stay connected... One thing led to another, and we were married in 1968, just as I was commissioned in the army and headed off to Southeast Asia. She couldn’t boil water at the time. For the next 48 years I watched her slowly but steadily—from making those early meals for me to hosting small dinner parties to owning and running a specialty food store to building a catering business to writing books to hosting her own TV show—become one of the best-known cooks in America. This October, she launches her 10th cookbook, which tells our story interwoven with some terrific recipes, and I’m afraid my relative anonymity will be blown.” See link (goo.gl/P0N1Cf) for book cover! [Editor’s note: The book is Cooking for Jeffrey: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, by Ina Garten.] From his South Texas home, Joe Parker commented, “I really haven’t had much to share with the Class of ’64 because I don’t ever run into any of you in Maverick or Uvalde counties, Texas. With recent rains, the desert country ranch lands have really come to life. What a blessing! Fat cattle, green grass, and huge coveys of quail aren’t the norm for us during the dog days of August. Life is good. My wife, Chrys, just received her doctorate in counseling and continues to help vets suffering with PTSD.” Their three children—two married with three children—all live in Texas. Their youngest child, a son and corporate pilot, flies north with Joe to the prairie lands of South Dakota and Wisconsin to hunt pheasants. Joe is also taking to the air in his own Vans RV7, a single-engine, twoseat kit airplane, and added, “I am building time flying it with the hope of flying sport aerobatics without killing myself. Still kicking and still up to my nose in agriculture.” Tony Sapienza wrote, “By the time the next issue is in print, my 36-year-old son will have gotten married. I’m still waiting for grandchildren. The further news is that I am giving up daily operational responsibility for manufacturing Joseph Abboud suits to my successor but will stay active as a part-time advisor to the company. Less work and more time for travel and civic volunteer activities (museum and community college boards, workforce and economic development chair for the city of New Bedford) is looking very appealing, with golf, sailing, and skiing as side dishes. I have no plans to leave the New Bedford and Cape area.” Mid-summer, Pam and Paul Gallagher visited him at his beach house on Cape Cod. Says Tony, “We talked about some mini reunions with classmates in addition to our annual ski trip with Tom Seligson, and I certainly will find the time to attend.” From DeWolf “Dewey” Fulton: “Just closed out my English-teaching career last June, retiring after 14 years in the Providence, RI, public school system. Very rewarding years. I will miss the teacher camaraderie built around taking on impossible urban-education issues. I will also miss being witness to even the smallest student success. I will not miss the preoccupation with data and testing.
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Andover | Winter 2017
www.andover.edu/intouch Looking forward to more gardening, birding, local Bristol community service, and part-time writing with an undisclosed publication.” John Wiles died on June 24, 2016. You may remember that John met his future wife Joan ’64 at our 20th Andover/Abbot reunion. See link (goo.gl/P0N1Cf) for details if you missed the obituary in the reunion 2016 issue or my July email report. Patricia Crowley wrote of her husband, Francis Crowley, and corrected the reported cause of his death: “He died on Jan. 30, 2016, after a brave fight to survive gallbladder cancer. He was gallant until his last breath. I miss him terribly.”
1965 ABBOT
Karen Swenson 20100 SW Peavine Road McMinnville OR 97128 503-472-2988 chezkren@gmail.com
I am saddened to report that Gail Goldstein died suddenly of a heart attack in July 2016. Several classmates shared memories of Gail. Marjorie Strauss Power wrote, “I remember her as a fireball, with a joyous laugh.” Barbara Sykes said, “She always seemed to have a lot of energy, lots of projects going on, and she had the most astonishingly black shiny hair. She was bright!” Melanie Fales Davis wrote a lovely remembrance. “Gail was the only child of Dr. and Mrs. Goldstein of New Bedford, MA. Living as I did on the Canadian border, it was difficult to get home for some of the shorter holidays. The Goldsteins very graciously invited me for Thanksgiving one year. New Bedford was a whaling town, and many Portuguese settled in that location. Gail had a friend, a guy our age who was 100 percent Portuguese, with the biggest eyes I had ever seen! I thought he was the most exotic thing I had ever laid eyes on, and I thank Gail for that. “While visiting Gail one time, we went shopping for a prom dress. My mother had made a dress for me that I thought was the ugliest thing ever. Gail lived in the relative sophistication of southern Massachusetts, and we found a great two-piece number that is pictured on the upper right corner of page 83 in our senior yearbook. I was indebted to Gail for making my senior prom wonderful. “Gail embraced life and could be very funny. Some of you may remember that she had a habit of fidgeting, absent-mindedly twirling a pencil, finger, or whatever in her hair. One time she was just too absent-minded and wound a rattail comb in her hair that she could not get out. She went to dinner with this comb sticking out of the top of her head and probably enjoyed the humor of it rather than being embarrassed, as some of us might have been. Gail signed my yearbook: ‘Pooh says live it up— live it up!’ Live it up, Gail, wherever you are.”
Barbara Sykes also noted, “My summer has been about working in retail and going nuts with the traffic and heat in this so very vacation-bound peninsula. Lots of family issues to deal with, and some swimming and time spent at Long Pond kayaking. My daughter Katie, who’s 34, just changed jobs and moved from Albany, NY, to Jersey City, NJ—from the frying pan into the fire, I say!” Maggie Warshaw Brill is excited to report that her first grandchild, Josie, was born in May in San Francisco. Maggie retired this summer from MIT, where she was a lawyer in the general counsel’s office. She loves retirement and has been spending a lot of time at her beach house in Maine, as well as visiting her children on the West Coast. She is delighted to report her son, Jacob, also living in San Francisco, is engaged to his girlfriend, Emma Huntington. Maggie’s youngest daughter, Charlotte, is working hard in a PhD program at the University of Washington. Liz Eder McCulloch hiked down to Phantom Ranch in the Grand Canyon on Thanksgiving 2015 with a party of five, including her husband and granddaughter, got a severe respiratory infection, and then had to hike out. Her “rescue” by a park ranger consisted of being set up with soup and sleeping bags in an open shelter a mile and a half below the rim on a sub-freezing night and then hiking out (very slowly) the next day. She is now fully recovered, though it took about eight weeks. You can read all about it at thefeministgrandma. typepad.com. Liz’s newest grandbaby, Ula Mae, was born in June to her stepdaughter, Leah, in New Orleans. Her first grandchild, Arianah, is now entering eighth grade and rapidly becoming easier to live with. Her son, Eric, has come home for an extended stay, so they have a full house: a 13-year-old, a 46-year-old, and husband Joe and Liz holding it together. She continues working with homeless people, writing (blog and novel), and having happy times singing with Voices Rising Community Chorus. Emily Davis is spending her time commuting back and forth from Greenville, SC, where she is fixing up her home to sell, to Pendleton, SC, where she has bought property. She wants to spend time on the new property before siting her house but is in the bind of having to sell her other house first. Unfortunately, she took no trip to Maine this summer because of the work she is doing at both sites. She ends, “So, basically, my life is work, work, work, but at least I’m the boss of me—and I am quite a demanding but a very good boss. I’ll just say that about it.”
PHILLIPS Ely “Terry” Kahn 243 West 60th St., Apt. 7D New York NY 10023 917-575-1514 ejkahn3@gmail.com
For many of us, I suspect, non sibi did not carry the same resonance in the early-to-mid-’60s that it does today at Andover. While not all of the student body were the “nihilists” that one national magazine suggested we’d become, selflessness and a life principle of helping those less fortunate were not typically—and I’m speaking for myself here—top of mind as we ran to morning chapel. So it’s remarkable, humbling, even somewhat dumbfounding to catch up with Alex Sanger and realize the difference he is still making in our world. I had lunch with Alex in Manhattan in early September, probably the first time we’d had a one-on-one conversation since we cocaptained JV hockey. His travel as the “international ambassador” and a chief fundraiser for the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) has taken him recently to Mexico and Bolivia. In Mexico City, he’d met with representatives from every IPPF organization in the Western Hemisphere. In La Paz, Bolivia, he inspected several of the 16 clinics and four mobile units delivering sexual- and reproductive-health services under the auspices of a group funded by IPPF. Next stop, he said, was most likely El Salvador, where the federation funds the largest nongovernmental sexual- and reproductive-healthcare provider in the nation. “I have retirement thoughts all the time,” Alex reflected, “but then my wife and I go someplace like El Salvador, where we’re both reminded of the value of the work being done, and she will turn to me and say, ‘Don’t you dare.’ ” The consequence, as it turns out, is that he now has the equivalent—in his words—of “three fulltime jobs.” The second, which he’s been involved with for the past four years, is as trustee of the Virginia Toulmin Foundation, which gives grants to female playwrights and composers to underwrite their new work. Through a partnership with Opera America, the foundation has commissioned 30 new operas on Alex’s watch, three of which have been staged. He’s also enabled a young composer to hear her music performed live—by the New York Philharmonic, no less—for the first time (she’d used a computer to create it). Says Alex, “She began to cry when the orchestra was playing, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, what have we done?’ Then she said, ‘These are tears of joy.’ ” Job three? Well, you could choose between the novel he’s writing about his grandmother Margaret Sanger, the reproductive-rights pioneer who had to flee the country in 1915 to avoid being arrested for the publication of her pamphlet “Family Limitation.” Or his new avocation as a painter, which was showcased this past summer in a family group show in Poughkeepsie, NY, featuring work by Alex,
Margaret, and grandfather William, who was arrested and jailed for said pamphlet. When Alex resigned as president of Planned Parenthood in 2000, after 10 years of political and cultural challenges and victories, he remembers thinking, “Enough!” Sixteen years later, he’s more reflective. “All my life,” he concluded before heading off to a Hillary Clinton fundraising dinner, “I’ve worked to improve the lives of women. There never was a plan. It just happened.” Non sibi, indeed. On the topic of reflection, Mike Hudner’s June 4 memorial service for wife Hope Freeman Hudner drew a crowd of many hundreds. Set in a huge opensided tent on a 40-acre plot overlooking the water in Little Compton, RI, with examples of Hope’s artwork exhibited throughout, Mike, daughter Bay, and other family members and friends drew laughter, smiles, and more than a few tears with their anecdotes and goodbyes. Schoolmates attending included Franz Schneider, Greg Richards, Geoff Davis ’66, and me, as well as others from Harvard, the sailing community, and the business world. As fog descended in the evening, the fireworks—which Hope loved—served as a muffled, subdued curtain falling on a too-short life, very well lived. Ed Samp reports our fundraising efforts this past summer were quite successful. The committee— Hudner, Dick Cromie, John Deane, Jim Eller, Paul Henry, Nick Marble, Kit Meade, Mike Sheldrick, Colby Snyder, Ralph Swanson, Danny Samuels, Don Shepard, Tom Hafkenschiel, and Vaho Rebassoo—raised approximately $40,000 from 96 classmates. “This was far better than we had expected this year,” Samp reported. “We even raised our class database number, where the usual trend is down. We’re finding lost people, including classmates who attended but did not graduate.” Sadly, we have lost another classmate, Perry Thurmond, who we learned this summer had died in Fayetteville, AR, in March. No obituary has surfaced, and if anyone has thoughts or memories to share, please do so on the memorial pages being kept by Ed and John Samp. As I write, it’s just the second week of September, and there’s still a lot of tennis talk with the Open fresh in folks’ minds. Steve Devereux had more to discuss than most, due to the success of PlaySight, a company that’s building “smartcourts” that use video and analytics technology to turn a court into a kind of athletic performance laboratory. Universities like Stanford, Harvard, the University of California, and Duke and tennis-club companies like Bay Club and Midtown are already all in, and Steve spent the two weeks of the Open in meetings with more potential clients. “I inserted myself into the PlaySight equation two years ago to help the Israeli founders raise money and close a few very strategic tennis deals,” he reported. “I am a consultant, but my business card says I’m in charge of ‘strategic sales and business development.’ ” Finally, I have to thank Paul Henry for the tennis lesson in Truro this summer. Hope to see more of you—on the court, in New York, wherever.
1966 ABBOT
Blake Hazzard Allen 481 School St. Rumney NH 03266 603-786-9089 603-359-0870 (cell) blakemanallen@gmail.com pakistan.partnership@gmail.com
Greetings to you all. With class-notes time lag entailing a post–Labor Day 2016 deadline and winter 2017 delivery, the following will be short and sweet. For a more in-depth reminder of our dynamic, multifaceted class, please refer to that remarkable 50th Reunion yearbook coordinated by Bethe Moulton and sidekick Lucy Thomson. As a corollary of the many months of outreach and engagement, Judy Froeber Rizzo sent a prereunion excuse. Thank you, Judy, for the update, in spite of your insistence on remaining in Surf City and the vibrant Wilmington, NC, area. “Hey, Blake! I so wish I could make the trip but I am slammed with recitals, sports, programs, and vacation bible school (I have the kindergarten). May and the first part of June are always the busiest, besides December! I plan to write a letter to the class and send a couple of photos of my crew: Eight grandkids and another on the way! I know you will all have a ball. Please extend an invitation to any and all to come south to the beach!” Elizabeth Walker Compton, one of my former roomies, used spring to decamp from DeLand, FL, and return to her beloved Deer Isle, ME. So yes, Lizzie, you are off the reunion hook as well. In alignment with requests for mini reunions, Beth Humstone stopped by en route to her Charlotte, VT, camp. For those interested in joining us, we will send out several dates in spring for response. With Abbot@Andover Day programming as a catalyst, Beth suggested we use Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal (http://atulgawande.com/book/ being-mortal) as a discussion base. While open to any recommendations, currently we are considering bucolic Rumney, NH, as minireunion headquarters: It’s between two college towns and interstates, with regular bus service from Boston, and easy lodging and yummy food are available. Located within the White Mountain National Forest, Rumney encompasses the Baker River, Stinson Lake, and the famous Rumney Rocks climbing area. Yes, I do live here. However, Beth and I talked about an accessible (and fun) locale. All input and involvement welcome. Several of us are committed already! As a sad segue to our memorial service, and with Being Mortal as appropriate coda, a note to classmate Ann Garten Shaw of Tallahassee, FL, was returned and marked as “deceased, unable to forward.” Wishing you all a healthy and happy 2017 from a brilliant September day. —Blake Andover | Winter 2017
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