A lumni Horae
TODAY’S MISH REFLECTS A CULTURE OF SERVICE AT SPS THAT DATES BACK MORE THAN 150 YEARS.
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
Jim Graham
Michael Matros
Jody Record
ALUMNI ADVISORY BOARD
Elise Loehnen Fissmer ’98
David M. Foxley ’02
Dana R. Goodyear ’94
Jonathan D. Jackson ’09
Malcolm Mackay ’59
Diego H. Nuñez ’08
Published by St. Paul’s School
JACQUELINE
28
MAKING
JODY RECORD
Just a year after graduating from SPS, Andrew Fleischner ’22 is dancing professionally.
30
COMMUNITY REVIVAL
JANA F. BROWN
With leadership from Chris Buccini ’90 and Amachie Ackah ’90, a low-income neighborhood in Pittsburgh is coming back to life.
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IN THIS ISSUE
2 FROM THE RECTOR
4 THE SCHOOL TODAY
New Admissions Center; farewell to Vice Rector for Faculty Rev. Michael Spencer; Spring Break trips and the student-led AAFC Conference.
36 REVIEWS
“Lost Son”
Brett Forrest ’91
“We Should Not Be Friends”
Will Schwalbe ’79
38 ALUMNI CONNECTIONS
40 PROFILE
Robert Pennoyer ’43 recalls his service in the Pacific during World War II.
41 PROFILE
L amar Bunts ’87 steps into a new role as Dartmouth’s first chief transformation officer.
42 PROFILE
Renée Boey ’00 founded Hong Kong’s Bloom Academy to create leadership and learning opportunities.
44 SPOTLIGHT
Remembering the Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold III ’55
46 IN MEMORIAM
52 SPOTLIGHT
Frederick H. Lovejoy Jr. ’55 and Sia Manta Sanneh ’97 receive 2023 Alumni Association Awards.
ALUMNI HORAE DEADLINE
Formnotes for the summer issue are due Friday, June 23. 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.
A Season of Renewal
KATHLEEN C. GILES
are transformed into verbs — building the skills and knowledge students need to integrate their intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and physical growth into becoming “good humans.” Becoming those healthy, resilient, optimistic, and loving people who will indeed continue in the SPS ways of kindness, unselfishness, thoughtfulness, and eagerness to bear the burdens of others so wellarticulated by our School Prayer, first delivered in 1934.
Spring mornings on the grounds are a blessing, as nature greens slowly and, despite some starts and stops and sleet along the way, the world buds and sprouts and hatches and renews. The air carries a soft, earthy scent that is fresh and without the sharp edge of January or the bloom-saturated fragrance of June. Despite being the home stretch of the academic calendar, spring offers yet another opportunity to celebrate a new year, renew our commitments, and begin again.
One of the ways we experience this “circle of life” as a school is by welcoming our newly admitted students and newly hired colleagues, even as we fondly say goodbye to those who are graduating, retiring, or otherwise heading out into the world. Our Admissions team’s hard work this year resulted in thousands of terrific young people seeking the opportunities an SPS education offers. After the full cycle of applications, acceptances, and decision-making, we are a robustly full school for the 2023-24 academic year, and we are eager to welcome the impressive students from around the country and the globe who have accepted the invitation to spend such an important time in their lives at St. Paul’s. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say in St. Paul’s, as we develop ways of being and doing where “community” and “citizenship”
And even as we welcome in the next cohort, we celebrate our Sixth Form as they complete their time on the grounds and ready themselves to graduate. There is the mixed-emotional-bag of “lasts” during the spring months that mingles with the relief and excitement of closing out high school and the college admissions process and looking ahead to the future with a sense of nostalgia. Perhaps that is infused by taking one’s place in the many rows of graduates’ names on the plaques in the dining rooms, or by thinking about one’s different seats in Chapel or different rooms in houses. Perhaps it is the strange combination of sadness and exhilaration that can accompany change — the close of one time, the beginning of another; what we bring with us, what we leave behind. While every student’s SPS experience lasts only a few years, they are powerful years full of growth and self-discovery. Our alumni experience this circle of life as they return to Millville in the spring for Anniversary Weekend, to renew relationships and continue to build out their lives by bringing together the people and places important to them and of value to them. We gather this year on June 9-11, and once again all are welcome to join us on the grounds. We will honor special reunion years with specific events and encourage alumni from non-reunion years to come back as life and schedule allow to reconnect with those early friends who so often teach us so much and become such important figures throughout our lives.
WHILE EVERY STUDENT’S SPS EXPERIENCE LASTS ONLY A FEW YEARS, THEY ARE POWERFUL YEARS
FULL OF GROWTH AND SELF-DISCOVERY.
On these fresh spring days, it is easy to be an optimist — and important to be an optimist, despite the discord and chaos of the world around us. There are, of course, many “circles of life,” and for those of us living and working in the current School, our gratitude is strong. Every morning in Chapel, we offer and are offered the opportunity to sit with the Love Divine in grace and gratitude, reflecting on the message of the day in the context of the beauty of the people and ideas and places around us. While that opportunity might seem unique to one’s time on the grounds, the start of nature’s new year — at least in the Northern Hemisphere! — offers us the opportunity to renew a connection with the spiritual and physical worlds around us. In the spirit of that optimism, and as a refresher, perhaps, of those days spent in Chapel on a bright, fresh morning, I share with you one of the recent readings that, while known to many and nothing new, captures such important spirit for this complex and beautiful spring:
The Best Day in the Year
by Ralph Waldo EmersonWrite it on your heart
That every day is the best day of the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day Who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt, crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; Begin it well and serenely with too high a spirit To be cumbered with your old nonsense.
This new day is too dear, With its hopes and invitations, To waste a moment on the yesterdays.
“PEOPLE ALWAYS TELL YOU NOT TO MEET YOUR HEROES BECAUSE THEY WON’T LIVE UP TO YOUR EXPECTATIONS. BUT MEETING AND PLAYING CELLO WITH YO-YO MA WAS THE MOST INCREDIBLE EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFE.”
World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma spent May 18 on the SPS grounds as the 2023 Conroy Visitor.
Trustees on Grounds for Spring Meetings
KAREN INGRAHAMtheir lives, to resist letting their stories be written by others; and he shared examples from his own life to underscore his points. At the end of his remarks, Loehnen was greeted by a standing ovation before Chapel concluded with the Rector’s prayer and community announcements.
Later in the day, Loehnen was joined on grounds by his Board peers for a formal program that began Friday morning. Trustees spent the first half of their agenda engaging with the School community, attending Chapel, sitting in on classes with student hosts and dining in the Upper with faculty members during the lunch blocks. Jamie Kolker, senior director of facilities and planning, also led Trustees on a walking tour of the buildings and grounds to provide further insight into the student experience, current infrastructure and reinvestment needs of the School.
In his Chapel talk on Thursday, May 4, St. Paul’s School Trustee Ben Loehnen ’96 spoke about how he learned to become an editor at the School, not only in literary terms but also, as he described, “it had to do with mastering the idea of life as narrative, and it involved the grand kind of editorial work all of us … are called on to do in our daily lives.”
Loehnen, editor-in-chief and vice president of Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster that he co-founded in 2018, added, “To live a life is to craft a narrative, but as both the heroes and the engines of that story, it’s imperative that we edit it as we experience it. We must ask questions of it, make meaning of it, and improve it.” He urged students to be mindful and intentional about the choices they make in
Formal board meetings were held on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning in the Schoolhouse Reading Room. Agenda items included budget approval for the Fleischner Family Admissions Center — a new multipurpose building to be constructed near the School’s entrance that will serve as a warm point of entry for families considering SPS as well as a gathering place for the St. Paul’s community (see story, page 8). The Board also approved newly revised board bylaws and discussed strategies to sustain the School’s financial health and ensure current and future programmatic needs are met. At the conclusion of the meetings, Trustees had the opportunity to cheer on Big Red during Saturday afternoon athletic competitions. The Board returns to the grounds September 29-30 for their fall meetings.
170
Successful Admissions Season Concludes
They are published authors and nationally recognized artists; presidents of their schools and activists who have organized social justice movements. One of them holds a national sports title. Another has lived in six different countries. Several have juggled school with jobs. When 170 new students matriculate to St. Paul’s School in September, they will bring with them a remarkable range of talents and interests, contributing in new ways to a community that is already brimming with both.
“I was blown away by the strength of our applicant pool,” says Dana Chapin Anselmi ’98, SPS dean of admission and financial aid. “Students who apply to SPS tend to be incredibly dedicated, and this is only the beginning of their story. Their web of talents will touch every house and every corner of campus.”
In just her first year heading up the SPS admissions program, Anselmi and her team delivered a student cohort for the 2023-24 academic year that is strong along every dimension. A total of 237 applicants were offered admission, and joining SPS this fall will be 113 Third Formers, 41 Fourth Formers and 16 Fifth Formers who hail from 37 states and 25 countries. Fourteen percent of the new students are
international, and 49% identify as non-Caucasian. As in past years, more than a third of the students — 37% — will receive financial aid; the 2023-24 school year is the first since 2019 in which tuition will increase, from $62,000 to $65,000.
As in years past, a combination of rigorous academics, vast extracurricular opportunities and a strong sense of community continue to be factors in the decision-making process for families who choose St. Paul’s School. Also playing a role was the positive experience of the School’s Spring Visit Days, April 4 and 6. Both days were at capacity, with 160 accepted students and their families spending the day on grounds for classes, Chapel, a current student and young alumni panel, an athletics and afternoon activities fair, and a food-truck finale that served up mac and cheese, ice cream … and plenty of good vibes.
“I was so happy to see the entire SPS community invest their heart and soul in our Spring Visit Days,” says Anselmi. “The energy on campus was palpable and our students, faculty and staff went above and beyond to represent their beloved School. Each person showed tremendous pride and also humility, knowing that we will only be better with the addition of these new students and families.”
New Admissions Center Planned
KAREN INGRAHAM
For many in the St. Paul’s community, a lifelong connection to the School begins with a tour of the g rounds and visit to Admissions. When the new Fleischner Family Admissions Center, located near the School’s entrance and adjacent to the academic quad, opens in early 2025, it will be a welcoming beacon for future SPS students and their families — and a building that will strengthen community life for all students and faculty as it returns Sheldon Library to its rightful role as a space for students. The budget for the new facility was approved by the SPS Board of Trustees during their meetings in May. “This project presents the rare opportunity to improve a student’s experience with St. Paul’s from start to finish, and so uniquely honors the Fleischner family’s desire to see one of our most beautiful places, Sheldon Library, returned to student life, rather than used for administrative purposes,” Rector Kathy Giles says. “Their gift to lead us
in the development of our new Admissions Center … has opened all kinds of new possibilities for our community. It’s a brilliant gift, made in the spirit of this loving family’s desire to embrace our students and their families. We could not be more grateful.”
...”
“THIS PROJECT PRESENTS THE RARE OPPORTUNITY TO IMPROVE A STUDENT’S EXPERIENCE WITH ST. PAUL’S FROM START TO FINISH, AND SO UNIQUELY HONORS THE FLEISCHNER FAMILY’S DESIRE TO SEE ONE OF OUR MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACES, SHELDON LIBRARY, RETURNED TO STUDENT LIFEThe Fleischner Family Admissions Center as viewed from Dunbarton Road.
The Center will be home to the Offices of Admissions and Communications, and its sustainable design and construction will reflect the School’s ideals for visitors and community members alike. In addition to office space, the Center also will feature a large, multipurpose indoor gathering space with a timber structure and floor-toceiling views of the surrounding landscape for Admissions and School-related events.
Building Features
Creates additional meeting and function space for Schoolwide uses, with 2,000 square feet of event space and two conference rooms.
Offers a 1,500-square-foot terrace with eastern views of the playing fields for outdoor events and gatherings.
Design incorporates green building principles and is currently targeting LEED Silver certification. The building will have net zero energy ready systems, including photovoltaic roof panels, and will use no fossil fuels during normal operation.
Immediately adjacent to the academic quadrangle, providing prospective families with better access to our Admissions experience and School life.
Provides collaborative and flexible office spaces for Admissions and Communications teams and allows for growth and change over time.
Sheldon Library: A Renewed Hub of Student Life
Designed by architect Ernest Flagg and built in the Beaux-Arts style, Sheldon was dedicated in 1902 as the School’s library. For nearly a century, it provided spaces for scholarly study, quiet reflection and community gatherings. After Ohrstrom Library opened in 1991, Sheldon became home to the Admissions Office and other administrative departments.
Today, Sheldon remains an iconic landmark. At the same time, its centrality to several dormitories, the Friedman Community Center, Coit Dining Hall and Ohrstrom Library position it at the nexus of student life outside the academic quadrangle — and as essential space to return to student programming and activities.
That evolution has already begun. Two years ago, the Communications Office was relocated to return the lower level of Sheldon to student and faculty use. That floor is now home to the Chaplaincy and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice offices, and students have access to dedicated affinity and interfaith spaces for club meetings and schoolwide events.
Returning the entirety of Sheldon to student and faculty use with the opening of the Fleischner Family Admissions Center will make available more than 9,000 square feet of new space for student use and enhance the community experience of SPS students for generations to come.
SPS Remembers Toby Brewster
JANA F. BROWNontemplating his retirement in 2021, longtime St. Paul’s School faculty member Toby Brewster shared with Alumni Horae the quality he valued most in himself.
“As a teacher,” he said at the time, “my goal was to listen more than I talked.”
Brewster, who died on March 16, 2023, will be remembered for his willingness to lend an ear as well as for his kind, considerate nature, his love of the outdoors, his sense of grace, and, most importantly, the deep affection he had for his family. He and his wife Becca, who spent nearly 20 years working in the School’s Advancement Office, raised their boys, Will ’11, Eli ’13, Peter ’17 and Seth, on SPS grounds. When they were young, the Brewster children were ever-present on the Nordic skiing and running trails of SPS, where their father coached so many athletes — including his own sons — with his thoughtful approach.
“He was a very involved parent, very present,” Becca Brewster says, recalling that her husband took the boys out to breakfast most Wednesdays, when there was no morning Chapel. “He was devoted, steady, patient. He was very proud of all the boys.”
During a fruitful career at SPS that began in 1994, Brewster taught Humanities and helped to develop the School’s interdisciplinary Fourth Form curriculum; served as a college adviser; and was a beloved coach and mentor. He thrived in the collaborative environment of the Humanities Department, and in the bonds he formed within the community of St. Paul’s. His style in the classroom reminded Becca Brewster of her husband’s calm approach to parenting, and the trust he placed in the growth of young people.
“He definitely saw himself as learning with the students,” Becca Brewster says.
Quentin Reeve ’03 describes his former coach as extraordinarily kind, someone who inspired and motivated his students and athletes, and embodied the idea of “leading from the front.”
“He never asked an athlete or student to do anything he wouldn’t do himself,” Reeve says. “His willingness to work just as hard as anyone else meant he was deeply respected and admired by all.”
In his understated way, Brewster made an impact on everyone he knew. Though he approached his work with the degree of professionalism it required, he also possessed a certain levity that put others at ease. In his life outside of his job, he was an avid runner, biker, swimmer and Nordic skier who was content in nature. He enjoyed sharing his quiet sense of adventure with his family in their travels, par-
ticularly to the coast of Maine. The family spent the 19992000 academic year in Rennes, France, with Brewster on the faculty of School Year Abroad, an opportunity for which he was forever grateful. He also experienced favororite destinations on a bicycle, including summer excursions through New Hampshire, Vermont and Ireland.
“He wasn’t a person who complained or was picky about anything,” Becca Brewster says, “but he’d make sure he planned his route so he could get a coffee frappe along the way.”
Throughout a period of declining physical health, Brewster maintained a quiet determination and unwavering inner strength — and never complained. He led a “full and fulfilling life,” his wife says. He enjoyed the quiet, reflective times, whether by himself, with family and friends, or with the family’s adored black lab, Bean, by his side. He loved being outside and, ever the learner, always had a book in his hand. It is not surprising that one of Brewster’s favorite classes to teach at SPS was called In Tune with Nature, a Humanities elective that allowed him to combine his interest in literature and writing with the natural world. Longtime SPS Science Teacher Rick Pacelli called the opportunity to create and co-teach the course with his friend “one of the joys of my career.” Most of all, Brewster led by example, approaching everything with grace, always with a smile, a word of encouragement and a positive outlook.
“He had the rare ability to bring out the best in people,” Pacelli says. “When speaking with Toby, I was always sure he was totally present. He embodied empathy and always was ready to help in the best way possible — gently, from the heart.”
EMBRACING THEIR IDENTITY
Asian American Students Lead AAFC at SPS
JIM GRAHAM
They came from as many diverse backgrounds of the Asian and Asian American experience as one can imagine. Yet when more than 300 students from 25 independent high schools gathered on the St. Paul’s School grounds for the 2023 Asian American Footsteps Conference (AAFC), they bonded instantly over the familiar, and sometimes hard, questions they pondered: Why aren’t Asian and Asian American cultures and contributions celebrated more widely in the U.S.? Why are Asian Americans underrepresented in corporate boardrooms, federal elected offices and college sports? How could an upcoming Supreme Court decision on affirmative action affect college admissions?
“Sometimes, Asian American voices aren’t highlighted in the bigger discussions around diversity,” says Chris Shia ’23, who co-led the AAFC Student Planning Committee with formmate Tianzhi “Tina” Yang ’23. “And it can be hard for us to get together with our peers, so this was a great opportunity for us to talk about some of these things that we have in common.”
It was the first time that SPS has hosted the conference, launched in 2011 to bring together Asian-identifying students from New England’s independent high schools and provide them with a safe space to discuss topics ranging from history, current events, mental health and stereotypes to Asian cuisine, arts and humor. This year’s conference, held on April 16, featured 31 student-designed workshops, 13 of which were presented by SPS students.
More than a year in the making, the process to organize the AAFC included 60 SPS student members of the planning committee along with faculty members who provided logistical support, led workshops and served as campus guides. An additional 25 SPS students joined the conference as participants.
BUILDING BRIDGES: AAFC 2023 BY THE NUMBERS
FRIENDS YOUTH MENTORING
PROGRAM Students Give Back — and Get Something in Return
JACQUELINE PRIMO LEMMON
On Monday evenings at 5:30, Jonathan Dase ’24 can be found at the Hockey Center with 10-yearold Jose, a local public school student and Dase’s mentee in the Friends Youth Mentoring Program. For 15 minutes or so, Dase and Jose — along with other St. Paul’s student mentors and the elementary schoolers they have been matched with — spend time chatting before going on to dinner at Coit Dining Hall. And while Dase wants to make sure his mentee enjoys their mentorship sessions, his priority is trying to support Jose’s intrinsic appreciation for knowledge, curiosity and kindness.
“One thing I’ll sometimes do is, he’s a little interested in math, so I’ll give him math problems. Some people think I’m goofy for it, but I want him to be as smart as possible,” Dase says. Often, he and Jose will stay to watch the SPS hockey teams practice before they head to dinner. If there’s a long line in the dining hall, they’ll keep
the conversation going. “We’ll walk around and we’ll just continue to talk about life and everything that’s going on and anything he’s struggling with,” Dase continues.
Dase and Jose are just one pair in the Friends Program, which matches local elementary school kids who could use some extra support, academically or otherwise, with SPS Fifth and Sixth Formers. Mentees come to the grounds once a week, and mentors have the opportunity to travel to their schools for additional weekly mentoring.
In their last session, Dase says the conversation drifted to the topic of planets, and Jose impressed him with how much he knew. After dinner, the pair will sometimes head to Mathes Cage to play wall ball while other duos work on basic athletic skills to boost the younger kids’ self-confidence, so the mentees feel more comfortable engaging in recess and physical education with their peers.
E lizabeth Esteves ’23 has been involved with the Friends Program since fall 2021, when she became the Fifth Form peer leader for the program. Due to COVID-19 precautions, the program was fully remote at the time, which meant weekly Zoom meetings with mentees. Returning to in-person mentoring this year is a welcome change.
“Not only does meeting in person make for more meaningful connections with our mentees, but we are also given access to more activities and engagement opportunities,” she says.
For Esteves, highlights of this year’s in-person sessions have included decorating Christmas cookies, playing UNO and playing drawing games.
When it comes to mentors of his own, Dase points to his teachers in the Classical Honors Program: Elizabeth Englehardt, Ryan Samuels and Dr. David Camden. “I had Mrs. Engelhardt for Greek and Latin last year, and she would stress the importance of kindness and how
giving back is the most rewarding thing you can do. And I really feel that.” He describes the trio as “brilliant teachers” who “know everything” and can make connections between current events and ancient civilizations. “You don’t just learn about classical language and how to translate,” he says. “You learn how to think.”
It’s no wonder why getting Jose to think more deeply about things, even as a fifth grader, is something the pair are always working on. And while the Youth Friends Program mentees certainly benefit from the bonds created through the program, Dase says the mentors get a lot out of it, too: “It’s very healthy for the mentors to get a break from all the social pressures they feel here and just help another kid.”
As for how he himself has changed since fifth grade? Dase thinks before saying, “I’m a little wiser and I talk a little slower; in fifth grade I was filled with energy.”
“NOT ONLY DOES MEETING IN PERSON MAKE FOR MORE MEANINGFUL CONNECTIONS WITH OUR MENTEES, BUT WE ARE ALSO GIVEN ACCESS TO MORE ACTIVITIES AND ENGAGEMENT OPPORTUNITIES.”Liz Esteves ’23 with her mentee, Ruthie.
LIVING HISTORY
Students and Faculty Reflect on Spring Break Trip to Civil Rights Sites
KRISTIN DUISBERG
As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on Sunday, March 5, nine St. Paul’s School students who had traveled there as part of the School’s inaugural civil rights-focused Spring Break Trip experienced a range of emotions. Excitement. Awe. Sadness. Elation. Almost 58 years to the day after a young activist named John Lewis had led 600 Black citizens to the same bridge in pursuit of the right to vote, only to be met with police brutality, the students and their three SPS chaperones felt their own footsteps on the bridge and heard the hum of hundreds of voices as they immersed themselves in a crowd of individuals of every race, age and identity.
“Seeing all those people together walking, and actually experiencing it for ourselves — it’s something that’s just stuck with me,” says Maya Lokhandwala ’25.
“We learned about Selma and the violence that happened there in Hum 4,” adds Jenny Jang ’24, “but it doesn’t sink in the same way when you’re just reading and taking notes and having some class discussion. To be learning about history in the places where it took place … the knowledge has stayed with me in a completely different way.”
That profound personal connection was exactly what Rev. Charles Wynder, the School’s dean of chapel and spiritual life, had hoped students would take away from the weeklong trip when he came up with the idea for what he describes as “a pilgrimage for history, justice and healing” last fall. Joined by Dr. John Bassi, P’17,’19,’21, the School’s medical director; and Humanities Teaching Fellow Lauren Lamb, Wynder led a group that also included Raen Kao ’24, Gabriella Purvis ’24, John Sanfilippo ’25, Cole
Edwards ’24, Cora Partridge ’24, Jermaine Baffour ’24 and Isabella Martinez ’24. In Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama, and in Atlanta, the group visited historic sites, museums and memorials to the struggle for — and the celebration of — civil rights and racial equality in America’s Deep South.
In Atlanta, the group met with Dr. Catherine Meeks, executive director for the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing; toured Morehouse and Spellman Colleges and visited historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, the King Center — dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. — and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. In Montgomery, the group toured the Southern Poverty Law Center, had a brief private audience with U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke, and visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The group’s time in Birmingham included a tour of the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four young Black girls were killed in a racially motivated bombing in 1963, and the Civil Rights Institute.
In between stops, there was plenty of journaling, good food and music, and an opportunity for students to get to know one another in ways they hadn’t before. For some participants, the destinations had personal resonance. Martinez, who is interested in public policy and issues around justice and healing, was struck by the role of women in the civil rights movement. For Edwards, the experience of visiting the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, a destination broadly referred to as the Lynching Museum, hit close to home. “Wake
County, North Carolina, had 55 lynching victims. My father grew up in Wake County in the sixties,” he says. “So these could have been people that he knew, that his siblings knew, that his parents knew.”
Wynder says he was moved by the grace and courage with which students engaged with the Lynching Museum in particular, and the experience as a whole. “They did great head and heart work,” he says, “and were wonderful ambassadors for St. Paul’s School.”
In turn, they credit him with understanding how to keep the emotional intensity at just the right pitch. “He provided so much insight and knowledge about the events,” Lokhandwala says. “We were there with a purpose, and he explained everything.” Adds Martinez, “His insights helped us make meaning of what we were seeing and learning, and his dedication to the experience for all of us just made the trip so much better.”
As a Teaching Fellow, Lamb found it a powerful exercise in how to discuss difficult information with high school-aged students. “As a Humanities teacher, one of my main challenges in the classroom is condensing a lot of information, making it digestible, and knowing when it’s appropriate to share challenging things,” she says. “So I appreciated that these students were willing and wanting to engage with a history that is hard to see and hard to hear about.” The experience was also, she says, an example of the School mission as a lived experience. “I found myself thinking about how this trip was hopefully giving [these students] the context and the knowledge to be inspired to do good things for others and not just for [themselves].”
Wynder’s pilgrimage of history, justice and healing may have been a first of its kind for SPS, but it will not be the last. There are plans to do the trip again in 2024, and Wynder says discussions are already underway to think about how to integrate it more fully into the life of the School and the Humanities curriculum. He’s hopeful that the next trip will include a service-learning component, most likely in Atlanta.
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
Other Spring Break Trips took students as far as Greece — and as nearby as the city of Concord.
Twenty students in the Classical Honors Program spent some of their Spring Vacation under the Mediterranean sun, exploring historical sites during an 13 day tour of Italy and Greece that took them from Sorrento, Naples and Rome to Athens and Olympia. They’re pictured here in front of a remarkably well-preserved Doric temple in Paestum, Italy — at one time a major city that was part of ancient Greece.
During the first five days of the break, 10 students took part in a service trip just down the street from St. Paul’s School. As volunteers at Mckenna House, an emergency housing facility for adults in need in the Concord area, they prepped, cooked and served meals, organized donated supplies, met with residents who shared their stories — and earned Community Engagement credit for their participation.
A pair of Sixth Form students spent two weeks of their Spring Vacation just outside London at Eton College, as part of the Mayflower Exchange Program. During their visit, Jamie Campbell ’23 (pictured at left) and Junho Moon ’23 attended classes and activities as boarding students at the nearly 600year-old independent boys school; at the beginning of Spring Term, the duo reciprocated, welcoming their Eton hosts for two weeks at SPS.
WHAT THE HECK IS BIOTECH?
Martha Greer Walker Started with an Internship and Finished with a Book
JIM GRAHAM“Like many students, I spend a lot of time thinking about my future,” Walker says, “and the world is changing so fast, especially in a field like biotech. So, I began wondering, ‘How do you prepare for a career or a job that may not even exist today?’”
Writing a book wasn’t on Walker’s radar initially. She only wanted to know if she should consider biotech as a potential major when she was choosing a college. And she had questions — lots of questions: How does the biotech industry work? What college majors and academic degrees are required? What kinds of jobs are there in the field, and which will be in greatest demand in five or 10 years? What do people in these positions actually do every day?
“I started by just emailing people at my internship,” Walker says, “and I was amazed that so many of them responded and that they took the time to let me interview them.”
It started with a simple question Martha Greer Walker ’23 began pondering when she landed an internship at a research institute last summer: What exactly is biotech?
There’s the easy answer: Biotech integrates biology with engineering technology and is driving breakthroughs in pharmaceuticals, medical diagnostics, agriculture and other areas. In the U.S. alone, revenues are projected to reach $193 billion in 2023.
But quick, simple answers aren’t enough for Walker, a Sixth Form student who competes on the varsity volleyball and tennis teams, is a debate captain, participates in several singing groups and is a member of the Young Women’s Club and GAINS – Girls Advancing in STEM.
Unable to find a good guide about the biotech field for college-bound students, she embarked on a quest for answers, interviewing two dozen employees and scientists at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, a sprawling research park in Huntsville, Alabama, where she was a lab assistant last summer.
The result was “What the Heck is BioTech?” a 195-page book that Walker researched, wrote and self-published. At its heart are the in-depth interviews she conducted throughout the institute, which hosts more than 50 start-up companies.
Among them were CEOs and COOs, faculty researchers, product testing managers, microbiologists, lab technicians and entrepreneurs. Walker recorded, transcribed and condensed each interview — a process that took 10 to 15 hours per interview — thinking that she might turn them into a podcast.
“Something that I found really interesting is that everyone had a different path,” Walker says. “Some started out wanting to be doctors and ended up getting really interested in biotech research. Others came from a business or finance background, and they saw a gap in the biotech market and wanted to fill it. They came from every back ground you can imagine.”
As she learned about their experiences, Walker realized that she wanted to create something more substantive and cohesive. She hopes the book will appeal not just to students her age who want to learn about biotech careers but also to parents whose highschoolers may be considering biotech-related majors in college.
After 16 Years, Rev. Michael Spencer Moves On from SPS
JANA F. BROWNWhen the Rev. Michael Spencer interviewed for his first teaching job at Tabor Academy three decades ago, the headmaster shared a theory with him about boarding school education.
“He said the most important subject a boarding school student will study,” Spencer recalls, “is the faculty.”
Since joining the faculty of St. Paul’s School in 2007, Spencer has been integral to a cohort of devoted educators. As he prepares to depart SPS to become head of Oregon Episcopal School, which serves Pre-K–12 students in Portland, he is reflecting on what he has contributed, what he has learned and what he will take with him on the next leg of his professional journey.
Initially hired as a Humanities teacher and dean of chapel, Spencer has taught multiple subjects, from Humanities V to Islamic Literature. In his ministry work, he has emphasized integrating interfaith and Episcopal programs by making deeper connections with social justice, diversity, environmental stewardship and the arts.
“It’s about making sure the Chapel is an open, affirming and inclusive space,” Spencer explains.
Since 2015, he has served as vice rector for faculty. In that capacity he has played a central role in the diversification of the faculty. During Spencer’s tenure, faculty of color have increased by 57%.
In addition to his other contributions, Spencer is proud of the legacy he helped build as varsity head coach of the girls crew program. Since 2011, he has helped lead SPS crews to 19 NEIRA medals that include four first boat gold
medals and four team trophies, as well as victories at the National Scholastic Rowing Association Regatta (2014) and the Henley Women’s Regatta (2019), among many other achieve-ments. He also established a strong collaborative coaching model with wonderful co-coaches over the past decade.
Though he has worn many hats, Spencer sees a continuity between his various posts, and draws a direct line between his wide-ranging SPS experience and his next chapter as head of school.
“I often talk about how, while I started as a Humanities teacher and dean of chapel,” he says, “the work of ministry and education continues.” Ministry, he observes, is in the word administration.
In 1993, Spencer was introduced to St. Paul’s as an intern at the Advanced Studies Program. Prior to that, he knew very little about independent schools and planned to become a lawyer. But, he says, “St. Paul’s was instrumental in the beginning of my vocation as an educator and as an Episcopal priest.” Spencer now leaves the School with a heart full of gratitude. It is where he and his wife, Amy, raised their children, Aidan ’18 and Katherine ’23. It is a community the family has come to call home, and one whose lessons will endure.
“ That emphasis on how we intentionally build community at St. Paul’s is something I’m absolutely going to bring with me,” he says. “And I hope I’ve done what I said I wanted to do in terms of creating the best subject for the students to study. I hope my own example of service to the School has honored this place I love.”
A FOND FAREWELL
WHEN FACED WITH ADVERSITY IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU CAN AND CAN’T CONTROL. YOU CAN’T CONTROL THE CALLS MADE BY REFEREES. YOU CAN’T CONTROL THE CONDITIONS OF THE PLAYING FIELD. YOU CAN’T CONTROL WHAT THE OTHER TEAMS SAY TO YOU. BUT YOU CAN CONTROL YOUR EFFORT. YOU CAN CONTROL YOUR PREPARATION. YOU CAN CONTROL YOUR THOUGHTS. … CONTROL THE CONTROLLABLES. DOMINATE THE CONTROLLABLES. I HAVE RECOGNIZED THAT ADVERSITY IS PREPARATION FOR GREATNESS. I CHALLENGE YOU ALL AS STUDENTATHLETES TO WELCOME ADVERSITY. THROUGH TRUST, BELIEF, AND LOVE FOR TEAMMATES AND THE GAME, YOU WILL OVERCOME ADVERSITY.”
— STUDENT-ATHLETE BRYCE TERRY ’23 Chapel Talk, March 31, 2023
ATHLETICS
IN ACTION
Treating the Whole Athlete
W “JANA F. BROWNhether it’s football in the fall, basketball in the winter or lacrosse in the spring, sports and the athletes who play them have defined seasons. But the same is not true of the professionals who support the players and teams.
“We’re never out of season,” says St. Paul’s School athletic trainer Sandy Snow.
In her first year at the School, Snow is part of a trio of full-time SPS certified athletic trainers that also includes fellow newcomer Kelsey Rainie and 34-year SPS veteran Bob Oziomek. The three are highly valued by the athletes and coaches at St. Paul’s, both for the work they do and the education and training that is required for them to practice.
Athletic trainers are healthcare providers proficient in the full spectrum of clinical knowledge, which includes everything from diagnosing injuries to evaluating an athlete for a concussion to operating an Automated External Defibrillator (AED) — and much more.
THE TRUE MISSION OF AN ATHLETIC TRAINER IS ENSURING THAT ATHLETES CAN SAFELY PARTICIPATE, AND GUIDING THEM THROUGH THE STEPS TOWARD MAKING THAT HAPPEN.
While the most visible part of an athletic trainer’s job is caring for athletes during practices and games — including keeping them calm while assessing on-field njuries — much of what the SPS team does takes place behind the scenes. Oziomek, Snow and Rainie spend time each week arranging follow-up doctor visits to nearby Concord Orthopaedics, transporting any injured athletes to twice-weekly clinics, and helping them navigate the return to competition. It’s a tag-team effort, with Oziomek and Rainie taking the morning shift at Concord Ortho and Snow handling afternoon physical therapy appointments. They also handle documentation and communication with the School and athletes’ families.
“We update the parents, the coaches, the adviser,” Oziomek explains. “This is the first year we have three athletic trainers, and we can better meet the needs of the students in practice coverage and in rehab and evaluations, but also on game days. We have always strived for a high standard of care.”
The true mission of an athletic trainer is ensuring that athletes can safely participate, and guiding them through the steps toward making that happen. The greatest joy, Oziomek, Rainie and Snow agree, is watching athletes successfully get back to the sports they love.
“It’s about treating the whole individual as opposed to just helping them rehab a sprained ankle or a torn ACL,” Snow explains. “Some people think we only tape and ice and do quick fixes on game days. But we really look at the whole biopsychosocial model [including physical and mental health] and are an extension of primary care. The switch never turns off in terms of caring for these kids.”
Known for his meticulous work and his devotion to his advisees and the student-athletes under his care, Oziomek arrived at St. Paul’s in the fall of 1989. Snow, who earned her M.S. from Plymouth State University, previously worked at New Hampshire Musculoskeletal Institute, Mount Holyoke College and Manchester Memorial High School. A Concord native and college rower at Rochester Institute of Technology, Rainie came to SPS from Granite State Physical Therapy and has previous experience as an athletic trainer at two New Hampshire high schools. All three members of the SPS athletic training team are impressed by how current the School remains in its athletic training practices and the way in which St. Paul’s prioritizes student-athlete health and safety.
Taking it to the Next Level
Each year, an impressive number of graduating student-athletes commit to continuing their St. Paul’s School athletic careers in college. As of early May, 35 members of the Form of 2023 students representing 11 SPS varsity teams have indicated their intent to continue competing in college as recruited athletes at the Division I or Division III level. As in past years, these student-athletes will be joined by formmates who compete on college or university teams as walk-ons or participate at the club level — all meaningful ways of extending the opportunities for leadership, learning and personal growth gained on the fields, ponds, rinks and courts of SPS.
BASKETBALL
Sam Andreottola, Carnegie Mellon University
Logan Carey, University of Maine
Matt Lamy, Colby College
Savion Stroud, Colby College
FIELD HOCKEY
Alexandra Butulis, Wellesley College
FOOTBALL
Monty Benedict, Western New England University
Cooper Blomstrom, Georgetown University
Rocco Bryant, Bowdoin College
Duke Charles, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Ryder Kurtz, Cornell University
Antone Moreis, Colby College
Ridder Morton, Pitzer College
Jamari Myers, Brown University
Glory Stephen-Wangjobe, Sacred Heart University
Jackson Tewksbury, St. Lawrence University
ICE HOCKEY
Tessa Demain, Boston University
Bree Ricker, Norwich University
Skyler Sharfman, Boston College
LACROSSE
Annie Bermingham, Bowdoin College
Teaghan Casey, University of Chicago
Gracie DeSimone, Colgate University
Ryan Doherty, University of Albany
Lily Iler, Trinity College
Sofia Mancino, Colorado College
Heath Mann, St. Lawrence University
Kaitlyn McKinnon, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
ROWING
Raph Clark, Yale University
Caroline High, University of Pennsylvania
Nick Hoerle, Bates College
Lily Schaeffer, Wellesley College
Lon Walton, Princeton University
SOCCER
Avery Barton, Colby College
Olivia Connelly, Hamilton College
Ben Thompson, Dalhousie University
SOFTBALL
Hana Bean, Brandeis University
THE SCHOOL RECOGNIZED WINTER ATHLETES AND TEAMS IN CHAPEL ON MARCH 31, 2023.
READ THE FULL STORY HERE.
COMMUNITY inService
MISH and student philanthropy at St. Paul’s School.
JACQUELINE PRIMO LEMMONIsabella Mas-Gutierrez ’23 was in middle school when she crossed the border from her hometown in Texas to an area of Mexico where many residents were experiencing homelessness and hunger. Earlier in the day, she had helped other volunteers with the nonprofit Banco de Alimentos load the car with groceries at a local food pantry; after a drive across dusty Texas countryside and passage through the port of entry, she helped unload and distribute the food to churches where those in need had sought refuge.
“We’d provide all the ingredients and volunteers would prepare a meal — sometimes the only meal those people would have that day,” Mas-Gutierrez says. “Sometimes we’d go grocery shopping with donated money to buy the food ourselves.”
She says that volunteering with Banco de Alimentos was one of the most meaningful experiences of her life — so she kept at it, taking multiple trips over the border with the group to distribute food, Christmas toys or care packages with essentials like toilet paper, cleaning supplies and nonperishable food items.
Now, as a Sixth Former at St. Paul’s School, Mas-Gutierrez is one of five student officers, alongside Whitney Shaw ’23, Sterling Cathey ’23, Xiaoyu “Sarah” Hu ’23 and Pierce Trevisani ’25, leading the School’s longest-standing student group. Known today as MISH, the group was established as the Missionary Society in 1860 — just four years after Dr. George Cheyne Shattuck Jr. founded the School — to provide students with an outlet for charitable and philanthropic work.
“It is the philosophy of the Missionary Society,” an early iteration of the mission statement reads, “to selflessly serve others, which is realized through the promotion of community outreach opportunities in the Concord vicinity, as well as those available nationally and internationally.”
Since its inception, it has been more accurate to classify MISH as a team of student leaders at the fore of the School’s commitment to service and community engagement than as a separate student organization or club.
MISH officers function as a vital link to the service projects and community outreach endeavors available to SPS students on School grounds, in the greater Concord area and even across the world; they spread the word about these service opportunities through Chapel announcements, the daily SPS Connected newsletter and weekly house meetings.
E ach year, students apply for the MISH officer positions; those who are chosen commonly have an extensive background in community service. “There is typically an in-person interview process with all the current MISH officers and the faculty coordinator,” says MISH faculty adviser and SPS Director of Global Engagement Victoria Bernier. “A variety of things are considered when choosing new MISH officers, but it’s primarily based on their demonstrated interest and experience in service. The officers provide the support, foundation and peer network to help other students who have ideas for their own service projects.”
It is the philosophy of the Missionary Society
... to selflessly serve others, which is realized through the promotion of community outreach opportunities ...
A Springboard to Future Service
Today, every student who matriculates to SPS must fulfill community engagement credits as part of their graduation requirements and can do so through afternoon programs on the grounds, offsite independent projects, or a combination of both. Independent service projects completed over the summers and School breaks, Bernier notes, can provide students with an opportunity for focused, intentional service. “Technically, everyone is a part of MISH based on the ethos of the School,” she says.
Among its peer schools, SPS is in a small minority that still has a graduation requirement in community service or engagement. “This differentiating factor underscores the value we place on what we recite in the School Prayer, which asks us to be ‘unselfish in friendship, thoughtful of those less happy than ourselves and eager to bear the burdens of others,’” Bernier says. “So whether it’s through volunteering in the Friends Youth Mentoring Program, weekly visits to a local middle school or the Families in Transition Food Bank, the form Outreach Days, or the extensive work done by our students during Spring Break community service trips and summer independent projects, SPS grads leave with multiple experiences related to the ways they can use their time to be unselfish in friendship and eager to bear the burdens of others. For many, these engagement opportunities lead to continued mentoring and volunteering in college and beyond.”
And with SPS students and alumni all across the globe, “service everywhere looks different,” says Xiaoyu “Sarah” Hu ’23, who has served as MISH president for the 2022-23 academic year. “I’m from Shanghai, so a lot of the things we do here are new to me. I’ve learned a lot.”
Hu grew up around service and was strongly influenced by her mother, who is active in community service and regularly took Hu to fundraising events. “One of her very good friends goes to schools in rural China and works with teachers on how to teach children to read — not just literacy, but how to actually interpret stories, how to value the tales and story books they’re reading and the messages they can get out of them,” Hu explains.
Inspired by this example and by the values her mother and other mentors were passing along, at the age of 12, Hu helped build a library for children in one of these towns. Those same values quickly found a home at St. Paul’s. As a
Third Former, Hu participated in a Spring Break service project focused on immigrants and refugees in Concord, which included volunteering at a center where basic English language skills are taught to help participants navigate daily tasks and interactions, such as going grocery shopping. In Fourth Form, she was part of a program focused on food insecurity and its prevalence in America.
“You get to know a community and its needs, and you cater to those needs by doing what you can,” Hu says. Now, as MISH president, she taps into her experience to organize service projects with other officers and students — but she doesn’t let the word “president” affect her. “I see it as more of just a title, because I feel like everyone on the board does so much to contribute and we’re all equally important.”
Focus on Fundraising
The origins of MISH unfold in the thousands of pages that make up the archives of the Horae Scholasticae in the basement of Ohrstrom Library, where every issue is carefully stored and protected on high shelves. At one time the School’s literary magazine, newspaper and alumni newsletter, the earliest issues of the Horae Scholasticae are yellowed, crisp and flaky to the touch. If one holds these pages close to read the delicate print, visions of the School’s earliest days begin to emerge.
A four-person “Committee of Publication” published the first issue of the monthly Horae Scholasticae in June 1860, five months after the Missionary Society was founded in January. The front page of that first issue reads, “The object of our paper, the first number of which is now before you, is to raise funds to be devoted to domestic missions.” This announcement is followed by students’ poems and short stories, a summary of a cricket match between “the two Clubs of the school — the Old Hundred and Isthmian,” and a handful of advertisements: three selling or calling for eggs, one offering a wood-turning service, and one selling lemonade and pie. Subscriptions to the Horae Scholasticae were sold for two dollars a year; proceeds were donated to organizations such as “the Orphans’ Home” and helped to fund the club’s various service missions.
Much of the Missionary Society’s history also is recorded in the student newspaper, The Pelican, which
made its debut on Sept. 19, 1945. The second issue of The Pelican, published the following month on October 3, describes how the Missionary Society helped run a summer camp in Danbury, New Hampshire, called School Camp, for boys from the Boston and New York areas. Often, Missionary Society members worked as School Camp counselors. “One who has been a councillor (sic) at the camp cannot but feel that he has made a real contribution to the welfare of society,” reads an article in that October 3 issue.
On the whole, historic coverage of the Missionary Society is a chronicle of the organization and execution of various fundraising events at St. Paul’s — including a student-favorite fair and dance launched in the 1890s that over the decades became, for many, synonymous with the organization itself. An Oct. 2, 1998, issue of The Pelican details more than 10 service projects that were available for students to participate in during the 1998-99 academic year. These included working at the MISH Shop, a secondhand clothing store in the Red Barn that sold items donated via MISH bins in each student house. The MISH Shop continued until 2020, when it closed amid the COVID-19 pandemic; students and others are currently looking into what the next version of the MISH Shop might be.
An Education in Empathy
Each year, MISH officers select a theme for the academic year’s service projects. For 2022-23, they chose to concentrate on homelessness in Concord and supporting families and children in Ukraine.
“ There is essentially an area in Concord, kind of out of the public view, where homeless people have had to settle in tents and with really rudimentary equipment,” Hu says of MISH’s local priority. “They are not humane living conditions, and it’s a growing community. Learning this struck a chord with each of the MISH officers and we decided we wanted homelessness in Concord to be our focus this year.”
To that end, the Concord Coalition for Homelessness was the beneficiary of a MISH fundraiser this past winter. A MISH Chapel talk in the fall aimed to increase student awareness of the issue, and during Spring Term, MISH officers organized a panel where local nonprofit directors discussed the state of homelessness in Concord and
Manchester and the “Housing First” strategy. The schoolwide LinC program, introduced in recent years to help every student become knowledgeable, responsible, caring and contributing members of society, also provided related programming; in April, the Spring Term LinC Day focused on some of the social and economic factors that often play a role in homelessness.
Lidia Zur Muhlen ’24 had already fulfilled her service requirements for graduation when she approached Hu last spring with the desire to lead a service project for Ukraine. The duo collaborated with Humanities Teacher Josh Duclos and Associate Dean of Admission Michelle Hung to fundraise at mealtimes and Saturday night
events. They purchased a generator with the funds and worked with the nonprofit Common Man for Ukraine to track the purchase from the U.S. all the way to a specific Ukrainian orphanage.
In addition to her work for Ukraine, Zur Muhlen also is the recipient of this year’s winter Sokoloff grant. A program established thanks to the generosity of Kiril Sokoloff ’65 that supports and helps fund a select student’s independent service project, winter Sokoloff grants are voted on by MISH officers who consider each candidate anonymously (there also are larger summer Sokoloff prizes, which are awarded by a committee of School administrators with input from the MISH officers). In the last few years, Sokoloff grants have funded student projects that provided computers and software for a basic programming course taught to underprivileged teens; provided supplies and CPR classes for women working in community kitchens in Peru; and established a new library at a men’s second chance sober living center in Idaho.
For her Sokoloff grant independent service project, Zur Muhlen reached out to local nonprofits to find a place where SPS students could volunteer in a meaningful way; Family Promise of Greater Concord was a natural match. In the organization’s rotating shelter program, local church congregations offer their spaces for families experiencing homelessness to take temporary shelter, while community volunteers help provide food, toiletries, resources and a listening ear for those working to get back on their feet. The Sokoloff grant enabled Zur Muhlen to buy games and toys that she could bring to the children of these families, and that MISH volunteers could continue to use for future service projects.
“I really wanted to make it a sustainable project that could be used by future SPS students,” Zur Muhlen says. “Most of the people we were working with were at one point living in houses and [were] stable. They don’t necessarily want a ton of help; they just want the resources in order to keep moving.”
She was also part of a group of SPS students who spent time with the families, listening to their stories and talking over shared meals. Zur Muhlen wants students to realize that they, too, are capable of leading service projects of their own. “Even without the Sokoloff grant, it’s possible to create your own project if you’re willing to put in the work,” she says.
Real-world Relevance
Independent of MISH’s annual theme, for the past several years the SPS community engagement program has focused on two areas: working with the youth of Concord and addressing areas of critical need in communities near or far. When working with students to approve independent service projects Bernier helps them focus on how to contribute to their home communities in these ways. “We want these to be meaningful opportunities for both parties,” she says. “The graduation requirement has shifted to be a little more focused, so the students can dig into one area that means something to them.”
Many SPS students and MISH officers serve in other ways, even if they aren’t taking the lead on a project. As a junior MISH officer, Pierce Trevisani ’25 has contributed to multiple service projects over the year, including organizing a raffle during Fall Term as part of a fundraiser for the Concord Coalition to End Homelessness and selling items like custom stickers as part of a fundraiser for Ukraine.
Trevisani will continue as a MISH officer next year and aspires to join one of the Spring Break community engagement trips before he graduates. He is particularly interested in the projects that serve the local Concord community, a place he says has given him a lot throughout his first two years at SPS.
“Being a MISH officer means a lot of things to me, and it’s hard to zero in on just one,” Trevisani says. “But being able to raise money for off-campus services is a very rewarding experience that I am honored to be a part of.”
And since the other officers are currently Sixth Formers and will be off to new adventures come the fall, Trevisani will be the sole returning officer left to carry the torch. “I hope to be able to pave the path for my new fellow MISH officers,” he says — just as generations of MISH officers have done before him, and will continue to do for years to come, one of the many ways in which SPS students embody what it means to be in service to the greater good.
Being able to raise money for off-campus services is a very rewarding experience that I am honored to be a part of.
A MISH Tradition
It’s one of the most anticipated events of the School year, a surprise holiday announced not by the Chapel reading of Zechariah 8 and its invocation of boys and girls playing on the streets of Jerusalem, but by methods as diverse as notes inside fortune cookies and a banner unfurled from the Chapel tower. Ask the average SPS student, however, and chances are they can’t tell you the origins of the MISH holiday and dance — or how, exactly, it’s connected to the School’s oldest club.
In the late 1800s, long before girls attended SPS as students, the boys of SPS invited select young ladies to the grounds for an annual celebration. The girls likely wore the puff-sleeved gowns and chignons signature of the late Victorian era, while the boys dressed in frock coats and top hats. The event, Washington’s Tea, was held around the time of George Washington’s birthdate, February 22, and students were invariably eager for the reprieve from their studies. In 1897, however, these Washington Tea attendees — students and their dates from nearby all-girls schools — took the festivities in a different direction.
“ The auditorium was beautifully and tastefully draped with flags, while the stage, on which the orchestra sat, was covered with rugs, screens and tall lamps,” reads a short article in the March 1897 Horae Scholasticae. “The tea lasted from four till six … Refreshments were sold, and after a while the tables were pushed back and dancing began.”
It’s unclear if the dancing was impromptu or a planned activity; regardless, it was the start of a tradition. What began as Washington’s Tea became an annual “tea dance” held over the Mid-Winter Holiday or Mid-Winter Weekend, and by 1900, Washington’s Birthday celebrations on the grounds had grown to include a Missionary Society fundraising fair along with the requisite dance and holiday. “The coming of this holiday is always hailed with more than the mere delight of a release from the class-room, for it makes us realize that we have accomplished more than half our year’s work,” reads the Feb. 22, 1906, Horae.
Uncoupled from the Mid-Winter Weekend in the early 1980s, the MISH holiday and dance now takes place in late April or early May and continues to function as the marquee fundraising event for MISH as students make donations to the year’s cause that serve as their “entry fee” to the dance. Fitted into a full spring schedule of classes, clubs, athletics and year-end activities, the exact date of the festivities remains a surprise even to the MISH officers.
Making the Leap
It was after seeing “Billy Elliot” in London that Andrew Fleischner ’22 began taking ballet lessons at the Jewish Community Center in his hometown of Pittsburgh. He was 5 years old. Two years later, he started attending the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School. Today he is deferring college for a second year for the opportunity to dance professionally with the Los Angeles Ballet. It is, he says, the culmination of a life goal.
Earlier this year, Fleischner attended a job fair in Nashville that landed him a nine-week stint with the Los Angeles Ballet to dance in “The Lady of the Camellias.” After performing for just one week, he got the offer to join the company for its next season.
“I was shocked,” Fleischner says. “I was delighted but very pleasantly surprised. It certainly was unexpected.”
And yet it is what he has been working toward — being a professional dancer — all of his life.
He attended the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School though middle school. In eighth grade he was looking at a preprofessional program that he would attend full time. But it wasn’t how he wanted to spend his high school years.
“A lot of people go into a preprofessional program and do high school online but I really wanted to attend in-person,” Fleischner says. “I didn’t want to miss out on the high school experience.”
It was his mother who suggested he consider St. Paul’s. His father and uncle are alums, and the St. Paul’s School Ballet Company’s full academic-year program would allow him to meld his academics and dance education.
“Going there was a great opportunity to have both dance and the high school experience I was looking for,” he says.
After graduating from St. Paul’s, Fleischner decided to take a gap year before starting at Columbia University so he could continue his dance training. He was attending the Rock School For Dance Education in Philadelphia when he got the nine-week offer from Los Angeles Ballet. When the opportunity came to dance with the company next fall, he says he had to think about it — he’d already committed to another company, and was supposed to go to the Youth America Grand Prix in Tampa, the world’s largest international ballet competition and scholarship program for dance students.
“It will be an adjustment to go from being a ballet student to professional dancer,” he says. I have been a student all my life. I’m looking forward to seeing what life as a professional dancer will be like.”
Fleischner says the advice he got from Kate Lydon, director of dance at St. Paul’s, and Peter Stark, president and director at the Rock School, helped him decide. “They told me that taking the position with LA Ballet was the best way to see what it’s like to become a professional dancer. I’m at an age where I can take advantage of a great opportunity.”
At the same time, he says he feels conflicted between dance and not wanting to lose his spot at Columbia. “I feel very lucky to have gotten in there; they have a great dance program as well as academics.”
He says he will go to college in the future and notes an interest in science and languages. “I do want to get my degree but I also want to see what it’s like to be a professional dancer. I have lots of goals and this checks one of the major boxes.”
Less than a year after SPS, Andrew Fleischner ’22 is fulfilling his dream of dancing professionally
JODY RECORD
“IT WILL BE AN ADJUSTMENT TO GO FROM BEING A BALLET STUDENT TO PROFESSIONAL DANCER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT ALL MY LIFE. I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING WHAT LIFE AS A PROFESSIONAL DANCER WILL BE LIKE.”
COMMUNITY REVIVAL
With leadership from Chris Buccini ’90 and Amachie Ackah ’90, a low-income Pittsburgh neighborhood is coming back to life, and its residents have a big stake in the rebuilding process.
JANA F. BROWN
As a b oy growing up on “the Hill” in the 1960s, Curtis Morehead watched as skilled workers — carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians — set to work each day, making sure the residents and business owners of his Pittsburgh neighborhood had heat, running water and other services essential to life in his district.
“I would see different tradesmen in my community,” recalls Morehead, who is Black, “and none of them looked like me.”
Though the Hill District had been a vibrant community of predominantly Black neighborhoods — and a cultural hub renowned for jazz — that all changed in the late 1950s, when urban renewal ushered in the construction of a new Civic Arena that displaced some 8,000 residents and forced the relocation of close to 400 businesses. The arena’s developers had promised that the new facility would continue to feature the arts, but poor acoustics instead led to it becoming the home of the National Hockey League’s Pittsburgh Penguins in 1967.
“And then,” says Chris Buccini ’90, “they built a highway that disconnected the community that was still living there from the rest of Pittsburgh.” In much the same way that the North End was cut off from the rest of Boston by the six-lane Central Artery until the Big Dig moved the highway underground, the then-new I-579 highway created a physical barrier between the Hill District and the
city’s other neighborhoods. “Since then,” Buccini says, “there has been this historic scar on the city.”
An economic downturn ensued, and the Hill’s population gradually dwindled. Buildings fell into ruin, businesses were shuttered and poverty dominated what was once a proud and thriving blue-collar community. Morehead — who in 2009 co-founded Emerald Electrical Services with his wife, Deborah — was there, watching it happen, as he and his siblings longed for what they had once known.
For years, developers proposed solutions to renew the Hill District, but they were met with understandable skepticism by residents who questioned their motivations. Large-scale construction had failed them once before, so what would be different this time? The desolation deepened in 2012, when the Civic Arena was demolished in favor of the new PPG Paints Arena and yet another parking lot took its place. Nearly five years ago, Buccini, president of the Wilmington, Delaware-based real estate development company Buccini/Pollin Group (BPG), took over the management of a 28-acre site in the Lower Hill District, partnering with a number of other entities, including the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Pittsburgh-based FNB Corporation, to launch the Lower Hill Redevelopment project. With a multi-layered mission of social justice, sustainability and community-building, the mixeduse project is both focused on the district’s future and deeply mindful of its past as it creates new residential and
commercial spaces, jobs, cultural opportunities and more. The first priority — getting mistrustful residents on board — was a challenge that Buccini knew he could take on, thanks to a core team that includes his lifelong friend and SPS formmate Amachie Ackah ’90.
“Chris has a unique view on these things, and he brings a sensitivity but also a global perspective to what’s going on with these issues,” says Ackah, an SPS trustee who’s also the co-founder, managing partner and chief investment officer of Clay Cove Capital, a key equity investor in the Lower Hill Redevelopment project. “The philosophy with this project has always been that you’re going to have better urban planning and renewal, and better development, if you humanize it and you think about the people who populate your buildings.”
A NATURAL FIT
Once completed, the redevelopment of Pittsburgh’s Hill District will represent the intersection of culture and commerce and will commemorate the history of a neighborhood and its residents. Ackah and Buccini both say their St. Paul’s School bond played a meaningful role in their decision to collaborate on the work. Hailing from Philadelphia and Delaware, respectively, the duo often saw each other on breaks during their years in Millville, extending a friendship that was forged in the houses and on the athletic fields of SPS. Over the last two decades, they have partnered on a number of real estate development and investment ventures, and when the opportunity to work together in Pittsburgh, relatively close to their home bases, came up, they jumped at the chance. The
Lower Hill Redevelopment project was a natural fit for their mutual interests.
A seasoned investor and developer, Buccini, who graduated from Princeton, notably teamed up with Bill Taylor ’91 in 2011 to restore Wilmington’s historic Queen Theater. Prior to its grand reopening, the theater had been abandoned for more than half a century; it is now a thriving live music venue. Ackah attended Williams College and then earned his MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. In addition to his role on the SPS Board of Trustees, for which he serves as the clerk/secretary as well as the chair of The SPS Fund, he also sits on the boards of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Episcopal Academy in Pennsylvania. His Clay Cove Capital Partners is a private equity firm that invests specifically in real estate and development companies.
The first phase of the Lower Hill project launched in September 2021, with the groundbreaking of the $250 million, 26-story FNB Financial Center, which will become the corporate headquarters of First National Bank. According to the Lower Hill Redevelopment website, “the tower is expected to generate 1,250 construction jobs, 2,000 permanent jobs and $40 million in investments in the Middle and Upper Hill Districts.” And, Buccini shares, the FNB Financial Center is one of the first new office towers under construction in postCOVID-19 America. Mindful of evolving societal needs, it will feature touchless elevators and security, along with layered mechanical, electrical, plumbing and other systems that take sustainability into account.
The second phase will include a 1,000-space parking garage and a 3,500-seat Live Nation entertainment venue. In addition to being a LEED-certified project, the Lower Hill Redevelopment also is founded on the fundamentals of green construction, and its design includes seven acres of central open space to host large and small gatherings.
Equally important as the project’s commitment to sustainability, Ackah and Buccini both note, is that first priority of rebuilding a community that had previously only seen the downside of development. To that end, locals like Curtis Morehead are playing a pivotal role; his Emerald Electric Services is one of dozens of companies engaged with the effort. Emerald, which has done prior work on PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team, and Heinz Field, where both the Pittsburgh Steelers and the University of Pittsburgh’s Division I football team play, so far has purchased the switchgear — components that control, protect and isolate power systems — and has supplied the lighting packages for the FNB tower. Four of the company’s 12 full-time electricians are at the site daily, overseeing and performing electrical work.
“We are really happy to have the opportunity to have that 28 acres coming back to life,” Morehead says, noting that the prospect of garnering maintenance and service agreements for the future means the project is good for
With a multi-layered mission of social justice, sustainability and community-building, the project is both focused on the district’s future and deeply mindful of its past.
the long-term viability of local businesses that will play a critical role in sustaining the Lower Hill.
“Amachie and I had a goal of [hiring] 30% minorityand women-owned businesses, and we’re at 32% right now,” Buccini says. “So we’ve created an infrastructure in our organizations that actually has really helped the smaller electrician who has never done something of this size, spending a lot more time and money to really help mentor them, partner them up with a bigger firm that could help them grow into the next career phase. That’s what we’re trying to do across the board.”
“We’re working on small jobs, but we’re also giving an ability for people to have basic financial literacy — understanding how to apply for a union job and be in the trades,” Ackah adds. “Looking at helping them turn a job into a career, maybe in one of our buildings after the construction is done.” He says that there also will be resources to assist everyone, regardless of race or ability. “It’s a multilayered project about reinvestment in the community. We’re trying to build some of that infrastructure for people to be successful in defining careers and opportunities, and building companies that will have a lasting imprint not only on themselves and their families, but also in their community.”
TRULY INTEGRATED
The redevelopment project also features a component of social responsibility. Ackah and Buccini proudly report that the development team, including BPG, Clay Cove and Fenway Partners (which owns the Boston Red Sox and recently acquired the Penguins) has agreed to give away 50% of the first 10 years of real estate taxes. That means that, instead of going to the city, the money will
be reinvested directly into the Hill community. In the first phase of construction alone, BPG was able to give $7 million to an affordable housing fund that will distribute grants to help residents restore their homes. “It allows people to then not be pushed out of their neighborhoods,” Buccini explains.
First National Bank will offer low-interest credit lines for minority developers to help them with set-up costs. BPG and its partners also are backing smaller projects in the Hill District, among them the relocation of a popular, historic barbershop to a larger space that will allow the owner to grow his enterprise. Funds and space also have been set aside for blocks of additional affordable housing, up to 20% of living space, to allow residents to remain in the district, even as property values rise with the redevelopment and the improved connection and access it creates to downtown Pittsburgh.
As part of the revival, Dr. Kimberly Ellis joined BPG as director of community, arts and culture. The niece of esteemed playwright August Wilson, Ellis grew up in the Hill District and is a self-described historian, preservationist and storyteller of the neighborhood, charged with engaging and empowering residents, artists and entrepreneurs in its renewal. In addition to finding artists to help tell the story of the Hill District’s cultural legacy, Ellis offers guidance to the development team on how to represent that legacy, whether it’s highlighting the rich history of jazz in the district or creating large murals to honor Black Lower Hill artists.
“My role is to build a new community in the city of Pittsburgh and in the Hill District and inform how people engage,” Ellis explains. “I help spread the news about artist opportunities on the site, help recruit the artists,
help set some parameters that allow artists to express their creativity. The idea is to show people how it captures our legacy and how to embrace it.”
For Buccini, Ackah, Ellis and others, incorporating the arts is yet another way to nurture a flourishing Hill District. To that end, among the earliest priorities of the redevelopment was securing federal funding for Frankie Mae Pace Park, a project Buccini describes as an urban connector over the I-579 highway that had previously separated the residents of the Hill District from Pittsburgh’s downtown. In addition to bike paths, pedestrian walkways and community gathering spaces, the park includes a museum that honors the Hill’s cultural legacy.
Artist Jann Rosen-Queralt designed trench drains with symbolism that reflects Pittsburgh’s culture while recognizing and honoring past social injustices. Rosen-Queralt also designed a rain garden and benches with steel-embossed prints of her artwork, bringing together poetry, the city’s legacy of the Underground Railroad, historical maps and more. Ellis served as the scholar for the project, and collaborated with artist Vanessa-Brantley Newton to create a fictional park guide named Keisha to help visitors navigate the space.
Once complete over the next decade, the 28 acres of Lower Hill ideally represent a cross-section of residents of multiple ethnicities, from university students to the elderly, as well as a thriving medical community at the upgraded University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (formerly the
Presbyterian Hospital campus, where Morehead’s mother, Louise, proudly served as a supervisor in the mailroom); and a swath of corporate America, complete with retail shopping and dining; and a vibrant music and events scene between the Live Nation venue and the arena that houses the Penguins. The intentional open space at the heart of it all invites connection in literal and figurative ways, acting as a throughway along which the various inhabitants can cross paths.
“Everything I do is urban redevelopment,” Buccini explains. “I typically take land or buildings that have sat vacant and generate very little tax revenue — and nothing for the community — and our company goes in and redevelops them. That’s the physical and the economic, but then you layer in the repair that’s going on to heal this community. The goal is for people to really have ownership when it’s done.”
Ackah’s hope for the project is to see the Hill District truly integrated into downtown Pittsburgh, and for it to become one of the city’s most lively and robust neighborhoods — a place where people can work, live and play at a world-class level. “This project is about taking a community that was once vibrant and building it into a 21st century neighborhood for everyone,” he says. “It will have diversity, it will have history, but it will also be a place that welcomes the world to what the modern city of Pittsburgh is and can be. It’s going to be an example of how you don’t give up hope.”
SPS – then, now and always ...
John Hargate, Form of 1861, dedicated nearly 50 years to St. Paul’s School, first as a student and then as a teacher. The bequest he made of his estate will impact the place he loved forever.
As you make plans to care for all the people and places that matter to you, consider including St. Paul’s School in your estate planning.
Options for planned gifts include bequests; appreciated securities; gifts of retirement accounts; gifts of life insurance; and/or charitable income gifts, such as charitable gift annuities, charitable remainder unitrusts, or charitable remainder annuity trusts. Planned gifts of any amount qualify for membership in The Hargate Society.
To learn more about leaving a legacy at the School you love, contact Director of Leadership and Planned Giving Phillip Blackman at pblackman@sps.edu or 603-229-4781.
LOST SON
Brett Forrest ’91
Little, Brown, May 2023
Reviewed by Michael Matros
In 2015, Billy Reilly disappeared into Russia. In 2018, Brett Forrest ’91 went to find him.
Reilly grew up in a working-class family in Oxford, Michigan, not far from Detroit. He was a solitary kid, attracted as a teenager to exploring foreign cultures on the family computer. He taught himself Russian, and then Arabic. He used his language abilities to discover and communicate with disenfranchised men and women, especially in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
“In online forums, he discovered people like himself, the alienated and underdog,” Forrest tells us in his new book, “Lost Son: An American Family Trapped Inside the FBI’s Secret Wars.”
Then, one day, an FBI agent appeared at Reilly’s door. He thought he was in deep trouble for his foreign correspondence, but instead the agent said he admired the young man’s skills and enlisted him as a Confidential Human Source, a soldier —online, in Reilly’s case — in the effort to reveal terrorist plots against the U.S. and its allies.
After five years of loyal and nonremunerative work for the Bureau — and rejection for employment status — Reilly began to understand that he was in a one-way relationship. He decided to pursue a more active role in the conflicts he’d known online. He flew to Russia, apparently to support its attempt to
reclaim Crimea from Ukraine.
R eilly needed intrigue and adventure, Forrest explains, but he also had developed a romantic entanglement with an online source who may or may not have been a fledgling terrorist. Or was he on assignment from the FBI? As with much of Reilly’s story, his motivations were ambiguous, and his wanderings in Russia and Ukraine were mysterious to his parents back in rural Michigan.
Bill and Terry Reilly became desperate to find reliable news of their son, especially after his regular communications abruptly ceased. As years passed with no word, the FBI was at best unhelpful while other agencies seemed disinclined to look for a young man who had joined the rogue effort against Ukraine by America’s adversary. Expensive fees to a Russian detective proved wasted.
Then in 2017, through a chain of contacts, Forrest learned of the Reillys’ search. His curiosity piqued, he spoke with the family from his Wall Street Journal office. A nationalsecurity reporter for the Journal, Forrest had spent years in the former Soviet Union and had reported about Russian atrocities in Ukraine. He decided to join the search.
In describing his motivation to help the Reillys, Forrest recounts his own history as a young reporter of leaving safe desk assignments for more excitement abroad. Of a series of African adventures, he writes, “I was an easy mark, a novice in the world. Like Billy, I took risks and was unable to calculate them, though I managed to make it through.”
Did Reilly make it through? As he searches, Forrest encounters his own perils and is warned at one point, with understatement, “Do not press in places where you are not sure, because there could be a bad reaction.” But he continues to press, despite very real dangers that have been made all too clear by the recent detention in Russia of Forrest’s Wall Street Journal colleague Evan Gershkovich.
In a tone of frustration about the seeming connivance of the FBI into Billy’s disappearance, Forrest echoes the cynicism about spy agencies commonly found in the novels of John le Carré. But “Lost Son” is a nonfiction thriller, with violent characters, mysterious motives and a thickening plot that engages its author in a perilous adventure of his own.
WE SHOULD NOT BE FRIENDS
Will Schwalbe ’79
Knopf, Feb. 2023
Reviewed by Kristin Duisberg
As an out gay man coming of age during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, Will Schwalbe ’79 had good reasons to avoid demonstrations of affection with his friends — no spontaneous hugs, and certainly no I love yous — particularly with any friend as different from him as Chris Maxey. Brought together by their common membership in a secret society at Yale, Schwalbe and Maxey are a study in opposites: Schwalbe an introvert, a Latin and Greek major comfortable with his circle of artists and comparative lit majors; Maxey a jock, an extroverted wrestler known to virtually everyone simply as “Maxey.”
“Maxey was the loudest among us. He took up space and knocked things over and he was drinking vast quantities of beer,” Schwalbe writes of the night of their initiation into the secret society alongside 13 other Yale juniors. “He was also trying way too hard, and I found it a bit much — the high fives and the instant nicknames and the questions to everyone about everything. Whenever he went to one part of the hall, I went to another.”
And yet from that inauspicious start, Schwalbe’s “We Should Not Be Friends” traces the path of a friendship that has spanned four decades, from New Haven to New York, Hong Kong and the Bahamas, through marriages and heartbreaks, business successes and struggles, and — for both men — rare
illnesses that challenge their way of moving through the world.
Readers who come to Schwalbe’s fourth book looking for a peek behind the curtain of Yale’s famed secret societies will indeed find that: snapshots of conversations at the society’s hall, where members meet twice a week for dinners; of visits from guests as varied as Yale’s president and a daytime soap opera star; and of each member’s audit: a formal presentation of “everything you had ever done and thought from your first memory to the present.”
More important, however, the explanation that Schwalbe shares early on for the society’s raison d’etre, and his particular inclusion within it — the older member who taps him for selection explains that the intent is to “bring together the fifteen most different kids we can find so you’ll meet people who are nothing like you” — establishes the utterly relatable premise of the story. Life isn’t about accomplishments and diplomas from places like St. Paul’s School and Yale … or at least not all about that. The richer part is in seeing beyond your own perspectives and prejudices to bond with others, especially those with whom you believe you have nothing in common.
Maxey joins the Navy SEALS, marries, dabbles in business and ultimately finds his calling in founding Eleuthera’s experiential Island School. Schwalbe moves to Hong Kong, where he finds love, stability and the beginnings of a media career that ultimately brings him and his future husband to New York City. Along the way, he documents decades that pass with connections that are at once true and tentative. Should he call Maxey when he hears his marriage is on the rocks? Should he confront Maxey about his shaky balance following brain surgery? Should he confide his own health struggles? There is conversation upon conversation that ends with Maxey’s I love you, brother, and Schwalbe’s self-consciousness about his inability to reciprocate.
As the chapters and the years accumulate, it’s hard not to wonder if Schwalbe will finally say “I love you” back to Maxey. But it’s also a little beside the point, because “We Should Not Be Friends” is, among many other things, a love letter in its own right. Classical scholar that he is, Schwalbe has written a Platonic ode — not just to Maxey, but to friendship itself.
ON THE BOOKSHELF
The Wind at My Back Misty Copeland with Susan Fales-Hill P’21 Grand Central Publishing, Dec. 2022
Often the only Black dancer on the stage during her time with the American Ballet Theater, renowned soloist Misty Copeland is widely considered a trailblazer for today’s dancers of color. In “The Wind at My Back,” she teams up with SPS trustee and parent Susan Fales-Hill to weave her story together with that of Raven Wilkinson, a Black ballet dancer born in 1935 who served for many years as Copeland’s mentor and role model. Copeland’s story about Wilkinson illuminates a pathfinder whose work was hidden in plain sight for decades and pays tribute to a friend and guide who pushed her to greater heights, both personally and as an artist.
Famous People of Queens
Rob MacKay ’85 Arcadia Publishing, Feb. 2023
Part of New York City since 1898, Queens has a long history as a landing spot for immigrants and a place where first-time home buyers achieve the American Dream. “Famous People of Queens” looks at some of the borough’s most notable residents, including Olympic athlete Bob Beamon, Nobel Prize-winning scientists Richard Feynman and Gerald Edelman and Hollywood entertainers Bernadette Peters and Rodney Dangerfield.
Hidden Cargo
Robin Lloyd ’69 Lyons Press, May 2023
Five months after the end of the Civil War, Acting Navy Lieutenant Everett Townsend is awaiting discharge in Key West, uncertain about his future and loath to take over his family’s business, a Cuban sugar plantation that depends on the labor of slaves. Returning from a routine supply mission, Townsend and his men witness a shipwreck that turns up the bodies of Black men. He’s encouraged to drop the matter
but can’t shake his suspicions that the dead, locked in the cargo hold, were destined for the sugar fields of Spanish Cuba. Soon, Townsend finds himself involved in investigating mysterious disappearances of former slaves from Louisiana, Alabama and the Florida coast — and torn between the Cuban-American woman he loves and the will of his tradition-bound Spanish grandmother.
The Soft Mud of France
Gregory Vail ’69
Aeronaut Books, March 2023
On Nov. 16, 1918, First Lieutenant William H. Vail, an aviator with the United States Air Service 95th Aero Squadron, flew a voluntary patrol that became a trap when another pilot flew into a swarm of nine German adversaries. He created a diversion that allowed his fellow pilot to escape, and the ensuing combat earned him the Distinguished Service Cross with Silver Star citation and recommendation for the Medal of Honor. Vail’s book is a narrative of his father’s life as a WWI aviator and in the years that follow: a travelog, a social history, a love story — and a case for a posthumous Medal of Honor for his personal hero.
The Scheme
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse ’73, with Jennifer Mueller
The New Press, Oct. 2022
A U.S. senator from Rhode Island since 2007 who served as a United States Attorney from 1993 to 1998 and as the 71st attorney general of Rhode Island from 1999 to 2003, Whitehouse is a former federal prosecutor and chair of the Senate subcommittee on the federal courts. His new book, his third, documents what he describes as “the scheme”: an effort by a small group to control the federal courts enabled by the 2010 Citizens United decision — a ruling that held that the free speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, including nonprofits, labor unions and other groups.
I HAD A MALE ORCA SWIM PAST ME, AND AS I DOVE DOWN, HE WAS ABOUT SIX FEET AWAY. WE HAD THIS EYE-CONTACT EXPERIENCE, AND I WAS LIKE, WOW. AND THEN HE WENT AND HIT ME WITH HIS BEST KIND OF VISUAL DEVICE, WHICH IS NOT HIS SIGHT, BUT HIS SONAR. AND IT MADE ME REALIZE THERE’S A WHOLE OTHER LANGUAGE IN THIS PLANET THAT WE OFTEN MISS IN OUR WILD FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS AND THE SPECIES THAT ARE STRUGGLING SO MUCH.”ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
Next Officers Named
F
— PETE MCBRIDE ’89 National Geographic photographer/videographer
O
n assignment above the Arctic Circle in Norway during the global COVID-19 pandemic, National Geographic photographer Pete McBride slipped into the 38-degree ocean waters in polar night to photograph orcas. With humans in lockdown and the ocean’s shipping lanes nearly empty, marine life was thriving — “as if they had left a cocktail party and could finally have a conversation without the din of humanity,” as McBride described it during an In Service to the Greater Good virtual alumni event this spring. Watch the full webinar with McBride and Lorene Cary ’74, cohosted by Rector Kathy Giles and Pierce Trevisani ’25.
IN MILLVILLE AND BEYOND
LATE JUNE
30 Last chance to support The SPS Fund for this fiscal year
EARLY JULY
SPS community reception, Fishers Island, New York
EARLY AUGUST
SPS community receptions, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, Massachusetts; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Sun Valley, Idaho
MID-AUGUST
SPS community receptions, North Haven, York and Prouts Neck, Maine
Visit sps.edu/events often as more opportunities to connect are added and to register for gatherings.
Visit sps.alumnifire.com, a networking and mentoring platform for alumni/ae of SPS to reconnect and open doors.
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OHRSTROM LIBRARY ARCHIVES
Call for Scrapbooks and Photographs
The SPS Archives contain more than 100 scrapbooks from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of which were donated by alumni and faculty. Their pages reveal much about student life at St. Paul’s School through the years, but they stop after 1960, which leaves quite a gap in the School’s photographic history. If you kept a scrapbook or photographs from the 1970s, ’80s or ’90s that show the School’s evolution during those decades, please consider donating them to the Archives. Future generations will be grateful! And if they are labeled? Even more wonderful. Photographs and scrapbooks from other time periods may be of interest as well; all are welcome to contact archivist Deanna Parsi at dparsi@sps.edu to discuss. Thank you for helping to preserve the history of St. Paul’s School!
Community Receptions
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANNA
ARE YOU HEARING FROM US?
Make sure you see us in your inbox. Add the SPS.edu domain to your trusted sender list (search “how to whitelist a domain in _name of your email client_”). Contact updates@sps.edu and let us know you've taken the first step. If you still don’t receive our emails, contact alumni@sps.edu. Don’t miss out on the many opportunities to reconnect with formmates and SPS!
ST. PAUL’S SCHOOL
HOSTED A NUMBER OF COMMUNITY RECEPTIONS THIS WINTER AND SPRING — SCAN THE QR CODE TO SEE MORE PHOTOGRAPHS OF RECENT EVENTS
CALLED TO SERVE
Robert Pennoyer ’43 recounts his time in the Pacific during World War II
KRISTIN DUISBERGthe war, he was part of a unit that helped occupy Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido and was the first American to set foot on the island. Noting that he perceived no sense of revenge from either side, he says, “I was proud to be an American, and proud of the sacrifice [my fellow Americans] were willing to make and did make. I learned in life that you can’t do anything significant alone.”
Robert Pennoyer ’43 skipped the Sixth Form and entered Harvard at age 17. After working six straight terms at Harvard without a vacation, in October 1944 he received his degree, his Navy commission and orders to join the Naval cruiser USS Pensacola somewhere in the Pacific.
Lieutenant (J.G.) Pennoyer was part of a crew of 1,000 that came under heavy attack during the Battle of Iwo Jima, sustaining nearly 150 casualties in the opening moments of the engagement on Feb. 19, 1945, and surviving days of kamikaze attacks at Okinawa. At the end of
A grandson of J.P. Morgan, Pennoyer went on to earn his J.D. from Columbia University in 1950 and became assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York under President Dwight Eisenhower. Now 97, Pennoyer shared stories with Endeavor Films in 2021 about his time in the Pacific and what he continues to carry with him eight decades after his service. “To be with young men from all over the country … to learn to work with them, to learn about their essential decency … I loved them,” he says.
LaMar Bunts ’87 tapped as Dartmouth’s first chief transformation officer
In the fall of 1983, LaMar Bunts ’87 arrived on the St. Paul’s School grounds, unsure of what the immediate future held for him. A little more than a year earlier, the 13-year-old Oakland, California, resident had been identified by the education nonprofit organization A Better Chance as someone who could thrive in an environment like St. Paul’s. But it meant leaving his family, moving thousands of miles away from home, and making a new life for himself at a place he’d only seen in photos.
“I got there after this long flight all by myself, lugging these big suitcases, and I encountered some people along the way that made me think that maybe I’d made a huge mistake,” Bunts recalls. He laughs. “But pretty quickly I was taken in by some senior students. They got me situated and just made me feel welcome.”
Which in turn put Bunts on a four-year journey, the reverberations of which he still feels today. Bunts threw every part of himself into his SPS education. A strong math student, he excelled in the classroom while simultaneously pursuing an ambitious extracurricular schedule. He played squash and was a standout football player and wrestler. He joined the orchestra as a clarinetist, sang in a few ensembles, and was actively involved in multiple academic and social clubs.
“It was a real inflection point in my life because all the things I had dreamed of doing I felt were suddenly possible,” says Bunts, a first-generation college student who went on to major in economics at Harvard and earn an MBA from Stanford. “In Oakland there was always this wall. I worked hard, was smart, but you never felt like you had the visibility. Then I did.”
In the decades since, Bunts has worked hard to bring that same kind of visibility to other students and communities. His senior thesis at Harvard was on Black entrepreneurship, and his resume reflects both his business acumen and a moral compass that’s oriented toward broadening education and entrepreneurship opportunities. In addition to holding senior roles in finance and
business operations in the technology and education sectors, Bunts is the co-founder and former CEO of the Beanstalk Initiative, a social venture seed-capital firm that connects young entrepreneurs with experienced counterparts. He’s also served on a variety of nonprofit boards.
But his most impactful work may come out of the position he recently started. In January, Dartmouth College named Bunts its chief transformation officer, a heady new position that places him at the forefront of helping one of the nation’s most prestigious educational institutions expand its reach and impact while also diversifying its revenue streams. Higher education is undergoing significant change, says Bunts, as students reconsider what a college degree even means, or what the route to a college degree can look like. As they do, colleges and universities are having to look at going beyond the traditional revenues they’ve long depended on.
“Higher education in general is facing some nasty headwinds that are changing how it’s going to serve people,” says the 54-yearold Bunts, who’s father to a 14-year-old daughter and splits his time between Texas and New Hampshire. “What does it mean
to be a learner? What does it mean to get an education in ways that are outside of the traditional track we’ve had for so long? These are the kinds of things we need to think about.”
Bunts sees his new position as not just a way to help steer Dartmouth deep into the 21st century but also to help establish a model for other higher education institutions as they navigate their own uncertain times. While it’s still too early in his tenure to outline specific goals, he says the work will take many forms, from forging new partnerships with other organizations to recalibrating Dartmouth’s international and online presences. Bunts, in a sense, is building bridges; connecting Dartmouth to a future that can better leverage its institutional impact by making it possible to welcome more of the world through its doors.
“When you help one kid, you can end up helping many others,” Bunts says. “There’s this great multiplier effect. But to do that you sometimes have to look at things differently. I feel like because of my lived experience it’s a lot more natural for me to see these things and understand what the obstacles are to making real impact with all different kinds of students.”
A SCHOOL GROWS IN HONG KONG
Renée Boey ’00 founded Bloom KKCA Academy to teach a love of learning with an eye toward the future
In a parallel universe, Renée Boey ’00 is an esteemed academic, an expert in Renaissance literature who’s published prolifically and is a well-known, in-demand speaker in her area of expertise.
Instead, Boey is an esteemed educator who has pursued a passion for teaching — a passion whose seeds were sown as a student at St. Paul’s School working with refugees in Concord, nurtured as a volunteer teacher in the community while a student at Harvard, shaped by formal teaching experience after graduate studies at Cambridge University, and now have grown into the Bloom KKCA Academy, the school she founded and leads in Hong Kong.
A ll too aware of how fast the world is changing and how slowly schools typically do, Boey envisioned a school that would prepare students to create their own futures. After intensive research that included visits to nearly three dozen schools, she designed her own future-oriented version with the input of experienced educators, engineers and entrepreneurs to go beyond what she
calls the traditional mindset and emphasize positive education, project-based learning and compassionate creativity. Combining strong academics with vocational education, the school leans on well-being and character education, bilingualism and multiculturalism, and collaborative innovation to achieve its goals. Bloom, a bilingual primary school (Mandarin and English, though Cantonese is the local language), opened in September 2021, despite COVID-19, and is flourishing, with plans to launch its secondary program this summer.
Situated in a densely populated neighborhood that serves as an extended classroom beyond Bloom’s building, the nonprofit private school is unlike most of its kind in Hong Kong: 25% of the students are on some form of financial aid.
“It’s important to expose people at a young age to different perspectives, even within the same culture,” Boey says. “That, to me, is central to the mission of education. I want to do things with love.”
And with a variety of enrichment classes in addition to its rigorous academic offerings, such as a farm-to-table program, Boey has brought her educational philosophy to life.
“I believe in learning by doing, but even more than that, I believe in respecting the individuality of the student as a human; when you can connect as a person first, then you can talk about other things and unleash the creative side and the human values,” she says. “So even though we’re a school of innovation and we talk about technology a lot, the tech serves the human purposes, which are about promoting peace and intercultural awareness, and understanding, which has become so important. I really believe that my own education is the reason I feel so positive about [humankind], and I do think if you have positive experiences in your formative years, you have a deeper trust for that possibility.”
Boey points to her years at St. Paul’s School as one of her own early positive experiences, and even today, a poster of the School hangs in her office. “St. Paul’s is one of the main reasons I’m in education,” she says. “I felt intellectually
challenged there, and I still keep in touch with my teachers. They really care for you as a person; it’s not a transactional relationship, but very deep. The comments they wrote made everything about much more than grades, and that shaped my view of education. Every adult that I interacted with at SPS taught me something and really cared about me, and I try to be that type of a teacher.”
As for that other life in education?
“I was at Cambridge, and it was a wonderful experience, but it is quite isolated. I could see how it would be so comfortable to settle down into academia and a life of writing and publishing but … while I love teaching literature and very traditional text, I realized I wanted to help kids bridge the gap between academic learning and what the real world would demand of them and what they cared about,” she says. “I wanted to do work that had more direct impact. I believe a good education can transform individual lives and through them, the world.”
A Faith Full Life
Remembering THE MOST REV. FRANK T. GRISWOLD III ’55 , the 25th Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church
IAN ALDRICH
In the fall of 1953, Yoshiaki Shimizu ’55 arrived at St. Paul’s School as a Fifth Former from his family home in Japan, just the third Japanese student to attend SPS through a recently launched exchange program with Seikei Junior High School in Tokyo. His arrival, less than a decade after the end of World War II, marked a profile of courage in the young man. Across the country, memories of the Pacific War were still fresh and at SPS many of Shimizu’s new classmates gave him an indifferent shoulder. One, however, did not.
Frank Tracy Griswold III ’55 made an immediate point of befriending Shimizu. He showed him around SPS, asked him about his native country, and did his best to integrate him into campus life. Shimizu would eventually thrive in his new surroundings, putting him on a path to a long teaching career at Princeton University, where he established himself as a renowned scholar of Japanese art history. St. Paul’s proved crucial in fostering Shimizu’s early love of art, and Griswold proved crucial in making sure he felt welcome at his new school.
“He just paid attention to him in a way the rest of us didn’t,” classmate Jerry Miller ’55 recalls. “He was being kind, one human being to another who didn’t quite fit in yet. That really impressed me. Many of us were not what I would call the most forgiving or kindly people in the world. We were pretty snooty, to be honest. But Frank wasn’t. He was never like that.”
Griswold’s impulse toward human kindness proved abundantly true over the course of his long life and trailblazing career with the Episcopal Church. Bishop Griswold, who served as Presiding Bishop, the leader of the Episcopal Church in the United States, from 1997-2006, died in Philadelphia on March 5. He was 85 and is survived by his wife of 58 years, the former Phoebe Wetzel, daughters Hannah Griswold McFarland ’86 and Eliza Griswold ’91, and three grandchildren.
Beloved for his gentle personality, deft sense of humor and limitless curiosity, Bishop Griswold used the same capacity for inclusiveness he’d demonstrated all those years ago at SPS to lead the Episcopal Church through one of its most turbulent periods as he championed the addition of women and gay priests into the fold.
Ordained in 1963, Bishop Griswold often played a crucial role in the Church’s most pressing matters. He was a key voice in a revision of its main text, the Book of Common Prayer, in 1976, its first major revision since the 16th century’s Protestant Reformation. Nine years later, then Rev. Griswold was appointed Bishop of Chicago, whose diocese did not include any women. Upon his departure in 1998 to become Presiding Bishop, 41 of the 146 diocese’s priests were female. In 1994, he signed a statement declaring that sexual orientation is “morally neutral” and that “faithful, monogamous, committed” gay relationships should be honored.
“He really did believe in holding disparate realities and disparate points of view,” says daughter Eliza, a poet and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. “That people could believe different things and live different ways. He wasn’t big on right and wrong and passing judgment… He really was for everyone and he was just completely open-hearted. Whoever you were, whatever crisis you might be facing, he was completely present. He was rooting for you.”
Even if it meant putting his own life in danger. In 2003, Bishop Griswold voted for the appointment of the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay priest, as bishop of New Hampshire. The decision threatened the very unity of both the American church and tested its ties to Anglican communities in other parts of the world. But Bishop Griswold, who wore a bulletproof vest to the ordination, never wavered.
“My basic task is to keep as many people at the table as possible,” he told PBS in 2004. “And to remind everyone though they have their own particular point of view there are others who have another point of view and they are equally members of the church loved by God, members of Christ’s risen body and therefore must be taken with full seriousness. And it’s in the tension often that the truth, whatever it may be, gets more fully revealed.”
Bishop Griswold’s work was steered in part by his own experience with otherness. The son of a dashing professional car racer, the future bishop struggled to connect to the world his dad revered. In that way, says Eliza, SPS was a life raft for her dad — a place where the School’s Episcopal priests were “moral, kindly” father figures who embraced his preference for books over sports. And as Bishop Griswold later recalled, his reverence for these men eventually sounded his own call to the priesthood.
“There were seven priests on the faculty who took an interest in me,” he told Fresh Air host Terry Gross in a 2006 interview. “And so I, in a very organic way, simply evolved into a person of faith. And by the end of my time at [SPS], it was clear to me that I wanted to be ordained. And this was supported by several of the clergy.”
In his later years, Bishop Griswold, who was the author of several books, taught at seminaries and universities across the globe. But even as he receded from the spotlight of church leadership, his abilities to lead and counsel others never waned. The impact of that work, says Eliza, is still being felt.
“I don’t think he understood how much his quiet solace that he provided to people, they hung on to,” she says. Following his death, she adds, “so many people have said, ‘your dad said this to me,’ or ‘your dad one time told me this.’ I think for my whole family, it’s been striking how many people feel like he helped really guide them in a time of real pain.”
“BELOVED FOR HIS GENTLE PERSONALITY, DEFT SENSE OF HUMOR AND LIMITLESS CURIOSITY, BISHOP GRISWOLD USED THE SAME CAPACITY FOR INCLUSIVENESS HE’D DEMONSTRATED ALL THOSE YEARS AGO AT SPS.”
The section was updated April 18, 2023. Please note that deaths are reported as we receive notice of them. Therefore, alumni dates of death are not always reported chronologically.
1945 — Richard C. Cowell
Dec. 27, 2022
1949 — Andrew Varick Stout III
Jan. 23, 2023
1950 — John D. B. Gould
Feb. 2, 2023
1950 — Richard D. Mann
Jan. 24, 2023
1950 — Dwight Bartholomew
Feb. 8, 2023
1952 — Philip Price Jr.
Feb. 1, 2023
1953 — Benjamin D. Williams III
March 7, 2023
1954 — Rufus K. Marsh
Feb. 26, 2023
1955 — Rev. Frank Tracy Griswold III
March 5, 2023
1955 — John Holbrook Jr.
Feb. 22, 2023
1961 — Walter Thacher Winslow Jr.
Nov. 22, 2022
1964 — Roger A. Young
Feb. 26, 2023
1965 — J. Michel S. Brown
June 15, 2022
1965 — William N. McCurdy
Feb. 18, 2023
1974 — Jesse Stewart Burkhardt
Oct. 2022
1980 — Anne Hutchins-Orsi
Feb. 27, 2023
FACULTY
William Tobias Brewster
March 16, 2023
James P. Holmes
March 14, 2023
STAFF
Madeline Joyce
Feb. 17, 2023
1949
Thomas Edsall Inslee
passed away peacefully on Jan. 15, 2022, at the age of 92.
Mr. Inslee came to SPS as a Second Former, graduated, earned a degree in engineering at Princeton University in 1953 and then worked for Lincoln Electric. He married the love of his life, Sara Elizabeth Bull, and was self-employed for most of his career. He lived in Sussex County, New Jersey, and after retirement, in Manchester, Vermont, before a final move to Florida for a life of warm weather and sunshine.
Above all, according to his family, Mr. Inslee loved St. Paul’s School. He was a good student but could also get up to mischief — he told tales of trying to snuff out a cigarette burning in his sweater pocket with his hand while he was talking to a master, about his roommates, and about cider jugs hanging from Upper windows (one of which, legend has it, fell at a less than an ideal time during his Sixth Form year). He hated cream chipped beef and would never eat it again after graduating. As he aged, he would sit at his computer and listen to hymns sung by the SPS Choir in the Chapel. One Christmas, all he wanted was a recording of the carillon in the Chapel.
Mr. Inslee was a wonderful but very private man who was proud that one of his children, Susan Paige Trace ’76, was able to experience the privilege of attending St. Paul’s School; he often said that an education is the one gift you can give a child that can’t be taken away. “Maybe say a prayer in Chapel for my father,” his daughter suggested in a written reflection about her father. “He’d like that. He’d be honored."
Mr. Inslee is survived by his wife, Sally; their three children and their spouses; and four grandchildren.
1950
Dwight Bartholomew
a boundless spirit bursting with accordion music and song who’d abandoned the corporate ladder to teach grade-school kids, and a descendant of five Connecticut governors who preferred the blue-collar towns in the West over his blue-blooded roots in the East, died Feb. 8, 2023, at his home in Port Angeles, Washington, of congestive heart failure and emphysema. He was 90.
Mr. Bartholomew was born in New York City on March 8, 1932, the son of Dana T. Bartholomew and Adela Sloane Griswold. He was educated at Selwyn House in Montreal before entering St. Paul’s School in the fall of 1946. A member of Old Hundred, he played ice hockey, baseball and football and ran track; he was also active in Le Cercle Français, The Pelican and the yearbook, as well as choir and glee club.
Mr. Bartholomew picked up an accordion when he was eight and never put it down. Like his father before him, he could straighten his shoulders, crane his neck, drop his jaw, load up his largest vowels and sing — his deep baritone lobbed cannonades of joy, filling rooms with his music.
He earned his B.A. from Yale University in 1954. There, he excelled at enduring friendships, hockey, the swing of an oar and solo bicycle rides as far as his legs could carry him. Most of all, he excelled at music and was tapped to lead the Whiffenpoofs, Yale’s elite a cappella group; he declined to focus on grades. He sang in the Yale Glee Club, was inducted into Scroll and Key and competed in intramural crew and hockey.
Mr. Bartholomew served in the U.S. Army as a chaplain’s assistant, private first class, at the VII Corps headquarters in Stuttgart, West Germany.
On Sept. 7, 1957, he married Elizabeth “Betsy” Hill in Montreal. The marriage produced four children and lasted 25 years. He worked for First National City Bank of New York in Brazil, then later joined Alcan Aluminum, which his father helped run.
At age 38, he answered a call to begin classroom teaching and P.E. instruction. In California, he taught at Rosita Elementary in Santa Ana; Adams and Paularino schools in Costa Mesa; Palm Valley School in Cathedral City; and Westside Elementary in Thermal. Later, he tutored in Leavenworth and Wenatchee, Washington. He earned an M.Ed. from Azusa Pacific University in 1978.
He spent his early retirement in Leavenworth, where he met Mary Ellen Olson, whom he married on Aug. 14, 2004, in East Grand Forks, North Dakota. They united in song. Dwight and Mary Ellen moved to Port Angeles in 2005.
At age 60, Mr. Bartholomew began playing the bass trombone, in tune with his favorite Dixieland jazz. Nearly 30 years later, he was learning the ukulele. When he’d return to accordion, he liked to say he was “back on ’box.”
A lifelong seeker who loved hymns such as “How Sweet Thou Art,” he practiced Christian Science, dabbled in the ’70s Jesus movement, then found solace in the Quakers’ Religious Society of Friends. He practiced yoga before dawn long before most people heard of yoga, and Canadian Air Force aerobics before most anyone heard of aerobics. He cared less about TV and smartphones. He dreamed of moving to far-off places, and sometimes did: North Dakota for its frigid winters and outdoor hockey, Washington for its volcanic mountains and winding rivers.
A connoisseur of words and writing, he loved the clack of a manual typewriter, just like he loved the clickety-clack of long-ago steam and passenger trains. A voracious reader, he inhaled everything from short stories by Damon Runyon to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. His final read was “A Pilgrimage to Eternity” by Timothy Egan.
In contrast to his forebears, he avoided any talk of politics. A longtime member of Alcoholics Anonymous, he preferred to share his experience, his strength and his hope. With a grin and a twinkle in his eye, he liked to acknowledge the good in people. He’d regale family and friends with tales from back East, what he called “the land of judgment.”
A lifelong fan of the Montreal Canadiens, he’d paste the team’s logo on his cars; at his wake, his body was draped with flag of his beloved team while his favorite cat rested at his feet.
Mr. Bartholomew is survived by his wife, Mary Ellen; his former wife, Betsy, of Leavenworth; his brother, Andy “Pujan” Bartholomew of New South Wales, Australia; his children Dana Bartholomew (and Toni Plume) of Los Angeles, Sterling (and Mireya Quick) Bartholomew of Leavenworth, Sloane Bartholomew Schubert of Leavenworth and Caroline Bell Bartholomew Davison of Wenatchee; stepchildren Jesse Olson, of Grass Valley, California, and Arielle “Charlie” Stellar of San Francisco; and grandchildren Treat and Price Schubert. He was preceded in death by a sister, Adela Sloane Wilmerding, of Old Lyme, Connecticut.
1969, he and his wife moved their family to Colorado, where he initially worked as a stockbroker, then as an independent investment counselor before working at the First National Bank of Colorado Springs. When he retired, Mr. Gould was senior vice president in charge of the bank’s trust division. In addition, he was a member of the boards of directors of many charitable institutions in the Colorado Springs area.
His passions included fly fishing and golf. He also became an accomplished watercolor artist, and his paintings adorn the walls of the homes of many friends and family members. He was not a fan of rhubarb.
Mr. Gould was married to Susan Singleton Porter of Lake Forest, Illinois, in 1958; she died in 1999. In 2006, he married Leilani F. McCall of Philadelphia; she died in 2014.
He is survived by his children James S.P. Gould ’78 (Elisabeth) of Palm City, Florida; B.L. Porter Gould (Julia) of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; David B.L. Gould (Beth) of St. Petersburg, Florida; and Holly Gould of Edemston, New York, as well as seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
1950
John D. B. Gould endearingly known by many as “Grumps,” a retired trust banker, died peacefully on Feb. 2, 2023, in Stuart, Florida. He was 92.
Mr. Gould was the youngest of six children born to Rear Admiral Erl C.B. Gould, USN, a member of the Form of 1914, and Katharine S. Laughlin of Pittsburgh. He came to St. Paul’s School in the fall of 1943; he was a member of Old Hundred and was a captain of the first Shattuck boat. He also was a member of the choir and glee club; in the 1970s, he served as a regional representative for his alma mater. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1954, then served his country during the Korean War as a member of the U.S. Army in the Artillery Division of the 25th Infantry.
Mr. Gould worked for 12 years in the Philadelphia National Bank in the investment division and served as vice president in charge of the municipal bond department. In
1952
Philip Price Jr.
a lifelong resident of Philadelphia, died peacefully, surrounded by his family, on Feb. 1, 2023. He was 88 years old.
Mr. Price, the youngest child of Philip Price Sr. and Sarah Harrison Price, was best known as a champion of numerous Philadelphia nonprofit organizations. He had a deep interest in American history and was a descendant of several notable figures, including Civil War General George Gordon Meade, 12th U.S. President Zachary Taylor and Joseph Harrison Jr., who was responsible for building the Saint Petersburg to Moscow Railway.
Mr. Price loved learning. He came to St. Paul’s in the fall of 1947; a member of Shattuck and Isthmian, he was awarded the Gordon Medal, the School’s highest athletic honor, for his contributions to the ice hockey, baseball, football and track teams. He also was active with the choir, glee club, choral groups and Missionary Society. Mr. Price was a dedicated alumnus, serving the School on the Alumni Association Executive Committee and as an alumni officer, form volunteer and regional representative.
Mr. Price graduated from Harvard in 1956; while there, he was an enthusiastic member of the Porcellian Club and the Krokodiloes, Harvard’s oldest a cappella group.
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1961, Mr. Price started his career as an attorney at his father’s law firm, Dechert Price & Rhoades (now called Dechert, LLP) and then worked in the public defender’s office. He was active in politics and elected as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1976. In 1978, he was elected to the Pennsylvania State Senate, where he served until 1982. For many years, Mr. Price was president of the Allegheny West Foundation, a community development organization dedicated to economic development in the Allegheny West neighborhood.
Mr. Price served on the boards of many organizations, including the Fairmount Park Conservancy, The Association for Public Art, the Civil War Museum of Philadelphia, The Woodlands Cemetery, The Woodlands Trust for Historic Preservation, The Ludwick Foundation and Saint James School. He was most passionate about Fairmont Park, and his work followed a long family tradition which started with his great grandfather, Eli Kirk Price, who was responsible for securing the land for the park. His grandfather, Eli Kirk Price II, was instrumental in the development of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and his father, Philip Price Sr., served on the Fairmount Park Commission.
Mr. Price, affectionately called Phil by his friends, loved his family and took great joy in spending time with his children and grandchildren, especially during summers in Maine. To those who knew him well, his deep laugh was infectious, as was his playful nature. He enjoyed tennis into his 80s and liked to switch hands mid-match to create an extra challenge. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Sarah Price; sisters Sarah (Sally) Chittenden and Evelyn (Evie) Scott; his children Alexandra (Aly) Price, Emilie Price and Philip Price III ’91; and six grandchildren.
Mr. Marsh earned a B.A. in French at Harvard College in 1958. There, he met his future wife, Fruzsina Karasz, a Wellesley student. He later received an M.A. in French from Columbia University. While at Harvard, he joined the Army ROTC, receiving an honorable discharge in 1965. Mr. Marsh earned a Ph.D. in French Literature from Stanford University in 1975. While pursuing his doctoral studies, he won a Fulbright scholarship to study original manuscripts of the 17th-century playwright Molière at the University of Paris Sorbonne.
1954
Rufus King Marsh
a university professor and preparatory schoolteacher of French language and literature and, later, a technical writer, died peacefully on Feb. 26, 2023, at home in Clinton, Connecticut, with his wife Fruzsina at his side. The couple had been together for nearly 70 years. Mr. Marsh was admired for his brilliance, creativity, sense of humor and love of family and friends.
Born in New York City on Feb. 10, 1937, to Norman James Marsh and Cornelia King Marsh, Mr. Marsh grew up in Mt. Kisco, New York, where his lifelong passion for nature was kindled among the nearby fields, hills, woodlands and streams.
At St. Paul’s School, Mr. Marsh played hockey and football for Isthmian and rowed for Shattuck. His favorite teacher inspired him to love all things French. He was a member of Le Cercle Français and the Cum Laude Society, and he won the French Consulate Prize.
After three years of teaching French language and literature at Portsmouth Priory School in Rhode Island, Mr. Marsh returned to St. Paul’s School as a faculty member from 1965 to 1968, teaching French and coaching crew and ice hockey. He was an assistant professor of French Language and Literature at Marquette University from 1974 until 1981. He then taught French at Evansville Day School in Indiana. During summer breaks, he worked as a technical writer at nearby Bristol Meyers. He enjoyed the work and joined the company in its new medical writing department. He then changed careers and spent the next 20 years working as a medical writer for three companies before retiring in 2004.
As a teacher, he made innovative use of comics to teach colloquial French, writing two articles about it for the French Review and coauthoring a textbook. He published scholarly articles on the topic of his dissertation: the 17th century French ideal of an enlightened man of reason known as the honnête homme As a technical writer, he co-wrote articles on the improvement of communication and performance in clinical research.
Mr. Marsh was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and was active in the Church of the Holy Advent in Clinton, Connecticut, where he served in many roles, including Sunday School teacher, vestry member and stalwart of the food pantry.
He is survived by his wife and their children, Alice, Jonathan and Catherine; seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild, as well as his brothers Norman J. Marsh Jr. ’53 and Langdon Marsh ’59. His younger sister Cornelia “Lela” Marsh died in 1959 at age 10.
1955
John Holbrook Jr. died at home, surrounded by his family and books, on Feb. 22, 2023, in New York City at age 85.
A true gentleman, Mr. Holbrook was a kind and decent man who adored his family. He was the son of John Holbrook of the Form of 1927 and Alice Doubleday and the brother of David Doubleday Holbrook, the late Phyllis Holbrook Lichtenstein and Peter Moffitt Holbrook.
He was born in New York City and spent much of his early childhood in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where he developed a love of farm life and the great outdoors. After graduating from Saint Bernard’s School in 1950, he entered St. Paul’s School as a Second Former. At SPS, he competed in hockey and football with Isthmian, rowed with Shattuck, and participated in the Scientific and Library Associations, the Propylean Literary Society and Le Cercle Français.
At Yale College, Mr. Holbrook began a lifelong study of ancient history, natural history and the history of science. He continued to row at Yale, participating in the 1957 Henley Royal Regatta and graduating with the Class of 1959. After three years of active duty as a platoon, company and then planning officer in a U.S. Marine Corps infantry battalion, Mr. Holbrook enrolled in the Yale School of Architecture. After receiving his master’s degree in 1968, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he practiced architecture and developed real estate at his small Dupont Circle firm ICON. Yearning for a richer and more meaningful life in the country, he moved his family to Grafton, Vermont, where he continued his practice and managed a 300-acre working farm.
In the 1980s, the focus of his professional life shifted from designing buildings to planning of all types. He returned to Manhattan and served as vice president of the Episcopal Church Building Fund, where he managed its loan portfolio and taught dioceses and congregations how to organize and plan for building construction. He was a consultant and vice president at Merrill Lynch’s corporate real estate department, where he led a strategic planning team of their building projects. Mr. Holbrook ended his career as a consultant to, and then CFO of, Chosen People Ministries, where he was responsible for administration, finance and development. During his working years, he provided planning services to friends and their businesses and ministries, served on many boards, and continued his studies in history and the Bible. In retirement, he concentrated on his faith and on writing books and papers focusing on his Biblical views.
Mr. Holbrook is survived by his beloved wife, Edythe Murphy Holbrook; his daughters Sara Holbrook Guggenheim ’80 and Anna Holbrook Bizzack; and his grandchildren, Benjamin and Wills Guggenheim and Emma and Ethan Bizzack.
Mr. Truslow grew up in Manhattan and Cold Spring Harbor, New York, the son of Francis Adams Truslow, a prominent lawyer, businessman and government official, and Elizabeth Jennings Truslow (later Howell), a painter and family matriarch. He lived in Lima, Peru, with his family during World War II, where his father aided in the war effort. He was stepson to Dr. John Taylor Howell, a leading pediatrician.
He came to St. Paul’s School in the fall of 1951 and played ice hockey, soccer and football for Old Hundred and sang in the choir. He earned his B.A. in English at Yale and served in the U.S. Marine Corp Reserves.
Mr. Truslow settled in the Boston area, where he built a career in sales and met his wife, Maria Lowell Gallagher. They raised their children, Anne and Frank, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He shared his love of nature, fly fishing, learning and athletics with his children. Residing in Sudbury, Massachusetts, in his later years, he loved spending time with his grandchildren and delighted in reading with them.
Throughout his life, Mr. Truslow enjoyed literature, particularly Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost, and nonfiction about subjects ranging from world religions to investments. Contemplative, he engaged others in his exploration of life’s mysteries. He outlived his midlife diagnosis of heart disease through disciplined diet and exercise. Kind, he bought meals for the homeless and placed calls to friends in need. He considered fly fishing a form of meditation and had an elegant cast. At home in nature, he especially loved the Bushkill trout stream in the Catskills and Crane’s Beach and the salt marshes of Ipswich, Massachusetts.
1956
Francis Adams “Tim” Truslow died in central Connecticut on Nov. 7, 2022, surrounded by his children, succumbing to congestive heart failure at age 84. He was a salesman, fly fisherman, reader, lifelong learner, outdoorsman and, above all, a loving father, grandfather, brother, cousin, uncle and friend. He is remembered for his big heart and keen, often irreverent, sense of humor. His twinkling eyes, easy laugh and kindness touched many.
Mr. Truslow is survived by his children; friend and former wife Maria; son-in-law Jim; daughter-in-law Nicole; siblings Fred, Betsy, John and Shirley; grandchildren Teddy and Thomas; and many cousins, nieces, nephews and friends.
1958
Philip Sloan Auchincloss died on Aug. 22, 2022, at the age of 82. Mr. Auchincloss was born on March 16, 1940, in New York City to Lydia and Samuel Auchincloss. He entered St. Paul’s School as a Second Former in 1953 and participated in crew, rowing as a member of the Shattuck first boat. After graduating, he went on to earn a bachelor’s in economics at the University of Pennsylvania. There, he was a cadet in the ROTC and, upon graduation, served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Transportation Corps, working along the DMZ in South Korea.
After Korea, Mr. Auchincloss returned to Washington, D.C., to finish his service at Fort Myer. It was there that he met his future wife, Victoria Sprague, whom he married on Jan. 7, 1967, in Christ Church, Georgetown. The couple moved to Chicago, where Mr. Auchincloss received his MBA from the University of Chicago and began his career in market research while still finding time to pursue his passion for sailing at the Chicago Yacht Club.
The Auchinclosses welcomed their first son, William, in 1971 and their second, Colin, in 1977. Also in 1977, the family moved to Pittsburgh, where Mr. Auchincloss began working at PPG Industries doing market research in the chemical division. Due to Pittsburgh’s lack of sailing water, Mr. Auchincloss turned to new recreational endeavors, including running and tennis. In 1985, the family moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he took a job with Weyerhaeuser. Mr. Auchincloss became active at the Little Theater of Winston-Salem, building sets, running lights and helping with sound. He also became an avid cyclist, touring the North Carolina countryside with friends. In 1991 he launched the Auchincloss Company, a market research consulting firm.
For his 60th birthday in 2000, Mr. Auchincloss and Victoria spent two weeks at a villa in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France — a vacation that planted the seed for their eventual
move to France. After a three-week bike tour of Provence in 2005, he and Victoria found a chateau to rent outside the small village of Pontlevoy. Like many towns in France, Pontlevoy had a bicycle club, which Mr. Auchincloss joined, biking up to four hours twice a week. After each ride, he would invariably return with French pastries.
Halfway through 2006, he and Victoria sold their apartment in Winston-Salem and purchased a small farmhouse just outside Pontlevoy. Through the Pontlevoy bike club, Mr. Auchincloss continued to go on biking adventures around France. Mechanically inclined, He also volunteered as the projectionist for the local cinema in Montrichard, where he would load reels onto the projector and get to enjoy watching the movies.
In 2017, he decided it was time to return to Winston-Salem. With furniture in transit from France, he and Victoria toured Africa, spending time in Zambia, Botswana and South Africa; when the furniture arrived, they moved back into their original apartment. Mr. Auchincloss remained active in his later years, staying involved in the community and connecting with his grandchildren.
Mr. Auchincloss is survived by Victoria; his sons William (Megan) and Colin (Sarah); and his grandchildren, Madison, Harper, Graydon, Jackson, Micah and Bennett. He will be greatly missed by his family and many in his community, and he will be remembered for his easygoing nature, love of business and bicycles, inventive spirit, strong moral character and all things sweet.
idyllic boyhood by Seabright Beach alongside his younger brother, Robert Harris McCarter Young Jr. Following the premature death of Mr. Young’s father, his mother moved the family to her hometown of Lexington, Massachusetts, and eventually married a childhood friend, Charles H. Tenney II. Mr. Young gained stepbrothers Rockwell Tenney ’62 and the late Charles H. Tenney III in the union.
Throughout his life, Mr. Young remained a proud alumnus of the Dexter School in Brookline, Massachusetts; St. Paul’s School and Princeton University, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1968 with a major in religion. The latter course of study marked the early steps in his lifelong walk with God. He would resume his studies when, after retirement, he attended Yale Divinity School for one year — not to become ordained, but just to learn.
At St. Paul’s School, Mr. Young was a Halcyon captain who also played football and ice hockey, served as a prefect and vice president for the Library Association; and was a member of the Athletic Association, the John Winant Society, Le Cercle Français, Cadmean/Concordian and the choir.
Mr. Young’s professional life was marked by three decades of service to Bay State Gas Company, where he ascended to the positions of president and CEO and where, apart from his clear business acumen, he was known to be friendly, approachable, fair and resolutely resistant to casual Fridays. Far more significantly, though, it was the gas utility business that brought him into contact with a sassy Indiana girl, Linda Furste, whom he would court passionately, if erratically, for five years before coming to the realization that he would regularly proclaim thenceforth: she was the love of his life.
1964
Roger A. Young of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, died on Feb. 26, 2023, after a long period of illness. He was 77 years old.
Mr. Young began life in Rumson, New Jersey, the son of Robert Harris McCarter Young and Gloria Ann Bond, and he enjoyed an
After getting married, the couple moved to Sherborn, Massachusetts, where they raised their children, Catherine (Cate) and Geoffrey, in a picturesque atmosphere of horses, golf, pool parties and trips to the lake. Mr. Young also became an active and beloved member of Pilgrim Church. Upon retiring in 2000, he and Linda pulled up stakes and headed west to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. There, he wasted little time honing his fine form as golfer, skier and fly fisherman and finding another church in which to be an active and beloved member. His commitment to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church led him to
serve in various leadership roles, including as a vestry member and senior warden, on task forces and committees, leading Bible study, and in Sunday worship as a reader and a choir member. Occasionally, Mr. Young would move his place of worship from under the vault of the church to under the vault of Colorado’s grand blue sky, where his love of nature, combined with his pride as an athlete, inspired him to summit Quandary Peak, a storied “fourteener,” in celebration of his 70th birthday.
Mr. Young will be remembered as a kind, generous, interesting, interested and eversmiling man whose affectionate twinkle became a comfort to all who knew him. He took utter delight in young people, especially his kids and their friends, and his three grandchildren were his special joy. It was his duty and his pleasure to help others in his communities, and a great many people can call themselves beneficiaries of his loving support.
He is survived by his wife, Linda; his children Cate Young (Jim Coffelt) and Geoffrey (Joanna) Young; his grandchildren Sydney Lehner, Daphne Lehner and Euan Young; and his brother Bob (Vicky) Young.
pickup truck and a vintage Model A engine/ chassis with a White Truck transmission up and running again, which provided hours of childhood entertainment. The Poor Farm was his home for 57 years and remained forever in his heart.
Mr. McCurdy attended Old Bromfield before entering St. Paul’s School in the fall of 1962 as a member of the Halcyon boat club and the Isthmian athletic club. According to his brother James Kipwood “Kip” McCurdy ’68, St. Paul’s School nurtured Mr. McCurdy’s abiding curiosity in matters of science and technology; the curriculum gave him a deep foundation for developing his particular interest: the analysis and troubleshooting of complex mechanical systems.
A fter St. Paul’s School, Mr. McCurdy attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst for a brief time and then worked at Harvard Auto Body, which led him to a sports car team in nearby Westford, Massachusetts. In 1977, with Mr. McCurdy as car chief, the Trojan Tools Division of Parker Manufacturing of Worcester, Massachusetts, sponsored the race team that secured the Northeast Division Championship with nine firsts, two seconds and two thirds, then went on to place third at the National Championships held in Atlanta that same year.
In 1983, Mr. McCurdy established William’s Racing Service back in Harvard, which he successfully operated for more than 40 years, producing winning engines and amassing a faithful motorsport community and likeminded friends who brought tremendous value to his life.
1965
William Nicely “Bill” McCurdy died Feb. 18, 2023, surrounded by his family, in Leominster, Massachusetts, following a year of failing health. He was 76.
Mr. McCurdy was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in January 1947. The McCurdy family moved to Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1956; growing up on the historic Poor Farm with more than 32 enchanting acres to explore was a delight. Mr. McCurdy found treasures on the property that helped develop an early interest in machinery and mechanical things — he got an old abandoned
His brother Alex describes Mr. McCurdy as someone who will be known not by shallow highlights, but rather by the fact that he was a fair and responsible person who did no harm to others for personal gain or notoriety. His sisters agree that his glory was not tied to the recognition of success but rather in his unbounding love of his family and friends.
Bill was predeceased by his parents, William “Coach” and Virginia “Jince” McCurdy. He is survived by James (Anne), Alex (Cathy), Allyson Cruikshank (Rick), Darcy, their families and especially by his love, Marion Duclos.
OBITUARY SUBMISSIONS
The Alumni Horae is happy to reprint obituaries that have been previously published elsewhere or written in traditional obituary format and submitted directly to us. We encourage you to reach out to alumni@sps.edu to submit an obituary but may contact you if we do not hear from you first. Obituaries may be edited for length and style and will appear in the next possible issue of Alumni Horae.
Recognizing Outstanding Service
The Alumni Association Executive Committee honors
Dr. Frederick Lovejoy Jr. ’55 and Sia Manta Sanneh ’97 with 2023 Alumni Association Awards.
The Executive Committee established the Alumni Association Award in 1997 to recognize and honor those members of the association who have been a credit to the School and its teachings. The Alumni Association Award is the highest distinction that can be bestowed on an alumna or alumnus by the association. Its recipients are those living alumni/ae who, through outstanding service, have improved the quality of life in a community on a local, national or global level. The recipients are selected by the Presidents Council, composed of the president and past presidents of the Alumni Association, as well as the executive director and past executive directors. The awards were presented to 2023 recipients Dr. Frederick H. Lovejoy Jr. ’55 and Sia Manta Sanneh ’97 in April.
The Academic Physician
Dr. Frederick H. Lovejoy Jr. ’55 has trained thousands of Harvard pediatricians and cared for sick children from all over the world.
in Boston. He chose Children’s, and aside from a two-year stint in Morocco in 1966-68 treating soldiers who were returning home from Vietnam, has remained there ever since. He spent four years as chief resident to physician-in-chief Dr. Charles Janeway, considered one of the foremost pediatricians of the 20th century, and worked with John Enders of the Form of 1915, winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Today, at the age of 85, Lovejoy is the associate physician-in-chief and deputy chairman of Boston Children’s Hospital and the William Berenberg Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
In the 1970s, Lovejoy served as the director of the Boston Poison Information Center and in 1978 founded the Massachusetts Poison Control System with then-governor Michael Dukakis. He also contributed foundational research to the understanding of fevers of unknown origin in children and helped develop the classification and staging system for Reye syndrome, a disease that can develop in children with flu or chicken pox who are given aspirin products.
As the oldest son of a prominent family in the steel business in Concord, Massachusetts, Frederick H. Lovejoy Jr. ’55 could have taken the obvious path: attending Concord’s Middlesex School for his secondary education, as many of his grade school friends had done, and entering the family business after college. That he chose an untried route — the only member of his family to attend St. Paul’s School, he’s also the only one to become a medical doctor — speaks to the qualities that have made him an exceptional physician: a strong sense of purpose and an appetite for hard work.
“My parents instilled in all of us — me and my brother and sister — the importance of service,” he says. “When I told them I was going into medicine instead of business, they said I should pursue the career I wanted. But the expectation was that whatever I chose, I do it well.”
After St. Paul’s, Lovejoy attended Yale, where he majored in history. A varsity athlete who played both soccer and squash — he was on the 1959 squash team that won the national championship — he completed much of his pre-med coursework during summer breaks (“afternoon labs and varsity sports didn’t really mix,” he explains) and earned his M.D. from the University of Virginia in 1963. He completed an internship in pediatrics at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital and then in 1965 was given the choice of doing his residency either at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore or Children’s Hospital
But it’s his 27-year leadership of Harvard’s residency program — from 1980 to 2007 — that Lovejoy says is his most meaningful contribution to medicine. “That program has trained over a thousand pediatricians who have gone on as faculty at the hospital and throughout the country. They have furthered the care of sick children, created new knowledge in pediatric medicine and assumed major leadership roles in academic pediatrics. Today, they are the legacy of the residency program training the future academic pediatric leaders,” he says.
Lovejoy met his wife, Jill, during his own residency. The couple married less than six months after their first date and share three children, their spouses and six grandchildren.
Lovejoy has found time to write six books — all histories of various aspects of Boston Children’s Hospital. His dual interests in science and the liberal arts also have been felt at SPS, where he established the Lovejoy Science Prize in 2004.
“I loved St. Paul’s,” he says, “but during my time there, science practically didn’t exist in the curriculum.” Instead, he says, what most influenced him was the School Prayer and its exhortations to be unselfish in friendship, thoughtful of those less happy than ourselves, and eager to bear the burdens of others. That, and his parents’ expectation that he do well in his chosen career path.
“If I have to choose one thing I’d say I’m most proud of, it’s contributing to the success of the best pediatric hospital in the world,” he says. At the same time, of the Alumni Association Award, he says, “It is remarkably meaningful, profoundly cherished and humbly and deeply appreciated.”
The Advocate
JODY RECORDSia Sanneh ’97 has spent the last 15 years defending individuals who have been on death row. Who have been wrongly incarcerated. Who were sent to jail as minors and grew up there. It’s a career that she feels has been a gift, to be able to provide direct service to people. A gift she says was passed to her.
“I had incredible parents. My dad was from a really small town in The Gambia, West Africa, and my mother grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa, during apartheid. They both had a rich appreciation for how much our lives are shaped by the context of the world you are born into,” says Sanneh. “They had a sense of fairness and justice and an awareness of how life could have been different. And the more I learned about history, the more I understood that my educational opportunities were fought for by generations of Black civil rights leaders who came before and fought to open doors that would otherwise have been closed to me.”
Both of her parents taught at Yale. Sanneh grew up knowing they believed in the power of education, and had a sense of what she was going to do with hers — a bachelor’s degree in history from Columbia University, a master’s in teaching from Columbia University Teachers College, and a J.D. from Yale Law School — but didn’t know it would lead her to the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is a senior attorney. She joined the EJI in 2008, the year after graduating from law school.
The EJI works to educate the public about America’s history of racial injustice, and how race has shaped the criminal system. All clients are represented free of charge. Sanneh says that allows their attorneys to serve people who have the greatest need.
“I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do when I started law school. But looking back, it seems like a really clear throughline to where I ended up,” Sanneh says. “I was interested in the bigger structures of life. I hoped to have clients I could help through direct service. I thought I would do international rights work.”
Then, during her second year of law school, she met Steve Bright, an attorney who taught courses on capital punishment and issues of race and poverty at Yale. She saw him as someone who was focused on public service, who believed you go where you are needed.
“His class helped us understand that the kind of lawyer someone gets makes a difference,” she says. “If they’ve never tried a criminal case and you’re on trial for something that can get you a life sentence, that’s a problem. It made me realize how
much I could do as a lawyer to make sure people get fair treatment.”
She cites the case of a man who, during the first week of April, celebrated eight years of freedom after being in prison for 30 years for crimes he did not commit.
“ The reason the EJI exists is because we know there are so many people across the country who have never had a good lawyer and are in prison,” Sanneh says. “There’s just no chance for them without the right lawyer.”
But having the right lawyer doesn’t always mean they are successful. There are losses, and Sanneh says they have shaped her life.
“It’s really devastating because I care very deeply about every one of my clients. I’ve worked with so many people in really challenging hopeless situations. Clients who have faced execution with dignity and courage. That stays with you forever,” Sanneh says.
While those losses have affected her, she says it’s in the best way. To be with an organization that wants to be of service matters to her and, she hopes, that is reflected in all aspects of her life.
“It makes me want to be better — a better person, a better parent, a better family member. I’m really grateful to be in a community that believes in service and how much it enriches our lives if we can just be open to it.”
Through her work with the Equal Justice Initiative, Sia Manta Sanneh ’97 has provided legal representation, and a fighting chance, to individuals in need.
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