50 Years of Co-Ed

Celebrating 50 Years of Coordinate Education

by RHEA HIRSHMAN

On a Thursday afternoon in early June of 1972, Rosemary Hall’s senior class graduated on the Wallingford campus, which had become the school’s new home. Sixty Rosemarians and 159 Choate seniors graduated separately, a practice that would last for six years until the first joint Commencement in 1978. The 2021- 22 academic year marked the 50 th anniversary of the merging of these two proud institutions, which began with the arrival of the entire Rosemary Hall student body in the fall of 1971.

As part of the celebration, four members of theClasses of 1972 share their memories and stories.

Choate Rosemary Hall became a fully co-educational institution in 1977-78. From 1971-72 to 1976-77, the Choate School and Rosemary Hall experienced coordinate education on the Wallingford campus.

When Christopher Rice stopped in at a cocktail party on New York’s Upper West Side in the fall of 1980, he saw a familiar face. “We didn’t really know each other in high school,” he says, “and I was amazed that Liza knew my name.”

Two years later, Chris and Carlotta (Liza) Wick were married.

In the ensuing four decades, they continued their educations, raised boygirl twins, traveled widely, and pursued both individual careers and joint ventures. Liza majored in English and comparative literature at Smith College and obtained her law degree at the University of Chicago. Chris has an undergraduate degree in economics and a master’s in Russian and Slavic studies from the University of Pennsylvania.

After graduating from Smith and spending time in Malaysia, where her father was working, Liza began her post-college work life as an editorial assistant at House and Garden magazine. A few months later she became the assistant wine and food editor. “It was perfect,” she says. “I was born to do that job!” But law school was beckoning. After a year in law school at Duke, she headed for Chicago where Chris was a regional manager for Xerox. They married, and Liza finished her law degree at the University of Chicago.

After working for a Chicago firm that specialized in commercial real estate and representing franchisors, Liza continued her law career at a large firm in Connecticut when Chris was transferred to Xerox Learning System’s headquarters in Stamford. Continuing in the same practice areas,

Liza immersed herself in the work and began to get calls from head hunters. “I loved practicing law,” she says, ”but I was working 24/7 and had no life.” After their twins, Alex and Carlie, were born, she arranged with her thenemployer to work part-time.

The setup did not work out. “I felt that I was doing 50 percent at two jobs, and I wasn’t happy in either. I knew that if I wanted to go back into the kind of practice I’d been doing, I would have to commute to New York as well.”

So Liza retired from her legal career and became, in her children’s words, “a non-practicing attorney.”

They relocated to Princeton, N.J., when Chris joined The Gallup Organization to survey people’s attitudes about their “cars, credit cards, and employers.” While the preponderance of Liza’s time after the move to Princeton became focused on school and community volunteer activities — including homeschooling their son for a year — she also found an opportunity to exercise her legal expertise when Chris became CEO of BlessingWhite, a global leadership and employee engagement consulting firm. The company, which did not have in-house legal staff, was engaged in a management buyout from a Dutch firm. “Liza dealt with everything that an in-house attorney would have done, from real estate leases to international copyright matters,” says Chris, “except pro bono.”

And when Chris decided to co-author a book with two colleagues, he called on Liza’s editing skills to meld three different voices into a coherent whole.

That book — The Engagement Equation: Leadership Strategies for an Inspired Workforce — explains how companies use employee engagement to execute strategy, reduce costs, and meet organizational goals. It presents a model that focuses on both individuals’ contributions to a company’s success and employees’ personal satisfaction in their roles.

Chris spent 16 years as president and CEO of BlessingWhite, including several years after selling the firm to GP Strategies — a successful transaction with lots of free legal advice from Liza — and was managing director of the global talent development practice for Lee Hecht Harrison. Throughout, his focus has been human capital management, a field, he explains, that involves leadership training, executive coaching, employee and customer satisfaction surveys, organizational change consulting, and diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Chris’ career has taken him all over the globe, but one of his early exposures to international travel came with Choate’s summer trip to Russia between his fifth and sixth form years. He also got a taste of making his own way. “I still can’t believe that my parents and the school approved.” he says. “My sixth form project involved my traveling solo and unsupervised through Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, and several other countries. The international experience that Choate gave me meant that I was comfortable going pretty much anywhere as I moved up in my career.”

Chris’ extensive traveling was another reason they decided that Liza would be a stay-at-home parent when the children were young. But once their children were in college, Liza was able to join him.

For the past few years, Chris has turned his attention to serving on the boards of three companies affiliated with human capital: a venture capital firm, a company that focuses on leadership communication through story-telling, and a company that has developed a gamified application for training employees of large companies. Liza has become both a certified master gardener for Mercer County, N.J., “something I’ve always wanted to do,” she says, and a certified ESL literacy tutor. She has also undertaken 85 hours of training under the auspices of a group called Womanspace that counsels, represents, and shelters victims of domestic and sexual abuse and their children. “I didn’t think I was naïve when I began the course,” she says, “but I learned far more than I could have imagined.”

Coming from a former Rassweiler Scholar — an honor awarded to the student who, “in achieving academic excellence, has shown a true love of learning” — Liza’s comment about learning is no surprise. In fact, she says, “Chris and I spend a lot of time asking each other questions.” They both credit their Rosemary Hall and Choate School educations with teaching and rewarding them for critical thinking. Chris even credits his third form public speaking class — “which didn’t go so well at the time,” he confesses — with providing the foundation for a lifetime of successful speeches around the world.

Asked for his reflections on retirement for the 50 th reunion book, Chris wrote: “I will never completely retire!” And, as for Liza: “The Rosemary Hall motto — altiora peto (I seek higher things) — has always been a personal motto for me as well. I am looking forward to whatever comes next. As I said to an old friend a while back: my work here is not done.”

If you had asked a young Ann-Louise Hittle what she wanted to be when she grew up, it’s a good bet that she would not have said “an oil market analyst.” In fact, she was not thinking of that career path even when she enrolled at St. Lawrence University, where she majored in history. But, sparked by a Choate class with Mounir Sa’adah and the experience of her father, whose work often took him to the region, she had developed an interest in the Middle East. For her junior college year, she did an independent study at American University in Cairo.

“You have to understand that I didn’t have a plan,” she says. “I just knew that I was interested in the Middle East and wanted to further my education.” Accepted into Harvard for a master’s degree in Middle East studies, Ann- Louise studied Arabic, Turkish, modern Middle East history, and Islamic philosophy. “I was also a teaching assistant for a great professor who taught the economy of the Middle East,” she says, “and the economy of the Middle East is a lot about oil.”

A chance encounter at a Harvard reception led to an interview with Gulf Oil and launched Ann-Louise on her career path. “Companies back then were much more willing to take a chance on someone like me — no MBA, but with a strong academic background,” she says. “I think that interview would never happen now.”

Starting her career at Gulf Oil, where she did supply and distribution analysis on OPEC and non-OPEC production, Ann-Louise then took a staff position for Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, writing articles on areas such as East Asia oil markets and OPEC production. “It was like going to oil graduate school,” she says. “And the analytic and writing skills I learned at Rosemary Hall really paid off in that job!”

After spending four years at PIW and taking time off to travel in Japan and Russia, Ann-Louise joined Kissinger Associates as a Middle East and oil markets researcher, and then took a position as a senior oil and gas futures analyst with Shearson Lehman Brothers. When Shearson Lehman split in the early ’90s, Ann-Louise stayed with Lehman until leaving the firm to join Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) in August of 1993.

Meanwhile, the previous December, Ann-Louise had married Tim Constable, a fellow Shearson Lehman employee. Then, as she was changing jobs and moving to Cambridge, Mass., she was pregnant with their first daughter. “It was,” she says, “a little wild.”

After several of her colleagues left CERA for another firm, Ann-Louise subsequently decided to make the same transition. Since 2003, she has been with Wood Mackenzie, a global energy consulting company based in Edinburgh. She is now a vice president leading oil market research. When she and her daughter Catherine were in Edinburgh for a year so that Ann-Louise could set up the firm’s oil market service, she and Tim started the process to adopt a daughter from China. “Usually, these referrals take a long time, but ours did not,” she says and, in the fall of 2004, the whole family was on a plane to Wuhan. They brought home their second child, Poppe, on Christmas Eve.

Now working in the Boston area, Ann-Louise is still analyzing and consulting on worldwide oil markets. With increasing concerns about climate change, much of Wood Mackenzie’s current focus is on the energy industry of the future. “We have an energy transition service that I work with every day,” she says. “The world’s huge global energy system has to transform.”

A great animal lover, Ann-Louise currently shares their home with five cats and two dogs, and serves on the board of a charity that rescues horses. She is particularly proud of her work as a Catvocate with the MSPCA, a Massachusetts program to reduce the homeless cat population through adoption promotion and spay/neuter initiatives.

As she looks back on her Rosemary Hall years, Ann-Louise has fond memories of starting the Rosemary Hall girls’ ski team with classmate Stephanie Hugus ’72. And, of her successful career, Ann-Louise notes, “The whole reason I am where I am today is because of my Rosemary Hall education. It lit a fire in me and gave me the skills I’ve relied on and a joy of learning that has guided me throughout my career.”

Even if you’ve never met Stephen Bogardus, you may very well know Stephen Bogardus.

An actor who has toured with regional and national companies, appeared in 13 Broadway shows and a dozen off-Broadway productions, and made numerous television appearances, including guest spots on The Good Wife and Law & Order, Steve has become accustomed to having his fellow New Yorkers peer at him, wondering why he looks so familiar. “Sometimes I’ll say, ‘Are you a Law & Order junkie’ and the person will respond, ‘Oh, yeah. You’re the crooked lawyer from last week.’”

Steve’s engagement with the arts began in childhood. He was in a youth orchestra, sang in the school and church choirs, and joined the chorus of community musicals during summers. At Choate, he played violin in the Telemann Society and sang in both the Glee Club and the Maiyeros, the school’s a cappella group.

But, in his fifth form year, Steve was cast in the role of Bobby Van Heusen in Sandy Wilson’s musical comedy The Boy Friend — the first time a musical was staged at the school, and the year before the opening of the Paul Mellon Arts Center was open. “Being on the stage, singing and dancing ‘Won’t You Charleston with Me’,” he says, “was a seminal moment in my early career – something that felt right.”

After Choate, Steve headed to Princeton, where he majored in psychology. “Not even clinical,” he says. “It was neuropsychopharmacology — I was in the lab with the rats. At that point, I didn’t think of myself as being able to sustain a career as an actor.” He did join the school’s Triangle Club — an organization with a professional director and choreographer but with scripts written by students — and sang with the a cappella group, the Nassoons.

But, by the end of his junior year, Steve had a realization. “I called my parents and said, ‘I want to pursue a career in theater. I don’t know if it’s going to work for me but that’s where my heart is.’” His parents were cautious (“Are you sure you are prepared for the ups and downs?”) but supportive — his mother had had a successful professional life in the Ice Capades — and, the day after graduation, Steve was on a train to a summer stock company in Rhode Island.

“Early on, I was cast in lot of musicals,” he says. “But I didn’t want to be onedimensional.” He settled in New York and, between gigs, took acting classes, building a craft that could get him work in plays and films and television. Slowly, he began to get roles in nonmusical theater, as well as film roles and television appearances.

Steve’s Broadway credits include Bright Star, Falsettos, Grapes of Wrath, High Society, King David, Les Misérables, Man of La Mancha, White Christmas, and West Side Story, which he describes as “the production that is probably most dear to me” — the 1980 revival was his first Broadway show. He starred as Tony in a 1981 Paris production, with Leonard Bernstein joining the cast at their opening night bows. He received an OBIE Award and Tony nomination for his work in Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion, which began as an off-Broadway production, then moved to Broadway and finally became a film, all with the original cast. (“That rarely, if ever, happens,” Steve says).

In the early 1980s, Steve did a workshop production of a show called Kicks. While the show never made it to Broadway despite an impressive pedigree (music by Alan Menken, book by Tom Eyen of Dreamgirls fame), it was where Steve met his wife, Fosse dancer and dance teacher Dana Moore. The couple, who live on New York’s Upper West Side, have one son.

In addition to performing, a major part of Steve’s professional life for the past 13 years has been devoted to Actors’ Equity. A member of the union’s governing council and a trustee of its health and pension fund, he has been involved in contract negotiations — particularly fraught as performance venues shuttered during the pandemic — and in helping to craft protocols to protect members’ physical and emotional safety once those venues began to reopen.

As the arts begin to come alive again, Steve looks forward both to continuing to practice his craft and to taking more time for himself. “I’ve worked hard over a 45-year career — it’s a career I’m content with — and have let go of all expectations about the future. But I do plan to continue — on my own terms and on projects that capture my imagination and tell compelling stories.”

Rhea Hirshman is a freelance writer in New Haven. She also teaches women’s,gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Connecticut in Stamford, and is aformer member of the Choate Rosemary Hall English Department.