You would hear a symphony of praise and affection if the entire Taft community voiced its feelings about this couple that has given so much for so many years. This is what a few of their friends say:
䉱 A lot of couples look at Anne and Jerry and think, “That’s what a marriage should be.”
When you think of Anne and Jerry Romano, you think of scenes that look like watercolors. Anne has a garden in Chatham. When I visit, that’s where I usually find her, her legs scratched from the roses, and her face smudged with dirt and sweat. She is always smiling. Often she has a plant in her arms—a transplanting in process. She is the best gardener I have ever seen, and the most passionate. She soaks seaweed in buckets of water and pours the mix on her perennials. She carts in manure from a nearby horse farm and spreads crumbly, dark compost around shrubs. She can take cuttings, dip them in root hormone, and three months later she has a knotted miniature hedge of rue or boxwood. A few years ago, she and Jerry brought a dozen thin, scraggly arborvitae trees to plant behind their house, as a screen. Today it is a lush green wall. Her plants are like people. She will point
to a rose, for instance, and say, with her delightful Italian accent, “She is a perfect lady, and so well behaved.” Anne loves to touch leaves and petals, and she cannot walk by a blossom without holding it to her face and breathing in the fragrance. The rose garden is bordered by privet, and the walkways are of pea-stone. Walking under the arch to enter, you have to duck your head beneath a tumult of blossoms from a climbing rose. Fruit trees bend over the hedge at the corners. Each flowerbed has knots of plantings, intertwined in patterns; and you brush against delicate tea roses and heavy-headed peonies when you stroll toward a bench at the end of the garden. Anne likes to sit there in the early evening, with cold ice tea made from her own herbs, and it is in the garden where she entertains and holds her annual “Ladies’ Tea Party,” an event which seems to spring from the pages of
There simply is not another person in the world who is as kind, gentle, and patient as Anne Romano. She took students under her wing, and cared about them like no one else. There was so much energy and passion in everything she did, whether reading an uppermid’s paper, driving students to go horse riding, or arranging flowers. It’s just sad that future Taft students won’t benefit from this incredible woman. —Christina Coons ’00 I am one of the lucky ones. I was touched by many great Taft teachers, but Jerry was different. When I looked in his eyes, I saw love. I am not sure I deserved it, but I could tell. I was an angry youth, and my temper was hard to handle, but he stood by me. He was tough and didn’t tolerate my behavior, but the love was always there. It never left. —Adam Bronfman ’81 He was the perfect leader. I spoke to him almost every day during the “Campaign for Taft,” and he was the man who held it all together. He was the conductor, and we played to his beat. —Drummond Bell ’63
to the
Sea
How much they have both meant to the Taft community! Their contributions are so towering it is hard to imagine the place without them. As the school’s third headmaster, and personally, I will always treasure them both. —John Esty, Headmaster 1963–72
Taft Bulletin Spring 2002
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