stay connected... then ease back into life. I only go out three times a week to visit the hospital and take daily walks in the park. So I only have 45 more days as a prisoner. “I need to be on a low-microbial diet because of my immature immune system. That means all my meals have to be cooked at home (no order-in is permitted). “And no sushi, raw fruit and veggies, or salads, and if I have meat it has to be super well done— ditto fish and chicken. Not my ideal, but I am over halfway home. “I am happy to report that all is going very well as I regain my strength from all the poisons they pumped into me…I look forward to seeing you in November.”
1963 ABBOT
Cynthia F. Kimball 7 Thoreau Road Lexington MA 02420 781-862-6424 cynthiakimball@earthlink.net
I had a nice call from Emory Wood Disney. She and her husband are living in Brookline, MA. Emory’s son is doing well, working in Providence, RI. Carolyn Holcombe Damp submitted the following piece, titled “The Plight of a Remote Nepalese Village,” which she and two other teachers wrote: “In just 53 seconds, deep shakes beneath our feet changed life in Nepal beyond recognition for all. Our role as teachers changed, too. We three retired American educators had originally planned to teach English to children and consult with faculty on instructional strategies at the Shree Ram school. Aftershocks continued intermittently day and night throughout Nepal more than one month after the original magnitude 7.8 quake of April 25, 2015. One remote village was essentially reduced to rubble. Villagers were forced into makeshift tents. They faced depleted supplies including staple foods (rice, potatoes, lentils), drinking water, and loss of electricity to pump water to their village wells. These hard-working villagers are subsistence farmers living on terraced, steep hillsides and use the most basic tools, growing food for themselves and feed for their animals as they are able. Most people have no income, savings, or earning power. There is great difficulty in purchasing and bringing building materials and equipment to the region, clearing debris, and rebuilding; reconstruction is daunting. “With the school officially closed, our role changed from teaching to providing a place for a tiny bit of normalcy. We invited children to join us for informal daily classes. In the afternoons, teachers came to share their stories with us. When aid began to trickle in, we assisted, alongside a few international volunteers and locals, in distributing food, tarps, and clothes. Our work as educators is not done, and we plan to return as soon as they can house us.”
32
Andover | Reunion 2016
Danica Miller Eskind wrote, “Late in February I heard from my good friend Yi-an Chang Chou, former Abbot piano teacher, that she had been diagnosed with last-stage pancreatic cancer the previous October. After six chemo treatments, she decided to quit in order to enjoy life, family, and friends in the time she had left. When I called and discovered that she felt well enough to have me visit, I dashed to New York to see her. What a gift that visit was. Yi-an was just the same—filled with stories, laughter, and an incredible zest for life. We talked nonstop about everything from museum exhibitions and current political crises to our days at Abbot. Many of you will remember talking with her when she returned for our 45th Reunion in Andover in 2008. When she wrote me about her illness, she ended her e-mail by asking me to ‘say hello to all the Abbot Rabbits!’ Yi-an died April 12. She was a wise woman, filled with a wonderful spirit of generosity. I know many of us feel lucky to have known her. Her obituary was published in the New York Times on May 8, 2016, and can be accessed online.” [Please see Yi-an Chang Chou’s obituary on page 73.] Iris Vardavoulis Beckwith wrote about her adventures with ballroom dancing: “I still think of our Abbot days when Lissa [Felicity Colby], Lois [Lois Golden Champy], and I used to dance and perform. I never would have guessed that I would now be competing in the ballroom world, as well as performing in local Broadway-type shows. If you feel the beat, my Rabbit friends, give it a try. It’s such fun, and learning all those steps is good for the memory!”
PHILLIPS John C. Kane Jr. 28 Puritan Park Swampscott MA 01907 781-592-4967 Jkane2727@aol.com
None of you has volunteered anything since I last put finger to keyboard (yes, finger; my late mother’s attempt, in the summer of 1959, to have me taught touch-typing was an immediate and lasting failure—but man, can that digit fly). In the past I have threatened to exercise my “filler” rights with political screeds, dark visions of the world, or homey anecdotes about my grandchildren. The grandchildren are quiescent, American politics incomprehensible, and the world too complex to unravel in the word allotment. So, to a slightly different, perhaps more rewarding theme. Over the past 45 days I have been in touch with four classmates: Will Nettleship (and wife Lois), Johnny Bilheimer, Joe Belforti, and Louis Wiley. Will and Lois came East in April and spent a day on the Massachusetts North Shore with Louis, poking around art galleries and visiting the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, after which I joined them for dinner. Joe outreached by e-mail in search of contact information for Tracy Kidder. Along with
Johnny’s friend and my Yale classmate Henry Jones and Johnny’s adopted daughter Katina Napper ’92, Johnny and I re-created the Little Rock school integration presentation, first presented to my KIPP Lynn students, at the Justice Department in DC. More than half a century ago, all four came to Andover through different routes and for different reasons. Each experienced Andover in a very different way. Each has experienced adult life in his own unique and hardly predictable way. And each finds himself in his 70s firmly connected to Andover for reasons largely distinct from our experiences as students and yet as a result of those shared years. First, the routes. Louis, like me, came as a legacy, and we both repeated the ninth grade. I suspect Louis Sr. saw Andover as a known commodity that would expand his son’s horizons, as it had expanded his. Will came through the Andover-Exeter outreach program that brought in exceptional students living in the national parks. (Gerry Liles came through the same program.) Johnny came because of the closure and turmoil of the Little Rock schools over integration. And Joe arrived from Marian High School in Framingham, MA, as a marquee student-athlete. No one, it seems to me, could have foreseen the lives these four have experienced, and little predictive evidence lies in a retrospective run through our 1963 Pot Pourri. Joe was stricken early and devastatingly by a medical condition that has bounded his life. Perhaps we would have projected him as a professional athlete or as a teacher-coach on the Sorota/Harrison/DiClemente model. Those options were denied him. Yet his courage, strength, and warm candor have inspired others through a life that is now firmly into its eighth decade. Louis was the quiet leader, recipient of the Lord Prize, president of Philo, and one of the three classmates having “done most for Andover.” I suppose a 40-plus-year career in public television, devoted to informing and engaging the public around the most important issues of our times, could be projected out of that resume—but certainly not the gay man who waited 44 years from our graduation to exit the closet and whose time in retirement has been devoted to identifying and understanding, through art, the major aspects of being gay during our lifetimes, including the devastating effects of AIDS. Johnny was certainly one of the smartest members of our class (three times on honor roll, a National Merit Finalist), reserved, Southern, a member of the chorus and spring musical casts, and, in 1963, heading home to the University of Arkansas. Despite his being one of my closest friends at Andover, I cannot recall a single, serious conversation with Johnny during those years about his views on race relations, and I am confident I myself did not hold a serious, deeply considered view on the subject. I certainly could not have predicted Johnny becoming a civil rights lawyer,