stay connected... Elizabeth “Bets” Kent shared, “My husband and I ventured south to the Olympics. We got tickets before we even knew the word ‘zika’! The venues were great, and Rio was fascinating. We were told not to wear any USA gear nor to carry much of value. There were lots of empty seats, except when the Brazilian men’s beach volleyball team was playing!” Nancy Clifton Collier and her husband live in Hanover, NH, where she is chair of their local land trust, which runs outdoor adventures and conserves land. Their two sons live in Utah. Lori Goodman Seegers hosted Edith “Edie” Wilson Fleming and family in NYC this past summer. Lori also had summer fun with Marcia McCabe and spent July 4 with Elizabeth Rollins Mauran. Edie invited Cornelia “Connee” Petty Young, Loraine Washburn, and Lissy Abraham ’74 to Healdsburg, CA, in late August. Fellow Stanford University School of Engineering alum Lawson Fisher ’73 joined Edie’s engineering team at Omnicell in May. Ellen Hoitsma saw Bets Kent this past summer before heading back to Arctic Svalbard, an area she had visited the previous summer. She then sailed to Greenland, Jan Mayen, and Iceland as a 2016 National Geographic/Lindblad Expeditions Grosvenor Teacher Fellow. Check out her blog at parktic.edublogs.org. Ellen visited Mary Clements Michelfelder in Tupper Lake, NY, and they both saw Mardi Jane Hudson Abuza in Northampton, MA. Judith Webster had dinner in March with Josephine “Josie” Martin, Debra Heifetz Stein, and Liz “Betsy” Coward Miller, who joined the technology advisory board of Judith’s nonprofit. Cathy von Klemperer Utzschneider writes, “A von Klemperer family reunion in Dresden this summer reminded me of how empowering reunions (and Abbot reunions) are. One hundred thirty von Klemperers, descendants of Gustav von Klemperer, gathered there from four continents. Though sobering to remember the circumstances during the 1930s, when the family was forced to leave, it was uplifting to meet relatives we hadn’t known. (I met another Catharine von Klemperer, a 40-year-old cardiologist from London.) That was amazing—along with something completely different: watching Jane Demers and Betsy Miller swim the length and back of Walden Pond (about 11/4 miles) for the second time this summer.” Marcia McCabe reports Victoria Elicker Joh is a second-time grandmother. Marcia broke two ribs falling off a dock in July but has healed and is heading to Paris, London, and Dublin with her sister for a belated 60th birthday celebration. Wedding bells are ringing, as Amanda Cobb married her longtime partner, David Halberstadt, in a small private ceremony in May, followed by David’s daughter’s wedding in October. Leslie Monsky visited Anne Weisman
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www.andover.edu/intouch Hogeland in Williamstown, MA, in August before Anne and Jane Demers drove to Binghamton, NY, to visit Marion Irwin and Connee, who was back East to attend her niece’s wedding nearby. Earlier in the summer, Connee visited Dorothy “Dee” Dodson McLaughlin in Salt Lake City, UT, before trekking in Moab with her brother.
PHILLIPS Pete Morin 41 Border St. Scituate MA 02066 pbmorin@comcast.net www.facebook.com/pete.morin2
Public service announcement: the Facebook Andover/Abbot Class of 1973 group is an excellent place to learn of and discuss (if in desultory fashion) news and issues coming from PA. What are you all waiting for? Most recently, our group (and many other PA class groups) talked a bit about Head of School John Palfrey’s letter to the community regarding campus sexual abuse in the past (posted by Mindy Feldman ’73). There has been generally enthusiastic reception to Mr. Palfrey’s exceptional transparency on this sensitive matter. In any event, sharing their opinions were Ted Harshman, Ted Maynard ’74, Noreen Markley ’73, Mimi Kessler ’73, Josie Martin ’73 and Molly Porter ’73. Over on the 1972 group page, they were really burning the subject up. Sam Butler ’72, David Schwartz ’72, Rick McKallagat ’72, Nancy Pinks Bennett ’72, Julia Gibert ’72, Melissa Baird ’72, and Brett Cook ’72 all weighed in. (This is the news you get when you don’t write in.) Connee Petty Young ’73 chimed in with a gem: Visiting with Lissy Abraham ’74 and Loraine Washburn ’73, they came across a picture from the yearbook. Which she posted. It shows Susan “Sam” Macartney ’73, Dave Downs, Annie Palermo McCready ’73, Amy Rogers Dittrich ’73, and me at the Abbot Fair, circa 1973. Here’s how cool Facebook is. A list of the people who saw the photo and “liked” it (in addition to Noreen and Amy: me, Ted Maynard, Jeff Howard, Dave Harsch, Paul Gordon, Robin Waters ’73, Susan Donahue ’73, Judith Webster ’73, Ila O’Brien Loveridge ’73, Sue Wheelwright ’73, Laurie Woodworth Gilligan ’73, Amanda Cobb ’73, Dianne DeLucia ’73, John Friedenberg ’74, Jonathan Meath ’74, and Becky Putnam ’74. Dave Swanson sighting: In between gallivants to Palo Alto, Hawaii, Florida, Las Vegas, Italy, and Ireland, Dave lays his head in Hingham, about five miles from me. We’ve been playing a lot of golf and listening to a lot of blues music. Dave Donahue and his wife, Sue, have moved from the homestead in Walpole, MA, to smaller quarters in Mansfield.
Dave, Dave, John McDonald, Steve Rooney, Jim Hackett, and I returned to “The Barn” in Dorset, VT, for a short weekend of fun in June: golf, food, wine, music, and a lot of laughter. Finally, Bill Robinson had several big performances of his new compositions in the Raleigh, NC, area in the 2015–16 season; those interested can see and hear them via Bill’s website, billrobinsonmusic.com. In fall 2016, he held premiere performances of a cello concerto in its chamber version, as well as a short work for concert band and a brief piece for string orchestra. Go listen to it—it’s very intriguing. At the end of the 2016 spring semester, Bill was told that his last year of teaching as a lecturer in physics at North Carolina State University would be the 2016–17 academic year, due to budget cutbacks. Adding some medical complications to that, Bill faces some big obstacles, and I would love for some of you to drop him a line and let him know we’re thinking of him. He’ll be moving to Cleveland, NC, 110 miles west of Raleigh, out in the countryside, with green hills and clean air, in May 2017. Bill would welcome correspondence from classmates at billrobinsonmusic@yahoo.com. My daughter Kate Morin Brotman ’07 got married in October ’15 in a spectacular bash in Kansas City. Love that town. We were joined for the occasion by Kate’s bestie from PA—and mine, too—Mathew MacIver ’72. (How did I forget to mention that last time?) We then performed a reprise in Chatham, MA, for the wedding of Mat’s daughter, whom Kate has known since infancy. Ain’t life grand? Please feel free to use my email address above and send me some news. I can only quote from Facebook so many times.
1974 Jack Gray 80 Central Park West, Apt. 20F New York NY 10023-5215 212-496-1594 ray0x@hotmail.com
Ann Hoover Maddox and I had a fun dinner with Peggy Bliss and her husband in Washington, DC. They were in town to celebrate their anniversary with, among other adventures, the show Kiss Me, Kate. Steve Miller called me from Singapore. He was characteristically frank about his professional transition from his role as dean of Singapore University to a solely teaching role. He misses the responsibility but not the stress. We spoke at length about what we want now as we move towards an “emeritus” professional role—in his case, literally. Steve’s candor, always bracing, is particularly refreshing as we enter our seventh decade. Ted Maynard is also looking beyond
his distinguished career in the law. As Ted put it, his priority is “time, not toys.” All three of us, as it happens, are thinking hard about how we fill that time. We must choose carefully now. Speaking about a life choice, Howard Lee wrote us that he “heeded Bill Cunliffe’s advice and got married for the first time, just before our 40th PA reunion.” The spring before last, his wife, Amy, gave birth to a baby boy, Derek Matthew Lee. This past spring they all went to Shenzen, China, to meet Amy’s family. While there, they took side trips to Macau and Sanya, on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. Howard is a board member and a minority owner of a for-profit two-year college with three New York campuses: Tribeca, Flushing, and Commack, on Long Island. He trades debt and equity positions from home, where he frequently takes the opportunity to bask in the glory of new fatherhood. Enjoy being the daddy god (at least for a few more years), Howard!
1975 Mari Wellin King 1884 Beans Bight Road N.E. Bainbridge Island WA 98110 206-842-1885 marjoriewk@gmail.com Roger L. Strong Jr. 6 Ridgeview Circle Armonk NY 10504 914-273-6710 strongjr@optonline.net Peter Wyman 963 Ponus Ridge Road New Canaan CT 06840 203-966-1074 peter.wyman@merrillcorp.com
Greetings, Class of 1975! Thank you to all who took the time to write in. I am hoping 2017 will be a year when we all find the time to celebrate a birthday that’s a milestone for most of us. Life is speeding by. Louise Kramer sent news: “Frank Lavin and I had a great lunch in NYC in May when he was passing through my beloved city from his home in Singapore. Was great to catch up. We hadn’t seen each other since PA graduation, and neither of us has changed a bit, of course! Frank has a book coming out about his father’s time in the military during WWII and encouraged me to get my dad, age 96, to tell more about his time in the Navy and to take notes. Great idea for all of us with parents still here.” Frank’s book will be out in January 2017, and is posted on Amazon: http://amzn. to/2dv18Mk. During the summer Jon Alter had a chance to catch up with George Cogan. He writes, “My wife, Emily, and I spent a terrific weekend with George Cogan and his wife, Fannie, in Isle au Haut, Maine,
a place of spectacular beauty where the extended Cogan family has vacationed for decades. The kayaking, hiking, and droning (not my droning on about the Trump menace but George’s drone-shot footage of the island) were all first-rate, though the highlight for the group gathered on a dock was when a squid squirted its black ink all over my face.” Tony Nahas emailed with an update on his life. “Few of our classmates know that I changed my career from investment and finance in Europe (London and Paris) to sustainability at UC Berkeley, where I am a visiting scholar in the Energy & Resources Group, project managing the Oakland EcoBlock, an urban sustainability experiment that brings together more than 100 residents of a local Oakland neighborhood block and an interdisciplinary team of urban designers, engineers, social scientists and policy experts from UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, NASA Ames Research Center, and Stanford University. Using a whole-systems approach, the project will retrofit a typical residential neighborhood block from a high energy and water dependency to the lowest energy and water footprint possible—transforming an obsolete, resource-wasteful model into an integrated design that guarantees long-term urban sustainability. The program’s objective is to build and blueprint a pilot system that demonstrates a highly efficient, affordable neighborhood block-scale energy, water, and wastewater treatment-and-reuse platform and retrofitting process that can be replicated anywhere in California and the United States. I love working at a world-class university, and sometimes I see our classmate Dori Hale, who is a professor of American literature at Berkeley! I live near campus and miss living in Paris, but love my work. The EcoBlock’s mission and challenge is a daily inspiration. Otherwise, I return several times a year to Paris, where I still keep a flat and where the four kids congregate.” Gren Blackall writes that, after living and working on both coasts and in the Midwest, “[Wife] Joyce and I settled in Woolwich, ME, about 10 years ago. This is probably the only place on the planet below the Arctic Circle where we could afford a house on salt water with a dock and boat right at the end of the lawn. I’m in a kind of semiretirement, having a little too much fun writing and playing, in between occasional gigs in bank strategic and marketing consulting and nonprofit board meetings. Life is good, including my lingering efforts to add another interesting business experience to my resume. My history is in banking, where I have been fortunate to have a great series of interesting experiences, across a wide spectrum. My two boys are deep into music and game production, Whitaker in Chicago and Stoddard in NYC. Joyce and I hit 40 years of dating this July, including her honorary membership in the illegal Silliman ‘commune’ in the Annex on Wall Street by Naples Pizza during the strike. While I don’t do a
great job of connecting with people, I cherish my insanely great times at PA and miss every one of my friends.” I heard from my favorite public defender, Helen Levin: “At last, a newsworthy announcement from the annals of criminal justice. Along with Defender Association colleagues, I have established the Juvenile Lifer Project. We are representing most of Philadelphia’s 300 juvenile lifers, some as young as 14, who were given mandatory life-without-parole sentences as teenagers. Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that they all must be resentenced. Nearly 100 have been incarcerated more than 40 years. On the whole, a thoughtful, mature, achievement-oriented group of clients with uncanny patience. Having done only homicide trial work for two decades, meeting these clients is like looking through the other end of the telescope. What an education.… Hard to avoid comparing their adolescence to ours at Andover. It is exciting, not at all dreary. And I intend to see some clients get out before I turn 60. Please stay tuned.” In closing, I have sad news to share. Margo Donahue dePeyster died Aug. 29, 2016, after a long struggle with breast cancer. Her twin sister Marion Donahue Gay writes, “Margo was described as a ‘cultural leader’ of our town in Palm Beach [FL], founding the now very well attended ‘Campus on the Lake’ program at the Society of the Four Arts. Margo served on the board with fellow Andover alum Ambassador Edward Elson ’52. She excelled at history, art history, and English at Andover and pursued art as a career.” Please see her obituary: http://bit.ly/2dqsCRw. Her family set up a special fund in her memory with the Dominican Foundation in New York, the Margo DePeyster Memorial Scholarship Fund: http://dominicanfriars.org/margo/. I remember Margo always having a smile on her face, with a spirited wit and intellect to match. I can picture Margo and Marion walking side by side through campus. While students at Andover, some of us wore teenage angst on our sleeves at times. Not Margo. She always offered a warm greeting, and her lovely spirit was felt by all. The PA Class of 1975 sends its warmest condolences to Margo’s husband, Fredric Ashton dePeyster III; her sister, Marion; and the rest of her family and friends. Wishing all of you and yours a happy, healthy 2017. Let’s make it a year of reunions. Stay in touch.
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