stay connected... or Sydney. Jason reports that his oldest daughter, Adèle ’14, is a junior at Barnard, playing on the women’s varsity squash team for Columbia. Helen is taking a gap year, and Alex is a lower at Andover. Staying put are classmates Susannah Hill and Rufus Jones. Susannah lives happily with her husband, Philip Pattarelli, and son Andrew, in Menlo Park, CA. She is the director of a local foundation. Rufus invites one and all to come hear him perform weekly in Jersey City, NJ: “Rufus Jones, Soul and Blues Guitarist, every Wednesday, 8–11 p.m., Light Horse Tavern, 199 Washing St., Jersey City, NJ.” No cover. Eric Banta writes that he is enjoying his 20th year as in-house counsel at Voya Financial, which used to be called ING. He spent many of those years in Colorado, but he is now in his sixth year in Atlanta, specializing in derivatives and managing the legal team supporting Voya’s fixed income investment teams. After Christmas, Eric took his daughter Sophie on a two-week exchange trip to Thailand, along with 30 to 40 other high school students. From Marin, CA, Ravi Mohan writes that he, his wife, Christy, and his two children, Maxwell (11) and Campbell (8), are very happy living in the town of Larkspur surrounded by redwoods. The son of one of his close friends attends Andover, and he enjoys hearing about the school through Cameron’s eyes. Another West Coaster, Thomas Lee, is director of the Vision Center at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where he focuses on curing childhood blindness. He is also developing an open-access online training platform for pediatric health care professionals in the developing world using telemedicine. He keeps in touch with classmates Andrea Feldman Falcione, John J-H Kim, and Donald Kim, and John’s daughter Alex ’17, just spent a couple of weeks at his hospital shadowing the heart surgeons. I thought I would end by briefly noting that I live in NYC with my wife, Jenn, and four children, Jason (18), Rebecca (15), Maya (8), and Maier (5). This fall has been inundated with college applications for Jason, boarding school visits for Rebecca, and the elementary school process for Maier. Jason is committed to joining the Navy when he graduates from college. My wife and I have completely renovated our home in Carmel, NY—a “cabin” in the woods at a place called Gipsy Trail. We would be delighted to host anyone who would like a few days in the middle of nature (and lots of sports)! That’s it for now. Wishing everyone a healthy 2017!
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Andover | Summer 2017
www.andover.edu/intouch 1984 Alexandra Gillespie 52 Amelia St. Toronto, ON M4E 1X1 Canada acoonpie@gmail.com William P. Seeley Department of Philosophy 73/75 Campus Ave. Bates College Lewiston, ME 04240 wseeley@bates.edu Adam Simha 84 Rice St. Cambridge, MA 02140-1819 617-967-3869 adam@mksdesign.com
Happy winter, everyone. It seems we’ve hit a lull in our news cycle. Until we get some hard, breaking news, I hope these little tidbits will be enough to tide everyone over. Let’s start with long-overdue thanks to Bill Seeley, Phoebe Brown, Susan O’Brien Lyons, and Dave Duckenfield for their work with the Alumni Council. Bill reports that he saw Susan, Phoebe, Matt Littell ’85, and Graham Anthony ’82 on campus in November. They were back on the Hill for the fall Alumni Council meeting, which happened to coincide with an Andover-Exeter game this year (a close, hard-fought win for the home team!). The usual suspects participated in typical shenanigans after-hours at the Andover Inn bar, albeit more than a bit moderated for the new century. Alumni Council members meet twice per year on campus (typically in May and November), maintain contact between alumni and selected areas of school life, and support the Academy in various endeavors involving alumni. Each member is appointed to a four-year term. Pat McCormick ’83 dropped in on Bill for the night recently. Pat was in Maine fighting the good fight for high-speed bandwidth for island communities Downeast on the Maine coast. This is a service vital to keeping small, isolated communities viable over the long term. Bill also saw Eric Cohen ’83 in Seattle in November. He is thriving and may have turned a number over 50. In news from all things baked, Eric took Bill on an early-morning bagel tour of Seattle. Who knew the bagels in Washington could be better than in Maine? (But never a patch on a Montreal bagel— just sayin’.) Adam tells me Paul Vrana is alive and well with a 17-year-old daughter at Andover. Is it me, or does it feels like there are quite a number of our classmates’ kids at the school now? The last little morsels I have to pass on are that Craig Kaufman ’85 has some very interesting things to say about meditation, and that Derrick Queen is
taking singing lessons. His best rehearsals, according to him, are done while walking up Fifth Avenue on Sunday evenings. I hope you are all enjoying a happy New Year. —Alexandra
1985 Pamela Paresky P.O. Box 8878 Aspen, CO 81612 pamela@ayearofkindness.com
One of the courses Peter Stark teaches is Intro to Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMs), and he reflects: “While I like lecturing, I far more enjoy the lab sections—the students’ joy is so obvious as they learn some pretty basic fabrication skills and techniques, and witness theory’s parity with reality. Today, I tricked one of them and gave her a couple of (111) wafers instead of the typical (100) wafers and told her to cleave it. When she thought she was screwing up and was almost crying with frustration, I asked her to explain to the class how she got several atomically perfect equilateral triangles while everyone else was getting perfect rectangles. When she finally realized the answer, the tears of frustration changed to tears of joy. Anyway, that’s one of the really beautiful things of my day. Teaching is so very rewarding sometimes.” Peter adds that the mini reunions have been a welcome part of his year. In September, several of us gathered at the Andover Inn to celebrate the 11th anniversary of Megan Carroll’s 39th birthday. In addition to Megan and Peter, celebrants included Ted McEnroe, Rebecca Derderian Daniels, Liz DeLucia, Strother Purdy, Seth Brooks, Alex May, and me (Pamela Paresky). In November, the Alumni Council met. Our class representatives are Rhys Dekle, John Kole, Matthew Littell, and Alison Smith Lord. Carter Vincent, Seth, and I were able to catch up with some of them, and with Jenny Rider ’86, Christine Balling ’86, Lee Westerfield ’86, and Caroline Ren ’84. Liz DeLucia hosted an Andover-Exeter pregame party at her house, where we celebrated with Nancy Colbert Puff, Steph Sanchez, Dave Duckenfield ’84, and Ellen LeMaitre ’86. At the game, we ran into Bayne Findlay. (Andover won, by the way.) My son (11th grade) and I recently had dinner with Chris Smith, his wife, and their son, Max, (11th grade) in Palo Alto, CA. Chris, the director of quality assurance for Moog CSA Engineering, and his wife, Cris, have been together since freshman year at Brown! Their daughter, Miranda, studies math at the University of Washington, and Max spends his nonschool time creating video games. John Caron writes that he recently finished his 11th year as a volunteer at St. Joseph’s Parish, and the Harvard Bookstore posted his books, Intimate Ghosts of the Haunted Sheafe Street Inn and Pray Day, online. Cindy Taylor writes that she finished all of her
treatments for breast cancer this past year. Despite complications with reconstruction and undergoing a second surgery, she is teaching and coaching at Lawrenceville. She lives with her husband and two children (9 and 12), who keep her busy. “Still not on Facebook,” she writes. Ben Schwall, who is easiest to reach on Facebook, writes that a particular piece of artwork by the husband of Yun Lee ’86 “…struck me and I made a comment about it [on Facebook]. A few weeks later it arrives at my door as a gift. How cool! How non sibi! Could have been sold, easily…But it was packaged up and sent off to me with a note… such an act of kindness…” Ben also mentioned “Yantao Jia sending my father flowers on his 90th birthday” and “Pete Kleinman who drove eight hours on two separate weekends to help me with a project a few months ago…” (Those of you on our class Facebook page know about “the Kleinshwantz incident” in which Ben referred to Pete by that nickname in a quote for our previous class notes. I got an email from Jane, the Andover class notes editor, saying that a cursory name-check resulted in her being directed to German porn sites. She has since left her position for one at Babson, but she assures me we were not to blame. “The ‘Kleinschwantz incident’ actually gave us all a good laugh here,” she told me.) For the past 15 years, Charlie Bowers (who wrote in my 1984 yearbook, “It’s been tough putting up with you in English class sometimes”) has been a volunteer magistrate for a juvenile diversion program in a Cleveland suburb. About the program, he writes: “It serves children who have been charged with their first criminal offenses and are ready to take responsibility for their actions. We try to emphasize consequences for actions, empathy for others, and making good decisions. Upon successful completion of the program, the juvenile has no record of delinquency.” He continues: “The part of the program that surprised me, and continues to be my greatest challenge, is how complicated school delinquency cases tend to be. I found that when a child isn’t able to do something as basic as get to school, it is a symptom of a breakdown of the family structure. The parents have either lost control and are desperate for help, or don’t see the importance of the issue. On those occasions when we are able to turn it around, it is tremendously rewarding.” Charlie’s daughter, Lucy is a sophomore in college and a musical theatre major, and his son, Jack, is in seventh grade. He remarks, “these kids work a lot harder than I remember working at an early age.” (I think all of us with children feel the same way.) Meanwhile, in media news, Roy Price is the head of Amazon Studios, Tony Optican is head of programming for Media General, and Jim Thompson is at NBC Olympics. Susanna Harwood Rubin writes about all things yoga for the Huffington Post, and in 2016 she published her book, Yoga 365: Daily Wisdom for Life, On and Off the Mat. The year 2016 also saw a new book
by prolific author Susan Conley, whose books continue to garner accolades. Artist Kiki Thompson lives in Verbier, Switzerland, and from Facebook, it appears as though Cliff Bernstein may see her at a Swiss ski resort this winter. In case anyone is planning a ski trip to Aspen, this year, you might see Susan Soule Blizzard, Heidi Salin Godomsky ’87 (who just moved here), Marcella Larsen ’84, Katie McBride ’84, Kate’s brother, John McBride ’83, Anne Rickenbaugh ’83, and Katrina Korfmacher who has family there. I’m still coaching executives and heads of schools, consulting for schools and businesses, writing for Psychology Today, and giving talks about happiness, leadership, bullying, kindness, viewpoint diversity, and how to have conversations with people who disagree with us. Let me know whether you’ll be out my way, and please send news.
1986 Kathleen Campbell DiPaolo 2516 Vista Drive Newport Beach, CA 92663 949-689-3314 (cell) 949-209-2043 (fax) Kathleen@kathleendipaolodesigns.com Caroline Langston Jarboe 3124 63rd Ave. Cheverly, MD 20785 301-322-4241 (home) 301-379-6572 (cell) caroline_jarboe@yahoo.com
Thirty years out and I’m still amazed every time it happens: You run into somebody you knew at PA, and even if you haven’t seen them in years or weren’t all that close to them back in the day, there’s this instant moment of recognition and identification— no matter how our lives have diverged in all the time since, we’re still on the same team after all. And you’re filled with that rush of pride and “us-ness” that time and change cannot dim. It’s not universal, of course: I’ve written elsewhere about the awkward feeling I’ve had when I’ve run into someone from PA and confessed all kinds of intimate and meaningful recollections that the classmate either does not remember or has chosen to forget. But I still stand by the possibility of the Transcendent Moment. I felt the greatest rush of this emotion recently when I read “our” Susan Glasser’s stunning postelection essay in Politico magazine, “Covering Politics in a ‘Post-Truth’ America.” Its subhead reads: “Journalism has never been better, thanks to these last few decades of disruption. So why does it seem to matter so little?” (See www.politico.com/ magazine/story/2016/12 journalism-post-truthtrump-2016- election-politics-susan-glasser-214523.) This is an essay that has some of the personal
poignance and heft of, say, an essay like Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That”—which is what actually turned up in my Google search when I was trying to reread it for this column. Susan reflects on the current state of journalism, but also relates how journalism was done in our younger years, and how it has changed—and also how she is going to get a break from it, as she is heading off to become a foreign correspondent again in Jerusalem, where her husband, Peter Baker, is the bureau chief for the New York Times. I expect and hope that Susan’s essay will find its way into the collections anthologizing whatever crazy historical era it is that we are in. It’s a landmark for the ages. Now, you would think that social media—by its very omnipresence and 24–7 nature—would serve to undercut experiences of the Transcendent Moment: No longer do I receive the occasional phone call from an Andover classmate from Chennai, or from a payphone in Montana, crackling with static. Everybody is just always there, all the time. Except when they’re not. Or when they’re gone, and they come back. It is ironically through the everpresent medium of social media that I find I have more and more serendipitous and meaningful connections. Like one time that my prom date, Tad Beck’s husband, Grant Wahlquist, and I commiserated about depressed mothers on Facebook. This year, in fact, I’ve had a number of classmates come back into prominence in my life via social media, and having them amid my quotidian doings has been meaningful: I’ve been having a good time checking in on the exploits of Nicole Gray ’85 and children from her home in Montclair, NJ. And even though we were never super-close back in the day, I’ve found a shared emotional affinity with Rosalie Woolshlager, with whom I’ve traded fondness for Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” among all kinds of other subjects. Rosalie reports, in turn, that Rob McQuilkin’s “political posts have kept me sane”—frankly, I’m thinking Rob ought to follow in Hella Winston’s investigative reporting footsteps, in addition to his literary agency work. But for 2017, let’s all make the vow that these social media connections culminate in actual human presence, too: Salt Lake City-based lawyer Rosalie reports that she “would love to ski or bike or hike with any classmates who find themselves in SLC.” I just had my annual visit, for example, with John Domesick. He reports recently seeing Jenny Rider and Carter Vincent, and even having an unexpected NYC meetup with Jake Lynch, in town from Hong Kong. I/Thou. Thou/I. Now, more than ever. Love, Caroline Andover | Summer 2017
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