ‘what should happen next?’ When we reported about the end of ‘Dog Day’ (this Class I spring tradition ended in 2005), we tried to ask, ‘Where do we go from here?’

Because we’re a weekly, we can assign urgency to an issue, just by covering it.”

“Because the Paper is the one thing that everyone on campus reads,” Abby asserts, “it provides a common source of conversation. It does a good job of taking on the School, but we also tried to applaud the School when that was necessary. By being balanced, and serious, the Paper influenced the School to take the steps to make some changes.”

Milton Measure co-editors from the Class of 2005 (left to right), Siobhan Atkins, Dan Corkum and Liz O’Neil.

“The Measure, because it’s biweekly, has the time to think through issues. So we’re less about breaking news and more about reflection,” says Dan. When the head monitor crisis happened last year, for instance (a head monitor lost his position in a disciplinary decision), the temptation was to go the tabloid route—that would have had more splash. We had to zoom out from the immediate, though, and find the greater issue at stake. When things are written, they hang out there for two full weeks,” he says. “We are responsible for something that is quite influential and long-lasting.”

“Our goal is not to personalize,” Siobhan says of the Measure. “It would have been easy this year to point blame for the loss of senior traditions, for instance. Even when it’s hard to figure out the larger issue, we try to. We try not to point a finger without suggesting a solution or a direction.” The Paper has done the same thing this year.

“The role of the Paper is to inform, to entertain, and to set the tone for discussions,” Charlie explains. “This is tough to do well,” Noah notes. “The fact that lots of news outlets pander to the people doesn’t lessen the importance of appealing to your audience. It’s only a paper if people read it,” he adds. “The Paper is an institution with a great history,” says Charlie, “and fun, quirky traditions, but at this point in its trajectory it needed to raise its standards on reporting the news. The mark of this editorial board is in the news and edi-

torials: we were more serious, more thorough, and we held ourselves and our staff more accountable.”

“We don’t feel that publishing the Measure is just another activity,” Liz says. “It’s consequential. I wrote, in Class III, an article about sexism I saw at that time among certain boys. I was held accountable for that, and I still am, two years later. The Measure is an element of our culture, and we cared about doing it right.”

The hard parts of the job Creating humor

Is it the medium? Humor is an essential ingredient in a School newspaper; creating it successfully is an intractably hard part of the job, claim the editors unanimously.

Knowing what to laugh at, translating a conversational joke into parody or cartoon, achieving edginess along with balance, making people laugh without hurting anyone: these are challenges. They’re particularly difficult when the “humor section” comes at the end of all the researching, writing, editing and layout. The humor sections are slipped in at the end, with urgency in the final minutes before printing, but in prime locations—so as to attract and entertain the audience.

Training writers

“Milton writers are some of the best you’ll ever find,” says Molly, “but while they’re comfortable with the five-point essay or short story, news writing is a whole new genre to them. There’s a real teaching role.”

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“When they apply to write news, they aren’t aware of what they will really have to do,” says Charlie. “They’ll have to do investigative reporting, interviewing—and that’s a new expertise—show flexibility, use people skills, think while they take notes and ask good questions. People we choose for the staff need room to grow, too. Noah wrote a style guide that included all our standards. We tried to assign people based on their skills and in the end had to edit strongly: restructure, rephrase—mostly in communication with the writers, but I wish even more so.”

Motivating staff

“The staff is huge,” Liz says. “They’re not part of the editing process, and we brainstorm together but we often give them their assignments by email. They don’t see the effects of late responses or sloppy writing. So we held a writers’ conference and we walked the staff through the whole process of putting out the Measure, to help them understand and to feel responsibility.”

“We used the seminar/conference to try to build a cohesive unit, to create attachment and loyalty,” Dan explained. “We made diagrams and showed them how many steps go into a single issue: it’s a threelayer process, and lots of people read each piece. Sixty active people are on the Measure staff. People in Class II are our critical players, though, and they’re busy!”

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Finding real news

“We had a bit of an identity crisis in the middle of the year,” Siobhan allowed. “We thought we were turning into a lifestyle magazine with the articles on stress and seasonal depressive disorder, and exams.

Slow news weeks are a problem.”

Understanding the audience

“The Measure publishes for students and adults, for alumni and even the general public. How much should we gear the paper to the student body? We’ve given a lot of thought to how to do our work seriously, and yet be more interesting and even exciting,” Dan says.

“We did a Paper survey in mid-November,” Noah says. “We heard from a lot of people that they appreciated the higher quality of the news. But we have to stake out a middle ground. We have to satisfy the community without pandering to them.”

What’s happening to journalism?

“The media today is less about the community glue and more about the entertainment dollar,” Noah asserts. “We saw that with the presidential election process, and now we’ve seen it (this past spring) with our own School. Every field has discouraging aspects, but many journalists seem to have forgotten who they serve. Journalists are a pillar on which society rests.”

“One problem with TV news,” Molly says, “is that it’s reductionist at best. The need to be driven by the visual automatically

constrains the story. It forces the sound bite. The emphasis is on what sells rather than what’s news. Priorities are reshuffled in a bad way.” “We saw this around the election,” Charlie adds. “When politicians speak there should be an automatic instinct to fact check, but that seems to be obsolete.

You need to keep your ratings up.”

“Fact checking should occur, and reporting facts should be an unbiased effort,” Noah says. “People seem to be applying to the facts the same reactions they are entitled to have to editorials: Everyone now thinks they’re entitled to their own set of facts.

We journalists need to shift the bias back toward the truth; it’s the journalist’s job to ground the community in the facts. Facts are not a flip of the coin. Opinions are a flip of the coin.”

“I’m not being paid for what I do as a journalist in School; on the other hand, I don’t have to worry about losing my job, or my paper going down,” Dan says. “ I can see why people blog, but in a blog, the emphasis is more on who the person is, and less on what the news is. It would be hard to go into a journalistic career now; it’s more about entertainment. Look at how the Globe reshaped itself to be more about entertainment.”

“No one reads,” Lizzy says. “Newspapers are old-fashioned. People are very lethargic in how they go about getting their information.”

Charlie Riggs, Abby Padien-Havens, Molly Cohen and Noah Lawrence, Milton Paper co-editors in 2004–2005.

“Look at Clear Channel,” Siobhan says.

“The owners have stakes in so many businesses. There are no independent entities any more. They ‘name’ something, and that name is repeated in multiple media; it becomes real. The Internet is the great equalizer. So the trends are paradoxical: a single owner controls a huge number of media outlets, and the Internet represents an infinite number of alternative options.”

“Last year and during the summer I thought about the extent to which the Paper could be what it needed to be,” says Charlie. “I studied papers: read news, followed stories, understood the norms and expectations and styles of what a good editorial is. We set more rigorous standards, ultimately had to pick our battles: We improved a lot, and had to yield on some things.”

“There seems to have to be a narrative, a story line for everything,” Dan says. “For example in our crisis, the Globe’s line seemed to be ‘rich kids gone awry.’ Why else would they publish the tuition every time they wrote a story?”

“Writing about the sexual incident at School last spring was like walking through a meticulously rigged ethical minefield,” Charlie continues. “We knew we would be scrutinized, and quoted, and taken out of context. We had to be very precise in choosing words and ideas. It was taxing.”

Life lessons “There are 80 writers on the Paper staff and an editorial team of 16,” says Noah.

“We put out 10–14 pages every week. You learn to delegate. We’re ultimately independent, so you experience depending on yourself. Being accountable felt good; I learned about identity, and guts—the guts to state something and the guts to apologize when I made a mistake.”

“Some people tutor eighth-grade math, I help arrange ideas for the community conversation. I think of it as community service for Milton Academy. From generation to generation this role is passed down; the people before me were just seniors, but they were giants to me.”

“We worked on four or five drafts of the editorial after the sexual incident,” says Molly. “Charlie began; Noah followed; then Abby and Charlie and I went at it again to deal with issues of gender and power and sexuality. Finally, we all went back over it again with Noah. Working on it together built confidence. We saw the sensationalism of the press around us, and asked ourselves, ‘Do we ever do that with our stories?’”

“We had an issue of the Measure all ready to go, that week of the sexual crisis,” Dan says. “We were tempted to take a new angle and get an issue out quickly. But we met about a few unresolved details and issues. We knew that what we wrote would

be picked up by the outside press and probably quoted in the Globe. We decided to wait, to rethink the audience and the approach, and that’s how we came up with the special edition, the comprehensive treatment.”

“Journalism is best learned on the job, in real time, with real issues, in a real community. Writing news is a craft,” says Noah.

“This is such a tangible thing to have done while in high school,” Abby says. “Five or six people, working three or four nights a week for a whole year; deciding what stories to run and when to run them, training other writers about news, training them to be careful not to editorialize, getting reactions from people, having an effect on the community. I definitely want to continue doing this.”

Cathleen Everett

A Journalistic Tradition The November 16, 1894, issue of The Orange and the Blue was printed by L.H. Lane of Boston; it sold for 10 cents a copy. The paper’s advertisers included local plumbers and pharmacists. The inaugural edition’s editorial stated: “This is the first number of the first printed paper ever published at Milton Academy.” And so it was.

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Campus Publications

Magus-Mabus: Student Literary Magazine Exemplifies Best of Milton Talent, Tradition

I

n 2004–2005, 2005 graduates Emily Cunningham and Andrew Gorin served as editors in chief of the venerable literary magazine, Magus-Mabus. The magazine has its roots in the Girls’ School publication, The Magus, and the Boys’ School publications, The Orange and Blue, and, later, The Lit, which momentarily morphed into The Milton Review before merging with the girls’ publication to become Magus-Mabus by the early 1970s.

The June 1912 edition of The Magus, under editor Priscilla A. Crocker ’12, leads with, “Published each year on Graduates’ Day by the Girls of Milton Academy”; it chronicled the school calendar, club officers and theatrical performances in its original iteration. As of 1920, the Girls’ School published The Magus three times a year. (That same year, its pages also announced that that the School’s endowment had reached $230,000; the School’s current endowment is roughly $150 million.) By 1932, an “Alumnae Notes” section had been added, recording, for example, that Esther Williams Apthorp, Class of 1903, would be returning with her family to Milton, so that her sons could attend the Lower School. Or 28

Milton Magazine

that Lucy G. Morse, Class of 1922, was working as an occupational therapist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

By 1956, the periodical functioned primarily as a yearbook and included individual headshots and club photos, but also news, poetry and short fiction. Throughout these decades of student publishing, the Boys’ School was likewise active: In the fall 1939 issue of The Orange and the Blue, which was first published in 1894, editor Ned Handy ’40 encouraged fellow boys to help build the quality of the publication to match that of peer institutions. The editorial came with the reprise, “If they can do it, so can we.” That publication split eventually into the news-centered Orange and Blue (which would become the Milton Measure) and The Lit, which eventually joined with the girls’ creative work in Magus-Mabus.

Despite its occasional swerves and fusions, Magus-Mabus is now known to generations of Miltonians as the premier campus forum for poets and artists. In 1983, Guy Hughes, former chair of the English department, hired Jim Connolly to teach creative writing and advise Magus-Mabus.

For more than two decades, Jim has

encouraged literary-minded students to practice poetry and produce, with the help of student-artists and art editors, MagusMabus. The publication has become part of Milton’s ethos.

“Mr. Connolly [also] has an aura—the leather bag, the copper glasses, the pipe,” says 2005 co-editor Andrew. “He’s genuinely excited about your work. He encourages you to heighten your consciousness around your work.”

“He knows that writers can shut off,” Emily says. “He helps you keep up the exercise of writing.”

“The first couple of workshops [in creative writing class] are scary,” Andrew says.

“Then you learn that it’s all about the work.

You can’t ever just go in there and say, ‘I don’t like this.’ You find pieces that need to be brought forward—pieces that have potential.”

Emily and Andrew apply the same principles when they consider work for inclusion in the School lit magazine. Along with a committee of 10 other students, they selected poems for inclusion author-blind.

They say that the tough part was that, in the case of Magus-Mabus, they needed to respond with a flat “yes” or a less encouraging “no” rather than asking writers to redraft a piece. The upside is the chance to reward good work and share it with the community. Art editors Randy Ryan and Adam Walker, also 2005 grads, worked in tandem with Emily and Andrew, selecting a mix of outstanding photography, drawings and painting to reproduce in MagusMabus.

“For me, reading the work of other students is more inspiring than reading the work of professional poets,” Emily says.

Both she and Andrew say that “workshopping” in creative writing classes gave them the competence, confidence and language—and reinforced the good manners—with which to analyze and appreciate the strengths, weaknesses and nuggets of brilliance in others’ creative work.

“Editorship is fun,” says Emily of her role last year. “You make decisions and create a magazine. You get to read good poetry, which is even more fun than writing. I would love to be an editor [as a career].”

Birthday I’ve always liked cracking eggs.

The rap of calcium on stainless steel.

The plopping yellow.

The mucus dripping clear, nose blown on a mother’s sleeve.

I’ve always liked cracking eggs.

But today the metal lipped mixing bowl’s echo was off when I tapped egg number three, (Large, Brown, Grade A).

It didn’t slip down and float above the creamed butter.

It didn’t break at all.

I had to peel apart the gentle fissure with my nails.

Inside I saw a chicken, wrapped tight under foggy film that kept it warm until the supermarket’s refrigerated rows.

It was folded up in three, eyelids shut black, elephantine in its pinprick head, pink skin poking frostbitten through its matted would-be wings.

In high school my biology teacher told the class that girls get all their eggs when they’re still eggs themselves.

We carry them with us our whole lives until one by one they expire and slip away.

—Abigail Padien-Havens ’05, as published in the spring 2005 Magus-Mabus

“I think we’re both probably better readers than writers,” Andrew says. “We’ve learned to read with an ear instead of just a head.” (The pair won writing kudos in the 2004–2005 Achievement in Writing Awards from the National Council of Teachers of English; and Emily won a Scholastic gold key prize and took first place in the Bennington College Young Writer’s Competition.)

“Kids here who are good writers are incredible,” Andrew says. “The kids who are okay are amazing.”

Heather Sullivan

A Wave The great ship plunges forward— The dark, deep waves Roll their white lace caps outward And, Breaking into crystal spray, The wind catches, and throws it on, Leaving powdery traces in the wake behind.

At right, Andrew Gorin and Emily Cunningham, literary editors of Magus-Mabus; at left, Adam Walker and Randy Ryan, the publication’s art editors.

—Polly Cunningham ’31, from The Magus, December 1928 edition

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Campus Publications

LaVoz “I

remember the first article I wrote for La Voz,” says Catherine Buzney ’05, co-editor. “It was about Ozvaldo Golijov, an Argentinian composer who happened to live in Boston. It combined my love of Spanish, my love of music—I’m a violinist—and my love of writing. My first article focused on his music. My second was about him, and his life experiences: I interviewed him.”

La Voz is a student-run Spanish newspaper—news, opinion, regular departments and reviews. The genre alone makes La Voz rare among school publications across the country, as does its continuous publication (four to five times over each school year) since the first edition in 1986. La Voz earned first place in a national competition for Spanish print media at the 2003 Sonoma State Language Festival.

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“We adhere to strict journalistic standards,” says Ana Colbert, who with Jenny Stortz, serves as faculty advisor to La Voz. “News stories, for instance, have to be researched and represent multiple points of view. If a student’s research has led him to some passionate conclusions, he can express them in the opinion columns, but not in the news reports.”

Emma Sando ’05 co-editor with Catherine and with Sara Pulit ’05 also remembers her first La Voz article. “It was the one I was most passionate about,” she says.

“I researched human rights in Latin America, and American relations with Latin American countries. Like everything we take on for La Voz, it gave me insight into the Spanish-speaking world. I’ve written about Bishop Romero and liberation theology, and about the civil war in El Salvador. Learning how to write in

Spanish in a journalistic style, as opposed to literary analysis, is one of the advantages of working on La Voz.” The final issue of 2005 highlights the 400th anniversary of the publishing of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. “I was surprised at how influential this book was on Western culture,” Sara says. “For example, 67 movies are based on this book; 13 countries are celebrating the anniversary, from Japan to Australia; 11 celebratory sculptures have been commissioned in Manhattan alone.” It affected cooking, people’s diets at the time, the role of women—and had a different impact in France than in Spain. Among the surprises, Sara was most excited to learn about Don Quixote’s influence on artists such as Dali and Picasso.

Co-editors of La Voz, 2005:

Emma Sando

Catherine Buzney

Sara Pulit

The editors figure out the theme and then assign writing to eight to 10 writers to cover news, features and departments.

They may focus on active political, cultural or social events in Spain or Latin America, and then include a focus on relevant Milton campus life. Departments include op-ed opinion pieces, reviews of movies and restaurants, cartoons, and columns called “Gente”—or “People,” and “Entrevistra” or “Interview.”

Juana Ines de la Cruz, one of the great poets of the Spanish language; and the Class IV (Grade 9) play, Fuente Ovejuna, a drama of comedy, romance and familiar historical themes, written in 1613 by Lope de Vega, a Spanish contemporary of Shakespeare. Another issue staged a contest in writing in the style of Nobel laureate poet Pablo Neruda.

merge diverse articles, about the world and the Milton campus, into a coherent and attractive whole. The strengths of their staffs vary from year to year. Their big ideas strain against a tight budget.

One issue took on “La politica de NAFTA,” (the politics of NAFTA), when those politics were timely. An issue this year highlighted two plays of historical importance

by Spanish authors that were just staged at Milton: The Sins of Sor Juana about

La Voz’s editors know their target audience—modern language enthusiasts who want a deeper immersion into Spanish.

Other journalistic challenges are unique to their genre. For instance, both the writers for their journal and the readers have a range of ability; each issue involves at least three rounds of skilled editing. They have to teach their writing staff journalistic style—in Spanish. The editors must

All three editors enjoy the writing aspect of their jobs most. They like doing the research, moving to a framework of ideas, and then writing. Working on La Voz has helped their writing in English, they say: Finding the big ideas comes easier; good editing is worth the effort. The pleasure of a finished product, a permanent expression of the ideas and the hard work, pleases everyone.

Cathleen Everett

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Campus Publications

J

ackie Vines and Elise Lockamy explain that other Milton student magazines are more about styles of writing or technical mastery. Their literary journal, Aché, is more “autobiographical,” Jackie says. They have expanded Aché ’s mission and opened its pages to thoughts about the cultural and spiritual concerns that Milton students experience, with an eye toward generating dialogue in the community.

Aché is a Yoruba word meaning power— not in the general sense but power that binds and connects. The magazine was launched in 1993 as a forum for all students to discuss experiences and ideas relating to people of color throughout the world. In 2005, Jackie, Elise and an editorial board of six students, published a revitalized Aché that holds true to its original mission but also includes aspects of identity and culture that are often misrepresented or underrepresented. The editors explain that today’s Aché may include ideas about the female or male experience, religious experience, or family and cultural roots.

Jackie Vines and Elise Lockamy, Class of 2005, co-editors of Aché

al art, Randy Ryan ’05, to help choose among submissions, and refine the work for publication. Artwork included paintings, drawings, photography and prints.

Writing ranged from a hip-hop poem, to an essay arguing against the majority fashion styles, to a poem about growing up

“Our aim is that students become comfortable enough about who they are and what’s important in their lives to write about that,” says Elise. The girls embarked on a “marketing” effort to make students aware of the “new” identity of Aché and to eliminate any intimidation they may feel about submitting writing. They held a writing party—with incentives to come that included clips of movies and culturally interesting snacks. Their idea was to catch students on the way to dinner, get them to relax, to start thinking, to share and, ultimately, to write. Many did, and some of the writing is featured in the latest Aché.

The editorial board this year included an acknowledged student “expert” in creative writing, Morgan Love ’05, and one in visu-

Aché:

The Power that Binds and Connects 32

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Asian in Boston, to a chapel talk urging students to “Trust Yourself” and believe in God. Jackie and Elise have worked to set up an infrastructure for Aché ’s future as well. They have secured a budget commitment, and named the next editors and editorial board. Aché is a fresh and welcome voice among many student expressions.

I

n its three to four annual issues, The Asian focuses on Asia, Asian culture and Asians in America.

In 2005–2006, Kathy Han, of San Jose, California, and Ross Bloom, of Boston, will co-edit the publication for the second year. The Class I students see the publication as a forum for everything Asian.

“We also want to help non-Asians become more aware of Asian culture and identity,” Kathy says. The editors hold shattering stereotypes and refining perceptions on their to-do list. “We want to give people more information so that they can re-think their ideas about what Asian culture is,” Ross says.

“Asia is more and more important in the world,” Ross says. “We want to express that by showing not telling,” adds Kathy.

They look at macro and micro issues, such as including South Asians in general conversation about Asia, as well as how changes in the School’s residential life program might affect the Asian student population. They also include first-person essays such as one by recent graduate Matt Miller on his trip to Vietnam. The coeditors are also asking alumni to contribute stories or essays as guest writers.

Kathy Han and Ross Bloom, Class of 2006, co-editors of The Asian

The now graphics-rich publication handles topics as varied as street fashion, Korean war art, the new prevalence of plastic surgery in Asia to Ramen noodle-eating in Milton’s residential houses. The Asian has evolved into a glossy 24-page periodical

with features on Asian art, fashion, food and literature. With approximately 60 percent of the world’s population living in Asia, infinite material and perspective inform the publication.

“We started in the early 1990s as an offshoot of the Asian Society, with Ivan Ting ’92 as the driving force,” says advisor and modern languages faculty member Michael Murray.

The Asian:

Broadening Understanding of the World’s Majority 33

Milton Magazine

The Dedication of Norris House May 20, 2005

T

he doors of Norris House opened in September 2004, and the faculty residents welcomed the boys who would begin to build the character and tradition of a new Milton house. This spring, along with other Milton students and faculty, they met H. Coleman Norris ’49, the graduate whose gift made the house possible.

1

“There have been words of thanks directed toward me and my family,” Coleman Norris said at the dedication, “but as nice and rewarding as that is, we are the wrong target for appreciation. I am here for one reason, and Norris House is here for one reason, and that is to express our appreciation to Milton Academy. Milton Academy has been a huge influence on the Norris family for three generations, and this is our way of expressing our thanks.

You, the students of Milton, are some of the most fortunate people, for you are being afforded the opportunity of the finest possible education. Make us of it, for that is one thing Milton cannot do for you.

The plaque in Norris House reads: This house is gratefully donated to Milton Academy with loving memories from the Norris family of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We pray that those living here during their Milton tenure will experience a level of outstanding academic, athletic and social challenge which so well prepared us for entry into the real world.

Richard Horton Norris, Jr. William Allis Norris Thomas Wyatt Norris Frank Watson Norris Richard Horton Norris III Harrison Coleman Norris Richard Allis Norris

Class of 1913 Class of 1914 Class of 1919 Class of 1924 Class of 1947 Class of 1949 Class of 1977

1

Multiple roof lines, a mix of clapboard and brick, plenty of windows and home-like rooms characterize Norris House.

2 Coleman Norris ’49 enjoyed a visit with the Norris House boys, centering on the house dedication, May 20.

3

House monitor, Andrew de Stadler ’05, thanks Coleman Norris on behalf of the Norris House boys.

4 Touissant Maars-Clarke and André Heard ’93, house head 5

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Andrew de Stadler ’05 and Coleman Norris

2

6 Sam Minkoff ’06 and Jamal Sabky ’05 7

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4

Coleman and the Norris House boys

8 Spencer Platt ’05 and Andrew Froude ’05 displaying Norris House buttons, a gift from Coleman 9 Head of School Robin Robertson and Coleman Norris 10 Coleman accepts the plaque in his family’s honor.

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Alumna Bertha Coombs ’80 Delivers Commencement Address Milton Academy graduated 181 seniors on June 10, 2005.

Bertha Coombs ’80 addressed members of the Class of 2005.

Bertha (see story, page 17) covers business and financial news as a reporter for NBC’s business news network, CNBC. Tanner Harvey and Lisa Campbell of the

Class of 2005 addressed their classmates. Head of School Robin Robertson announced—in random order as is Milton’s tradition—the name of each graduate, while president of the Board of Trustees Fritz Hobbs ’65 delivered a diploma to each member of the class.

Milton Academy 2005 Awards and Prizes Cum Laude Class I Siobhan Catherine Atkins Sprague Judith Brodie Catherine Diane Buzney Elizabeth Jane Campbell Vincent Junming Chan Julia Cohen Chapman Ashley Ellen Chow Molly Samantha Musicant Cohen William Nathaniel Faulkner Jessica Ashley Heitman Neil Phillip Katuna Tess Irene Kenner Clara Heown Kim Julia Salber Kingsdale Ian Wing Ye Kwok Noah Joshua Lawrence Dermott James McHugh Kevin Albert Leung Moy Jonathan David Pasternack Sara Leslie Pulit Arkady Rasin Charles Emerson Riggs Mae Diana Ryan Jamal Dean Sabky Emma Marie Sando Julia Elizabeth Schlozman* Lee Seymour Samuel Barnes Stone Adam Simonsen Walker Katherine Wang Whitman Jason William Kram Yeager* Class II Caitlin Allegra BarryHeffernan *Elected to Cum Laude in 2004

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Milton Magazine

The Head of School Award The Head of School Award is presented each year to honor and celebrate certain members of Class I for their demonstrated spirit of self-sacrifice, community concern, leadership, integrity, fairness, kindliness, and respect for others.

Ashley Ellen Chow Andrew Martin de Stadler Clara Heown Kim Matthew Smith Miller Sara Leslie Pulit Randolph Jonathan Ryan Colin McGee Tierney Jason William Kram Yeager

The James S. Willis Memorial Award To the Head Monitors.

Anthony Flaviano Calitri, Jr. Gladys Noela Girabantu

William Bacon Lovering Award To a boy and a girl, chosen by their classmates, who have helped most by their sense of duty to perpetuate the memory of a gallant gentleman and officer.

Elizabeth Jane Campbell Andrew Martin de Stadler

Student graduation speakers Tanner Harvey and Lisa Campbell

The Louis Andrews Memorial Scholarship Award To a student in Class II who has best fulfilled his or her potential in the areas of intelligence, selfdiscipline, physical ability, concern for others and integrity.

Shellonda Anderson Jamie Elizabeth Mittelman

The Korean War Memorial Scholarship Award

The H. Adams Carter Prize Awarded to the student or students who, in their years at Milton, have shown a dedication to the pursuit of outdoor skills, demonstrated strong leadership, and reached high levels of personal achievement in one or more outdoor activities.

Dermott James McHugh

The A. Howard Abell Prize

Created in 1956 in memory of Frederick Sprague Barbour ’46, Thomas Amory Hubbard ’47, George Cabot Lee, Jr. ’47, and Sherrod Emerson Skinner, Jr. ’47, who gave their lives for their country and the United Nations.

Awarded to a boy or girl from a developing region to further his or her education at Milton Academy, while enriching the school by their presence.

Established by Dr. and Mrs. Eric Oldberg for students deemed exceptionally proficient or talented in instrumental or vocal music or in composition.

Dilshoda Yergasheva (Uzbekistan)

Awarded in recognition of helpful activity in furthering in the school an interest and joy in music.

The Leo Maza Award Awarded to a student or students in Classes I–IV, who, in working within one of the culture or identity groups at the school, has made an outstanding contribution to the community by promoting the appreciation of that group throughout the rest of the school.

Noah Joshua Lawrence Sara Leslie Pulit

Catherine Diane Buzney Elizabeth Jane Campbell Colin David Wagner Geoffroy Jason William Kram Yeager

Harrison Otis Apthorp Music Prize

The Science Prize Awarded to students who have demonstrated genuine enthusiasm as well as outstanding scientific ability in physics, chemistry and biology.

Julia Salber Kingsdale Dermott James McHugh Sara Leslie Pulit Arkady Rasin

The Wales Prize Awarded in honor of Donald Wales, who taught Class IV science for more than 36 years. It recognizes students in Class IV who have consistently demonstrated interest and excitement in science.

Marie Lea Berkowitz Prutsdom Jiarathanakul

The Robert Saltonstall Medal For pre-eminence in physical efficiency and observance of the code of the true sportsman.

Zachary Hamilton Trudeau

The A. O. Smith Prize

Clara Heown Kim Kevin Albert Leung Moy Samuel Barnes Stone Hidde Tonegawa

Awarded by the English Department to students who display unusual talent in expository writing.

The George Sloan Oldberg Memorial Prize

Siobhan Catherine Atkins Caitlin Allegra BarryHeffernan Marguerite Katherine Weisman

Awarded in memory of George Oldberg ’54, to members of the school who have been a unique influence in the field of music.

The Markham and Pierpont Stackpole Prize Awarded in honor of two English teachers, father and son, to authors of unusual talent in creative writing.

Ashley Ellen Chow Marguerite Katherine Weisman

The Dorothy J. Sullivan Award To senior girls who have demonstrated good sportsmanship, leadership, dedication and commitment to athletics at Milton.

Through their spirit, selflessness and concern for the team, they served as an incentive and a model for others.

Martha Lincoln Pitt

The Donald Cameron Duncan Prize for Mathematics Awarded to students in Class I who have achieved excellence in the study of mathematics while demonstrating the kind of love of the subject and joy in promoting its understanding which will be the lasting legacy of Donald Duncan’s extraordinary contributions to the teaching of mathematics at Milton.

Neil Phillip Katuna Julia Elizabeth Schlozman

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The Performing Arts Award Presented by the Performing Arts Department for outstanding contributions in production work, acting, speech, audiovisuals, and dance throughout his or her Milton career.

Jessica Catherine Giannone Amy Ginette Kurzweil Andrew George Pinkham Charles Emerson Riggs Lee Seymour Courtney Alex Stock Amy Elizabeth Unger

The Kiki Rice-Gray Prize Awarded for outstanding contributions to Milton Performing Arts throughout his or her career in both performance and production.

Julia Salber Kingsdale Matthew Smith Miller

The Priscilla Bailey Award To a senior girl who has been a most valuable asset to Milton Academy athletics and to the Milton Academy Community —an athlete who has demonstrated exceptional individual skills and teamwork, as well as true sportsmanship.

Lindsay Elizabeth McNamara

The Henry Warder Carey Prize To members of the First Class, who, in Public Speaking and Oral Interpretation, have shown consistent effort, thoroughness of preparation, and concern for others.

Samuel Barnes Stone

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The Robert L. Daley Prize Created by his students of 1984 in his memory and honor, this prize in Classics is awarded to the student from Latin 4 or beyond who best exemplifies Mr. Daley’s love of languages.

Jessica Ashley Heitman

The Richard Lawrence Derby Memorial Award To an outstanding student of the Second Class in Mathematics, Astronomy, or Physics.

Seo Hyung Kim Oliver Alan Pechenik

The Alfred Elliott Memorial Trophy For self-sacrifice and devotion to the best interests of his teams, regardless of skill.

Ryan Christopher Walsh

The Gorham Palfrey Faucon Prize

The Modern Languages Prizes Awarded to those students who, in the opinion of the Department, most exhibit the qualities of academic excellence, enthusiastic participation, and support of fellow students, both in class and outside.

M. Ross Bloom Catherine Diane Buzney Julia Cohen Chapman Sara Leslie Pulit Emma Marie Sando Raphel Stephen Marino Vagliano

The Milton Academy Art Prizes Awarded for imagination and technical excellence in his or her art and for independent and creative spirit of endeavor.

Mae Diana Ryan Randolph Jonathan Ryan Emma Marie Sando Adam Simonsen Walker

Established in 1911 and awarded to members of Class I for demonstrated interest and outstanding achievement in history and social science.

Jonathan Michael Garrity Noah Joshua Lawrence Charles Emerson Riggs Julia Elizabeth Schlozman Katherine Wang Whitman

The Benjamin Fosdick Harding Latin Prizes Awarded on the basis of a separate test at each prize level.

Level 5: Caitlin BarryHeffernan Level 4: Elizabeth Regard Stark Level 3: Nathaniel Stetson

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Graduates’ Weekend 2005 40

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The “Dare to Be True” Luncheon Honored Speaker: John Noble, M.D. ’55 From global to local, from laboratory to urban outpatient clinic, from teaching to writing, from inner-city teenagers who wanted to deal with addiction, to Siberian tuberculosis patients who wanted to cure their disease, John Noble has been a driver.

Beyond the literal idea of “Dare to be true” Milton “forced us to think about core values,” John says. He names eight “Dare to be true” values or principles based in his Milton experience that have influenced major decisions during his “five decades on the trail”: continuing growth and renewal; loyalty and commitment; do your best; be prepared; leadership and teamwork, respect for order and one another; equanimity and confidence; clear-headed thinking.

The highlights of John’s professional endeavors bear out his convictions: • As a Public Health Service officer, he worked with the World Health Organization global smallpox eradication program.

• He directed the CDC laboratory that improved the differential diagnosis of smallpox.

• He returned from the lab to the world of practicing physicians, and delved into health services and systems for delivering care.

• While serving as the superintendent of the Middlesex County Hospital, he established a residential until for teenage quadriplegics, some of whom ultimately attended Massachusetts Bay Community College.

• In Siler City, North Carolina, he introduced medical students to real-world practice, piloting the community orientation for medical practice that proved to be invaluable, as he helped develop similar services in the Boston’s inner city.

• Wrote and edited a textbook on primary care.

• For the past 27 years he has developed curricula in internal medicine that will optimally train young physicians at Boston University to serve inner-city and highrisk patients in other communities.

• Healthcare for the Homeless Program is one of his program’s most successful endeavors as well as developing community-based teaching in seven community health centers.

• The American College of Physicians has understandably tapped John, appointing him as Commissioner on the Board of the Joint Commission of Accreditation of Health Care Organizations.

• He continues as a consultant for this organization’s international subsidiary, developing standards for HIV, tuberculosis and maternal-child health care.

Several strong themes course through John Noble’s professional life: his love of science; his desire to use it to change lives; his attitude toward exhilarating challenge; his energy; his keen sense of emergent possibilities. John began with a determination to make a difference, and to work where the need was great. He did that, throughout a career that demonstrates the remarkably diverse applications of medicine. John’s voice was both credible and compelling on “Dare to be true.”

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Llewellyn Howland ’55

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2 Derick Fay ’85 3

JaQuie Parmlee-Bates ’85 with Elise Wanger ’07

4 Class of 1955: front (left to right) Llewellyn Howland, Bill Crowell, Tony Marlow; back (left to right) Parky Damon, Paul Robinson, Gil Butler, Ellis Waller; kneeling, a future Miltonian 5

(Left to right) Evan Hughes ’94, Jesse Johnson, Claire Hughes Johnson ’90, Heather Hauser, Doug Dohan ’90, Sarah Burley ’90

6 (Left to right) Elizabeth Carroll ’95, Justin Bowers ’95, Larry Pollans (art history faculty) 7

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Cousins Nancy Burley Chase ’50 and Sarah Burley ’90

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Class of 2000: front (left to right): Leslie Wade, Matt Heck, Anna Bulbrook, Prue Hyman, Ashley Carter; back: Brent Bucknam

2 Bill Musto, Lauren Musto ’95, Peter Brooks ’95 3

6 Class of 2000 with Mark Hilgendorf and Laurel Starks 7

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Doris Kim ’85 with Danielle and Madeline

8 Brad Richardson ’48 and Frank Millet

Doreen Ho ’95 and Mike Sze

4 (Left to right) Melissa Domizio ’00, Eugene Izumo ’00, Leslie Wade ’00, Elizabeth Weir ’00 5

Class of 1985: (left to right) Blyth Taylor Lord, Laurence George Chase, Tara Parel Wilson, Rachael Weber Sabates, Mary Markis Kraczkowsky, Sarah Smith Gerritz

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Robin Robertson with the Milton Mustang

2 John Noble ’55 with Kitty Stinson Carleton ’55 3

Members of the Class of 1995 enjoy an evening under the tent.

6 Families enjoyed activities including make-your-own-sundae and face-painting.

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Bryan Cheney with Roberdeau Callery DuBois ’45 and her husband, Arthur DuBois ’41

4 Old friends share dinner under the tent.

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(Left to right) Nicholas Stephenson ’75, Jenni Stephenson and Clinton Loftman ’75

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Nancy Burley Chase ’50 (center) enjoys a student-led tour

2 Allan Jean-Baptiste (Class of 2008) with Daphne Abeel ’55 3

Class of 1985 (left to right) J.R. Torrico, Dan Tangherlini, Jose Robledo, Derick Fay, Bryan Cheney (faculty), Doug Jones, Mike Choi

4 Trustee panel on Milton’s present and future includes Head of School Robin Robertson, Warren McFarlan ’55 and Tracy Pun Palandjian ’89

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Class of 1990 women pose on the quad

6 Facing front: Barney Corning ’80, (clockwise from Barney) Mory Creigton ’80, Dave Williams ’80, Angela Corning 7

(Back to front) Ashley Carter ’00, Andrew Lapham ’00, Merril Feather ’00

The Head of School

Milton’s Magazine

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s long as journalism is the topic of the hour, graduates may want to know where Milton Magazine stands in the universe of its peers.

Milton Magazine earned a grand gold medal, one of only three medals awarded nationwide this year by CASE (the Council for Advancement and Support of Education) for independent school alumni magazine excellence—and the only grand gold medal, which signifies an entry as a model of excellence for peer schools. In 2004 and 2003, the magazine won a gold and silver medal respectively, and each year that award was the highest designation in the category.

Milton Magazine, formerly the Milton Bulletin, has been in continuous publication since May 1920.

The magazine as Cathy Everett, editor, and Heather Sullivan, associate editor, will readily tell you, is based on a clear mission statement and strongly held beliefs about Milton graduates. Milton graduates read, think, care, and are intensely engaged with the world, and the magazine is

testimony to their many commitments. Our alumni demonstrate the myriad ways that individuals find “meaningful lifetime success,” in the language of the School’s mission statement.

The Milton Magazine’s mission is succinct: Through quality writing and photography, and the discussion of important and thought-provoking ideas, it increases awareness of the School’s sustained excellence and distinguishing features. It celebrates the role of alumni in public life and in the life of the School. The magazine tracks Milton’s history, while increasing awareness of the School’s traditions and highlighting new developments.

The awards the magazine has earned are, by extension, a tribute to all of you, and to your willingness to share your lives with each other, and connect them with today’s students and their Milton experience. Please join me in celebrating the pursuit, and in this case the achievement, of excellence.

Robin Robertson

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Faculty Perspective An odyssey: Embracing life during a time of loss David Peck, Performing Arts Department Chair

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was about 25 miles south of Nacogdoches, 120 miles out of Houston.

This was the first full day of a 2,000-mile ride to Boston. The temperature was 37 degrees and it was raining lightly. The previous day the weather had been glorious as I waited impatiently for my helmet to arrive a full six days after it had been dispatched from Milton. With temperatures in the high 70s, a shakedown ride around Galveston Island wearing a borrowed helmet had passed the time and convinced me that the machinery was in excellent condition. Formations of pelicans skimmed the wave tops as I rode on a warm, desolate beach, stopping to chat with a solitary fisherman who had been pulling trout and bluefish from these waves since his daddy taught him how.

A week before, on eBay, I had found a beautiful Yamaha Virago 1100 in Texas and, after the usual negotiations with myself about funds and priorities, placed a bid. Once the bidding closed, I was committed to picking up the motorcycle and bringing it to Milton during spring vacation. This would be a replacement for my current ride, a somewhat older and increasingly unreliable Virago that I had ridden home from Pittsburgh and then all over New England and Prince Edward Island during 2004. Now, with a tiny pack tent and a sleeping bag, I was going to be self-contained, capable of stopping almost anywhere. In addition, I had friends scattered all over the region who would be happy to put me up for a day or so. The usual temperature in the South in March is perfect for riding and, after a few days

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of wandering byways, I figured I had a good shot at a break in the weather toward the north. At the first reasonable opportunity I would dart across the Mason-Dixon Line and be next to my own radiator before the demons of late New England winter had a chance to notice me. In the language of dramatic criticism, this is known as hubris.

It turns out that Dixie has some late winter demons of her own, and with the weatherman predicting heavy rain and temperatures stuck at 20 degrees below normal for the season, camping was out of the question. There was nothing for it but to start my dash immediately or spend days huddled in inexpensive hotels, watching March Madness on TV as my new prize slowly rusted outside.

Which brings us back to U.S. Route 59, south of Nacogdoches. My hands and knees were cold already, just an hour out of the Livingston Inn and with at least nine hours to go before Memphis. I could feel the storm moving up behind me, a predicted two-inch downpour for the Gulf Coast. On the other hand, the redbud trees were defiantly in bloom and the sun was occasionally burning a hole in the mist, spreading an unearthly radiance over the rolling hills of early morning East Texas.

I thought of Mary Della. On the occasion of our 30th anniversary she had given me a gift-wrapped book and a small envelope.

The book was one she knew I wanted, Rogue Nation—nice but not terribly romantic. I opened the note. “OK, a book is pretty cheap for 30 years. So here is the real gift. (Even cheaper) My permission to

get a bike. Stay alive. Love, MD.” Within a month I was riding my first motorcycle— very carefully—determined to heed her instruction. Four months later she was suddenly gone, the victim of an internal hemorrhage, and her note took on the aspect of dark irony. Still, I rode the bike constantly and still carefully, though I was not quite sure why. When the time came to carry Mary Della’s ashes to Maine, they rode on the back of the Virago. I learned that you can scream, rant, curse, weep and generally carry on in a full-face helmet at 70 miles an hour and no one will notice.

That was often a comfort.

Now, alone on a distant, frigid highway with only names on the map to look forward to for days, I needed to define this trip in some way that would rescue it from the inevitable tedium and grinding fatigue which lay ahead. Given the wind chill at 70 miles an hour, even very good gloves will not keep fingers from going slightly numb after an hour or so of cold-weather riding. If I was going to stay alive, I could not afford to let my mind freeze up as well. I began working on the problem of remaining alert. Separating one moment from the next. For an actor that means getting specific. Really seeing, noticing intensely, waking up your interior by connecting to the exterior. And for a biker the exterior is immensely rich. The sound of the engine, the state of your body on the bike, the surface of the road and how the tires and shocks are dealing with it, crosswinds, every detail of the traffic around you, vibration, airflow through your helmet, potential hazards, and the constantly scrolling landscape.

I began to inventory the sensations. First the feedback from the bike itself. Steady and satisfying. Then the weather. Mist on my facemask. Droplets migrating to the edge of my windscreen. Super-cooled air probing the layers of my protective clothing, tugging and buffeting. The little, blessed heat rising from the engine to warm me. And, finally, the imminent world of a new road in an unfamiliar part of the country. The clouds receded slightly and the rain abated and the world came alive, not because visibility improved but because I had begun to see with fresh eyes, to listen with curious ears and to welcome sensation for the pure joy of being free on a road I had never ridden before.

Faces in nearby cars became interesting, inviting speculation about what it must be like to live in this particular place and drive this road to work every morning of the workweek.

Suddenly I heard Mary Della whisper in my ear, “Stay alive,” and the miles between me and Milton changed their aspect. Like life they were a gift, not an obstacle standing between me and warmth and comfort.

I have the anniversary note sitting next to my computer as I type. In retrospect, I know that many of the miles during the next four days flowed together with nothing to distinguish them in memory. But in the living, I know that they were among the most vivid of my life. For instance, it is true that the highway between mile markers 26 and 27 on Route 30 in Arkansas was distinguished from that between 27 and 28 only by the different versions of “Sweet Georgia Brown” I was improvising at full throat in my helmet as I traveled over each. Then, at mile marker 29, I ran out of gas and, in the process of getting to the nearest station, I met a crusty old Arkansan who gave me a ride in his ancient pickup truck. Wreathed in cigarette smoke that almost obscured the proud glint in his eye, he reminded me that this little town, Hope, was the birthplace of Bill Clinton. Later, walking back to the bike with my thumb out, I was astounded when a 16-wheeler careened

David Peck on the shores of Galveston Island

across two lanes and finally came to a stop 500 yards down the highway. As I clambered, breathless, into the cab, I opined with a grin that I was simply too old to be running that far and that I was hardly worth his time since I only needed a ride of a mile or so. I asked my host where he was coming from and he said, “Serbia.” It was a brief but very engaging ride steeped in generosity of spirit and laughter.

During the following days, I met a gallery of engaging characters in convenience stores, truck stops, motel lobbies, smalltown libraries and state-maintained rest stops. Between Memphis and Knoxville, I managed to master the task of stacking all the states of the union in alphabetical order. I remembered hitchhiking the same highway during a blizzard on Christmas Eve day of 1963, a young Marine heading home on leave from San Diego. This time the snow came in the mountains of southwest Virginia, swirling around the speeding bike and dancing circles on the pavement without sticking. It was glorious and invigorating and made the roaring fireplace at a rest stop almost impossible to abandon when the time came. Another fireplace in the home of Milton parents in northern Virginia thawed me out that evening, and my computer bag still smells like wood smoke.

The next morning the sun was warm on my helmet for a few idyllic hours, and I discovered a completely unmarked and fascinating ruin of a 19th-century stone inn on a quiet, country road. When I stopped at an elementary school in the nearby village to inquire about its history, I found that no teacher or administrator in the entire school lived in the town. In fact, they all drove in from West Virginia each day to teach the children of parents who spent their days working 50 miles away in Washington, D.C. The ride through Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and especially Connecticut, became progressively colder, and when the Virago glided to its new berth on Randolph Avenue, it was with honest relief but a deep sense of well-being that I began lifting off the luggage. Mary Della had given me the means for bringing the world so close that I must continue embracing it even during a time of loss.

The trick, of course, is to stay alive off the bike as well as on.

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Post Script Post Script is a department that opens windows into the lives and experiences of your fellow Milton alumni. Graduates may author the pieces, or they may react to our interview questions. Opinions, memories, explorations, reactions to political or educational issues are all fair game. We believe you will find your Milton peers informative, provocative and entertaining. Please email us with your reactions and your ideas—cathy_everett@milton.edu.

Milton is far from Hollywood: The making of a screenwriter Hadley Davis Rierson ’89

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ilton is far from Hollywood. I know this because I have traveled from Logan to LAX with my infant son in tow (six hours, 19 minutes). Los Angeles, however, is not just far in the literal sense. People look different here. On Rodeo Drive, I have yet to spot an authentically rumpled oxford shirt—the I-just-rolled-out-of-bed-and-picked-thisup-off-the-floor timeless fashion statement that Miltonians have long and effortlessly sported crossing Centre Street.

Furthermore, last I checked, most Milton teachers can still move their eyebrows. But what struck me most when I moved to Southern California and went to work in the entertainment business—and what still strikes me today— is the flagrant disregard for the correct use of the object of the preposition. “Between you and I” (as they say), various who-and-whom violations are as rampant as car chases on the 10 o’clock news. To be a bit more blunt: what counts is not how well you are educated (or if you are educated at all), but rather whether the movie or television program you have acted in, directed, written or produced is a success. As I said before, Milton is far from Hollywood. How is it then that I attribute my screenwriting career to Milton?

For one, you can’t be a Hollywood screenwriter if you can’t pitch your movie, and in order to pitch your movie you have to be able to communicate well. That DreamWorks executive may have just returned from a languorous lunch

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at the Palm. He may have chomped one too many bites of filet mignon and he may have downed one too many martinis at the Tom Cruise premiere the night before. Not to mention he may have more than a touch of “Sesame Street” generation ADD. You must grab him—immediately. You must help him focus by giving him an overview of your movie. And then you must, for 10 minutes, tell him your story. Your story has to be thoughtfully structured; it has to have a beginning, a middle and an end; that end needs to leave an impression (big finish) and you, the screenwriter, have to be animated (remember the languorous lunch) and convincing (notice the Harvard diploma on his wall). Yes, it helps to be poised and to appear confident. This is, after all, a performance. Sound familiar?

It should. The Hollywood Pitch is, essentially, the Milton Academy Fourth Class Talk.

Every time I pitch I think of my Fourth Class Talk— because every time I pitch I am scared. I was especially scared when I had to pitch my first movie, Ice Princess, to the president of Walt Disney Pictures. The stakes were high. If I impressed her, I would officially become a working screenwriter. If not, it would be back to square one.

But, scared as I was, I was not—and could never be—as terrified as I was at age 14, in braces, standing sweatypalmed before the boy I prayed would ask me to “slow dance” and the rest of the Fourth Class. This is the genius of the Fourth Class Talk. You are made to speak publicly at your most awkward and at your most insecure. Public

Hadley Davis Rierson ’89

speaking is difficult for many people but it will never be as difficult as it was when you were in ninth grade. In case you are curious, my talk was about smiling (I believe it began “smile and the whole world smiles with you”) and I grinned and bore it and received an A–.

As you have surmised from the talk of the boy and the slow dancing, I did not have an overabundance of social confidence at Milton. I was not a sophisticated New York City–bred boarding student. I was not an athlete with muscular calves and a field hockey stick in hand. I was not blonde (I am now). I had (and still have) what I consider to be an imperfect nose. Thanks to my Milton teachers, however, there was one arena where I had plenty of confidence: the classroom.

My Milton English teachers nurtured confidence in my writing. This is not to say J. C. Smith or Mr. Zilliax were nurturing. They were tough critics. When I had not lived up to my potential, their disappointment alone was crushing. But when I met or exceeded their impossibly high expectations, like the time Mr. Zilliax read my paper on The Turn of the Screw (ending with my analysis that “the governess’s screw was, in fact, ‘loose’”) aloud, I felt, well, brilliant. Now, on days when writer’s block takes hold and I cannot write a sentence, I think of Mr. Zilliax. I was good enough for John Zilliax for God’s sake! He read a paper aloud for God’s sake! I have to be good enough for some run-of-the-mill Hollywood executive.

Knowing you can write and knowing how to sit down and write are not the same, however. Milton taught me to do the work. Each time I stare at 120 blank pages (the length of a screenplay), I get the Milton exam pit in my stomach.

People are counting on me to write 120 pages of words from my own imagination! No, wait, they are not just counting on me; they’re paying me! The reason I stop short of a full-blown anxiety attack is that thanks to Milton, and all those blue books, I know how to manage my time.

I outline my scripts much like I outlined my U.S. history term paper for Alan Proctor. I map out how many scenes I need to tackle each day to meet my deadline and trudge forward until 120 blank pages become 120 completed pages and I get to type the wonderful words “The End.” This brings me to the end of my essay. As I said before, I attribute my Hollywood writing career to Milton. Incidentally, between you and me, my characters never confuse who and whom.

Hadley Davis Rierson has written for the television shows “Dawson’s Creek” and “Spin City” and is the author of a book: Development Girl: The Hollywood Virgin’s Guide to Making It in the Movie Business (Doubleday). Ice Princess, her first feature film, was released by Walt Disney Pictures in March 2005. She is currently working on a movie for Warner Bros.

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Post Script

Treasures in unexpected places: Caring for discoveries at Harvard Emmy Norris ’62

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magine opening the door to a utility closet and finding on a shelf inside some long-forgotten film footage of the elderly Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The artist is seated in a wheelchair, talking to his dealer and to his model. With him are Ambrose Vollard, his dealer, and “La Boulangère,” his longtime model and servant. It is the only known footage of Renoir; it is also the only known film of any French impressionist. The film was found because a phone call to a retired department administrator jogged her memory of an old film canister up on a shelf behind the Drano and the paper towels.

This happened in May 2001 at Harvard University. But it could happen anywhere.

Old institutions like Harvard often have a bewildering variety of objects that are not catalogued. There is little information on works owned by its various units; they sometimes disappear or suffer considerable environmental damage because nobody is looking out for them. Such objects may be works of art, antique furniture and carpets, silver trophies, donations that should be tracked, and other items of monetary, artistic or cultural interest. Their acquisition by its nature has been haphazard. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the documentation has been haphazard as well.

I first became interested in these scattered objects when I was a curator at the Harvard University Art Museums.

Assorted Harvard-owned artworks, frequently called “orphans” by museum staff because they were undocumented and unsupervised, would arrive for conservation treatment after somebody noted a torn canvas or damaged sculpture or butter on a painting in a dining room. The works were treated and then sent back, since the art museums, overwhelmed with their own collections, could not undertake managing additional objects.

The most famous example of neglect was a series of murals painted by Mark Rothko. In the early 1960s, the artist completed a series of large “color field” murals on commission from Harvard, in the penthouse of Holyoke Center, the university’s chief administration building.

Rothko bought cheap paints, and the light levels in the penthouse were high. Nobody checked on the murals because there was no procedure in place to do so, and they gradually deteriorated. By the ’70s, the murals’ rosy colors had faded from excessive light exposure and the effect was something like an x-ray of the originals. The murals are now stored at the Fogg Art Museum, but their colors have essentially died.

It seemed to me that it was high time for the university to manage these unsupervised objects scattered throughout the campus, and I was interested in doing the job myself.

In 2000, armed with facts, figures and photos, I persuaded Harvey Fineberg, former university provost, to fund a survey. The selling points were numerous: good inventory

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Emmy Norris is a prowler for “cultural properties” at Harvard, preserving and insuring important artifacts.

control; improved alumni and development relations; alerting of departments to the presence of significant works; information for the general public; clarification of legal status; documentation for the insurance office; and, of course, periodic supervision. In many cases, Harvard did not know what it had. People retire and take stories with them; what one person considers disposable may in fact have considerable value; something that was “always there” appreciated greatly in value over the centuries.

The survey of these objects, called “cultural properties” for lack of a better word, has just been completed after three years. Now that Harvard knows what it has, we can work with the information to make policy decisions as to their treatment, deaccession, publicity and so forth.

The work itself was simple: I went with an assistant through Harvard properties with a tape measure, laptop computer and digital camera. We worked building by building, having first contacted department heads and building managers. We asked for their suggestions as to what to include and then we took a look around. It is always worth taking a personal look; only with physical inspection can it be determined what is important, what is deteriorating, and what is in the wrong place. We gathered basic museum information—object type, artist, title, century, materials used, donor, measurements, etc.—as well as a digital photo. If the object was deteriorating or needed extra security, we flagged that entry and advised the department in charge. The survey has taken us to Sutton Island

and Kittery Point in Maine, Washington, D.C., numerous sites west of Boston—including historic houses, an old NIKE missile site, the Harvard Forest and the Oak Ridge Observatory—as well as the campuses in Cambridge, Boston and Allston. The database contains some 3,500 objects from all parts of Harvard except for the Law School, which prefers to keep its own records.

We never knew what would turn up, and so the vague definition of “cultural properties” expanded as we went along.

Examples include Josiah Quincy’s walking stick; Edward R. Murrow’s beat-up old desk; a beautiful old surveyor’s instrument; gorgeous stained glass and late-19th-century tiles; 19th-century teaching aids; the football that won the 1920 Rose Bowl; Civil War–era baseballs; and buggies and sleighs.

Information about these objects has been most useful to various departments of the university. This would be true at other sites, where valuable objects are not tracked. So many fine things disappear from old institutions; I think particularly of private schools, colleges and private clubs.

I urge those involved with these to take a closer look and take appropriate action, rather than waiting to close the barn door until the horse is stolen.

Reach Harvard’s curator of unexpected discoveries at enorris@camaid.harvard.edu.

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In•Sight

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A collection of symbols, none more beloved than the individual wearing or bearing them: Frank Millet at graduation, 2005.

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OnCentre

Students’ Gala Nets $10,000 for Tsunami Victims “Figuring out the total of what we had raised was overwhelming,” said Alex Desaulniers ‘07, of Rockland, Maine. The student Tsunami Relief Coalition capped its semester-long fund-raising efforts with a gala event in Kellner Performing Arts Center’s Pieh Commons, raising more than $10,000 that was directed to Habitat for Humanity International, for new housing in the tsunami-affected areas.

The students’ efforts started on the first day back at School after winter break.

“I live on the coast,” Alex said.

“So do my grandparents and my aunt and uncle. All I could think was if something like that happened to me, I would hope someone would help me out— with a house, at least. I watched the small tents going up and thought about people crowding into them to live for months and months. Housing is such a basic need.”

Susannah Burrage ’07 and Sara Pulit ’05 returned to School with the same drive to help. The three

girls consulted with Andrea Geyling, faculty community service director, Hope Rupley, student activities director, and with students from other concerned clubs and activity groups, and the Tsunami Relief Coalition formed. Students began raising funds immediately.

The group, however, did not want the idea of the victims’ need to disappear over the winter months, knowing that it would remain urgent. They picked May for the gala, then

divided into committees to carry out the work of a spectacular night with great food and student entertainment. The group met every Friday throughout the winter and spring to keep tabs on the details that would make the evening a success.

“More people came than I ever thought would—boarding students and parents, day students and parents—and they had a great time,” Alex said. The jazz combo played and so did “Tin Siblings” (a student chamber group); Alison Brace played the piano, and Steve Wagner played the violin. Donations from local vendors and faculty bakers supplemented the School food service for the gala fare.

Alex knew that the $10,000 total from tickets, the raffle, the silent auction, donations, and earlier club fund raisers would help Habitat for Humanity extend the work of house-building in an important way. Groups whose efforts contributed to the total included: Young Republicans, Asian Society, Middle School, Jewish Student Union and Christian Fellowship, Common Ground, Community Service, F.L.A.G. (Young Democrats) and Theatre Tech Crew.

The Tsunami Relief Coalition at Milton: back row, left to right: Alison Brace, Jessica Heitman, Rachel Bechek, Alexandra Desaulniers, Rachel Konowitz, Susannah Burrage, JungMin Lee, Olivia Greene, Rachel Nagy; front row, left to right: Zachary Schwab, Lara Yeo, Ali Martin, Alicia Driscoll.

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Middle School Tackles Complex Problems on “Focus Days” Focus Days—occasional, intense, interdisciplinary days of handson learning—are one of the innovations today’s Middle School students experience at Milton. Scheduling a full day when all faculty and students work together on many approaches to a challenging and complex issue is possible because of structural changes: Milton now has a discrete Middle School division. Grades 6 through 8 at Milton now have their own space, faculty, sched-

ule, assemblies and traditions.

Students’ pre-adolescent developmental needs are served by a full-time counselor, and a Middle School athletic director manages a program that requires every student to play on a team. Middle School students can choose to be involved in speech, drama, chorus and community service at their own grade levels, and the older two grades participate in a specially designed life skills curriculum that takes on the key concerns of this age group.

Last April’s Earth Day was a great success as a Focus Day, students and faculty agreed.

Eighth-grade students researched renewable energy sources that can supplement fossil fuel: hydrogen fuel cells, wind energy, solar energy and geothermal energy, for example.

played and presented their research of alternative energies.

In a mock Congress, students presented, debated and voted on alternative energy bills. Everyone at the Middle School was part of the action as they will be for the Focus Day series that takes shape this year.

A representative from the state office of sustainable energy, kicked off the day. Following the lecture, students hosted an Energy Fair, where they dis-

For Middle School news, go to the dedicated Middle School portion of www.milton.edu, where you’ll find updates on activities, visiting speakers and more about Grades 6–8.

Shakespearean Great Sir Derek Jacobi Performs Hamlet’s soliloquy at Milton British actor Sir Derek Jacobi, a protégé of Sir Laurence Olivier, taught master classes to students and delivered a performancelecture at Milton Academy on May 11 and 12. Sir Derek’s stage roles have included Uncle Vanya, Oedipus Rex and Hamlet.

Recent film credits include Gladiator and Gosford Park.

“I find acting much easier than the real world,” Sir Derek told Milton community members in King Theatre May 12. “In the real world, you don’t know how it ends.”

Sir Derek concluded his hourand-a-half lecture by delivering Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy and Prospero’s “farewell” to a standing ovation.

Sir Derek’s trip to Milton was part of the Melissa Dilworth Gold ’61 Visiting Artist series, which commemorates Melissa’s life and interests by bringing internationally recognized artists to campus. As part of the series, each visiting artist also spends time with public school students: Sir Derek delivered a talk at Milton High School.

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World-Class Musicians Performing in Straus Library The Gratwick Concert Series celebrates 75 years “Over the past 25 years, I have heard some wonderful music in Straus Library. I feel fortunate to work in a school that offers such events. Not only do these concerts offer students and friends of Milton Academy the chance to hear great music, but also to meet and chat with these renowned musicians. Some musicians have been friendly and gracious, others less so, but all have beeen unique. I remember vividly holding Annie Fischer’s cigarette while she was barely able to walk up to the piano and play. But then, boy did she play! Taking the Emerson String Quartet for a late dinner in Chinatown after their performance was another more tangential highlight of these events.

Last year the duo of Isserlis and Hough played one of the best concerts that I can remember.

Their vitality and energy infected the crowd around them. I can still remember how they were greeted as if they were rock stars

by Milton Academy students at the reception afterwards in Pieh Commons.

New students, faculty and friends learn about Milton’s annual musical phenomenon— the Gratwick Concert—through Jean McCawley. For more than five decades, she has patiently, passionately explained that “the performance series, a gift to the school, was established by Mitchell Gratwick, a former Academy faculty member, in memory of his wife Katharine Perkins Gratwick, a cellist, Girls’ School Class of ’24.” Fostered by family members, the series has continued unbroken for 75 years.

Designated primarily to give students the rare opportunity to hear world-class artists in an intimate setting, the concert is held in Straus Library, where half the room is reserved for students.

Since her retirement from the faculty in 1989, Miss McCawley has made a cameo appearance in the music classrooms to prepare students for the concert ahead.

She can relate many tales of interactions with famous musicians, but her visits to student musicians prior to the concert set the tone and create enthusiasm and anticipation. Miss McCawley remains involved in the selection of future musicians and on the committee that meets each spring to administer the endowed series.

Part of Gratwick’s charm is its setting: Straus Library is an elegant room in a handsome and well-proportioned Georgian structure. Dark wood paneling, brass chandeliers, leather furniture, grand window casements, abundant floral arrangements, and a palpable sense of history conspire to create the perfect atmosphere for music. The concerts are often on a Sunday afternoon in April with budding trees and the promise of spring just outside the windows.

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Katharine Perkins Gratwick ’24, inspiration for 75 years of beautiful music

After experiencing their first concert, Milton students truly understand the Gratwick opportunity. Stephen Wagner ’08, a talented musician, feels that “the Gratwick Concert is a great experience for the students and faculty of Milton. The concert is a chance for students in the orchestra to see what can be accomplished on an instrument through practice and perseverance, and for the Milton community to gather and enjoy the magic of great classical music.

The Gratwick concert is truly one of the best events Milton has to offer.” The list of performers in the series has set an extraordinary example for aspiring Milton musicians through the years.

Dr. Donald Dregalla, chair of the Music Department, missed the Gratwick Concert during his first year at Milton Academy (1980).

“What struck me, when I looked at my first program,” he said, “was the list of artists that had performed on this series.

“From Piatigorsky and the Trapp Family Singers, through Benny Goodman and Lynn Harrell, I was amazed and quite frankly a little embarrassed. How could I have missed last year? Since then, only my travel during two sabbaticals has kept me away from concerts. The Gratwick concerts are certainly one of the musical highlights of my year.

“For me these concerts are about one wonderful person and his generous gift to our School. Dr. Gratwick must have been a person who had a tremendous love in his heart, both for Katharine and for Milton Academy. I look forward to many more of these yearly events. We continue to work hard to make sure that Dr. Gratwick’s gift is always showcased at its best. We can do no less for such a gift from the heart.”

While all the underlying elements of the Gratwick experience have remained constant— Straus Library, excellence of performers, reception following the concert, student emphasis— small details have changed to improve the experience. Chairs have been rented to avoid squeaky distractions, artists have been encouraged to hold a master class or discussion with stu-

Gratwick Performers

dents prior to the concert, and this year, the Gratwick committee has agreed to use part of the fund’s annual yield to provide two Boston Symphony Orchestra season tickets formerly given by a recently deceased alumnus.

The tickets are dispersed through a careful system to allow the maximum number of students to attend each year.

Sharing musical enrichment even further is characteristic of the Gratwick family.

Catherine L. Farrington, Director of Stewardship

1930–31 1931–32 1932–33 1933–34 1934–35 1935–36 1936–37 1937–38 1938–39 1939–40 1940–41 1941–42 1942–43 1943–44 1944–45 1945–46 1946–47 1947–48 1948–49 1949–50 1950–51 1951–52 1952–53 1953–54 1954–55 1955–56 1956–57 1957–58

Felix Salmond Myra Hess Albert Spalding The New English Singers Edward Johnson Gregor Piatigorsky Richard Crooks Joseph Szigeti Bidu Sayao Jan Smeterlin Trapp Family Singers Rudolf Serkin Gregor Piatigorsky Yehudi Menuhin Roland Hayes William Primrose Witold Malcuzynski Dame Myra Hess Maggie Teyte Pierre Fourier Dorothy Maynor Claudio Arrau Michael Rabin Nicole Henriot Richard Dyer-Bennett Leonard Rose Adele Addison Rudolf Firkusny

1958–59 1959–60 1960–61 1961–62 1962–63 1963–64 1964–65 1965–66 1966–67 1967–68 1968–69 1969–70 1970–71 1971–72 1972–73 1973–74 1974–75 1975–76 1976–77 1977–78 1978–79 1979–80 1980–81 1981–82 1982–83 1983–84 1984–85

Andrés Segovia The Festival Quartet Isaac Stern Cesare Valletti Guiomar Novaes Leslie Parnas Marian Anderson Benny Goodman The Deller Consort Claude Frank Roman Totenberg Beverly Sills Christopher Parkening Eugene Istomin The Beaux Arts Trio of New York Zara Nelsova – Grant Johannesen Waverly Consort Alfred Brendel Czech Chamber Soloists Barry Tuckwell Tashi Lynn Harrell Benita Valente Russell Sherman Juilliard String Quartet Heinz Holliger Jaap Schroeder

1985–86 Jane Gratwick Bryden and St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble 1986–87 The Muir String Quartet and David Deveau, Pianist 1987–88 John Miller 1988–89 Benjamin Luxon 1989–90 Annie Fischer 1990–91 Joshua Bell 1991–92 Mitsuko Shirai – Hartmut Holl 1992–93 Rudolf Firkusny 1993–94 The Amadeus Winds – Jane Gratwick Bryden, Robert Levin 1994–95 Pamela Frank – Claude Frank 1995–96 Beaux Arts Trio 1996–97 Eduardo Fernandez 1997–98 Richard Goode 1998–99 Lorraine Hunt 1999–00 Christopher Krueger 2000–01 Garrick Ohlsson 2001–02 Emerson String Quartet 2002–03 David Shifrin 2003–04 The Tallis Scholars 2004–05 Steven Isserlis and Stephen Hough

Dr. Katharine (Tinka) Gratwick Baker ’55 grew up understanding the special nature of her father’s gift to Milton and continues to shepherd the Gratwick fund in its 75th year.

The Gratwick Concerts

by Katharine Gratwick Baker ’55 During my early childhood all I knew about the Concerts (with a capital C) was that Mum and Dad disappeared once a year for a weekend, took a long train ride to Boston, visited the Perkins family, and apparently attended a wonderful, mysterious event at Milton Academy in memory of Dad’s first wife, Katharine Perkins (Class of 1924), after whom I had been named. I knew that one Concert had taken place on the night my little sister, Jane, was born (William Primrose, November 9, 1945), but my brothers and I were never invited to go with our parents until they were sure we could be counted on not to wiggle through a two-hour program.

The first Concert we were allowed to attend was Dorothy Maynor’s recital in 1950, when I was 12 years old. I dressed up in my best dark-red velvet dress, and my brother Harry

wore an elegant suit and tie (at age 14). We got to sit in a big, deep, comfortable leather sofa in the very front row with Mompy (Katharine Perkins’s mother and our “adopted” grandmother). Dorothy Maynor stood high above us in a brilliant green silk dress, pouring out songs in her warm intense soprano. The dark paneled Library (now Straus Hall) was filled with old family friends, teachers, and many older high school students all quietly and intently listening to her.

Mompy had arranged a tall vase of flowers that stood on the piano. She sat back in the sofa, half asleep, occasionally humming along or loudly whispering to me about how much she loved the music. In the program I read the words of Miss Goodwin, who had introduced the first Concert back in 1930: “Great music rendered in surroundings so beautiful is

expressive of Katharine. She loved beautiful things and brought beauty into all that she touched.” I felt that beauty all around me as a 12-year-old in the Library with the music and the flowers and Mompy’s smiling face.

After that first moving experience, I went to all the Concerts with my family. And later, as a student at Milton (1952 to 1955) and a music major at Radcliffe (1955 to 1959), I came to realize what an extraordinary opportunity my father had given all of us, as we have been inspired by world-class musicians close up in a warm, musically vibrant setting and have had a chance to talk personally with these musicians after their performances about the meaning of music in their lives.

I have felt special family pride that my sister, Jane Gratwick Bryden, soprano, has been one

of the performing artists three times (1974, 1985, and 1993) and that her husband, Christopher Krueger, flutist, was the artist in 2000. Jane and I, as well as members of the Perkins family, continue to be involved with the Concerts through helping the school choose future artists at a meeting in Milton each spring.

As an adult I lived for many years in Washington, D.C., and also overseas for periods of time, but whenever possible I’ve done everything I could to attend the Concert each year, bringing my own now grown sons when they have lived nearby, and thinking ahead to the time when my grandchildren will be old enough not to wiggle, but can sit with me in one of the big, deep, comfortable leather sofas and breathe in the beauty.

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Alumni Authors Recently published works Slave Country Adam Rothman ‘89 “Why did slavery expand in the early national United States?”

Adam Rothman ‘89 begins his tightly argued Slave Country with that deceptively simple question.

Adam contends that slavery did not merely linger after 1776 as a regrettable national embarrassment. Rather, the institution flourished in unanticipated ways, as the slave population more than tripled in the 50 years after independence. Adam focuses on the Deep South, where the growth and evolution of slavery may have been most pronounced. In 1790, Americans, Europeans and Native Americans still struggled for control over the region, but by 1820, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama had each entered the Union. Those three states produced one-quarter of the nation’s cotton crop in 1820. By then, Adam argues, the region had emerged as “the leading edge of a dynamic, expansive slave regime incorporated politically into the United States and firmly tied to the transatlantic system of commodity exchange.” On the eve of the Civil War, of course, over 60 percent of the nation’s cotton came from those three states and close to one-third of the nation’s slaves lived there.

The expansion of slavery in the Deep South had already shaped the nation’s destiny.

Rejecting the notion that there is one simple explanation for such rapid and important change, Adam instead argues that “contingent global forces, concrete policies pursued by governments, and countless small

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choices made by thousands of individuals” shaped slavery’s expansion and evolution. Adam makes his case in clear, clean language, deftly synthesizing what at first appear to be widely disparate types of evidence.

For example, he shows that the evolution of international cotton and sugar markets both encouraged the explosion of cotton production in the Deep South and sustained the great wealth of Louisiana’s sugar planters. As powerful as those market forces were, however, Adam does not cast Americans, black or white, as helpless, nameless victims of impersonal economic forces. In fact, in the central chapter of the book, Adam explores the complicated relationship between

southern leaders during the War of 1812 and the institution that so many of them sought to preserve. The story seems straightforward at first. Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the Red Stick movement in the Creek War led to the cession of 23 million acres of the Creeks’ land. Many white Americans soon flocked to that and other territory once controlled by Native Americans, and many of those white Americans compelled their slaves to join them. Jackson’s subsequent victory over the British in New Orleans further consolidated American control of the region.

European and Native American foes proved to be no match for the expansion of American slavery.

Yet as Adam points out, the story of the War of 1812 is not so simple. In the eyes of at least some Americans, the war that ultimately advanced the interests of slaveholders seemed to put the very institution at risk. Some American slaveholders believed that the British would foment a slave rebellion, and in New Orleans slaveholders stepped up patrols to squelch any incipient insurrection. Yet when the British threat became real, political and military leaders ultimately came to rely on the labor of African Americans. New Orleans organized a militia of free men of color (commanded by whites, of course), a militia that served enthusiastically in the war. The planters around New Orleans also allowed the city to use their slaves to build the military fortifications. Slaves, each a possible rebel, each a possible British ally, ultimately proved essential in defending the growing institution of slavery, the very source of their oppression.

Andrew Jackson figures prominently in the later chapters, but it is Thomas Jefferson as visionary and as president to whom Adam returns time and again.

Jefferson’s dreams of the West, his purchase of Louisiana, and his writings on slavery make him a critical figure, and congressional choices about the slave trade, land sales, tariff policy, and the admission of new states put national policy at the heart of Adam’s story. Still, Adam includes the stories of the less famous. Ethan Allen’s grandson, it turns out, sought warmer climes, migrating from Vermont to Alabama. He initially insisted that slavery was not necessary for financial success.

He changed his mind, though, soon mouthing that insidious claim that slavery served black Americans better than freedom ever could. Brazilian Candido Gomez, the son of a slave and her master, endured a rather different journey, one with a tragic ending. As Adam tells the story, Gomez’s father put him on a ship bound for Guinea as a punishment for drunkenness.

Privateers captured the ship, however, and Gomez was sold illegally in Louisiana. Gomez tried suing for his freedom, and, it comes as no surprise, failed.

Slave Country is full of such stories, so even as Adam makes arguments about economic forces and political deal-making, he returns regularly to the lived experience of the people who by choice or by coercion shaped the Deep South.

Academic historians heaped praise on Adam for his fine scholarship. By writing with power and precision, however, Adam has made this distressing American story accessible to any engaged reader. That may be his greatest triumph.

David Ball ’88 Academic Dean

See You After the Duration: The Story of British Evacuees to North America in World War II Michael Henderson ’49 Michael Henderson’s See You After the Duration (PublishAmerica 2004) explores why British parents risked sending their children to safety over submarine-infested waters. How would American and Canadian families and public respond to them? What adventures would the children experience and what would be the long-term effects? Michael tells a tale that is at times moving, often humorous, evoking an authentic picture of life and attitudes 60 years ago. It is a saga of separation, a story of unashamed patriotism and a contribution to the literature of World War II. The book’s forward is by Sir Martin Gilbert, who wrote Churchill’s biography. On the publisher’s Web site, he writes, “For those who were not part of the saga Michael Henderson so brilliantly recounts, there will be

myriad surprises, affectionate vignettes, warm tributes, amid the difficulties and uncertainties of exile. [Michael writes] a vivid portrait of the events, moods and atmosphere of a fast-moving, fearful and inspiring era.”

“Those of my generation, born towards the end of the war, are often haunted by the thought of what might have happened had we been just a little older,” Sir Christopher Meyer, British Ambassador to the U.S. 1997–2003 writes, “Michael Henderson tells us in a fascinating narrative, filled with adventure, drama and sadness of children taken from their parents to a foreign land for their own safety.” Michael Henderson was among the children sent overseas during the war. His temporary destination and home: Milton Academy.

Play Ball(et): A Life in Sport and Dance R.L.F. Robinson ’48 In Play Ball(et), Ralf Robinson writes of 50 years’ playing baseball—at Harvard, in the Navy and for the semipro team, the Belfast Merchants—and dancing professionally in New York, Nice and elsewhere With his wife, Swiss ballerina Jeanne-Marie Aubert, Ralf formed the now 28year-old Robinson Ballet, a professional company in northern Maine. In his introduction, Ralf writes, “Anecdotes, drawn from over 50 years of baseball and ballet, will be on our menu. No philosophical or arty courses will be served, only a stew, lightly seasoned, with the whimsy of everyday professional life.”

Miss Edna McRae. In one essay, he compares McRae to the cannon in Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” He recounts performing on the Ed Sullivan show. After Chicago, Ralf went to Paris to look for work as a dancer. There, his Milton Academy and Harvard friend, Charlie Cabot, shows up unexpectedly and Ralf enjoys a moment as an Ivy Leaguer out to dinner before returning to grueling instruction from a new teacher, affectionately known as “The Hatchett Lady.” Later, he and Jeanne-Marie teach in Boston—at the time when the Boston Strangler is on the loose.

“Nervously, we felt that doing the wash in the cellar laundry was a two-man job,” he writes.

In 12 essays, Ralf paints poignant characters from memory.

Remarkably, even the friends, dancers, lovers and baseball players who make only cameo appearances in these tales, do so believably—and humorously.

After training in New York, Ralf went to Chicago with the Chicago Ballet Opera, There, he took classes with the formidable

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Class IV Talks: Students deliver wisdom and wit Milton traditions: Completing a Senior Project. Seeing Mr. Millet’s calligraphy embellishing each diploma. Giving your Class IV talk. These moments recall Milton long after graduation.

The Class IV talks, five- to sevenminute speeches given before your ninth-grade peers are a Milton rite of passage—an act of transformation (see Hadley Davis postscript, p. 48).

Last spring, Tarim Chung (English department) introduced the students who were voted by their peers to have given the best talks of 2004–2005: Spencer Gaffney, who talked about the mental health of favorite childhood characters, including Winnie the Pooh; Tonantzin Carmona, who spoke to her classmates about the MexicanAmerican immigrant experience and finding dignity in your work; Gordie Sayre, who questioned widely accepted postulates of history; Ned Pride, who (pre–Red Sox World Series win) said, “Every time we lose, winning seems more important”; Ned Morris, who spoke about frivolous lawsuits, such as suits against McDonald’s that claim the company causes obesity; and Sam Panarese, who detailed his experience as a “primitive” camper at Night Eagle.

“We thank them for their brilliance and their guts,” Tarim said of the group.

Two of this year’s favorites drew attention for their humor: From Spencer Gaffney’s “Tigger on Ritalin”: There are some things that you do when you are young that you think are awesome, but then you go back and they really aren’t that great.…I did manage to discover two things that remain as

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amazing as ever: “Sesame Street” (even though Elmo sold out) and Winnie the Pooh.

When I was 2, I got a copy of The House at Pooh Corner from my aunt and uncle. Although Pooh getting a honey jar stuck on his nose was one of the most memorable moments in the collection, it was always Piglet’s fascination and fear of Woozles that got my attention. How could an animal so small and so scared of everything in the world be fascinated by these ferocious animals? This was one of the many great mysteries I set out to solve when I decided to reread the book.

“Pooh was a compulsive eater, always in search of a small smackeral of something. Piglet had anxiety disorder, Rabbit had OCD, Tigger had ADHD, Owl was self delusional, and Eeyore was extremely depressed.”

However, when I looked back at the stories, I started noticing some problems with my friends in the hundred-acre woods.

Problems that, when the book was published in 1928, were not generally regarded as serious medical conditions. Pooh was a compulsive eater, always in search of a small smackeral of something. Piglet had anxiety disorder, Rabbit had OCD, Tigger had ADHD, Owl was self delusional, and Eeyore was extremely depressed. What changed so that my view of some of my favorite children’s story characters shifted so profoundly?

From Sam Panarese’s “Becoming a Night Eagle”: Hi. I’m Sam Panarese and I know how to kill a snake, thanks to Night Eagle.…Night Eagle is a “primitive” camp, where one would learn to live as the Chippewa Indians lived a thousand years ago. I was an 11-yearold boy who enjoyed the outdoors, so this camp seemed a perfect fit. I was intrigued that the only requirements were to bring a sleeping bag and a seven-inch knife. It took some convincing but my parents finally allowed me to go. …On opening day we drove three hours on main roads, one hour on secondary roads, 30 minutes on dirt, and then we hiked another three hours. Expecting to see a traditional “camp” scene, I was shocked to see three 22foot teepees and a mess tent in a clearing. That was all. Night Eagle was not very typical. In learning to live in harmony with nature, the camp’s policy was that clothing was optional; however, the camp was not co-ed, so I chose to wear clothes. Also, bathing was not mandatory. We mostly swam in the leech-infested ponds if we wanted to get clean. When my parents brought me home they made me soak in a bath many times. When I still looked brown, my Dad handed me steel wool and sent me back to scrub my skin off. …At Night Eagle, I did, in fact, learn many survival techniques.

We lived in teepees, which slept eight around an inside campfire, for over a month. When it rained and water rushed through these teepees, those of us who had followed directions and put our bags on logs didn’t get wet— I got wet…I learned how to shoot a bow and arrow to catch food: cooking the food was the real challenge. Using flint and steel,

“The food left a lot to be desired. Imagine a tofu lasagna cooked on an open fire—those were our best meals, which we had on Fridays.” we started fires in the cooking pit in the middle of the mess tent. The food left a lot to be desired. Imagine a tofu lasagna cooked on an open fire—those were our best meals, which we had on Fridays. …To make bison jerky, we had to construct a giant teepee where we would smoke the meat. We tended the fire in the teepee through three days and three nights. One night, while walking across camp to tend the fire in the pitch dark, an owl swooped down, screaming. I nearly peed in my breechcloth.”

…

The Class IV talks, of course, often focus on serious topics as well as the lighthearted. At least as far back as 1915, students practiced public speaking on their peers. Rosalie Florance, for example, delivered, “Social Evils of Today and How to Change Them” that year; Emily Tillinghast, quoting Rudyard Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West” in her talk, “A Day in India.”

Ultimately, the shared experience of giving a Class IV talk helps stimulate students’ natural empathy and respect for one another. “This process [giving the talks],” Tarim Chung noted, “is really about creating community, in the end.”

For a Web site feature, we invite you to share memories or transcripts of Class IV talks with us. Please email us at MiltonMagazine@milton.edu.

Creating Cityscapes: Third-grade students Third-Grade Cities. The unit starts with a simple question, “What is in a city?� Twenty three hands shoot up. Buildings, parks, roads, stores, people, museums, ballparks and the list grows. They continue to add to the list and mini-discussions follow. Some know from residing in Boston, while others know from visits. These students are keen observers. We begin reading A Cricket in Times Square by George Selden. Some students offer perspectives of the city based on family trips to New York. Susan Wheelright [the other third-grade teacher] and I lead the students in gathering information that compares different cities. Voices of eight- and nine-year-olds are excited and become knowledgeable. Their firsthand accounts speak to the importance of primary source experiences. The next step is to visit Boston via mass transit.

The third-graders will be in groups of five, and each group will seek different aspects of the

city from a scavenger hunt list.

Their proof will be in a photo of commercial sites, residences, natural spaces, public places, cultural venues and more. A poster detailing the hunt of each group is carefully made and the group shares their day in the city. Conversations about the use of space explore the need to build up in these highly congested areas. Their discoveries are fresh and connected to the work previously done in the classroom in the Lower School.

ing about geography and climate. Others contain familiar elements of U.S. and European cities. They work without interruption for a full two weeks.

Once their cityscapes are completed, parents and others classes are invited to view these impressive projects. The third graders enthusiastically describe the details that make each city unique. These future urban

planners know the value of a carefully considered metropolis.

[Also pictured: fifth-grade students displaying their reports on endangered animals; an investigation of the properties of light during a light show hosted by fourth- and fifth-grade students in spring 2005.]

Jane McGuinness Third-Grade Teacher Lower School

Some have parents who work downtown, others eagerly share information about a favorite restaurant or museum. We continue to build an impressive framework for the next event, the construction of their own cities. In groups of three, the children devise a plan for their version of a livable urban space.

Conversations focus on those necessary components of cities.

They are vigorous and sometimes contentious. In the end, they present a design for approval by Susan and me. After discussion and revision, the students get down to the serious business of building. Many have themes that reflect understand-

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Springtime 2005 Flicks: Two Milton alumni write for Hollywood’s Silver Screen Hadley Davis ’89 and David Lindsay-Abaire ’88 were lead screenwriters for 2005 releases Ice Princess (Walt Disney Pictures) and Robots (Blue Sky Productions), respectively.

Ice Princess Takes a New Spin on Coming-of-Age Drama Hadley’s Ice Princess, for whom a high school physics project leads to a love of skating, earns praise from Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times for beginning with a formula to deliver a fresh, wellacted story that allows even its villains to transform and discover themselves.

“The movie, written by Hadley Davis and directed by Tim Fywell, starts with a formula and then takes it to the next level,”

Ebert says. “We have two obsessive stage mothers and two driven overachievers, and the girls want to trade places, to the despair of their moms.…This leads to more substance than we’re expecting, and more acting, too, since the central characters don’t follow the well-worn routines supplied by the GCFDDPO formula (Gifted Child Follows Dream Despite Parental Opposition). They strike out with opinions and surprises of their own.”

Hadley, whose screenwriting credits include “Dawson’s Creek” and “Spin City,” recently told The Hingham Journal that the Ice Princess screenplay was semiautobiographical: Hadley once dreamed of becoming a professional ballet dancer. And, like

the film’s heroine, she enjoyed spending winter afternoons skating on a pond in New England.

Hadley also told the Hingham Journal that her Milton Academy English teachers taught her how to write.

Robots Delivers Great Animation, Slapstick Humor David Lindsay-Abaire ’88 is best known as an award-winning playwright. His credits include Fuddy Meers, Wonder of the World and Kimberly Akimbo.

In Variety magazine, film critic Joe Leydon writes that David’s newly released film, Robots, “inspires sufficient wonderment to impress as spectacle and generates enough guffaws to score with every audience segment

except the most toon-averse teens. Fox and Blue Sky Studios follow up their 2002 smash Ice Age with an even more vividly precise and inventively realized 3-D CGI package.

“Climactic clash between good and evil feels more chaotic than comedic, but laughs come frequently even during frenetic folderol. Pic overall abounds with clever in-jokey references to other movies—note the guest appearance by a character from somewhere over the rainbow— and other instances of sophisticated wit,” Leydon writes.

Outside of live theater and Robots, David has also been writing for television and is at work on other screenplays.

Anne Neely’s “Going West” Irish landscapes Anne Neely’s “Going West” exhibit in West Cork, Ireland, opened at the Catherine Hammond Gallery on July 29, 2005. Works in the exhibit can be viewed at www.hammondgallery.com. Anne’s small paintings, inspired by a fellowship from the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in County Mayo, Ireland, explore the relationship between man and nature, gravity and weightlessness. Anne has taught Milton students since 1974.

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Day’s End, 11" x 14", oil on linen

New Roles for Milton Faculty Members

Richard G. Hardy Upper School Principal Robin Robertson announced to the faculty and students this spring that Rick Hardy, chair of the English department, had accepted the invitation to become principal of the Upper School. The position was appealing to Rick because of the opportunity, he said “to work closely with a lively, bright student body and a talented, committed faculty.”

Rick has taught English for 24 years, 22 years as a member of Milton’s English department.

Rick’s teaching has spanned Grade 7 to Class I, and he has incorporated a love of acting and directing that was spawned in graduate school at Brown with Milton students and faculty. Rick assumed the role of English department chair in 1999.

Rick’s long experience as a teacher, his leadership of the department, and his service, in 2000–2001, as interim Upper School principal, have prepared him well “to help the faculty be involved effectively in decisions that affect the learning environment—the experiences students should have and the competencies they should develop.”

During the coming year Rick, for instance, will guide the Upper School through a decision about scheduling, the identification of the next athletic director, continued progress toward new learning centers in science and visual art, and an Academy-wide project aimed at making sure our values are explicit and expressed in student experience.

During his years at Milton, he has been a house head in Faulkner, and with his wife, Del, a member of the house faculty in Goodwin. He has coached girls’ JV softball, boys’ JV baseball and boys’ 4th soccer. Rick, his wife, Del, and their children, Aidan (Class I) and Owen (Grade 8) live on campus.

As Robin Robertson said to faculty members at the time of Rick’s appointment, “I am confident that under his leadership, we will continue to address thoughtfully the issues important to our future. As we work in the Upper School to improve our use of time, enhance our athletic programs and build two new academic buildings, Rick’s capabilities will serve all of us well.

Please join me in congratulating him.”

Rick Hardy

David Ball Academic Dean David B. Ball, Milton Academy Class of 1988, assumed the position of academic dean this summer. David returned to Milton in 1999 to join the history department, after six years on the faculty at the Montgomery Academy in Montgomery, Alabama.

There, David taught United States history and coached the debate team; ultimately, he served as Montgomery Academy’s history department chair, and that experience sparked an interest in administrative work.

At Milton, David taught economics, a course that had steadily gained enrollment over the last several years. In addition, David participated with other members

students. “What happens in the classroom, in the lab, and in the library defines Milton as a vibrant educational community,” David notes. “The energy and talent here make Milton a great place to learn, and it’s a privilege to share in the good work that our students and teachers do.”

of the department in developing and teaching Milton’s groundbreaking two-year course, launched in 2002—The United States in the Modern World. In 2005, David served as interim chair of the History department.

As in Montgomery, David coached Milton’s debaters for four years.

Pursuing his interest in issues that were institutional in scope and impact, David served on two trustee committees—the Budget Committee and the Enrollment Committee. The position of academic dean held particular appeal for David, as it will allow him to consider those broader issues even as he focuses on the intellectual growth of Milton

He was a member of the Discipline Committee, and served on the Senior Project Committee.

David Ball ’88

After Milton, David attended Princeton, where he earned a bachelor’s degree, and Duke University, where he earned a master’s degree in history.

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Departing Faculty Members

Andreas Evriviades Mathematics Department, 1972–2005 Thank you, Andreas, for your 33 years of service on the Milton Academy faculty in the mathematics department, where your knowledge of the subject and your enthusiasm for mathematics made you a respected colleague and a beloved teacher.

You knew all levels of mathematics from Algebra I, to advanced calculus, and taught them as exciting stories that gripped your students’ imaginations. The hours of help you generously gave to some students endeared you to them, just as your years of advising the math team endeared you to others. Your SAT preparation sessions and your prize-winning problem books added to your image as a teacher. You inspired those destined to become mathematicians, and supported and encouraged those more reluctant to develop their mathematical abilities. In all you did, you were driven by your love of the subject and your love for your students.

Your spirit extended to the athletic field, where you coached your track and soccer teams with the same inclusive enthusiasm, both for varsity and for intramural teams. We will miss your famous Milton cheers and spirit.

Boom-a-Giga!

Thank for including your family in the life of the community: your wife Margie and Milton graduates Alexi, Leo, AnneMarie and Christina. Your family’s hospitality at Milton is legendary, whether hosting Greek Easter celebrations or team celebrations, or any event worthy of a party. Perhaps most memorable was your palpable pride as we celebrated with you Cyprus’ membership in the European Union: a feast to remember, complete with a toast with your father’s homemade sherry.

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Geoffrey Theobald Academic Dean, 2001–2005 Milton Academy Faculty, 1992–2005

Thank you for bringing the sunny warmth of Cypriot and Greek culture into New England’s chill. How many students’ lives were changed by the trips you guided to Greece and Cyprus? How many colleagues and friends saw your culture through your eyes and understood Greece and Cyprus in a deeper way? How many of us stood with you on the Hill of the Muses at sunset, imagining the clash of armies on the plains of Athens below as the sun reddened the ancient columns of the Parthenon?

Many years ago, you came to this country to study mathematics; you made your home and raised your family here. We have relied upon you for your knowledge of mathematics as well as for your kind and generous personality. We are grateful for more than 30 years of service to Milton Academy. Efharisto poli, Andreas. We will miss you, Mr. E. Keith Hills-Pilant Mathematics Department

Andreas Evriviades

you moved into admissions work as associate director of admissions and director of financial aid. From 1999 to 2000, you served as director of admissions.

You have taught mathematics, coached golf and girls’ soccer, served as a class dean when that role was called “head class advisor,” and been a dorm parent in Wolcott House.

Geoffrey Theobald

Geoff, when I think of you, the picture that springs to mind is your forward leaning, athletically pigeon-toed gait, your physical grace, your head thrown back in laughter. I see you in blue blazer and tie, working the crowd at an admissions or orientation event, and I see you rushing, books in hand and a little late, across Centre Street to teach in Ware Hall. I see you standing on the stairs, against the wall in Greeley Auditorium, reminding us that today is Monday not Tuesday, despite what the calendar says, and don’t forget to turn in your grades and comments. I see a portrait of a happily engaged man, most alive when you are most engaged with us.

You were a member of the 13year club as a student at Milton, before you graduated cum laude and much celebrated in 1984.

You returned to Milton in 1992, after college at the University of North Carolina, where you were a Morehead Scholar, and after a few years teaching at another school. You have done many jobs at Milton, all of them well.

You started out as assistant dean of students and director of community service. Two years later,

One thing that is extraordinary about you has been your ability to impress us as a student and then return to lead us as a dean: not an easy change to pull off.

You navigated the shoals of that passage from student to peer to leader with grace and tact and humor, learning along the way how to be married and how to be a father—and how to be the kind of man we admire. Your humility shone when you told us that your two central concerns, teamwork and taking care of people, are simply what you learned here as a student and what you were trained to do here as a dean and teacher and coach; in your modesty, you would have us believe that your empathy, intelligence, and warmth, your generosity and discipline and integrity, are things that we have laid upon you. But we know better. You have showed us the way to be, with our students and with each other.

We watch you coaching your girls’ soccer team in passing and shooting drills, or working with a wayward Class IV boy on helping him understand what he’s done and accept his responsibility for it. We watch you tutoring one of your geometry students after class. We see a happy man.

We drop by at recess or lunch or at the end of classes, and see the line of students waiting to see you at the office door. Some are anxious, some are sheepish, some are happily waiting to talk with their mentor. All of them,

Hugh R. Silbaugh Upper School Principal, 2001–2005 whether they like what’s coming or not, know that you are going to treat them gently and fairly.

You are generous in acknowledging and celebrating students’ and colleagues’ successes, and deeply humane in talking with them about unfortunate truths that have to be addressed. You seek and find the teachable moment in both success and failure. You take your occasional lumps, some of them from me, humbly and learn from your own successes and failures.

Geoff, you teach us that character is more lasting and more important than accomplishments. You model goodness and integrity for us. You are a great friend and we will miss you.

Hugh R. Silbaugh Upper School Principal

I sent Hugh an email, welcoming him to Milton, the day after Robin announced his appointment. A short time later, he decided to teach a course I chair, so our emails became more frequent, and soon we were sitting in my backyard, talking books.

Hugh had used a collection of modern novellas at Putney and thought he would use it at Milton. “You don’t want to do that,” I said. “The kids signed up to tackle the big books; they won’t be happy if you walk in with a bunch of little books instead.” About an hour later, I was on campus and saw Hugh walking out of Cox Library with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, To the Lighthouse, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Beloved under his arm. I phoned Robin and said, “This is my kind of guy.”

I was pleased, therefore, when Robin asked me to join Hugh’s committee studying the Middle School. We met late on Wednesday afternoons, arriving grumpy and becoming grumpier, listing all the hurdles we foresaw in creating a new model for this part of the school. Hugh sat quietly at such moments, making notes, and then said, “Here are the problems I’m hearing you describe. We can take care of this first situation by doing A or B, and the other large cluster of issues should be manageable if we do D or E.” I remember thinking, “The guy’s an optimist.”

learn something by watching the way he moved people to consensus in order to solve a problem.

He used his talent for this challenging dynamic to study many thorny issues after the Middle School Committee finished its work. In tackling these issues —and many others that arise in the day-to-day life of a school–– he put into action a professionalism informed by integrity and compassion. For me, a representative moment of this ethic came during the discussion of a new course in the English Department. As the person responsible for issues of staffing and budget, Hugh asked a number of tough questions of the faculty member proposing the course, yet, at the end of the meeting, he offered her his hand to show that the difficult questions had in no way been personal.

I truly came to value that handshake during Hugh’s years at Milton, as it ended my weekly walk with him and gave me a sense of security in having his friendship, so much so that I

once walked back downstairs from my classroom to his office because we’d forgotten that ritual when we’d parted company.

That handshake reminded me of my grandfather’s generation, one for whom a handshake was not simply a social gesture, but a measure of the man who stood behind it. I took my first measure of Hugh on the day he arrived in his trademark footwear to interview here. At the end of his conversation with faculty members, I wrote on my evaluation form, “Anybody who wears clogs to a professional interview is obviously his own man––at least from the ankles down.” I soon discovered he was his own man from the ankles up, as well, and, while I have had the good fortune to be his close friend, I am only one of many people at Milton who do their jobs better because of the thoughtful guidance which is Hugh’s stock-in-trade.

John Charles Smith English Department

I hate optimists; they make me feel old. However, I knew Hugh had extensive experience in outdoor education, school work programs, and other endeavors which required group effort for success and realized I could

Hugh Silbaugh

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Milton Academy Board of Trustees Welcomes three new members Austan Goolsbee ’87 Austan Goolsbee ’87, professor of economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, has joined the Milton Academy Board of Trustees.

Austan is also an editor of the Journal of Law and Economics, a research fellow at the American Bar Foundation and at the National Bureau of Economic Research and recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He has served as a special consultant to the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice for Internet Policy, and advised Congress on issues of Internet taxation. In 2002, he was named one of the 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum.

Austan earned a bachelor’s and master’s in economics from Yale University and a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He delivered the Milton Academy 2004 graduation address.

Julia Wallace Bennett ’79 Prior to joining the Milton Academy Board of Trustees, Julia Wallace Bennett ’79, of Norwell, Massachusetts, served Milton as a Head of School Council member, class agent, phonathon volunteer and reunion committee representative. After graduating from Milton, she earned a bachelor’s from Princeton University and a doctorate from Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine.

Julia was a member of the 1986–87 and 1987–88 Women’s National Championship Ice Hockey Team. Supporting science, faculty and athletics are among Julia’s priorities in her role as a board member. Julia’s family has been active in philanthropy through the Wallace Foundation.

Lisa Jones ’84 Lisa Jones, of Newton, Massachusetts, also joins the Milton Academy Board of Trustees. She has been a member of Head of School Council.

Lisa graduated from Yale University and is a master’s candidate at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Her work in broadcasting includes producing a “Frontline” series for PBS (Public Broadcasting System). She is also a producer of “ZOOM,” an interactive PBS television series that leads 5- to 11-year-olds to do science experiences and other hands-on learning. She also worked on the PBS series “The American Experience.”

…And thanks four others David B. Jenkins ’49 Milton Academy Board of Trustees Ex Officio 1995–1997 Elected member 1997–2005 Milton turned to David—accomplished fund raiser, thinker, strategic planner, and project manager for Wesleyan—when our need was great. Having taken on what was then a historic challenge, raising $50 million in a first comprehensive capital campaign, we asked David in 1995 to chair, along with Marshall Schwarz, our leadership gift effort. Not only was David’s experienced and pragmatic guidance invaluable, so was his energy and perseverance. He managed to sustain high levels of commitment to both schools during his tenure; perhaps he was the magic ingredient in their mutual success stories. After all, as Mr. Perry said, “David is a boy of exceptionally sturdy character, forthright, inquiring, alert and always willing to give his best to worthwhile activities and ideas.”

Although we first relied upon David’s ability to inspire others’ generosity, we have also relied upon the other powerful talents he applied to strengthening his beloved schools. So thorough was his understanding of Milton’s challenges and aspirations, that Marshall, as board president, asked David to lead the search for the head of school. Leading the search was both an exploration of the beliefs and hopes of the students, faculty, board members and alumni and a team-building effort focused on a crucial choice for the future of the School. David’s insightful and skillful work in 1998 and 1999 led to Robin’s leadership, and to the great accomplishments we now share as a School community.

A true school man, David understands the delicate “eco-system” that supports the life of an outstanding school. No only does he acknowledge the critical role of

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financial strength, he embraces the richness of diversity, strives for excellence across all programs, insists upon architectural soundness, supports effective recruiting and holds us accountable for living within our means.

He’s attended to these issues as a vigorous member of many board and ad hoc committees: Enrollment, External Relations, Buildings and Grounds, and the Architectural Steering Committee. Perhaps Mr. Perry said it best, years ago when he said, “Jenkins has been popular in School in spite of his propensity to express himself very forthrightly.”

We have benefited from all of David’s expressions—of thought, word, and action. Thank you for your great gifts to Milton David, and we count on your continuing to speak forthrightly to us over time.

Jorge G. Castro ’75 Milton Academy Board of Trustees 1993–2005 We travel so far in life to find out that we simply returned to where we began.

“Because of his personal charm,” faculty wrote about him in the ’70s, “Jorge evokes a warm response from people. He has a positive approach and a cooperative nature.” We have all felt Jorge’s charm, undaunted by red-eye flights from sunny Los Angeles, and the inevitable wind and snow that greeted him.

Once here on the East Coast, Jorge has had an impact serving on the Student Life and Lower School Committees. He has chaired the Investment Committee since 1994. Jorge was a strategic and disciplined thought leader during our recent restructuring of endowment asset allocation and selection of new managers. He almost single-handedly drove Milton’s profitable push into and then out of high yield assets—literally earning millions of dollars for the

Academy. Jorge was singularly focused on what was best for Milton.

Coast events, keeping Milton’s banner front and center on the Pacific Coast.

Jorge joined the board in 1993 at the moment when the board was launching Milton’s first $50 million capital campaign.

(As always, his timing is impeccable.) Throughout that campaign, and through the ensuing years, Jorge has sounded the call for Milton’s endowment. We will hear Jorge’s voice from California long after this meeting, asking us whether our new projects include an endowment component.

Jorge has helped shape Milton’s financial strength and educational identity over the last 12 years.

Jorge, we hope you feel gratified by the role you have played in Milton history. These have been years of significant change and progress at the Academy.

Although you may make fewer trips to campus in the near future, we hope you keep Milton close in every way.

The endowment that Jorge has led does important work. One of the most important jobs, Jorge has always believed, is funding financial aid. “Many young people share innate aptitude,” Jorge stated at the launching of the last capital campaign, “but without the financial support and the particular education that Milton provides, they may not be able to learn to believe in themselves, nor would they acquire the skills that allow them to compete on the same level as others whose parents can afford this education.” Jorge’s generous financial support for Milton has always helped include students who would not otherwise be here. In fact, outside of his work for Milton, Jorge has been deeply committed to education for Hispanic youth, and to action on political campaigns that affect Americans of color.

Milton Academy Board of Trustees 1997–2005

An advocate for diversifying Milton in all ways, Jorge encouraged us to find trustees from across the country as a member of the Trustees Committee. As a member of the Enrollment Committee, he conveyed his conviction that the Los Angeles area was a rich field for our East Coast, highly academic boarding school. Jorge also often hosted our California alumni—among the most imaginative and engaging of all our alumni—at West

Edward Dugger III

“Well here’s the way I see it….”

Ed often said, transforming a stalemate into an action plan by moving from these introductory words to a key insight or perspective that solved the gnarly problem du jour. Ed is a thinker who knows what makes Milton tick, cares deeply about what happens and can—better than most of us—integrate plans and projections to describe the outcome (impact) we should expect.

That he does so with diplomacy and grace made him an especially valuable player in our deliberative sessions.

The immediacy and power of the three Dugger children’s experiences always enhanced Ed’s perspective on the changes we contemplated. Cyrus, Class of 1998, Langston, Class of 2000 and Chloe, Class of 2002, were all members of the 13-year club, and were all shining stars at Milton who sought out different aspects of Milton to fulfill their significant potential. His experience as a Milton parent made Ed a powerful supporter of the Lower School; a champion of athletics, arts, and community service; a voice for paying attention to the value of the day student community in the Upper School mix that is Milton. Ed also clearly and thoughtfully made the case for the essential links

between the divisions of this K–12 school, and consistently made sure that fulfilling our mission included a deep and enduring K–12 experience.

The importance of Ed’s work on the Architectural Steering Committee was not lost on Robin.

She counted on Ed’s keen aesthetic eye and openness to the importance of design. Ed’s clear focus on the right look and function guided the group whether they were choosing carpet or considering the feasibility of running a snack bar. “It’s not just about economics” Ed would say, “it’s about what works and what is right for the students.”

Our new buildings are beautiful and they work as they were intended to, thanks in large part to Ed’s ability to help synthesize ideas into functional architecture at prices we could afford.

At moments carefully chosen, Ed spoke from the heart about issues that are at the core of our mission and the board listened.

The Dugger family figures prominently in Milton’s tradition of excellence. Ed himself served on the Budget Committee, the Student Life Committee and chaired the Lower School Committee; but as a family, the Duggers have been part of the action as the School changed and strengthened over 17 years.

Those years, and the Duggers’ prodigious list of accomplishments in every arena of school life, form a collective Milton legacy. They represent the permanent bond between you and Milton Academy. We are honored by that bond and we are grateful for our time together.

Helen Lin ’80 Milton Academy Board of Trustees 1997–2005 “Helen has a strong will to succeed and the ability to work with great concentration and dedication; she strives for perfection,” her School records say. As Milton’s advocate and taskmaster

in Hong Kong, Helen tried to push us toward perfection as well. Is it possible to meet Helen’s standards? She sets them high to match her love for Milton and commitment to Milton’s future. Helen founded the Hong Kong Alumni Association: she shepherded both Headmaster Ed Fredie and Head of School Robin Robertson over the years—as well as assorted students, including the Chamber Orchestra—during their visits to Hong Kong. She strengthened our relationships with graduates and parents, and facilitated the connections that culminate in great students for Milton and crucial financial support for our programs. With “unwavering persistence and attentiveness,” as the faculty here described her attributes in 1979, Helen served Milton in Asia. Helen’s father was one of the charter donors who founded the Hong Kong Scholarship; Helen’s carefully nurtured network of Milton supporters helped that generosity expand to include the Hong Kong Distinguished Speaker Series (1998) and The Hong Kong Chair in Asian Studies (1998).

Today these gifts bring to Milton students speakers and celebrations of Asian culture that broaden and enrich students’ awareness.

When Helen was able to travel to Milton for board meetings she tended to the campus-side aspects of our aspirations in Asia. She was focused and spirited in making sure that the Enrollment Committee, the External Relations Committee and the Student Life Committee understood the opportunities for Milton with international students and families. We are counting on Helen continuing her dedication to Milton, in spirit and deed, and we are grateful for her many years of active service to her School.

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Sports Milton Thanks Tennis Coach Herb Chenell Herb Chenell, Milton tennis coach since 1988, finished his Milton career impressively with seven New England championships—including a third consecutive one in his last season— 11 Independent School League titles and 10 undefeated seasons.

Herb learned to play tennis at the Sportman’s Tennis Club in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He has taught tennis programs

there and at the Boston Athletic Club, Weymouth Tennis Club, Blue Hills Tennis Club and the Easton Tennis Club.

During Herb’s final match as head coach, Milton beat the Hotchkiss School, 4–3, in Connecticut for the New England title. Mike Dusseau (science faculty) served as junior varsity coach in 2005; he will assume the position as head tennis coach in 2006.

Strength and conditioning: Coach Steve Darling designs programs for Milton teams Football great Herschel Walker once said, “If you train hard, you’ll not only be hard, you’ll be hard to beat.” On- and off-season training makes Milton teams hard to beat, and plays a crucial role in the success of the Academy’s athletic programs. In fact, 12 Milton teams have won Independent School League championships within the last five years. Milton’s commitment to the strength and conditioning of players helps prevent injury and allows for the advancement of individual performance on the field, court and rink. Steve Darling joined Milton Academy in September 2002 as a strength and conditioning coach. Aside from his daytime responsibilities as athletic trainer and faculty member teaching health, Steve works after school designing and implementing the in-season strength programs for the Academy’s varsity teams, and assists athletes preparing in the off-season.

Why is strength and conditioning important in high school athletics?

Herb Chenell

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As an athletic trainer, I have evaluated many injuries that could have been prevented, or at least been much less severe, had the athlete participated in a formal strength and conditioning program. Most of these injuries occur during the first few weeks of each season, and they usually occur to someone who had not been very physically active in the weeks leading up to the season.

What is involved in Milton’s program?

Because practice time is so valuable, I try to create quick, effective programs so that each athlete receives the most out of his or her in-season strength training sessions. I have discovered circuit training to be valuable for our teams. For instance, during the fall, I train both the girls’ soccer team and field hockey team (35–40 athletes) together during a 10-station circuit. The circuit, which includes components of strength, balance, stability and agility training, allows the students to train the whole body in 20 minutes.

Do you train differently for different sports?

Yes. For instance, football players need to be strong and “explosive.” The sport requires each athlete to go from a set position to maximal effort strength in one or two seconds. This training, therefore, must include Olympic and power lifting, various forms of multi-directional sprint training, and whole body explosive training such as plyometrics. Soccer and lacrosse players must also be strong and explosive, but need different cardiovascular training. A half in soccer lasts 45 minutes, so it is important for these athletes to have aerobic-based endurance training. Tennis and squash athletes compete in smaller arenas (courts) and, therefore, must concentrate on multi-directional speed and lateral movement.

Their programs focus on strengthening the lower extremities through exercises such as step-ups and squats.

There are many variations for each sport, but all athletes have similar needs. All must try to improve their overall body strength; speed; agility and quickness; power; flexibility; balance; core strength and stability; and conditioning.

What are the strength training myths?

Many young students and parents are misinformed when it comes to strength training.

Some feel that strength training is dangerous for young adolescents and believe myths such as “it will stunt their growth.� All the research done by the NSCA (National Strength and Conditioning Association) and the NASM (National Academy of Sports Medicine) has proven that properly supervised strength training for adolescent boys and girls is beneficial. However, inappropriate and unsupervised strength training can be dangerous for young students or anyone else. Educating athletes and parents regarding this topic is very important to me.

Are strength training resources available to Milton athletes on the Web? For their senior project last year, Andrew de Stadler and Spencer Platt built a strength and conditioning Web site that is now linked from Milton Academy’s athletics Web page. The site gives athletes a reference as they train over the summer, and it helps them perform the exercises and drills correctly. It will also be a great tool for our coaches.

The Web site puts Milton way ahead of most schools in terms of focusing on the importance of training. We take good care of our athletes.

Greg White

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Class Notes 1935

1937

Sarah (Sally) Campbell Hansen’s gallery, The Glass Gallery, is celebrating its 25th anniversary.

On April 16, 2005, in Australia, Sarah and Edwin’s eldest granddaughter was the first of their grandchildren to be married.

Daphne Withington Adams moved in January 2004 to a continuous-care senior residence in Fort Worth, Texas, to be nearer to her daughter and her family.

She is enjoying it despite being in rehab for five months after having her right hip replaced in October 2004. The first replacement shifted, requiring a second surgery.

Eleanor Blackall Read sold her house on Mason’s Island and moved three and a half miles to a new retirement home in Mystic. She reports, “Many of my friends are here, life is congenial, there are many activities, excellent meals, and I’m still very involved in local history.”

1936 Susan Miller Jackson says that she is becoming accustomed to no longer sharing her life with her husband of 57 years. She believes, however, “He really still is, and always will be, a part of me. Many of you are probably also experiencing this, which provides many happy remembrances of things we did together and often with our children.

I was lucky to have such a really kind, generous, caring and fun, lovely man and doctor as my husband for so many years. Day by day, life goes on in the same places as before April 1, 2004, when he died. I also have many pleasant memories from Milton, where I enjoyed the chance to play Scrooge in the fall and Little Red Riding Hood in French in the spring.”

Rosemary Crocker Kemp lives in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in a house more than 200 years old!

Her children and grandchildren live nearby in New Hampshire.

She also spends time in her other home in Franconia, New Hampshire.

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In John Cobb’s so-called retirement from teaching (as professor emeritus of preventive medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine), he is working on a method of utilizing solar energy to produce safe drinking water. His goal is to devise an affordable, simple, effective, fail-safe method of distilling contaminated water that could be constructed out of locally available and affordable materials in underdeveloped rural areas, by any local villager who is handy with tools. He reports that it is coming along!

1938 Tarbell Clay (Mrs. John S.) Hoes has moved into a wonderful home in Cooperstown, New York. Despite an unusual disease, Wegener’s granulomatosis, she gets around pretty well.

Anyone in the area is invited to come see her. Her phone number remains the same.

Don’t Miss the Party From annual receptions and networking nights to young alumni gatherings and other regional programs, events will take place in dozens of cities across the country this year.

Go to www.milton.edu and click on “alumni” for details and updates.

Posing at the 2005 Milton Academy graduation ceremony are Class of 1940 graduates, from left to right, Stephen Gifford, Thayer Mackenzie and J. Walker Stuart.

1939

1941

Evan Calkins and his wife, Virginia, were expecting two grandchildren in summer 2004, which brings the total to 30!

Benjamin Burr reports he is “well, happy, optimistic, humble, grateful and solvent.”

1940 Sixty-five years after their own graduation from Milton Academy, Stephen Gifford, Thayer Mackenzie and J. Walker Stuart enjoyed reuniting at graduation in June.

Estelle Lawson Johnston believes, “What is new is nothing new—a time of incredible questions about the future. The only thing certain is change,” she writes.

Mary Hunting Smith lives in a retirement community in Lenox, Massachusetts. She says, “I live near Tanglewood, and summer concerts are popular. We also have in-house concerts, a singing group and a bell-ringing group as well as many nonmusical events and organizations.” She continues her choral society interests by singing in a local chorus and a church choir.

Ed Squibb continues to compete in New England Section 80’s singles.

1942 R. L. Day reports that son Stephen Day ’78 and his Spanish wife, Clara, run The American School in Oviedo.

Recently, they were placing U.S. students for family stays. The school has more than 100 students from age 7 to over 45.

Stephen and Clara’s two bilingual sons (ages 6 and 8) spend August in the States.

Irving Forbes was featured in an article, “Grants in Action: Forbes Family Fun,” in the spring 2005 issue of Northeast Historic Film Moving Image Review. Irving and his family gathered in Brooklin, Maine, to view footage of island sheep drives and coastal boating that Irving’s father, Alexander Forbes, had shot in 1915. The original 28mm film was transferred to 35mm film by a laboratory in Bologna, Italy “It was very good, with none of that click-click-click [of the handcranked projection],” Irving said.

Basil Gavin and his wife, Janis, would be pleased to meet up with any classmates visiting the beautiful Mendocino Coast in California.

Class of 1950, front row (left to right): Judy Phillips, Betsy Stevens; row 2: Al Bigelow, Sandy Batchelder, Nancy Burley Chase, Oakes Plimpton, George Wheelwright, Maureen Wheelwright, Pliny Jewell, Janet Mann.

1943 Ellen Fuller Forbes reports, “Eighty years and still vertical!”

Anne L. Putnam Seamans shares news that her husband, Peter, died in February 2004.

Her great-granddaughter, Isabelle Crowninshield, was born in July 2004.

1944 Ardis Fratus Porter reports that her second-oldest granddaughter, Lydia Halloran, has graduated from Babson College, where she broke her own record for the mile. Lydia’s deceased grandfather, another Babson graduate, must be as proud of her academic and athletic accomplishments as the rest of the family.

1945 Philip Dickson Jr. and his wife, Suzan, battled Hurricane Jeanne with partial success, suffering moderate damage compared to others.

Daniel Kunhardt’s wife, Margaret, died suddenly in October 2004. He still lives in Bath, Maine, where he has many friends and is close to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, where he was Class of 1949.

Emily Atkinson Stabler and her husband, Wells, live in Washington, D.C., in the house they have had for almost 40 years! Keeping track of 12 grandchildren keeps them busy, as do tennis, golf, travel and local interests.

1946 Nicholas Cunningham and wife Cathryn live in Manhattan, where he is at Columbia University as a professor of clinical pediatrics and clinical public health. They spend time with their five grown children and also play tennis and squash.

Nicholas plays the cello, usually in quartets with other amateurs, both here and abroad.

1947 Henry Lauterstein enjoys his retirement and time with his children and grandchildren.

“Best to the Class of 1947!” he writes.

1948 As part of her retirement plan, Katharine Hodgdon Brown moved to a lovely home in Nobleboro, Maine, in May 2004.

She takes classes at University of Maine Senior College in Bath, and has volunteer jobs. One of her sons lives nearby with his wife and children, and Katharine enjoys visits with the whole family.

Proud grandparents Ann Hackett Hutchinson and her husband, Richard, have two granddaughters who’ve just graduated—one from college and the other from nursery school. They have six other “grands.” This spring’’s rites kept them busy! They are becoming “snowbirds” on the west coast of Florida (Manasota Key) and wonder, “Are any Miltonians around here?”

Ralf Robinson has published a new book, Play Ball(et), A Life in Sport and Dance. He invites emails at jmquilts@prexar.com.

Lucius Wilmerding is, at 75, the senior member of his family.

He and wife Adela are approaching their 50th wedding anniversary. The majority of their three children and seven grandchildren live in Washington State: Pullman and Friday Harbor.

One child moved back to Poughkeepsie, New York. All are well.

1949 Michael Henderson is the author of a new book, his ninth, called See You After the Duration: The Story of British Evacuees to North America in World War II. Milton Academy is featured. It is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and at www.publishamerica.com/books/6619.

John B. Hewett reports that he is the very proud grandparent of three grandchildren with amazing and diverse interests. His oldest, Tyler, recently won a Watson Fellowship, and will spend a year studying and researching the electronic drum internationally. Myles, the second oldest, was named a Truman Scholar and will study law, focusing on agricultural issues and community building, and his youngest, Tucker, is a nationally ranked fencer at Penn State.

E. A. Hubbard continues to hear Milton news and reports “Great to hear Dave Jenkins’s news. I saw George Chase at younger brother Jack Chase’s (Class of 1952) party last year, and we even sang a few songs together.

Thanks, Jack, for keeping us in touch!”

Katharine Biddle More graduated in 1999 from the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and was certified and licensed to practice in the state of Vermont. After two years she let her license expire, realizing that her talents lay elsewhere, and began painting. In July and August, her oil paintings were exhibited at the Chaffee Center for Visual Arts in Rutland, Vermont.

Jack Robinson reports that classmate David Stevenson Morgan died on February 17, 2004.

David attended Williams College and earned a bachelor’s from Syracuse University. He taught school for 30 years, sharing his love of math, history, French and English. He is survived by his wife, Alice, whom he married in 1971.

John B. Nash reports that he and Polly are thriving. Their three children have produced six granddaughters and one rolypoly, red-headed grandson. The oldest is 11. They are a happy group and all less than an hour away. John and Polly spend as much time in Harpswell, Maine, as they can. John’s health took a dip with a mild stroke in 2000, which affected his short-term memory. He says that his wonderful wife of 46 years, plus Canadian pills, keep him on the ball. “Three cheers for the head of school and the trustees, who showed recently that ‘Dare to Be True’ continues,” John writes.

1950 Alfred Bigelow is retired and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He recently saw Harris “Harry” Coulter at the Rock Creek Nursing Home (2131 O St., N.W., Washington, D.C., 20037). Harry is partially paralyzed, having suffered a stroke 71

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David Gannett ’58 wished to share with Milton graduates his 2004 letter of apology to Middlebury College, acknowledging the addiction to alcohol with which he struggled and successfully manages today. David noted that “Milton sharpened my familyinstilled sense of duty, honor and integrity. All of this is reflected in Milton’s motto, “Dare to be true.”

David’s letter acknowledged that he had not fulfilled an important commitment to represent Middlebury at the inaugural ceremonies of a new president of a small

liberal arts college near Portland, Oregon. Despite understanding the responsibility and the honor of his role, David’s addiction got the better of him prior to the event.

Since that time, David reported, he has regretted failing to discharge the responsibilities so graciously conferred upon him. “As I write this letter,” he said, “I have not had a drink since March 2, 1998.”

David was happy to make amends and take part in a similar role in a recent academic inaugural ceremony.

Somers, New York, to start an organic farm on property she has owned since the ’60s. Her wonderful new partner for this and the adventure of life, Larry Cross, hails from Maine and is a health care consultant when not farming.

Helen Twombly Watkins and her husband, Eric, happily report that their oldest child, Michael, at age 41, planned to marry for the first time over July 4 at a state park in Oregon. Susan Longerbeam (similar age, also a first wedding) will have received her doctorate from the University of Maryland, and hopes to work in upper-level college administration.

1957 several years ago, but his mind is as sharp as ever. He maintains an interest in domestic and world affairs. Classmates and friends are welcome to call (202835-0411) or visit (please call ahead). A voracious reader, Harry appreciates any “good” books friends send him. His book critiques are refreshing and often surprising!

Rachel Felton Muller took two fabulous trips this year. The first took her to Venice with friends and the second to Costa Rica on a Smith College family trip with her granddaughter, Rebecca. She highly recommends both destinations. Back home, Rachel plays paddle tennis and tennis, and teaches for Literacy Volunteers.

As a board member, Judith Mackay Phillips spends most of her time at the Arboretum in Seattle, Washington, just five minutes from her home. She says, “I could walk there if I weren’t saving my athletic energy for tennis!”

1951 Nicholas J. Baker has compiled and edited two books, The Artistic Legacy of John Prentiss Benson, Volumes I and II, about

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his late wife Joan’s grandfather.

Joan Prentiss Benson Baker ’54 was named after her grandfather. An exhibition of John P. Benson’s paintings was held last summer at the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Athenaeum. In addition to the two reference books, a collection of boxed greeting cards is available.

1954 C. S. Heard is practicing law in the Chrysler Building in New York and enjoying wildlife at Seabrook Island, South Carolina.

1955 Penny Fisher Crowell Dunklee reports that she won a first prize this spring for a miniature watercolor in a show in Albuquerque, “Miniature Bardean—Masterworks.” She says she is “still laughing, my parts still work, painting and doing stuff for the New Mexico Watercolor Society, as well as editing John’s writing.” She adds, “It would have been fun to join everyone at reunion.”

1956 Marian Lapsley Schwarz stepped down from running the Adult Literacy Media Alliance in New York City, and has moved to

Avis Bohlen spent spring semester teaching a course at Georgetown University on weapons of mass destruction.

1962 Virginia Frothingham Fleet works as a therapist at a community mental health center in Greenfield, Massachusetts. She plays violin in a local orchestra, takes a painting class and a class in psychoanalytic theory.

1963 Tim Brooks retired from his position as the dean of students at the University of Delaware, but he’s stayed on as a professor and works part-time in the University Center for Disabilities Studies. He reports that he is finding his second career in the disabilities world very fulfilling.

1964 Peter Pavan is in his sixth year as chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of South Florida in Tampa. His greatest challenge is from his female chief resident.

After having delivered a wonderful baby boy by caesarean section, his colleague challenged him to a series of road races. He has beaten her in the first two 5K races. Now she has increased

the ante: the next race was to be a 10K on July 3, 2005. He writes, “I hope I do better than Bobby Riggs.”

Lindley G. Thomasset consults for a local hospice association, which she finds rewarding. She has been a member of the Hudson Bells (like Octets) for 21 years. She and Paul went to Costa Rica in January, which was a “wonderful experience.” They will visit the house they rent in France this fall. “Life is good— thanks to Milton, I can read music and speak French.”

1965 Judy Whiteside survived a neardeath experience caused by Addison’s disease, a rare chronic condition that had remained undiagnosed for several months.

She is teaching English—grades 9, 10 and 11—at Wareham High School, specializing in working with children with learning disorders. Life has good rewards, and hers has been blessed with superior education, a controllable disease, work she finds rewarding and challenging, and two very nice children.

1966 Warren Chase and wife Sandra have returned from a two-year assignment running a large project in Mali (West Africa) to provide assistance to that country’s financial sector. He has returned to independent investment banking, work that he did for 20 years. He reported that he has been preparing for a classical music voice recital and connecting with activities in the public realm in New York and D.C.

1967 After exchanging many emails, a small group from the Class of 1967 enjoyed a rare get-together in May. Sally Walker Helwig wrote, “Some of us hadn’t seen each other in years, yet it was hard to believe that 38 years had gone by since we graduated!”

Most in attendance were former day students in the Boston area:

Class of 1955, front row (left to right): Paul Robinson, Martha Flynn Peterson, Deborah Roberts, Lee Stout Dane, Priscilla Rand Baker, Evie Hill Spalding, Margot Parsons Brown; row 2: Nancy Drinkwater, Mary Elizabeth O’Connor, Nancy Magendantz, Boze Arnold, Parky Damon; row 3: John Noble, Bill Crowell, Yolanda Whitman McPhee, Sue Bowditch Badger, Betsy Frederick Schell, Kitty Stinson Carleton, Daphne Abeel, Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle, Llewellyn Howland III; row 4: Tony Marlow, Walter Hinchman, Malcolm MacNaught, Ellis Waller, Jim Swan, Kit Wright.; row 5: Paul R. Toulmin, Warren McFarlan, Whip Filoon, Fred Cabot, Ned Weld, John Adams, Rens Lee, Howard Foster, Harry Gratwick.

Betsy Bentinck-Smith, Lynn Wheeler Anderson, Jana Palfreyman Jennings Porter, Lindsay Williams Murphy, Gretchen Wagner Feero, Mimi Keith Drummond, Lauly Chase, Nina Brown, Carolyn Stetson and Sally Walker Helwig.

1968 Last September 25, Oliver Kane married Susie Huang in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Helping to celebrate were classmates Jon Sobin, Dave Cornish and George Gibson. Oliver planned to retire in March 2005

from the company he helped found, Ashmore Investment Management. He and his wife are working toward adopting a baby girl from China, so 2005 should be a busy year!

In 2003, Ann McClellan left the world of traditional work in nonprofit management, which she had enjoyed for 30 years, including executive positions at the Smithsonian Institution, World Wildlife Fund and the American Association of Museums. In the spring, her book, The Cherry Blossom Festival, was published.

She enjoyed the public speaking

Class of 1960, front row (left to right): Martha Fuller Clark, Dottie Weber, Susan Abell Morison, Sally Morris Gayer; row 2: Fred Filoon, Tom Holcombe, Susan Williams Dickie, Sam Harding.

and book signing during the book’s launch and at the annual Cherry Blossom Festival in D.C. She is thrilled to see the book on Amazon and reports that she has seen people pick up the book and purchase it without a book signing to encourage them.

She is now working on other book projects in addition to doing public relations and marketing consulting work. She lives in the Washington, D.C., area, where she has lived most of the time since her graduation from Goucher College.

Ann McClellan ’68 wrote The Cherry Blossom Festival, which was published this spring.

1971 Sandra Naddaff’s family continues the Milton tradition as son Nathaniel graduated from Milton in 2004, and another son, Ben, will enter with the Class of 2009 this fall.

1975 Elaine Apthorp exclaims, “Weird, weird, weird that it’s been 30 years. All I can say is: I am one very old teenager!”

Henry Heyburn, Jr. and his wife, Alicia, have had a busy spring.

They are about to embark on a

Class of 1965, (left to right): Peter Carter, Jane Lyman Bihldorff, Ned Rogerson.

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Class of 1970, front row (left to right): Bill Corea, Joel Davidson, Nat Weeks; row 2: Rob Fallon, Steve Gifford, Chris Carr, Jane Cruckshank Zimerman, Jeff Garrity; row 2: Hugh Osborn, Heather Smith Collins.

bike ride across Montana, beginning in Missoula. Their children are with their grandparents.

1976 Macy Lawrence Ratliff enjoys her new job as an ESL tutor at a local junior high. Her students speak many languages: Spanish, Taiwanese, Korean, Russian and Arabic, to name a few. She says it’s been a wonderful transfer of all the skills she learned from years in special education. In her free time, she’s also enjoying hiking, skiing, running and swimming with her two daughters, ages 12 and 14.

Last November Makoto Sawai joined RS Asset Management Japan, Co., Ltd., a former subsidiary of RS Investments in San Francisco, California, where he is an independent boutique house asset manager as head of legal and compliance. He spent more than 22 years at UFJ Group, one of four megafinancial groups in Japan.

Carolyn Sullivan and her husband are producing a CD of their own originals in their home studio and anticipate a finished product in fall 2006. It is a lengthy project, as they are playing all the instruments themselves—but they say they are having a great time. Carolyn is happily ensconced in a wonderful “day job” with the Modern

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Class of 1975, front row (left to right): Suzie Hurd Greenup, Martha Smith McManamy, Barnadette T. Weeks; row 2: Clint Loftman, Julia Rabkin, Michael Withington.

Red School House Institute, a not-for-profit school improvement consulting organization.

She just saw Ann Bisbee Scheffler and her sister, Liz Borne ’77, who were in town [near Goodlettsville, Tennessee] for a convention. She says, “It was great catching up with them. It may be a cliché, but there really is nothing like getting together with old (sorry, poor word choice, perhaps!) friends.”

Steve Heckscher married Oksana Vladymyrovna Rog in Littleton, Colorado, on November 13, 2004. Nick J. Hinch ’64 was one of the groomsmen.

1977

Christopher Garrity lives in Sharon, Connecticut, with his wife, Karen, and daughter, Roxanne, who is a freshman

Marc Terfloth and family reside happily in Montreal. His three daughters attend a girls’ school there, and Marc and family travel frequently. He invites those in the vicinity to call or visit.

Sarah Swett weaves tapestries in Idaho. Her book, Kids Weaving (published by Stewart, Tabori and Chang), should be in stores in October or November.

1981

1978 Prudence Murray Bovee reports, “I know I’m supposed to update my classmates on my dazzling professional success (thereby attempting to inspire jealousy while simultaneously justifying my Milton education)—but the biggest news I have at the moment is that our 6-year-old, Rusty (named for his grandfather Russell Murray II ’43) is learning to read. I have no idea why this perfectly normal landmark should leave me so surprised and sort of gaspy, but it has. Can his impressive Milton education be far behind?”

hockey player at Kent School. He saw Jim McLaughlin at the Beanpot ’05 and speaks with Tad Hills every so often. His nephew Jonathan Garrity graduated from Milton in May. Christopher wrote that he recently visited Milton, and it looks great.

“Wow,” he says, “it’s been a long time since we hung out on the science building wall!”

1982 John Feldman reports his children are all attending school in Bethesda, Maryland. Son Elias will be in fifth grade at the Landon School. Fellow classmates include Jack Sears, son of Ted Sears, and Aaron Gordon, son of John Gordon ’81.

Daughter Polly will enter fifth grade at the Holton-Arms School, and son Moses will enter second grade at Wood Acres Elementary School.

Mike Kinnealey is enjoying the combined administrative, teaching and coaching responsibilities as Belmont Hill. In his post in admissions and financial aid, he sees fewer Milton grads, but would be thrilled to catch up with classmates and former students: kinnealey@belmonthill.org.

Steve Heckscher ’78 and Oksana Vladymyrovna Heckscher, pictured with Nick J. Hinch ’64 on the Heckschers’ honeymoon in Hawaii following their November wedding.

Bennett Schneider has been appearing in a play at the Ford Amphitheater in Los Angeles.

The play brings together 10 reli-

gious communities in Los Angeles in one production. He made a trip to Washington, D.C., and appeared on the National Mall as Sister Unity (who lectured at Milton last year). He will play John Waters in an upcoming play this summer in L.A. Over Christmas, he saw Eric Kjellgren, who “is very well and is the grand poobah of Oceanic arts at the Met in NYC.” He invites those in the L.A. area to drop him a line and he’ll give you a tour of the city!

1983 Two thousand five has been a big year for Adrienne “Rennie” Brodeur: She married Timothy Ryan and was expecting her first child at the end of August. Her first novel, Man Camp, was published by Random House on July 19. She would love to catch up and invites anyone who is interested to drop by her Web site www.gotomancamp.com to find contact information.

Lisa Donohue has officially relocated from Chicago to New York City and lives on the Upper West Side. She would love to hear from fellow Miltonians.

On May 18, 2005, Ben Garrison and his wife, Miko, celebrated the birth of their third daughter, Harumi Shani Garrison. Ben enjoys his new “career” as a “stay-at-home dad.” With three girls to look after, he stays busy.

Class of 1980, holding banner (left to right): Clara and Alice Pingeon, Kate Mali Pingeon; row 1: David Williams, Bertha Coombs, Sam Minot, Chris Paul, Mouse Ashjian, Heather Hunderhill Dumaine, Dierdre Duffy, Lee Arthur LaPlante with Jacqueline, Brenda Murphy, Christine Sang; row 2: Nan White Theberge, Robert Mehm, Andrew Moore, Julia Smith Solmssen, Mike Chase with Christian, Tim Games, Andrew Pillsbury, Nick Zervas, Chris Sear, Barney Corning; row 3: Cor Trowbridge with husband Hugh Silbaugh, Mory Creighton, Jim Scullin, Chris Kenney, Anne Grignon, Betsy Garside, Gordon Gray, Yolanda Makowska, Sean McVity, Steve Swan, Paul Barresi, Steve Bates with Calden.

nal. Lisa, who began her teaching career at Milton, has been appointed director of the high school at the Dalton School in New York City. He is pleased that his niece, Lora-Faye Whelan, is a member of the Class of 2006 at Milton. He recently had lunch with Bill Appleton in the city, and sees Chris Morrow and his family regularly in Vermont.

He would be happy to hear from fellow Milton alumni.

1985 Tom Atkinson has had a relaxing and exciting two years living in Istanbul and now Madrid. “This summer, however, it all comes to an end, and we’ll be moving back to the Boston area to settle for a while,” he says.

Elizabeth Day Churchill and husband John are proud to announce the birth of their sec-

ond son, Robert Blackwell Churchill. Born April 5, 2005, Robert weighed 9 pounds, 2 ounces and was 22 1⁄2 inches long. Robert’s older brother is 2 1⁄2.

Bill Denneen joined Mount Holyoke College last fall as director of Internet marketing.

He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, Suzanne, and their three children.

1984 Charles Slotnik’s son, Zachary, celebrated his first birthday on April 30 with his dog-brother, Fraggle, and other family members.

Sid Whelan lives in a townhouse in Harlem with his wife, Lisa Waller, and their daughters, Genevieve and Gabrielle. He changed careers from music to real estate and is now a licensed real estate broker with Halstead Property, LLC, working all of New York City. He still performs music monthly with the One Tree Reggae band. He also writes the “African Beat” column for Beat Magazine, a bi-monthly international music news jour-

Class of 1985, front row (left to right): Doris Kim with Danielle and Madeline, Tim Perini with Olivia, Sarah Smith Gerritz; children Evan Smith Gerritz, Lena Smith Garrita, Clair Clayton, Cecelia O’Menarah, Katie Markis Kraczkowsky, Gavril Rodriguez-Thompson; Mary Markis Kraczkowsky, Charity Appell McNabb, Anias Rodriguez-Thompson, Dan Thompson, Pat Flaherty with Gus and Erin, James Cadigan, Reni Doulos Cadigan with dog, Luke Cadigan with Christine; row 2: Martin and Christine Hoey DeMatteo with Olivia and Tommy, Jacquie Parmlee-Bates, Louise Zonis, Blyth Taylor Lord, Rachael Weber Sabates, Laurence George Chase, Lynda Ruiz; row 3: George Ho-Tung, Michael Dohan, J.R. Torrico, Dan Tangherlini, Mike Choi, Doug Jones; row 4: Ian Lapey with Catherine, Ed Hartman, Tara Parel Wilson, Eamon O’Marah with Ceci and Margot, Hong Duong, Jose Robledo, Derick Fay, Chris Wyett, Steven Kagan, David Pines with Noah Brenner.

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Roger Hicks was sorry to miss Graduates’ Weekend and gives his regards to all!

After working as a teacher and principal in international schools in Mexico, Gabriel Kaypaghian joined the State Department in 2000 and has served as a foreign service officer in embassies in Mexico City, Rome Italy. His next posting is Tunis, Tunisia, beginning in August 2005. He and his wife, Veronica, have three children: Andrés (13), Yohan (8) and Gabriel (6).

1986 Dave Andrews is the new executive director of Rolling Readers USA, a non-profit children’s literacy program. He lives in San Diego with Clyde Yoshida, his partner of 12 years.

On June 11, 2005, Milton classmates gathered on Martha’s Vineyard to celebrate the 10th wedding anniversary of Josh Everdell ’89 and his wife, Lynn.

From left to right: George Papageorge, Jay Sullivan, Eric Taylor, John Notz and Josh Everdell.

Jill Valle ’89 recently traveled to the state of Utteranchal in northern India with Educate Girls Globally (EGG) and the Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles.

Diana Donovan and her husband, Andy Walbert, are thrilled to announce the birth of their daughter, Charlotte Brooke, on July 24, 2004. They live in Mill Valley, California.

1989

1991

1987 Last summer, Sarah Wolman and family moved to Montclair, New Jersey. Sam turned 5 on May 5, 2005, and Hannah will be 2 at the end of June. Sarah is now working part-time at Harlem-based Legal Outreach and teaching at Columbia Law School. “It was great to hear from a few classmates recently,” she writes.

1988 Kevin Epstein and wife, Amy Jervis, announce the birth of their son, Elliott Alexander, in June 2005. Father, mother, big sister and Elliott are all well and invite classmates to email or drop by.

Michael Kobb works in consumer electronics at Roku [www.rokulabs.com]. He finally took the plunge into California real estate and bought a house.

He writes, “I’m working on the guest room and would love to see any Milton alums coming through.”

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Lawrence “Nat” Damon has been living in Santa Monica for the past year where he is starting up Sierra Canyon School, a new independent high school in Los Angeles, as dean of school life.

He reports, “It’s been the perfect start-up for me as I have spent the past 10 years teaching at prep schools both around Boston and in L.A.” On the side, he is writing features and keeping active. He invites anyone coming out to L.A. with an interest in education or entertainment to contact him.

On June 11, 2005, Milton classmates George Papageorge, Jay Sullivan, Eric Taylor and John Notz gathered on Martha’s Vineyard to celebrate the 10th wedding anniversary of Josh Everdell and his wife, Lynn.

Jill Valle recently traveled to the state of Utteranchal in northern India with Educate Girls Globally (EGG) and the Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles.

EGG is a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of primary and secondary education for girls in developing countries through community participation in schools. Claire took nine ninth- and tenth-grade students from Archer, where she teaches human development

counsels students in grades six through 12. In addition to her work at Archer, Claire spends summers teaching surfing at an all-girls surf camp, Maui Surfer Girls, on the island of Maui.

Sam Williamson and his wife, Eleanor, announce the birth of Natalie Owen Williamson on January 11, 2005; baby Natalie weighed 8 pounds, 11 ounces.

1990 Austen Barron Bailly and her husband, Jonathan, are happily settled in Los Angeles, where they live in Westwood. Austen completed doctoral coursework in art history at University of California, Santa Barbara, and plans to advance to candidacy in fall 2005. Her field is American art, and she continues to work as assistant curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Amy Louise Smith and husband, Eric Handly, welcomed baby number three, Madelyn Rose Handly, on February 13, 2005.

Sarah Ingber Culver and husband, Andy, welcomed Natalie Michele Culver on November 30, 2004. Natalie’s older brother, Sam (2), seems to enjoy having a little sister.

Kerin McGlame Adams announces the birth of her second son, Jackson Carter Adams.

He was born on September 23, 2004, and weighed 7 pounds, 14 ounces. He joins big brother Luke (2).

Denielle Bertarelli-Webb and her husband, Andrew Webb, welcomed their first child, Cecelia, on November 21, 2004.

Denielle, Andrew and Cecelia live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Denielle works at NOGGIN, an educational TV network for preschoolers. She says, “I have been there since it launched six years ago and I am sure my extensive knowledge of popular kids’ TV characters will serve me well as Cecelia grows up!”

Linda Harrison Biederman and husband Joel are teaching French and math, respectively, at Suffield Academy in northern Connecticut. She thinks often of Milton as Suffield is also a private, part day, part boarding prep school on a beautiful old campus. She was looking forward to bike touring in France this summer and hopefully catching part of the Tour. She says hi to everyone and welcomes visitors.

Class of 1990, front row (left to right): Sarah Burley, Roxana Alger Geffen, Kimberly Langworthy Blair, Leslie Jones Garvin, Saveena Dhall, Amy Smith, Lydia Unfried; row 2: Andy Wiemeyer, James Millard, David Zug, Aisha Harris Cofield, Jennifer Ginorio Escobedo, David Kimball; row 3: David Bergan, Laurence Lombard, Dan Coyne, Douglas Dohan, Seth Reynolds, Alexis Greeves, August Eriksmoen.

Jeff Courey married Alicia Talanian on June 12, 2004, in Boston. The best man was Matt Courey ’97. Groomsmen included Abdi Soltani and Mike Finegold, and bridesmaids included Cristina Courey ’92.

Other alumni in attendance were Noah Bookbinder and Andy Welch ’90.

Ellen Kirkendall Hummel has a new addition to her family: Alexandra Pierce Hummel was born on February 12, 2005. She and her husband, Scott, are thrilled.

In May 2004 Daniel S. Isaacson was ordained a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. In June, he drove to California with his fiancée, Liora Abrahams-Brosbe, and in July they were married. Spencer Campbell, Simon Clark, Luke DiGirolamo, Aaron Goldberg and Tom Siegfried came to their wedding in Occidental, California. Daniel and Liora now live in Berkeley, California, where Daniel is a hospital chaplain at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center.

Marc Pitman is pastoring at a new church plant in Maine: the Vineyard Church of Waterville [http://vcwaterville.org ]. To pay for his “pastoring habit,” he’s also the development director at

Jeff Courey ’91 married Alicia Talanian on June 12, 2004, in Boston.

Inland Hospital and a fund-raising coach [http://fundraisingcoach.com]. Marc and his wife celebrated their 10th anniversary in May. As if life weren’t full enough, they welcomed their third child in March. Pictures are posted at http://sofiapitman.com. If you’re in the Central Maine area on a Sunday, Marc invites you to check out VCW. Peter Ryan and his wife, Kelly, celebrated the birth of their daughter, Madeline Elizabeth, on October 28, 2004. “The Red Sox won the World Series one day, and Maddie was born the next— not a bad week!” Peter says.

Jennifer Simon and her husband, Fred Phillips, joyfully announce the birth of their son, Jacob Samuel, on May 10, 2004.

Peter Ryan ’91 and his wife, Kelly, celebrated the birth of their daughter, Madeline Elizabeth, on October 28, 2004.

Spencer Dickinson ’92 married Jane Peacock in Key West, Florida, on April 2, 2005.

Posing for the camera are Natalie and Sam Culver, children of Sarah Ingber Culver ’90 and husband Andy.

Kerin McGlame Adams ’91 announces the birth of her second son, Jackson Carter Adams, born September 23, 2004, weighing 7 pounds, 14 ounces. He joins big brother, Luke (2).

Megan Stephan received her doctorate in English literature from Oxford University.

1992 Spencer Dickinson married Jane Peacock on April 2, 2005, in Key West, Florida. The couple planned to complete master’s degrees at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, in May and take up residence in New York City in July.

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Ned Roberts ’93 and Michelle Jordan are planning an April 2006 wedding.

Zach Sturges ’93 married Parvin Moyne on June 4, 2005.

The May 7, 2005, wedding of Peter Scott ’94 to Emily Fox brought together many Milton alumni. Pictured in the back row (from left): Kristen Case, Anna Fricke, Andrew Katzman, Evan Hughes, Sadia Shepard ’93. In the front row (from left): Chris Osgood, Mary Lisio, Emily Fox, Peter Scott, Andrew Topkins, Keri Topkins, Kate Scott ’97.

Zoe Poole says hello to all her friends: “Email or write when you can!”

Repertory Ballet. He recently formed a dance company, Nimbus Dance Works, which performed in May and June in Maine and Princeton, New Jersey.

reunion, where many met his dog Wrigley. He lives in Chicago’s North Side, working as an analyst/statistician for the hotel team at Orbitz. He says, “If any of you are in Chicago, it’d be great to hear from you: jeffrey.b.fine@alum.dartmouth.org.”

Wildeman on October 2, 2004.

The ceremony was held at the Boston Public Garden with the reception downtown. A threeweek honeymoon in Australia followed. Dawn Meehan attended the wedding, which Pam writes “was wonderful!”

Doreen T. Ho married Michael H. Sze on May 28, 2005, at Harvard Memorial Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They celebrated with an evening of dinner and dancing at the Four Seasons in Boston. Milton alumni in attendance included Diana Birkett, Andrew Dukatz, Lauren Dwyer, Stacey Kamya Grisby and Laura Snydman. Doreen began a residency in neurology at TuftsNew England Medical Center in June. Michael, a graduate of Princeton University, works at Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington.

1996

1993 Ned Roberts and Michelle Jordan, Florida ABC affiliate anchor, got engaged in Carmel, California, in December. Their wedding is set for April 2006 in Boca Grande, Florida. Ned reports for Tampa Bay–area CBS affiliate WTSP-TV. In December, he won two regional Emmy Awards for his work, and Michelle won one as well.

Zach Sturges married Parvin Moyne, now Parvin SturgesMoyne, on June 4, 2005. The cobest men were Arkadi Gerney and Hunter Gray. Zach is an assistant attorney general for the State of New York, working for Eliot Spitzer.

1994 Edward Cunningham IV was set to move to China on a Fulbright scholarship from July 2005 until June 2006. He is based at Beijing’s Tsinghua University but traveling quite a bit as he conducts research regarding China’s energy market and reforms.

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Milton Academy alumni gathered in Los Angeles on May 7, 2005, for the wedding of Peter Scott and Emily Fox. Present from the Class of 1994 were Kristen Case, Anna Fricke, Andrew Katzman, Evan Hughes, Chris Osgood, Mary Lisio and Andrew Topkins. Other Milton alumni present were Sadia Shepard ’93 and Kate Scott ’97.

Andrew Topkins is happily married to wife, Keri, who is an attorney at Goodwin Proctor.

They live in New York City where he has started a brandlicensing agency. His agency, Brandgenuity, represents corporate brands including Snapple, Sports Illustrated, World Poker Tournament, Leap Frog and Verizon. Check it out at www.brand-genuity.com.

1995 Jerome Bradford Anderson received a doctorate. in comparative literature from Yale in May. Jeffrey Fine still can’t believe it’s been 10 years since graduation, but loved seeing everyone at the

Scott Tremaine was sorry to have missed everyone at the reunion but reports he and his wife, Maria Lafuente-Rubio Tremaine, were about to move to Spain, so there was much to do to get ready. Scott works for The Boston Consulting Group in Madrid and invites anyone who will be in Spain to contact him for information or to meet up.

Pam Smith is now Pam Wildeman, after marrying fellow Dartmouth ’99 grad Roy

Ohene Asare and Regine JeanCharles celebrated their first wedding anniversary in summer 2005. The couple married on June 27, 2004, in a ceremony at Our Lady Help of Christians Church and reception at Brook Meadow Country Club in Canton. Milton alumni present included siblings of the groom, best man Kwaku Asare ’94, bridesmaid Abena Asare ’98, bridesmaid Amma Asare ’02, bridesmaid Keisha Belinfanti ’95, as well as groomsman Brian Tobin and groomsman Sam Phinney. Also in attendance were Tetsa and Taiye (Eyi) Tuakliy-Wosornu, both ’97, and Natasha Graham ’95. Ohene and Regine live in Cambridge, where Obene works for Biogenidec, in addition to being a student at Boston University’s School of Public Health; and Regine is completing a doctorate in literature at Harvard. They look forward to moving to Paris for a year and hope to make it back for their 10th reunion at Milton.

Class of 1995, front row (left to right): Elizabeth Carroll, Genevieve Groom, Paula Lyons, MC Hyland, Samara Alpern, David Colbert, Caperton Flood; row 2: Jeff Fine, Cynthia Needham, Sarah Aldrich, Walter Hinton, Lyle Bradley, Nicholas Chubrich; row 3: Pete Brooks, Jason Day Bolton, Sam Shaw, Michael Kirkman, Alexandra Pappas, Justin Bowers.

Jared Baird is finishing teaching his first year at Berkeley High School. Also, he is helping develop a two-week program on “what matters most in education” with the Center for Creative Inquiry.

Laura Burnes lives in Medford, Massachusetts, and works as a project manager at a residential architecture firm. She reports that her brother, Ian Burnes ’94, married Gillian Ashley. Bob Collins ’94 and Sam Douglas

’94 attended the wedding where “fun was had by all and the boys even hit the dance floor!”

Peter Vassilev wrote that he was looking forward to his September 4, 2005, wedding to Miriam Ingber. The couple met as undergraduate students at Dartmouth College. Steve Lehman, Justin Beal and William Bunting will be groomsmen in his wedding party.

Pam Smith ’95 married Roy Wildeman on October 4, 2004, in Boston.

1997 Martina Baillie reports that things are busy in London: She celebrated the launch of Cambridge’s first and only student-run academic law journal, which she founded last year, and of which she is editor-inchief.

After time off between Milton and college and again after senior fall, Emily Bates received a bachelor’s in Italian studies from Smith College in January 2005.

She hopes to enter the fields of teaching and translation. “Auguri a tutti!”

Peter Curran graduated from Harvard’s School of Education in June and then moved to Lugano, Switzerland, to work at TASIS (The American School in Switzerland), where he will be the 10th-grade dean and English teacher. He invites anyone traveling through Europe to look him up.

Ohene Asare ’96 and Regine Jean-Charles ’96 were married June 27, 2004.

Seated: Newlyweds Regine Jean-Charles and Ohene Asare. Standing left to right: Dr. Roger Jean-Charles, Mrs. Denise Jean-Charles, Abena Asare ’98, Yetsa Tuakliy-Wosornu ’97, Amma Asare ’02, Keisha Belinfanti ’95, Natasha Graham ’95, Brian Tobin, Sam Phinney, Mrs. Barbara Phinney, Mr. Ben Phinney, Kwaku Asare ’94, Rev. Dr. Seth Asare, Taiye (Eyi) Tuakliy-Wosornu ’97, Rev. Dorothy Asare.

Douglas Helm is finishing medical school at UPenn and will move to Boston to start his general surgery residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Douglas reports that Alex Helm is teaching mathematics at the Newton Country Day School and completing a master’s at Boston College.

Michael Silverstein was engaged to his longtime girlfriend, Kim, after proposing to her at sunset on the beach at the Ritz Carlton Kapalua on Maui in Hawaii.

Mike and Kim live in Los Angeles, where Michael is trying to get his foot in the door of the film industry. He hopes to hear from Milton friends at Mikesilv1@aol.com.

1998 Justin Derrick Basilico married Julia Lillian Austin in June 2004 at St. Ignatius Church in Newton, Massachusetts, with many Milton alumni in attendance. Justin received a master’s in computer science from Brown University. He and his wife live in New Mexico, where Justin works for a national laboratory investigating artificial intelligence, while Julia completes a doctorate in clinical psychology.

They report that they have two adorable dogs.

Alexa Carter lives in Vermont and works with an at-risk youth group. She begins work on a master’s in education this fall.

After his recent engagement, Greg Marsh and his fiancée, Julie, will move in September to Palo Alto, California, where Greg will begin work toward a master’s in education at Stanford University.

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Justin Derrick Basilico ’98 married Julia Lillian Austin in June 2004. Pictured are Matthew Basilico ’03, groom Justin Basilico ’98, bride Julia Austin, Marina Hillard, Briana Hillard and Peggy McClean; back row: Andrea Cantisani, Gilda Lozoya, Ming Zhang ’98 and Mayhew Seavey ’98. Also in attendance were Simon Rasin ’98, Ian White ’98, and Jack and Nancy Starmer.

Class of 2000, front row (left to right): Eugene Izumo, Melissa Domizio, Leslie Wade, Matt Heck, Anna Bulbrook, Prue Hyman, Ashley Carter, Shannon Gulliver, Molly Epstein, Rachel Feinberg, Lauren Sozio; row 2: Scott Vasquez, Kate Orchard, Brent Bucknam, Merrill Feather, Andrew Lapham, Jennie Bartlett, Natalia Solado, Ellen Snead row 3: Critter Gilpin, Leah Culver, Molly Perkins; row 4: Colin Fx, Dave Malkenson, Justin Ng, Josh Pressman, Ben Alschuler, Drew Konove, Rob Weller, Will Connors, Dave Huoppi.

Michael Rozas is working on a master’s degree in architecture and planned to spend the summer traveling through Brazil.

Matthew Heck is graduating from Oberlin in 2005 with a musicology major (theory and history) and history minor.

2003

Deaths

Tyler Jacobson is spending the fall 2005 semester in Paris.

2000

Daniel Weisman graduated from Emory University in December 2004 with a double major in journalism and AfricanAmerican studies and a minor in history. In addition to writing for The Sunday Paper, a weekly Atlanta newspaper, he held a number of DJ residencies at some of Atlanta’s top clubs and still runs a club promotion company targeted at the college crowd. He moved back to Los Angeles in the middle of February and is working in the agent-training program at United Talent Agency with hopes of building a media empire over the next 20 years.

Taylor White spent the summer working in Maine.

1926 1928 1934 1936

Joshua Cohen lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he is teaching kids how to ski.

After graduating from Yale and Georgetown respectively, Molly Epstein and Rachel Feinberg moved to Manhattan, where they share a cozy (read: small) apartment on the Upper East Side.

Rachel teaches third grade in the Bronx as a member of Teach for America, and Molly is a gallery associate at a contemporary art gallery in Chelsea. They saw Lauren Sozio often and were sad when she left New York City this summer to return to Boston.

They look forward to connecting with others in the Class of 2000 who live in New York.

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Milton Magazine

1937

Poornima (Katherine) Kirby completed her freshman year at Vassar. She has been on the crew team, is a member of the Vassar Shakespeare Troupe, and sings with Vassar’s mixed choir, with which she traveled to Italy last year.

1938

1941 1945 1946 1947 1949 1953 1956 1959

Friends Bradford Fitch Herzog, Faculty 1952–1965

Momoke Hirose is at Brown University pursuing a degree in economics.

Alison Quandt was elected cocaptain of the Boston College Women’s Ice Hockey team for the 2005–2006 season.

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2004

Eleanor Lane Cluett David C. Crockett Katharine Reeve Draper Joel C. Goldthwait Frederick Holdsworth, Jr. Cornelius C. Felton, Jr. Paul Hollister, Jr. Elisha Atkins John D. Crawford Charles H. Wolfe, Jr. Ethel Anderson Mary Callan Bailey Prentiss Shepherd, Jr. Robert C. Meisel George E. Michaud David Stevenson Morgan Richard “Scotty” R. Stewart Bradford N. Swett Rollin M. Johnson John C. Pappas

Stay up to date with classmates. Submit and view class notes online! http://www.milton.edu/ alumni/pages/ad/index.asp

Margaret Creighton Williams Margaret Creighton Williams, widow of Ralph B. Williams ’26, died on January 17, 2005, after a remarkably full 97 years.

Margaret was the mother of Benjamin Jackson Williams ’54 of Beverly Farms, Sally Williams Casey (a Milton parent) of Greenwich, Connecticut, and the late Ralph B. Williams III ’51 and Albert C. Williams ’60. She

counted many Milton graduates among her nieces, nephews and grandchildren. Her affection for the School is evident in the Williams International Squash Courts, the hockey rink, as well as the many special funds she supported. Milton mourns the loss of a true friend and extends its deepest sympathy to the Williams family.

Paul V. Harper ’33 A Leader in the Uses of Nuclear Medicine Published: August 13, 2005 Dr. Paul V. Harper, who as a nuclear medicine pioneer led a University of Chicago team that developed an isotope widely used to pinpoint and diagnose cancers, died on July 15 at a hospice in Evanston, Ill. He was 89.

The cause was pneumonia, a university spokesman said.

Dr. Harper’s team conducted its research in the 1960s using technetium, a radioactive element discovered during the 1930’s. Working with another researcher, Katherine A. Lathrop, and others, Dr. Harper injected an isotope, technetium 99m, into a patient’s bloodstream and then traced its progress through the brain, the heart, the liver and other organs.

Richard R. Stewart ’49

Richard R. Stewart ’49 Volunteer Squash Coach for Seven Years Richard R. Stewart ’49 died June 22 in his home in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the youngest of three brothers, Charles P. Jr. ’41 and Donald McD. ’45. Their father was Charles P. Stewart, Sr. ’13.

After Milton, Scotty, as he was known to his Milton friends, received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Trinity College in Hartford and a law degree from Boston University. He was the captain of the Trinity College squash team, an excellent hardball player who won three amateur national singles championships. A longtime resident of Southport, Connecticut, he

retired to Ipswich and, for the last seven years, volunteered to work with the Milton boys’ squash team, at first as an occasional coach and consultant, then for the most recent five years as the primary coach. His knowledge, coaching ability and success produced winning teams and ISL championships.

One of his players writes, “His critiques and comments will be remembered and cherished by all the members of the squash team; we will remember the many good times we had with our coach, and mostly, our friend.”

Francis D. Millet

The Chicago experiments brought about a method of scanning the isotope to create images of cancers and other tumors. In 1963, while using their method, Dr. Harper and his team performed the first detailed scan of the brain. Their technetium isotope remains in use and, with its relatively rapid disintegration, has proved to be a safer diagnostic tool than isotopes developed earlier.

Trained as a surgeon, Dr. Harper was keenly interested in nuclear medicine’s therapeutic as well as diagnostic aspects. In the 1950s, he surgically implanted radioactive materials in patients to treat tumors of the pancreas that were otherwise inoperable, initially by inserting radium needles. He later implanted lengths of fine plastic tubing filled with another radioactive isotope, iodine 131, to shrink or even destroy cancers and tumors.

Dr. Robert Beck, an emeritus professor of radiology at Chicago, said Dr. Harper’s pathbreaking experiments had produced “valuable methods for irradiating the pancreas and a variety of organs, and those

methods are used today for treating the pituitary gland as well as the prostate.”

In 1961, working with Ms. Lathrop, Dr. Harper also devised an efficient method of producing iodine 125, an isotope considered significantly safer than iodine 131. Iodine 125, used to scan the liver and the thyroid, remains a common medical tool, Dr. Beck said.

Paul Vincent Harper was born in Chicago, the grandson of William Rainey Harper, founding president of the University of Chicago.

Paul Harper attended Milton Academy and received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard. After training in surgery at Chicago, he became an assistant professor of surgery there in 1953 and was named professor in 1960. In 1963, he was made an associate director of Argonne Cancer Research Hospital, at the university.

Dr. Harper studied the effects of doses of radiation, a discipline known as dosimetry, and was appointed to the International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements in 1975. He received a presidential citation from the Society of Nuclear Medicine in 1986.

His wife, the former Phyllis Sweetser, died in 1993. They made their home in Glencoe, Ill., a Chicago suburb.

He is survived by two sons, David, of Pennington, N.J., and William, of Hartford; two daughters, Stephanie Harper of Glencoe and Cynthia Harper of Chicago; a sister, Jane Overton of Chicago; a close friend, Syble Paden of Evanston; and two grandchildren. © Copyright 2005, The New York

Times. Reprinted with permission.

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Lexi Rudnitsky, Class of 1991, Poet On January 17, 2005, Lexi Rudnitsky, Class of 1991, died suddenly of cardiac arrest.

It is with such sadness and continued disbelief that we find ourselves writing a remembrance of Lexi Rudnitsky. We are 15 years out of high school, but it was at Milton where we first met Lexi and embarked upon a friendship that lasted. It was 1987, our freshman year. It all began, as mornings did for many of us day students at Milton, with the bus ride. In fact, anyone who rode the Needham-Wellesley bus route during those years would remember her. Some people just stand out in this world. Lexi was often late, desperately flagging down the bus, only to come barreling on, a whirl of long hair, a tie-dyed T-shirt, a tea-filled travel mug and that leather bomber jacket she stole from her father.

By the time we hit the highway, Lexi would either have us caught up in laughter or a raucous debate with the boys in the back.

Lexi was both an integral and defiant member of our class— both at its center and pushing past its edges. She organized recycling campaigns and launched feminist critiques in history class. She went on to start Students for Sexual

Equality and to co-lead Lorax.

She played varsity soccer, ice hockey and lacrosse, running circles around us on and off the sports fields. She wrote provocative poems for the Magus-Mabus and pleaded with us to reduce waste at the dining hall. Much of what she was fighting for or writing about was over our heads at the time, and as a result she could be met with confusion, resistance and fear by students and faculty alike.

Even in the depths of adolescent self-consciousness, Lexi had the astonishing ability to inspire the silly and spontaneous. She corralled the girls together at parties for Salt-n-Pepa sing-a-longs (“I’m not a man, but I’m in command. Hot damn! I got an all girl band.”); she organized us to workshop poems outside of the classroom; she wrote plays about us and for us; she pilfered the library for obscure playwrights to perform readings in our spare time; she always gave gifts of (used) books.

To us, Lexi was a friend of firsts—our first radical, environmentalist, feminist, poet— the first to be unabashedly and unapologetically herself. Imagine the gift of her friendship at such a confusing and awkward

time. That spirit of solidarity, adventure and integrity never left her or her friendships.

Eighteen years after meeting Lexi, we were as close and connected to her as we were as teenagers. These were not friendships reserved for adolescence—our friendships grew and deepened as we evolved into grownups. And she continued to set the bar, with what was one of her most important contributions: she gave birth to Samuel —the first to become a mother.

This proved to be one of her most brilliant and fulfilling accomplishments. Lexi and her husband, Sandro, shared their love for one another with their son, born on October 13, 2004.

And unlike some of us who engaged in adolescent, confessional poetry in high school only to leave it behind, Lexi’s work at Milton laid the groundwork for becoming a published poet and scholar, remaining an activist in the often stifling world of academia. Just one month after the birth of Samuel, and two months before her own death, Lexi received the news that her manuscript had been accepted for publication. Her first book of poetry, A Doorless Knocking Into Night, will be published next year.

With Lexi, the inimitable combination of soft and fierce ways was always a magnet for others, a call to friendship and action.

Much of what we care about in our lives today comes from seeds Lexi planted. It is the lucky clan that has among its members the daring friend. Lexi is ours.

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The Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Project sponsors the annual publication of a poetry collection by an American woman poet who has yet to publish a book of poems. Contributions to The Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Project can be mailed to: The Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Project c/o Wainwright Bank & Trust Co. One Church Street Watertown, MA 02472 Lexi’s parents, Vicki and Ed Rudnitsky, and her husband, Sandro Stille, welcome any written remembrances or anecdotes of the role that she may have played in your life. Samuel will not know his mother as we did, but these remembrances will be his. Remembrances can be sent to 27 Winter Street, Watertown, MA 02472.

Contributed by Lexi’s classmates Susan Meagher, Amy Hamill McDonough, Cindy Talbot and Erika Malm.

Deepest Remains What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?

—Walt Whitman, The Wound-Dresser 1.

In my early years, I spoke in many languages.

Then I grew quiet.

(This is not an obituary.)

Some of my dreams faded, if they could count as dreams.

I was a good friend, though I mostly called when there was no one else.

I was a poet, though I only wrote when there was nothing else.

(That was often enough.)

2.

I was truly in love once, at least as I remember it.

A boy from another country said, I intend to go alone, which was not what I intended.

I learned to sleep in a hammock, my body sagging to the floor.

I bathed in the river fully clothed: the cotton clung, translucent.

(A man watched from the outer banks.)

I spent the night on an ancient pyramid, monkeys shrieking through trees.

I bribed a guard to leave me alone, and there was no one left to tell.

3.

A young man skipped ahead on the trail.

I must have said, Wait.

(Years passed.)

How could I say goodbye?

I sealed leftovers in ziplock bags; I wore a flowered bathrobe.

I began to listen to books on tape, especially biography.

(This is not an obituary.)

There was a jungle-book ending: strands of dirty-blond light shone through the spreading palms.

Lexi Rudnitsky ’91, printed posthumously Ed’s. note: This poem appeared in the April 16 issue of The New Yorker. It is reprinted here with permission from Lexi’s husband, Alexander Stille.

Lexi Poem (In Memoriam: Lexi Rudnitsky 1972–2005) At sixteen we race past ourselves while you linger in lines, honing a throaty contralto.

It becomes you.

In print it tolls, like a rusty black Remington plucked out from bric-a-brac in some garret in the tropics of your mind.

I only read you.

At thirty-two we double back, catching up to ourselves.

I read you again, startled by the likeness, the bark still in the paper, humid and sap-sticky.

Same voice— full-grown at half your life, the only way your Poem makes sense.

As if your son I try in vain to assemble you from text: a scalloped red sundress, two flip-flops fold to arches, your heels trace a sundial in sand.

But of course It shouldn’t make sense.

I only read you.

Aaron Goldberg ’91

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Smart Philanthropy We Wrote the Book on It Smart philanthropy for you may mean making an outright gift now, a planned gift or both. Milton’s Philanthropy Handbook helps members of the Academy family understand different ways to structure their gifts and the advantages of various options.

To request a handbook, please call or email Suzie Hurd Greenup ’75 in the Office of Development and Alumni Relations at 617-898-2376 or suzie_greenup@milton.edu.

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Milton Academy Board of Trustees, 2005

Julia W. Bennett ’79 Norwell, Massachusetts Bradley M. Bloom Wellesley, Massachusetts William T. Burgin ’61 Dover, Massachusetts James M. Fitzgibbons ’52 Emeritus Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts Austin D. Goolsbee ’87 Chicago, Illinois Victoria Hall Graham ’81 New York, New York Margaret Jewett Greer ’47 Emerita Chevy Chase, Maryland Antonia Monroe Grumbach ’61 Secretary New York, New York J. Tomilson Hill ’66 New York, New York

Franklin W. Hobbs IV ’65 President New York, New York

John P. Reardon ’56 Vice President Cohasset, Massachusetts

Barbara Hostetter Boston, Massachusetts

John S. Reidy ’56 Boston, Massachusetts

Ogden M. Hunnewell ’70 Vice President Brookline, Massachusetts

Kevin Reilly Jr. ’73 Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Harold W. Janeway ’54 Emeritus Webster, New Hampshire Lisa A. Jones ’84 Newton, Massachusetts George A. Kellner Vice President New York, New York F. Warren McFarlan ’55 Belmont, Massachusetts Carol Smith Miller Boston, Massachusetts

Robin Robertson Head of School Milton, Massachusetts H. Marshall Schwarz ’54 Emeritus New York, New York Karan Sheldon ’73 Blue Hill Falls, Maine Frederick G. Sykes ’65 Rye, New York Jide J. Zeitlin ’81 Treasurer New York, New York

Tracy Pun Palandjian ’89 Belmont, Massachusetts Richard C. Perry ’73 New York, New York

On the back cover: Ashley Chow, author of “Last Ferry,” won a 2005 Head of School Award. She and Marguerite Weisman ’05, shared the honor of winning the Markham and Pierpont Stackpole Prize, awarded in honor of two English teachers, father and son, to authors of unusual talent in creative writing. Ashley’s poem was part of her senior project, a slim volume of poetry, Parachutes: the Beginning, Poetry by Ashley Chow.

Milton Magazine Milton Academy Communications Office Milton, Massachusetts 02186

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Last Ferry We sit in blue plastic seats, dusk. The sky foams gold cloud and dirty pink.

Look at my irises In the gray you can see seagulls withdrawing and their flight home, clear like beach glass. The deck is full and the air, restless with autumn and the smell of salt water.

Ashley Chow ’05