Alumni Horae Fall 2022

ST. PAUL’S SCHOOL | ISSUE I 2022-23

A lumni Horae

ON THE 125TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH, SPS REMEMBERS NOBEL LAUREATE JOHN FRANKLIN ENDERS OF THE FORM OF 1915

Alumni Horae

RECTOR

Kathleen C. Giles

EDITOR

Jana F. Brown

DESIGNER

Cindy L. Foote

EDITORIAL CONTRIBUTORS

Ian Aldrich

Matt de la Peña ’04

Kristin Duisberg

Kate Dunlop

Michael Matros

Taylor Plimpton ’94

Alumni Association

ADVISORY BOARD

Elise Loehnen Fissmer ’98

David M. Foxley ’02

Dana R. Goodyear ’94

Jonathan D. Jackson ’09

Malcolm Mackay ’59

Diego H. Nuñez ’08

Published by St. Paul’s School FPO

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DEEDS WELL DONE KRISTIN DUISBERG

John Franklin Enders, Form of 1915, became one of the 20th century’s foremost scientists — and the School’s only Nobel laureate.

ON THE COVER

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MORE THAN A GAME

MATT DE LA PEÑA ’04

With help from SPS alumni, Portland Community Squash has become a model for integrating the game of squash into the fabric of community.

The1954 Nobel Prize in Medicine, awarded to John Franklin Enders of the Form of 1915, is on display in the Lindsay Center at SPS.

PHOTO: Michael Seamans

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PART-TIME COMEDIAN

JANA F. BROWN

An investment banker by day, Tiger Gao ’17 won’t give up his stand-up comedy dream any time soon.

UPDATE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

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FACETIME

Software engineer Jeremy Smith ’75 is writing the code that controls NASA’s SLS rocket launch vehicle — and will eventually send astronauts back to the moon.

Do you receive email communications from SPS? If not, we may not have your current address on file. To update your email, please write to alumni@sps.edu. Thank you.

NEWS AND NOTES

2 FROM THE RECTOR 4 SPS TODAY

Five questions with Dana Chapin Anselmi ’98, Opening Days, meet students Katy Scott ’24 and Matt Letourneau ’23, ASP by the numbers 24 REVIEWS

Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family from Vietnam to Today Craig McNamara ’69 Award-winning audiobook narrator Chris Gebauer ’08 26 SPOTLIGHT

In his career as a video game developer and professor, Gordon Bellamy ’88 has worked to make the gaming industry and its technology more inclusive. 28 FORMNOTES 40 PROFILE

Curator Karl Kusserow ’81 harnesses the power of art. 47 PROFILE

The research of sociology professor Dialika Sall ’08 aims to increase understanding of immigrant integration and Blackness in America. 52 COMMUNITY 56 IN MEMORIAM

OBITUARY SUBMISSIONS

Alumni Horae is happy to accept obituaries written and submitted by family members. If we do not hear from you first, we will reach out to ask if the family would like to submit a written tribute. Those tributes will then be edited for length and style and will appear in the next possible issue of  Alumni Horae. Families of the deceased: Submit obituaries to alumni@sps.edu.

Tradition and Evolution

The New Hampshire fall we know — the maples along Rectory Road turning shades of red and yellow, the daily fog rising from earth still warmer than air, the prevalence of soccer balls and field hockey sticks in the Coit cloisters on the way to dinner in the Upper — contrasts sharply with the changing world in fall 2022, as news outlets and media streams deliver it to us. Sitting here in the Schoolhouse on a Saturday morning, the building hums like a beehive as students live the rhythms that decades and indeed, centuries of students here have lived before them. Sixth Formers are working hard on college applications. The Ballet Company is preparing for the upcoming Nut cracker performance, and the faculty “littles” have their first rehearsal as angels today.

C lasses will run the morning; games, races, and rehearsals will consume the afternoon. After the Fiske Cup preliminary round tonight, students will linger over brunch tomorrow in the Upper, invest themselves in church services and clubs and homework and friends on Sunday, all to begin anew on Monday morning in Chapel. My Monday mornings begin early, with weekly breakfast with the Sixth Form Officers (known as “SFOs” in our acronym-addicted community), during which time we eat together, talk through School issues, and share our perspectives. I am not certain, but I suspect that these rhythms have been constants through generations of alumni and faculty who have lived here. The rhythms are known, comforting, and healthy — the work of a mission-centered high school, blessed by extraordinary commitment and investment by generations of grateful alumni, parents, employees, and friends.

As we note in the recently-published introduction to our new strategic plan, excellence evolves, and so must we — as

a school and as a community. It is tempting for St. Paul’s to resist change. In our confidence in our history and identity, in the vivid adolescent impressions and experiences that become part of the fabric of our lives, it can be hard for some in our community to hear and acknowledge the need for cultural and responsive change. But the fact is that even as they sit in those well-worn chapel seats and walk the paths of the grounds, our current students, growing up in a rapidly evolving world, need that response from us. They need us to be knowledgeable about adolescent brains and human development — about the important roles that structure, boundaries, sleep, and health play not only in school performance but also in health for life. Our students need us to make the best choices possible about where to direct their work and attention as the body of human knowledge expands exponentially. And growing up in a culture of complex online interactions, gaming, vaping, and consumerism, they need us to help them establish the personal structures and strength to incorporate their experiences in the current world, even as they build “purposeful lives in service to the greater good” around core principles that won’t fail them, even if those same principles require them to live to a higher ethical and, yes, hopefully spiritual standard than the world seems to demand.

All of this work requires us to seek out and define excellence for our students in ways that will not be perfect, on which we will not all agree, but in ways that build on our strengths in service to the important ways our school fulfills its mission in the world.

As we seek to “draw forth what is best” in ourselves and in each other, in the spirit of educere and educare, we do so with the commitment to affirm the School’s and this generation’s responsibility to serve the greater good. That service is our most important tradition, and it is the special connector from past to present to future, as much part of the rhythms of our school as are the teenaged voices outside my door on the kind of beautiful fall morning we all know and love.

MICHAEL SEAMANS

The Rev. Charles Wynder greets Fourth Former Gabriel Taylor after Fall Convocation.

Five Questions with Dana Chapin Anselmi ’98

Alumna returns to the School as dean of admission and financial aid.

ana Chapin Anselmi ’98 might be new to her role as dean of admission and financial aid, though she’s anything but new to St. Paul’s School. It’s not just that she’ll celebrate her 25th reunion this spring; the one-time form agent also grew up in an SPS family that stretches back nearly a century: Her grandfather, John Carsten Chapin, graduated with the Form of 1938; her father, John Carsten Chapin, Jr., is a member of the Form of 1966; and her siblings, Lucy and Seth, graduated in 2002.

“When I was going through the admission process, I focused on schools closer to home, but my dad couldn’t shake the idea of bringing me up to see St. Paul’s,” she recalls. “I remember visiting the day before applications were due, really to oblige my dad, but then we stayed on campus all day and I was hooked. I began writing my essays in the car.”

Speaking of new connections, your husband, Donald, is in a new role here as well.

Donald and I met working at boarding schools in Cal ifornia in the early 2000s and have been living this life ever since. He has always been the most committed com munity member, teaching Spanish, leading trips abroad, serving as activities director, coaching, advising, working in the dorm. He is excited to work as the associate di rector of the Advanced Studies Program, where he will be able to continue to think about fostering leadership and building community in this important connection between SPS and the state of New Hampshire.

What excites you about the opportunity to lead the SPS Admission Office?

What was the experience like of coming back to cam pus in such a different context?

I walk by the Chapel each morning with my dog, and sometimes I find myself right back in 1998 — it really is surreal. But here in 2022, I look around at the Chapel pews and recognize I now have the privilege of working with these students as they experience SPS. The world has changed immensely, and educating ethical future leaders has never been more important than it is today.

How has the adjustment been for your family?

My kids [7-year-old Hudson and 5-year-old Bridger] were born at a boarding school, and while they miss their buddies, they are starting to find new connections and things to do here in Millville. Plus, we love exploring the trails and lakes of this region.

Over the past 18 years, I have gained so much perspec tive working at other boarding schools, and I’m excited to reengage now with a community that is familiar and also new at the same time. St. Paul’s has evolved through the challenges of the past few years — we all have — and this is an exciting time to think about how to help students build ‘purposeful lives in service to the greater good.’ I feel a deep sense of responsibility to partner with my awesome colleagues to identify and enroll students who will live out that School mission … and working with kids is also just plain fun. I can’t wait to high-five students in line at the dining hall, see them shine on stage or in the athletic arena, and have deep conversations in the dorm.

You played on three Division III NCAA champion ship lacrosse teams at Middlebury College. Any plans to get involved with the lacrosse program here?

Heather Crutchfield taught me how to play lacrosse when I arrived at St. Paul’s and it grew to be a really important part of my life — I have coached for the past 20 years. While I am not officially part of the roster, I hope Coach Crutchfield will let me crash some practices from time to time.

Meet Our New Trustees

On July 1, the board welcomed three new members to its ranks. The 23-member volunteer board is composed of individuals who possess the critical skills, experience, and commitment required to meet the Board’s strategic and fiduciary responsibilities, and we are grateful for their service to the School.

BEN A. LOEHNEN ’96

Ben Loehnen ’96 received an A.B. from Har vard University. He is editor-in-chief and vice president of Avid Reader Press, an im print of Simon & Schuster he co-founded in 2018. He previously worked at the Simon & Schuster imprint and, prior to that, at Harp erCollins and Random House. He has served as the co-chairperson of The Young Lions of the New York Public Library and now serves on the Literary and Historical Manuscripts Visiting Committee of The Morgan Library & Museum.

At St. Paul’s School, he has served as a form agent, a form director, and as a member of the Alumni Association Executive Com mittee. His sister, Elise, is a member of the Form of 1998. He lives in New York City.

K-J “EDDIE” PARK ’94, P’21

Eddie Park ’94, P’21 holds a B.S. in finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is CEO of Institutional Equities at CLSA Ltd., a subsidiary of CITIC Securities, China’s largest securities company. Prior to joining CLSA, Park worked at Credit Suisse, Credit Agricole, and Bank of New York, based in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Seoul.  Park is a member of the St. Paul’s School Asia Council and has been leading the fundraising efforts for The SPS Fund South Korea for more than 10 years. His daughter, Stephanie, graduated from St. Paul’s School in 2021. Park and his family reside in Hong Kong and Seoul.

After graduating from Brown University, Page Sargisson ’93 worked for biotech startups, eventually landing as corporate communi cations manager at Genentech in South San Francisco. Her co-workers started buying her jewelry creations and a side business turned into a full-time company after a move to New York City in 2003. Twenty years later, Sargisson owns a store and studio, Page Sar gisson Designs, in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Her designs are sold around the world and have a large following in Japan. Sargisson has designed for other brands, such as Coach and ear-piercing startup Rowan Inc.

Sargisson is a board member of Prospect Park Alliance, where she sits on the Devel opment Committee, and a class officer of the Brown University Class of 1997. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Peter Robbins, and their two boys.

PAGE M. SARGISSON ’93

EDWARD

Students Bring Energy, Positivity to 167th Academic Year

hen Rector Kathy Giles welcomed students, faculty, and staff to Fall Term Convocation on Sept. 6, it wasn’t just noteworthy that there were so many smil ing faces, but that she could see the smiles on those faces. “For the first time in recent memory,” she said the following day, “we opened a Convocation yesterday morning by welcoming everyone into Chapel — masks optional — to be together in full good health at the start of a term. Our new students are off to a strong start, and our returning students are doing a wonderful job helping them to settle in and feel part of our community. The energy and positivity on the grounds bodes well as we undertake the work of our 167th year at St. Paul’s School.”

That energy and positivity got underway on Friday, Sept. 2, when Sixth Formers arrived on the grounds. They were joined by new students — 96 Third Formers, 48 Fourth Formers and 14 Fifth Formers — on Sunday, Sept. 4. Returning Fourth and Fifth Formers moved back the following day, rounding out a student body of 535 that was

ready for the official start of the school year on Sept. 6. By the end of the week, with classes, athletics, arts endeavors, and student groups all off and running, the grounds were abuzz with activity and excitement.

In her Convocation remarks, Giles spoke about the manner in which St. Paul’s School and its community members belong to one another, and invited those who were gathered to reflect on the people to whom they owed gratitude — family members, friends, and those at SPS who had prepared the grounds for another year. She encouraged everyone to engage in the opportunities pre sented by the new academic year, noting, “We are where we are supposed to be, in a place that was built for us to be doing the work of our school — built with the continual optimism and hopes of decades of students, teachers, staff members, alumni, and families who believe that we come together here, in this place that was built for us to do this work, to educate ourselves to build purposeful lives in service to the greater good.”

Experience the energy of Opening Days for yourself. Watch this video.

Photos: MIchael Seamans

Stepping into the Spotlight

Violinist Katy Scott ’24 selected to perform on a national stage.

KATE DUNLOP

It was mid-July and Katy Scott ’24 was at a classic Vermont summer camp, the kind where she could play her violin down by the lake in an outdoor reverie after a day of hiking. It was there that she learned she’d been selected to perform with the All-National Honor Sym phony Orchestra in Maryland in November 2022.

Symphony orchestras have two violin sections, and Scott will play in the more prestigious first section, which typically carries the melody. It’s the next step for the St. Paul’s School Fifth Former, who played in the third chair of the first section with the New Hampshire All-State Musical Festi val in April, though Scott was still surprised to hear she was accepted to the national competition.

“I auditioned last year as a shot in the dark and was an alternate, but they didn’t need me,” says Scott, who hails from Massachusetts. “I’ve been working really hard this past year, so to be accepted is very rewarding. I’m excited to meet so many people from across the country.”

More than anything, Scott plays to share her own love of the violin. After the work and frustration of learning a piece comes the reward — and even relaxation — of play ing music by memory. Scott finds community through her music, whether performing last year in Chapel with her sister, Abigail Scott ’22, playing with a chamber group or a full orchestra, or pulling together a virtual perfor mance with the help of faculty and peers to share with audiences in elderly care residences.

A three-year member of the SPS Music Program, Scott has distinguished herself as a true leader both in ability and attitude, according to Director of Music Orlando Pandolfi. “I have never met a more positive, affable, yet highly motivated student,” he says. “I count her among my best students in more than 40 years teaching.”

“I’m grateful that I’ve gotten to play violin because it’s taught me a lot about what it means to put time into something and be rewarded for the effort.”

Scott auditioned with a recording of the first move ment of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 but doesn’t know yet what pieces she’ll perform in Maryland. When she does, she’ll begin learning them with an approach she’s been perfecting since she started playing at the age of four.

“I rely heavily on listening to multiple recordings with their different interpretations, tones, and phrasing,” Scott explains. “I take that and decide what I like and how I want to play the piece.”

Scott, who was named a Ferguson Scholar as a Fourth Former for her academic achievements and was coxswain for the girls crew program’s third boat that received the Coach’s Award last spring, applies some of the lessons she’s learned on the strings to her other pursuits.

“ The hard work and persistence of music is applicable to things like my schoolwork — if I don’t understand something we’re learning, I have confidence that I’ll eventually get it,” she says. “I’m grateful that I’ve gotten to play violin because it’s taught me a lot about what it means to put time into something and be rewarded for the effort. I’ve had a lot of fun and met a lot of good people, too.”

MICHAEL SEAMANS

A Library of Possibility

Sokoloff Prize recipient Matt Letourneau ’23 seeks to help those in need through books.

KATE DUNLOP

There are some things about life that Matt Letourneau ’23 learned too soon. One, you play the cards you are dealt, and the game is probably rigged. Two, the effects of addic tion can echo across generations. Three, those who struggle do not struggle equally, whether in terms of healthcare, support, or even the possibility of being offered a second chance.

Letourneau learned these lessons the hard way; when he was eight, he lost his father to a decades-long reckoning with alcohol. Grow ing up in Idaho’s Sun Valley, an area haunted by Ernest Hemingway’s own lost battle with alcoholism, Letourneau developed a deep interest in addiction. A writer himself — he’s been on the Pelican news paper staff since his Third Form year, recently fin ished a collection of short stories, and is interested in studying journalism — Letourneau approached learning about addiction by embracing Hemingway’s belief that a writer should not judge but understand. He devoted his Fifth Form capstone project to the subject and at tended drug court — which helps offenders recover from substance use disorder with the goal of reducing future criminal activity — where he watched a judge treat those who came before him with dignity and curiosity.

Receiving the go-ahead, he applied for and received the St. Paul’s School Sokoloff Prize of $2,500 to fund the project that he chris tened — with a nod to the organization’s acronym — “Mind Muscle.”

The Sokoloff Prize is awarded annually to a Fifth Form student who “has a special and unique kindness and compassion; seeks a personal transformation towards spirituality; demonstrates a vision to make the world a better place through service for the good of mankind; and acts as an inspirational leader for his/her peers and classmates.” Prize recipients receive an award of up to $2,500 to be used for a project that will help to further the values outlined in the prize description.

“It was really cool to have the opportunity to help my community. I have great gratitude for the Sokoloff Prize.”

“I was really excited to get the prize, and then the reality of fleshing out my idea set in,” Letourneau says. “The planning and preparation took the most effort. I wanted everything to be new and look nice, so I assembled shelves and a desk chair; bought a computer, books, and Kindles; and heard a lot of stories along the way. I even bought a label maker and designed a screensaver for the computer so it would look like a real library.”

“What do you want to do to get better?” the judge would ask. Many replied that they wanted to improve their physical and mental well-being. “Have you tried reading?” he would respond.

Hearing that last question, Letourneau decided it was an opening for him to help addicts access additional resources. Already a volunteer at the Men’s Second Chance Liv ing House (MSCL), a place near his home town with support services to help men sus tain sobriety, he approached the executive director to see if creating an in-house li brary and resource center would be helpful.

O ver the summer, Letourneau filled the empty shelves with books he hoped would be interesting — “a lot of Hemingway because of the Sun Valley connection” and his own favorite dystopian novels — along with titles that would help residents with earning a GED or learning a trade, and with recon necting with family and self. Early apprecia tion for the library has turned into constant use of its resources, according to the execu tive director, who shared with Letourneau this fall that residents are enjoying their access to books and getting more comfortable with the technology now available to them.

“It was really cool to have the opportunity

to help my community,” Letourneau says.  “I have great gratitude for the Sokoloff Prize.”

Letourneau plans to continue his volun teer work with MSCL, writing grants, host ing a readathon and adding more books — anything, he says, that can contribute to the wellness of others and help turn their own stories in a more positive direction.

MICHAEL SEAMANS

ADVANCED STUDIES PROGRAM

Th e Advanced Studies Program (ASP) has b een offering a St. Paul’s School summer experience to talented public and parochial school students in the Granite State for 65 years. This year, the first fully in-person program since 2019 brought 179 students to the grounds from June 25 to July 30 to take part in one of 15 major classes, several of which were being offered for the first time. And while students came to Millville from 54 different high schools, bringing different levels of academic preparation, they all arrived at ASP with a common desire to learn for the sake of learning.

179 students attended this summer 54 New Hampshire high schools with students from every county represented 100% residential 5-week program 12+ hours of college admission guidance to jump-start the application process 45% of students received financial aid in 2022, with the average award equal to 67% of tuition 65 consecutive years that St. Paul’s School has offered the ASP since 1958 12,000+ ASP alumni, all graduates of New Hampshire public and parochial high schools

Deeds Well Done

John Franklin Enders of the Form of 1915 excelled in the humanities at St. Paul’s School. He went on to become one of the 20th century’s foremost scientists — and the School’s only Nobel laureate.

KRISTIN DUISBERG

Earlier this year, as COVID-19 and monkeypox vied for headlines across the United States, another infectious disease slipped back into the news: poliomyelitis, better known as polio, which began turning up in wastewater samples in New York City — decades after being declared effectively vanquished.

For most, polio conjures a few specific images, in the stark black and white style of a LIFE magazine photo essay: children in iron lungs, their smiles wide despite the metal chambers that encase their bodies; U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, projecting a vigor that belies his wheelchair and the braces on his legs. But for those who knew him, polio calls to mind a different man entirely, soft-spoken and stoop-shouldered, toiling away over test tubes in a modest laboratory at Harvard Medical School.

John Enders, a member of the St. Paul’s School Form of 1915, didn’t contract polio, nor is his name immediately tied to the vaccines developed in the mid-20th century that led to the near-eradication of the illness across the globe. But those vaccines — the inactivated polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk in 1955 and the oral polio vaccine developed by Albert Sabin five years later — were critically dependent on a discovery that Enders made in his Harvard lab in the late 1940s, as were many vaccines that followed it. The SPS alumnus developed a cell culture technique that made it possible to grow polio virus in abundance, in a test tube. Indeed, the discovery by Enders ushered in what many in infectious disease describe as a “golden age” of vaccines, and it earned him the 1954 Nobel Prize in Medicine that today is housed in the place where Enders began to chart his course for a life of intellectual discovery, the grounds of St. Paul’s School.

“When the Nobel committee called him from Sweden, he said, ‘thank you for the honor, but I’m not going to accept the prize unless my research fellows receive it, too.’”

who later established the Aetna Life Insurance Company; in the late 1920s, his father, John Ostrom Enders, oversaw a series of banking mergers that created the Hartford National Bank and Trust Co. According to a biography of Enders published by the National Academy of Sciences, the bank’s clients included Samuel Clemens — the American humorist better known by his pen name, Mark Twain — “whose spotless white suits impressed the young [Enders] when the famous author visited.”

A WAY OF LIFE

Enders didn’t set out to be a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. In fact, he didn’t set out to be a scientist at all. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1897, John Franklin Enders was the eldest of four children in a prominent family with only peripheral ties to medicine — he had an uncle who was a physician — but extensive ties to the business world. His grandfather, Thomas O. Enders, was a Hartford banker

The first of his family to attend St. Paul’s (his brother Ostrom followed six years later), Enders was drawn to the humanities, studying Latin, French, German, and English litera ture and, according to his own account, struggling with math and sciences: “In mathematics and physics,” his National Academy of Sciences biography quotes him as saying, “I encountered difficulties which were surmounted in a most mediocre fashion only after great effort.” He was a member of the Missionary Society, played football and rowed with the first Shattuck boat, and as a Fifth Former wrote a poem that provided some early insight into his character, asking in part: When I am old/And spindle shanks and sunken chaps/ Betoken the coming of the fearful Last Event/What memories of youth will come to steel my heart/ Against the fear of meeting with my Creator?/Will then my heart be strong with thoughts of Deeds well done?

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After St. Paul’s, Enders went to Yale to study English, leaving in 1917 to become a Navy pilot and returning after World War I to complete his degree. He graduated in 1920, and after a brief stint in real estate, headed back to academia with the intent of earning a Ph.D. in English literature and becoming a teacher. He’d completed his mas ter’s at Harvard and was three years into a doctoral thesis on philology when one of his roommates, an instructor in Harvard’s department of bacteriology and immunology, introduced him to his department head, Hans Zinsser.

Out of sheer curiosity, Enders had begun to accompany his roommate to his laboratory in the evenings and, in trigued, started to question whether he was on the right academic path. Meeting Zinsser tipped the balance. Like Enders, Zinsser came from a humanities background, and had published poetry in The Atlantic Monthly. The bacteriologist’s capacity for standing simultaneously in the seemingly disparate realms of medicine and literature opened a whole new world of possibilities to Enders, who later wrote of his soon-to-be mentor, “Literature, politics, history, and science — all he discussed with spontaneity and without self-consciousness. . . . Voltaire seemed just around the corner, and Laurence Sterne upon the stair. . . . Under such influences, the laboratory became much more than a place just to work and teach; it became a way of life.”

Enders earned his Ph.D. in bacteriology under Zinsser in 1930 and spent the early years of his research career at Harvard studying bacteria. He expanded his study to in clude mammalian viruses in 1938 and, in 1941, partnered with half a dozen other researchers to study the viral illness mumps. Five years later, he was asked to establish a labora tory dedicated to infectious disease research at Children’s Medical Center in Boston, now Boston Children’s Hospital. It was there, working with research fellows Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins, that he discovered and refined the laboratory cultivation technique for polio virus that made it possible for Jonas Salk to develop the first vaccine against the disease.

A CRITICAL BREAKTHROUGH

Today, it’s hard to fathom the significance of Enders’ achievement — on any number of levels. A highly con tagious virus that attaches itself to cells in the intestinal tract and attacks the nervous system, in the late 1940s polio infected between 35,000 and 60,000 Americans every year, causing symptoms that ranged from fevers and neck pain to irreversible paralysis or death. The seriously ill ended up in iron lungs — mechanical respirators that supported the physical processes required for breathing — often for the rest of their lives. And while it had been more than 150 years since British scientist Edward Jenner had developed the first “modern” vaccine against smallpox, which he achieved by inoculating an 8-year-old boy with active cowpox virus, in 1949 no one had yet figured out how to

grow the polio virus — or any virus — in a laboratory. Building off the 1931 work of Ernest Goodpasture, who had succeeded in growing pox viruses in the chorioallan toic membrane of embryonated eggs, Enders’ experiments represented a crucial step toward developing a vaccine against the disease.

“Growing viruses is complicated,” says Peter Wright ’60, an infectious diseases specialist at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center who worked with Enders at the end of his career and has dedicated much of his own to researching vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus. “Viruses aren’t alive, so they require some sort of host, and the right media and conditions to allow them to replicate.”

Advances like the mRNA technology used to develop vaccines against COVID-19, Wright notes, make the ability to grow viruses less necessary today than it was 80 years ago, but the success of Enders in growing polio in a test tube using human tissue was groundbreaking — and a perhaps inevitable extension of his background in bac teriology. By using antibiotics, Wright explains, Enders was able to kill off other microbes that contaminated cell cultures and competed for nutrients, leaving the viruses to grow freely.

“ That breakthrough allowed for the development of vaccines not just for polio, but also for measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox,” he says.

Also hard to fathom is the stance Enders took regarding the Nobel itself. Frederick Lovejoy ’55 was the chief resi dent at Boston Children’s Hospital and then a junior faculty member in pediatrics during Enders’ tenure. He says it was common knowledge that Enders initially refused to accept his Nobel Prize unless his two researchers, then early in their academic careers, shared in the award.

“When the Nobel committee called him from Sweden, he said, ‘thank you for the honor, but I’m not going to accept the prize unless my research fellows receive it, too,’”

Enders receiving the Nobel Prize from the King of Sweden, Gustav VI Adolf, in Stockholm.

Lovejoy recalls. “They told him they didn’t think that was possible — that wasn’t how it worked — and he told them that he understood, and they could give it to someone else.’ And later they called him back and let him know they were going to award the Nobel Prize to him, Weller, and Robbins.”

Both Lovejoy and Wright say this particular anecdote reflects the quintessence of the John Enders they knew: soft-spoken, unassuming, a man who carried his own lunch to work every day in a paper bag or a wicker basket and would call his lab members together in the afternoon to enjoy tea. Enders was in his seventies when Wright knew him, and he remembers him as still being very involved in the day-to-day work of his lab, and also quick to give a great deal of credit to others.

“We all knew about his Nobel, of course, and how im portant he was, but he did not act that way at all,” Wright says. “He was a very reserved person. It was very typical of him, I’d say, that he would ensure others got their due credit for their contributions to the work.”

Lovejoy describes Enders as a “central, central figure” at Boston Children’s, the namesake of the hospital’s 15-story John F. Enders Pediatric Research Laboratory, built in 1970, as well as the annual Enders Lecture, for which Lovejoy provides the introduction every year. For Lovejoy, there also is a personal dimension to his connection with Enders: his mother’s family was from Hartford, where the Enders family lived, and his mother was acquainted with John Enders growing up. It’s a connection that gives him a particular perspective on how remarkable — and fortuitous — it was that Enders pursued science instead of continuing in the family business as a banker.

“For him to go in such a different direction, as did one of his brother Ostrom’s sons, who later became a diplomat and an ambassador to Spain,” Lovejoy says, “… it’s remarkable what talented people choose to do, and the contributions they go on to make.”

EQUAL RECOGNITION

One hundred and twenty-five years after his birth and 37 years since his death, John Enders and his work remain relevant. “Every year, there’s a national infectious diseases conference called IDWeek, one of the centerpieces of which is the John Enders Lecture,” says Mehri McKellar ’87, an

Nia Goodloe-Pierre ’23 and Science Teacher Sarah Boylan, director of the Advanced Science and Engineering Program (ASEP), in front of the Lindsay Center display that holds John Enders’ Nobel Prize medal. This summer, Goodloe-Pierre completed an ASEP internsip at City College of New York, where she studied the interactions between antibiotic-resistant bacteria and host cells, genes associated with the cholera toxin, and competitive fitness of V. cholera. BELOW: Goodloe-Pierre ’23 and Boylan working in a nearby LIndsay Center lab.

infectious diseases special ist at Duke University who was just starting her Fifth Form year at SPS when Enders died on Sept. 8, 1985, while reading T.S. El iot aloud to his wife, Carol, and daughter, Sarah. “Dr. Enders is still a really big deal in the infectious diseases world. His work is widely regarded as the foundation of all modern vaccines.”

Today, the Enders name might not be synonymous with the polio vaccine the way Salk’s and Sabin’s are, or even with his 1961 success developing the first vaccine for measles, and certainly not with his late-life work to better understand the human immunodeficien cy virus and the manner in which it leads to AIDS. But Enders himself seemed little concerned with his legacy, noting when Time named him one of its “men of the year” in 1961 that, “As a rule, the scientist takes off from the manifold observations of his predecessors,” and that it was simply the case that “the one who places the last stone and steps across the terra firma of accomplished discovery gets all the credit.” To that end, when The New York Times hailed Enders’ measles breakthrough as “one of the great achievements in medicine” that same year, he responded with a letter to the paper, insisting on recognition for six other scientists with whom he had worked.

For all his personal reserve, John Enders remains a tangible presence at SPS. His brother Ostrom graduated in 1921 and his son, John Ostrom Enders, was a mem ber of the Form of 1946. Extended family members have attended the School through the decades, including one who graduated just this year. Enders himself was a driv ing force behind a fundraising initiative that allowed the School to make upgrades to the former Payson Science Building, and in 1986, his widow Carol Enders gave a gift to the School that included her late husband’s Nobel medal for display.

The first time Theresa Gerardo-Gettens saw the Enders’ Nobel Prize medal was in 1990, shortly after she joined the biology faculty at SPS. Today, the medal is mounted into a wall on the third floor of the Lindsay Center for Mathematics and Science — just around the corner from Gerardo-Gettens’ biology classroom. GerardoGettens says she loves walking by the medal each day and often stops to read and ponder the words etched into the two glass panels on either side of the central display, which holds the medal and an image of Enders with the dates of his birth, death, and years at SPS. The right pan el includes quotes from and about Enders; the left has the full copy of the poem Enders wrote in 1914, a Fifth

Former already grappling with the question of whether he’d live a life of deeds well done.

“I was filled with awe when I first saw it and stunned that the Nobel had presum ably been bequeathed to a high school,”

Gerardo-Gettens says.

“After reading the words written by a young John Enders, I began to think that St. Paul’s was no ordinary place.”

On one hand, it’s easy to imagine that the unassuming Enders might object to the considerable size of the display, some 10 feet wide by 8 feet high. On the other hand, as a man who cared more about recognizing the work of others than accepting praise for himself, he might appreciate that on a sunny fall afternoon, the black glass triptych that celebrates his achievements also reflects passersby — students with laden backpacks and smiling faces, on their way to biol ogy or chemistry classes or maybe the state-of-the art laboratory that contains one of the country’s only high school-based quantitative polymerase chain reaction machines, perhaps taking their own first steps toward an extraordinary scientific discovery for the benefit of the greater good.

When I am old And spindle shanks and sunken chaps Betoken the coming of the fearful Last Event, What memories of youth will come to steel my heart

Against the fear of meeting with my Creator?

Will then my heart be strong with thoughts of Deeds well done?

Of Struggles, great achievements, the joy of children?

Of weeping, sorrow, pain — a life lived to its full?

Or shall I gaze with sorrow and despair

Back upon the assemblage of empty, wasted years And curse a life of dull and brutish indolence?

— John Enders, Fifth Form, 1914

More Than a Game

With help from St. Paul’s alumni, Portland Community Squash has become a model for integrating the game of squash into the fabric of community.

MATT DE LA PEÑA ’04

Atypical week for Alexandra Maurer ’84 is likely to include a serve and volley. Maurer, a notable conceptual artist, acupuncturist, and fourth-genera tion resident of Maine, is one of many people with ties to St. Paul’s School (graduate or otherwise) counted among the members of Portland Community Squash, a local community center and squash facility nestled in the Oak dale neighborhood of Portland, Maine.

With its high, ornate ceilings and windows, one could just as easily imagine the building’s denizens kneeling in prayer as standing in the service box, ready to put a small rubber ball into play.

To be sure, PCS (as it’s colloquially known) looks, at first glance, much more like its former incarnation as a con verted synagogue than a community center. And in some respects, Maurer says, it still conveys an ethereal mystique, albeit with a welcoming mantra that for 10 years has chal lenged conventional notions of the game of squash and introduced new players of all backgrounds to the sport.

“When I learned to play squash, it was private colleges, private clubs, university clubs,” says Maurer, who notes that the PCS model is rapidly being recognized as one of the premier standards for community development in

the United States, with at least 12 non-affiliated commu nity squash centers establishing roots in cities like San Diego, Atlanta, and Houston.

For its part, PCS currently serves 200 students, ranging from third to 12th grade, and more than 200 adult mem bers. Within PCS’s robust student population, 67% are students of color and 63% are identified as low income; more than 60% are setting out to be among the first in their families to go to college. With membership offered on a sliding scale, from free to full pay, the program is operated

by 140 volunteers and 12 full-time staff members. At any given practice, two full-time coaches are present to run drills, aided by adult and student volunteers. Young play ers travel to monthly tournaments around New England, many outfitted with sneakers, racquets, eyewear, and balls that are made available at no cost.

“At PCS, we have meals, potlucks, barbecues,” Maurer continues. “We have a real multicultural, multigenerational facility. The pivotal backbone is that it’s about access, equity, and integration.”

Alexandra Maurer ’84 works with young squash players at the PCS facility in Portland, Maine.

MICHAEL SEAMANS

That “pivotal backbone” is particularly relevant for SPS graduates. The sport first came to life in the United King dom as a pastime for prison inmates who one day de cided to fashion old rubber balls into whack-able ovals, pinging one after the next against the skyward stone walls. The game eventually made its way mainstream and inspired a group of intrepid students at the Harrow School, a British all-male boarding academy founded in 1572, to tweak the rules and refine it in their image.

In 1882, less than 30 years after the establishment of St. Paul’s School, squash arrived on the campus of Millville thanks to Jay Conover, a known Paulie and sports enthu siast who attended Columbia University with Hyde Clark, an avid squash player and graduate of Harrow. Conover eventually lobbied St. Paul’s to build two outdoor squash courts that would serve as the foundation of the School’s long association with the game and, through the years, en courage students like Maurer to take up their racquets and carry on the SPS legacy.

That legacy eventually made its way to Portland, thanks in part to the SPS graduates who have found a home in Maine and, more precisely, at Portland Community Squash. In addition to Maurer, the PCS mem bers with SPS ties include George Cooley ’14, who serves as a volun teer, and Nathan Rosenzweig ’24, who coaches in the summer. Henry Parkhurst ’16 and Whit Ford ’75 are also PCS members, and there is a scholarship named in honor of cur rent SPS squash coach Chris Smith.

the idea for Portland Squash was just taking shape. Evarts supported the PCS vision through a generous gift that helped get the program off the ground, and he has con tinued to give, including to a scholarship fund that covers the travel and equipment expenses for about 300 young PCS players. Evarts also serves as an advocate for the pro gram and a consultant to Takesian, a 2012 Bowdoin grad uate and former college squash player who incorporated Portland Community Squash in 2013.

Tapping into his connections and the networks of Evarts, Maurer, and other members of the Portland com munity, Takesian rallied support for what would eventu ally become a refuge for hundreds of students and fami lies across Portland and inspire a high-priority strategic initiative for U.S. Squash, a more than century-old non profit headquartered in New York City that serves as the national governing body and membership organization for the sport in the United States.

“There are programs that are really designed to produce good students and good squash players.... [PCS] is really going beyond that by building community, too. If you go there, spend less time looking at the squash court and more time looking at the quiet area, where the kids study and prepare for their classes the next day.”

A competitive squash player, Rosenzweig was ranked No. 1 at every junior level in Hong Kong before moving to Maryland a year ago. He ended last season ranked fifth in the U-17 division in the U.S. Rosenzweig discovered PCS on visits to Brunswick, Maine, to see his grandmother. At first, he was just look ing for a place to practice his own game, but soon became involved in teaching squash to others whenever he had a chance. Last summer, the SPS Fifth Former coached players ages 12 and under during a two-week camp at PCS. It was then that he discovered the joy in sharing the game and getting to know more of his fellow squash lovers.

“It’s right there in the name,” Rosenzweig says. “The sense of community at PCS is becoming a very important part of these kids’ lives. Having this place where they’re treated like family is pretty special — and expanding the game so that it’s much more accessible is noth ing but good.”

Jimmy Evarts ’70 met Barrett Takesian, executive director of PCS, through a mutual friend at a time when

Takesian’s plan began with a capital campaign that topped $1.5 million and became the basis for a renovation project that converted Portland’s former Shaarey Tphiloh Synagogue into PCS headquar ters. The facility now includes four courts and also features everything from events and lectures to tutor ing to a wellness center for exer cise, plus classrooms for socializing and community gatherings. PCS is billed as “an accessible community center that holistically supports and unites its members.”

“It turns out that squash makes for great community centers,” Take sian says. “We have had a lot to prove to overcome the idea that squash is elitist. If squash is going to grow, it needs to be reinvented.”

For Evarts, who played squash at St. Paul’s and has remained a squash player for life, his backing of the pro gram is not as much about the desire to see others enjoy the game he loves, but to see young people thriving with in a community that embraces them both on the court and in their academic pursuits.

“ There are programs that are really designed to pro duce good students and good squash players, and if a great squash player emerges, well, so much the better,” Evarts says. “[PCS] is really going beyond that by build ing community, too. If you go there, spend less time look ing at the squash court and more time looking at the quiet area, where the kids study and prepare for their classes the next day.”

Charlotte Daum ’25 was just a toddler when her family first introduced her to squash. Back then, the only public squash courts in Portland were still at the local YMCA.

She loved the tiny doors that led into each court — a perfect fit for her two-year-old frame. That was all the incentive she needed to keep up the squash tradition of her family.

Fast-forward several years to when Daum and her parents learned of the ambitious plans drawn up by Takesian, a welcome development for the family and those in the Portland community who were anxious to square up more frequently against friendly opponents. But as time went on, the PCS model quickly showed its full effect, says Mimi Munson ’92, Daum’s mother and a former member of the SPS squash team. Squash became more the exception than the rule, with the community events drawing more interest with regularity. When peo ple showed up, they were just as likely to attend a lecture or hang out within the friendly confines of its communal spaces as they were to schedule a match.

And then came COVID-19. As for many, the pandemic drastically put things into perspective for Daum’s family and became the catalyst for a permanent move to Maine (the family had been dividing its time between New England and the West Coast).

“ The support, warmth, and constant fun we both

found at PCS during those COVID months were vital as we adjusted to all the changes in our lives,” Munson says. “For my daughter … PCS was like a family, a port in the storm.”

As the storm receded, Daum found herself applying to boarding schools and eventually landed at St. Paul’s School. Now a Fourth Former, she is a proud member of the SPS squash team. Munson notes that the PCS model is what set the foundation for Charlotte to achieve her goals beyond the game, and she remains connected to the orga nization, despite the distance from Concord.

In some ways, squash is secondary to what PCS wants to achieve: helping young people and families of all eth nicities and backgrounds engage more meaningfully on a human level. What distinguishes PCS, and what others are trying to emulate, is the idea of “coming for the sport, staying for the relationships.”

“Throughout the whole program, you hear these kids and the adults repeating ‘respect, effort, and positivity,’” says Maurer, who counts among the SPS grads who played a role in bringing the PCS mission to life. “It’s not just coaching squash, it’s raising kids to be good human beings. It’s not being out for yourself. It’s a community effort.”

SPS squash players Nathan Rosenzweig ’24 (front) and Charlotte Daum ’25 have strong ties to Portland Community Squash.

MICHAEL SEAMANS

Part-Time Comedian

An investment banker by day, Tiger Gao ’17 won’t abandon his stand-up comedy dream any time soon.

JANA F. BROWN

PHOTOS: Jane Mok

Tig er Gao ’17 never planned to become a comedian. Sure, he possessed a sharp sense of humor and the keen observational skills required of those in the business, but it wasn’t until he was named the winner of the annual Hugh Camp Cup public speaking competition as a Third Former at St. Paul’s School that Gao realized he enjoyed being on stage — and being funny.

“In the speech, I made fun of weird school rules and talked about how I was this Chinese student who came in and had all these culture shocks,” explains Gao, who grew up in Beijing. “Suddenly, I went from this Third Former nobody knew to making 500 people laugh. After the show, I remember people telling me, ‘Hey, that was stand-up comedy.’ I started looking at YouTube clips and realized it was.”

It took two more years for Gao to get in front of his peers again, this time with the intention of telling jokes. At the Fifth Form Talent Show in the fall of 2015, Gao nervously referred to notes pulled from the inside pocket of his suit jacket as he stood in front of the entire student body — and many faculty — in Memorial Hall. The re ception to his humorous observations about the SPS Student Handbook, the food in the dining hall, and the fact that his jokes might put him in front of the Disciplinary Committee were met with universal laughter.

At Princeton, where Gao majored in economics and minored in German (in addition to finance, statistics and machine learning, and values and public life), he did not have many opportunities to pursue his comedy outside of the occasional impromptu performance, but Gao found another outlet for his interest in connecting with others. He started the Policy Punchline podcast after approaching some of Princeton’s visiting speakers to see if they would agree to on-air interviews with him as the host. To his delight, many of them agreed.

After winning the annual Hugh Camp Cup public speaking competition as a Third Former, Gao realized he enjoyed being on stage and being funny.

“ That was probably one of the big gest crowds I’ve performed for,” Gao says, noting that for his inaugural performance and for the shows at the School that followed, he had a dean vet his script ahead of delivering his material.

“ To be very honest, I love pushing boundaries, but I still wanted to go to college, so I never deviated from my script once it was approved. But the response was amazing and I knew I wanted to continue to do stand-up.”

At SPS, Gao also developed a love of the German language under Jennifer Hornor and an interest in art history under Colin Callahan. While he describes both SPS faculty members as “life-changing mentors,” Gao identifies the now-retired Callahan as one of his comedic inspirations, someone who “inspires me about the way he looks at the world. Mr. Calla han embodies the ideal kind of humor, the perfect blend of boundary-pushing and maturity.”

A few months after his debut in Memorial Hall, Gao found himself in Chicago, attending summer comedy school at Second City, the famed comedy club and improvisational theater that has produced the likes of Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, and Steve Carell, among many others. He discovered open mic nights during that time, and began his foray into per forming in front of strangers.

Featured guests on the podcast includ ed scholars, policymakers, business exec utives, journalists, and entrepreneurs from a variety of fields. In his tenure as the podcast’s host (Policy Punchline has been passed along to other students since Gao’s 2021 graduation), Gao interviewed more than 150 guests, among them former White House Chair of Council of Eco nomic Advisers Austan Goolsbee; former U.S. Secretary of the Navy and Acting Secretary of Defense Richard V. Spencer; Moderna co-founder Robert Langer; and constitutional trial lawyer Robert Barnes, who represented controversial figures Alex Jones and Kyle Rittenhouse, discussing topics from climate change to nuclear weapons to philosophy to financial policy. Under Gao’s leadership, the podcast also featured series on COVID-19, the 2020 election, and “aspiring intellectuals” and published two books of interview tran scripts and op-eds.

“At Princeton, there was not that much of a comedy culture, so I didn’t do as much stand-up,” Gao says. “But podcasting is a medium that really brings the most out of you in terms of connecting with people, which goes along with comedy.”

Today, Gao is an investment banker Monday through Friday and an aspiring comedian on the weekends. He is a secondyear analyst at Centerview Partners in Manhattan, while continuing to pursue comedy at open mics and at pop-up apartment shows in the city whenever he can. “It’s this great atmosphere where you bring people together on a weekend night after dinner to hear some jokes,” he says.

In total, Gao has performed more than 60 shows at various clubs in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York. While stand-up is a part of him that he won’t give up any time soon, Gao has no plans to leave his day job to pursue a career en tirely as a comic.

“I can’t see myself not doing comedy,” he says. “But it’s hard for me to see myself as a full-time stand-up comedian because there are other intellectual sides of me that need to be stimulated. I do think the fact that I do comedy means there’s a part of my personality that needs to be fulfilled, one that is constantly wanting to be connecting with people in that way.”

BECAUSE OUR FATHERS LIED: A MEMOIR OF TRUTH AND FAMILY FROM VIETNAM TO TODAY

Craig McNamara ’69 Little, Brown, 260 pages, $29

Reviewed by Michael Matros

“Like it is for any young man entering adult hood, it was my destiny to confront the legacy of my father.”

In his memoir’s title, Because Our Fathers Lied, Craig McNamara ’69 universalizes a key aspect of his own coming-of-age experience. But McNamara is not every son, and his father, Robert McNamara, was not every son’s dad. Appointed U.S. secretary of defense in 1961 by then-President John F. Kennedy, the elder McNamara became the architect of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. McNamara was accused often, and accurately, of expanding the war while ingenuously declaring that victory was at hand. Thus, the “lies” in the title of his son’s memoir.

Craig McNamara loved his father but resented the distance his dad imposed on their relationship. “How can a family never speak the truth, despite having good and comfortable lives?” he asks.

McNamara begins his story in his SPS dorm, Conover House, with Garry Trudeau ’66 as his “Old Boy.” In a wooden phone booth down the hall, among “elaborately carved wooden plaques depict[ing] winged owls, pelicans, rowboats, and Latin mottoes,” he calls his father to ask for “information or leaflets” supporting his position on the Viet nam War in advance of a teach-in against the conflict. After a silence, his father says, “Sure, Craigie. I’ll have my secretary get on it.”

The information never arrives, and that phone call becomes a touchstone in their relationship, what McNamara calls “the ongoing drama with my father, which had started way back in that phone booth at St. Paul’s.”

McNamara is admitted to Stanford, but soon leaves Palo Alto for a series of adventures that take the book, while not away from the looming presence of his father, to motorcycling, hitchhiking, and hard labor through out Latin and South America. The storytelling is vivid and often painful. Eventually, he makes it to Chile, and the Chilean territory of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, where he learns to milk cows and make deliveries on horseback, earning the designation “milkman.”

He leaves Chile just before the assassina tion of the country’s leftist president, Salva dor Allende, in a coup conducted with the complicity of the Nixon administration. His father had left government years earlier to become president of the World Bank, which has now resumed lending to Chile’s brutal Pinochet regime.

Back in the U.S. after his encounters with subsistence farming, the younger McNamara becomes infatuated with the soil, and he soon returns south to Mexico and a brief stint as a sugar cane worker, “in an effort to better understand localized farming practices.” His story continues with agricultural study at UC Davis and, eventually, the pur chase of a walnut farm in northern California. He turns to his father as an investor.

On the phone, the elder McNamara avoids discussing his son’s love of the land. “All he wanted was big data,” he says. “In fact, those

conversations reminded me of the mislead ing statistics that had so doomed his wartime strategy.”

Over the years, the farm grows and suc ceeds, and Craig McNamara becomes a leader in California’s sustainable farming movement and founder of the Center for Land-Based Learning, an educational nonprofit.

All the while, he struggles to accept his father’s aloofness and to forgive him his cata strophic Vietnam legacy. On his deathbed, the elder McNamara repeatedly declares that God had abandoned him.

“No, Dad,” his son replies. “Let go of that. God has not abandoned you. ... He is holding you in the palm of his hand.”

“Like it is for any young man entering adulthood, it was my destiny to confront the legacy of my father.”

Q&A with Actor and Audiobook Narrator Chris Gebauer ’08

of the cast that received the American Library Association’s Odyssey Award for Excellence in Audiobook Production for its performance of the teen/young adult novel Kent State by Deborah Wiles. Gebauer spoke with Alumni Horae Editor Jana Brown.

Narrating audiobooks is a type of perfor mance. How did you get into that?

Through a little bit of luck. Audible had been around for a few years, but had just launched a website called ACX, an open platform for independent narrators and publishers. A good friend of mine gave me an email address and I got an audition and did two books for Audible.

so I can match the voice. But the second we start recording the voice, I end up doing it a little differently, and I just go with it.

You were the co-narrator on Kent State, which won the 2021 Odyssey award. It’s a little more serious than some of your other projects like the Zombie Goldfish series. Did you approach it any differently?

In terms of preparation, that book was very interesting because the way it’s written is more like poetic prose on the actual page. There is no character name [identified] in the book; [lines are] just in different typeface.

Chris Gebauer ’08 caught the acting bug early in life. As a student at St. Paul’s School, he was deeply involved in the theater program and the Fiske Cup competition. Since graduating from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Gebauer has been pursuing his acting passion. For the last nine years, he has found his most steady work as an audiobook narrator and now has to his credit more than 110 titles in the children’s and teen/ young adult genres. In 2021, Gebauer was part

I thought, ‘I’m actually getting paid to be an actor.’ I now work with four or five publishers.

What’s a typical day like in the recording studio?

It’s reading a book intensely and professionally. The publisher sends a list to me of all the words with questionable pronunciation, then I get it back with the phonetic pronunciation of each word. If the characters are going to be around for a while, I take notes on their descriptions

The Odyssey Award is the Newbery Medal of the audiobook world. What did it mean to you to be part of that cast?

It was a project that we all got to record together around a table. Usually when you have a group record like that, you’re doing it individually or you have people in individual booths, recording it one by one. But we actually had a mic in front of everyone and recorded it like an old school radio play. That made it an incredibly personal project and the award was amazing.

Dignity for Deeply Forgetful People

Stephen G. Post ’69 Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022

How do we approach a “deeply forgetful” loved one in ways that observe and affirm their continuing self-identity? Written for caregivers, this book combines new ethics guidelines with an innovative program for how to communicate and connect with people with Alzheimer’s disease. For three decades, Stephen G. Post ’69 has worked around the world, encouraging caregivers to become more aware of — and find renewed hope in — surprising expres sions of selfhood that continue in individuals despite the challenges of cognitive decline.  Here, Post offers new perspectives on the worth and dignity of people with dementia.

Giant of the Valley

Harry Groome ’55 The Connelly Press, 2022

The first of two novellas in the book, “Giant of the Valley” — set in the Adirondack Mountains of New York — is the tale of a family struggling with the encroach ing dementia of its aging patriarch, Big Louis McCutchen. Once a leader in business and his community, Big Louis battles with the guilt of causing his wife’s death while resisting his three well-meaning but conflicted daughters’ attempts to move him to a life-care facility. “The Witness” is Jusuf Kurtovic’s story. A revered concert pianist, Jusuf pays a horrendous price to protect his Muslim grand daughters from being killed or raped during the Bosnian War.

Writing Themselves into History

Kim Bancroft ’76

Heyday Books, 2022

In the early years of California’s statehood, Emily Brist Ketchum Bancroft and Matilda Coley Griff ing Bancroft had frontrow seats for the unfolding of the Golden State’s history. The first and second wives, respectively, of historian extraordinaire Hubert Howe Ban croft, these two women were deeply engaged members of society and perceptive chroniclers of their times.  Writing Themselves into History  offers a rich immersion into 19thcentury California, detailing Emily’s and Matilda’s experiences with public life, mother hood, and business against the backdrop of San Francisco’s high society and the state’s growth amidst the tumult of the American Civil War.

Well Played

IAN ALDRICH

As a video game developer and professor, Gordon Bellamy ’88 has worked to make the gaming industry and its technology more inclusive.

In his career as a video game developer and professor, Gordon Bellamy ’88 has worked to make the gaming industry and its technology more inclusive.

Can a video game change the world? Maybe not, but a healthy gaming culture can help heal divisions, says Gordon Bellamy ’88, a pioneering game executive whose work has included leading stints at Electronic Arts (EA) Sports, Tencent, MTV, and Spike TV.

“When you have people from different parts of the world, from different walks of life, participating in some

thing where they all have to operate under the same rules, that can be extremely powerful,” says Bellamy, now a pro fessor of the practice of cinematic arts at the University of Southern California. “A really valuable discourse can take place.”

A native of Reston, Virginia, Bellamy showed a high aptitude for math early on. He was identified as a prodigy in the first grade, and math camps became a staple of his summers, with competitions the rest of the year. As an adolescent, he attended the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth and Duke University’s Talent Identification Program. In 1984, Bellamy’s MATH COUNTS team won the competition’s inaugural national championship.

He arrived at St. Paul’s two years later as a new Fifth Former. For Bellamy, who was still wrestling with his sexual identity and had spent much of his life navigating elite, white spaces, the School offered an important feeling of community.

“It was a meaningful time for me,” he says, “to feel valued and celebrated for who I am. I had the freedom to follow my own path.”

The experience wasn’t unlike the sense of liberating exploration he felt playing video games as a child. At Harvard, where he majored in engineering, Bellamy set a determined path to a career in the industry. In the sum mer of 1993, he landed a coveted internship with gaming giant EA, which led to a permanent job. His inclusive work at EA revolutionized how the gaming industry embraced the people who used their products. Bellamy’s ground-breaking idea was to give those users the ability to better see themselves in the games they were playing. His landmark work came with Madden NFL ’95, in which he advanced the technology to portray Black athletes for the first time, reflecting the faces of the majority of NFL players. Bellamy’s innovations also paved the way for the game to incorporate other personalized options, including left-handed players, season-long play, and the ability for teams to negotiate trades.

“What I wanted was Maddens for everybody,” says Bellamy, who received EA’s Rookie of the Year Award for his work. “How many ways can we have everyone at the table?”

B ellamy has continued to be an important design and thought leader in the gaming world. Among his many roles, he has served as head of the industry’s two main trade groups, the International Game Developers Associ ation and the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. He is currently the CEO of Gay Gaming Professionals. In 2020, he was featured in the Netflix docuseries High Score, which tells the story of gaming’s earliest key cre ators and designers.

“It’s hard to be something if you can’t see it,” says Bellamy, who lives with his husband in Los Angeles and is committed to helping the next generation of creators blaze new trails. “As I tell my students, many of the roles they’ll have probably don’t exist at the moment. All you can do is prepare to be the best version of yourself.”

When you have people from different parts of the world, from different walks of life, participating in something where they all have to operate under the same rules, that can be extremely powerful. A really valuable discourse can take place.

“

COURTESY GORDON BELLAMY ’88

FORMNOTES

These formnotes reflect information re ceived through Sept. 9, 2022. Please send news/photos of yourself or other alumni for these pages to: Formnotes Editor,  Alumni Horae, St. Paul’s School, 325 Pleasant Street, Concord, N.H. 03301 or alumni@sps.edu.

For reunion information, please visit sps.edu/anniversary

1946

Melissa Walters mwalters@sps.edu

In July, Jim Kinnear traveled by boat on Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada, with his granddaughters, Stephanie Neul ’11 and Stacy Neul ’15, to buy ice cream cones.

1948/75th Pete Coley

bradleypetecoley@aol.com

Porter Hopkins plhopkins@hughes.net

Al Malabre writes, “Not much changed with us. Still summers in Quogue and winters in Charleston. Miss having Wayne and Archie Douglas next door there and occasional golf with Bill Timpson. Still write infrequent col umns, more on golf than the economy.”

Clacky King shares: “I recently sold my last boat and have fully retired to The Wall Street Journal and Fox News after a lifetime in the door and hardware industry. The smallest boat I operated was a 12-foot skiff with a three-horsepower outboard. The largest was about 990 feet longer, Battleship Wisconsin BB64. Of more interest is the fact that this school year marks the first year of the last 42

that some member of my family has not lived and taught at SPS. Daughter Toni King Cal lahan ’76 went to SPS but took four years off to get a degree from Williams. SPS hired her back upon her graduation from Williams to be the assistant dean of admission. She later taught languages. Her older brother, K.C. King ’74, was a trustee. Her husband, Colin Callahan, was head of the Art Department and just retired.”

1949

Sam Cooley cooleyack@aol.com

I have a new great-grandson, Henry Cooley, born last month to India Laughlin ’07 and Sam Cooley ’07, joining big sister Louisa.

1950

the help of the clinical trials she has partici pated in. She still drives to familiar local places, reads and does jigsaw puzzles, and carries on conversations with friends so well that they don’t believe there is anything wrong with her. We still love each other and enjoy living together. Although my mind is slowing with age, I am still writing things like this and occasionally painting watercolors. However, I fractured a vertebra three years ago and, while I walk around unaided, I have slowed down significantly.”

Melissa

Walters mwalters@sps.edu

Bob Monks tells of his great-granddaughter, Sofia Porta Monks, at 18 months of age, “driv ing” a car recently. “Happiness!” he writes.

1951

Fred Church church1955@gmail.com

Fred Gardner writes: “Gael and I are living happily on our 56-acre farm about 10 miles north of Princeton. July and August have been extremely dry. I keep weather records for the National Weather Service and have not seen anything comparable since I started around the year 2000. Trees seem to be get ting enough underground moisture, but large sections of our lawn, fields, and pastures have turned a grayish brown. This is particularly tough on local farmers since there is little likelihood now of the usual second hay crop. Gael was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in early 2017 but is physically in great shape with ex ercise, a good diet, lots of pills, and perhaps

A sad note from Lee Carter ’57: “My broth er, David Carter, died on Aug. 29, 2022. He was 89 years young and enjoyed a good life. In 1973, he moved to England, where he is buried, along with his wife, Beppie. Through out his life, he was interested in and loyal to SPS. He will be greatly missed by his four children and 12 grandchildren.”

1952

Truman Bidwell jbidwell@sullivanlaw.com

From Peter Booth: “As I creep deeper into old age and tend on occasion to be concerned as to the direction of our proud nation and the younger folks, our great-grandchildren, will step into, I’d like to offer a perspective as a former career naval officer. How fortunate I was to have had the advantage of only two years at St. Paul’s after five or so years of straight mediocracy at three Washington, D.C., public schools. Those two years got me on the right track, taught me to pay attention, challenged me, provided an opportunity to meet lots of good young classmates, and en abled me to squeak into the Naval Academy, do reasonably well, and make some modest contributions in the front lines of our Navy during the most perilous years in our nation’s history. This is a thank you to all at SPS who enabled me to see the big picture.”

Form of 1945 formmates Jim Walker (l.) and Doug Coleman represented their form at an SPS reception in North Haven, Maine.

Jim Kinnear ’46 with granddaughters Stephanie Neul ’11 and Stacy Neul ’15, on Georgian Bay, Ontario.

Bob Monks ’50 shares a photo of his greatgranddaughter, Sofia Porta Monks.

Bill Emery shares: “We were sorry to miss our 70th reunion at SPS, but we had a long-standing commitment to get back to Ski athos, Greece. We had a successful trip, and the crowds had not yet arrived on the island. Our English friends living there were well, and we celebrated our friendship going back to days in Beirut in 1974-75. On return to Con necticut, we settled in for a hot summer, only to be confronted by bouts of COVID. I marvel at the success and changes at SPS in recent years. To me, SPS was a path for my trying to enjoy how much the School meant to my fa ther (Form of 1910), who spent six years at SPS and died in 1941 when I was seven. Among his closest friends at SPS was Hobey Baker (Form of 1909), lost in WWI.”

Frederic Hoppin writes: “You are among the most important memories of my life. Along the line, I have reconnected a bit with Stan Rinehart, Phil Price, George Ross, Alan Booth, Albert Francke, Peter Stearns, Truman Bidwell, David Sinkler, Peter Wells, and who else? (memory weakening). In 2012, I moved into a Continuing Care Re

tirement Community in Lexington, Massa chusetts (largely academic retirees, which is a bit intimidating, but they are losing it, too, so it’s okay). Ambitions? To let go (of eyesight, hearing, memory, ambulation, driver’s li cense, etc.) without agonizing (after all, it’ll only be a fraction of my lifespan). Regrets? Not keeping up with you all, and not getting to know many of my Harvard ’56 classmates.”

Dick Duckoff writes: “I have just complet ed my 14th year as the organizer for the Friends of Stark Park Summer Concert Se ries in Manchester. It involves soliciting sponsors and the booking of bands. Some of this season’s nine concerts included ‘Another Tequila Sunrise (Eagles Tribute),’ ‘The Wol verine Jazz Band,’ and ‘Compaq Big Band.’

The concert series brings together audiences of up to 700 people. I spent five weeks this summer visiting my daughter in Minneapo lis. We enjoyed a Broadway show, the Minne sota Orchestra, a performance of Emma at the world-renowned Guthrie Theater, and many historical sites and museums. We trav eled to Kansas City and visited the excep tional WWI Museum and the Truman Presi dential Library. My lifelong love of learning has recently been channeled into studying the history of millworkers, miners, team sters, migrants, child laborers, and the early struggle for the American dream.”

1953/70th

Jim Hammond hamjam123@hotmail.com

Michael Maude reports: “Following a rush of blood to the head, I have sponsored a forth coming production at the Wexford Festival in Ireland of Lalla-Roukh by Félicien David. It was the forerunner of the nineteenth century French craze for Oriental opera librettos but

has not been produced in Europe for about 150 years. When I was widowed, I moved to Bath, and it is a brilliant place for a widower to live. It offers more culture than anywhere in the UK outside London, and it is all within walking distance.”

Peter Paine shares that three generations of Paines gathered this summer on Lake Champlain, including Peter Paine III ’81, Alexander Paine ’87, and Peter Paine IV ’15.

1954

Jim Darby goodstuff404@gmail.com

Peter Pool moved back to his childhood home of NYC 11 years ago for culture and travel; a “final phase” sort of thing. “My, how we have traveled — just about everywhere, but loving the out-of-the-way places that take lots of effort to get to. For example, Minaret on top of the mud brick Great Mosque in Timbuk tu, Rikki and I near Ha’il in Saudi Arabia, leap ing dancer in Cote d’Ivoire. The pandemic was a slowdown but not a stop. I’d swear the travel keeps one from getting older.”

Bill Emery ’52 enjoying lobster in New Canaan. Michael Maude ’53 prepares to attend a production of Lalla-Roukh by Félicien David at the Wexford Festival in Ireland.

Three generations of Paines gathered on Lake Champlain. (L. to r.) Peter Paine, Jr. ’53, Peter Paine III ’81, Alexander Paine ’87, and Peter Paine IV ’15.

1954 formmates Jay Cushman (l.) and Jim Darby got together in East Blue Hill, Maine.

Peter Pool ’54 and Rikki Samuels in Saudi Arabia, during his recent travels abroad.

1955Gunnar Baldwin gunnar.baldwin@gmail.com

John Horan jrhoran@foxlex.com

Fred Lovejoy writes: “A highlight for me was attending our reunion in June. A smaller group allowed for marvelous conversations and opportunities to catch up with each oth er. The drive up and back from Boston with Bob Hurlbut was very special. Jill and I have six grandsons (4-9 years) and are enjoying Concord throughout the year and Annis quam in the summer. Still hard at work at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and enjoying it greatly. My recent book, A Goodly Heritage, a history of the 10 physicians-in-chief at Children’s Hospital (1893-2022) will come out in September.”

Davis Hammond shares: “Very sad to real ize that SPS formmates of ours from Penob scot waters are dying off, first Morris Cheston and then Ethan Emery. But Herbie Parsons and I are still here. Mates from the Floridian waters of the West Coast and the Gulf, Charlie Cochran and Dyer Wadsworth, I hope to see you as soon as winter winds chase us south. My old college roommates, Frank Griswold and Charlie Glenn, how are you? And my oldest childhood playmate, Robert Hurlbut, how about you? Also, best wishes to our mate Joachim von der Goltz. And a fond hello to all who are still up and about.”

Gathering on Fishers Island, N.Y., on Aug. 19, were formmates Steve McPherson, Nat Howe, and Locke McLean. Following lunch, they posed for a photo in front of the SPS crest painted on the road near the golf course about a year ago.

Bob Webber writes: “Sometime in March of this year, Mary Filippelli and I became be trothed. Renovations on our house contin

ued. Then, in June, we ventured to SPS for the long-delayed 65th reunion. It was good to spend time with old friends and to learn of all the changes that occurred since our last visit. We were invited to sing in the Choir for ‘O, Pray for the Peace.’ In July, Mary and I were espoused at St. Paul’s Church in Fair field, Conn. Our recessional was the “Cum Sancto Spiritu” of Vivaldi’s “Gloria XIX” sung by members of The Fairfield County Chorale, us included. Mary thus has become the third generation Mary Webber by marriage. The following weekend, Mary and I were co-ral ly-masters for a charity auto rally and tour, our 20th-plus year. The Mount Equinox Hill Climb in August was a delight; the top sec tion having just been repaved.”

1956

Rennie Atterbury ratterbury164@gmail.com

Bob Ingersoll, Peter Strawbridge and Jim Bromley had lunch together recently and, like the “Walrus and the Carpenter,” talked of many things, including SPS of yesteryear.  Bob Ingersoll, Harald Paumgarten, David McAlpin, John Schley, and Mike Hershey are hopeful of continuing their long annual tradi tion of dinner and a Princeton hockey game. Harald is also working on a resumption of lunch at Sardi’s in New York on Jan. 26 to involve several vintage classes. And Bob has published a book, Recollections at Eighty, Another Gener ation Heard From, inspired by Recollections at Eighty, a book by his grandfather, Sturgis Ingersoll (Form of 1910). Interested? Contact Bob (robertsingersoll@aol.com).

1957

Bill de Haven bill_dehaven316@hotmail.com

Chris Raphael writes: “For the past several years, Peggy and I have had a summer visit

with John Pearce and Jane on their island off Mount Desert in Maine. This has included Mason Smith and Jeannie for a typical lobster and corn dinner and overnight stay. Three ar chitects together enjoying wine and the su perb location makes for lively conversations.”

John Pearce sent the following note this past August: “The 65th reunion brought back many memories. Mason Smith and I get to gether several times a year. My wife, Jane, and I visit the Smiths in Mattapoisett, Massa chusetts, and the Smiths come to visit us in Maine, on Mount Desert Island, the site of a recent SPS gathering.” John also shared that David Noble, author of Saigon to Pleiku: A Counterintelligence Agent in Vietnam’s Cen tral Highlands, is making presentations about his time in Vietnam. “It’s a recommended read,” John writes. His presentation is avail able on YouTube by searching for “David Grant Noble: Vietnam Passage.” Additionally, John shared, “Sam Beard, who has a long list of public service accomplishments, has a new endeavor — childhood develop ment (giftglobal.org/zero-to-five).”

1958/65th

Allan Ayers aayers3667@gmail.com

Guy Rutherfurd rutherfurdguy@gmail.com

From Reuben Rich: “In Argentina in August, a driving wind is bringing rain and snow, which we hope will abate years of drought at my partner’s estancia. After a few weeks at home in Bozeman, I return to the Everest re gion of Nepal on yet another ‘ultimate’ trip to be among the people and the place which has so informed much of my life. Perhaps this year the trails will be less steep and less long.”

1959

Sam Callaway samuelcal41@gmail.com

Sydney Waud sydney.waud@compass.com

Peter Neill writes: “In June, World Ocean Observatory launched a virtual aquarium as a transformational tool for ocean education — built on a gaming platform, connected to an underlying ocean literacy curriculum, World Ocean Explorer will be available for formal and informal education on any de vice, anytime, anywhere, at no cost. Recently returned from three weeks in Greenland with a delegation of Wabanaki curators and

Formmates from 1955 Steve McPherson, Locke McLean, and Nat Howe posing in front of the SPS crest on Fishers Island, New York.

(L. to r.) Steve McPherson ’55, Tom Hamilton ’80, Ellie Hamilton ’12, and George Hamilton ’15.

artists from Maine for a W2O project explor ing cultural exchange/interpretation with In uit cultural managers, associated Greenland museums, and UNESCO World Heritage Sites. This summer has also marked 12 years (640 editions) of weekly syndicated audio feature, World Ocean Radio, and the first year of a new monthly hour-long interview/pod cast with authors and artists who evoke ‘the spirit of Maine.’”

1960 Dimitri Sevastopoulo dsevastopoulo@gmail.com

Cathy and I visited Aix-en-Provence at the end of May. Our destinations were chosen by researching market days within an hour’s drive. Since French markets close down at 1 p.m., we reserved tables for lunch in the nearby countryside and mused about mov ing to this part of France. In July, we rented a house in Northeast Harbor, Maine, where Marc and a few close friends joined us at the Pot and Kettle Club for a magical evening choreographed by Cathy in celebration of my birthday. We have rented a house on a hay farm in Millerton, N.Y., and moved into it several containers of furnishings and pots and pans, which had been domiciled in a home we once had in Hudson, N.Y.

Charlie Thomson writes: “I have been bat tened down in our home in Tetón Mts. in Jackson Hole. Regret having had to cancel a reception here in July for SPS folk when Kathy Giles’s flights collapsed. We will reschedule next summer, airlines willing. Meanwhile our own Liz Cheney has been a huge national sto ry. She should and will go far and deserves better than the Wyoming Republican Party.”

Jack Mechem shares that he and his fami ly, including daughter Chapin ’90, chartered a catamaran in the British Virgin Islands for Jack’s 80th birthday. “It was a very festive

occasion, but we all missed having Joe and his family with us. Our two families have cel ebrated our major birthdays together for many years and there was a large void not having him aboard.”

From Chip Loomis: “Liz and I continue to reside in New York but have recently ac quired a small condo in Newport overlook ing the New York Yacht Club and Narragan sett Bay. This little gem will take the place of our boat, which we sold during COVID, but we are also chartering now from time to time. I also closed my investment partner ship after 55 years, although I continue to manage portfolios for the Seamen’s Church Institute and the Naval Academy Sailing Foundation. Liz is working on her fourth book of poetry with New Directions and still translating classical and contemporary Per sian poets. Our twin sons are now 26. One is flourishing at The Atlantic Council, a respected think tank in D.C. The other is at Ocrolus, a FinTech company here in NYC, that brings AI to the analysis of credit appli cations. My daughter is happily married, spending winters in NYC, where my grand daughters, 9 and 7, attend Friends Seminary. We are in good health, busy as usual, and trying to keep up the outdoor activities we have always enjoyed.”

1961

Ed Tiffany edtiffany@gmail.com

Joan and I spent time with our four grandchil dren in Marion and sailed our 14-foot 1914 Herreshoff-designed Bullseye, placing fourth in the National Regatta at Fishers Island, after two Olympians and a Brown sailing team star. We were pleased. She is now “on the hard” and we are in Boston most of the time.

Luther Tucker writes: “In June, Cordy and I drove from our home in Easton, Maryland,

to my Dominick cousins’ ranch – 7D – in Sun light Valley outside of Cody, Wyo., to ride and reunite with family, including Helen Sanders Gray ’82, Marcia Sanders Loughran ’85, Tom Boogaard ’87, Nick Tucker Sanders ’88, daughter Elisa Tucker Chute ’99, and their families. After a visit to Glacier National Park for spectacular views and bird walks, we drove eastward to Wellfleet, Mass., to partic ipate in the memorial of our nephew, Cam Sanders ’83. Cam was a donor in our family gift dedicated to four Tucker study bays in Ohrstrom Library ‘in gratitude for what St. Paul’s School has meant to four generations of one family.’”

Bill Matthews reports: “Marcia and I are still going back and forth between Kenne bunkport, Maine, and Venice, Florida. Enjoy touching base with formmates, former stu dents, and players. Golf game in freefall. Love beginning day on bike ride with my wife now taking the lead, especially going up hills. Life slowing down, but in many ways much richer than when I was younger. Wish ing my many SPS friends all the best.”

John Shattuck shares: “Owen Walker has been convening a small group of us on Zoom every week to ruminate about the state of the world and swap stories about ourselves and

Marcia and Bill Matthews ’61 with Cal Bussey ’85 and his wife, Nancy, in Kennebunkport.

Formmates from 1960 DeWitt Sage, William Foulke, and Dimitri Sevastopoulo met on Little Cranberry Island, Maine.

Jack Mechem ’60 and family, including Chapin ’90, on a chartered catamaran in the British Virgin Islands for Jack’s 80th birthday.

Form of 1961’s (l. to r.): Chris Jennings, John Ransmeier, Bobby Clark, Sherm Barker, and Tod Rod ger at the home of Carroll and Bobby Clark.

our families. Retired from his position as a federal public defender in Boston, Owen is our genial and provocative host. Participants include Rick Wilmer, whose singing career continues to flourish (and performances to dazzle);  Ru Rauch, sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of opera and politics (preferring the former);  Wint Aldrich, steeped in New York history and the legacies of both FDR and moderate Republicans;  Tyson Gilpin, promoting racial justice from his base in ru ral Virginia; and myself, teaching interna tional politics at the Fletcher School and publishing a new book, Holding Together, about the democracy crisis in America. In June, my wife, Ellen, and I ventured out of COVID-19 hibernation to travel to Europe for a book event at Central European Univer sity in Vienna; a stunningly hilarious performance of Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe Theatre in London; meetings about Putin’s war on Ukraine at the Institut Montaigne in Paris; and a Fletcher School conference in Talloires, France, where I finally succumbed to overindulgence in French cuisine, landing briefly in the emergency room of a Geneva hospital, from which I was happily released after a brief stay, just in time to fly home.”

A note from Will Pier: “Sculling on the Pet aluma River, hoping to sign up for the over 80 group at Head of the Charles in 2023. Anyone interested in doing a 2x or a 4x? Youngest son is an intern anesthesiologist at UC Davis Med ical Center in Sacramento. Youngest daughter is a script supervisor in film production and a new mother. Seventh grandchild. Considering retirement communities for like-minded pro gressives. Any suggestions?”

Several members of the Form of 1961 gathered at Carroll and Bobby Clark’s home for a delightful June afternoon in advance of Anniversary Weekend.

From Rick (Derek) Richardson: “Ellie and I traveled to the Bugaboos in the Purcell Mountains of British Columbia in July to go heli-hiking. It was very exciting to be whisked up to 9,000 feet and then figure out how we were going to get down. The scenery was stunning, the guides terrific, and our heli copter technique (lying prone with hands on hat and glasses) rapidly improved over the trip. It is really the only way to hike.”

Tad de Bordenave published a book this year, God’s Other Children, the story of seven groups of people who are largely unnoticed

by the rest of the world. They are the poor, the hungry, the refugees, and the slaves. Tad serves under the Rt. Rev. N.N. Inyom, the Diocese of Makurdi, the Anglican Province of Nigeria. As the first director of Anglican Frontier Missions, he has an awareness of those overlooked. At the heart of the book is Tad’s conviction that the church displays the righteousness and justice of God and can “rise humbly, stand boldly, and make war on the enemies of God.” Tad also has written The Global Gospel of Saint Paul and other books. He is living with Constance in Richmond, Virginia. They have five grandchildren.

Stuart Douglas reports: “Busy year so far. Martha and I spent a wonderful February in Sierra Vista, Arizona, and many days in Doug las, Arizona, named after my great-greatgrandfather. Then it was off to Malta for May and June. We spent a week in Cyprus and had a great visit to Vienna on our way home, which included a two-week stay at the family camp in the Adirondacks. I just got home from a road trip to New Castle, Colorado, and was still able to keep up with my three grand children (8, 7, and 2) and my only child, Molly. In my spare time, I still play a lot of golf and tennis. Life is good at almost 80. Classmates are always welcome at my Talent, Oregon, home (peaceman888@gmail.com).”

From Sherm Barker: “We spent three weeks at our shared family summer cottage on Inner Heron Island near Boothbay Har bor. Saw all the grandchildren, lost in crib bage for the first time to my 13-year-old grandson. Lots of boating, seals are taking over offshore ledges. Contrary to what you read and see on TV, the water is not warming up yet on this corner of the Gulf of Maine. Returned to Hilton Head in August for some medical appointments. Temp and humidity both in the 90s. COVID is making the rounds among friends and relatives.”

Jim Hatch shares: “Summer started off with classmates having a wonderful time at Bobby Clark’s home, followed by very enjoy able reunion activities at SPS. July and Au gust found me back rowing at home in the Berkshires. Got away to the Mid-Atlantic states to watch my 13-year-old granddaugh ter from California play in three national la crosse tournaments. Tanglewood, the sum mer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra here in western Massachusetts, put on a wonderful program of classical mu sic events, as well as the likes of Van Morri

son, Ringo Starr, Judy Collins, Bonnie Raitt, and James Taylor (who lives here). I am glad the crowds have gone home.”

Tod Rodger reports: “While working at GE in Lynn during the summer of 1961, I was a member of, and sculled regularly at, Cambridge Boat Club. I served on a commit tee to help organize the first HOC, failed to get Yale to participate, helped transport shells the day of the race, rowed and finished 8/16 in the Junior Sculls, and attended the cocktail party for all participants at the unfinished penthouse. I then moved to Phoenix/Califor nia/etc. and could not believe what the HOC had become when I returned to Massachu setts. I know Will Pier was planning to race in HOC, but I’m not sure he ever did.”

Alex

1962

Whiteside

alex.whiteside@hotmail.com

Splitting the distance between Colorado and Hawaii, Wick Rowland and Stosh Thomp son recently reconvened on the Oregon Coast to catch up on news of old friends and their respective families. Stosh reports that his 20-year-old daughter, Kailana, has a scholarship to study in Romania at a univer sity in Transylvania. Wick’s oldest grand child, Nicole, is off to Charlotte, N.C., for her first post-university job in sports marketing; Joanna and Tar Roberts have kindly offered to serve as her advisers.

1963/60th

David Gordon gordondavidcjr@gmail.com

As I write this note in August, fun plans are unfolding for our Cape Cod ’63 gathering in September. More about that in the next Horae. Really looking forward to seeing everyone at our 60th in Concord, June 9-11, 2023.

Wick Rowland ’62 and Stosh Thompson ’62 on the Oregon coast.

Henry Livingston writes: “An old Shat tuck and an old Halcyon intend to rise to the challenge once again. Dick Hawkins is a stal wart Shattuck, and I am a former secretary of the Halcyon BC. Neither of us are known for ‘good intentions.’ (Henry Crocker Kittredge would be quick to say, ‘The road to hell is paved with them.’) We are not intending, we are determined, to launch our rowing shells on Barnstable Bay soon and square off one against the other. The distance has yet to be determined. It takes just about all I’ve got to walk a mile or so, never mind row one, but we shall prevail. There is another issue — steering a straight course without coxswains. That’s why Barnstable Bay is a reasonable body of water for such a challenge — it’s wide. When you get around to reading this, the race could well be over. The outcome may not be clear, especially if one of us capsizes. Then we’ll see who can swim.”

Jim Taylor was featured in the Aug. 16 Washington Post talking about the ranch market in the West.

Douglas Makepeace reports: “We all con front some serious risks. These include se nior moments of mental hesitation or worse

— strokes or cardiac or prostate issues and other challenges. Many of these are caused by atherosclerosis, blocking the blood in our ar teries. I have found the Cleveland Clinic to be the best source of comprehensive and up dated medical information. They offer spe cial reports on strokes and several other is sues, which are updated each year, and provide excellent coverage of what we need to thrive. The Tufts School of Nutrition Sci ence offers the 2022 Heart-Brain Diet. The Cleveland Clinic Reports cover the related science, use of drugs and surgery, and nutri tion, etc. The Tufts reports focus on diet and nutrition. These last two, plus exercise, are the only way we can improve our health over the next 15 years. You can order any of these reports by calling 877-300-0253.”

1964Rob Claflin robclaflin@comcast.net Rick Sperry overcable@aol.com

Dick Ranck informs: “I’m preparing for a September 2023 show in Flint, Mich., at the Buckham Gallery. My painting, Making and

Dissolving Connections, will be displayed.”

Bill Gordon created the Walter Harper Project, which commissioned the statue and constructed the monument site in honor of Walter Harper. “Harper was an Athabaskan man who was the first to summit Denali (for merly Mount McKinley) on a 1913 expedi tion created by Episcopal Archdeacon Hud son Stuck. The climb took almost three months and started from Fairbanks by dog team. Harper was an amazing man whose life ended tragically at age 25 in a shipwreck off the coast of Alaska as he and his new bride headed for the East Coast for medical school. Harper intended to return to Alaska as a medical missionary. His life of service and adventure is chronicled in the book Walter Harper, Alaska’s Native Son by Mary Erlander. The statue dedication was held in July.”

L ivy Miller writes: “Our indefatigable Form of ’64 scribe, Rick Sperry, has done it again with a meticulously organized golf trip to Sand Valley and Mammoth Dunes (think of this as Bandon Dunes comes to Wiscon sin). Formmates Coggeshall, Miller, and Betts were all to participate, although Betts was a late scratch due to hip issues.”

Formates from 1965 John Rice (l.) and Randy Morgan met up in Maine this summer.

Leslie and Fred Dillen ’64 paddle around in their kayak.

Bill Kennedy ’65, and his wife, Priscilla, cohosted an event in North Haven, Maine, this summer. In attendance were (l. to r.) Joanne and George Carlisle, Claire Williams, John Foss ’65, David Parsons ’67, Jim Walker ’45, Zoe Williams ’10 (co-host), Bill, Doug Coleman ’45, Priscilla, and new SPS Director of Alumni Relations Steve Donovan.

Bill Gordon ’64 and his wife, Bonnie, at the dedi cation of the Walter Harper statue, with sculptor Gary Lee Price and his wife, Leesa.

Retired Captain John Foss ’65 and his new schooner.

From Fred Dillen: “While we were in Gloucester this summer, the gods at REI wrote to tell me that if Leslie and I didn’t get a kayak, it might soon be too late. In a greater display of bravery, Lucy, our 12-year-old, 50-pound shelter dog of all good breeds, who had never been swimming, decided to try the salt water of Brace Cove, and kept trying (brutally hot day), until beyond the touch of paw-to-bottom, she swam eight strokes be fore returning triumphant. About ‘O Pray…’ — there should be mention of Peter Hum phrey, who could deliver it, a cappella, to break your heart.”

1965 Bob Hall ro.hall@northeastern.edu

Eric Saunders eric@lawefs.com

Bill Kennedy reports: “Priscilla and I had the pleasure of hosting a reception for SPS alums at our place in North Haven, Maine, in Au gust. Among the highlights: John Foss sailed over from the mainland in his schooner, spending the night aboard as our guest room was occupied by George Carlisle, retired SPS teacher, and his wife Joanne, retired SPS ad mission director. Also joining us were Doug Coleman ’45 and Jim Walker ’45, both go ing strong at 95.”

John Rice shares: “Here, on the border of Maine and New Hampshire, we are in a per fect spot to watch the comings and goings of formmates on their way to Maine. Captain John Foss sold his commercial schooner business in the spring and has just completed fitting out a much smaller schooner than the American Eagle. Laurie Brengle stopped by Newcastle, Maine, for the July launch of Ea gle Also visiting the Pine Tree State for two

weeks were Gro and Bob Coxe, trekking up from their Kennesaw, Ga., home. Apparently, Bob and his old SPS roomie, the now-retired Captain Foss, had a grand reunion. Not to be upstaged, Priscilla and Bill Kennedy hosted a summer party for the School at their Vinal haven home. Captain Foss made a cameo ap pearance. Sending his regrets was Rick Bill ings, cruising off the coast with his wife, Linda. Budding social chairperson Peter Otis swung through Maine twice, once visit ing Captain Foss and Randy Morgan, who spends August in York Harbor, and then Ote and Bobbe voyaged to Monhegan Island in late August with me and Joan. Elsewhere, Rick Burroughs, Laurie Brengle, Michael Yahng, and Sandy Faison all became firsttime grandpas this year. Sandy has had a busy several months traveling to Europe and Cen tral America. But Samson is probably most proud of conquering his first 14,000-foot mountain in August.”

Peter Otis is proud to say that his daughter, Casey Otis, has recently become an overseer for the School’s Advanced Studies Program and writes: “She, like many fortunate high school students in New Hampshire, spent a summer in Millville. Sensei Andre Hurtgen was her Japanese instructor. Subsequent ly, while in college, she returned as an intern for Ned Sherrill. Since 1957, New Hampshire high school students have been blessed with the opportunity to experience SPS.”

In the last year, David Martin and Mid Til ghman have hiked in Utah (Escalante/Grand Staircase) and Texas (Big Bend) and on many portions of the Appalachian Trail in Virginia, all a great antidote to COVID-19. This past August, Martha and David spent a fun week with Jad Roberts ’64 and other friends on a boat trip around Scotland’s Orkney Islands.

1966

Hugh Clark hclark@ursinus.edu

As George Wheelwright admitted in the last Horae, finding one’s way into retirement can be tough. My good fortune for the past five years is I have had a number of topics on which I have wanted to write. Most recently, I have brought a manuscript to completion that is scheduled for publication this fall: A Narrative of Cultural Encounter in Southern China: Wu Xing Fights the Jiao (Anthem Press). It’s the story of a land reclamation project on China’s southeast coast in the late 700s that goes awry when a crocodile (i.e., jiao, in Chinese tradition a kind of dragon) begins to break down the dikes. Wu Xing must defeat the jiao to preserve his project, which has a wide range of cultural and eco logical complications. My challenge is to fig ure out where to go from here. I imagine many of us have faced, or are facing, a similar dilemma. Retirement, however, is an oppor tunity. The challenge is to grasp that and find new meaning going forward. I would love to hear how others have engaged it.

A note from John Gordon: “My father grew up in Boston, and when he graduated from business school in 1923, his father, who was born in 1860, told him to move to New

Surf’s up for Peter Meyer ’66.

Andy Roberts ’66 (r.) and his brother, Tom Rob erts ’71 (c.) ran into Hugh Clark ’66 (l.) after a hike around Eagle Lake on Mount Desert Island.

David Martin ’65 with family near Cape May, New Jersey, including Mark Powers Smith ’92, Charlotte Martin Smith ’93, Jessica Martin Hayne ’96, and Adelaide Hayne ’26 (fourth from left).

York City, as ‘that is where the pot boils the fastest.’ I am happy to report that all three of our children are now on their way to moving far from NYC. Our daughter, China, moved with her family two years ago to Bentonville, Ark., where her husband works for Walmart. Our sons, Tyler and Zach, formed a company two years ago to find and buy a small enter prise they would run together. They are about to close on the purchase of a company that sells ‘lightly used’ clothing to young adults through a chain of franchised stores that is headquartered in Salt Lake City and has been in operation for 20 years. My wife, Kiendl, and I are really delighted that all three will be liv ing in much healthier environments than NYC, where the quality of life has declined significantly, with no improvement in sight.”

Peter Meyer writes: “Still taking surfing lessons and have invested in my own wet suit (no, it doesn’t make you slim and trim); a board is on my shopping list. I am hooked.”

Jim Phillips writes, “I spend most of my time spearheading an investment discussion group in Darien, while Marta works parttime as a clinical social worker. Zoom has changed our lives, allowing us to remain on Cape Cod for our summers with fewer trips back and forth to Connecticut. Our daugh

ter, Sarah, graduated from her residency pro gram at Columbia and will now join Mt. Si nai as a family doctor helping the underserved. She and her husband, Mike, moved to Brooklyn Heights as they both work downtown. Meanwhile, Eric Phillips has moved to Chicago with Tishman Speyer while taking an executive MBA at Kellogg on weekends. During the first week, the class heads to Cyprus for some class bonding. No wonder tuition is so high! We are planning several trips to Chicago in case any ’66ers have recently moved there. To keep the brain and heart stimulated, reading books on world history (consider  Empire of Cot ton or The Partnership) and pickleball are fre quent summer activities. In the winter, we head to Vermont or out West for some cross country or downhill. I’m happy to report my two new knees have been a game changer. Finally, I always enjoy catching glimpses of any ’66ers who pass through Connecticut to visit and/or enjoy playing nine holes of golf with Gordie Grand, Bill Jackson, and me.”

1967

John Landes jlandes1948@yahoo.com

It’s been busy for Rick Wheeler: “Daughter Ginny got married in June in Cognac, France, to Francois Lavergne. We returned to Phila delphia and resumed the unenviable task of downsizing. We have moved into a much smaller house in Bryn Mawr, where our ga rage is crammed to the ceiling with ‘stuff.’ A word of caution — postpone if not altogether avoid downsizing. It is a seemingly endless and enervating process.”

Dickerman Hollister writes: “After a fabu lous year at Yale Divinity School, I consider myself ‘sufficiently holy’ to take the second year off and really start retirement. Despite conflict and contagion, Frankie and I are

traveling again, next to Turkey. We will be retracing one of Paul’s missionary journeys (which, no doubt, you all remember from Fourth Form Sacred Studies). So indeed, SPS continues to inspire this septuagenarian.”

Dave Rea shares that he, Bob Ewell, and John Branson met for their annual midsum mer reunion in Concord at Makris Lobster & Steak House.

C otty Chubb reports: “Still working, if barely, in the movie business (which might still exist by the time you read this); teaching a couple of courses at the AFI Conservatory; 36 years married; an opa (Dutch for grandfather) to a charmer, Ava (2); younger daughter, 30, newly engaged. DM me on IG if you’re passing through Santa Barbara @chubbco.”

Ambassador Michael Klosson writes: “Sor ry to have missed the June Anniversary, but it collided with my postponed Hamilton Col lege 50th reunion. Our class of ’71 got medal lions, so we were suitably decorated for the alumni parade. And we enjoyed the tradition of listening to our class agent’s half-century annalist letter that spoke of my career in diplo macy and said I was the class ‘Forrest Gump’ for always being in the middle of current events in the room where it happened. Boni and I had planned to cap our 30-year foreign service careers and my 15 years with Save the Children with lots of travel to faraway places, but thanks to the pandemic, we have remained closer to home and enjoyed becoming grand parents to our wonderful 9-month-old grand son, Wyatt. I remain active (via Zoom) on Save the Children Hong Kong’s board of trustees, collaborating with Stuart Scadron-Wattles on writing and recording songs, teaching, consulting, and spending time with our two daughters.”

From John Stevenson: “In May, I traveled to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico to visit mid dle son Jeffrey and his wife, Erin. It was quite an adventure, as I had not been farther away

Rick Wheeler ’67 and his daughter, Ginny, at her wedding.

Dick Jaskiel ’67 and his granddaughter, Eleanor Ennis.

John Stevenson ’67 (r.) in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, visiting his son, Jeffrey, and daughterin-law, Erin.

Formates from 1967 (l.to r.) Bob Ewell, Dave Rea, and John Branson met at Makris Lobster & Steak House in Concord.

FORMNOTES

from home than Maine in more than two years. I am using a cane in deference to a dete riorating hip, which will be replaced in Octo ber. Astonishing to note that, 59 years ago this month, we all were Third Formers at SPS.”

Dick Jaskiel writes: “Our family had a wonderful reunion in Maui, replete with per fect beach weather, great food, and many rounds of card games. Granddaughter Elea nor Ennis took to the water very well, splash ing and kicking in the pool and even a bit in the ocean. I managed to spot a turtle to swim with briefly at Makena Surf beach. We both moved very slowly. Still enjoying memories of our Anniversary Weekend.”

Neil Stevens shares: “After doing some ex tensive traveling in the après-SPS years, I stayed put for 40 years of IT work. This most ly consisted of supporting the nationwide computer network of a healthcare company in various ways, including network design. The job was often extremely exciting because of the massive nature of the technological changes that were happening in a stunningly high percentage of those years. Four years ago, I retired. In a few days, I’m off with my twin brother and his family to see Madrid and Seville, and thence onward to the Picos of northern Spain. The plan is to do a good

deal of hiking, but not attempt to scale any crag that’s too close to the sun. My first time out of the U.S. in more than four decades.”

1968/55th

Walker Wainwright soled59@aol.com

Jim Colby (aka “Cleats”) shares: “On an un eventful August day in NYC, Messrs. Shortall, Robinson, and Colby gathered for a midday lunch at Maggies. We ate what we could and did what we could to enliven an otherwise somnolent city. Also, just after the Fourth of July, while on a family vacation in southern Maine, I ventured on a long overdue trek to visit Marcia and Bill Matthews ’61 at their family residence in Kennebunkport. As it has been more than 10 years since we last had the opportunity to speak at any length, it was reas suring to dive into some of the shared past memories of life and events at a place we both care for. Marcia, Bill, and I walked the path to the oceanside, where they often kayak with children and grandkids. I am still amazed at the memories both still have for the boys and events highlighting the Form of ’68.”

Bill Hoehn writes from Idaho, where he spent the end of the summer, having just re turned from Slovenia, Croatia, and Alsace, that “2022 has been a landmark year. My son got married to his longtime partner; our oldest grandson turned 18 and is applying to colleges; and in December, Susan and I will celebrate our 50th Anniversary. Then, in the spring, we hope to attend our 55th reunion. I’m still working most of the time, helping transition our business to the fourth generation.”

1969

Eliot Larson ewlarson@comcast.net

Bob Rettew relays several alumni-related updates from this summer, despite laying low

for COVID-19 and continuing to give ground slowly to Parkinson’s Disease. “After catching up with Craig McNamara by email and phone in May, I read his evocative mem oir, Because Our Fathers Lied. On June 10, friend and neighbor Frank Kenison ’70 and I donned dark suits and well-polished shoes to attend a memorial service for Cliff Gilles pie in the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul and a reception hosted by his family in the space we knew as Hargate (since renovated and re named Friedman Community Center). On June 12, Annie and I were pleased to host Tom Iglehart’s daughter, Jaime ’01, for lunch and great conversation. In June, a fam ily wedding took us to the Pacific Northwest. Before heading to Olympia, Annie and I stopped in Seattle and were joined by Zonnie and Lex Breckinridge ’70 for a delightful day on Bainbridge Island and a leisurely walk around the Bloedel Reserve. The wedding and reception in Olympia was for the daughter of my sister, Robin ’73. The joyous occasion brought all five of the immediate Rettew family together under one roof for the first time in more than four years. Home again, we hosted Laraine and Don Lippincott ’70 for dinner and conversation in the backyard gazebo. In August, we joined Daphne and John Bronson for lunch and a swim at their charming home in Orford, N.H. I hope all of you are well.”

Stephen Post writes: “Two kids are doing well, Andrew in Manhattan and Emma in L.A. I’ve been teaching medical humanities and ethics over these past 35 years at med schools (Chicago, Case, Stony Brook). I have a book out with Johns Hopkins University Press (May 2022) entitled, Dignity for Deeply Forgetful People: How Caregivers Can Meet the Challenges of Alzheimer’s Disease. I was grateful to everyone who endorsed it, including

Bob Rettew ’69 at a recent wedding reception with his wife, Annie, and their children, Katie, Elizabeth, and John.

Peter Flynn ’69 (l.) and Charlie Hickox ’69 at the wedding of Pete’s son last October.

Bill Hoehn ’68 at his son’s wedding.

Formmates from 1968 Tom Shortall, Jim Robinson, and Jim Colby gathered for lunch at Maggie’s in NYC (and shared this photo as a joke).

Charlie Scribner and the Dalai Lama.”

Terry Hunt reports: “I continue to be happily married and happily retired from a 40-year clinical psychology practice and now live six months in Rhode Island and six months in Cambridge, Mass. I am a passion ate gardener and weeder in summer and still skiing the bumps out West in winter. We are finally getting our youngest son (30) married this fall but have yet to have even a hint of a grandchild in the mix. Gale and I maintain our health with at least three times a week sessions at power yoga, biking, tennis, and golf. We continue to dismay at the divisive and climate-denying political climate we live in and have not just once recalled to my chil dren that Woodstock ’69 (of which 16 of our class attended) gave me so much hope for a better and more loving world, and here we are anyway.”

Rob Deford shares: “With the 43rd vintage just commencing at Boordy Vineyards, I am reminded of the passage of time and the im portance of appreciating the moment. One recent moment involved a visit with wine makers of several Bordeaux chateaux with my wife, Julie. The French I learned in four years of M. Jacques’s class was stress tested; it ap pears that my accent was good enough to elic it an enthusiastic torrent in response, to which I reacted with smiles and nods. Alas, a bit rusty. Music remains a sustaining, grounding force. I’m still playing the finger-style guitar that began with ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Alice’s Restau rant’ as a senior at Brewster, and which has now morphed into jazz standards and doowop with a local band. Other interests include land preservation, fly fishing, foraging for mushrooms, and enjoying good wine and food. On the family front, my wife, three kids, and six-year-old granddaughter enrich my life immeasurably. I invite all who are passing through Maryland to stop by for a glass of wine, a meal, or an overnight.”

1971

Dennis Dixon

dennis.c.dixon@gmail.com

To commemorate the centennial of Jack Ker ouac’s birth, Spencer Rumsey gave a talk about the celebrated author’s unique connec tion to Northport, Long Island, at the North port Historical Society. Kerouac and his mom lived there, off and on, from 1958 to 1964. Rumsey, a longtime Northport resi dent, has written about Kerouac, and inter

viewed Allen Ginsberg, his ‘Beat Generation’ poet compatriot, as well as Sterling Lord, Kerouac’s agent. Spencer gave the same talk in October at the Frick Lecture Series at the Nassau County Museum of Art.

1972

Graeme Boone boone.44@osu.edu

Chip Haggerty haggerty@pshift.com

The extraordinary joy and poignancy of our 50th reunion in June has led to increased communication and reconnection among many ’72 formmates. It is such a pleasure for us, as your new form directors, to be part of this moment. Long may it last.

Chip Haggerty reports: “Vacationing with the whole wonderful family (three grand children) on Cape Cod right now, baffled by how this all came to be. I just wrote my ‘art narrative mission statement’ for an upcom ing group show in Springs, N.Y. One of my art education highlights, of course, was learning how to pen and ink crosshatch from Abbé drawing the obligatory steer skull/ sneaker still life in Hargate studio by the sluice. Otherwise, loving collaborating with Graeme Boone on reimagining form direc torship for the middle of the first half of the 21st century.”

Cindi Mann Lermond writes: “A shoutout to everyone who attended the 50th. I can’t be lieve it has been that long! I am thinking we are probably the best looking 50th reunion group ever. On July 16, I finally retired, think ing that things would slow down a little, only to discover that I haven’t slowed down at all. My husband, Larry, and I decided to take advantage of the seller’s market and sold our investment property (where we were residing)

in New Durham, N.H. Expecting that (due to the same market) we would continue to strug gle in finding our new home (we have been searching and bidding on properties since the beginning of 2021), we planned a threemonth trip in our new 47-foot RV complete with two dogs and a cat. We start Oct. 15 and head down the East Coast to end up in Ocala, Fla., in mid-January. Stops include Delaware Water Gap, Williamsburg, Blue Ridge Park way, Smokies, Gatlinburg, Orlando, Palm Beach, and other buckets-list locations. I had to promise friends and family that we would keep in touch, so I am posting our travels on Facebook if you want to follow along. However, little did we know that the great real estate god would decide we had suffered long enough and allowed us to purchase a beautiful log home on four acres in Grafton, N.H. So, the plan now is to head out on our trip then come back to New Hampshire this winter to settle into the new place. Then, next summer we will head out to California.”

From John Tait: “My wife, Katherine, and I just visited ‘Habitat,’ one of John Chris tensen’s outdoor sculpture installations in Happy Valley, Ore. There are five sculptures placed on benches at intervals along a trail, reflecting on the smaller plants and animals that live in the Northwest woods. Maybe SPS needs a set of these on the trail around Lower School Pond?”

Bayard Clarkson writes: “I went tuna fish ing the other day with Nick Parker, whom I haven’t seen in about 45 years. We had a great time, even though we never saw any tuna. It was beautiful out on the water, and we saw a pilot whale and many shearwaters skimming over the waves. I also had dinner with old friend Jamie Byrne a couple weeks ago. We spoke about France, old friends and teachers,

John Tait ’72 visits formmate John Christensen’s outdoor sculpture installations in Happy Valley, Oregon.

Formmates from 1972 Ian Laird, Willie McDonald, Chip Haggerty, and Graeme Boone at their 50th reunion in June.

and books. Jamie is always recommending books for me to read, and he told me that he had recently been reading T.E. Lawrence. I was reminded that when I first saw the movie Lawrence of Arabia, I was with Jamie in Paris during our Fifth Form year in France with School Boys Abroad.”

David Holt published some of his thoughts about the reunion experience in the Canadian magazine Silver: The Art of Living Well, for which he is editor (silvermagazine. ca/time-travel-part-ii-take-a-sad-song-andmake-it-better/).

1973/50th Alden Stevens ahs472@optonline.net

1975

Dorien Nunez omniresearch@aol.com

I have a new role as a senior fellow at Inten tional Endowments Network, a consortium of 200 university endowments managing more than $117 billion focused on ESG in vesting issues and inclusion of diverse and emerging asset managers. My health im proves, and I’m happy to report that my youngest daughter recently announced her engagement. By the time you read this, I will

have completed my East Coast fall tour with a campus visit planned for the end of Octo ber. You will know if I reached out to you from the road!

Chip Clothier reports that all is well in his family and he deeply appreciated those who sent condolences for the passing of his father (Isaac H. Clothier IV ’50) last summer. He was recently elected president of the alumni board of Connecticut College and to the Connecticut College board of trustees. He was sorry to miss Anniversary last June, but he was attending a Connecticut College event that weekend. He did enjoy the pic tures and says “Everyone looked great!”

Cari and Carl Lovejoy welcomed two more grandchildren to the family. That makes six. Annabelle Hudson Lovejoy (daughter of Nick and Meg) arrived in June and Brooks Nickerson Lovejoy (son of Matt and Kendal) in August.

1976

Tony Bullock tony.bullock@ogilvygr.com

Alison Zetterquist zettera.az@gmail.com

Caryn Cross Hawk shares: “In August, my husband Shawn and I celebrated our 35th

wedding anniversary with a trip to Europe. We spent four days in Rome and took a Med iterranean cruise with port stops in Italy (Florence and Naples), Spain (Barcelona and Majorca) and France (Cannes and Corsi ca). We visited many iconic sites, including the Colosseum, Pompeii, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and, of course, Vatican City.”

For many years now,  Kim Bancroft has been living in a cabin in a forest three hours north of San Francisco, keeping busy with writing and editing jobs, along with wonder ful labor in her garden, on trails around her, and other family and community projects. Every year, she gets to see Marny Kittredge and her husband on their way north or south from the Seattle area to southern California. Following a decade of work, her book Writ ing Themselves into History: Emily and Matil da Bancroft in Letters and Journals, will be published by Heyday Books in November. She’s hoping everyone has kept as safe and sane as possible in these crazy times.

1978/45th

Nora Tracy Phillips noratphil@aol.com

Jon Sweet jsweet1000@gmail.com

Els Collins finds herself the chair of produc tion and stage management at USC’s School of Dramatic Arts. She pauses there at the apex of her career before strapping on her skis for one last good run before heading into the lodge for cocoa in front of a warm fire.

From KT McCammond: “My new duo Cov er Stories (with Dave Ernst) has been gaining momentum around coastal Maine this year. This summer, we enjoyed a Tuesday night residency at the Nonantum Resort in Kenne bunkport. In early September, we played out doors in Perkins Cove, downtown Ogunquit,

Rena Zurn and Spencer Fulweiler ’76 with Tiffany and Jon Sweet ’78, P ’20, ’21 at the SPS event on Mount Desert Island.

Annie Rettew, former SPS staff member, with her sister-in-law, Robin Rettew ’73.

Caryn Cross Hawk ’76, P’09 (r.) and Shawn Hawk in front of St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome.

Trustee Tim Steinert ’78, daughter Natasha, son Luca ’21, and wife Lixia in Ireland.

Richie Perkins ‘80, Laura Bickford ‘80, and Peter Pennoyer ’75 celebrating Laura’s engagement.

and at The Rabbit Hole in Kennebunk, where in walked Charlie Clement ’79, and Kevin Foley. All unplanned.”

Tim Steinert reports: “My wife, Lixia, and daughter, Natasha (Deerfield ’23), traveled to Limerick, Ireland, this summer to watch our son, Luca Steinert ’21, represent Hong Kong at the U21 world lacrosse tournament. Hong Kong finished a respectable second in the sec ond bracket, beating Sweden, Poland, Korea, Netherlands, and Uganda in regular play.”

Anne Bartol Butterfield writes: “A spontaneous eruption of Paulies in late August at the home of Skiddy von Stade ’80 in Prouts Neck, Maine, happened upon the occasion of a pig-roast birthday party and mini bluegrass festival. Present were Brett Lewis ’77 and wife Cappy von Stade ’76, me, Skiddy, Cyn thia White Day ’85, Alec Timpson ’79 and David Scully ’79.”

Andy Schlosser aeschlosser83@gmail.com

1979Form Scribe: Lili Cassels Brown ecb@cassels-brown.at

Kimball Halsey shares: “After more than two years of no travel, I have been making up for

lost time with trips to Bend, Ore., Hawaii, Palm Springs, Peru, and France. A couple of highlights include a four-day hike along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu and a visit to the Aiguille du Midi in France. There, my wife, Cynthia, and I stepped into a glass box and looked down 3,000 feet to Chamonix in the valley below. Mont Blanc and the Bossons Glacier are in the background. I’ll probably take a break from travel for a few months, but I’m already planning my next adventure (probably to Costa Rica) sometime in early 2023.”

Miranda Cox writes: “I went to Naples, Fla., in August for the ordination into the priesthood of Amy Matthews Feins. Famili ar as I am with the words of the Holy Eucha rist in the Book of Common Prayer, I found it very moving to hear them in Amy’s voice on her first day celebrating communion.”

From George Brooke: “Since the onset of COVID, my significant other, Karen, and I have pursued exercise, fresh air, and sun shine in the form of hikes and nature walks. We’ve been to Yellowstone, the Marin Head lands, Yosemite, the Grand Tetons/Jackson Hole, the Badlands, Big Horn National Rec reation area, Mt. Mitchell and the Blue Ridge Mountains near Ashville, and dozens of hikes closer to home in Pennsylvania in nature preserves as well as on or near the Appala

chian Trail. Recent highlights included the mighty five national parks of Utah and a cou ple of the big treks in and around the Ausable Club in the High Peaks area of the Adiron dacks. These experiences have reinforced the lessons I learned as a kid and surfaced mem ories from SPS — to always respect nature, leave no trace, and appreciate the simple blessings of health and friendship.”

1980

John Maeck mwfarmcsa@gmail.com

From Ian MacColl : “A group centering  around former faculty member Mike Burns has been gathering on Zoom almost every week since April 2020. The group consists of Valerie Pierce, Janet McAlpin ’81, Sara Holbrook Guggenheim, Mike, Jamie Neil son ’79, Geoffrey Underwood, John Wills Martin, and me. Guests have included Ain lay Samuels Dixon, Will Schwalbe, John Bankson ’81, Ned Doubleday ’81, Kristin Orr, and Andy Schlosser ’79. Please reach out to one of us if you would like to come visit one week. After meeting virtually for over two years, we decided to gather live last October on Cape Cod and most recently

(L. to r.) Lauren MacColl Maass, Geoffrey Underwood ’80, Sara Holbrook Guggenheim ’80, Valerie Pierce ’80, Mike Burns (ret. faculty), Janet McAlpin ’81, Val’s husband Michael Stortz, and Ian MacColl.

(L. to r.) front: Cynthia White Day ’85 and Alec Timpson ’79; back: Brett Lewis ’77, Cappy von Stade ’76, Ann Bartol Butterfield ’78, and Skiddy von Stade ’80.

KT McCammond ’78 says, “Look, Ma, I made the poster.”

Kimball Halsey ’79 (r.) and wife Cynthia Tschampl at the Aiguille du Midi in France, looking down 3,000 feet to Chamonix.

(L. to r.) Valerie Pierce ’80, Janet McAlpin ’81, Sara Holbrook Guggenheim ’80, Mike Burns (ret. faculty), Jamie Neilson ’79, Geoffrey Underwood ’80, Stephanie Neilson, and Ian MacColl ’80.

Amy Matthews Feins ’79 and formmate Miranda Cox at Amy’s ordination in Naples, Florida.

WINDOW INTO THE PAST

Curator Karl Kusserow ’81 harnesses the power of art.

IAN ALDRICH

n October 2018, a new traveling exhibit opened at Princeton University that told the story of America’s evolving relationship with the natural world.

Among other artifacts, “Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment” showcased more than 120 sculptures, paintings, photo graphs, and videos, and its narrative spanned a range of voices and perspectives, from early colonists to Native Americans to late 20th century environmental activists.

Lauded for its ambition, the show’s exacting details were the product of more than 10 years of work, much of it at the hands of co-curator Karl Kusserow ’81, Princeton Art Museum’s John Wilmerding Curator of American Art. For the 59-year-old art historian, the exhib it — which would go on to have temporary

residencies at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas — also served to subtly showcase Kusserow’s own approach to his field.

“Art and art history are card-carrying members of the humanities and, as the name implies, it’s very oriented toward the human perception of things,” says Kusserow, who is also associate faculty at Princeton’s High Meadows Environ mental Institute and a lecturer in the Depart ment of Art and Archaeology. “Most of my work has been about trying to unsettle that a little bit; to try to see things from other per spectives, or at least pay credence to the reality of the existence of all kinds of other types of life and other priorities that we haven’t been very good about considering.”

R aised in Vermont, Kusserow arrived at St. Paul’s School as a Third Former in the fall of 1977, still very much living in the shadow of his father’s unexpected death just two years before. For a time, Kusserow thought he might follow his late father into medicine and become a doctor, but a class called Origins of the West piqued his interest in culture and history. Then, a nearly yearlong trip around the world following his graduation from SPS captured it even more. Kusserow studied art history at Wesleyan and earned his Ph.D. in the field from Yale. In 2006, he landed at Princeton, where he worked closely with John Wilmerding ’56, a pioneering curator and professor of art.

“Objects, even more than text, speak to you in a very immediate way,” Kusserow says. “An object is right there, right in front of you, and you can get an important window into the past by virtue of the objects that have survived it.”

Over the last decade-and-a-half, Kusserow’s work has waded into the dynamics of Amer ican power while also drawing on his own deep interests in the human impact on the environment and climate change. His exhibi tions have included the 2013 show “Picturing Power: Portraiture and its Uses in the New York Chamber of Commerce,” and he’s edited several publications, perhaps most notably last year’s Picture Ecology: Art and Ecotourism in Planetary Perspective

To believe, however, that Kusserow’s work is just about the past misses the point of what he does or what is possible in his field. There’s a moral and directional point behind his books and exhibits. Only by fleshing out a more complete history, he argues, can we truly find a stable path to the future.

“Art has the power to help us sort through really important issues and concerns,” says Kusserow, who is working on a new traveling exhibit, “Object Lessons in American Art,” as well as a new book of his lectures. Both will debut in early 2023. “What I’m trying to do is not just history as history, but as a means for understanding where we currently are and how we can use that understanding to better position ourselves going forward.”

COURTESY KARL KUSSEROW ’81

Karl Kusserow ’81 (r.) with John Wilmerding ’56.

this summer in California. Over a long week end in June, great fun was had by all at Hardly Strictly Sixty, a camping and music bash for my birthday in West Marin. The lively celebra tion was followed by a quieter one at Valerie’s house in Glen Ellen in commemoration of our beloved Nancy Burns, who died in April.

“I am happy to report that I am getting married,” Laura Bickford shares. “My fiancé, Stephen Graham, and I had an engagement party on Mishaum Point, Mass., in August.”

Murchie, Tony Kieffer, and I went to the Red Hot Chili Peppers at Fenway in September and guess who we saw afterward but the OG surf punk, Dr. Carol Moheban  See photographic proof, classmates.”

1986

Harold Bost hbost2@me.com Helen Fairman hfairman@comcast.net

gathering. Thus, the continuation of the “Why Wait” series of parties. Annie Hager gener ously hosted our first one in New Hampshire in September and it was fantastic. More are being planned. Please be in touch if you would like help organizing one in your area. And if you are reading this note and have not been receiving the Form of 1987 emails I have been sending out, please be in touch.

Eric Chehab writes: “Great to see so many at the reunion and thanks to SPS for hosting.”

1983/40th Icy Frantz

icy@icyfrantz.com

Hanako Yamaguchi writes: “Greetings from New York City. I’m enjoying my life as an in dependent producer, curator, and adviser in the world of the performing arts. The highlight of my summer was a fantastic fun-filled weekend in Maine that included a meaningful catchup with San Francisco-based Jessica Lutes and her family. I also was lucky to see Hilary Graham a lot this year because work took me to Boston, where she and her family live.”

John Pleasants reports: “Everyone is growing up … well, maybe not me, just get ting older. Hope everyone had a wonderful summer.”

Tod Brainard shares: “Jos Nicholas, Stew

Jill Forney is “still living in Cambridge; four out of five children have graduated from college; the last is starting high school next week; she is still a practicing psychotherapist. Continuing is a dedication to West African drumming and dance. New is a small business called Urban Pharm (urban-pharm.com), which launched its first product (shrubs, or drinking vinegars) in May 2022. Urban Pharm is a mid-COVID, winter-conceived baby, which aims to bring deliciousness and a little some thing good for you into the every day.”

1987

Melanie MacMillan melanieshawmacmillan@gmail.com

It was great to see so many of you on campus in June. We all have so much fun together that five years is too long to wait for another

Greg Fowlkes reports: “Desperately trying to stave off the end of summer by going over to sail in two regattas in the south of France. Loved seeing everyone at the 35th and row ing for the first time in 35 years was way more difficult than I anticipated.”

Katie Blenkinsop Hill says she is “starting my 10th year teaching at The Williston Northampton School, where my husband, Bob Hill, is the head of school. I teach both math and Latin here, as well as serving as the ‘Mrs. Clark’ of this school. Just had Laura Schleussner Forne stay with us as she dropped off her son, Xavier, for ninth grade (they live in Berlin).”

Bill Kessler shares: “Great to see so many friends at the 35th. It was super special

Hanako Yamaguchi ’83 caught up with form mate Jessica Lutes.

Sue Bershtein ’87 and John Musto ’87 at Anniversary Weekend.

The children of John Pleasants ’83.

Form of 1983 Red Hot Chili Peppers fans at Fenway Park included l. to r., back: Tony Kieffer, Carol Moheban, Jos Nicholas, Stewart Murchie and front: Tod Brainard.

Formmates from 1987 Tim Clark, Melanie Shaw MacMillan, and Eric Chehab during Anniversary Weekend.

Minot Maser, Melanie Shaw MacMillan, Annie Hager, LaMar Bunts, and Bethany Tarbell at a gathering for 1987 formmates in New Hampshire.

to hang with the form at Coach Gillespie’s celebration, stand on the Jesus Rock with formmates, row down the pond, and hang at T-Bones in Concord.”

L ast year, Lexy Funk decided to leave the fashion and design company she co-found ed and ran for over 25 years, Brooklyn Industries. After being a bit lost in the wilderness, she decided to get a Ph.D. in philosophy at The European Graduate School and is completing her first year. Liv ing between Greenville, N.Y., and Istanbul, Turkey. She invites formmates to please come visit.

Mona Gibson shares: “Our news here in Steamboat Springs is that we are ranchers. Cue the Green Acres theme song. We have a small grass-fed and grass-finished Akaushi Wagyu beef operation on our ranch. There’s been a bit of a learning curve, but it’s been fun. We are using rotational grazing and do not use any hormones or antibiotics. Our goal is to use the most sustainable and best practices. We are selling our beef in quarter and half shares. If anyone is interested, we ship all over the country. Steamboat Springs has a terrific and supportive Community Ag riculture Alliance, and we are selling our beef

through them and privately. We still barely know what we are doing, but we have learned so much and it’s been very interesting.”

1988/35th

Caroline La Voie carolinelavoie@me.com

1989

Jessica Mellon jessicarmellon@gmail.com

From Brian Berlandi: “The Berlandi family has moved on to the campus of the Trinity Pawling School in Pawling, N.Y., where my wife, Katie, works and my son, John, 13, is in eighth grade. My daughter, Amelia, 21, is now a senior at UVM and her sister, Eloise, 19, is a sophomore at BC.”

Catherine Burnett reports: “Taking up new hobbies in my fifties — would love rec ommendations of favorite windy spots in farflung locales.”

1991

Jose Leos

joseleos@gmail.com

A few of us attended Anniversary Weekend this past June to celebrate our 30th+1 reunion.  It was nice to spend quality time with Geno

Sung, Stephan Solzhenitsyn, Marcy Chong, Tamsen Williams, Alex Eberts, and Clay Wang. See photos from the weekend at link. sps91.org/anniversary2022.

Marcy Chong writes: “The big news is that we are all turning 50. Make a celebration plan and fill in the details on this google doc at link.sps91.org/50thbirthdays, so we can have a yearlong party. I’m looking forward to invi tations to your parties.”

In May, John Jordan kicked off the 50th birthday parties by hosting a cowboy-themed celebration at the Jordan Winery in Healds burg, Calif.  Dee Scates and Jose Leos grabbed their cowboy boots and hats and moseyed on over to celebrate with John.

Tamsen Williams reports: “Had a local show this fall (link.sps91.org/dyinggaulproject).  My work’s mixed in with works from the Fairfield University collection. It’s a riff on classical tropes and may or may not involve balloons.”

Brett Forrest, who is a WSJ journalist cov ering Russia and Ukraine, writes, “If any of you make it to D.C., I’d love to host on my roof. Not a bad view of the Washington Mon ument. Cold beers in the fridge.”

Toby True says that “all is good in Philly. If anyone is ever in town, track me down, love to meet up.”

Jonathan Meeks writes: “Proudly attended the graduation of Jon ’22, who dropped himself off with two fellow SPSers to Arizona State. Had a summer of SPS with formmate sight ings of Rosie Stovell, Dave Fleischner, Will Minton, Steve Hermsdorf, and Dee Scates. Good times, as well, with Amachie Ackah ’90, Pete Stovell ’89, John Pleasants ’83, and Bill Veghte ’85 among other sightings. The SPS force is still strong.”

Formmates from 1987, (l. to r.) Katharine Birdsall, Melanie Shaw MacMillan, and Olivia Douglas.

Marcy Chong ’91 (l.) and Kirsten Ruemenapp ’91 made it to the top of Mount Monadnock.

Catherine Burnett ’89 enjoying a new hobby.

Dirk Tenzer ’89 and Brian Berlandi ’89 at the Connecticut College vs. Amherst lacrosse game.

Formmates from 1991 Jose Leos, Dee Scates, and John Jordan at a cowboy-themed birthday.

William Lynch ’01, Kevin Saleeby ’89, Dan Molnar ’89, Matt Mallgrave ’89, Tom Noe ’89, Gretchen Kelly Giumarro ’89, Jessica Rogers Mellon ’89, Chris “Kiff” Gallagher ’87, and Pete Stovell ’89 helped Dennis Lynch ’89 (second from l.) celebrate his 50th birthday.

Formmates from 1991 (l. to r.) Rob Seamans, Tamsen Williams, and Marcy Chong attended an art show in NYC.

Members of the Form of 1987 during Anniversary Weekend.

Meredith Meeks, Jon Meeks, Jr. ’22, Trustee Jon Meeks ’91, and Anson Meeks at SPS Graduation Weekend 2022.

1993/30th Phoebe Lindsay pde.lindsay@gmail.com

Adrian Smith and his wife, Sweta, visited SPS in August. Adrian graciously donated a stone pelican carving to the School. During their campus tour, they stopped for a photo with the granite lizard that Adrian had carved as a student. More of Adrian’s carv ings can be found at www.stonesmith.org.

1996

Caitlin Riley criley2k@gmail.com

Jenna Millman Franks ’97 and I, who hadn’t seen each other since our glory days at SPS, reconnected in 2022 to produce two 90-min ute videos (worldsciencefestival.com) for the World Science Festival, a nonprofit co-found ed by physicist, author, and Columbia profes sor Brian Greene. The first video delves into the mind-bending world of psychedelics, and the second program explores something sim ilarly trippy — lucid dreaming.

Shamus Khan writes: “I spent most of the summer in Paris as a visiting professor at Sci ences-Po. While in Paris, I ran into Caitlin Riley. We had a nice stroll through the city

and a lovely meal together. Earlier in the year, Edgar Padilla ’95, Marlon Key ’95, and Maki (former faculty) and Brian Hoashi visited me in the suburbs. In 2021, after 13 years teaching at Columbia, I moved to Princeton University, where I teach in sociology, American studies, and gender and sexuality studies.”

Alex Leigh reports: “Just revisited our glo ry days during drop off for our daughter, Be atrix Brown ’26, who was ‘shanked’ as Cait lin Durham put it, and will be living in Kitt III. She joins Addie Hayne ’26, daughter of Jess Martin Hayne, and we mothers are be yond thrilled. Prior to the drop-off, our fam ily spent some glorious days in the Adiron dacks among the whispering balsams with KT Taylor ’93 and her husband, Aitor. If you are ever in the New Orleans area, please reach out.”

Jess Martin Hayne shares: “Alex Leigh and I had so much fun dropping off our girls at SPS. Prior to that, Amanda Schreyer and I enjoyed our annual day at the beach in Ava lon, N.J. Amanda and her daughter also got to visit with my family, including my father, David Martin ’65, my sister, Charlotte Smith ’93, and my brother-in-law, Mark Smith ’92.”

1997

Earl austen_earl@yahoo.com

Jamie Funk

james.t.funk@gmail.com

Last fall, I walked across England with my dear friends David Walton and Oliver Haslegrave. We followed in the footsteps of a leg endary English walker, Alfred Wainwright, on his eponymous route, The Wainwright CoastTo-Coast. The journey started on the west coast, where we picked up a stone each in the Irish Sea, then carried it 192 miles east from the Lake District to the Yorkshire Dales, where we tossed said stones in the North Sea. The weather was spectacular, the lager was flowing, and as a testament to the fat content of the food over there, we walked about seven hours and 20 miles a day, and somehow all gained weight on the trip.”

An update from Susie Clark: “This past June, I traveled back to SPS for the first time since graduating. Admittedly, it was a little overwhelming, but even with that, it was amazing and wonderful. I thought I was al ready grateful for being able to experience SPS before, but going back to campus made me realize the enormity of appreciation and grati tude I have for the place. I’m in Rochester,

Austen

Adrian Smith ’93 (r.) and wife, Sweta, with the granite lizard Adrian carved at SPS as a student.

Friends from 1996 (l. to r.) Shaan Mehta, Sarah Driscoll Kelly, and Jeff Lynn rallied in London for a mini-Anniversary.

Nick Cohen ’96, Devie Deland Perry ’96, and Trustee Ben Loehnen ’96 chilled poolside this summer at Devie’s home in Roxbury, Connecticut.

David Martin ’65, Addie Hayne ’26, Jess Martin Hayne ’96, Amanda Schreyer ’96, Charlotte Smith ’93, and Mark Smith ’92 at the Jersey shore.

Caitlin Riley ’96 and Shamus Khan ’96 met up at a bistro in Paris in June.

Katherine “KT” Taylor ’93 (r.) with Beatrix Brown ’26, daughter of Alex Leigh ’96, during a scenic hike in the Adirondacks.

Minn., and have been working at the Mayo Clinic for 14.5 years in a handful of depart ments and areas (hospital/clinical and re search). Since September 2019, I’ve been working for an oncologist, Dr. Steven Robin son, doing research into oncolytic virotherapy to find better, more effective treatments spe cifically for treating sarcomas (his specialty) and I absolutely love it. If anyone ever travels to Minnesota (even through the Twin Cities), please reach out and let me know. I’d love to connect/reconnect with other Paulies.”

C harlotte McWilliams shares: “It was wonderful seeing so many of my formmates in Millville in June. Singing in the Chapel, rowing on the pond, and raising a glass with people I hadn’t seen in 20 years. The Austin ’90s contingent (Carol Lee ’96, Caitlin Ri ley ’96) and I have gotten together a couple times and would love to see any Paulies who come through town. I’m working at an MLOps startup; my four kids are growing like weeds; and I’m enjoying this chapter of carpooling, middle school drama, and not dealing with diapers.”

From Michael Boyle: “Ever gone from devastatingly depressed to living an awesome

life? I have. SPS carried dark days for me; am now moving forward. I am sorry I missed you all at reunion. Like many of you, I am both much the same and a totally new person, so I look forward to the next opportunity to meet up and get to know you. During COVID, I pivoted my in-person psychotherapy prac tice to an online model, where I coach C-suite execs for optimal performance, while healing the stuff underneath that prevents us all from experiencing the peace, love, trust, connection, and joy we really are seeking. This online pivot enabled me to move my family to the beach in Southern Mexico — Huatulco, Oaxaca. My wife is Mexi can-American, and we long wanted to teach the kids about this aspect of their culture, enable them to be fluent in Spanish, and im merse ourselves in a life full of possibilities. It’s been a wild adventure getting grounded in a whole new country and life. If you want to get away for some great surfing, snorkel ing, food, music, laughter and love, come vis it (mike@alltogether.academy).”

1998/25th

1999

Cybil Roehrenbeck cybil.roehrenbeck@gmail.com

Charlotte Will shares: “I recently celebrated a decade of working at Google, followed by the birth of my third child, Henry. Life is about to get extra busy with the return to work alongside the return to the office and business travel, all while raising three young boys (6, 3, and 7 months). We now live in Mill Valley, Calif., where we sleep to the sound of coyotes and watch quail run through our front yard.”

Will Dick wcdick@gmail.com

From John Imbriglia : “Greetings from Darien, Conn. Our boys are growing up fast. Jack is eight and Charlie is five. We are excit ed to show them SPS soon to plant the seed. On the professional front, I recently left iCapital, the financial technology company I helped start almost 10 years ago, and joined a small growth equity firm called Platform Capital. Last spring, I was also lucky enough to catch a great ski day with Brian Chen at A-Basin in Colorado, and we had a blast. We, also, had a great summer trip with my sister, Sara Leone ’94, and her three girls on the Cape. We see Pete Pachios and Suzette and Werner Kratovil ’00 often.”

David Walton ’97, Oliver Haslegrave ’97, and Austin Earl ‘97 walked across England together.

Michael Boyle ’97 with wife Tania, sons Rudi (12) and Finn (10), and daughter Sofia (4).

The Austin 1990s contingent: Charlotte McWil liams ’97, Carol Lee ’96, and Caitlin Riley ’96.

Charlotte Will ’99 announced the birth of her son, Henry Amory McGrath Will.

John Imbriglia ’99 and Brian Chen ’99 skiing together at A-Basin in Colorado.

Cousins: The children of John Imbriglia ’99 and Sara Leone ’94 on a family trip to Cape Cod.

2000

Marc Aronson marcaronson43@yahoo.com

Charles Lee writes: “Masks are still required in Korea, but the Lee family had a great sum mer traveling around the country. We also had our third child, Chewy, the maltipoo.”

2002

Tristan Besse tristan.besse@gmail.com

Alexa Melkonian-MacIver shares: “A lot has changed in the last year for the Melko nian-MacIver Clan. In March, my husband Kenneth and I welcomed our second son, Finlay Roderick Iain MacIver. Big brother Archie has really taken to his new role, and Fin is an amazing baby. We feel blessed to have those two little men in our lives. Prior to the addition of our newest family member, we bought a 14-acre farm in Chichester, N.H., and have been accumulating animals. Our main goal is to responsibly produce high-quality meat for our family and com munity. Cnoc Àrd Farm (High Hill Farm in

my husband’s native Scots Gaelic) is a labor of love and a dream come true. We have been working extremely hard for the last year and are proud to say we now have more than 200 animals, including cows, pigs, turkeys, meat chickens, laying hens, and Guinea hens. We are hoping to add sheep.”

Virginia Russell started her new job as di rector of strategic research with Fidelity In vestments this summer, which allowed her to move back home to North Carolina after 14 years in Dallas. She got to hang out with Catharine Morgan on her first business trip up to headquarters in Boston and hopes to see many more Boston-based Paulies on those trips in the future.

Archaea Energy (NYSE: LFG) named Bri an McCarthy as its CFO in August 2022. Bri an is a co-founder of LFG. He and his team are transforming how the waste management industry processes landfill emissions into re newable natural gas. While at SPS, Brian dumped much of his trash in the Foster House dorm room of Gavin Johnstone-

Butcher and Jeff Thompson. Gavin and Jeff are thrilled that Brian is finally taking trash seriously. Brian, Gavin, and Jeff send their best to the Form.

Ashley and Will Dunn welcomed Isla Coo per Dunn into the world on Feb. 25, 2022. Will writes: “It was a special treat to celebrate our 20th reunion in Millville with Isla and in troduce her to our friends from SPS.”

2003/20th

Melody Lam melody.lam@gmail.com

2005

Lindsay Kryzak sancti.pauli@gmail.com

David Wagner shares: “My wife, Patricia, and I (and our 4-year-old son, Jacob) wel comed our second child, Emma, who just turned one. We’re enjoying living in Cam bridge, Mass. It’s been a treat to have my par ents and both of my siblings (and fellow Pau lies) Erik Wagner ’03 and Stephanie Wagner ’09 living in the area for frequent meals and family gatherings.”

2007

Mary Gamber mary.gamber@gmail.com

In May, Kat Greenbaum married her part ner of five years, Morgan Rogers, at Kat’s par ents’ house in Aiken, S.C. She writes: “We had gorgeous weather with mercifully little rain. The weekend was filled with swimming, watching polo, and enjoying the charm of Aiken, where my very New England parents have recently relocated. We were very lucky to be joined by SPS friends from across the globe, including Helen Burdett, who arrived from Geneva, Phoebe Stockman, Nolan Jennings, Carrie Read, Syrie Bianco ’09, and Brian Burton ’09. Morgan and I are still

Charles Lee ’00 and family with their newest addition, Chewy the maltipoo.

Ethan Leidinger ’98 (l.) and David Foxley ’02 welcomed baby boy, George, on Jan. 30, 2022.

Finlay Roderick Iain MacIver, born to Alexa Mel konian-MacIver ’02 and her husband, Kenneth MacIver, joins big brother Archie.

Ashley ’02 and Will Dunn ’02 welcomed Isla Cooper Dunn on February 25, 2022.

Jaime Iglehart ’01 (l.) met up with Bob Rettew ’69 and his wife, Annie, in Concord this summer.

FULL CIRCLE

TAYLOR PLIMPTON ’94

ialika Sall ’08 counts it a great privilege to find herself back home in New York, sharing what she’s gained with her community. After all, it was this very community that helped make her who she is today. An assistant professor of sociology at Lehman College-CUNY, Sall recognizes that her current research was inspired by her own experience being raised as the child of West African immigrants (her parents moved to the U.S. from Senegal in the 1980s).

“Growing up in the Bronx was where I first grappled with immigrant identity issues, which I’m now studying as a professor,” she explains. “Back then, my identity as an African was at the forefront of what I was navigating. Because children — and this is true for children across the board — want to fit in. And so anything that makes you stand out is like, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna die.’ For me, that was the African piece of it.”

Upon her arrival at St. Paul’s School, Sall felt like “a fish out of water,” but for different reasons. Almost overnight, her acute sensitivity to the African part of her identity faded into the background.

“Now it was my Blackness, it was my race,” she says, “something I hadn’t even thought about growing up where there was a large Black population.”

At Pomona College, her introduction to sociology began to give Sall the tools to better understand what she’d been going through.

“I really appreciated how sociology gave me the language to start to unpack some of the experiences I had up until that point,” she says. “I realized this thing that I’d been curious about, as far as how racial ethnic identity changes based on context, was a sociological question.”

Sall went on to Columbia University, where she earned her graduate degree studying with Shamus Khan ’96. Now, back in the Bronx teaching sociology at Lehman College, her academic focus remains a personal one — continuing to make sense of what she experienced in her youth and what other second-generation immigrants in New York are still going through. Part of her research has involved interviewing teenagers across the city to explore their experiences navigating adolescence, race, and immigrant identity. These interviews form the core of a book she’s writing, Connecting Black: Second-Generation Africans in America. In Sall’s own words, the book, due in 2024, investigates “not only how we understand immigrant integration, but also how we understand Blackness in America.”

While the teenagers she’s interviewed still encounter some of the negative stereotyping Sall experienced growing up, she mentions that a recent surge in “African influence on American pop culture — from the popularity of Afrobeat music to movies like Black Panther to cultural icons like Beyoncé publicly wearing African-inspired clothing — has helped youth feel prouder about their African ethnic identities.”

Despite this refreshing development, Sall knows all too well that immigrants in the U.S. still face serious chal lenges. Shedding much-needed light on the immigrant experience, the professor does her part to address these challenges by learning, teaching, and giving back to the community she calls home. After all, if you’re going to change the world, it’s always best to start in your own backyard.

The research of sociology professor Dialika Sall ’08 aims to increase understanding of immigrant integration and Blackness in America.

living in Los Angeles, where I recently start ed an MBA at UCLA Anderson, while work ing full time in tech, and Morgan is in her second year of her Ph.D., also at UCLA. If any SPS friends find themselves in sunny So Cal, we would love to catch up.”

India Laughlin and Sam Cooley welcomed their second child, Henry Laughlin Cooley, in July. Louisa is already a very loving older sister.

2008/15th Dorothy MacAusland dmacausland@gmail.com

Kailin Weng and her husband, Dan Han, welcomed their daughter, Luna Han, on July 11, 2022. She was born at the New York Pres byterian Alexandra Cohen Hospital.

2010

Sterling Khan kahnsk@gmail.com

From Chris Riva: “Chalker Kansteiner mar ried my sister, Bissy Riva ’14, on Aug. 27 at our parents’ house in Hamilton, Mass. Bissy and Chalker live in Nairobi with their dogs Kima and Pacha. Bissy is a fine artist and Chalker runs a solar development firm.

2012

Kate Borst katherineborst@gmail.com

Carter Nelson just got back from a month long trip to Tinos, Greece, after being award ed the Delbert Highlands Travel Fellowship by the Carnegie Mellon School of Architec ture to study and document the island’s more than 1,000 dovecotes — structures for doves to roost in, which date back to the 17th cen tury. He writes: “A vernacular at risk, the dovecotes of Tinos capture a time in history when agrarianism was the key to prosperity. These elaborately decorated structures dis play ancient symbols of folk art and are the result of special socioeconomic and political circumstances, as well as a local culture of artistic inclination. As their function of pro viding food and fertilizer becomes obsolete, hundreds sit abandoned and deteriorating. My research is focused on both their material preservation and local attitudes about their protected status, a recent status which limits their use beyond the original purpose and shifts the responsibility for restoration to their owners.”

Nina McKee sent this update: “On a perfect

August evening in Maine, Nina McKee and Christophe Niquille were married with Nina’s intimate family in attendance. The happy cou ple will have a bigger celebration next sum mer, and in the meantime is counting down the days until the June 2023 wedding of broth er Aidan McKee ’14 and Kia Garrett.”

L aura (Gullett) Ory writes: “I married my longtime boyfriend, Ben Ory, on July 30 in my hometown, Tiburon, Calif. We had a lovely celebration, which included some dear SPS friends. After living in Switzerland for three years, we have also just moved back to the U.S. and will be based in the Bay Area for the next couple years. Since coming back, I’ve been able to see more friends from our form and am looking forward to seeing more of you soon.”

Earlier this summer, Woody Winmill and Kate Borst met up with Martie Curran and her husband, Alberto, for a beautiful hike in the Hudson Valley with their dogs.

C harley Biddle has officially moved back to the U.S. after six years in China. He’s ex ploring new career paths and is excited to reconnect with the SPS community closer to Millville.

Attendees at the wedding of Elisabeth Wistar Wilson ’03 and Max Hyatt included Grant Wilson ’08, Bayard Wilson ’06, Kelley Wittbold ’03, Greg Heidt ’03, Emily Heidt ’03, the bride and groom, Ellie Roberts ’08, Elizabeth Fison Hudson ’03, Camille Ashley ’03, and Ben DeLoache ’03.

David Wagner ’05 with wife, Patricia, son Jacob (4), and daughter Emma (1).

Mary Gamber ’07 with her husband, Robby Bitting, and their daughter, Jane Lyman Bitting, born April 8, 2022.

Luna Han, daughter of Kailin Weng ’08 and husband Dan, was born on July 11, 2022.

Morgan Nelson ’07 and her husband, John Shaughnessy, welcomed their second child, John Nelson Shaughnessy, on June 19, 2022.

2013/10th Beth Anne George elisabethgeorge84@gmail.com

2017 Lane Letourneau lel84@cornell.edu

Amane Machida reports: “I have just moved to Vienna as the next step in my career as an opera singer. I have just began working at Vi enna State Opera as a member of Choir acad emy. I am very grateful to have opportunities singing in one of the best theaters in the world, surrounded by top opera stars. My first show is coming up, and I am very excit ed. I will also begin my artist diploma study of classical operetta soon.”

2018/5th Haley Fuller hefuller@me.com

2021 Blair Belford bqs3dp@virginia.edu

From Lyndon Taylor: “The summer was spent doing trainings with the Navy and Marine Corps. Some of the highlights include flying the T-34 with F/A-18 pilots, doing flights ops with Osprey pilots, conducting live-fire train ing with combat engineers, and going into the field with the 5/11 artillery marines.”

Victoria Chen, a sophomore at George town, recently started a literary and music podcast called StarkMarkings, where she in vites a guest to pick a piece of literature and pair four songs with it, discussing how the themes of the book relate to their life. Search StarkMarkings on Spotify. If you’re interested in being interviewed, email her.

2022

Tristan Brigham tristan.j.brigham@gmail.com

From Andrew Fleischner: “In the middle of June, I had an awesome time celebrating grad uation with Mikai Spencer, Finn Goss, Ra hul Kavuru, Keya Loding, and Katya Cher nyshev. Over the rest of the summer, I danced in ballet summer intensive programs, one for two weeks in Tampa, Fla., (where I saw Jen Howard ’92 and trained under Philip Neal ’86) and another for four weeks in Boston. Af ter traveling with my family to Southern Cali fornia in middle of August, I moved to Phila delphia to dance at the Rock School for Dance Education and work as an RA in the dorms for the next school year. I also had fun meeting up with Katya in New York in September.”

Kat Greenbaum ‘07 married Morgan Rogers on May 14, 2022, in Aiken, South Carolina. Attendees included (l. to r.): Phoebe Stockman ’07, Nolan Jennings ’07, Carrie Read ’07, Kat and Morgan, Helen Burdett ’07, Syrie Bianco ’09, and Brian Burton ’09.

India Laughlin ’07 and Sam Cooley ’07 with their son, Henry, and daughter, Louisa.

Christopher (Iffer) Beisswenger ’08 married Elizabeth (Beth) McDaniel ’07 on June 25, 2022. In attendance were (clockwise from top left): Mike Ott ’08, Nolan Jennings ’07, Carrie Read ’07, Tom Hearne ’08, Mike Daly ’08, the groom and bride, Katelyn Bourgea ’07, Andrew Peabody ’08, John Cronin ’08, Jamie Wilson ’08, Jenna Dannis ’08, Trent Blossom ’08, Tyler O’Brien ’07, Jason Bourgea ’08, Will Morris ’08, and Ben Beisswenger ’05. Not pictured: Fred Vennat ’08.

Carter Nelson ’12 on a month-long trip to Tinos, Greece.

Laura Gullett ’12 married Ben Ory on July 30, 2022.

Nina McKee ’12 married Christophe Niquille on August 4, 2022. Pictured are (l. to r.) Aidan McKee ’14, the bride and groom, Kia Garrett.

Lyndon Taylor ’21 (r.) training with the Navy and Marine Corps this summer.

Formmates from 2022 celebrating graduation included (l. to r.) Mikai Spencer, Keya Loding, Katya Chernyshev, Andrew Fleischner, Finn Goss, and Rahul Kavuru.

Newlyweds Chalker Kansteiner ’10 and Bissy Riva ’14 live in Nairobi.

(L. to r.) Kate Borst ’12 and Woody Winmill ’12 met up with Martie Curran ’12 and her husband, Alberto, in the Hudson Valley.

Where the magic happens.

Legacy gifts change lives and transform institutions. Legacy gifts impact the student experience for generations. Legacy gifts allow you to share your values with the world. Legacy gifts protect the best of the past and nurture hope for the future. Simply put, legacy gifts make magic happen. Donors can use charitable remainder trusts, charitable gift annuities, life estates, qualified charitable distributions, life insurance, and more to strengthen SPS both now and in the future.

Please consider allowing us to help you develop a planned giving strategy that meets your philanthropic goals, minimizes your tax obligations, and protects your heirs.

To learn more, contact: Phillip Blackman, director of leadership and planned giving, at 603-229-4781, pblackman@sps.edu.

SPS Connections Regional Receptions Return for the SPS Community

St. Paul’s School hosted a series of events across the country in the fall, from Los Angeles to Boston. Alumni and parents gathered together for evening receptions to catch up with one another and hear about what’s new at the School today.

At Fenway Park, alumni, parents, and friends delighted in the opportunity to reconnect with SPS and hear from Rector Kathy Giles about what students and faculty are doing in Millville today — and how enjoyed pictures with the 2018 Red Sox World Series trophy on display.

Meanwhile, dinners for college-age alumni brought Paulies together in nine cities, reuniting some of the School’s youngest graduates for evenings of reconnection and conversation.

LEFT: At the Boston reception, held at Fenway Park, Harvard student Nicole Hu ’22 and her parents, Yi Ling Du and Jie Hu, chatted with Rector Giles.

RIGHT: Tiffany and Jon Sweet ’78, P’20, ’21 were all smiles with the 2018 World Series trophy. Events were also held in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. PHOTOS: Mary Schwalm

Nominate the Next Alumni Association President

The St. Paul’s School Alumni Association is a vibrant group of alumni/ae who strive to stay connected, stay involved, and support future generations of SPS graduates. From mentoring and networking with alumni to serving the greater good through annual service initiatives, it is their mission to act on the lessons of their St. Paul’s School education. Nominations for the next Alumni Association president will be accepted through Dec. 16. Form directors will vote to elect the president during the Annual Meeting in April. Nominate yourself or another alumnus/a today: www.sps.edu/president-nomination.

Follow us on social media for more on SPS gatherings

StPaulsSchoolNH

Visit www.sps.edu/alumni for upcoming event information and to register for gatherings.

College-age alumni events: TOP: The group in New York; LEFT: Attendees in Philadelphia; and RIGHT: The New Haven contingent.

LIFTOFF

Software engineer Jeremy Smith ’75 is writing the code that controls NASA’s SLS rocket launch vehicle — and will eventually send astronauts back to the moon.

a

“I needed a job that would provide me with a roof over my head, food, and clothing, and that turned out to be my Private Benjamin moment,” he says. Smith met his wife, Susan, the following year and enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he accepted a spot in the nuclear propulsion program — a six-year commitment he extended to eight when he was assigned to the submarine fleet. Smith’s varied career has taken him from New Hampshire to Atlanta and from St. Louis to his current home in Huntsville, Alabama, where he works for NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Smith also has worked for several large engineering companies, including Lockheed, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon. He spoke with Alumni Horae Editor Jana Brown about his work at NASA. At the time of the interview in August, the Artemis I was preparing to launch its first unmanned mission to the moon.

Jeremy Smith took an unconventional path to NASA, where he currently works as a software engineer for the Artemis program’s Space Launch System (SLS), the world’s most powerful heavy-lift expendable launch vehicle Losing everything in

1977 fire at his off-campus apartment at Worcester Polytech was a turning point for Smith.

COURTESY JEREMY SMITH

When you got out of the military, where did you go?

I got a job with Public Service of New Hampshire, the statewide electric utility. I started in a power plant in Bow. Because of my high-tech training, I eventually became a software engineer, supporting the SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system [used] to control the statewide power grid. The company that provided that com puter system orphaned the various utilities using it. I saw an opportunity, and my wife and I started our own software business to support those SCADA systems. I also finished my undergraduate degree. Later we branched out into supporting nuclear power plant control room simulators.

When did you first get involved in flight?

I had the opportunity to take my experience to work on an F-16 simulator. Once I worked on that, I realized I wanted to get back to being an engineer full time, so we folded the company and I ended up at Lockheed in Georgia. There I worked on the F-22 project, re-hosting the actual flight software from the aircraft into an SGI (silicon graphics) computer environment.

How did you end up at Marshall Space Flight Center?

On one of my stops as a contractor, I ended up at Marshall Space Flight. I was hired to work the flight software for the Ares rockets in the Constellation program — the Ares I crew launch vehicle and the Ares V cargo launch vehicle. Unfortunately, the Constellation program was canceled so I returned to the Department of Defense world. I eventually had the opportunity to go back to Marshall Space Flight to work on the flight software for the Artemis program. I’ve been there for almost nine years.

Tell me about your role in the Artemis project and the SLS rocket launch vehicle.

The Artemis program is our new manned launch pro gram, which is going to take our astronauts to the moon and (hopefully) eventually to Mars. They will be flying in the Orion capsule, which will be lifted by the SLS, the Space Launch System, our new heavy lifter. That’s what I specifically work on. I’m a software engineer and I’m on the team designing and implementing the flight software that controls it.

What does the software do?

The software has to be able to read all the sensors on the rocket: pressure, temperature, flow rate, vibration, naviga tion sensors — any commands that are coming down from the Orion capsule or up from the ground via telemetry. It has to detect anything that needs a response, has to figure out the commands, to [support] the engines for steering the vehicle, for pressurizing the tanks, for controlling the throttles, for changing the antennas so we maintain contact with the ground. It looks like a big flying tube, but there’s a lot happening on board at all times.

How many people are on this team with you, doing this software engineering?

There are only about a dozen who are actually writing the software, and then we have a very large group of people who support the software tools we use and do indepen dent testing.

How many tests has this gone through?

As a developer, I not only write the software that imple ments the thousands of requirements, but I also have to write a software test that explicitly cycles the software and demonstrates that each requirement is met. I also have to write tests that cycle and demonstrate that every single line of code is being executed. We are running tens of thousands of tests every day, continuously.

Tell me about the feeling of doing something of this magnitude.

There is a huge responsibility and we’re very aware of it. This is a billion-dollar rocket. We don’t know who’s going to be chosen to fly the first mission with crew yet, but there’s a good chance we’ve met those people. The world is watching and we can’t afford a failure.

What is the ideal outcome of the Artemis mission? We need to make sure that everything is ready to support human space flight. This is an all-new rocket and it’s complicated. We have tested everything we can, short of actually flying the vehicle. We have to get it to orbit, go around Earth, successfully do the translunar injection burn, which is to leave Earth’s orbit and head to the moon. On the way to the moon, we have to separate the Orion, so it can go on its way.

Where will you be when it launches? I’ll be here in Marshall on a console, monitoring the be havior and the data.

Assuming the mission goes off and it’s successful, what’s the next phase for you personally? We’re standing by for lessons learned after this first flight, to update the flight software as needed for the second launch, but we’re also working on the flight software for the fourth launch. It’s essentially a whole new rocket since we’re put ting on a new and much more powerful upper stage. Half of the software for this first flight goes out the window.

Did you ever think, when you were at St. Paul’s, that you would be where you are now? Never. I squandered most of my opportunity at St. Paul’s. I spent a good amount of time smoking and playing cards. It wasn’t really until the middle of Fifth Form year that I looked around and decided I needed to make better de cisions. It took me a long time to get to where I am now.

The section was updated September 29, 2022. Please note that deaths are reported as we receive notice of them. Therefore, alumni dates of death are not always reported chronologically.

1942 — Harry S. Finkenstaedt, Jr. April 19, 2022

1949 — Compton Rees, Jr. April 13, 2022

1951 — David Hill Carter Aug. 29, 2022

1953 — George H. “Pete” Bostwick, Jr. July 7, 2022

1955 — Lawrence Michael “Mike” Elliman July 29, 2022

1958 — Fellowes Morgan “Sam” Rodd Jan. 7, 2022

1960 — Richard Warren Brewster July 15, 2022

1960 — Allan Pinkerton “Cookie” Gibb July 27, 2022

1961 — Kenneth Chaloner Schley July 16, 2022

1966 — Jere Leonard Cudd July 28, 2022

FORMER FACULTY

Charles Allen Weeks July 15, 2022

FORMER STAFF

Tenley A. Rooney Sept. 11, 2022

Lonnie Rutledge Aug. 20, 2022

William A. Stickney July 27, 2022

1945

Joseph Bailey “Joe” Hartmeyer  died peacefully in his sleep on June 24, 2022, at Bayleigh Chase Assisted Living with his family by his side. He was 95 years old and a resident of Easton, Maryland.

Born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, on June 1, 1927, he was the son of Lewis I. and Lucile B. Hartmeyer. When Mr. Hartmeyer was 11, his family moved to Scarsdale, New York, where he spent his childhood years.

He enrolled at St. Paul’s School as a Fourth Former in the fall of 1942. At SPS, he com peted in baseball, boxing, football, hockey, and squash with Isthmian, sang with the Glee Club, and was a member of the Acolyte’s Guild, Le Cercle Français, and the Mission ary Society. Upon graduation, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Following his ser vice, Mr. Hartmeyer graduated from Yale in 1950 with a B.A. in economics.

He spent his entire career with Chemical Bank (now part of JP Morgan Chase) in New York City until he retired as a senior vice president in 1989. He was beloved by his business associates as well as his corporate clients in the Northeast.

Mr. Hartmeyer was happiest when spend ing time with his family. He met his wife, Betty L. Byam, in New York City; they mar ried in Independence, Missouri, on April 19, 1952. The couple made their home with their five children in Locust Valley, New York, and enjoyed 70 years of marriage.

Mr. Hartmeyer loved playing golf, and his fondest memories included his retirement to Easton with Betty. He was known for his wide smile and great sense of humor. Throughout his life, his commitment to helping others and mentoring young people was important to Mr. Hartmeyer. He was particularly active at St. John’s Episcopal Church of Lattingtown, New York, and Christ Church in Easton. He was a member of the Creek Club in Locust Valley, where he served as treasurer and board member and also was a board member of the

Locust Valley Grenville Baker Boys & Girls Club. Other memberships included the New York Racquet Club, the Yale Club of New York, the Chesapeake Bay Yacht Club, the Tred Avon Yacht Club, and the Talbot Coun try Club. In his later years, he particularly enjoyed weekly luncheons with his men’s lunch group in Easton.

Mr. Hartmeyer was predeceased by his parents and older sister, Gloria Hartmeyer Howard. He is survived by his wife, Betty; his children, Cecily Schneider, Bailey Hartmey er ’73, Valerie Dalton, Stuart Hartmeyer ’80, and Beatrice Hartmeyer McHenry ’84, and their families; nine grandchildren; one great-grandchild; four step-grandchildren; and several nieces and nephews.

1946 Kaighn Smith

a revered physician and beloved family man, died peacefully on September 18, 2021, at his home in Northeast Harbor, Maine, in the same room and by the same window where his wife of 70 years, Rev. Ann Robb Smith, had died three months earlier. He was 92.

Born on November 5, 1928, he was the son of Geoffrey Story Smith of the Form of 1918 and Katherine C. Smith. He attended Chest nut Hill Academy before entering St. Paul’s School as a Second Former in the fall of 1941. At SPS, Dr. Smith was elected vice president of his form, served as captain of the Old Hundred football team, sang in the Choir, and was a member of the Scientific Associa tion and the Cadmean/Concordian Literary Society. He was awarded the School Medal at Graduation. He loved the School for his en tire life.

Dr. Smith earned his A.B. at Harvard in 1950 and his M.D. at the University of Penn sylvania Medical School in 1954. He married his high school sweetheart, Ann Robb, in 1951, and the couple eventually settled in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

His son, Kaighn, Jr., describes his father as “a man who recognized the gift of his privilege and used it to the fullest.” After graduating from medical school, Dr. Smith became one of the most well-respected obstetrician-gynecol ogists in the country. In 1966, he joined Phila delphia’s Lankenau Hospital, and in 1974, commenced 22 years as chair of its OB/GYN Department and director of its residency pro gram. Dr. Smith would eventually lead the hospital as chief of the medical staff.

He loved to teach as much as he loved to practice medicine, holding numerous faculty appointments for decades at Penn and Jeffer son Medical School. As a leader in his field, Dr. Smith introduced the use of fetal moni tors before they were widely known and was the first OB/GYN in the Philadelphia area to incorporate midwives into the practice. He unceasingly advocated for women to take leadership roles. His care of his patients, numbering in the thousands, superseded all other interests. They were grateful for his caring, fatherly figure; his gentle sense of hu mor; and his calm competence.

Throughout his life, Dr. Smith held many leadership positions, both within the medical profession and outside of it. He served as president of the Obstetrical Society of Phila delphia (following in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, Dr. Albert Holmes Smith); chairman of the board of the Philadelphia Contributionship; and commodore of the Cruising Club of America, among others. He was a devoted alumnus of St. Paul’s School and served as a trustee from 1967 to 1987. His many honors include Endowed Chair in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Lankenau Hospital and the Amos S. Weiner Award for Service and Teaching from Thomas Jefferson University.

In addition to his family and medical prac tice, Dr. Smith was passionate about sailing and the sea. In the late 1950s, he sailed com petitively for the Navy in the small, one-de sign Thistle Class. He eventually turned to ocean racing and, with a finely honed ama teur crew, won (overall) every major ocean race on the eastern seaboard in his Swan 38, Gaylark. Anyone involved in the high levels of ocean racing at the time knew and respect ed Dr. Smith and his crew.

Although designed by world-renowned marine architect Sparkman & Stephens, the Swan 38 keel was not deep enough. In the ear ly 1980s, Dr. Smith built a new mold for a lon ger keel in his basement, had the molten lead from the old keel poured into it at a foundry owned by a patient’s husband, and refastened the new keel to the hull. He went on to win the 1983 Annapolis-Newport Race. A longtime member of the Cruising Club of America, he initiated and implemented what became the “Safety at Sea” program, which has now trained thousands of amateur sailors for han dling emergencies aboard offshore sailboats.

Dr. Smith was the patriarch of a family that admired and loved him beyond mea sure. He is survived by his daughters, Ger trude “Gay” Smith and Laura Parker; his son, Kaighn Smith, Jr. ’74; four grandchildren, including Story P. Schildge ’99; and nine great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his brothers, Geoffrey Story Smith ’42 and William C. Smith ’51.

the top singles player for four years, going undefeated in singles and doubles during his first two seasons. He also was an assistant captain of the men’s hockey team at Middle bury and tried out for the 1960 U.S. Olympic hockey team. Mr. Bostwick was inducted into the Middlebury Hall of Fame in 2020.

Mr. Bostwick married Lilias Juanita “Lili” Knott in 1955. After his graduation from Middlebury, the couple settled in Locust Valley, New York, where they raised their four children.

In 1959, Mr. Bostwick joined H. N. Whit ney, Goadby & Co. as a stockbroker. He be came a general partner in 1966. Mr. Bostwick spent 35 years at the firm, retiring several years after it was acquired by Advest.

A talented athlete, he remains one of only three men to have played in the U.S. Open in both golf and tennis (at the time, the U.S. Na tional Championships). Mr. Bostwick won two World’s Open Championship titles in court tennis, two U.S. Open titles in racquets, and three national age-group championships in squash. In tennis, he achieved multiple na tional rankings in father/son, father/daugh ter, and grandfather/grandson doubles. In golf, Mr. Bostwick won the New England In tercollegiate Championship; six regional am ateur tournaments; and reached the semifi nals of the French Amateur and the fifth round of the British Amateur.

1953

George H. “Pete” Bostwick, Jr. a true gentleman and a gifted athlete, died at home in Delray Beach, Florida, on July 7, 2022. He was 87.

Mr. Bostwick was born on August 22, 1934, to George H. Bostwick and Laura Eliz abeth Curtis. He grew up in Old Westbury, New York, and Aiken, South Carolina. He enrolled at St. Paul’s School as a Third For mer in the fall of 1949. At SPS, he competed with Isthmian in hockey, tennis, and squash. He served as squash captain and won the New England interscholastic title in tennis.

He earned a B.S. at Middlebury College in 1958. There, he was a three-sport standout in golf, ice hockey, and tennis. In tennis, he was

Above all, Mr. Bostwick was a true gentle man who displayed impeccable sportsman ship and integrity. His love for his wife and family is his greatest legacy and was the foun dation of his life. He was a devoted husband and father and was adored by his grandchil dren. Mr. Bostwick was an uncomplicated man who was positive and had an outgoing, warm, and fun disposition. He had a great sense of humor, was a loyal friend, and loved his life.

Mr. Bostwick was predeceased on July 1, 2022, by his wife of 66 years, Lili. He is sur vived by his four children, Peter Bostwick III ’74, Catherine Bostwick Wilson ’75, Lilias B. Noesen, and Janet K. Bostwick; and 11 grandchildren, including Laura Bostwick ’07, Kathryn Bostwick ’08, Lucy Bostwick ’14, and Jamie Wilson ’08.

1955

Lawrence Michael “Mike” Elliman a true renaissance man, died peacefully on July 29, 2022, at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Hos pital in Bellingham, Washington. He was 85 and a resident of Bainbridge Island, Wash ington. Mr. Elliman was born on May 8, 1937, to Rhea Munroe Elliman and Lawrence Bogart Elliman. He grew up in New York City, where he attended grade school at St. Bernard’s School and participated in the Knickerbocker Greys at the Armory on Park Avenue before enrolling at St. Paul’s School as a Second Former in the fall of 1950. At SPS, Mr. Elliman played hockey for Old Hundred, rowed with Shattuck, and sang in the Choir.

He attended Princeton, where he played hockey, and graduated in 1959 with a degree in Latin American studies. Mr. Elliman spent eight years with Chase Manhattan Bank in Panama and two years with Chase Manhat tan Bank in Nassau, Bahamas, before return ing to the U.S., where he became the found ing director of Pacific Union Bank and Trust in Menlo, California.

After several years in the banking indus try, Mr. Elliman shifted his focus to asset management and real estate development. In Napa Valley, he established his own video and satellite business, and he founded the Lawrence Gallery of Fine Art. In 1994, he re tired to Whitefish, Montana, with sum mers spent on Blakely Island, Washington.

From an early age, Mr. Elliman was deter mined to use his talents to the fullest poten tial. He learned to sail and fly in his early 20s, two interests he would pursue for the next 50 years of his life. Using his skills for good, he spent years flying doctors, nurses, missionar ies, and supplies into the Sand Blas Islands of the Kuna Indian Tribes in Panama, earning the moniker “the flying banker.” Mr. Elliman

gave his time to his community through nu merous efforts, including the Angel Med Flight Program in San Francisco and the Big Brother Program in Whitefish. His love of adventure included a lifelong passion for ski ing. Above all, was his dedication to the res cue dogs that were an integral part of his life. Many joked that when they died, they “hoped to come back as one of Mike Elliman’s dogs.”

He was a member of the Episcopal Church in Whitefish, where he met his wife, Sally. Af ter a 2001 wedding in Kauai, the couple spent the next 22 years as co-pilots in a fun-filled life of great adventure.

Mr. Elliman was predeceased by his par ents; his sister, Rhea Alexander; and his faith ful rescue pups, Cody, Lucky, and Lucy. He is survived by his wife, Sally; his daughter, Mi chele Elliman; his daughter, Jackie Leonard, and her husband, Robert; his son, Christopher Elliman; his son, Jonathan Elliman, and his wife, Sarah; his grandchildren, Lucas and Isa bel Fee, Caroline, Anne, and Robert Leonard, and Tristan Elliman; and an extended family of step-children and step-grandchildren.

1958

a man of many talents, died on Jan. 7, 2022, at home in Scottsdale, Arizona, after a period of declining health.

Mr. Rodd was born in New York City on April 24, 1940, the son of Thomas Rodd III of the Form of 1931 and Wendy Morgan Rodd. He attended The Harvey School before enroll ing at St. Paul’s School as a Second Former in the fall of 1953. At SPS, Mr. Rodd played hockey and baseball (captain) for Old Hun dred, sang in the Choir and Glee Club, and was a member of the Library Association.

He went to Harvard, where he played on the Crimson’s championship soccer team. Af ter graduating in 1962, Mr. Rodd continued his athletic pursuits, running six marathons in New York City and Boston and playing rugby as a member of the Old Blue, Manhattan, and other squads until he was 50. Along with a few of his rugby teammates, he started the maga zine Scrum Down, which covered the interna tional rugby scene in the mid-’80s. It was during that period that Mr. Rodd co-founded Rathbones (in honor of his grandmother’s maiden name), a popular gathering place for NYC sports fans and Upper East Side locals.

He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1966, and Mr. Rodd began his legal career in estate law at Emmet, Marvin & Martin. For most of his working life, he specialized in complex commercial contracts. For Interna tional Nickle and Freeport MacMoran, he covered mining contracts around the world. During Mr. Rodd’s tenure as associate gener al counsel for Computer Associates, the com pany greatly expanded their business. He also served as general counsel for Metiom, a software startup. Later, Mr. Rodd joined col lege and law school classmates as a principal in the NYC family law firm Berkman, Bott ger, Newman & Rodd, LLP.

Mr. Rodd was known for a ready laugh and a big smile. He was a master of the writ ten word, a devotee of mysteries, and a store house of rarely used evocative expressions. He loved Ireland for bicycling, Wales for rug by and music, Italy for its cuisine, and the Thousand Islands for his idyllic childhood spent boating, fishing, and making ice cream “on the River” with his family. For Mr. Rodd, every day began with The New York Times crossword puzzle. He was a graceful dancer, whether the foxtrot or the hustle — and he was modest about his prodigious talents.

Sam Rodd is survived by his wife, Alice Rodd O’Rourke; his sons, F. Morgan Rodd, Jr. ’82, Loughlin F. Rodd ’11, Aiden B. Rodd ’14; a daughter-in-law, Maggie Littlejohn; his grandson, David Rodd; and his brothers, Thomas Rodd, Jr. ’60 and Carey Rodd ’67. He was predeceased by his first wife, Elizabeth Channing.

Fellowes Morgan “Sam” Rodd

1960

Richard Warren Brewster  a man of grace, died on July 15, 2022, after a courageous battle with mesothelioma con tracted from asbestos exposure related to 9/11.

Born on November 15, 1941, he was the son of Warren D. Brewster of the Form of 1919 and Marion D. Brewster. A graduate of The Green Vale School, he enrolled at St. Paul’s School as a Third Former in the fall of 1956. At SPS, he sang with the Choir and Glee Club, served on the Student Council, and participated in debate. Mr. Brewster was active in theater and was named a Ferguson Scholar as a Fourth Former.

Mr. Brewster earned his A.B. from Prince ton in 1964 and his J.D. and LL.B. from Har vard Law School in 1967. He went to work for the Wall Street law firm of Milbank Tweed, then transitioned to the U.S. Attor ney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York from 1974 to 1979, where he became chief of the Criminal Division. Mr. Brewster eventually went into private practice as a partner of a mid-sized Manhattan firm, Moses & Singer (1979-1991). He took a year off to write fiction before starting and running his own law practice for 10 years. He landed in the New York Attorney General’s Office for a second stint in public service, where he prac ticed defensive civil rights litigation for the State’s law enforcement establishment. A superb, sophisticated litigator in both public service and private practice, he retired from practicing law in 2016 and became a media tor and adjunct professor of mediation, roles he relished.

Mr. Brewster had an extraordinarily close bond and unwavering loyalty to his dearest friends and family. During the pandemic lockdown, he wrote and published the memoir Witchcraft Legacy: Stories from the Big Attic.

He was a true gentleman, humble, com passionate, and genuine. Mr. Brewster was youthful and energetic, with a lifelong pas sion to lend a hand and improve the lives of others. He was an enthusiastic outdoorsman and upland bird hunter who had a great love for Central Park. His legacy will live on through his adoring family and friends.

Mr. Brewster was predeceased by his sib lings, Isabel Van Dine and Samuel Brewster ’57. He is survived by his wife of 31 years, Barbara B. Brewster; his children, Sylvia, Scott (and wife Amelie), and Darrah; his grandchildren, Will and Charlotta Brewster; and his brother, Thomas Brewster ’52, and sister-in-law, Mary.

Mr. Schley spent his childhood on the family’s sprawling Broken Arrow Ranch, be coming an adept horseman who enjoyed competing in shows, playing polo, and help ing to move the herd of Charolais cattle. After attending local schools, he enrolled at St. Paul’s School as a Second Former in the fall of 1956. In addition to playing lacrosse and singing in the Choir. Mr. Schley was also introduced to what would become his signature piece of apparel, the bow tie, at St. Paul’s, an accesory he learned to don quickly while dashing down the stairs in his dorm, always late for class.

He returned to California to enroll at Stan ford University, where he studied history, joined the Theta Xi fraternity, and met his first wife, Susan Morse Osborne. He graduat ed in 1965. Mr. Schley’s first real career pur suit was in racing cars. His love for speed and adventure came from his parents, who were both pilots. He raced regionally and nation ally from 1966 into the mid-1970s.

1961

Kenneth Chaloner Schley who possessed youthful good looks, an affa ble nature, and positive outlook, died on June 24, 2022. He was 79.

Born on March 25, 1943, Mr. Schley was the youngest of four boys born to Viola Tuck erman and Grant Barney Schley II of the Form of 1927 in California’s Santa Ynez Val ley. He never got to know his father, who died while transporting a B-25D bomber in April 1943, but his stepfather, a Danish cowboy named Sigvard Hansen, loved him like he was his own.

Mr. Schley tried a few professions before landing at the stock brokerage firm of Kidder Peabody, where he found his true calling. He savored the challenges and enjoyed building relationships and friendships, caring for his clients through the numerous ups and downs of the market while working alongside some remarkable colleagues. He planned to em bark on the multiyear process of retirement on his 80th birthday and was proud of what he helped build with the Pacific Investment Group at UBS.

In September 1986, Mr. Schley married Su san Christine Freeland, bringing her son and two daughters into his life and his daughter into hers. The couple built a home in Pasade na, and their house was the first constructed in the development, which debuted a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus just in time for the 2000 U.S. Open in Pebble Beach.

Mr. Schley took joy from many things, particularly golf, which he played at every opportunity. In 1984, he joined the Cypress Point Club. His love of the game was the im petus for travel all over the world to play, but he also simply loved adventure. Mr. Schley

made repeat visits to Europe and explored Australia, the UK, Japan, Antarctica, Iceland, the Panama Canal, and other destinations. He and Susan completed their most recent trip to France in May.

A dear friend introduced the Schleys to Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, and they were immediately smitten. Their first Cav, Dash, was Ken’s shadow, and he found a new joy in puppy class and obedience training, going on to compete. He often took his dogs with him to the golf course.

He was a man of style and poise — and one of the few who could pull off a combination of pinks and lavenders topped with a pastel bow tie. He withheld judgment. Anyone in conversation with him felt like the only per son who mattered. It wasn’t uncommon for those who’d known him only hours to feel as though they’d known him for years. He had a ready, genuine laugh and a quick wit. He was always humble, giving credit to others even when he deserved the praise. He never raised his voice. He had an extraordinary amount of empathy and capacity for love. He was thoughtful, kind — and mischievous. He loved good food, good red wine and good te quila, especially with good friends and those he loved. He made and kept lifelong friends through every chapter of his life, including three of his best friends, all named John. He enjoyed a good cigar, especially outdoors while listening to live music and drinking Scotch at the Bohemian Grove during sum mer encampment.

Mr. Schley is survived by his wife, Susan Freeland; his daughter, Mary Tuckerman Schley; his stepchildren Patrick Susemihl, Amy Susemihl, and Katie Bennie; five grandchildren; his brothers, Grant Barney Schley ’59 and Sigvard Hansen; several nieces and nephews; many friends; and his faithful canine companion, Jackson. He was predeceased by his brothers, Bryant Turner Schley ’52 and Wolcott Schley ’55.

1971 Waldemar Leopoldo “Leo” Romer

died on September 28, 2021, in his home town of Valencia, Venezuela, from complica tions of COVID-19. He was 69.

Mr. Romer was born in Caracas, Venezue la, on March 15, 1952, the son of Oscar Waldemar Romer and Martha Lermo de Romer. He entered the Fessenden School in Massachusetts in 1961, at the age of 9, despite not speaking English well or knowing Amer ican culture.

In the fall of 1967, Mr. Romer enrolled St. Paul’s School as a Third Former. At SPS, he captained the Old Hundred hockey team, played football and soccer for the club, and competed in SPS lacrosse. He was a member of La Junta. He graduated from Kansas State University in 1976 with degrees in animal husbandry and dairy science, which he would apply to his family’s business — a large, vertically integrated dairy, beef, and poultry conglomerate. Upon completing his degree, he did a two-year apprenticeship in a German milling company before returning to work with his father on a poultry and dairy farm in the town of Miranda in the state of Carabobo.

Upon the death of his father in 1993, Mr. Romer became vice president of Inversiones Las Clavellinas and a director of Agricola Las Clavellinas. He remained in those positions until his death.

One of Mr. Romer’s great passions was the study and practice of falconry, an interest that began at an early age. His first experi ence in Venezuela was in 1958, when he and

his brother, Ricardo, brought home a spar row hawk they had purchased from an agri cultural store. Mr. Romer’s father had been interested in falconry since his own youth, and he and the two boys trained the bird un til he completed his molt and flew free for the first time in 1959.

While at Fessenden and dealing with the trauma of a new language and living far from home, Mr. Romer sought refuge in the school library, reading anything he could find on falcons and falconry. Later at Kansas State University, he hunted avidly across the plains of Kansas, Missouri, Idaho, and Wyoming. He joined other falconers in following the birds’ routes down to Texas. Mr. Romer later imported falcons and hawks into Venezuela and became an important promoter and teacher of falconry there.

Mr. Romer also remained a lifelong soccer fanatic; when the World Cup was in Mexico in 1972, he visited SPS friend Guy Antonioli ’71 to attend the matches and also made a special trip to Orlando, Florida, in 1994 when the World Cup was held there. His last trip to the U.S. was in 2012 to celebrate his 60th birthday.

As the political situation in Venezuela dete riorated, Mr. Romer tried to maintain the family business, despite chaos and violence and a government that countenanced crime at the highest levels. Occasionally, when the in ternet connection worked, he would call friends and classmates and discuss his days in Millville and happy times at his family’s house in Maine. Up until his death, Mr. Romer talk ed about making it to the Form of 1971’s 50th reunion, but having been misdiagnosed with pneumonia, he died of COVID a week before his formmates gathered in New Hampshire.

Mr. Romer is survived by his children, Mi chelle Diane Romer-Meneses, Christian Waldemar Romer-Hernandes, Ernst Roder ick Romer-Meir, María Carlota Perez- Meier, and Carlos José Perez-Meier; five grandchil dren; his sisters, Elena Alvarez, Martha Pultz, Maria Pelaez, and Annabella Carranza; and his cousin, Eugenia Bacalao.

Alumni Horae

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