Alumni Horae Spring 2024

A lumni Horae

ST. PAUL’S SCHOOL | ISSUE III 2023-24

Alumni Horae

103 | ISSUE III 2023-24

RECTOR

Kathleen C. Giles

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Karen Ingraham

EDITOR

Kristin Duisberg

DESIGNER

Cindy L. Foote

SECTION EDITOR

Kate Dunlop

PHOTOGRAPHY

Ben Flanders

Michael Seamans

EDITORIAL CONTRIBUTORS

Ian Aldrich

Jana F. Brown

Edie Jones ’24

Jacqueline Primo Lemmon

Jody Record

David Scully ’79, P’21

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

22

THE SPS ENDOWMENT EXPLAINED KAREN

INGRAHAM

The School’s endowment is its financial foundation, and a perpetual investment in excellence.

ON THE COVER

27

A CALL TO ACTION

DAVID SCULLY ’79, P’21

The president of the SPS Board of Trustees reflects on how we build the SPS we need for the 21st century.

Comprising nearly 800 individual funds, the SPS endowment supports virtually every aspect of life at St. Paul’s School.

WRITING THEIR WAY

JANA F. BROWN

This year, the long literary careers of three alumnae artists have taken some exciting new turns.

UPDATE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS: ALUMNI@SPS.EDU

Do you receive email communications from SPS? If not, you may need to update your address with us or check your spam filter to make sure SPS is identified as a safe sender.

IN THIS ISSUE

2 FROM THE RECTOR

5 THE SCHOOL TODAY

Trustees, an admiral and an ambassador on grounds; students and faculty see the eclipse; five questions with teacher Chris Morse; “The Addams Family”; the newest SPS cohort; athletes take their talents to the next level and more.

35 BOOKSHELF

“Eliot House”

Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. ’53 and Constantine A. Valhouli

“I Could Have Been More Wrong” Kevin McCaffrey ’75

36 ALUMNI CONNECTIONS

38 PROFILE

Army veteran and photographer David Noble ’57 has catalogued his own life — and the lives of others.

39 PROFILE

For evolutionary biologist Jeffrey Townsend ’90, data holds the key to understanding disease.

40 PROFILE

Leticia Dwomor ’09 has found purpose in her career as an OB/GYN.

41 IN MEMORIAM

ALUMNI HORAE DEADLINE

Formnotes for the fall issue are due Friday, Aug. 30. 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.

The Meaning of Mutuality

KATHLEEN C. GILES

In April, our Alumni Association held its annual meeting in New York, and I offered the following remarks. They have been edited minimally for print.

Congratulations to Max King ’62 on his receiving our Alumni Association Award; his life and career certainly are, as the award stipulates, “a credit to the School and its teachings.” Max’s recent biography of Fred Rogers is a beautiful, loving biography of Mr. Rogers, and Max illuminates this story in ways that make reading it a great pleasure. The book is about someone we think we already know and love and now come to deeply admire in new ways. Thank you, Max, and congratulations.

Thank you all, and special thanks to our form directors, form agents, and volunteers. There is no such thing as “free time” in this life, and that you choose to spend your time strengthening our people and our School is indeed service to the greater good.

And thank you to the many people who care about St. Paul’s School, who have raised their voices and invested time and energy in demanding that we grow and learn and become better for our students. Thank you for sharing your own experiences to make the experiences of current and future students safer, better, stronger. We appreciate you, and we are grateful to you.

Yesterday, we brought most of the School community into the path of totality for the eclipse. It was quite a trip to Johnson, Vermont, where we were guests on a farm for the event. We took 10 buses up, with 410 students and 45 faculty members, and it was everything we had anticipated — a beautiful day, excitement and anticipation, a lot of fun, and then the eclipse: the diamond ring, the 360-degree sunset, the cold, the ring of fire, and then the 360-degree dawn. We then got back on our buses, but probably not quickly enough — three of the 10 buses made it back to campus in five hours, while the other seven got stuck behind an accident in Franconia Notch and returned at 1 a.m., with sleepy students and teachers happy to be back on the grounds, none the worse for wear, and much the better for the adventure.

And then this morning, at our usual time, we had a terrific chapel talk given by an upperformer (who professed to still be a bit sleepy) who told us his story about being a Sikh and deciding to cut his hair. He told us less about his decision and more about how hard it was to share his decision with his family, especially with his beloved grandparents. His story was his own, but his themes are familiar across decades of student talks in the Chapel of

“ ”

The School today is strong, healthy, and full of energy as we work on that concept of mutuality, of connection with our neighbors, contributing to the learning and well-being of others and of the community.

St. Peter and St. Paul: Look on challenges as opportunities to grow, not as roadblocks but as steppingstones, he advised us. Think about the metaphor of people as matchsticks — deceivingly simple — “our fire, once lit, serves not only to light our ways but as a beacon to others, to help them find their way.” And finally, he talked about the importance of being open to getting help and to giving help; to using one’s own insight and experience to make another’s way easier and better. You all heard some version of this talk during your time at school; it is the quintessential coming-of-age chapel talk in a community

in which the bonds of trust and affection allow young people to share what matters most.

As we talk about what makes St. Paul’s School special, the “why” of lifelong friendships, inspiring relationships — lasting relationships — and our sense of community, I really think we are talking about mutuality. Mutuality requires us to focus not only on getting but also on giving. Mutuality creates the expectation that we will “get as good as we give,” from greeting each other on the paths to being generous with friendship, and not just with our friends; thoughtful of those less happy than ourselves, and not just through pitying others; and eager to bear the burdens of others — not just those we know and like, but all of our neighbors, as we do unto others, to the least of those among us, in loving our neighbors as ourselves, and knowing that everyone ultimately is our neighbor. These values and phrases should sound familiar — they have been part of our DNA for a little over a century, adopted into our community by Dr. Drury [Fourth Rector] from a prayer espoused by his good friend, Bishop Charles Slattery.

The School today is strong, healthy, and full of energy as we work on that concept of mutuality, of connection with our neighbors, contributing to the learning and well-being of others and of the community — what having one’s own seat in the classroom, in the chapel, at meals, in the dorm means not only for you but for everyone around you. Not surprisingly, these elements of our life together — connection, contribution, recognition, the invitation to spiritual development, being in a beautiful, natural place, being fully residential — turn out to be really good for young people in this age of screens and screeds. The Hugh Camp Cup finals are approaching, and as I listen to students practicing their speeches in the corridor outside my office and receiving the praise — and sometimes quite direct critiques — of their friends, I’m reminded again

how important it is to have that sense of belonging, of having an equal seat at the table.

These concepts have somehow become incredibly politicized as “equity” and “inclusion,” but I think about Ben Makihara’s Hugh Camp Cup speech in 1950 on the Declaration of Independence, with his thesis, “All men are created equal, but they are not the same,” and how this event and this speech also are part of our DNA. Words from Mr. Kittredge [Sixth Rector] in 1949 tell our story: “If the School is to do its duty in preparing American boys for the kind of life into which they will emerge, we must give them every opportunity to associate at close range and for considerable time with boys of other nationalities. If our School is to live, it cannot remain in a sort of rarified isolation any more than our Nation can.” Think about the post WWII context of that remark and the subsequent invitation to Japanese boys to come to our grounds and School — remarkable. The very good news is that we will celebrate our 75th anniversary of this important relationship during the next school year. It is a good story, a living story — a part of us as we continue to evolve.

And yes, the numbers back up that assessment of strength and energy today, in our admissions, in college matriculation, in the huge range of activities into which the students pour their energies. You can read about all of that in our many publications, and I hope that good news about the School today is exciting. We have learned so much during these past decades, about everything from the safety and well-being of adolescents to the care and keeping of our beautiful vintage home, and while there is much to continue to learn, perhaps the most important skill we are developing is indeed how to learn as we evolve, how to not be overwhelmed by nostalgia or frightened by current turbulence. As a school, our focus must

Halcyon rowers head to Turkey Pond for Graduation Weekend boat races.

be on the safety, well-being, and thriving of our students; and Mr. Kittredge’s insights about the dangers of “rarified isolation” apply to every aspect of School life. We have excellent DNA that can guide our evolution so that we remain relevant in the educational world and, most importantly, that we continue to be in service to the greater good by producing good young people intellectually and ethically trained, morally and spiritually aware, eager to learn and grow and engage and contribute and give … not just take.

Students on the grounds thrive with great new programs as well as wonderful traditions: the Applied Science and Engineering program and the Classical Honors program; The Pelican and Horae Scholasticae and The Partisan; performing arts and fine arts including glassblowing, printmaking, and ceramics; competitive athletics and robotics; coding, debate, and Model UN teams.

And we continue to do this work in the context of the questions posed by Dr. Tillich: who am I, why am I here, how should I live, what should I do, and am I becoming a good person? Importantly, Tillich taught us that church schools have the extraordinary opportunity to embed these questions into a child’s mindset and frame of reference, where they remain for life. Indeed, Tillich saw this work as the essential function of that church school. The St. Paul’s experience also invites us to internalize respect for the beauty of nature and the divinity within, the mutuality of living in community in which everyone has an equal seat; and the core DNA of our prayer, our motto.

And as David Scully ’79, P’21, our Board president, likes to say: Onward to the work at hand and ahead.

Our Board is at work on developing a comprehensive campus plan that will address decarbonization on campus; preserve and steward our heritage sites; and map the life cycles of our current facilities and the programs they support to identify long-term strategies for renewal and reinvestment. Just think for a moment about the unprotected wood in the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul and you will get a taste for the need to act now to make sure that generations of future students have the same experience in chapel that we have enjoyed.

WATCH THE VIDEO OF THE RECTOR’S REMARKS.

Our endowment provides great support — 54% of our operating budget — to specialized categories of need, as most endowed funds are highly “restricted” — and everyone here knows that we can’t spend the actual endowment or even all its invested returns. Yes, we are concerned about expenses and rising tuition, and yes, we are managing budgets that include big increases in everything from the cost of food and energy to the cost of employee and retiree health care. Last week, there was an article in The New York Times about the St. Thomas Choir School and the potential closing of its boarding program. The rector [there] made this remark: “A lot of people think we must be the wealthiest church in the country, but it costs a lot of money to maintain this tradition.” We find ourselves in that same position, as our facilities age and as we need to find new ways to think about and prioritize our needs. (See related story on the SPS endowment, page 22.)

I want to pause for a moment and think about what it was like, generally, in the 1970s and ’80s — for those of us who remember and for those of us who have just seen pictures and reruns [on TV]. Think about hair, clothes, cars — think about what the kitchens looked like! Sure, it was great then, but it is not great now. We have one student at St. Paul’s right now who makes the ’80s look good, but it takes an icon to do that! Many elements of St. Paul’s fare the same way. What might have been great then may not be now for a modern, 21st-century school.

The responsibilities for stewardship are on us — for a safe and healthy school that can thrive for its next century. I often think of Dr. Drury and the “new” chapel — the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul, consecrated in 1888, completed in 1894, and needing to be renovated (cut open at the altar!) only 25 years later. Why? Because the School valued the chapel experience in which the students and teachers faced each other during the service but needed to accommodate the expanding school. Critically, the decision-makers and supporters prioritized the students’ experience. They wanted the students’ experience to remain true to the ideals of excellence, mutuality, and invitation. While we have no plans to grow the School, and I hope we will not be proposing anything so extreme as we take on the needs of our aging and beautiful home, I also hope we can invoke the courage and vision of the School’s stewards in those early days. It is now our turn, and we must make sure that we do not mistake the emotions of nostalgia or fear in ways that limit our commitment to our SPS DNA and to excellence, mutuality, and invitation.

We have so much to offer a world in need as we work on educating the next generation of citizen leaders. It is important and worthy work — we are grateful for your care, your commitment, and your partnership as we look to guide the School’s evolution into bright and promising days ahead.

Students make sushi in Warren House.

TRUSTEES’ SPRING VISIT

Meetings, fond memories and eyes toward the future

KAREN INGRAHAM

In Chapel on Friday, May 3, Trustee Matthew Baird ’83, P’21 spoke to students about some of the advice he had been given during his time at SPS, including that from Latin and Greek Language Teacher George Tracy. When Baird was struggling with an upcoming midterm exam and feeling failure was imminent, Tracy advised him to pause one night and “look up at the stars,” because no matter what happened the next day, “the stars will still shine tomorrow night.”

Delivered during the Board of Trustees spring meetings, Baird’s message was one of resilience and optimism, and it was met with a standing ovation. Baird is one of three trustees whose service to the board concludes on June 30, along with Noelle Kwok ’98, P’27,’28 and Julian Cheng ’92, P’27,’28, all of whom joined the Board in 2015. In the nine years since, each has contributed meaningfully to bring the School forward through periods of challenge into opportunities for growth. For Baird, it is his work on the Buildings and Grounds Committee that “has been a particular gift,” according to Trustee Tim Steinert ’78, P’21. For Cheng, a member of one of the first three-generation Asian families to attend SPS, it has been his role as a “vital mentor” and a “calm and thoughtful partner,” said Trustee Amachie Ackah ’90, P’28, who also noted Cheng’s leadership in revitalizing the School’s Asia Council and strengthening the SPS community overseas. Board President David Scully ’79, P’21 highlighted Kwok’s knack for “ask[ing] the right question at the right time as we worked toward consensus and understanding around complicated questions,” expressing gratitude for Kwok and her family’s philanthropy to the School over the years, including the creation of the Kwok Café in Friedman Center.

Also during the meetings, the Board offered its thanks to Dean of College Advising Tim Pratt P’15,’18,’21, who leaves

Millville on June 30 after 25 years of service. The Board unanimously approved a Resolution of Thanks that recognized Pratt’s “...outstanding service to the School as a faculty member, administrator, and dean of college advising.” (More on Pratt’s service to the School can be found on pages 8 and 9.)

The two-day agenda included a final vote to approve revised Board governance policies and charters — the outcome of a yearlong effort by the Board and an external consultant to audit and revise existing governance documents and bylaws and draft a new Board Handbook to outline the Board’s fiduciary and governance duties to the School today. Trustees and Rector Kathy Giles also engaged in work on the School’s Comprehensive Campus Plan, facilitated by Philadelphia-based architectural design firm KieranTimberlake. The scope of this work, guided by the School’s mission and Strategic Plan (see sps.edu/about/strategic-plan) includes an in-depth analysis of the student experience, from the grounds and buildings on and within which our students live and learn to current programmatic needs and longer-term strategic priorities. The plan is targeted for completion this fall, and the School will communicate the plan’s emerging priorities with the community as it seeks support to begin work in further elevating the student experience.

The meetings were held during Anniversary Weekend, and Trustees — in reunion cycles or not — participated in the festivities, attending dinners, boat races, Alumni Chapel, the parade and an Excellence in Character and Scholarship alumni panel. Trustees return to Millville for their fall meetings on Sept. 26-28.

Trustee Matthew Baird ’83, P’21 in chapel.

Trustees Julian Cheng ’92, P’27,’28, Henry Ho ’90, P’21,’22 and Amachie Ackah ’90, P’28 take part in the Anniversary Weekend alumni parade down Rectory Road.

THE VIEW FROM HERE

Springtime in Millville means green — and plenty of pink, orange, yellow and blue, too, as students celebrate Holi, the Hindu festival of colors, on Chapel Lawn.

A FOND FAREWELL

Dean of College Advising Tim Pratt moves on after 25 years at the School

JODY RECORD

Tim Pratt has spent much of his life in boarding schools.

His father taught English at Phillips Exeter Academy and Pratt graduated from Exeter before earning a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in English from Middlebury College. When he departs St. Paul’s School at the end of June, he leaves behind a career that spans 35 years at boarding schools, 25 of them at SPS — years of teaching and advising college-bound students that he hopes have made a difference.

The dean of college advising since 2009, Pratt found his way to Millville a decade earlier, hired first as a humanities teacher and boys varsity head hockey coach. In 2004, he became an associate director of college advising; five years later, he became the department’s dean. Prior to SPS, Pratt taught history and English for a combined 10 years at Hebron Academy and Tabor Academy.

“After 15 years in the classroom, I was excited to move into administration,” Pratt says of the change in direction that has defined his past two decades at SPS. “I wanted to maintain positive relationships with students, and when the college advising opportunity presented itself, it felt like

a perfect fit. From my perspective, it has certainly proved to be just that.”

Noting that one constant of college admissions is change, Pratt says that one of the biggest shifts he has witnessed in his 20 years of college advising has come about as a result of COVID-19: a recent growth in application numbers that he describes as massive.

“Since the pandemic and the subsequent decision by many schools to drop their standardized testing requirements, the most selective colleges across the United States have seen applications increase dramatically,” Pratt notes. “Some pools have grown by 30% to 40%. Others have doubled. As a result, acceptance rates have dropped precipitously — some are now below 5% — and students have had to adjust their expectations around the process. Our job has always been to help students find an array of colleges that match their interests and academic profiles and to encourage them to widen their lens. That aspect of the work has become both more challenging and more vital in the past few years.”

To that end, Pratt is quick to highlight the work of his

team of “wonderful and committed colleagues” in the College Advising office, describing himself as “proud of the strides we’ve made in shifting the focus away from a handful of colleges and universities so that students and families appreciate the range of outstanding opportunities there are in higher ed.”

Unsurprisingly, those colleagues are equally quick to turn the praise back to Pratt. Associate Director of College Advising Erin Ainor, who has worked with Pratt for the past 13 years, describes him as an “incredible mentor” who has set the tone for collaboration not only within the office but with students and their parents. “He’s led the way for broader thinking for all of us about what makes for a happy and successful college fit,” Ainor says.

“WHETHER TEACHING, COACHING OR ADVISING, I HAVE ALWAYS TRIED TO BE A POSITIVE SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS AND TO MEET THEM WHERE THEY ARE.”

That particular exercise is one Pratt describes as an extension of what students learn throughout their time at SPS. “We ask them to think critically, to ask essential questions, to research meaningfully, to express themselves authentically and articulately, and to remain open-minded,” he says. “These are all skills they’ve developed by the time they get to us, thanks to the good work done by our faculty.”

Pratt has firsthand knowledge of just how much work the faculty do, and their impact on students. He also knows

COLLEGE SUCCESS

what it’s like to be an SPS parent — two of his three adult sons are SPS graduates. “The experience of being an SPS parent provided me with a rich and different perspective,” he says. “I feel that it helped me develop empathy for our parents and what the experience is like for them, especially with their kids far away. I’d like to think it has made me a better college adviser.”

I n addition to coaching both hockey and squash, Pratt has served as head of house and director of strategic initiatives. He also has been involved in School Year Abroad, including teaching in France for a year at the same school where his father taught decades earlier. He leaves St. Paul’s School for a new position with the Spring Education Group, a California-based pre-K-12 private school network where he will be the director of college advisory, working with college counselors while helping to build the college programs at several high schools the Group plans to launch.

“Whether teaching, coaching or advising, I have always tried to be a positive support for students and to meet them where they are,” Pratt says. “It has been a true privilege to work with so many amazing students and colleagues over the years.”

Form of 2024 College Admissions: A Snapshot

KRISTIN DUISBERG

Even as the ever-more-competitive college admissions landscape continues to evolve, the overall success of St. Paul’s School students in the admissions process remains a constant, thanks both to the rigorous preparation they undertake in the classroom and to the work done by Pratt and his colleagues to broaden their perspective on college fit. Each November, the College Advising Office asks students to complete an interest rating form on which they rate each school to which they plan to apply on a 1-5 scale, with 1 representing a first choice and 2 being a school that “matches me well and (where) I would be extremely happy to attend.” This process allows the college advisers to work with

students to make final adjustments to their lists to ensure they have good-fit schools across the spectrum of selectivity. This year, more than 75% of the Form of 2024 was admitted to a school they had rated as their first choice or as a 1 or 2 on their fall interest form. These numbers are even higher when accounting for the students who made changes to their lists after submitting the interest rating form. Pratt also points to the broad range of schools students will be attending as a marker of their open-minded approach, with 139 Sixth Formers attending 67 different colleges and universities.

In the face of volume-driven increased selectivity at colleges and universities

across the country, 63% of graduating Sixth Formers were admitted to one or more schools with an acceptance rate of 15% or lower, with particularly robust offer numbers at Georgetown, Columbia, the University of California-Berkeley, Brown, Harvard and Yale. This year’s form also includes a Morehead-Cain Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Jefferson Scholar at the University of Virginia, widely regarded as the two most prestigious college-specific merit programs in the United States. While SPS has produced several Morehead-Cain and Jefferson scholars over the years, Pratt notes he can’t recall having a recipient of each in the same year during his tenure.

A Monstrously Good Time

Who says true love can’t be a little bit ghoulish? Certainly not the members of the SPS Theater Company, who brought their talents to bear on the St. Paul’s School spring musical, “The Addams Family,” which portrays a funny and painful night on which two families — one “normal,” one not so much — are brought together by their children’s romance and secret plan to marry.

Staged in Memorial Hall on May 17 and 18, “The Addams Family” featured nearly three dozen Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Formers who sang, danced and acted their way

through a comically disastrous dinner party, supported by the technical expertise of student assistant directors, choreographers, stage managers and more.

The second spring musical in as many years, “The Addams Family” was a show SPS Director of Theater Kirsten McKinney had in her sights for the Theater Company since Fall Term. “I wanted something that would offer a bigger challenge to our principal actors with building true relationships on stage in a musical, and I also wanted the ensemble to have the opportunity to create their own

characters on stage,” McKinney says. “And they did a great job developing the life of all these characters.”

Another thing they did great with? Mastering the complexity of a musical on a compressed timeline. “When directing any show, whether at this level or professional, the formula is two hours of rehearsal time for every minute of stage time, or ideally nine to 10 weeks for a show like this,” McKinney explains. At SPS, the show went on in just seven and a half weeks — to standing ovations from two appreciative crowds.

KRISTIN DUISBERG

ADMISSIONS

SPS Prepares to Welcome Newest Cohort

A competitive 2023-24 admissions process emphasized academic excellence, citizenship and character.

KRISTIN DUISBERG

It’s a process that began in May 2023, when St. Paul’s School hosted its first “Spring Peek” to give prospective students in the 2023-24 application cycle an early look at academics, afternoon programs, athletics and more, and ended in April, when 147 new Third, Fourth and Fifth Formers accepted their offers of admission to SPS.

In the intervening 11 months, members of the Admissions Office conducted 1,621 interviews and read 1,573 applications; hosted four virtual events and traveled to 20 U.S. states and 12 international destinations; and put in countless hours reading, discussing and reflecting on personal essays and teacher recommendations — all in the interest of inviting to the School a group of students who not only were top scholars, citizens, artists and athletes, but also would embody the SPS mission and actively engage with the opportunity to contribute to the greater good. This year’s process proved particularly competitive, with the School able to make offers of admission to just 13% of applicants.

“We are so fortunate to have a robust and talented applicant pool, filled with many students who could thrive at St. Paul’s. The challenge, then, is how to identify the students who will most help us elevate our classes and programs and live into our mission,” says Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Dana Anselmi ’98. “The admissions team feels a deep sense of responsibility to the School, and we take great care in these hard decisions.”

Anselmi’s office admitted fewer applicants than in recent years in part because of the relatively small size of the graduating Form of 2024 and the larger sizes of the rising Fourth through Sixth Forms. The incoming cohort for September includes students from 24 U.S. states and 19 countries and includes among others the Dominican Republic’s pitching ace at the recent Pan Am U18 softball championship tournament in Colombia, a rower who holds a world record, and a passionate climate advocate who has fought for climate action on the national stage. It also includes three pairs of siblings.

Last spring, before the official start of the 2023-24 application cycle, the admissions team surveyed faculty members to help tease out the characteristics that SPS teachers believe will most lead students to success — and also happiness — at SPS. The top responses were clear and reflective of the existing community: kindness, intellectual curiosity and resilience. To that end, Anselmi and the admissions team refined both the applicant es-

say questions and the admissions process to glean more information about academic passions and personal experiences and pursuits.

“We evaluate academic performance and ability, but at least half of our applicants are really strong students who could do the work and do very well,” Anselmi explains. “So, the next level ... is thinking about who embodies the traits that we hear from our faculty are most important for finding success and who has talents that will make an impact on campus.”

Anselmi says she’s excited about the broad range of backgrounds and lived experiences of the students her team admitted. “I cannot wait to welcome them to campus in September,” she says.

HEAR FROM CURRENT STUDENTS WHY THEY SAID YES TO SPS.

FIVE QUESTIONS

WITH Math and Science Teacher Christopher Morse

KRISTIN DUISBERG

Christopher Morse earned his undergraduate degree in inorganic chemistry from Dartmouth College and wrote his doctoral thesis at MIT on synthesis and reactivity of rhenium and technetium polyaryl complexes. At St. Paul’s School, Morse is a popular teacher of chemistry and mathematics who can often be found during lunch in the Friedman Community Center, surrounded by students in avid discussion of subjects ranging from precalculus to game theory. He’s also a puzzlemaster who regularly writes trivia questions for the School’s weekly faculty updates and crafted an eclipsethemed puzzle hunt — a series of 11 puzzles that came together to form a twelfth meta-puzzle — for the more than 450 students and faculty who traveled to northern Vermont in April to view the total solar eclipse.

So, puzzles. Where did that interest begin?

I had a teacher in fourth grade who used to take the puzzles out of old Games magazines and use them as classroom materials, and then I got a subscription for Games magazine myself. That really started it, though I tended to focus on the more logic- and non-word puzzles back then. It was right around the time I went to grad school that I began to realize I actually liked word puzzles, too, and I started doing more crosswords. I used to go to crossword tournaments, but I was never very good. I mean, the problem was all my friends were the biggest crossword people in the world.

You actually mean that literally. Rumor has it you and New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz are rivals.

Not rivals. I’ve known Will Shortz since I was in college and I love what he’s done for the world of puzzles. When I was in grad school, I started doing the MIT mystery hunt, which is the world’s largest puzzle hunt each year, and I joined the National Puzzlers’ League, which is something Will is involved with. For a while, I was the National Puzzlers’ League vice president and Will was the historian, so we saw each other quite a bit. He doesn’t do chitchat, so sometimes he just starts posing puzzles to you.

You have your Ph.D. in chemistry. How did you end up teaching math?

I actually taught college chemistry for about 16 years, first at Tufts and then at Olin College. When I was at Olin, the head of the college had been asked by someone at SPS if he could send a math teacher to review the School’s Math Department, and was like, ‘Well, can I send you a chemist who cares a lot about math instead?’ So 11 years ago, I spent four days here as part of a team who interviewed everyone in the department. Laura Hrasky was the department head at the time, and she and I kept in touch afterward, and one day she sent me an email that basically said, ‘We have a job opening; you should apply.’ I asked if it was in chemistry, and she said no, it’s in math, but we think you can do it. I applied, and they made me the offer while I was here.

Had you planned on becoming a teacher?

I always knew I wanted to be a teacher. I just love all knowledge. In third grade, I used to play “school” after school in the basement and make the neighborhood kids play with me. At the end of the year, teachers would get rid of old copies of worksheets and I literally had a storehouse of things for [my friends] to work on. My dream was always to be wearing the jacket with the fancy elbow patches.

What’s your favorite class to teach?

Mathematical problem solving — it’s my puzzles elective. We start with something called paint by number, and we do Japanese logic puzzles, we do KenKen. ... It’s fun, but it also teaches thinking, working in logical systems, using some of the thought processes you need to do geometric proofs. Every year, there’s someone who wants to be the guesser, to go with their gut feeling, but it doesn’t work that way — there are rules, and you can’t get to the answer without following them. There’s no question that everyone who’s taken the class comes out of it a better, stronger, critical thinker.

Morse (right) with a student in his Advanced Chemistry class.

The St. Paul’s School community heard from a variety of speakers during Spring Term chapels. Here’s just a little of what some of them had to say.

ABDUL REHMAN-MALIK / April 1, 2024

Associate research scholar and lecturer in Islamic Studies at Yale Divinity School

“Ramadan calls us to be heartful. Yet this year, I am finding this call particularly difficult. … In a time of mass death, widespread injustice, climate catastrophe, how do we remain heartful? The Muslim tradition offers some advice. It simply is: Do good. The Prophet Mohammed once said that if the end of time was near and the hour was close and you find yourself with a sapling in your hand, plant it anyway. The blessing is not in its growing; the blessing is in the act of planting.”

REV. DR. KAREN THOMPSON / April 12, 2024

General minister and president of the United Church of Christ

“The Yoruba people, who are from the western part of Africa, have a saying, and what they say is we choose to come; we chose why we came. They say that we decided our purpose, and that once we are born, we forget why we came, and that our lives are spent remembering why we came so that we can live out, and live into, our purpose. A part of our faith journey is self-discovery: The act of remembering who we are, and perhaps why we came.”

DUSTIN BRAUNECK ’99 / May 1, 2024

Director of relationship marketing for the New York City Ballet and founder of the SPS Gay-Straight Alliance

“We’re encouraged to define community by space — a school, a neighborhood, a workplace — [but] that’s too restricted for our modern times. ... I see community in everything. ... We seek people who understand our condition. We generate common interests, which lead to access, enlightenment and opportunity. ... Community is ... the foundation of compassion, how we understand and empathize with other people, and this is one of our greatest tools of peace and happiness.”

RABBI ROBIN NAFSHI / May 6, 2024

Rabbi of Temple Beth Jacob and consulting rabbi for SPS

“During the year I lived in Israel, Yom HaShoah was chilling and overwhelming and remains emblazoned in my mind and on my heart. ... We spent time in our morning chapel offering prayers and memory of the six million who had been murdered, then we headed outside to our courtyard where various people associated with my school told stories of their own survival or that of their parents or grandparents. ... Just before the outdoor program started, the siren blared. It reminded me of air raid sirens I have heard in World War II movies — maybe it’s supposed to — and even though I knew the exact times that it would sound, the blast came as a shock and a call, a call to remember, and a call of never again.”

ZHUQING LI / May 7, 2024

Professor of Chinese historical linguistics and dialectology at Brown University and author of ”Daughters of the Fragrant Flower Garden”

“Sharing [my family’s] story with you within the stunning chapel is an incredible honor for me, but I’m fully aware that this is because my two aunts’ lives in my memoir speak to so many in our time. They speak about how to keep dreams alive and faith close; about how when history’s random power pushes you down to the bottom of the pit, you claw your way out and still find meaning in life.”

CONROY VISITOR

Retired Admiral John Richardson Visits SPS

The Conroy Distinguished Visitor regaled students with tales of his military service from the depths of the seas to the upper echelons of the U.S. government.

KATE DUNLOP

John Richardson, a retired four-star admiral in the United States Navy who served a s the 31st Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), spent Friday, April 19, at St. Paul’s School as the 2023-24 Conroy Distinguished Visitor. A physics major at the U.S. Naval Academy who holds master’s degrees in electrical engineering from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as well as a master’s in national security strategy from the National War College, Richardson sat in on classes, offered remarks during a special chapel held in Memorial Hall and had lunch with students.

In his 37 years of active military duty, Richardson served aboard and commanded nuclear submarines and held a number of other high-level Navy positions. In 2012, President Barack Obama nominated him to serve as the Director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program and in 2015 to the Navy’s top administrative position of CNO. In 2019, Richardson was named a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. He currently serves on the Director’s Council

of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

In Chapel and in a morning session with Third Form Physics First classes taught by Science Teachers Ben MacBride and Rick Pacelli, Richardson shared sea stories that, taken together, tell the tale of a man who advanced not only through intelligence, creativity and dedication to his teams but also through the grace of forgiveness in the form of a few extra chances. Among his career’s high notes were lows that included getting “kicked out twice” from his interview for the submarine force and a training exercise near-mishap that left him thinking he might have to find another path. When he wasn’t fired, he was “super grateful” for the second chance and made the most of it.

It’s apt that forgiveness should play a pivotal role in the life of a man of great faith whose actions are based on three relationships and his vow to each: God, his spouse and the U.S. Constitution. Sporting representations of each (socks with fish, an early Christian symbol; his wedding ring; and a tie spelling out the Preamble in license plates),

Richardson concluded his chapel talk by likening the surface, middle and deep-current strata of the ocean to a person’s connections, creativity and character, respectively, which he says in turn inform their actions, mission and relationships.

“Your character is going to define your relationships,” he said. “St. Paul’s School spends a tremendous amount of time developing elements of character — things like integrity, honesty and empathy. These are the deep currents that will be the foundation for all the decisions you make later. I’ve found that when people struggle, it’s because they haven’t spent enough time understanding their deep currents in their mind and in their spirit to give them the foundation for how they’re going to manage their way through situations.”

Edie Jones ’24 and Colter Sienkiewicz ’24 were on the Memorial Hall stage with Richardson to lead the Q&A portion of the program. Richardson wrapped up his visit with students in Chinese Language Teacher Jenny Li’s Chinese Seminar and Humanities Teacher Josh Duclos’ Political Philosophy class.

The Conroy Distinguished Visitors Program

Established to stimulate and inspire students at St. Paul’s School, to enlarge their view of life, and to suggest directions in which they can serve their country and their communities effectively, the Conroy Distinguished Visitors Program invites outstanding leaders in various fields to the School for discussions, meetings, schoolwide performances and lectures. Conroy Visitors have included poet/author Maya Angelou, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the Chicago Symphony Singers, U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins and three-time Olympic gold medalist Misty May-Treanor, among others.

Richardson speaks to students in their Physics First class.

Former Ambassador Jess Baily ’78 Returns to Millville

The Foreign Service Officer brought a global perspective to chapel and class

KRISTIN DUISBERG

The Honorable Jess Baily ’78, a career Foreign Service Officer whose 35 years of diplomatic experience includes having served as U.S. ambassador to North Macedonia, was in Millville April 16 and 18 to offer his perspective on current events and share some advice on navigating an increasingly complicated and global world.

In a community-wide conversation co-moderated by students Rhys Henrikson ’26 and Isa Martinez ’24, Baily engaged students on developments in American foreign policy; his experiences as ambassador during the ratification of the Prespa Agreement, which led to North Macedonia’s ascension to NATO; and more. During a chapel talk, after cataloguing issues from humanitarian crises in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere to the threats of climate change and the rise of artificial intelligence that he recognized weigh on SPS students as much as they do on him, Baily said, “You’re right to be concerned, and even anxious, but don’t be consumed by it… First, take a deep breath. That always starts you off on a good path. And then pause, and reflect, and understand the challenge at hand. Understand context. And then, crucially, embrace optimism COMMUNITY CONVERSATION

as your modus operandi, with a clear understanding of powers and limitations.”

“EMBRACE OPTIMISM AS YOUR MODUS OPERANDI, WITH A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING OF POWERS AND LIMITATIONS.”

Invoking his training as a historian, Baily then discussed the national and global events that had been the backdrop for his time at SPS in the 1970s — Watergate, the Cold War — and encouraged students to use that as a model for placing current events in a broader context. “But don’t just stop at understanding context,” he said. “As a retired ambassador once told me, don’t just admire problems. Move from the frozen state of despair and adopt optimism as an operating principle. And by optimism … I mean a belief that propels us to work and to seize the power and resources in our possession and address the challenges, even the hardest ones, with a small measure of confidence in progress if not full success.”

D uring his multi-day visit, Baily spoke in chapel twice, met with students over meals and was a guest in the Religion and Ethics class taught by the Rev. Charles Wynder Jr., SPS dean of chapel and spiritual life.

Baily ’78 answers questions posed by Rhys Henrikson ’26 and Isa Martinez ’24.

CLUB NEWS

SPS Rallies for Pickleball Club

Popular sport brings students together for weekend fun, exercise and friendship.

PRIMO LEMMON

On a sunny spring Sunday, while some students enjoyed bagels at Kwok Café and others met up in Ohrstrom Library to study, more than 50 of them packed the outdoor tennis courts — some dressed for a costume contest, others in color-coordinated activewear to match their teammates — to play pickleball. If there is any question that the national craze is alive and well at St. Paul’s School, consider this: nearly 40% of the student body belongs to the SPS Pickleball Club, which offers an opportunity for fun and exercise without the pressure of formal competition, and for those of all experience levels (or none) to play together.

Club co-heads Maude Niemann ’25, Charlotte “Charlie” Voge ’25, Craig Burton ’25 and Kristof Lovegren ’25 are excited about how popular their club — new this academic year — is among their peers. It’s not uncommon for as many as 100 students to show up for open play and tournaments, says Niemann, who enjoys the opportunity to teach others some basic rules of the game so they can jump in right away.

Niemann says the idea for the club came to her after spending every day of her 2023 Spring Vacation playing pickleball with her mother. “I had so much fun

SEE THE PICKLEBALL CLUB IN ACTION.

playing with and meeting new people. I was fascinated by how easy it was to pick up and how so many age groups played,” she says. “It became my new favorite thing … and I wanted to share that joy with SPS.”

With more than 200 students ready to grab their paddles and hit the courts, the Pickleball Club hosted open play on Sundays all three terms this year, as well as tournaments with prizes. Faculty members even join in on occasion. During Winter Term, a tournament was paired with — naturally — a pickle feed with eight flavors of pickles.

Girls hockey coach and Humanities Teacher Kelli Mackey is a casual player and was happy to come aboard as club adviser when Niemann and Voge asked. “A lot of our [hockey] team goes to events and is in the club,” Mackey says. “It’s a great way to meet people if you’re open, and just have fun and break a sweat and enjoy your Sunday off.”

The club ended the year with a student vs. faculty tournament fundraiser that Niemann proudly reports raised $640 for Concord Hospital’s Payson Center for Cancer Care. Mackey says she hopes that in the fall incoming students will see the club as yet another avenue for finding their place in the School community.

JACQUELINE

Students take on teachers in a friendly pickleball game on Rectory Road.

SOLAR ECLIPSE

Totally Worth It

EDIE JONES ’24

On April 8, as the solar eclipse passed through 15 U.S. states, including Vermont and New Hampshire, almost 450 members of the St. Paul’s Community traveled to northern Vermont to witness totality — the moment the moon completely covers the sun. The trip was optional for students and teachers, and everyone was warned that the day could involve [long] hours on the bus and a return to campus past midnight. Even so, the consensus among many students was that this was a oncein-a-lifetime experience, and nearly three-quarters of the student body signed up for the big day.

In chapel that morning, Science Teacher Seth Cohen gave an enthusiastic presentation about why students should be excited for the eclipse. He explained eclipse etiquette (stay off your phones, try to minimize noise during totality that might disturb other eclipse watchers); spoke about how special it was to be in a place where a total eclipse is happening; and described the phenomena everyone should look out for, such as the crescent shadows on the ground and “diamond ring” that would appear around the moon right before totality. Later that day, many students reported that Cohen’s presentation was a crucial reason for their excitement. “I’m actually really, really excited,” said Olivia Hu ’25. “I wasn’t that excited until I heard the chapel, where I learned all those cool things about the eclipse.” Val Barletta ’24 agreed. “Before Dr. Cohen’s presentation, I didn’t know what the eclipse was all about,” she said, “but now I’m really looking forward to it.” After chapel, students loaded onto buses by dorm and began the 150-mile drive to Foote Brook Farm in

Johnson, Vermont, along the path of totality.

At the farm, students spread out onto a grassy field to wait for the eclipse to start. During the hours between arrival and totality, they enjoyed the sunny day off from classes by playing Frisbee, doing homework and solving an eclipse-themed puzzle hunt made by Math Teacher Chris Morse. As the partial eclipse began and the air chilled, the anticipation grew — especially for people who had been waiting for the eclipse for much longer than just the day. Lou Szal ’24 said she had been looking forward to the eclipse since her Fourth Form Astronomy class with Cohen. “I couldn’t believe that I’d be a Sixth Former, and now I’m here,” said Szal. Cohen had been looking forward to the eclipse since he saw the last one to cross the continental U.S., in August 2017. While the official planning process with the School began last year — and Cohen said the administration was supportive from day one — he had begun thinking about the trip almost seven years ago.

At 3:27 p.m., the eclipse reached totality. As the St. Paul’s group saw the last sliver of the sun disappear behind the moon, the eclipse etiquette learned in chapel was forgotten. As the air turned cold and an eerie afternoon sunset fell in every direction, there was screaming, jumping, cheering and crying, and everyone took off their glasses and looked at the hole in the sky. As soon as the sky brightened and the three minutes of awe were over, students began packing up to head back to campus while chattering about what they had just seen, describing the eclipse as “other-wordly,” the “most beautiful thing they’d ever seen” and “life-changing.”

Cohen deemed the day a huge success: the snow had melted, the ground was dry, the weather was perfect and the logistics ran smoothly. “It was as close to perfect, as I could’ve hoped,” he said. Heavy traffic on the drive back to Concord meant some unlucky students endured a nine-hour bus ride and sleepy classes the following day, but even they said it was all worth it.

TAKING THEIR TALENTS TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Thirty-nine student-athletes in the Form of 2024 representing 14 sports will continue competing in college at the Division I, II and III levels. It’s the largest number of graduating student-athletes who have placed into collegiate athletic programs in recent memory. “These young individuals ... have demonstrated exceptional dedication, talent and perseverance throughout their athletic careers,” says SPS Athletic Director Chris Smith. “Their accomplishments not only reflect their individual talents but also speak volumes about the support and guidance they have received from their coaches, teammates, families and our entire school community.” Thirty-four student-athletes are pictured here; scan to read about all 39 and their college destinations.

ATHLETICS

A Member of the Big Red Goes Orange Grant Winter ’24 will

play football at Syracuse University

IAN ALDRICH

Grant Winter’s earliest football memory is a revealing one. He was in second grade, playing fullback on his local Pop Warner team, when he caught a screen pass and burst past most of the defense for a long run that nearly resulted in a touchdown.

“It was just this amazing feeling to make that play,” says the Form of 2024 graduate. “And then also the camaraderie of my teammates afterwards. It just felt very special.”

This fall, Winter will carry that memory with him — along with his 6’3, 255-pound frame — to Syracuse University. He’ll play as a defensive end for the Orange, who compete in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), one of Division I college football’s elite Power Five conferences. A three-year member of the SPS football

program, Winter will follow in the footsteps of several recent high-caliber St. Paul’s football recruits including Parker McQuarrie ’20 (UCLA), Jonathan Saklad ’19 (Wake Forest) and Ezechiel Tieide ’18 (Boston College).

“I’m excited,” Winter says. “It’s a big program; they play in a big stadium, so I’ll be playing in front of 50,000 people. So obviously there’s going to be a big difference from St. Paul’s.”

But Winter feels prepared. It helps that he comes from a family of athletes and coaches. “I grew up around a lot of good athletes, and ever since I was young I had that Division I goal,” he says.

His time at St. Paul’s School also pushed the dream forward. Winter arrived in the fall of 2021 as a Fourth Former, hungry to be a part of a stronger football pro-

gram and more challenging academics.

“We play in a really strong league, against really good competition,” says Winter, who anchored the School’s defensive line and played offensive tackle and some tight end. “I got the chance to play against other Power Five [recruits] and I think that’s what helped me get the offer from Syracuse.”

But his path required plenty of hard work off the field, too. He cataloged highlight clips of his play and posted them on social media for college coaches to review. There also were letters he wrote to football programs that outlined both his academic and athletic attributes. His outreach eventually caught the attention of newly hired Syracuse head coach Fran Brown, who is looking to rebuild the program after several sub .500 seasons.

At Syracuse, Winter will enroll at the university’s highly regarded S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where he hopes to continue to leverage the creative skills he developed at SPS.

“It’s been a fun experience,” he says of SPS academic pursuits that have included humanities, German and a range of art classes. “But I think it’s also helped me for what’s next. ... I’ve really had to learn how to prioritize

and organize my time. At Syracuse the days are going to be long — football is like a full-time job there — but I’ll know I’ll be ready.”

And thousands of Orange fans will be ready to root him on.

Winter puts pressure on an opposing quarterback during a 2023 game.

The SPS Endowment Explained

A history of generous philanthropy has provided the foundation on which St. Paul’s School has built excellence for generations of students. Go inside the endowment and learn how it is managed, what it funds (and what it doesn’t), and why gifts from both the past and present are essential investments in the School’s future.

KAREN INGRAHAM

In 1859, three years after St. Paul’s School opened, founder George C. Shattuck made a gift of $10,000 to the School, calling it the “Founder’s Scholarship.” On the deed of gift, he stipulated two restrictions: one on the principal, which “shall be always kept invested in some proper manner… ,” and the second on the fund’s income, directing it “to be expended for at least two scholarships… .”

That endowed fund, the first monetary gift recorded by the School and since renamed the “Founder’s Financial Aid Funds,” has a fair market value today of more than $1 million, and its revenue continues to be distributed as directed by Dr. Shattuck. It is one of nearly 800 funds that comprise the School’s endowment, valued at $747 million as of April 30, 2024.

This tradition of reinvesting in our students was further consolidated on June 26, 1906, when the Alumni Association “voted to raise an Endowment Fund to commemorate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the School; such Fund to be a permanent one for the general endowment of the School.” Third Rector Henry Ferguson recorded this vote in his Report of the Endowment Committee, indicating that the formal work to fund School operations and assure the long-term health of the institution through an investment strategy had begun. Since then,

... the Board balances the spending needs of today against the goal of maintaining the endowment’s purchasing power over time to ensure it will provide a financial foundation to the School for generations to come.

the endowment has grown substantially, thanks to over a century of generous, intergenerational investment in the School’s excellence by hundreds of alumni and families. Of the hundreds of funds that comprise the endowment, only five have principal values (the original amount of the donation) of $5 million or greater, demonstrating the collective power of many smaller gifts accumulating value over time.

THE ENDOWMENT TODAY

Today, earnings from the “general endowment” provide the largest source of revenue for St. Paul’s School (54%). Other revenue sources include tuition (34%) and annual gifts to the SPS Fund (10%). Invested as a single pool of assets, the general endowment serves the School well in the short and long term by providing consistent annual financial support while ensuring long-term stability and growth from which to draw on in future years. To serve these dual purposes requires careful management, and the School’s assets have been the purview of its Board of Trustees since the governing body first convened in 1855 in the front parlor of Dr. Shattuck’s house.

SPS Board members are the legal fiduciaries of the general endowment, along with members of the School’s Investment Committee — a group of current and former trustees, alumni and SPS administrators who oversee the School’s investment strategy with the goal of longterm growth of the assets. The Board defines the School’s endowment spending policy, determining what portion of the endowment is paid out as an annual distribution to support the School’s budget every year. Importantly, what is paid out is not the principal of the endowment but rather a small portion of its appreciated fair market value — ranging from 4% and 5%, though the exact number each year is determined based on a three-year rolling average of the general endowment’s fiscal year value. (In fiscal year 2022-23, the endowment payout rate was 4.85%.) Equally important, even in years of particularly robust market performance, the School never spends all of the endowment’s investment earnings; instead, any amount earned above the 4% to 5% annual “draw” remains invested in the endowment for its continued growth. In determining the annual distribution, the Board balances the spending needs of today against the goal of maintaining the endowment’s purchasing power over time to ensure it will provide a financial foundation to the School for generations to come.

The Investment Committee targets a return that exceeds inflation plus annual spending each year. To achieve this result, the School’s investment strategy balances growth-

oriented investing with portfolio diversification across a wide variety of industries, geographies and asset classes to mitigate risk and enhance returns; active management to create incremental value; and the liquidity necessary to ensure downside protection in times of market and economic stress. The underlying principle is that growth investments offer superior revenue and earnings potential that will drive a larger increase over time. To ensure active management, in April 2022, St. Paul’s School engaged Partners Capital to provide the School and the Board of Trustees with full-time oversight of the endowment portfolio allocations, investment opportunities and liquidity needs all within the strategic investment objectives of the School. “Outsourcing the function of a chief investment officer is an excellent alternative for schools not seeking to build their own internal investment office,” Chief Financial and Administrative Officer Brooks Seay says. “With over $50 billion in assets under management, Partners Capital is known for its ability to successfully manage sophisticated pools of assets, recognizing the importance of preservation of capital, purchasing power parity and meeting liquidity needs while generating a sufficient return on investment.”

DESIGNATED SPENDING

“Here on the grounds, we experience every single gift as an investment or reinvestment in the excellence of the experience of our students,” Rector Kathy Giles says. “Every gift matters. Many people marvel at the size of our endowment, and yes, mission-directed giving over the last century-plus has created incredible resources for our School. An endowment, however, is not a bank account, and ours is highly restricted — with gifts aligning with donors’ interests and wishes so that the gifts support specific programs rather than immediate needs.”

When Edward S. Harkness, Form of 1893, drew up his estate plans prior to his death in 1940, he included a gift to the School in the amount of $1.1 million, about 90% of which was designated to be used for the School’s “general purpose.” A smaller restricted fund also was established, with about $100,000 going to a maintenance fund for the New Study Building, now known as Schoolhouse — home to the Languages and Humanities Departments. Today, the combined market value of Harkness’ gift is $25.6 million (as of Dec. 23, 2023), a sizable contribution to the student experience and an incredible testament to the equation of generosity plus time equaling an enduring legacy that changes lives in service to the greater good.

The Edward S. Harkness Fund is one of 15 planned gifts with principal values of $1 million or greater that represent 28% of the endowment, or approximately $200 million of its market value. These gifts span nearly a century of philanthropy — the first gift recorded in 1925

and the most recent in 2020 — and are cornerstones to the School community’s ability to thrive and excel in the 21st century.

Approximately 77% of the endowment is made up of restricted funds — the designations of which cannot, without the approval of the donor or their representative, be allocated for other School priorities or areas of emerging need. The remainder of the endowed funds (23%) are Boarddirected — gifts designed to provide School leadership and the Board of Trustees with the flexibility to choose where to invest the funds’ annual payouts — such as operational priorities, financial aid and capital investments.

Examples of what individual endowed fund payouts support each year are numerous — including several represented in the pages of this Horae. Retired Navy Admiral John Richardson, the country’s 31st Chief of Naval Operations, spent two days on grounds as the year’s Conroy Distinguished Visitor (page 14), thanks to the endowed speakership for which the program is named. The hit production of “The Addams Family” spring musical, which debuted in May (page 10), drew support from funds like the Greve Fund for the Performing Arts and the deWilde Family Theatre Fund. Dedicated teachers (and puzzle masters) like Science and Math Teacher Chris

Returning Sheldon to Students

When Leslie and the late Hans Fleischner reflected on their sons’ time at SPS, they recalled the importance of Sheldon Library as a destination for Chris ’89 and David ’91 after classes — one of the primary meeting and gathering spots for students in the center of campus, brightly lit at night. That changed in 1991 when Ohrstrom Library opened and Sheldon was repurposed to house the Admissions Office. A few years ago, the Fleischners asked Rector Kathy Giles about how they might make a gift to enhance the experience of students.

It was a fortuitous question. Giles, School leadership, and the Board of Trustees had been in discussion about relocating the Admissions Office to a site closer to the School’s entrance, to provide a more accessible welcome center for prospective families that also would serve as a much-needed event and meeting space for the entire community. Simultaneously, students were needing more space, as both the Ohrstrom Library and Friedman Community Center were increasingly packed at night.

Thanks to the Fleischner family’s subsequent leadership gift, the Admissions Center that will bear their name is under construction next to the Lindsay Center for Mathematics and Science, with a target opening in January 2025. When that occurs, Sheldon will indeed be returned to student life, with plans underway to provide academic and peer tutoring support in that space, as well as faculty office hours and club and affinity group meeting spaces.

“When Sheldon is returned to student use, the lights will be on in the center of campus every night,” Giles notes. “The Fleischner family’s generosity in making the lead gift for the Admissions Center will make possible a multi-pronged, on-mission effort that will strengthen the School for our current and future students.”

SCAN FOR MORE ABOUT THE FLEISCHNER CENTER

Gifts made to support financial aid, compensation and benefits, arts, athletics, and everything funded through our operating budget are reinvestments in the excellence of the student experience ... “ ”

Morse (page 12) are supported by Board-directed funds as well as restricted funds for faculty and academic support, like the John S. Schweppe Fund for Support of Excellence in the Sciences and the The Ernest duPont, Jr. Fund in Support of the Sciences. And student-athletes like the 39 college recruits from the Form of 2024 (page 18) benefit from funds like the Baker Fund for Physical Education.

“Gifts made to support financial aid, compensation and benefits, arts, athletics, and everything funded through our operating budget are reinvestments in the excellence of the student experience for which we stand,” Giles says. “Very few young people live and learn and grow together with the kinds of opportunities with which our students engage, and principal among them is the invitation to integrate their intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual growth as they come of age in a complex and challenging world. There is nothing more important than investing in the education of children, the next generation of citizens and leaders, and nothing more generous than investing in those children even when you know you will never meet them, and they will never know who you are.”

As Board President David Scully ’79, P’21 states in the accompanying piece, “the endowment is doing all that it can” to provide the kind of SPS experience for students today that generations of alumni have enjoyed, and that future students also will experience thanks to the community’s rich history of philanthropy and the careful stewardship of those investments. The question becomes how to augment the endowment draw to advance the School’s position of strength as a fully residential school committed to the pursuit of excellence in character and scholarship, in service to the greater good.

A Call to action

Building

the SPS we need for the 21st century

DAVID SCULLY ’79, P’21, SPS Board of Trustees President

Our long-term investment strategy for the endowment has enabled St. Paul’s School to offer generations of students a transformative experience at one of the few remaining 100% boarding high schools in the United States. Now we seek to carry forward our unique values and community ethos to position SPS as a 21st-century destination for student leaders preparing to pursue careers in service to the greater good. The question of how to fund the School’s ongoing needs has become pressing. Rising costs and aging buildings create an even greater sense of urgency. Our School community has met this challenge before, and I am confident we will do so again now.

“It is not a question of whether the School is operating at a deficit or holding its own, but whether or not it has the resources to do the job it thinks it should and must in the years ahead. Right now, St. Paul’s is dead center financially, and to the extent that its destiny depends upon educational and physical development, its financial resources must be augmented.” — Campaign statement 1956 Centennial Fund for SPS

In FY23, the total annual endowment draw was $32.2 million — with 36%, or $11.6 million, going to financial aid that was awarded to more than one-third of the student body. The average award was nearly 90% of tuition. The balance was spent on faculty support and academic programs, and general operating expenses such as insurance, utilities, dining and facilities — in essence, all the costs involved to sustain our 2,000-acre campus community with 540 students, 325 staff and 119 buildings and residences.

The SPS endowment is a huge competitive advantage for the School. In recent years, many high schools have experienced tremendous strain on their operating budgets, compelling them to raise tuition well above the rate of inflation.

The actual cost of educating a student at SPS is $130,000 per year — St. Paul’s is really a high-tech campus masquerading as a bucolic New England village. The strength of our

endowment combined with generous annual support from alumni and parents have enabled SPS to hold tuition at nearly half this cost ($68,353 for fiscal year 2025). To put this in context, several of our peers with less financial means have already seen tuition levels rise above $80,000.

“Will the work still live? Will the flame of this sanctuary still be kept up?”

— Dr Henry August Coit 25th Anniversary Sermon, 1881

First Rector Dr. Coit made these remarks with his students in mind, for the community they were building together. One year later, he offered the beginning of an answer, tasking a committee of alumni to raise funds for a new chapel, because the original Chapel of St. Paul was already too small for the growing student body. Six years later, Rector Coit sat in the new Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul for its dedication, surrounded by “a crowd of alumni … the most numerous that had ever returned to the school at one time,” according to St. Paul’s historian August Heckscher II ’32.

Our peer schools have made significant investments in facilities to expand their offerings in performing arts as well as math and science. SPS is fortunate to have the Lindsay Center, a state-of-the-art facility for STEM disciplines that opened to students in 2011. Our last major investment in performing arts occurred nearly 50 years ago with the construction of the dance and music buildings in 1980, and Memorial Hall is nearly 75 years old. Our dining staff operate in Coit, working in kitchens that are more than 60 years old.

As the School approaches its 175th anniversary in 2031, we are actively planning how best to continue nurturing “the flame of this sanctuary.” The current Strategic Plan, released in November 2022, outlines a set of Guiding Principles enabling the mission to “educate students to build purposeful lives in service to the greater good.” Since fall 2023, the Board of Trustees and Rector Kathy Giles have been developing a comprehensive campus

plan for St. Paul’s School with Philadelphia architectural firm KieranTimberlake. Once completed (anticipated January 2025), the plan will outline a comprehensive 25-year framework grounded in tradition, aligned with core values, and flexible enough to adapt to an evolving future. In short, it will guide us on what to tear down, what to renovate and what to build new.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the endowment’s support of excellence at St. Paul’s School. With 92% of the endowment made up of gifts with principal values of less than $1 million, the power of the community’s generosity over time has been extraordinary. This is also a testament to the effect of compounding. The endowment is worth $747 million today. Acorns really grow into oak trees.

As we look to the future and think about our capital needs, it is important to recognize the endowment is doing all that it can. The annual draw (typically 4% to 5%) is fully allocated to the operating budget, and we do not want to eat into its principal to pay for new investments, reducing its permanent stream of income.

We are excited to share the new comprehensive campus plan with alumni and parents. We will need to raise new money to bring it to life, and this will be a big lift. We will need the generosity of alumni and parents to source major gifts. We are also keen to leverage crowdfunding techniques to enable all alumni and parents, regardless of means, to help us reinvest in excellence at SPS. We are all in this together, and we need everyone to grab an oar and help pull.

The Board of Trustees and I are honored to lead this effort in partnership with Rector Giles and her administrative team, and on behalf of every student and adult who is a member of our special SPS community. SPS is thriving, and its best days are ahead! Onward!

writing their way

The long literary careers of three alumnae artists have taken some exciting new turns.

JANA F. BROWN

In December 2023, Heid E. Erdrich ’82 was named the inaugural poet laureate of Minneapolis, the city where she’s lived since 2008. A month later, Janice Y.K. Lee ’90 saw the TV version of her 2016 novel “The Expatriates” come to life on Amazon Prime Video — the same month that the curtain went up at Philadelphia’s Arden Theater on “Ladysitting,” a play by Lorene Cary ’74 based on her 2019 novel of the same name. Three of the many St. Paul’s School graduates who have gone on to successful and rewarding literary careers, these alumnae are enjoying an eventful year that is seeing their past work bear new fruit — and lead to new artistic opportunities.

MEET THE NEW POET LAUREATE

Heid Erdrich likes to joke that she’s the “busiest person I know who doesn’t have a job.” It’s a facetious comment because Erdrich actually has more jobs simultaneously than some people have in a lifetime.

A renowned poet, teacher, editor, researcher, curator and mother of two, in her “free” time, Erdrich chaired the panel of poetry judges for the 2023 National Book Awards. She has a chapbook of poetry due out in October and is considering a winter teaching gig in Montana. And then there’s her appointment as the inaugural poet laureate of Minneapolis.

“I’m trying to dial it back significantly,” Erdrich says in earnest, “but I love it.”

Erdrich did not have a chance to dial it back when it came to her work selecting finalists for the National Book Awards. Between April and November last year, when the winners were announced, she and four other judges reviewed nearly 300 books submitted in the poetry category. “Books arrived in my mail in alarmingly increasing volume through June,” Erdrich says. “I warned my mail carrier, and we agreed he should bring only two full mail tubs a week for his back’s sake.”

While she continues to fill many roles, at heart Erdrich is a poet. She has published six collections of her work —

so far — from her distinct Native American perspective. Born in Minnesota, Erdrich spent her early life on the campus of a federally operated boarding school in North Dakota, where her parents were employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Erdrich’s mother was a member of the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Band of Chippewa Indians, one of the consortium of tribes that ran the school. With strict limits on TV time at home, Erdrich and her six siblings became avid readers. While her mother was a visual artist who taught her to sew and paint, Erdrich’s father consumed and recited poetry throughout his life and encouraged his children to memorize and perform poems for him.

“It was not an enriched environment like we think of now,” Erdrich recalls, “except it was rich in creative, silent time.”

Erdrich’s path to St. Paul’s School was entirely self-motivated, but triggered by her oldest sister, Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist Louise Erdrich. Though it wasn’t always the case, the Erdrich sisters now live near one another in Minneapolis, and they talk about their work on a regular basis. Their grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was the Turtle Mountain tribal chair, and wrote histories of the Ojibwe people. Another sister, Lise, is also a published author, while sister Angie is a doctor and children’s book illustrator.

“ There always have been a few writers in the family,” Erdrich says. “Louise and I take walks and talk about work

Erdrich with "Original Local," her 2019 homage to Indigenous ancestors and living relatives in stories, photos and recipes.

all the time now. For decades, we never discussed writing, then she started sending me manuscripts, and occasionally she would come to a reading and I would show her my poems.”

It was Louise who told her younger sister about A Better Chance, a program that offers pathways for young people of color to attend secondary schools. Erdrich remembers informing her parents that she was going to apply for a scholarship, and taking the necessary steps to fulfill application requirements. Her mother and father knew Erdrich wanted to study in a place where she could excel academically, creatively and socially, so they wholeheartedly supported the plan.

“Never in my wildest dreams did it occur to me that an important part of my life would center on New England,” Erdrich says.

At SPS, Erdrich contributed to the student literary journal Horae Scholasticae and served as editor one year, though her first writing was published in the magazine of the Institute of American Indian Arts. Erdrich distinctly recalls the thrill of picking up a copy of the publication from her mailbox at the SPS Post Office. She found a home in the Poetry Society at St. Paul’s, joy in reciting poems in chapel, and engagement in discussing writers and their works around the Harkness table.

“I didn’t think I was going to be a poet at first,” admits Erdrich, who studied English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. “I thought I would write children’s books; that was my dream. I started writing poetry around the time I got to St. Paul’s. I had teachers who helped me build my interest in it, and I felt completely supported.”

In her not-so-spare time, Erdrich has become a trusted instructor herself, first at Johns Hopkins University and the University of St. Thomas, and more recently for a term back at Dartmouth, where she developed a special course focused on Native women and creativity to celebrate the 50th anniversary of coeducation at the college. One of Erdrich’s favorite professional endeavors is giving writing workshops in Native communities, including her mother’s Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, where Erdrich is an enrolled member. She serves on the board of Indigenous Nations Poets, an organization that supports Native American writers through fellowships and retreats.

“The poets get to spend a week with a mentor, go to various sessions, meet their peers, and develop opportunities with the guidance of more established poets,” she explains.

In addition to writing from her own perspective as a Native woman, Erdrich continues to promote the voices of others. In 2018, Graywolf Press published “New Poets of Native Nations,” an Erdrich-edited collection featuring 21 emerging Native American poets. The tome has become a teaching tool, replacing similar — but outdated — volumes that go as far back as the 1980s. Erdrich also has become a champion of Native artists through thoughtful curatorial efforts, most recently producing “Boundless,” an exhibition at Amherst College’s Mead

Museum, for which Erdrich spearheaded the curation of creative literary and visual works.

“The exhibit is a combination of the archives and special collections of Native American literature at Amherst College and the visual art of the Mead Museum,” Erdrich explains. “I gathered an advisory committee to make sure I had the input of those closest to indigenous people near Amherst. Consequently, there was a lot of inclusion of rare and historic literature by Massachusetts indigenous people.”

The “Boundless” exhibit continues through July 6, and Erdrich is hard at work editing a companion publication that will be accessible both as a printed book and an online edition.

But before she takes a true pause from her many commitments, Erdrich will spend much of 2024 completing a project for her role as Minneapolis’ poet laureate. For that, she will conduct a series of poetry listening sessions in different parts of the city, focusing on residents who live near the Dakota sacred sites, geography that’s significant to the state’s first inhabitants.

“I grew up in a Dakota village, and I’ve come here and made my home,” she says. “I wanted to honor that by having public events and recording what folks have to say about the role of poetry in their community. My hope is that collecting voices from different quadrants, putting them together in a video, and installing that as public art will help spread a unifying message about the land we live on and how we encounter that through our differences.”

Her packed schedule does not leave a lot of time for respite, but Erdrich isn’t concerned.

“I love what I do,” she says, “and feel lucky that these wonderful things keep coming to me.”

“ ”

I started writing poetry around the time I got to St. Paul’s. I had teachers who helped me build my interest in it, and I felt completely supported.

— Heid Erdrich

A STORY GETS THE STAR TREATMENT

Sometime in 2017, Janice Lee ’90 received a call from her agent, who had news regarding Lee’s New York Times bestselling novel, “The Expatriates.”

“She said, ‘Nicole Kidman wants to buy your book,’” Lee recalls. “I guess when [Kidman] options something, she does really try to make it. There are lots of things that get optioned but never get made, so it was just thrilling.”

Nearly seven years later, the TV version of Lee’s original story premiered on the small screen as the six-episode limited series “Expats,” starring Kidman, Sarayu Blue and Ji-young Yoo as a trio of American expatriates living in Hong Kong. In the years between acquisition and production, filmmaker Lulu Wang signed on as director. While it’s not common practice in Hollywood to invite the novelist into the writer’s room, Wang enlisted Lee to collaborate on the project.

“I give [Lulu] credit for that, because a lot of people don’t want the writer in the room since they think your vision might not align with theirs,” says Lee, whose debut novel, “The Piano Teacher,” also was a New York Times bestseller. “I think it’s only artists of enormous ability that have the confidence to include many voices, and that was my experience with her.”

As part of a five-woman writers' room, Lee was credited as the author of the series’ sixth and final episode. Even with all of her professional experience, writing for television was a new pursuit, and she was grateful for the opportunity to learn about the medium. With in-person

collaboration replaced by Zoom during the pandemic, Lee was impressed by the fortitude of Wang, Kidman and others to finish the subsequent production and filming process at such a challenging time.

Beyond creating the original characters and narrative that inspired the television adaptation, Lee’s role in the production was complete once the scripts were locked. Because much of the series was set in Hong Kong, which mandated a multi-week quarantine during COVID-19, Lee was only able to visit the set briefly when the series shifted to Los Angeles. She never imagined her story as a novel, so seeing her characters spring to life through somebody’s else’s eyes — with select dialogue plucked directly from her novel — was an experience that both “thrilled and flattered” Lee.

“I didn’t envision [“The Expatriates”] as a show,” Lee says. “They’re not the same thing at all, but you can feel the DNA running through them. I’m the mother of my novel, and [Lulu’s] the mother of the show, so we’ve made things that are related like cousins. I feel lucky because she really got the spirit of the novel.”

As in its book format, the “Expats” series explores themes that bind the characters together, from guilt and grief to purpose and social status and more. In writing the initial story, Lee set out to examine female relationships and motherhood, based on her own experience of living in Hong Kong while her four children were young.

“When you’re an expat,” she says, “you form very close relationships with people who are not displaced, but who

Lee in Hong Kong, the setting for her novel "The Expatriates" and the series based on it, "Expats." AMANDA

are there in that temporary environment with you. The show explores those things in a different way … but I thought they came through beautifully.”

In both formats, Margaret grapples with adjusting to cultural norms in Hong Kong while contemplating her purpose, her situational loss of personal career goals, and, most profoundly, the disappearance of her young son, Gus. That inciting incident emerged from Lee’s experience of losing one of her own children for a few traumatic minutes years ago. Writing about such a sad event “spooked” Lee, and she put “The Expatriates” away for several months because she “didn’t want to call this into the world.” But she eventually followed that unsettling kernel, imagining what would happen if those few minutes became forever. “If that happens to you, how do you live?” she wondered at the time. “I was exploring that, and it’s a very uncomfortable place to be.”

Once the character of Margaret is in that unenviable position, the story begins to unveil the depth of friendship and understanding, both from the perspective of Margaret and her husband, Clarke, and from those whose lives also are impacted by the incident. The concept of grief levels led to a discussion in the writers’ room about the way people tend to rank pain. In the final telling, Lee was impressed by Kidman’s skillful portrayal of Margaret’s complex emotions, and the way in which the Academy Award-winning actress was able to bring humanity and meaning to the character.

Lee is in the early stages of developing an outline for a new novel, but the chance to emerge from the solitary life of a novelist to collaborate with other creative minds in television is something she would gladly embrace again. For now, she’s grateful to everyone who helped shepherd “Expats” on its journey from book to screen.

“ To have artists like Nicole Kidman and Lulu Wong translate the vision was a privilege,” Lee says. “When you write a novel, that’s your artistic vision, and then when you sign it away to someone to make a movie or TV show, you’re signing up to accept their vision. With that lens in mind ... I loved the end product they gave to the world.”

PUTTING THE PERSONAL ON STAGE

When “Black Ice,” the critically acclaimed memoir of her years at St. Paul’s School, was released in 1991, Lorene Cary had one hope.

“ The initial run was 7,500 copies, and all I kept thinking was, ‘Please, let that sell out so I can get a contract to write another book,’” Cary recalls. “And then people wrote me letters because they had read it and wanted to talk to me about it. [And] I thought, ‘I don’t want to talk to anybody about this. I didn’t even really want you to read it.’”

In the more than three decades that have passed since the book’s release, “Black Ice” has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and is required reading at many schools. Over the course of her career as an author, educator and social activist, Cary has flashed her writing skills in many genres, from fiction to opera to plays. But until the 2019 publication of “Ladysitting: My Year with Nana at the End of Her Century,” she had not felt the pull to explore the personal exposure of memoir again.

E arly in 2024, Cary’s recollections of caring for her grandmother in the last 18 months of her 101 years were brought to life in a production staged by the Arden Theatre in Cary’s native Philadelphia. Cary wrote (“and rewrote again and again”) the play version, transforming her experience into a stage version of the emotions and characters she had lived. But asked how it feels to see her memories come to life through performance, Cary pauses.

“It’s like asking, ‘How’s it been walking around with no skin on?’” she says. “It’s beyond walking around naked; it’s like somebody takes off the skin and then the wind blows. It was like the first time doing a reading of ‘Black Ice’ and realizing that people wanted to talk about it. Seeing the play in the theater after a month of rehearsal readies one to see life turn into art. You keep company with others who face end-of-life with loved ones. I hear them laugh … and then hear them sobbing.”

Although she previously had been commissioned to write “My General Tubman,” a play exploring the life of abolitionist Harriet Tubman that premiered at the Arden Theatre in early 2020, Cary had not intended to turn “Ladysitting” into a live-action story. Concerned about how the theater would survive the COVID-19 shutdown (including the last five performances of “My General Tubman”), the venue’s artistic director approached Cary about adapting “Ladysitting” for the stage to help revive the Arden after an extended dormancy. She had previously turned the memoir into a 30-minute opera, so did not anticipate any difficulties reimagining it once again.

It’s been 15 years since Alumni Horae first profiled the writing career of Lee, a member of the St. Paul’s School Board of Trustees from 2013 to 2022, following the 2009 publication of her debut novel, “The Piano Teacher.” Read about that New York Times bestselling work, and Lee’s own journey from apologetic writer to confident novelist in this excerpt from the fall 2009 Horae.

“I said I’d be happy to,” Cary says, “But I had no idea how difficult that would be. I’ve rewritten the whole thing over and over, particularly after listening to actors read it around the table. And then, once the designer makes a wonderful set that is not our home, once the music is put in, once the director has come in and said, ‘I have a vision,’ by the time it gets to the stage, it’s no longer me; it’s a character I’ve written based on my experiences.”

As to why she chose to write about the year she spent caring for Nana at the end of her life, Cary points to the preface of “Ladysitting,” where she recounts childhood weekends at her grandmother’s home. There she “traveled with a sun patch across the floor of the suburban New Jersey neo-colonial, and soaked in more light and lux than my parents’ West Philadelphia apartment could ever offer.” Weekends at Nana’s meant being spoiled, and Cary glowed in her grandmother’s affection. Cary explains that she felt compelled to write about Nana — her stubbornness, her feistiness, her vanity, how she drove herself to work until the age of 94, how she was relentlessly independent, and how profoundly she feared death. Her fierce autonomy came with a refusal to leave her beloved home, despite her growing need for assistance — which Cary provided, though doing so was at times immensely challenging.

“I couldn’t just live it and then go on,” Cary explains. “There are some parts of life that I have to examine more deeply … For this one, the only form I could do it in was memoir, and it felt to me like my own need for selfrediscovery, but also for honesty to readers. Fiction is about truth, but memoir is about truth and honesty.”

While Cary remained at the Arden through the first two weeks of rehearsal, and returned in the last week to give final notes, the stage version of “Ladysitting” reflected the vision of director Zuhairah McGill and the portrayals of Cary’s “characters” by Trezana Beverley (Nana), Monet Debose (Cary’s daughter, Zoë), Melanye Finister (Cary) and David Ingram (Cary’s husband,

Bob). There also was an additional character that Cary created for the stage that wasn’t in her memoir — Death, a shapeshifter played by Brian Anthony Wilson who even takes the form of Nana’s father.

“I made Death a character because you have to externalize the thing, which is Nana’s fear of Death, her fighting against Death, her having no company in her generation anymore, no siblings, no parents, no best friends, no husband,” Cary explains. “So Death keeps her company and talks to her with compassion and firmness. Nana breathes her last breath, and then Death comes back and holds her hand.”

“Ladysitting” enjoyed a successful run at the Arden from Jan. 28 to March 10, including a Feb. 15 performance attended by a large group of SPS alumni. Cary plans to shop the play to other companies at the end of her term of teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.

At one time, just meeting the challenge of writing the memoir in the first place would have been enough to satisfy her. Now, though, Cary finds that telling the story of her time with Nana has redirected her thinking.

“It made me more certainly mortal,” she says. “I’m at the stage of life where I say, ‘How do I orient myself toward death? What do I think? How do I feel? How do I accept it?’ You get this life in this moment, and you get the opportunity to give and receive love. You either use that opportunity, or you mess it up.”

It’s an opportunity Cary has used well, much as Lee and Erdrich have done with opportunities of their own.

"Ladysitting" is the second play by Cary to be staged at Philadelphia's Arden Theater.

ELIOT HOUSE

Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. ’53 and Constantine A. Valhouli johnfinleybook.com, 2024

“Where else but Harvard would you find the grandson of Matisse, the grandson of Joyce and the great-great-grandson of God?”

In the 1950s, Eliot House master and classics professor John Finley made that remark to a New York Times reporter in reference to a dormitory suite that housed Paul Matisse, Stephen Joyce and Sadruddin Aga Khan, a lineal descendant of the prophet Mohammed. The line brought considerable attention to a college residence that would ultimately become known as “more Harvard than Harvard itself,” home over the decades to a cast of characters that included composer Leonard Bernstein, journalist Ben Bradlee and Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox ’30. Poet Frank O’Hara roomed with writer-illustrator Edward Gorey and played Bernstein’s piano with art critic John Ashbery. Beat poet Gregory Corso, not even a Harvard student, lived in a tent in a friend’s Eliot House suite. Other houses had Pulitzer Prize winners; Eliot House had Joseph Pulitzer Jr. himself.

As a professor, Finley transformed philistines into philhellenes; as a public intellectual, he was the force behind “General Education in a Free Society,” Harvard’s 1946 post-World War II blueprint for education at the college that remained in place until the

1980s. But it was as the master of Eliot House that Finley entered into Harvard’s mythology, stewarding the futures of his residents to opportunities that included — at least in one year — more Rhodes Scholarships than those awarded to entire universities. During his 1940-1968 tenure and long after, the manner in which he evaluated the applications of first-year students who wanted to spend their remaining three years under his guidance, and the depth in which he advised those students, was the stuff of Harvard legend. Decades before the term “life coach” entered the argot, Finley distinguished himself for his commitment to mentoring his residents with as much dedication as he put into educating his students.

A project of many years in the making, “The Master of Eliot House” was finished by Constantine Valhouli following the 2022 death of Nelson Aldrich ’53, an Eliot House resident in his own right who is perhaps best known as poetry editor of The Paris Review and author of the book “George, Being George,” about Paris Review founder George Plimpton (yes, another Eliot House denizen). More than 600 pages in length, “Eliot House” illuminates the life of one of the most revered figures at one of education’s most revered institutions, and both asks and answers the question, “What is college for?”

“To an outsider, Eliot House is just another of Harvard’s eight masses of brick and steel. But buildings, particularly college buildings, have a way of impressing themselves on the minds and memories of those who live in them.”

— Harvard College Yearbook (1949)

I COULD HAVE BEEN MORE WRONG

Kevin McCaffrey ’75

Four Winds Press, March 2024

There’s perhaps no better way to capture the sensibility of “I Could Have Been More Wrong,” the second volume of poems by Kevin McCaffrey ’75 (he published “Laughing Cult” in 2014), than to note that the titlular poem includes, in close proximity, an allusion to Homer’s “Odyssey” and a reference to Cheech and Chong. There are also poems titled “My Friend Zuckerberg” (in which McCaffrey marvels at the breadth of the personal information his “friend” knows about him, from what he ate for breakfast to where his political leanings lie), “Karl Marx, Lord of the Leprechauns,” “Robot Spies Watching Elves Watch a Fish,” “Reformed Hunters Seeking Praise”; there’s one about land acknowledgements and another about a man who juggles his own eyeballs. Mostly set in traditional form, the pieces in McCaffrey’s second collection are whimsical, cynical — and often surprising as they turn on a dime from bathos into pathos.

— Reviewed by Kristin Duisberg

“I’M GRATEFUL FOR THE AWARD … [BUT] WHAT I’M REALLY GRATEFUL FOR IS ST. PAUL’S GETTING ME OFF TO A GOOD START AS A KID. WHEN I CAME TO ST. PAUL’S … I DIDN’T KNOW HOW I WAS GOING TO SURVIVE. … THAT FALL, I GOT THE ANSWER … FROM ST. PAUL’S ITSELF, FROM CLASSMATES, FROM UPPERCLASSMEN, FROM TEACHERS: PUT YOUR HEAD DOWN AND WORK. IT’S BEEN A VALUABLE LESSON MY WHOLE LIFE. WHEN YOU HAVE CHALLENGES, FOCUS AND APPLY YOURSELF, AND YOU’LL GET THROUGH. I THANK ST. PAUL’S FOR THAT ALL THE TIME.”

— MAXWELL KING ’62

Recipient of the 2024 Alumni Association Award

Alumni Association

Annual Meeting and Celebration

Held on Tuesday, April 9, the Alumni Association Annual Meeting honored this year’s Association Award recipient Maxwell King ’62, a renowned journalist and bestselling author; former nonprofit leader; active volunteer; and community, literacy, education and environmental advocate.

The evening, held at the Harvard Club in New York City and livestreamed for those who could not attend in person, also included a brief report from Alumni Association President Caroline La Voie ’88, P’20,’21; remarks from David Scully ’79, P’21, president of the SPS board of trustees; and a School update from Rector Kathy Giles, followed by a lively reception.

Annual meeting attendees David Walters ’07 and Vinny Peterson ’77 with Rector Kathy Giles at NYC’s Harvard Club.

King received his award in absentia. Scan the QR code to view his recorded acceptance speech and the evening’s live remarks.

At left, attendees Gabrielle Porter Dennison ’74 and Katherine McMillan ’73. At right, Alumni Association President Caroline La Voie ’88, P’20,’21 delivering her remarks.

Form of 2017 attendees included Francesca Walton, Andrew Dienes and Ellora Sen with guests Savannah Tynan (center) and Timothee Bourcier (right).

Washington, D.C. Reception

In February, SPS hosted gatherings in Vero Beach and Miami, Florida, as well as in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. A special thank you to SPS Trustee Chase Robinson ’81, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, who, with Rector Kathy Giles, hosted a reception for alumni and families at the museum in Washington, D.C. It was a lovely evening of reconnecting with the School and the greater SPS community while enjoying the Freer Gallery of Art after hours in small guided tours.

XIX Society Global Seated Meal

XIX Society hosted a Global Seated Meal at the end of February and across the country (and across the Atlantic), women and nonbinary members of the SPS community gathered to carry on the beloved SPS tradition.

DID YOU MISS . . .

In March, Shantal Chan Friday Hunte ’03 and Amory Loring Logan ’00 hosted a webinar discussing financial best practices for women. View the conversation and others in the SPS Alumni Webinar Series.

IN MILLVILLE AND BEYOND

JULY

17 Alumni and Parent Reception

New York City

24 Alumni and Parent Reception hosted by Julia and SPS Trustee

David Fleischner ’91, P’20,’23

Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.

27 Alumni and Parent Reception hosted by Radha Mikkilineni P’26 and Kathryn Tucker P’25

The Hamptons, N.Y.

28 Alumni and Parent Reception hosted by Beth and Mark Andrews ’68

Fishers Island, N.Y.

AUGUST

5 Alumni and Parent Reception

Livingston, Mont.

6 Alumni and Parent Reception hosted by Anne and Jim Crumpacker P'94,'98

Sun Valley, Idaho

20 Alumni and Parent Reception hosted by Lisa and SPS Board

President David Scully ’79, P’21 Prouts Neck, Maine

Visit sps.edu/events often as more opportunities to connect are added.

In West Hartford, Connecticut, Judith Frost ’94, Christine Pina ’87 and Emily Jacob ’07 enjoyed their time together.

D.C. reception attendees hear from Trustee Chase Robinson ’81 (right) during an after hours tour of the Freer Gallery of Art.

THE BIG PICTURE

Photographer

David Noble ’57 has catalogued his own life —

and the lives of others

JACQUELINE PRIMO LEMMON

David Noble ’57 sits in his home workroom in Santa Fe, surrounded by research books and books of his own — he has published 12 — as well as framed photos on the wall that include images he’s made at archaeological sites. Among the stacks around him are unpublished manuscripts and short stories he has written over the years, as well as pictures that document his journey from New England to Vietnam and across the American Southwest with his wife Ruth, and from undergraduate to Army counterintelligence officer to prolific photojournalist. Throughout his career, his works have been represented by galleries, libraries and museums across the country, including Yale University’s Beinecke Library and the National Museum of the American Indian.

An avid student of French at St. Paul’s, Noble earned a degree in the language at Yale University in 1961. A year later, he enlisted in the Army, and, assigned to a counterintelligence unit, was among the earliest military personnel sent to Pleiku, Vietnam. There, he helped launch a covert intelligence-gathering operation in the region’s Central Highlands, home to more than 30 French-speaking Indigenous tribes collectively referred to as Montagnards.

As Noble integrated into the community, he took photographs of the Montagnards that he says were “very often the first pictures they’d seen of themselves.” Among them are images of individuals going about daily family life, at traditional celebrations and events and in military uniform as they fought against the Viet Cong. Noble found a

purpose in developing and printing these photos to give back as gifts, even as he was still on active duty.

Following his return to the U.S. and subsequent discharge in 1964, Noble knew he wanted to turn photography and writing into a profession but “kind of floated for quite a long time,” teaching French for a private school in Manhattan, participating in the antiwar movement and often covering protests for a small New York newspaper. In 1970, he went to the wrong address for an appointment and arrived at a building site where he found a crew of Mohawk Indian high-steel workers. He took their photos and shared the portraits with them just as he had with his subjects in Vietnam. The encounter led to friendships and a life spent learning as much as he could about American Indians and the archaeology of the Southwest.

“My wife and I, we got this idea to pull up stakes, get a van, [and] hit the road,” Noble says, and so they did, for six months in 1970 and ’71. His eyes glimmer as he describes living out of their secondhand Volkswagen bus with a camper stove and sleeping bags while visiting reservations in upstate New York and Canada, Ojibwe reservations in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and Northern Cheyenne and Crow reservations in Montana. On the Bad River Reservation in Wisconsin, the duo was invited by an Ojibwe couple to canoe alongside them and take photos as they harvested

wild rice in the sloughs along Lake Superior. Noble soon began working on an archaeological guidebook, “Ancient Ruins and Rock Art of the Southwest,” then went on to write or edit more books about Southwestern history and culture. During a more than 50-year career, he photographed hundreds of archaeological sites that included the Alibates Flint Quarries in Texas, the Sears Kay Ruins in Arizona, and 14th century Arroyo Hondo Pueblo archaeological excavations in New Mexico. Just four years ago, at the age of 81, he capped off a 30-year career as an archaeological guide and interpreter on rafting trips on the Colorado, Green and Yampa rivers.

In 2020, Noble’s memoir was published. “Saigon to Pleiku: A Counterintelligence Agent in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, 1962–1963,” features many of his photos and letters home.

Ever humble, Noble credits “coincidences” with determining many of his life’s twists and turns. He chuckles before reclassifying them as “coincidences that were meant to happen,” such as an early 1970s encounter at a Santa Fe gas station with noted Tewa Pueblo anthropologist and author Alfonso Ortiz, who became a mentor and friend and introduced the Nobles to the Pueblo people and culture. Another coincidence? While Noble and his former SPS roommate lost touch for many years, they later reconnected. He’s a photographer in Santa Fe as well.

FINDING ANSWERS

For evolutionary biologist Jeffrey Townsend ’90, data holds the key to understanding disease

KRISTIN DUISBERG

Biostatistician and evolutionary biologist Jeffrey Townsend ’90 has changed our understanding of risks around COVID-19, the Ebola virus and even the bubonic plague, and his work on tumor mutations is helping to revolutionize the treatment of many cancers. But catch him in his office at the Yale School of Public Health on any given morning and you might as easily get him talking about his achievements on the Masters running circuit as his scientific discoveries. In March, the former Division I runner earned a gold medal and two silvers at the National Masters Indoor Championships in Chicago, eight months after bringing home a silver at the National Outdoor Championship. “Both times, I’ve looked around and thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m so outclassed by these people. … Oh well, I’ll just do my best,’” Townsend says. “And then I’ve gotten medals and I’m just like, ‘How did that happen?’”

In the question, Townsend reveals his professional training as much as his athletic modesty; in analyzing health data in novel ways that help shed light on diseases and their spread on both individual and population levels, his work very much an exploration of “how did that happen?” His mathematical modeling of the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak helped public health officials in West Africa understand who was transmitting the disease and how frequently; in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, his was the work proving that individuals who were exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus could safely leave isolation after seven days

and not the 14 originally recommended by the Centers for Disease Control if they tested negative at that point.

In terms of his research, Townsend says, “I constantly look at what’s going on around me, and when I see something I feel is not being done the right way or the right question isn’t being asked, I dive in and do that question” — a process that involves modeling massive amounts of often disparate historical data to predict how a virus or a genetic mutation will behave. In cancer, his work involves quantifying the relative importance of various genetic variants that have been sequenced in established tumors, and this critical information is helping oncologists more precisely target gene therapies that can arrest the proliferation of the disease.

Ironically, Townsend, who grew up on a farm in Caanan, New Hampshire, and came to St. Paul’s School as a Fourth Former, never took biology in high school. “This is going to sound silly, but I had a really good biology course in seventh grade, and when I got to St. Paul’s, I was focused on the quantitative sciences, where there’s more of a linear progression to what you’re learning than in the life sciences, where one course isn’t necessarily built off another, and so I took a lot of chemistry and physics as well as math,” he explains.

At Brown University, he brought that quantitative background to bear on his study of biology — and the three years of training he’d done under SPS cross country coach Chip Morgan to the Brown cross country team. “He was an amazing coach,” Townsend

says of Morgan, describing the in-depth strategic analyses the longtime Latin, Greek and English teacher and crew coach would share with his runners before every race. “It was such a rigorous approach.” A walk-on at Brown, Townsend ultimately earned a scoring spot on the varsity squad, and established the dual identities of serious athlete and serious scientist that he maintained through data-heavy doctoral work in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard and post-doctoral work at the University of California-Berkeley and to faculty positions first at the University of Connecticut and now at Yale, where he is the inaugural Elihu Professor of Biostatistics and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology.

While many describe the field of evolutionary biology as inevitably backward looking, that’s another duality that Townsend is quick to embrace. “Evolutionary biology historically has been viewed as this thing that you look back and figure out what happened when, as a sort of intellectual curiosity,” he says. “But in fact, it’s really important for a lot of the major questions we’re addressing in the world today, and I’ve been trying to show how that’s true. I could never have made … those predictions of [COVID] immunity without looking back at evolutionary biology; I couldn’t do any of the cancer stuff I’ve done without looking back at the evolution of the many tumors that people have already had.”

Diving deep into the scientific past to draw robust maps of the future — it’s the perfect puzzle for an academic whose mind is always moving even faster than his legs.

CHANGING

LIVES

Leticia Dwomor ’09 has found purpose in her career as an OB/GYN

JANA F. BROWN

The summer after her first year of college, Leticia Dwomor ’09 returned to Ghana for the first time since her family left when she was nine.

As a volunteer for Unite for Sight, a nonprofit that provides affordable eye care for patients in Ghana, Honduras and India, Dwomor was excited for the opportunity to revisit her birthplace and also to explore what direction her career might take. In Ghana, she shadowed doctors as they screened patients for treatable eye diseases, which proved to be a seminal experience.

“It was a chance to see if I was more of a service-based person or a research-based person,” Dwomor says. “I was moved by how these small procedures can change the life of someone living with a disease that’s so preventable if they lived under different circumstances. Seeing firsthand the impact you can have with a skill you’ve learned and developed was very important for me. By the time I came back, I definitely wanted to go to medical school.”

After graduating from Yale in 2013 with a B.S. in psychology, Dwomor earned her M.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and completed her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Brown University. In the fall of 2022, she joined Lifespan Health System’s OB/GYN practice in Providence, Rhode Island, and became a clinical instructor at Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School. Dwomor’s interest in global health also has continued. At Pitt, she founded the PittMed Tarkwa-Breman Group to fundraise for tuition support of female students in Ghana, and at Brown she was a fellow with International/Global Health Training.

Though drawn to the sciences at an early age, Dwomor recalls discovering a particular affinity for human biology while studying the subject at St. Paul’s School. “That’s where it all clicked for me,” she says.

Although boarding school was not in the initial plan, Dwomor came to SPS through a program called City Prep near her home in Bronx, New York, that invited talented students to an after-school program to prepare for the SSAT. When she and her father visited SPS during an accepted students day, they found a welcoming and safe community. Once enrolled, Dwomor quickly formed a lifelong friendship with Stephanie Wagner ’09, her roommate in Kittredge III. The two lived together throughout their time at St. Paul’s, and in a true circle-of-life moment, when Dwomor and Wagner were residents at Brown, they found themselves in the delivery room at the same time.

“I was doing the C-section,” Dwomor says, “and Stephanie was in the room as a pediatrician.”

Now almost two years into practice, Dwomor has discovered the perfect balance between her desire to support women’s health and the opportunity to use her surgical skills. She also finds purpose in helping to improve the sobering statistics regarding Black maternal health and morbidity in America.

“ These statistics show that Black women are two to three times more likely to die [in childbirth] compared to white women,” she says. “That was also a motivating factor to become a generalist OB/GYN. It does really make a difference when you walk into a room, especially for women of color reading about this data. I think it’s comforting when they see me.”

Dwomor’s work also includes being shadowed by medical students through an integrative mentorship program associated with Brown’s medical school, and participating as a panelist in the Reproductive Justice and Black Birthing Experience lecture series for first-year medical students. In 2022, between the end of her residency and the start of her work at Lifespan, Dwomor returned to Ghana for the second time to work with the OB/GYN residency program at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, where she was born. One of her goals is to become more involved in healthcare in Ghana. Last fall, Dwomor began a term as president of the New England chapter of the Ghanaian Physicians and Surgeons Foundation. She also recently got her license to practice medicine in Ghana.

“I’m working on establishing a connection with the Ghanaian OB/GYN residency programs because they need some additional support,” she says. “I’m trying to lay down the foundation for that, but that’s hopefully where I’ll end up at some point.”

This section was updated March 28, 2024. Please note that deaths are reported as we receive notice of them. Therefore, alumni dates of death are not always reported chronologically.

1946 – Douglas Trowbridge Elliman

June 15, 2023

1947 – Cecil F. Backus Jr. Dec. 19, 2023

1947 – H. Hollis Hunnewell Feb. 25, 2024

1947 – Sidney S. Whelan Jr. Jan. 27, 2024

1947 – Rollin H. White III Nov. 15, 2023

1950 – Roderick H. Cushman Sept. 10, 2023

1951 – James V. D. Eppes Jr. Oct. 30, 2023

1952 – Richard L. Duckoff March 8, 2024

1953 – Grayson M.-P. Murphy III Jan. 6, 2024

1954 – James W. Bowers Nov. 30, 2023

1961 – Bruce R. Lauritzen Feb. 21, 2024

1965 – James C. Gibbons

Jan. 10, 2024

1965 – The Hon. Gordon McG. Strauss March 10, 2024

1965 – James S. Lusby Dec. 6, 2023

1971 – Robert N. Taylor

Jan. 22, 2024

1976 – Elisabeth Claudy Fleischman

May 27, 2023

2008 – William B. Hartigan

Jan. 30, 2024

FACULTY

Joel F. Potter

Jan. 31, 2024

Francis O. Ryder

Jan. 10, 2024

STAFF

Joan Slavin Rice

March 4, 2024

Helen Kalin Van Rossum

Feb. 4, 2024

1943

Robert M. “Bob” Pennoyer passed away on Aug. 13, 2023, at the age of 98. A member of the Form of 1943 who graduated early as a Fifth Former in 1942, Bob excelled in his studies at St. Paul’s School, where he developed a lifelong love of learning and the arts. He was a member of Le Cercle Français and the Radio Club, and he was a Delphian and Shattuck; he rowed bow seat on the Shattuck fourth crew.

Bob entered Harvard at 17, and after working six straight terms there without a break, in October 1944 received his degree, his Navy commission and orders to join the Naval cruiser USS Pensacola somewhere in the Pacific. Bob served with distinction in the Pacific Theater, participating in the Battle of Iwo Jima and other major engagements. He was awarded several medals for his bravery, including the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. Lieutenant Junior Grade 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 the 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.

After the war Bob attended Columbia Law School, where he met the love of his life and future wife, Vicky, who predeceased him. Following law school, Pennoyer served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and later joined the law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler. He became a partner in 1962 and remained with the firm for many years, specializing in tax-exempt organizations and trusts and estates.

Bob was deeply committed to public service and served on the boards of numerous

charitable and cultural organizations, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Morgan Library; the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C.; and Human Rights First. He was a passionate advocate for justice and equality, and his legacy will continue to inspire generations of lawyers and those who work to make a difference in the world.

Bob was a grandson of J. P. Morgan Jr., Form of 1884, and a great-grandson of American financier J. Pierpont Morgan. He is survived by his children, Christy, Russell, Tracy and Peter ’75; their spouses, Helen Pennoyer, John Auchincloss and Katie Ridder; grandchildren Kate, Frances, Scott and Molly Greathead; Gordon, Robbie and Margaret Pennoyer; Emily and James Auchincloss; Jane, Tony and Gigi Pennoyer; and their families, including eight great-grandchildren; as well as nephew William Pennoyer ’80 and grandnephew Morgan Spencer Nadai ’09.

1946

Douglas Trowbridge “Trow” Elliman

founding publisher of the Stowe Reporter, an award-winning weekly, died peacefully on June 15, 2023, in Boynton Beach, Florida, at 95. The cause was “old age after a wonderful life,” said his wife, Claudia Elliman.

Trow embarked on his career in the heyday of mid-century advertising, working for a decade in New York City for BBDO and J. Walter Thompson. He began coming to Stowe, Vermont, to ski with college friends, then later with Claudia and two babies in tow; they journeyed by train from New York City to Waterbury, lodging at Ten Acres with Darby Chambers or at the Spear Farm. Weekends were filled connecting with a wide range of people from all walks of life who shared their passion for sports, the outdoors and the Vermont landscape.

The Vermont pull ultimately became too strong for just weekends, and in 1960, Trow and Claudia purchased a derelict hillside farm in Stowe and moved there full time. Lilacs grew up through the floorboards and mice had the run of the place in the beginning, but they slowly restored the farmhouse and immersed themselves in the community. Trow never stopped appreciating the beauty of the area and often told his three children that if he had stayed in New York City, he would have died early.

Packing away his grey suits in favor of parkas, heavy wool sweaters and long johns, Trow embraced an active and adventurous life. Skiing was integral to his daily winter routine. In 1962, he became an instructor in the predominantly Austrian-staffed Sepp Ruschp Ski School. Also in the early ’60s, Trow and Claudia founded and managed the Stowe Cottage Club, an association of secondhome owners who rented their homes to skiers and summer people. Later, while running the paper, he would take six runs before starting his workday. In 2011 and 2012, Trow was inducted into the VARA Ski Hall of Fame and the Vermont Ski Hall of Fame.

During a cocktail party in 1960, Trow was encouraged by Alex Nimick and other friends to invest in the Stowe Reporter, which at the time was a modest two-page mimeographed sheet. In 1965, Trow acquired his partners’ shares, assuming majority ownership of the Stowe Reporter, and served as its publisher from 1963 to 1998 Trow understood at a deep level the responsibility of running a weekly newspaper and covering local news. Under his leadership, the newspaper thrived and won press awards in New England and Vermont. The Stowe Guide & Magazine followed in the late 1960s and the Valley Reporter, covering the Warren/Waitsfield area, was launched in 1971. Trow sold the latter in 1982, and the Stowe Reporter to A. Biddle Duke ’81 in 1998.

Throughout his career, Trow’s contributions extended beyond publishing. He was a founding board member of the Stowe Land Trust and the Stowe Tennis Club, and he was involved in the formation of the Hopeful program — a name he coined — for aspiring younger ski racers in the Mt. Mansfield Academy Ski Club.

Trow was born on Dec. 8, 1927, in New York to Mildred Welte Leisy Elliman and Douglas Trowbridge Elliman. His grandfather, Douglas Ludlow Elliman, was the founder of Douglas Elliman, a large national real estate company. Trow spent his formative years in Charleston, South Carolina, but because of health issues was sent to boarding school at the age of 8 with his dog, Mike. (Mike was later expelled for an accident on the headmaster’s rug.) He attended Aiken Preparatory School in South Carolina and later St. Paul’s School; as an SPS alumnus, he was an active form volunteer and became a member of the Hargate Society in 2006. Trow’s legacy at SPS lives on through five of his grandchildren, who not only followed in his footsteps as students but also share his deep affection for their alma mater. Trow earned his undergraduate degree at Yale University.

Trow possessed a dry sense of humor and a curious mind. His eclectic interests spanned the works of Capability Brown, the Fibonacci sequence, Bach’s melodies and the art of photography. His love for carving turns down Nose Dive at Stowe never waned.

In later years, Trow and Claudia became residents of Boynton Beach, Florida, but they always returned to Stowe for the summer. In Florida, he took up golf with characteristic passion. While attending his grandson’s graduation in Scotland, Trow shot his age (86) at Kingsbarns Golf Links.

In addition to his wife of 69 years, Trow is survived by daughter Claudia “Dia” Elliman Jenks and her husband, T. Story Jenks; son Douglas Trowbridge “Toby” Elliman III and his wife, Leatrice D. Elliman; son William Baskerville Elliman; his grandchildren: T. Story Jenks III ’05 and his wife, Elyse Lipman; Fielding W. Jenks ’09 and his wife, Carolyn M. Jenks; Penn T. Jenks ’11; Leatrice “Elle” Elliman ’09; D. Trowbridge “Trow” Elliman IV ’11; Lisle D. Elliman, Theodora “Teddy” T. Elliman, H. Gerritsen “Gerrit” Elliman; and two great-grandchildren, Ella M. Jenks and Fielding W. Jenks Jr.

OBITUARY SUBMISSIONS

The Alumni Horae is happy to reprint obituaries that have been 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.

1947

Sidney S. Whelan Jr. of Essex, Connecticut, passed away peacefully on Jan. 27, 2024, surrounded by family. He was 94.

Born in New York City on Oct. 14, 1929, to Hortense (Harder) Whelan and Sidney S. Whelan, Sidney attended Buckley School, St. Paul’s School, Trinity College and Fordham University School of Law. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War on the USS Rodman before returning to civic life, where he used his trust and estate background as vice president of the American Museum of Natural History. There, he helped create “West Side Day” to open the museum to the local community. Later, as vice president at the New York Community Trust, he worked closely with donors to help them make effective investments in improving society. Sidney was proud of facilitating the endowment of a large fund, which today provides significant grants to environmental organizations across the U.S.

An avid outdoorsman and fly fisherman, Sidney served on the board of Adirondack Experience, the museum on Blue Mountain Lake in New York, where he was a catalyst to help support conservation of land and his beloved guideboats. Sidney’s love for the Adirondack guideboat was surpassed only by his love for family and friends. The edited and annotated transcriptions of the 1890s journals of fellow guideboat and fishing enthusiast Dr. Arpad Gerster are one of the many gifts that Sidney leaves. He brought his passion for small wooden boats to Mystic Seaport Museum, where he was a longstanding volunteer and docent working with the museum’s boat collection.

When on vacation, Sidney could often be found rising at dawn to hop into his one-person kayak to fly-fish for trout, taking a walk in the woods, or out in the fields to check on the bird families nesting in bird houses he put up every year. Sidney also loved music and enjoyed playing the “nose-trombone” while listening to his collection of New Orleans jazz and singing off-key to sea shanties with his children. He also rocked a bow tie.

With his genuine interest in others, Sidney’s circle of friends kept expanding, from family members and the earliest of school friends to friends of his wife and his children and grandchildren to people he would meet through his work and volunteer positions. We will remember him for his curiosity toward life, his sense of humor, his beautiful smile, his unique warmth and care for people, his unremitting integrity, and his many acts of service, both big and small.

Sidney and his loving wife, Patsy McCook, had a long and harmonious marriage. He is survived by Patsy; his brother-in-law, Jim McCook; his children Tensie and partner Russell Wild, Lora and husband Edward French, and Sidney and wife Lisa Waller, all from his first marriage to Carol Storke; his three grandchildren, Lora-Faye and wife Jordan Kisner, Genevieve, and Gabrielle; and his much-loved nephews and niece.

1950

Peter deFlorez Millard

long-time Manhattan resident and quintessential gentleman, died peacefully at home just after midnight on Monday, Nov. 6, 2023, with his second wife, Polly Espy Millard, at his bedside. He was 91.

Peter was born in Paris on May 14, 1932, the youngest of three children born to Hugh and Maria Luisa (deFlorez) Millard; he grew up in various European capitals as his father pursued a career in the U.S. Department of State. At the age of 5, he moved to New York City to complete his primary school education at Buckley School before heading to St. Paul’s School, Yale University and Harvard Business School for postgraduate study in business administration. Following a stint in the U.S. Navy aboard the battleship Charles R. Ware in the Mediterranean, Peter returned to New York, where he married his first wife, Anne (Lalor) Millard, of Utica, New York, in 1962. Together, they started a family that included Richard, from Anne’s previous marriage, and Hugh ’82, Peter Jr. and Anne (Minnie).

Peter began his professional life as an investment banker and partner at J. & W. Seligman & Co. After leaving Seligman, he set up shop as an investment advisor and embarked on a variety of charitable endeavors. At the Allen-Stevenson School in Manhattan, first as a board member and then as board president, he helped guide the institution forward while also acting as treasurer for the American Bible Society.

He also shared with his first wife an abiding passion for preservation, both architectural and environmental, through enduring commitments to Friends of the Upper East Side and efforts in Barneveld, New York, to protect the West Canada Creek. During this time, Peter developed a formidable reputation for valuing closely held private investments for tax purposes. A lifelong conservative, he enjoyed jousting with the Internal

Revenue Service with an admirable rate of success.

Following the death of his first wife, Peter met and courted Polly Espy of New York; they were married in 2016. She welcomed him into her family and introduced him to the beauty of Nantucket, a place he came to love as he loved Polly. A lifelong student of history and an avid reader, Peter was fascinated with the American Civil War and European history. He enjoyed playing squash at the Union Club, where he was on the membership committee. He loved walking and bicycling in Central Park. Always current, his last ride was electric.

Peter is survived by his wife, Polly; sister, Mary; four children and five grandchildren.

1951

James Van Deusen “Jamie” Eppes Jr. of Winchester, Virginia, died peacefully on Monday, Oct. 30, 2023, at Winchester Medical Center at age 89. He was born Dec. 1, 1933, in Port Arthur, Texas, the son of James and Mary Bean Eppes.

Jamie was a scholar, teacher and ardent bass singer; he loved singing in church choirs and was a lifelong member of the Yale Russian Chorus. He studied history at Princeton, French and Spanish at Middlebury College, linguistics and Chinese at Yale Graduate School, and economics and German at Stanford Graduate School.

Jamie’s brother Bennett ’54 shared that Jamie was an honors student at St. Paul’s School who loved history and debating, singing in the Chapel Choir and Glee Club, and playing Old Hundred sports, especially football as a defensive back; he also was a member of the School’s Library Association. The brothers were together at St. Paul’s for two years and loved their Sunday walks around the Lower School Pond.

Jamie worked for the U.S. Department of Commerce for six years and taught at high schools in California and Virginia. He also

worked as a nursing assistant in Boulder, Colorado, and Winchester, Virginia.

Jamie’s partner, Mary Cunningham, preceded him in death. He is survived by his brother, R. Bennett Eppes, MD, and his wife, Cynthia, of Shaker Heights, Ohio, and nieces Elizabeth Eppes Winton, Susan Bennett Eppes, MD and Carolyn Eppes Gilbert.

1953

Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy III died peacefully on Jan. 6, 2024, at his home in New Haven, Connecticut, with family by his side. He was 88.

Grayson was born in New York City on Feb. 26, 1935, the son of Mary Eleanor Warren Murphy and Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy Jr., Form of 1926.

Grayson entered St. Paul’s School as a Second Former in the fall of 1948. In addition to playing football and tennis, he was on the first line of the Old Hundred and the St. Paul’s ice hockey teams, and he was a Sixth Form Officer.

Grayson matriculated to Harvard College and served his country as an officer in the U.S. Army. During his career, he worked at Harriman Ripley in New York; at Gardner Associates and the Boston Company in Boston; and as president of Halsey Associates and G. M.-P. Murphy & Company in New Haven. Grayson served his community in many ways, from neighborhood and school boards to managing political campaigns.

Grayson is survived by Rosita (O’Callaghan), his wife of 47 years; their children, Mary, Grayson and John, and three grandchildren. He is also survived by his sisters, Constance Paine, Anita Fritze and Ellen Warner. He was predeceased by his brother, Howland Murphy ’71.

Among other family members, he also leaves behind classmate and brother-inlaw Peter S. Paine Jr. ’53; nephews Peter S. Paine III ’81 and Alexander G. Paine ’87, and grandnephew Peter S. Paine IV ’15.

1954

James Whyte “Jim” Bowers of South Kingstown, Rhode Island, passed away peacefully on Thursday, Nov. 30, 2023, at age 87. Born in Boston, he was the son of Hazel Whyte Bowers and Frederick Edmund Bowers of Marblehead, Massachusetts.

At St. Paul’s School, Jim was a member of the Glee Club. As a Sixth Former, he was recognized with the Rector’s Medal and these accolades: “What he has done is to bring cheer into the lives of everyone with whom he associates. When we see him we feel better than we did before. He always is willing to lend a hand. I have never seen him disagreeable or mean. All his classmates and all of his masters will remember him with the keenest delight, and with genuine gratitude.”

Jim graduated from Williams College in 1958 and spent two years in the Army, including during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He met his wife, Susan Robinson, in Boston, and they married in Wakefield, Rhode Island, on the Robinson family farm in 1964. After a honeymoon in Bermuda, they lived in Marblehead for 25 years and raised their daughters, Lisa and Linda.

Jim owned the Parisian Cleansers and Furriers in Lynn, Massachusetts, with additional plants in Salem, Peabody and Danvers. He established the largest specialty drapery cleansing business in New England, and his furrier business stored 10,000 fur coats in an underground vault. He was active with the Cleansing Plant Owners of Massachusetts and was president of Leather and Suede Cleaners of America, headquartered in Chicago.

An active community member in Lynn, Jim served as president of the Rotary Club, the Greater Lynn YMCA and as a trustee of the Eastern Bank. He also was a trustee of the McCarthy Family Foundation in Boston and Peabody, and he represented the Greater Lynn United Fund in negotiations with Boston, which resulted in the creation of the Greater Boston United Way. He spent several years in the marine business and ended his career founding Bowers, Mayer and Company, a small corporate merger and acquisition association in Boston.

Jim was a member of the Eastern Yacht Club in Marblehead for 35 years, where he served as house committee chairperson for four years and was a member of the club’s Race Committee for several years. He and

Susie spent the happiest days of their lives cruising the waters of New England in their beloved 40-foot lobster yacht, “Caribou.”

In 1986, Jim retired to live the good life in Rhode Island. He managed the Robinson family farm, with its small herd of black Angus cows, 80 acres of hay fields and several homes and buildings. He belonged to the Dunes Club in Narragansett and the North-South Bowling League in Wickford. Jim thoroughly enjoyed life in Rhode Island and the lifestyle available to him there; parts of the farm were gifted to the South County Land Trust in 2016.

Jim’s greatest enjoyment was his family, and his wife and daughters were his life. Besides Susan, the best-ever wife for 59 years, he leaves daughter Lisa W.B. Walker and her husband, Andrew, of Westwood, Massachusetts, and their children, Drew and Ashley; daughter Linda Bowers of Exeter, Rhode Island; niece Pamala Notman and her husband, Donald, and their children, Anson, Alexander and Emily of Wellesley, Massachusetts; nephew Frederick E. Bowers II and his son, Nico, of Becket, Massachusetts; and sister in-law Sandra Bowers of Vero Beach, Florida, and Kennebunk Beach, Maine. Jim is predeceased by his brother, Frederick W. Bowers.

1959

Ridgway M. “Ridge” Hall Jr. of Washington, D.C., was a pioneer in the field of environmental law. Since 1977, he handled a wide variety of environmental cases with a focus on Superfund sites and the Clean Water Act. He began his career as an associate, and then partner, with Cummings & Lockwood in Stamford, Connecticut, and later served as associate general counsel for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Ridge was a founding partner of the law firm Crowell & Moring in Washington, D.C., where he started their environmental law practice in 1979. He was an officer of

the Environmental Law Institute, a member of the American Law Institute and The American College of Environmental Lawyers, and he was frequently named one of the top lawyers in the field.

After retiring in 2011, Ridge became vice chair of the Chesapeake Legal Alliance (CLA) and maintained a private part-time practice. Through CLA, he helped create a network of lawyers to handle cases on a pro bono basis relating to the protection and restoration of the Chesapeake Bay, its watershed and its natural resources.

Ridge grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut, and spent summers on the water sailing in the Thimble Islands. At St. Paul’s School, he was involved in the Acolytes Guild, Cadmean Literary Society, Cum Laude Society, Le Cercle Français, the Library Association, the Propylean Literary Society, Sailing Club and the Shakespeare Society. He was a Delphian and Halcyon and played on the Delphian hockey team as a Sixth Former; he was on the sailing team for three years, including as captain as a Sixth Former. Ridge graduated magna cum laude from both SPS and Yale College, and from Harvard Law School in 1966.

An athlete even beyond his school days, Ridge was a former world champion in Blue Jay class sailboats and was a finalist in the 1968 U.S. Olympic trials sailing in the Finn class.  Ridge is survived by his wife, Anne (Jill) Harken Hall; their children, Ridgway (Taddy), Alden and Anne and their wives and partners, Karen, Marcy ’91 and Kate; and beloved grandchildren Khuan-yu ’21, Josephine, Penelope and Hadley. He also is survived by his sister Eleanor Clevenger and brother Toby Hall ’62. They remember him for the enthusiasm he brought to every activity, the delight that accompanied each discovery, his openness to new ideas, the essays he wrote on the sacredness of natural places, and his love of the water, a beautiful sunrise and strong wind in his sails.

His adaptations of 1960s rock balladsturned-tributes for holidays and parties, the elaborate pirate stories he tirelessly dreamed up for his children and grandchildren (again! and again! and again!), and his moves on the dance floor are some of the moments most treasured by friends and family. Ridge’s incandescent spirit blazes on in the many people and natural places he fought so hard to protect. He truly made this world and those he touched better for having known him.

1963

John Heard “Jock” Chamberlain passed away at the age of 79 on Dec. 10, 2023, surrounded by his loving wife and daughter in Sucre, Bolivia. Born in Cooperstown, New York, to Marileeds and John Maxwell Chamberlain, Jock will be lovingly remembered by his wife of 44 years, Ana Maria; children Max, Alex and Cristina; grandchildren Kylie, Lawson, Mari and Charlotte; sisters Leeds and Brooke; and numerous relatives and friends touched by his compassion, loyalty and capacity to dream.

Jock’s life exemplified resilience in the face of adversity. He embraced challenges with courage and a determination to never give up. Mastering dyslexia, Jock thrived at St. Paul’s School, where he played hockey, lacrosse and soccer and ran track. He also was a prefect in his dorm. After SPS, Jock earned a business degree at the University of Colorado, Boulder. During the Vietnam War-years, he served as a Green Beret in the U.S. Army Special Forces and was stationed in Panama. This deployment ignited his lifelong passion for South America.

Jock first worked for Adela, an international company headquartered in Lima, Peru, which was founded to promote economic and social development in Latin America. Following Adela’s model, he fostered entrepreneurial growth across the region. Then, at the age of just 28, as president of the First National Bank of Boston, Jock’s innovative leadership significantly expanded that bank’s presence in La Paz and Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

He continued to take on new challenges as he embraced his entrepreneurial spirit. He became the CEO and operations manager of a fishing boat manufacturing company in Mexico, creating more than 200 jobs and exhibiting his commitment to community development. He bought a fly-fishing rod company, which allowed him to combine his career and his passion for fly-fishing. He

produced an innovative and inspiring radio program, “Radio Tomate,” and contributed to the Latin American information forum. Years later, he established Steuben Tile in New York, supporting his wife’s ceramic tile factory in Bolivia and showcasing his commitment to craftsmanship.

Despite health challenges with Parkinson’s, Jock never gave up trying to cure himself and possibly find a way to help others. He documented his efforts and experiences in a book entitled “The Adventures of Jock & Mr. Parkinson,” which is being edited for publication. Jock will be missed by all who knew and loved him.

1965

Robert D. “Bob” Lievens died suddenly at home in Londonderry, New Hampshire, on Nov. 19, 2023. He was born Sept. 19, 1946, to William and Catherine (Mills) Lievens and was a lifelong resident of Londonderry.

At St. Paul’s School, he played on the football and hockey teams, rowed crew, was a member of the Library Association, Choir, Cum Laude Society and yearbook. He was named a Ferguson Scholar in 1964 and was a National Merit Finalist. After SPS, he received his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and then returned home to manage the family wholesale apple business, Woodmont Orchards, with his father and brother. Bob valued his employees greatly and found many creative ways to offer them support.

He was active in numerous apple organizations, including the New York-New England Apple Institute and the International Apple Institute. His favorite was the Northeast Apple Society, where the growers skied all day and held “meetings” on chairlifts. He was an early member of the Londonderry Conservation Commission and spent several terms on the Planning Board. Later, Bob became a member of the Londonderry Housing and Redevelopment Authority.

Bob grew up skiing and made sure his wife and children got onto skis. He was a member of the Waterville Valley Black & Blue Trail Smashers and contributed above and beyond to the running of youth and disabled ski races. Later, he was a member of the Silver Streaks at Waterville Valley. Bob enthusiastically followed every sport and extracurricular activity with which his children were involved, and he was especially proud to see Sarah row crew for Dartmouth.

In his retirement, he took great pleasure in mentoring younger apple farmers and advising businesspeople for SCORE (Service Core of Retired Executives). Retirement also brought time to travel and enjoy his muchloved grandsons.

Bob leaves his wife and best friend, Deborah Wolfe Lievens; a daughter, Sarah Lievens and husband Trey Cromwell; a son, David Lievens and wife Eliza Spaulding, and their sons, William and Thomas; two sisters, Catherine Gallagher ’77 and Susan Folsom; and his stepmother, Merrell Lievens. He was predeceased by two brothers, William Lievens II ’62 and Stephen Lievens ’69.

B ob’s personality, sense of humor and presence were singular and unforgettable. He touched many lives and will be sorely missed.

1971

Robert N. Taylor

internationally renowned reproductive medicine researcher, died unexpectedly on Jan. 22, 2024. He was raised in Sacramento and Lake Tahoe, California, and attended Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland before matriculating at St. Paul’s School in 1967, where he was a member of the Cum Laude Society. As a Sixth Former, he played varsity football and lacrosse and was captain of the ski team, participating in all alpine and Nordic events. He graduated with cum laude honors and received the Benjamin Rush Toland Prize, which recognizes “intellectual achievement, athletic ability and a gallant spirit.”

Rob attended Stanford University, where he played lacrosse and participated in club skiing. He graduated with honors in biological sciences and attended Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, under its combined MD/PhD program, graduating in medicine and cell biology. Rob returned to California, completing a residency in obstetrics and gynecology, a clinical fellowship in reproductive endocrinology and infertility and a postdoctoral fellowship in vascular biology, all at the University of California, San Francisco. He was appointed to the UCSF faculty and remained there for 20 years, combining a career in academic medicine and subspecialty practice in gynecologic endocrinology, eventually rising to the position of UCSF’s vice chair for research in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences.

Rob was a frequent lecturer both nationally and internationally. He served on executive committees of the National Institutes of Health Reproductive Scientist Development Program, the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Rob was a past honorary secretary of the World Endometriosis Society and past president of the Society for Reproductive Investigation.

Among the many accolades for his work Rob received the Harry Reich Award for pioneering work in the science and treatment of endometriosis from the Endometriosis Foundation of America and the Distinguished Researcher Award by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. His work was funded continuously by the National Institutes of Health. At the time of his death, he was the assistant dean for student and academic affairs and the MD/PhD program director at the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

In addition to an active professional life, Rob traveled widely and was an amateur of French culture, literature, wine and gastronomy. He was a great fan of music (especially jazz), cycling and skiing, particularly in the Lake Tahoe basin.

Rob was predeceased by his father, Rowland, an OB/GYN, and his mother, Dorothy, a homemaker. He is survived by his brother, Scott Taylor ’73 and his two sons, of whom he was very proud: Christopher Taylor and Patrick Taylor. His first marriage ended in divorce; he is survived by his second wife, Sarah Berga, MD, and two stepchildren, Alexis Sherman and Nathaniel Sherman. Those who knew Rob well will miss his quick and sometimes acerbic wit.

1976

Elisabeth Claudy “Lisa” Fleischman of Chevy Chase, Maryland, and Teton Village, Wyoming, passed away in her home on Saturday, May 27, 2023, after a five-year battle with cancer. She was 64.

Lisa was born in 1958 in  Washington, D.C., to Donald Edwin Claudy and Elizabeth Osborne Claudy. The family later lived in Hudson, Ohio; Greenwich, Connecticut and London, England. Lisa attended St. Paul’s Girls’ School in London before starting at SPS as a Fifth Former. At SPS, Lisa lived in Drury. She participated in the Fiske Cup drama competition and the theater program; was co-president of the Chorus and Madrigals; and was a member of the Winant Society and the Cum Laude Society.

Lisa was mature and serious, and she often moved her formmates with her passion for learning. Ultimately, her passion for the arts touched many lives; Valerie Minton Webster ’76 shared: “[Lisa’s] singing voice not only added to the sound of the St. Paul’s choir and the power of our spring musicals, but her passion also made all around her sing with greater precision and expression.

Lisa had a strong sense of self that graciously allowed those with her — at the dining hall, in class, at choir — to be their full selves.”

Lisa’s presence enriched the joy and power of artistic and academic endeavors shared with her classmates at St. Paul’s, and much of

what she experienced at the School set the foundation for her nonprofit work and the arts.

After SPS, Lisa attended Harvard College, where she graduated cum laude with a concentration in psychology. She dedicated her career to consulting for and supporting nonprofit institutions, receiving a master’s in public and private management and a master’s in business administration from Yale University. She worked in philanthropic consulting for Brakeley, John Price Jones, Thomas Harris & Associates and J.C. Geever & Co. before joining the National Gallery of Art in  Washington, D.C., as assistant director of development. Thereafter, Lisa worked tirelessly to support nonprofits directed at women’s development, art and the environment with organizations such as the Washington Area Women’s Foundation, Green Door, the Grand Teton National Park Foundation, the National Museum of Wildlife Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her most recent efforts included the feature “Five Wyoming Women Artists to Watch,” which was published by the Wyoming Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

L isa met her husband, Charles Mark “Chuck” Fleischman, when they both were sophomores at Harvard. They married in June 1988 and were a team in every sense of the word: they were always aligned on their vision for their family and balanced each other in everything, from their interests and talents to their music tastes. Together, Chuck and Lisa created a loving home for son Philip, born in 1991, and daughter Joan, born in 1994 — Lisa’s children were the greatest joy in her life. Living in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Chuck and Lisa sent their kids to Sidwell Friends School, a community Lisa loved dearly. She served multiple stints as head of the Parents Association there and strove to promote the school’s values of education and love for all members of the school.

Chuck and Lisa also built a community around their home in Teton Village, Wyoming. Avid lovers of the outdoors, the two found incredible friends on the slopes of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort and on the hiking trails of Grand Teton National Park. Lisa combined her love of the outdoors, the arts and giving back with her work in this community. She served multiple terms on

the board of the Grand Teton National Park Foundation and worked as a docent for the National Museum of Wildlife Art.

Harder to put into words than Lisa’s many accomplishments is the goodness she brought to the world in everything she did. She was graceful and selfless and wholeheartedly committed to the people in her life. She emanated love and light in her every gesture, and she was constantly looking to build bridges and provide love to those around her. To know her was to feel awash in her sense of righteousness, her desire for good and her lifelong journey to make the world a better place. With the loss of Lisa, the world has lost a woman who was pure in her devotion to her friends and family, but also to the greater well-being of us all. Her family is left without its North Star and emotional anchor, but trusts that the values she instilled will guide them in her absence.

Lisa is survived by her husband, Chuck; her son, Philip; her daughter, Joan; her sister-in-law, Patricia Claudy Schade; nephew Henry Claudy; nieces India Claudy, Shayna Solomon and Jamie Solomon; sister-in-law Janet Fleischman and brother-in-law Joel Solomon. She was predeceased by her brother Peter Claudy ’79 and her parents.

FORMER FACULTY

Joel F. Potter who taught science and coached at St. Paul’s School from 1964 to 2001, died Jan. 31, 2024, at age 87 after a brief illness and a long, full, wonderful life.

Joel was a psychology major at Williams College and earned his master’s degree in biology from the University of Michigan.

At SPS, Joel founded the Environmental Studies program and Eco-Action, the student organization dedicated to raising awareness about the environment on campus, as well

as Eco-Fest, an SPS tradition that celebrates getting out in nature. He was a favorite of his students, who called him “Colonel Potter” and the “Gentle Polar Bear”; he was known for his wise and gentle demeanor as he taught ecology, coached the ski team and took students on memorable canoe trips down the Merrimack River (inspired by Thoreau’s river trips) and on Turkey Pond.

In 1994, Joel received the Conservation Teacher of the Year Award for Merrimack County and the State of New Hampshire. He served on the New Hampshire Teacher Certification Board and for 21 years on the Concord Conservation Commission. Joel also worked with New Hampshire Audubon and the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department to plan activities and events.

At his retirement, Joel received the Governor’s Citation for his 37 years of service at St. Paul’s School. It read in part: “His dedication and passion to both the environment and students has been limitless. He is an unbelievably warm and resourceful teacher, who has made a distinct niche in the St. Paul’s community. He will forever remain an irreplaceable legend.”

After retiring from St. Paul’s School, Joel and his wife, Prue, moved to Worton, Maryland, to be near their daughter, Paige, and her family. The couple enjoyed spending time treasure hunting for their antiquing business, Silver Fox Antiques, and in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. Joel remained connected to the School after his retirement, though, teaching in the summer SPS Advanced Studies Program from 2004 to 2008. In 2005, the School recognized his distinguished career with faculty emeritus status.

Joel is survived by his wife of 63 years, Prudence B. Potter; son Joel F. Potter Jr. ’83 and wife Samantha; daughter Paige P. Howard ’84 and husband John; and his grandchildren Allison Potter, Grafton Howard and Lilly Howard. Joel’s legacy will live on in all those he inspired.

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