The Lawrentian Winter 2020

Parents of alumni: If this magazine is addressed to a son or daughter who no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please email us at kzsenak@lawrenceville.org with his or her new address. Thank you!

Lawrentian WINTER 2020

usps no. 306-700 the Lawrenceville School Lawrenceville, New Jersey 08648

THE LAWRENTIAN • WINTER 2020

Lawrentian THE

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ALUMNI MAY’ 1-3 WEEKEND 2020

FIFTY YEARS AFTER LEAVING LAWRENCEVILLE AMID A SOCIETAL RUPTURE, THE

CLASS OF 1970 REFLECTS.

There’s no better way to celebrate being a Lawrentian than by returning to campus!

Come back in the spring and reconnect with old friends, meet new ones, and see what’s new at the School. We look forward to seeing you!

VISIT LAWRENCEVILLE.ORG/ALUMNI/EVENTS/ALUMNI-WEEKEND FOR MORE DETAILS AND TO REGISTER.

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18 AHEAD OF THE PACK

24 HOUSE HISTORY 2/19/20 10:55 AM

LEADING OFF

His Appointed Rounds It takes more than a little snow to keep Head Master Steve Murray H’54 ’55 ’65 ’16 ‘P’16 ’21 from bicycling to his office in the Mackenzie Building.

SNOW FALL In the 1890s, well before idle hours were absorbed by iPhones, a fierce winter storm saw one student, identified only as “little John,” leap from the third floor of Woodhull House into a pillowy bank of snow piled high against the structure.

As seen in the inset, the youngster emerged no worse for wear, but let us make this clear: Do not attempt this at home – or House.

Photo: Lisa M. Gillard Hanson

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FROM THE HEAD MASTER

In a Veterans Day service around the flagpole this past November 11, we expressed our gratitude to all members of the U.S. Armed Forces, including those who also belong to our Lawrenceville community and particularly those 143 alumni who laid down their lives for this country. I offered the following remarks:

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e gather to remember, to honor, and to thank those who serve, or who have served, our country in the military. I believe that one of the ways to honor their service is to, collectively as a country, seek to understand the cost of war so that we never take it lightly, so that we always keep in mind the extent of the sacrifice we ask of our soldiers, who risk their lives to protect the freedoms we enjoy in this country.

For those of us who have not experienced war, there are a number of lenses we can look through to try to understand. Here is one that I have used: When I was a younger teacher at Deerfield, I used to lead student trips to France, staying almost entirely in rural, remote parts of eastern France – quite close to the battlefields of World War I. For part of the trip, we stayed in an old, partially restored 16th-century chateau – a damp, old, stone structure. It had been abandoned for much of the 19th century and left to the elements; parts of it had been dismantled by local farmers over the years as they scavenged for stone. American soldiers leaving battlefields of World War I bivouacked there briefly, and their graffiti was still discernible on windowsills in the attic.

I recall a date next to the name of a young corporal from St. Louis, Missouri: Dec. 18, 1918, just weeks after the guns on those terrible European battlefields finally went silent. The young writer scratching his name on the sill was far from home, it was Christmas, and as he sheltered in the old, ruined hulk of the chateau, I had to wonder what he had seen, what he had endured, what images haunted his sleep.

Because vestiges of the war, in so many ways, surrounded us in these Eastern French provinces, we dug into the historical context on the trip. But I found that touring battlefields evoked little of that tragic war.

The horrific trenched battle zones – scarred, barren moonscapes – were now pleasant, bucolic settings, parklike and serene.

So we tried a different approach with our students to help them gain a perspective on war. Each time we entered a village in our travels, I asked them to

locate in the town square the inevitable memorial to those who had lost their lives in “La Grande Guerre” as the French say. Every village had one, usually a small, chipped, marble plaque – invariably a few sad geraniums growing beside it.

They were to count the number of villagers killed in the war, and then determine the ratio to the overall village population. The first time they tried this simple exercise, they were shocked. Thirty-six men died in a village of 135. Fifty-five lost in a small town of 250; 14 lost in small hamlet of 65 people. The ages ranged from teenagers to men well into their fifties. An entire swath of the population simply gone.

The black-and-white photos of our history books allow us to distance ourselves, remove ourselves in space and time from the horror. Somehow, standing in a forlorn village common, not far from the actual battlefields, the cold simple numbers seemed to have an immediate, wrenching, and powerful effect.

Barely 20 years after the catastrophe of World War I, Nazi Germany was on the rise and invading neighboring countries. Was it lack of resolve that Europe, and France in particular, did not stand up more effectively to Hitler, or simply that human beings don’t take naturally to war; that maybe they need to be provoked into it, that at a certain point, they’ve had enough? I choose to see this optimistically, to believe that we have an aversion to war, to believe that the human spirit recoils from war.

Often those who have experienced it know this best, that while there are times when we must have the courage to fight to defend our convictions, we also must never go into it lightly. And as a nation, in order to honor the sacrifice that our brave members of the military are willing to make, we must never, ever take that willingness for granted.

Sincerely,

Stephen S. Murray H’54 ’55 ’65 ’16 P’16 ’21 The Shelby Cullom Davis ’26 Head Master

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INSIDE

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 Many Moons Ago: The lunar landing of

Apollo 11 was just one of many changes the Class of 1970 witnessed during their time at the School.

Features 24 ‘A Prince Among Princes’

A Kennedy House researcher found that well before Japan-U.S. relations soured, a prime minister’s son was beloved by his Lawrenceville peers.

Class of ’70: 28 TAnheOral History ifty years after graduating, members F of the class recall the way a nation’s growing pains shaped their time on campus.

DEPARTMENTS 4

A Thousand Words

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In Brief

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By the Numbers

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Inside the Gates

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On the Arts

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Sports Roundup

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Go Big Red!

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Take This Job and Love It

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Table Talk

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Alumni News

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Class Notes

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Old School

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On the Cover: The Class of ’70 tell their story.

Illustration by PJ Loughran

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WINTER 2020 VOLUME 84 | NUMBER 1

EDITOR Sean Ramsden ART DIRECTOR Phyllis Lerner STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Paloma Torres CONTRIBUTORS Colette Burns Christopher Cull P’20 Jamie Cuthrell Andrea Fereshteh Lisa M. Gillard Hanson Barbara Horn Sarah Mezzino Grayson Sherr ’18 Nicole Stock Matt Trappe ILLUSTRATIONS BY Tiago Galo – Folio Art Joel Kimmel PJ Loughran Wastoki CLASS NOTES DESIGN BY Selena Smith PROOFREADERS Rob Reinalda ’76 Linda Hlavacek Silver H’59 ’61 ’62 ’63 ’64 GP’06 ’08 HEAD MASTER Stephen S. Murray H’54 ’55 ’65 ’16 P’16 ’21 ASSISTANT HEAD MASTER, DIRECTOR OF ADVANCEMENT Mary Kate Barnes H’59 ’77 P’11 ’13 ’19 The Lawrentian (USPS #306-700) is published quarterly (winter, spring, summer, and fall) by The Lawrenceville School, P.O. Box 6008, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648, for alumni, parents, grandparents, and friends.

Periodical postage paid at Trenton, NJ, and additional mailing offices.

The Lawrentian welcomes letters from readers. Please send all correspondence to sramsden@lawrenceville. org or to the above address, care of The Lawrentian Editor. Letters may be edited for publication.

FROM THE BASEMENT OF POP HALL

A

s the calendar flipped to January, there was some debate over whether the year 2020 actually began a new decade. Sure, the date seems to herald the advent of “the twenties” but some insist that the “0” year is actually the last of the previous decade, given that there was no Year 0 to begin the time count of the Christian era, but rather, 1 A.D. — or, if you prefer, 1 C.E. Like most people, I am inclined to think of this new year as the start of a fresh decade. For this year’s graduating class, however, this marker of time is also a dénouement of their time at the School.

For the Class of 1970, their time on campus ended in virtual tandem with a decade that had revealed a snarling cultural divide. Gone was the patriotic innocence of the Eisenhower era, replaced by the ache of a nation’s growing pains. A sweeping expansion of civil rights was stained by the blood of its leaders. The United States grew increasingly entangled in a complex war its population struggled to reconcile, while a culture of young people grew its hair out and sang about peace and love. And at the same time a people strained to see things more clearly, a psychedelic kaleidoscope only distorted perceptions for many others.

This rupture eventually found its way to Lawrenceville, where the confused, frustrated, and even disillusioned Class of ’70 were also questioning, challenging established institutions — not the least of which included their venerable old school.

For the members of that class, now themselves in their late sixties, the intervening fifty years have shifted those trials into their eventual perspective. In this issue of The Lawrentian, several members of the Class of 1970, as well as two longtime English masters who began their careers at the School that year, recount the turbulence of the times and how the changes growling at Lawrenceville’s gates recast many time-honored conventions of student life. Their candor and the clarity of their recollections animate a story of a school coming to terms with a world it has always endeavored to make better.

All the best,

Sean Ramsden Editor sramsden@lawrenceville.org Setting the Record Straight Bringing you the profile of sports journalism giant Garry D. Howard ’77 in the fall 2019 Lawrentian was a highlight of this publication’s recent history, but in our enthusiasm, we misreported three facts of Garry’s life. The inimitable Ann Boone Howard P’77 raised Garry and five other children in Mitchel Houses on East 135th Street in the Bronx, and one of those children is Garry’s sister, Jacquelyn. The editor apologizes for these errors and is grateful to Ann and Jacquelyn for their help in telling Garry’s story.

The Lawrentian welcomes submissions and suggestions for magazine departments. If you have an idea for a feature story, please query first to The Lawrentian Editor.

POSTMASTER Please send address corrections to: The Lawrentian The Lawrenceville School P.O. Box 6008 Lawrenceville, NJ 08648 ©The Lawrenceville School Lawrenceville, New Jersey All rights reserved.

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A THOUSAND WORDS

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T H E L AW R E N T I A N

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These Colors Will Run

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Many shades — and many Lawrentians — all ran together in the rain to raise money for the Williams Syndrome Association at the School’s 6th annual Run for Color in October.

Together, they raised more than $3,200 to benefit the organization, which supports both research and services for individuals with Williams Syndrome. To date, Lawrenceville has raised over $30,000 for the cause.

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IN BRIEF

MAPPING LEOPOLD’S LAWRENCEVILLE JOURNEYS

The Leopold Scholars’ interactive digital map links users to information and original 190405 writings about those locations by Aldo Leopold.

Legendary environmentalist Aldo Leopold, Lawrenceville Class of 1905, spent just one year on campus, but his legacy resonates with students over a century later.

The seven student members of the School’s Leopold Scholars program spent two weeks last summer literally following in Leopold’s footsteps — and mapping them for future generations.

After a year of edits and preparations, their interactive, smartphone-friendly, digital map (available at sentinel.lawrenceville.org/AldoLeopold/map.html) takes viewers from the “Woods of Eerie Gloom” — home to the campus’ largest hardwood trees — to the Shipetaukin Creek — the water source for the School pond — and beyond, with photos and links to Leopold’s original writings, plus transcriptions, about each location. The digital map is a goldmine guide to the local environment and Lawrenceville’s place in it.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PROJECT IN THEIR JULY 2019 BLOG FOR THE ALDO LEOPOLD FOUNDATION (ALDOLEOPOLD.ORG), TITLED “MAPPING LEOPOLD’S LETTERS: LAWRENCEVILLE STUDENTS CONTINUE ALDO’S LEGACY.”

TEN CONTEND FOR NAT’L MERIT SCHOLARSHIPS

TEN LAWRENTIANS ARE AMONG THE FEWER THAN 1 PERCENT OF U.S. HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS SELECTED AS SEMIFINALISTS IN THE 65TH ANNUAL NATIONAL MERIT SCHOLARSHIP (NMS) COMPETITION. CURRENT FIFTH FORMERS SHRIYA ANNAMANENI, MIRANDA CAI, PRANEEL CHAKRABORTY, AILEEN CUI, ASHLEY DURAISWAMY, VINCENT HUANG, DAMI KIM, DEVEN KINNEY, LIANA RAGUSO, AND NICHOLAS ZHOU WERE AMONG MORE THAN 1.6 MILLION HIGH SCHOOL JUNIORS WHO ENTERED THE NMS PROGRAM LAST YEAR BY TAKING THE PRELIMINARY SAT/NMS QUALIFYING TEST.

STUDENTS NOMINATED FOR PRESTIGIOUS SCHOLARSHIPS From left: Scholarship nominees Boxley, Kinney, Paine, Floyd, and Baziuk.

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Five students were nominated for three of the nation’s most prestigious college scholarships this fall. Jax Floyd ’20 was nominated for a Jefferson Scholarship at the University of Virginia and Makayla Boxley ’20 and Deven Kinney ’20 are candidates for Morehead-Cain Scholarships at the University of North CarolinaChapel Hill. Marta Baziuk ’20 and Isabel Paine ’20 were nominated for Robertson Scholarships at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill, respectively. Each of these scholarships covers all college-related expenses, as well as a host of enrichment opportunities, for the recipient.

T H E L AW R E N T I A N

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FLAKE DECRIES DIVIDED POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

RETIRED U.S. SENATOR URGES STUDENTS TO FIND SHARED GROUND

Retired U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) encouraged Lawrentians to “search for the better angels of our nature” during this time of political diverseness.

“Lincoln came to power when our nation was at war with itself, and at no time since then has our nation seemed so divided,” Flake told an audience of students during an October address in the Kirby Arts Center. “I hope and believe that we will return to ourselves and concentrate more on shared facts, shared values, and shared faith.”

Flake, who also served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, said that it is “hard not to be alarmed by the levels of vitriol and cruelty” he feels have become part of everyday political conversations.

“I hope that we are still alarmed and haven’t accepted it,” he said. “[American politics] have become so very polarized that if there’s a fight, the inclination is to pile on, not to break it up. … The level of hate and vitriol is unhealthy not only for those who harbor those feelings, but also for the country as a whole.”

Referring to the current political climate as a “toxic stew,” Flake said there was “very little reward for reaching across the aisle” in search of compromise.

“You end up in opposition ads,” he said.

Flake’s own experience in the Senate lends credence to this idea. Though he described himself as a “traditionally conservative Republican,” Flake occasionally found himself at odds with his constituency, particularly over his criticism of President Trump. Though his record indicates that he consistently voted in line with Trump’s positions, Flake was dogged by low

Book It: Rachel Krumholtz ’21 (right) and the Community Literacy Club provide access to books for

GETTING A READ ON LOCAL KIDS

Republican Jeff Flake of Arizona served in the U.S. Senate for six years.

approval ratings from Arizona’s voters throughout his term in the senate. He announced in October 2017 that he would not seek reelection.

Four months earlier, Flake and other federal legislators found themselves running from a gunman’s blasts during a practice session for the 2017 annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity in Alexandria, Virginia. Flake recalled the event, saying that his enduring memory from his desperate scramble to the safety of the dugout was, “Why? Why us? Why would anyone see a bunch of middle-aged men playing baseball as the enemy?”

Urging Lawrentians to step out of their own ideological bubbles, Flake encouraged them to reach out to those who don’t think like they do.

“Take positions, but do it in ways that are uplifting. It’s difficult, but it can be done,” he said. “And understand that you might change your mind later and that is fine.”

America is, Flake continued, “a nation of compromise. When we want legislation that will endure, we must work with the other side and be willing to compromise,” he said. “We can get back to the people we know we should be.”

– Lisa M. Gillard Hanson

Harry Potter and Curious George are about to make new homes with local children, thanks to Lawrenceville’s student-run Community Literacy Club. Now in its second year, the club has raised almost $1,500 to purchase books for thirdthrough fifth-graders served by the Lawrence Community Center (LCC). The LCC is managed

by HomeFront, which assists underserved Mercer County residents.

“Most of the students are reading below grade level, so they need more one-on-one attention, which we are able to give them,” explained Community Literacy Club founder Rachel Krumholtz ’21, who, along with other club members, is a volunteer reader at the LCC. “We try to make it fun so they want to do more reading on their own.”

Krumholtz recalled working last with one boy who “hated” reading.

“He wanted nothing to do with it. But as the year progressed, he started coming to us and wanted to read with us,” she said. “One day I walked in, and he was reading by himself. Those are the sort of changes I hope to see in the kids.”

With advice from LCC staff, club members select books for each of the children.

“I saw the look on [the children’s] faces when they were able to open their own book,” Krumholtz said. “One of the kids told me that Harold and the Purple Crayon was his favorite book, but he was never able to own a copy himself. That was really great.”

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IN BRIEF

YOUNG DEMS COMBAT CLIMATE CHANGE

With a fundraiser that was both ambitious and delicious, Lawrenceville’s Young Democrats raised nearly $1,000 to help combat climate change. Students sold doughnuts in both the Irwin and Abbott Dining Halls to benefit 350.org, a nonprofit, sustainableenergy advocacy group. The recent Global Climate Strike, headed by teenage activist Greta Thunberg, was spearheaded through 350.org.

Cate Levy ’20, president of the School’s Young Democrats, said she was happy to raise both funds and awareness.

“I’m not here to complain and say, ‘It was your fault, older generations,’ because many people didn’t know what was happening,” she said. “However, they are the ones in power now, and they aren’t taking action or responsibility. So now it is our turn — and I can vote in the next election.”

FIVE IN A ROW

FOR STATE-CHAMP FIELD HOCKEY Big Red field hockey downed Blair Academy, 4-1, to claim the team’s fifth-consecutive N.J.I.S.A.A. “A” tournament state title at Fisher Field in October. The victory came a week after head coach Lisa Ewanchyna’s squad edged Stuart Country Day, 1-0, to win its fourth-straight Mercer County Tournament title and its eighth in nine years. Caroline Foster ’21, with assists from Clare Rubenstein ’21 and Anna Gill ’23, provided the winning margin against Stuart.

GIRLS’ TENNIS WINS M.A.P.L.,

TIES FOR STATE TITLE

Lawrenceville’s girls’ varsity tennis team closed out its season in style, winning the Mid-Atlantic Prep League championship and tying with Pingry for the N.J.I.S.A.A. “A” title in October. Under the tutelage of head coach Dave Cantlay H’89 ’91 ’93 ’94 ’15 P’07 ’09 ’11, the team finished with a sterling 15-0 record after topping Hill, 15-1, in its final match.

Captain Ally Schwarz ’20 led tennis to an undefeated season.

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Field hockey added a fifth consecutive state trophy to its collection this fall.

$75K DONATION TO LTEF Head Master Steve Murray H’54 ’55 ’65 ’16 P’16 ’21 presented a check for $75,000 to the Lawrence Township Education Foundation (LTEF) in September, an increase of $10,000 over its previous gift.

“The Lawrenceville School is one of our strongest community partners,” said Karen Faiman, executive director of LTEF. “Thanks to their continued investment in their surrounding community, we are able to enhance the educational experience of every student, in every Lawrence public school.”

Since 1995, the School has donated a total of $1.58 million to LTEF, as well as event sponsorship and numerous in-kind services, including office space.

T H E L AW R E N T I A N

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HALL OF FAME HONORS FOUR The Alumni Athletic Hall of Fame added four esteemed members in November when Drayton Nabers Jr. ’58, Keith S. Jennings ’62, Ashley Temple ’94, and George Calvert ’04 were inducted at the beginning of Hill Weekend.

Induction recognizes and honors those alumni, coaches, and other members of the community whose athletic accomplishments have been of the highest caliber and have brought great credit to the School.

L DRAYTON NABERS JR. ’58 •N o. 1 singles tennis player for three years; captain of 1958 team. First singles at Princeton, 1959-61.

•L ed tennis team to three consecutive Eastern Interscholastic team championships, 1956-58; individually undefeated in ’57 and ’58.

•C aptained 1958 basketball team, leading it to ’58 N.J. State Prep title; named firstteam all-state.

L KEITH S. JENNINGS ’62

No. 63 in singles, and No. 10 doubles, 1964.

Keith Jennings ’62, George Calvert ’04, and Ashley Temple ’94 were inducted into the Alumni Athletic Hall of Fame in November, along with Drayton Nabers Jr. ’58 (not pictured).

•P layed doubles at Wimbledon in 1965; inducted into New England Tennis Hall of Fame, 2015

L GEORGE CALVERT ’04

L ASHLEY TEMPLE ’94

•L ed football to two M.A.P.L. championships (2003, ’04); captain of 2003 team.

•T hree-sport captain: Soccer (1994), Basketball (1993-94), Softball (1993-94).

•L ed undefeated 1992 soccer team and N.J.I.S.A.A. state champs, 1990 and ’92; first-team all-state and all-prep, 1993.

• First-team all-prep softball, 1993 and ’94.

•T wo-year captain of tennis team, 1961 and ’62; N.J. State Prep individual champion, 1960-62.

•F our-year letter-winner and 1997 softball captain at Stetson University

•L ed tennis team to State Prep (1960-62) and Eastern Interscholastic (1961-62) titles

•P layed for three teams in the United Soccer League W-League; served as league commissioner, 1999-2000.

•L ed lacrosse team to state championships and Prep A titles in 2002, ’03, and ’04; captained 2004 team.

•O ne of top scorers in lacrosse program history with 275 points; All-Pitt Division team, 2004; second-team all-state, 2002, ’03, and ’04; second-team All-M.A.P.L., 2004 •F our-year letter-winner at Cornell, which won four Ivy League titles in his time, finished as national runner-up in 2009, and semifinalist in 2007.

•C aptained 1966 Princeton tennis team; ranked USTA in junior and senior categories:

BOYS AND GIRLS BEST IN M.A.P.L. XC

THE BIG RED BOYS’ AND GIRLS’ CROSS COUNTRY TEAMS HAVE SOMETHING MORE IN COMMON THAN

THEIR SPORT: BOTH SQUADS ALSO BROUGHT MID-ATLANTIC PREP LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIPS BACK TO CAMPUS THIS FALL. THE BOYS EDGED PEDDIE, 39-46, AND THE GIRLS DEFEATED HILL, 26-31.

BOYS’ WATER POLO: GARDEN STATE CHAMPS

THE BOYS’ WATER POLO TEAM WON THE ANNUAL GARDEN STATE TOURNAMENT IN OCTOBER.

THE BOYS WENT 4-0-1 OVER THE TWO-DAY EVENT, OUTSCORING THEIR OPPONENTS 94-47. BIG RED BESTED ST. BENEDICT’S PREP IN THE FINALS, 21-10.

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IN BRIEF

Jeff Durso-Finley and Holly Burks Becker help students and their families navigate the collegeadmissions process.

COLLEGE COUNSELING DIRECTORS PRESENT AT NATIONAL FORUM College Counseling Co-Directors Holly Burks Becker P’06 ’09 ’12 and Jeff Durso-Finley P’13 ’14 ’19 ’22 discussed the causes of increasing student stress/ anxiety and the inroads Lawrenceville has made, along with the challenges that remain, in solving this issue at the 2019 College Board Forum in Washington, D.C., in November. The forum is the preeminent annual gathering of K-12, higher education, and college-access professionals.

WEEDEN LECTURE: Congressional Conflicts of Yore

TWO CHOSEN AS NATIONAL HISPANIC SCHOLARS Santiago Parra ’20 and Victoria Scholtz ’20 have been selected by the College Board as National Hispanic Scholars. These students scored in the top 2.5 percent among Hispanic and Latino PAST/ NMSQT test takers in the region and have earned a cumulative GPA of 3.5 or higher by the middle of their junior year.

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The 2019 Weeden Lecture, delivered by Joanne B. Freeman, professor of history and American studies at Yale University, reminded Lawrentians that for all the divisiveness in today’s U.S. Congress, it was once worse.

Joanne B. Freeman, professor of history and American A leading scholar on studies at Yale, with Walter Buckley Jr. ’56 P’96 ’99 Alexander Hamilton and GP’09, who established the Charles F. Weeden III H’65 a consultant for Hamilton Great Historians Lecture series. the musical, Freeman has dedicated years of research to uncovering the lost history of congressional violence between 1830 and 1860, significant for its insights into the growing conflict between North and South. Outbreaks of violence in the halls of Congress often accompanied impassioned speeches on both sides of the issue of slavery. Freeman’s lecture was based on her 2018 book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War.

T H E L AW R E N T I A N

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BY THE NUMBERS

Under the Bright Lights

The Periwig Club’s

fall musical, Sweeney Todd, was the latest iteration of the annual production to thrill audiences inside the Kirby Arts Center. The stages of the KAC are active throughout the academic year, from the fall musical to Winterfest to the Spring Dance Concert, all animated by the efforts of Periwig, the student-led Impulse comedy troupe, the Mask Troupe Ensemble, the Improv troupe, and the new Lawrenceville School Dance Collective. And it’s not just for students: Over the years, plenty of adults have gotten into the act as well.

667 ACTORS WHO HAVE PERFORMED IN THE FALL MUSICAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY.

44 Total Mask and Impulse Comedy Troupe performances in the 21st century.

648 SLICES OF PIZZA EATEN

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Actual wedding dresses worn by Lawrenceville staff members to be repurposed as Periwig costumes by students in the last decade.

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Hours contributed by eight Fifth-Form techcrew leaders behind the scenes of Sweeney Todd.

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BY PERIWIG CLUB MEMBERS FROM THE START OF PRESEASON THROUGH THE CLOSE OF SWEENEY TODD.

1,326 Actors who have participated in 21st -century Winterfest shows.

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Minimal estimate of hours spent in rehearsal for Sweeney Todd.

Winterfest shows in the 21st century.

Cans of hair spray used to create the look of Sweeney Todd’s “Beggar Woman” character, portrayed by Isabelle Sweeney ’20.

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Safety stage prop razors used by the murderous title character in Sweeney Todd, played by Nicholas Winkler ’20.

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12 All-adult

Full-length musicals and musical revues directed by students in Black Box Theater since the beginning of the 21st century.

243 Shows staged as part of Winterfest, student-directed and -acted short plays in the KAC Black Box Theater, since the beginning of the 21st century.

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Costume pieces from different Periwig shows used to create costumes for Sweeney Todd.

335 Individual lighting cues in Sweeney Todd.

Information supplied by Christopher Cull P’20, director of theatre; Jamie Cuthrell, technical director of the Kirby Arts Center and drama master; and Colette Burns, Performing Arts Department office manager.

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INSIDE THE GATES

ONE TO WATCH

5Q4 5

questions for Danny Concepcion ’02, who returned to Lawrenceville this year as a science master, about what he learned as a Lawrentian that will make him a better teacher and what remains his favorite dining hall meal.

Which three scientists would you invite to join you at a Harkness table?

I would select Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Carl Sagan and ask if they thought their lives had meaning.

I would have them discuss what they thought of the world, what they contributed, and see how each one’s accomplishments affected the other. I think it would be interesting to see how they react to each other’s discoveries.

If you could be any fictional character for a day, who would you choose?

I would be The Flash. I think it would be interesting to be outside the laws of thermodynamics and be able to control your acceleration, thus possibly being able to reach infinite mass/infinite energy.

What’s one talent you’d like to have?

I would love to play the piano. I love to sing songs by Ray Charles, and being able to accompany myself on the piano would be a dream come true.

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What did you learn as a Lawrenceville student you think will help you as a teacher?

A lot of things, but I think the most useful thing is knowing the types of pressures and struggles that my students are going through and being able to use that knowledge to both challenge and connect with my students.

Best dining hall meal?

The best dining hall meal is stuffed shells. I loved them when I was a student, and I still do as a teacher.

If you could visit any time and place, when and where would you go?

The 1950s and 1960s in New York City. It had some of the most amazing clothes, music, and art. I am fascinated by all the movements and all the changing dynamics of that period.

Off to a Quick Start Name: Anoushka Sharma ’23 Age: 15  Anoushka completed her first book before enrolling at Lawrenceville, publishing the 54-page Hidden in Plain Sight: Images, Words, and Reflections in April 2019.

 The book’s cover photo received an honorable mention in the 2019 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

 Anoushka’s poem, “Hey Girls,” won a gold key in the same competition and is featured in the 2019 Appelley Publishing Rising Star Collection.

 Also a singer-songwriter, Anoushka appeared in the cast of A Christmas Carol at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in December.

OFTEN OVERLOOKED For eightyeight years, vehicles entering and exiting Lawrenceville’s campus through the dramatic Class of 1891 Gate have done so under the inconspicuous gaze of two marble turtles, each supporting a scrolled corbel into which matching ears of corn are also carved. Well above eye level, these artistic flourishes are easy to miss, but their classic symbolism was figured into the design of the gate, built in 1932. Turtles represent health and longevity, as well as adapting to new surroundings, and corn is employed in the Bible to symbolize spiritual goodness. They also hark back to the diets of early students and faculty, when both were found in abundance on and near campus.

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THEY SAID IT “What is good, right, or acceptable

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IN THE CLUB

in society changes. congratulatory about how much less prejudiced we are than past deplore them for their persistently linear thinking, but this form of hindsight can be a way of unjustly transferring our current moral standards, which no past culture even had a semblance of, to past misgivings.”

— Editorial representing the majority view of The Lawrence, October 4, 2019.

The Lawrentian

1. Just 24 years old when

he was hired in 1969, Champ Atlee ’62 H’74 ’75 ’79 ’83 ’84 ’87 ’89 ’06 P’92 was at the time the youngest subject master ever at Lawrenceville.

It is easy to be self-

generations and

Things we learned producing this issue of

2. As a young girl, English

Artistic Aid at Morris Hall Founded: 2018 Purpose: To provide art and companionship to the residents of Morris Hall, a local senior care and assisted-living residence.

Art has always been a medium for connecting disparate human lives, and now it fuels the work of Artistic Aid at Morris Hall, which sees five members travel weekly to the nearby senior-care center to paint a mural in the facility’s dining hall.

Despite its moniker, however, the club involves much more than art. “It’s not only for painting but for getting to know the residents,” co-founder Miranda Cai ’20 says. Artistic skill is not required to join Artistic Aid; the desire to connect and learn through conversation will do. “While we painted, the residents wanted to hear about our lives at a boarding school,” says Jasmine Barco ’20, who established the club in fall 2018 with Cai. “There’s a feeling you get from sharing an invaluable, intangible experience with a stranger that makes you aware of the similarities all people share regardless of age.”

Master Enithie Hunter was not allowed to swim in the pool of her school in segregated Tennessee.

3. Cross country’s

Charlotte Bednar ’22 posted the fastest time in the country among all freshmen at the 2018 Nike Cross National Championships in Oregon.

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ON THE ARTS

Periwig Opens on the cutting edge It was a grisly good time when the Periwig Club opened its 2019-20 season with the three-time Tony Award-winning musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in October. The stage of the Kirby Arts Center came to life even as a series of victims lost theirs throughout the ghoulish thriller.

With talented actors and singers, a brilliant stage crew, skilled instrumentalists, and dedicated faculty members, the fall musical is a perennial favorite, and this year’s installment did not disappoint.

Twenty-eight students played roles in Sweeney Todd, including Nicholas Winkler ’20 in the title role; Cate Levy ’20, who portrayed Mrs. Lovett, Casey Rogerson ’20, as Anthony Hope; Isabel Sweeney

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Picture This ’20 as the Beggar Woman; Zack Finacchio ’21 as Judge Turpin; Deven Kinney ’20 as Beadle Bamford; Lana Utley ’20 as Johanna; Giao Vu Dinh ’20 as Tobias; and Robert Smith ’20 as Pirelli. They were backed by a student orchestra and dozens more who lent their efforts to supporting technical roles and directed by Christopher Cull P’20.

Jupiter Huang ’21 and his fine brushwork earned first place in the School’s summer student art contest. A remarkably lifelike black-and-white drawing of cherries by Nina Suresh ’20 was the runner-up.

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Brodie’s Art Exhibited

Two pieces by Rex Brodie, Lawrenceville’s director of design and fabrication, were selected for a juried exhibition at the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey. Brodie’s pieces, “Burn Time 102 Minutes” and “Blending Times,” were chosen from among more than 130 submissions for Members Musings, the annual show by Grounds for Sculpture members. The exhibit ran from October to December.

“Burn Time 102 Minutes” is a dynamic composition of burned wood forms and twisting metal, juxtaposed with the beauty of the light shining through a decaying, spalted maple veneer.

“The smell of the burned wood plays an important role in creating the psychological tension between the beautifully crafted object and the horrific subject that the title refers to,” said Brodie, referring to the fallen North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center.

The inclusion of forms derived from digital fabrication techniques into “Blending Times” is Brodie’s attempt to explore the relationship between technology and society.

“Utopian visions of technology and the notion of technology as a liberating force have been instrumental in shaping the construct of our reality,” he said. “I believe it is important to think critically about the uses of technology.”

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FALL SPORTS ROUNDUP Compiled by NICOLE STOCK

Boys’ Cross Country is Hyson P’14 ’16 Record: 4-0 • Coach: Chr ’20, Alexander mi Bam o The s: tain Cap • Rajakannan ’20 • Pesendorfer ’20, Vishnu ons mpi Cha .

M.A.P.L

girls’ Cross Country

mpions • Record: 4-0 • M.A.P.L. Cha mpion, New Home Cha al vidu Indi .A. I.S.A N.J. rlotte Bednar ’22 • Course Record (17:17): Cha tains: Caroline King Cap • put Cha ie Kat Coach: ’20 han ’20, Alannah Nat

Field Hockey

Record: 14-3 • • Mercer County ons mpi Cha .A. I.S.A N.J. • All-M.A.P.L. First Tournament Champions Lizzie Huesman ’20, aux yne Mol y Team: Brid t Team: Lizzie Firs p Pre All• ’23 ’20, Anna Gill Anna Gill ’20, aux yne Mol y Huesman ’20, Brid Caitlin Hoover ’23 ’23, Claire Rubenstein ’21, ie Huesman ’20, Anna CJFHCA First Team: Lizz nchyna • Captains: Ewa Lisa ch: Coa • Gill ’23 Huesman ’20 ie Lizz ’20, h clot Grace Fair

Football

ry Record: 1-8 • Coach: Har istian Forbes ’20, Flaherty • Captains: Chr Vilfort ’20 Jacob Simpson ’20, C.J.

Boys’ Soccer

Record: 11-7-1 • r Lee ’21, Xavier nce Spe : ons M.A.P.L. Champi e Eldridge ’96 H’12 • Lacoste ’20 • Coach: Blak ’21 Captain: William Murray

Girls’ Soccer

Record: 11-7-1 • .A. Runner-up • I.S.A N.J. • ons mpi M.A.P.L. Cha n ’21, Marcia Gille e All-Prep First Team • Paig • Coach: Jessica Ojo ’21, Maggie Ross ’20 olyn McLaughlin ’20, Magnuson • Captains: Car el ’20 Vog Ellie ’20, s Ros Maggie

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For the most current athletic news visit www.lawrenceville.org/athletics.

Girls’ Tennis

Record: 15-0 • N.J.I.S.A.A. Co-Champion s• M.A.P.L. Champions • All-M.A.P. L. Singles Team: Sabrina Yeung ’22, Aarushi Attray ’23 • All-M.A.P. L. Doubles Team: Sabrina Yeung ’22, Tiffany Yeung ’22 • Coach: Dave Cantlay H’89 ’91 ’93 ’94 ’15 P’07 ’09 ’11 • Captain: Alexandra Schwarz ’29

Girls’ Volleyball

Record: 18-3 • N.J.I.S.A.A. Prep AllStar Team: Ashley Warren ’20, Victoria Dugan ’20 • Coach: Katherine O’Malley H’07 • Captains: Victoria Dug an ’20, Ashley Warren ’20

Boys’ Water Polo

Record: 12-7-1 • Garden State Champions • Coaches: Julio Alca ntara Martin, Misha Klochkov • Capt ains: Marvin Dominguez ’20, Henrique Giangrande ’20

Girls’ Water Polo

Record: 8-5 • First Team East ern Invitational: Isabelle Monagha n ’20, Bettina Tapiero ’20 • Coaches: Stefanie Harrison, Misha Klochkov • Capt ains: Isabelle Monaghan ’20, Bettina Tapiero ’20 WINTER 2020 17

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GO BIG RED

IN THE LONG RUN...

A

...Charlotte Bednar ’22 is almost unbeatable.

s you sift through the photos of Charlotte Bednar ’22 competing for Lawrenceville this past fall, you begin to notice one peculiarity the images have in common: Bednar is always the only runner in the frame.

That’s not any photographer’s fault, though. Bednar, who is one of the top-ten high school cross country runners in the nation, is always too far out ahead of the pack for any other local competitor to be pictured in the same image. For her head coach, Katie Chaput, it’s a nice problem to have.

“Well, she’s good,” Chaput says of Bednar, who transferred into the School this fall after a year at nearby Hun. “She’s run the fastest time of any kid this year in the state.”

Garden State dominance only begins to tell the tale of Bednar’s accomplishments

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halfway through her high school career.

Just as she did as a freshman at Hun School, Bednar swept the Mercer County, N.J.S.I.A.A. Prep A and Mid-Atlantic Prep League (M.A.P.L) championships this fall.

Her margins of victory in the 3.1-mile races were eye-opening: One minute, 47 seconds in the county meet, 53 seconds in Prep A, and 17.15 seconds over her nearest rival in the M.A.P.L championship – her closest local race of the year.

Bednar did not fail to finish first in a race this year until the Nike Cross National Championship in Portland, Oregon, in early December, where she placed eighth against the very best high school runners in the United States. Her time of 17:40.5 was the best finish by a New Jersey girl there since 2006. Bednar also finished 12th at the national meet in 2018, the top freshman in the country.

“That’s what really pushes me to keep going and enjoy it, winning and getting to go to these cool places like Nike,” says Bednar, who qualified by winning the Nike

Cross Northeast regional title at Bowdoin Park in Wappingers Falls, New York. There, she crossed the finish line in 18 minutes flat, the fastest time ever by a New Jersey girl on that course.

“There’s a good sophomore class in New Jersey,” says Chaput, who competed for Syracuse University as a collegiate runner, “but they’re all about 45 seconds to a minute behind where Charlotte is now.”

Bednar says that the presence of other talented runners at invitational races helps motivate her, too. Rather than running against herself, she prefers to have another girl close on her heels.

“Definitely,” she affirms. “Last year, I beat my personal record by a lot that night at the Nike National race. I think that was just because I had so many other people pushing me that I was able to go so much faster without even really feeling like it was so much harder.”

Bednar has been competing in organized cross country since sixth grade at Stuart Country Day School in Princeton.

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Charlotte Bednar ’22 finished eighth in the country at the Nike Cross National Championship in Portland, Oregon, in December to earn All-America status. (Courtesy Runner’s World/Matt Trappe)

In any local meet, you’ll find Charlotte Bednar ’22 running ahead of the pack.

“I started running in fifth grade just for exercise with my dad in the morning, when we would go on jogs together,” she explains. “My mom said that I should try cross country, and by seventh grade I started realizing that it’s something that I was pretty good at.”

As she reached the end of middle school,

Bednar could have opted to stay at Stuart for high school, which she strongly considered.

However, after twin sister Caroline Bednar ’22 was accepted to Lawrenceville, Charlotte began to reconsider her options and enrolled at Hun, where she immediately made her mark on the cross country circuit.

When she wasn’t running – or running

A RUNNING TAB: CHARLOTTE BEDNAR’S TROPHY CASE L MERCER COUNTY CHAMPION: 2018, 2019 L M.A.P.L. CHAMPION: 2018, 2019 L N.J.I.S.A.A PREP A CHAMPION: 2018, 2019 L NIKE CROSS NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS — 8TH IN 2019 L NIKE CROSS NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS — 12TH IN 2018 (1ST AMONG FRESHMEN) L MILESPLIT USA ALL-AMERICA: 2018, 2019

to class – however, Bednar could often be found on the Lawrenceville campus, spending time with Caroline and other friends she knew from their years at Stuart.

“Seeing how much they loved it and my sister loves it, I was like, Maybe I should come here,” she says. “I knew from the meets that they had a great running program with really good coaches, so I was like, Oh!” To Chaput, it was an unexpected windfall, but her challenge now is to help Bednar develop as a runner while ensuring that she maintains her love of the sport.

“I don’t think Charlotte even has to run faster to show she’s improving,” says Chaput, who says Bednar – like many talented young runners – needs to be mindful of avoiding injury, the biggest threat to her development. Her zeal often has her eager to forgo stretching to get out on the course.

“Those are the things that are going to keep her healthy, and if you can stay healthy as a distance runner, you get better,” Chaput says. “But she loves running, and she runs.”

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TAKE THIS JOB AND LOVE IT

CRACKING THE CODE

David Dodge ’86, who went from breaking to making video games, is now teaching them to the next generation through CodaKid.

L

ike so many children of his time, David Dodge ’86 enthusiastically embraced the 8-bit lure of video game systems that invaded living rooms in the late 1970s. Drawn first by the revolutionary Coleco Telstar before the Atari 2600 became ubiquitous, Dodge logged so many hours in front of his television that the games themselves were reduced to a secondary level of interest for him. Anyone could play the game, he figured, but what was happening behind the game?.

“When the Atari came out I loved it. I actually played it so much I got bored with the regular gameplay,” he recalls. “My primary interest was in trying to break the game, causing bugs and issues and things like that.”

Dodge’s time at Lawrenceville left him little time for joysticks and paddles, but after graduating from Trinity College, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where technology was all around him.

“Suddenly, I was surrounded by all of these interesting opportunities in the early ’90s,” said Dodge, who had a friend working at video-game giant Sega who helped him land a job there, too.

“The intro-level jobs there were actually

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in the test department. Here I was, trying to break old Atari games, and now I’m getting paid to break games on the Sega Genesis,” says Dodge, who worked on the wildly popular Sonic the Hedgehog game, as well as many others, during his earliest days at Sega.

“Starting in test is kind of like starting in the mailroom at a Hollywood studio,” he explains.

“Soon I was managing teams of testers and being brought in on design teams.”

Dodge eventually landed his first formal game-design position with a startup, but it came with a requirement that was new to him: He would have to learn to code.

“The games were all written in C++, so we all had to use C++-based scripting languages that are similar to what you would find today in Lua or Python,” Dodge says. He became a lead designer on games for PC and the Sony PlayStation and was soon managing teams of artists and designers.

“It was a really, really fun time,” he says.

As much as Dodge enjoyed the highly creative work, the relentless schedule began to wear him down as he entered his thirties.

“Back in those days, Silicon Valley didn’t have masseuses and snack bars. It was a grind,” he says. “I literally would work 100hour weeks.”

After what he recalls as “a few really long, arduous projects,” Dodge was burned out.

“I think my longest week was like 120-something hours. I was taking little catnaps on a couch and waking up and scripting,” says Dodge, who is credited on more than 30 game titles. “It was a really chaotic, crazy environment.”

For Dodge, gaming was no longer a game.

He stepped away to pursue an M.B.A. at Arizona State’s Thunderbird School of Global Management before launching an academic tutoring company with his wife, Lauren Dodge.

The business grew quickly before Dodge decided to combine his love of gaming and coding with his acumen in educational entrepreneurship to take another step forward: CodaKid, a coding academy and tech camp that teaches children to create games, apps, and Minecraft modifications, or “mods,” using real programming languages and professional tools.

“We had always talked about CodaKid, putting everything that we’d ever done together into one package,” Dodge says of the

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Scottsdale, Arizona-based business he and Lauren founded in 2014. “That was teaching kids how to design games and code. We teach them how to program drones, create websites, and build professional-quality games using professional tools and languages.”

Dodge says the nascent days of CodaKid made good use of his friends’ and family’s children to test models through free lessons, but the initial results were discouraging.

“After about two weeks we realized that we were just failing,” he recalls. “One of my friends turned to me and said, ‘Dave, I’m really sorry but Niko just doesn’t want to come back.”

Dodge protested — “I was like, But it’s free!

Come on!” — yet he knew they had to change their approach.

“We were trying to be too academic,” he says. “We realized that at this age, coding is challenging, especially when you’re writing real code. The projects have to be engaging.

They have to be exciting.”

Dodge decided to meet kids where they

already were.

“The best projects, I think, are the ones that use things that kids already love,” he says.

“We discovered that after kids build games, they want to show their friends.”

To that end, the philosophy behind CodaKids has been giving its students a great deal of agency over the projects they develop, to the point where they build their own websites, populated by games they coded. Instructors provide students the context — teaching them to use the scripting language Lua or to build games in Python — before turning them loose with their own imaginations.

“It affords a ton of decision-making on the part of the kids. They get to make a lot of decisions,” Dodge says. “It’s not a typing class where you’re just telling them what to do.”

Encouraging students to build their own custom Minecraft mods was another early turning point for the CodaKids, Dodge says.

The best-selling video game of all time, Minecraft allows users to modify its source

code, building in features that don’t ordinarily exist in the game.

“You get to build your own custom creature and determine how fast it is, if it’s friend or foe, and give it special powers,” Dodge says.

“It gives kids a real sense of the power and creativity of code — really quick victories for them.”

The first time CodaKids invited students to try a Minecraft modding session, “we had kids jumping on their chairs and fist-pumping and yelling and screaming,” Dodge says. “We thought, Oh my gosh, we’re onto something.”

They were indeed. Since 2016, CodaKids has taught nearly 10,000 children from ages 7 to 15 from fifteen countries to code, and it continues to grow.

“I cannot wait to see what some of them do out in the work world,” Dodge says of the near future, “and some of the really cool things that they’re going to accomplish.”

Learn more about CodaKid at codakid.com.

Flipping the (Java) Script: With CodaKid, David Dodge ’86 has redirected his childhood love of video games to helping students create their own.

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QA &

TABLE TALK

A DISRUPTIVE APPROACH Only after arriving at Lawrenceville four years ago did Enithie Hunter realize that she had been using some collaborative form of Harkness in her public-school classroom for years. The English master told The Lawrentian about how busing opened her eyes to things she would have never otherwise experienced, the ways in which it pointed her toward teaching, and how Lawrenceville’s familiar oaken oval tables often become the setting for some incredible cultural revelations.

understand initially until I was old enough to understand what loneliness felt like. So for instance, our school had a pool, but I wasn’t allowed to swim. There were places that I wasn’t allowed to go even if it was a field trip because those places didn’t allow for diverse audiences, so I spent a lot of time hanging around inside the building.

Because of segregation.

Right, so these two teachers kept me busy with classroom help: organizing supplies, help copying papers – all manner of little kiddie classroom tasks. It was just them taking an interest in me and trying to ensure that I felt

What led you to the classroom?

contentiously as the situation came about, they

I think I knew that I wanted to be a teacher as

were the best years of my life.

In what way?

Did that help you understand that the role of a teacher also involves ensuring that no one feels marginalized?

It opened up a world to me that I had no idea

Yes, absolutely. There were difficult times,

existed — to new people, to new places, new

and I will say that it made me question what

ways of learning. Our school was very well-

school was meant for. But I think that with a

the new school.

resourced. It was located near the hospital

strong family supporting me and then having

where all the doctors’ and lawyers’ kids went

a couple of teachers in the school who wanted

How did that work?

to school, so our library was fully stocked. We

the best for me … those things, coupled

If you lived on the same side of the road as

had viewing rooms for films, fall festivals, field

the university in town, Austin Peay University,

days with real rides. It was quite an experience.

far back as elementary school, but it surfaced in a rather strange way. I was bused to a school across town in Clarksville, Tennessee, as part of an effort to integrate. Only a handful of students from my community actually went to

then you went to school with the university

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like a part of the school community.

together, engendered the kind of empathy for children and for learning spaces that I don’t think I would have developed otherwise.

kids. University professors didn’t want their

You mean in terms of the school’s resources?

kids going to the local school because it was

A couple of teachers took me under their

predominantly African American. I wouldn’t

wing, and I remember them saying often that

You taught for years in the well-funded Carrolton, Georgia, public school district, outside Atlanta. Why did you leave?

trade the experience for the world. I mean, as

“we just don’t want you to be lonely.” I didn’t

It was fine until the standardized testing

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engine began to the power public school systems, and it was just too powerful to overcome. There was no space, really, for a collaborative model of teaching, so I started looking for some other opportunities.

Does your taste for “collaborative models” explain what you find attractive about Harkness?

Yes. I do a lot of professional development, mainly around diversity in the classroom, and I use the Disruptive Anchoring Learning Theory, which focuses on students’ innovation in the classroom. In a Harkness environment, it provides a framework for disruptive practices, such as incorporating more authors of color into an English language arts classroom or the kind of work that we’re doing around diversity, equity, and inclusion within the School community. It requires a disruptive approach — a disruption to previous practices.

Enithie Hunter is able to expose her English students to authors whose life experiences and perspectives often vary wildly from their own, fostering increased understanding and empathy.

Such as not teaching the same authors who have always been taught?

Right, but also thinking about culturally responsive ways of approaching learning.

Think of students who have never experienced diverse authors’ perspectives or even kids who come from “diverse populations,” but who may or may not have experienced those authors.

Disruptive approaches are most necessary, but I think they only work when teachers are responsible with the information in the materials that they share with students.

In the latest update of Lawrenceville’s Harkness brochure, you speak about how this style works so well at our tables.

theoretical and pedagogical approach to developing curriculum.”

This is actually something I wrote for that

Which is?

publication, if I may read: “Upon arrival, I learned that that loud and disruptive thing I’ve been doing all those years before had a name, Harkness. In a Harkness learning environment at its finest, there’s no absolute power and no absolute truth. There is however, meticulous preparation, careful listening, and informed sharing.”

And, of course, the respect that undergirds these sorts of conversations.

[Still reading]: “Thanks to the unique experiences afforded our seniors in the Harkness model of teaching and learning that permeates every aspect of community life at Lawrenceville, I can select texts that reflect one of the main tenets underlying my

To expose students to various ways of thinking, living, and being, with the goal of demonstrating that as a people we are more alike than different, or what [Nigerian author] Chimamanda Adichie calls ‘disrupting single stories.’

That’s a very powerful idea, to challenge the idea that someone’s perspective isn’t universal or the default view.

It’s interesting you mentioned that, because my challenges with Harkness are very different.

My students weren’t prepared for the content that I taught, teaching it from the perspective of a person of color. I had some context and insights to share that other folks within the department either didn’t have or just weren’t

comfortable sharing or exposing students to.

That’s understandable. It can be very difficult to present that material in an authentic way.

But how did that affect you?

I had to adjust to how students responded to that new information. It’s important for them to be a part of creating new knowledge, but there needs to be an awareness in terms of how kids adapt: to be on the lookout for when kids are uncomfortable or when they might be struggling to accept new information and ideas.

Because they may feel challenged or even defensive?

I think when it is what it’s always been, and it favors you, then regardless of whether or not you’ve heard it before, it’s much easier to digest than when you may feel like you’re the target of some new knowledge.

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ASK THE ARCHIVIST

A Prince Among Princes

By GRAYSON SHERR ’18

A KENNEDY HOUSE RESEARCHER FOUND THAT WELL BEFORE JAPAN-U.S. RELATIONS SOURED, A PRIME MINISTER’S SON WAS BELOVED BY HIS LAWRENCEVILLE PEERS.

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The 1934 Olla Podrida revealed that not only could Konoe carry the green on the golf course, but he could carry a tune as well, as a member of the Glee Club and the choir.

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umitake Konoe ’34 (also spelled “Fumitaka Konoye”) was a member of Kennedy House from 1932 to 1933. Born into the ancient Fujiwara clan, Fumitake, like his father Fumimaro Konoe, the 34th prime minister of Japan, was a member of a branch of the Japanese Imperial Family.

Dating back one thousand years, descendants of the royal Konoe line were styled as princes and heirs of the family dynasty. During his lifetime, Prince Fumitake Konoe, or “Fumi” and “Butch” as he was known, was many things: student, advocate, ace golfer, junior diplomat, soldier, prisoner, and, posthumously, the subject of a song and a stage musical. As a teenager and young adult studying at Lawrenceville, Fumi was a beloved member of his House and School, winning friends, admirers, and respect. However, as comfortable as he was residing in the United States, Fumi remained a loyal subject of the Japanese imperial government and a dutiful son of the official who would sign the Tripartite Pact allying Japan with Germany and Italy preceding the U.S. entry into World War II.

On first glance, most would view Fumi’s involvement in pursuits that did not align with American interests as anti-Lawrentian and in opposition to the values aspired to by Kennedians. However, given the content of his character, his placement in life, and the times in which he lived, the sum of Fumitake Konoe as a man revealed that he was indeed a prince among princes. Repeatedly placed in tense or trying situations, Fumitake Konoe demonstrated honor, geniality, and bravery, the timeless and situationless qualities esteemed by the Lawrenceville community.

The Konoe family, like other main members of the Imperial Family of Japan since the 1868 overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate, were a Western-orientated ruling class of oligarchs called the Meiji genrō.1 The patriarchs of the families, along with their sons, looked

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While at Lawrenceville in 1933, Fumitake Konoe ’34 showed the powerful lefthanded swing that made him a two-year captain and one of the top amateur players of the day.

Credit: Bettman Contributor

at the success of the West — in constitutions and advancements — as holding the blueprint for their own country’s modernization. The Meiji understood that they would need to undertake diplomatic missions into the Western world to study and learn the ways of the West in order to compete with it. As a result, Fumi, like other sons of the genrō, were sent to elite boarding schools and universities in the United States from the late 1880s to prepare for careers in politics and international relations.1 While the children of the oligarchs studied Western ideas and cultivated American relationships to better publicize Japanese interests, the contemporary rulers of Japan like Fumimaro Konoe used the opportunity to visit their sons in America to seek U.S. favor or sympathy for Japanese causes internationally. As president of the Japanese House of Peers, Fumimaro Konoe found his 1934 trip west to Fumi’s graduation from Lawrenceville an opportune moment to make several speeches to the American political elite concerning the establishment of a Japanese puppet state in northern China.1

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Initially immune from obligations of the state, Fumi’s time at Lawrenceville was one of assimilation into the 1930s American lifestyle.

By all accounts, Fumi had little trouble fitting in. His brother-in-law would describe him years later by saying, “He was a big man, stood almost six feet, and weighed 175 pounds… He was astonishingly popular; he had an infectious laugh and a radiant good humor that drew people to him. When he joined in, groups suddenly came to life…

That’s the way it was in school, in lower school and middle school, in America when he studied there.”4 Beyond socializing, Fumi excelled in golf and went out for the Lawrenceville team, quickly becoming captain. His superior abilities from tee to green saw him reach the semifinal round in the championship division of the Eastern Interscholastic Golf Tournament before graduation.8 By the time he captained Princeton’s golf team in 1938, he was playing semi-professionally and competing on par in tournaments with top pros like Ben Hogan and Gene Sarazen.4 As Fumitake matured on American soil as an undergraduate at Princeton, his responsibilities to his father and homeland also grew. The elder Konoe pressed his son into larger diplomatic roles in the United States; on a few occasions he was tasked with delivering his father’s messages to President Franklin D. Roosevelt GP’57.1 Although Fumi’s main purpose at Princeton was to learn from the West and become a diplomat furthering Japanese causes with the United States, he focused his studies on the hostilities between Japan and China; his senior thesis was “A Survey of the Sino-Japanese Political Relations in Modern History.”

With his thesis submitted, all that stood between Fumi and graduation was the completion of his comprehensive exams in 1938.

He never sat for the exams. There are conflicting reports of this time in Fumi’s life. In a 2015 tribute piece on Princeton’s Nassau Weekly website, columnist Alex Costin wrote that Fumi’s father had grown worried about — or tired of — his son’s perceived “bon vivant” lifestyle and recalled him to Tokyo. The author Eri Hotta, in the book Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War 1931-1945, wrote that Fumi “was never much of an intellectual, unlike his father,” and was expelled from the university for academic reasons.2 Fumitake himself outlined the struggle of transitioning from Lawrenceville to Princeton, writing in his 1937 Census of Lawrenceville Alumni, “The strictness which was forced upon us while attending Lawrenceville made some boys reactionary upon receiving freedom at college. Sometimes such reactions are very dangerous and, as a matter of fact, they led a few boys astray.”7 In 1938, a year after writing those words, the dean of Princeton’s faculty, Robert K. Root, sent a letter to Fumi’s American guardians overseeing his education for his father and stated, “[Fumitake] did a very bad comprehensive examination [and] confesses with complete frankness that he has been doing very little work, so that result is only

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As president of the Japanese House of Peers, Fumimaro Konoe found his 1934 trip west to Fumi’s graduation from Lawrenceville an opportune moment to make several speeches to the American political elite concerning the establishment of a Japanese puppet state in northern China.

what he should have expected.”7 Honesty in all matters was a hallmark of Fumi’s character.

A correspondence that remains from his time at Princeton and addressed to his concerned father shows that whatever the reason he was summoned home before graduating, Fumi was well aware of the heavy expectations placed on him. In this letter, he begs the senior Konoe to have faith in him and his mission in the United States, writing, “Trust me. Please believe that I am deeply aware of my responsibility and never forget it for a day.”

By 1940, having missed out on walking with his classmates at graduation in America, Fumitake Konoe was marching with his new brothers in arms as a private in the Japanese Army fighting against the United States and her allies. It is curious that the educated son of the prime minister was entered into the Army as a private: Marius Jansen, Princeton professor of history and East Asian studies, theorized that this unusual move was orchestrated by the military high command to keep his father, Prime Minister Konoe, in line. Stationed mostly in China during World War II as a member of the Kwantung division, Fumitake eventually rose to the position of lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army.

A friend and Lawrenceville classmate of Fumi’s, Seymour Marvin ’32, asserted that the positioning of Fumi to fight in the Chinese/ Russian region of Northeast Asia termed Manchuria by Japan was due to his refusal to fight against Americans.6 There is no evidence that Fumi engaged in battle against members of the U.S. armed services.

On August 15, 1945, when Japan surrendered to the Americans, the Soviet Army was still fighting the Japanese Kwantung Army division in Manchuria, where Fumitake held command of the artillery in Harbin. Captured on August 19 by the Soviets, Fumitake was held as a prisoner of war without formal charges for seven years. In 1952 he was finally sent for trial in Moscow for “aiding the international bourgeoisie.” Fumitake was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment in a Soviet gulag.

Four years into his harsh sentence, the Soviet Union officially ended its state war with Japan, and many believed that Fumitake Konoe would be released and able to return to Japan. Fumi, however, was less optimistic. A postcard he was allowed to send to his mother in 1956 said, “So far I’ve taken a light-hearted view of things, but now that’s changed. I face the end.”4 On October 29, 1956, days after the Soviet Union and Japan ended hostilities, Fumitake Konoe died in the Soviet gulag far outside of Moscow. His official cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage;

however, facts later emerged that his death was most likely an execution. In a chapter of his book Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers, Yoshikuni Igarashi writes details of Japanese POWs in Soviet captivity and claims Fumitake was “killed by injection when he refused to become a Soviet agent.”3 Classified documents uncovered in 2000 revealed that Igarashi’s assertions were true.

The Soviet Union of the Cold War 1950s viewed getting the son of a former Japanese prime minister as a spy for Moscow to be quite a coup. The uncovered document, a missive sent to a colonel at the Soviet Interior Ministry that included a handwritten memo suggesting the involvement of the chairman of the KGB, said that the plan to convert Fumi to aid Russian interests was started three years prior to his death, in 1953. However, all attempts to turn him failed.5 Fumi was killed because he was a loyal nationalist who would not betray his homeland. Initially buried in Siberia, his remains were later exhumed and cremated before being returned to Japan.

There have been many tributes to Fumitake Konoe in both Japan and the United States. In 1987, a classmate of Fumi’s at Princeton established a scholarship in his good friend’s memory, enabling a Japanese student admitted every other year to have all expenses paid.

In Japan, the life of Fumitake Konoe is memorialized in a popular song Ikoku no oka or Hill in a Foreign Land and as the plot of a stage musical with the same name.3 First performed in 2001, the legacy of Fumitake Konoe lives on as an idealized national hero who sought to forge an understanding between nations and died dedicated to his country and his people. The content of the musical is broadly based on Nishiki Masa’aki’s historical fiction of Fumi’s life, Yumegao-san ni yoroshiku.

Returning to the words of his brother-in-law many years after his death, Fumitake Konoe was remembered not for the circumstances he was placed in, but for the manner in which he lived.

“He pursued his life and faith with sincerity and consistency,” he wrote. “At every occasion, with every person, he treated everyone the same way, openly and directly. He was not concerned with others’ status, but cared only about his humanity.” These traits among others make Prince Fumitake Konoe a true Kennedian and noble Lawrentian.

n This article is adapted from a research paper by former Kennedy House resident Grayson Sherr ’18 for which he became the inaugural recipient of the Wesley R. Brooks ’71 H’59 ’09 P’03 ’05 House Historian Award. The original work, including all citations, is available in the Stephan Archives of Bunn Library. Footnoted citations appear on page 75 of this magazine.

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an oral history Edited by SEAN RAMSDEN Illustrations by PJ LOUGHRAN

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“Let me pause to suggest that in focusing on people, the Class of 1970 has also been active in a collective sense. Changes continue to take place as we seek to relate the School community effectively to the world around us.”

— Bruce McClellan H’57 ’58 ’60 GP’10, “From the Head Master,” 1970 Olla Podrida

“This class has struggled to identify itself.

Maybe it will do that before diplomas are received.”

— Knox Key, “Class History,” 1970 Olla Podrida

y the time Lawrenceville’s Class of 1970 graduated that May, the upheaval that had torn through the fabric of American society had stormed the gates of their ancient campus. Over the years the class lived, learned, and grew together, they saw the thirst for change rise slowly, advancing first from their television screens, newspapers, and magazines before it took up residence on the Circle and shouted right in their faces. A revolution of some sort was here.

It can be tempting to frame this rupture as generational — progress vying to topple tradition — but to the boys who watched how their insular school began to reflect the tumultuous world outside, it wasn’t so simple. The teenage years are confusing enough before that landscape is altered to include nightly body counts reported from an unpopular war in Vietnam, assassins’ bullets silencing voices of change, and a popular culture growing its hair and shedding its inhibitions. Their world could easily be described just as The Temptations sang that April: a ball of confusion.

Fifty years later, several members of the Class of 1970 peer through the lens of time to recall what was ultimately meaningful and what was not, and how they managed to keep their focus on life even as it became blurred in many ways.

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‘‘

During the first half of the year, students had spurts of interest in changing the School. At first, it was a hope for slow change.

When this was seen to be a hopeless path, students talked about revolution. After realizing that the idea of revolution was absurd, they turned to indiscriminate chair-breaking.”

– Knox Key ’70, “Class History,” 1970 Olla Podrida

K.C. MURPHY

’70

School president: I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, all the change that existed in that four- or five-year period of ’66 through ’70. If you said, “As a group, you couldn’t have been immune to it, even though you were in a private boys’ school,” I’d say, “No we weren’t.”

PHILIP ULANOWSKY

’70 director of photography, Olla Podrida: A tidal wave hit the country, which was this counterculture. It came in to hit us in many ways, as naïve about the world as many of us were, and I certainly put myself at the top of the list there.

Murphy: I sensed that there was kind of a restlessness to the class, and I think part of that manifested from all this change around us. I think the people’s view of all-male prep schools in 1969 was very different than they were in 1961.

CHAMP ATLEE

’62 H’74 ’75 ’79 ’83 ’84 ’87 ’89 ’06 P’92 English master, returned to Lawrenceville in fall 1969 as the youngest master ever hired: The

Lawrenceville that I graduated from was that kind of a prep school that had a set of understandings with the best schools in the country. I would guess that maybe forty-five or fifty of my classmates went to Princeton.

By the time I came back to work, that understanding was gone, and intentionally gone.

DOUG EZZELL ’70

faculty and activities editor, Olla Podrida: The Vietnam thing, I just thought it was a waste. Most of us were just disgusted by the thing, and what we couldn’t understand was: Why weren’t we in it to win it? But I don’t recall us ever really talking about it that much. We were too busy trying to get into college...

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Atlee: Inky Clark became director of undergraduate admissions at Yale, and it was Clark who one day walked into [Yale President] Kingman Brewster’s office and said, “Please stop this.” They literally called in schools and said the deal was off. […] it’s an extraordinarily rare thing for a power elite to give away power voluntarily.

Ulanowsky: There were the leadership people, like Martin Luther King, who were an enormously positive voice, being eliminated. And the war was just dragging on, dragging on, dragging on. All we heard were body counts on the news every night.

Murphy: It came to the forefront each year going forward, challenging institutional values and norms.

Should the School be co-ed? Should people show up to Chapel? Should there be a dress code?

Atlee: Eventually, [Head Master] Bruce McClellan — and this is a minister’s son — did away with Chapel.

He said that, “I’m not going to sit up there with a machine gun under my robe. If people don’t want to be here, then I’m not going to force them to come.”

MAX MAXWELL H’74 ’79 ’80 ’81 ’91 retired English master, hired in fall 1969 as the School’s sole black faculty member: I was a graduate student from Rutgers, going through the Ph.D. program in English. The thing was that everyone was looking for black graduate students to fill the necessary holes.

Murphy: Besides the news, you also had cultural changes … not just these riots and assassinations, but look at Woodstock and the pushing of cultural boundaries. And I think it led people to be more restless in the way they looked at being in an allmale school.

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Maxwell: I had the luck of being on Student-Faculty Senate, which was a curious institution. It made recommendations that both took very seriously. It got rid of the dress code the second year it was there. It voted itself out of existence in the third. It said, “We have no further use for ourselves.”

STEPHEN KUNI

’70

editor-in-chief of The Lit: The two things that happened were Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King getting shot. And I will tell you this, they both rang home with me, because I was sitting in my room at Dawes, over the front door, going, What the hell’s going on?

AL HARRIS

’70 came to Lawrenceville in fall 1969 as a postgraduate student from nearby Ewing High School: It was just so much happening. Then you had the Olympics of ’68, and the election of ’68. It was boom, boom, boom, boom. You really got the impression that the country was in the midst of a great revolution, that it was just around the corner — which, I found out later on, was really just television to a certain degree.

Ulanowsky: All that kind of stuff was swirling around, and there was an enormous hit of what I would call cultural pessimism that really swept over my generation. And it was just during those years that it really hit like a brick wall.

‘‘

In a word, people create an institution. It is much more than a building or a place.”

– McClellan, “From the Head Master,” 1970 Olla Podrida

Harris: By the time I got to Lawrenceville in ’69, I had pretty firm political opinions, and I was very much influenced by the Black cultural revolution, the Black power movement, as they called it. My heroes were Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis. So at that point in time, I was more a young Black militant to a certain degree.

Ulanowsky: One of my two closest friends at Lawrenceville, from my first year there in ’66, was a guy named Lenny Stone [’70], who was a fullscholarship student from a rough neighborhood in Queens. Very smart, wonderful guy, a musician. He became the lead singer of our rock group “Lenny and the White Nights,” which was well-known on campus.

Maxwell: It was probably the best three or four years for black graduate students for hiring, so I got in fairly easily. Then I realized I was the only black teacher here, because the one who had integrated the faculty the year before [Rolland Hence] had taken off to NYU.

Maxwell: I guess in a sense I didn’t have to become a rebel, because there were people who were fed up with the status quo or what was going around, anyway.

Murphy: The School could been seen very easily as part of the capital-E “Establishment” that people were rebelling against. People were challenging those things and asking if there should be change and in some cases demanding that there should be change.

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Murphy: Obviously the Civil Rights Act was a good thing, but even though those laws passed, that didn’t instantaneously change the condition of people living in urban America and their relationships with authority.

Ulanowsky: Lenny was very concerned about the Civil Rights movement. I thought, “Well, OK,” but I really had no idea what it was about. I knew there were protests going on, but it just seemed very distant to me.

Murphy: For us, you have [Civil Rights] boiling on one side of your head, but on the other side of your head, you’re going, “Well, I’m trying to get into college.

I’m trying to get to the next step.”

Harris: I didn’t mind the title “radical” or “revolutionary”; it didn’t bother me at all … though, to be honest, I never expressed or showed that aspect of me. I think including me, there was probably seven black students at Lawrenceville at the time. And I don’t believe we ever discussed anything regarding race at all. Nothing at all.

Maxwell: As the only black teacher at Lawrenceville, I guess people thought I was a first. Anyway, I found 720 students, and fifteen of them were black. It seemed to me a very dangerous sort of ratio. The kids were defensive and extremely self-conscious. They looked to me for expertise that I did not have because I am Jamaican. I did not come from an inner city.

Murphy: I think my sophomore year or my junior year was really the first time I remember having, at least during my lifetime, more African American studies being brought up, whether it was Baldwin or Ellison or Alex Haley.

Harris: There may have been situations where students, after school in the dorms with a housemaster or whatever, talked about the Vietnam War or about racial situations. But being a day student and leaving after dinner and studying in the library, I got in my car and went back home. I was totally unaware of any of those discussions at all.

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Maxwell: There was an odd occurrence with a kid named Virgil Ladson [’70], who was a senior. He came to me at some time at middle of the fall term and said, “We would like you to be the faculty adviser for the Black Students Society.” I said, “Oh, great. I’d be honored to do that.” He looked at me as if to say, “You’re bloody crazy. Who else are we going to get?”

Murphy: So I mean, the School obviously was trying to be sensitive or at least change in some degree to that, because the parts about race relations and black culture and teaching those things seemed to be becoming more evident.

Harris: If there had been a book on the syllabus in terms of “Native Son” or “The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin or something like that, I’m pretty sure there would have been a discussion of race. And maybe in some of the courses there had been in terms of the books they were exposed to. But in none of my classes did I have any such readings. And I didn’t have any problems with it.

Maxwell: The only [other] one that they would have asked would have been Bob Ainspac [H’76 P’77 ’85], who was a housemaster. When I came in he went to the dean and said, “I want him as my associate.” So, I became his associate at Dawes, where most of the black kids ended up.

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‘‘

In my judgment, there is more middle ground in this generational conflict than most of the participants — even the most outspoken — would be prepared at first to recognize.

Whenever I have become depressed — as I sometimes have — about the ways boys mishandle trust, I find it good medicine to spend time with them. Though some are mixed up and otherwise unhappy, on the whole, they are cheerful, positive, and constructive in their attitude towards the School community and towards the adult responsibilities that lie ahead.”

Ezzell: I mean, [Atlee] was definitely faculty, but he was a young guy, and I thought it put him in an interesting position that year.

Atlee: I didn’t even know the smell of marijuana. If I caught somebody smoking in his room I would know what to do about that, but at the same time, I think the faculty was ill-equipped to try to cope with this all at once.

Kuni: It was, as you and I might say, a cultural dichotomy — here we are, and where are we?

Ulanowsky: It was a culture clash against the kind of values that we had absorbed.

Atlee: In faculty meetings, there were demonstrations of the smell of marijuana and so on, as faculty members tried to get up to speed on what they were facing.

Ezzell (a native of Lexington, Kentucky): I didn’t know they had that training on how to smell pot. Hell, I’m thinking everybody up there knew what pot smelled like; that and musk oil, two of the essentials of northeastern living.

– McClellan, Alumni Day remarks, May 1970

Atlee: As I caught these stories at a housemasters meeting from what would’ve been the spring of 1967, Dren Geer [’52 H’59], who was one of the Lower School housemasters, said, “What are we going to do next year when drugs hit the campus?” Everybody said, “What do you mean? Drugs aren’t going to hit the campus.” Ha ha ha.

Ulanowsky: One thing that I do remember more clearly is the way the drugs hit the campus. When I entered in ’66, nobody had even heard of drugs. By the time I graduated, half my class was on them.

Ezzell: Yeah, there was pot and acid and everything, but it wasn’t some widespread epidemic where you were seeing people doing cartwheels through the Circle; it wasn’t anything like that, OK? People would try to go do it off campus.

Atlee: That following year, I think, was a really difficult year for the school. I came in the wake of that.

Ulanowsky: I wasn’t in that scene, I didn’t want to be around it. I have a feeling there may have been a few people who were expelled in my senior year for drug use.

Maxwell: I was not only new, I was peculiar. I came from a graduate school environment. So, when I first came here first, Tom Eglin [H’86 GP’19] was the dean of students and he was critically involved with [confronting] the whole drug problem. It was raging then, across campuses all over the place. I didn’t know much about drugs and kids and how much they were into it or how to spot it.

Ulanowsky: I came from a very highly educated, very highly cultured family setting, and those are the values that I got to Lawrenceville with. The rock culture, the whole counterculture, started breaking that down. I fell into that as far as I was comfortable doing. I say I didn’t get into drugs, but I was all with the hippies and the bell-bottom jeans and the whole bit; peace and love.

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Maxwell: I had smoked marijuana before. I mean, I went to Rutgers as a grad student! But my assumption was the drug scene wasn’t as bad as it turned out to be.

When I came in, I needed a little more sensitivity than I had. So when Tom Eglin was telling me at the head master’s opening dinner, in September 1969, about the drug scene, I made some damn fool comments. They looked at me as if to say, “I don’t think you’re going to last very long.”

Ulanowsky: My view of how I was going to somehow change the world someday with my art, my music, or photography or something like that, it was all very vague, and I thought: “Well, let’s just let people be happy, let people just enjoy each other. And let’s end the war; the war is bad. The drugs are bad. Let’s just move on.”

‘‘

It is very difficult to write about my past year at Lawrenceville. I have mixed emotions about it. I do know, however, that it has been a lonely year.

I do know that it has been a confusing year.”

— K.C. Murphy ’70, School president, in the 1970 Olla Podrida

Ulanowsky: The draft was certainly a major topic, because people had numbers. You got a draft number, and you didn’t know when it was going to come up.

There were these periodic lotteries in which numbers were chosen, and people worried about that. That was on the radar: “When’s the next one?”

Kuni: We all were in a position where our draft cards were in our mail, OK? My draft card was 364.

Ezzell: Yeah, I was lucky. All three of my lottery numbers were in the low to mid 300s, which means the Viet Cong would have had to attack Hawaii for us to be called up.

Murphy: I remember my lottery number was 18, and I was very blessed that they suspended sending people to Vietnam.

Ulanowsky: It was so completely different from our parents’ generation, the World War II generation, where they talked about a war that we had fought for a real purpose and won, and then it was done.

Ezzell: My old man told me, “You’re not going.” He said, “I’ll pull every string to make damn sure.” He said, “Your namesake died in World War II, but I’m not having you die for a nothing cause run by idiots.” And he was a conservative man.

Murphy: Part of the uncomfortableness of that was at that time, most of the people going over were high school kids from the South, or from the inner city or rural areas, and it wasn’t us. And I think that most of us knew that wasn’t fair.

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Harris: I did have a brother who was in Vietnam during that period of time, and I remember my mom breaking down and crying. There was a song that came on by The Temptations, “Silent Night.” She started crying, and she mentioned how concerned she was about my brother.

[Ed. Note: The shootings of four student protestors at Kent State University by National Guardsmen on May 4, 1970, occurred just weeks before Lawrenceville’s Commencement.]

Maxwell: When I got to Lawrenceville, I had to register with the Selective Service, because it was a permanent job.

Murphy: As horrible as Kent State was, I just remember thinking that I’m sure the guy did not want to shoot the student. Most people don’t want to hurt somebody else in that way or kill somebody.

Ezzell: It got me, and I thought, this is totally stupid.

This is useless.

Atlee: Some of the people who really suffered that year were the custodians and the kitchen staff […]

When those [students] were trashing their rooms and they’re having to clean up after them, and they’re unrepentant about it, that frankly annoyed me.

Ezzell: This is total folly. You’re asking an 18-year-old reservist, panicked, a bunch of kids are coming after him, and he has to fire. You know, that story doesn’t want to be told.

Maxwell: I thought I was going to be sent over to Vietnam. I assumed that it would happen, because my brother-in-law was in the Army. Two of his friends were killed in Vietnam. I just assumed, “I’m going there.”

Murphy: So I think you could’ve found some on both sides. I remember other people being much more like: “God, it’s awful, they’re trying to suppress us. This is an unjust war; we need to speak up, be more activist about it.”

Atlee: There’s a tribute in that 1970 yearbook to Hugh Walker, who was sort of the lead waiter and oldest waiter in the Upper House dining room, and I wondered whether that tribute wasn’t almost kind of an apology.

Kuni: Sure, and let me say this: Peter Oldziey [’70] and I were part of the New Congress movement, and we ended up riding the bus over to Princeton, when they were burning down Jadwin Gym.

“We had at least one anti-war rally that some of the faculty participated in, against the Vietnam War, out in front of Upper.

There were various stories, and a lot of emotional responses at that particular rally.”

Ulanowsky: We had at least one anti-war rally that some of the faculty participated in, against the Vietnam War, out in front of Upper. There were various stories and a lot of emotional responses at that particular rally. It was concerning to me but I really … it didn’t affect my life directly.

Atlee: At the same time, you couldn’t help but be sympathetic to what they were facing, the world on fire around them, the assumptions of their own education being in question.

Ulanowsky: The rally that sticks in my mind was a man who got very emotional and really started crying as he was speaking. He was so upset about what the Vietnam War was and what it was doing to this generation and so forth. His name was [William] Polk [H’68 ’72, chair of the Religion Department]. I would say there were probably 200 or more of us there.

Murphy: It was a time to be careful and think about what you were going to participate in and what you were and weren’t going to do, because there’d be consequences. I mean, Kent State, you look at the horrible consequence of that circumstance.

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Ezzell: And yeah, it was one accident after another after another after another, and I think every one of us in our class will remember the picture. I mean that picture will be with us the rest of our lives.

Kuni: The Kent State thing definitely was a bottom line. It was just the crummiest thing that could ever happen.

Murphy (School president): I’ll never forget, it was right after Kent State, we had a discipline meeting.

I won’t say who it was, but he made a few bad choices and got caught and got expelled right before graduation. I remember Mr. [Paul] Porter [H’68 ’69 ’72 P’76 ’78] coming out, saying “K.C., you know, it’s just been a bitch of a week, hasn’t it?” I said, “Yeah, it has.” He said, “Well, this’ll pass.”

‘‘

Hopefully as members of the Class of 1970 go on to college and their later adult responsibilities in the communities in which they will be members, the recollection of this year may serve on the one hand to strengthen them as individuals and on the other to support them in their awareness of the contribution they can make to their society.”

— McClellan, “From the Head Master,” 1970 Olla Podrida

Ulanowsky: This was a whole, so-called, imagined revolution of, “Oh, well, this is going to change society and it’s all going to be so good,” and so forth. So, yeah, there was hope, but look how it turned out.

Harris, on student radicalism he observed at Columbia: I have looked back and thought about it

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many times. Some of it was people who were maybe not really 100 percent serious about what they were doing. It was more like a fad to a certain degree: You grow your hair long and grow your beard and protest the war in Vietnam and all.

Murphy: Part of your teenage years is rebelling against your parents, but on the other hand, most of us don’t want to … we want to rebel, but we don’t want to cut the rope.

Ezzell: I’ll never forget my fourth year at Virginia, I was thinking about maybe staying and pursuing a master’s. I made the mistake of saying something about “finding myself.”

Murphy: If you look at the culture of the times, by the time we got to 1974, you didn’t have Joan Baez.

I mean, she was still singing, but you didn’t have all those protest songs and those songs questioning injustice and the rest.

Ezzell: My old man said: “Son, don’t waste your goddamn time. I found you, your mother found you, we know where you are, you know where you are, so get off your ass and go to work.”

It was more like a fad to a certain degree: You grow your hair long and grow your beard and protest the war in Vietnam and all.

Murphy: I don’t know how, culturally, we could have sustained that much focus and energy.

Ezzell: But you find out later that even though he’s gruff, he has a heart. And I think we realized at some point over the next ten years, we chased our careers and we’re just going ninety miles an hour constantly, that you might have a soul in there somewhere.

Harris: To me, you walked onto the Lawrenceville campus and it was tranquil, it was peaceful. And I’m being bombarded with all these wonderful new ideas and literature and things of that nature, so I viewed it as a very nice, wonderful place.

Murphy: Now, as a 68-year-old guy, having raised children, I understand how it happens. Every child is different in how they respond to things, and when you’re in those adolescent formative years, unless you’re grounded in some strong way or someone else helps ground you in some certain way, it’s easy to kind of lose your way for a while.

T H E L AW R E N T I A N

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Stay connected with the NEW Lawrenceville Alumni Network App

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The NEW! Lawrenceville Alumni Network, now powered by Graduway, makes it easier than ever for alumni to connect worldwide. Available on your desktop/laptop or your Apple or Android mobile device, the Lawrenceville Alumni Network app combines the scope of our alumni database and the power of Facebook and LinkedIn to connect you with your fellow Lawrentians wherever you and they may be.

For download instructions, go to lawrenceville.org and click “Connect and Network” on the Alumni tab, or simply search for “Lawrenceville Alumni Network” on the App Store for iPhone or Google Play for Android.

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LAWRENCEVILLE LEGACY LEAVE A

John Hover ’61 P’91, a former private banker, and his wife, Jacqueline, are

knowledgeable world travelers. Through the years, they have witnessed first-

“I came to Lawrenceville in 1957 as a young boy and graduated

hand the ongoing timelines of civilization and of nature. Recently, following a trek to the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska, John observed that the glacier, like The Lawrenceville School, is always carving new paths. This sense of time

in 1961 as an aspiring young man.

and progress has led John and Jaqui to create charitable remainder trusts

Lawrenceville and its amazing

at both John’s college alma mater and at Lawrenceville. These gifts have

masters made that happen. My

provided the Hovers with current tax benefits and an income stream for their

wife’s and my goal, with every gift

lives. When they are both gone, the remainders of the trusts will pass to the

we make to Lawrenceville, is to

institutions the Hover family holds dear, enabling them, like the glacier, to

help sustain its legendary faculty

continue carving new paths.

for current and future generations of students.”

– John Hover ’61 P’91

For more information on leaving a bequest to Lawrenceville or for other planned giving opportunities, or if you have included Lawrenceville in your will but have not yet informed the School, please contact Jerry Muntz at the Lawrenceville Office of Planned Giving at 609-620-6064 or jmuntz@lawrenceville.org, or go to www.lawrenceville.org/plannedgiving

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k:

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SUMMER SCHOLARS July 12 - August 1

residential

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day MIDDLE SCHOOL (6-8) HIGH SCHOOL (9-10) Experiential Education i Harkness pedagogy

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A

ALUMNI NEWS

THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 2019/2020 PRESIDENT Ian S. Rice ’95 FIRST VICE PRESIDENT Charlie C. Keller ’95 SECOND VICE PRESIDENT Heather Elliott Hoover ’91 P’20 EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Vincent J. “Biff” Cahill Jr. ’68 P’09 Frederick “Fritz” E. Cammerzell ’68 P’18 Morgan Dever ’06 Kevin Huang ’05 Neil Mehta ’02 Greg G. Melconian ’87 Brockett Muir III ’80 Porter Braswell ’07 George Arnett ’79 P’16 ALUMNI TRUSTEES Tim Wojciechowicz ’78 P’06 ’10 ’12 Heather Woods Rodbell ’91 Mark M. Larsen ’72 P’01 ’04 ’06 Jennifer Ridley Staikos ’91 SELECTORS Bruce L. Hager ’72 Brendan T. O’Reilly ’83 P’16 James A. Rowan Jr. ’66 Emily Wilson ’05 Rocky Barber ’69 P’08 Nina Mackenzie Kumar ’02 FACULTY LIAISON Emilie Kosoff H’88 ’96 ’00 ’18 P’19 EX OFFICIO Cat Bramhall ’88 (Lawrenciana)

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FROM THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION PRESIDENT

s I prepare for my own 25th reunion this year, I wanted to dedicate this column to encouraging everyone — whether in a major reunion year or not — to make Alumni Weekend your excuse to return to campus.

The dates this year are May 1-3.

Why add to an already busy life with a trip to New Jersey, you ask? Let me count the reasons: While the traditions endure, our campus – which has always been aesthetically stunning and world-class in its facilities — continues to evolve. You will be able to see the new Gruss Center for Art and Design and Hutchins Galleries, to be dedicated on April 30. The new building, on the footprint of what you may remember as the John Dixon Library and the Carpenter Wing, will be a 16,000-square-foot monument to STEAM education. A well-equipped makerspace will allow for hands-on, experiential learning, while the visual arts galleries aim to “stimulate creative thinking, aesthetic appreciation, and openness to new ideas.” Virtue is always growing, as they say, and so is the grandeur of our physical plant.

On that note, you will also be able to see the plans and artistic renderings for the Tsai Dining and Athletic Complex, scheduled to break ground in October. If your most vivid memories of Lawrenceville involve the camaraderie you developed with teammates, or the familiarity you shared with fellow students each day while eating together, then you will appreciate the idea of the TDAC as an athletic and social center of campus.

The Masters Award ceremony is a highlight of Alumni Weekend. The Masters Awards recognize and celebrate the careers of Lawrenceville masters who have retired. Last year we had more than 100 attend as we honored Robert Ainspac H’76 P’77 ’85 (posthumously), Joel Greenberg H’77 ’13 P’93, and Col. Dave Schorr H’88 ’97 ’02 P’80’82 ’88 GP’97 ’09 ’12 ’17 for their excellence in teaching and for their commitment in the Houses and on the fields. The year before, we honored Martha Gracey H’92 ’93 ’98 ’07 P’18, Rusty Hlavacek H’95 ’17 P’06 ’08, and Marsh Chambers H’58 ’62 P’77 (posthumously). One of the best parts is that many of the former Masters Award winners also return for this event, so it’s a great way to reconnect with some of your favorite teachers.

According to a study reported in The New York Times, our musical taste is formed and anchored in adolescence. Your class reunion committee has already selected a playlist that will take you back to the soundtrack of your high school years. The fact that you still know all the words will remind you that you are perpetually young in some respects.

More than one taste develops in youth. To further indulge your nostalgia, TJ’s is still right there across the street where you left it, and the menu hasn’t changed much.

If it’s a retail stimulus-response you seek, The Jigger Shop has moved, but is easy to find.

Lastly, in an age of virtual communication, there is still no real substitute for the old-fashioned way of meeting: in person.

I hope to meet you in person in May. I’ll be there, along with many of the members of the Great Class of ’95. May you all be well in the meantime.

Very best, Ian Rice ’95 President, Alumni Association ianrice@gmail.com

T H E L AW R E N T I A N

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OLD SCHOOL

60 years ago in

The Lawrentian

WINTER 1960

FIRE DESTROYS OLD GYMNASIUM

Roy McGonigal, the school’s night watchman, noticed nothing out of the ordinary as he walked his rounds on the bitter cold night of December 23. At 3:10 a.m. he punched the clock in the Old Gym. Sometime in the forty-five minutes that followed, a fire of unknown origin worked its way through the building. At 4 a.m. Mrs. Grace Sylvester, a secretary and bookkeeper who lives behind the Old Gym, was awakened by the reflection of flames on her bedroom wall. She called the fire department, and within four minutes the Lawrenceville volunteer company was on the scene. But it was too late. […] By 6 a.m. the worst was over. Only the walls and smoldering ruins remained of the fifty-eight-year-old building.

Gutted by flames in December 1959, the Old Gym was the indoor home of School athletics for fifty years before the completion of Lavino Field House in 1951.

20 years ago in

The Lawrentian

WINTER 2000

ROPES COURSE DEDICATED

Lawrenceville’s Joshua L. Miner Ropes Course was dedicated on Sunday, November 14, 1999. The new course, built by Alpine Towers, Inc., was made possible through a gift from Marjorie B. Buckley P’96 ’99 and was named in honor of Josh Miner, longtime Andover educator and founding president of Outward Bound USA, who was present for the dedication. When asked about the relevance of the ropes course to a Lawrenceville education, Mr. Miner replied, “This ropes course is the epitome of discovery, which is really what education is all about. You discover first that you can go further than you thought you could, and second, that you have great strength when you get your mind off your own troubles and start thinking about somebody else.”

— From the “Around the Campus” news roundup.

For twenty years, “The Josh” has been a staple of student team-building exercises at Lawrenceville.

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LEADING OFF

His Appointed Rounds It takes more than a little snow to keep Head Master Steve Murray H’54 ’55 ’65 ’16 ‘P’16 ’21 from bicycling to his office in the Mackenzie Building.

SNOW FALL In the 1890s, well before idle hours were absorbed by iPhones, a fierce winter storm saw one student, identified only as “little John,” leap from the third floor of Woodhull House into a pillowy bank of snow piled high against the structure.

As seen in the inset, the youngster emerged no worse for wear, but let us make this clear: Do not attempt this at home – or House.

Photo: Lisa M. Gillard Hanson

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Parents of alumni: If this magazine is addressed to a son or daughter who no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please email us at kzsenak@lawrenceville.org with his or her new address. Thank you!

Lawrentian WINTER 2020

usps no. 306-700 the Lawrenceville School Lawrenceville, New Jersey 08648

THE LAWRENTIAN • WINTER 2020

Lawrentian THE

THE

Both Sides

NOW

ALUMNI MAY’ 1-3 WEEKEND 2020

FIFTY YEARS AFTER LEAVING LAWRENCEVILLE AMID A SOCIETAL RUPTURE, THE

CLASS OF 1970 REFLECTS.

There’s no better way to celebrate being a Lawrentian than by returning to campus!

Come back in the spring and reconnect with old friends, meet new ones, and see what’s new at the School. We look forward to seeing you!

VISIT LAWRENCEVILLE.ORG/ALUMNI/EVENTS/ALUMNI-WEEKEND FOR MORE DETAILS AND TO REGISTER.

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18 AHEAD OF THE PACK

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