Portsmouth Abbey School Winter 2014 Alumni Bulletin

P ORT S M O U T H

ABBE Y SCHOOL

WINTER ALUMNI BULLETIN 2014

MISSION STATEMENT The aim of Portsmouth Abbey School is to help young men and women grow in knowledge and grace.

Grounded in the Catholic faith and 1500-year-old Benedictine intellectual tradition, the School fosters: Reverence for God and the human person Respect for learning and order Responsibility for the shared experience of community life

BOARD OF REGENTS Right Rev. Dom Caedmon Holmes, O.S.B. Abbot and Chancellor Portsmouth, RI Mr. John M. Regan, III ’68, P ’07 Chairman Watch Hill, RI Sr. M. Therese Antone, RSM, Ed. D. Newport, RI

Mr. Peter S. Forker ’69 Chicago, IL

Mr. James S. Mulholland, III ’79 Vero Beach, FL

Mr. Patrick Gallagher ’81, P ’15 Annual Fund Chair Westwood, MA

Ms. Deborah Winslow Nutter Westwood, MA

Meg Healey P ’91 New Vernon, NJ

Mr. Robert A. Savoie P ’10, ’11, ’15 Jupiter, FL

Mr. Denis Hector ’70 Miami, FL

Right Rev. Dom Matthew Stark, O.S.B. Prior Portsmouth, RI

Dr. Gregory Hornig ’68, P ’01 Prairie Village, KS

Mr. Rowan G.P. Taylor P ’13, ’16 New Canaan, CT

Rev. F. Washington Jarvis Dorchester Center, MA

Mr. Samuel G. White ’64 New York, NY

Rev. Dom Damian Kearney, O.S.B., ’45 Portsmouth, RI

Mr. William G. Winterer ’87 Boston, MA

Dom Francis Crowley, O.S.B. Portsmouth, RI

Mr. Peter Kennedy ’64, P ’07, ’08, ’15 Big Horn, WY

Rev. Paschal Scotti, O.S.B. Portsmouth, RI

Mrs. Kathleen Cunningham P ‘08, ‘09, ‘11, ‘14 Mr. Tim Cunningham ‘74 Co-Chairs, Parents’ Committee Dedham, MA

Mr. William M. Keogh ’78, P ’13 Saddle River, NJ

Ms. Yanling Xu P ’13 Yantai, China

Mr. Edward G. Kirby ’83 Jamestown, RI

Emeritus

Mr. W. Christopher Behnke ’81, P ’12, ’15 Vice-Chairman Chicago, IL Dom Joseph Byron, O.S.B. Portsmouth, RI Creighton Condon ’74, P ’07, ’10 New York, NY

Mr. Peter Ferry ’75, P ’16, ’17 Fairfield, CT Frances Moyles Fisher P ’15 San Francisco, CA Dr. Timothy P. Flanigan ’75 P ’06, ’09, ’11 Tiverton, RI

Dr. Mary Beth Klee P ’04 Hanover, NH Ms. Devin McShane P ’09, ’11 Providence, RI Rev. Dom Gregory Mohrman, O.S.B. Creve Coeur, MO

Mr. Peter Flanigan R ’41, P ’75, ’83, GP ’06, ’09, ’11 Purchase, NY Mr. Thomas Healey ’60, P ’91 New Vernon, NJ Mr. William Howenstein R ’52, P ’87, GP ’10 Grosse Pointe Farms, MI

Cover: Students Luxi Yang ‘14 (designer), Xijia Yuan ‘13 (left) and Melanie Camacho ‘13 (right) bring ancient art to life in Allie Micheletti’s ‘05 Art History AP class. Here the students have recreated a larger-than-life amphora depicting Exekias’s “Ajax and Achilles Playing Morra” (dice). The two Greek generals are playing a board game with which they were so preoccupied that they did not hear the enemy coming. The students faithfully recreated the details that Exekias used to make the scene realistic. See more living art on pages 38-39.

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

Dear Friends of Portsmouth Abbey, It gives me genuine pleasure to welcome Dan McDonough as the new headmaster of Portsmouth Abbey School. By a unanimous resolution the Board of Regents appointed him to this office on September 28, 2013, making him the twelfth headmaster in the lineage begun when Dom Hugh Diman opened the School in 1926.

Dan grew up in Brewster, New York, the only boy in a family of sisters. He earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Humanities and Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After a short spell working for IBM, he with his wife, Mary Jean, and their infant son, Joseph (the eldest of six), came to Portsmouth in 1984.

Dan taught math, and acted as assistant housemaster of St. Hugh’s for a year, then become head housemaster of St. Leonard’s for two years. He began coaching cross country and track as assistant to Jim Garman.

Subsequently, from 1987 to 1990, the McDonoughs moved to western Pennsylvania near Mary Jean’s family, where Dan taught, coached, and acted as houseparent at the Kiski School. Upon returning to Portsmouth Abbey in 1990, he again taught and coached, and was head houseparent for the freshman boys in St. Aelred’s until 1996. From 1996 to 2003 he directed summer programs at the Abbey, coordinating a variety of oneweek programs run by outside organizations and sports camps. From 1997 to 2001 he was director of summer school. A very successful coach of cross country and track & field, he was president of the New England Prep School Track Association from 2001 to 2003. In 2000-2001 he was acting director of admissions.

He has constructed the master schedule for the School since 2001; was academic dean from 2001-2004; oversaw faculty recruitment 2001-2007; was dean of faculty 2003-2007; and chairman of the Mathematics Department from 1993 -2006 and 2008 -2013. He has held the Dom Andrew Jenks Chair in Mathematics from 2011 to the present. During this period he also served on four visiting committees of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges for reaccreditation of schools. He was associate headmaster from 2006 to 2013 and acting headmaster from July through September 2013, after the retirement of Jim DeVecchi.

This impressive roster of details is noted here to make the point that Dan brings to his headmastership a depth and breadth of experience and an unsurpassed knowledge of Portsmouth Abbey School in its recent history and present state. The strengths, weaknesses, and needs are well known to him; and this augurs well for his ability to assess, both imaginatively and realistically, the possibilities for the School’s future. Speeches he has made at recent gatherings in Boston, Chicago, and New York have shown him effective at connecting with Portsmouth’s friends and alumni, of whom he has by now taught, coached, and mentored an impressive number. Moreover, he is well acquainted with and well connected in the broader world of independent schools.

Being a mathematician, he is used to thinking in numbers and adept at reading and interpreting financial spread sheets. This gives me grateful confidence, mathematically challenged as I am, that the School’s finances are being watched over by sharp and trustworthy eyes.

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Dan’s Catholic religious commitment is strong and clear. For decades he and his family have been daily participants at Mass in the Abbey church, and for many years they have hosted a weekly Bible study group in their home. He and Mary Jean regularly take part in weekly group meetings for lectio divina. Twice in recent years Dan accompanied Dr. Blake Billings and me to Santiago, Chile, to visit the members of the Manquehue Apostolic Movement (a community of Catholic lay men and women inspired by Saint Benedict’s Rule); and in the first month of his acting headmastership, he traveled there again on his own to take part, at their invitation, in a special workshop on lectio divina.

Having many years of experience in every aspect of school life, Dan is a complete educator. To him, our work in the School is not aimed only at preparing our students for college and career by transmitting academic skills and knowledge. He understands and embraces the School’s crucial role in inspiring, encouraging, and assisting young people to become part of a community of friends dedicated to growth in knowledge and grace.

I wish him a long tenure and pray daily to the heavenly patrons of Portsmouth Abbey, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Peace, and St Gregory the Great, that he may fulfill his bright promise of success in every aspect of the headmaster’s role, and especially in promoting the Catholic and Benedictine religious and spiritual life of the School.

Yours in Christ,

Right Rev. Dom Caedmon Holmes, O.S.B. Abbot and Chancellor

Rooted in Generosity A gift to Portsmouth Abbey School in your will or revocable trust enables you to support our mission and make a difference in the lives of future generations of students. Bequests do not cost you any cash flow during your lifetime, and are easy to modify or revoke if your situation changes.

Visit our website to learn more: Giving.gs/PAbequest To learn more about bequests or other ways to support Portsmouth Abbey, contact: Andrew Rose Senior Development Officer 401-643-1280 arose@portsmouthabbey.org

Stay Connected To keep up with general news and information about Portsmouth Abbey School, we encourage you to bookmark the www.portsmouthabbey.org website. If you are an alumnus/a, please visit and join our Alumni Community. Check our our listing of upcoming alumni events here on campus and around the country. And please remember to update your contact information on our Alumni Community pages where you can find out more about Reunion 2014, our Annual Golf Scholarship Tournament, and share news and search for fellow alumni around the world: www.portsmouthabbey. org/page/alumni.

If you would like to receive our e-newsletter, Monthly Musings, please make sure we have your email address (send to: info@portsmouthabbey.org).

To submit class notes and photos (1-5 MB), please email: alumni@portsmouthabbey.org or mail to Portsmouth Abbey Office of Development and Alumni Affairs, 285 Cory’s Lane, Portsmouth, RI 02871.

The Portsmouth Abbey Alumni Bulletin is published bi-annually for alumni, parents and friends by Portsmouth Abbey School, a Catholic Benedictine preparatory school for young men and women in Forms III-VI (grades 9-12) in Portsmouth, RI.

CONTENTS

Letter from the Abbot by Right Rev. Dom Caedmon Holmes, O.S.B.

1

Q & A with Headmaster Dan McDonough

4

Reunion 2013 by Julia Driscoll ’06 and Niel Cannon ’63

11

A St. Bede’s Recollection by Shea Farrell ’76

18

The Great Classroom and Beyond...

The Portsmouth Abbey Humanities Program: A Retrospective by Doug Norris

22

An E-Ticket for English by Michael Bonin, Ph. D., English Department Head

28

The Active Call to Love by Therese Thomas, Director of Christian Community Service

31

Cut on the Bias: The Irish History Seminar by Bowen Smith, History Department Head

32

Portsmouth Abbey in Salamanca, Spain

by Roberto Guerenabarrena, Modern Language Department Head

34

To Teach and Train With Love by Dr. Haibo Qu, Chinese Language Teacher

36

Living Art History by Alassandra Micheletti ‘05, History and Visual Arts Teacher

38

When Education Really Happens by Siobhan Curran, Science Teacher

40

Latin Is a Living Language by Elizabeth Benestad, Classics Department Head

42

On Teaching Math, a Q&A with Kevin Morrissey, Mathmatics Department Head

44

Great Expectations by Steven Pietraszek ’96, Associate Director of Admission, Director of Financial Aid, History Teacher

46

After 23 Years: Returning to Liberia by Clarence Chenoweth, Dean of Students, Math Teacher 47 The Ali Sacco ’05 Memorial Internship by Julia Boog ’14

52

The 2013 Haney Fellowships

by Abby Byrne ’14, Peter Vergara ’14, Kilian White ’14, Lucy Chen ’14, Melody Mo ’14, and Eden Franz ’14

53

Jacques Pages: notre professeur, notre semblable, notre frere! by Carroll Moulton ’64

58

Horse Milk Tea, Animal Fear and Transformation: My Ultra-marathon in Mongolia

by John McCormick ’85

60

Every Dollar Counts from the Office of Development and Alumni Affairs

64

Fall 2013 Athletics

66

Headmaster: Daniel McDonough

In Memoriam: Peter Magnus Flanigan ’41 William King Howenstein’ 52

68 74

Interim Director of Development: Polly Antol

Milestones

78

Class Notes

83

If you have opinions or comments on the articles contained in our Bulletin, please email: communications @ portsmouthabbey.org or write to the Office of Communications, Portsmouth Abbey School, 285 Cory’s Lane, Portsmouth, RI 02871 Please include your name and phone number.

The editors reserve the right to edit articles for content, length, grammar, magazine style, and suitabilty to the mission of Portsmouth Abbey School.

Editors: Kathy Heydt, Katherine Giblin Stark Art Director: Kathy Heydt Photography: Jez Coulson, Louis Walker, Andrea Hansen, Kim Fuller, Julia Driscoll ’06, Kathy Heydt Individual photos found in alumni profiles have been supplied courtesy of the respective alumni.

Corrections to the Summer 2013 Alumni Bulletin: On page 42, in Necrology, Spryos S. Skouras was erroneously identified as the father of George Fowler’ 63. Mr. Skouras was the uncle of Mr. Fowler.

On page 35, in the photo of the sailing team at Nationals, the student on the far right is Derek Poon Tip ’15, not James Lansing ’15.

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 Q&A with headmaster dan mcdonough The McDonough family in 2007

In a world where you’re constantly going to have to recalibrate, retune and relearn, I think learning

W

ho have been your mentors here at the Abbey?

I have a very interesting lineage. On one side, I’m descended as a headmaster from Deerfield’s Frank Boyden through John Pidgeon, and on the other side, I have the 11 great men here, going back to John Hugh Diman. Of my 11 predecessors, I think I’ve known seven of them and worked for six. And there were monks here

how to learn is important.

who knew John Hugh Diman, like Father Philip. So there

The combination of learning

from the time Jim DeVecchi became headmaster, and I

how to live as well as how to learn still comes best from a liberal arts education.

is not just one mentor. Certainly over the last 13 years, started working directly for him in the administration, he was my closest mentor professionally. Leading up to that, the things that prepared me for my current position were these other people.

When I first started at Portsmouth Abbey in 1984, I would probably point to my mentor as Norman Marcoux, who was the senior member of the Mathematics Department and taught math here for 40 years. The schedule seemed a little quieter in those days. We had a math office, and most of us tended to spend our free periods in there in between classes, even though we lived on campus.

Norman would sit at the end of a small table and I would sit at one of the sides, and we had a lot of conversations about math and teaching. One thing in particular he said to me that really stuck in the first year was: “You don’t have time in boarding school to figure out if you like it the

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P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

first year. You just have to sort of go through with it, and

who were struggling, not just the honors classes, and

in the second year, you’ll figure out if you like it or not.” I

that was an important lesson for me to learn. To a certain

thought that was pretty good advice.

extent, anyone can teach honors students; your honors

You know, Norman had done a lot of pretty interesting things. There was a movement in the Sixties called “the New Math.” Norman was very involved in that, went to a lot of conferences and workshops; he was very serious about keeping up professionally, which set another good example for me. Norman passed away last year. We had the funeral here at the School, and he’s buried in the Abbey Monastery. For me, as a young teacher, he was a

student is usually going to get along okay. But it takes a different kind of teacher to reach the student who, maybe, isn’t good at math, doesn’t like math, or doesn’t see the importance of math; the challenge is trying to reach that kid and make him or her feel successful, especially if he’s come here from somewhere else, where he failed at math.

I saw in Father Andrew the patience he had for those kids, and set a goal for myself to be that kind of teacher as well.

big influence.

John McCauley, who was the athletics director when I came here and just had a way of instilling character in kids, was another very big influence on me. He coached football, baseball, those sorts of sports, which I’d never really played or been involved with. But it was really more the lessons of how to interact with adolescents and the standards of character and decency he set for the teams that rubbed off on me. One of the attractions in coming here was the environment where you can teach and coach.

When I first arrived at Portsmouth, Jim Garman, the head cross-country coach, was mid-career. He’d already been the coach for about 20 years, so I apprenticed with him in the fall, and I became the head track coach in my second year here. (Jim, who also taught at the Abbey for 40 years, retired in 2004.)

What is your favorite memory of your time here so far?

Certainly, a big moment for me as a coach was when we went co-ed here in the fall of 1991. Then, in the spring of 1999, my girls’ track team won the New England Championship. That was Portsmouth Abbey’s first New England Championship since 1962 in any sport. I had the opportunity to start the girls’ track team from scratch, and in 1992, I think we had three or four girls doing track. That 1999 team had no Sixth Formers on it, so they won it again the following year. They won back-to-back titles. So as a coach, that was a wonderful accomplishment. Now, I don’t give myself a whole lot of credit for that because I had an incredible group of athletes, and I look back at that now and I think, how did they all wind up here at the same time? These were phenomenal athletes. So in their Sixth Form year, when they won the New England

During the first year in St. Hugh’s House, Father Philip,

Championship again, they took first place in 11 out of

who is retired now in the monastery, was the houseparent.

17 events. That’s the kind of domination they had. You

The teaching influence, houseparenting influence and

know, I won a championship with the boys a couple of

athletics influence were all important. You think you

years later, but to be able to look back and say we started

know it all when you’re young, but seeing how those

with four girls and we didn’t have a track…the School

established people were working showed me how to

built our track the summer after they won in ’99. Another

interact with students.

team of girls won the New England Championship a few

Now, I hold the Dom Andrew Jenks Chair in Mathematics, and Dom Andrew was also a bit of an influence. When I accepted the chair, I told a couple of stories about my

years later, but to have started from almost nothing and to have gone eight years later to a championship… that was a great moment.

interactions with Dom Andrew. He was teaching at the

Professionally, in math, there have been so many students

School when I started here, although at a reduced load.

who have had so many triumphs over the years… but I

He was probably in his seventies at that point, but he had

think back more to the D student whom I turned into a C

an influence on me. Everybody knew he was brilliant,

student or a C student I turned into a B student. The kids

but he always made a practice of teaching the students

I’ve worked with at the honors level have been great kids,

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q&a with headmaster dan mcdonough

and it’s been a privilege to have worked with them, but I’m not sure I’ve really had much influence on them. I don’t necessarily look back and say I’ve changed their lives the way I might have with some other kids, so it’s hard to pick one moment in there.

There’s

tremendous

satisfaction

in

what

we’ve

accomplished here, so it’s hard to pin down any one moment. Anytime a graduate comes back to campus, I hear most often, “I can’t believe what you’ve done since I’ve left!” I want people to keep saying that.

Dan in 1991

Is there a seminal moment during your time here that reaffirmed your choice of career?

I have nothing against Italian, but we’re doing Latin and

Well, I came here from IBM. I’d saved all of my IBM

schools have to decide who they’re there for. There have

recommendation letters in case things didn’t work

certainly been schools that were true to their missions and

out here, and I don’t remember what day it was, but

have closed nonetheless; there’s a certain market reality

somewhere about six or seven months into the teaching,

that’s part of all of that. But I think the number-one thing

I tore up my IBM stuff. I said, “Yeah, I’m not going back.

is deciding who you are, and standing for it.

I like what I’m doing.”

Greek, and a lot of schools don’t offer Latin and Greek. So

Another thing you will find: It’s not wise to come to a boarding school if you don’t fundamentally like kids,

In a career that has spanned a range of roles – teacher, coach, admissions officer, associate headmaster, head of school – what strikes you as the top few traits or guiding principles shared by all successful schools?

because it’s a 24/7 existence. You might be a great teacher,

I think one of the reasons we’ve been successful is

field, you’re going to see them in the dorm, and you’re

because we’ve been true to our mission, and I think

going to see them on weekend chaperone duty. Those who

that’s certainly the number-one thing. There are a lot of

don’t like kids leave pretty quickly.

but if you don’t like kids, boarding school’s not the right environment for you, because you’re going to see students in the dining hall, you’re going to see them on the playing

independent schools out there. And it’s sometimes hard to get parents, and even teachers, to understand that there’s a reason the word “independent” is used. We’re

What do you feel truly sets independent schools apart?

all supposed to be a little bit different from each other.

We have the freedom to set our mission specifically to the

Of course, we have things in common, but it’s a mistake

needs and values of our own school and also have the flex-

to think that every independent school is going to be

ibility to experiment and try different things. For instance,

perfect for every single person. That’s why you want

we changed our curriculum from the sequence of biolo-

students to visit schools and go through the admission

gy-chemistry-physics to physics-chemistry-biology. Other

process and make sure that the school is right for you

schools are now getting on that bandwagon, but it can be a

and that you’re right for us. I’ll give you an example:

difficult change. Our biology teachers had to teach physics

Over the years, parents will sometimes come through

for a year. Our teachers were willing to do that, and the

here and say, “We’d really like it if you’d offer Italian

adjustment happened quickly, because they saw a greater

here.” Well, that would be great, but we’re not going

goal; I think that’s an important difference in independent

to do it. They say, “Are you sure? You’re sure you’ll

schools. Even though we tend to be conservative organiza-

never offer it?” I can’t say never, but we’re not going to

tions by nature, once we make up our minds to do some-

add it just because some students want to take Italian.

thing, we usually get it done.

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P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

q&a with headmaster dan mcdonough

But, also – and I’m thinking specifically about independent

several colleagues told him, “You know, the only place

boarding schools – the level of attention and time that we’re

where we’ve seen the same traits as your Kiski kids, in

willing to put in with students sets us apart. I’ve mentioned

terms of their respect for adults, is this place in Rhode

this several times in remarks I’ve made at admissions gath-

Island called Portsmouth Abbey.” He was really struck by

erings this year: If education is just about the transfer of

that, so, over time, I thought to myself, “Well, what’s that

knowledge from one person to another, then we may as

coming from?”

well all just stay at home and watch computer videos. But a computer can’t pat you on the back, a computer can’t give you a look that says, “You’re doing this right, good job.” Just the feedback of living with other people, having a teacher who can interact with you, both in the classroom and outside the classroom, is a particular strength of independent boarding schools. It certainly happens at day schools, too. But that is really a strength for us, the sense of community and the sense of the personal touch.

Dan with members of his cross country team in 2008

Ultimately, it is this quiet, implicit example set by the monastery. E.J. Dionne, who graduated from Portsmouth in 1969, does all sorts of things; he was our first Rhodes Scholar. Now he writes for The Washington Post. He once wrote a column about Jesse Ventura, the former governor of Minnesota. Ventura was spouting off about how religion was for weak people or for stupid people, and Dionne wrote a column saying something to the effect of, “I went to a school where I was taught by Benedictine monks. Say what you want about them; these were not weak guys. They were smart guys who could’ve had any other career, but they chose to come and live in community and teach us.” And even if he put into words what our students don’t, they understand there’s something special going on here. There are monks living in community; we hear the bells ringing for prayers. I have to think that’s the differentiator that makes our campus friendlier.

That it’s something other campuses don’t have. So that’s something that sets us apart.

Evaluating the options offered by independent schools can be overwhelming. Why choose Portsmouth Abbey?

One of my students from China graduated last year. He’s now at an American university, in fact, at a Catholic school. He told me that last year, in his Sixth Form year,

How does Portsmouth Abbey differ from other New England independent schools?

What differentiates us in a positive sense is, there’s no way to get around the fact that we have a monastery here on campus. Very few other schools can say that. So what does that mean for us? I’ve always felt that when people come on to this campus, they’re struck by the fact that the students will talk to them, pay attention to them and are polite to them. When I first came here, I thought, “Well, it’s probably like that at all schools.” But I found out it wasn’t so. In fact, while I was at Kiski, the college counselor there told me that he was really struck with how

when the new students were accepted at the Abbey, he got a call from a parent in China, from his province, who basically said, “Okay, you’ve been at Portsmouth Abbey, and my son’s been accepted there. But, you know, we’re Chinese. We’re not Roman Catholics. Why would I want to send my son to this Catholic school in Rhode Island?” And – I was really impressed – this young man said, “Well, sending your child to a religious school is the best guarantee of the strength of the student culture.” He said the parent sort of chewed on that, and responded, “You’re right.” And the parent did, in fact, send his son here, and his son is a new student this year. So that’s one

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q&a with headmaster dan mcdonough

reason – the strength of our student culture – why you

second level. Yes, your kids are getting a great education.

would want to choose Portsmouth Abbey.

But what are they getting on top of that? Are they getting

I would never say that Portsmouth Abbey is the right

the right values?

school for everyone. But I think we’re the right school for some people who don’t think we’re the right school

Is there still value in a liberal arts education?

have friends. They have respect from other kids. They’re

Yes. I’ve certainly instilled that into my own children, and they have gone on to liberal arts colleges. The fact is that a liberal arts education is the best vehicle to learn how to think – and what better vehicle than to engage with the lives and thoughts of our predecessors! There’s a certain hubris in thinking that, because we live in the 21st century, we ought to maybe know better; or we’re more diverse, so we understand better. But I think you’ll find that when you engage the past, you’ll see some ideas that are no longer valid, but you’ll also see that a lot of the ideas are the same ideas, especially discussing the concepts, “Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?” So I think there has to be more to living as a human being than, “What’s my job going to be?”

celebrated for their differences as well as the things they

In the current world, my generation might be the last

have in common.

one that could aspire to work for the same company for

for them. Of course, we have kids who came here from strong Catholic families, and it’s a great environment for them. But we also have lots of students who come from less committed Catholic families, and from families that aren’t Catholic at all or who are from other religious traditions. And they find there’s a respect here for them, and people fit in here. I’m constantly amazed by how many students here, had they gone to my public school, might have had a very different existence. I’m not sure it’s that different now from when I was in high school.

I’m happy that these kids are accepted for who they are; they’re part of the group. It’s not just a matter of tolerating them. They’re accepted and drawn in. They

We’re in the process of producing an admission video right now. The production company asked us to poll our faculty about what makes Portsmouth special. Here’s one of the responses: “It is a place where a student may be different but is embraced by a very kind student and faculty culture.” I’ve been ending several of my talks with the statement, “We live a unique mission that you will not find by reading websites at other schools. I am at Portsmouth Abbey because I cannot think of a better way to teach these things than in a community that embraces reverence for God and the human person, respect for learning and order, and responsibility for the shared experience of community life.” It’s hard to mistake Portsmouth Abbey’s mission statement for any other school.

So I would say to parents, “That’s why you would choose Portsmouth Abbey. Does the mission resonate with you?

We’re not trying to drag you here if it doesn’t. I think you may find that the things we find important are things you think are important, too.” We’re sharing with them in the raising of their children, and presumably, one would want to have congruent values in that sense. We feel we’re offering a superlative education, but we’re also immersing their children in a vibrant community. I feel as if parents sometimes don’t look closely enough at that

PAGE 8

30 or 40 years. Even in my time, when I worked at IBM, they had a policy of full employment; they had never laid anyone off in the history of the company. Well, they do now. So, in a world where you’re constantly going to have to recalibrate, retune and relearn, I think learning how to learn is important. The combination of learning how to live as well as how to learn still comes best from a liberal arts education. And again, there’s nothing wrong with people wanting to specialize, to be an engineer, to be a doctor. For us, we’re giving the liberal arts education that used to be standard in colleges, and still is in a lot of colleges, but a lot have moved away from it. So our kids are getting a leg up.

What do you see as the primary benefit of boarding at a school like Portsmouth Abbey?

I think the real advantage is for the family who has a certain set of values they want their children to have and recognizes that they’re not necessarily in a position to deliver it often enough. Parents dealing with peer culture can be very difficult. It can be hard to find other parents, even in your own town, who share your values.

For parents who are looking for those kinds of shared values, the boarding school is an ideal place. Yes, we have families of our own, but we’re also sharing our lives,

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q&a with headmaster dan mcdonough

expanding our lives, to be there as a presence, weekdays and weekends, keeping some wraps on the child culture.

We know from working with kids for as long as we have, that they may see us in the short term as “the bad cops,” but they know in the long run what it is all about. We do this because we care about them, we love them, we are helping them set limits that they can have trouble setting for themselves. That’s the major advantage of the boarding school in terms of the values.

The other advantage, of course, educationally, is that it’s huge to be able to see a teacher for help outside the classroom and not be limited to the half-hour before the school bus leaves. You have teachers here who can see you on the weekends or at night or at lunch. We have daily check-ins with kids that are very important, you know, to let them know that someone notices that they exist and it’s not just a learning factory.

What key characteristics do you like to see in an Abbey graduate?

Portsmouth Abbey graduates leave here with a sense of their place in the world – that they’re not the most important thing in the world. They have a sense that there are other people about whom they have to care.

They have a sense of self-reliance educationally, because they’ve learned how to learn. Those are all things I’ve seen over the years that have made me proud. As the headmaster now, I have to make sure it continues. I’m pretty happy with the Portsmouth Abbey graduates right now.

What does our mission of Reverence, Respect and Responsibility mean to you?

I’m here because that’s the mission I want to support and live by in terms of educating students, so it means a lot to me. It means the last 27 years of my life. It’s very important to me. I was involved with the writing of that mission statement. For a long time, schools didn’t have mission statements. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon. This one is probably a good 12 to 13 years old now. We had a board committee that took responsibility for it, but I was on the committee of faculty that helped write it. We really spent a lot of time thinking about what it is that we were trying to accomplish here. And that sort of triad (Reverence, Re-

PAGE 9

q&a with headmaster dan mcdonough

spect, Responsibility) is very important to us. So to me…

dinners were really just for the boarding students. But

it means a way of life.

we were not getting the day students. Now, with the sit-

How do you think our Benedictine tradition informs our daily life on campus?

down lunches, we get half the school on one day, half the school on another. To me it was a chance to increase the interaction among all groups of the school. I think those

The daily life is the educational life. And there’s no ques-

things are important. The residential life dean told me the

tion that being part of a 1,500-year intellectual tradition

other day that the kids have asked that the tables be set

for the Benedictines and a 2,000-year tradition for the

to include a mixture of all the grades, instead of by Form,

Catholic Church is a huge influence on our curriculum.

because the older students feel they don’t get a chance to

I said to someone – we were talking about the 10-year

meet the younger students as much as they’d like. So, I

accreditation –that a lot of things were on the table, but

made this change, not realizing that would happen, that

whether or not we offer Christian Doctrine is not on the

the students would ask to take it a step further.

table. Now if the Christian Doctrine Department comes up with an idea about how they want to deliver that in a different fashion, I’m very happy to listen to that. But if another department says to me, you know, if we took that out, we could offer another AP course. That’s nice, but that’s not who we are.

Where do you see the world of independent boarding schools being in the next decade or two?

I don’t know where independent schools are going in the next 10 to 15 years, but I do feel that they’re an important part of American culture. A very small number of students, when all is said and done, go to independent

As headmaster, are there any new directions in which you’d like to take the School?

schools. But I think it’s an important part and I think we

There are always ideas and new approaches, but I’m

tradition, to touch upon all facets of life in a way that

excited about the fact that we’re about to begin a self-

some schools can’t anymore. It’s not that our students are

study, and I think it’s an opportunity for everybody to

not part of the common culture, either. But it’s accepted

have a voice. Obviously, as headmaster, in some ways

that we’re speaking with love, so to speak, and we talk

I’m going to have the final word. But we have a very

about these other aspects of life – religion and God. One of

dedicated faculty here who, I believe, are going to have

our young students gave a church assembly talk last week

a lot of good ideas. You know, these opportunities come

about what it’s been like being a Jewish student here and

every ten years, and it’s hard sometimes in the regular

how it’s brought her closer to her own religion. Seeing the

ebb and flow of school life to sit down and think about

way people take religion seriously here has made her take

ideas. I’m excited about the opportunity and the fact

her own religion more seriously. And I think that’s the

that I’m coming into this position at a time when we

perfect example of what we’re all about. I actually told

have the chance to think about what we can do over

her afterwards that several years ago one of the students

the next 10 years.

who won the Christian Doctrine Award here at Prize Day

have a chance, particularly in a school with a religious

was Jewish. As an independent boarding school, we’re

What type of atmosphere and culture do you wish to create for our students, their families, and our alumni?

Culture and atmosphere are very tricky things. You

an important part of society. I don’t know where we’re going, but I certainly hope we have a viable life. I’d like to think that Portsmouth Abbey is going to be here for the grandchildren of the students who are here now.

try to accomplish one thing, and sometimes you get unintended consequences. I made one minor change this year. We moved sit-down dinners to sit-down lunches. We’re at a point where we can’t fit the whole school into the dining hall at once, so the sit-down

PAGE 10

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

by Julia Driscoll ‘06, Director of Special Events

On September 20–23, over 150 alumni made the trip back to Portsmouth Abbey School for 2013 Reunion Weekend. Classes ending in ‘3s and ‘8s were welcomed back to campus; for some, it was the first time classmates had seen each other since their graduation 50 years ago. Everyone enjoyed reconnecting, with fellow classmates, the monastic community and faculty, and with the campus on which they had spent so much time. Some alumni proudly introduced their children who currently attend the School, and a few even showed off their grandchildren who are current students!

A classic New England fall day set the stage on Friday for a terrific day of golf, as reunion golfers hit the links at the world-class Carnegie Abbey course. In the early evening, an alumni art exhibit opening was held in the gallery of the McGuire Fine Arts Building, where, over wine and cheese, guests admired the works of artists Dom Julian Stead ’43, Dom Christopher Davis ’48, Sean Eno ’88, Eric Mauro ’88, and Emily Pederson ’08. Later in the evening, reunion classes met at various locations in Newport, Portsmouth, Watch Hill and Jamestown for their respective class dinners.

Saturday morning alumni re-lived their days as students by sitting in on classes. Headmaster Dan McDonough then hosted a Q&A session in the auditorium and fielded questions regarding the state of the School. With a New Englandstyle lobster and clambake luncheon awaiting them, reunion guests headed to the tent on lower campus to enjoy the feast.

Guests were treated to the music of Jim Coyle ’79 and his band, the North Shore Jazz Trio, and Nick Moran ’81 was able to sit in and play a few songs. Later in the day, alums headed out to various events held around campus. Highlights of the afternoon included: the perennially popular tour of “The Art of Portsmouth Abbey,” led by Dom Damian Kearney ’45; the Ravens’ varsity football team being led out on to the field by science teacher Siobhan Curran playing the bagpipes; and Sophia Diodati ’15 singing the National Anthem – a treat for all who were in attendance!

2003 golfers were treated to a beautiful fall day at Carnegie Abbey on Friday: (l-r) Morgan Jetto, Adam Robertson, Charles Mackey, Brendan Hewett, Alex Forbes, and Walter Zaykowski

Nadia Barbosa-Ferreira ’98 enjoying the clambake with her children, Zahra and Zidan, and her husband, Adonis

Members of the Class of 2008 (l-r) Celina Wright, Margaret Power, Katie Strong, Liz Childs, Colleen Kennedy, Catherine Kennedy, Jimmy Buckley, and Madison Nunes

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“The Art of Portsmouth Abbey” walking tour with Father Damian stops by the St. Thomas More Library to view the display of the City of Portsmouth’s 375th Anniversary, including the original charter of

the town from March, 1638, and the cannonball from the original H.M.S. Rose.

Bill Gilbert ‘03, Julia Egan ‘03, Neal Biddick ‘03, and Pam Silvia Biddick ’03 at the Saturday cocktail party

Sam Francis ’43 receives a big applause Saturday evening while being recognized as the most senior alumnus in attendance.

Saturday evening kicked off with a cocktail party held outside on the Winter Garden Terrace overlooking the Holy Lawn, where classmates and faculty happily mingled and reminisced. Faculty Emeriti John and Geri McCauley and David McCarthy were warmly greeted by their former students. Dan McDonough welcomed our alumni at dinner and Patrick Burke ’86 addressed the group, recognizing two special alumni in the room: Sam Francis ’43, the most senior alumnus in attendance, and Alexander “Lexi” Schwarzenberg ‘03, the farthest traveled, from Hawaii. A highlight of the evening was an ad hoc concert in the Winter Garden, following dinner, by John Cadley ‘63 and his wife, Cathy, who serenaded members of the Class of ’63 on their guitars with a concert-turned-sing-along.

A Jubilee Mass was held on Sunday in the Church of St. Gregory the Great in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the ordination of Dom Matthew Stark, the 60th anniversary of the ordination of Dom Philip Wilson, and the 60th anniversary of the monastic profession of Rev. Dom Christopher Davis ‘48. At brunch following Mass, Rev. John Neilson shared warm stories of his relationships with those being honored.

Anne and Willie Wright ’63 visit with their granddaughter, current student Helen Wittenborn ’17 (center), at the clambake

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Planning has begun for Reunion 2014, which will take place September 26–28. Classes ending in ‘4s and ‘9s, as well as members of the Diman Club (those having graduated more than 50 years ago), will be welcomed back to campus for this event. If you are interested in becoming involved in planning Reunion 2014, please call or email Julia Driscoll ‘06, director of special events, at 401-643-1276 or jdriscoll@portsmouthabbey.org.

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

The football team taking the field, led by science teacher, Siobhan Curran, playing the bagpipes, and the Raven mascot on Saturday afternoon

Members of the Class of 1973 and their wives enjoyed Moxie, a drink of yesteryear, at the Saturday night dinner.

Front (l-r) Peter MacGuire, Jay Buckley, Sheila Buckley, Cushing Condon, Tom Anderson, Roger Levesque Back (l-r) Deb Wagner, Reverend Beau Wagner, Don Macdonald, Henry Coz, Keith Barnes

The 1968 Friday Class Dinner, at Mac Regan’s house in Watch Hill ,was enjoyed by all.

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PAGE 13

To the Class of 1963: I cannot get this past weekend out of my mind. I spent two days with some of the best men that I have ever met. After 50 years I returned to Portsmouth Abbey School for our class reunion. More than half of the members of the Class of 1963 showed up – some travelling great distances. I had only seen one of them since our graduation. We had a terrific class dinner. We reminisced.

We told “war” stories. We introduced our spouses. Some of us played golf at the wonderful Carnegie Abbey Club on the shores of Narragansett Bay. On Sunday night we were treated to an impromptu concert by our classmate John Cadley and his wife Cathy. While listening to the music – songs of our time – I leaned back and let it all soak in, thinking that these moments will never happen again. Yes, there were some tears.

You see, during those four years at the “Priory” we changed from frightened, apprehensive kids to young men. We graduated and went on to college, graduate school, and in some cases, the armed services, where some of my Father Christopher Davis ’48 and Father Damian Kearney ’45 catch up with their former students from the Class of 1988, (l-r) Sean Eno, Chris Nordloh, Timothy Leahy, Strat Wallace, Rob Sheppard; in front: Father Christopher Davis ’48 and Father Damian Kearney ’45

classmates experienced the horror of the Vietnam War. We started careers, got married, had kids and are now entering the age of retirement, of slowing down, of graceful living. This past weekend brought back memories of my youth, and – in some cases – of lost opportunities, for I will never experience that time again.

But most of all it brought a sense of pride. Pride in my classmates and what they had accomplished and pride in the class unity that was on display. You see, back in 1963 we were not considered the brightest class, even though all of us went on to top-ranked colleges and graduate schools. We produced four published authors, a Teacher of the Year in Boston, one of the country’s best amateur golfers, some who fought bravely for us in a terrible and unpopular war. We produced a songwriter and musician, many business leaders, and several entrepreneurs who took risks and have been rewarded with success. Many of us now have the time to give back to our communities, to help others through charitable work and volunteerism. In doing this we honor our Benedictine mentors by practicing quiet acts of Christianity without seeking recognition or rewards.

But our greatest accomplishments may not have occurred after graduation. As our late class president wrote back then, we were criticized for being too critical. We were supposed to toe the line and accept the rules, regulations, and traditions without questioning them. We did not. What made us different – and I just realized this over the weekend – was that we freely questioned authority. That indeed, later became the mantra of our generation and most of our lives. I am grateful for that lesson, for it lead to great change and allowed us to survive the turbulent years to come.

Members of the Class of 1963 enjoying the Jubilee Brunch in honor of Dom Matthew Stark, Dom Christopher Davis ’48, and Dom Philip Wilson. Front (l-r) Leslie Roach, Curtiss Roach, Jorge Lawton, Marty Paul, Joyce Bob Skinner, Elizabeth Skinner; Back (l-r) John Lamenzo, Willie Wright, Anne Wright, Paula Cummings, Red Cummings, Dave Corcoran, Carolyn Corcoran

Thank you Red and Willie for convincing me to come back. God willing I will come back again….and again. I miss all of you already. After I wrote John Cadley a note of thanks for his impromptu concert he responded with this: “Thanks, Niel. The Class of ‘63 is a gift to me. Every one of you. I’ll cherish the memory forever. We shared something special. It was wonderful to see you. God bless, my friend.”

I cannot say it better. God bless, my friends.

Niel Cannon ‘63 9/23/13

PAGE 14

The Diman Club

Front row: Fr. Julian Stead ’43, Samuel Francis ‘43 Back row: Fr. Damian Kearney ’45, David Kearney ’50, Roger Moriarty ‘50

Class of 1963

Front row: S. Curtiss Roach, Russell Buckley, Robert Lewis, John McCabe, Robert Skinner, John Cummings Jr., John Lamenzo Back row: Wilfred Wright, Peter McCaffery, David Corcoran, Jeremy Kinney, Martin Paul, Niel Cannon, Charles Millard, Stevenson Ward, Christopher Dorment, John Cadley, Jorge Lawton

Class of 1968

Front row: James Mannion, Thomas Cunningham, John Regan, Gregory Hornig, John Cotter Back row: Robert Barnes, Michael Rich, Vincent Lackner, Robert Lanigan, Peter Romatowski, Jay O’Connor

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PAGE 15

Class of 1973

Front row: Jay Buckley, Tom Anderson, Roger Levesque, Cushing Condon, Christopher Long Back row: Keith Barnes, William Wagner, Henry Coz, Donald Macdonald, Peter MacGuire

Class of 1978

Front row: Christopher Carey, Joseph Elliot, Aaron Godfrey, Fr. Robert Hyde, William Byrnes, Jose Melian Back row: Richard White, William Keogh, John Tillinghast, David Oliver, Charles Evans, Stephen Behnke

Class of 1988

Front row: Michael Goss, Keith Cardoza, Christopher Abbate, Robert Sheppard Back row: Marc Indeglia, Dan McDonough, Christopher Nordloh, Sean Eno

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P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

Class of 1993

Taylor Fairman, Ramon Goris

Class of 2003

Front row: Niamh Bohan, Mallory Eardley, Amanda Stout, Kellie DiPalma-Simeone, Shannon Maher, Pamela Biddick, Julia Egan Back row: Walter Zaykowski, Samuel Quatromoni, Neil Biddick, Alexander Forbes, Alexander Schwarzenberg, Evan Piekara, Adam Robertson, Brendan Hewett, William Gilbert, Morgan Jetto

Class of 2008

Front row: Margaret Power, Celina Wright, Theresa Cunningham, Katherine Strong, Catherine Kennedy, Matthew Post, Paul (Teddy)Taylor, Corrigan Van Sant, Elizabeth Childs, Naseemah Mohamed, Madison Nunes Back row: Carl Lichtenfels, James Buckley, Marco DiMattino, Bryan Abraham, Kunwoo Kim, Harry Holden, Margaret McCarthy, Kathleen Behan, James Libutti, Jonathan Jaxtimer, Brigitte Spillane, Benjamin Fernandez

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PAGE 17

In the Autumn of 1973, while attending The Rivers School (in Weston, MA), we played football against the Ravens of Portsmouth Abbey, on their home turf.

The day was a picture postcard kind of crispy fall, complete with dipped temperatures and the autumn sun reflecting so beautifully off Narragansett Bay. There were also these men who seemed to float around the Abbey’s spectator area in these long, black cassocks, like dyslexic Mary Poppins’.

to give the coaches a way to evaluate our potential. There was a point where we lined up facing each other for blocking drills, and, for all intents and purposes, it was a joke.

God knows I wasn’t a great ball player, but I had some talent and a lot of size, which, by default, made me a target. There was this other new kid, a tough cookie from Hingham, MA, who wore a scowl like the medal of honor. Didn’t like him one bit. He was purposely (I believe) placed in front of me, and we went at it.

After a few of these drills, and the temperatures being what they were, I kept saying to him, “Hey, lighten up a little…relax.” Not only did this SOB not slow it down, he kept hitting harder. Finally, I had to hit him so hard, grind his head into the ground and whisper in his ear, “Don’t get up.” Within two seconds he was up and lined up to go again.

A ST. B E DE’S RECOLLECTION

Compared to The Rivers School campus, Portsmouth was aesthetically superior. On the gridiron, Rivers walloped Portsmouth soundly. I left there thinking, “What in the world is this place? Who are all these bright but fairly mediocre athletes, and why are they here? And, what’s the deal with these Benedictine monks?... What a bunch of poor, pathetic losers the guys are who attend this all-male school.”

Cut to ten months later: with satchel over shoulder, I’m in St. Bede’s dorm for pre-season football. What in God’s name had gotten me here? My parents had probably been to the game the year before and, voilà, their little Irish Catholic boy son would be transferring, much to my utter surprise.

For reasons that stunned me, they roomed me with Paul Kinnane, who, as captain of the football team, was also the coolest guy I had ever met. He was a superb athlete, but he had what I never seemed to possess –and that was confidence. He was kind, and all the guys seemed friendly enough, so warming to this community wasn’t going to be a problem. It was clear that had it been possible to transfer I.Q.s and grade point averages into mass physical capabilities, we would never have lost a game. Alas, for the most part, our combined talent was sub-par, but we tried. We also had a new coach, John McCauley, who had coached at West Point (where shenanigans were not part of his gestalt), but he was certainly baptized with a team full of wicked smaht kids who lacked discipline and were sassy.

On the first day of practice, we all filed out of St. Bede’s for the first day of our double-day sessions. Ughh. After one day, St. Bede’s smelled like jocks and socks. St. Bede’s was not air-conditioned, so in the last couple of weeks in August, things got pretty ripe.

We put on our practice uniforms. Much of the equipment was antiquated, and we ran out onto the field for endurance drills and

Something clicked that day. I still didn’t like him, but I was taught a valuable lesson. Never give up. Work harder. Fatigue makes cowards of us all. And though in my eyes he still was a punk-ass kid, I had a great deal of respect for him. I was bigger and tougher than he was, but he was braver.

After two weeks in Bede’s, some of us went to our regular dorm assignments, and I wound up in St. Aelreds. I kid you not: I walked into my new room and met my new roommate. Jeff Calnan, student, football player and the tough cookie from Hingham, MA. This couldn’t be any worse.

For the next two, and then 37-plus years, Jeff, his family and I have been dear friends. We were prefects in the Blue dorm the following year. We are close enough so that, when we say our goodbyes, it’s always punctuated with an “I love you.” This friendship and my many other good friends from Portsmouth, be they Rob O’Donnell, Tom Keogh, Chris Harty, Mark Anderson, Chuck McDonald, Ben Reese, Chris Tovar, Chris Ferrone, Nick Murray... I could go on and on. But, the point is, we have collectively formed a tribe, which is, whether we realize it or not, a solid band of brothers, whom I love dearly.

Where did it all start? St. Bede’s.

At top, the boys of St. Bede’s House in 1975.

PAGE 18

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

– Shea Farrell ‘76

FAREWELL, BEDE’S

Fencing in the St. Bede’s courtyard, 1963

Fr. Hilary and his Bede’s boys in 1966

The boys of St. Bede’s House in 1965 with Fr. Hilary Martin

Above: St. Bede’s House,1972 Right: Bedesmen Nion McEvoy ‘70 and Jamie MacGuire ‘70

The boys of St. Bede’s House in 1977 Right: Fr. Hilary with members of the MacGuire family Relaxing in St. Bede’s House courtyard in 1979

I cannot describe our experience at the Abbey without mentioning one particular building that will never again shape the lives of Abbey students: St. Bede’s. For a publicspeaking assignment, Sixth Formers wrote their own valedictory addresses for English class. I would like to quote what St. Bede’s meant to one student in my Form: “One of my favorite experiences while at the Abbey has been the Bede’s experience. Picture some of our favorite pastimes: Bede’s football, anarchy hour, and the classic running of the Bedes. You get the picture that things were a bit out of hand. Yes, Mr. Dolan tried to slow us down, but Michael Stark still ran wild and free. In the spring, while passing by Bede’s, if a water balloon didn’t hit you, the stench would.” Bede’s showed me what true camaraderie really was. It will be sad to see Bede’s go, but the memories will live on in our hearts – and in our immune systems – forever.

– Nick Medley ’13 Class of 2013 Speaker in his Commencement remarks WINTER BULLETIN 2014

PAGE 19

In 1995, Bede’s endless hallways served many of us well as we moved around while learning how to master juggling.

We all walked away with solid ball-juggling skills and, miraculously, we left all of Bede’s windows intact.

The courtyard served as an excellent badminton court of sorts during the springtime. Needless to say, we spent a great deal of time retrieving birdies from the roof.

– Bedeswomen Alexandra Krol Riordan ’97 Leslie Heller ’98 Anne Marie Gagnon Forbes ‘96

The girls of St. Bede’s House

St. Bede’s House, 1984

St. Bede’s House, 1981

St. Bede’s House, 1988

St. Bede’s House, 1991

In 1996, the Abbey staged a religious retreat that, in addition to participating in energetic group song, required us day students to stay overnight. So for us Bedeswomen, this meant sleeping wherever we could find a space to sleep – as the not-so-spacious Bede’s rooms couldn’t house us all, many of us ended up sleeping in the common room.

– Alexandra Krol Riordan ’97, Lori Goodrich ‘97

St. Bede’s House, 2001 PAGE 20

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

FAREWELL, BEDE’S

Being in Bede’s made us all friends because nothing in the dorm worked, so instead of using computers or watching TV, we talked to each other. Those decrepit walls forced us to look at each other.

– Justin Mistikawy ‘13

Bede’s solidarity during the Headmaster’s Run, 2009

The last boys of Bede’s in 2013

The halls were empty by June, 2013

Demolition was completed in August, 2013

I wish that Bede’s was still our dorm.

We – the Bedesmen – did everything together because nobody really hung out in their rooms, and we weren’t distracted by computers or video games because those things in Bede’s were always broken. We played Bede’s Football (don’t ask) and Kan Jam in the spring. We had heated foosball tournaments that we took very seriously. I think Bede’s had the best collective spirit on campus, chanting our name as a dorm any time a fellow Bedesman was recognized at Assembly.

– Fletcher Bonin ‘13

If you have St. Bede’s photos that you’d like to share, please email them with captions to communications@portsmouthabbey.org.

WINTER BULLETIN 2014 PAGE 21

At Portsmouth Abbey, we do not shy away from

these moments renew and refresh the daily toil and

big questions. Beyond the facts, we demand our

remind us that the classroom at its best is a place of

students go further. We do not shirk the brazen

high celebration.

earnestness of our enterprise: to help young men and women grow in knowledge and in grace. This is the work, this is the labor. We render ourselves intelligible through the classroom, students and teachers alike. The classroom – limited by time, space and personality – is charged with possibility,

As you read through the following excellent articles, I hope you are reminded of the special quality of the Portsmouth Abbey classroom. A school is a complex organism, yet everything conspires together to protect what can happen each and every day here. Enjoy.

– Kale Zelden, Academic Dean

that peculiar grace of the moment. As a teacher,

THE PORTSMOUTH ABBEY HUMANITIES PROGRAM: A RETROSPECTIVE

On

a crisp November morning, as an early frost melts under a sluggish sun on the grounds of Portsmouth Abbey School, a group of Fourth Formers shuffles into a conference room on the first floor of the art building. The students remove their backpacks, shed their coats and crowd around a table before their teacher, Peter O’Connor, asks them to rise to recite the “Our Father” in Latin. Once seated again, all thoughts turn to Chaucer.

“Why does the host interrupt the monk in the prologue?” asks O’Connor, the first in a series of ritual quiz questions based on selected reading in the Abbey’s Humanities Program – in this case, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” a 626-line narrative poem that is one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. After students turn in their answers on paper, the class reviews the questions together.

(Both the knight and the host, said one student, interrupted the monk because they found him “boring and annoying.”)

“And the host gave a direction, didn’t he?” O’Connor asked.

“What do all stories need? Every story must have two qualities.

Every tale must have meaning and delight. It’s why we like to listen to stories, and it’s the primary axiom for the entire Canterbury Tales.”

It’s also a quality that could be used to describe the Abbey’s signature Humanities Program. On this occasion, for 45 minutes,

PAGE 22

O’Connor, head of humanities at Portsmouth, leads a seminar that delves into medieval England, ancient Greece, modern Rome and 21st-Century America. While focused on “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” the discussion touches upon Chaucer’s other tales, Dante’s Purgatorio, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Thomas More’s Utopia, the ideas of Pascal and Descartes, parables in the Gospels and contemporary books and movies. Underlying all of the discourse and discovery is a sense of engagement with the questions that lie at the heart of our common humanity.

“I think it’s very important not to see this as some sort of Great Books Program,” said O’Connor after class. “We think of this as a living tradition, an ongoing enterprise.

It’s a program that explores how we ought to live as part of the larger conversation of what it means to be human. What it means to be intelligent. What it means to be part of a community. We take seriously the idea that, for the students, the classroom is a dynamic space, a world in which we look at ourselves in community as an integral part of a Catholic liberal arts education.”

That the Humanities Program, a requirement for all Fourth Formers, has become such an integral part of an Abbey education could be seen as a lesson for academic institutions to remain true to their core values. But it didn’t happen without some controversy.

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

THE GREAT CLASSROOM AND BEYOND...

“It was a radical idea in some ways,” said Headmaster Dan McDonough, who was among the team of administrators and teachers that launched the program in the late 1990s, a decade in which Abbot Mark Serna, as headmaster, reintroduced Latin into the core curriculum. “In the late 1980s our enrollment had declined. And here we were, bringing back Latin and talking about the humanities.”

Abbot Mark had written an essay titled “A Portsmouth Abbey School Education,” stressing the need for every Abbey student to develop the capacity for independent inquiry and critical thinking in order to fulfill his or her intellectual and spiritual potential. Under Abbot Mark’s leadership, the wheels began turning.

“The first year of the pilot program, we basically filled it with our strongest students,” he said. “We just wanted to work out the kinks. The next year we took our 16 top students and 16 students picked randomly, then mixed them together into two classes. That’s when we knew it could work.” During the second year of the pilot program (2000-2001), the School strengthened the history component and incorporated other facets of academic life at the Abbey.

One of the students in that first pilot program was Dan’s son, Joe, now a teacher of classics at Kent School in Connecticut, who credits his experience in the Abbey’s Humanities Program with having a profound influence on his own educational beliefs.

“It was unlike any class I’d ever had before,” he said. “First, it was team-taught, with three teachers teaching. We also had a writing session that was more intensive and directed than anything I’d experienced. Everything about it was unique. I remember Dr. Mark Clark giving us a three-word exam: “What is love?”

We had a half-hour to answer it. Just the fact that we had the ability to write something reasonably intelligent in response to a question like that was remarkable.”

Mark Clark at Portsmouth Abbey, 1998

In 1998-99, Mark Clark, who later became the first head of the Humanities Department, offered an experimental seminar in Western Thought to honors-level Fourth Form students. One year later, a pilot program was offered to select Fourth Formers who took a core humanities course in place of existing offerings in history, English and Christian doctrine. The purpose, according to O’Connor, was two-fold: First, “to reaffirm the place of theology and philosophy in a humanities core that not only educated but also inspired;” and second, to replace existing liberal arts courses “with a unified curriculum that balanced assimilation of data with the opportunity for in-depth reading, discussion and analysis of primary sources under the close supervision of faculty.” Moving beyond the traditional lecture format, the Humanities Program would combine several pedagogical approaches, including lectures but also seminars, plenary and small-group writing sessions. Additionally, wherever possible throughout the curriculum, primary sources would replace textbooks.

Early on in the process, McDonough had worried that any experimental program would be difficult to implement to Third Formers, given that students were still adjusting to the social and educational climate and expectations of the School and knowing that the coursework would be challenging.

Dr. Clark is now an associate professor of Church history at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He still remembers those discussions about core education at Portsmouth.

“There are two ways to go when you start a humanities program,” he said. “You can go literature/history or philosophy/theology. I wanted to combine them to get a balance of philosophy, theology, literature and history.”

In 2001-2002, with its essential curriculum set, the pilot program became the core humanities curriculum for the entire Fourth Form under the direction of David McCarthy, who was acting head of both English and humanities. It was decided that teams would consist of two teachers rather than three, but the intellectual rigor of the program and opportunities for faculty collegiality would continue to be benefits of the program.

McCarthy said that the Abbey made a radical choice to move in the direction of the humanities in an age of specialization when other institutions were streamlining their curricula away from traditional approaches. In the Portsmouth Abbey School Summer 1999 Bulletin, McCarthy presented a defense of Portsmouth’s decision to institute a Humanities Program and re-introduce Latin into the curriculum. His parting words then were a bellwether for the program’s success now: “But how, one may wonder, can such curricular changes making obligatory Latin, a dead language, and what for many today seems the parochial cultural heritage of the West, be considered visionary?” McCarthy wrote. “Such questions imply our ambiguity about how our inherited past is relevant to the shaping of

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our future. St. Augustine’s comments on memory in his Confessions offer a hint of an answer. Memory, he argues, is no simple reservoir of things seen, done or learned. Rather, like Plato’s idea of anamnesis, it brings to consciousness things the conscious mind does not know it knows. Only by studying the past can one give birth to the past in the present, and only by making the past one’s own can one understand its meaning for the future. ‘I encounter myself and recall myself,’ says Augustine, ‘and by so doing, create the way I move into the future.’”

The millennium was still new, but the Abbey’s choice to embrace the humanities was anything but. By the time the dot. com bubble had crashed globally, humanities were entrenched in the curriculum. As constructed, studies would encompass Western literature and history from Rome’s descent from republicanism and the early Christian period through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and French Revolution, ending approximately with the First World War. Christian doctrine is examined closely through the texts of Christian philosophers and theologians and by exploring Christian themes in literature. Study of “the Church in the world,” said O’Connor, underpins the entire course. In the seminars, students have explored such seminal works as Saint Paul’s “Letter to the Romans,” Aquinas’ Summa, Dante’s Inferno, Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Descartes’ Discourse on Method, Pascal’s Pensees, Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Goethe’s Faust, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabbler, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

The seminars, which encourage students “to attempt to catch a glimpse of the intellectual process of the writer” in an examination not only of the source text but also the emotional and intellectual life of the writer and his or her period in history. Seminars are supplemented by formal lectures on the history, literature, philosophy, theology and art of the West. They weave various and seemingly disparate strains of theology, philosophy and literature into a narrative that is both chronological and thematic, putting the works into an historical context.

Plenary sessions emphasize the discussion of unifying themes, where the two instructors and the students make connections between how those timeless questions are explored in the texts and how they are still being addressed in the modern era. They are opportunities for moments of “surprise and delight,” with a goal of moving toward some larger understanding of meaning by sharing individual reflections and opinions about the works.

Another integral component, the small writing section, splits the class between the two instructors and focuses on students’ writing through either a study of poetry or expository writing.

Twice a week students are asked to explore poetical and rhetori-

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Faculty Emeritus David McCarthy

cal aspects of composition by imitating or critiquing readings of antiquity and modernity. Overall, students become grounded in the essential elements of fiction, develop a habit of “close reading,” and learn the four basic genres of tragedy, comedy, epic and lyric that comprise the bulk of literature.

Dr. Clark called the program’s overall success a testament to the commitment of students, teachers and administrators at Portsmouth and its inherent traits.

“Its greatest strength are those interdisciplinary connections that occur… the ability to learn and to think and to acquire a habit of mind that young, which can be applied to all disciplines,” he said. “Its second-greatest strength is the sense of wonder and amazement one gets when those connections are happening.”

Those connections occur across all of the areas of study. Blake Billings ’77, director of spiritual life and head of Christian Doctrine at Portsmouth Abbey School, taught in the program from 1999 until 2010. He said that while it has certainly evolved from its inception, “the predominance of classic texts from the Christian canon helps to keep the intellectual climate and interests solidly rooted in a Christian perspective.” According to Billings, the intellectual rigor and sense of community that the program inspires has its roots in the traditions of Portsmouth Abbey life.

“I believe that the practice of a thoughtful and open-minded intellectual program, undertaken within a community of faith, resonates with our School’s Benedictine tradition,” he said. “Our monastic community, from the time I was a student, always struck me as sincerely engaged in the pursuit of both human and divine wisdom – finding God along the way of the intellect and culture as well as prayer. The most explicit benefit of a consciously interdisciplinary program like ours is to facilitate the connection of a student’s thinking and to help move away from an overly compartmentalized way of approaching their studies.”

McCarthy, who taught at Portsmouth Abbey School for 31 years, remembers the program enduring some growing pains. While supportive of the idea that a school working within the Benedictine tradition of education would strive to develop a liberally

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

educated person, he thought the humanities requirement was too difficult for many Fourth Formers and might be better suited as a capstone course for the Sixth Form year – a scenario that would prove impractical to schedule, given conflicts with students taking upper-level math and science courses. He recalls those first two years as a struggle, but felt that by the third year, he and his teaching colleagues began to have the necessary dialectic giveand-take that engenders success in a course devoted “to the habitual concerns of human beings – What is man? Who am I?” As it has turned out, perhaps one of the most fortuitous decisions made early on was to ground it into the students’ Fourth Form year. Kale Zelden, academic dean at Portsmouth, who moved his family from Los Angeles seven years ago in part to become involved with the School’s Humanities Program, believes it is “perfectly situated in the student’s development here.”

I can’t tell you how many emails and phone calls I get from young alumni thanking us because they are so ready for their first two years of college.

Zelden said Third Formers come in with a variety of cultural and educational backgrounds and spend much of the year acclimating themselves to the rhythms of Portsmouth Abbey life. “By the Fourth Form,” Zelden said, “they’re settled. They know the routine. So they’re ready for a program like this.”

The students who participate are at an age when their intellect is developing and “they really want to get excited about something,” Dr. Clark said. There is comfort in discovering and realizing that others before them have “contemplated and grappled with all of those abstract thoughts and questions we have.” Asked when he knew a humanities-based program could succeed at Portsmouth, Dr. Clark didn’t hesitate.

“I knew right away,” he said. “I knew it in the second month.

We were sitting around a table, reading Aristotle’s Physics. As the students struggled with that text, I remember the moment when we really figured out what he was saying. The experience was so profound, it affected the rest of my teaching.”

Students, alumni and teachers all point to those “aha!” moments when describing the impact of the program on their lives. Whether the focus is on one discipline, or the synergy between them all, the humanities foster an eye-opening and consciousness-raising way of looking at the world. Zelden recalled a class in which the subject matter was Joyce’s collection of short stories, Dubliners.

“We had read the first story, ‘The Sisters,’ then after ‘Araby,’ and ‘Eveline,’ I mentioned how this one character in ‘Eveline’ reminds me of another character in the story, and all of a sudden lights go on all over class,” he said. “One student said, ‘Mr. Zelden, you’ve been talking about a present absence. Isn’t Eveline’s mother a present absence?’ It was like, yes! So we finally get to the last story in the book, ‘The Dead,’ which, of course, is the great present absence story, ghosts and all, and that certainly was not an insight I had in reading the book on my own. In criti-

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THE GREAT CLASSROOM AND BEYOND...

cal literature, people have made reference to this, but to see that kind of insight and discovery happen without the benefit of an article, to see it happen in class with those kids, it was such an exciting moment that I think it has altered the whole way I ap-

is. However, the study of the humanities can reveal a lot about human nature and history. It helps us to understand why some events take place and to learn from those experiences. That requires a great deal of empathy, which the humanities foster, allowing one to understand and interact better with others.”

Humanities Prize winner Tim Cunningham ’14 said that knowledge of the humanities is helpful “for any path and career,” and is especially critical in a democratic society. It is important, Cunningham said, for citizens to know how to “think rationally, understand historical precedence, and be able to refer to both historical events and great works of literature and glean wisdom from them.” He believes that, by studying the humanities, students learn how to grapple with complex ideas in ways that can be applied to contemporary problems.

Peter O’Connor with his humanities students in a seminar

proach teaching, waiting and watching for those moments where students can make their own connections.”

O’Connor calls those moments “a kind of transformation, an awakening of the deepest capacity to learn and feel, that is at the heart of all real learning.” From a student’s perspective, he explained, what begins as trepidation and confusion about how to navigate between six seminars, a lecture, a plenary session and two small writing classes becomes part of a dynamic approach to studying and schoolwork that builds confidence and competence.

The expectations are challenging but clear. For the six seminar periods, students prepare for their assignments one night each week, while the lecture and the plenary are opportunities to absorb and engage the texts critically. By the end of the year, students have learned to “open themselves” to the works in ways they never considered at the start.

“I still use the information and the insight from the Humanities Program almost daily,” he said, “whether in discussions with friends and family, analysis of the latest book I am reading, or just when lost in my own thoughts.”

Kate Smith, who co-teaches in the program with her husband, Bo, acknowledged that many students feel intimidated at the start of the course. But as their reading comprehension improves and they begin to think about and talk about the sophisticated ideas found in the text, they move from a deeper

Current students attest to its value. Douglas Lebo and Olivia Wright, both Fifth Formers who won the Humanities Prize last year, said that they have grown as students, thinkers and socially conscious young adults as a result of the program.

“Looking back on it, I actually find it breathtaking how much it has taught me,” Lebo said. “As much as we tell ourselves that we live in a material world, we can never escape the three questions Mrs. (Kate) Smith gave us as central concerns: One, who am I? Two, what is my place in the universe? Three, how do I know?”

“The course pushes us to think about the ‘big questions,’ and I’ve found that [it] has helped me to constantly connect what I learn in class or write in an essay to a bigger picture,” added Wright.

“It’s easy to lose oneself in a sea of the next trends, the biggest and best technologies, or the pursuit of some goal because it is popular among the masses. Sometimes one forgets what our real purpose

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Humanities teacher Kate Smith

understanding to a genuine engagement – even confrontation – with the material.

“When they start the humanities, some students expect to sit back and ‘be taught,’” she said. “They want more than anything else to be told what to think. We try hard not to tell them. I don’t want them to know what I think about Eve’s character in Paradise Lost – I want them to develop their own thoughts – and to learn to articulate them with discipline, clarity, and depth. And I want them to be able to listen to and think about what others have to say about it, and to be comfortable with refining and changing their own perspectives.”

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Smith described the humanities classroom as a “very intimate space,” in which students learn to trust in their own intellectual faculties. As alumni, they often keep in touch with their humanities teachers, thanking them for how well-prepared they are for college-level work.

“These students are discovering that they do indeed care about the big questions,” she said. “And, impossible as they are, that these questions may actually be central to how they live their lives. To leave their cynicism behind and to explore what they truly care about is a dangerous, scary thing. As teachers, we also have to take the leap of faith that the truth is accessible in these great works of art that we study, and that the human mind is able to find real truth, somehow.”

People don’t write well here because we teach good writing. They write well here because we teach them how to think.

In reflecting on the program’s success, Headmaster Dan McDonough recalled a conversation he had with another faculty member, Nick Micheletti ’04, who went through the program as a student and now teaches classics at the School. McDonough was remarking on the number of great writers that the Abbey has produced (ranks that include the likes of Christopher Buckley ‘70).

“Nick said, ‘People don’t write well here because we teach good writing. They write well here because we teach them how to think.’”

“It’s always a great temptation in times of economic and cultural crisis to go practical,” said Academic Dean Zelden. “‘All right, we’re going to scrap classes in Shakespeare because we need to make sure that kids know how to code and we need to make sure that students know what a spreadsheet is.’ To be sure, those are all important things. But those are precisely the times that are most important for students to encounter to the truth about themselves and the world and the way that people before them answered these questions. In retrospect, periods of crisis are wonderfully rich. Look back at the time during which Shakespeare lived; it must have been scary: today you can be Catholic, tomorrow you can’t, and vice-versa. So, in giving students exposure to how to begin answering these questions, it’s nice to know that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can start with a story that has already been started, and you take it in any direction you want.”

What anyone involved in the Program understands is that those old primary sources, some written centuries ago, most bound in codices, are alive and dynamic. They speak to us today. The Fourth Formers at the Abbey learn to join in the conversation.

The hope, according to Smith, is that students who encounter these ideas in their original forms in the Humanities Program will never feel intimated by a complex or difficult text again. “They learn that if they are read well, these books can be funny, disturbing, naughty, bawdy, violent, bizarre – as crazy as any blockbuster movie is today. They are often shocked to learn that the truth of human nature is as complicated and challenging as it has always been. And alumni report back that their familiarity with these books gives them a huge leg up on their peers in college.”

“At some level all of these works we look at try to answer the existential questions: ‘What am I supposed to do with this 75-80 years that I’m going to be around,’ and ‘What is the good life?,’” Zelden said. “And the good life is probably more than the cynics would have us believe. So I see the tradition as not something that’s ossified, calcified and set in stone but something that’s a little bit more blood and guts and alive. I think that’s why the Humanities Program is popular – because we’re passionate about it. It’s fun. Students pick up on that and get excited themselves. I can’t tell you how many emails and phone calls I get from young alumni thanking us because they are so ready for their first two years of college. They’ll say, ‘I’m reading Dante for the second or third time and my roommate doesn’t even know Dante’s Italian, never mind that the Divine Comedy is not a video game.’”

Those frequent comments from alumni are ultimately the best validation for the Humanities Program, which in just over a decade has earned a reputation as a course that prepares students for future success in some of the most prestigious colleges and universities in the country. Zelden said. “What I tell them is, this is the first time you likely will have read these works, but it’s also my assumption that this is not the last time you will read them, and if you give them your attention and read with precision and let them wash over you, it can be life-altering. And I know this, because it was life-altering for me.” In fact, Zelden described a communication with one Abbey graduate from the Class of 2013 who now attends the College of the Holy Cross. After he received his class list, the student went to the bookstore.

“Basically it was a hit parade of all the works he had read as a Fourth Former,” Zelden said. “He took pictures of every one of the books – Augustine’s Confessions and Aquinas’ Summa, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Chaucer. He put them in one album and sent me the link. And the name of that album was ‘Thank You, Portsmouth Abbey.’ He added, ‘These are what other people are reading in college!’”

– Doug Norris Doug Norris is a freelance writer from Barrington, Rhode Island. He formerly served as Arts & Living editor for Independent Newspapers for 12 years, and currently writes about art, travel and culture for a variety of publications. His poems have been published in Frogpond and American Tanka, as well as in The Origami Poems Project.

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An E Ticket for English

by Michael Bonin, Ph. D. , English Department Head One summer during my college years I worked at Disneyland. I was a skipper on the Jungle Boat Cruise, a job with considerable prestige amongst the thousands of Disney “cast members,” as park workers were called. For one thing, Jungle Boat skippers got to wear a cool Indiana Jones hat and khaki pants, rather than the awesomely dorkoid electric-blue double-knit Dacron zippered jumpsuits ride operators wore in Tomorrowland. The Three Little Pigs had it worst of all, claustrophobic and blind in a hot, giant plastic pig head, always being shoved to the ground by mean teenagers.

Jungle Boat skippers never put up with that crap. I can’t believe Disney’s liability attorneys permitted it, but we had real Smith and Wesson .38 service revolvers holstered at the helm, for shooting at the fiberglass hippos. We knew they fired blanks, but the passengers didn’t, and the report and cordite smoke were authentic. Those teenagers minded their manners on our boat.

See, on the Jungle Boat we were the ride. The skipper narrated the cruise through the jungle, delivering a sort of safari-guide stand-up routine.

Welcome aboard the Leaky Tiki. I’m Michael, and I’ll be your skipper for the next three days and two romantic nights in the jungle. Take a seat – there’s no dancing in the back there, folks. . . no dancing. Dancing is only allowed on the promenade deck.

As we pull away from the dock, I’d like you to turn and wave to all the smiling natives we leave behind. You may never see them again.

As we make our way down the Irrawaddy River, feel the mist on your face. Don’t worry. That’s just the monkeys in the trees.

Up ahead, you’ll notice an alligator playing with an elephant. That’s something you don’t see every day. (Long pause) But I do.

You may groan – my passengers sure did – but as summer jobs go, it wasn’t a bad way to make some money. (Did you know Disneyland ride operators belong to the Teamsters union? Boarding school teachers, by the way, do not.) But looking back at it now, after over thirty years in the classroom, I wonder if I ever really left the Leaky Tiki. I still wear khakis to work. And I’m still standing at the helm, talking to keep a captive audience interested and amused. I don’t have the Smith and Wesson anymore, but the Abbey teenagers don’t usually need gunplay to keep them in line.

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THE GREAT CLASSROOM AND BEYOND...

Now, boarding school is no amusement park, in case you were wondering. But I still think of myself as a tour guide to English. For instance, in the Winter Term I teach my Sixth Formers the history of the English language. For some reason they don’t expect to be fascinated by Verner’s Law, which describes fricative voicing in Proto-Germanic languages, or the Great Vowel Shift of 1350. Yet as we chug our way down the ages, every bend in the linguistic river offers something of interest, at least by admittedly low English teacher standards. I’ll throttle down here so we can take a look at “Caedmon’s Hymn,” the very first poem in English literature.

Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard, meotodes meahte and his modgeþanc weorc wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs ece drihten, or onstealde.

4

He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend; þa middangeard moncynnes weard ece drihten, æfter teode firum foldan, frea ælmihtig

8

“Middangeard” in line 7 means “middle-earth,” the realm of mankind, and that’s the Anglo-Saxon word Tolkien lifted for his Lord of the Rings saga, for Tolkien was the Bosworth and Rawlinson Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. And that odd-looking letter at the beginning of the line, in the word “þa,” is called a “thorn,” an ancient rune which represented the “th” sound in Old English. Printing presses didn’t have runic symbols, of course, so centuries later the thorn was printed using a “y”– which is how “the” becomes “ye” in faux-archaic formulations such as “Ye Olde Souvenir Shoppe.”

Cruise another three centuries down the English river and we meet the Vikings, which is much more pleasant from our vantage point than when the English were meeting actual Vikings. Our language doesn’t have a lot of Norse words, but the words which did make it into English are suggestive.

Anger Skin

Knife

Slaughter Outlaw

Scorch

Ugly

Scare

Ransack

Wrong

Skull

There you have, in a nutshell, what it was like when Vikings dropped by.

The sightseeing is much more pleasant once we reach Chaucer, writing after the Norman ruling class had put Anglo-Saxon through a French press for 300 years, so that Middle English sounds virtually like a Romance language, soft and melodious.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour...

4

And specially, from every shires ende Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, The holy blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.

That “shire” (“county”) in line 5 makes the hobbit fans onboard perk up again, and they like learning that the local constable would therefore be called the “shire-reeve” or, as a Nottingham peasant would pronounce it, “sheriff.”

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The Jungle of English Cruise hasn’t reached familiar territory yet, so I still have my passengers’ attention. Yet even when we arrive at Shakespeare and Early Modern English, virtually a home away from home for Abbey students, all steeped in the classics, there are a few curious sites to point out along the Thames.

Off to starboard, for instance, not far from the Globe Theatre, is the Bethlehem Royal Hospital, in 1599 already the oldest mental hospital in Europe. Of course, no Cockney would pronounce “Bethlehem” the way we do – to him it would be “bedlam,” and that’s where we get our word for absolute madness.

In fact, to capture the original sound of Shakespearean English, I tell the students to imagine that in Elizabethan England every day was National Talk Like a Pirate Day. Try it out, matey.

Frinds, Roomuns, coontrimun, lend me yurr eers.

Oy coom too berry Sayzure, nut too preyze im.

Thee eevul that men doo livz aafturr theym, The gewd iz aft inturrid with thyr boonz.

Eventually the Leaky Tiki returns to the dock, and it’s time for me to unload the boat.

Now comes the most dangerous part of our journey. . . you guys trying to get out of the parking lot.

Please exit the boat the same way you entered – pushing and shoving. Any children left behind will be taken to It’s a Small World and forced to sing that dreadful song forever.

Please be sure to tell your friends how much you enjoyed the Jungle Cruise. It helps keeps the lines short.

Disneyland calls itself “The Happiest Place on Earth,” a most dubious claim since, at least while I worked there, they didn’t serve alcohol anywhere in the park. But these days, as I stand at the lectern and watch the students file into my classroom, I can almost feel the Leaky Tiki rocking gently under my feet, ready to get underway – and I’m pretty happy.

Michael is the head of the English Department and holds the Dom Damian Kearney Chair in English. For thirteen years he was an English professor at Gonzaga University, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in Shakespeare, Milton, writing, and public speaking. From 1995-2001, he was chair of Gonzaga’s English Department. He recieved Gonzaga’s Teacher of the Year award in 1995 and the Abbey’s Dom Peter Sidler Award for teaching excellence in 2008. He has given conference presentations and published articles in scholarly journals on the topics of Renaissance literature, 18th - Century art, moral education, and academic freedom. Michael spent part of 2008 in London on a fellowship at the Globe Theatre during its productions of King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Michael coaches boys’ varsity squash and advises the Sixth Form student speakers for church assemblies. He lives on campus with his wife, Laureen, who is also a member of the English Department, and their children, Drake ‘11, Fletcher ‘13 and Sydell.

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The Active Call to Love

by Therese Thomas, Director of Christian Community Service

IT’S NO SECRET THAT HERE AT THE ABBEY, EVERY TEACHER IS PASSIONATE ABOUT HIS OR HER SUBJECT MATTER. MY DESIRE TO TEACH THE CATHOLIC FAITH HAS ALWAYS COME FROM MY ENERGETIC HOPE TO CLARIFY MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT THE CHURCH.

AT THE TOP OF MY

COURSE SYLLABUS THAT I DISTRIBUTE TO MY STUDENTS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR IS A QUOTE BY ARCHBISHOP FULTON SHEEN. THIS CATHOLIC EVANGELIST ONCE SAID, “THERE ARE NOT ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES WHO HATE THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, BUT THERE ARE MILLIONS WHO HATE WHAT THEY WRONGLY PERCEIVE THE CATHOLIC CHURCH TO BE.” AS A CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE TEACHER, I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED TO TEACH MY STUDENTS THAT OUR FAITH IS CENTERED ON TWO THINGS: LOVE, AND THE DIGNITY OF THE HUMAN PERSON.

Recently, Pope Francis has been making headlines because he, too, has been trying to teach us about the core concept of love in Catholicism. Many think he is radically shifting the message and direction of the Church, but actually he is just reminding us of the original doctrines and truths upon which it was founded. What is love? It is not just an emotion or a feeling, but rather actively willing the good of another. Recognizing the dignity and worth of every human being, summarized in the teaching of the Catholic Church’s Consistent Life Ethic, is framed by this foundational concept of love in our faith. How does one even begin to teach their students about the practice of theological love? About how the dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God? I’ve been lucky enough in my time at the Abbey to pair my classroom conversations about these Catholic doctrines with a call to service learning. My students can write essays on church teachings, have interactive debates on social issues, or role-play moral dilemmas until they are blue in the face… but the real test for them is after the academic bell has rung.

There are so many opportunities at our School for a learned application of faith. I’ve watched our students brave the bitter cold of January to encourage congressional leaders at the March for Life to see that gestational age shouldn’t dictate a person’s right to live. In the rocky mountain hills of Virginia and Kentucky, I’ve seen groups of Abbey students transform broken homes and hearts through our Appalachia Service Program. Helping them build wheelchair ramps, repair leaking roofs or build irrigation systems for others are some of my favorite “classroom” activities. Volunteering with My Brother’s Keeper in Massachusetts, I’ve been able to see my students deliver furniture and hope to people who were sleeping on the floor, before we arrived with new mattresses and bed frames. I often wish I could give a “grade” for the amount of sweat accumulated from transporting those bed frames up three flights of rickety, trashed stairwells. Working at nearby nursing homes, our kids give manicures, construct crafts or play musical instruments to entertain and delight those elderly residents. It might be a Friday night, but it doesn’t stop our Abbey volunteers from happily putting together bags of nutritious food for families in Haiti. I even have viewed some fantastic pieces of colorful art, put together after an afternoon our students spent playing with children at different social agencies. These many service learning initiatives naturally stimulate seeing the value and worth of every human being, no matter what his or her age, economic status, geographical location or background may be.

As a teacher, I’ve also learned many life lessons from those I’ve educated. One of my favorite “homework assignments” occurs when it is 11:00 at night and a teenage girl is knocking on my apartment door for me to help her with an essay. As I fend off sleep and head to answer the door, I am reminded that even she has human dignity, and I am actively being called to love.

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Cut on the Bias: The Irish History Seminar

by Bowen Smith, History Department Head

We love our myths. They inspire us, console us and absolve us so well that we weave them deep into our history. Then we try mightily to forget the difference between the natural and the synthetic. Mostly, we succeed.

Still, the occasional loose thread tantalizes. Something compels us to tug on it and trace the artifice. The garment gets messy and comes apart at the seams. Those it fits best get angry. They use all sorts of nasty euphemisms for this unraveling of a stylish narrative and its eventual replacement with something sturdier and humbler. They call it skepticism, revisionism, even nihilism. In the Irish History Seminar, we just call it historiography.

Over the nine years that I’ve offered this Sixth-Form Honors elective, students have initially reacted to our analysis and criticism of competing versions of the dramatic Irish past with a mixture of unease and excitement. Struggling to prepare for this fall’s exam essay on how serious a challenge historians’ bias presents to our understanding of the United Irishmen and the revolutionary 1790s, one very conscientious, exasperated scholar confessed, “I’m afraid I’m just becoming a cynic. I can’t believe history anymore!”

Descartes would sympathize with his skeptical crisis, but prescribe something more practical than weak-kneed nostalgia for the textbook mono-narratives that we too often present as “history.”

The Seminar’s version of Cartesian therapy begins with the acceptance of an indubitable truth: all historians are human and, hence, as biased as you and me and our favorite cable news channel. Both consciously and unconsciously, they pick and choose shamelessly from evidence, methodology and philosophy to fashion their own version of the story. Yet, somehow, we still love them... and trust them. The heart truly does have its own reason.

Reconciling ourselves to the very human imperfection in our histories doesn’t end with this potentially depressing discovery of the ubiquity of bias. Investigating and critiquing it in its different shapes and colors and fashions, we begin to recognize the timeless, universal qualities in our own nature.

The most biased historian, the most manipulative propagandist is us.

Seamus MacManus published his unabashedly nationalist The Story of The Irish Race (1921) in the extraordinarily charged atmosphere of the Irish War of Independence. His selfless United Irish heroes, Wolfe Tone, Thomas Russell and the Emmets, almost Christ-like in their republican virtue, in effect, rise from their slumber to support Collins, de Valera, Barry and O Malley in their desperate struggle against the British Empire. MacManus means to inspire his own people in their hour of destiny and does so with a ripping good yarn. In spite of his ideological bias or, perhaps, because of it, his history-as-rallying-cry continues to call from the shelves of our big corporate book stores almost a century

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after it first sounded. This ancient mode of storytelling triggers something primal in us and defies the contemporary discipline’s morally neutral, scientific pretensions.

Ireland’s prince of these professional pretensions, Roy Foster, occupies the chair in Irish history at Oxford for good reason. The very talented anti-nationalist revisionist portrays Tone and the other United Irish leaders not as martyrs in the national passion play but as dangerouslyout-of-their-depth naifs epitomizing the “radical chic” of their heady era of revolution. Foster’s genius as a modern academic historian lies in his ability to mock rebel idealism and rationalize state terror while seeming to remain above the late unpleasantry. In the Seminar, the students’ quantitative and qualitative analysis of his verb and modifier choices reveals the deception. We see how his Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 (1988) met the need of British and Irish establishments petrified and embarrassed by the resurgence of the independence struggle in the North after the bloody suppression of the American-style civil rights movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. We recognize the history text’s potential as a sophisticated biological weapon... and our temptation to deploy our own.

In the daily discussion, vigorous peer review of essays and formal debate of the Seminar, we try to practice what we preach. Sensitive to the vices and virtues that characterize authors and readers alike, we strive for transparency rather than impossibly inhuman objectivity. Some might call it disillusionment. Well, like our discovery at the morning mirror as the fog slowly retreats to the edges, that’s just what it is.

Long fascinated by what history reveals about our human condition, Bowen majored in the subject at the College of the Holy Cross, where he balanced his studies with four years as a varsity hockey goaltender. After graduation, the intellectual and athletic aspects of his nature compelled him to take on the multidimensional challenge of prep school life. Three years in the classroom at St. Sebastian’s in Needham, MA, convinced him to pursue his favorite discipline at the graduate level. A Master of Arts degree in Modern European History at University at Albany, and the completion of doctoral studies (ABD) in early modern Britain and Ireland at Fordham University, led to teaching and dean of faculty responsibilities at the Saint Thomas Choir School in Manhattan for five years.

With his wife, Kate (an accomplished English teacher), and their young sons, Conor ’17 and Sean, Bowen decided the Abbey’s mission, traditional curriculum and beautiful setting made it the ideal place to combine professional and family life. The third of the Smithereens, Thomas, arrived shortly after the move to the bayside.

Here at the Abbey, Bowen chairs the History Department, has taught the signature Humanities course for more than a decade (team - teaching with Kate for the past three years) and developed a challenging university-style, honors-level Irish History Seminar.

As head coach of boys’ varsity soccer, Bowen guided the Ravens to their most successful season in School history in 2011, capturing the EIL title and a New England Prep Championship tourney berth for the first time. But if pressed on his most satisfying achievement at the Abbey, he would choose his selection by his peers for the Dom Peter Sidler Award for teaching excellence in his first year of eligibility in 2007.

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PORTSMOUTH ABBEY IN SALAMANCA, SPAIN

by Roberto Guerenabarrena, Modern Language Department Head Having taught at Portsmouth Abbey for 15 years, I appreciate how unique our school is; as residential faculty, we have an opportunity to educate and influence our students in so many different ways. I never stop being surprised when I hear the students on the soccer field practicing their language skills by speaking Spanish to me or among themselves. I cannot help but smile when a faculty member tells me his or her students are singing a Spanish song during an unrelated activity. An effective language teacher presents the students with opportunities to use the target language in an authentic way that is relevant to their lives. At the Abbey, the Modern Language Department goes beyond the curriculum to encourage students to experience the language outside the classroom. It can be on the sports fields, in the dining hall, the common room of the dormitory, or during our program in Salamanca, Spain. This month-long program abroad has been successfully teaching our students for the last 12 years.

As the second week of our trip comes to a close, we are all savoring each moment we have left in this great city. Salamanca has so much to offer, not only in terms of restaurants and entertainment, but also in culture and historical importance. We have visited countless places of interest in the past 14 days, and each is more awe-inspiring than the last.

Every time we leave the dorm, someone is taking a picture, due to the fact that everywhere you go in Salamanca you see something incredible, even on our daily walk to classes.

Salamanca was a wonderful experience from beginning to end. It was a great opportunity to learn not only the Spanish language, but also its culture. Being able to take what we learned in the classroom and use it to converse with people really helped improve our Spanish-speaking skills. By doing so, we were forced to step out of our comfort zone, and gained confidence when speaking a foreign language.

The excursions to Portugal and other parts of Spain gave us the chance to appreciate a culture different from our own and learn its history. In many areas, people did not speak much English and, therefore, we were pushed to practice our Spanish, which in the end benefitted us. The conversation classes were also helpful because we practiced how to express ourselves in Spanish. The trip was a great opportunity to develop many new friendships.

We were lucky to have a fantastic group of students and a remarkable leader, Señor (Guerenabarrena), who made the trip one that we will cherish and remember for the rest of our lives.”

– Claudia Trahan ‘13 dents to become active members of a global community – interconnected, multicultural and multilingual – and the program in Salamanca is the perfect setting for students to learn the language and the culture through an amazing immersion experience.

The program in Salamanca allows Abbey students to improve their level of proficiency and prepares them for their next-level language course at the Abbey or in college. Depending on their level of proficiency, students finish the program with six to nine

–Brian Fredericks ’14 Since I began teaching, I have seen an effort in our profession to teach our students not only the language, but the culture of Spanish-speaking countries as well. Our goal is to enable stu-

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college credits that can transfer to the college they attend. Most students continue studying some Spanish at the university level (many go onto receive a minor, or perhaps major, in Spanish.)

The language courses in Salamanca are conducted by native speakers; one of the most fun parts of the program is the afternoon conversation class in small groups of five students with an instructor held in the plaza or an outdoor café.

We concluded our visit to Madrid by having lunch in the historic Plaza Mayor, which was built during the reign of King Philip III. I thoroughly enjoyed hanging out with my friends and eating delicious tapas while listening to the Spanish bands that played right next to our table.

– Jake Oldewurtel ‘14

Salamanca offers the perfect setting for our students to immerse themselves in the Spanish language and life. The city is clean, friendly, and easy to navigate as well as full of history and beauty.

Home to one of the oldest universities in the world, and the oldest in Spain, Salamanca offers the country’s most magnificent examples of Renaissance and Baroque architecture, centuries-old cathedrals, and monuments that are located in walking distance from the students’ dormitory. Most importantly, it is a safe city where visitors are welcomed and respected.

The fun activities of the program are the excursions and weekend trips. Students see spectacular castles and cathedrals in Segovia, where, at Meson de Cándido, I encourage them to lunch on roasted suckling pig. It is a memorable experience to eat at the century-old restaurant where the chef and his family have the “privilege,” given by the King of Castilla, to serve food to the royal family. The four-day excursion to Andalucía is an unforgettable

experience, as students visit the Mosque in Cordoba, the Alhambra in Granada, Toledo, and the mandatory stop in Madrid to tour the city and visit the Museo del Prado and the Reina Sofía Museum.

Salamanca’s excellent location, the academics and always-welcome college credits, the beautiful city setting and the outstanding educational excursions offer our Abbey students a learning experience outside the classroom, and beyond our curriculum, that is unique and provides our students with the necessary knowledge to be successful in a rapidly shrinking, globalized world.

To learn more about the Salamanca, Spain program, visit www.portsmouthabbey.org/page/5596.

Writing about Salamanca does not truly do it justice; the beauty and complexity of the architecture, among other aspects, still leaves me in awe. Upon arrival I could tell that the month would be jam-packed with excitement. On the very first day I had a two hour-jam session with a local accordion player in the Plaza de Los Toros, ate the best ice cream of my life, and witnessed Spain’s victory in the Euro Cup. The first week was a transitional experience with an introductory meet-and-greet to familiarized everyone with each other; we took our placement exams and started classes the next day. In week two we started our evening conversation classes, which consisted of an hour of casual talk with a teacher, usually in the park or at a café. These classes helped us correct the little errors that usually flow by unimportantly when we talk to the native Spanish speakers. We also did our first tour of important locations with Señor this week. The final week arrived quickly; it was a solid reminder that we only had one month to absorb the complex Spanish culture and language.

Living in Spain aids immensely in your comprehension; it was exciting to see how much I had learned over the course of this month. The overall experience changed me as an individual.

It made me realize that monitoring my expenditures is an essential aspect of life; that no two cultures are ever too different to have many common characteristics; and, finally, that adulthood is not reached in a single moment, but rather through many small transformations. ¡Viva España y viva la vida!

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– Rasaanh Matra ‘13

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THE DEVECCHI YEARS

To Teach and Train with Love

by Dr. Haibo Qu, Chinese Language Teacher

As a teacher who is trusted by the parents of his students,

aligning one’s breath, which is related to Qigong, or “Life

it is very important for me to teach and train my students

Energy Cultivation,” a branch of Chinese martial arts. But

with love.

doing traditional calligraphy, using a brush, special paper,

Simplify complex issues. At first glance, the Chinese character is somewhat mysterious.

The core of the

Chinese language is its characters, which come originally from pictographs; therefore, each character is backed with culture and historic stories. I give my students the cultural background and historic stories when teaching Chinese characters; by linking the unfamiliar characters to a sufficient amount of culture, it is easier for the students to understand and memorize the characters.

Simplify numerous thousands to easier hundreds. It is said that in order to understand and apply the Chinese language, one needs to learn about 3,000 characters. That is a difficult job! Instead, there are only 214 basic, simple, but meaningful radicals that comprise thousands of Chinese characters. Letting my students master 214 radicals is a good, short-cut way to learn and understand Chinese characters.

Encourage teens to study and memorize what they have learned. One of the most opportune times for the brain to assimilate learning takes place during the teenage years.

Memorizing Chinese characters benefits the student not only in learning the Chinese language but also by developing both the right and left sides of the brain, which is an effective way to improve and train a youngster’s brain. I try to: train and develop my students’ image memory through my calligraphic handwriting on the blackboard, and my body language

and special ink, is a time-consuming job. As the teacher of a high school second-language course, I have no time to teach it. How to do it then? I try to use chalk-calligraphy on the blackboard, teaching concurrently during my classroom time, instead of brush-calligraphy on the special paper. As I mentioned earlier, the chalk-calligraphy method also enables students to learn Chinese characters by image memory and exercises their breath.

Authentic Character Chinese vs. Alphabet, or Latinized (PINYIN) Chinese Language. As a teacher of a second language, I try to teach “authentic character” Chinese while using Latinized, or Pinyin, Chinese as an assisting tool.

Some students who learned Chinese in other schools before coming to Portsmouth prefer to use Pinyin for Chinese in its written form. I help them make the transition from Pinyin to character Chinese.

The Pinyin system is a method used by native Chinese speakers in mainland China to learn the sounds of Chinese or to look up unknown characters in dictionaries. It uses the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and tone marks to represent the sounds of Chinese. It is a temporary tool for the beginning learner of Chinese and not a written form of the Chinese language at all. The written form of Chinese is the Chinese character, although learners whose native language is the written form of the Latinized alphabet prefer Pinyin.

as well; increase their logical memory by telling them the

The core of Chinese is its character, which originally comes

structure of the character with its radicals; and strengthen

from a pictograph. As my students become familiar with

their muscle memory by handwriting the characters time

the Chinese language, my teaching gradually focuses on

after time. Developing the students’ brains in these ways

understanding each character, its structure and its meaning,

automatically helps them in their other areas of study.

such as radicals, phonetic portion, meaning portion, primary

Chalk-calligraphy teaching instead of traditional calligraphy. Calligraphy is an important aspect of China’s

meaning, extensive meaning, etc. The teaching sequence is character, followed by word, sentence, and then paragraph.

cultural heritage as well as an actual part of learning the

The Chinese language is spoken by about one-quarter of the

Chinese language. Chinese calligraphy is also a way of

world’s population. China is the most populous country in

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THE GREAT CLASSROOM AND BEYOND...

the world, with 1.4 billion people, representing 22% of

culture, exercising their ability to compare aspects of

the world’s population. The Chinese language is one of

different cultures, making connections to their daily lives,

the six working languages of the United Nations. China is

and building links among communities.

束

the world’s second-largest economic entity following the United States. Because of this, the Chinese language is included in the curricula of most colleges and universities

in the four basic skills of listening, speaking, reading, and

Haibo teaches all levels of Mandarin Chinese at Portsmouth Abbey. He is a multi-level educator with experience teaching at middle and high schools and at the college level in China and the United States. A leading Chinese authority on population research, his book, Issues of Chinese Population Aging, is best known. Haibo’s experiences also include entrepreneurial management in China and post-doctoral research at Brown University. He holds advanced degrees from three countries: a Ph.D. from Renmin University of China (The People’s University of China), which is one of the most prestigious universities in China; a M.B.A. from Bryant University; and a M.Phil. from Cairo Demographic Centre of the United Nations at Egypt. His other degrees include a B.A. from Jilin University, and an A.A. from Jilin

writing, all while gaining an understanding of Chinese

Teacher’s College in China.

and in more and more high schools as well.

The Chinese course in our curriculum is designed mainly for those whose goal is to learn the Chinese language for career application and continuing study in college.

Therefore, the “5Cs” principles of the National Standards for Foreign Language Education – Communication, Cultures, Comparisons, Connections and Communities – are instilled throughout my teaching activities. My teaching aims to help learners develop their communicative competence

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The Death of Marat, Jacques-Louis David 1793

L I V I NG A RT H I S TORY

by Alassandra Micheletti ‘05, History and Visual Arts Teacher

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd.

Without innovation, it is a corpse.

– Winston Churchill While Churchill did not become an artist himself until late in his career, the man certainly summed up the keys to not only successful art, but the study of it as well. In the Art History course here at the Abbey students are constantly reminded that all art necessarily builds on what came before, and so to ignore the foundations is to ignore the art itself. At the same time, art is a dynamic discipline, and most of what people are drawn to in a work of art is the ability of the artist to present life in a new way.

Take, for example, Michelangelo’s landmark sculpture of David.

While this work is undeniably captivating, in class the students discuss the ways in which Michelangelo embraced both tradition and innovation in this piece. The sculpture is full of references to the classical world as the natural weight shift, or contrapposto, of the perfected Greek athlete is clearly referenced in the colossal body of David. At the same time, though, Michelangelo has created a work that is entirely new. David is not the lifeless shell of the Greek nude meant only to demonstrate the perfection of the body; instead, he is poised in the moment just before the action.

His tensed muscles and steady gaze imply to the viewer that Goliath waits just beyond and that David himself is ready to engage.

The stone is charged with emotion and brimming with life, and it is only in viewing the work in the light of what came before that one can fully appreciate Michelangelo’s skill and the impact of the piece as a whole.

As the students learn the importance of tradition and innovation in art, they themselves are held to the same standard in their daily studies.

art before they can question them. And question them we certainly do! The students engage in debates over the ownership of antiquities, the value of restoration, and the skill of forgeries, but all within the context of actual art.

Churchill’s quote also helps to define the qualities of the classroom itself. While images are now digital and displayed using Smartboard technology, they are often the very same images that were projected in lecture halls on dusty slide reels of eras past.

The students are still asked to memorize the artists, titles, dates, and periods of various works, and in doing so, they are able to not only identify works accurately, but to place them within a specific context and understand the progression of influence within the art world. And yet, art is a tactile and living discipline. The students are exposed to the wealth of art here on campus during guided and unguided tours, draw from their own experiences in the art studios, relay their impressions of works they’ve seen throughout the world on their many travels, and even reenact famous works put on display for the whole school. As the teacher, I may provide the guidance, but ultimately it is the students that bring the life force into the classroom.

 Allie majored in art history with a minor in the classics at Georgetown University, where she earned her B.A., magna cum laude. She returned to Portsmouth Abbey in 2009 to teach Art History and Ancient History, which has allowed her to pursue her interests in the classical cultures of Greece and Rome and their importance as the foundations of Western education. Allie has begun her master’s degree in liberal arts at St. John’s College. Each summer, she heads to Annapolis, MD, to read the great works of the Western canon and discuss their significance, garnering great experience and knowledge to implement back in her own classroom.

As the students learn the importance of tradition and innovation in art, they themselves are held to the same standard in their daily studies. The students are encouraged to have opinions about the works they see, but only after they have gained an understanding of these pieces. In other words, they must learn the traditions of

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Allie has also coached girls’ varsity soccer, basketball and track at the Abbey, all sports that she captained here as a student.

She lives in St. Leonard’s House with her husband, Nick ‘04, their daughter, Betty, and their dog, Mincemeat.

THE GREAT CLASSROOM AND BEYOND...

The Old Guitarist, Pablo Picasso, 1903

Waiting, Edgar Degas, 1882

The Card Players, Paul Cezanne, 1894–1895 Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, Jan van Eyck, 1434

Woman Holding a Balance, Johannes Vermeer, 1664

The Son of Man, Rene Magritte, 1964

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WHEN EDUCATION REALLY HAPPENS

**********************************************************

by Siobhan Curran, Science Teacher A great classroom is one where everyone is paying attention, excited about the next thing that’s going to be said. A great classroom requires a lot of back-and-forth between the students and the teacher. It’s a group effort; we are all conspiring to understand new information. If you have that back-and-forth, you know immediately if students have become hung up on a certain concept.

Then you can address it right away. I think when you have students interested and participating, education really happens.

Students should be able to see that there are very clear real-world implications for what we discuss in class. We talk about certain drug trials that students may have heard of, or sugar substitutes that they use. This approach really grabs students. You see them look more alert. They’ll say, “Oh yeah, this is something I use every day.” Like shampoo; “I use that. What’s in it? I never thought to check.” Keeping science relevant is the key to teaching it.

One way I try to make science relevant is by using our local resources. For example, our unique location provides access to a stream, pond, estuary, and a bay – all on campus.

My biology classes observed these water-based ecosystems in person during our ecology unit. Then, during the cell

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biology unit, they used microscopes to examine water samples from these locations. I had students looking at their microscopes exclaiming, “This is what we were standing in?!” Some students were so excited, they even took videos of the microscopic organisms they found moving through the water. It is really amazing to see students connect what they see and know in the larger world with the very complex reality that underpins it.

I try to encourage students to appreciate research as the heart of science. Research involves a way of thinking, where you learn to ask questions of the world in such a way that the world answers you. I begin emphasizing this process in September when we study why scientists can make the claims they make. Elegant experiments can provide some great examples of this scientific method.

However, some of the best ways to communicate the need for careful systematic research is to examine poorly done research. We discuss real experiments and then students identify key features of the experiments. Students judge whether the researcher can support the claims he or she has made. We’ve had examples where a researcher might say, “Deodorant causes breast cancer, because we saw more cases of breast cancer when people started using deodorant.” In this particular work, researchers failed

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to take into account that our methods for observing breast cancer advanced dramatically in the 20th century concurrently with a rise in the availability of deodorant.

You might as well say that deodorant usage causes more people to use computers. Just because things happen at the same time doesn’t mean that one causes the other.

Once we have this type of thinking down, we apply it throughout the year.

Students learn how to design experiments so that they can answer questions they are interested in. In chemistry, for example, students are often asked to identify ‘unknown’ chemicals using techniques they have learned in class. This past year in biology, students also designed experiments, and then voted on several labs that we could do as a class.

They organized the experimental design, data collection, and analysis for their own experiments. Other labs have more built- in structure, but I still try to include some aspects of experimental design so that students are actively a part of the scientific process.

I try to get students to see that research is an ongoing process. In class we discuss cutting- edge research. As the year has gone on, I have begun to receive emails and comments in class from students who have been reading about current research on their own time. I love that they are integrating what we are learning with their life outside of the classroom.

Science doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so I try to give students a glimpse of that wider context. For instance, the food pyramid was originally created by nutritionists. However, it is also shaped by others, like pork farmers, who were upset when meat was not featured as prominently as they thought it should be. These pork farmers put pressure on politicians, who then put pressure on the FDA. Ultimately, the food pyramid that made it to the public was heavily influenced by special interests and politics to such an extent that it didn’t fully reflect the biochemistry of nutrition.

Students in my classes are exposed to this idea that other fields, such as history, politics, economics, and especially ethics, influence what type of research is performed and how that research is analyzed.

the ends of DNA strands. This combination of approaches helped students better understand mutations in regions of the DNA linked to specific diseases like cancer and cystic fibrosis.

In order to display some of the great student work I have had the pleasure of seeing this year, I am organizing an art and science exhibit for later this year. I hope to also include, as an element of this event, student presentations about their personal research.

 Siobhan earned her B.S. in biology, magna cum laude, from Providence College, where she worked as a teaching assistant in chemistry and spent a year as a resident assistant. She was a member of the Liberal Arts Honors College and also dabbled in illustration. Prior to starting graduate work, Siobhan had diverse research experiences, such as work with non-human primates at Harvard Medical School, work with in - vitro systems in Dr. Breen’s laboratory at Providence College and with protein purification at the University of Rhode Island. At the University of Dundee, she investigated protein modification and degradation.

Siobhan also has experience as a chemistry tutor for high school and college students. Her goal is to combine her love of science with her love of teaching and to build excitement in her students about the exploratory and interdisciplinary nature of chemistry and biology. Siobhan encourages students to appreciate research as the heart of science. She believes that research is fundamentally creative as it combines knowledge of multiple disciplines with a scientific way of thinking and problem solving.

Siobhan is thrilled to be in Rhode Island (“It’s like a giant small town – the island is definitely a concentration of that idea.

Everyone just looks out for everyone.”). She is enjoying her roles as assistant houseparent in Manor House and assistant field hockey coach. Beyond the classroom, she is a bagpiper with the Newport AOH Pipes and Drums.

One way I integrate that interdisciplinary perspective is by incorporating visual aids and hands-on activities in the classroom. When we studied the structure of DNA, I made use of diagrams, 3-D molecular modelling software, and the hands-on assembly of a model to help students visualize the structure. They were able to examine the similarities and differences between segments of DNA with different roles, such as encoding proteins or protecting

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latin is A LIVING LANGUAGe

students begin their Third Form year here, I am sure they experience a feeling of concern similar to my own many years ago: What is this Latin requirement all about? Why do we learn Latin if no one speaks it anymore? Why do I have to take this class?

by Elizabeth Benestad, Classics Department Head A S I S TA R T E D M Y F R E S H M A N Y E A R O F H I G H S C H O O L

a t Scranton Prep, a Jesuit school in Pennsylvania, I asked the question that every other freshman at Prep asked: “Do I have Fr. McGrath for Latin?” Fr. McGrath was a legendary Latin teacher and Jesuit priest who was famous for kicking the podium, calling students “bird brain,” and placing the under-performing students in “radiator row” next to the window. After a recent Parents’ Weekend class at Portsmouth Abbey, a fellow Scranton Prep alum, whose daughter now attends the Abbey, told me that my Latin class was certainly different from Fr. McGrath’s. I took that as a compliment!

My final three years of high school Latin were taught by a lay faculty member, Mr. Patrick Marx, himself a graduate of Scranton Prep, who inspired me to study Latin and Greek. A poster in his classroom caught my eye; it read, “Latin is a Living Language.” As a teacher at Portsmouth Abbey School, I think of that poster often. Latin is a living language, and we do our best here at the Abbey to show our students how Latin permeates the various academic disciplines, especially the English language. When

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Latin class at Portsmouth Abbey is a unique experience indeed. The majority of independent schools do not require ninth graders to study Latin. But here at the Abbey, every Third Former must complete one year of Latin. Our current textbook, Latin for the New Millennium, published in 2009, presents Latin a little differently than most Latin textbooks. In addition to the traditional presentation of Latin’s grammatical rules, each chapter contains an adapted passage from a Roman author, presented in chronological order. Students learn about and read a brief excerpt by authors such as Plautus, Cicero, Caesar, Catullus, Horace, Ovid and Vergil. As a result, they are learning Latin in the context of the Roman world and as a language that was very much alive in ancient Rome.

As the Third Formers progress through their year of Latin, they quickly learn that the structure of Latin is very different from the structure of the English language. In English, we use word order to determine the function of a word, whereas in Latin, the endings (or inflections) of words signify the function. Many students struggle with this concept.

Another stumbling block for Latin I students is the structure of the English language itself. Grammatical terms such as subject, direct object, indirect object, tense, mood, voice, and others can be completely foreign to native speakers of English. But as the students learn these terms and how they operate in English, they often discover how fascinating both English and Latin are! They start to think about English in a whole new way as they are learning the basics of a Latin sentence. If I had a nickel for every time a student said to me, “I had no idea that English worked like

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that,” I would have enough money to own the Yankees.

Nearly one-third of our Latin I students continue on to Latin II. At this level, the Latin sentences become more sophisticated. Students learn constructions such as participles, gerunds, dependent clauses, and conditions. Their ability to understand, and then to actually use these grammatical forms correctly in English, increases dramatically! In these upper levels of Latin, including Latin II, III, and IV, the students begin to comprehend the nuance of the Latin language. They discover that Roman authors were very careful about their word choice and even word placement. As one student said, “The language is unique because it can say a lot through word structure beyond what the words themselves mean. Translating is really fun (in poetry especially).” Speaking of poetry, students of Latin poetry at the Abbey are introduced to the rhetorical devices of the Roman poets. Identifying these figures of speech, and discovering why a poet uses them, proves to be much fun for the students. Their eyes light up a bit when they see that the word order actually mimics the meaning of the sentence. I know that I always get excited when explaining a good “word picture” in Latin poetry. Students actually draw out the word pictures on the tests!

Perhaps the best reason for studying Latin is to be able to read works such as Vergil’s Aeneid in the original Latin.

Present and past students of mine do not soon forget the Latin word lapsus, which means gliding, slipping, or falling.

Vergil uses this word several times to refer to the downfall of Troy – the snakes devouring Laocoon, the Trojan horse entering the city, the Greeks descending from the Trojan horse, and the death of Priam. Vergil’s most poignant use of this word occurs in his description of the death of the Trojan king, Priam. After Priam’s son has been killed by Achilles’ son Pyrrhus, Priam himself is killed by Pyrrhus. Vergil says that “Pyrrhus dragged Priam slipping (lapsantem) in

much blood of his son.” A dreadful image, to be sure, but unless it is read in the original Latin, the connection to the other images is completely lost.

It is only fitting that our students at Portsmouth Abbey perpetuate the study of Latin. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the Benedictine monks of the 6th century and beyond who preserved various invaluable Latin manuscripts.

Through our teaching of Latin at the Abbey, our students learn more about our past and are better prepared for their futures.

 A classics major at Assumption College, where she focused her collegiate studies on Latin authors such as Cicero, Ovid, Catullus, Vergil, and St. Augustine. Lizzie has been the head of the Classics Department since 2008. She also continued her study of Greek, reading Plato, Euripides, and Homer. Her graduate work was a combination of reading Latin and Greek authors and learning successful techniques in the Latin classroom.

In her professional career, Lizzie has attended many conferences, institutes and workshops. Most notable are the Classical Association of New England Summer Institute, American Classical League Institutes, and two AP workshops at the Taft School. The week-long workshops have sparked her love of teaching Caesar and Vergil at the AP level.

Recently, she attended the Classical Association of New England Summer Institute, “America’s Founding Fathers and the Classics of Greece and Rome” at Brown University.

At Portsmouth Abbey, Lizzie has coached varsity girls’ basketball, softball and track. She is an avid runner and has completed several marathons, three of them for charity.

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On Teaching Math Q&A with Kevin Morrissey, Head of Mathematics Did you always want to be a math teacher?

No! Math never really came easily to me; it was a challenge.

But I worked hard at it, and when I had those “aha!” moments, I said, “I can do this!” I wanted that challenge and sense of satisfaction…so it drew me to teach the subject.

A lot of students think the person teaching their class had no trouble with the subject, that he or she was an ace at whatever it is they now teach. In many cases that is true, I suppose…but I tell my students, “Go to your weaknesses, not your strengths.

Put in the time and effort, and it will come to you.” I tell my students that math was a challenge for me, but I kept at it, and I succeeded, and they can do the same. I hope I am able to pass that idea along to them.

I currently teach two sections of AP Calculus AB, an Honors Pre-Cal class, and two sections of Algebra II. I was teaching primarily Pre-calculus and Calculus but wanted to go back and teach algebra to better understand how our students are learning algebra – what the kids are building on before they get to calculus – to better understand if they are struggling in a higher-level math class like calculus. Having a solid foundation in math is critical – everything builds upon something the students have previously learned, so they must understand algebra in order to understand calculus. It has been very beneficial for me to go back and teach algebra.

Can you talk a bit about Portsmouth Abbey’s mathematics curriculum?

We offer courses from Algebra I through AP Calculus AB and BC, and there are honors sections in Geometry, Algebra II and Pre-calculus. We also have two other AP courses, AP Statistics and AP Computer Science. Beyond that, we offer courses for those who have completed math through AP Calculus; the topics include a multi-variable calculus course, a linear algebra course and an analysis course. This is high-level material for our most talented students, who must earn a “5” on the AP Calculus BC exam the prior year in order to be considered for these courses. We typically offer one of them each year, and depending on the specific interests of the students who will be taking the course, we will select the topic. We then most often will rotate through the topics on a three-year basis.

And we have extracurricular math activities: 30 or so of our students participate each year in the New England Math League

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contests, for which the students volunteer, and in February we participate in the American Mathematics Competition, sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America. We choose about 50 students each year for this; there are two levels of competition based on the student’s current grade.

We have some very talented math students, and our goal is to make sure they are challenged and that we meet their goals mathematically during their time here. We like to say that no one has ever exhausted the math curriculum at Portsmouth Abbey, and that continues today.

In your opinion, what makes for a great classroom experience?

There has to be interaction between the teacher and students.

If, by the end of the year, my students don’t know me as more than their teacher – me, the human being, someone who was also a teen at one time, and who struggled but succeeded – then I have failed. We expect that the classroom will consist of learning the material, but the students also need to learn about me as their teacher.

The classroom has to be enjoyable – even during tough lessons, we can smile and have fun, and it can be interesting.

Too many students approach math with dread – “ugh, math… it’s my worst subject, I hate math…” – and that likely comes from their previous experiences with it. I try to spend more time with those students, and work with them to show them that they can succeed, and learn to enjoy math, if they are willing to put the time into it. There’s a method for figuring everything out – as I said, math is about building blocks and laying a good foundation. Even the most difficult calculus problem can be solved if you break it down, give it time, and go through the steps.

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

THE GREAT CLASSROOM AND BEYOND...

In calculus, we look at solving the problem with different approaches: numerically, graphically and analytically. I often will start by going through the problem with the student by hand – numerically – and then we will look at the problem graphically, and then analytically, and see how the problem was solved using those approaches, too. The approaches are all related, and it is helpful to show the students that you can arrive at the same answer using different approaches.

How do you tie real life into the math you teach?

I often try to connect math to other subjects and make the connection between math and real-life applications. When I speak with my students about polling and statistics, or certain decisions that our government makes, I show them how knowledge of math is regularly used to solve problems in everyday contexts. Math is not a stand-alone subject. I often hear from students, “When will I ever use this?” I tell them I am happy to show them… and then we speak about applying that mathematical formula or concept to daily life. In Algebra II, we recently plotted the winning times in the 100-yard freestyle competition in the Olympics over the past 100 years. From that, the students predicted what the winning times will be in the upcoming Olympics. It was fun and relevant for them because correlating mathematics to everyday life is so important, I try to apply it to real-world situations whenever I can.

How do you help a struggling math student?

I often use a sports analogy, which is something so many of our students here can relate to. I tell my students that when they put time and effort into a sport, and practice it to the best of their ability, they will improve – they can make the varsity team and be a good player. Now, a lot of kids are happy to put time into becoming better at a sport, but they have to do the same thing if they want to become better academically! They can’t make excuses – they have to make a firm commitment.

If they do, they will see the results – just like they do in sports.

That goes for every academic subject, not just math.

Of course, I offer extra help to any student who wants it. I view it as part of my job. And, I hope that the commitment I give to my job as a teacher will teach the students about more than just math – it will teach them about work ethic, perseverance, trying to be the best at whatever they do – all good life skills.

What is a special moment for you as a teacher?

The “aha!” moment in the classroom is always gratifying, but the best thing is to hear from my former students who are now in college and taking a math class. To hear from them

that they are doing well and feel prepared for that class – even if they have not taken a math class in a few years – because of what they learned in my classroom makes me feel great.

How has technology factored into your teaching of math in recent years?

The advent of technology in the classroom is nothing short of incredible. In class, I use a SmartBoard and a graphing app on my iPad. They are wonderful tools, offering a different approach to illustrating and solving a problem. And the students pick up on the new technology, such as our new graphing calculator, very quickly; it comes naturally to them. But there is no substitute for hands-on, teacher-to-student learning. The technology should make the learning better, not the teaching easier.

What else helps you provide the best possible classroom experience for your students?

There’s an assumption that if you teach the same subjects year after year, you know the material and so not much needs to change. I disagree! Even though I have many years of experience teaching math, I need to bring new ideas and new energy to the classroom every year. You cannot get stale or stagnate – which is what can happen when you teach the same problems, in the same order, year in and year out. The students are new to the material every year, and I must take the same approach.

We have changed our math textbooks every few years, which has helped us stay fresh.

It is also very valuable to exchange information and ideas with teachers from other schools; it re-energizes me and can offer me new ways of helping my students see and solve mathematical problems. I will be participating this summer in a week-long professional development seminar, the Conference of Secondary School Mathematics at Exeter. It is a well-known and highly regarded conference, and I am really looking forward to it.

 A member of our faculty since 2006, Kevin came to the Abbey having taught at Seoul International School in Korea from 20022006, New Hampton School from1999 -2002 and a public school in Vermont from 1994-1998.

Outside of the classroom, Kevin coaches girls’ junior varsity soccer and is the head houseparent in St. Aelred’s House. Prior to beginning his teaching career, Kevin was an active - duty officer in the Army and has remained in the Reserves since departing active duty in 1994. He was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010. Kevin and his wife, Chun, have two sons, Sean ’11 and Kyle ’15.

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Great Expectations

by Steven Pietraszek ‘96 Associate Director of Admission Director of Financial Aid History Teacher

My relationship with Portsmouth Abbey began when I was 13 years old. I first came to campus for an admission interview in 1991. I was in the 8th grade and looking forward to starting high school the next year. I was looking for a school that would present distinctive academic opportunities – small classes, engaging teachers, and motivated peers. I also wanted to be able to play on sports teams and be known within the community. In short, I wanted to like my classes, have fun, and make good friends. Fortunately for me, my parents were willing to let me apply to the Abbey.

Fast forward 23 years, and my relationship with the Abbey has changed over time. I am not only a member of the Class of 1996 but I have been on the faculty for the past 10 years. Currently, I am an admission officer, a history teacher, a houseparent, and a coach. In the independent school world, this is called “wearing a lot of hats.” All of these roles enable me to continue the things that brought me to the Abbey in the first place. In particular, my roles in the admission office and as a classroom teacher have developed a symbiotic relationship over the years.

A big part of my day during the winter months in the admission office is spent interviewing prospective students. While every interview is different, I always ask about a student’s favorite teacher. In speaking with hundreds of students each year about the teachers they connect with, a couple of similar traits emerge. These students look for a teacher who is passionate about the subject, who is engaging in the classroom, and who challenges students to think on their own. This is similar to what I felt as a student. My understanding of history and the profession of teaching has been shaped by this, and it is my aspiration to live up to this standard every day. To me, the study of history has never been about memorizing names or dates. It has been about connecting the dots between events in the past to the issues of today. In order to understand the human experience, you must be able to see both the possibilities and the limits of our capacity for change. I aim to promote interpretative thinking through analytical reading and persuasive writing. If a student can research a problem, formulate an answer, and successfully communicate that idea to others, then I am happy with his or her work.

As historians, many of the questions we investigate in class deal with the concept of change over time. As an admission officer, I am com-

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monly asked how this School has changed over time. In my eyes, the School has grown in several ways. The students of today bring to Portsmouth Abbey tremendous diversity: racial, ethnic, geographic, socio-economic, political, and religious. With this, our students bring to the community global awareness to help us work towards cultural understanding. At Portsmouth Abbey, proficiency in language and communication skills have always been highly regarded, and high-level thinking and problem-solving skills have always been praised. While this is not new, the places where our students have the opportunity to hone these skills have expanded. From Haney Fellowships to summer study abroad programs, Abbey students are working at places such as Children’s Hospital in Boston and orphanages in Romania. They are taking college-level courses in Salamanca, Spain, and teaching school children in Lhasa, Tibet. The opportunities that exist far beyond Cory’s Lane only serve to make Portsmouth Abbey a better place.

Here in the Office of Admission, our guide for prospective students is called Life on the Lane. As I reflect on the impact studying, working, teaching, living, and coaching on Cory’s Lane has had on me over the years, I can easily say that it has exceeded every expectation I had as a 13-year-old 8th grader.

 After graduating from the Abbey, Steve attended Colby College, where he majored in history, with a concentration in turn-of- the-20th - Century U. S. History, graduating cum laude. His senior thesis was entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in Maine.” Steve has also completed course work in Latin American history, the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, Islam and the Middle East, and the African Diaspora.

Steve began working in the Office of Admission in 2004, and has been teaching one or two sections in the History Department since 2006. “I feel that a connection to the academic world here at Portsmouth Abbey is essential to my work in the admission office,” Steve explains. “We are a vibrant academic community, and being a part of that on a daily basis helps keep me focused on the mission of the School and the impact incoming students will have on the future of my alma mater.”

In addition to teaching, Steve coaches junior varsity boys’ lacrosse and lives in St. Martin’s House with his wife, Beth, and their son, Ben.

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

After 23 Years: Returning to Liberia

by Clarence Chenoweth, Dean of Students, Math Teacher

Let me first explain why and how I left Liberia. During the civil war in Liberia that lasted for roughly 14 years (19892003), several warring factions were combating for control of the country. With the country in turmoil, unless you were carrying a gun or were associated with one of these factions, your safety was at risk.

Security for the common citizen was non-existent, so after several discussions with our parents, it was decided that my brothers, then 20 and 18, and I, then 22, would have to leave our parents and the home we had lived in since 1975. One of the main reasons for our departure was that most young men were being forced to join one of the factions as a soldier or risk losing their lives. As time passed, the decision to leave Liberia and try to find our way to the Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), the country bordering Liberia in the northeast, became evident.

In early 1990, we left our home in Bong Mines, in the northern part of the country, during early 1990, traveling through several checkpoints along the way. At times we were ordered off the vehicle we were traveling in and stripped of whatever monies and belongings we had with us. This was taking place at every checkpoint we encountered, so we figured out ways to conceal items that were essential to our survival if we were to make it across the border.

We traveled for several days through dense forest, where we came across several dead bodies, always in fear of what might happen at the next checkpoint – we could encounter a group of child soldiers that were under the influence of something or simply thirsty for blood.

Eventually we crossed the Liberian border through Nimba County (Luguato) and entered the Côte d’Ivoire at a place called Danane.

There, we were able to make contact with our sister, who resided in the United States, and several friends who’d traveled through similar ordeals and were already settled there. With the help of friends and relatives, we were able to feed ourselves and acquire the bare necessities to survive one day at a time. Looking for better ways

to simply exist, we left Danane through a family friend and travelled to Abidjan, the capital city of the Côte d’Ivoire.

The city of Abidjan was my “home” for several months until I moved to another city on its outskirts, Abobo. I was fortunate to be taken in by a friend of a family friend who had a small compound with a boys’ quarter. Abobo became my new home, and I started reaching out to several organizations and colleges to find any kind of assistance to help me get by. I was fortunate to sign a small contract with a second-rate basketball team that paid for my daily transportation to practice and two meals a day.

Our practice facility was on the local university campus. I could read, write, and speak enough French to get by. I began to explore ways to get from Abidjan, playing basketball, to any institution that would give me the chance to return to school. I was spending time on the university’s campus, researching leads to possible opportunities, when the thought struck me to simply write letters to colleges and universities in the USA. I introduced myself, told my story, and asked for an opportunity to attend their school. I didn’t know it at the time, but an initiative had begun that was helping promising Liberian students relocate to the United States.

My letter made its way to the late Representative Joseph Newsome, founder of the Rhode Island Liberian Student Initiative. Through the kindness of Rep. Newsome, his staff, and several alumni of the program, I was awarded membership in the program along with the promise that I would be the recipient of an upcoming scholarship. The group helped me acquire travel documents in anticipation of being granted a visa to travel to the United States. I later received word from Rep. Newsome that I had received a scholarship from a small university in Rhode Island, Salve Regina University.

In order to be allowed to travel to the USA, I had to be interviewed by a visa agent at the U.S. Embassy in Abidjan. I was also told that

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several applications had been rejected by the U.S. Embassy, so even with the scholarship my interview was no guarantee that I would receive my visa. However, Rep. Newsome came to Abidjan, took all of our documents and went to the U.S. Embassy himself. He returned and extended his hands to me and several other students, telling us, “Congratulations, you have received visas to travel to the United States of America.” With this exciting news we were also told we would have to find money for our travel and plane tickets. Without any means to acquire a ticket, I became worried that, after all, I might not be one of those traveling to the States.

However, to my great surprise, I learned that I was one of the lucky students whose travel expenses had been paid in full.

In the early fall of 1992, two years after leaving Liberia, I left Abidjan with literally only a backpack on my back. I arrived at JFK Airport and took a bus to Providence along with several students, supporters and alumni of the initiative. We were met by more supporters, friends and alumni, along with several long-lost family members. I stayed with a cousin of my dad’s as I waited to start classes at Salve Regina in September 1992. I was able to transfer several credits from Cuttington University College in Bong County. Although it meant a challenging adjustment period, I was able to graduate in the spring of 1995.

My experience at Salve was not always easy, but I managed to adjust and, in the process, made some good friends. It would be selfish of me not to mention some of the wonderful people I met, especially Mrs. Deb DeVecchi, who was a member of the math department at Salve. She steered me towards Portsmouth Abbey School…

Now on to my travels back to Liberia, 23 years after leaving.

Planning my return to Liberia took several years, and it became even more difficult when I married and started my own family.

When I first decided to return, the air travel was a lot more affordable, but safety was a serious issue because the country was still recovering from 14 years of war. Discussions with my wife, Rhonda, about the trip were not always easy. At first we thought about making it a family vacation, but I was advised against it by a lot of people, who said that with my children as young as they were, it might not be a good idea. They were right.

On July 16, 2013, I boarded a plane from Providence to Liberia by way of JFK and Accra, Ghana, with mixed emotions. I was heartbroken to be leaving my wife and children for so long, yet excited and anxious to be on my way to see my Liberian family – my dad, brothers, aunts and cousins. I arrived in Harbel (35 miles from the capital, Monrovia) in the early evening of July 17 to an unexpected scene, compared to what I remembered when I was last there in 1990: my first sight of the airport was of rows of U.N. helicopters and planes. Upon deplaning, we were ushered onto a bus to take us to the arrival gate. I’d heard from several friends who had recently traveled to Liberia that going through customs can be quite a challenge (I did not have a Liberian passport). Thankfully, one of my brothers had arranged for me to be escorted through customs, so I did not spend much time going through lines.

I was met outside with great joy by my dad and two brothers (one of whom I had not seen for eight years). The feeling hit me: How was my stay going to be? As we left the airport, reality began to set in. What should I be bracing myself for?

I was immediately introduced to the darkness of the city streets as my younger brother tried to navigate his way through the traffic, dodging both cars and motorcycles coming his way, sometimes driving on the wrong side of the road. For the first time I heard the saying, “This, too, is Liberia,” meaning, “Anything goes in this country right now;” one needs to have an open mind and be cautious of one’s surroundings. In the night, I could easily see the existence of an absolute disparity among the people, as certain houses had electricity provided by generators, while most houses and streets were in total darkness. I immediately realized that Liberia is unmistakably divided into two classes, the “haves” and the “have-nots,” and the “haves” are subdivided into those who can afford electricity all 24 hours a day and those who can only provide for the family 12 hours a day (mainly at night). The darkness of the streets, along with the countless motorcycle-taxis (referred to as pehn-pehn), made it difficult for us to get through the city. We

As years passed and traveling to Liberia became more expensive, I asked our then-Headmaster, Jim DeVecchi, about the possibility of my trip being funded by the School as a part of my upcoming sabbatical. After a series of meetings, Dr. DeVecchi approved my request. Rhonda finally came to terms with this and began to be excited for me, although she was torn. With a family, including two little ones, CJ and Siena, my leaving them for two weeks to spend time with my family in Liberia was bittersweet.

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finally arrived at my aunt’s house in Brewerville, on the outskirts of Monrovia, to a welcome dinner. We gathered at the dining room table, and I had my first real Liberian dish of Cassava Leaf since 1990!

The next day I was dropped off in the city at the Mamba Point Hotel, where I stayed for most of my trip. The hotel is located in one of the most secure parts of the country, in the vicinity of the area once used by the American Embassy. I had a spectacular view of the ocean from my hotel balcony. Once settled, I started to make my way around, driving with my dad and brother throughout the city.

We started right in the heart of downtown on Broad Street, which was as congested as I remembered but mainly occupied now by a lot of people with not a whole lot to do. Monrovia is overcrowded.

Everyone peddles in the street, simply trying their best to make ends meet by selling whatever they can find – sometimes including stolen property.

region of the country. On July 21, my brothers, dad and I traveled to Bong County. “The Chenoweths’ Farm,” as it is called, was once a vibrant farmstead, but on that day we returned to an area full of nothing but overgrown vegetation. The once-150 acres of land, with a nice, 4-bedroom house, a boys’ quarter, and several livestock, was used mainly for the production of palm oil. Now it stands overgrown and desperately in need of clearing. While there, we managed to get several men from the nearby village to begin work on the farm so that it could be re-opened (I hear from my family that progress is being made).

Back in Monrovia, on the morning of July 25, I was invited by a friend of my aunt to visit a primary school located in Harbel. I was shocked by how little there is for the students who attend the school, yet the staff does a good job at making ends meet with what little resources they have. Impressed by what I learned about the school, I left with a short wish list. I wanted to visit the community where I grew up, Bong Mines. I called a longtime neighborhood friend, Bokai Ragland, to see if his schedule was open for the rest of the day. It was, and he agreed to accompany me.

Most of Liberia is quite safe, but theft of personal property is a serious issue. For the most part, things seemed to have improved, yet corruption and bribery are still evident, even at high levels. There is a saying that, in order to get something done in a timely fashion, you must “put ink in the pen” of everyone who helps you. Liberia was recently deemed one of the most corrupt nations in the world.

Sadly, progress, such as rebuilding the country’s infrastructure and economic development, will take some time. There is still a lot that must be done by elected officials and those in the position to affect change.

Visiting with my family, and meeting people whom I had heard about but never met, made the initial part of my trip go by quickly.

I met my mom’s sisters, their husbands and their families, along with several other aunts on my dad’s side of the family. They were as excited to meet me as I was to meet them. We spent some good times together, although my visit was too brief for their liking.

My next stop was to visit our family farm in the northwestern

My family moved to Bong Mines during the early ‘70s. We lived there until the war began. Bong Mines was a mining community built by a German company to mine and export iron ore. Everything about the community was of German origin. Both of my par-

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ents worked for the company. My dad was a zone supervisor in charge of placing staff and non-staff employees and families into different neighborhoods. My mom was a primary school teacher within the school system. Life was great; we were privileged to have an excellent elementary and high school education and a comfortable way of life. Simply put, we lived in a wonderful community, had all that we needed, and could afford what we wanted.

On the ride from Monrovia to a city call Kakata, we drove past several breathtaking landscapes, reminding me that there are still some beautiful things about the country. As we turned off from Kakata to Bong Mines Highway, we drove on a recently paved road for a while and then began a long stretch of bumpy, unpaved road. Returning to a community that was once one of the best places to live outside of Monrovia, I felt chills running through my body. There was nothing to be seen other than overgrown trees and vegetation. I then realized that the area that was once considered the center of our community no longer existed. I was disappointed that we were not able to drive up to our family house because our entire neighborhood, I was told, is covered under dense forest. Amazingly, the Lutheran Church that was once a popular place of worship still stands intact along with the highly regarded hospital that was used throughout the war.

Driving past the ruins of what used to be the houses of people with whom I grew up, we finally arrived in what is now the center of the community: many people, carrying on their daily activities of marketing, shopping and simply living as best they could with what meager resources they had. There was even a soccer game being played at the stadium that was once the site of our weekend activities. Several people recognized me or knew about my family.

But there was little left of the life I experienced there. After watching a bit of soccer, we left Bong Mines and made our way back to Monrovia.

The final agenda item for my trip was, along with my dad, brothers, aunts and cousins, to travel to Robertsport, in Grand Cape Mount County, where my family is from. I was 10 or 12 when I was last there. I remembered very little about the city. Robertsport is bordered by one of the biggest lakes in the country, Lake Piso, along with the St. John River and the Atlantic Ocean. Above sea level, there are breathtaking views. At one time, the city was home to the Hotel Victoria, which was built to house visiting international dignitaries. I was fascinated as I listened to people talk about my grandfather and the different positions he held in the city government: Chief Shoemaker, City Mayor, and Commissioner.

The time I spent in Robertsport was the highlight of my return to Liberia. We visited my grandfather’s grave, my dad’s elementary school, and the family homestead that is now in ruins. We saw other family land within the city as we were touring. Being an avid lover of coastal living, I loved everything about Robertsport.

It has one of the best beaches in the country and is considered

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The trip home was long and delayed, with several postponements and a forced overnight in Accra, Ghana (a beautiful West African city), due to airplane mechanical issues. Our transatlantic flight to JFK finally took off. Upon arriving in New York at 2:00 a.m. and being notified that I would have to wait another 12 hours to fly to Providence, I rented a car and drove home to Portsmouth, anxious to see my own family before another day passed.

the country’s best location for surfing. We took a refreshing swim in the ocean. While there, we helped local fishermen pull in their catch of the day, buying some fresh fish to take home. We concluded our visit with a family dinner at what was once my grandfather’s establishment and used as a gathering place. Sadly, my trip was in its final stages.

I am grateful for the prayers, support and generosity I received from everyone in helping me make my dream – to return to Liberia – become a reality.



On July 29, my sister told me that we were invited to attend the rededication ceremony of the Bong Mines High School the next day by the President of Liberia, Her Excellency, Madame Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. We were invited as honored alumni who had supported the school during its most difficult time, the post-war period. It took a while for the President to arrive, but it was an honor to be in her company. She is quite a character in person, jovial and down to earth. I was privileged to meet some of her ministers and other dignitaries, and I was also introduced to one of my cousins, Madame Christina Tarr, who is currently serving as the Minister of Justice.

My departure from Liberia on the evening of July 31 was full of emotion. I was sad to be leaving my dad, sister, brothers, aunts, and cousins but excited to be returning home to Rhonda, CJ and Siena. Even with all that was going on during my stay in Liberia, I missed them a lot. I was glad I’d been kept busy as it made my days go by faster.

Since 1997 Clarence has held many positions at Portsmouth Abbey, including dean of discipline, head houseparent of two of the boys’ houses on campus, head varsity girls’ basketball coach, and head junior varsity boys’ basketball coach.

Currently, Clarence serves as the dean of students, a position he has held since 2000, and teaches AP Statistics and Algebra II. He has also taught AP Calculus, Pre-Calculus, Geometry and Algebra I. Clarence is the head coach of junior varsity boys’ soccer and varsity boys’ basketball. In additon, he has organized and participated in our Appalachia Service Project trips, where students raise funds to travel to Appalachia to work on renovating homes in West Virginia and Kentucky.

Clarence lives on campus with his wife, Rhonda Mitchell - Chenoweth, and their two children, Clarence (CJ) Elijah and Siena Lena.

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The 2013 Ali Sacco ‘05 Memorial Internship

by Julia Boog ‘14

As the 2013 recipient of the Ali Sacco ‘05 Internship, Julia spent two weeks at Children’s Hospital in Boston, shadowing the physicians and staff in the Cardiology Department. The following is her account.

I held a human heart in my hands. It’s funny how these things happen, really. One second you’re walking through the hallways of one of the most renowned hospitals in the world, and the next second you have a team of doctors leading you down 6 flights of stairs into a sketchy room literally full of buckets of body parts. The doctors and I stood around a small table, entranced, while another took out a scalpel and cut a small opening to allow access into the right ventricle. Some whipped out their iPhones and nonchalantly snapped a few photos, while I stood paralyzed in the corner of the room wondering how I had gotten myself into this situation. However, when a nurse asked me if I would like to hold the heart, I was curious. One minute later, the lifeless, enlarged heart sat in my hands, and although I was inclined to listen for a heartbeat, it sat perfectly still. Even worse, there was nothing that I could do to reverse it. In a sense, I was having a one-way, and not to mention flat-lined, conversation with this heart.

Only an hour later, I met a teenage girl with a congenital heart defect. Because she also had Williams Syndrome, she could not relay her thoughts in speech. Instead, she waltzed around the room wearing no shoes, creating havoc wherever she danced. When the doctor asked permission to listen to her heart, she grunted and climbed onto the hospital bed in a fetal position – which didn’t make the doctor’s job any easier. The doctor took out her stethoscope, and after a quick listen, she then asked me if I would like to listen as well. Everyone in the room went silent, enabling me to hear the subtle thump of her heart. While before I thought that by feeling the dead heart in my palms I’d gained insight into everything I needed to know about cardiology, I now understood that nothing I had learned so far meant anything until I actually listened to a beating heart.

I was getting a response, and it felt natural, even conversational.

Normally, I am a talker. Five out of my six teacher comments last year used several variations of the word “vocal” to describe me. In school, I listen for information only to regurgitate back onto the paper or in class in some shape or form. I had first learned about the Ali Sacco Internship the summer before. This internship was established in memory of Ali Sacco, who had a heart defect and died in December of her Fifth Form year. I had entered my internship with no prior knowledge of cardiology – or medicine, for that matter – and considering that I was shadowing the doctors in the Pediatric Cardiology Department, I found I had little to talk about with them at first. They are far too busy to listen to the trivialities of my day.

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However, the entire hospital environment is about listening rather than talking. Doctors listen to patients to make diagnoses; patients listen to the doctors as they explain the rare heart defect that has taken over their lives.

And I – I sat in the corner of the room, constantly listening.

I quickly learned that I was merely a fly on the wall. I heard everything and wasn’t expected to do anything with that information. When you really listen, you start to feel the intangible characteristics of the hospital: the heaviness in the room when a mother finds out that her newborn daughter was that one-in-ten-thousand diagnosed with a life-altering heart condition, or the buoyant feeling when the boy who has had countless catheterization procedures has made the varsity baseball team at his school.

I now think back to the dead heart – a doctor explained that this heart had stopped working and that the patient had just received an artificial one to keep him alive for the time being. Holding the heart did not tell me anything about this man, but later, while walking down the long hallways of Boston Children’s, I listened to the laugh of the man who was awaiting his new heart. I felt his life everywhere – in his family, in him, and in me.

In the internship, I would witness medical feats which I had believed were nearly impossible. I saw several cases of some of the rarest heart defects in the world, and witnessed world-class cardiologists take them on with a positive light. It never failed to amaze me how optimistic families were, and how the doctors explained everything with a certain patience and care necessary for their job. These doctors, who sometimes seemed to live off of ice chips and unsalted crackers, were saving lives every day.

Their humble yet confident attitude was undoubtedly reassuring.

Now, I am aware every time I walk into a room - aware of my environment; aware of the personalities surrounding me; aware of their palpable energies. Rather than absorbing information for the sake of spitting it out, I step back and become the observer. I listen with the beating heart – rather than to it– and I finally can hear everything that I need to know.

d

The Ali Sacco '05 Internship award was established by Children's Hospital in Boston in memory of Ali's spirit of curiosity, enthusiasm, and generosity. Ali died in December of 2003 during her Fifth Form year at Portsmouth Abbey.

The award recipient is chosen each year based on academic accomplishments and outstanding personal qualities. The internship affords the opportunity to shadow physicians and medical staff in the Cardiology Department at Children's Hospital for two weeks.

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2013 Haney Fellowship in Salta, Argentina

by Abby Byrne ‘14

“Bizcocho, es hora de dormir!” “Guau, Guau!” thirty kindergarteners chirped at me. They sat cross legged on mats around my chair, and the closest ones rested a hand on my knee. This was a favorite of theirs. We read Biscuit almost every day. After Biscuit there was a second story, then it was time for me to move on to the next classroom of kids. But as I stood up to leave, one kid would stand up to hug me, then another. Soon I was the center of a group hug of waist-high Argentinean 5-year-olds. I promised them I would be back to read again tomorrow.

I read to the three kindergarten classes at the Fe y Alegria School five days a week, every morning after breakfast. The walk there was beautiful in the mornings; the fog rolls down the mountains as the sun gets higher and the dogs are curled up in the grass – finally at peace. The air was chilly but not unbearable. Everyone told me I was lucky; we were experiencing a particularly warm winter.

I stayed with three nuns in a convent at the end of the barrio. The nuns are part of the Sister’s Faithful Companions of Jesus (FCJ). They came to Barrio Solidaridad in Salta mainly to strengthen the community in this poverty-stricken neighborhood. The dynamic in the convent was pretty interesting. We were four very different people. Sr. Margarita started and owns a special education school. She has white hair, bright blue eyes, a British accent and the biggest heart. She cooked some of the best food I have ever eaten. Then there was Sr. Alicia, originally from Madrid.

She is a bit younger and very soft spoken – a professor at the Catholic University at Salta; she teaches robotics. And there was Sr. Madeleine, a professor of elementary education at the University of Alabama. She is large in every aspect of her being – big, loud, with a huge personality.

I went to the library twice a week in the afternoons. It is the only library in the barrio and, before we came, had only a handful of children’s books. Thanks to donations from St. Philomena School, in Portsmouth, RI, and some of my grant as well, Sr. Madeleine and I brought almost 200 books to add to the shelves, every one inscribed by an American grade-schooler. This felt pretty awesome. About 10-15 children (ages between five and eleven) would come after school to read in the library.

We would sit around the big table and pass a new story around for each kid to read a page aloud. After a few stories, we took to playing hand games. Madeleine and I taught them every one we could think of, and we spent afternoons giggling and making up our own.

I got to debut my skills as a ballet teacher to the library group. I brought ballet slippers to give to the kids. They were the shoes that my sisters and I had worn from age three all the way to the present. We sat around the floor, trying on slippers until each girl found a pair that fit her. I lined the girls up in the courtyard outside of the library and I taught them first position and plié. We practiced ballet arms, pirouettes and leaps across the floor. None of them had ever had a ballet class before, and I was so impressed with their eagerness to learn and their grace when they leapt across the floor. I was also taken aback by their gratitude. After each dance lesson, every girl gave me a kiss on the cheek and thanked me, clutching her new ballet slippers.

To read more about Abby’s Haney Fellowship trip, visit www.portsmouthabbey.org/page/6784 on our School website.

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2013 Haney Fellowship in San José de Cusmapa, Nicaragua

by Peter Vergara ‘14

Each leaf. One by one. Chris and I knelt down beside the tomato plants and began to count moscas blancas – a common pest that plagues many Central American fields; it translates to “white flies.”

As we found a mosca blanca we would kill it and pluck off the leaf it was on. If there were several moscas blancas, we would rip away the entire branch. When we had counted and eliminated all moscas blancas from a branch, we moved to the next one and repeat the painstaking process – making our way to the next plant. There were 16 rows of plants in the field, with almost 75 plants per row – over 1,000 plants. Thankfully, Chris and I were not the only ones laboring as manual pesticides; in fact, we were helping twelve students of a SAT class – Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial. The SAT program provides students with both theoretical and practical classes, allowing them to understand certain skills, while also enabling them in the practice of them.

SAT covers many areas of study – all of them essential to living in the heart of Nicaraguan poverty: from reading and writing to pest control and crop cycles.

This past summer, I was able to experience, witness, and work in the heart of Nicaraguan poverty. From June 14th until July 11th, I was in Nicaragua, living among some of the poorest communities

of the world. My time in Nicaragua was spent in the north of the country, in a small village named San José de Cusmapa. I was there with Fabretto’s Children Foundation – an NGO (non-government organization) based in the USA and Spain, working to improve living conditions in Nicaragua. While I was a solo volunteer on the trip, I lived with other Fabretto volunteers: three American college students and two graduate students from France. Together, we lived in the heart of Cusmapa – each day, further understanding the miserable living conditions. The water pressure was low; sometimes it did not even run. When it did, it was not potable. Purified drinking water was very scarce and in high demand. As a result, we usually resorted to filtering and boiling tap water – despite that, it took over a week for our bodies to adjust. Furthermore, the food consisted mainly of beans and rice. Vegetables and meat were rare, and milk was a considered a luxury.

As a Solo Volunteer, I helped where I was needed. In other words, each day held a new adventure.

Every morning, the director of the Fabretto center in Cusmapa would inform me of the ongoing projects and ask me to help with a particular one. As a result, my work in Nicaragua ranged from teaching classes and babysitting, to paperwork and delivering food.

To read more about Peter’s Haney Fellowship trip, visit www.portsmouthabbey.org/page/6784 on our School website.

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P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

2013 Haney Fellowship in Vietnam

by Kilian White ‘14

Vietnam, for most, elicits ugly images of Huey helicopters and napalm drops and a war that nobody wanted. But for me, it was much more than that. Last winter, I read these words: “The Haney Fellowship was established to provide Fifth Form students with a unique educational experience during the summer before their Sixth Form year.” I racked my mind for a place worthy of such an extraordinary opportunity.

And somehow, on July 18th, 2013, I found myself stepping out into the hot and humid air of the Saigon night.

How I got there mystified even me. It all began with an idea: colonialism. I had learned much about how colonialism affects countries negatively. It’s the story of the America, North and South, and much of the rest of the world. In the light of Vietnam’s ascendance to a world economic power, I wanted to see if the impossible was true: could France, as a colonial power, have positively impacted the rising Vietnamese economy?

And so here I was, in Saigon. Through a Vietnamese priest in Chicago, I had made sleeping arrangements at a local seminary house there. My main focus in Saigon was French infrastructure. Saigon was the heart and soul of French economic power in Vietnam. As such, it was home to the massive port of Saigon as well as a host of repurposed French structures and institutions. Many of them, it seemed, remained almost unchanged since the departure of the French. The old Saigon post office remains identical to how it was left by the

French. Save for the obligatory photograph of Ho Chi Minh on the back wall, the station had changed little since its construction, keeping even its aging row of clocks showing the times in all of the relevant cities of the world, circa 1945, along with double rows of sturdy wooden phone booths. Here, too, the Catholic Church had flourished, both as a tourist attraction (Saigon’s Notre Dame Basilica occupies the heart of downtown Saigon) and as an institution, with masses overflowing into the streets from even the meanest of country churches on a daily, even hourly, basis. The training facility where I lived was visited almost daily by priests and faithful, and acquired a carnival atmosphere on holy days when, after Mass, of course, singing, laughing, and jokes overwhelmed the compound and the street outside.

For four weeks I lived in Saigon before boarding a train for Hanoi. The Reunification Railway, which I rode, was Vietnam’s primary railroad and had been constructed by the French before being destroyed by the Americans and finally rebuilt by the Vietnamese after the reunification of 1975. I traveled up the southern coastal plains before reaching the highlands of the nation’s central and northern regions. Along the way, I was able to observe the dynamics of life across a spectrum of Vietnam, from fishing villages to the majestic imperial city of Hue to small farms and rice paddies in the Central Highlands.

Arriving in Hanoi, I experienced a very different life in Vietnam, living with a family of successful Vietnamese Catholics in Ciputra International Village, a gated community on the outskirts of Hanoi that catered to the very wealthy Vietnamese and foreign businessmen and diplomats. I was able to visit Hanoi whenever I wanted but could also extend my reach far into the surrounding countryside, as these devout Catholics made a point of paying visits to various religious organizations and facilities near Hanoi.

To read more about Kilian’s Haney Fellowship trip, and to see more of his photographs and sketches, visit www.portsmouthabbey.org/page/6784 on the Portsmouth Abbey School website.

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2013 Haney Fellowship in Tibet

by Lucy Chen ’14 and Melody Mo ‘14

Lucy Chen ‘14

Melody Mo ‘14

During July 2013, we went to the countryside areas of Lhasa, Tibet, for two weeks where we continued to develop our Qian Shu Quan Shou (“Hand-inHand”) Program in the local schools. We visited and taught as volunteers in three counties at nineteen schools that we have donated to in the past two years. Every day, we spent twelve to fourteen hours in the schools with both teachers and students. With the support of the Haney Fellowship, we completed two new donations of books to two elementary schools in Maizhokunggar County: Zaxoi Gelaowo Elementary School and Nima Jiangre Elementary School.

A Story with the Children

Maizhokunggar County is located east of the main center of Lhasa, Tibet, in the valley of the middle reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo River, the main river in Tibet. The average altitude of the county is above 4000 meters (about 13,123 feet). The county has a population of 38,000 people. Most students in Zaxoi Gelaowo Elementary School and Nima Jiangre Elementary School are from poor families and, therefore, enjoy free education. However, the living conditions and educational resources in the whole county are not adequate. As we visited Maizhokunggar, every elementary school in the county was under reconstruction because many buildings’ structures had become unsafe to use and reside in over the years.

Looking into the blue sky, I felt nothing but the tranquility inside of me. As I looked down, one of the children accidentally met my eye and shyly grinned. I had finally found a sense of belonging, responsibility and accomplishment.

My first summer in Tibet had been rough. The altitude sickness, crowded classroom, overall bad living conditions, and difficulties in teaching at one point made me uncertain whether I would be able to keep going. But thinking of the kids, I carried on with what I started. And as I gradually got used to this new life, my second summer in Tibet went by more smoothly. The more I discovered how awful the environment was, the more I respected those young lives that tenaciously held on to this place and grew.

Last summer with the Haney Fellowship we received, “Hand-in-Hand Foundation” was able to donate books to more schools—a total of 23— including both elementary schools and middle schools. And I got the chance to spend more time with the kids and learn more from them.

In the schools, all students are boarders. Usually ten students share one room in the dormitory. The teachers live with the students on campus. They rarely have any break during the school year because even during the weekends they need to take care of the students who remain on the campus, or they must escort the students to their homes, which are far away from the school.

We were warmly welcomed by the teachers and the headmasters in the schools. The experience was mutual: while we taught the teachers and students about how to read and learn from the books, the teachers also inspired us with their dedication to their students, reminding us what a privileged life we live and how much more we can do for them.

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To read more about Melody’s and Lucy’s Haney Fellowship trip, and to see additional photographs, visit www.portsmouthabbey.org/page/6784 on the Portsmouth Abbey School website.

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2013 Haney Fellowship: Sketches of Spain This past summer I walked five hundred and fifty miles across the Pyrenees and northern Spain. My journey took me from Saint-JeanPied-de-Port in southern France to Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia in northwestern Spain. Along the way, I followed in the footsteps of Christian pilgrims and Roman traders. Beginning in the ninth century, thousands of Catholics walked this route, known as the Camino de Santiago, to visit the relics of Saint James (Santiago in Spanish) in the cathedral at the end of their journey. Interest in the Way of Saint James declined as medieval times drew to a close. However, its popularity has recently surged upwards as people from all over the world have discovered the way, though not necessarily drawn to the pilgrimage for religious reasons.

As a pilgrim on the way, I attempted to delve into the culture of the Camino. I learned a great deal not just about my fellow pilgrims, but also about the remarkable Spanish people who run the hostels, or albergues, where thousands of pilgrims stay each year. I documented my pilgrimage in writing and photography. Most of the images in my slideshow were taken in transit, or before I had finished my walking for each day. They consist of brief snapshots of the breathtaking landscape, the unique Spanish charm of the towns and cities I passed through. The following six vignettes explore in greater depth the history, mythology and even the psychology behind the images we associate with the Camino before experiencing it for ourselves. Hopefully, between the two components, I have exposed both the beauties and the realities of this unique, monumental experience.

SKETCHES OF SPAIN

A Pilgrim’s Impressions on the Way of St. James The Anti-Pilgrim Albergues – the hostels where pilgrims sleep in rooms with as few as two or three or as many as a hundred other people – aren’t luxurious. The private ones charge a little more, and generally offer better services and more privacy. The municipal albergues, funded by the local government of nearly every small town

by Eden Franz ‘14

that lies along the Camino, are cheaper, and it often shows. I spent my first night in relative luxury after crossing the Pyrenees and ending my twenty-five kilometer trek in the town of Roncesvalles. The municipal there was brand new, a cruel trick to play on pilgrims – we expect the worst, get a pleasant surprise, and the next day decide to try the municipal in a town about twenty-seven kilometers along the road.

Larrasoaña definitely comes close to the worst. Its hospitaleros speak Spanish exclusively and don’t particularly care about pilgrims’ comfort, as evidenced by the tiny, shared restroom with mysterious vegetation growing on its walls. Essentially everything that Roncesvalles had, this place lacked. And yet the Camino has a funny way of constantly undermining first impressions. Unlikely as it may seem, I enjoyed my night in Larrasoaña more than any other in the course of my pilgrimage.

Often when circumstances are at their worst, people are at their best.

Even just two days into our Camino, many of the pilgrims I started out with already understood the necessity of camaraderie in the face of miserable conditions. That night, Eric was the cheerleader for our motley crew of peregrinos. At the beginning of the Camino, before the exhaustion sets in, pilgrims eagerly share the reasons for their walk and speculate about how meaningful it all will be. Eric, a twenty-nine yearold graphic designer from just outside of Montreal, was even more willing to dive straight into deeply personal discussion, because unlike everyone else, Larrasoaña marked the end of his Camino. A little over a month before I met him, he had been at a dance competition in Paris with eleven other proud French-Canadians who were promptly dominated by their European and Asian competitors. He decided he wanted to walk the Camino before he went home, to try and figure out what to do next with his life, and a train ticket to Leon was cheaper than a ticket to St. Jean. So he headed to Spain and started walking backwards. (Later on, I fell in with a quartet of middle-aged Brits who were very confused by Eric’s approach to the Camino; they began telling other pilgrims that some crazy Quebeçois was making the journey to Santiago by physically walking backwards.)

To read more about Eden’s Haney Fellowship trip, and to see additional photographs, visit www.portsmouthabbey.org/ page/6784 on the Portsmouth Abbey School website.

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Jacques Pages: notre professeur, notre semblable, notre frère!

The following comments were made by Carroll Moulton ‘64 on the occasion of Jacques Pages’ retirement in 1985. Carroll’s tribute is reprinted here from the December 1985 issue of “The Portsmouth Newsletter.”

It is a great pleasure to be able to share this occasion with you. If you will forgive a personal note or two; I must tell you that tonight, in a way, feels like a proverbial “25th”– since it was on a day like this, almost exactly twenty-five years ago in 1960, that I entered the gates of the school for the first time. We callow 13-year-olds were rather surprised on that occasion to find that the roof of the dining hall in which we now sit had waged a losing battle with a hurricane! There was, I recall, a sense of being part of a special, pioneering experience: The Class of 1964 had been either blessed or cursed, depending on how you looked at it.

The true hurricane, however was yet to come. Father Andrew, with his legendary deft scheduling, assigned me to French 3, and that is how – several days into the term – I first met Jacques. For the next four years he directed our studies of French literature. What stands out in those memories? The Pall Mall cigarettes and sometimes the chalk he mistook for them; the rhythmic exhortation, “n’est-ce pas, n’est-ce pas?”” as he coaxed us to consider a point; the flurry of purple masters from the mimeograph machine, meant as aides-mémoire but really, if we could have known it, the cahiers of a restless, questing intelligence; the vast reading assignment, tempered occasionally as a result of our timid complaints. I still recall our lack of comprehension when Jacques asked us to read Racine’s Phèdre for the third time. “But sir, we already read this last year!” “Ah,” he replied, “but this year we will find in it something new!”

Something new indeed! If we could have then predicted the chant of the Parisian university rebels of 1968, who marched on the Sorbonne intoning the new Marseillaise of “No more Racine,” we would have been able handily to refute them – because Jacques had the cunning habit of remembering, amidst all of the classes he had to teach, exactly what aspects of a literary work he had emphasized to us the year before. He went on the following year to something new, and – almost casually – he showed us that the re-reading of a work could be always an enrichment, never a bore.

I was told that the theme of this speech was not to be a collection of anecdotes, but was rather to consist in some reflections on the nature of scholarship, and I now proceed to that theme. But I ask you not to forget the anecdotes, because we shall come round to them, in time.

The word “scholarship,” as you know, is derived from schole. My Greek dictionary gives a rather wide spectrum of meanings: leisure,

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rest, quiet, time, ease – probably something of a shock to current students at Portsmouth! The word, of course, is also the root of our word “school.” A glance at an English dictionary gives a more solemn set of meanings for “scholarship”: “the quality of knowledge and learning shown by a student”; “the systemized knowledge of a learned man, exhibiting accuracy, critical ability, and thoroughness”; “the knowledge attained by scholars, collectively”; “erudition.” The stuff, indeed, as dreams are made on.

My purpose tonight is to suggest that we need not settle for any of these definitions tout court. If I may be a bit loose with etymology, I think that the example of Jacques powerfully supports another definition of scholarship – a definition which we may have known all along, but which we may have been tempted to suppress because, possibly, it seemed too remote or outdated. Originally, of course, the word’s Greek meaning involved an economic dimension. Only those with enough freedom from the tiresome necessity of making a living could have a claim on scholarship: in practice, learning was the province of the rich. Scholarships in the form of cash, or loans, have eased this restrictive requirement in our society. But I submit that we have largely forgotten one important dimension of the term’s original meaning. I refer to the dimension of pleasure and freedom – not in a financial sense, but in an intellectual one. Jacques has shown us in a very particular way that the quest and the effort to know can make the mind dance.

My own years as a university teacher coincided with a wrenching turnaround in the outlook of many Americans colleges after the political and plentifully populated “Sixties,” as colleges were confronted with the necessity for numerous cutbacks. Beneath the departmental skirmishes and the economic arguments was one outstanding issue of concern: how to justify to parents and to students themselves – who were now dubbed “consumers” – the rationale of study in the liberal

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

arts. The defense of liberal arts was difficult, and remains so. The reasons are not recondite: the promise held out was one of intangible rewards which could not be quantified. And that promise, it seemed, was not enough.

Meanwhile, the trends within university faculties – the tradition bastions of scholarship – were not encouraging. Pressured by students,

by Deans’ offices, and by the world at large, the Humanities began to mistake scholarship for numbers and tables. Philosophy suddenly became “analytic”; articles on linguistics and anthropology bore an uncanny resemblance to cuneiform; in literary studies, destruction took hold, when it wasn’t up against structuralism. Students increasingly became careerist, and in the late 1970s I was not surprised to read a statistic that over 80 percent of the Princeton students entering class announced that their ambition was to be a doctor. My only consoling thought was that the required course in organic chemistry would certainly deflect a good third of them from that goal.

No one can guarantee the flowering of the liberal arts tradition in an individual life, for the simple reason that an education in the liberal arts is quite different from either a medical serum or certificate of deposit.

All of this frantic activity lost sight of one of the fundamental truths of scholarship, and specifically of humanistic scholarship: that its liberating effects on our spirit depend upon an act of faith. The times demanded certitude, and faith was out of favor. But faith was what was needed to nourish true scholarship. No one can guarantee the flowering of the liberal arts tradition in an individual life, for the simple reason that an education in the liberal arts is quite different from either a medical serum or certificate of deposit. This uncertainty puts the writer in the same boat as the teacher: no one can predict the outcome of his or her effort, as Samuel Johnson once said, to “make the world better.” And so, without a crystal ball, people who believed in the liberal arts were at something of a loss. As the hymn says, they were called to “Come, labor on.” The verities they championed were attacked as shopworn, and people debated, once again, their “viability.” The eloquent defenses made on behalf of the liberal arts in the 1970s, by university presidents and other distinguished figures, failed largely because they treated with the enemy on his own ground. In attempting to re-establish the respectability of the liberal arts, people argued that – for example – medical schools really preferred the all-around applicant with an appreciation of Chaucer to the functional illiterate with three A’s in biochemistry.

The argument was invalid, as later revelations from medical schools made clear. But, more importantly, the attempt to give scholarship in the liberal arts a “solid,” quantitative grounding ignored the fact that it is basically a complex, rather lonely thing – tied to the individual mind and its freedom, relying not on products and balance sheets, but – to a very considerable extent – on faith.

Yet there are a few things we might say to those who persistently require a “bottom line” of scholarship. “All men, says Aristotle, “seek to know” – and knowing, whatever its practical value, is better than not knowing. More to the point, knowing can give us pleasure, and suggest to us that I want to call – for want of a better term – the resonances of our culture, and the connections of diverse cultures. To illustrate these resonances and connections, I must be highly personal. Were it not for Jacques, and the superb teaching he gave us, I doubt I should have paused last month before the portrait of Mme. de la Fayette at Versailles. I doubt that the portrait of Algiers would have meant much to me last summer, except that Jacques and Camus fused in my mind, together with the memory of the first novel he asked us to read, L’Étranger. In my work, I have had occasion recently to read some of the French press: how much more can I appreciate – let alone understand – because of Jacques! At the opera, if I see Andrea Chénier or Manon Lescaut, I know whereof the characters sing, or I think I do, because Jacques had us read the literary works that are the basis of these operas’ plots.

Obviously, these are very personal, isolated moments. You don’t need to go to Versailles, or North Africa, or even to the opera, to appreciate cultural resonances, any more than you need to leave your living room sofa. I don’t want to imply there’s anything dramatic about this whole business! You see the narrowness of my examples; this reflects, in turn, the unpredictable, zany nature of that liberation in scholarship about which I spoke earlier. I could tell you, of course, about more serious, less frivolous things. If I had some ledger paper, I might be able to draw up for you a convincing balance sheet, showing that knowledge of a second language can advance one’s career as a free-lancer in publishing. Such has been the case for me – but, then again, it easily might not have been. I would prefer to think that an argument in favor of liberating scholarship does not stand or fall by economic considerations. I would prefer to think that we all have our own very personal and individual examples by which we can prove to ourselves – if not to others – that the scholarship of Jacques and of teachers like him has , very simply, made the quality of our lives better.

An occasion like this one is probably more useful to us than to Jacques. He, after all, knows what he has done, and why he did it.

What he did – as I see it – was to nourish us, class after class, with a love of reading and of literature; to exhibit to us what Alfred Kazin might have called the “French Procession” of writers; and – above all – to inspirit us with a conception of scholarship that comprised passion, humor, grace, and esprit. In all these manifestations, as in so many others, Jacques, you have armed us with an education, and you have offered us scholarship in the most humane, most liberating sense. Tonight, your gift to us comes twice over, because this party allows us to reflect explicitly on our debt to you. With an apology to Charles Baudelaire, we thank you and we salute you: notre professeur, notre semblable, notre frère!

Carroll Moulton in 1964

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Horse Milk Tea, Animal Fear and Transformation: My Ultra-marathon in Mongolia

by John McCormick ’85

In the summer of 2013, I ran a 100- mile ultra-marathon in Mongolia’s unforgiving Gobi desert. At first, it may seem odd to connect Portsmouth Abbey to this challenge of a lifetime. Then again, doing extreme things in extreme places can cause one to realize how interconnected things are. First, the friend who invited me into the race was someone I indirectly know through an Abbey classmate. Second, I am a grateful beneficiary of the Abbey’s mandatory sports program. Those who knew me back in the day would remember that freaky guy in the basement cranking up his guitar, trying to be the next Jimi Hendrix. A noble aspiration to be sure, but the Abbey’s gentle course- correcting helped me evolve to varsity cross country, track, and lacrosse and to reap a lifetime of athletic confidence. Two big reasons to credit the Abbey for a big opportunity.

The Prep This ultra-marathon, called the “Gobi Challenge,” has been run for the last 10 years by small but intrepid group of mostly Scottish and British explorers, adventurers, super-athletes and military.

Weekend warriors need not apply: this high-risk 100-plus-mile test of will happens in searing desert heat and occasional mountain cold at 7,000 feet above sea level. Granted, we had 6 days to complete it, but that meant living out of the 30-pound pack on your back, carrying your food, sleeping in stifling tents deprived of any kind of showers, toilets or running water. Web access and cell phone use? Forget it. Blisters are guaranteed and heat-stroke, dehydration, and hypotension constitute serious risks.

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But to this former Abbey runner, now 6-time marathoner, the pull was irresistible. Having once run a marathon in 3 hours flat (thanks again Abbey), I could only “just say yes” to the temptress and start training.

For most, marathon prep is a well-honed mélange of art and science, and so it seemed that ramping it up for the Gobi was the key: train with a backpack, run on beaches, put sand in shoes to toughen up feet.

Extend, don’t pretend.

Living a fast- paced life in New York City as a private equity executive didn’t seem to be a hindrance. Three loops around nearby Central Park after work was the perfect 18-mile-long training run, and my beach-loving girlfriend knew some great getaway spots for running on sand. Even when traveling, I’d train. In one instance, a glorious 7-mile practice run on a beach in Sweden told me I was doing it and doing it well.

As we shall see, I was utterly clueless about the lessons the Gobi had in store.

JOURNEY TO THE START Mongolia is almost 3 times the size of France, with a population of only 2.7 million people – roughly that of Brooklyn, NY. Half of these inhabitants are packed into the smog- choked capital city, Ulaanbaatar. Mongolia’s hinterlands are thus the least- densely populated region on the planet. With only 1% arable land, cruel and unusual winters interrupted by merciless hot summers, this is one desolate place. The country’s famous Gobi Desert is even

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

“I am always amazed when one of my former runners acquires a taste for even more adventure and mileage! John’s combination of humility about himself along with that sense of adventure made for a compelling story.”

Think twice if these guys are patting you on the back and calling you brave.

– Headmaster Dan McDonough and John’s cross country coach at Portsmouth Abbey School

more barren to the point where it is reminiscent of the recent photographs from planet Mars.

After a 36-hour journey from New York to Ulaanbaatar, no time was wasted meeting up with the race participants for the 2-day dirt road drive to the start. On the way, we dropped off medicine and food for the poorest of the poor at dusty orphanages and makeshift medical clinics. None of my prior envelope-pushing adventures in Guatemala, China, Brazil, or Egypt allowed me to meet face-to-face with how the other half lives so closely. No question it’s a tough world out there.

Yet one could only be awed by the sturdiness of the Mongols.

These are, after all, the proud torchbearers of the infamous conqueror Genghis Khan’s legacy. Everyone we met beamed with unspoken pride that their founding father was the architect of the greatest land empire in human history, capturing lands from modern- day Hungary to Iraq to southern China and to Korea.

Eat your heart out, Romans; the Mongols are confident of their remarkable place in history, and live their lives with a dignity that defies econometric sense.

As we journeyed closer to the start, I felt reassured to have such a hearty people backslapping us, feeding us camel dumplings and calling us brave.

It should have dawned on me that if a Mongol is calling you brave, you might want to think about a good life insurance policy.

A SENSE OF DREAD The ever-present dread started at camp the night before the race.

It crept up while I was alone, hunched over in a corner my tent, wearing a headlamp and stitching sand shields onto my sneakers.

A menacing feeling of vulnerability consumed me with the force of a living presence. This was it. The challenge was upon us and the only food and clothing I had in the whole wide world was being carried on my back. Even worse, I realized that I was truly on my own. Despite being in the company of 2 dozen highly skilled athletes, explorers and guides, nobody could get me through this but me. Time to dig deep.

The ominous feeling passed quickly during the glorious first day.

Dazzling ruddy mountain peaks surrounded us beneath a deep blue sky punctuated by eagles diving spectacularly for desert rodents. A breeze partly defused the glowering sun and the 15mile distance felt like a mere warm up. The early finish even gave us time to banter and swap anti-blister strategies for the coming days.

And yet, when the night came, there was that feeling again. The animal brain was starting to take over again, infusing me with dread over what the days ahead had in store.

ANIMAL FEAR

Sleeping in this “ger” was high luxury compared to the wilderness we were about to encounter.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs can be simplified into a reduced form: one progresses by moving away from mere survival to success, and ultimately, to transformation.

Conventional wisdom suggests that few, if any, ever progress to transformation. Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King, Jr. or maybe even Genghis Khan himself would serve as examples of having achieved this highest level. But surviving in the Gobi Desert throws conventional wisdom right out the window.

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MY ULTRA-MARATHON IN MONGOLIA – JOHN M C CORMICK ‘85

After completing the second day, which was a marathon, animal fear became a troublemaker again, but also served as a survival tool. I became badly blistered after trying to outrun a rare, but potentially dangerous desert thunderstorm. The fear made me run harder and blocked the pain until after safely reaching camp and gathering enough large rocks to stabilize our tents to protect us from merciless winds.

But soon enough the menace was back with the gnawing realization that tomorrow was yet another marathon, this time with blisters. It made me desperate for a way out, and there was little the rational brain could do to calculate a way through. Time to dig deeper.

This is when it started to dawn on me that I might just be progressing down Maslow’s hierarchy in reverse! I was being quickly reduced from apparent worldly success in glittering New York to mere survival in the remote Gobi Desert.

Fear gave way to delight in the paradox that getting to the level of survival was causing the very act of transformation itself.

Forget conventional wisdom. The more we are humbled, the more we are transformed. The more regression, the greater the transformation.

So the marathons in the coming days started to look like a blessing, not a curse. Sounds great, right? Only one problem: there was plenty of down from here.

HORSE MILK TEA Who among my generation could forget the immortal Mr. Haney’s “fudge factor” in chemistry? Never losing one iota of scientific rigor, he taught us there is a time and place that allow for the bending of certain rules. The big lesson? Don’t box yourself in!

Mr. Haney’s “fudge factor” came to play at the end of day 3 when, at the end, a group of villagers sacrificed a goat in our honor and fed it to us. Tired, hungry, blistered and anxious, we were living only on the food we could carry as prescribed by the race rules.

It would have been an insult not to accept the offering, however, and the race director let it slide. More importantly, we let it slide.

For a fleeting moment, we were good to ourselves in the midst of this punishing trial, just like bringing a permitted formula sheet into one of Mr. Haney’s exams.

And, yes, that strange, greasy white tea served with the goat was made from horse milk.

Never before has anything tasted so good.

TRANSFORMATION The real moment of transformation came when I physically gave way to dehydration near the end of the fourth day’s epic, 30mile run.

At the start of the day, old animal fear was nowhere to be found as we journeyed from a breathtaking mountain range to the desert floor. Spirits were high because we knew if we could conquer this, the finish line would be in sight, as days 5 and 6 were so doable by comparison.

As typically happens, the 15 or so race participants got separated on the race route, but always in a safe way. With water stations every 7 miles and vans running up and down the lines regularly, checks and balances were in place to ensure everyone’s wellbeing. Even with these precautions, combined with taking salt tablets in the morning and keeping to the standard 5-6 liters (about a gallon and a half) of water intake a day, nature proved to be a pitiless master.

The cool morning breeze slowly amended itself into an insidious, sterile dry heat that dispersed the sweat so fast I had no idea how quickly essential body salts were leeching out of my skin. The problem with loss of body salts is that it can lower blood pressure to a dangerous threshold.

I was alone, forging toward camp when, almost out of nowhere, my head and extremities went numb and became constricted in a vice-like grip. I started to hyperventilate as my heart raced to counter dilated blood vessels. Becoming delusional is not uncommon in these circumstances, and the last recesses of my rational mind did realize something was going terribly wrong as I started asking deceased relatives for help finding water.

Screaming into the endless desert and sobbing like a child was no help. This was it. No way out. I had been reduced to a helpless animal, desperate to survive.

Mountain nomads preparing to barbeque a goat head with a blowtorch.

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P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

MY ULTRA-MARATHON IN MONGOLIA – JOHN M C CORMICK ‘85

We were constantly reminded that nature is a pitiless master.

As the wild mood swings settled down and I started to get a grip and take stock of what just happened, a great lesson started to unfold. I had achieved transformation – a form of rebirth.

By being reduced to survival, by becoming that helpless inner child, by being exposed to that animal fear lurking in the recesses of the unconscious, I had been transformed. Even more so, the transformation took on the grand characteristics of the hero narrative Joseph Campbell so famously articulated as a hallmark of mythology. The one who faces the dragon (often a metaphor of the unconscious) is the one who achieves rebirth.

Using the last decisio- making faculties I had, I reasoned that forging ahead upright was better than crawling or going into a fetal position, only to lie baking in the sun.

It is as if the Gobi was trying to teach me that worldly success falls short of being a gateway to transformation and rebirth because success is all about getting away from the survival level.

Time slowed down to an eternity, and fear devolved into a sense of vulnerability so powerful it became a physical force accompanying the growing numbness. All of this gave way to a dizziness that became so overwhelming that I had to stop or risk passing out.

The very moment of being pushed to the edge of my absolute physical and mental limits was the very moment that miraculous dust trail appeared on the horizon. The water van!!!

With salvation at hand, fear gave way to elation as I contemplated getting precious, glorious water. Water!!! On my knees, I fervently signaled for the van to come over. Come over they did, and the guides wasted no time evacuating me to camp where the race medical director was stationed.

Diagnosed with hypotension (a low blood pressure attack), I was infused with water and salts and prohibited from continuing the race. What? Prohibited? Talk about seeing a grown man cry, my ego just couldn’t stand the humiliation.

After losing 10 pounds in one week

EXHILARATION Fortunately, a rapid recovery and persistence with the medical director permitted me to get back in the game on day 6. Reborn from fear and enlightened by finding my definitive physical and mental limits, I raced alongside my superb hero companions to the finish line. We all ended up winning, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the desert.

Even weeks after completing this epic challenge, the journey’s rich lessons are still being revealed. Hard questions have presented themselves and keep boiling up: Are we governed by our limits? I’d like to think we are not. I’d like to think that we can and should extend our limits.

What about achieving that elusive transformation as we strive for success in our careers? Is worldly success necessary for transformation? Maybe yes, if we define transformation as how we change the world around us. Maybe not, if we define transformation as how we change the world within us.

Surviving the 30-mile day. A hard day at the office seems so trivial by comparison.

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every Dollar counts The Annual Fund is always said to “keep the lights on,” but the contributions of alumni, parents, faculty and friends of the School do so much more. Here is a look, by the numbers, at what your gifts are doing to impact the lives of our students this year.

The 2013-14 Annual Fund goal is $1,400,000.

Where does your Annual Fund dollar go today?

44¢

34¢

12¢

Faculty and Monastic Support

Students and Financial Assistance

Maintenance and Facilities

resideNtial life 29 sit-down meals

GeNeral 368 students from 26 states and 18 countries live out our mission each day. $3,680,000 in financial aid was given, in part , due to the Annual Fund.

The Annual Fund keeps tuition cost down.

In fact, without Annual Fund support, tuition would increase by $13,200.

36% of students are on some sort of financial assistance.

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63 off- campus weekend activities 58 faculty living on campus To enrich the shared experience of community life

10¢ Administrative

academic s 20 new laptops for the Science Department 7

new projectors for the classroom building and science center

40 new iPads for language, humanities

and mathematics departments To educate and inspire our students to be the next generation of leaders

fa c u lt y 81 dedicated faculty 43 faculty with advanced degrees (or in progress) 41 faculty attended professional development conferences and workshops To encourage our teachers to be lifelong learners and provide a top-tier education for our students

arts 30

libretto books for the musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying�

160 paintbrushes 800 pounds of clay

at h l e t i c s Uniforms for 46 Ravens teams

2

new ceramics wheels

To cultivate passions for creativity

And, of course, 15,000 light bulbs to light the way for our students.

Buses to 238 games, tournaments and national championships 24 basketballs, 100 hockey pucks, 2 tennis nets, 16 cases of baseballs To instill the value of competition and sportsmanship

To make your donation today, visit www.portsmouthabbey.org/makeagift.

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FALL 2013 Boys’ Cross-Country Coach’s Award: Sean McDonough ‘14 Most Improved Player (MIP): Will Wu ‘15 Captains-Elect: Dylan Bedford ‘15, Fen Billings ‘15 Overall Record: 5-9 Eastern Independent League (EIL): 5-2

Girls’ Cross-Country Coach’s Award: Claire Ritch ‘14 Most Improved Player (MIP): Annie O’Donnell ‘17 Captain-Elect: Joy Loftus ‘16 Overall Record: 6-8; Eastern Independent League (EIL): 6-3 Field Hockey Hannaford Field Hockey Trophy: Taylor Lough ‘15 MIP: Kaity Doherty ‘17 Captains-Elect: Grace Jannotta ‘15, Taylor Lough ‘15 Overall Record: 4-9-1; Eastern Independent League (EIL): 4-5-1

Sean McDonough ‘14

Football John M. Hogan Football Trophy: William Locke ‘14 Coen Award (MIP): Bobby Cloughen ‘15 Captains-Elect: Will Behnke ‘15, Gabe Carter ‘15, Bobby Cloughen ‘15, Ben Wilson ‘15 Overall Record: 1-6; Evergreen Division Record: 1-4 Boys’ Soccer William Franklin Sands Memorial Soccer Trophy: Julian Minondo ‘14 MIP: Aidan Cain ‘15 Captains-Elect: John Falvey ‘15, Ben Vergara ‘15 Overall Record: 9-7-3; Eastern Independent League (EIL): 6-5-3 Girls’ Soccer Girls’ Soccer Trophy: Amberlee Majewski ‘14, Arianna Lowney ‘14 MIP: Ayanna Sommers ‘16 Captains-Elect: Maggie Ingraham ‘15, Alex Savoie ‘15, Maggie Stark ‘15 Overall Record: 1-12-1; Eastern Independent League (EIL): 1-8-1

Julian Minondo ‘14

Boys’ Golf Boys’ Golf Trophy: Harrison Wall ‘15 MIP: George Sturges ‘16 Captain-Elect: Stephen Vye ‘15 Eastern Independent League (EIL) Record: 8-4

Fall 2013 Athletics Highlights Sean McDonough ‘14 finished 2nd in the EIL championship and 14th at the New England Class C. Sean earned All-League and All-New England recognition and competed in the Prep School All-Class Championship.

Julian Minondo ‘14 was selected to represent the Abbey in the 2013 New England Prep School (NEPSAC) Soccer All-Star game.

Amberlee PAGE 66

Majewski ‘14

ATHLETICS Post-Season Honors Boys’ Cross-Country EIL All-League: Sean McDonough ‘14 EIL Honorable Mention: John Billings ‘17, Jon Campau ‘16 N.E. Prep All-New England (Class C): Sean McDonough ‘14 N.E. Prep School All-Class Championship Participant: Sean McDonough ‘14 Girls’ Cross-Country EIL Honorable Mention: Joy Loftus ‘16, Claire Ritch ‘14 Field Hockey EIL All-League: Brooke Kazama ‘14, Taylor Lough ‘15 EIL Honorable Mention: Grace Jannotta ‘15 Football Evergreen All-League: Carlin Page ‘15, Chris Weiss ‘16 Evergreen Honorable Mention: Seamus O’Connor ‘16, Bobby Cloughen ‘15, Keith Edwards ‘15 Boys’ Golf EIL All-League: Stephen Vye ’15, Harrison Wall ’15 EIL Honorable Mention: Oliver Ferry ‘17, George Sturges ’16 Boys’ Soccer EIL All-League: John Falvey ’15, Julian Minondo ‘14 EIL Honorable Mention: Ben Vergara ‘15 N.E. Prep School Soccer All-Star Game: Julian Minondo ‘14 Girls’ Soccer EIL Honorable Mention: Ari Lowney ‘14, Amberlee Majewski ‘14

Taylor Lough ‘15

Portsmouth Abbey Fall Junior Varsity Awards The Portsmouth Abbey Junior Varsity Award is given to the athlete on each team who best demonstrates the spirit of Abbey athletics. The award recognizes hard work, individual improvement, sportsmanship and a willingness to do what is best for the team.

JV Boys’ Cross-Country: Ryan Gallagher ‘15 JV Girls’ Cross-Country: Holly Kazama ‘16 JV Field Hockey: Grace Fink ‘17 JV Football: Rory O’Connor ‘16 Boys’ JVA Soccer: Sean Crandall ‘15 Boys’ JVB Soccer: Alexander Klonaris ‘17 Girls’ JV Soccer: Ali Vergara ‘17

Visit our athletics photo galleries online at: www.portsmouthabbey.org/page/athletics/photo_ gallery

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LOUIS WALKER III

Bobby Cloughen ‘15

www.louiswalkerphotography.com/Sports

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IN MEMORIAM

Peter resigned from the Nixon administration in June 1974 to return to Dillon Read, where he was named managing director.

Upon his resignation, President Nixon said, “Of the many men and women who have served our administration, few can match—and none exceed—the exceptional skills, energy and dedication you brought to your duties.” He was also appointed a member of President Ronald Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board in 1981. Peter retired from Dillon Read in 1992.

PETER MAGNUS FLANIGAN ’41, P ’75, ’83, GP ’06, ’09, ’11 The Portsmouth Abbey School and Monastery lost one of its most ardent, longtime and benevolent supporters on July 29, 2013, when Peter Magnus Flanigan ’41, former chairman of the Board of Consultants and Regent Emeritus, died in Salzburg, Austria. He was 90.

Hailed as “a man of prodigious talents, abilities and gifts,” Peter spent much of his adult life working to effect positive change in government and education. According to his son, Bob ’83, “He pondered non-stop as to how to help his children and grandchildren seek the most important truths of life. First and foremost was his Christian Catholic faith, but the principles of limited government and personal freedom were close behind.”

Born June 21, 1923, in Manhattan, Peter was the son of Horace Flanigan, chairman of the Manufacturers Hanover Company, and Aimee Magnus Flanigan, granddaughter of Adolphus Busch, cofounder of Anheuser-Busch. He entered Portsmouth Priory in 1936 and was involved in a number of extracurricular activities, including football, tennis, hockey, sailing, soccer, gun club, and debating.

He was also the Fourth Form president and a prefect.

The day after Pearl Harbor, at the age of 19, Peter enlisted in the Navy and served for three years as a World War II Navy carrier pilot in the Pacific theater. He attended Princeton, graduating summa cum laude in 1947 with a degree in economics, and joined Dillon Read & Co. as a statistical analyst. Peter had a long and distinguished career with Dillon Read, but, being a believer that “politics was the ultimate forum to decide how our society should function,” according to his son, Bob, Peter interrupted his work at Dillon Read on four occasions to serve in government and politics.

He was an economic analyst from 1947-49 for the Economic Corporation Administration Mission in the United Kingdom to help administer the Marshall Plan; worked as executive director of volunteers for Richard Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign, organizing the nationwide Volunteers for Nixon & Lodge; and was deputy campaign manager for Nixon’s successful 1968 presidential bid.

From 1969-74, Peter served in the White House in several capacities, initially as a talent scout for Nixon’s transition team, and then as the President’s chief domestic policy and economics advisor.

During that time, he was considered Nixon’s chief go-between with regulatory agencies and business interests; one of his most prominent contributions was in helping to re-write the draft reform law. In 1972, Peter became assistant to the President for International Economic Affairs and director of the Council on International Economic Policy. In a Time magazine article published that same year, he was referred to as “Nixon’s ‘Mr. Fixit.’”

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Bob Flanigan said, “Dad believed deeply in public service and characterized his time in the Nixon White House as ‘noble and necessary.’ His advice to legions of younger people… was not to count the cost, but dive in and serve our country through public service.”

A fan of a free-market society, Peter was also a strong voice for responsible citizenship; civic duty was immensely important to him. In his later years, in particular, he was a fierce advocate for improving the quality of education for underprivileged, inner-city children. As an honoree at the Manhattan Institute’s 2004 Alexander Hamilton Award Dinner, Peter spoke of “…the need to fight for and defend freedom. The battleground that I chose for myself in this fight for freedom is education.”

Stating that “many of American’s most needy and vulnerable children remain in educational bondage,” Peter became a renowned figure in the world of education reform and philanthropy, working to bring school choice to low-income families.

Peter and his wife, Brigid, became involved in the “I Have a Dream” Program in 1984, and in 1985 he founded the Student Sponsor Partners (SSP), a nonsectarian private-voucher program that pairs inner-city high school students with sponsors who provide tuition for four years of private school education and mentoring. SSP has since assisted more than 6,000 students in New York City and is considered a resounding success. Peter also started School Choice Scholarships for elementary schools and, in 1987, the Patrons Program, in support of inner-city Catholic grammar schools. He also founded the Center for Education Innovation at the Manhattan Institute, which seeks to implement new programs to improve education. He was described in the book Living the Call as “one of the great patrons of Catholic education for inner-city children in New York.”

John Kirtley, of the American Federation for Children and Alliance for School Choice, said, “Few in America have done more over the past few decades to advance educational choice for children than Peter Flanigan. A man most generous of spirit and of heart, Peter believed in the essential dignity and value of every human life and

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

in the fundamental principle that every child – regardless of race, socioeconomic status, or geographic residence – deserves a quality education.”

He served as a board member or in leadership positions in numerous civic and educational foundations, including: the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and its Center for Educational Innovation; the New York City Partnership’s Education Committee; the American Federation for Children—Alliance for School Choice; the “I Have a Dream” Foundation; the John M. Olin Foundation; the National Park Foundation; The Catholic University of American; the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester; and the Richard M. Nixon Library & Birthplace. He was a founding member of the board of trustees of the Reading Excellence and Discovery Foundation; chairman of Children First America; and, along with his wife, Brigid, was co-chair of St. Ann’s School, a Catholic grammar school in Harlem. Peter was also a former board member at Anheuser-Busch Companies; Thyssen, Inc.; The Budd Company; Co-Chair of the Tanglewood Music Center; and director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and chairman of its Economic Policy Committee.

Ben Stein, who enjoyed a friendship with Peter that spanned nearly 45 years, beginning during Nixon’s presidency, called him “the best of the greatest generation: steadfast, heroic, modest, hardworking, generous of spirit.

“It was not Peter’s résumé or his money or his good looks that made him a great man. It was his extraordinary intelligence, his brilliant wit, his knowledge, and his love of man and God. “Superhumanly smart, superhumanly handsome, superhumanly devout, superhumanly strong, loyal, generous, the kind of man that all of us men want to be. Ever since I met Peter, I have thought of him as a man who would always be there, always would be available to fix anything that was wrong, always ready to be as helpful and inspiring as a man can be. If I could want my son to be like anyone I have ever met, that man would be Peter Magnus Flanigan. A superman in a highly un-super world.

“I keep thinking, ‘If Peter Flanigan can die, then everyone has to die.’ I thought that Peter was a god, immortal, a superman. Immortal, once again.

“There will never be another Peter – Naval WWII aviator, righthand man to the greatest peacemaker of all time, Richard Nixon, devoted father and husband, benefactor, guardian of life. My superman.”

Peter’s relationship with Portsmouth Abbey was, by his own admission, a 79-year “love affair.” In 2001, at the School’s 75th anniversary celebration, Peter said, “Since first coming to this wonderful place in 1936, Portsmouth Abbey School has had a major influence on, and been a very important part of, my life. One might ask why (our family has) this generational fidelity to this place, surely not because of emotion nor beautiful campus. Rather, it is

because of Portsmouth’s fidelity to teaching our faith and to academic excellence.”

Peter was a member of Portsmouth Abbey’s Board of Consultants from 1978-84 and 1987-94, during which time he served as chairman of the board from 1990-94. He was named Board Emeritus in June of 2012. He was a member of the Capital Campaign Steering Committee and a strong supporter of the Portsmouth Institute.

Peter was the proud father and grandfather of seven Portsmouth graduates to date, including sons Tim ’75 and Bob ’83, and grandchildren Teresa ’06, Daniel ’09 and Michael ’11 Flanigan, and Susan ’09 and Kate ’11 Skakel. Two nephews, Mike ’70 and Steve McDonnell ’73, also attended Portsmouth Abbey.

Peter was married for 53 years to the former Brigid Snow; their great partnership ended in Brigid’s death in 2006. While on a biking trip through France in 2007, he met his future wife, Dorothea von Oswald, whom he married in 2008. Thereafter, Peter and Thea spent half of each year in Salzburg with Thea’s family, and the other half in Purchase, NY. According to Peter’s daughter, Sister Louise Marie, “They had almost six wonderful years together, sharing their faith, their love of family, and their love of adventure and life.” Peter’s final wish was for his family to accompany him on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which he, with 23 children and grandchildren in tow, fulfilled the month before he died. He passed along his great love of the outdoors to his family, with whom he loved to share such pursuits: “From mornings in the hunting fields with his dogs, to late-afternoon fly-fishing on the Big Sandy Ranch, to racing down Long Island Sound in his boat, Astrea, to finding the powder shot at Alta, Dad relished his time with his children and grandchildren,” said son Bob. Peter’s and Brigid’s daughter, Sheila (Sr. Louise Marie), a member of the Sister Servants of the Eternal Word, attributes her religious vocation to the efforts of her family to expose her to the fullness of the Faith from her early years on.

Along with his wife, Thea, sons, Tim and Bob, and daughter, Sr. Louise Marie, Peter is survived by his sister, Peggy McDonnellWalsh; daughters Brigid S. Flanigan and Megan A. Flanigan; 16 beloved grandchildren; and many cousins, nieces and nephews.

In addition to Brigid, his brothers John ’40 and Robert ’48 predeceased him. Peter’s Funeral Mass, held at the Church of the Resurrection, in Rye, NY, was concelebrated by Cardinals Dolan and Egan.

Bob Flanigan said, “Dad died beautifully and well, just as he lived.” In his eulogy remarks, Bob said his father’s life reminded him of the Parable of the Talents. “He was the servant given many gifts by his almighty creator, according to his ability, and he returned those gifts many fold.”

The Portsmouth Abbey community is grateful for Peter’s many years of steadfast guidance, support and generosity on behalf of the School and Monastery. We offer our most heartfelt condolences to the entire Flanigan family and Peter’s many friends.

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PeTer FLANIGAN ’41

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IN MEMORIAM

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

IN MEMORIAM

PETER FLANIGAN ’41

As fellow members of the Class of 1941, Peter and I were classmates for three years at Portsmouth. During those years we were friends, though not exactly close friends. Peter came to Portsmouth from the New York City-Connecticut area, and most of his companions and friends were from thereabouts. I came from Chicago, where we were somewhat differently oriented. He played hockey. I made my own stab at it. We played on the frozen pond in those days and had a lot of fun at it. Of course, it was nothing to compare to the beautiful hockey rink of more recent years.

We both played soccer fairly well. But soccer was not a sport that aroused much attention in those days. What we had for a team, we could thank Jim Sands for scraping it together. Peter and I did our best on

Dom Hugh Diman and Dr. Brady with the Portsmouth Priory prefects for the 1940-41 year: (l-r) Francis G. Dwyer, Hugh Tovar, Henry M. Elliot, Jr., John A. Walsh, Peter M. Flanigan, Robert C. Glennon (killed in WW2)

the field. But I regret to admit that in our final game of the season we were treated rather harshly by our traditional rivals at St. George’s School.

directions. Peter’s became focused on the New York area, while mine involved concentration on Southeast Asia, with

Peter and I were both respectable students. Our grades were good, and at times we competed for the leading ranks in class. In the end, however, it was Jack Walsh who beat us out for top honors in the Sixth Form. In his triumph Jack went on to the Naval Academy, and Peter and I were relegated to Princeton and Harvard. The war intervened, but we survived and went on to some 62 years as devoted Portsmouth alumni. It was quite some years before we had any further contact, because in peacetime our careers took us in different

extended residence overseas.

It was not until 1969 that we actually met again, of all places, in Washington, D.C., where Peter played a key role in President Nixon’s White House. I was then active in the Central Intelligence Agency, and was temporarily home from overseas on assignment to Washington. Peter came to our house one night for dinner, and he gave us a fascinating picture of what it was like to work for the President himself. Another thing that brought us thereafter into periodic contact was that we had sons attending Portsmouth. Now, I believe, Peter actually has grandchildren there.

Since then, time has marched along at an ever-accelerating pace. I have retired from the CIA, and I live rather far from Washington. But I have been able to visit Portsmouth more often than in years past, usually on the occasion of Reunion Weekends.

Almost invariably, Peter has been on hand

to join the celebrations. He was always devoted to Portsmouth. Now, sadly, we are without him. The picture I have enclosed was taken last year, as Peter and Dick Cooley and I met to mourn the passing of another dear friend of Portsmouth, Gerry Dwyer, also of the class of 1941. We are now down to our final 10.

Dick Cooley ’41, Hugh Tovar ’41 and Peter Flanigan ’41 at Gerry

-- B. Hugh Tovar ‘41

Dwyer’s ’41 funeral in 2012

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Left, Peter and his family in the Holy Land, 2013 Below, Peter with his students from Student

Sponsor Partners in New York City in the 1980s.

In addition to a large, loving family and many friends, Peter Flanigan left behind a legacy of

several educational institutions that he founded or nurtured, the Abbey among them. I met Peter over 25 years ago when I was incorporating a scholarship organization and obtaining a tax exemption for it. Peter was one of its founders. He was disappointed in its operation, and

the sponsor recruitment committee and then to serve on its Board. That was only the beginning, as Peter then recruited me to serve on the Abbey’s Board of Consultants.

We often traveled to the Board meetings together, and the conversations were lively, mostly about Portsmouth, all of Peter’s charities, the state of education and schools, and current events.

At the time the School was suffering from declining enrollment and the attendant consequences. I witnessed firsthand how Peter analyzed the most relevant issues, proposed solutions and, most important, convinced the Board and the Monastery to support and implement a revitalization of the School by becoming co-educational. He raised money for a new dorm and oversaw the transformation and reenergizing of the School and its mission. The Abbey would not be the School that it is today without the vision, the will and the energy of Peter.

I only learned that we were fellow alumni of Portsmouth when he wrote in the Abbey Bulletin about founding a new organization to provide, on a one-on-one basis, financial and mentoring support to disadvantaged inner- city high schools students in New York City to attend private schools. I contacted Peter, became one of the first 45 sponsors of Student Sponsor Partners, and in Peter’s inimitable, charismatic way, he quickly enlisted me to head

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In the meantime, Student Sponsor Partners continued to grow and expand. It now serves over 1,000 students and inspired the founding of similar charities in other cities, including one I co-founded in Bridgeport, Shepherds Inc., which grew from 5 students 15 years ago to over 90 students today. Literally, thousands of students past, present and future owe their education to Peter. Personally, I will always remember and thank Peter for the privilege of permitting me to experience the courage of one man to articulate great ideas and then act and enlist others to join him in acting upon those ideas – simply put, a great leader.

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

– Barnet Phillips ‘66

Peter and Brigid on their wedding day in 1954

Peter and Thea greeting Pope Benedict at Yankee Stadium

Peter Flanigan graduated in 1941 from what was then known as Portsmouth Priory School, and, following the example set by his father, Horace Flanigan, maintained close ties with Portsmouth for the rest of his life. He was present here last June, on the eve of turning 90, for a birthday celebration arranged by his children and to introduce his friend, George Weigel, at the Portsmouth Institute. It was a great pleasure to see that at both the birthday dinner and the Institute, he delivered his impromptu remarks with undiminished presence, articulateness, and “pepper.”

Peter married Brigid Snow in 1954 at a wedding presided over by Dom Aelred Graham, prior of Portsmouth Priory. He sent his two sons, Tim ’75 and Bob ’83, to school at Portsmouth. Besides frequently putting heads together on practical matters with Dom Peter Sidler, longtime cellarer of the Monastery and treasurer of the School, Peter served as chairman of our Board of Consultants (which has since become the Board of Regents) from 1990 to 1994.

Peter gathers with family for his 90th birthday

Over so many years Peter Flanigan supported the Monastery and School with generous (and usually anonymous) gifts as well as with unflagging concern and expert advice. We rejoice at his life well spent in Christian philanthropy, of which Portsmouth Abbey has certainly been one of the prime beneficiaries.

– Abbot Caedmon Holmes, O.S.B. Peter’s grandaughter, Kate, his son, Tim, and his wife, Thea, join him for a sail on Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island.

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IN MEMORIAM

WILLIAM KING HOWENSTEIN ’52, P ’87, GP ’10, ’17

William King Howenstein, 80, Detroit business and community leader, and loyal supporter of Portsmouth, died Aug. 15, 2013, with his family at his side. His death followed an eight-year battle with Myelodisplastic Syndrome (MDS). A true gentleman, Bill’s intellect and wit won him friends the world over. His resilience, grace, and humility never wavered. He was an irreplaceable mentor to countless family members, friends, and business associates.

Born May 2, 1933, in Detroit, to Harry Baron and Eloise FitzSimons Howenstein, Bill entered Portsmouth Priory in 1948 and was active in the Boat Club, the Raven, and the Beaverboard, on which he served as sports editor. He was president during his Fourth- and Fifth-Form years, played football, hockey and baseball, and was co-captain of football and captain of hockey in the Sixth Form.

After graduating from the Priory, Bill attended Dartmouth College, Class of 1956, before serving in the U.S. Army. He was stationed in Wurzburg, Germany.

Bill’s business career began in Detroit in 1956 as a salesman of automotive parts to Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp. and Chrysler Corp. on behalf of FitzSimons Manufacturing Co. In 1965, he joined Copper & Brass Sales Inc., becoming a general manager, and, later, president of the company before being named chairman and

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chief executive officer in 1979. Under Bill’s direction, the company grew from a local business to an international corporation with 1,600 employees in 45 locations across North America. Bill was instrumental in directing the sale of the business to ThyssenKrupp Materials North America, where he then served as executive vice president until his retirement in 1998. He was president of the National Association of Aluminum Distributors, a director of Stanadyne Corp., and was on the boards of MascoTech Inc., and the Stroh Companies Inc. A long-time resident of Grosse Pointe Farms with his wife of 52 years, Lorna “Lorrie” Candler Howenstein, Bill served his community through a variety of leadership and advisory roles in numerous organizations. According to his son, Bing ’87, “He loved and remained eternally optimistic about Detroit.”

Bill was supportive of several educational institutions, including Portsmouth Abbey. In addition to being a class agent, Bill and Lorrie were regular hosts of School functions held in the Grosse Pointe area. Bill was a member of Portsmouth’s Board of Consultants from 1985-91, serving as chairman from 1987-90, and was named Regent Emeritus in July of 2012.

A member of numerous clubs in Detroit and Harbor Springs, MI, and Palm Beach and Hobe Sound, FL, he was also a member of the U.S. Seniors Golf Association;

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

IN MEMORIAM

Bill had an abiding love for the game and achieved two holesin-one. He was also a retired multi-engine, instrument-rated pilot and an avid sailor. Bing said, “His zest for life was infectious, and he never held back.”

A man of strong faith, Bill was a good friend of the Catholic Church and was invested as a Knight of Magistral Grace in the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

He remained faithful to the values and traditions of his early years and encouraged all of his children to embrace these values. “From the moment his feet hit the floor in the morning,” said Bing, “he was, under full view of the Lord above, making himself an exemplary man.”

only matched by his incredible faith, which I believe took root during his years at the Priory. I am thankful to have followed in his path for many reasons, including the fact that I was able to score the best single room in St. Benet’s my senior year by explaining to Mr. (Tom) Kennedy that it was, in fact, my father’s room as well.”

Thanksgiving 2008, Harbour Island

Described as “a gatherer of people,” Bill enjoyed many friendships. Mrs. Andrea Fisher, widow of Bill Fisher ’53, reflected, “Our world has lost a special, gifted man.

I’ve always felt that Bill (Howenstein) had a holiness about him… he gave so much confidence and inspiration to all who met him, and in a quiet and unassuming way. He was so respected and loved. The Heavens greeted him with, ‘Good job, Bill.’ I hope Bill H. and Bill F. are again laughing and sharing the Priory stories I so enjoyed hearing.”

Bill considered his family his most prized possession. In addition to Lorrie, he is survived by his five children, whom he adored: Elise H. Trulaske (Steve), Sheila H. Fruehauf (Rick), Brooke H. Fink (Tom), Fay H. Savage (Paul) and William K. “Bing” Howenstein, Jr. ’87 (Angela); his sisters, Harriet and Beth; and 21 beloved grandchildren, including Harry Fruehauf ‘10 and Grace Fink ’17. Bill was predeceased by his siblings, Jean and Robert. He also leaves an extended family that includes his cousin, Dave FitzSimons ’56, and nephews David ’84 and Will ’86 FitzSimons.

The Portsmouth Abbey community mourns the passing of this humble servant and loyal supporter of the School, and we extend our sincere sympathies to the entire Howenstein family.

Bing said, “Portsmouth always had a very special place in my Dad’s heart. Lifelong lessons and friends were

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William King Howenstein was my cousin, mentor and most importantly, my friend. When I arrived in 1952 to Cory’s Lane, his exploits at Portsmouth were legend. Bill’s leadership role in sports and other activities was profound.

He always strived to bring out the best in himself and those around him, which he achieved without a lot of fanfare, but not without diligent work on his part. Bill carried that quality in his future endeavors with great aplomb, which I witnessed many times during our thirty-six years of working together in the family businesses. He brought that same characteristic commitment to others to his family life and the community and business boards on which he served. His devotion to his Catholic upbringing was strong, as was his service to the Portsmouth community.

Bill with cousins Michael and David ’56 FitzSimons

When I reflect on the greatest aspects of the life of William K. Howenstein, they were his love for his wife, Lorrie, their children and grandchildren and his support for his extended family and friends. Hardly a day would go by where he would not be helping someone, somewhere.

That legacy will stay with all who knew Bill, and those whom he helped, who didn’t.

– David FitzSimons ’56

Bill in the early 1960s

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Bill and Lorrie in Africa

Bill with his son, Bing ’87

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

The phone rings.

Howie was fiercely loyal, caring, bright, with a wonderful sense of humor, respectful, inclusive, very competitive in the proper fashion, pragmatic, and deeply and quietly religious.

“Hello…Mr. McManus?”

“Yes.” “Mr. Howenstein.”

“Hello, Mr. Howenstein – what’s up?”

“I’m sitting here, reading the United States’ Seniors Golf Association Report, and I noticed you’re a member.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, if you can be a member, so can I.” “That’s right. Do you want me to make some calls?”

“No. I’ll handle it. Good-bye!”

A friendship that started in 1949 makes such a telephone call possible – but it also speaks volumes about William King Howenstein, the man.

Our friendship started when, at 15 years old, we played football together. It has stayed constant ever since. My first impression of Howie was how sophisticated this product of Grosse Pointe was. He talked of meeting girls “under the clock” at the New York Biltmore Hotel, lunch at 21, etc.

As our years at Portsmouth rolled along, I came to realize some of the attributes that made our friendship so special and lasting.

He went to Dartmouth, and I to Harvard, but we figured out a way to spend a weekend together every other month – the favorite place was an inn at Smith College – “Raha’s” by name – equidistant from both colleges!

Friendships such as ours run deep and true, even though we’re out of touch for some years. When physically reunited, it’s like turning on a light switch – instant catch-up, never missing a beat!

Over the years, we managed to play in many gold tournaments around the country or at Marion, Mass., or Hobe Sound/Vero Beach, Fla. We usually managed to win a prize, especially since we were in the last flight.

Howie had a hugely successful business career fueled by his brain power and massive common sense. But he never lost his fondness for the outrageous, like the night Bill and Lorrie and my Barbara and I found ourselves in the Rotunda at Faneuil Hall in Boston, singing at the tops of our lungs the popular songs of the day, only to be escorted out by “Boston’s Finest!”

We have all been blessed with various friendships over the years. I was truly blessed to have found Howie 65 years ago and have held him close over these many years.

No remembrance of William King Howenstein would be complete without recognizing the real reason for his successful life – his beloved, saintly bride – Lorrie!

Howie, I look forward to being with you once again, dear friend!

– Gil McManus ‘52

Bill and Lorrie at the 75th anniversary celebration of the founding of Portsmouth Abbey School, held at Rosecliff in Newport, RI, in 2001.

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MILESTONES

Siena Rose Sheehan, daughter of John ‘86 and Lilah Spencer

Ansel Grey Hedstrom, son of Mark Hedstrom ‘91 and Laura Sheehan

Sean Mitchell and Willow Hawk ‘98, along with big sister Harper, welcomed John (Jack) Hawk Mitchell in October.

Mack Sahady, son of Paul ‘87 and Marie Joseph Sahady

Alice Knight Berry was born to Sean and Erin ‘93 Berry in October 2013.

Campbell June Button, daughter of Justine (Reeber) ‘99 and Chris Button Eliza Etta DeVecchi, born to Matt ‘95 and Libby DeVecchi in October 2013

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Folake Adeson Olorunmaiye was born to Wolguine (Stervil) ‘97 and Jerome Olorunmaiye.

P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

MILESTONES BIRTHS 1986 A girl, Siena Rose, to John and Lilah Sheehan

1997 A girl, Folake Adeson, to Wolguine (Stervil) and Jerome Olorunmaiye August 16, 2013

September 15, 2013

1987 A boy, Mack, to Paul and Marie Joseph Sahady August 12, 2013

1990 A boy, Maxson Alexander Griffin, to Joseph and Andrea Bell

A boy, Nicholas Louis, to Louis Tavares and Erika Darling October 16, 2013

1998 A boy, John (Jack), to Willow Hawk and Sean Mitchell October 13, 2013

July 24, 2013

1999

1991

A boy, Clayton Joseph, to Matt and Amara (Murray) Mulder August 22, 2013

A girl, Caroline Brigid, to Jeremy and Megan Healey August 27, 2013 A boy, Ansel Grey, to Mark Hedstrom and Laura Smith September 19, 2013

1993 A girl, Alice Knight, to Sean and Erin Berry October 10, 2013

A girl, Campbell June, to Justine (Reeber) and Chris Button October 13, 2013 A girl, Sienna Lucia, to Francesca and Andy Tauber

2001 A boy, Ambrose Lee, to Nikki (Wyman) and Jordan Betts

1994

November 18, 2013

A boy, Andrew Nicolas, to Nick and Katie Lombardi

2002

November 9, 2013

1995 A boy, Ryan James, to Andrew and Jennifer Sacchetti August 25, 2012 A boy, Ethan, to Greg and Jamie Oliphant July 28, 2013

Nicholas Louis, born to Louis Tavares ‘97 and Erika Darling

A boy, Grayson Thomas, to Sean and Mia Biddick March 31, 2013

2005 A boy, Crosby Edward, to Kelsey (Scudder) and Phil Davies August 28, 2013

Sienna Lucia, daughter of Francesca ‘99 and Andy Tauber, was born in July 2013.

A girl, Eliza Etta, to Matthew and Libby DeVecchi October 28, 2013

1996 A boy, Benjamin Thomas, to Steve and Bethany Pietraszek November 11, 2013 Grayson Thomas, son of Sean ‘02 and Mia Biddick

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MILESTONES

Cara Gontarz ‘99 married Jordan Hume in October 2012.

WEDDINGS 1968 George W. Johnston to Eric Price May 18, 2013 1995 Monique Roeder to Roland Singer May 2013 1997 Ashley E. Jones to PJ Griswold September 21, 2013 1999 Cara Gontarz to Jordan Hume October 6, 2012 2000 Bryan C. Flynn to Joanna Humphrey Flynn September 21, 2013 Courtney Macken to Steven Mercier September 21, 2013 Patrick M. Kraper to Molly Hoisser October 19, 2013 2002 Andrea Petronello to Paolo Marone September 7, 2013 2003 Rachael Pickin to Christo Lombaard August 1, 2013 2005 Katherine B. Morgera to Michael J. Clores September 14, 2013

Andrea Petronello ‘02 and Paolo Marone at their wedding in September 2013

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P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

MILESTONES

Monique Roeder ‘95 and Roland Singer were married in Hawaii.

Ashley Jones Griswold ‘97 and her husband, PJ Griswold, at their wedding in September 2013

Katherine B. Morgera ‘05 married Michael J. Clores in September 2013

Bryan C. Flynn ‘00 married Joanna Humphrey in September 2013.

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NECROLOGY

NECROLOGY Frank L. Audino ‘80 August 2, 2013

Peter Magnus Flanigan’ 41 Father of Timothy ’75 and Robert ’83

Klaus Baernthaler Former volunteer at the Portsmouth Abbey Monastery Library October 23, 2013

Grandfather of Teresa ’06, Daniel ’09 and Michael ’11 Flanigan and Susan ’09 and Kate ’11 Skakel Brother of John ’40 and Robert ’48 Uncle of Michael ’70 and Stephen McDonnell ’73

John F. Berry ‘55 Father of Sean P.D. Berry ‘93 August 29, 2013 Katy Burrell Wife of Alan Burrell ‘41 November 19, 2013 Louise Carter Mother of Warwick ’82 and Prescott ’84 Carter. Sister-in-law of Charles C. ’46 and J. Newman ‘42 Carter. Aunt of Adam A. ’82, Carroll ’77, Montgomery and Samuel (Casey) ’84 Carter.

October 9, 2013 Lucien R. Collart ‘58 Brother of Michael J. Collart ’60 and uncle of Matthew G. McCabe ‘89 August 28, 2013 Edmee Combs Widow of William H. Combs ’41 K and great- aunt of Charles J. Zahringer ‘79 Frederick Ames Cushing ‘52 Brother of Thomas Cushing ‘59 November 15, 2013 John Augustus Elliot, Sr. Father of William J. Elliot ‘72 Grandfather of Jared J. Elliot ’05, Peter M. Elliot ’97 and Kate E. Sedgwick ‘98 Brother of Henry M. Elliot ’41 K November 11, 2013

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Shirley Ann “Nan” Gilloon Mother of Jon ’66 and Peter ’74 Gilloon July 27, 2013 William K. Howenstein ‘52 Husband of Lorna C. Howenstein Father of William K. Howenstein ’87, Grandfather of Harry R.G. Fruehauf ’10 and Grace E. Fink ‘17 August 15, 2013 Jonathan Hunter-Kilmer ‘77 Father of Patrick O. Hunter-Kilmer ‘99 November 29, 2013 Gloria Jantzen Wife of William E. D. Jantzen ’41 K August 20, 2012 Mary Ann Kalogianis Grandmother of Theo Nikolopoulos ‘17 October 9, 2013 Paul Kelly Grandfather of Maggie ‘15 and Annie ‘17 O’Donnell December 2, 2013 Mary Alice Lamenzo Sister of John Lamenzo ‘63 August 16, 2013 Jose Matos Grandfather of Joshua T. Vertentes ‘16

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Marlene McKenna Mother of Mary-Kathryn (McKenna) Aranda ‘96 October 8, 2013 John Nordloh Father of Christopher J. Nordloh ‘88 November 2, 2013 Florence Daniels Peale Mother of Lieutenant Cmdr. Douglas J. Peale ‘81 July 26, 2013 Sophie Quinn Wife of Peter Quinn ‘42 May 24, 2013

K

JoAnne P. Scott Mother of Katherine A. Scott ‘04 October 17, 2013 Kevin Shanley ‘60 October 8, 2013 Jerome L. Smith, Jr. Father of faculty member Bowen Smith Grandfather of Conor Smith ’17 November 6, 2013 Lawrence E. Stewart Grandfather of Caitlin Nicholson ‘05 June 28, 2013 Deborah Mary McCarthy Tovar Mother of Christopher D. Tovar ‘76, Gregory H. Tovar ‘67, James R. Tovar ‘79, and Peter Q. Tovar ‘72 August 1, 2013

CLASS NOTES

46 I Dr. John (Jack) Lyons is president of the Board of Directors of Willing Hands, an organization that delivers donations of wholesome food to neighbors in need.

Willing Hands recovers nutritious food that might otherwise go to waste and gives it to organizations that serve people in need.

They operate seven days a week, all year long, and deliver approximately four tons of food per week.

Preston Shea ‘58 was a featured speaker at an

inter-faith meeting of The International Hospitaller Committee of the Order of Malta

Preston has been working hard producing wooden toys, commenting,”Not enough ora, too much labora, I guess.” His son, Stuart, has encouraged him to sell his toys on Etsy. To purchase Preston’s work, visit www.etsy.com/shop/BillsWoodToys.

52 I Bill Denney retired years ago from Plexus Corp. Since 1971 Bill and his wife, Sheila, have lived in Oshkosh, WI, (much to their surprise!) where they raised their three sons. He and Sheila enjoy going east to their house in Cape May Point from August through September, and to Sanibel Island in Florida for the months of February and March. Bill admits “We are Wisconsinites along with our sons and two grandsons, and yes, we do cheer for the Green Bay Packers and Wisconsin Badgers.” It has been several years since Bill last attended a reunion but he will try to make it to campus in 2014.

56 I Bentley Offutt and eight former classmates from Gilman School have met for the past several years with Fr. Joe Healey whenever he returns from East Africa. “The depth of conversation from each has been incredible.” The Offutt family often spent

John Belt ‘57 with his brother, Edward ’51, and Creighton McShane ’50 (right) at the wedding of John’s daughter, Laura, in September 2013.

two weeks this past summer in Ecuador’s high Andes and on a sailboat snorkeling in the Galapagos Island. In additon, Offutt Securities marked its 25th anniversary last year, and the firm stills puts out institutional research on small- and mid-cap value stocks.

57 I John Belt’s daughter, Laura, was married to Paul Ponomarev at The Creek Beach on Long Island, NY, on September 7, 2013.

John and Laura were joined by several Portsmouth alumni, including Laura’s uncle, Edward Belt ’51, and Creighton McShane ’50.

58 I John Tepper Marlin has resigned his position as chief economist for the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice to take up the same assignment at the Warrior Family Foundation, which is chaired by General Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, former superintendent of West Point.... Preston Shea was a featured speaker at an interfaith meeting of The International Hospitaller Committee of the Order of Malta. He addressed members of the U.S. delegation on the topic “Cana Revisited: Marriage Rights and the American Church.” The session was chaired by former Portsmouth Institute speaker Mr. George Weigel of The Ethics and Policy Center. More recently,

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Jaime del Amo ‘69

59 I Jaime del Amo spent a few days as an extra on Exodus, Ridley Scott’s movie that was filmed in Spain. “With 800 technicians, Christian Bale, Ben Kingsley and thousands of extras, I’d need binoculars to see myself in it. But it was great fun.”

60 I Jim Robinson met up with Tim Lanigan and Pete Smith at another of their bi-monthly Sunday lunches. They toasted to the memory of Roger Stephens, who passed in the winter, and then to Kevin Shanley, who passed in early October.

While Pete is working at the State Department, Jim is now in his 28th year in real estate (in Who’s Who in Real Estate since 1997) after his earlier government and overseas service, and Tim is enjoying his retirement with a number of charitable activities. All three “are less spry than earlier, but have great mini-reunions.” Jim notes, “With two kids under 21, I guess I will work forever to pay college tuitions. I added a third dependent, a little white ball of fluff called Rambo, who just turned one (and should have come with a warning: “This little puppy will grow and be more demanding of walks and visits to check

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John (Rat) McCabe ‘63 with wife, Maureen, his four children and six grandchildren

out any neighbors who may be outside”).

Our local trio welcomes contact with any classmates passing through,” says Jim, “and we look forward to our 55th reunion in 2015.”

62 I Peter Leonard is developing retirement housing integrated with a permaculture farm in New Mexico.

63 I Niel Cannon took an unplanned detour last May on the way to Cape Cod. He visited Portsmouth for the first time in 50 years! The only buildings that he remembered were the Manor House, Bede’s, the Gym, the Dining Hall, and the Church, “which remains one of the most inspirational buildings that I have ever been in.

There is a wonderful spiritual and friendly feeling to the campus and the people we talked to.” Neil returned for his 50th reunion in September.... John McCabe has much news to report: “To my fellow classmates and friends at Portsmouth Abbey, I can’t tell you how great it was seeing all of you at our 50th. Some of you haven’t changed at all; a few others sure did, but all of you were terrific. Thank you all for making Maureen feel so welcomed, and for apparently excusing me for all my years of absence. This ‘absence’ was my loss for sure. After an exciting and, at times,

John Dale ‘65 (second from left), Richard Campbell ‘65 (second from right) and friends after a successful goose hunt

challenging corporate career as a CEO and CFO, I started working in real estate and mortgages, which sure looked good when I started in 2004, but you all know what happened a few years later – boy, can the Rat pick ‘em! We’ve weathered the storm and I am now actively doing both – as a broker specializing in relocations to the Greater Raleigh/Durham area, as well as a senior loan officer specializing in helping seniors. (Can’t help myself, but I do a great job with other old farts!) I have four kids and six grandkids (collectively known as ‘The Munchkins’ ) who thrill me a lot more than my four kids ever did, except maybe at their births and on one or two other occasions. The Munchkins are all bright, good-looking, healthy kids and I thank the dear Lord for blessing me with them every day. Maureen, originally from Liverpool, and I are very happily married, living in Cary, NC, and, at this time of the year, enjoy watching ACC basketball (big Duke fans), finding new restaurants and basically just being together. The only problem we have is that this ‘getting old stuff’ really sucks, but compared to the alternative, I guess we’ll deal with it.

With the promise I’ll do a far better job staying in touch with the Class of ’63 – sure couldn’t do worse – I wish you all the very best. Thank you again and hope you had a very Merry Christmas, Rat.”

65 I James C. Sturdevant and his wife had dinner recently with Nick Keefe and his fiancée, Debbie, (“great couple!”) who does marketing for the Oakland Symphony. Jim’s oldest daughter, Emma, who spent two summers at Portsmouth, is now a senior applying to colleges – “none of the ones I was interested in” – large and small schools, sprinkled throughout the country. His youngest is in seventh grade shooting for an athletics scholarship (and a very early admission) at Notre Dame. “He already has the play-by-play CD from his grandfather of his bringing the Irish from behind as its freshman quarterback. Fortunately, he’s smarter than to play football. We are all looking forward

Iris Goodwin and Vince Lackner ‘68 joined Abbot Caedmon for some reunion celebration in September.

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P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL

Jon Gilloon spends his time between the Florida condo, the Shreveport real estate venture and home in Arlington, TX.

Greg Hornig ‘68 trekking in Torres del Paine in southern Patagonia last spring.

Greg Hornig ‘68 at his daughter, Eliza’s, wedding

to our 50th reunion in 2015,” concludes Jim.… Charles Carignan retired from the investment brokerage business in 2003.

In 2011 he and wife, Gale, relocated from New Hampshire to Naples, Florida. Local sightings include classmate Mark Bonner and neighbor Peter Fagan ’55. They also enjoyed a visit from classmate and college room mate Jim Minor, and his wife, Andrea.

“We send best wishes to all.”... John Dale joined old friend Richard Campbell for some serious goose hunting above Saskatoon in October. By the way, John was one of the lucky winners in our Amazon.com gift card drawing for those who sent in class notes.

Congratulations, John. Keep those class notes coming!

mountainous (and spectacular) region of southern Patagonia, just north of the Strait of Magellan. Greg reported that the group had to leave the area when the winds exceeded 60 mph, but said it was “a great trip otherwise.”.... Paul Florian continues to practice architecture and recently attended the Headmaster’s Reception in Chicago. Three projects designed by Florian Architects were featured in a new book, Luxury Homes Chicago.

66 I Jon Gilloon is “Blissfully retired, with new projects galore – hanging out with the grandchildren and visting old friends – spending time between the Florida condo, the Shreveport real estate venture and home in Arlington, TX, mostly. Life is good!”

69 I

68 I Greg Hornig’s daughter, Eliza, married Kyle Hausmann on June 8, 2013. The wedding took place in West Palm Beach, and Eliza’s brother, Chris Hornig ’01, was also in attendance. Also, in the spring of 2013, Greg trekked in Torres del Paine, a

Jane and Jim Pfeffer ‘69 cruising in the BVI

Paul Florian’s ‘68 architectural work is featured in a new book, Luxury Homes Chicago.

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Jim Pfeffer checked in to say, “Because of time limitations, a number of years ago we sold our cruising sailboat in favor of annual charters. This new year’s wintertime Caribbean bareboat charter is from St. Lucia to Grenada. I will be skippering a Beneteau 43.3. The nine-day trip will take us through the Grenadines and to Mustique Island, as well.”... James Johnson has been enjoying his work in consulting,

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James Johnson ‘69 served as the head coach of the French National Lacrosse Team.

helping organizations and leaders generate better performance from themselves and their people. In recent years, his work has concentrated on coaching C-Level leaders and Boards. “It seems that a few grey hairs have helped with my credibility :-).” One of his other passions is the game of lacrosse, where Jim has had the privilege to serve as the head coach of the French National Team. They will compete against 40 nations this July in the World Championships. “Hope to see some of you there.”... Roman Paska’s production of Echo in Camera opened La Mama’s Puppet Theatre Festival on November 8th. Rob Barnes and Michael Rich ‘68, Toten Bacardi and Chris Coy ‘69, Byron Grant ‘70 and members of the Klemmer and Raho families were among those who supported the production.

70 I John Walsh is mid-way through his second term in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and is vice chair of the climate change committee... According to John, “Architecture has taken a back seat to public policy. My bill filings range from palliative care to public access rights and anything in between that moves us.

Abbey alumni are welcome to visit me in the Massachusetts State House, and I will try to give a personal architectural tour of the oldest continually elective legislative body in the world.”... Jamie MacGuire has become executive education director at IESE Business School (www.iese.edu), a leading European business school with campuses in Barcelona, Madrid, Munich, Sao Paulo and New York. Jamie will be primarily based in New York and welcomes

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Gust Stringos ‘73, below, in his boat, Bluebird, sailed the Bermuda 1-2 last spring. At right, Gust tends to his bees in central Maine, “the center of the universe.”

Abbey visitors to the IESE Center just opposite Carnegie Hall.... Aidan C. Melia ‘00, daughter of John F.R. Melia, of Brooklyn, NY, and Carol Gray Potter of Edmonds, WA, was married on August 3, 2013, to Michael Burton Lane at the Salish Lodge, Snoqualmie Falls, WA. She will take her husband’s surname. Helping celebrate was John’s classmate, Byron (Sandy) Grant.

The couple lives in Salem, OR.

73 I

the 2013 Bermuda 1-2 single-handed to Bermuda, double-handed back to Newport, RI. He was third in class for the solo leg, first on return, and first in overall combined time. Gust added, “I was sorry to miss our 40th reunion. It seems impossible that it has been that long.” Gust continues to live, garden, practice medicine, and keep bees in central Maine, “the center of the universe.” He likes to run, and looks forward to turning 60 in 2015, “when I will enter a better age class. As they say, if you can keep showing up...”

Rodney E. Willoughby, Jr., M.D., is a pediatric infectious disease specialist with a practice at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, James Kenney spent the summer trainin Milwaukee, and a professor of pediatrics ing the Climbing/Rescue Rangers at Mount at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He is Rainier National Park. He has recently perhaps best known in the medical world joined the Washington State Department of for being the lead physician on the 2004 Health and Social Services Aging and Dis“Milwaukee Protocol” case, in which a abled Services Administration as their Em15-year-old Wisconsin girl survived rabies, ployment Program Manager, which he conafter being bitten by a bat, without receivsiders an exciting new challenge to develop ing the vaccine. Dr. Willoughby led a medical team in an experimental course of treatment that saved the girl’s life. A segment titled “Rodney Versus Death” was the topic on Radiolab (a radio show and podcast that weaves stories and science into sound and music-rich documentaries.)

The segment featured two journalists who documented the case in Wired magazine and in a newly published book, Rabid - A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus... Gust Stringos Eduardo Llach ‘77, his wife, Teri, and pooch, Milo, watchsailed his boat, Bluebird, in ing the sunset and moonrise near their Tahoe cabin

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Ben Howe ‘79 rode with his daughter, Rachel, in the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge in July.

services designed to support the aging and disabled population in their efforts to return to work.... Timothy Flanigan, M.D., has been named to the Board of Trustees of Rhode Islanders Sponsoring Education, an organization dedicated to empowering children of incarcerated parents. Tim currently serves as a staff physician at The Miriam and Rhode Island hospitals, dean’s professor of medical science at Brown University and was ordained a deacon by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence.

77 I Eduardo Llach lives in the San Francisco Bay area and writes, “Please let us know if you are in the area or in Tahoe – would love to host you, or you can stay at the cabin near Tahoe City (650 678 1406).

The kids are all out at college or working, so it’s a new phase for Teri and me : ). My company, Krome Photos, is doing well, but it has been a long four years getting here.

Next year I’m continuing my recent trend of doing mountain bike stage races with TransPortugal, a 9-day race from the north to south of Portugal. I’m trying to get them in before the body decides it’s enough.”…

Shortly before his untimely death, Jonathan Hunter-Kilmer wrote that he has five grandchildren, one from Patrick ’99 and four from his daughter, Rosie, whose twins will have their first birthday soon.

78 I Bill Keogh writes, “The Class of “78 was well represented for our 35th (yikes!)

Dan ‘79 and Pete ‘81 McCormick at Fenway Park during last fall’s World Championship season. The photo was taken by their father, Jim ‘48.

reunion. About 16 of us visited campus for at least part of the weekend. We were joined at dinner on Friday evening by one of our favorite teachers, David McCarthy, and his lovely wife. We were especially blessed to have Rob Hyde say a special Mass for us on Saturday evening. For those of you who couldn’t make it, we missed you. And we look forward to seeing everyone at our 40th in 2018!”

79 I Last July, for the 8th year in a row, Ben Howe rode in the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge. This year his daughter, Rachel, rode with him, joining the AGC team of five riders. The PMC is an annual bike-athon that draws more than 5,500 cyclists.

In its 34th year, the PMC has raised more than $375 million for the Jimmy Fund, which is the fundraising arm of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

81 I Andrew Hill continues to enjoy teaching history and journalism at Tampa Preparatory School, “where I have worked both as an administrator and teacher for the past 16 years. With two children out of college and one in the 11th grade, our lives are slowly settling into a ‘proto empty nest’ phase. (Frankly, it’s much better than advertised – quieter, anyway.) My thoughts of life in St. Hugh’s in the late 70s and early 80s are among my most cherished.

(My apologies to Father Philip – I have no

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idea how you survived our presence!) Best wishes to all my fellow Ravens.”

82 I Bob Durant was named to the Board of Directors of the Ronald McDonald House of Rhode Island, where he will work with the board to fund and implement the Ronald McDonald House’s mission. Bob is of counsel in Edwards Wildman’s litigation department. He holds a J.D. from Emory University School of Law and a B.A. in finance from Georgetown University...

Gregory Zancewicz has been working for a small software start-up company, along with a few east coast colleagues, since late 2012. “I have not really kept in close touch with my fellow alumni, although I recently exchanged emails with my old roommate, Joaquin Font, and with our ever-active class president, Anthony Rondeau,” he writes. “The only other big news in our life is that after about a year of very serious reflection, prayer and study, my family took the dramatic step of being received into the Eastern Orthodox Church. I don’t think I would have ever considered such a thing if not for my contact with the Benedictine monasticism of the Abbey, which predates the schism between east and west by 500 years or so. I helped found an orthodox ministry at a federal penitentiary and have been completing some theological studies sponsored by the Russian Orthodox Church, both of which are probably the last things I would have imagined myself doing about 5 years ago or so.

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Robert Rondeau, John Cummings, Paul Anghinetti, Steven Cotta and James Burke, all Class of ‘83, enjoyed a great day of golf at Carnegie Abbey.

Derek Minihane ‘87 joined his family members for a great reunion with all three generations present, including brothers Neil ‘85 and Keith ‘89.

Left, Max and Otis Sorensen, twin sons of Marc Leandro ‘89 and Lin Sorensen, sporting their Portsmouth Abbey onesies at 6 months

83 I James Kaufman was recently ranked tenth on Registered REP’s 2013 “Top 100 Wirehouse Advisors” list published in WealthManagement.com. Jim is senior vice president of wealth management and a senior financial advisor for Merrill Lynch in Atlanta. He is also a senior leader of the Global Corporate and Institutional Advisory Services Group (GCIAS) at Merrill Lynch, which originates and administers benefits platforms for Fortune 1000 corporations.

In 2013 Jim was named to The Financial Times Top 400 Financial Advisors and is

an inductee of the Merrill Lynch Director’s Circle… Robert Rondeau, John Cummings, Paul Anghinetti, Steven Cotta and James Burke enjoyed a great day of golf at Carnegie Abbey in September. John reported that for old time’s sake the group dined in the Stillman Dining Hall before their round, where they saw lots of familiar faculty and members of the Board of Regents. John also mentioned that Bob Rondeau drove the 18th green with a 275-yard shot to finish off the day! John also writes that this year he had added CASL (Chartered Advisor for Senior Living) to his CLU and ChFC designations. He reports that his youngest daughter, Chloe, is scheduled to complete her degree in video and film production at Pepperdine University, graduating a year ahead of schedule. Her whole family is very proud of this fantastic accomplishment!

84 I Joe Griffiths ’86 was delighted to run into Coach McCauley and his son, Richard McCauley, at the Boston College football game on Saturday, October 5, for an impromptu Abbey mini-reunion.

A vintage photo from 1947, sent by Strat Wallace ‘88, shows his father, Stratford C. Wallace, and uncle, William Wallace (Andrew Wallace’s father), in front of St. Benet’s with a young Brother Andrew!

85 I Mike Nannini and Matt Cunningham got together in Arlington, VA, in October to watch the Red Sox start their march to the World Series.

John Cummings ‘83 with his daughter, Chloe

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Joe Griffiths ‘86, Joe Bardenheier ‘86 and Bob Castellini ’86 reunite at Fenway Park for Game 1 of the 2013 World Series.

Pete Lucas ‘94 ran into former Raven baseball teammate, Kevin Merkel ’95, at a wedding in downtown Pittsburgh.

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Derek Minihane and his family have been enjoying Sydney, Australia, for the past four years and have decided to stay there and enjoy the lifestyle, people and country. They flew back in July to Rhode Island for a great reunion with all three generations present, including Neil ‘85 and Keith ‘89.

Keith Minihane and his wife, Kelly, have moved back to Colorado to be closer to family and the mountains. Mack just turned two and is looking forward to becoming a big brother in a few months.

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Rob Poirier continues to serve as the clinical chief of emergency medicine at Washington University School of Medicine/ Barnes Jewish Hospital. He is working towards finishing an executive MBA degree at Washington University in St. Louis, Olin School of Business... Matt D’Arrigo’s organization, ARTS (A Reason To Survive), was featured on Tuesday, December 31, on NBC’s “Today Show.” The story highlighted the creation of ARTS, Matt’s new ARTS Center in National City, CA, as well as four students who have been impacted by the ARTS program. Matt also visited campus on February 6 to deliver a Dom Luke Childs lecture about finding his passion, and serving others, through ARTS.

Stratford Wallace was on campus for his reunion this past September. Strat tells us he had a great time and wished he could have stayed longer. See photo on page 88 of Strat’s father and uncle on campus in 1947.

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reunion last year. He just started law school and could not afford the time away. He said he hopes the Class of ’93 had a good turnout and asked us to pass “his best” along to all!

94 I Pete Lucas ran into former Raven baseball teammate, Kevin Merkel ’95, at a wedding in downtown Pittsburgh on 11/16/13. Kevin is enjoying life in Pittsburgh, where he’s lived since college.

Pete is living in Barrington with his wife and two sons. They were all anxiously awaiting the birth of their third child in January 2014…. Miguel Bichara is currently living in Monterrey, Mexico. In 2002 he married Susana Garzalaguera from San

93 I Patrick Parsons wrote to tell us he regretted that he could not make it back for his 20th Ryan Kern’s (‘94) daughter, Molly Isabelle.

Miguel Bichara ‘94 and his family are living in Monterrey, Mexico.

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John Plummer ‘95, his wife, Marina, their daughter, Siena, and their son, Jack.

Patrick ‘65 and Pam Rooney, Sean ‘96 and Lisette Rooney, Kate Rooney ‘98 and Stephen Sams and the kids: Quinn, Sophia, Lucy, and Jack

Diego, CA, and they have three children, ages ten, seven and four. “I like traveling to Cancun, Orlando and San Antonio with the family,” reports Miguel. “Our vacations in the near future will include a ski resort and a cruise. I´m very happy to see pictures now and then from Mr. Hobbins, Mr. Sahms, Mr. McDonough, Betty, and from Father Paschal, Edmund & Damian. I have not been to the Abbey since 2006. If there is a reunion for the Class of 1994, I want to be there!”…. ryan Kern is currently living and working in San Francisco with his wife and two kids, Beckett, age four, and Molly, one-and-a-half. “Jennifer and I are enjoying our careers in finance,” says Ryan.

“Jennifer works in investor relations for a large mutual fund company, Artisan Funds, while I work in the middle office of a hedge fund, Partner Fund Management. We all enjoyed watching Oracle Team USA and their amazing come-frombehind victory over Emirates Team New Zealand in the 34th America’s Cup on San Francisco Bay this past summer. In addition, we were able to travel back to RI over the summer where I was able to catch up with Chris Ollerhead, Jer-

emy Kane, Mike Vergnani and Declan hayes. I can report all are doing incredibly well.”

95 I Annie Sherman has been busy! Not only is she managing editor of the following magazines: Newport Life Magazine, Newport Wedding Magazine, Newport Best Read Guide, South County Life Magazine and the Cliff Walk Map, she has also written a book titled, Legendary Locals of Newport. Published by Arcadia, the book features over 375 years of Newport’s characters in black and white photos and little vignettes… In May 2013 Monique roed-

96 I Ann Marie Forbes reports, “The Forbes Clan moved from Marlborough, MA, to Westport, MA, this past summer. We love being near family and the beach!”

97 I Ford Curran ‘95 welcomes retired Mayor Thomas Menino as new member of the BU Faculty

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er was married to Roland Singer in Hawaii.

Portsmouth Abbey alumni John Edenbach ’96 and Daphne Nebergall ’04 were there to celebrate the big day! Monique and Roland live in New York City, where Monique works in Soho in real estate branding, marketing and development. “Looking forward to the next reunion!”... Ford Curran is celebrating 10 years at Boston University and recently welcomed retired Mayor Thomas Menino as a new member of the BU Faculty…. John Plummer and his wife, Marina, recently celebrated the third birthday of their daughter, Siena, and first birthday of their son, Jack. John continues to practice law at Roberts Carroll Feldstein & Peirce in Providence, RI. Marina is currently practicing law at Ratcliffe Harten Burke & Galamaga, also in Providence...

James healey recently moved the family to Pretoria, South Africa. “If anybody happens to be in the area let us know, we would love to get together.”

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Matthew reeber has been elected to the Board of Directors of the MS Dream Center of Rhode Island. Matt currently serves

Kristen Weida Smith’s (‘99) two sons, William Borden Smith and Carter Jameson Smith

as an associate with Pannone Lopes Devereaux & West LLC. He holds a J.D. from Tulane University Law School and a B.A. in American studies and history from Colby College…. Ashley Jones Griswold was married on September 21 in Newport, RI, to Paul John Griswold, Jr. “We had a gorgeous day!” Brennan Koch, Anne Erhard and Janine Graebe ’98 were bridesmaids.

Other Ravens in attendance were Billy Gilbane ‘95, Mary Burke, Mary McGregor, Mary Kibble, Tara Tavares Winston ‘98, Tristan Mouligne ‘98, Alexandra ’00 John Jay Mouligne ’01 and Matt Kavanagh ‘98 on the bag pipes!” Ashley and Paul live in New York City.

98 I Talia (Resendes) Richards was recently selected by the University of Rhode Island’s

At the wedding of Cara Gontarz ‘99 and Jordan Hume

“Fifty for Fifty” Committee, which honors distinguished alumni who have provided leadership, innovation, and professional service in the field of Library and Information Studies. Talia graduated from The University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Library and Information Studies (GSLIS) with a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science. She was honored at the School’s 50th Anniversary Gala Event held on November 8, 2013, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Warwick, RI…. Kathryn Rooney-Sams and her husband bought a new home in Newport, RI, in June “after I finally convinced him to move back from San Francisco almost four years ago. We go back often for friend and family

visits so I would love to hook up with anyone while there. I also went back to work after five years of staying home with my two children, Jack (6) and Lucy (3).” Kate is a rental and sales associate at Gustave White Sotheby’s International Realty in Newport.

“It’s a great company with even greater roots in the community, and I couldn’t be happier.”

99 I Francesca Tauber and her husband, Andy, welcomed their first baby, Sienna Lucia Tauber, on July 11, 2013. (See Milestones on page 79 for a photo of Sienna.) “She is a wonderful happy baby and so much fun.”

We are living in New York and are looking forward to seeing class of ‘99 at the reunion in 2014.”... Joseph Sills, after graduating Brown University and completing two years of Tufts Medical School, enrolled in the creative writing graduate program at the University of Virginia. In 2010, he graduated with a MFA in creative writing. He has been published in many literary journals, including that of Columbia University. He returned to Tufts Medical School and graduated in May 2013 in the top six percent of his class with the distinction of receiving AOA honors for medical school. He was accepted at his first choice of residency programs in emergency medicine and will be at UCSF in San Franciso for the next four years.

Ann Marie Forbes ‘96 and her family now live in Westport, MA

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Walter Zaykowski ‘03 and his bride, Kate, are living in Austin, TX.

Liz Lirakis ‘05 has become the sole proprietor of TRACIMOC, a small business that takes homeless comic books and transformed them into unique, useable and wearable art.

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ington, VT…. Daniel C. Murray graduated from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in May 2013. He was sworn into the R.I. Bar Association on Dec. 2. He currently works as an aide to Rhode Island General Treasurer Gina Raimondo. In addition, Dan married Alexis E. Lowry on August 17, 2013, at Lake Memphremagog, Quebec.

Dan and Alexis have returned to Rhode Island and now live on the west side of Providence. Alexis is the curator at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University.

Paul Yoon, his wife, Jenny, and their threeyear-old son, Noah, moved in June from Massachusetts to Vermont to live in their dream home that they have been building from scratch for months. “It is an Energy Star rated home,” says Paul, “and we are very pleased with how it all turned out. We love living in Vermont, and we look forward to spending many more years here.”

In addition, Paul started a new job as an assistant principal at a school in South Burl-

Paul Yoon ‘01, his wife, Jenny, and their three-yearold son, Noah, have moved to Vermont.

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Included in family and friends were Conor Casey ’00, Zoe Butler ‘16, Will Hogg, John Jay & Alexandra Hart ‘00 Mouligné, Garrett Behan ’11, and Emma Butler ’16.

02 I Daniel Garvey, Jr. was awarded dean’s list honors for the 2012-13 academic year…. Jonathan Pitts-Wiley, who is the artistic director at Mixed Magic Theater, directed a play last September titled Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train. The play was writ-

Danny Murray’s (‘01) wedding included (l-r) Conor Casey ’00; Danny’s cousin, Zoe Butler ‘16; Will Hogg ’01; Daniel Murray 01 and Alexis Lowry; John Jay ‘01 and Alexandra Hart ‘00 Mouligne; Danny’s cousin, Garrett Behan ’11; and Danny’s cousin, Emma Butler ’16.

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Jesahel Cantarell ‘06 is thriving in Harrisburg

Elise Markell ‘04 and Steven Tyler in Japan for an Aerosmith tour

Microstructure Profiler), for detection of turbulent mixing. Read more about Susan’s work at: https://sites.google.com/site/susankwillis/ outreach... Elise Markell is living in Nashville and continues to work in the entertainment industry. She traveled to Japan in August with Aerosmith, and is currently working on a National Geographic television production in the U.S.

05 I ten by award-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis.... Justin Hart is in the process of opening the third-largest tattoo removal center in the state of South Carolina. The clinic is called “ReThink” and will be located in Myrtle Beach... Cassandra Helms earned her M.Div at the BU School of Theology. Cassie is working as an AmeriCorps volunteer at The Learning Community, a nationally recognized K-8 charter school in Central Falls, RI.

03 I Walter Zaykowski checked in: “After getting married and moving in February, Kate and I are settled in in Austin, TX. I have started a new job as press secretary for Congressman Michael McCaul and am working out of the office here in Austin.

Kate and I enjoyed seeing everyone at the reunion in September!”

In addition to her full-time job, Liz Lirakis has become the sole proprietor of a small business – TRACIMOC (Comic Art spelled backwards). Since 2010 Tracimoc has taken homeless comic books and transformed them into unique, useable and wearable art. Each item is handmade using the original comic book pages. Liz has traveled to dozens of events spanning from New York Comic Con to the Bay Area Maker Faire.

Like TRACIMOC on Facebook to see some of her creations and follow her upcoming shows: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tr acimoc/151612214900451?ref=hl.... Keith Hoffmann sends “Lots of good news! I’m graduating from law school in spring 2014, and will spend the next 2 years working as a public interest law fellow with great organizations and law firms, making legal claims

on behalf of veterans. I also got engaged last August to Rachel Kaplan. Rachel and I started dating in college and are planning the wedding for June 2014 after our med and law school graduations.”

06 I Jesahel Cantarell writes that 2013 has been a year of change. “I am the proud owner of two wonderful puppies, Borris and Pepper. I accepted an offer from Amazon.com and now work for a brilliant and emerging company (I make sure those

04 I Susan Willis is currently a doctoral student in the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Her thesis focuses on “Internal Waves and Turbulent Mixing on a Stratified Inner Continental Shelf,” and she expects to graduate in May 2014. Over the past few years, she has contributed to the planning, implementation, and recovery of several field campaigns, and directed two, from hiring boats to instrumentation. Her primary research instrument is a PME SCAMP (Self Contained Autonomous

From left to right, Ben Fernandez ’08, Ryan DaPonte ‘07, Austin Roberts, Jordan Reagan and Bill Rives ’67 won the final round of the Summer Trivia Series at the Newport Grand Casino. Their prize: $1,000 cash!

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Alex Gallo ‘09 frying his first Thanksgiving turkey

Sarah Sienkiewicz ‘13 and Lauren Bolusky ‘11 ran into each other in London.

smiley brown boxes get to your door).

Additionally, I was accepted into Penn State’s MBA program with an expected completion year of 2015. Lastly, I recently purchased a historic home in midtown Harrisburg with my amazing girlfriend.

I already look forward to our 10- year PAS reunion.”... Perry Markell earned her master’s degree in public health from George Washington University and is now living in Boston, MA.

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Adam Hobbins ‘09 is studying nursing at CCRI.

Through the Fund My Travel organization, Lori Rich is planning a trip to Port Elizabeth, South Africa, to join the National Learn-to-Swim campaign to teach children from disadvantaged communities how to swim. Over 70% of the nation has little or no swimming ability with over 1000 reported drownings each year. 84% of the drownings involve people from historically poorer backgrounds. Learn more about Lori’s trip at https://www.fundmytravel. com/Laura-Rich-1380815276/campaigns/ SendLoriToSouthAfrica/view.

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Claudia Vollmer ‘09 is in her ninth semester at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, Venezuela.

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Frank Holbrook, former Wheaton College standout who helped the Lyons’ baseball team to four NCAA tournament appearances and a second-place finish in the 2012 tournament, has joined the staff at his alma mater as an assistant coach.

Frank was a member of the Newport Gulls coaching staff last summer…. Pierce King received the Paul Tiemer Award last spring which is voted on by players and coaches

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and awarded to the player on the team who best exemplifies Bowdoin lacrosse on and off the field. He was also accepted to the Tuck Bridge Program at Dartmouth.

The five-week program offers a “crash course” in business and financial analysis.

In addition, Pierce has accepted a oneyear position as a research assistant at the University of Navarra, in Pamplona, Spain.

He will be helping a professor finish his doctorate on economic poverty and development in Ethiopia, which will also provide Pierce with the opportunity to travel there a couple of times throughout the year.

09 I Claudia Vollmer is currently in her ninth semester at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, Venezuela. “Only one more semester to go!” This past summer Claudia went to the Dominican Republic with her family and spent time with Isabella Schad, Luis León and Xavier Oller.

“We had an awesome time together catching up. I hadn’t seen them since my Abbey graduation on May ‘09.” Claudia currently works as an intern at the Renaissance Hotel (Marriott) in Caracas. “I’m loving my job as a DTS (delighted to serve) Agent.”… Following graduation in May, Alex Gallo started working in Houston, Texas. Also of note, he fried his first turkey this Thanksgiving…. Daniel Garvey, Jr.

From left, Akunna Onyiuke, Toni Ramos, Marguerite Crandall, and Jamie Chapman, all Class of 2012, met up in D.C.

Assad Bichara ‘09 and his Abbey classmates in Boston

was awarded dean’s list honors at Union College for the 2012-2013 academic year…. Adam Hobbins is studying nursing at the Community College of Rhode Island and will receive an associate’s degree in nursing in 2016…. Kerry Klemmer’s paintings were on exhibition at Northeastern University’s Gallery 360 in the fall of 2013. Kerry explained that “as a student of astronomy, I have used lenses to view and study celestial bodies that are not visible with the naked eye. In my paintings, I set out to straddle the line between vague recognition and abstraction. My process is founded in scientific exploration of dynamically interacting common household materials such as tinfoil, saran wrap, and tissue paper. I photograph these materials in order to distort them through the lens of a camera and capture unique moments in time otherwise unseen. Through paint, I further obscure the identity of these materials in order to create abstract landscapes in which the paint as much as the image becomes the subject.” You can see some Kerry’s paintings at www.kerryklemmer. com. This past summer, Daniel Flanigan and his brother, Michael ‘11, launched Scout, a solar-powered, trans-Atlantic, autonomous vessel. Unfortuantely, the vessel has stopped sending its signal back home.

Dan remarked, “Although the chances are that we will never hear from Scout again, our database is ready to accept incoming messages; the satellites watching over Scout will send us an email if they spot her.

As much as we have been captivated by

Scout, this was probably the right time to let her go. We all have a number of projects to catch up on, and we’re always looking for the next one.” For more information on Scout, visit www.gotransat.com.... Rodrigo Bichara says, “Hi everyone! I’m about to graduate from Monterrey ITESM; my degree will be in law and finance. I’ve been to the Abbey twice since I graduated.”

Rodrigo also went to Boston to see some classmates– Shane McComiskey, Kwasi Amoako, Robert Skolsky, Matt Franklin, Adam Hobbins, and David Garvey. He says, “Skolsky has been in Mexico three times since I came back, and Nick White and Shane McComiskey, once. We all have a great friendship! I’m looking forward to the reunion next year and hope to see everyone up there, including all the teachers.”

10 I Frank Pagliaro has written a play that was featured in the Adams Memorial Theatre at Williams College. The play, titled Cap & Bells: Of One Allegiance Only, is an historical drama surrounding the events of Ireland’s Easter Rising of 1916. At its core is a young man’s conflict between fighting for what he believes in and remaining true to the woman he loves. Militant nationalism, blood sacrifice, doomed romance, and battle with the imperial machine that was twentieth-century Britain abound. The epic and the intimate collide in this exciting new play, which examines the effects of political idealism and revolution on the young...

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Pierce MacGuire is completing an honors course in business and economics at Southwestern and looks forward to entering the financial services industry in Austin upon his graduation in May.

11 I After overcoming freshman and sophomore year injuries Brigid Behan is having a great junior year playing soccer at Gettysburg.

“She’s been our best player this year,” says Bullets coach Matt Garrett. Brigid is tied with three other players with one assist to pace the team, and her 16 shots are the most among the Bullets…. Lauren Bolusky spent the fall semester studying abroad in Dublin, Ireland. She has returned to Elon University for the spring semester where she serves as a university tour guide and as vice president of member education (Pledge Mom) for Kappa Delta.

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Jamie Chapman recently met up with Toni Ramos, Marguerite Crandall, and Akunna Onyiuke in Washington, D.C., to enjoy a weekend together, having traveled from Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., respectively….

Marguerite Crandall achieved dean’s list honors at Loyola University, MD…. Taryn Murphy was named Drew University’s Defensive Player of the Week in October in the Landmark Conference. Murphy helped the Rangers’ defense allow just 16 shots in

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Callie Hall ‘13 sent this photo of her college town, Colchester, VT, in all of its autumn glory Hadley Matthews, Joe Yates, and Mossiah Kouassi-Brou, from the Class of 2013, met up for a Princeton game in the fall.

two games. She also contributed on the offensive end in a 3-1 Landmark win over Susquehanna. She was credited with the game-winning goal, the first goal in her career. The Rangers are allowing a conference-best 0.70 goals per game. Drew University is ranked #16 in the nation for Division III Field Hockey.

13 I After Thanksgiving Allison Bolles got together with Andrew Lowis, Minjae (Steve) Cho, Hadley Matthews, Joe

Yates, Doug Lebo ‘15, Nick Medley, Dan Jackson and Brandt Matthews ‘15 to enjoy some leftovers! Hadley visited Joe at Princeton in November to attend the Orange and Black Ball with him. While at the Princeton vs. Yale homecoming football game, they bumped into Mossiah Kouassi-Brou…. Sarah Sienkiewicz reports, “Manor House takes on London!

I randomly ran into Lauren Bolusky, my prefect in Manor House Fourth Form year, at the Tower of London in October. She was studying in Dublin, while I was studying in London; made me realize what a

small world it is!”… Callie Hall finished up her first semester of college at St. Michael’s in Colchester, VT. “What a change it is has been. I enjoyed my classes and especially loved taking my first seminar course, The Examined Life. My experience at the Abbey has definitely prepared me for the college life. I have loved being able to experience the outdoors in so many different ways, and being just a short bus ride away from downtown Burlington. I am looking forward to returning to campus during my holiday breaks”…

Remember to stay in touch by visiting the front page of the School website for news and event info, and to connect to our social media pages.

You can download our mobile app in the Apple iTunes Store or in Google Play. To connect, type

“Portsmouth Abbey Alumni Mobile App” into either iTunes or Google Play.

Andrew Lowis ‘13, Minjae Cho ‘13, J. Hadley Matthews ‘13, Allison Bolles ‘13, Joe Yates ‘13, Doug Lebo ‘15, Nick Medley ‘13, Dan Jackson ‘13 and Brandt Matthews ‘15 (not pictured) got together in November.

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September 26- 28, 2014 Save the Date!

Classes ending in ’4 and ‘9 – this is your reunion year!

We especially welcome back members of the Diman Club – alumni from all classes prior to 1964!

Visit www.portsmouthabbey.org/reunion for more information regarding the schedule, alumni golf, class dinners, accommodations, babysitting and more!

Questions? Contact Julia Driscoll ’06 at 401-643-1276 or jdriscoll @ portsmouthabbey.org

285 Cory’s Lane Portsmouth, Rhode Island 02871 www.portsmouthabbey.org Address Service Requested

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Visit our Facebook fan page!

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The Portsmouth Abbey Summer Program is designed for younger students, beginning with current sixth graders, and is intended to give them increased skills and knowledge for greater success in school. It also provides them a safe, fun place to try new things and so increase their confidence and ambition.

June 29 - July 26

Contact Tim Seeley ’77, director of the program, at tseeley@portsmouthabbey.org or (401) 643–1225

Call to find out about our tuition discounts.

for more information and to hear about our alumni and sibling discounts.