Valete

Prize Day is also the moment that the students, faculty, and staff recognize those adult members of the community who are leaving Roxbury Latin. Thanks to their endurance, loyalty, and commitment, very few adults move on from RL each year. We are the better for that continuity. This spring, however, we bid farewell to six members of the faculty and staff—one of whom has completed his Penn Fellowship, and four retirees. Below are the remarks delivered in their honor by Headmaster Brennan on June 1.

Taylor Fitzgerald

Taylor Fitzgerald joined Roxbury Latin as a Penn Fellow two years ago. On the heels of the pandemic his arrival represented another hopeful blast of fresh air, and of relentless high energy, good cheer, affection, and unabashed comfort in being himself—a character in all the best sense. A committed teacher of “Roots and Shoots,” Western Civ, and U.S. History, he delighted in that content, but yet more so in the boys he was teaching. Despite his advanced age for a Fellow, there is much of the boy still in Mr. Fitzgerald, and though he could empathize easily with his students’ situations and idiosyncrasies, he was also able to draw the line and get down to work. A high achieving schoolboy and collegiate athlete, Mr. Fitzgerald was especially effective assisting with our programs in football, basketball, and track and field. Even when Mr. Fitzgerald was sidelined by serious surgery this past winter, he maintained his relentless positivity and concern for each of us. Now he ventures to New Hampshire to join the faculty at Derryfield School, headed by our own Andy Chappell. Our loss is Manchester’s gain, as Mr. Fitzgerald will doubtless have the same positive impact on his new students and colleagues as he has had on all of us. They will come to appreciate, as we have, his integrity, talent, friendship, and sense of fun.

Myron McLaren

From time to time, but not often enough, we acknowledge the intricate ecosystem that is required in order for our school to operate efficiently. We imagine teachers and students at the heart of the matter but fail to imagine how we could do our work were it not for an army of others who do their work. Especially in this technological age, we desperately need people who allow us to interact with the broader world— to access information, to communicate our thoughts and feelings, to organize data. Myron McLaren, for the past six years, has been someone who has helped us to do our work, to realize our goals, to operate efficiently. In his role as Network Technology Coordinator, Mr. McLaren has helped all of us to realize our potential, to honor our responsibilities. That he has done this all with interest and good cheer has made knowing him a pleasure. From the Study Center to courtside at basketball practices and games, Mr. McLaren has signaled his appreciation for all students, for their various pursuits, and has offered his energetic friendship. He leaves us to take on a position as the Assistant Director of Technology at Beaver School. He will not be far away, but we will miss his helpful style and good will.

Derek Nelson

“There are no small parts, only small actors.” The great guru of modern acting, Stanislavski, is attributed with that admonishing and encouraging revelation. A student of acting and of actors, Derek Nelson has taken to heart that sentiment over the past 11 years, in who he has been and in what he has asked his students to be. I have known Derek Nelson and called him a friend for 47 years, since he arrived on the threshold of Amherst College’s first coed dormitory, Pratt Hall—he as a freshman, and I as his dorm advisor. We went on to sing together both at Amherst and then with Boston’s most surprising male a cappella group, The Moving Violations, who in the ’80s even performed for the school in Rousmaniere Hall. You see, then, that when Mr. Nelson took my call when the drama director vacancy occurred here it seemed right and good—the closing of a circle, as it were.

Mr. Nelson always has been a caring, talented, funny man, a man of many accents (especially of the British Isles), a penchant for startling costumes and get-ups (think any number of Maru-a-Pula outfits), and as a beautifully informed, delightful conversationalist. As is true of all good teaching, he has sustained a worthy conversation for all his time with us. In his English teaching (nearly across all six grades), in his committed advising, and especially in running our theater program, Mr. Nelson has represented the best of this business, even as he was catalytic in getting the best out of all of us. Think of the plays he directed: The King Stag, Lord of the Flies, Three Birds Alighting on a Field, The Wizard of Oz, Enron, The Christmas Truce, The Secret Garden, The Illusion, The Arabian Nights, Dogg’s Hamlet/Cahoot’s Macbeth, It Can’t Happen Here, A Few Good Men, Newsies, Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, Frankenstein, Chalk is Cheap, Love and Information, and The Little Prince. In the range of these offerings, Mr. Nelson has signaled that he cares deeply about taking on ideas, controversies, anomalies, historical icons, controversial characters, reassuring characters, all in service to an inspiring philosophical vision of the power of theater—the ability to inform, to challenge, and to entertain.

Succeeding David Frank, who for 34 years ran the RL theater program in distinctive fashion, Mr. Nelson took the opportunity to express regard for what went before, but also to make the program his own. In a school that so robustly espouses generalism, it’s not always easy to get enough of boys’ interest and focused attention for something that isn’t academics or athletics, but through his vision, organization, flexibility, talent, and patience, Mr. Nelson has done just that. And along the way he has taught scores of lucky actors what it means to bring life to characters and their important stories. Mr. Nelson has done that with creativity, cleverness, and respect. We are much the better for his impact on all of us, and I am grateful for his willingness to heed the call and to honor our common calling in this place. Now, Mr. Nelson pursues a wellearned retirement to enjoy life and especially his family. And he will miss, I am sure, those late afternoon pizza runs to Comella’s— incidentally another sign of his care, concern, and generosity.

Elaine Driscoll

“How can I help?” Can there be a more welcoming, reassuring offer than that? And such has been the clarion call of Elaine Driscoll for the past 11 years. A talented, committed, positive, friendly force for good, Mrs. Driscoll may hold the title Assistant to the Headmaster but her work and her accomplishments have been decidedly more than that. Her dayto-day responsibilities administering the school—its schedule and calendar, its communications strains, its operations involving food and cleaning and setting up and tearing down and figuring out are plenty. But she has also provided much of the vision for imagining a better school, one that honored the dignity and possibility of each member of this community, one that remembered its past but envisioned its future. From her ubiquitous perch, she has withstood the endless stream of people seeking answers, permission, help. And she has responded with peerless professionalism, canny problem solving skills, and a human touch that belied the fact that she might have dropped everything in order to help out a boy, a colleague, a parent, a trustee, or a delivery person. In effect, she has been my co-advisor to a gaggle of boys with whom I have had the pleasure of working closely. As the Director of Community Service, Mrs. Driscoll has effectively supported programs that speak to our mission as a school—to lead and serve. On behalf of several worthy causes, and especially Medicines for Humanity and Maru-a-Pula School, she has offered annual reminders of our obligation and our opportunity. Throughout the pandemic, Mrs. Driscoll kept this listing ship afloat, reminding me and all of us that our first commitment was to the boys and the school’s mission. Then, sometimes as fill-in nurse, sometimes as chief health officer, sometimes as associate director of buildings and grounds and food services, she led and collaborated so that all of us could know the diminished, but reasonably striving, experience that we did.

Perhaps the hardest part of her job was having to deal with me and my idiosyncrasies and imperfections. She has been an essential partner in everything I, or the Board of Trustees, or other members of the leadership team have strived to accomplish over the past eleven years. She is amazing at what she does. She is versatile and resourceful. She is a tenacious and tireless worker. She has a glittering personality and a warm, irreverent sense of humor. She is forgiving. She is a great friend. She has loved her work and she has loved all of us.

Tobey O’Brien

When I talk about what makes Roxbury Latin distinctive, I usually lead with our student body, our demographic. I emphasize our commitment to affordability and accessibility. I explain that we make decisions on admission totally independent of financial aid that is offered in order to allow boys of all kinds to come here. Before we extend those scholarship dollars to boys—as we do now routinely not just for the regular program, but for school trips, or for laptops or counseling or many other elements of what makes the RL experience notable—we establish a tuition that is $20,000 less than our neighboring independent schools. We are affordable and accessible and committed to the idea that it is not simply the just thing to offer the opportunity of RL to a range of kids, but that it makes us, this experience together, more interesting and better because of it. How does it happen? It happens because those who can give of their treasure to Roxbury Latin do so. But that does not happen automatically. People have to explain our philosophy, our mission, and then articulate our need. Remarkably, in the spirit of the covenant that I believe exists between the school and parents, alumni, and other friends, we all do what we can— we do our best to support a cause in which we believe.

For 17 years, the chief cheerleader on behalf of our Annual Fund, and by extension the mission it helps to realize, has been Tobey O’Brien. In the years in which Mrs. O’Brien has headed the Annual Fund and served as Director of Development, the school has raised $140 million—$59 million of which has been in the Annual Fund alone. In 2007, her first as Annual Fund Director, Mrs. O’Brien and her team raised $2.2 million. Last year she led an effort that raised $4.8 million. Every other independent day school in the country is envious of our achievement.

Mrs. O’Brien is a workhorse. She inspires others to do the same. It helps greatly that she believes fervently in Roxbury Latin and is grateful for what RL meant to her two sons, JJ and Mike. But it is mainly for who she is, not just for what she has done, that we celebrate Mrs. O’Brien today. A ball of energy, a whirling dervish, a focused, committed organizer and executor of countless efforts and events, Mrs. O’Brien has a rare, irresistible capacity for drawing others into her orbit, and whatever she does, she does with great style, with class. Somehow she has a magic touch that signals to all that their participation is essential, and she has the rare capacity to make it all fun. Even though she has endured personal setbacks over the years, one would never know it. Every day, members of Class III witness her indefatigable friendliness as she takes attendance in that homeroom; what she’s really doing is signaling that those boys are known and loved, and that there is a surrogate mom eager to help at school. In countless gestures of kindness and care, she has offered that same reassurance to all of us at one time or other. And it’s not just the chocolate chip cookies. It’s that she loves us and she shows it. Mrs. O’Brien has earned her retirement—a time for family, friends, and fun, we hope. We are delighted that she will continue to consult at RL. But mainly we want to say “thank you” and “we love you” to someone who has said both of those things over and over to so many of us, so meaningfully, for so many years.

Michael T. Pojman

Several years ago, we began using the term “generalist” to describe the school’s commitment to a broad, diverse student experience. We offered our commitment to this idea boldly, given what in the culture-at-large had been a decided tilt toward specialization, especially when it came to athletes and their sports. Our theory was that at this point of a long educational funnel, it made sense for students to sample broadly from all that has been thought and known, and to encounter different perspectives on life, living, the educational process, and the people who animate our existence. We wanted boys who felt and were liberally educated—open to established thinking and documents, eager to connect the dots and make contemporary sense of what had gone before, and to revel in the interconnectedness of things. It also mattered terrifically that in a small school, in which we offered lots of academic and non-academic choices, boys were positioned to explore and express themselves broadly. Of course, the best way to convey the heart of this philosophy would be to have adults in charge who themselves represented generalism at its best. Borrowing from military vernacular, it would then be appropriate to name Mike Pojman a five-star generalist, a brigadier generalist. He models and epitomizes the form.

Mr. Pojman arrived at RL in the summer of 1980 fresh from an introductory teaching experience at University School, an RL partner in personnel and program for many years. Initially, Mr. Pojman taught mostly math with a dollop of IPS and chemistry. He advised both Tripod and the Yearbook from the get-go. He lived with two wet-behind-the-ear colleagues in the Rappaport House, a ramshackle twin to my current abode. The school had acquired the house from Jerry Rappaport (of Rappaport Field legend), and it fell to the unsuspecting occupants to make their nests in that space that already hosted the nests of rabbits, birds, and raccoons. It was no fun. And soon Mr. Jarvis would shut down the experiment in communal living after hearing one too many complaints of wild parties. Mr. Pojman protested, “I was just showing our friends my new microwave.”

In my own early days, Mr. Pojman quickly became a close friend. I was drawn to him thanks to his winning personality, sense of humor, and Midwest values, but, more important, because I thought we shared a keen appreciation for the possibility of school, for the unique possibility of this school, and for the privilege and pleasure of working with RL boys. In his first year, Mr. Pojman became a sidekick for Glee Club tours, a job he continued 41 more times for various subsequent music directors.

I offer this report of Mike’s beginnings only to signal that his potential for greatness was evident even then. Soon he would be a force teaching chemistry to virtually the whole junior class, as well as an effective, offbeat teacher of a section of English 8 (in part, I guess, influenced by Mr. Pojman’s St. John’s master’s in that famous great books environment). When I think of Mr. Pojman’s academic versatility, I am reminded of the great benefit we have as teachers when we are interested in lots of things, not just our taught disciplines. In fact, I know that when Mr. Pojman was first hired by the legendary University School Headmaster Rowland McKinley, Mr. McKinley exclaimed, “I like you, Pojman; you’re not like other math teachers!”

Indeed, he wasn’t. Soon in his RL odyssey, Mr. Pojman was entrusted with more and more responsibility. Mr. Jarvis treasured his collaboration and support, and Mr. Pojman became a trusted consultant on all the buildings that emerged in the Jarvis years, including the Gordon Wing, the Smith Arts Building, the Bauer Science Center, and the Jarvis Refectory. Especially good at this, it seemed to me Mr. Pojman found a perfect setting for a combination of engineering-like smarts and aesthetic sensibility. It also didn’t hurt that he knew how school and its students worked. Fairly early in his time at RL, Mr. Pojman was entrusted with devising the schedule. With sensitivity to students and teachers, and needing to compress too much stuff into too little time, year after year he devised a worthy timetable. So, too, was he mindful of the overall calendar and a ferocious foe of snow days. The schedule changed over the years, and Mr. Pojman rolled with it. For many years, Mr. Pojman was the point person for faculty hiring, and you can imagine how his care and sensibility paid off in that role. Virtually from the start, Mr. Pojman through his amazing photography has chronicled every important moment over the past 43 years: Think the arrival of former President George Bush, the Queen’s Herald, and, let’s just say for history’s sake, the Queen herself. His willingness to fulfill that necessary function has been saintly. For nearly 40 years, he was a class dean, the shepherd of the senior class offering advice and patient leeway to a sometimesuncontrollable crowd. He served for nearly two decades as

Director of Studies. Along with that, he ran the senior projects program, urging always that those be more tilted toward service projects and helping others.

Service—his own, and that which he advocated for in others—has always been at the top of his list. I believe his own commitment to service is not unconnected to his faith and his long-established urge to practice his Catholicism in real, impactful ways. While he often organized and led various service projects—locally and farther afield—it was his ingenious founding of the Ave Atque Vale Society that will forever bear Mr. Pojman’s irreducible stamp. Patterned after a program at Mr. Pojman’s own high school, the great Jesuit St. Ignatius of Cleveland, Ave Atque offers our seniors the chance to serve as pallbearers for those who have no one else— those who die destitute and alone. For the past 10 years, senior classes have benefitted from this helpful, humbling opportunity, one that in an age of relentless gratification understandably allows for no one offering thanks. The lesson is that sometimes you do the right thing simply because it’s right and can’t expect any more in return than that satisfaction.

Of course, it’s not just what someone does but especially who he is that matters most. While first for 20 years the Assistant Headmaster and most recently the school’s first Associate Headmaster, Mr. Pojman’s title has never been what defines him or makes him great. He is great because he is good. Because he cares. Few can so pleasantly hold the line as he. Think ice cream specialties on Friday. Mr. Pojman loves you boys. He has given his sweat and blood in service to the possibility that in his teaching, leading, and advising he could have a powerful impact on the people you will become. One need only hear him in a discipline committee deliberation (of which he has seen too many) to be reminded firmly but lovingly that to be a good person is our school’s highest value. He acknowledges that people will make mistakes, that they pay a penalty, and that they are forgiven. There is no way to encapsulate all that Mr. Pojman has meant to RL over 43 years. He has been at its heart. He has been its conscience. He has been the embodiment of its mission. He has been such good company. He has been such a valued partner. For this, for his irreverent sense of humor, for his loyal friendship, for his generous pitching in in every quarter, and for the way he has modeled what it means to be a great man who is good, we salute you, Mike. I honor you and thank you. And now from all of us not the ultimate, but a temporary, ave atque vale. //