REUNION
The Reunion Committee (from left): Mark Griggs, Kent “Mole” Haberle, Don Klock, Chip Keeney, Paul Wainwright, Jim Cain Original photo on opposite page, back row, from left: Bill Fifield, Emil “Emes” George, Don “Klockman” Klock, Chris “Palmer” Palmieri, Doug “Swine” Fuller, Andy Wernick, Bruce “Bueno” Marshall. Front row, from left: Rich “Hal” Halpern, Dave “Urqi” Urquhart, Peter “Greek” Downs, Will Buckley. On the floor: Jeff “Skull” Roberts
A RecordBreaking Reunion HOW PLANNING AND PERSISTENCE—AND THE WORK OF A PHANTOM— HELPED THE CLASS OF ’68 SET A NEW BAR FOR REUNION SUCCESS —BY JONATHAN ADOLPH
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sk Reunion Committee Chair Chip Keeney to explain why a record 44 percent of his class attended their 50th Reunion, and he notes that the class of 1968 is extremely tight-knit. “It wasn’t hard to get these guys
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back at all,” he says. “It was a logistical thing, but that’s nothing we couldn’t work out. It was so easy, and that’s what made it a pleasure.” But, clearly, the comprehensive outreach campaign waged by Keeney and his committee—Don Klock, Kent Haberle, Paul Wain-
The Phantom Strikes Again Did a shared history of pranks bring the class of 1968 together?
54 WILLISTON NORTHAMPTON SCHOOL
wright, Jim Cain, and Mark Griggs—had more than a little to do with it. Here are three key strategies they employed.
Formed at Reunion the year before, the committee scheduled regular conference calls every three weeks to update each other on their progress tracking down classmates. Each member had his assignments, based on classmates he knew, and had to answer to the group by the next meeting. Committee mem-
bers became gumshoes. “Calling was always preferred, then emailing if they had one, then we looked on LinkedIn, Facebook, Internet searches, and then, lastly, if none of that stuff worked, we’d write an actual letter to their home,” notes Klock. “What made this successful is we bird-dogged this thing to everybody we could find.” To chart it all and keep tabs on loose ends, Wainwright created what he calls “the mother of all spreadsheets. Every fact known about the class is somewhere in it.”
TAP CLASS TALENT To ramp up the appeal of the event itself, the committee sought out members of the class to provide programming of particular inter-
Prior to breaking Reunion records for participation and generosity, the class of 1968 was famous for more subversive acts, specifically for a series of pranks that still stand out for their audacity. At a Reunion talk, Chris McWilliams, Russ Creighton, Worth Durgin, Kent Haberle, and Paul Wainwright provided an insider’s look into the origin and history of the prankster known as the Phantom. What emerges is a rich irony: The Reunion success of the class of 1968 reflects a closeness that was born at least in part
est—an exhibit of members’ art and photography curated by Wainwright, a talk by Will Buckley on lessons learned at Williston, even a presentation by Haberle, Chris McWilliams, and others on the mysterious Phantom, a figure responsible for a string of pranks on campus, including the legendary Crumpled Newspaper Caper (see below). That personal connection “helped pull people in,” notes Klock.
GET A ROOM! To solve the logistical challenge of finding hotel rooms in the area (on what turned out to be graduation weekend for a number of area colleges), the committee rented out the entire Autumn Inn in Northampton, which became a
from the shared experience of rebellion. In “A (Short) History of the Phantom,” a 15-page tell-all shared at Reunion, the authors note that their class came of age at a time of great social change, an era of questioning that called for an anti-establishment superhero. Pranks had a long tradition at Williston (who could forget the cow in the tower of the old gym in 1924?), but in keeping with the spirit of the sixties, the Phantom would be a collective. “One of the original goals of this group