www.andover.edu/intouch Gabrielle Sheinberg. Great rehearsal dinner at John’s house upstate, with the wedding ceremony held high in the Catskills. John is the entrepreneur-in-residence in a new teaching/mentoring program at UCLA and is contemplating writing a new book. Dave is looking to hand over the reins of his board president role at the San Francisco Film Society and return to film a project with KQED about tech start-ups in Silicon Valley. And finally, back to our e-mail thread. Bill Gardner responded at one point, “That Andy Rutherford has stayed so true to the Andy Rutherford I remember gives me great joy.” Which reminds me: Spring 2016—not too far away now—is the time for our class to reconvene.
1972 ABBOT Julia Gibert 300 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 7ED England + 44 0 7766 022832 juliagibert@gmail.com
Our class report for the summer of 2015 is all about love, adventure, and connection—so, not a lot of change in 40-plus years. Since feeling is first, I’ll begin with love: Maud Lavin and her partner, Bruce, entered into a civil union in Illinois in June, and Nora Kyger, with her partner, Bill, was there to celebrate. Maud is, as ever, active in culture and feminist studies, and she spoke at the Asia in Motion conference in Taipei in June on issues in gender, art, and popular culture. Nora is executive vice president and partner at Ter Molen Watkins & Brandt, but I bet she still drums. And long-lost Laurie Camosy McKinney turned up gorgeous and engaged to her partner, Morgan Pearsall, with a September wedding planned. Which brings us to adventure. I had a newsy letter from Lila Wills Bronson that just missed the deadline for our last class notes. Lila was recently back from study in a spiritual eco-village in northern Italy. Lila retired in 2014 from a 37-year career in education and has started her own educational consultancy in Los Angeles. Since retirement, she’s also had more time to spend on her 40-year astrology business. Somehow she also manages to find time for three daughters, three stepdaughters, her sweetheart of 14 years, her grandchildren, and traveling. Jessica Straus’s adventure was an artistic tour of the ossuaries of Europe. She wrote a wonderful blog about it, and you can find the blog, Quirk, and all her photos at https://jessicastraus. wordpress.com/, or by searching her name with the word “ossuary” (a “chest, box, building, well,
or site made to serve as the final resting place of human skeletal remains”). Joanie Lichtman’s adventure is extraordinary in a different way. I hope to have more information on this in the next news, but for now, all I know is that Joanie is in Cambodia as a psychologist volunteer working with traumatized families—with grim ossuaries in the background. I also know that Joanie is an amazing, brave, and strong woman. Non sibi may be the PA motto, but it is equally embraced by Abbot. And that brings us, finally, and cheerfully, to connection—and we don’t need much excuse for that. Since we have long informally agreed that we are one class with PA ’72, we enthusiastically joined the tour of Congress hosted by Bruce Poliquin ’72, the representative of Maine’s 10th District, and the rooftop dinner hosted afterward by Russell Perry ’72. (See photo, page 85.) Nancy Pinks Bennett, Amy Broaddus MacNelly, and Missy Baird were all there. Elly Mish also hoped to attend, but because she looks after her elderly mother, it proved impossible. Nancy and Amy shared a hotel room, while Missy chose what Nancy dubbed a “protestor hostile.” Nevertheless, Sam Butler ’72 (the self-proclaimed “official tosser”) did not have to make good his threat to throw into the Potomac anyone who got political, and in the end, no one swam with the fishes. I am not sure, however, it would be wise to repeat the experiment with any other well-known candidates for the presidency. After food and merriment, Amy, Missy, Nancy, and several of the Andover men took a two-mile stroll back to their hotels together, enjoying the beauty of the Washington night and stopping for a photo op in front of the White House and then a nightcap. These notes will arrive just too late to nudge you to come to our AA/PA reunion on the Cape in September, and too early to give you all the gossip, but the message is still the same: only connect.
PHILLIPS Tom Rawson P.O. Box 1361 Eastsound WA 98245 206-632-8248 tomrawson@gmail.com
Some sad news to report: Doug Westberg’s wife, Carol Holden, died suddenly in March from complications after surgery. Carol helped Doug raise his three daughters and shared with Doug a love of musical theatre. Together they wrote and directed a cabaret musical comedy that ran for almost a year in Portland, Ore., across the Columbia River from their hometown of Vancouver, Wash. Our condolences to Doug and daughters Sarah, Eli, and Hannah. From the Super Bowl to the 2016 race for the White House, our brethren from the Class of 1971 have been dominating the national news. We did manage, however, to tag along and share a little of
the fame. An article in the Boston Globe in February reporting on the Andover years of presidential candidate Jeb Bush ’71 contained a photograph of the 1971 varsity tennis team. Pictured along with coaches Kent Allen and Dalton McBee were captain Jeb and nine teammates, including Dave McCracken, Rich Darner, Tom Raleigh, David Chase, and team manager Joe McDermott. Rich recalls that Doug Billman was also on that squad. Tony Hewett did not make the cut, and he remembers a humiliating defeat at the hands of the future governor of Florida: “I first arrived at Andover for upper year and, like many new students, I had been a somewhat big fish in a very small pond, this one called Morristown, N.J. I had played tennis all my life and assumed I could just walk onto the varsity team and easily handle all these prep-school punks. So it was a blind draw that had me paired against Jeb in the tryouts for the varsity team, and an [expletive deleted by class secretary]-kicking ensued. Needless to say, I never saw a moment of time on the varsity team.” While we don’t have a Super Bowl coach or a presidential candidate, we do have our own congressman. Bruce Poliquin, newly elected member of the House of Representatives from Maine, invited his PA/Abbot ’72 classmates for a private tour of the U.S. Capitol on June 18. The event, dubbed Bruce-a-Palooza 2015 and personally conducted by Congressman Poliquin himself, was followed by a rooftop reception at the architectural office building of Russ Perry, located near the White House and affording spectacular views of the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial. Bill Boak was in attendance, and sent the following account of the festivities: “Bruce appeared to be thoroughly enjoying his freshman term as a Republican member of Congress, which he compared to a food fight in the old PA Commons. In vigorously representing the interests of his Maine constituents, he has asserted his views to President Obama and Speaker Boehner alike, and has jumped across the aisle and into Congressional cloakrooms in efforts to persuade other members of the House. He’s a regular in the Capitol gym, where he competes in weight lifting with Paul Ryan. Bruce regaled us on the floor of the House Chamber with inside stories of Congressional intrigues, and his enthusiasm for the place would have made PA history teacher Tom Lyons very proud. “Because we 1972ers remain strongly opinionated, we established ground rules under which there were to be no political debates for the day, upon penalty of being tossed into the Potomac River by the ‘official tosser,’ Sam Butler. Fortunately, there was no action needed on Sam’s part, as the group remained relatively well behaved and proceeded to the rooftop reception, dodging scattered thunder showers. To thank Bruce for the event, and to keep him out of trouble with the GOP leadership, we presented him with a rare red Andover sweatshirt.” Andover | Fall 2015
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