Hotchkiss Magazine, Summer 2011

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Board of Trustees Thomas C. Barry P’01,’03,’05 Katheryn Allen Berlandi ’88 Ian R. Desai ’00 Thomas J. Edelman ’69, P’06,’07 William R. Elfers ’67, Vice President John E. Ellis III ’74 Lawrence Flinn, Jr. ’53 Diana Gomez ’76, P’11,’12 Sean M. Gorman ’72, Secretary John P. Grube ’65, P’00 Elizabeth Gardner Hines ’93 Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet ’85 Eleanor Green Long ’76 Forrest E. Mars, Jr. ’49, P’77,’82 GP’09,’09,’11,’11,’14, Vice President Malcolm H. McKenzie P’10, Trustee Ex Officio Christopher H. Meledandri ’77, Vice President Kendra S. O’Donnell Philip W. Pillsbury, Jr. ’53, P’89,’91 Peter J. Rogers, Jr. ’73, P’07, ’11 Jean Weinberg Rose ’80, President Roger K. Smith ’78, P’08 Jane Sommers-Kelly ’81 Marjo Talbott John L. Thornton ’72, P’10,’11, Officer-at-Large William B. Tyree ’81, P’14, Treasurer Daniel Wilner '03

EMERITI

Howard C. Bissell ’55, P’82 John R. Chandler, Jr. ’53, P’82,’85,’87, GP’10 Edgar M. Cullman ’36, P’64, GP’84 Frederick Frank ’50, P’12 David L. Luke III ’41 Dr. Robert A. Oden, Jr. P’97 Nancy Watson Symington P’76,’78, GP’00,’10 Francis T. Vincent, Jr. ’56, P’85 Arthur W. White P’71,’74, GP’08,’11

Alumni Association Board of Governors

Brenda G. Grassey ’80 Edward J. Greenberg ’55, Vice President and Chair, Alumni Services Committee D. Roger B. Liddell ’63, P’98, Secretary Jennifer Appleyard Martin ’88, Chair, Gender Committee Alessandra H. Nicolas ’95 Nichole R. Phillips ’89 Daniel N. Pullman ’76, Ex Officio Thomas S. Quinn III ’71, P’15, Ex Officio Wendy Weil Rush ’80, P’07, Vice President and Chair, Nominating Committee Peter D. Scala ’01 Thomas R. Seidenstein ’91 Bryan A. Small ’03 George A. Takoudes ’87, Vice President

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Christopher M. Bechhold ’72, P’03, Vice President and Chair, Nominating Subcommittee for Membership Christina M. Bechhold ’03 Lance K. Beizer ’56 William J. Benedict, Jr. ’70, P’08, ’10 Katheryn Allen Berlandi ’88, President Keith E. Bernard Jr. ’95, Chair, Alumni of Color Committee Douglas Campbell ’71, P’01 Charles A. Denault ’74, P’03, Ex Officio Patricia Barlerin Farman-Farmaian ’85 Kerry Bernstein Fauver ’92 Quinn Fionda ’91, Chair, Communications Committee

T RUSTEE N EWS

The Trustees are, seated, l-r: Head of School and Trustee Ex Officio Malcolm H. McKenzie P’10, John L. Thornton ’72, P ’10, ’11, and Jean Weinberg Rose ’80. First row, standing, are: Daniel Wilner ’03, Jane Sommers-Kelly ’81, Kendra S. O’Donnell, Lawrence Flinn Jr. ’53, Eleanor Green Long ’76, Marjo Talbott, Diana Gomez ’76, P’11, ’12, and Peter J. Rogers Jr. ’73, P’07, ’11. Second row, standing: John E. Ellis III ’74, Roger K. Smith ’78, P’08, Philip W. Pillsbury Jr. ’53, P ’89, ’91, William B. Tyree ’81, P’14, John P. Grube ’65, P ’00, Thomas J. Edelman ’69, P’06, ’07, William R. Elfers ’67, and Sean M. Gorman ’72. Not present when the photo was taken were Trustees Forrest E. Mars Jr. ’49, P ’77, ’82, GP ’09, ’09, ’11, ’11, ’14, Thomas C. Barry P’01, ’03, ’05, Katheryn Allen Berlandi ’88, Ian R. Desai ’00, Elizabeth Gardner Hines ’93, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet ’85, and Christopher H. Meledandri ’77.

This announcement from the Hotchkiss Board of Trustees’ May meeting was made by Sean Gorman, Secretary of the Board: Jean Weinberg Rose ’80 was elected by the Hotchkiss Board of Trustees at its May 7, 2011 meeting to succeed John L. Thornton ’72 as President of the Hotchkiss Board of Trustees, effective July 1, 2011. Ms. Rose, the first woman to serve as President of the Hotchkiss Board, has been a Trustee since 1995 and a Vice President since 1999. The Board noted its deep gratitude to John Thornton, who served for 10 years as President, for his leadership, innovative ideas, and the energy he brought to his tenure, as well as its appreciation that he will remain a Trustee and serve as Officer-at-Large on the Board. The Board also elected as officers Forrest Mars ’49, William Elfers ’67, Chris Meledandri ’77 (Vice Presidents), William Tyree ’81 (Treasurer), and Sean Gorman ’72 (Secretary).

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COVER ARTIST: JONATHAN DOSTER

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HEAD OF SCHOOL

Malcolm H. McKenzie EDITOR

Roberta Jenckes DESIGNER

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We send a special summer treat, to be read and appreciated by all who love the Hotchkiss campus. Hotchkiss, The Place, first published in 2003, has been revised to include recent additions to campus. Lloyd Zuckerberg ’80 sponsored its publication, terming it “my contribution to a syllabus in stewardship for students.” Lloyd, notes Head of School Malcolm McKenzie in his Foreword to the booklet, “loves Hotchkiss, its grounds, buildings, and place. …. This love needs sharing.” Elegantly capturing the enduring beauty of the place is Barbara Walker. Lloyd describes her as “one of the few writers I’ve met who lives up to Hotchkiss standards and tells the story of campus architecture with exceptional grace and style.” Thanks to all involved for this handsome addition to our libraries.

Christine Koch, Boost Studio EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Divya Symmers Communications Writer

150 Years of Service: 4 Teachers + Knowledge + Dedication = Learning for a Lifetime

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WRITERS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Joan Baldwin Ed Greenberg ’55 Kristen Hinman ’94 Malcolm H. McKenzie Henry McNulty Lou Pressman Divya Symmers Andrea Tufts The Hotchkiss School does not discriminate on the basis of age, sex, religion, race, color, sexual orientation, or national orientation in the administration of its educational policies, athletics, or other school-administered programs, or in the administration of its hiring and employment practices.

Hotchkiss Magazine is produced by the Office of Communications for alumni, parents, and friends of the School.

Letters and comments are welcome.

Please send inquiries and comments to: Roberta Jenckes, The Hotchkiss School, P.O. Box 800, Lakeville, CT 060390800, email to rjenckes@hotchkiss.org, or telephone 860-435-3122.

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150 Years of Service 4 TEACHERS + KNOWLEDGE + DEDICATION = LEARNING FOR A LIFETIME Foreword by Malcolm McKenzie Our Reunion Weekend in June was special and memorable. Despite a power outage that lasted into the early hours of Saturday morning and intermittent rain throughout the weekend, the general spirit was electric and the mood could not be dampened. As happens so often during these precious days of coming together, reminiscences ranged over the great teachers of the past.

One member of the Class of ’51 said to me, with unaffected and moving simplicity, that the best teacher he had ever had in his life was during his time as a student here. That is as it should be, and I hope that many in our extended family feel that way. It is during those impressionable and formative years of our teens that we need great teachers to inspire us for life. We still have such giants at Hotchkiss, some in the making, some fully grown, and some, sadly, retiring.

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y opening paragraph is a frame for a salute to our four retiring teachers. Bob Haiko, Walter DeMelle, Jim Morrill, and Sarah Tames add up to a century and a half, yes 150 years, of utterly committed and profoundly transformative teaching at Hotchkiss. The calculus of years does scant justice to their impact. They are giants, whose shoulders provide durable planks that strengthen the platform on which we all stand.

In an end-of-term letter over two years ago, I asked for pithy statements to be returned to me describing the essential attributes of great teachers. I received a rich trove of replies.

From these, I compiled a short list. Here it is. Alongside each comment from someone in the Hotchkiss extended family, I have coupled a parallel statement of my own, in blue, that tries to contextualize its partner within a wider world.

Great teachers: Are passionate about their students, their subject, and teaching • Exemplify world-mindedness and the movement of ideas across frontiers • Demand high standards in a supportive, enabling atmosphere • Approach unusual teaching situations with enthusiasm. • Make learning inspirational, however hard it might

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be • Know the challenges and rewards of struggle, especially in unfamiliar contexts • See teaching as a calling and call their students to learn • Relish the challenge of learning from difference • Stay up-to-date in their field and in how to impart that knowledge • Aim for fluency in more than one language • Allow their students to develop confidence in their voice and identity • Develop deep knowledge of other frameworks through a culture of exchange • Pay attention to individuals and to personal detail • Ponder and understand human commonalities • Model character, by example • Move beyond tolerance to engagement and celebration of otherness • Encourage independent, interrogative thinking • Expect flexibility in knowledge and conceptual constructs • Listen with respect • Speak with intercultural awareness and sensitivity • Use up-to-date information technology seamlessly and appropriately • Illustrate their teaching with rich and diverse examples • Are curious • Are curious.

I see many of these attributes in each of my four colleagues and friends. In the context of so much else in this magazine, it seems fitting to add one final quality – service.

Our community is so much the better for having had all four give so much of their lives to us in selfless service.

Sarah, Jim, Walter, and Bob, we all salute you.

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ALL PHOTOS IN THIS SECTION BY JONATHAN DOSTER, EXCEPT AS NOTED

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JAMES MORRILL P’87, ’89 THE RUSSELL MURRAY BIGELOW CHAIR AND INSTRUCTOR IN BIOLOGY & ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE By Roberta Jenckes

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ne day I walked into Mr. Morrill’s classroom, and everything changed for me. He is one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had.

“He taught me a number of things about biology separate and apart from the nuts and bolts of what he was teaching me. ….. I learned the biological sensation of someone believing in you, believing in you as a good student and not writing you off. I learned that from Jim, and I kept working, and I’m proud to say I got A’s in that class.” Bill Gaede ’80 At a retirement dinner on campus in May, William Gaede III, an attorney in San Francisco, spoke movingly and memorably about his former teacher. James Morrill, known to everyone as “Jim,” changed Bill’s life and, he was sure, he did so for many other students. The biologist with “the twinkle in his eye” was a tremendous example to students and was loved by all. Others spoke that night – Blair Torrey Chair and Instructor in English Geoff Marchant; global-health practitioner Elizabeth Bird ’03; and Rhys Bowen ’78, a field biologist who studies the Northern Harrier. Their tributes captured for everyone present the depth of their learning experiences in Morrill’s classroom, as well as the respect and affection they felt for him. Excerpts from their remarks appear interspersed in the interview that follows here.

Characteristically, Jim gets right to the point, in the style of a man known for his humility and directness. He sums up a lifetime in short, declarative sentences.

“This is my 39th year. I know, it’s a lot. It’s quite a momentous thing.

“My father was a pediatrician in Patterson, N.J., and I grew up in nearby Ridgewood. When I was 10, I remember my parents set me up in a small room with a couple of examining tables, where my brother and I and a couple of other kids would collect things. I became good at collecting butterflies, and I had a rock collection. I was predisposed to becoming a biology teacher in some ways.

“I did major in biology at Hamilton College. I had a really good teacher my senior year, a guy named Nick Gerold. He

had a profound effect on me. I innately liked the way he did things; he was tough, gave a lot of information, but then was available to help kids. He was really involved as a teacher, unlike some college professors.

“After college, I joined the Peace Corps. … I think it was the sense of adventure and a definite desire to do service – I was a real Kennedy fan – and hey, what else was I going to do? I was flopping around some. I had done some service work in Guatemala for the AFS between my junior and senior year in college. My assignment was teaching Venezuelan teachers how to use machine tools.

“When President Johnson sent the Marines into the Dominican Republic, the Venezuelan students, quite a few of whom were communist, struck the school in protest. They barricaded the school, broke every window, and set fires. The school was closed, so my assignment changed to community development. That’s where I met Harriet. She was in an organization called Accion, which does community development.

She and I worked well together, and I think that’s a good sign that you’re compatible. And I mean it, because there’s a lot of work in life.

“I am honored to speak tonight for Jim – and in speaking for Jim, you always speak for Harriet, Jim Junior, and Molly, for they have always been a tight-knit family. Harriet, like Jim, is quietly strong and like Jim, carved out a distinguished career, in a different direction. For nearly three decades, Harriet worked for IBM in Poughkeepsie, not only logging 14,000 round trips to the Hudson, but establishing her own identity, not always an easy thing to do and something many of us respect.”

Geoff Marchant “So, if President Johnson hadn’t sent the Marines into the Dominican Republic, I wouldn’t have met Harriet. I think of that often. I was in Venezuela for 2 ½ years. When we returned, I began graduate work at Rutgers. I ended up getting a master’s degree there in physiology. I worked for a few years at Rutgers Prep School, which is right in New Brunswick. We must have sent out 200 letters to schools and pharmaceutical companies. One of the first responses was Hotchkiss. I knew of the school. My cousin, David Kranz S u m m e r

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LEFT: Jim Morrill works at Eco Day with the students, as he has since 1993.

“Advanced Placement Biology per se is not the Mt. Everest of biology – it is the K2. I mean, it can kill you. Jim mastered this. He taught himself everything he needed to know to be the first teacher of Advanced Placement Biology at Hotchkiss, and he succeeded brilliantly.

“I had the privilege of going on to teach AP Biology at his side; again, how he does it, watching him keep all the balls in the air, get all the labs scheduled, get all the labs set up, get all the test questions written, and just do it seemingly effortlessly – the guy never broke a sweat – I don’t know how he does it. It’s a miracle.” Rhys Bowen ’78

[Class of 1960] went here, and Harriet’s father, Kenneth Hatcher, [Class of 1933] went here.

“I didn’t know anything about prep schools. I did have another teaching job, but we came up here in 1972. Jim Junior and Molly were three and two. I got certified over the summer. Then, I got a second master’s degree in science at Wesleyan. It was an excellent background for me to teach AP Biology here, which I started in 1978. At Wesleyan I was able to take courses in ecology. One of the teachers, a guy named Bill Niering, was Professor of Botany and Research Director of the Connecticut College Arboretum. He was a great field biologist. I took two courses with him, which got me very interested in doing a field course at Hotchkiss.

“In the ’80s, I started the field course; this is such a great place to do a course like that. I built up a knowledge base of locations and also people who could help teach in that specific location.

“That course was not connected with AP. I’m a big AP person. After the AP Biology, I started the AP Environmental Science course here. Teaching those AP courses in a creative way, where the kids are also being served by being prepared for these tests, has been very satisfying. Also satisfying has been the time I’ve spent reaching out to high school teachers through the College Board and teaching them how to do these courses. You can, I think, be extremely creative in how you teach an AP course.”

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“In the science department I replaced John Bodel, and there were four other teachers. It was a really small department. All of us became interested in teaching electives. I taught a molecular biology course a long time ago and an evolution course.

The concept when I was department chairman from 1978-88 was that students would take survey courses like APs early, so that by the 11th grade, they’d be finished. For the really talented students, this meant they could take these electives – meteorology, robotics, invention, geology. Today APs have grown, so that students are not just taking one science AP; they’re taking as many as they can cram in. So, this idea of doing special courses as a senior has been made more difficult.

“Yet we do still have limnology, stream ecology, engineering, robotics, and a science research course. I think those are important courses for kids because when they get to college they may not be able to take courses like that.

And an astronomy or geology course, if you take a course like that, it can change your life; I mean, seriously – it can change your perspective. They’re good liberal arts courses.

Plus, in my mind, they really should emphasize independent research, which was a big part of our original thinking about our science program. Kids should get personally involved in a research project of their own design in any course that they would take. I know it takes a lot of time to do independent research with kids, time to get them set up so that they can go off and actually do it. But I think we should do more of that.

“No Limits, the science research publication, was started in the early ’80s, as a biology discussion group, shortly after AP Bio started. I’d put an article on reserve in the library; kids would read it, and then you’d meet and discuss it. My kids in AP Bio would end up leading the discussion, and then they’d write up notes. And eventually we said, ‘Why don’t we put this into a magazine?’’

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“Jim planted seeds in students – intellectual seeds that sometimes take years and years to grow. In my case it took a circuitous route. I went back to something he planted in me years and years ago. It was from one of his classes in 1978.

“I was sitting in my office – it must have been late 1990s or so, and I was reading a primary science article on biotechnology. And I’m thinking, ‘I’ve read this,’ and lo and behold, I thought, ‘I read this in his class.’

“That’s what I call planting seeds – when a thought comes into your mind 15 years later. If that isn’t the hallmark of a great teacher, I don’t know what is. So, Jim, thank you.”

Bill Gaede ’80 “Nancy Gaynor and Lou Pressman founded SEA in ’90, and I became one of the advisors shortly after that. Nancy and I have been club advisor for Students for Environmental Action for over 20 years. We struggled with the issue of having kids do hands-on environmental work around the school.

Along with the help of students, we started the Eco Day in 1993. We wanted to have it be the type of day where you have a speech or program with some intellectual clout, do work, have a big school picnic, and the kids would then have a holiday after that. That’s the way we started the Eco Day. You’re trying to bring out the students’ potential and not run it yourself. With Eco Day, it’s the students’ brains at work.”

“In the early days of planning for this year’s Eco Day, the students on the SEA board decided they wanted to dedicate the day to Jim. They wanted to recognize his years at the School, along with his commitment to connecting students to the outdoors. Jim was instrumental in establishing what has become known as Eco Day and has worked hard through the years to support a community effort that is organized by the students. Liza Johnson ’11 and Cam Ewing ’11, SEA co-heads this year, surprised Jim when they called him to the stage during the opening meeting for the Eco Day. They presented him with a personalized fluorescent vest, a bottle of tick spray, and a pair of work gloves – standard Eco Day tools – and a copy of A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. I’m going to guess that what meant the most to Jim, was the long, loud standing ovation from the students, as they are what have truly mattered the most to him.” Nancy Gaynor, co-founder of Eco Day

this used to happen at faculty meetings. We would read off the courses that a student was going to take the next year. I remember having some of the old guard raise their hands and say, ‘That person can’t possibly take that course because he’s not qualified.’ To my mind, that’s the wrong approach as a teacher – Let him try it. I can remember this happening in the ’70s with a student who ended up really growing up in the course and doing extremely well, and actually showing that she had tremendous potential for that work. Those experiences for me are very, very satisfying, and I think I have a lot of cases where I’ve been able to help kids in that sense.”

“Mr. Morrill’s class shifted the way I saw the world and the approach I took in my course work. He taught me that I loved biology, which is I think a common theme tonight.

“I left Mr. Morrill’s course knowing there were layers of complexity in everything in the world that I saw and felt. I wanted to know so much more about that. So, in the end it encouraged me to become in fact a biology major in college, which led to my study of infectious diseases, which led to my career in global health, which is what I do now. That to me is Mr. Morrill’s simple but fundamental gift of a teacher – that he sets you on a path that you’re passionate about.

“So, thank you, Mr. Morrill, for your quiet leadership and your commitment to Hotchkiss students….” Liz Bird ’03 Postscript: In retirement, Jim and Harriet Morrill will be living in Lakeville. They are talking about going back into the Peace Corps, and Jim hopes to help with the town’s environmental initiatives. They also plan time with their four grandchildren.

“With individual students I’m the type of person who’s still kind of like a Peace Corps volunteer … In fact, here ….

RIGHT: The annual attention on Eco Day to rooting out invasive species has made a difference.

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WALTER E. DEMELLE JR. P’94 THE EDGAR M. CULLMAN ’36 CHAIR DIRECTOR OF THE EDSEL FORD MEMORIAL LIBRARY By Henry McNulty

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hen former Hotchkiss English teacher Ron Carlson first came to Lakeville in the early 1970s, he was immediately struck by one aspect of School life. “I was surprised that this school, isolated in the country, had such a vibrant library,” he says. “It was really the heart of the School.”

The guiding force behind that vibrant place was Walter DeMelle, longtime Director of the Edsel Ford Memorial Library, who retired in June.

For more than 40 years, the library was not only DeMelle’s kingdom; it was his passion. He expanded it, both in physical size and in number of volumes and educational opportunities offered. He led the way through the many technological changes of the past four decades. He was instrumental in developing the library-based School archives. And through it all, he was guided by the principle that a library is about much more than the books.

“Libraries are social magnets,” says DeMelle. “Kids come because they want to be part of a community. That’s a big part of what this library is about; it’s part of the community. Kids don’t always come here for altruistic reasons like studying per se – though you’re always amazed how much of that happens.”

Says Mike Hall ’85, now Director of Cisco Alliance North America in Ladera Ranch, CA: “With most librarians, the first word you think of isn’t ‘cool.’ But Walter DeMelle is cool.”

The Road to Hotchkiss DeMelle grew up in Natick, MA, where his father was a tool and die engineer and his mother was a dietitian. When he was a teenager, he became involved in the Episcopal Church, heading a church-related youth group in Boston and spending summers as a counselor at a church camp. “I aspired to be an Episcopal priest,” he says, “and I went to Hobart College, which was considered sort of an Episcopal school, on a pre-theological scholarship.”

While in college, he grew ever closer to his wife-to-be, Susan Sullivan, whom he had known since elementary school and dated since high school. At the same time, he was having serious doubts about ordination. “I continued to work at the

church camp,” he says, “but I eventually decided that I did not want to be an Episcopal priest. I met with the bishop, and he absolutely concurred.”

But if not the church, what? “I majored in English and was passionate about that,” he says. “Because of my camp work and my strong academic record, the college counseling office thought I should consider teaching.” In the fall of 1965, he joined the faculty of Hawaii Preparatory Academy, on the Big Island, in the middle of Hawaii’s ranching country.

It was, to say the least, isolated. “We had no television, no radio, no source of news – we were unto ourselves,” he recalls. “The biggest day of the week was the day Time magazine arrived, because then we could catch up on things, albeit late.” Despite – or perhaps because of – the remoteness, he loved the job. “I taught English to grades 9, 10, 11, and 12,” he says. “I felt this was where I belonged.”

Susan and Walter were married in August 1968, and she moved to Hawaii, both agreeing that the move would not be permanent.

Hotchkiss or Salisbury?

It was at Hawaii Prep where DeMelle first worked in a school library. “I liked the sense of responsibility,” he says, “dealing with issues that came up; the combination of teaching and administration was what made ultimately a library career seem like the right thing for me, because I consider a librarian a type of teacher.”

The DeMelles moved back to the mainland in 1969; he earned a degree in library science from Rutgers, then looked for a permanent post. He still spent summers working at the Episcopal camp, where the assistant director happened to be the chaplain at Salisbury School. “He wrote to me,” DeMelle says, “and said Salisbury was looking for someone to teach part-time and run the library part-time. I also saw that there was an opening at The Hotchkiss School, so I submitted an application and I interviewed at both schools.”

He chose Hotchkiss, becoming the first person in the School’s history hired as a full-time faculty member who did not coach, live in a dorm, or teach. That unique status made him an especially effective adviser, faculty and former students say.

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influence on kids who might not have felt close to teachers,” says history teacher Julia Trethaway. “He’s an authority figure without being in the classroom – except he would never say that; he will always say the library is his classroom, which is absolutely the truth. But he was never in a position to assign grades, or to dole out punishments, like the dorm masters.”

“He wasn’t a classroom teacher, and he wasn’t a parent,” says Nick Molnar ’03, who now teaches math at Choate Rosemary Hall. “He was a mentor, in a relationship based on friendship and trust. When I’m advising students, I think about how Walter was with me.”

Adds Mike Hall ’85: “When he was my adviser, I thought, ‘here’s a guy who’s in tune with high school kids.’ There weren’t any crises where he talked me off the ledge, but I’m pretty confident that if there had been something like that, he would have been the guy to be the voice of reason, and provide lucid and relevant advice.”

Chris Meledandri ’77, now a film producer and CEO of Illumination Entertainment in Los Angeles, was at Hotchkiss “during a period in my life when I was not particularly close to either of my parents,” he recalls, “so the presence of an adult figure in my life held great importance to me. Walter was not there to judge me, or ask for anything in return for his mentoring. I was 17 years old, and in the throes of figuring out who I was, and Walter’s gentle presence in my life had great meaning.”

Building a Library “When I came to Hotchkiss,” DeMelle says, “there were 4,000 square feet of library space. I was hired because they thought they were going to change some classrooms into library space. The first year and a half went into changing people’s idea of what a library should be, and what was needed here – to define what should happen in the library – and getting support for that. And that took a lot of changing of attitudes. I was able to take the library committee to Taft, which had a brand-new library, built in 1969 … a completely different kind of space. And that was an eye-opener for them: study spaces, lecture rooms, comfortable chairs, and it doesn’t look like your typical reading room.”

The road to changing attitudes about the very nature of a library was not always smooth, remembers history teacher Tom Drake. “We have a first-rate library, and Walter almost single-handedly has done that,” he says. “He advocates for the library strongly, and in order to do that, you can’t worry about offending other people when you push for excellence.

Walter and I share the conviction that the library is the intellectual center of the School. As a person responsible for its development, he is uncompromising. To me that’s something with which I resonate. But it also means competing for resources, which is a huge task.”

Although it might not appear so from the outside, the Edsel Ford Memorial Library is now six times larger in

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capacity than it was when it was built in 1952. Projects in 1974 and 1978 brought some expansion, with major renovations in 1981, 1999, and 2009 that involved adding new technology and addressing environmental issues.

In the 1990s, DeMelle notes, Hotchkiss introduced library-based instruction on doing proper research. “Kids learn how to do research, how to evaluate information, how to find different types of sources,” he says. “Despite the great growth in resources, teenagers today have far less understanding of research now than they did in the past, because all you have to do is search, and Google finds it for you. You can get answers, whether they’re good answers or not, instantly. So a lot of kids are coming to us clueless – they have no knowledge of an index, or primary sources. Some of that is archaic, but some of it isn’t. These days, information literacy skills are embedded in the curriculum. The hope is that kids who graduate from Hotchkiss now will know how to do research, how to get good information.”

‘It’s Everybody’s Space’ Ron Carlson, who now directs the creative writing program at the University of California - Irvine, says DeMelle does not have the ‘fortress’ mentality seen at some schools.

“I’ve visited a lot of prep school libraries,” he says, “and they tend to protect their materials. Walter sent the material out.

He was looking after the people in the community, not the ‘things’ in the library as much. He was also involved in designing the spaces, and making them smart.” The library’s soft leather chairs, remembered by generations of alumni as “the Gucci chairs,” invite both readers and those who simply want to hang out.

Tom Drake says DeMelle “committed himself early to an extensive audiovisual component – CDs and DVDs, and so forth, not only to supplement the teaching material but also in terms of making one’s life better. From my first years here, Walter was ahead of me. If I had a new course I’d be developing, he already would have gone through his not inconsiderable resources to find out what the seminal work was in that field, so that when I came with my recommendations, I’d find that he had already ordered them.”

Julia Trethaway agrees. “Any time any teacher needed a book, either for pleasure or for class, he ordered it right away,” she says. “That kind of privilege is taken for granted every single day. There was not one book he wouldn’t order for you if you asked. It’s a gift that he never gets enough recognition for.”

The ‘any book, any time’ policy applied to students as well. “If a student asks me to get a book, whatever you want, I’ll get it for you,” DeMelle says, “because I want you to be reading.”

That includes books about sex. “One of the things I did,” he says, “was to make sure we had material that would inform kids who wanted to learn about their sexuality. Sex

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RIGHT: At the retirement dinner in May for the four honorees, alumni found Walter DeMelle and wished him well.

books and auto repair manuals were the ones libraries usually kept in locked cases behind the circulation desk – but what kid is going to go up and say ‘I want the books about sex’? As for sex education, I grew up in a world where if you were lucky, your parents left a little pamphlet lying around, and that was it. I wanted to provide more than that. The books about sex are right on the shelves.”

For a decade, he also coordinated the Human Relations and Sexuality program at School. “It was the successor to Bio 450, which Ted Davis had been teaching and was quite renowned for its explicitness,” he says. “HR&S was successful, but did not include all of the students, since it was completely voluntary. Once Nancy Bird came on board as Director of Health Services, she and others developed the current Human Development program, which is required for all lower mids and includes sexuality education as well as many other matters.”

Including books on sexuality “affirmed my belief that the library should be here for everybody,” DeMelle says. “In this School, anyone can walk down the main hallway and tell where the seniors sit, where the hockey team sits, where various other groups sit together. That’s not true in the library. It’s everybody’s space, and that’s something of which I’m proud.”

The Human Library According to Hotchkiss Poet-in-Residence Susan Kinsolving, DeMelle “is forward-thinking in that we have media interspersed on the shelves with books, but he also is a warrior for keeping books in hand, on shelf, and available. He fights the idea some places have that you can have a modern library without books; he both understands the future of libraries and intends to preserve what’s best about them.”

In his four decades here, DeMelle has chaired numerous faculty committees, including those on summer programs, health services, long-range planning, and educational policy.

“He is known for his institutional memory,” says Julia Trethaway. “He has chaired a lot of groups, and in faculty meetings he was known for being the voice of experience over the years, because he remembers so much. It’s coincidental that he runs the library, because he himself is like a library.”

In retirement, DeMelle hopes to contribute more to an oral history of Hotchkiss he began during a sabbatical in 2003. “What I want to do is to continue that project,” he says. “I was concerned that the history of the School was not

being guarded, was not being collected.”

His wife, Susan DeMelle, recently retired after 38 years at Salisbury School, where she was head of the study skills program and served as director of studies. Their older son, Jeff, is the quality assurance manager for Knowledge Anywhere, which creates training software for various large companies, including Microsoft Corp. and Gallo Wine. He also plays bass with the group Publish the Quest. Their younger son, Brendan (Hotchkiss ’94), is Executive Director and Managing Editor of DeSmogBlog.com and a freelance writer who has served as research associate for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – and also plays bass, in the band Kore Ionz.

“I think for a lot of people,” former Hotchkiss teacher Ron Carlson says, “Walter has two sides: This wonderfully resourceful educator, and then this really caretaking friend.

The School is very, very smart, but Walter is going to be difficult to replace.”

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SARAH K. TAMES THE HUBER G. BUEHLER CHAIR DIRECTOR OF THEATRE, INSTRUCTOR IN THEATRE AND ENGLISH

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hen Sarah Tames joined the faculty in 1983, her arrival was notable.

Some of the School’s male teachers, who were the stuff of legend on campus, were still adjusting to the School’s decade-old move to coeducation. Tames’s youthful spirit, exuberance, and knack for establishing instant rapport distinguished her in the Hotchkiss landscape. Furthermore, her route to the faculty appointment was a bit unusual.

Tames’s first immersion in theatre occurred at Howard University, where she majored in acting and directing. Leaving there after two years, she acted in professional theatre, sang in a rock band, worked in a gallery, and did other jobs to make ends meet. It was Hotchkiss that helped her to return to college.

In 1977, the School needed a choreographer for its production of the Neil Simon-Burt Bacharach musical, Promises, Promises. Tames got the job … and a new direction. She completed her undergraduate degree at Amherst and then earned a Master’s degree in English from Rutgers.

Hired to teach English at Hotchkiss, Tames went on to chair that department for 13 years and the Theatre Department for 13 years. “She is an incredible English teacher,” says Marilyn “Sam” Coughlin, who held the Audrey Meyer Mars Chair in English until her retirement. “She has a tremendous ability to perceive nuances of meaning in writing and to articulate them.

She also has a fine sense of craft for her students. She expects craft in writing.”

As the Huber G. Buehler Chair and Instructor in Theatre and English, Tames has taught theatre courses and American literature, as well as senior electives whose topics have ranged from Irish literature to contemporary dramatic literature.

Further igniting her passion for teaching in the past three years have been the intellectually hungry preps and lower mids in the Humanities Program. With these young scholars, she has shared the wonders of commedia dell’arte masks and a mix of Renaissance philosophy and dramatic monologues from The Merchant of Venice.

Over the years, her sabbatical leaves have been – surprise, surprise! – busman’s holidays. She’s used these opportunities to

steep herself in theater, visiting repertory companies and theatre festivals, studying classical training in theatre, and acting in New York. Singing with the Gospel Choir on campus, sometimes as a soloist, keeps her “vocal instrument working.” Her voice, meaningful and measured, is well remembered by former students. Recalls Kyle Boynton ’02, “She has this unique combination of being able to speak exceptionally well and being able to add drama to her voice. She has this great sense of timing – she always says the right thing at the most perfect moment.”

Away from the classroom, her voice has been heard and appreciated on stage. Working for almost three decades in the capacity of director, producer, costumer, actor, or a combination thereof, she has brought precision and professionalism to some 60 School productions. During her tenure, the Hotchkiss Dramatic Association has presented acclaimed productions of The Laramie Project and For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, and jazzy musicals, including Guys and Dolls and Into the Woods.

Tames says her main task in teaching is reconnecting students with their natural acting abilities. “From birth to age eight, most kids are brilliant actors,” she says, “because they can imagine doing it all. Then they get socialized, and they learn how to get rigid, and they forget how to react to something. So my job is to help students rediscover their imaginations.”

In 2009 Tames received the Lufkin Prize, an annual honor reserved for the faculty member who has made a significant contribution to the character development of students through his or her example – in sum, serving as a moral compass. In her acceptance speech, she reflected on the honor, as well as the responsibility. Here are her remarks to an all-School Auditorium on that day.

IMMEASURABLE BEAUTY: LUFKIN PRIZE SPEECH

By Sarah Tames Currently the whole question of what we teach and how we teach it is very much alive here at Hotchkiss. Your teachers talk about it in faculty meetings, and discuss it in department meetings or at the lunch table; we gather in Monahan with an open laptop and overhead projections, writing and thinking S u m m e r

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about these questions. We attend conferences and participate in workshops.

And yet, while all these discussions and conferences and endless streams of articles and data have been important in this collective pursuit of excellence in teaching, I confess I still begin every semester with some very basic metaphors in mind: an island, a pie and, more recently, a compass.

My seniors from this past semester’s English elective on Modern Irish Literature will recognize this first image. It stands for everything you know so far, large and small, from quadratic equations, whatever they are (some of you know, I don’t) to the latest version of the IPod or the phone number for Mizza’s Pizza. Everything you currently know is included on this island. Now, the shoreline represents all you know that you don’t know. For example, I know that I don’t know what a quadratic equation is. I know that I don’t know very much about theatre or literature, but I also know that I know a whole lot more than I used to know. I know virtually nothing about Irish history, but I know more this year than I did last. Three years ago I knew nothing about, had never heard about, the “dirty wars” in Argentina and Uruguay, yet now I’m about to direct a play based on a piece of that history. The island grows.

Which brings me to the last part of this metaphor—the space beyond. All this area, which is and always will be infinite, represents all you don’t even know that you don’t know.

For example, when you were two years old you most likely did not know that there was something called a boarding school, much less that you would attend one, nor did you know a smidgeon of all the information now roiling around there in your brains. You have learned a great deal more, and your island has grown; but for every widening, lengthening, deepening of that island there is just as much knowledge out there yet to claim. I find that quite comforting. The one thing I know with absolute certainty is that there is always something left to learn. I’ll never read all the books, see all the plays, hear all the music, and so on, but I will, we will, always have an ever-increasing island of what we’ve read, heard, seen, touched, tasted, smelled, and especially, thought. It’s a nice metaphor, one you can carry around and draw on a paper napkin at a diner to share with friends.

Related to this way of seeing and knowing what you know and what you don’t know and what you don’t know that you don’t know, comes my second metaphor: pie. Not mathematical pi, which is a concept I still cannot grasp, but a puzzle pie comprised of fairly familiar symbols placed in five of six wedges; one wedge is deliberately left blank. The invitation here is to suggest what symbol you would put in the empty wedge that would essentially unify all the symbols into one collaborative connection. There are many plausible answers. Recently a student suggested that I put in a ques-

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tion mark, simply to say “unknown,” and besides, it is the upside down mirror image of the top middle symbol; another student suggested that we use the letter Z. She reasoned that the Z either completed a rather ephemeral presence of the alphabet or, since Z stands for zed or nothing, it represented the nothing that was there in the wedge before.

Wonderful ideas! I showed this image to Mr. Babcock who, using his lens as a designer, saw the letter M as the viable choice. Why? We needed a shape to be in balance with the E, just as the A was with the V, and the I with the J. Interesting and very plausible. The point here is that there can be many satisfying interpretations to what you read, what you see.

You know this. Daily themes, history term papers, Teagle essays, lab experiments, scene study, everything we do really engages us in the multiplicity of choice. Are there less satisfying choices? Yes. But that just makes our ultimate choice all the more satisfying for having tried a few others.

I suspect you can hear now where I’m headed, for this metaphor of multiple choices easily applies to our life choices as well. That brings me to my last image: the compass, or more specifically, a moral compass, which is a phrase incorporated into the description of the Lufkin Prize. Indulge me a moment while I read the description to you: Traditionally one of the most unique characteristics of a Hotchkiss education is the moral compass set by the ‘everyday living’ examples of the School’s faculty. In classrooms, on the playing fields, in the Dining Hall and dormitories these faculty members set an example of character and personal integrity that, as much as at any other time or place in their early years, imprints on students a value system with which to address the inevitable conflicts that arise in their later lives.

That, Mr. Lufkin, is a huge responsibility! I would like to say that the choices I’ve made in my life were well thought out with a clear sense of direction and an awareness of the potential moral consequences. I cannot. Here I stand, a person who vehemently supported the riots when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, who stridently participated in illegal protests against the war in Vietnam, who certainly experimented with drugs, who proudly stood naked on stage in a “tribal love rock musical” called Hair, and, well, the list could go on, but you get my point? I should think many folks in this audience would not see me as a very reliable moral compass at all! Indeed I would even suggest that with me by your side you might just get a little lost. Then again, getting lost is not always a bad thing.

It is in fact by getting lost for a while that I serendipitously ended up here today. Thirty-two years ago, recently divorced and a college dropout, I came to Lakeville because I thought it might be a nice place to live, to get my life straightened out—whatever that means. I started cleaning houses to pay my rent, and one of my clients was Barbara DelPrete, wife of

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RIGHT: At the retirement dinner, Sarah Tames thanks Athena Fliakos ’95 for the remarks that she gave in tribute to her.

Like her mentor, Athena has studied and taught English and writing.

the athletic director at a place called The Hotchkiss School.

That was my introduction to this boarding school world.

Talk about widening my island of knowledge! I was hired as a guest choreographer here for a production of Promises, Promises, an awful show, and that in turn, with Hotchkiss advice and connections, led me to go on to finish an undergraduate degree in English, which in turn led me to graduate school. In 1983, Blair Torrey, the head of the Hotchkiss English department, invited me to interview for a position, and 27 years later I’m still here. Rewind that tape, and you’ll see it all started with my personal moral compass spinning in many directions at once!

The truth is that I tend to let things happen to me or to leap with one eye closed or not leap at all but just sort of fall into the next thing. Maybe fall isn’t exactly right. Sometimes maybe it’s more about just being open to what comes next. I say this to you not from some position of supreme confidence. In fact I find that the longer I stay in this profession the less confident I am about what I think, what I know, what I believe. I sometimes find it rather ludicrous to say that I am a teacher at all. I have much more information, yes, but I also have many more doubts. I think they keep me honest; I know they keep me curious; I hope they keep me humble. But I’m not certain. Happily, something Kipper Deutsch stated elegantly in a recent in-class essay has given me a new way to think about such doubts. “Most of life’s important questions,” writes Kipper, “are unanswerable.

Most truths cannot be revealed, and a person’s true agenda: unknowable. This uncertainty that accompanies these questions is of immeasurable beauty.”

Immeasurable beauty. I love that phrase. The immeasurable beauty in the discovery of something completely new to you; the immeasurable beauty in the intellectual argument that has multiple and equally viable perspectives; the immeasurable beauty of not knowing exactly where you’re going, but making the choice as best as you can, right or wrong, to go anyway – that particular beauty, it seems to me, must be at the heart of all we do, as mutual teachers and learners, as veritable stumblers in our lives, hopefully having with us good compasses to help us along the way. That’s all we can do, and hopefully, do it well.

Thanks very much for listening, and have a great day.

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ROBERT F. HAIKO THE EDWARD R. TINKER CHAIR DIRECTOR OF FILM AND PHOTOGRAPHY INSTRUCTOR IN PHOTOGRAPHY TREMAINE GALLERY DIRECTOR By Henry McNulty

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n August 1969, Hotchkiss Lower Mid Chris Bechhold ’72 watched as a young faculty couple began unpacking their car and moving into Memorial. “Who’s the new teacher?” he asked another student. “Some guy named Haiko,” was the answer. “He’s going to teach photography.”

Bechhold couldn’t believe it. “For credit?” he asked in astonishment. “Yeah,” the other student replied, equally amazed. “For credit.”

Bob Haiko’s arrival as the first faculty member to teach something as practical and hands-on as photography was not the last of the changes he would bring to School. Even today, the first thing prospective students and their parents see when they walk into the Main Building is the huge collage of photos of Hotchkiss students covering the walls of the foyer – all taken by “Foto Bob.”

Building a Program Robert F. Haiko grew up in the Hartford suburb of Wethersfield, Conn. He enrolled at the School of Fine and Applied Arts at Boston University to study art; while there, he discovered his interest in photography. He took graduate studies in photography at MIT and went on to earn an M.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of Design. Despite all that education, “I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he confesses. But he was given a few months to decide, courtesy of Uncle Sam. As his student deferments from the draft expired, he joined the Air National Guard.

In the meantime, then-Headmaster A. William Olsen Jr. had decided that the School ought to offer courses in photography and dispatched English teacher Richard Hughes to look for a suitable candidate. He found Bob Haiko, fresh from six months of Guard duty. “I came for my interview in April of 1969, still in my uniform,” Haiko says. “I guess they decided that anyone who was in the service wouldn’t be too much of a troublemaker.” He started that fall.

Although Hotchkiss had eight darkrooms and a handful of photo enlargers in 1969, mostly used for work on the Mischianza, there was no formal photography program.

Haiko created one from scratch. “I had to use one of the

chem labs for my classroom,” he recalls. “I kept all the teaching stuff in a darkroom, and every time I had a class, I had to take it out to the lab, and when it was over, bring it all back to the darkroom. It was a rough first year.” By 1970, he had turned an underused storeroom into a small office, three film-editing rooms, and a classroom.

Chris Bechhold remembers: “At any time of the day or night, in sunny, rainy, or snowy weather, Bob would have us out hiking around campus, in the woods, or around Lakeville, attempting to isolate or depict or capture a particular quality or essence of some subject – especially if that quality or essence was elusive or difficult to discover or portray.”

“We lived above ground with our cameras in our hands and below ground with tongs and photo paper,” said Kathy Araskog Thomas ’87 in a note to Bob Haiko, “and you gave us freedom, and you trusted us – for that I was always grateful because so many adults wouldn’t do that.”

But not everyone welcomed a course in photography.

“When I first started,” Haiko chuckles, “there were some who thought teaching photography at a school like Hotchkiss was pretty bogus.” Over more than 40 years, he proved them wrong.

Moving into Movies As for motion pictures, says Haiko, “first, we did a little sequential still photography, using slides. The next year, we began with Super 8 movie film. I would give the kids specific technologically-oriented assignments, but eventually the students could design their own films.”

A typical beginning film assignment, he says, might be something as basic as “two people meet in a particular place; an interaction happens; and they leave.” Simple exercises like that “taught how to set up camera angles, how a scene should be lit, what’s the blocking like, how do you keep it in focus,” Haiko notes. “It wasn’t as easy as it is today with digital video.”

Walter Strafford ’99, who now works behind the scenes on films and TV shows in New York, recalls a teaching moment.

“Following a less-than-successful screening of a short film I’d made, I returned to the video editing room for a shot-byshot review with Bob,” he says. “He didn’t spare me from S u m m e r

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some well-deserved criticisms. He did, however, make me want to prove I could do better, and he pointed to specific places where I could start. It was typical of Mr. Haiko, who could be demanding without being demoralizing. ” Haiko also taught students the history of still and motion picture photography. “We studied Louis Daguerre, Alfred Steiglitz, Walker Evans, and many others. For cinema, I did Hitchcock for several years, Ingmar Bergman, people like that,” he says. He also tried more up-to-date fare, with mixed results: “I was steeped in avant-garde films, and I tried to show some to the students. They didn’t always go over well with the audiences in the auditorium. We would start out with 50 or 60 kids there, and when we turned the lights on, there would be three or four of us sitting in the back.”

But a handful of students in the film classes started the Unreel Film Society. “They showed work by Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Jonas Mekas – all the avant-garde filmmakers of the day,” Haiko says. “It was so much fun. And we did our own experimental films, too – one of the assignments was to take 50 feet of 16-millimeter leader and scratch it, punch holes in it, and so forth, just to see what the result would be. It gave the students a chance to understand the materiality of real film.”

recalls those first digital photo courses. “Their rudimentary computers had no memory. There were no digital printers … There was no textbook, no process manual. This was all new – all ‘Foto Bob.’” Even as he taught digital techniques, Haiko insisted that his photography students learn how to shoot, develop, and print with film. “All the nuts and bolts are learned at that level,” he explains. “You have to spend time learning about f-stops and shutter speeds, depth of field, instead of just waving a camera around that does everything for you. The kids that learn the basics are going to have a better understanding of the whole process, a tactile sense of it.”

Walter Strafford remembers: “When I expressed frustration with some of the under- or over-exposed portions of my prints, Mr. Haiko had patiently demonstrated the ‘dodging’ and ‘burning’ techniques by which I could lighten and darken these areas. A few weeks later, Mr. Haiko spotted me as I examined some of my new negatives. Looking at the shots on the light table, he said something like, ‘If you put more work and care into getting a good negative, you wouldn’t need to spend so much time, in the darkroom, trying to improve your prints.’ It was a kind-hearted, encouraging rebuke.”

Not all his time was spent with cameras. In athletics, Haiko started an exercise program, which soon became known as Foto Bob’s Bod Squad. “You would start doing pushups, sit-ups, running around the field,” Haiko says. “So I would do that fall and winter until the 2000s. The advantage of the Bod Squad was there was no way I was going to sit around and watch them – so I exercised right along with them.” He still rides his bicycle almost every day.

Because of the specialized nature of his coursework, Haiko says he didn’t work collaboratively with other faculty often. That changed two years ago, when he taught a component of the multidisciplinary humanities course. “That experience,” he says, “was really special with me.”

Over the years, he also brought the work of many superb photographers to the Tremaine Gallery, including Walker Evans, Susan Meiselas, Eugene Richards, Fred Cray ’75, and Paul Strand.

In retirement Haiko, and his wife, Sandy, whom he married just before coming to Hotchkiss, have moved off campus but still live in Lakeville. Their son, Bradford, lives in Salisbury and pursues careers as a chef and in landscape design.

And Haiko hopes to continue bringing photography to Hotchkiss. “That Main Building collage was designed to be updated from time to time,” he says. “Now that I’ve retired, I’d love to do a new panel or two.”

Technology Steps In

PHOTO BY SANDRA HAIKO

“The students shot Super 8 film through the 1970s,” Haiko says. “Then we changed to reel-to-reel Beta videotape. At first, editing equipment wasn’t available to us. We were finally able to edit video when we began using the VHS format.

But even that involved a complex system of three huge editing decks and multiple cords running everywhere.”

In 1991, Haiko and computer specialist Leland Hall started a course in digital photography. Hall, now retired in Maine, remembers those revolutionary days with bemusement.

Charlie Noyes ’78, co-head of the Art Department, similarly

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OPPOSITE: Recent work by Bob Haiko, clockwise from top left: Pool, Canaan, 2010; Kiss, NYC, 2009; Girl With Pig Tails; and Woman in Car, Torrington (all Copyright Robert Haiko)

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LEFT: Jonathan Canno speaks at the Community Service Award ceremony.

NOT ONE BUT TWO REMARKABLY ACCOMPLISHED HOTCHKISS ALUMNI RECEIVED THE HOTCHKISS COMMUNITY SERVICE AWARD THIS YEAR: JONATHAN S. CANNO ’66 AND DAVID H. CARLETON ’85. BOTH HAVE BLAZED PHILANTHROPIC PATHS THAT PROVIDE INSPIRATION AND GUIDANCE FOR THE NEXT GENERATION.

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nd both have used their conventional business backgrounds to lever success in the not-forprofit world: Jonathan Canno by raising millions for AIDS research through amfAR; David Carleton by spearheading FareStart, a culinary job training and placement program for homeless and disadvantaged men and women.

Carleton, who has a B.A. from McGill University and an M.S. in Communications from Northwestern University, has applied his management, business development, and communications experience to develop social enterprises that result in positive outcomes for individuals

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facing employment barriers, including homelessness, addiction, and/or a history of incarceration. In 2006 he founded Catalyst Kitchens, a social-enterprise model that’s currently duplicating Seattlebased FareStart’s success across the country. “I like things that make sense,” he said, explaining why he left a career in media and hi-tech funds to make an impact by providing people in need with food, jobs, and self-esteem.

Jonathan Canno, a 1970 graduate of Boston University, began his business career at Equitable Bag Company, a family business started by his grandfather that today is the country’s largest retail-

and flexible-packaging company. He went on to become its COO and president, and later CEO and chairman of the board. In 1983, he joined the board of the New York-based AIDS Medical Foundation (AMF) and eventually became vice chairman. Two years later, he was pivotal in combining AMF with a nascent Los Angeles organization, the National AIDS Research Foundation – begun with funding from Rock Hudson’s estate and additional support from Elizabeth Taylor – to create amfAR, today the world’s leading not-for-profit organization dedicated to the support of innovative AIDS research, HIV prevention, treatment education, and the advocacy of AIDS-related public policy.

In the early 80s the HIV virus hadn’t been identified yet, said Canno, who served as chair of fund development for amfAR’s board until 1995 and received the organization’s Award of Courage in 2004. “People were dying. Young people – my friends. And no one was doing anything,” he pointed out during the CSA awards ceremony at the Esther Eastman Music Center’s Katherine M. Elfers Hall on April 8. Joining two complex entities into a single organization with a cohesive mission wasn’t an easy process, but by using business skills learned at his family-

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impact. Because of this, AIDS is no longer considered a major problem for newborn babies. Just discussing it,” he added, “sends chills up my spine.”

Praising Hotchkiss as the best preparatory school in the U.S., he noted with pleasure that although it’s happily less homogenous than when he was student, it’s still a place where learning for the sake of knowledge is key. “If there is one message that I’m trying to get across, it’s that while some of the information you learn [here] may be specifically important or specifically irrelevant, it’s nevertheless all part of the body of knowledge that you will need to solve any problem you will face.”

In 1995, when he became a CEO, he remembers reading that 55 percent of all CEOs had a humanities background, rather than a business or financial one.

The percentage is far smaller today. A shame, he thinks, since he believes that

My challenge to you guys as a

new generation: Any time you hear that [term]

‘not for profit’ focus on what positive is being represented by

that organization…

’’

David Carleton ’85

creativity is as crucial to problem-solving as number-crunching. “Digression is actually the point,” he said with a grin.

“It’s not all a straight line. You must learn everything and choose your own passion.”

Next up at the podium was David Carleton, national director of FareStart and founder of Catalyst Kitchens, who pointed out that the words not-for-profit have a negative connotation, which he urged students to counteract. “What about FOR finding a cure for AIDS, or FOR transforming lives through job training?” he asked. “My challenge to you guys as a new generation: Any time you hear that [term], ‘not for profit,’ focus on what positive is being represented by that organization or that agency that is being described.”

LEFT: David Carleton talks about his program, FareStart.

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owned manufacturing firm, he was able to do it, he said, since the same methodology applies whether an organization is for- or not-for profit.

In the quarter century that followed, amfAR has invested more than $300 million in programs and awarded grants to more than 2,000 research teams worldwide. Because it has the freedom and flexibility to respond quickly to emerging areas of scientific promise, it has played a catalytic role in accelerating the pace of HIV/AIDS research, achieving real breakthroughs and saving hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives.

Along the way, Canno has custom-tailored the business model of Art Against AIDS, an international effort of artists, galleries, and festivals that raises millions of dollars. He also established the Jonathan S. Canno Vaccine Research Fund at amfAR to support the development of innovative AIDS vaccines. “amfAR funded the original research that proved that pregnant women who had been tested positive for HIV can deliver a baby who if treated with AIDS drugs at birth will ‘zero-convert’ to being HIV negative,” he noted. “This has had a huge

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LEFT: The two award winners share up-tothe-minute information with Head of School Malcolm McKenzie, right.

Carleton worked in media and Internet technology for 15 years before taking a leadership role at FareStart in 2003. He was drawn to it because, as a social enterprise, it combines what he terms the best of service and business approaches. “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. And if you teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime,” he said, quoting the old saying. “FareStart does both. We use the process of producing nutritious, from-scratch meals to train individuals who need a second chance, who deserve a second chance.”

Founded in Seattle almost 20 years ago, the organization has enabled nearly 3,500 people to transform their lives while serving over four million meals to disadvantaged men, women, and children at low-income daycare centers, head-start programs, senior meal programs, and shelters. (Lunch is also served to the public in the FareStart restaurant in downtown Seattle.)

Because sharing good ideas also makes sense to him, Carleton set up Kitchens With Missions (KWM) in 2006 as a way to replicate FareStart’s success

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in other cities, including running restaurants where profits go back into programs that support job training and placement. The name was changed to Catalyst Kitchens last January. “The vision was to take the impact we’re having in the Seattle region and grow it exponentially by sharing a good solid model, a proven model that works, [and] providing other organizations with a path to reach the same kind of success that FareStart has achieved,” he said.“Through food-service job training, and job placement in the food industry, folks go from having nothing, to having a career, to having a place to live.

And we see this transformation happening every day.”

So far, he has helped guide the development and launch of more than 50 similar social enterprise businesses around

the country. “In just a few years Catalyst Kitchens across the U.S. will be providing 25,000 meals a day to individuals in need,” he said. “We’re going to be training over 5,000 individuals as they work toward a better life. And we’re going to be self-generating over $15 million in business revenues, the profits from which go back to pay for the services that we provide the individuals in our training programs. So this is a complete circle – something that makes sense – and that’s where my passion and my enthusiasm come from.”

TO VIEW THE ENTIRE 2011 COMMUNITY SERVICE AWARDS PRESENTATION, GO TO THE SCHOOL WEBSITE’S ALUMNI HOME PAGE AT WWW.HOTCHKISS.ORG AND SCROLL DOWN TO “VIDEOS.”

‘‘

Digression is actually the point.

It’s not all a straight line.

You must learn everything and choose your own passion.

’’

Jonathan Canno ’66

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POET

IN

RESIDENCE

P O E T A N D T E A C H E R S U S A N K I N S O LV I N G C O N T R I B U T E S T O A V I S I O N A R Y C O N V E R S AT I O N A M O N G A R T I S T S A B O U T A M E R I C A “ N OW A N D H E R E ” oet in Residence Susan Kinsolving can now add a new book to her ouevre (three critically acclaimed collections of poetry and publication of her work in numerous anthologies). Crossing State Lines: 54 Writers, an American Renga, published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, presents a dialogue about the American experience among the country’s poets.

Crossing State Lines is a book of linked verses in the tradition of a 14th-century Japanese renga. One poet composes the first three lines, or hokku (5-7-5 syllables), and the next writer completes those verses with two more lines, or the ageku (7-7 syllables). In Crossing State Lines, each poet was required to write ten lines. For a long renga such as this, the pattern is repeated, each verse moving in a new direction. This technique keeps the renga twisting and turning like the interstate highways crisscrossing America.

The invitation for Susan to participate in this conversation came from Eric Fischl. Fischl has a strong conviction that our country, since 9/11, has grown more politically polarized and as a result has been losing its sense of its place and direction on the world’s stage.

Fischl turned to America’s poets, musicians, playwrights, and visual artists in hopes that their voices would spur on this conversation as they express in color, words, and music their experiences of America. His project, America: Now and Here is not so much about the art created, but building a dialogue about our country through the art. Using the concept “through art” provides people with ways to contemplate America other than those offered by the nightly news and pop culture. The conversation will be taken on the road during a Great American Art Trip, which will first stop in temporary spaces in Kansas City, Detroit, and Chicago, and then be outfitted in six trailer trucks, which will visit smaller towns and cities. More on this project can be found at www.americanowandhere.org.

Susan Kinsolving speaks with her signature eloquence about her piece of the conversation in this interview.

P

The project involves 54 well-known poets. Lisa Russ Spaar wrote the lines previous to yours, and Grace Schulman wrote the verses which link to yours. Had you worked with these poets before, or was this project an icebreaker?

There was not any correspondence with my predecessor or successor on the renga. It’s a chain, rather than collaboration. It’s a bit like replying to a note in a bottle, then tossing that bottle back into the waves, brain waves.

Can you explain your thought process in creating your verses, and how Lisa Russ Spaar’s portion influenced your writing?

No, I can’t explain any of that. The poet Randall Jarrell said: A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.

Is this your first renga?

Yes. Formal concerns in poetry interest me; so I attempted to follow

B y A n d re a Tu f t s

the syllabics or sound units of a renga, along with its thematic ties.

Writing a renga might be a poetry project our students would enjoy. The linkage, making each writer dependent and independent, is a useful and intriguing example of cultural layering.

Did you bring any part of your experience with this project into your classroom? If so, what was the outcome?

Farrar, Straus & Giroux just published the renga this spring. So then the poem could be read in class, and its particular development considered. Next year, I might imitate Crossing State Lines by asking students to cross poetically all the state lines and international borders in the Hotchkiss community. International poetry has a surprising place in little Lakeville.

Eric Fischl said that some artists declined to be involved in America: Now and Here because they thought the project was too patriotic or nationalistic. Why did you decide to participate?

America: Now and Here is an excellent idea. Invigorating cultural dialogue is beneficial to any civil society. I admire Eric as a visual artist and a citizen. His project was not about ego, but service. He spent many months organizing and administrating this. Now truckloads of art are on display in Kansas City today, along with readings of poems, interviews with playwrights. Wonderful, thought-provoking exhibits. He certainly didn’t need the work. As Americans, we can be proud that our artists and poets have celebrated our landscape and heritage, as well as fiercely criticized and questioned our politics and social values. Carol Muske-Dukes uses the image of a “fun-house mirror” in her portion of the renga to dispute greed, to reflect upon true American “wealth.”

What do you feel you added to the conversation about America “not about art, but through art?”

My contribution is modest, just a beginning. As a poet and a teacher, I’ll enjoy Crossing State Lines as a reference and an inspiration. Reading and writing poetry is “through art.” Literary criticism is “about” poetry. Our creative writing class continues through and about, above and below, even sideways.

What has participating in America: Now and Here meant to you?

Having 54 poets participating in a mutual project was visionary, so I was glad and honored to be among them. The concept of the project encouraged thinking about local and national cultural outreach. I like Edward Hirsch’s line “Every state is a state of mind.”

I’ve lived in Connecticut, Southern and Northern California, Massachusetts, New York City, Upstate New York, and Illinois.

Each evokes a different spirit and physicality.

Will you travel to Kansas City, Detroit, or Chicago to see the exhibition?

The temptation is great, but so are my teaching commitments.

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Graduation

GRADUATION 2009 The PromiseCoflass a New Day of 2011

ABOVE AND LEFT: Seniors processed in a route from the Main Building and along the Harris House lawn to a waiting audience.

BELOW LEFT: Graduation speaker James Moorhead ’97 OPPOSITE: Malcolm McKenzie leads the faculty and audience in applauding the new graduates.

‘Find your purpose,’ speaker urges Hotchkiss’s newest alumni B Y

A N D R E A

T U F T S

“You are a formidable class,” Head of School Malcolm McKenzie told them, after first thanking retiring faculty members Walter DeMelle, Bob Haiko, Sarah Tames, and Jim Morrill for their many years of dedicated service. Advising the graduating seniors to “savor this ceremony,” he pointed out that “unity and diversity are the hallmark of your class culture…you did not choose each other, but you have made

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the most of each other.”

Class presidents C. Anders Fogel and Georgina Ryder thanked Class Dean Stacey Nicholson and all of their teachers for making their time at Hotchkiss memorable. “None of us would be where we are today without your caring,” they noted, and closed by challenging classmates to stay in touch and to return for their FiveYear Reunion in 2016.

ALL PHOTOS BY JONATHAN DOSTER

The skies finally turned blue on May 27, just in time for the 119th graduation of Hotchkiss seniors. As the School orchestra played the stirring notes of Tchaikovsky’s “March Slav” and Lake Wononscopomuc glistened in the morning sun, family, friends, and faculty gathered on the Harris House lawn to honor 2011’s 170 accomplished graduates.

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‘‘

‘‘

Unity and diversity… ARE THE

HALLMARK OF YOUR CLASS CULTURE …

After a musical interlude by graduating senior Frederick Jenkins, keynote speaker James Moorhead ’97 approached the podium. Adweek’s 2010 Grand Marketer of the Year for his brilliant reinvention of the Old Spice brand, now the leading body wash and deodorant for men, Moorhead was Old Spice Brand Manager at Proctor and Gamble until last month, when P&G moved him to Gillette as associate marketing director.

With a less-than traditional marketing background that includes working as a hockey coach and serving as a board member of Thinking Beyond Borders, a gapyear program committed to changing the world by translating learning into action, Moorhead keenly remembered standing

where the graduates stood and candidly admitted he didn’t win any awards 14 years ago. But he successfully conveyed a deeply felt message to the Class of 2011 about the importance of finding one’s purpose in life through four ideals he said were symbolized by the Hotchkiss seal – Service, Education, Agility, and Leadership – and which were rooted in his own experience here.

“I would encourage you to make service a central part of your life,” he said, citing School events such as Eco Day and Martin Luther King Day, and he advised graduates to bring this service mentality to their leadership styles – in other words, to lead in order to better serve others, rather than to increase personal power.

He also encouraged them to explore the world. “Somewhere between Zorba the Greek, Odysseus, and Mr. Barker’s Tudor England, I was inspired to travel and continue my education through firsthand experiences. I haven’t stopped exploring since the summer I graduated. Since then, I have traveled to more than 40 countries across all continents, immersing myself in many cultures. While you will have the privilege of continuing your education next year, your peers around the world will be joining the military, demonstrating in the Middle East, or working with their hands to feed their families. Education is a privilege, so I encourage you to continue to be curious and educate yourself in and out of the classroom.”

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HAVE MADE THE MOST OF EACH OTHER …

ABOVE: Associate Head of School John Virden ’64 announces the graduates, as Charls Hurlock approaches Dean Stacey Nicholson and Julia Hunter walks back to her seat.

LEFT: The graduates enjoy the program on a beautiful, warm morning in May.

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…you did not choose each other, BUT YOU

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Crediting agility, the third lesson, for his success on the Old Spice campaign, Moorhead recalled that when he first started in the business marketers only needed to understand print and television advertising. Then the digital age began changing the advertising landscape – but marketers were slow to change with it.

The skills that had made his early career shine were becoming obsolete. “I realized that the recent graduates were running circles around me because they understood digital and social media. As a result, I immersed myself in digital training, found several recent grads to coach me, and I took company-sponsored internships at Microsoft and Facebook.”

It’s this ability to keep changing and

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‘‘

‘‘

I would encourage you TO DRAFT … Y O U R P U R P O S E .

W R I T E I T D O W N . . . B U T C O M M I T T O A C H I E V I N G I T.

growing that keeps him on the cutting edge of the marketing industry, he admitted, since “it is only the agile leaders, schools, and businesses that will survive.”

The fourth lesson, legacy, is one he finds integral to Hotchkiss, from Maria Hotchkiss’s founding of the School in 1891 to Bill Olsen’s introduction of coeducation in 1974. It is embedded in the curriculum, in the Holidays, in the proctors and the dormitories, and was, perhaps, the most important part of his message.

“The best leaders leave a path for those that follow after them. They leave footprints,” he said. “So with every big decision that I make in my life, I ask myself, how will this impact my legacy?”

By the same token, he asked the graduating seniors, “What legacy has Hotchkiss left with you? And vice versa, what legacy have you left at Hotchkiss?

“As you head to college, I would encourage you to draft what you believe is your

purpose,” he advised. “Write it down.

Modify it over time, but commit to achieving it.”

For a video of James Moorhead’s speech, go to the Hotchkiss website, www.hotchkiss.org.

THIS PAGE: Hotchkiss’s newest alumni, 170 strong, sing “Fair Hotchkiss” and enjoy their new status as graduates.

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C A M P U S

V I S I T O R

THE VOICE OF THE CIVIL WAR: Popular historian Edwin Cole Bearss recalls “The Opening Act of a Grand Terrible Drama” B Y

D I V Y A

S Y M M E R S

On April 6, almost the eve of the 150th anniversary of the South’s attack on Fort Sumter, the man who’s considered the Mick Jagger of the Civil War battlefield tour circuit strode to the podium of the Esther Eastman Music Center’s Katherine M. Elfers Hall and proceeded to enthrall a packed audience. yes closed, reading from a text only he could see, he spoke eloquently in a clipped, distinctive voice about ardent abolitionists like Abner Doubleday, staunch secessionists like Edmund Ruffin, stalwart Union navy men like Gustavus Fox, and the intrepid Major Robert Anderson, Fort Sumter’s beleaguered commander, who was promoted to general after his surrender but later suffered a breakdown. As he described the series of events that seemed to lead inexorably to the firing of the first shot of the Civil War, and the deaths of more than

E RIGHT: Historian Ed Bearss OPPOSITE: From left, David Ward, Ed Bearss, and Nate Seidenberg on the Manassas battlefield in June 2010 (at the guns marking the position of the West Point Battery)

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620,000 Americans, you could almost hear the cannon fire and smell the gunpowder.

“To understand the Sumter story, you need to visit the fort, walk across the parade ground, stand at the battery where the signal gun fired on that fateful April morning,” said David Ward, assistant director of the Edsel Ford Memorial Library, in his introduction. “We can’t do that this evening, but we can do the next best thing. We can take a historical journey back in time with someone who’s been leading such time travel for over 50 years.”

Former chief historian of the National Park Service, Edwin Cole Bearss, who turned 88 on June 26, served as historian at a national military park in Mississippi before that. Since retiring 16 years ago, he’s been leading private battlefield tours, garnering a large, loyal, and enthusiastic following known as the “Bearss Brigade.” There is probably no person living who knows more about personalities and political events leading up to the outbreak of the War Between the States – and the subsequent battles waged between soldiers wearing the blue and gray – than he does.

Certainly there’s no one who sounds like him: From the moment he delivers the first word of his narrative, he has you on the edge of your seat.

“Mr. Bearss was incredibly knowledgeable and made the presentation more interesting by not just spouting facts but by relating the events that led up to and after Fort Sumter to modern politics,” commented Brent Shapiro-Albert ’12 by email. “He came to my History 390 (AP U.S. History) class the next day and answered questions not just about the Civil War but also about more recent events. He told us a lot about his own experiences, and even how he told his parents he was joining the Marines after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”

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During his lecture, in fact, Bearss drew a parallel between the previously disunited Union’s sudden mobilization after the South fired first with that of a disunited United States’ coming together on December 6, 1945; for him, as for thousands of passionate battle re-enactors around the country, the Civil War is a living, breathing epoch that just happens to have taken place 150 years ago.

Even the title of his Hotchkiss lecture, “Fury at Fort Sumter: The Opening Act of a Grand Terrible Drama,” made it seem more recent. No detail escaped him, no senator or commanding officer’s quirk went unmentioned, and when he was asked questions at the end of the night (“Did the South ever have a chance of winning the Civil War?”), he demonstrated that his ability to answer them is inexhaustible.

“The firing of the first shot – the first shot that counts – is the one fired at Fort Sumter,” he said before pointing out the eerie coincidences of April 14 in the years 1861, at war’s start, and 1865, at its end. “On the 14th day of April 1865, Anderson is at Fort Sumter where he will at noon hoist the garrison flag – the same garrison flag he lowered at that time on the 14th day at that time [four years earlier],” he said. “Strange to say, Mr. Lincoln cannot be there.

He’d have been better off if he’d been there, because on the evening of the 14th, he will attend the play, Our American Cousin, at the Ford Theatre. And at 10:20 that night, John Wilkes Booth will fire a bullet into the President’s brain.

Thus we have the first shot of the Civil War and the assassin’s bullet taking place the same time, four years and 10 hours short.”

A native of Montana, Ed Bearss grew up on a cattle ranch where, as a young boy, he was enthralled by a biography about dashing Confederate cavalry officer Jeb Stuart that his father read to him. (To this day, Bearss prefers telling stories about Confederate generals, whose colorful peccadilloes make their Union counterparts seem like buttoned-down executives.) In the spring of 1942, when he was 18, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps. Severely wounded by Japanese machine-gun fire in the South Pacific, he was discharged in 1944. After a two-year convalescence in San Diego, he used the G.I. bill to finance his undergraduate degree at Georgetown University and later earned a Master’s from Indiana University. Although he’s written a number of books and holds several honorary degrees, he eschewed academia for a career as a public historian and in the early 1950s joined the Office of the Chief of Military

History. He was then appointed as on-site historian at Vicksburg National Military Park, where he remained until shortly after the Civil War Centennial of 1961 when he was transferred to Washington D.C. In 1981 he was named chief historian of the National Park Service, a job he held until pretending to retire in 1995. But it’s as a battlefield tour guide that he’s best known by the general public, a role that allows him to engage in what a Washington Post reporter termed “Homeric monologues.” Those stentorian tones and long pauses, his unique cadence and delivery – always in the present tense – make listening to him an unforgettable experience, one first introduced to the world at large by Ken and Ric Burns’ seminal 1990 documentary, The Civil War, in which his retelling of the saga of abolitionist leader John Brown sent chills down viewers’ spines. “He sounds like McArthur,” says David Ward. “On battlefield tours, we march to the sound of Ed’s voice.”

Ward, a librarian at Hotchkiss for 24 years this September, has known Ed Bearss since 1989 when he began organizing Civil War seminars and started a roundtable that met at Hotchkiss before moving to the library in neighboring Salisbury, and then to the church in Torrington where John Brown was baptized. At around the same time, he began inviting distinguished Civil War scholars to give informal talks; Ed Bearss was one of the

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ABOVE: From left, David Ward, Ed Bearrs, and Malcolm McKenzie stand before the School’s statue of Abraham Lincoln.

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first. (Ward was also responsible for last year’s allSchool lecture by eminent Civil War scholar James McPherson.) A scholar in his own right – he has a Civil War book due out from Kent State University Press in 2013 – he, too, became interested in Civil War history as a child, and was five or six when he and his father visited Antietam and Gettysburg.

“We lived in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, and that’s only a couple of hours’ drive from Gettysburg,” he remembers. “My father had a fairly large book collection and I can remember looking at a particular set of volumes known as Miller’s Photographic History, which is a photographic record of the war.” Later he became interested in it in “a more academic way” while at Franklin & Marshall College, and eventually authored a master’s thesis on a Union Army unit, a group of threeyear volunteers, also from Pennsylvania.

In the 1990s Ward began offering tours to Gettysburg, first for roundtable groups and then as a commercial venture (see www.civilwartours.org).

Today he runs summer trips to the battlegrounds of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania for groups ranging from five to 60 people. Early on, he got in touch with Ed Bearss and says his company

A G A Z I N E

is one of two or three firms that Bearss works for exclusively when he’s not otherwise engaged. “He’s doing a tour or a lecture 300 out of 365 days,” Ward noted. “He’s the most hyperactive octogenarian you’ll ever meet. He loves doing the tours.

He loves seeing people. It keeps him going. He also has a photographic memory: he remembers everything he’s ever read. You have to understand that he’s not a regular person. He’s unique.”

Instructor in History Nate Seidenberg, who went on a tour with Ward last summer, agrees. “We were in northern Virginia in June and it’s in the high 90s with close to 100 percent humidity and here’s this man in his eighties pacing back and forth, with that timbre he’s got in his voice, and he’s telling us exactly what it was like during that particular battle.

He’s read so many books, and he’s got such an incredible recall. As I told my students, Ed has forgotten more about the Civil War than most people will ever know.”

Seidenberg admits he can still recall every word about John Brown that Bearss spoke in the Ken Burns documentary, which historians credit with rekindling a national interest in the Civil War that resulted in dramatically higher visitor rates to battlefield sites. “It was the way he got to the heart of the matter with the cant of his voice, and the way he tells a story. It burned itself into my brain.”

Through the voices of the soldiers that fought, the generals who led them, and a host of minor and major characters, the nine-part public television production captured the unforgettable pain and horror of brother fighting brother; it remains one of the most popular PBS programs ever aired.

“One of the things Bearss and I have been talking about lately is that we’re seeing younger people on the tours. We’re not seeing a bunch of gray-haired, bald-headed guys. We see a lot of fathers with their sons. We see a lot more women,” said David Ward.

“The Civil War is clearly the defining period of American history and the central event in the American historical consciousness.”

TO VIEW THE LECTURE BY HISTORIAN EDWIN COLE BEARSS, GO TO THE SCHOOL WEBSITE, WWW.HOTCHKISS.ORG, AND SCROLL DOWN UNDER “ALUMNI” TO “VIDEOS.”

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THE

DATE

Inaugural State-of-the-School Webcast September 27, 2011 On Tuesday, September 27, at noon EDT, Head of School Malcolm McKenzie will deliver a State of the School address via webcast. Moderated

by Associate Head of School and Dean of Faculty, Kevin Hicks, the program will include an overview of the beginning of the new school year, admissions and college advising news, a financial snapshot, and reporting on some important initiatives underway at the School. Participants will have the opportunity to submit questions electronically. Initiated by the Alumni Association Board of Governors Communications Committee, this and subsequent webcasts are intended to bring School news to our geographically diverse community. Look for your invitation and registration instructions via e-mail or a printed card in late August. For more information, please contact Caroline Sallee Reilly ’87, Associate Director of Alumni and Parent Programs, at creilly@hotchkiss.org or (860) 435-3892.

AT A COMMUNITY EVENT IN JULY, SALISBURY VOLUNTEER AMBULANCE SERVICE (SVAS) MARKED 40 YEARS OF SERVICE TO LAKEVILLE AND SALISBURY.

SHOWN AT

THE EVENT ARE THESE HOTCHKISS EMPLOYEES AND SVAS VOLUNTEERS, FROM LEFT: FRONT ROW, TIM VILLANO ’84, VIRGINIA

BEVAN,

PAT

KELLY,

AND

CAROLINE

KENNY

BURCHFIELD ’77; BACK ROW, TED DAVIS, BETSY DAVIS, PAULA

RUSSO,

WALTER

CRAIN,

JARED

ZELMAN,

BOB

HAIKO, TINA CHANDLER, AND BETTY TYBURSKI.

EARTH & FIRE

SOUTH AFRICAN POTTERY SYMPOSIUM MAY 14 & 15

midst the extracurricular richness of spring, the special weekend symposium on contemporary and traditional South African pottery, Clay: The Art of Earth & Fire, stood out for its blend of striking hands-on demonstrations and illuminating talks by visiting artists and scholars, including Juliet Armstrong, a professor of ceramics at the Center for Visual Arts at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, Fée Halsted, artist and founder of Ardmore Ceramics, and Edward S. “Ned” Cooke ’73, professor of American decorative arts at Yale, who delivered the keynote address on Saturday morning.

Conceived by Hotchkiss Ceramics Chair Delores Coan with help from Instructor in Art Terri Moore, ceramist Judith Crouch, and arts specialist Sarah Vallera, it was an event of “unusual beauty and cultural appeal,” not least because the four Zulu potters, Peni Gumbe, Boni Magwaza, Punch Shalabala, and Betti Mathenjiva, so easily won the hearts of the Hotchkiss community.

All are from rural villages in the heart of South Africa’s KwaZulu Natal province: three of the four women had never before flown on a plane, much less left their country, and spoke little or no English. Yet they took it all in stride – from the hallways filled with rushing students to formal meals in the Dining Hall to a whirlwind trip to New York City on Monday.

During their stay, Coan encouraged the School via e-mail to make them welcome by trying out Zulu words of the day, useful phrases that included “Siyafunda,” or “We are learning.”

For those attending the symposium, some from as far away as New Mexico, the accompanying exhibit in the Tremaine Gallery

A

ABOVE: South African potters with Hotchkiss artists: (L-R) Betti Mathenjiva, Punch Shalabala, Terri Moore, Delores Coan, Boni Magwaza, Judith Crouch, Peni Gumbe

was a spectacular, unforgettable highlight.

Bowls and plates with exquisitely fashioned flowers, zebras, tigers, and elephants, by Shalabala and Mathenjiva of the Ardmore artisans’ collective, were displayed in highly colored contrast to the stately dark ukhamba, or Zulu beer pots, created

by Gumbe and Magwaza; the latter pair gave a demonstration of traditional pot blackening on Sunday afternoon, complete with palm-frond fire despite a light but steady downpour.

By the time the artists flew home on Wednesday, almost every piece had been sold.

—D.S.

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Robert Barker passes on the Summer Programs baton, begins sabbatical

Portals

By Joan Baldwin

IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND HOTCHKISS SUMMER PORTALS, YOU NEED TO COME TO BREAKFAST. THERE, IN THE DINING HALL, JULY HUMIDITY HANGING IN THE AIR, AMIDST LAUGHTER AND CLATTERING DISHES IS THE ESSENCE OF THIS DYNAMIC PROGRAM. IT IS THERE IN THE VARIETY OF NATIONALITIES KNOCKING ELBOWS. IT’S THERE IN THE DIVERSE FACULTY AND STAFF, WITH SOME FAMILIAR HOTCHKISS FACES AND SOME KNOWN ONLY TO THIS SUMMER COMMUNITY, BUT ALL COMMITTED TO

PHOTOS: JONATHAN DOSTER

THE INTENSE THREE WEEKS THAT IS THE PORTALS EXPERIENCE.

TOP: Thanking Robert Barker for his service, Melvin Chen presents him with three Langston Hughes songs reformulated for Portals in his honor.

ABOVE: Robert addresses the concert audience.

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As breakfast draws to a close, the chatter is interrupted by Dean of Summer Programs Robert Barker, who booms, “Good morning, everyone.” To this, a chorus of voices, American, Israeli, French, South African, Australian and Chinese, answer, “Good morning, Mr. Barker.” Portals morning meetings are more than just announcements about bus transportation, after-class activities, and special programs.

They are also an opportunity for anyone to be a leader and speak to the group. Shy students, students who secretly want to be actors, and faculty members have all stood at the head of the dining hall under the kind eyes of Maria Hotchkiss and shared something about themselves.

This summer these meetings are tinged with a bit of sadness as Barker steps down from his Portals post July 22. After a long-awaited sabbatical, he will return as Development Assistant to the Head of School in August 2012. (His wife, Candy Barker, retired this June as Director of Events at Hotchkiss.)

Portals new dean is Steve McKibben, a member of the English department and former headmaster of Lake Tahoe School in Nevada.

McKibben has a long history in boarding schools, and although he came to Hotchkiss to return to teaching, he is happy to find himself in an administrative role again as the new Dean of Summer Programs. “I was attracted to Hotchkiss because of the aspirations Hotchkiss has for transforming itself into a school that’s at the leading edge of 21st-century global education,” McKibben says.

“Robert Barker has done extraordinary work in envisioning, founding, and realizing Portals,” says McKibben. “For all his strength as a leader and effective administrator, at his core Robert is a teacher and an advocate for students. I’m going to miss his experience and mentorship, but I’m heartened by the fact that he will be back on campus and active in a new role that will do justice to his knowledge of Hotchkiss and Portals, and his commitment and passion for all its students.”

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RIGHT: Robert Barker extends congratulations to his successor, Steve McKibben.

A member of the faculty since 1975, Barker has taught history for 36 years, served as department head from 1986 to 1991, as class dean and Dean of Dormitory Life from 1994 to 2000, and as Interim Dean of Admission from 2000 to 2001. He was appointed Dean of Summer Programs in 2002, charged with creating a school within a school to replace the more traditional summer program that Hotchkiss had in the 1980s and 1990s. Asked about Portals beginnings, Barker recalls then-president of the Board of Trustees John Thornton ’72 telling him, “Don’t set up any old summer program. Set up one that’s distinctive and exceptional.”

The new Hotchkiss summer program grew out of a blueprint developed by a faculty committee chaired by now Dean of Academic Life, Tom Woelper. After reviewing other programs, the committee realized that in many cases the traditional concept of summer school for students in grades nine to 12 had been co-opted by colleges. “There was no way Hotchkiss could compete,” Barker explained. Instead, the committee suggested Hotchkiss build on two new curricular threads – one symbolized by the Esther Eastman Music Center then under construction and one by the environmental initiative that had gained strength throughout Head of School Robert H. “Skip” Mattoon’s tenure. To build its own distinct audience, the new program would concentrate on rising eighth- to 10th-graders, with a focus in environmental studies and music.

And then there’s the name. According to Barker, as soon as he knew he would be running a program with a music component, he arranged to meet with Robert Blocker, well-known pianist and Dean of the Yale School of Music. Barker remembers two things from what would be one of many conversations with Blocker. First, Blocker described a walled garden with many doors opening onto a world outside, and also he talked about a school’s opening doors to a world of learning, thinking and doing. “It was really Robert [Blocker] who coined the phrase [Portals] and used it as a concept,” Barker said. “I took it and ran with it.”

So Hotchkiss Summer Portals was born. And while it focused for its first six years on music and environmental science, from the beginning the idea was for multiple portals. Door number three opened this summer with an English and Theatre Portal, a partnership between Peking University High School (PUHS), Hotchkiss School and Summer Portals. Born out of friendship between Head of

School Malcolm McKenzie and PUHS Principal Wang Zheng and a subsequent alliance between Barker and PUHS International Division head Xuejun Jiang, the new Portal offers Chinese high school students with a good knowledge of written and spoken English the chance to immerse themselves in American literature, both spoken and written.

This year the 28 PUHS students joined Portals’18 instrumental music students, 13 vocal, and 74 environmental science students. Given the size of today’s science program, it is fitting that the first faculty member Barker hired was the head of Portals’ Environmental Science program, Kevin Mattingly, now Dean of the Faculty at Lawrenceville. Mattingly was succeeded in 2004 by Jim Serach, a Lawrenceville colleague.

For the music side, Barker brought on board Chris Shepard, Music Director, and Melvin Chen, Artistic Director. “Together,” he said, “they came to define chamber music at Portals.” The program’s focus on chamber music – both instrumental and vocal – is intentional because chamber music makes students work in varying groups of three or four, utilizing diverse skills while interpreting the music together. It is, in fact, another metaphor for how Portals works. Bring together students from disparate backgrounds, give them common goals alongside imaginative teaching, and ask them to work as a team.

This style of behavior is visible everywhere, from the annual ping pong tournament where pianist Melvin Chen finds himself opposite a feisty 12-year-old from Russia to a camping trip where students cope with everything the New England woods can throw at them.

For Barker, the experience of creating a program like Portals, from the ground up, has been “extraordinary and humbling.” To this honor he adds the opportunity that he has had to select and work with the students and faculty in such an intimate setting. And then there are the Portals watchwords: Humility, Honesty and Passion. “Those are the things I live by,” he says. “When I think of the best Hotchkiss people I’ve known, people like Frank Sprole ’38 and David Luke ’41” – he stops for a moment before beginning again – “You can have all the knowledge in the world, but unless you have a good heart, you won’t be much good to yourself or the world.”

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Lisa Brown’78, Sarah Brown O’Hagan’79, and Marcia Brown’82: Alumnae with starring roles in public service

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BY KRISTEN HINMAN ‘94

In a way, you could say that the Brown sisters all work

in the family business. One reports to the President of the United States. Another travels the globe to help people afflicted by

disaster. And the third is working to preserve the planet’s natural resources.

Service, particularly public service, runs in the Brown family blood. Their grandfather, W. John Kenney, oversaw the Marshall Plan’s administration in London. Their uncles were foreign service officers. Their father, Philip Brown, who toiled as a corporate lawyer, also advocated for civil rights and served for a decade on the board of his collegiate alma mater. Their mother, Elinor K. Farquhar, meanwhile, had already spent years devoting time to her community’s cultural and philanthropic institutions when, as the mother of three female Hotchkiss students she agreed to serve on the School’s board of trustees.

Daughters of Washington, D.C., and raised to be uber-doers, ever since the three Brown sisters left Lakeville – Lisa in ’78, Sarah in ’79 and Marcia in ’82 – they have thrived in public service careers. “Our parents raised us with a real belief that if you are given a really good education, with it comes the expectation that you’ll do something meaningful with your life, that you’ll

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use that education to help other people,” says Marcia. “I think that all of us absorbed that message and have taken it in different directions.”

It’s a timeless lesson, to be sure, yet one that may resonate even more in a challenging economy. Here, these pioneers of coeducation reflect on the routes they took after graduation from Hotchkiss.

Lisa Brown ’78 Earlier this year, Lisa was tapped by President Barack Obama to co-manage a restructuring of the federal government – her third executive appointment. She was previously Obama’s staff secretary and in the mid-1990s served as counsel to Vice President Al Gore. Lisa attended Princeton University and studied law at the University of Chicago. She has worked in private practice for Shea & Gardner in Washington, D.C., and served as executive director of the American Constitution Society, a progressive

legal organization based in the capital. She has also logged time as a trustee at Hotchkiss. Lisa lives with her husband and eight-year-old son in the D.C. suburbs.

Marcia on her sister Lisa: “I remember years ago, when we were kids, my family vacationing in the Bahamas. I’d have my paperback novel with me, because it’s vacation, and Lisa is there with an 800-page biography of Harry Truman. Lisa has always loved a challenge.”

I just watched an online video of you counting out the 22 pens that the president used to sign the health-care bill into law.

Typical day at the White House?

That’s the ceremonial part of my old job, the public side. In general, the substantive part of the staff secretary job is very internally-focused. But the bill signings are incredible. Typically the audience is people who have played a major role in getting something passed, and so you really get a sense of what this bill or executive order means in people’s lives.

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Previous Page: From left, Marcia Brown, Sarah Brown O’Hagan, and Lisa Brown

Let’s go back to high school. Your family didn’t have any history at Hotchkiss. Why did you choose it?

It was a time [1975] when a lot of the boarding schools were just going coed. And Hotchkiss in contrast to a number of the others had really thought through what it meant to have girls on campus. The girls’ sports teams didn’t have to practice at nine at night or at six in the morning, for example. And, I had a fabulous tour guide. I fell in love with the school when I visited.

Were you planning then to end up in the White House?

I think our parents had the biggest influence on me. There’s no question that I’m a lawyer in part because my father was, although neither he nor my mother said I should become one. They were both passionate about politics and social justice, and that was inculcated in us at an early age, in a good way. For example, they chose not to buy a house in a certain neighborhood of Washington because of its racial covenants. I remember my father at the dinner table giving us lectures about how incredible it was to be an American, and how lucky we were to have freedom of speech.

You did pass through the private sector.

For seven years! One of the important things I learned was that law firms have tremendous resources that you can put into pro bono work. I always had at least one pro bono case going, usually involving disability rights or homelessness issues.

And you left your firm a year or so after making partner!

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OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA

Right: President Barack Obama and Staff Secretary Lisa Brown on the Colonnade prior to the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act Bill signing ceremony, March 30, 2009

I was lured to the Department of Justice (DOJ). And yes, I think a lot of my colleagues thought I was crazy. But it was a fascinating office within the DOJ, where you’re basically in-house counsel for the executive branch of the federal government.

Nine months later – I never could have predicted this – I was working for Vice President Gore in the White House. It was one of those things where a contact of mine at DOJ happened to be close with Gore’s

new counsel, who was looking for a deputy.

That was a good lesson for me, a good lesson in the benefits of risk taking every once in awhile.

The Clinton White House. No shortage of drama there.

Yes, but Al Gore is such an upright person, I never had any doubt that he was absolutely the kind of guy who does the right thing. The work involved everything from staying on top of campaign ethics to various

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policy issues, including disability rights.

You’d walk in in the morning with your todo list, and you might never get to it. That was a very reactive job. But it was a great job, as government jobs often are.

Did you have sense that you’d return to the White House some day?

I was so exhausted when I left. I really didn’t think about it like that.

So did you have to think very long about saying yes the second time?

Yes and no. It was a different conversation.

My husband and I had gotten married while I was working there the first time. Back then it was fine to have dinner together at ten o’clock at night. But the equation changes when you have a young child. You really have to think it through. We had this conversation: Can we make this work? It has to be a we. I’d been at a nonprofit where I was very passionate about what I was doing, but where I also controlled my hours to a large degree. Now my husband is the one who gets home first in the evening and does homework with our son.

So what does the staff secretary do internally?

You’re issue-spotting. You’re the last person who sees every memo that comes in, before it gets to the president. You’re asking, ‘Does this tell him everything he needs to know about this issue?’ Part of it is making sure that everybody who has equities in the issue has looked at the memo, so that by the time it gets to the president he can be sure he’s not getting a warped perspective. A lot of the people in the White House see only one set of issues; you’re making sure that everybody who needs to be hooked up together is communicating.

Stressful!

I would say fascinating. You couldn’t be an expert in everything, which was the challenge, but learning about everything from Afghanistan policy to education was fascinating. It makes you have tremendous respect for the president.

Was there one particularly memorable moment?

The awarding of the Presidential Citizens Medal. It’s given to people who contribute to the betterment of the community in a variety

of ways, and typically to very prominent people. But what the president and First Lady decided was to get nominations from the public. The stories that came in were absolutely incredible, and I got to make the initial calls to tell the 13 winners the president had chosen them. These were people who never thought they’d come to the White House. One of the first people I called tried to say no to our invitation because she was worried she’d embarrass the president. She was one of the people we’d all come to love just by reading about her. It makes you realize both how much is going on all around the country in public service, and what a difference the president’s focusing on an issue can make.

Switching gears, did you ever play basketball with the commander-in-chief?

What’s funny about that is that back when Mr. Crain was starting a girls’ basketball team at Hotchkiss, he knew I was a jock and asked me to come play. I’m horrible at basketball. I can run, I can defend, but I can’t shoot for my life. It turns out that once when we were in Italy traveling with the president, the staff set up a hoop right outside our compound. One day I was in my running shorts, and the guys convinced me to come out for some twoon-two. The president wasn’t playing with us at first, but he did come out and start shooting in between meetings. So I’ve got this wonderful photo of me, David Axelrod, a national security advisor, and the president on the “court.”

He recently tasked you with the government restructuring announced during the State of the Union.

Yes. I’m working with Jeffrey Zients, the chief performance officer at the Office of Management and Budget. If you were planning the government now, for today’s world, in today’s economy, you would design something pretty different from what we’ve got.

So it’s essentially figuring out how we can do better by our customers. Our first area for reform is trade and exports.

So you haven’t exactly freed up much time for anything like those old political biographies.

That is true. But I am reading Harry Potter with my son right now, and I just love it.

Sarah Brown O’Hagan ’79 The list of groups to which Sarah, a recipient of Hotchkiss’s Community Service Award, has given of herself is lengthy: Summer Search New York City; The Louis and Nancy Hatch Dupree Foundation for the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University; the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, to name just a few. But the bulk of Brown’s philanthropic career has been spent with the New York-based International Rescue Committee, where she currently co-chairs the board of directors. After Hotchkiss, Sarah went to Wesleyan University before studying for her master’s degree at SAIS. She worked as a journalist before turning to philanthropy full-time. She lives with her husband and three daughters in New York.

Lisa on Sarah: “Sarah has at times sort of said, ‘Oh, I should be working full-time.’ But she puts a huge amount of time into IRC, and she couldn’t give as much to them if she did have a job. There are so many different ways to figure out the balance in your life, and it’s interesting to see how the three of us have ended up doing it differently.”

I guess you had to go to Hotchkiss, since Lisa was already there.

I had actually announced that I wanted to go to Groton, after I got in there. But yes, I think our parents suggested we each go to our rooms and not come out until we were ready to say we were excited about attending the same school. We played field hockey together; I did a little bench warming while Lisa was always a starter. Then I placed into her French class. We were always a little competitive with each other. In the end, we both loved it.

Was it odd to be among the first groups of girls at the school?

Our prior school had been coed, and so while that experience in and of itself seemed natural to us, I think that the chance to gain S u m m e r

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admission to a top-flight school that had previously been open only to boys was definitely exciting. It felt like we were part of this generation colonizing the old boys’ schools.

Hotchkiss certainly gave us a lot of confidence.

How was it that your life’s work took on an international focus?

We came of age in the ’70s, watching Walter Cronkite report on the Vietnam War and wearing POW bracelets to school. Since my father’s law practice was very international, we always had people coming through our door who spoke seven languages and had been to really far-flung places. There was this sense that being an American meant something important potentially. I was involved in journalism at Hotchkiss, particularly with The Whipping Post, but I wasn’t really actively engaged in international service. We had international students at that time, but not a lot of international-related activities. During my junior year at Wesleyan I was working as a waitress in the president’s house on commencement weekend. The speaker was Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican writer. He gave this powerful speech about the north-south divide and dialogue and the development imperative that the world faced. I was completely captivated. That led me to SAIS at Johns Hopkins.

Where you met your husband.

Yes. After school he was sent to Japan for his job with a commodities trading firm. I went to work for Institutional Investor and then CNN in New York. He came back to the States and said, Will you leave CNN to come to Tokyo with me? I said no. He came back six months later and said, Will you marry me? That was a bigger problem!

Though I spoke three foreign languages by then, Japanese was not one of them. And my timing was bad. The fall of the Berlin Wall was the big story at the time. So I switched to communications consulting in Tokyo.

But the International Rescue Committee ended up being your true calling.

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Yes. We had daughters when we got back to New York, and I decided to stay home with them. In 1995, a great friend suggested I send my resume to volunteer for the IRC. The organization was really at the crossroads of all the things I cared about: America’s role in the outside world, compelling human stories, and advocacy for a meaningful cause. I burrowed my way in and never left.

You’ve had your hand in a lot of the organization’s growth.

I have served in a variety of roles, from researching countries that we might want to put on our watch list to chairing the board’s development committee for a decade.

During that time our total giving grew from $24 million to $62 million. I feel proud of having had a hand in that. We’ve also prioritized our external relations. It used to be that the IRC sort of felt bad about touting its work. But now I think there is real pride here in letting people know about the humanitarian assistance we provide.

Which you’ve seen firsthand.

Yes. I started traveling in IRC delegations in 1996 and have been on trips almost yearly ever since. It’s total immersion: a seven-a.m. to 11-p.m. day, every day, during which you learn what is going on in a particular community through the IRC’s program there.

The purpose is to provide a connection between the field staff and headquarters, to bring a fresh perspective from the field back to the U.S. government and the institutional donor community, as well as to share stories with people who will be seized of the mission and feel compelled to help. I’ve traveled throughout Africa, and to Eastern Europe during the Balkan crisis, and along the Thailand/Burma border. The IRC is known for being the first in to places wrought by war and crisis.

What have you learned in your travels?

Every trip is a huge education. You always meet a mix of incredibly idealistic and committed staff who are experts in their field, whether it’s water or women’s rights or health care, partnered with people who have lost everything – yet are frankly undaunted

and more than willing to do anything to get back up on their feet again. On my first trip through Guinea and into the Ivory Coast, I saw this network of schools that the IRC had begun to build for Liberian refugees resettled in this very forested, dense, almost impenetrable area. These were schools with dirt floors and no textbooks. Yet every 60 or 100 miles, we saw over and over again this whole generation receiving orally the curriculum that their parents had had, and, believe it or not, passing a West African standardized test. In 2008, I went to Liberia and got to meet again with a lot of the people who had been in those schools. I saw how they were now working to rebuild their communities.

It sounds energizing.

Completely. I had a similar experience in travels to Sudan and Uganda. The first time I went to Sudan in 2000, IRC was beginning its push to make health care a uniform component of every program, and I met this staffer named Gabriel. He told us about how he covered his terrain – that he had to walk a couple of days through waist-deep water to reach some of the further out communities and provide for their basic medical care. I ended up seeing him again four years later in Uganda. By that time he was running a complex health operation for internally displaced people there. It was wonderful to see that working with the IRC had enabled this practitioner to hone his skills and then transfer them to another arena.

For some, especially these days, foreign aid is far from a priority. What do you say when Americans ask, Why should we care what happens in Khartoum or Cambodia?

Tom Brokaw, a longtime champion of the IRC who is one of our overseers, has articulated so succinctly my vision, which is that working with the IRC is the best way to reenlist as an American patriot. I really do believe that what happens to women and girls in Khartoum is very important to us here in the U.S. For me it boils down to a simple question: What kind of world do you want to leave for your children?

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Marcia Brown ’82 Name a major conservation organization and chances are, Marcia has worked with or for it.

After extensive environmental field work on projects for The Nature Conservancy and RARE in Central America, she became a senior program officer for Foundations of Success in Bethesda, Maryland. The nonprofit consults on accountability measures for conservation efforts worldwide. Marcia studied at Brown University, worked in the Peace Corps, and obtained a master’s degree in forestry from Duke University. She and her husband

live with their daughter and son in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.

Sarah on Marcia: “Marcia was always more in tune with the planet. She was musical, gentle, and she was more of a listener, especially in our early years.”

Lisa on Marcia: “When I listen to her talk about her job, I’m always impressed at her level of knowledge, even when it sounds like a foreign language to me. She’s gone really, really deep into something really important with an organization that seems to be ahead of the curve.”

You were on your own at Hotchkiss, without your sisters, yet more-so than for them

ABOVE: Sarah Brown O’Hagan, seated at left in the third row, at work with a team from the International Rescue Committee in Saniquelle, Liberia

the school directly influenced your career.

Yes. I took a course in limnology, the study of freshwater lakes, with Ted Davis. I remember very distinctly one winter day when Lake Wononscopomuc was completely frozen, we went out there on snowmobiles, all of us dressed in ten layers of clothing, to

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drill a hole so we could collect water samples and analyze the algae content. The lake had become over-nourished, polluted – the effect of people putting so much fertilizer on their lawns. From there Mr. Davis brought into the class issues of water and air pollution more generally. It was my first introduction to environmental studies, and I knew then that that’s what I would study at Brown.

What compelled you to take that class?

Ironically I was never very scientificallyoriented. My parents really emphasized the humanities. I’d always taken a second language instead of chemistry or physics. But I saw the limnology offering senior year and thought, Ooh, that sounds like fun. I think it may have been fear of the more rigorous science classes!

So you weren’t a nature lover as a kid.

Are you kidding me? My parents didn’t

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take us hiking or anything like that. Oh, no no no. In fact, I ended up taking a year off from Brown to do a NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) course out in the Rockies. It was a really fun course, but it was a very intense, crazy thing for somebody who had hardly ever been out on a trail to do.

Why did you pursue the Peace Corps?

I felt that domestically there was a lot more capacity. We already had basic environmental legislation. Abroad there was so much need to protect some really fabulous and relatively untouched natural areas. I was sent to Costa Rica, which at the time was like the Club Med of the Peace Corps. Within five or six months I was fluent in Spanish and teaching environmental education in an elementary school. I still remember our instructors telling us two things: One, that the world changes you more than you

change the world, and two, that 40 percent of us would marry a Latin American. When I heard that one, I thought, no way; the men seemed so sexist to me. But I did. I met my husband, through a friend from Duke, while working in Guatemala a few years later.

Your field work took you from cloud forests to sea coasts.

Yes, from the top of the watershed to the bottom. First, I was working for a small organization trying to prove the economic value of the forest, in terms of the water source it provides. And then the coastal zone management plan that I worked on was a transnational project spanning several countries and bodies of water in Central America.

It was very complex and involved protecting the marine life where there was a lot of imminent coastal development and illegal fishing going on at night. I was supposed to

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Opposite: Marcia Brown, now a senior program officer for Foundations for Success, at work with a team, Alianza Andes Tropicales in Colombia

monitor and evaluate this plan, which I had no idea how to do when I was hired. I ended up developing a scorecard, so that we could gauge how we were doing, and that became a tool that USAID, which was funding the project, really liked. It showed directly where we had made progress and what we still needed to work on. That was really how I got interested in this whole idea of monitoring and strategic planning in conservation projects – trying to make them more effective.

It sounds like a no-brainer.

Conservation actually has a lot less accountability than most other fields. If you’re working in public health, for example, trying to prevent malaria from spreading in sub-Saharan Africa, you measure how many mosquito nets you’re handing out and the rates of infection before, during, and after your project to see if you’ve had an impact.

But in conservation the systems of measuring effectiveness are a lot more complex.

Historically there’s been a lot of emphasis on what some call “bucks and acres”: how much money you’ve raised and how many acres you’ve saved. But say you’re teaching environmental education to kids in an area that is threatened by deforestation and hunting of endangered species. How do you know if your teaching has had any effect? Donors are getting more savvy and are pushing for more evidence of success. It isn’t good enough anymore to just show pictures of pandas frolicking in a beautiful forested reserve. We need analysis to know when to use certain conservation strategies and why they are effective.

Tell me how you do that.

We teach organizations how to develop results chains, and we help them develop con-

PHOTO BY MARGARET ALLEN

Right: Sarah, Lisa, and Marcia enjoy some rare “sister time” in Washington

ceptual plans that really get at the root causes impacting the scenarios they are trying to change. So there’s a lot of diversity in the substantive nature of my work. Most recently I’ve been teaching a course to nine different organizations working on a variety of projects, from manatee conservation in Costa Rica to forest-corridor development in a coffee-growing region of Colombia. I’m just starting a project with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to help them evaluate their communications program concerning climate change. And this summer I’ll go to the Galapagos to work on a conservation action plan. It’s so gratifying to help people who are working really, really hard but not necessarily doing the right things. When I see these light bulbs going off in their heads during my trainings, I just think, Wow, I love what I do.

Was it difficult to return to the U.S.?

We moved back in 2001, to Fort Collins, Colorado, where my husband had a fellowship. My organization is virtual, which means I work from home. It’s great because I can adapt my hours in order to make appointments with my kids. I was able to start with the firm in Colorado and then bring my job with me to Washington.

Do you drive a hybrid?

I have the kid car, a VW, but my husband has a hybrid. We weatherized our house a few years ago. But we’re still looking for ways

to reduce our own consumption of fossil fuels. I think our biggest contribution to the greenhouse effect is the gas heating of our house. In Colorado we lived in a co-housing community. It was a collection of townhouses around a common green, with a common house where you can have community meals.

We loved it. And one of the best things was the fact that the townhouses were built with radiant heat, which was so much more comfortable and I think healthier than the forcedair system we live with now.

Do you think we’re legitimately in the midst of a green revolution here?

I think it’s fabulous that there is more awareness. But I’m still waiting for there to be more substantive change. I feel as though there’s a lot of superficial “green” stuff out there: a lot of “green” labels that when you look a little closer you can see are not affixed to environmentally-friendly products or services. From a legislative standpoint, there’s a lot of work to be done.

What does that mean for you?

For now I’m really happy doing what I do in Washington. My mom (who is here) is getting older, and if I moved anywhere else, I’d probably never see Lisa because of her schedule. Plus, Sarah can get here easily.

Down the line, though, I could see my family going back overseas. If we did, I would more than likely stay in the nonprofit world.

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The 2010-2011 Athletics Year in Review C O M P I L E D B Y C 0 - D I R E C T O R O F AT H L E T I C S R O B I N C H A N D L E R ’ 8 7

Fall Season Wrap-Up:

GIRLS SOCCER:

8-4-4

VOLLEYBALL:

15-3

Founders League Champions New England Class A Runners Up #3 Ranking in N.E. Tournament: (Quarter-finals: Hotchkiss 3, Deerfield 1)(Semi-finals: Hotchkiss

V A R S I T Y B OY S C R O S S C O U N T R Y :

4-3

5th in Founders League GIRLS CROSS COUNTRY:

8-0

Founders League Champions 5th in New Englands FIELD HOCKEY:

17-0-0

Founders League Champions Western N.E. Champions New England Class A Champions #1 Ranking in N.E. Tournament (Quarter-Finals: Hotchkiss 5, Choate 0) (Semi-finals: Hotchkiss 1, Andover 0- OT) (Finals: Hotchkiss 2, Greenwich 1 - 3OT) FOOTBALL:

2-6

B OY S S O C C E R :

15-1-2

Founders League Champions Western New England Champions N.E. Tournament (#1): (Quarterfinals: Hotchkiss 3, Belmont Hill 0) (Semi-finals: Hotchkiss 3, Brunswick 1) (Semi-finals: Hotchkiss 2, Kent 4) TOP RIGHT: The Varsity Girls Cross Country team – Founders League Champions RIGHT: The Varsity Field Hockey Team – Founders League Champions, Western N.E. Champions, and, for the ninth consecutive year, New England Class A Champions

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3, Taft 0) (Finals: Hotchkiss 0, Andover 3)

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W AT E R P O L O :

8-3

Liquid Four Tournament: (Semi-finals: Hotchkiss 8, Loomis 15)(5th-Place Game: Hotchkiss 10, Williston 3)

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LEFT: The Varsity Girls Lacrosse Team – Founders League Champions, Western N.E. Champions BELOW: The Varsity Boys Basketball Team – Tri-State League Champions (4th straight year), New England Tournament (7th-seed)

J U N I O R

V A R S I T Y

A N D

T H I R D S

B OY S S W I M M I N G :

5-2

2nd at Founders League Championship, 6th at New England Championship, Jack McCarthy ’13,

B OY S C R O S S C O U N T R Y :

5-2

GIRLS CROSS COUNTRY:

6-2

B OY S S O C C E R :

4-9-2

GIRLS SOCCER:

7-7

GIRLS THIRDS SOCCER:

2-2

B OY S T H I R D S S O C C E R :

2-9-2

FIELD HOCKEY:

3-4-4

GIRLS SWIMMING:

1-7

THIRDS FIELD HOCKEY:

1-8-2

WRESTLING:

12-5

VOLLEYBALL:

12-3

FOOTBALL:

2-5

Founders League Champion in Diving, Jack Parker ’11, Kenneth Low ’11, Noah Callaghan ’11 and Stefan Brown’11, Founders League Champions in 200-Freestyle Relay.

J U N I O R

V A R S I T Y

A N D

B OY S J V B A S K E T B A L L :

1-12

GIRLS JV BASKETBALL:

8-4

Winter Season Wrap-Up:

BOYS THIRDS BASKETBALL:

5-6

V A R S I T Y

B OY S J V H O C K E Y :

3-7-1

GIRLS JV HOCKEY:

3-10

B OY S J V S Q U A S H :

6-5

GIRLS JV SQUASH:

6-2

B OY S B A S K E T B A L L :

14-8

Tri-state League Champions (4th

straight year) New England Tournament (7th seed): (Quarter-finals: #7 Hotchkiss 64, #2 St. Mark’s School 76) GIRLS BASKETBALL:

7-11

B OY S H O C K E Y :

6-19

GIRLS HOCKEY:

10-8-3

B OY S S Q U A S H :

16-6

T H I R D S

9th in New England GIRLS SQUASH:

6-4

8th at New England

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Spring Season: V A R S I T Y BASEBALL:

8-4

B OY S G O L F :

8-8

5th in Founders League GIRLS GOLF:

2-10-1

5th in Founders League B OY S L A C R O S S E : 7 - 6

2nd in Founders League GIRLS LACROSSE:

11-1

Founders League Champions Western New England Champions SAILING:

ABOVE: Jack Parker, Kenneth Low, Noah Callaghan and Stefan Brown, all Class of 2011 - Founders League Champions in 200 Freestyle Relay

10-3

New England Fleet Racing Champions CT State Champions NESSA Champions 3rd at Nationals SOFTBALL:

LEFT: Katherine Rich ’12, Elizabeth Rich ’12, Dani Henry ’14 and Schuyler Nardelli ’11, who set a new School record of 4:07.31 in the 4x400 relay

3-9

B OY S T E N N I S :

6-8

New England Tournament: Lost in Quarter-finals to Deerfield, 1-4 GIRLS TENNIS:

11-1

Kent Invitation Champions Founders League Champions New England Tournament Runners Up B OY S T R A C K :

Founders League Champions 5th in New England U LT I M AT E F R I S B E E :

5-4

3rd in Founders League 6th in New England GIRLS TRACK:

6-2 G I R L S W AT E R P O L O :

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A N D

V A R S I T Y

ABOVE: The Varsity Sailing Team – New England Fleet Racing Champions, CT State Champions, NESSA Champions, winners of the Fritz Mark Trophy

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T H I R D S

JV BASEBALL:

3-5

B OY S J V G O L F :

6-4

B OY S J V L A C R O S S E :

6-5

GIRLS JV LACROSSE:

7-2

B OY S T H I R D S L A C R O S S E :

7-3

GIRLS THIRDS LACROSSE:

4-3

JV SAILING:

2-3

B OY S J V T E N N I S :

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24-7

12th Annual Hotchkiss Invitational Tournament Champions 2nd at NEPSUL, lost to Andover in finals

6-3

GIRLS JV TENNIS:

3-4

THIRDS TENNIS:

4-4

J V U LT I M AT E F R I S B E E :

4-9

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READERS

w ri t e

Broken, Bruised, & Lovin’ It: A L U M N I R E M E M B E R C L U B S P O R T S AT HOTCHKISS

Dear Roberta, Just back from Florida and have caught up with the Winter issue, which is quite typically wonderful!

The black and white photo on p. 14 caught my eye (perhaps because I’m in it!).

This is not “a 1945 club swimming team” but, in fact, a very successful VARSITY ... all of whom I remember. They are: (front row l to r) Carleton Brower ’45 (backstroke), J. Peter Holmes ’47 (freestyle); Morgan Murray ’46 (freestyle); Tom Brittingham ’45 (Capt; backstroke) Tom Merritt ’46 (breaststroke); Peter Forbes ’47 (Diver); Jack Blum ’47 (freestyle). Back row: George LaBalme ’45 (breaststroke); Stiles Twitchell (’45 Manager); and Hank Windsor ’46 (freestyle). There were some others, like David Gimbel ’45, who weren’t in the picture.

We were coached by Bill Stakely and John Bodel (Diving) and though I don’t remember our record, we were pretty darned good!

As often noted in the article, Club Sports were great fun and keenly fought. I played Baker football (Jon Bush, ’48, quarterback) Baker track and golf (a beautiful way to catch the Spring! ) But swimming was the only one I did well ... and still do, at 81, less well!

Best, Jack Blum ’47 (E-MAILS TO ARTICLE AUTHOR

Dear Kristen: I would like to second my classmate Dave Steffen’s letter of congratulations to you for your splendid article on Club Sports at Hotchkiss. Reading it made me realize, as Dave said, how fortunate we were to have a wide range of athletic alternatives to the rigid class sports system in place when we arrived in September 1941. Somehow we got through that Prep year despite getting our brains beaten out by the upperclassmen (in addition to having to wear “beanies,” black ties, and rubbing our coatsleeves along the wall of the Corridor whenever as we walked along).

I also realize now, as I didn’t at the time, how very important it was for us to have the distraction of club sports to take our minds away from the headlines of World War II – battles, invasions, casualties – which greeted us each day in the morning headlines. Many of us had older brothers in the service – as did Clint Ely, Dave Steffen, and I, and we worried about them more than we would have admitted to anyone – perhaps even to ourselves, because as you can see from our entries in the Mischianza every one of us expected to serve in the army or navy ourselves (and most of us did).

Thank you again, Kristen, for your excellent article.

Ben Labaree ’45

WKIS: From Underground Operations to SchoolSanctioned Sound (E-MAIL TO ARTICLE AUTHOR ANDREA TUFTS)

KRISTEN HINMAN ’94)

Dear Kristen: The H Magazine came yesterday. You wrote a great article; it deserved to get feature billing. Your title says it all. Yes, we did love doing those sports.

I had not thought of the Club Sports program as being a lucky off- shoot, of WW II. But that’s what it was. Amazing!

A job of writing always poses organizational problems. You handled it just right: catchy title, perceptive introduction and then letting classmates and coaches over a 50-year period speak for themselves and tell the story.

We’re such a diverse bunch that this way of doing it added a lot of flavor. All the ups & downs came trumpeting through it all.

Congratulations!

Dave Steffen ’45

Andrea, I enjoyed your article on the evolution of radio at Hotchkiss and have talked with James Hemingway at some length.

I do not know if we were the first to do this, but in my Senior year of 1957, my roommate Peter Carnes, (now brother-in-law), and I ran what we called “Radio Free Hotchkiss”. It originated from our double room in Memorial, and the technique was the same. I do not take credit for the transmission concept, but nor do I know who does.

One wire to the radiator and one wire to the neutral line of the electrical system would send our disc jockeying efforts around the campus. Those at the receiving end who could not find the dead side of the 110-volt

electric system would blow out their speakers and return to the hardware store once again.

Many were hooked up to extension cords and then the radiator, but this left you at the mercy of the maids. After using her vacuum, should the maid plug in the extension cord backwards, the core of the speaker would be blown out with a very loud pop.

This went on for some time, until one day Mr. Ohly Ingham, history teacher and third floor dorm master in Memorial, came in during our broadcast. A cease and desist order was issued, and since graduation was on the line, it was the end of Radio Free Hotchkiss.

Truth be known, he admitted there was nothing in the “bluebook” making this illegal, but that was not an argument worth pursuing with two months to go.

Prior to our senior year I do not think amplifiers and turntables were allowed. Radios were still verboten; probably considered to be mind-corrupting.

I hope you will carry this foolishness a step further and see if somebody beats us at the game.

“Dusty” Reeder ’57 (AND THIS POSTSCRIPT FROM DUSTY:)

Roberta, I called Steve Lumb (Class of ’57) who added that he ran the sports news from his room on the second floor while Peter and I were in the disc jockey business on the first floor. The “Sports News” included live broadcasting of the stickball games on “Senior Lawn” in front of Memorial. All of this was prior to ESPN, TVs, and instant replays. Steve remembered the story of Mr. Bates, also one of our Memorial dorm masters, entering a student’s room and hearing music coming from “nowhere,” for there was not a radio in sight. Steve felt this was probably the beginning of the end of Radio Free Hotchkiss.

Both Steve and I think it must have been “invented” around our era. The advent of homemade Heathkit stereo amplifiers, which we all made with loving care, and the permission to have them and a turntable in your room was a new and special privilege. The Heathkit company was quite an operation in its day.

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THE BOARD

o f Go v e rn o r s

A MESSAGE TO ALUMNI f ro m t h e B o a rd o f G o v e r n o r s o f t h e A l u m n i A s s o c i a t i o n

HOTCHKISS DAY OF SERVICE 2011 “We hope that our graduates will leave Hotchkiss with a commitment to service to others and to environmental stewardship, and with a greater understanding of themselves and of their responsibilities in a global society.”

The Hotchkiss School Statement of Goals and Purposes Community service has been part of the fabric of Hotchkiss since the founding of the School. The St. Luke’s Society, founded in 1892 to promote work and service, is our oldest student organization. Through the recent strategic planning process, there is an even stronger commitment to service and the vital role it plays in a Hotchkiss education. As a means of honoring this part of the School’s his-

tory and mission, the Board of Governors and the Office of Alumni and Parent Programs launched a Hotchkiss Day of Service in April 2011. Designed as a pilot in the first year, the program offers alumni, parents, students, and friends of the School an opportunity to engage in volunteer projects within their local communities.

The first Hotchkiss Day of Service took place on April 30 and May 1. Four regions participated in the pilot program, each with a member of the Board of Governors as project coordinator.

G R E AT E R B O S T O N :

Coordinator: George Takoudes ’87 Location: Massachusetts Audubon Society.

An early-season light trail clean-up in preparation for the arrival of spring visitors FA I R F I E L D C O U N T Y

Coordinator: Meredith Mallory George ’78, P’09, ’11 Location: Stepping Stones Museum for Children in Mathews Park (Norwalk, CT).

Planting an “edible garden” – vegetables that museum visitors will watch grow during the summer MINNEAPOLIS:

Project Coordinator: Kerry Bernstein Fauver ’92 Location: ABOVE LEFT: Greater Boston – Massachusetts Audubon Society LEFT: Northwest CT – Red Mountain Trail

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RIGHT: Fairfield County – Stepping Stones Museum for Children BELOW: Northwest CT – Geer Senior Living Community BOTTOM: Philadelphia – The Chosen 300 Alliance

Greater Minneapolis Crisis Nursery Cooking and serving lunch for the children at the nursery PHILADELPHIA

Project Coordinator: Alessandra Nicolas ’95 Location: The Chosen 300 Alliance Preparing/serving breakfast to nearly 300 homeless people NORTHWEST CT

Coordinator: Lance Beizer ’56 Location: Geer Senior Living Center Coordinator: Roger Liddell ’63 Location: Red Mountain Trail Clearing the grounds, planting flowers, and reading or playing games with the residents at Geer; Working with the Sharon and Salisbury Land Trusts to clear trails that are part of the Red Mountain Trail system The 2011 Hotchkiss Day of Service was by all measures a great success, with more than 80 alumni, parents, current students, and friends participating. The School provided invaluable support. Events were “family-friendly” and gave members of the Hotchkiss family an opportunity to work side by side and enjoy the rewarding experience of giving back to their communities by engaging in service to others.

The Alumni Board of Governors is planning the second Hotchkiss Day of Service for spring 2012 in selected locations. Watch for further details on the school website, in the e-news, and in the mail.

Ed Greenberg ’55 Chair, 2011 Hotchkiss Day of Service

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IT’S

MY t u rn

Community – and the daily experience of receiving and giving

BY LOU PRESSMAN P’98

G

Good morning. Let me begin with thanks: to Dan Lufkin,

and to all of you here this morning, who have to endure

Though accustomed to speaking in public, I feel extremely awkward standing here today. I wish I could muster the robust self-esteem voiced by school co-president Anders Fogel a week ago today in auditorium, as he and Georgina announced the upcoming school elections. I quote him now: “Only the best, the smartest, the wisest…become school presidents.” Thinking about Anders and Georgina, and all the three pairs of people who ran for the office this week, maybe he’s right: they all fit his description nicely.

But I know that neither “best,” nor “smartest,” nor “wisest” describe me. And if I pretended otherwise, there’d be a great rush among students and faculty colleagues to correct my error.

So what could I have to say to you on this occasion? After Jack Shanley’s article in the latest Record, I’m tempted to launch into a defense of the Bow Tie Bowl’s impartiality. How was I to know that I’d pull the question about South Africa’s official languages during a match involving Mr. McKenzie’s team? And that deposit wired into my account in Lakeville from the bank in Cape Town? It could have come from anyone.

Let me be a little more serious. I am now into my fourth decade of teaching at Hotchkiss. And

hearing from me in a venue additional to the chapel.

I have a confession to make: over 31 years I have, pretty regularly, wrestled with the question: should I stay at Hotchkiss? Isaac Newton may have been right in formulating his first law of motion: an object at rest tends to stay at rest.

But one doesn’t want to remain teaching in a school simply by virtue of inertia. If that’s why one continues doing anything that properly calls for passion and commitment, there will be little joy or satisfaction in the doing, and one will be of little use to anyone.

Of course nobody should care about my reasons for choosing to stay at Hotchkiss simply because they are mine. In sharing them with you this morning, I invite you to consider your own reasons for the commitment you have made in being part of this school community – as a student, as a teacher or staff member.

First of all, I think the work we do here is great fun. This is easier to say on a sunny morning in late April than on a dark, icy morning in February. But it’s true in every season. When I say the work is fun, I don’t mean just the work of “teaching” (even the kind that extends far beyond the classroom); I mean the shared work of learning that we – students and teachers and

staff – pursue together in this very peculiar setting of a school that is also home, round the clock, to a common life.

It’s hard to explain to those who have never experienced it, but I think almost all of you know what I mean. Sure, we differ in the portions of the Hotchkiss experience that most promote joy, or excitement, or just laughter…but we know. For me, almost every day – listening to a student in a classroom advance an original argument; watching your performances in the S u m m e r

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arts or on the athletic field; enduring the goodnatured mockery of my advisees; working with students in service, or presiding at a Bow Tie Bowl match that goes into overtime – there are times when I say to myself, “I can’t believe they pay me to have this much fun.”

Yet it’s more than enjoyment that has kept me in Lakeville. The work we do is also genuinely important – and you students are the reason.

You are a remarkably talented group of people by just about any measure. By virtue of your talents, and by the support of a whole lot of people who aren’t here – your families, teachers at home, alumni and friends of the School you’ve never met – you have been given opportunities at Hotchkiss that are granted to very few. As a result, you will be able go on from this place to make a big difference in the larger world – a difference out of proportion to your numbers; out of proportion, as well, to your deservingness (since so much of what you will take into that larger world has come to you as an unmerited accident or gift).

The truth is, a lot of damage is done in the world by people who are smart and talented.

Some of it is done deliberately, most of it by lack of attention – by a failure to notice or attach much importance to those who might be harmed by their choices. So what you take from here, as talented, smart people, matters deeply.

It matters, but the very education we try to foster is a two-edged sword. From the day you enter Hotchkiss, you are encouraged to hone your skills as critical thinkers – to question what’s given, to sniff out bias, to recognize the different perspectives provided by different cultures, adopted by different individuals.

I couldn’t believe more in the importance of developing those habits of mind: they are vital for citizens, in a democracy and in a complicated world ranging beyond national borders. Yet those skills by themselves, without a different kind of learning, can lead to a kind of impasse: if all viewpoints are partial, if virtually all commit-

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ments include a measure of self-interest, then aren’t all viewpoints – and all commitments – equal in value, or (the same thing) equally subject to dismissal as mere personal preferences?

The word for anyone, young or old, who adopts such a stance is “cynic” – defined by the writer Oscar Wilde as “one who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” I would hate to see us become a school that lets loose tides of cynics on the world. Just because of those talents and opportunities you enjoy, the result would be grim.

The good news is, that’s not you – it’s not the school I have known. Sure we are tempted by cynicism at times. In fact, we need to invite skeptical, critical voices into our conversation – and to be careful about labeling as ‘cynics’ those who simply challenge our values. But what has kept me here, above all, is the project we undertake together beginning every fall: to build and nurture anew a community that demonstrates, in its life, the falsehood of cynicism.

Sometimes we do community very well, sometimes bumblingly. I once heard someone say: “Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives.” This makes doing community “hard” – and hugely valuable. The aim remains a common life in which you can’t help but discover how much we depend on one another – even on those with whom we might have said we have little or nothing in common, people who sometimes become our friends. Increasingly, we are recognizing how much the same, shared dependence extends beyond this patch of Connecticut or this country. The best antidote to cynicism isn’t books – not even a whole library of philosophy! – but the daily experience of receiving and giving that keeps life going, and reminds us of what we owe and what we might become.

Years ago, in the memoirs of a man named Albert Schweitzer, I came upon these words. I may have shared them with some of you before: When I look back upon my early days I am

stirred by the thought of the number of people whom I have to thank for what they gave me or what they were to me. At the same time I am haunted by…consciousness of the little gratitude I really showed them.

In my days thus far at Hotchkiss, I can’t count the number of people to whom I owe thanks – for what they have given me, or what they were to me; what they are to me. Some of them are now alumni, or teachers and staff members who have left here for new stages in their lives. Some are no longer alive, but remain in my thoughts this morning. And many of them are here in the faces I see today.

What keeps me here? What’s here for any of us? We are fed by others’ gifts and by their willingness to discover ours; we are enmeshed in mutual indebtedness. For that I say, to all those people whose names outstrip my allotted time or my powers of memory: thank you.

LOU PRESSMAN P’98 IS THE INDEPENDENCE FOUNDATION CHAIR #1, CHAPLAIN, AND INSTRUCTOR IN PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. HE GAVE THIS SPEECH IN APRIL TO AN ALLSCHOOL AUDIENCE AS THE 2010 RECIPIENT OF THE LUFKIN PRIZE, GIVEN TO THE FACULTY MEMBER WHO HAS MADE A SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTION TO THE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT OF STUDENTS THROUGH HIS OR HER EXAMPLE.

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Ho otchkiss tchkiss k REEUNION UNION

October 28-30, 2011

June 15-17, 2012

Class of 1961 - 50th Reunion (opening reception on the evening of October 27)

Classes of 1932, 1937, 1942, 1947, 1952, 1957, 1972, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2002, 2007

Fall 2012 - Classes of 1962 and 1967 For more information, please contact: For October: Sara Eddy ’78, Director of Alumni and Parent Programs, at (860) 435-3114 or seddy@hotchkiss.org; For June: Caroline Sallee Reilly ’87, Associate Director of Alumni and Parent Programs, at (860) 435-3892 or creilly@hotchkiss.org; or visit www.hotchkiss.org/alumni and click on Events & Reunions.

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P.O. B OX 800 L AKEVILLE , CT 06039-0800 (860) 435-2591 www.hotchkiss.org

UPCOMING EVENTS ON CAMPUS In the Tremaine Gallery From September 6 through October 8, 2011, in recognition of the events of 9/11 ten years ago, the Tremaine Gallery will host the exhibit,“The City Resilient: Photographs by Joel Meyerowitz.”

On display will be photographs taken by Meyerowitz in the days immediately after September 11, 2001 and published in his book, AFTERMATH: World Trade Center Archive (Phaidon Press, 2006). Although the Ground Zero site was closed by the city of New York after the attacks, with the help of the Museum of the City of New York and city officials, Meyerowitz was able to obtain unlimited access. He worked at the former World Trade Center site for nine months, day and night, using a large-format view camera. The resulting photographs are extraordinary in their detail. More on his work can be found at: http://www.joelmeyerowitz.com.

FROM THE OFFICE OF ALUMNI AND PARENT PROGRAMS: Tuesday, September 13 Day Parent Reception Tuesday, September 27 State of the School Webcast with Head of School Malcolm McKenzie Thursday, October 13 Parents Weekend Cocktail Reception Friday and Saturday, October 14-15 Parents Weekend Friday through Sunday, October 28-30 (opening reception on Thursday, October 27) The Class of 1961 50th Reunion Friday and Saturday, November 04 - November 5 Volunteer Leadership Weekend For details of these events and more, view the Alumni Web calendar at www.hotchkiss.org/alumni/events-reunions/index.aspx.