Alumni Horae Winter 2022-23

PAUL’S SCHOOL | ISSUE II 2022-23

A lumni Horae

SPS IS CREATING NEW NETWORKS TO SUPPORT STUDENT HEALTH AND WELL-BEING

ST.

Alumni Horae

RECTOR

Kathleen C. Giles

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Karen Ingraham

EDITOR

Kristin Duisberg

DESIGNER

Cindy L. Foote

SECTION EDITOR

Kate Dunlop

SENIOR WRITER

Jacqueline Primo Lemmon

PHOTOGRAPHER

Michael Seamans

EDITORIAL CONTRIBUTORS

Ian Aldrich

Jana F. Brown

Larry Clow

Michael Matros

Jody Record

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

18

HEALTHY THINKING

IAN ALDRICH

In the U.S., teen mental health issues are rampant. St. Paul’s School is finding ways to respond.

24

HOLLYWOOD STORIES

JANA F. BROWN

From script to screen and everywhere in between, St. Paul’s School alumni have made their mark on the entertainment industry.

56 SPOTLIGHT

MIRIAM GURNIAK ’79 says her work as a midwife in northern Florida is challenging. But she can’t imagine doing anything else, anywhere else.

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IN THIS ISSUE

2 FROM THE RECTOR

4 THE SCHOOL TODAY

The School observes MLK Day and Lunar New Year; Josh Duclos publishes a book; Friedman and Crumpacker turn five.

32 REVIEWS

“Quit”

Annie Duke ’83

“Around the World in 50 Courts” Haven N. B. Pell ’64

“A Goodly Heritage”

Dr. Frederick Lovejoy ’55

34 COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS

36 FORMNOTES

39 PROFILE

Gunnar Baldwin ’55 and his sliding track are legendary.

49 PROFILE

Kelly Heaton ’90 combines engineering, nature and art in her visual displays.

52 PROFILE

Noah Elbot ’09 is connecting communities through sustainable approaches to complex issues.

59 IN MEMORIAM

ALUMNI HORAE DEADLINE

Formnotes for the spring issue are due Friday, March 31. Notes and photos may be sent to alumni@ sps.edu. Please note the minimum allowable photo size for print publication is 1MB. Photos that are smaller than 1MB do not provide the resolution necessary for print and will be included only at the discretion of Alumni Horae.

Asking the Right Questions D

uring this time of uncertainty and remarkable change, I find that I greet the coming of a new year differently than perhaps I did “in the old days.” The past several new years have brought to us some recurring human tragedies and challenges, from war to inflation, all cast against a backdrop of unfiltered, un-fact-checked information overload. The rising conversation about artificial intelligence and chatbots brings yet another dimension to our contemplation of how to find and follow truth. If it is a challenging environment for someone with multiple decades of life and work experience, one can only imagine the experience our 13- to 19-yearolds are having as they come of age. The work we do here with them in this environment has perhaps never been more important than it is right now.

In this edition of Alumni Horae, we offer a second installment on the issue of adolescent mental health, specifically addressing how here on the grounds we are working to help our students develop their skills as thrivers. In this time of serious concern about mental health that, in fact, probably should extend to all of us, our practice as a community to seek truth in Chapel provides very powerful, positive energy as we explore those four essential questions — Who am I? Why am I here? How should I live? and What should I do? — that are part of the special mission of St. Paul’s School in relation to the students in our care.

Every year, we commemorate the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with a special Chapel, speakers, films, performances and discussions. As I took my seat in Chapel for that service this year, I scanned the program to preview the readings. One in particular caught my attention — an excerpt from Dr. King’s 1968 speech, “Drum Major Instinct,” in which he elaborates on a passage from the Gospel of St. Mark 10:35-45 as framed by a 1952 homily given by a well-known white Methodist preacher, J. Wallace Hamilton. Dr. King addresses our desire to “sit at the right hand”: our human, innate, insatiable desires for attention, recognition and praise — “a desire to be out in front, a desire to lead the parade,

a desire to be first. And it runs the whole gamut of life.” Later in this speech, Dr. King comments:

Now the presence of this instinct is why we are so often taken by advertisers. … They have a way of saying things that kind of gets you into buying. In order to be a man of distinction, you must drink this kind of whiskey. In order to make your neighbors envious, you must drive this kind of car. In order to be lovely to love you must wear this kind of lipstick or this kind of perfume. And you know, before you know it, you’re just buying that stuff.

This truth permeates our 2023 environment — our need for perfect Instagram images; the allure of TikTok; the status of influencer; the focus on “following” and being “followed.” These challenges touch all of us in different ways, in an environment in which rapid change requires constant learning and exacerbates both that “drum major instinct” and FOMO (fear of missing out) — and perhaps stokes a fear of becoming irrelevant that gives special energy to the demand for what we knew and who we were to remain constant.

The specific reading our chaplaincy offered from this speech provides important insight and inspiration related to adolescent mental health and more broadly, to human well-being in this age. Again, in the words of Dr. King:

If you want to be important — wonderful. If you want to be recognized — wonderful. If you want to be great — wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That’s a new definition of greatness. … the thing I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. … You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant.

Since the adoption of our School Prayer in 1934, the people of St. Paul’s School have believed that we should be “eager to bear the burdens of others.” Connection, community and service are part of the best that is St. Paul’s School. In the search for wellness, an important starting point can be the recognition of the divinity in each of us and our embrace of that divinity in each other.

Students enjoy downtime with two of Rector Kathy Giles’ dogs at a Rectory Open House on Jan. 21.

“MY FAVORITE PLACE ON THE GROUNDS IS OHRSTROM LIBRARY. IT OFFERS ONE OF THE BEST VIEWS OF LOWER POND, AND IN THE EVENING, IT’S A QUIET AND RELAXING PLACE TO GET MY WORK DONE.”

— Sofia, Sixth Former

ARTS AND SCIENCES

For Garrett Stiell ’23, Lizards are a Scaly Study in Adaptation

JACQUELINE PRIMO LEMMON

In the corner of the Lindsay Center greenhouse — past trellis shelves holding an array of potted plants, behind an aquaponic pond where foot-long white and gold tilapia swim under an auto-feeder at a languorous pace — stands a slice of the Costa Rican rainforest.

“All the insects come out at night, mostly,” says Garrett Stiell ’23 as he peers into the 6-foot-tall structure. Looking through the tinted glass at a neotropical green anole scuttering farther up a branch, Stiell laughs.

“ They know when you’re watching them,” he says. “But on a really hot day, all five of them will sit on these top branches and they’ll just hang there.”

Called a biotope or biosphere, the structure is a self-contained ecosystem replicating a specific area — a Costa Rican rainforest in Stiell’s case, complete with indigenous flora and fauna. As of now, the main characters are five lizards, not to be upstaged by the hundreds of cockroaches, worms, crickets and other insects, including spiders who have wandered in from the greenhouse. But the insects burrowed into the forest floor and taking shelter under leaves are even harder to spot than the wellcamouflaged anoles.

“I really enjoy environmental science and studying

ecology, or how ecosystems interact with each other and how the animals, the microbes and the soil all work together,” Stiell says. So when he learned about the Burke Biodiversity Award — which recognizes St. Paul’s students who demonstrate great interest in understanding and preserving the natural world and its biodiversity — he wrote up a proposal with the assistance of Science Teacher Scott Reynolds, and was one of two students to win. The award meant a green light for the greenhouse biotope, which Stiell worked with Reynolds to plan, design and install.

“For a month or so, the plants were all in there getting acclimated,” Stiell says of the vegetation added last spring. Then came the insects and bacteria, followed by the anoles in late fall. “They’re these canopy-dwelling green lizards that live in Costa Rica, and really throughout Central America and a little bit of the Caribbean; they hop on shipping boats and go to different islands. We put five in there, and they’re basically the apex predators for now…until they start overpopulating and then we’ll have to put in a snake or something. But it’s really cool to see how they control the populations of all the insects and how everything just gets recycled and works together.”

Stiell is a patient educator when talking about the world he has created within the biotope, answering every question with a calm and steady enthusiasm. The scientific names for lizards and bugs roll fluently off his tongue: anolis biporcatus; isopoda.

But Stiell’s interests are trained elsewhere, too. When he entered SPS in 2019 as a Third Former, he took as many advanced photography classes as he could squeeze into his schedule and participated in summer film programs. “I’ve always had that slightly artsy, more visual arts side, so that was really my focus when I came to SPS,” he says.

His focus on science became clearer as a Fifth Former when he joined the Applied Science and Engineering Program (ASEP), in which students do an internship during the summer before Sixth Form, followed by a capstone project during Sixth Form. Stiell’s focus was herpetology, the study of reptiles and amphibians, and his internship was with the Digital Imaging Division at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Stiell spent five weeks working with an associate scientist at the museum, scanning and studying monitor lizard specimens to see how different environmental factors changed their skull features. “That process is called adaptive radiation, which was the title of my capstone paper, actually, and is basically the process where factors in the environment cause them to change rapidly over time,” Stiell explains.

In practice, this research meant running specimens through a computed tomography scanner akin to those used for CT scans on humans — a process Stiell says was not as technical as one might assume. He then plotted skull points on the lizards and created 3D models of them to compare the differences and similarities between monitor lizards’ skulls from all over the world.

While the majority of the lizards he looked at were segregated into their family types, there were two — Lanthanotus borneensis (the earless monitor lizard) and Heloderma horridum (the Mexican beaded lizard) — that showed up as similar on every graph he plotted. “And I have to do a lot more digging, and probably another whole research paper, just to figure out why that is,” Stiell says, laughing as he acknowledges the true nature of science: one question leads to 10 more.

In addition to his work resulting from the Burke Biodiversity Award and with ASEP, Stiell also is a captain of the Robotics Team and a prefect in Middle. With plans to attend Morehouse College in a dual degree program for applied physics and environmental engineering, Stiell ultimately wants to get a law degree in environmental policy and work in environmental consulting.

As for what’s next for the biotope? Tree frogs are in the running, Stiell says — adding in a tone that doesn’t sound like he’s joking: “We could have put a monkey in there, but they cost like $8,000.”

On Saturday, Jan. 28, members of the St. Paul’s School girls varsity hockey team traded their skates for sneakers to help coach, keep score and cheer on young skaters from across New Hampshire as the School hosted the youth division of the 1883 Black Ice Pond Hockey Tournament at the Hockey Center. One of the first large-scale events for which the School has been able to offer its facilities to the public since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the daylong Shinny Classic was a particularly appropriate place to start. Established in 2011, the 1883 Black Ice Pond Hockey tournament is a celebration of the first organized hockey game played in the United States, which took place on Lower School Pond on Nov. 17, 1883.

“I REALLY ENJOY ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND STUDYING ECOLOGY, OR HOW ECOSYSTEMS INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER AND HOW THE ANIMALS, THE MICROBES AND THE SOIL ALL WORK TOGETHER.”

Friedman and Crumpacker

KRISTIN DUISBERG

For today’s St. Paul’s School families, it’s hard to imagine the spot for student social life being anywhere other than along Library Road in the center of campus, or for the art gallery not to be located just steps away from the Fine Arts building. But 2023 marks just the fifth anniversary of the dedication of both the Friedman Community Center and the Crumpacker Gallery — two facilities that once stood in opposite locations. Friedman, constructed in 1928 as Hargate Hall, served until 1967 as the dining room for Third and Fourth Formers, and for the subsequent 49 years as the School’s visual arts center. Crumpacker was built in 1970 to house the St. Paul’s School bookstore and the Tuck Shop, and became the Freeman Student Center in 1990.

When the buildings traded functions, both underwent extensive renovations. Freeman took on 1,550 square feet of additional space, including climate-controlled exhibit and storage spaces, to become the Crumpacker Gallery, which opened in fall 2018 with a generous gift from the Crumpacker family and five leadership donors. Hargate was renovated within its original footprint to house Raffini Commons, the Kwok Café and a student game area as well as project rooms and the Dean of Students Suite. The hub of student life on campus, the center also includes an outdoor terrace that is a popular place for events and casual gatherings — and the ideal vantage point from which to watch Hank, the campus heron, fish for his dinner. Dedicated in 2018, Friedman was made possible by the generosity of 29 leadership donors, led by Trustee Tully Friedman and his wife Elise, parents of two members of the Form of 2017.

The Friedman Community Center Won Family Lounge, looking out at Ronald J. Clark Terrace.

CRUMPACKER GALLERY

• The upper floor includes a 2D area for painting, printmaking, architecture, drawing and design studios; the lower level houses a 3D area for ceramics, sculpture, welding studios and a glass workshop.

• The inaugural show, in fall 2018, celebrated Thomas Barrett, who founded the SPS arts program in 1969, and his wife, Leni Mancuso Barrett.

• The current program includes three curated shows per year, with artists exhibiting works that range from representational and abstract painting and drawing to blown and sculpted glass, video art and animation, installation works applied directly onto the walls, traditional print processes and large-scale photography.

• Between Hargate and Crumpacker, SPS has now hosted a total of 337 gallery shows.

• Students create some 1,900+ pieces of original, finished art each year, exhibited at Crumpacker and in four rotating student exhibition spaces across the SPS grounds.

FRIEDMAN COMMUNITY CENTER

• The Friedman Community Center building was a gift from Henry Chalafant, Form of 1886, in honor of his teacher and friend Rev. John Hargate, who graduated in the Form of 1861 and taught at the School until his death in 1906.

• 21,970 square feet of space, with new windows and entrances added to the original Tudor façade, serve as home to Raffini Commons — a performance and program space, the gift of George and Patricia Raffini P’07,’10, and once the site of the Third and Fourth Form dining room — and Kwok Café, a gift of Trustee Noelle Kwok ’98 and family.

Other named spaces include the Won Family Lounge, the Baxter Dean of Students Suite, the Tao Family Project Room and the Ronald J. Clark Terrace.

• Approximately 500 events and meetings, from Opening Days family registrations to student salsa dancing lessons to Anniversary Weekend receptions, have taken place in Friedman since its official dedication in June 2018.

• Whether swinging through grab n’ go to pick up a quick lunch, meeting with friends in Raffini to power through homework, or relaxing after classes in game space that includes pool, pingpong and foosball tables and arcade-style video games, close to 100% of the SPS student body spends time in Friedman on any given day.

Crumpacker Gallery

Crumpacker Gallery space

Raffini Commons, Friedman Community Center

FIVE QUESTIONS WITH Humanities Teacher Josh Duclos

JANA F. BROWN

Josh Duclos joined the faculty of St. Paul’s School, where he teaches Humanities, including philosophy electives, in 2019. Duclos earned degrees in philosophy from Connecticut College (B.A.), the University of Chicago (A.M.) and Boston University (Ph.D.). He also was a Fulbright scholar to the Czech Republic.

A Concord native, Duclos first became acquainted with SPS as a student at the Advanced Studies Program in the summer of 1999. He returned to the ASP five years later as a teaching fellow and became a teacher for the biomedical ethics class in 2017.

An expert in moral philosophy and its relationship to environmental and political philosophy, Duclos published “Wilderness, Morality, and Value” with Lexington Books in 2022.

What’s been the focus of your research?

At the University of Chicago, I studied virtue ethics. In contemporary moral philosophy, there are generally three major approaches to normative ethics. One is that you just work out the consequences of an action and try to produce the most happiness for the most people. Another is about trying to establish some fundamental rules of right and wrong, not worrying too much about the consequences. [And then] there’s a much older tradition that’s known as virtue ethics that begins with the question, “What sort of person should I be?” The project for a virtue ethicist is to sort out what it means to be a truly good or an excellent human being.

How have your interests as a philosopher evolved?

I shifted projects when I went to do my Ph.D. I got interested in thinking philosophically about the environment. I was working part-time guiding trips in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, but also trips to Nepal, the American West and the Alps. As someone who was studying formal philosophy, I found myself dissatisfied with a lot of the philosophical thinking about wilderness. I realized I was uncomfortable with some of what other people were saying, but I didn’t have much to say myself, so I got into the literature and realized that philosophers had not

always done a great job thinking carefully about the concept of wilderness, what it means, how it’s been used, if it has moral ramifications. The question I fixated on, that became the focus of the book, is “What is the value of wilderness itself?”

What arguments do you explore in your book?

My interest was in the meaning and value of wilderness, but to investigate this I draw attention to an often-ignored tension that exists between animal welfare activists and wilderness preservation activists. This tension motivates an investigation of the value of wilderness itself. Is the value of wilderness instrumental, or intrinsic? Is it anthropocentric, or non-anthropocentric? Is there a value to wilderness that is unique, not attainable from some other source? There are many arguments about these questions. This is what I explore. The later chapters deal with bioethics, long-term planetary thinking and wilderness as a religious value. I published this book while I was working at SPS. The School supported me in a number of ways. I am very grateful for that.

How do you define wilderness?

It’s hard to argue about the ethics of wilderness preservation if we don’t have a shared understanding of the term. Wilderness is a condition rather than an entity. It’s something like a condition of the natural world distinguished by a relative absence of human activity — past or present, intentional or unintentional, conspicuous or inconspicuous. The worst thing we can do is spend all our time arguing about the definition rather than thinking about what to do with the wild places we still have and what moral trade-offs are made when we protect or preserve wilderness. Part of what I argue is that wilderness really is a spectrum. It may be that there’s no patch of land on Earth that has not been affected by human beings. In a sense, Walden Pond is more of a wilderness than the Boston Common, and the Alaska Wildlife Refuge is more of a wilderness than Walden Pond. If people get fixated on identifying an absolute wilderness, they’re going to be disappointed.

Is there somewhere you’ve been where you feel like you’ve experienced true wilderness?

If you’re in New England and you’ve never been deep into the Pemigewasset Wilderness, go there and spend a couple days alone. Go a mile out into the woods behind St. Paul’s. You’re not in the deep wilderness, but you’re in a place that’s more or less controlled by nature. Spend 24 hours out there alone and you’ll begin to get some sense of the distinct experiential value that comes with wilderness. Thoreau was relatively comfortable at Walden Pond, but he took some journeys into Northern Maine where he encountered something much closer to wilderness, and he admitted it was terrifying. There is peace and beauty in the woods; there is also fear and trembling.

“WE ARE A COMMUNITY THAT PRIDES ITSELF ON DOING, COMPETING AND ACCOMPLISHING, AND ALL OF THESE ARE GREAT THINGS. OUR WORLD DESPERATELY NEEDS THE PEOPLE IN THIS COMMUNITY TO BECOME THE PEOPLE WE ARE ALL ALREADY BECOMING RIGHT NOW. OUR WORLD NEEDS YOUR TALENTS AND GIFTS — PRESENT AND FUTURE — AND IT NEEDS YOUR HARD WORK. THESE ARE ALL NECESSARY THINGS, BUT THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH OUR BEING WORTHY, VALUABLE AND ENOUGH. YOU ARE “A PEOPLE,” YOU ARE BELOVED . . . FROM THE BEGINNING, NOW AND ALWAYS.”

— SPS CHAPLAIN REV. WALTER THORNE Jan. 10, 2023

HEARD IN CHAPEL

Ashley Zhou ’23 on Mindfulness and Her Work with The Pelican

JACQUELINE PRIMO LEMMON

further sharpened in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic: traveling to Beijing and having to isolate for two weeks gave her a new understanding of those in longterm quarantine — including people in nursing homes, substance abuse patients and the left-behind children of migrant workers — and a desire to help. In August 2020, she founded the Youth Alliance for Mental Health to teach meditation and mindfulness practices to those in confinement. Today, the youth-run YAMH is global, and Zhou has twice been named a Hershey Heartwarming Young Hero for her work.

For many in the SPS community, walking from one building to another — whether between classes, on the way to dinner, or to and from clubs and activities — is a chance to catch up with friends. For Ashley Zhou ’23, it’s often when she’ll squeeze in some brief walking mindfulness, paying deliberate attention to her movements and staying present in the moment.

“I make mindfulness a part of my daily life through formal practice and ‘informal’ practice,” Zhou says. The formal practice means daily meditation and yoga in the mornings; the informal mindfulness exercises are between classes or even when brushing her teeth. “Oftentimes, people think of meditation as something you need to devote a great effort to or squeeze in time for in order to start, but really you can meditate anywhere, and it can be very brief.”

After early exposure as a young child, watching and playing along as her mother practiced yoga, Zhou began to develop her interest in earnest to help with her father’s chronic back pain. “I taught him specific asanas, like the supine spinal twist, to try to help. He felt like his back pain was much more alleviated, and I realized so clearly the therapeutic power of yoga,” says Zhou. She became a certified yoga instructor at 13.

As a Third Former, Zhou had the opportunity to stay at an ashram in Florida and learned a lot about mindfulness and meditation as she navigated the strict practice schedule and diet there. Zhou’s perspective on mindfulness was

At SPS, Zhou heads up the Mindfulness/Meditation Society and the Yoga Club. She’s also working on an Independent Study Project with Kate Daniels, director of academic support, to create a mindfulness handbook for students and a long-term series of mindfulness sessions for the SPS community. “I’ve come to understand clearer than ever that living mindfully means accepting your emotions and thoughts, but also not getting caught up in constant chatter. It’s about creating space between yourself and the mind and body,” she says.

Zhou is also co-editor-in-chief with Madison “Maddie” Rosato ’23 of the School newspaper, The Pelican. “Journalism and community service are actually very intertwined,” she says. “Just like people use art to fight for social justice, journalism is a way to combat stereotypes and show different perspectives to complicated issues. . . .

We’re not only contributing to the current School community, we’re also documenting the intellectual and cultural environment of St. Paul’s at our time.”

One of Zhou and Rosato’s aims is to cover more perspectives on campus. The publication recently included an article about Vishal Kumar, who works at the Kwok Café, written by Lidia Zur Muhlen ’24, and there’s another in the works about the SPS Bookstore staff.

A talented oboist, a member of Chapel Council and co-head of the International Society, Zhou last spring received the H. Boone Porter Prize in Applied Religious Studies and was one of just eight Fifth Formers to be inducted into the Cum Laude Society. She also was a Ferguson Scholar finalist in her Fourth and Fifth Form years.

As for her post-SPS goals, Zhou is still figuring out the specifics. “Ultimately my goal is to serve the community and be of some service to the world; to leave something behind,” she says. “I’m excited to continue exploring the world and who I am.”

MICHAEL SEAMANS

Seven Fun Facts About the Horae Scholasticae

It’s the oldest continuous publication not just of St. Paul’s School but of any boarding school in the U.S., so chances are you’re probably familiar with the Horae Scholasticae. But here are seven facts about the School’s student-run literary journal, founded just four years after the School itself, that might be new to you:

The Horae used to feature a section called “Nugalia,” which was full of random bits of information about the School, students and faculty. An example from Oct. 8, 1942, reads: “Due to lack of farm labor, the School is helping to pick the potato, apple and carrot crops, going one football squad at a time.”

The first issue of the Horae Scholasticae was published on June 1, 1860. For the first 80 years, the Horae was not just a literary magazine but the school newspaper and alumni newsletter as well.

The symbol of the Horae used to be the owl. Every year, the Horae board would have their yearbook photo taken with a stuffed owl. The owl is also featured on many of the form plaques found in the Upper.

1 2 3

A fun story title found in the Nov. 25, 1897, issue: “A Foot-Ball Game in the Year 2000,” written by Charles Edward Adams, Form of 1900. It’s hard to imagine that an event that seemed so futuristic then is now nearly a quarter of a century in the past.

The first Horae issue to feature an image rather than the table of contents on the cover was published on Feb. 11, 1956. The artist was Huntington Barclay ’56.

The Horae issue from December 1965 featured the artwork of future famous cartoonist Garry Trudeau ’66, creator of “Doonesbury.”

Some of the current Horae staff are following their creative dreams: Editor-in-Chief Olivia Connolly ’23 has an album of all-original songs debuting in February and poetry editor Skylar Christoffersen ’24 was chosen to study poetry at the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio last summer.

Festivities to Usher In the Year of the Rabbit Offer Community and Belonging

JACQUELINE PRIMO LEMMON

Athousand dumplings. Ten gallons of bubble tea. More than 50 calligraphy couplets hanging on classroom and faculty house doors. St. Paul’s School rang in the Year of the Rabbit and closed out the Year of the Tiger in January with events that engaged international students, Chinese learners and the SPS community as a whole.

The School’s Lunar New Year celebration began with a Chinese-themed dinner in the Upper on Friday, Jan. 20, and continued on Saturday in Raffini Commons, where students enjoyed Chinese games, karaoke and calligraphy. The Lunar New Year concluded on Monday, Jan. 23, with a special Chapel service in Memorial Hall, during which students in the Chinese Society and Chinese language program performed skits, dances and songs, as well as a traditional dragon dance and Chinese kung fu.

The Lunar New Year holds special significance for those SPS students whose families celebrate, including international students carrying on holiday traditions while far away from their families.

“My grandma and I, thousands of miles apart at opposite ends of the Pacific Ocean, have eaten the same dumplings, made the same red couplets and looked upon the same Lunar moon,” says Anqi Hu ’24, who is co-head of the Chinese Society.

At the same time, the SPS celebration of Lunar New Year offers a window into Chinese culture for the broader community. “I play a lot of chess, so I found learning to play xiangqi [Chinese chess] to be an interesting contrast to the chess I’m used to playing,” says Chinese 5 Honors student JJ Detweiler ’23.

Lanaguages Department Chair Jenny Li described this year’s observation as the “most joyful,” with activities and traditions shared widely across School grounds. A few prospective students and their families even got a taste of the holiday — literally, as students making dumplings and bubble tea in the garden-level Sheldon interfaith space stopped in Admission Saturday afternoon to offer samples of their work.

SPS EMBRACES LUNAR NEW YEAR

SPS Marks the Holiday with Song, Dance, Documentaries — and Dessert

JACQUELINE PRIMO LEMMON

St. Paul’s School has long observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day with programming that includes visiting speakers and workshops in which students reflect on social justice issues. This year’s MLK Day observation, held on Monday, Jan. 16, also included a birthday cake, cupcakes and ice cream in the Friedman Community Center, served following a rousing concert by Camerata Baltimore that saw the entire student body — as well as faculty and staff — up on its feet in Memorial Hall.

The reason for the sweet finish was as simple as it was powerful: while MLK Day is an opportunity for sober and oftentimes uncomfortable examination of issues of race, identity and privilege, it also is a chance to celebrate the life of Dr. King. Or, as MLK Day keynote speaker Rev. Melanie Mullen said at the closing of her Chapel talk, because “I have so many reasons to rejoice.”

Mullen, the director of reconciliation, justice and creation care for the Episcopal Church, opened the day in Chapel with reflections on the interrelatedness of environmental rights and civil rights. After Chapel, students gathered by form to watch one of four civil rights documentaries and participated in breakout discussions led by faculty members and student LinC leaders. Between the discussions and the Memorial Hall concert by Camerata Baltimore, which also performed in Chapel, students had the option to attend an inaugural interfaith luncheon in the Upper.

Asked what he took away from the Fifth Form workshop session, a screening of “Making Black America Episode 3: Through the Grapevine,” Armaan Arora ’24 reflected on the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott and the power of collective action. When the discussion turned to what improvements students would like to see at SPS, Jaeleen Baffour ’24 said they’d like to see their peers get as excited about affinity events as for athletic contests. “It’s really fun to learn about someone else’s culture; you’re having fun and learning at the same time, and that’s what we’re here to do at St. Paul’s.”

Rev. Melanie Mullen, director of reconciliation, justice and creation care for the Episcopal Church, speaks to the SPS community during Chapel.

Students on their feet during a rousing performance by Camerata Baltimore in Memorial Hall.

PHOTOS: Michael Seamans

THE SCHOOL RECOGNIZED FALL ATHLETES AND TEAMS IN CHAPEL ON DEC. 12, 2022.

HEALTHY THINKING

ILLUSTRATIONS: DAVIDE BONAZZI

In the U.S., teen mental health issues are rampant. St. Paul’s School is finding ways to respond.

IAN ALDRICH

During Winter Term this year, the Counseling S ervices team at Clark House Health Center launched its newest initiative: a grief group for teens to talk to trained professionals and fellow students about whatever issues may be affecting their lives. No topic is off limits. Maybe it’s the death of a loved one; possibly a friend’s illness. Or, in the wake of a pandemic that still hasn’t let go of the world, it’s the grieving of a life that still doesn’t feel like it’s fully returned.

St. Paul’s School has always offered support to students in this area, but not in such a concentrated and coordinated fashion. Meeting weekly at Clark House, the sessions are the fruition of a cross-department collaboration that has become central to SPS’s work around teen health over the last 15 years. Dr. Thomas Peters, director of counseling, and two of his counselors, Ryan Shirilla and Deb Hansen, worked closely with the Rev. Charles Wynder Jr., the dean of chapel and spiritual life, to architect the group sessions; and the meetings include the active involvement of both the chaplaincy and the counseling team.

“We wanted to do something at a higher level and that required a partnership with the chaplaincy,” Peters says. “The counseling team, we have our expertise, but I think we also recognized there were other things to contribute that only the chaplaincy could bring. We’re an Episcopalian school and we have a chaplaincy right here. Why wouldn’t we partner with them and make this something that is more inclusive and conducive to the School’s mission?”

Peters is far from alone in his thinking. At a time when the number of American teens who report feeling anxious or depressed has climbed to alarming levels, schools like St. Paul’s have reoriented not just the kinds of services they offer to students but how those services work together to foster a healthy community for all its members. At SPS, student support staffing has expanded, new programs have launched, and many existing ones have been recalibrated to meet the moment. The work has taken many forms, from incorporating mindfulness practices into student life to establishing phone-free zones around the campus to creating a community-focused curriculum that explores topics such as diversity, cultural competency, personal identity, sexuality and wellness.

“We’ve really put an emphasis on meeting the students where they’re at and supporting them on their journey here,” says Dr. Theresa Ferns ’84, P’19, the vice rector for school life. “It’s a different mindset than what I think existed here when I was a student. Back then in some ways, it was either you belonged here or you didn’t. And now there’s a broader acceptance of different students and where they’re at. The thinking is, you’re a part of this community. Now let’s figure out how we can support you as you continue on your journey.”

DEVELOPING THE SKILLS OF THRIVERS

Last October, during Family Weekend, Rector Kathy Giles delivered welcoming remarks to a packed Chapel. Giles used the moment to marvel at students’ ability to find their footing in a world that could feel so unsteady. “It is at times perplexing to me to try to figure out how the kids keep it together as well as they do, given the extraordinary inputs they are trying to integrate, at their ages and stages of development, into a perspective on the world that allows them a sense of well-being and the ability to be optimistic,” she said, noting that students’ ability to handle stresses didn’t diminish the difficulties that often shaped their lives. Growth and change, she observed, are at the very core of adolescent life — as is a vulnerability to the pressures that can result from so much upheaval.

“Nature wires kids to be resilient as they grow, probably because everything they do is about learning and growth,” Giles said. “As we address the concerns about mental health, we do so for the kids in the context of their adolescence — an adolescence that at once leaves them uniquely vulnerable and allows them an enormous capacity to adapt to change. . . . They are determined to be thrivers, and I urge us to do everything we can to encourage

“GIVEN THE RAPID PACE OF CHANGE IN THE WORLD, THESE STUDENTS NEED TO DEVELOP THE SKILLS OF THRIVERS AS NEVER BEFORE.”

them in that direction. Optimizing their response to change is an important part of our work as adults in their lives. This won’t be the last pandemic; globalization isn’t going to go away; doomscrolling has become an element of our lives, and we know for a fact that nature is not kind to those who fail to evolve. Given the rapid pace of change in the world, these students need to develop the skills of thrivers as never before.”

Giles’ embrace of teen mental health as a major theme at Family Weekend didn’t raise an eyebrow, which was at once unsurprising and a marked change from even a generation ago. “Parents, teachers, even kids feel more comfortable talking about those things,” says Dr. John Bassi P’17,’19,’21, the School’s medical director. “We see kids coming who already have therapists on the outside. Ten years ago that almost never happened, or it wasn’t shared with us. Both parents and students are a lot more comfortable talking about these things. Before, it was just like, ‘Buck up Johnny, you’ll do fine.’”

Bassi has had a front-row seat to that change. When he joined SPS as medical director in 2008, he oversaw a mental health team of two counselors, both of whom were also full-time faculty members and had other responsibilities that often took them away from Clark House. It wasn’t uncommon that students who came to the health center couldn’t get access to a counselor. Bassi immediately set out to change that by expanding hours and building out the department to meet demand.

“It wasn’t a case of you build it and they will come; they were already knocking on the door, and we just didn’t have the capacity,” he says. Today, Clark House employs three full-time counselors and one halftime counselor, as well as a department director in Peters. In a typical year, some 40 percent of the student body seeks the assistance of a counselor at some point, for a total of some 2,000 individual visits — more than double what the department reported when Bassi came to SPS 15 years ago. “Now we’re able to see the students within the timeline that they need to be seen,” he says.

In the last two years that includes issues related to COVID-19. For obvious reasons, the onset of the pandemic upended the baseline function of the School. But as students and the contours of community life returned to campus, Bassi says SPS leadership began to do the important work of looking at the mental health repercussions from the virus and the measures taken to ensure the health and safety of everyone at the School.

“I think once we got a feel for how COVID was evolving and the potential impact it had on a young and healthy population, we moved quickly to focus on the mental health of the students,” Bassi says. “We realized how important it was for students to socialize and be together. It’s why we probably removed masks sooner than our peer schools, simply because we saw students’ mental health decline.” Emphasizing that the School’s incremental mask-optional policies were introduced only when supported by CDC recommendations, he adds, “We had to ask ourselves, what’s more important here: the potential physical effects of COVID-19 on a student or the long-term mental health fallout from ongoing social separation?”

Others are also asking the same question. Since his arrival at SPS last August, Peters has been examining how the work of mental health help can be expanded beyond the Clark House walls. That’s included the formation of other kinds of group therapy options like the recent one focused on grief. But perhaps even more significantly, he’s looked to strengthen his department’s relationships with faculty members and heads of house, who often are on the frontlines of student crises. By continuing to work with other members of the SPS community on how to handle the early stages of a problem, faculty and staff have a better chance of positively impacting how that situation plays out. Maybe that even means averting a call to counseling services.

And for those who do need it, Bassi says, the mission of the counseling team is to address the immediacy of the existing crisis while also helping students build a toolkit so they have the ability to better navigate future ones.

“IT WASN’T A CASE OF YOU BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME; THEY WERE ALREADY KNOCKING ON THE DOOR, AND WE JUST DIDN’T HAVE THE CAPACITY.”

“It’s about giving them the tools to learn how to deal with some of those hard feelings,” he says. “So let’s recognize that your anxiety is real, then let’s understand the situations that cause that anxiousness and how your body reacts when those situations happen. We’re trying to teach resiliency because life is going to be full of these situations. If we can teach them to face their fears and those difficult moments, then they can come out on the other side with maybe a completely new understanding of who they are and what they’re capable of.”

CATCHING KIDS BEFORE THEY FALL

As it’s done considerable work to build supports for students who are dealing with the immediacy of a complicated crisis, SPS also has taken a number of measures to help identify and work with students before a deeper problem sets in.

Every two weeks, for example, the Student Support Office, headed by Kate Daniels, director of academic support and the inaugural Kiril Sokolof ’65 Chair, generates reports for Dean of Studies Lori Bohan on students who are struggling academically. The steps that follow can include connecting with other faculty or staff members in the student’s life to understand what may be contributing to the issues. The effect, says Daniels, creates a continuous discussion that allows the School to “put in place a number of systems to catch kids before they fall. That way they don’t get into holes they can’t dig out of.”

At the conclusion of each term, SPS also does a comprehensive review of each of its students to gauge their performance and how they’re connected to the broader School community.

“We talk about celebrations and joys as well as share any challenges or concerns students may be experiencing,” says Daniels. “It’s not the first time those of us in roles of student support hear about these concerns [and] it is done with discretion with invitation to necessary faculty — teachers, coaches, head of house, etc. — to follow up with the adviser if more information is needed.”

The work is proactive in other ways, too. In recent years SPS has integrated different practices, including meditation and yoga, into campus life as a way to help students build habits that can mitigate stress or anxiety. Daniels, who heads the all-boys Manville House and coaches the girls cross country team, has used mindfulness with many of her students, from race prep to exam study.

“ These are kids who are working with pretty intense schedules, so it’s important that they find ways to just slow down, even if it’s just for a few moments,” says Daniels, who also advises the school’s yoga and mindfulness clubs. “Whenever I meet with a student, I’ll say, ‘let’s just sit and center ourselves before we jump right into things.’ I do the same at my house meetings every week. The boys know to expect that the first thing we’re going to do is to put our technology away and close our eyes. The act of being quiet for a moment and making that transition from a busy day to this time when we’re all gathered together is important. It’s subtle but it’s valuable.”

So much so, in fact, that SPS has integrated mindfulness into its curriculum. This year the School began a pilot program for Third Formers that requires them to take an interdisciplinary course that explores the spiritual, psychological and medical benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Meeting once a week over the course of a single term, students don’t just learn how to meditate but go deep on the neurology behind its benefits. Following the course’s conclusion students are then provided guidance for self-guided meditations so they can continue the work. Daniels says the student feedback has been positive and the program’s early success has led SPS to consider expanding it to other form years.

“ There were a lot of us who felt this was important for our students to experience because there is so much evidence that shows how mindfulness can be helpful,” she says. “And coming out of the pandemic there was a real impetus to help students relieve their stress, improve their sleep and learn how to address any anxiety or depression they’re feeling. But we also want to help them find ways to strengthen their own relationships by practicing compassion and loving kindness.”

“IF WE CAN TEACH THEM TO FACE THEIR FEARS AND THOSE DIFFICULT MOMENTS, THEN THEY CAN COME OUT ON THE OTHER SIDE WITH MAYBE A COMPLETELY NEW UNDERSTANDING OF WHO THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY’RE CAPABLE OF.”

CREATING A ROADMAP FOR GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT

Mental health, in other words, can’t be divorced from the health of one’s immediate community. To understand how St. Paul’s School believes the two go hand-in-hand you have to look no further than its Living in Community (LinC) curriculum. Launched nearly a decade ago, LinC is a 21st century reboot of a residential life program that had changed very little from the time when Theresa Ferns was a student at SPS in the early 1980s.

Then, says Ferns, “we tried to do typical preventative work and character-building that occurred during house meetings once a week. But it was kind of one-and-done. ‘Today we’re talking about drugs and alcohol, next week we’re going to talk about sex.’ They weren’t linked by an overarching framework and there weren’t a lot of skills that were being passed on to the young people to help them deal with those areas.”

In 2013, Ferns and several others began work to rethink not just how SPS could engage with its students but also how students could engage with each other. At its core, the LinC curriculum centers on five critical areas: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship-building and positive decision-making. Using those interconnected themes, faculty members and student LinC leaders then lead student groups on focused explorations of topics like cultural competency, diversity and inclusivity, personal identity, sexuality, drugs and alcohol, gender and wellness.

As students move through SPS, their relationship to LinC evolves. Third and Fourth Form students, for example, attend small, topic-focused classes. Trained Fifth and Sixth Formers, meanwhile, help mentor their younger peers in the classroom. Additionally, a group of student LinC leaders meet regularly to discuss programming, from guest speaker events to special LinC Days that focus on topics of importance to the student body.

Ferns says LinC has given the School an “important roadmap for student growth and development.” The fact that it is now so central to the School’s overall curriculum, she says, also signals just how serious SPS considers the issues that influence teen mental health.

“How you spend your time really reflects the values you have in a school community,” she says. “When you push a conversation on alcohol and drugs to Monday at nine o’clock during house meeting you’re sending one message. When you have it as part of the content of your regular school day you’re sending a very different message about how you think about those things.”

For many who work at the School and are central to the lives of its students, how they think about these issues has also taken multiple points of view. Ferns, for instance, is both an alum of SPS and the parent of a recent graduate. All three of Bassi’s children passed through the School. As SPS leaders they’ve helped shape how the School handles issues around mental health. As parents, they’ve had a personal view of the positive impact those changes have had on the School’s community.

“

To watch a student go from 14 years old to 18 is really something,” says Bassi. “It’s a time of real discovery for them and they’re going to challenge you. They want to know why we’re doing what we’re doing. But that’s why I like adolescent medicine. It’s absolutely rewarding.”

LEARN MORE ABOUT STUDENT HEALTH AND WELLNESS INITIATIVES AT SPS.

HOllywood STORIES

Nick Stoller ’94, second from left, with the stars of “Bros” at the film’s Sydney, Australia, premiere.

PHOTO: Getty Images

It’s a project that was overdue in Hollywood, says Nick Stoller ’94, but there’s been significant buzz about his latest film since its Sept. 30, 2022, theatrical release. Stoller co-wrote, directed and produced Universal Pictures’ “Bros,” which has garnered praise both as a studio rom-com that features a gay couple and for its pioneering all-LQBTQ cast. So far, “Bros” has been nominated for Best Comedy by the Critics Choice Awards and the Hollywood Critics Association and for Outstanding Achievement in Casting by the Casting Society of America, among other honors.

“It’s shocking it took this long,” Stoller says. “I think this should have happened years ago.”

From script to screen and everywhere in between, SPS alumni have made their mark on the entertainment industry.

JANA F. BROWN

As screenwriters and actors, directors and producers, Stoller and other St. Paul’s School alumni have made their mark on the entertainment industry. In the Form of 1994 alone, Stoller, Jamie Vanderbilt and Dave Coggeshall all have become successful screenwriters. Vanderbilt has established himself as a prolific writer in Hollywood, with credits that run the genre gamut, including a recent revival of the “Scream” franchise and two films with comedian Adam Sandler. Coggeshall had a breakthrough year in 2022, with a pair of features he wrote that are set for release in the coming months. In a 20-year career, actor David Walton ’97 has become a recognizable face on TV and in films. And it’s the thoughtful behind-the-scenes work of producers such as Cotty Chubb ’67, Electra Lang ’78, Charlotte Cooley ’13 and Amanda Morrison ’15 that contributes to making the final products we love so watchable.

Is there an SPS thread that runs through these alums’ success? For the Form of 1994 trio, at least, there might be. Stoller, Vanderbilt and Coggeshall all were devoted students of longtime SPS Theater Director David Newman. Vanderbilt came to SPS as an aspiring actor. And Stoller says his prolific career as a television and film writer, director and producer was fueled at least in part by the angst he felt as an awkward high schooler.

NICK STOLLER ’94, SCREENWRITER/DIRECTOR/PRODUCER

After SPS, Stoller attended Harvard, where he wrote for the Lampoon — a natural next step for the co-founder of the now-defunct SPS satire magazine Spaluts. His dream was to become a director of comedy films, but he saw a clearer path to becoming a TV writer. When he didn’t immediately find work as a writer in New York, he moved to L.A., where he got his first break.

Stoller’s aforementioned high school angst found fruition in comedy films that including “Get Him to the Greek,” “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “The Five-Year Engagement,” all produced by his longtime creative partner Judd Apatow. He also co-wrote “The Muppets” with actor Jason Segel, wrote the first “Captain Underpants Movie,” directed “Neighbors” and “Neighbors 2,” and has been involved as a writer/director/producer on a long list of film and television projects, from the animated film “Storks” to the new “Goosebumps” series.

As for “Bros,” Stoller directed and co-wrote the story about two men who are reluctant to commit to their budding romantic relationship with one of the film’s stars, Billy Eichner. The groundbreaking comedy — the first produced by a major studio to feature an all-LGBTQ cast — is about two men who are reluctant to commit to their budding romantic relationship.

“ The studio was like, ‘Let’s do it,’” Stoller says. “The best comedies are fresh stories, and if you tell it with people you’ve never seen before, it can be even fresher.”

Stoller recently wrapped the AppleTV show “Platonic,” which he directed and co-wrote with his wife, Francesca Delbanco. He cast three of the stars of “Bros” for the series. He is thrilled about these new connections and says the response to the film from the LGBTQ community has been very positive.

“It’s a movie about falling in love, and it’s really funny. So I think there’s been a lot of enthusiasm from the LGBTQ community,” Stoller says. “That, to me, has been exciting.”

JAMIE VANDERBILT ’94, SCREENWRITER/PRODUCER/DIRECTOR

A native of Norwalk, Connecticut, Vanderbilt shifted his focus from acting to writing at SPS once he realized he had a penchant for the craft. A writer/producer/director known for “Zodiac,” the “Scream” franchise and “The Amazing Spider-Man” (1 and 2), among many others, “I credit St. Paul’s with making me feel like I could succeed as a writer,” he says.

In what sounds like a Hollywood storyline, Vanderbilt sold his first screenplay days before graduating from the University of Southern California. For his senior thesis, he’d been working on a “terrible” action script about a team scaling Mount Everest to prevent a nuclear bomb from

Jamie Vanderbilt ’94

discharging. On the side he also was writing a romantic comedy, which he shared with a friend who was an aspiring literary manager.

“Warner Bros. bought it on a Wednesday, and my parents flew in for graduation Thursday. My mother’s first reaction was to burst into tears because I now had health insurance,” Vanderbilt laughs. “I graduated from college on Saturday and went to my first studio meeting on Monday.”

While that project ultimately was not made, Vanderbilt was off and running — and he hasn’t stopped. Part of his success, Vanderbilt acknowledges, is his versatility as a writer. His first big break after selling that initial script was optioning a second one in a different genre. That was the military thriller “Basic,” which Vanderbilt describes as “the movie with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson that is not ‘Pulp Fiction.’” His next script became an action movie called “Rundown” starring Dwayne Johnson. In a full-circle moment, he recently penned “Murder Mystery” and “Murder Mystery 2,” two comedy films for Netflix that star Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston.

Vanderbilt has become known for that versatility, and it’s what he looks for both in his own writing and in the projects he chooses for his production company, Project X Entertainment. In March alone, Project X will release “Scream 6,” “Murder Mystery 2,” and the Netflix spy thriller series “The Night Agent.” Whether writing or producing, Vanderbilt has hopped genres from action to crime to comedy without missing a beat.

“I was never someone who enjoyed doing the same thing over and over,” he says. “I got a good lesson early on that you don’t have to stay in any one lane; I’ve always kind of zigzagged. But I’ve found that I’ve been able to sustain a career doing that rather than trying to live up to what other people’s definition of my work might be.”

DAVE COGGESHALL ’94, SCREENWRITER

After graduating from Colgate in 1998, Coggeshall packed up and drove to L.A. He landed a job as an assistant to a producer at Paramount, where his duties included fetching coffee and answering phones. But he also was asked to offer feedback on scripts.

“I read script after script and wrote a detailed analysis of every one of them,” Coggeshall recalls. “That was my film school.”

While waiting for his big break as a writer, Coggeshall worked various other jobs, including as a junior writer on the game show “Pyramid with Donny Osmond” and as head writer on the series “1000 Ways to Die.”

Coggeshall then shifted into the horror genre and began to gain traction when his first feature, “The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia,” was produced. Next came the production of his script, “Prey.” Coggeshall’s career took another step forward when “Star One” made the prestigious Black List, an annual compilation of Hollywood’s favorite unproduced screenplays.

“Overnight, I went from being seen as only a horror

writer to more action/adventure,” he says, “which opened a lot of doors.”

Coggeshall was soon tapped to write “Thundercats” for Warner Bros. and sold a science fiction pilot to Syfy channel. He returned to the horror genre to pen Paramount’s “Orphan: First Kill,” which enjoyed a successful theatrical run in 2022. Coggeshall reinvented himself yet again with a family action/comedy script called “The Family Plan” that marked his return to the Black List and sold in a bidding war to Skydance and Apple. It’s currently filming with Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Monaghan.

Coggeshall enjoys pointing out that his former agent dropped him right before “The Family Plan” script went to market and sparked the biggest year of his career, including re-teaming with Skydance to adapt the Matchbox toy line into a big-budget feature film of the same name.

“Let’s just say I wasn’t without an agent for very long,” he jokes.

C oggeshall’s big 2022 also included writing “The Deliverance” for director Lee Daniels, produced this past summer by Netflix and starring Glenn Close and Mo’Nique. “The Deliverance” and “The Family Plan” will premiere later this year.

“After 20 years of doing this,” Coggeshall says, “I finally feel like I have an actual career.”

Dave Coggeshall ’94

DAVID WALTON ’97, ACTOR

Walton jokes that he has a “high tolerance for insecurity.” That’s an actor’s life, after all. But Walton’s consistent work in the profession over the last two decades demonstrates an enviable staying power.

He recently returned from Vancouver, where he was shooting a four-episode arc for ABC’s “A Million Little Things.” Home for Walton these days is Prouts Neck, Maine, where he lives with his wife, actress Majandra Delfino, and their two young children. Making that move a few years ago after nearly 20 years in L.A. was a career risk for Walton, but he and Delfino felt Maine would be a great place to raise their family.

“I miss some of the serendipity that can happen there,” Walton says of leaving L.A. “Like dropping your kid off at kindergarten, striking up a conversation with another dad who happens to be a writer, and then three months later you’re developing a show together. That can happen in L.A.; it does not happen in Portland. The big fear of moving to Maine and trying to maintain this career was would I be forgotten? Knock on wood, so far so good.”

A Boston native, Walton developed the acting bug as a kid, when a friend of his was cast in the 1990 film “Lord of the Flies.” He played Petruccio in “The Taming of the

Shrew” in his first role at St. Paul’s and was selected for the now-defunct improv group SPIT. At Brown, Walton was a member of the sketch comedy troupe that also featured John Krasinski. He moved to New York right after 9/11 and got an agent through a national casting search for “Terminator 3.”

“Once I got an agent, it went from considering a hundred-dollar-a-week job in Northern Maine to auditioning for a new pilot called CSI,” he says. Not long after that, Walton signed a holding deal at Fox and was cast in the series “Cracking Up,” an early project of “White Lotus” creator Mike White. He jokes about playing “doctors and idiots,” despite his Ivy League education. Among his long list of credits are a two-year run on the NBC series “About a Boy”; turns in the “Bad Moms” movies and “New Girl” on Netflix; and a recent starring role on the Starz series “Power Ghost.”

“What happened with ‘Power Ghost’ was actually the dream of moving to Maine, which was: go to New York for four or five days, fly back to Maine for two weeks, go back to New York,” Walton says. “That was the rhythm for six months. It was awesome.”

“THE BIG FEAR OF MOVING TO MAINE AND TRYING TO MAINTAIN THIS CAREER WAS WOULD I BE FORGOTTEN? KNOCK ON WOOD, SO FAR SO GOOD.”

David Walton ’97

VIVIAN ZINK, NBCUNIVERSAL MEDIA, LLC

ELECTRA LANG ’78, PRODUCER

After graduating from Stanford with an art history degree, Lang spent seven years working in New York for a company that specialized in visual effects and post-production.

“It made sense, because I wanted to be an art historian [but had found] I couldn’t connect with the idea that I’d be raking through the boneyard of other people’s work,” Lang recalls. “I was worried about not having a world where I would connect with other people. Who knew it was possible to work in production and combine art and working with people?”

From there, Lang joined Pittard Sullivan Fitzgerald, which created motion graphics for television, splitting her time between the U.S. and Germany. Lang met her husband, Peter, a commercial director, and in 1995, the couple started their own production house, Picrow. Nearly three decades later, the company is thriving, in part because of a partnership with the production branch of Amazon. Equal parts production house, creative studio and post-production facility, the company’s projects include “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Modern Love,” “Transparent,” “Goliath,” and “Mozart in the Jungle,” among others.

In her work as an executive producer, Lang and her team provide the “connective tissue” to her projects, overseeing everything from writers’ rooms to payroll services to negotiating contracts with the various creative guilds.

“For example,” explains Lang, “‘Maisel’ is a huge show. We’ve done five seasons, so that’s years of building rapport with these amazing teams that, in the end, are freelancers. Picrow provides continuity and support structure from banking, funding and HR to the back end, making sure insurance claims get paid, tax credits run smoothly — because it all runs through us. It’s the busy work of making it all happen.”

At any given time. Picrow may have as many as 30 shows in various stages of production worldwide. In a twist of SPS fate, Picrow recently wrapped a show that  began shooting in Hong Kong and Los Angeles in July 2021. The limited Amazon series, “Expats,” which features Nicole Kidman, is based on the book of the same name written by former Trustee Janice Y.K. Lee ’90, who served as a consulting producer on the project.

Electra Lang ’78

“WHO KNEW IT WAS POSSIBLE TO WORK IN PRODUCTION AND COMBINE ART AND WORKING WITH PEOPLE?”

CHARLOTTE COOLEY ’13 AND AMANDA MORRISON ’15, PRODUCERS

Morrison and Cooley did not really know each other at St. Paul’s, but their paths ended up intersecting in a big way in 2020.

It was Cooley who told Morrison about an opening on an upcoming docuseries she was producing for Ark Media, where she had been employed since shortly after graduating from Georgetown. Morrison, a recent Princeton graduate, had just returned from Beijing as COVID-19 was making the news. Cooley, too, had found herself back in New York after a stint in Ethiopia working on a documentary for Ark.

With much of the film industry in shutdown mode during the pandemic, Cooley and Morrison traveled to Short Creek, Utah, where they were part of a crew filming interviews for the Netflix show “Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey.” The limited series details the story of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) — a polygamist sect that broke off from the Mormon Church — its disgraced leader, Warren Jeffs, and the women who managed to escape. Cooley describes it as a “timeless moving portrait of resilience in the face of really challenging circumstances,” and credits the courage of those who chose to tell their stories. The series recently landed on The New York Times list of “What to Watch on Netflix.”

“ There’s been a lot done on FLDS with a salacious or sensationalized angle,” Cooley says. “It was exciting working with a director who wanted to approach this subject without sensationalizing it.”

While living in Utah, Cooley and Morrison were roommates. Cooley was an on-the-ground co-producer and part of the advance team that screened the interviewees and made sure everything was in place for production. As an

associate producer, Morrison conducted key research and spearheaded the collection of archival materials from the primary interview subjects. They both formed close bonds with the cast members and their families, even eating Thanksgiving dinner in 2020 with the couple whose story of joining FLDS opens the series.

While Cooley continues to work at Ark and is also working on her own documentary, Morrison has moved on to Little Monster Films. The women are proud of their work on “Keep Sweet” and were gratified by the reaction of those featured in the series. One of them FaceTimed Cooley and Morrison after watching the premiere.

“She called us in happy tears,” Morrison says. “The most rewarding part of the whole experience was seeing the impact of being able to tell your story and have people listen.”

COTTY CHUBB ’67, PRODUCER

Decades into a career as a film producer, Caldecot “Cotty” Chubb ’67 laughs when he thinks back to the inevitable pull of Hollywood and the entertainment industry.

“One of my friends described me as just another moth to the flame,” says Chubb, who splits his time between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.

A human biology major at Stanford, he arrived in L.A. in 1980, hoping to break into the film business after a brief career as a photographer in New York. His first job in L.A. was working as an assistant to a director and then on sets for Roger Corman, the prolific independent producer. He also worked in two separate stints for independent producer Ed Pressman and for eight years at Alphaville, a studio production company first on the Universal lot and then at Paramount. Having formed his own production company, ChubbCo FilmCo, early on, Chubb began working almost exclusively for himself in

Charlotte Cooley ’13

Amanda Morrison ’15

2003. Over the years, he has been enchanted by strong storytelling and by finding scripts and writers primed for the big screen. That has involved building relationships with a web of film professionals, from line producers to editors to financiers.

Though he has three dozen projects to his credit, including film and television, among the ones that remain closest to Chubb’s heart are “Eve’s Bayou,” “To Sleep with Anger” and “The Crow.” “Eve’s Bayou” was the 1998 winner of Best First Feature from the Film Independent Spirit Awards. “To Sleep with Anger” won the Spirit Awards’ Best Screenplay in 1991 and, along with “Eve’s Bayou,” is one of two Chubb-produced films selected for the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

C hubb continues to be captivated by stories that move an audience, though these days he “only works on a few things I care about.” He’s currently producing a feature-length version of a short “traumedy” called “Hallelujah” and serving as executive producer on a “genre-adjacent” Canadian drama about two Indigenous brothers and the vengeful spirit that is attacking them.

“ The great critic Roger Ebert wrote that movies are empathy machines,” he says. “One of the tragedies of contemporary America is that loss of empathy and community. Being able to give people that sense of it, even if it’s for a few hours in a darkened room, is a privilege.”

SPS in ENTERTAINMENT

The alumni highlighted here are just a sampling of those working in the entertainment industry in various capacities. Below are others we’re aware of, including a number that we’ve profiled in past issues of Alumni Horae. Is there someone we missed? Let us know at alumni@sps.edu.

Celia Aniskovich ’10 DOCUMENTARY PRODUCER/DIRECTOR

John Bankson ’81 PROP MASTER

Pippa Bianco ’07 WRITER/DIRECTOR

Laura Bickford ’80 PRODUCER

Alexis Denisof ’83 ACTOR

Lucy Barzun Donnelly ’91 PRODUCER

Austen Earl ’97 SCREENWRITER/PRODUCER

Megan Ferguson ’01 ACTOR

Jess Fulton ’92 EDITOR

Jordan Hawley ’78 WRITER/PRODUCER

Annie Jacobsen ’85 EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

Perry King ’66 ACTOR/DIRECTOR

Judd Nelson ’78 ACTOR

Marie Schley ’90 COSTUME DESIGNER

Derek Simonds ’90 DIRECTOR/WRITER/SHOWRUNNER

Cotty Chubb ’67

QUIT

Annie Duke ’83

Penguin Random House, Oct. 2022

Reviewed by Michael Matros

You’re 300 feet from the summit of Mt. Everest. It’s already noon, and you’re running late according to your go/not go decision point. Meanwhile, the weather has started worsening. But you’ve spent years in conditioning, months of onsite preparation and many thousands of dollars to get here. So of course you continue upward.

Maybe your frozen body will someday be found. Maybe not. Maybe you should have quit when you told yourself you would.

Annie Duke tells a lot of stories in her new book, “Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.” Some of them are about fatal disasters, like that of the eight mountain climbers who died during an Everest summit attempt in 1996. Other stories are about financial ruin from stubbornly pursuing success when success isn’t in the cards.

Duke knows about cards, having won some $4 million in poker before retiring from the game in 2012. And knowing when to fold ‘em was essential in her success.

“ There’s a saying among top poker players that poker is one long game,” she writes. “It’s a reminder that the particular hand they’re playing is not the last hand they’ll ever play or that any particular day that they’re playing is not the last day they’ll ever play.”

But it’s hard to fold a hand when you’ve already put a lot of money in the pot. Likewise, Duke writes, “If we’re in a relationship or a job, we don’t want to walk away because we’ll feel like we will have wasted or lost all the time and effort that we put in.”

D uke’s job in “Quit” is to remind us that bailing out at the right time doesn’t make us losers. Instead, it allows us to direct our time and energy into more worthwhile pursuits.

She admires the quality of grit, the ability to work through persistent obstacles toward a goal. But sometimes those goals are either unattainable or, as it turns out, not worth the pain and effort. And so, writes Duke, “Success is not achieved by quitting things just because they are hard. But success is also not achieved by sticking to hard things that are not worthwhile.”

But just knowing that reality is different from acting on it. Our goal-driven psychology and culture can compel us more strongly than reason and cold-eyed calculation of the odds. And so, Duke offers perspectives and techniques to help us recognize when quitting time has arrived.

A “quitting coach” can help. Sometimes that person can be a professional career or relationship consultant, or, as one of Duke’s chapter titles advises, you can “find someone who loves you but doesn’t care about hurt feelings.”

Duke also points out that “goal-setting can interfere with rational quitting behavior.” She advises using a simple “unless” when setting goals: “I’m going to continue to run this marathon unless I break a bone,” unlike the obsessive marathoner whose fractured leg wasn’t signal enough to quit.

Duke stresses the idea of “kill criteria” that require you to quit if certain markers aren’t met. Adm. William McRaven, who oversaw the raid to capture Osama bin Laden, explained to Duke that the effort was broken into 162 phases, the failure to pass any one of which required killing the operation.

Duke offers another kill criterion: Set a turnaround time on your next Everest expedition. “If you haven’t made it to the summit by 1 p.m., you cannot safely descend to camp before dark, so you must abandon the climb.”

That way, Duke explains, you can achieve a goal even more profound than summiting the world’s highest mountain: Getting back down alive.

AROUND THE WORLD IN FIFTY COURTS

Haven N. B. Pell ’64 Ronaldson Publications, 2023

Reviewed by Jim Schutze ’64

For some years, I have been aware of my fellow formmate Haven Pell making references to something he called “court tennis.” Based on my very distant experience as a newspaper reporter in Texas, I thought he might be describing a rehabilitative activity imposed on miscreants by the courts.

Imagine my wonder, then, when I opened Pell’s new book, “Around the World in Fifty Courts,” and discovered an impossibly difficult and storied sport and the equally unfamiliar world in which it takes place.

One authority on the history of ball games states that contemporary court tennis “possesses a not-inconsiderable amount of snob appeal,” but I didn’t read a whiff of that in Pell’s book. Instead, I found a funny, frank description of an ancient game I never want to play myself because I’m afraid it would make me cry.

The racquets are small; the balls handmade,

heavy and sound like they would hurt. The court has all kinds of protrusions and obstacles that look like a memory of medieval shop windows and rooftops off which the ball can be cannonballed or caromed at crazy angles.

Pell, who retired from law and banking to become a writer and Washington pundit, has written a rich account and history of the sport, told in the framework of his own quest to play on all of the 50 playable court tennis courts in the world. He vows that he did not write with any big mantras or morals in mind, but the minister’s son in me couldn’t help finding one anyway: Whenever a questionable call must be made in this game, a player is expected to make it against himself.

Just imagine a rule like that in general use in these times.

the talent for the law or ministry — and the patients who had the most means received their care at home. In “A Goodly Heritage,” his sixth book chronicling the history of Boston Children’s Hospital and its practitioners, Dr. Frederick H. Lovejoy ’55 offers a portrait of both the institution’s first 10 physicians-in-chief and the milieu in which they led the storied pediatric hospital. An academic pediatrician at Children’s for more than five decades, Lovejoy worked closely with five of the 10 physicians about whom he writes.

“A Goodly Heritage” is broken into four parts, and chapters about each chief — beginning with Thomas Morgan Rotch, who served from 1893 to 1914, and ending with Gary Robert Fleisher, appointed in 2009 — are interspersed with those about the era in which they were leading. Lovejoy takes readers from the 18th century, when the best medical training took place in Europe, the medical care of children was undifferentiated from that of adults and pediatric mortality rates were staggering, through the emergence of pediatrics as a subspecialty. He charts the rise of academic medicine (the affiliation of hospitals with medical schools) and the era of scientific investigation — greater understanding of viral and heritable diseases, subspecialization and the introduction of well-child care — and then brings us into the modern age in which Children’s and other elite medical institutions offer an equal focus on clinical care, teaching and research. Along the way, Lovejoy makes a well-substantiated case for each chief as both a product of and the right leader for his (or her; of the hospital’s 10 leaders, only one, Mary Ellen Avery, has been a woman) moment in time.

ON THE BOOKSHELF

Granite Kingdom

Eric Pope ’68 Rootstock Publications, Nov. 2022

In 1910, the electrification of the granite industry has transformed the northern Vermont village of Granite Junction into the nation’s largest supplier of finished granite for construction. Newspaper reporter Dan Strickland, a stonecutter’s son, finds himself caught between the village’s two big granite producers. Several fatal industrial accidents prompt one of them to ask Strickland to investigate the possibility of sabotage, while the other’s right-hand man bullies him for working for the newspaper that supports their competitor. Despite prosperity at the top, almost everyone in the village struggles to attain or maintain economic security. In Pope’s novel, while the good guy triumphs in the end, it is not in the way he had imagined.

Guarding the Golden Gate

J. Gordon Frierson ’53 UNevada Press, May 2022

A GOODLY HERITAGE

Frederick Lovejoy ’55

Science History Publications, Nov. 2022

Reviewed by Kristin Duisberg

Living in an age of celebrity surgeons and hospitals-as-soap-opera-sets, it’s hard to imagine a time when medicine was considered an inferior profession — reserved for those without

In a postscript, Lovejoy describes “A Goodly Heritage” as his thank you to Children’s, a place that has served as his professional home for some 55 years. Himself a former chief resident, deputy chair of the department of pediatrics, two-time interim chair, and 42-year associate physician in chief as well as chaired and distinguished professor at Harvard Medical School, Lovejoy says of his book, “It is most especially my humble thanks to an institution for bringing out the ‘better angels’ in me and in so many others who have gone before me. Each has been the beneficiary of the hospital’s soul and the deep privilege of caring for the sick children of this world.”

As a major seaport, San Francisco once struggled to control infectious diseases carried by passengers on ships entering the port. In 1882, a steamer from Hong Kong arrived carrying more than 800 Chinese passengers, including one who had smallpox. The steamer was held in quarantine for weeks while smallpox spread among those on board — an episode that convinced port authorities that better means of quarantining infected ship arrivals were necessary. “Guarding the Golden Gate” covers the creation and operation of the U.S. quarantine station and discusses the challenges of life on Angel Island. Frierson’s account also examines steps taken to prevent the spread of diseases not only into the United States but also into other ports visited by ships leaving San Francisco, the political struggles over the establishment of a national quarantine station and the day-to-day life of the immigrants and staff inhabiting the island.

AFFINITY GROUP NAME CHANGE SPS Queer Alumni

BEN LOEHNEN ’96, SPS TRUSTEE

WAS

OF CONVERSATIONS I HAD HERE THAT I PARTICIPATED IN MARCHES IN SELMA, ALABAMA. IT WAS A CLASSMATE OF MINE FROM HERE AT ST. PAUL’S, WHEN WE WERE TOGETHER AT YALE, WHO CALLED ME THE NIGHT [DR. KING WAS KILLED] AND SAID WE NEEDED TO GO DOWN TO ATLANTA TO BECOME PART OF THE TEAM OF PEOPLE SUPPORTING DR. KING’S WORK AS IT MOVES FORWARD, EVEN THOUGH HE’S GONE. A LOT OF PEOPLE HAVE ASKED ME, ‘WHERE DID YOU FIND THE COURAGE TO PARTICIPATE IN THOSE KINDS OF MOVEMENTS?’ AND I HAVE TO TELL THEM THAT A LOT OF THAT ENCOURAGEMENT CAME FROM THIS SCHOOL.”

— TED LANDSMARK ’64

During a daylong visit to SPS, Jan. 12, 2023

In 2020, a group of LGBTQIA+ SPS alumni formed an advisory counsel to the Alumni Association. The group at first called itself The LGBTQIA+ Advisory Council, but we came to find the name a mouthful. What else to call it? We debated several choices. SPS Pride was one option, but many alumni feel pride in the School, and we deemed it too generic. SPS Queer Alumni appealed to the majority of us, from our most senior members to our youngest ones.

As Kat Greenbaum ’07, one of the co-chairs of the group, says, “While some may find the word ‘queer’ pejorative, it has become a word our community has reclaimed from people who once used it as a slur. It’s broad but inclusive.”

The group is hosting ongoing alumni panels, another social gathering at Anniversary Weekend and, in May 2023, a Seated Meal hosted by queer alumni around the world. We’d love for you to join us. To learn more about SPS Queer Alumni, sign up for email updates, or inquire about how to get more involved, email alumni@sps.edu.

WE NEED YOU

If you are an SPS alum — or know of any alumni — who competed in the Olympics, volunteered in the Peace Corps or were a Rhodes Scholar, please let us know. Send the who, what, when, where and why of your experience to sdonovan@sps.edu.

IT

“BECAUSE

XIX Society at Serafina Seaport in Boston on Dec. 8: (l. to r.) Amanda Filoso Schreyer ’96, Alex Hoffman ’04, Macy Radloff ’02, Chapin Mechem ’90, Madeline Wang ’93, P’21, Laura Bostwick ’07, Katherine Ko ’16 and Elizabeth Wells ’17.

XIX SOCIETY NETWORK

COLLEGE DINNERS

IN MILLVILLE AND BEYOND

MARCH

13 Reception with Amachie Ackah ’90, hosted by Cate Stafford ’94 London

31 Fine Arts Faculty show opens Crumpacker Gallery

APRIL

19 Alumni Association Annual Meeting virtual

24-26 SPS Community Receptions Texas

On Sept. 22, college-age alumni in Washington, D.C., gathered for dinner. L. to r.: Ellie La Voie ’20, Audrey Biles ’22, Emma Horvath ’22, Dru Strand ’22, Alexes Merritt ’19, Claire Bassi ’19, Chris Robinson ’21, Victoria Chen ’21, Erik Hoets ’20, Yixuan Li ’21, Clara Lu ’21, Olivia Chuang ’19 and Alexander Rowley ’21. Not pictured: Ella Kulicki ’21 and Neel Banerjee ’19.

LUNCH AT SARDI’S

SPS alumni attending UVA gathered for dinner in Charlottesville on Sept. 21. L. to r.: Lilly McCluer ’22, Fisayo Odukoya ’22, Madeline Mitchell ’22, Serena Cody ’22, Maya Maloney ’21, Will Walton ’22, Emily Barker ’20, Livia Hughes ’19 and Sam Conway ’20. Not pictured: Blair Belford ’21, Nick Shepard ’21 and Ali Kimball ’19.

25 XIX Society Global Seated Meal virtual

MAY

6 Alumni SPARKS, various locations

17 SPS Queer Alumni Seated Meal virtual

19 Anniversary Registration Closes

19-20 Spring Theater Production New Space Theater

26 Student Art Show opens Crumpacker Gallery

26-27 SPS Ballet Company Spring Performance, Memorial Hall

27 NEIRA Regatta, Worcester, MA

JUNE

4 Graduation of the Form of 2023 Chapel Lawn

9-11 Anniversary Weekend at SPS

30 Last chance to support The SPS Fund for this fiscal year

Visit sps.edu/events often as more opportunities to connect are added and to register for gatherings.

More than 30 alumni from the Forms of 1950-1961 gathered for lunch with Rector Kathy Giles at Sardi’s in New York City on Jan. 26, for conversation and socializing. Special thanks to Harald Paumgarten ’56 for organizing this time together.

T hese formnotes reflect information received through Jan. 6, 2023. 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, NH 03301 or alumni@sps.edu.

For reunion information, please visit sps.edu/anniversary

1948/75th

Porter Hopkins plhopkins@hughes.net

Pete Coley bradleypetecoley@aol.com

Pete Coley writes: “Panda and I have just moved into a retirement community called Meadow Ridge in Redding, CT, a few miles from Coleytown, one of the earliest colonial grants from the King in 1640. It’s like going to college, with all the left and right brain diversions, and we are thrilled with the place, and with the future of similar institutions. Our five children and nine grandchildren are all doing well, and I look forward to our next get-together, whatever alumni manage to organize. I’m hoping to be at the reunion in June.”

Porter Hopkins shares: “For most of us, this is our 93rd year, so I want to wish all of you who are celebrating a very happy birthday. We’ve gotten by COVID, and now the next big item on our horizon is our 75th SPS Anniversary, June 9-11. I hope folks will start making plans to attend. If Herbie Oven can make his way out of Oklahoma to be there, I’ll give him a prize! Recently, I’ve gotten a kick out of rereading books I enjoyed 50 years ago. Most of us can still read, and I encourage you to pull out your favorites once again, too. In our lifetime, we’ve seen the demise of three major trees — American chestnut, American elm and American ash. Looking back, I think one of the greatest contributions of our form has been Albie Neilson’s gift to take care of the SPS grounds. I have three daughters living in Maine, and we’ve been talking about the drastic changes in the weather lately. I recall when we were students, shoveling snow from the Lower School Pond, along with the teams of horses with their wooden plows, clearing the ice for the hockey rinks. That’s something you’re not going to see again. John Scully ’49, who ended up on the Yale hockey team with a few of our classmates, has a son, David ’79, who is

now president of the SPS Board of Trustees. I congratulate both David and John, as well as the Form of ’49 on this honor. See you all in June!”

Burton Closson and his wife, Susan, are welcoming a new great-granddaughter, Lucia Duphenieux Grimaldi, daughter of Laura Closson Dean ’04 and her husband, Carmine Grimaldi ’04. Lucia joins older brother, Nico Closson Grimaldi, 3. Her grandparents are Lucie and Paul Dean ’75. Four generations are celebrating this good news.

1949

Sam Cooley cooleyack@aol.com

Peter Van Doren writes: “I fully retired as an active lawyer two years ago and still live in NYC. Early in life, I developed an interest in wine and a few years ago became a minor partner in a group that purchased part of Batard-Montrachet in Burgundy. At the time, I was told it was a vanity investment and that suited me just fine. That aside, it pays dividends in very good bottles of wine and gives me something to talk about at cocktail parties. I’m happy to share a bottle.”

1950

Melissa Walters mwalters@sps.edu

Brooks Robinson sends this greeting: “To my fellow survivors of the Form of 1950, I wish everyone well! Stay in touch!” Brooks can be reached at fbrobinson1@yahoo.com

1952

Truman Bidwell jbidwell@sullivanlaw.com

As you all know, a number of us (Albert Francke, David Sinkler, Bill Emery, Breezy Reid, your scrivener, Fred Hoppin and Tom Charlton) continued at Yale the rowing careers we began on the Lower School Pond. The Yale varsity boat represented the U.S. at the Olympics in Melbourne in 1956. The captain and bow oar of that boat was Tom. Yale failed to qualify for the semi-finals in the first race, but did so in the repechage and then went on to win gold in the finals. I believe that is the only time a boat that lost in the first qualifying race has won the gold at the Olympics. Tom has graciously given his gold medal to SPS, and arrangements are underway to create a very special place in the gymnasium to display this med-

Members of the Form of 1953 Jim Hammond and Gordon Frierson, together with their wives, at a late Sept. dinner at Settepani in NYC.

Jim Hammond ’53 (l.) at lunch with formmate Peter Swords (r.) in Sept. at NYC’s Le Monde.

At dinner in Friedman on Anniversary Weekend 2022 are 1951 formmates (l.to r.) Mark Cluett, Fergus Reid and Steve Gurney.

al. We hope other SPS Olympic medal winners will follow Tom’s example, and that the case holding Tom’s medal will also soon have the company of other Olympic medals. Both

Tom and I are thrilled that between Tom’s medal and the form’s shell that will ply the waters of Turkey Pond for decades to come, our form will be represented, and we hope remembered, for the fun we had on the waters of Long Pond and later Turkey, and indeed on all the playing fields and in the classrooms of SPS (OK, maybe some of the classes weren’t so much fun). Thank you, Tom!

1953/70th

Jim Hammond hamjam123@hotmail.com

As you may know, our SPS 70th Anniversary is June 9-11. I encourage you to make your hotel reservations at the Holiday Inn now, before the hotel fills up — call them at 603224-9534. I hope that many of us will attend. Send a formnote to me or Melissa for this space for the next issue, too. The deadline is March 31. We would love to hear from you.

Peter Paine relays: “Two weeks after our 70th anniversary, Patty and I will head to Oxford to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the founding of the Rhodes Scholarships. I had discussed with John Sewall, our form’s other Rhodes Scholar, the possibility of meeting up in Oxford, but sadly, he passed away last year. My son, Peter III ’81, also attended Oxford and went to the same college I did, Christ Church. He also read Law and was taught by the same tutor, Teddy Burn, a legendary figure. Peter and I help run the American Friends of Christ Church, our college’s fundraising arm in the U.S.”

University of Nevada Press recently published a book by J. Gordon Frierson, “Guarding the Golden Gate: A History of the U.S. Quarantine Station in San Francisco Bay,” available on a number of sites. It’s in the Reviews section of this issue.

1954

Jim Darby goodstuff404@gmail.com

While reviewing the highs and lows of the previous year, I can’t help but pause when remembering those who are no longer with us going into 2023. This is especially timely coming on the heels of Jamie Houghton’s passing only a few weeks ago. For me, last

year’s most jarring loss was that of John Zimmerman in March. I met Zim in fourth grade when my family moved to Pittsburgh in 1946. We lived in the same end of town, and it was during that period that I was introduced to his two Great Danes named Shurna and Breena. Trembling with fear, I’d look up into their calm, brown eyes while standing as tall as I could muster at that age. John, himself, was good-sized, and I could only think, “My Lord, they make things big at this end of the state!” Luckily, the dogs didn’t consider me a soup bone, and had the same calm friendly personality of their owner. Zim used his size to real effect in football and was on the first crew SPS sent to Henley. John reappeared in my life when he and his wife, Missy, asked me over for dinner upon moving back to Pittsburgh. At that point, they introduced me to the town of Sewickley, which my family called home for the next 38 years and in retirement. Ask me if I knew John Zimmerman and I’ll tell you “darn right,” and then I’ll tell you he was one heck of a guy.

1955

Gunnar Baldwin gunnar.baldwin@gmail.com

John Horan jrhoran@foxlex.com

We are sorry to hear about the death of another formmate, Bob Duryea. It prompts me (Gunnar) to write what I often think when I read obituaries: Why do I only hear about old friends’ lives when it is too late? Perhaps we

should share more about what we have been doing in our formnotes before our classmates have to read our obituaries! I have found that reconnecting with friends can be a great pleasure, and the older I get, the greater! We’re always interested in what everyone has done with their lives post-SPS. Send either of us an email and share your news with us by March 31 for the next issue.

1956

Robert Ingersoll robertsingersoll@aol.com

Harald Paumgarten writes: “Curious geographic concentration for 1956 — on Mount Desert Island, ME, particularly Northeast Harbor, there are nine form members. Charlie Mellon and Morgie Wheelock have passed, but still making enduring summer arrangements are Benjie Neilson, John Wilmerding, Harald Paumgarten, Bill Beadleston, Jared Edwards and Walter Lippincott, with annual passthroughs by Bill Zimmermann.”

1957

Bill de Haven bill_dehaven316@hotmail.com

Hello, 1957. We are in the process of scheduling our annual Philadelphia Dinner. We will establish a Friday night in May. Hopefully, that date will encourage our snowbird formmates to attend. Stay tuned for details.

George Hobson writes: “In the last six years, I have published ‘Imago Dei: Man/ Woman in the Image of God,’ a series of theological essays centered on this crucial anthropological revelation in Genesis, chapter one. I have also published during this period six collections of poetry: ‘Faces of Memory,’ ‘Love Poems for My Wife Victoria,’ ‘The Parthenon,’ ‘May Day Morning in Yerevan,’ ‘Heights and Depths’ and ‘A Far Country

On Dec. 31, 2022, Bobby Clark ’61 took a Polar Plunge at Singing Beach with three of his grandsons

David Atkinson ’59 (second from right) and friends celebrated their arrival in Santiago de Compostela on Oct. 19, 2022.

1958/65th

Allan Ayers aayers3667@gmail.com Guy Rutherfurd rutherfurdguy@gmail.com

For the Greatest Class of ’58: Plans are taking shape for our 65th Reunion in June, so now is the time for you to make your reservations. Come to our pre-reunion at the York Harbor Inn for the nights of June 7 and 8, including a casual dinner on Wednesday as we arrive, and a tour of the Portland Museum of Art and the Homer Winslow home/ studio on Thursday. A block of rooms is reserved at the York Harbor Inn (207-3635119). Also, SPS has reserved a block of rooms at the Concord Holiday Inn for us for Friday and Saturday nights, so call for those, too (603-224-9534). Saturday night dinner will be at The Common Man in Concord. More details will follow.

Tony Nicholas writes: “Our class is busy emailing about the 65th anniversary. No one can actually comprehend that it has been that long since graduation, and even longer since we did our thing in those days at SPS. We are, naturally, anxious about more attrition between now and June. The warmth in the communication is remarkable. The sense of shared experience bonds us despite long gaps in time and communication. I especially appreciate hearing from classmates who were off the radar for years, such as Guy d’Agostino and Hilmi Toros. I tried for years to move beyond SPS and its world of privilege, but the friends and memories sucked me back in. Would you believe that a dozen or more 82-year-olds, who once lived in Foster House, have been emailing and reminiscing

about that morning in the winter of 1957 walking to the Upper for breakfast when the temperature was 40° below? No wonder they call us the Greatest Class! And today, we are quietly grieving about the news that our formmate, Esty Stowell, died last March. Even though he vanished from our lives more than 50 years ago, we grieve. He was in the Greatest Class. He was one of us.”

1959

Sam Callaway samuelcal41@gmail.com

Sydney Waud sydney.waud@compass.com

We are beginning to plan for our 65th Reunion in 2024, likely the first or second weekend in June, and will send a letter to all formmates soon. I hope you will all think about attending. It should be a joyous occasion with us old fuddy-duddies close to leading the annual parade. We will also suggest some alternatives for a pre-reunion gathering, such as we held at the Woodstock Inn before our 50th. So, keep this in the back of your minds as well. I can’t help but remember viewing the Alumni Parade during our Third Form year and exchanging comments about “we’ll never be that old.” Well, that time has come for us, and I hope as many of us ’59-ers as possible will find our way to Millville to celebrate our life experiences, as well as the amazing growth and change that has occurred at SPS over the last 65 years. Let’s make it an unforgettable weekend.

Malcolm MacKay writes: “Bill Everdell’s son, Christian, is a New York lawyer who’s represented Ghislaine Maxwell and Sam Bankman-Fried. A summa cum laude graduate of Princeton and longtime assistant federal attorney, he is obviously the lawyer to see for anyone who has a serious legal problem.”

1960

Dimitri Sevastopoulo dsevastopoulo@gmail.com

From Bill Burnham: “It was fall of 1987 when Chris Roosevelt announced himself in the lobby of my toy manufacturing company in South Norwalk. He had a dream and asked me to play a small part in it. Today, his dream is a reality … the Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk, a steward of Long Island Sound research and conservation and New England’s number-one aquarium (according to Tripadvisor). Having been a trustee for all these years and vice chairman today, I thank Chris for introducing me to his passion and the honor to provide leadership for the Aquarium’s mission.”

The skiing was so bad at Cannon, we did not drive north and enjoyed relaxed days, restaurant visits and First Night on Dec. 31. Hopefully, we will get snow. My best for 2023. Keep in touch.

Mike Seymour ’61 shares: “Maggie and I live in Beaufort, SC, following in the footsteps of my brother, Richard ’57. We were rowing three days a week with a rowing club, but we lost our space. Son Malcolm lives in Brooklyn; younger son David is in Seattle. I don’t care much to get on planes anymore, so we will have a family reunion in Hilton Head next June. Overall, we are staying healthy and work out at the YMCA three days a week as well as take regular walks.

Jim Hatch sends greetings from the Berkshires and says, “The summer’s fantastic rowing conditions lingered into fall, but it has been a crazy winter so far. Serious cold in late December enabled ice to form on the lakes, but warm and rainy weather ar-

Here.’ All are available on Amazon.com; my website is georgehobson.com.”

1961 Ed Tiffany edtiffany@gmail.com

Camaraderie on Cape Cod with 1963 formmates and significant others. Front, l. to r.: Jules St. Marie, Susan Livingston, Marian Hawkins, David Gordon, Jacquie and Lee Scarbrough. Back, l. to r.: Walker Lewis, Dick Hawkins, Jerry Nelson, David Evans, Rick Tilghman, Henry Livingston. Not pictured: Bart Baldwin.

Mike Van Dusen ’61 with four of his grandchildren at a family reunion near Bend, OR, last summer.

Gunnar Baldwin ’55

and His Sliding Track

Until someone tells him otherwise, Gunnar Baldwin ’55 stands by his belief that snow tubing, now ubiquitous at ski areas across New England, was invented right in his backyard on the sliding track he’s built every winter since 1965 at his home in Thornton Gore, New Hampshire.

It all began on an October day a decade after he’d graduated from St. Paul’s School. A father of four then and a math teacher at Moses Brown in Rhode Island, he was bringing the school’s Outing Club members to New Hampshire’s White Mountains so frequently that he decided to buy a property he could use as a base. Having grown up in a research forest the son of a forester and a botanist, Baldwin was drawn to a 65-acre former sheep farm in the Gore surrounded by the White Mountain National Forest. When considering buying the property, he followed one of its paths down to Eastman Brook, where a gorgeous pool lined with colorful fallen leaves was glinting in the sunlight. Standing in the middle of that pool on what he’s dubbed Decision Rock, he knew he’d found the perfect place.

Soon after building a new house on a hill dotted with rocks and birch trees, Baldwin’s first marriage ended. Two years later, he married Heather, his wife of 50 years now. With eight children between them, the family made the Gore their fulltime home and he started teaching at the local high school.

Where there are kids and snow, there will be sliding, and from their first winter in the North Country, the Baldwin children loved sliding down their hill. To keep them safe as well as entertained, Baldwin shoveled snow into banked turns along a 700-foot course, eventually adding a starting gate complete with a tunnel off the back deck, more twists and turns, lights for night sliding, and even a 1,200-foot second course. During its heyday in the 1980s, the track was in constant use by the eight Baldwin kids, their friends, neighbors and even, once, 150 high school seniors who stayed past midnight to take run after run. By then, the Baldwin clan had traded plastic sleds for the overinflated truck inner tubes they used to float on the brook in the summer — the first such use of inner tubes, Baldwin believes. “A lot of the kids who used to slide here went on to work at Waterville Valley, Loon, all these ski places that have tubing now,” he says. “I really think they got the idea from their time here on this hill.”

In the Pixar film “Monsters, Inc.,” the city of Monstropolis is powered by the screams of children before it’s discovered that laughter is an even more powerful energy source. As long trains of linked tubers fly down the luge course, reaching up to 25 miles per hour, it’s the combination of delighted screams and whoops of joy that power Baldwin and motivate

him to build the course another year. “I measure my reward in decibels,” he says of his annual effort. “The louder the sliders are, the happier I am.”

In 2015, however, Baldwin was less than delighted when well-known New Hampshire television host Fritz Wetherbee stood at the foot of his driveway to tell the story of how Thornton Gore had been, before the Civil War, a thriving farming community but that now there was nothing there.

“He was 200 yards from the top of the longest sliding course in the state, where tubing originated,” Baldwin says, still a bit indignant. “That’s not nothing.” Baldwin wrote a number of letters, and a crew finally arrived to film a segment for “New Hampshire Chronicle” on Baldwin’s backyard tradition.

Now, with a new knee and a new tunnel mold to help build this year’s course, Baldwin just needs one thing — snow. Inquiries about the legendary track’s status dot his inbox and social media pages, and though the weather is iffy, he knows one thing for sure: that when he builds it, they will come to revel in winter fun once again.

rived and hope for a skate disappeared. So, headed for CA soon to get warm weather and visit family. Starting in La Quinta to stay with a friend and watch granddaughter play in a lacrosse tournament before moving on to Marin.”

From Bill Matthews: “All’s going well down here in FL — well, almost. Was diagnosed with Parkinson’s last spring. Then, at the end of the summer, I fell off my bike in Maine and will have a shoulder replacement the end of January. The good news is I am married to Marcia, and she has been both a terrific caregiver and drill sergeant. I am in good hands. I, as does Tod (Rodger), have a recumbent bike down here, and thanks to the flat terrain, I am able to zoom, one armed, around the neighborhood. Finally, Marcia and I will take three grandsons to Paris in March. Can’t wait. All in all, life is pretty good.”

Rick Richardson and Bill Matthews, roommates for three years at SPS, spent a great day together in October. Rick’s wife, Ellie, and son, Willy, also came. The Richardsons provided the lobster rolls and the Matthews the view and Grampy’s cookies.

1962

Alex Whiteside alex.whiteside@hotmail.com

Peter Rousmaniere, John Rousmaniere’s brother, reports that John has Alzheimer’s and, in Dec. 2022, was admitted to Bridges by Epoch in Westwood, MA. His long-term memory is quite good. Peter can convey messages to John,” contact him at 802-291-3843 or pfr@rousmaniere.com

1963/60th

David Gordon gordondavidcjr@gmail.com

Our 60th Reunion is June 9-11. Make your plans now! As a warmup, nine of us gathered on Cape Cod last September. Thanks to our hosts David Evans, Marian and Dick Hawkins, and Susan and Henry Livingston, we enjoyed three days of camaraderie sharing lots of seafood, drinks and boating. One night, we enjoyed a ’63 Zoom call; kudos to all those who joined in! Maggie and I are relishing Christmas with our granddaughter, Klara, and her parents, Amy ’01 and Johan Lundstrom, who are visiting from Stockholm. Hoping for snow and smooth pond ice here in Garrison.

1964

Rob Claflin robclaflin@comcast.net

Rick Sperry overcable@aol.com

Steve Wilmer has returned from Libourne, France, for the FISA World Rowing Masters Regatta.

From Ted Baehr: “My SPS son, Jim ’01 (Marine Lt. Col. and successful attorney in New Orleans), came with his wife, Jasmin, to celebrate Christmas with me; my son Robby and his wife and four children; and my daughter Evy with her husband and two children (with one more on the way).”

Haven Pell writes: “It has been rather a year, I guess. A small group of us completed the construction of a court tennis court at Westwood Country Club in Vienna, VA, thus providing a permanent home for the game in the Washington area. “Around the World in Fifty Courts,” my book about my experiences in this micro game, was published in time for the opening of the court in Nov. when HRH The Earl of Wessex and I discussed it at a book chat. You can get the real scoop in Jim Schutze’s review on p. 32. Skihad V began before Christmas and will continue until mid-February. Chuck Coggeshall, Bill Gordon, Livy Miller and maybe Tony Parker will join for several days in early February.”

1965

Bob Hall ro.hall@northeastern.edu

Eric Saunders eric@lawefs.com

Several formmates have shifted the focus of their lives from their business careers to charitable activities and community service. Buff Chace is chairing the Providence Resilience Partnership (PRP), bringing together businesses, academic institutions, nonprof-

Ted Baehr ’64 with his family, including four children and their spouses, and his 15 grandchildren.

Steve Wilmer ’64 after his race at the FISA World Rowing Masters Regatta in Libourne, France.

Michael Yahng '65 (l.) and Rick Burroughs '65 enjoyed breakfast together in CA.

Form of 1961 friends Bill Matthews (l.) and Rick Richardson spent a great day together in October.

its, civic leaders, community groups and residents to address climate change threats in RI’s capital. The organization is catalyzing a comprehensive, inclusive approach to protect Providence from accelerating sea-level rise and severe weather impacts.

Jim Gibbons reports: “I retired from J.P. Morgan’s investment bank in 2008 and relocated to Williamstown, MA, from NYC. I raised my hand to serve with two charitable organizations. First, I served on the board of the local ambulance service, an enterprise that received no government support yet served Medicaid patients. This year, after 12 years of service, I retired as treasurer of the Williamstown Rural Land Foundation, which preserves land for agriculture and to maintain vital view sheds. About 60% of land in the town is preserved through the foundation in collaboration with the state and town.”

When not in Hong Kong, Michael Yahng lives in Moraga, CA, and Rick Burroughs in Peace Dale, RI. Mike learned that Rick would be coming west to see his new granddaughter over the holidays and decided to arrange a meeting. Schedules being what they are, breakfast was the only time that worked. Mike drove 30 minutes to a restaurant in Livermore where the two enjoyed a wonderful reunion. Anything for the School and the Form of ’65!

Jim Treadway reports he is living in Napa, CA, and maintaining an active work life, including consulting on a hotel project in Missouri. He is enjoying good health and time with his five children and their eight kids — one of the benefits of senior status. As the countdown begins and he becomes more reflective, he is reconnecting with old friends from St. Paul’s, Dartmouth, Cornell and the Marine Corps.

Sandy Faison is hard at work on his bucket list. He and his wife are headed to Antarctica for a 12-day trip, and then he and his son are going to Iceland for some heli-skiing. In between these activities, he is enjoying his two young grandchildren.

1966

that Freddy, retired from practicing law in NY, now lives mostly in Santa Barbara, quite a bit closer to their children, James and Laura, who are in California. The draw of Santa Barbara was that Dolores grew up there, in addition to other reasons, including great weather.

Martin Oppenheimer reports: “I and my wife, Annilee, who witnessed the stabbing of Salman Rushdie during her stay at Chautauqua during the summer, moved to Fearrington Village, next to Chapel Hill, NC. My daughter, Caroline, who is also Andre Bishop’s goddaughter, and her family live 12 minutes away. I am scheduled to leave Morgan Stanley on April 30 and am no longer accepting new clients. You are all safe now. I would welcome ideas for the rest of my life. My SPS roots apparently go back to the days of Dr. Shattuck. A relative from Colorado attended for a year. The family mine gave out and he lacked the funds to attend a second year. Dr. Shattuck wrote him to come anyway and work in the stables. I am frequently flooded with gratitude for all the personal connections I made at SPS, where I could meet people such as Andre. He was my roommate and a longtime friend, a great genius of our generation. Dan Maxwell was so kind and patient as he tutored me in Latin. He beat me in chess 312 times without even a draw. Dan is active in the Esperanto World Congress. He told me Esperanto is a made-up language spoken in 100+ countries: “It is easy to learn so people can overcome the curse of the Tower of Babel.” John Brown, who also stayed with my family during a vacation while his family was in Mexico, introduced me to language and literature outside of English. At age 15, John and I traveled by bus and train in Mexico. We stayed in Acapulco for two dollars at a hotel we learned later was involved in the drug trade. We met guests who told fantastical stories. John is similarly grateful for the friends he made at SPS, and for Le Cercle Français, of which he was president. Finally, Copey Coppedge is a single parent of a 13-year-old Jack Russell he inherited from his late wife. This dog, who ignored him while his wife was alive, now is ‘glued’ to him.”

visit with one of my Stowe, VT, neighbors, Trow Elliman ’46, and his wife, Claudia. Trow recounted with pride leading the parade at Reunion in 2016. This reminded me of my own experience when formmates encouraged me to carry the ’66 sign, despite my DNF status. I still enjoy a slow run through the falling leaves, a passion that was fostered on the trails around Millville.”

1967

John Landes jlandes1948@yahoo.com

Chris Pleatsikas reports: “It has been an eventful year. At the end of 2021, my daughter married a wonderful man. Then, early in 2022, I began to have headaches all day, every day, for months — unfortunately, they caused me to miss the 55th Reunion. The doctors were confused for quite a while, but finally figured it out. In August, surgery cured me. Luckily, it was in time for me to make my annual trip to North Haven, ME, with my longtime companion Jody to her house there. Saw David Parsons, which is always a highlight, along with the wonderful scenery. Shortly after returning home, Jody and I went to Australia to see her daughter — the very talented singer/songwriter Dora Jar, please check her out — open for Billie Eilish in huge arenas across the country. It was amazing. When we weren’t being rock ’n roll groupies, we had a lovely sojourn to Brunswick Heads, a small, counterculture beach town in northern NSW. Also, I got to see several friends from my years living and working in Australia. Most recently, I have tried to put in place a plan to retire (finally!). Here’s hoping. See you all at our 60th in 2027.

1968/55th Walker

Wainwright soled59@aol.com

Hugh Clark hclark@ursinus.edu

Freddy Gillmore and his wife, Dolores, were cruising in the middle of the Aegean Sea when he received a 2 a.m. phone call from Martin Oppenheimer. Martin can confirm

Rick Carrick writes: “I’m glad to see the return of the obituaries in the Horae, as well as other on-campus alumni activities. I particularly enjoyed reading about Ed Harding ’54, who died ‘reluctantly.’ I’ve been meaning to write to share a vignette from a

The Form of 1968 looks forward to gathering in June for its 55th Anniversary and perhaps dedicating the installation of Chris Gray’s bones in the Lindsay Center. Eric Pope has recently published a novel, “Granite Kingdom,” set in Vermont circa 1910. Niko Sullivan published his fourth book earlier this year, “The Blue Revolution,” which addresses the transformation of the fishing industry in New England and its prospects. Craig McNamara published a memoir, “Because Our Fathers Lied.” All are well worth reading.

1969

Eliot Larson ewlarson@comcast.net

Gail and I were busy entertaining friends and family throughout the summer in Kennebunkport. In early October, we went to the Canadian Rockies and toured Calgary and Banff and took the train to Vancouver. Lots of spectacular scenery, great hikes, beautiful cities and wonderful people. No sooner had we returned home, however, and even after five vaccine shots and boosters, we both came down with COVID. Fortunately, not horrible cases and we recovered rather quickly. In other news, our daughter, Juliana, is expecting her second child, a daughter, this spring and our son, Eliot, will be getting married this summer. So, lots to look forward to as life goes on.

1970

Mory Houghton ahoughton3@aol.com

It has been a while since I posted anything, but the New Year brings new hope! So, I’ve heard in various ways from a number of you. There has been good news and sad. The latter being that Tim Glidden and Miles Herter both lost their moms this past fall. I wasn’t lucky enough to know Mrs. Glidden, but I did know Miles’ mother, Lee, and she was simply fabulous. Our condolences to both. As to less bad news, despite my best intentions, I got the damn COVID bug toward the end of last year. It is highly likely more of us did as well. I thought because I had more vaccine in my body than anyone I knew, I’d be OK, but this new variant is insidious and sneaky. Recovered now Now the good news: I spoke to Bob Besse a few times about a) the World Cup and b) his new vocation/avocation as a master gardener. I guess when you’re in the garden business, you

can still use the word “master.” Bob sounded great, BTW.  John Eldridge is continuing his excellent adventure with superb French wine, though this past year, he did have a very nasty bicycle accident/dog attack while riding close to home in Houston. It seems he has healed nicely, though, and the episode has not affected his ability to raise a decent glass. Heard from John Martin, who won yet another notable book award, and also had his first brush with ChatGPT. He thought it was “useful though not always accurate” but “is curious about its implications for students and academics ... whether it will become a short cut.” I think the answer is probably, “Yes, John.” Alec Haverstick is still working 50 hours per week and claims to have no other interests, though I know he has many, including what might by now be dozens of grandchildren. Still good to know Stick is keeping busy. Fritz Newman posted several photographs of various pub crawls he undertook in London, where his grandchildren live. Nicely done! I had a fun lunch with Doug Bateson, who is in great form and continuing to do important board work for the Open Space Initiative.  Steve Crandall returned to Mill Falls last autumn

where the management apparently forgot about the nuisance we caused 14 months before and let him have a room. Lex Breckinridge wrote that he and his family “are thriving” (not that I am surprised). I almost stayed with Frank Kenison while in Concord for an SPS event that, unfortunately, was canceled. I guess it is also unfortunate I didn’t get to savor Frank’s cooking, which he had kindly offered as an extra incentive. Chris Phillips continues to live the good life outside Charleston, SC, and Tres Davidson, who always remembers to send a festive holiday greeting, did it again this season. Thanks, buddy. Keep in touch, all.

1971 Dennis Dixon dennis.c.dixon@gmail.com

Form of 1971 members gathered in NYC in Dec. to commiserate on their group ticket’s near-miss in the recent $482 million jackpot of the NY Mega Millions Lottery. In attendance were Bram Lewis; Gwen and Woody Pier; Fred Stillman; Tony Hairston and wife, Laurie Kamaiko; Peter Seymour; and Jaymie and Trip Spencer. Missing from the evening were late-scratches Debra Stillman; Terry Gruber and his wife, Claudia Brown, pulled away by a celebrity wedding; plus, Wendy and Chris Denison, housebound by a virulent flu rampaging through Maine. The group toasted those in absentia, including New Yorkers Artie Schoen, Murph Murphy and Bill Selby, plus the beloved and recently departed Leo Romer and Rob Barker Bram’s Schoolhouse Theater introduced The Pandemic Players in 2020, a roster of nearly 50 accredited artists, who have performed dozens of Zoom matinees during COVID. In 2023, the Theater is back with “American Icons” live performances. Woody is winding

Members of 1972 (l. to r.) Doug Chan, Pres Stone, Mark Wainwright, Charlie Bronson and Dierk Groeneman at their annual holiday lunch in San Francisco.

Members of the Form of 1971 in NYC in Dec. L. to r.: Bram Lewis, Woody Pier, Fred Stillman, Tony Hairston, Laurie Kamaiko (Tony’s wife, in red, behind Gwen), Gwen Pier, Peter Seymour, Trip Spencer and his wife, Jaymie Spencer.

down his full-time role as co-founder of architectural firm Pier, Fine, while honing his skills as an award-winning ballroom dancer, and Gwen continues as National Sculpture Society president. They’d just returned from a real estate foray into Uruguay. Fred is in fine form and continues seducing unwitting golf victims in Dutchess County, North Carolina, Arizona and wherever else he stashes houses. Tony, despite enduring a knee replacement, was spotted running for a cab as we left the restaurant. He’s blossoming in TV, movie and Schoolhouse Theater roles and is now a SAG/Actors Equity member. Laurie remains a gentle soul and top New York lawyer specializing in the insurance industry. Peter continues the process of relocating from Westchester to Bar Harbor, while steering his family through health-related issues. He’s always the most cheerful one in the crowd. Trip, with Terry, Peter Oliver, and vital input from Dennis Dixon, Gregg Stone, Donn Randall, plus other formmates, finished “Phase One” of the Form of 1971 Visionary Award installation, book and video project and looks forward to updating the form on award opportunities. He completed his ad tech business sale in 2018, and has recently created and produced over 20 songs, a few of which have found their way into commercial radio and Bram’s Schoolhouse Theater productions. Trip is back to competing in squash tournaments and is ranked Top 10 in New York and Top 50 in the U.S. among players 70+. He and Jaymie, who has retired from her full-time recruiting role at Ernst & Young, enjoyed a wonderful dinner at Peter Seymour’s Maine abode in Auguse en route to hiking in Mount Desert, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton and Newfoundland.

From Byam Stevens: “Since moving on from an 18-year stint as artistic director of Chester Theatre Company, I have been developing an acting curriculum (DanceText) geared to the specific needs of ballet dancers. DanceText has been accepted as part of American Ballet Theatre’s National Training Curriculum and I have been leading workshops at ABT, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, NYU and, in February, the SPS Ballet Company. Also working as an acting coach on PBT’s productions of “Giselle” and “Swan Lake” and various productions at ABT. During the two-year theatre/dance hiatus dictated by COVID, Robin and I moved her therapeutic riding center from a commercial stable to

our 100-acre farm in the Berkshire Hills. The hours of outdoor work reclaiming pastures, brush-cutting, fence installation, barn building, etc., have paid off with fulfilling service to a wide range of clients (from veterans with PTSD to children on the autism spectrum) and the joy of looking out the window at any time of day and seeing our Icelandic horses munching away in the pasture.”

Stephen Gray writes: “I have mostly been traveling for business, which periodically takes me to Austin. On my most recent trip, I stopped by to see Guy Antonioli, who is in very good form. We were able to catch some of the World Cup play. We also reminisced about our old friend Leo Romer, who we both miss — very unfortunate final years to his life. Although I have not had the opportunity to connect with Bob von Stade, I do sit on one board with his lovely bride, Elizabeth Munson ’74, and visit with her regularly. I have also recently connected with Gregg Stone on a couple of business matters. He constantly impresses me with his commitment to rowing. He must be one of the most fit among all of us. Finally, after several years living in Galveston, TX, Eliza and I will be pulling up stakes again and moving to Ocala, FL, later in the year; downsizing 48 years of accumulation is mind-numbing work.”

Mark Wheeler shares, “Enjoying our seventh year of living in the medieval village of Rochefort En Terre, France. Came expecting to stay a few months, but somehow never got around to leaving. It suits us, and happy to share it with anyone interested in stepping off the tourist trail and seeing a bit of rural France. Rodney Place has settled not too far away and we are in close touch. Amazing to think of the many friendships SPS spawned that are still strong today, more than 50 years later. Boggles me.”

1972

Graeme Boone boone.44@osu.edu

Chip Haggerty haggerty@pshift.com

Lou Borie writes: “My wife, Kathy, and I are off on our seven months ‘vagabond tour,’ a winter leave of absence from Vermont that feeds our post-retirement, COVID-delayed wanderlust. Our first stop is the Philadelphia area (childhood home), where we are spending a few months near family and friends. After the New Year, we’re headed to Mexico, the Bahamas and Florida. Hoping to catch up with Peggy and Eric Carlson on our way down the East Coast. Before leaving VT, I spent an afternoon with Chip Haggerty at his Stowe farmhouse, where I congratulated him on his hard-fought victory as form director. He showed me the large folk art works he has been painting (and selling) the past few years. Unique and impressive! Back to VT this spring.”

Eric Carlson shares: “Peggy and I thoroughly enjoyed our 50th Anniversary visit. As many others have said, it was great seeing old friends and acquaintances. We were fortunate to meet and talk with some classmates

L. to r.: 1972 formmates John Chapin and Rick Miller at Frenchman Bay, ME.

Pres Stone ’72 sitting pretty in Morocco.

Peggy and Eric Carlson ’72 (l.) visiting Donna and David Holt ’72 in Halifax.

we didn’t know. Following our SPS weekend, we continued our road trip through Maine and the Maritimes. While in Nova Scotia, we met Donna and David Holt for an evening along the bustling Halifax waterfront. What a fun city on the beautiful coast of Nova Scotia!”

Jon Cronin reports: “After a 38-year career as an academic neonatologist, the last 28 years at Mass General in Boston, I have retired. Out of the rat race! Plans include spending more time in Newport, RI; hanging out with my wife (who is still working!); seeing our grandchildren more and caring for our two mini dachshunds. There’s a lot to do! I also want to thank Bob Stockman and Bob Shepley for the great dinner at Myopia Hunt Club before Anniversary Weekend last May. I could not make the reunion due to my work schedule, so it was great to attend the pre-reunion event. Best to all!”

Lin Giralt writes: “We can only report from Houston im westen nichts neues, with apologies to Herr Schade. The June 10 reunion dinner was the high point of my year. Walking back to the car with Pres Stone, I can now officially say, with a supporting medical opinion, that I had a severe angina attack (BTW, I don’t think there’s any other kind). Pres helped me deal with it and drove me to the hotel afterward. Back home, my medical woes continued, and I had a triple bypass at Houston Methodist DeBakey Cardiology Institute on Aug. 11. The Grim Reaper must have been asleep for the second time in as many years since I am still around to pen this note. My recovery has been long but uneventful and most satisfactory. Seeing all of you in June was the high point of 2022; it not only renewed my faith in humanity but being able to share experiences with so many of you has gotten me to think about what I want to do for the rest of my journey on this planet. I can share that making money is not going to be the most important thing going forward, although it cannot be ignored, either. My new north is going to be making friends, sharing with old friends and family, and creating positive contributions to my environment. Teaching, research and maybe writing will be important elements of my journey. I swear. I certainly hope that all of you will accompany me on that journey and remain a close and cherished part of my environment. You cannot recreate 50 years of knowing each other in a test tube. Best to all, and especially P.S., who saved my you-knowwhat on June 10.”

David Holt relays: “Last fall, Donna and I enjoyed seeing Peggy and Eric Carlson in Halifax. We had stayed together at the Henniker House Inn for our 50th and one of the highlights of the reunion was sipping wine one afternoon on the deck of the inn with them. It was a beautiful spot that reached out over the river. John Tait and Sally Keating and their spouses also stayed there. The reunion was a great experience for Donna. Meanwhile, grandson Oscar, 5, is fascinated by negative numbers and insists the days are the same length even if the amount of daylight varies. Gwen, 2, loves clothes and books with pictures.”

Rick Miller writes: “At the end of a twoweek tour of Nova Scotia in Aug., my wife, Linda, and I dropped in on John Chapin at his Hancock, ME, home. His cabin boasts a breathtaking view of Frenchman Bay (named for Samuel de Champlain), Bar Harbor, and the surrounding terrain. Over a home-cooked dinner, John regaled us with tales of real estate glory, including the colorful one about how he came to be a Maine property owner (well worth asking him yourself!). His next-door neighbor, Denny Doucette (beloved faculty emeritus and Manville housemaster) joined us for coffee the next morning.”

Blair Scribner shares: “Since 1978, I have been teaching junior high English and American history. The genius faculty emeritus Richard Lederer, whose creative, inspiring classes I was privileged to take, was an influence on my career choice. Since leaving SPS, he’s written many books, all lighthearted and brilliant, about English. Three years ago, I attended his entertaining talk at Hunter College in Manhattan on the topic of people’s names.”

Pres Stone reports: “Doug Chan, Mark Wainwright, Charlie Bronson, Dierk Groeneman and I had our annual Form of ’72

Christmas Lunch on Dec. 19 at the Beach Chalet in San Francisco. Halsted Wheeler couldn’t make it this year. Other than Mark, all of us are still working. Mark continues to build his own plane, under construction in Maine. He has two grandkids. I have four grandkids, went to Dubai in March, Morocco in October and India for a wedding on Christmas. Charlie continues to be Charlie, and Dierk has been remodeling his home in S.F. and has finally gotten to move in. He has one grandchild. Doug is, I think, collecting and documenting old photographs from early Chinatown in S.F.”

Doug Chan elucidates: “I continue to serve as the chairman and president of the Chinese Historical Society of America. I have been analyzing and writing about the pre1906 photographs of San Francisco’s Chinatown, including the alleyway on which my grandmother, a third-generation San Franciscan, was born in 1898.”

1973/50th

Alden Stevens ahs472@optonline.net

Rob Deans writes: “I look forward to celebrating the 50th Anniversary for the Form of 1973 in June! Please don’t miss this historic weekend for us and the fantastic opportunity to reconnect and renew friendships. The planning committee and I have a great weekend (beginning on Wednesday, June 7, in Meredith, NH) in store for the form, so if you’ve not yet made your plans to join us, please do! You can find details about Concord hotels and the School’s schedule at www.sps.edu/anniversary. Look for more information about activities and the schedule for our form in your email. Be sure SPS has your current email address. Send updates to alumni@sps.edu. See you in June!”

(L. to r.) Tony Bullock ’76, Blaine Carter ’75 and Dorien Nunez ’75 met at Millie’s in D.C. in the fall.

Jose Luis Huertas ’75 and David “Jake” Askins ’75 met for a brew at Mel’s in Manhattan.

1975

Dorien Nunez omniresearch@aol.com

The marathon House Speaker political drama  kept me from asking for notes from more of you, but here’s a quick rundown. Randa Wilkinson and I have both had the pleasure of addressing the students at SPS about careers via Zoom; I talked about Wall Street and entrepreneurship and Randa about her activities making the world a much better place through her work in the Peace Corps. Jeremy Smith was featured in the fall Alumni Horae for his efforts at NASA — Walter Hawley would be proud. Our 50th Anniversary will be here soon! Anyone willing to host regional warmups or Zooms should let me know. Blaine Carter, Tony Bullock ’76 and I met at Millie’s in D.C. to catch up on the reunion event in June and to start the planning for the SPS ’75 50th Reunion! Jose Luis Huertas, living in NY (six-year Paulie), and David “Jake” Askins, living in Atlanta (fiveyear Paulie), met for a brew at Mel’s on 111th Street in Manhattan when David dropped off his daughter to attend Columbia, where Luis and Dave both attended.

From Randy Blossom: “Greetings from Concord. Dayle and I welcomed our fourth

grandson in August; Tyler James is the son of Trent Blossom ’08 and his wife, Emily, of Kennebunk, ME, who also have Theo, 2. Ryan Blossom ’05 and his wife, Sarah, have moved back east from Oregon and now reside in Bow, NH, with their sons Bobby, 4, and Henry, 2. We are waiting for the ponds to freeze so that we can get these boys on the ice! It was great seeing everyone at our delayed 45th Reunion.”

1976

Tony Bullock bullocktony@hotmail.com

Alison Zetterquist zettera.az@gmail.com

Alison Zetterquist reports: “In October, I was asked to step in for a brief stint as interim CEO of the Epilepsy Foundation of America. It’s been a wonderfully fulfilling experience, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to contribute. A trip to D.C. gave me the excuse to have dinner with good friends Suzanne Crawford, Tony Bullock and Blaine Carter ’75. Don’t get me wrong. Retirement is great, but I must admit that I’m enjoying my time with the foundation.”

Charles Altekruse expresses deep gratitude to classmates and School community members who helped celebrate his late wife through the Barbara Banks GoFundMe campaign supporting grassroots natural and cultural conservation projects globally. “It was a beautiful exercise in rebuilding community and putting positive energy out in the world,” said Charlie, who introduced Barbara to SPS at the 25th reunion event in 2001. Charlie would love to connect directly at caltekruse@caconsult.org

Charles Baldwin writes: “An article about me was published in The Elmira Star Gazette

and I have received recognition for videos I have produced. If anyone would like to know more, please contact me. I am also researching buying investment income properties (large apartment complexes in affluent areas). If anyone cares to be a mentor and guide, I’d love to know as much as possible before I leap. Any and all help appreciated.”

From Theo Maehr: “I have created a YouTube channel called 365 Days of Stories by Theo Maehr (easily found in a Google search). Each story will be a delight for people of all ages. Happy New Year.”

Hovey Brock writes: “My wife, Margaret Seiler, and I have taken the retirement plunge and sold our house in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We are now living in our weekend home in Frost Valley on the beautiful West Branch of the Neversink, close to the hamlet of Claryville, NY. While we enjoy country living, we are contemplating our next move, which will likely be buying a house or apartment in Richmond, VA, Margaret’s hometown. I have plenty of time to make paintings for a show I am having at the Mann Library at Cornell University in fall 2024, in case anyone is interested in checking it out. I am also working on a series of personal essays about climate change and the Catskills, one of which I published last year in the 2022 Winter/Spring edition of Appalachia Journal, titled ‘Crazier River: The Neversink River Goes Rogue in the Climate Crisis ’ Margaret, whose uncles, grandfather and other relatives were SPS alums, is working on immigrant rights issues and dissecting her southern aristocratic heritage, fostering dialogue between descendants of the enslaved and enslavers through the organization Coming to the Table. She is working on some personal essays, including ‘A Closetful of Skeletons.’”

Eric Zetterquist, Alison Zetterquist ’76, Anne Benning ’79, SPS Trustee Liz Robbins ’79 and Greg Robbins at the 2022 Epilepsy Foundation New England Gala.

In December, Alexis Johnson ’76 and spouse Dr. Amy Jelliffe hiked in the foothills above Santa Fe.

Alison Zetterquist ’76, Tony Bullock ’76, Blaine Carter ’75 and Suzanne Crawford ’76 at Millie’s in D.C.

Perot Bissell perotbissell4@gmail.com

Talie Harris homerbird@hotmail.com

Talie Harris writes: “Since June, ’77 Pelicans have been flying all over the place. George and Connie Gurney visited Iceland right after reunion. Several of us who couldn’t make it to Concord for our 45th joined Liz Maxwell-Schmidt, who hosted a gathering at her vacation home in Arizona. Hikers wore shirts designed by our own Cornelia Atchley and dined on fine cuisine, laughter and libations while paying homage to Beth Frank, whose path to ordination began at a similar gathering of the Pelican Sisterhood in Santa Fe during our 50th birthday year. Over a recent Zoom hosted by Kim Henning, we began planning a rather extensive flight plan for 2023, including a landing in Bermuda at Sara Frisbee Burnett-Herkes’ place. United we fly (or maybe Delta ...), divided we fall. Over the summer, Penny and Charlie Finnie visited Joanne Flynn and Nick Newlin during their annual August foray to Northeast Harbor and were joined by Chris Willis and Perot Bissell, and Nick’s folks, Louisa and Bill Newlin ’51. This would all be truly impressive if any of the aforementioned visited Maine in January.  Leo Arnaboldi checked in from Berlin to report that the weekend warrior in him had sustained bodily injuries while biking on a business trip overseas. According to Rudolph’s pal, Yukon Sam, ‘Bumbles bounce!’ But our class coxswain did not. I prescribe golf. And lots of it. Joel and I flew to Killarney in June to play the Tralee, Waterville, Dooks, Ballybunnion and Killarney courses. In fierce weather, we slogged through an historic round for 14 holes until the Tralee course was closed for the first time in our ancient caddy’s memory. Luck of the Irish? Not so much. Our house full of golfers all returned with COVID and slightly elevated handicaps. Gluttons for punishment, we hiked the Gap of Dunloe in gale force winds and rain as leprechauns laughed and jaunting carts took shelter. Elizabeth McLearn Richards is finally back on U.S. soil. She moved to a sweet place in Norwalk, close to Dick Soule, Allen Hance and Jim Tung in Rhode Island. Bets has opened a private counseling practice and is helping daughter, Isabel, plan for a California wedding next summer. Keep those emails com-

ing, and blessings on your New Year. May it bring peace to Ukraine and health and happiness to all.

Cathy (Lievens) Gallagher shares: “And so it was that a flock of Pelicans landed together in Arizona. It was an unusual migration, with individual birds arriving from as far northwest as Alaska, as far northeast as Maine, as far south as Mexico, and other points east and west with no discernable migratory pattern. Yet they were driven by a signal … “1, 4, 3.” For, you see, 1, 4, 3 is a lighthouse signal of ‘I Love You’ championed by our lost sister, Beth Frank. She had felt the deep support of Pelican Sisterhood as she ventured into her new avocation of minister more than 13 years ago. She was given a jar of ‘Holy Molé’ during a raucous gathering in New Mexico, and that jar was saved all these years to be brought out again as an homage to her … and to us. We will always cherish those moments with her, and we will honor her life and her passing with a commitment to carry the torch of love, light and humor for as long as each of us is here. And we will pass it on to our extended circle of family and friends. Her presence was felt this weekend, with chance symbols that clearly pointed to her spirit joining in

on the fun. Something special occurred at SPS in the 1973-1977 time when only a few female feet graced the campus. We knew we were unique. We were pioneers. Urinals in our bathrooms screamed out that we were not necessarily a permanent addition or completely welcome. Yet we prevailed. Our Pelican Sisterhood has only strengthened over the years. There is a sameness that flows through us that cannot be broken by the other life experiences elbowing their way into daily existence. There is an ‘atta girl’ voice that was faint in the ’70s but is a loud shout today. There is a shared history that we enhance by bringing each other up to speed from time to time. ‘Got a minute? Let me tell you what happened in the last 20 years …’ Nine Pelicans arrived in Arizona on Columbus Day weekend. We talked and talked some more. We hiked, dined, drank, laughed. We shared experiences and space that we will cherish forever. But even though only nine sisters connected for this weekend, there were many more who will forever be part of that initial group. Whenever we meet up, it is a rediscovering of memories and friendship.”

Xavier de Richemont sends greetings: “Stat crux dum volvitur orbis en 2023 … Le meilleur pour tous. The best for all. Lo mejor para todos. Abrazos!”

1978/45th

Nora Tracy Phillips noratphil@aol.com

Jon Sweet jsweet1000@gmail.com

Nora Tracy Phillips writes: “Time … it’s so complicated. Unless your head has been under a rock, you know that our 45th Reunion is coming up in June. And years before that, we began the process of growing up together. But not one of us was cast in amber on the

(L. to r.) Form of 1977 members Cindy Drinkwater, Cathy (Lievens) Gallagher, DeeDee Look, Cornelia Atchley, Allison Clark Swift, Didi Blau, Cici Cruice Peterson and Liz Maxwell Schmidt gathered in AZ, celebrating Pelican Sisterhood and Beth Frank’s memory.

SPS Trustee President David Scully ’79 (r.) with formmate Al Timpson on the Serengeti.

Chapel Lawn in June 1978. If 60-year-old you has even an ounce of curiosity about what has come of your efforts begun almost 50 years ago, or if it would feel good to nestle in the hug of an old friend, or if you’d like to make a new friend in someone whose name you’ve known, but so little else, or if you just need to revisit that particular spot on campus where … come back. The rest of us will rejoice at having you among us. For details, go to www.sps.edu/anniversary.”

Writing from upstate New York, where she works as an associate dean of students at SUNY Oswego,  Liz Droz says she is “thankful for God’s peace and blessings,” which include not only having a job that she really enjoys, but also that her husband, Jeff, and daughter, Carly, are in similarly good places. Jeff is newly retired from teaching and Carly has just completed an MA in public policy. Carly lives in Nashville and would like to find work supporting a nonprofit organization — any leads would be welcome, says Liz.

Back in January,  Bryan Bell was making New Year’s resolutions, among them the vow to enjoy life. Bryan credits a memory of Bill Abbé with having prompted him to make that resolution. “One lesson I learned from Mr. Abbé was that whatever else life was, it should always be fun,” Bryan recalls. “I picture watching him drive his orange ’56 Corvette between the trees of the apple orchard after crew practice one spring day. Mr. Abbé had fun, and he enjoyed life.” Bryan goes on to say, “To enjoy life might seem like a decadent resolution, but to be honest, it’s something I’ve too often forgotten in a busy work and child-rearing life.” Bryan Bell sent word that  Curtis Starr  had created a beautiful work of art that he’d used as his Christmas card this year. Curtis made a linoleum print of a hairy woodpecker that visits  Amy (Nobu)’s

bird feeder. Bryan says, “An interesting and true story is that I saw what I think was one of those birds in my yard for the first time the same day Curt’s card arrived. It might have been a downy woodpecker, but they are almost identical. Synchronicity?”

1979

Andy Schlosser aeschlosser83@gmail.com

Form

Scribe:

Lili Cassels Brown ecb@cassels-brown.at

In the last issue, we read about George Brooke’s hiking adventures. He’s not the only one. David Scully reported that he and Alec Timpson backpacked across 200 miles of the Serengeti in March 2022. Photographic evidence was submitted, and it looked great. So far, I (Lili) am still mainly hiking in the Vienna Woods. I did complete a 120km trail, in 23 segments, around Vienna in 2022, though, which qualified me for the gold hiking pin of the City of Vienna.

David Stevenson writes, “It was terrific to see Bill Martin, Kimball Halsey and Charlie Andrews at the Head of the Charles in October. The weather was spectacular. Charlie competed in a composite crew out of the Cambridge Boat Club in the Director’s Challenge Men’s Quads and finished fourth out of 32 boats! An outstanding performance.Wishing you a happy and healthy 2023!”

Christoph Partsch writes: “I couldn’t take part in the form Zoom as I had COVID but I am back to life in 2023. All fine. My book, “The Potsdam Conference Villas and their History: In Search of Happiness Lost,” has been published in English now. And I have had the pleasure of spending New Year’s Eve with the writers, Thomas (“The House by the Lake,” etc.) and Debora (“Dancing with the Octopus”) Harding, in Florence discussing

how to write the next one. Challenging and equally inspiring times in Europe.”

From Bill Martin: “I retired in September after 31 exciting years as a foreign service officer with the State Department. With two girls in college and a son in high school, I plan to keep working, but I’m not sure yet if I will take a part-time, short-term position at State working on Afghanistan or do something else in foreign affairs or teach high school.”

1980

John Maeck mwfarmcsa@gmail.com

Gifford West shares: “The high point of the year was the wedding of Becky Gaghen in a small village in France. Truly the most loving, elegant and beautiful service Myriam and I have been to. Becky could not have been more radiant and beautiful. Her career and life are a testament to service to the world and passion. My news: with compatriots from DebtX, we started our own firm, AlpineTremont, a year ago. Same focus on international bank advisory. It has been fun/terrifying to build up a company from nothing; I have a new respect for HR and IT departments. All good. Myriam has three plays in development, one on Nathaniel Saltonstall and the Salem Witch Trial, one on the French mathematician Marquise du Châtelet, and a third on the trauma of abuse. She will have a reading in London on March 2, if anyone is going to be in the UK. And finally, a note of a passing with significance to some of us. Driving down from Quebec, I passed through Concord. The call letters WSPS have been retired and 90.5 is now a classical music affiliate of NPR with the call letters WCNH. I have, faithfully, tuned in to 90.5 as I crested the hill coming into Concord for 40+ years and always enjoyed listening to the next generation of students learn how to

Members of the Form of 1979 David Stevenson, Kimball Halsey, Charlie Andrews and Bill Martin.

Charlie Andrews ’79 at the Director’s Challenge Men’s Quads for the Cambridge Boat Club in October.

Becky Gaghen ’80 and Sébastien Véron (center), flanked here by Gifford West ’80 and wife Myriam, married in July at their home in France.

be disc jockeys and news readers. I learned a great deal from WSPS and made some great friends — sad to see it go!”

David Rolph reports: “I live in San Francisco and work as a financial investor for myself and for a family account. Over Christmas, I was blessed to be with my parents; my brother, Douglas Boring ’78; his wife and three of his five children. I recently returned to the University of California, Berkeley and completed a BA in history.”

1982

Louisa Benton lbenton5@gmail.com

Edward Marchese marquessman@gmail.com

From  Greg Lee: “I liked the recent reunion format held [a week] after Graduation, which provided time for cocktails and leisure in smaller groups. Louisa Benton, Alice Coogan, Lucy Chubb and Clo Dickey were great hosts; seeing  Biddle Duke ’81,  David Lister ’81 and  Andrew Binger ’81 play roofball with  Gus Wilmerding was a time warp. Encouraged me to have dinner with Jamie ’83 and David Lister ’81 in Southampton later in the summer.”

1983/40th

Icy Frantz icy@icyfrantz.com

It’s 2023 and the Form of 1983 is eagerly preparing for our 40th Reunion. Looking forward to being back on campus and reconnecting. As for me, I continue to write, play a little squash, attempt to parent my now mostly grown children, run a community teen center, dip my toe in the world of local politics and hang with my husband, three dogs and two cats. HNY!

An update from Kirk Mead (aka Winter): He and his wife, Pamela, live in scenic and exciting Columbus, OH, after having made the Bay Area home for 25+ years. Pamela ran Zapt, a successful medical cannabis edibles company in 12+ dispensaries, but changes to state cannabis laws in 2018 forced them to shut down. That, coupled with her parents’ health, prompted their move to take care of them, but they still miss the Bay Area desperately! One of the only consolations about leaving NorCal’s scenery, weather, culture and politics (not to mention their friends) is that they’ve reconnected with some folks in Ohio, including Nat McCormick and his wife, Jennifer, and are genuinely going to try to make it back in June!

And happy news from John McCard: “My daughter, Florrie Patricia McCard, was married to Kate McHale on Dec. 31 at Saint Mary’s School in Raleigh, NC; both brides work at Saint Mary’s in administration and athletics.”

1986

Harold Bost hbost2@me.com

Helen Fairman hfairman@comcast.net

From Anthony Sehnaoui: “After four eventful years, my son, Zach ’22, graduated from SPS in June the weekend before our reunion.

Bittersweet moment, for sure. I’ve always loved returning to these hallowed grounds and will miss bumping into many of our contemporaries on the paths. Zach and dozens of his formmates went on a pilgrimage to Montreal. So grateful to the School and to Zach’s amazing advisers (shout out to Heather Crutchfield) and coaches (especially Parker Chase) for their support and dedication during the COVID years. In other news, the winds of change have inspired me to relocate to Ponte Vedra Beach, FL, write a novel and start a new job in consumer M&A.”

1987

Melanie Shaw MacMillan melanieshawmacmillan@gmail.com

I am happy to report that the Form of 1987 is not waiting for reunions every five years to get together, we are not waiting to stay in touch, and we are not waiting to keep our friendships and connections strong. Our series of Why Wait gatherings continues! In Dec. 2022, Holly Sanderson Garrett hosted an SPS ’87 Why Wait? dinner at her house in NYC. We invited everyone from the form with addresses in the city and ended up with a lively group of about 10. (So, please, make sure your address in the SPS directory is up

Three generations of Paulies: Mark Cluett ’51, Rex Thors ’19 and Lisa Cluett Thors ’83 playing golf on the nine-hole course in Blue Hill, ME.

John Pleasants ’83 feels blessed and wishes a great 2023 to all!

Eric Chehab ’87 and family send greetings to all!

John McCard ’83 at the wedding of daughter Florrie Patricia McCard to Kate McHale. L. to r: Clementine McCard, Cynthia McCard, Florrie, Kate, John and Matilda McCard.

Kelly Heaton ’90

Combines Engineering, Nature and Art

JANA F. BROWN

When describing her career as an artist and its many influences in science, engineering and the natural word, Kelly Heaton ’90 frequently invokes the idea of consilience. The word describes the manner in which different academic realms, particularly science and the humanities, can come to a common, unified way of understanding a given topic — something that’s been described as “a jumping together of knowledge.” Heaton’s creative work largely revolves around the intersection of art and electrical engineering.

“My pursuit of consilience came through being a highly creative person who loves spirituality because I’m curious about the big questions of who we are and where we came from,” Heaton explains. “I’m also a nature fanatic, so trying to put those things all together in a world that asks you to be practical forced me into this modality.”

Heaton’s work has evolved over the course of a career that has spanned more than three decades. Her early inspirations can be traced to her days at St. Paul’s School, where she counts among her mentors teachers of art, mathematics, French and religious studies. It was at the School that she “got her legs as an artist.”

“ To have that combination of supportive, critical feedback and the freedom to make decisions about the direction of your work is what makes artists the greatest they can be,” Heaton says. “It happens so rarely, but that’s what happened for me at St. Paul’s.”

After St. Paul’s, Heaton went on to study urban planning and ecology at Yale. She had planned to attend veterinary school at North Carolina State, but when that path didn’t feel right, she applied for an MFA program at Tufts. Ultimately, however, during the maker revolution of the late ’90s, she found a place at the MIT Media Lab, where she later completed a Master of Science degree.

In her graduate classes, Heaton began to explore a budding interest in technology. She learned to write code, use laser cutters and work with circuits. She refers to that time as one of the most intellectually challenging of her life.

“I was like an artistic experiment,” she recalls. “MIT required me to collaborate intensely because there was no way for me to survive otherwise. It taught me how to basically do anything, because it was so difficult that I moved beyond my internal conversation about what I’m capable of and I just did it anyway.”

Her work today reflects that intersection of electrical engineering and art. Known for creating circuits that generate bird songs, Heaton has an interactive installation,

“Circuit Garden,” on exhibit in Brooklyn. A 21-foot-wide artificial lawn that is “planted” with human-sized sculptural electronic devices, “Circuit Garden” uses analog electronic oscillator circuits to create vibrations that sound like birds and chirping crickets.

“ They’re sculptural electronic components as large as you,” Heaton explains. “I did that so people could stand in front of electronic devices and see them as an extension of our own nature.”

As one of very few modern artists who combine art with electrical engineering, Heaton takes her inspiration from some of the greatest creators in history, including Leonardo da Vinci, a painter, scientist and engineer. As humans have become progressively reliant on technology run by circuits, Heaton says, she’s felt a desire to help educate people on what’s inside these machines.

“I can think like a poet and a humanist and I know how circuits work,” she says. “I understand machine intelligence at the foundational level.”

Her online biography describes Heaton as a “creative polymath,” noting that she is also a “self-taught perfumer, Tarot reader, life coach, mushroom hunter, foodie and former innovation consultant in the field of diabetes care.” Her versatility makes her a Renaissance woman, but Heaton is most interested in making connections between those seemingly disparate subjects.

“ The relationship between all of the things is what matters to me,” she explains. “Because I’ve pushed myself to work in so many different fields, my art is not about those fields per se.”

R ather, it’s the consilience of those fields that drives Heaton’s work.

Heaton’s “Circuit Garden” is on exhibit at 15 MetroTech Center in Brooklyn through April 28, 2023.

to date to be sure you are included in future regional 1987 gatherings!) I am looking forward to more Why Wait gatherings in 2023! Our connections are deep and true.

Laura Schleussner Forne writes: “Hello from Berlin, still having a great time after 25+ years in this amazing city. My son, 15, is in ninth grade at Williston Northampton, where Kathryn Blenkinsop Hill is teaching, so a true highlight of this year has been reconnecting with my wonderful old roommate and her husband, Bobby (double heart emoji!). If anyone is heading to Germany and would like to reconnect, I love hosting visitors from the U.S. Contact me at lsforne@protonmail.com.”

Katie Blenkinsop Hill shares: “My husband (Bob Hill, SPS faculty 1998-2007) and I continue to live and work at The Williston Northampton School, where I teach math and Latin and he is now in his 12th year as head of school. I’ve been in touch quite a bit with Laura Schleussner Forne, as her son, a native of Berlin, is a student here at Williston. Our two children are almost launched, with our daughter, Cameron, living and working in D.C., and our son, Robby, in his junior year at Yale. I hope everyone is doing well post-COVID!”

1988/35th

Caroline La Voie carolinelavoie@me.com

Margaret Meserve’s book, “Papal Bull: Print, Politics, and Propaganda in Renaissance Rome,” has won the American Catholic Historical Association’s  Helen & Howard Marraro Prize in Italian History for being the most distinguished work in the field published in 2021. “Papal Bull”  explores how Renaissance popes used the printing press in its early years to promote traditions, pursue alliances, excommunicate enemies and lure pilgrims to Rome.

1989

Jessica Mellon jessicarmellon@gmail.com

I’m playing in a pickleball group with SPS Mainers Rosie Stovell O’Donnell ’91, Gretchen Kelly Giumarro and Sarah Southall Crowley. We’re having a great time connecting and getting outside each week.

From Amanda Cramer: “I have gone from making wine to shipping wine and am feeling fine. Doing a lot of math (inventory) and driving a forklift on a daily basis!”

From Sarah Lee: “I’m in Arlington, VA, with my husband and two teenage children and work on the executive communications team at Amazon. Abigail Sloane Davenport, Tory Tomlinson, Sandy St. Laurent Vergara and I get together occasionally, but have failed to record any photographic proof. Last fall, I spent time with Sarah Ellwood Opler ’88 at her gorgeous vacation home in Carmel. Sarah’s daughter, Phoebe ’23, my goddaughter, is an SPS Sixth Former.”

1991

Jose Leos joseleos@gmail.com

Marcy Chong writes: “Clay Wang stopped by to visit me in Vermont after spending time teaching and connecting with other scientists at Dartmouth regarding his groundbreaking work with medical mushrooms and futuristic uses for fungi.”

Happy New Year from Antoine Servas and family: Carole, Jeanne, Gaspard, Louis!

1993/30th

Phoebe Lindsay pde.lindsay@gmail.com

SPS Mainers (l. to r.) Rosie Stovell O'Donnell ’91, Gretchen Kelly Giumarro ’89, Sarah Southall Crowley ’89 and Jessica Rogers Mellon ’89.

Sarah Ellwood Opler ’88 and Sarah Lee ’89 in Carmel last fall.

Antoine Servas ’91 and family share good wishes for 2023.

SPS ’87 Why Wait Dinner in NYC in December 2022. L. to r.: Olivia Douglas, Lori Huneke, Nick Paumgarten, Penny Hardy, Holly Sanderson Garrett, Melanie Shaw MacMillan, Chris Allen, Brittain Stone and Richard duPont. (Photo by honorary Form of ’87 member Rob Garrett ’85.)

Courtney Evans ’95 and Joe Zorumski ’95 bumped into one another early on a Saturday.

1995

Will McCulloch mccullochwill@hotmail.com

Much to her delight, Courtney Evans bumped into Joe Zorumski (who is still wearing his hat backwards after all these years) at the hockey rink one early Saturday morning for an energizing catch-up and warm banter.

1998/25th

Will Dick wcdick@gmail.com

2002

Tristan Besse tristan.besse@gmail.com

From the desk of Rich Keefe: “I’m excited to share we welcomed Georgina (Georgie) Keefe to the family this past September. Everyone is happy and healthy as we kick off 2023.”

Jane Fung writes, “Jay Buchman and I are delighted to welcome our daughter, Caroline Rose Buchman (Callie), born Sept. 24, 2022. Andy, 3, is a very sweet and loving big brother. We also traveled to Seattle over the summer and caught up with Cindy Huang More recently, we had a big (and slightly

chaotic) afternoon tea gathering in NYC with Devina Luhur Willard ’03 and Velina Luhur Butti ’03 with all our five children in tow. It was so fun to catch up with friends in person again.”

L izzie Owens shares, “My husband, Forbes, and I got married on my family’s porch on Orr’s Island, ME, on Sept. 24, with our immediate family members present. A couple of weeks later we had a party in Boston with friends from near and (very) far and a whole crew of SPS alums. In attendance were Maggie Owens Moran ’94, Oakley Duryea ’95, Ethan Leidinger ’98, Slade Harte ’00, Samantha Walsh ’01, Livia Carega, Lucy Chapin, Drew Collins, LeeLee Duryea, David Foxley, Isa Fries, Toby McDougal, Dana Powers-Klooster, Luke Oppenheim, Marjorie Bates ’03, Eleonora Monacella Browne ’03, Tathiana Monacella ’03, Anna Widdowson ’05, Jay Clapp ’06 and Will Harte ’06. We are still living in NY, where we see SPS friends on a near weekly basis. I hope to see more of you at alumni events in 2023.”

2003/20th

Melody Lam melody.lam@gmail.com

Simon Parsons shares, “We finalized the adoption of Ruth Josette Parsons on Oct. 28, 2022!”

2006 Jenna Lloyd-Randolfi jlloydrandolfi@gmail.com

From Marian Bull: “I celebrated 10 years of living in Brooklyn this year, where I continue to work as a freelance writer, editor and ceramicist. I've just returned from a two-month artist residency in Schöppingen, Germany, where I worked on a nonfiction book about the stage magic company I grew up in. I’ve been working intermittently on the book for three years now, thanks in part to a handful of grants and residencies, and 2022 has seen significant progress both in research and writing. I’ll take the rest of the winter off to continue this work, which is equal parts impossible and gratifying. Last winter, while home conducting oral history interviews for the project, I drove up to Concord to give my boyfriend a tour of the SPS campus, which was blanketed in snow.”

After dropping off their Third and Fourth Formers at Opening Days, 1992 formmates Jay Aston, Doug Asano, Blair Linen Demers and Jeff Demers found a moment to catch up.

Will Taft ’96 (the Fifth!) and his dad, Will Taft ’62 (the Fourth!), visited Jeff Lynn ’96 (l.) in London while there celebrating Thanksgiving with family.

Formmates from 1998 met for a pre-reunion dinner in NYC. (L. to r.), front: Dana Chapin Anselmi, Will O’Boyle, Margaret Winterkorn-Meikle Myers, Rich Thieriot and Maggie Webber Smith; back: Will Dick, Connor McGee and Andy Gustin.

Rich Keefe ’02, wife Kaitlyn, Cece, Georgie and Harrow ready for Halloween!

Jane Fung Buchman ’02 and Jay Buchman with their daughter, Caroline Rose Buchman, and big brother Andy.

Ruth Josette Parsons, daughter of Simon Parsons ’03.

Noah Elbot ’09 Finds Sustainable Approaches to Complex Issues

LARRY CLOW

and national organizations that are tackling the many dimensions of poverty. While lots of groups, large and small, are dedicated to individual issues — criminal justice reform, access to housing, etc. — those groups aren’t always able to coordinate their efforts, particularly small community-based organizations trying to engage with state and national initiatives. There’s a similar disconnect between large foundations and the programs they help fund.

Kindness has taken Noah Elbot ’09 to some unexpected places. He’s traveled around the world as a project manager with Dalberg Advisors, a global group that champions inclusive and sustainable solutions to complex social and environmental challenges. He’s also camped out on the floor of the Grand Canyon as a cofounder of a remote learning startup during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Though the scenery may change, Elbot’s guiding principles remain the same. “As someone who’s spent a good portion of my life living in other countries where I don’t necessarily share a lot in common with people, kindness is helpful. It’s something that’s universally recognized,” he says.

It’s an attitude that Elbot developed early in life, thanks in part to his years at St. Paul’s. “Interacting with my formmates and dorm neighbors from different countries and different backgrounds was a great influence,” he says.

Elbot began studying Chinese at St. Paul’s and completed a five-week language and culture intensive program at Beijing Normal University. He studied economics and East Asian studies at Brown and in 2016 was among the inaugural recipients of the Schwarzman Scholarship, a master’s degree program based on the Rhodes Scholarship that brings students to study leadership and global affairs at

China’s Tsinghua University.

“Ever since St. Paul’s, I’ve worked at missiondriven organizations,” he says. “I knew that I wanted to work on international issues, and issues of equity, justice and sustainability, and Dalberg was a great opportunity to work at both global and local scales.”

He joined Dalberg in 2018, where he focuses on strategy for social impact projects. That could mean anything from helping the U.S. government to work with impact investors on renewable energy projects in the Caucasus to advising the Gates Foundation on how to shift power to community-led initiatives in the U.S. on issues of equity and justice.

“If someone wants to do something complex or interesting or new, we work with foundations and nonprofits and governments to help create a plan,” he says. “We aren’t the experts, but we have the time and networks to connect the stakeholders.” Elbot likens his work to being a translator: Taking what he’s learned from experts or community members and turning that information into value propositions for investors or designs for a new initiative.

Elbot says no matter how big a problem — and its accompanying solution — may be, individual people should be the focus. He points to his recent work at Dalberg with the Urban Institute on connecting community

“ The people doing this work know how intersected and interdependent it is, but there aren’t many ways for them to talk. This project looked at how we can make sure the silos come down and everyone’s working on shared goals set by the communities they are serving, and doing so in an equitable way,” he says. “It’s an effort to flip the top-down way philanthropy has traditionally worked.”

Flipping traditional experiences comes naturally to Elbot. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, he took a leave from Dalberg to help launch A Place Beyond (APB), an education start-up that created residential experiences for college students at summer camps. With most college campuses closed and students stuck learning remotely at home, Elbot and his co-founders found a way to build community and create unique education experiences from inside small pandemic bubbles in nature.

Students came from a variety of backgrounds, with some never having been on a camping trip before. Though far away from the global scope of his usual work, Elbot tapped into the same values — relying on empathy, not sympathy, to relate to people, and understanding where people are coming from.

“Our team was made up of educators from wilderness expedition organizations like NOLS and Outward Bound. We’d take the APB participants camping, hiking and rock climbing in national parks,” he says. “Building a new type of campus community was a wonderful and complex way to spend the pandemic. It was very much shaped by my time at St. Paul’s, and wanting to replicate the best parts of the residential campus experience.”

2007

Mary Gamber mary.gamber@gmail.com

Kaye Verville writes, “We welcomed Frederick (Freddie) Stevens Gottfried in July 2022. He joins big brother George, almost 3. We enjoyed meeting up with George’s godmother, Charlotte Hickey, and her baby girl in Boston this fall.

Anne-Louise Meyer (Wuster) sends this update: “I married Hendrik Wuster in Freiburg, Germany, on Oct. 22, 2022. We had a great day with perfect weather and 85 awesome guests.”

2008/15th

Dorothy MacAusland dmacausland@gmail.com

Philippine de Richemont shares the birth of her son, Folger Tunstall, born June 18, 2021.

2009

Liza Rollins lizarollins91@gmail.com

My husband, Jim Barker, and I welcomed our daughter, Reese Upton Barker, on Sept. 27, 2022. Her favorite animal is a pelican, and she looks great in red.

Will Ferraro shares this update: “My wife,

Grace, and I welcomed our son, Henry Ferraro, on Oct. 22. Henry and Grace are both doing great!”

L eticia Dwomor shares: “This summer, after graduating from OBGYN residency at Brown, I was in Ghana volunteering as an OBGYN at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (the hospital where I was born by C-section!). I also provided free general health screening to residents of my grandfather’s town. Loved the opportunity to give back at this stage of my career and look forward to more opportunities in the future!”

2010

Sterling Kahn kahnsk@gmail.com

Amelia White writes: “I met up with Hope Mulry ’11 in London recently. I’m living in Cornwall and, if you hear of any other Paulies in the area, I’d be happy to host a meet up!”

Olivia Mok writes: “After graduating from Juilliard in 2014 for classical violin and Berklee Valencia in 2016 for jazz and electronic music production, I have been growing my electronic music and jazz career under my Chinese name, Xiaolin. I released my second EP on vinyl, “Tower Moment,” which has been featured on BBC Radio 1. I

also hold the position of director of music and artist curation at the renowned jazz club brand Cafe Carlyle, which originated in NYC; Cafe Carlyle opened a sister branch in Hong Kong, where I have been leading the curation, bringing top jazz artists into town.”

On Oct. 18, Caroline Heitmiller Darling and her husband, Luke, welcomed their first child, Samantha Grace Darling.

2012

Kate Borst katherineborst@gmail.com

From Nina McKee: “After working for the past six years on human rights and community development projects overseas (Guatemala, Ecuador, Palestine and Israel, Greece, Switzerland), I moved back to the States in Dec. 2022 to take a position co-directing the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs. The Institute is run out of Wellesley College, my other alma mater, and fosters a multidisciplinary approach while training the next generation of leaders to grapple with complex global issues. As the program director, I’m on the lookout for inspiring individuals leading good work globally. If this interests you, let’s have a conversation! Write to me at nmckee@wellesley.edu.”

SPS formmates celebrate the wedding of Lizzie Owens ’02 to Forbes Litcoff. Pictured: Isa Fries ’02, David Foxley ’02, LeeLee Duryea ’02, Dana Powers-Klooster ’02, Livia Carega ’02, Lizzie, Maggie Owens Moran ’94, Tathiana Monacella ’03, Jay Clapp ’06, Samantha Walsh ’01, Anna Widdowson ’05, Marjorie Bates ’03, Eleonora Monacella Browne ’03 and Will Harte ’06.

Frederick Stevens Gottfried, born in July, with big brother George, sons of Kaye Verville ’07.

Folger Tunstall de Richemont (18 months), son of Philippine de Richemont ’08 and Colin Tunstall.

Grace and Will Ferraro ’09 announce the arrival of their son Henry, born Oct. 17, 2022.

2013/10th

Beth Anne George elisabethgeorge84@gmail.com

Spencer Washburn and Beth Anne George married on Aug. 27, 2022, at the Metropolitan Club in NYC.

Katherine Hofley and Luke Hatton ’12 married on Aug. 6, 2022, in Henniker, NH. They live in Boulder, CO.

2015

Annie Gray Burge anniegrayburge@gmail.com

Amanda Morrison writes, “I was an associate producer on the Netflix series “Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey,” which premiered in June. The series was co-produced by Charlotte Cooley ’13. (Check out the story that starts on p. 24 to learn more.)

2018/5th Haley Fuller hefuller@me.com

2021 Blair Belford bqs3dp@virginia.edu

Dae Yeon Cho shares: “I decided to embark on a gap year journey in Dec. 2021 to race for Korea in World Juniors held in March. I traveled to Kuhtai, Austria, with one pair of sweatpants, two hoodies and two pairs of skis, and I lived there until mid-February, when I traveled to Cortina d’Ampezzo for a ski race, where I tore 90% of my ACL and 50% of my meniscus in a crash. I returned to Korea and my gap-year journey transitioned from a reckless ski lifestyle to being rehabfocused for the next three months. I was invited to train with the Korean National Team skiers at Les Deux Alpes, France. From June to July 2022, we trained there and when the glacier melted early this summer, we traveled to Landgraaf, Netherlands, to continue training. We returned to Korea mid-August, and since then I have been focused on working out and continuing my rehab journey. In October, I traveled to Copper Mountain, CO, to train for two weeks and went to Käbdalis, Sweden, for five weeks after that to return to official racing in the pro-track, also known as the FIS circuit!”

Samantha Darling, born on Oct. 18 to Caroline Heitmiller Darling ’10 and Luke Darling.

Amelia White ’10 and Hope Mulry ’11 met up in London recently.

Family photo: Liza Rollins ’09 and James Barker ’09 welcomed their daughter, Reese Upton Barker, on Sept. 27.

Leticia Dwomor ’09 at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (where she was born) in Ghana.

Luke Hatton ’12 and Katherine Hofley ’13 married Aug. 6, 2022. In attendance were (l. to r.): Payne Hadden ’12, Harry Nicholas ’12, Bridget Hatton ’09, Luke, Katherine, Carolyn Hofley ’15 and Jay Gurney ’08.

Beth Anne George ’13 and Spencer Washburn ’13 were married on Aug. 27, 2022, at the Metropolitan Club in New York City. Attendees included formmates and faculty too numerous to name!

Dr. Anne-Louise Meyer ’07 married Hendrik Wuster in Freiburg, Germany, on Oct. 22. They had a great day with perfect weather and 85 awesome guests.

Dae Yeon Cho ’21 on his gap year journey last Dec. to race for Korea in World Juniors (ski race) in March.

Zach Sehnaoui ’22 with his peers during SPS Graduation Weekend in June.

An Obligation to Effect Change

MIRIAM GURNIAK ’79 says her work as a midwife in northern Florida is challenging. But she can’t imagine doing anything else.

JODY RECORD

Miriam Gurniak ’79 is a midwife. She’s also a woman of faith — faith that she shares with her congregation and faith in herself that she is doing the work she was meant to do. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel tested because she does, sometimes for days on end. When she delivers children to mothers who aren’t yet women, for example, like the 13-year-old who is repeating seventh grade after the birth of her premature twins.

And then there is the poverty and racism that shadows the area of northern Florida that she serves. The lack of good nutrition. Of education. Access to birth control. Proper care.

“People here don’t see any possibility of being able to escape,” Gurniak says. “They’re working at the chicken processing plant, the marijuana plant, the Dollar Store. This is a world that many people don’t have any clue about.”

Gurniak, the daughter of an Episcopal priest, counts herself among those who didn’t have a clue when she first arrived in Tallahassee, some 27 years ago. “I was really naïve and arrogant when I moved down here. I didn’t know it was so rural, so poor.” What’s more, there are multiple factors that interfere with Gurniak’s patients’ ability to get the care they need. “The need is complicated. We assume they have choice over their

bodies. We are often dealing with very high medical and social risks.”

An example of that is the woman who is waiting to learn if her baby suffers from a debilitating birth defect. Insurance won’t pay for testing in the first trimester and by the second trimester, if the news is bad, she won’t be able to do anything about it. Gurniak contacted her state representative about the issue.

“As a woman of privilege, I have an obligation to effect change, to communicate to the rest of the world — to policy makers, the people who can make a difference — what goes on here,” Gurniak says. “I can sit with the women; I can rub their bellies and help the babies come and hold their hands when they lose one, but my legacy from St. Paul’s is the policy part. How does one person make a difference?”

When Gurniak was at St. Paul’s, she didn’t know that her interest in feminist women’s health care would lead to a career in midwifery. She recalls talking with friends in their dorm, reading “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” and encouraging each other to learn everything they could about the kind of care they wanted to receive, the kind of people they wanted to become.

“One of the things St. Paul’s does well is that, during those formative teenage years, you are exposed to people who are making a difference, and it makes you ask how you are going to serve,” she says.

Before she knew the answer to that question, Gurniak earned her undergraduate degree in art history from Oberlin College. That was, she says, just a placeholder and not a career path. She spent the next several years in New York working as a fundraiser for private schools. She was in her early 30s when she turned her ruminations about her future — and her present — into action.

“I was driving across Pennsylvania by myself and had hours to think about what I wanted to do. After a while, I ended up flipping my thinking,” Gurniak says. “Instead of thinking about what I might do, I thought, ‘What would I regret later if I didn’t do it?’ Midwifery kept coming back to me.”

She didn’t have the science requirements and was afraid of blood. She spent a couple of years taking basic science classes, then went to Yale because it was one of the only schools at the time where you could get a graduate-level advanced practice degree in nursing/midwifery without being a nurse. To help pay for her schooling, she turned to the National Health Service Corps, which she describes as similar to the Peace Corps but for primary

care workers. The organization connects providers to people in the United States who have limited access to health care.

“ They front your schooling and you owe them two years of working for them,” she says. At the time, the program’s only option for midwifery was in northern Florida. Gurniak now works for the Tallahassee Memorial Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program, where she also trains doctors who are doing their residency in family medicine.

“It’s an ironic and wonderful thing that I’m serving the same population I did when I came here,” Gurniak says. “I love my patients, they love me, and I know I’m making a difference. My obligation to the St. Paul School legacy is one of service and attempting to make a broader impact. It’s a justice issue. It’s a ‘feed the hungry, go to the prison’ faith piece to me.”

While she is doing the same work she did when she began her career, Gurniak also is involved now with the politics of that service. She deals with health care programs, prenatal care and education.

“ The need is more complicated now,” she says. “We’re dealing with medical and social issues, things like access to contraception. Some of it has to do with state policy, some has to do with administration challenges. There are systemic issues.”

Gurniak says she used to think that if she got patients to tell their stories, it would make a difference. But she knows that’s not enough.

“What makes me think someone else is going to fix it?” she says of the issues that interfere with people getting adequate health care. “But I know I have to try. So I talk to my pastor who sits on the board of the local hospital. I tell my patients’ stories to state legislators. I do what I can. At the same time, I have been blessed with a very broad and very deep sense of reality and don’t live in a bubble.”

Which means it’s hard, day to day, knowing that once you have seen you cannot unsee. And yet, she considers herself lucky.

“Is it hard here? Sure,” she says. “But I have a great church, fabulous community support and things that nurture me so that I can go back out and serve people. I’ve been gifted with having my assumptions and realities completely pulled apart and then ultimately put back together and rearranged in ways that I never, ever could have imagined and yet are completely fulfilling, affirming, and a source of joy that gives me the energy to keep fighting the good fight. It’s a great gift from God. How lucky am I?”

“AS A WOMAN OF PRIVILEGE, I HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO EFFECT CHANGE, TO COMMUNICATE TO THE REST OF THE WORLD — TO POLICY MAKERS, THE PEOPLE WHO CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE — WHAT GOES ON HERE.”

JOIN US JUNE 9–11

We look forward to welcoming forms ending in 3 and 8 back to Millville for an Anniversary Weekend full of events on the grounds aimed at celebrating your connections with each other and your Big Red roots.

Registration is open, and we hope you will join us. Scan the code below for more information about programming, reserved hotel room blocks, and to get a sneak peek at who has already said they’re coming back.

sps.edu/anniversary

We can’t wait to welcome you back.

The section was updated January 18, 2023. Please note that deaths are reported as we receive notice of them. Therefore, alumni dates of death are not always reported chronologically.

1934 — Joseph H. Seaman Jr.

Dec. 10, 2008

1939 — Willard P. Hunnewell

Nov. 7, 2022

1940 — William L. Sneed Jr.

Sept. 2, 2015

1942 — Harry S. Finkenstaedt Jr.

Apr. 19, 2022

1942 — Leavenworth P. Sperry Jr.

Nov. 15, 2022

1943 — Leonard Sullivan Jr.

Oct. 31, 2022

1944 — Peter S. Wainwright

Jan. 26, 2021

1944 — Warren C. Fisher

Sept. 16, 2022

1944 — William F. Otis Jr.

Nov. 28, 2022

1944 — C. Ross Smith Jr.

Mar. 6, 2010

1944 — John F. Fairchild

Sept. 30, 2017

1944 — Lawrence W. Ward

Jan. 11, 2022

1946 — Robert D. Kilmarx

Sept. 21, 2022

1946 — C. Lanier Stone

Jan. 8, 2023

1948 — Timothy Fales

May 20, 2017

1949 — Frederick “Ted” A. Terry Jr.

Jan. 13, 2023

1950 — Geoffrey McN. Gates

Oct. 24, 2022

1950 — W. Dean Howells II

Oct. 3, 2022

1951 — Francis M. Simonds

Nov. 2, 2022

1952 — Gordon Wilson

Oct. 19, 2022

1953 — Anthony J. Drexel IV

June 23, 2020

1954 — James R. Houghton

Dec. 20, 2022

1955 — William M. Duryea Jr.

Dec. 24, 2022

1955 — Michael M. Gee

Nov. 22, 2005

1956 — Francis A. Truslow

Nov. 7, 2022

1956 — John W. Wilcox

Jan. 1, 2023

1958 — Philip S. Auchincloss

Aug. 22, 2022

1958 — E. Esty Stowell Jr.

Mar. 8, 2022

1960 — William W. Parshall II

Nov. 12, 2022

1963 — Ian M. W. McLaughlin

Oct. 19, 2022

1963 — James P. Patton

Oct. 22, 2021

1964 — Christopher B. Howard

Dec. 12, 2022

1967 — William H. Rogers III

Sept. 26, 2021

1971 — Robert H. Barker Jr.

Sept. 24, 2022

1974 — Wilford Horne Jr.

Oct. 18, 2022

1976 — Mark Lewis Rhodes

Apr. 1, 2022

1984 — Gregory G. Maynard

Dec. 13, 2021

STAFF

Harold (Joe) Denoncour

Oct. 29, 2022

Lois Sinclair

Oct. 29, 2022

The St. Paul’s School Spanish-American War memorial, Sheldon Terrace.

1939

Willard Peele Hunnewell of Wellesley, Massachusetts, died on Nov. 7, 2022, at the age of 101, less than one mile from where he was born on June 1, 1921.

Mr. Hunnewell entered St. Paul’s School as a Second Former in 1934, following in the footsteps of his brother Walter Jr. ’35; their father, Walter Sr. of the Form of 1897; and grandfather George Lyman of the Form of 1869. He participated in the Cadmean Concordian Literary Society, crew, football and ice hockey and graduated as a member of the Form of 1939. In 2019, he proudly led the alumni parade at Anniversary Weekend, marking both his 80th reunion and his 98th birthday on the same date. After St. Paul’s, he attended Harvard College where he graduated with the Class of 1943, earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry.

Mr. Hunnewell served in the Navy during World War II as a U.S. Navy navigator, supporting amphibious operations in the invasion of Italy in 1943 and the Pacific Islands in 1944 and 1945. A horticulturalist and businessman, Mr. Hunnewell owned and ran Apco Mossberg — a company that designed and manufactured precision instruments for the scientific, jewelry and automotive industries — before retiring in 1978. He then spent his lengthy retirement pursuing many scholarly, horticultural and environmental interests.

Like many of his ancestors, who collected and imported different species of plants into the U.S. and who helped to found the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, Mr. Hunnewell had a profound interest and deep knowledge of horticulture. A past president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and the co-recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Dendrology Society, his particular expertise was in rhododendrons and magnolias, which he propagated and sold at his annual plant sale. He also was caretaker for the H.H. Hunnewell Pinetum, a renowned collection of pine and conifer trees from around the world begun by forebear Horatio Hollis Hunnewell and located on the Hunnewell family estate. In his 90s, Mr. Hunnewell led an effort with Wellesley College students to identify, record and map many of the tree

species found in that town. He also volunteered for several decades collecting water specimens for analysis of algae growth in Wellesley’s Lake Waban and other local environmental projects, including for the Charles River Watershed Association.

Until recently, Mr. Hunnewell could often be found working in the garden, in the bushes pruning or on his knees weeding at home in Wellesley or at the Eliot Church in South Natick. An avid beekeeper, he kept hives on his property and enjoyed caring for them. He loved Wellesley, where he was always surrounded by cousins and relatives spanning generations, and cherished many family traditions.

Mr. Hunnewell had the opportunity to travel extensively in his lifetime and enjoyed learning about and meeting different people around the world. Favorite adventures included a canoe trip down Egypt’s Nile River, meeting headhunters in Borneo, watching the king of Bhutan play basketball in Thimphu and exploring worldclass gardens in Ireland and elsewhere.

Whenever possible, Mr. Hunnewell loved any activity involving his children and grandchildren. Whether it was travel or simply chores around his home, time with family was his favorite.

Mr. Hunnewell was predeceased by his wife, Dorothea “Dee.” He is survived by sons Willard Jr. (Kim) of Edina, Minnesota and George (Rebecca) of Sherborn, Massachusetts, and six grandchildren: Johnathon, Christopher, Nicholas, Jessica, Richard and William. As recently as 2019, Mr. Hunnewell noted in formnotes his intention to live to the age of 105 or even 110. “My sister died a few years ago at the age of more than 102 and I think I am stronger than she was,” he noted at the time.

1942

Leavenworth Porter Sperry Jr. passed away peacefully on Nov. 15, 2022, at his home in Middlebury, Connecticut, at the age of 97. He was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, on April 3, 1925, son of the late Leavenworth Porter Sperry and Olive Smith Sperry. A member of the Form of 1942, at St. Paul’s School he competed in athletics for Delphian and was a member of the Shattuck boat club.

After St. Paul’s, Mr. Sperry matriculated to Yale University, but at the age of 18, he was called to serve in the U.S. Navy. Originally an ensign, he was promoted to lieutenant JG, executive officer and navigator. Commissioned in February 1944, he served aboard the 220-foot minesweeper USS Pochard in the Atlantic and Pacific areas from November 1944 to April 1946, sweeping 83 mines in the East China Sea and the coast of Japan. In 1945, his crew had been assigned to sweep Tokyo Bay the day before General Douglas MacArthur and the USS Missouri accepted the surrender of Japan. Mr. Sperry later visited Hiroshima while on duty, three months after that city was bombed in August 1945.

A fter completing his military service, Mr. Sperry returned to New Haven to finish his college degree. He graduated from Yale in 1947 and from Harvard Law School in 1950. After earning his J.D., he moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as an attorney for the Wyatt Company. There, he began dating Carol Joyce Skoglund of Edina, Minnesota. They were married on April 24, 1954, and moved back to Connecticut — first Waterbury and then Middlebury — where they spent their entire 61 years of married life. The same year, Mr. Sperry began working as general counsel for Waterbury Companies, a brass button manufacturing company. He was promoted to director and president in 1956, and chairman of the board in 1969. He retired in 1983 after almost 30 years of service.

Mr. Sperry’s favorite sport was tennis, which he played until he was 94. He also enjoyed golf, paddle tennis, sailing, riding his bike, croquet, working in the woods on his properties in Middlebury, and a gin martini with a lemon twist. He was a founding member of the Highfield Club of Middlebury, was a member of the John’s Island Club of Vero Beach, Florida, and was a member of the Mill Reef Club of Antigua, West Indies, for more than 40 years. He served a broad array of Connecticut companies and organizations as a member, director, board member or president.

Predeceased in 2015 by his wife, Carol, Mr. Sperry is survived by his four sons and their wives: James and Abigail of Madison, Connecticut; Charles and Lisa of Vonore, Tennessee; Edward and Holly of Denver, Colorado; and Grant and Lynn of Houston, Texas. He also leaves 12 grandchildren — Nina, Ben, Blake, Brooks, Chase, Sarah, Hiller, Connor, Taylor, Parker, Caroline and Adrienne — and seven great grandchildren: Chase and Molly McGrath, Duke Sperry, Alice and Elenor Sperry, and Porter and Palmer Neel.

1944

Warren Carl Fisher  was born an American citizen at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, Germany, on July 22, 1925, and died peacefully on Sept. 16, 2022, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, at the age of 97. One of his favorite sayings was, “They don’t make them like you anymore!” which was certainly true for him. He will be sorely missed by everyone who knew him; he was loved and respected for his intelligence, resilience, honesty and kind nature.

Mr. Fisher’s father, Carl Alvin Fisher, was in the foreign diplomatic service. The family — which included his mother, Adrienne King Fisher; his sisters Barbara Fisher Foley and Geraldine Fisher Passin; and young Mr. Fisher — lived in Belgrade, Serbia; Athens, Greece; as well as Amsterdam and Canada, learning multiple languages. The Fishers returned to the United States when he was 11.

One highlight from Mr. Fisher’s early years was playing the tuba in a band celebrating the King and Queen of England in June 1939. He entered St. Paul’s School as a Second Former that same year and graduated with the Form of 1944. After St. Paul’s, he matriculated to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but was drafted on his 18th birthday to join the WWII efforts.

During the war, Mr. Fisher fought in the Battle of the Bulge, serving as an infantryman, an intelligence observer and sharpshooter. In April 2016, he received the Legion d’honneur — the highest order of merit from the French government, recognizing personal sacrifices made in the liberation of France and Europe — for his service in the Battle of the Colmar Pocket as a member of the 28th Division of the U.S. Army 109th Infantry. Seven decades later, Mr. Fisher’s memory of the battle remained sharp.

“We had a huge battle,” he said at the time of his recognition. “It was so cold the rifles wouldn’t work, so we took aircraft artillery and made it horizontal and used it like a machine gun.”

Asked how he could recall the war so vividly after more than 70 years, he responded, “There was all this artillery — shells 24 hours a day. It was constant. It’s hard to forget.”

In addition to being named a knight in the Legion of Honor, Mr. Fisher also earned three Combat Stars and the Combat Infantryman Badge.

After the war, Mr. Fisher returned to MIT, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1949. That same year, he married his first wife, Daphne E. Voss Fisher, and they had three daughters: Nicole Elaine Fisher, Joan Andrea Fisher and Eugenie Loumos Adler, whom he often said were the best things that ever happened to him.

For decades, Mr. Fisher worked faithfully at FMC Corporation in their chemical division; he earned a master’s degree in chemical engineering at the University of Connecticut in 1967 and taught a senior engineering seminar at Drexel University.

Mr. Fisher was extremely active throughout his life, skiing, sailing, bicycling and playing tennis and ice hockey. He spent most years of his life enjoying summers on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, where he sailed in the “Rainbow Fleet” on his little blue-sailed catboat, Nancytuckett.

He was a prolific writer of history and about his experiences in WWII. He also enjoyed writing illustrated histories for his children and grandchildren, particularly of Elizabeth I, whom he described as “easily the most competent Royal that England ever had.” He was pounding away on his laptop on his final project, “The Illustrated History of Queen Elizabeth I,” the day before he took his last breath. He went peacefully, without pain and not alone.

Mr. Fisher is survived by his second wife, Christine Auten Fisher, whom he married in 1994, along with two daughters, Eugenie Loumos Adler (Dan) and Joan Andrea Fisher (Richard Rosenberg). He also is survived by his first wife, Daphne; nephews Carl and Marc Foley; many grandchildren, grandnieces, grandnephews, great-grandchildren, great-grandnieces and -nephews and his canine companion, Helga, whom he would not hear of being referred to as merely a dog.

1944

William Fullerton “Sandy” Otis Jr. of Princeton, New Jersey, died at home after a fall on Nov. 28, 2022, at the age of 97. He was alert, talkative and lucid right to the end.

Dr. Otis was born on Oct. 16, 1925, in Kansas City, Missouri, to William F. Otis of the Form of 1913 and Marjorie Otis. He entered St. Paul’s School in September 1940 as a Third Former. He played football, basketball and baseball for Isthmian; served as president of the St. Paul’s Athletic Association; and was responsible for starting the School’s first baseball team. An exceptional athlete, his single greatest athletic moment at St. Paul’s took place in fall 1943, when the football team played Concord High for the first time. Concord was state champion, and heavily favored to win. A running back who also played defense for SPS, Dr. Otis scored all four of the School’s touchdowns and St. Paul’s won the game. In later years, he loved to recount that right before the game Rector Nash called him over and said, “I’m counting on you, Sandy.” He had no further recollection of what happened until the game was over.

Secretary of his form, Dr. Otis was permitted by St. Paul’s to graduate in December 1943 along with two friends, Frank Vickers and Mike McClanahan. He enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps to fight in World War II, and both he and Vickers were sent to England to fight as tail gunners in B-25s. Unfortunately, Vickers was shot down and killed on a mission. Dr. Otis’ plane also was shot down on one occasion, but he parachuted out over Holland, survived, and was back at the air base within 36 hours. He completed 34 combat missions. For his war service, he was awarded both the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

After the war, Dr. Otis met his first wife, Grete, who had emigrated to the United States from Norway. They traveled around the country finding jobs together and spent the winter of 1949 in Jackson, Wyoming, where Dr. Otis skied. Dr. Otis and Grete then moved to Middlebury, Vermont, where Sandy attended Middlebury College on the G.I. Bill and graduated in the Class of 1953. His daughter, Christine, was born in 1950 in Middlebury. He went on to Vermont Medical School in Burlington, Vermont, graduating in 1957. His son, Kim, was born in Burlington in 1954.

Dr. Otis did his internship and residency at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and started his psychiatric practice in 1962 at The Carrier Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in Belle Mead, New Jersey. A practicing psychiatrist there until 1977, he was most proud of introducing group therapy. In 1978, Dr. Otis and Grete moved to Zurich, where he studied to become a Jungian analyst at the Jung Institute. On their return to Princeton, Dr. Otis established a private practice, which he maintained until 1992.

After his retirement from private practice, Dr. Otis audited several courses a semester at Princeton University for some two decades. He traveled to town every day on his motorcycle and loved being in town. He also met with a small group of older men every morning for two hours at Bon Appétit. When the pandemic ended that, he continued to meet with the group on Zoom until shortly before his death.

Following Grete’s death in 1999, Dr. Otis married Daniela Bittman. For many years the couple spent two months of every summer in Europe, staying in an apartment above a barn in Switzerland and at places they found in the Dordogne region of France. Dr. Otis loved Switzerland and hiked many mountains in the Alps. He always said that he was one of the luckiest men alive and that he enjoyed his life tremendously, famously noting that his 80s were the best decade of his life. When he had a motorcycle accident in his 90th year, things started to get more difficult. He said he was particularly lucky to have a second marriage to Daniela. They were devoted to each other and she took wonderful care of him, especially and completely at the end of his life.

Dr. Otis is survived by his wife Daniela Bittman; his son and daughter-in-law Kim ’73 and Loraine Otis; his granddaughter Anna Otis; and his stepson Jonathan Bittman and Jonathan’s wife, Sarah Jeffrey and daughter, Bodil. He was predeceased by his daughter, Christine.

1950

Geoffrey McNair Gates Jr. beloved family man and former Marine, passed away on Oct. 24, 2022, surrounded by his loving family, at the age of 89.

Born in New York City on Nov. 20, 1932, Mr. Gates was the son of Jane Shonnard Bell and Geoffrey McNair Gates. Raised in New York City and Bedford, New York, he began his schooling at the Buckley School and Rippowam Cisqua School. He entered St. Paul’s School as a Second Former in 1945 and participated in a broad array of activities, including choir, glee club, choral groups, the Missionary Society, The Pelican, Pictorial Board, Le Cercle Francais, Rubber Band, Bridge Club and Sunday Bounds. An athlete, he competed in crew, football, ice hockey and squash.

After St. Paul’s, Mr. Gates attended Princeton University, graduating in 1954 with a bachelor’s in English. He joined the United States Marine Corps that same year and served until 1956 as captain. Mr. Gates was appreciative of his time in the service, and it played a significant role in the rest of his life.

He started his career on Wall Street, working as a stockbroker at Bache & Co. He subsequently worked for Allen & Company and then Laidlaw, Adams & Peck. After a stint at Sanders Morris Harris, he worked independently in investor relations and specialized in mining stocks, founding several small mining companies in the U.S. and Canada over the course of his career. He loved working, building connections and researching innovative industries, ultimately pursuing a role as a financial consultant to cleantech companies.

Mr. Gates married the love of his life, Wende Devlin, in 1974, and the couple welcomed three children, Christopher ’94, Bryan and Julia, while living in New York City. In 1986, the family moved to Darien, Connecticut, and then moved again to Westfield, New Jersey, where they remained for 23 years. Mr. Gates also spent many summers on Long Island in the Hamptons, where he developed a deep passion for ocean swimming and bodysurfing. He made many friends and pursued a range of interests throughout his life, especially during the 40 years he spent in his beloved NYC.

Mr. Gates loved the arts and social life, even attending Truman Capote’s famous Black and White Ball in 1966. He collected paintings by contemporary artists, often befriending the artists themselves, and also was a talented cartoonist and caricaturist. His love of music and popular culture, lightning-quick wit and contagious delight at the world made him a fascinating friend to people of all ages.

For all his accomplishments, Mr. Gates felt his greatest achievement was his loving family. He is survived by Wende, his wife of 48 years; son Christopher ’94, daughterin-law Kristina, and their three sons, Soren, Charlie and Field; son Bryan, daughter-in-law Meera, and their two sons, Raj and Rishi; and daughter Julia.

India, where Mr. Howells spent two years as executive assistant to the U.S. ambassador to India.

Upon returning to Washington, Mr. Howells took the position of South Asia division chief. He and Christina had two more children, son Horace and daughter Rose-Marie. In 1976, Mr. Howells was promoted to deputy director of the Office of Politics-Military Analysis, and then appointed director in 1982. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent end of the Cold War, Mr. Howells felt that his service was complete and retired from the federal government. Over his 30-year career at the State Department, he received a Superior Honor and two Meritorious Honor awards, among other distinctions.

In retirement, Mr. Howells started a book publishing company, Howells House, and pursued his favorite hobbies: open ocean sailing races and chess. A deeply engaged alumnus with extensive ties to St. Paul’s School that include cousins Fergus Reid ’51, William “Breezy” Reid ’52 and first cousins once removed Fergus Reid ’81, Samuel Reid ’81 and Katharine Koeze ’79, Mr. Howells served the School as a form agent and twice as form director. He also was a member of the John Hargate Society.

1950

William Dean “Dean” Howells II age 90, died at home in Kittery Point, Maine, on the evening of Monday, Oct. 3, 2022, overlooking Pepperell Cove, a view he enjoyed his entire life.

Mr. Howells was born Sept. 13, 1932, in Boston, to William White Howells of the Form of 1926 and Muriel Gurdon (Seabury) Howells. He was named after his great-grandfather, the American novelist William Dean Howells.

Mr. Howells entered St. Paul’s School as a Second Former in September 1945. During his years at the School, he participated in ice hockey, glee club, baseball, football and track. After graduating from St. Paul’s in 1950, he enrolled in the Navy ROTC before enrolling at Harvard College. In 1954, upon his graduation from Harvard, Mr. Howells went to flight training and spent the next four years as a naval aviator in the Pacific. After 1,334 landings — 120 on aircraft carriers — all but one plane could still fly.

Following his military service, Mr. Howells took advantage of the GI Bill and went to Columbia University for a master’s degree in international affairs and Japanese, citing his love of the power and discipline of the Japanese language. His concern over nuclear proliferation led him in 1960 to roles in the State Department, starting in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Mr. Howells married Benitha “Christina” Lindeman on Dec. 29, 1962. While living in Washington, D.C., he and Christina welcomed the first two of their four children, sons Edward and John, and in 1965 relocated to New Delhi,

Mr. Howells was predeceased by son John. He is survived by his wife, Christina; his sister, Gurdon Howells Metz; his children Edward, Horace and Rose-Marie; daughters-in-law Patricia Healy Howells and Ivy Symons Howells; and five grandchildren, Emerson Howells, Elinor Howells, William Boyd, Abigail Howells and Amelia Howells.

1954

James Richardson “Jamie” Houghton died peacefully at home in Boston on Dec. 20, 2022, after a valiant 11-year-struggle with frontal lobe dementia.

Mr. Houghton was born on April 6, 1936, in Corning, New York — the town in which his great-great-grandfather, Amory Houghton, founded the glass and ceramics company Corning Inc. A son of Amory Houghton of the Form of 1917 and Laura Richardson Houghton, he attended Corning public schools and then the Fay School in Southborough, Massachusetts, before enrolling at St. Paul’s School as a member of the Form of 1954, following in the footsteps of his brothers Amory ’45 and Alanson ’48.

His grandfather, Alanson Houghton, was a member of the Form of 1881.

At St. Paul’s, Mr. Houghton was active in choir and glee club, served as Library Association treasurer, competed in athletics for Isthmian — he was a hockey goalie — and rowed varsity crew for a Halcyon boat that competed at Henley. After graduating from St. Paul’s he attended Harvard College, graduating in 1958. He also received his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1962 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 2011.

It was at Harvard that he met his wife of 60 years, May “Maisie” Kinnicutt Houghton, who earned her undergraduate degree from Radcliffe College the same year Mr. Houghton earned his MBA. The couple married in 1962 and raised two children together: son James DeKay Houghton ’82 and daughter Nina Bayard Houghton ’84.

Mr. Houghton worked for Corning from 1962 until 2007, starting as a shift foreman in Danville, Kentucky, and retiring as chairman in 2007. He succeeded brother Amory as chairman and CEO in 1983 and stepped down in 1996 but was asked to return as CEO again from 2002 to 2005, at which point he joked that he had “failed retirement.” At Corning, Mr. Houghton was an early champion of diversity in the workforce and Total Quality Management. He was a tireless cheerleader for the values by which he lived and for which he personally held the company accountable. He served on many corporate and nonprofit boards, including MetLife, CBS, Exxon, JP Morgan, the Morgan Library and the Corning Museum of Glass. At one point in his career Mr. Houghton was simultaneously chairman of Corning Inc., chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation.

Mr. Houghton gave generously of himself to many, but whenever he said “we,” his family knew he was thinking of them. He loved to fish for salmon on the Moisie River in Quebec, Canada, and to sail his Morris 27-footer in Penobscot Bay, Maine. He idolized Fred Astaire, danced a mean two-step and sang Broadway show tunes and choral hymns with equal passion. He wrote his own lyrics and poems for many family occasions and happily played golf with the same eightsome for many years. He built stone walls on his Corning property, smoked cigars by the pond, loved red wine and enjoyed drawing and reading American history (the longer the book the better). From the age of 9, he was a faithful Red Sox fan.

During his last years, Mr. Houghton was lovingly cared for by a group of dedicated caregivers. He is survived by his loving wife, Maisie; his son, James (Connie); daughter, Nina; and four grandchildren, Isabelle ’17 and Abigail ’20 Houghton and Finn ’17 and Augusta ’21 George. He was predeceased by his four siblings: his brothers Amory (Amo) and Alanson (Alan) and sisters Elizabeth (Betty) and Laura (Meme).

1960

William Worthington “Bill” Parshall II of Oaks, Pennsylvania, and Chestertown, Maryland, died on Nov. 12, 2022, at home in Oaks at the age of 81.

Mr. Parshall was born on June 1, 1941, in Pittsburgh, the son of William Baldwin Parshall of the Form of 1921 and Lillian Barrow Parshall. He attended Hoosac School in Hoosick, New York, and entered St. Paul’s School in September 1957 as a Fourth Former.

Mr. Parshall had wonderful memories of his years at SPS, where he made lifelong friends. He played soccer for Old Hundred, rowed crew for Halcyon, and also participated in football and ice hockey. He was most passionate about crew and proudly wore his Halcyon blazer, which he never outgrew, at each of his quinquennial anniversaries on the School grounds. He was a member of the Acolyte Guild, Missionary Society, Science Society and the Hargate Society.

After St. Paul’s, Mr. Parshall went on to attend Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where he was a brother of the Sigma Phi Society and earned a degree in math and psychology. Shortly after graduation from Hobart, Mr. Parshall took a job with Tasty Baking Company. He remained with the Philadelphia-based company for 30 years, retiring as director of production in 1996. As a member of St. James Episcopal Church in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, he spent many years on the vestry, serving at various times as treasurer and rector’s warden. In Maryland, Mr. Parshall attended Chestertown’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church.

Mr. Parshall is remembered by his loved ones for his commitment to family; his generosity of time, talent and treasure; his love of travel, skiing and nature; and his love and respect for boating. He’s also remembered for the great value he placed on education, as exemplified by his service to the Hoosac School as a trustee for more than 30 years.

Mr. Parshall divided his time between his places in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Palm Beach and, following his marriage to his beloved wife Faith in 2018, Paris, enjoying the many marvels of that magical city.

Mr. Parshall was preceded in death by his wife of 40 years, Ann Gray V. Parshall, and son William W. Parshall III, who died in infancy. He is survived by his wife, Faith Conant Parshall; daughters Lee Roberts (David) of St. Inigoes, Maryland, and Ann Marble Tarburton (Andy) of York, Pennsylvania; his grandchildren, Todd, Madeline, Kylie and Abigail; a sister, Patricia (Norman) Berger, and brother, David (Jane) Parshall ’65; two nieces, including Lily Parshall Wachter ’97; and nephew Anthony B. Parshall ’98.

operated manufacturing firms of its time, Watson built turbine water wheels in the 19th century, iron bridges, electric cars, wire and most recently fiber optic cable.

Mr. McLaughlin loved spending summers at his family’s place in Lincolnville, Maine. He was a member of the Collections Committee for Ancient Art at Harvard Art Museums, a graduate of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s training course for education guides in New York City and a volunteer and educator at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In his final years in Lake Forest, Mr. McLaughlin was a devoted father to his youngest child, Isabella, and has left a lasting legacy of wit, humor and passion through his children and grandchildren.

Mr. McLaughlin is survived by his partner of 16 years, Marett Taylor ’90; their daughter, Isabella TaylorMcLaughlin; his three sons, Callum, Gavin and Ian “Andrew”McLaughlin and their mother, Mary Makrianes  McLaughlin; his sister, Lys McLaughlin Pike; and his grandchildren, Ian “Sandy,” Malcolm, Pearson, Elsie, Suzanne “Sunny” and Marsden.

1963

Ian Malcolm Watson McLaughlin

a decorated war veteran, father of four and grandfather to six, died surrounded by his family and friends at home in Lake Forest, Illinois, on Oct. 19, 2022, at age 77. He was diagnosed with cancer in March 2022.

Born in New York City on June 14, 1945, to Elizabeth Watson and F. Malcolm McLaughlin, Mr. McLaughlin entered St. Paul’s School as a Third Former in 1959. At SPS, he was in the Acolyte Guild, the Cadmean Concordian Literary Society, the Classics Society and Le Cercle Francais. He also participated in crew, soccer and both Nordic and alpine skiing.

After St. Paul’s, Mr. McLaughlin studied fine arts at Harvard, graduating with honors in 1968, and with the British School of Archaeology in Athens, Greece. The latter experience sparked a lifelong love of antiquities and art that led Mr. McLaughlin to conduct an independent study on Aegean prehistory at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, participate in excavations of Haghios Stephanos — the port for Menelaus’ palace at Sparta — and Mycenae, and study ancient sites in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. He returned to his beloved Greece in 2015 with all his children for his 70th birthday.

Mr. McLaughlin served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War as a district intelligence advisor and first lieutenant with top-secret security clearance. He was awarded two Bronze Stars, one with valor. He ran the Watson Machine Company, founded by his great grandfather in Paterson, New Jersey. One of the oldest continuously

1963

James Perry “Jim” Patton

a treasured husband, father and grandfather, died peacefully, surrounded by love, on Oct. 22, 2021. He was 77 years old and a resident of Seattle.

Mr. Patton was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on Sept. 21, 1944, the son of James P. Patton and Mildred C. Kallman. He grew up on Long Island with siblings Curtis and Nancy. Mr. Patton enrolled as St. Paul’s School as a Third Former in the fall of 1959. At SPS, he competed for Isthmian in football and basketball and served as captain of the lacrosse team. As a Sixth Former, Mr. Patton was the recipient of the Gordon Medal, recognizing him as the School’s best athlete. He also served as president of the Missionary Society.

He went on to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied psychology. It was in a chemistry class at Penn in 1963 that Mr. Patton met Jacqueline “Jacquie” Webster, who was studying to be a nurse practitioner. The couple married in 1966, a year before their college graduation.

From 1968 to 1981, Mr. Patton served in the U.S. Army Medical Specialist Corps as an occupational therapist. Upon his discharge from the military, he returned to school at the University of Colorado, where he earned his M.S. in physician assistant studies in 1982.

His career was spent working as a physician assistant at various hospitals, including the VA Puget Sound Health Care System, the Seattle Veterans Administration Medical Center and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. In the early 1980s, he worked with HIV/AIDS patients at Harborview Hospital in Seattle.

Over the course of their 55 years of marriage, the Pattons lived in Washington, D.C., Japan, Colorado, Germany and Seattle. Together, they raised two children, Matthew and Mari.

Mr. Patton was described by his wife as a quiet, humble man who loved to help others, including volunteering his time to work with disabled veterans. He was family oriented and enjoyed extensive travels with his wife and children in a VW camper. He also loved tennis, biking, skiing, hiking, photography and gardening. Mr. Patton was a doting grandfather who loved all children, and was known for his energy, vitality and big smile.

Mr. Patton is survived by his wife, Jacqueline WebsterPatton; his son and daughter, Matthew and Mari, and their spouses; and his three grandchildren, Etta, Tyler and Marlo.

his competitive years ended, as he would go on to complete multiple marathons with what he once described as “respectable though not outstanding times.” He also kept active with both cross-country and downhill skiing, the latter most notably in California.

After Trinity, Mr. Howard earned a Master of Science degree from the Air Force Institute of Technology in 1975 and became an officer in the U.S. Air Force. It was while serving that Mr. Howard met his wife, Norma — a nurse in the Air Force — as members of the same church choir. The Howards married in 1976 and raised three children together: Stephen, Margery ’98 and Jonathan. Mr. Howard involved himself in his children’s lives, volunteering with his sons’ Boy Scouts troop and taking piano lessons alongside his daughter and attending all of her gymnastics meets. He and Norma continued to sing in church choirs together for the 46 years of their marriage.

Mr. Howard and his family moved several times during his time in the Air Force before finally settling in Hudson. After retiring from the Air Force in 1988, Mr. Howard expanded his technical skills, earning his second master’s degree at Rivier College in 1990. He worked as a senior software developer at Lowell Shoe and HH Brown Shoe Company for 27 years. After his second retirement in 2005, he continued to find ways to serve and be connected with his community by volunteering at the Nashua Soup Kitchen and singing in the Concord Chorale, as well as in his church choir.

In addition to family and work, Mr. Howard enjoyed hiking, biking, kayaking, sailing, reading and his family’s summer property on Chebeague Island, Maine. He also was an active member of the Church of the Good Shepherd for 36 years.

Mr. Howard is survived by his wife Norma; his children Stephen (Ava), Margery (Seth) and Jonathan (Julie); his grandchildren Aidan, Maiara and Eli and his brothers Robert and John.

1964

Major (Ret.) Christopher B. Howard of Hudson, New Hampshire, passed away on Dec. 12, 2022, at age 77. Born in Stamford, Connecticut, on Oct. 12, 1945, to Margery Hall Howard and Robert R. Howard Jr. of the Form of 1935, he entered St. Paul’s School as a Third Former in 1960, the middle of three Howard brothers to attend the School. Mr. Howard’s older brother Robert graduated with the Form of 1962 and his younger brother John graduated in 1971.

At St. Paul’s, Mr. Howard competed in cross country, a sport he continued at Trinity College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1968. His love of long-distance running endured even after

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1971

Dr. Robert Howard Barker Jr. of Canton, Massachusetts, died peacefully on Sept. 24, 2022, at the age of 69 after a battle with colon cancer. Born in Boston on Oct. 31, 1952, to Robert H. Barker and Athalia Ogden Barker, he entered St. Paul’s School as a Second Former in 1966. At St. Paul’s, he was active with the Library Association and graduated as a member of the Form of 1971.

As an undergraduate student at Yale University, Dr. Barker studied American history, earning his bachelor’s degree in the subject in 1975. After graduating from Yale, an interest in biology took him to Northeastern University, from which he earned a master’s degree in 1979. In 1984, he received a doctorate in molecular biology from Brown University.

Following his doctorate, Dr. Barker enjoyed a distinguished career researching and developing treatments for rare and infectious diseases, including malaria and genetic diseases, beginning at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He also held positions at Hybridon Inc., where he was principal scientist, and at Geltex Pharmaceuticals. His final role was as a distinguished scientific fellow at Sanofi Genzyme Corporation. Outside of his work in the medical field, Dr. Barker served on the Canton school and finance committees for nearly 20 years.

Dr. Barker was an avid sailor and voracious reader. A true Renaissance man, he was possessed of a seemingly endless set of skills that included singing, carpentry, plumbing, cooking and gardening.

He was the devoted husband of 45 years to Marla Schay  Barker of Canton, and the loving father of Amanda R. Barker of Chicago and Naomi C. Barker of Boston. He was the brother of Athalia Barker Esty of Andover, Massachusetts; Margaret Barker Christie of Chestertown, Maryland; Elizabeth Barker Abbott of Andover and Alice Barker Canham of Wareham, Massachusetts. Survived by these individuals as well as 13 nieces and nephews and numerous grandnieces and grandnephews, Dr. Barker changed the lives of everyone he met.

1976

Mark Lewis Rhodes of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, whose work for Universal Studios delighted countless thousands of young Harry Potter fans and whose southpaw serve frustrated opponents on tennis courts throughout the Berkshires, died in Orlando, Florida, on April 1, 2022, following cardiac arrest.

Born in Bombay, India (now Mumbai) on Oct. 11, 1957, Mr. Rhodes spent his childhood in Switzerland, Germany and New York City. He enrolled at St. Paul’s School as a Third Former and graduated in 1976, following in the footsteps of his brother John ’74. At St. Paul’s, he was a member of Isthmian and Shattuck, skied and played soccer, and perhaps most importantly discovered his love and gift for theater. It was this passion that he continued at Princeton, where he studied English and theater, taking a gap year at the Young Vic Theatre in London and the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven before graduating in 1981.

Equipped with a striking resemblance to David Bowie — a fact for which he never apologized — Mr. Rhodes worked in theater and film in New York City after graduating from Princeton, and on May 27, 1989, married Elisabeth Soderholm. The couple subsequently moved from New York City to Great Barrington, where Mr. Rhodes worked with the late visual effects maestro Doug Trumbull; their work on ways to use 70 mm film at a high frame rate to heighten immersion resulted in the technology known as Showscan. At the time of his death, Mr. Rhodes was senior director of media at Universal Creative in Orlando, where he was involved in developing many of Universal Studios’ most popular attractions, including TRANSFORMERS: The Ride-3D, The Simpsons Ride, The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man and the wildly popular Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

For all his accomplishments, Mr. Rhodes was a modest soul, kind to the core and a true gentleman. He most enjoyed spending time with his wife of 33 years, his son Nik, and his daughter Sarah and her husband Charles Cochran, or simply “puttering about” his rambling home.  Other survivors include his brother John (Lucy), sister Lydia Petty ’84 and her husband Rob ’83, cousins Willie and Mary Herndon, and many nieces and nephews.

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