Parents’ Post A Newsletter for Parents and Friends of The Thacher School
Fall 2001
RE-CREATION
Dear Parents, Grandparents, and Friends: So soon do fresh faces and names become familiar that it’s difficult already to reEach new school year here is launched by the Head’s member that the new kids on the block reading to the School Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The ever were new. The 75 (a smut class Chambered Nautilus, his late 19th-century poem about perof 57 and 18 joining the Class of sonal development and spiritual evolution. On this year’s first ’03) come to the Ojai from alfalfa day of classes, just as Head of School Michael Mulligan was gatherranches, university towns, and windy cities, from places as close ing up the various shells in his office and home to take to the Pergola as a faculty home on campus to so that new students could see for themselves those iridescent pearly those as far away as Singapore, chambers symbolic of such growth, the news came: terrorists had comYungaburra, and Hong Kong, mandeered commercial aircraft and attacked the World Trade Center and and they bring special talents the Pentagon. When, an hour later, students, staff, and faculty were gathand energy to our community. We can sense already their saluered on the Pergola in the filtered morning sun, Mr. Mulligan held up a tary influence from the center nautilus and read the poem measuredly, paused, and then spoke briefly of campus out to all its corners about the events that had just transpired on the East Coast. More talk and beyond. Of the student body would follow later that day and in many days following–but for the as a whole, a quarter receive finanmoment, a 113-year-old tradition kept us centered, reminded us cial aid; 22% are self-described as students of color. Well over one third of why we are at Thacher and, perhaps, even, why we are on of the boarding population are from this earth, giving us some hope that while some things out of state, with Colorado and Illinois can be blown apart, others can cohere, can resist the contributing the highest number to the mix. forces of intentional dissolution, can repeat young Many in the School—129, in fact—are related and hold meaning one generation women to another enrolled student or to a graduate of graduates— Thacher, putting a different spin on the phrase “famafter another.
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ily school.” Downright historic is this fact: matriculating this fall as a freshman was the first child born to two CdeP2 grads: Will Oxley, whose mother, Marganne, was among the first
and whose father, Dave, and grandfather, Bruce, also earned Thacher diplomas. Connected in this particular way or not, the individuals who now comprise the 113th Thacher School are well on their way “to do[ing] the best work that [they] can,” in the exhortation of founder Sherman Day Thacher. And, as Mr. Mulligan concluded in his New Year’s Banquet speech, “When each of us does his or her best, starting now, something magical starts to happen: we become transformed, changed outwardly by an alchemy inside of ourselves that then, through our actions, begins to transform the world we live in. What starts in this school travels, through each of you, potentially far, far afield. And it has already begun.” 1 smut: 9th grader, freshman; from campfire soot on faces when, on camping trips, the youngest students cleaned the pots 2 CdeP: followed by a year indicates a graduate of Casa de Piedra (“House of Stone”), the original name of the ranch and the School