FALL 2023 Deerfield Magazine by Deerfield Academy

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D I N I N G H A L L / B A C K S TA G E C L A S S R O O M / T H E H O L D O V E R / A D VA N C E M E N T R E P O R T

DE E R F I E LD MAGAZI NE

volume 78/3

James “Jim” H. Marksbury Read his memorial on page 76.

This issue of Deerfield Magazine is dedicated to former Secretary to the Alumni and Editor James Marksbury P ’96 H ’80, my friend and mentor, who passed away on September 14. He remains one of the wittiest, most intelligent people I’ve ever known. Jim held many positions at Deerfield over his 33-year career and presided over several firsts—the first-ever Deerfield Festival of the Arts, created with his colleague and friend Dan Hodermarsky in 1970; the first Deerfield prom; the first Casino Night; and three mock political conventions. He served as special assistant to Headmaster David Pynchon, director of student activities, director of academic programming, and erstwhile chair of the curriculum committee. He was the gregarious ambassador for Deerfield who arranged multitudes of events and gatherings for alumni, including Reunion Weekends, and served as administrative liaison to the Executive Committee of the Alumni Association.

Director of Communications/ Editor-in-Chief

Jessica Day

Associate Director of Advancement Communications/ Managing Editor

Carly Nartowicz

He taught English, and he brought this publication to new heights, winning 13 national awards, including being named the best secondary school publication in the nation in 1990. As noted in 2002 when Jim retired: No matter what role he served in, but perhaps most in his role as editor, Jim worked in support of Deerfield, always firm in his basic belief that the Academy’s mission, and therefore his, was good. I met Jim in 1995 when I interviewed to be his assistant. I didn’t know it then, but he was same as he ever was: of slight build, wearing tortoise shell glasses, and impeccably dressed. We had (what I thought was) a great conversation, and he gave me several copies of the magazine to peruse, promising I’d “hear soon.” I didn’t get the job. Fast forward to a phone call three months later; it was Jim, (somewhat sheepishly) admitting that the person he’d hired hadn’t worked out, and might I still be interested in the position . . .? And so began a career for which I am most grateful. Every now and then after he’d retired and moved to North Carolina, I’d get an email from Jim. I could hear his voice in every word: I’m somewhat overcome by emotion at the moment. (An archival photo from one of the mock conventions he’d organized was on the back cover of Deerfield Magazine.) I was the faculty instigator of the 1980 Mock Convention, and along with a committee of eight teenage boys, we managed to pull off one seriously crazy event (note that we even planned for a balloon drop). Sheer recklessness . . .. The magazine is fabulous, professionally executed and thoroughly engaging, better than most commercial publications by a long shot. Also enjoyed the shot of Ben Lovejoy hoisting the Stanley Cup. He was a student of mine and a great guy. Let’s catch up. Love to hear from you. I am still able to sit up and take nourishment and even go to the gym regularly. I have a girlfriend with season tickets to Duke basketball. Nothing else matters . . .. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. Fondly, Jim. Thank you, Jim, for your service to the Academy, for your wit and wisdom, and for giving me the opportunity to tell Deerfield’s stories. I hope you enjoy this issue of the magazine. //

Jessica Day

Director of Communications/ Editor-in-Chief

Production Manager

Design & Art Director

Social Media & Email Manager

Academy Archivist

Steve Berman

Brent M. Hale

Meghan Hoagland

Anne Lozier

FALL 2023 / DINING HALL / BACKSTAGE CLASSRO OM / THE HOLD OVER / ADVANCEMENT REPORT / volume 78/3

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Remarks from Dr. Austin

Dining Hall

The Common Room

Albany Road

The Backstage Classroom

Regional & Club Events

A Report on Annual Giving

The Hold Over: Dominic Sessa ’22

In Memoriam

Object Lesson

On Our Cover

This portrait is by Dom!

Dominic Sessa’s portraits were shot in May of 2022 at photographer and Deerfield parent Wheaton Mahoney’s Greenfield, MA, studio. More of Wheaton’s work at: wheatonmahoney.com

Spring / Summer ’23 correction: The alumni spotlight featuring Heesun Lho ’04 was written by Eric Butterman.

Produced by the Deerfield Academy Communications Office: Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, MA 01342. Telephone: 413-774-1860 communications@deerfield.edu Publication Office: Cummings Printing, Hooksett, NH. Third class postage paid at Deerfield, Massachusetts, and additional mailing office.

Deerfield Magazine is published three times a year. Deerfield Academy does not discriminate against any individual on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, transgender status, marital status, national origin, ancestry, genetic information, age, disability, status as a veteran or being a member of the Reserves or National Guard, or any other classification protected under state or federal law. Copyright ©2023 The Trustees of Deerfield Academy (all rights reserved)

ALBANY ROAD / HOS REMARKS

A NY RU OA OLPBPA O RT NDI T I E S F O R E X C E L L E N C E :

2023 Fall Family Weekend Remarks from Head of School Dr. John Austin Good morning, and welcome to Fall Family Weekend. There has been terrific energy on campus since the opening weeks of school back in September, and spirits have remained high even as we are well into the Fall Term. I have been proud of our students—of their engagement, their leadership, and, most importantly, the innumerable ways they show up for and care for one another. I hope that you’ll see and feel their enthusiasm, dedication, and fellowship this weekend. I’d like to use our time together this morning to offer updates on the campus, the school year to date, and some important priorities that will shape the future of Deerfield. And then, if we have time, I’ll be happy to take some of your questions. The talent and creativity of our student-artists are simply extraordinary. Their performances, across a range of artistic forms, never fail to bring our community together in a spirit of joy and pride. Now, I can’t talk about the arts at Deerfield without mentioning the new film The Holdovers. It’s directed by two-time Academy Award winner Alexander Payne, who directed, among other films, Sideways, and it stars Paul Giamatti and Deerfield’s own Dominic Sessa, Class of ’22. A number of other students have minor roles and speaking parts. The film was shot in part on our campus, and Dom was a senior while participating in the production. I’m sorry that we can’t offer a sneak preview this weekend, but I understand that it’s opening nationwide on November 10, so look for it, and look for Dom! He is representative of the many student-artists on campus doing phenomenal and inspiring work. Beginning tomorrow afternoon, we’ve got some exciting athletic contests scheduled. One of Mr. Boyden’s greatest accomplishments over the course of his 66 years at Deerfield was building our interscholastic athletic program. When he arrived at Deerfield in 1902, there was a national movement to eliminate athletics from schools and colleges, led by none other than the President of Harvard University at the time, Charles William Eliott. He spoke often and publicly against baseball, basketball, and hockey. He described football as “a fight whose strategy and ethics are those of war . . . [where] The weaker man is considered the legitimate prey of the stronger.” (As his language suggests, the idea of young women participating in athletic competitions was unthinkable.) Of baseball he wrote: “This year I’m told the team did well because one pitcher had a fine curveball. I understand that a curveball is thrown with a deliberate attempt to deceive. Surely,” he lamented, “this is not an ability we should want to foster at Harvard.” Contrast that with this story from John McPhee’s The Headmaster describing a young Mr. Boyden playing first base on Deerfield’s baseball team—and yes, he did play side-by-side with his own students: “In the early days, having the headmaster as a player produced some disadvantages for Deerfield teams. Once, in a pickoff situation in baseball, when he caught the throw from the pitcher and put his glove down, the opposing player slid safely under him. ‘Out!’ said the umpire. Any other baseball player would have congratulated himself on his luck, but the headmaster had to tell the umpire that the fellow had in fact been safe.”

Mr. Boyden sought to shape Deerfield’s athletic program around the values of fairness, sportsmanship, grace, and humility. He saw it as a way to foster the virtues of teamwork, practice, and hard work. He sought to make athletics, as quoted again by John McPhee, “a moral force.” That tradition is carried on by our coaches, our athletic staff, and most especially by our Director of Athletics and Cocurricular Program Bob Howe, whose commitment and dedication to our cocurriculars is unmatched. Bob has deepened our commitment to athletics at all levels— I recommend to you the article recently published in Deerfield Magazine on our JV program—and Bob and his team have translated our community pledge into a series of aspirations and values that are lived every day by our athletes. You will see these posted throughout the school. The first is: “Be a great teammate.” It is not accidental that we speak of “cocurriculars” and not “extra-curriculars” (though we have a lot of those, too). The athletics and the arts are not “extras” or add-ons at Deerfield. They are intrinsic to who we are—equals to academics in our educational program—and an important and defining part of the student experience. Nor is it accidental that we require participation and ask students—whether they are involved in our athletics or arts or service programs—to work as “teams.” One of the things I value most about the arts and athletics is that they offer young people the opportunity for teamwork and collaboration, and for self-effacement in the service of something bigger than they are. If a student is a part of an ensemble, a dramatic performance, or a team, there are,

of course, opportunities for individuals to stand out and excel, but in the end, success, as it is in life, is always a collective achievement (one of the reasons we don’t have names on our jerseys). Whatever you accomplish as a member of a theater production or a crew, you accomplish it as part of a team. And this is as true in defeat as it is in victory. Arts and athletics remain one of the last great laboratories for leadership: an arena where young people can meet, and overcome, adversity and setback. Failure, as it were, is built into the curriculum, which is why student-athletes and student-artists often develop such high levels of confidence and resiliency. It’s probably worth pointing out that Mr. Boyden was also quite skeptical of over specialization. He famously went so far as to remove baskets from backboards in the off-season. Although he did not have access to it, there’s a great deal of research suggesting that his skepticism was warranted. (A smart summary of that research can be found in David Epstein’s Range: Why

Great schools, like Deerfield, are national treasures that need to be protected. We are carefully planning for Deerfield’s future and what the school, its students, and its faculty will need to thrive in the decades ahead. Over the last few years, we have dialed up, in both large and small ways, our emphasis on forms of pro-social connection and inclusion: Our campaign, at its core, is for community and connection in support of student

flourishing and excellence.

Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.) Those days are behind us, I suspect, and I don’t think it’s necessary to prohibit the off-season pursuit of excellence, but there is much to be said for a commitment to broad student engagement. I’m very proud of our artists and our athletes, and I’m also grateful to our artist-athletes (those students who do both) as well as our multi-sport athletes; they contribute to Deerfield’s competitiveness, which is why a school of our size can support 31 athletic programs and twice that number of teams, allowing us to compete at the highest levels at each. This fall are teams have, at all levels, a combined record of 72-38-7. One of the highlights of the Fall Term was a “Friday Night Lights” football game, the first in Deerfield’s history. I think the entire school came out in support, which was as exciting as it was unsurprising. A strength of Deerfield is the quality of our weekend program. Unlike other schools closer to Boston or New York or boarding schools with a sizeable proportion of day students, the social energy remains on campus during the weekends, and this is a defining aspect of life here—one we seek to leverage in our weekend programming. We’re still very much in the planning phase for our campaign, and still in the process of prioritizing institutional needs and aspirations. But, as you know, we are already moving ahead with the renovation and expansion of the Dining Hall, which is largely as it was when it was first built in 1948. You may not know this, but we do not outsource our dining; all our menus and food preparation are done by our staff. In the end, this project is not merely about refurbishing a beloved building. We are not building a cafeteria. It’s about creating connection, fostering inclusion, and deepening our sense of community. We’re currently unable to bring everyone together in one space for meals, and expansion will remedy this. The Dining Hall project is ambitious, and it will take about eighteen months to complete. It requires several chess moves on campus, the first of which is the temporary facility. You may have already noticed the construction and earth-moving on Albany

ALBANY ROAD / HOS REMARKS

Road, where Headmaster’s Field—our baseball field—is located. We’re building a temporary dining facility there, and although it’s temporary, it too will be a historic first for Deerfield, in that it will allow all of us to gather for meals together at the same time. As you drove onto campus, you may have also noticed construction between Main Street and Routes 5 and 10. We are creating a new, five-acre, multipurpose synthetic playing field. So, no baseball games will be called on account of our Dining Hall project. This new field will not only enable our baseball season to go forward without a hitch, but it’s located beyond the flood plain. You’ll recall in the summer we had extensive flooding and damage to the Lower Level playing fields after the Deerfield River overflowed its banks. Our grounds and facilities teams were heroic in addressing the flooding—working tirelessly to restore the fields and prepare campus for the arrival of students. As weather events increase in both frequency and intensity, exploring long-term solutions to campus challenges has become a priority. This new, versatile field is part of that solution, providing additional playing fields outside the flood plain. You will have a chance to see it in action come Spring Family Weekend. And I should mention that when the temporary dining facility is no longer needed, Headmaster’s Field will return to its former glory. Great schools, like Deerfield, are national treasures that need to be protected. We are carefully planning for Deerfield’s future and what the school, its students, and its faculty will need to thrive in the decades ahead. Over the last few years, we have dialed up, in both large and small ways, our emphasis on forms of pro-social connection and inclusion: Our campaign, at its core, is for community and connection in support of student flourishing and excellence. The Dining Hall is an expression of that commitment—as are our commitments to school ritual and spirit, face-to-face interactions that are free, as much as possible, from the distractions of technology, and the highest levels of faculty engagement with students.

Through our campaign, we will invest in what we are calling a faculty model of “high engagement,” where teachers connect deeply and broadly with students across multiple dimensions of school life. High engagement means much more than simply being an exceptional and inspiring classroom teacher —that goes without saying. It means believing in the potential of all students to grow and learn. It means working collaboratively with colleagues in support of our mission and broader, shared institutional priorities. And it means working together to actively create a culture of connection, joy, optimism, and reciprocity. Highly engaged teachers maintain a strong presence on campus and enthusiastically support school events as audience members and spectators. They embrace the lifestyle of living and working on a residential campus and the opportunities that it affords for teaching and mentoring beyond the classroom. In support of this high engagement model, we will invest in new and existing residential spaces, create additional residential housing for faculty so they can be closer to students, and dramatically improve teacher-student ratios in residential spaces where that can be improved. These priorities inform our hiring and the great work that our Dean of Faculty Ivory Hills and Associate Dean of Faculty Abe Wehmiller do each year. Another campaign priority is to continue Deerfield’s long and robust tradition of creating access for students of every socioeconomic background, in keeping with Mr. Boyden’s tradition of asking families “to pay what you can.” Roughly 40 percent of the student body now receives financial aid. With the campaign, we hope to fully endow our existing financial aid program— all told, an annual commitment of 15 million dollars—to bolster supplemental aid and fully meet the needs of families across the economic spectrum, with a particular emphasis on middle-income families. Over the last two decades, tuition growth has outpaced family income, so the need for assistance is spread widely across income levels. These efforts are based on a simple

premise: A family’s resources should never be a reason to keep a student from attending Deerfield. A final campaign priority speaks to our educational program and some of the unique challenges schools face. In 1952, four years after she led the effort that resulted in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt came to Deerfield to speak with students about the United Nations, and in 1964, Deerfield hosted a United Nations symposium featuring delegates from Yemen, Jamaica, Australia, Pakistan, the Netherlands, Honduras, and the Ivory Coast, among others. I mention these events because they underscore Deerfield’s long history of promoting citizenship, international and global engagement, and constructive discourse. Like you, I have been following with deep sadness the events in the Middle East that began with the terror attacks on southern Israel. Over the last four years, schools and colleges have been deeply impacted—and tested—by world and national events, and I have been following and studying closely how they have responded. The challenge for educational institutions, I believe, is threefold: to support impacted students in a caring and compassionate way; to provide structures for dialogue and conversation across differences—something our Director of Inclusion and Community Life Steven Lee has led so skillfully; and to hold fast to the intellectual ideals to which Deerfield is uniquely committed: capturing in constructive, thoughtful, and disciplined ways the sometimes anarchic political energies that, from time to time and of late with increasing frequency, descend upon our campuses. These challenges will, I suspect, only increase over the next years. I continue to insist that Deerfield is, first and foremost, a community of learning and inquiry. Our approach to national and international events, both in and outside the classroom, follows from that core commitment. Over the last weeks, our deans, advisors, and Student Life leadership have been particularly alert to

students who may have been impacted by events in the Middle East. Under the leadership of the Student Life Office and our Dean of Ethical and Spiritual Life Jan Flaska, the Deerfield Academy Student Spiritual Council and other student groups have convened for conversation and mutual support. Classes in history and ethics have also touched on the ongoing war within the disciplinary framework of their courses. This kind of teaching and engagement is happening throughout the school. Last spring, history teacher Joe Lyons approached me about his senior elective constitutional law course. There was tremendous interest among his students in discussing the legal arguments around affirmative action that were before the Supreme Court. Joe, master teacher (and trained lawyer) that he is, was appropriately sensitive to the challenges of teaching such a controversial topic and doing it well, which he did with tremendous success, with high levels of engagement among his students, and with appropriate attentiveness and sensitivity to the complexity of American history, constitutional debate, and legal disagreement. As you know, I have resisted the temptation to speak or position the Academy on matters of national controversy and urgency, as difficult as this has sometimes been. At the same time, I remain committed to providing opportunities and structures for dialogue and inquiry at Deerfield. One initiative is worth mentioning. A few weeks ago, at our Thursday advisory lunch, each student received their own pocket Constitution of the United States. Over the course of the year, we will stage a series of conversations, talks, dialogues, and performances about the history of the Constitution. Some of these are simply fun and entertaining, such as quiz show competitions at School Meeting, an upcoming presentation by a member of the math department on the mathematics of the Constitution, and skits performed by students. At a School Meeting in September, two students, one playing James Madison and one playing Thomas Jefferson, debated, in full costume, the merits of the provision for amending the Constitution, calling historical figures as witnesses in support of their arguments.

Those figures included students playing the roles of civil rights activist Wong Kim Ark, suffragist Alice Paul, journalist Neil Sheehan, and Martin Luther King Jr. This year of conversation around the Constitution will culminate in the spring with our third Deerfield Forum, which will consider the question of whether or not it is time to hold a second constitutional convention and substantially alter our governing structures. The forum will feature columnist and political correspondent Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times and Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School; it will be moderated by Jeannie Suk Gersen. Gersen is a professor at Harvard Law School and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. This model of shaping the Deerfield Forum around a shared text of enduring significance will, we hope, continue in future years, and it reflects our commitment to providing students with shared intellectual experiences. You might remember that Deerfield received a grant from the Edward E. Ford Foundation to draft a framework for independent schools in support of inquiry. Our thinking is still evolving and our work will continue in the coming weeks, but the core commitments are falling into place. The framework, as it presently stands, rests on three pillars. The first pillar is the importance of expressive freedom for schools and students, centered on three dispositions: • Courage of expression: cultivating in students the ability to express confidently and courageously their own opinions and arguments, even when they run counter to prevailing orthodoxies and peer beliefs;

The second pillar is promoting an ethic of disciplined nonpartisanship on the part of institutions, school leaders, and teachers. We are living through a moment when levels of trust and confidence in major United States institutions have reached historic lows. Yet we know that institutions that adopt norms protecting themselves against the appearance of partisan or political bias enjoy higher levels of public confidence and trust. Public stance taking on the part of school leaders can compromise that trust, and it can also risk constricting or even closing space for inquiry by appearing to establish an orthodox view, discouraging dissent, and silencing minority opinions. And the third pillar is a commitment to intellectual diversity—the idea that schools should foster standards of teaching and curricular structures that intentionally expose students to a broad range of ideas, arguments, and materials. My hope is that, once completed, this framework will also ground and inform our efforts here at Deerfield, including in our Center for Teaching and Learning. I believe I have successfully run out the clock, so I’ll leave it there. But please know that my door is open. Find me, email me, if you want to continue the conversation or wish to share your thoughts on anything I’ve said today. I always welcome your questions and feedback. And, as always, thank you for sharing the lives of your wonderful and extraordinary children with us, and for entrusting them to our care. //

• Conscientiousness of expression: providing students with the skills and opportunities to practice speaking with consideration, civility, and temperateness; • Toleration of expression: fostering in students a willingness to listen deeply and patiently, even in the face of provocation and arguments with which they might disagree.

ALBANY ROAD

Friendly Faces

Deerfield welcomed 16 new* faculty members to campus this fall.

TREVON BRYANT

JACKIE DE LUCA

ELIZABETH DOLLHOPF

ASSISTANT DEAN OF RESIDENTIAL LIFE

DIRECTOR OF ACADEMIC SUPPORT

MATH TEACHER

HAYDEN FOX

AVA GOODALE

VIRGINIA INVERNIZZI

TEACHING FELLOW: HISTORY & SOCIAL SCIENCE

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR SERVICE & GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP

LANGUAGE TEACHER: SPANISH

BUKOSIA ODONGO

JENNIFER POUSONT

YU-MEI WEI

TEACHING FELLOW: MATH

SCIENCE TEACHER

PIANO STUDIO DIRECTOR

*Ms. Ellis, Ms. Invernizzi, and Ms. Pousont—welcome back!

Joyful Themes on Campus

JOHN DOLLHOPF

FRANCOISE ELLIS

MATH TEACHER

LANGUAGE TEACHER: FRENCH

This year the Student Life Office team and Director of Inclusion and Community Life Steven Lee continue the Dignity Campaign that started in the fall of 2022 with a renewed emphasis on the Academy’s school values: respect, integrity, and care for others. New this fall is “80 Percent on Albany Road,” which reminds students to smile and engage with others when crossing Albany Road and elsewhere in their travels on campus. “Kickin’ it With Kindness” reminds the Deerfield community to do just that: Be kind! 80 on Albany Road stickers, Kickin’ it With Kindness t-shirts, and Dignity pins recognize students whose efforts ensure their peers feel heard and appreciated. //

“Smile at 80% of at least the peo pl pass on Albany e you Road!”

WILLIAM JACKSON

MATT KUTOLOWSKI

COUNSELOR

LANGUAGE TEACHER: CHINESE

VINCENT (VJ) ROUGEAU JR.

RYAN TYREE

TEACHING FELLOW: ENGLISH

ENGLISH TEACHER

ng specti rth is e r d n a ing. ent wo nizing Recog rson’s inher se of belong e n each p a greater se o t vital

Did you help someone who was feeling down? Carry a backpack for a friend? Set the table for your First Waiter? Yeehaw—You are making Deerfield a better place and “KICKIN’ IT with kindness!”

ALBANY ROAD

FALL FAMILY WEEKEND

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Martin Espada Hosted by the Academy’s English Department, critically acclaimed poet Martin Espada visited campus in October. Mr. Espada, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, facilitated several poetry workshops for English classes, participated in Q&A sessions about his process and poetry, and read some of his work at a School Meeting.

Bloody Brilliant! See full photo galleries on biggreen.photos

The fall theater production, Dracula, A Feminist Revenge Tragedy, by playwright Kate Hamill appropriately opened on Halloween and played to a full house throughout its run. Upending the familiar tropes of damsels in distress and dashing villains, Ms. Hamill’s retelling confronts the sexism in Bram Stoker’s original work in an adaptation that bounces between horror and humor.

In the Gallery: Robert Sweeney Local artist Robert Sweeney’s exhibition in the von Auersperg Gallery— The Energy That Lies in the Seams: Form, Light and Atmosphere—explored the convergence of observation and imagination in landscape and still life. In addtion to his work as an artist, Mr. Sweeney teaches painting and drawing at Amherst College. The von Auersperg Galley is open to the public Monday through Friday from 8:30 am to 4:00 pm, and information on current and upcoming exhibits can be found at deerfield.edu/academics/von-auersperg-gallery.

ALBANY ROAD

BEHIND THE BENCH

Jeannette Boudway VARSITY SOCCER

Coach Jeannette Boudway was living a double life. Her days were mostly spent confined to a cubicle, engaged in a solitary pursuit: tax accounting. In her free time, Boudway would head to the suburbs, far from the clutches of KPMG’s downtown Chicago office, where she played for a semi-pro soccer team. A few months into this first job out of college—a job for which she had completed multiple internships—Boudway had serious reservations but committed to giving it a try for one full year. “I did give it a year, and then I decided to go to grad school so I could shift gears and pursue a career in sports,” says Boudway, who headed to Barry University in Miami to complete a dual degree: an MBA and a master’s in Sports Management. “I was like, I need a change! I wasn’t entirely sure I’d be coaching at that point, but I knew I wanted to do something in sports.”

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While in graduate school, Boudway worked as an assistant for the women’s soccer team. “It was a lot of fun! I started getting interested in [coaching] and I started coaching club,” she recounts as she catalogues the series of events that cemented her coaching career. A semester before she was set to graduate, Boudway received a call from her former college coach at DePaul University, informing her that he had recommended her for a coaching job at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). “I had a great interview, and I loved the coach, so I took a chance and moved to Birmingham.” Her time at UAB under Coach Paul Harbin was a major period of growth for Coach Boudway, who subsequently coached women’s soccer at Notre Dame and Amherst and Smith colleges before accepting the position of head Girls Varsity Soccer coach and associate athletic director at Deerfield in the fall of 2022. “Coming from the college game, it feels very natural for me to live [at Deerfield] because as a college coach, you’re so intertwined with everything your student athletes are doing and you’re there all the time, so to be here just makes it more convenient,” says Boudway when asked about how she acclimated to life on campus. The opportunity to bring her family into the Deerfield community was also one of the draws for Boudway, who was conflicted about having to choose between a career she loved and giving up family time with her children as a college coach. “It’s those small moments,” she observes, describing a recent weeknight on dorm duty in DeNunzio, when one of the students on the hall came into her office to play a game with Boudway’s young son who loves boardgames. After coaching at high-level, Division I programs, Coach Boudway has honed her coaching philosophy into one where she aims to teach the principles of the game while leaving enough space for her players to react and make their own judgements on the field. “I tend to rely on foundational basics, and my hope is that we aren’t just training the players to say, ‘If A happens, then B.’ The exciting part about soccer, to me, is the fluidity of the game and the opportunity for the players to make decisions for themselves. So, I try not to give too much direction in a game when it’s their opportunity to make those decisions,” says Boudway.

“Jeannette has a deep love for the game of soccer along with a firm commitment to improving the soccer program. She cares about winning, but more deeply, she cares for the positive experience of her players while here at Deerfield,” says Director of Athletics Bob Howe, emphasizing Boudway’s support of her players. Former Captain Jasmine Irizarry ’23 shares this sentiment; Irizarry appreciated the effort Coach Boudway made to know her players on a deeper level and encourage them, noting that “[Coach Boudway] was really big on team bonding and did whatever it took to bring us together off the field so that it would bring us together on the field.” Boudway sees sports as a vehicle for self-growth. She focuses a lot on the team’s core values—love, devotion, unity, inclusivity, and resilience—weaving them into weekly conversations. “I think Jeannette is a really thoughtful coach in terms of her approach to developing young people on the individual level but also within the context of a team. A lot of coaches talk about the importance of culture, but Jeannette is very intentional about building it,” notes former colleague, Kristin Hughes, Director of Athletics at Smith College. Coach Boudway has no regrets about letting go her corporate path for a life on the soccer field. Finding it a privilege to be in the position to foster “a growth-mindset” environment for young people, Coach Boudway also serves on the Community Values Council as part of a pool of faculty who assist in situations where there is an incident that deviates from Deerfield’s values, standards, and major school rules. She also helps to run two programs: Captain’s Council for the captains of the current season and LEAD, an application-based program for aspiring student leaders. As someone who practices daily gratitude and positivity, her sunny outlook imbues her surroundings—a trait that her colleagues and players appreciate. “When you find something you’re passionate about,” says Coach Boudway, “sometimes you can’t put your finger on why it just brings you so much joy.”//

ALBANY ROAD

Casey B E H I N D Vollinger THE BENCH

SOCCER

Casey Vollinger barely remembers life without soccer. As the son of a soccer coach himself, Coach Vollinger’s childhood was spent on the campuses of Eaglebrook School and Northfield Mount Hermon (NMH), tagging along to practices with his father where he recalls some of his fondest memories. “I remember how special it was as a little kid to be around the players. They all seemed like best friends, and they loved playing the game,” says Vollinger, who went on to serve as a captain of the boys soccer teams at Eaglebrook and NMH before eventually playing college ball at Skidmore College. “I idolized those guys, and they treated me so well. I think that is one of the main reasons I took to the game the way I did.” Coach Vollinger is the first to recognize the influence his coaches had on his knowledge of the game. “I have been so fortunate to play for a number of coaches who understand the game on a deep level. They all approach the game differently, and that’s the beauty of it: crafting your own philosophy from the bits and pieces you’ve learned along the way.”

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These days, Vollinger’s passion for soccer has shifted to the sidelines. While he still loves to play, he now sees the game through a different lens. There are pieces of scrap paper around his house on campus with ideas for training sessions that his wife photographs before tossing out. On his bedside table you’ll find books on soccer and his favorite coach, Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola. “I grew up learning about the great Johan Cruyff from my father and the idea that soccer is a simple game, but playing simple soccer is the hardest thing there is,” notes Coach Vollinger. “Pep learned under Cruyff at Barcelona and has adapted Cruyff’s teachings to the modern game in the most brilliant fashion.” His love for the game is undeniable, and when he’s ready to talk soccer, pull up a chair because you might as well get comfortable. “Coach Vollinger loves the sport of soccer, and you’ll see this clearly any time you walk close to the boys varsity soccer field. His players appreciate his energy as does the athletic team that supports the program off the field!” notes Athletic Director Bob Howe. Coach Vollinger has spent much of his life around the prep league in one way or another, giving him a unique perspective. “Casey has an old soul for a coach who is young. He’s been around the game a long time, he’s seen it as a ball boy, as a player, as an assistant coach and a head coach,” says Jim Burstein, Co-Head Coach at NMH and former colleague. “More talent,” says Coach Vollinger when asked about how the league has changed over the years. “Top-

end talent is about the same but there’s more of it. Recruiting is now ultra-competitive, and more teams have deeper rosters filled with soccer-first kids.” While Coach Vollinger misses the multi-sport athletes that used to populate the prep league, he understands that sports are becoming more specialized, and he must find quality players who will also enhance the Deerfield Experience for the rest of the community. As Bob Howe notes: “The greatest challenge [Coach Vollinger] will face in the years ahead will be attracting more talented soccer-first players to our school, and he is showing that he has the charisma and the work ethic to make this happen.” Coach Vollinger, who has been called a “gentleman on the field” and a “class act” by colleagues, was recently named the president of Western New England Preparatory School Soccer Association (WNEPSSA), an organization of 50+ independent schools founded in 1954. He can’t help but appreciate the opportunity to serve an organization that has given him so much. “WNEPSSA has been a part of my life in one way or another since I was a kid. It’s a wonderful honor to be named president of the league, but I am most thankful for the opportunity to give back to an organization that has been such a big part of my life. That’s the real honor.” While Vollinger always strives to get his players to appreciate “the beautiful game” and play it the right way, he is most concerned with mentoring young athletes and stressing the importance of strong character: “Our goal might be to win, but our duty is to

play with integrity and represent ourselves and our school in an honorable way.” Coach Vollinger believes sport, especially at the youth levels, is as much about building character in student-athletes as it is about achievement. “He’s committed to the kids developing on the field and off the field as well,” notes Burstein. “So, there’s a really good perspective that he has, especially in a society where it’s win at all costs or crush at all costs.” Former captain Tynan Creagh ’22 appreciates the way Coach Vollinger helped each player capitalize on their own strengths to make the team better. “Coach V was truly the person who had the back of each and every member of the team,” recalls Creagh. “When you take everything else away, the opportunityto make a positive impact on kids is the biggest privilege!” remarks Coach Vollinger, who is also a college advisor, faculty advisor, and dorm resident at Deerfield. Coach Vollinger keeps all the cards he receives from students. He was moved beyond words when he received a recorded video message on his birthday from his former proctors of Doubleday 1. “Every Deerfield student has pillars that hold up their love for Deerfield. For most, these pillars include sit-downs, the River, School Meetings, and many other sacred Deerfield traditions. For me, one central pillar is Coach Vollinger. He was a part of some of the best memories I made,” says former captain Derek Zhang ’22. “When I think of Deerfield, I think of Coach Vollinger. He’s one of the biggest reasons why I wish I could go back to those Days of Glory.”//

“Our goal might be to win, but our duty is to play with integrity and represent ourselves and our school in an honorable way.”

FIRST PERSON / JUSTIN AHN ’24

Mending Bridges: US–Vietnam Reconciliation from 1995 to Today Justin Ahn ’24 won the 2023 American Foreign Service Association’s high school essay contest with his original work entitled “Mending Bridges: US - Vietnam Reconciliation from 1995 to Today.” Justin’s works cited list can be found at afsa.org/2023-high-school-essaycontest-winning-essay

When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, US–Vietnam relations were understandably tense. During the war, 58,220 American soldiers were killed; on the Vietnamese side, a staggering two million civilians and one million soldiers were killed (Albert). The US severed diplomatic ties with Vietnam and imposed a full trade embargo (Albert). But today, less than fifty years later, the two countries are close economic and strategic partners thanks to the Foreign Service’s successful reconciliation efforts. Between 1975 and 1995, shifting international dynamics created an opportunity to build ties with Vietnam. Initially, US–Vietnam relations deteriorated as Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978 and aligned itself with the Soviet Union (Manyin 2). However, after Vietnam withdrew its troops from Cambodia in 1989, the Bush administration decided in 1990 to seek contact with Vietnam to facilitate a peace agreement (Manyin 2). In 1991, a multilateral peace accord concluded the Cambodian–Vietnamese War, and the US lifted travel restrictions against Vietnam (Albert). After increasing diplomatic exchanges in the following years, in July 1995, the two countries normalized relations, agreeing to exchange ambassadors (Albert). To enable more extensive cooperation, the Foreign Service had to rebuild Americans’ trust in their recent enemy by addressing the legacies of war. Because some Americans believed that American soldiers were still being held captive in Vietnam, a full accounting of prisoners of war (POW) and missing in action soldiers (MIA) was necessary to prove that Vietnam was no longer an enemy (United States, Congress, Senate 1–4). Moreover, advocacy groups demanded that the US offer closure to veterans’ families and recover soldiers’ bodies so that their deaths would not be forgotten (Osius 7–8). As early as 1992, the Department of Defense established an office of the Joint Task Force–Full Accounting (JTF-FA) in Hanoi (Osius 12). In fact, Vietnamese cooperation in accounting for MIAs was a major reason for the decision to normalize relations (McCain). Once an embassy was established, under the direction of charge d’affaires Desaix Anderson, Political Officers

Ted Osius and Bryan Dalton supported the efforts of JTF-FA (Osius 22). Their close coordination with Nguyên Xuân Phong, Director of the Americas Office at the Foreign Ministry and Vietnam’s Office for Seeking Missing Persons, allowed JTF-FA to make steady progress in confirming that no POWs remained in Vietnam and finding the remains of American MIAs (Osius 22). To date, over 1,000 American MIAs have been identified and repatriated (Vu and Wells-Dang). To regain the trust of the Vietnamese people, the Foreign Service had to repair the damages the US military had caused. During the Vietnam War, the US sprayed 45.6 million liters of the herbicide Agent Orange, which contained the toxic chemical dioxin, over Vietnamese forests (Phan 25). More than four million Vietnamese may have been exposed to the substance, which causes serious health effects such as cancer and heart disease (Phan 25–26). From 2013 to 2018, to address the issue of Agent Orange and promote reconciliation, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Vietnam’s Ministry of National Defense collaborated to remediate roughly 90,000 square meters of dioxin-contaminated soil at Da Nang Airport, a former US air base (US Embassy and Consulate in Vietnam). Thanks to the clean-up, commercial activity in Da Nang airport now takes place without fear of health damage due to dioxin exposure (Phan 27–28). In 2019, the two partners inaugurated a similar project to clean up Bien Hoa Air Base, the largest remaining dioxin hotspot (Phan 27). Moreover, the US is currently supporting Vietnam’s effort to locate and identify fallen Vietnamese soldiers, just as Vietnam has extensively cooperated with MIA efforts for American soldiers. The Department of Defense’s Vietnam Wartime Accounting Initiative aims to transfer DNA analysis technology and train Vietnamese forensic workers (Vu and Dang). The United States Institute of Peace accompanies this initiative with policy dialogues, public communications, and workshops to stimulate people-topeople connections between the US and Vietnam (Vu and Dang). /// p o r t r a i t b y To m K a t e s ///

Based on a foundation of trust and reconciliation, the Foreign Service built avenues of economic cooperation with Vietnam, allowing US businesses to capitalize on the growing Vietnamese economy. In the 1990s, even after President Clinton lifted the trade embargo in 1994, US firms in Vietnam fell behind competitors from other countries because US tariffs on goods produced in Vietnam were 40 percent higher than on most other countries, discouraging investing in Vietnamese manufacturing (Schulzinger 59). To support American companies, US negotiators worked with their Vietnamese counterparts on a bilateral trade agreement. In the agreement, signed in 2000, both countries granted each other “most favored nation” status and drastically reduced tariffs (Agreement 2–9). Importantly, Vietnam agreed to some reforms to liberalize its economy, including abiding by more stringent intellectual property rights standards and relaxing restrictions on investment by US firms (Agreement 10–33, 44–51). Furthermore, public diplomacy expanded US soft power among the Vietnamese people. For example, in 2014, then-Ambassador Dave Shear obtained a grant from the State Department’s Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation to restore the Triêu TÔ Temple in the city of Huê, which had been destroyed during the Vietnam War (Osius 123). The project successfully restored local officials’ and residents’ trust in the US (Osius 123). Moreover, Public Affairs Officer Alex Titolo arranged initiatives in Huê, including student exchanges between US educational institutions and Huê University, English-language teaching, and a small US cultural center (Osius 124). Additionally, the Foreign Service collaborates with Vietnam on Mekong River issues. Upstream, China and Laos have constructed more than seventy dams for hydroelectric power generation, threatening to disrupt Vietnam’s water supply, harm biodiversity, and reduce agricultural output (Osius 81). This issue is important not only to Vietnam but also to the US because the collapse of the Mekong ecosystem would destabilize regional security, and China’s ability to threaten to restrict water flows gives it substantial leverage over Vietnam

(Lichtefeld 21). So, in 2008, following a proposal by then-Ambassador Michael Michalak, a DRAGON Institute, conducting environmental research in cooperation with the US Geological Survey, was launched at Can Tho University (Lichtefeld 17). In 2009, the US launched the Lower Mekong Initiative, supporting technical and scientific collaboration initiatives such as Forecast Mekong, which utilized data analysis to support water management and address climate variability (Lichtefeld 15, 18). In the near future, as the US seeks to pivot to Asia and counter Chinese influence in the region, engagement with Vietnam will be more important than ever. In 2013, at a summit between President Barack Obama and Vietnam’s President Truong Tan Sang, Vietnam and the US upgraded their relationship to a “comprehensive partnership” based on “mutual respect and common interests” (Obama White House). Under this framework, the US supports a “strong, prosperous, and independent Vietnam” (White House). As Senator John McCain wrote leading up to the normalization of relations in 1995, “It is, therefore, absolutely in our national security interests to have an economically viable Vietnam strong enough to resist, in concert with its neighbors, the heavy-handed tactics of its great power neighbor [China].” Moving forward, the Foreign Service should facilitate defense cooperation with Vietnam regarding Chinese military activity in the South China Sea, a mutual concern. In recent years, China has aggressively asserted its “nine-dash line” claim, which conflicts with Vietnam’s Exclusive Economic Zone (Abbott 39). The US has an interest in regional stability and maintaining principles of maritime law, including sovereignty and freedom of navigation (Abbott 41). While joint military exercises would go against Vietnam’s traditional policy of non-alignment, the Foreign Service should provide technical support so that Vietnam can monitor its claim in the South China Sea, collecting and publicizing data about Chinese military vessels (Jung 55–56; Poling and Natalegawa). In terms of economics, the Foreign Service must reinforce trade and investment ties to build soft power. Although President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017 undermined bilateral trade, the US and Vietnam can begin multilateral negotiations on a new digital trade agreement as a precursor to a broader free trade agreement (Osius 233–234; Poling and Natalegawa). Moreover, the US should increase its investment presence, emphasizing niche sectors such as education and information technology while providing feasibility studies and project assessments to support infrastructure projects led by other countries (Nguyen 51). Of course, the Foreign Service has obstacles to overcome, such as Vietnam’s concerning human rights record. The Socialist Party of Vietnam suppresses freedom of expression, freedom of religion, ethnic minority rights, and labor rights, which leads some members of Congress to discourage closer diplomatic and security ties with Vietnam (Tran 6). However, the US must continue to expand and strengthen its partnership with Vietnam, given its significance in regional affairs. The progress that has been made since 1995 is remarkable; the Foreign Service has led a multifaceted reconciliation campaign to transform the US–Vietnam relationship from hostility to a comprehensive partnership. As in Vietnam, the Foreign Service can look to build peace and advance productive, mutually beneficial relationships around the world. //

A R E P O RT O N A N N UA L G I V I N G

Gratitude and Momentum: A Report on Annual Giving

/// B y J u l i a E l l i o t t ///

Have you ever wondered where to look for the impact of your gift to Deerfield’s Annual Fund? The answer is easy: Everywhere! Deerfield’s budget needs and depends on the Annual Fund. It pays for everything from lightbulbs to sports equipment to keeping the Dining Hall open. BETSEY DICKSON ’94 P’27

DIRECTOR OF ADVANCEMENT CHUCK RAMSAY ’88 To understand how crucial the Annual Fund is to Deerfield’s operations, one has only to remember the Academy’s remarkable response to the Covid pandemic in 2020. Deerfield was able to quickly purchase technology for distance learning; put up tents to create outdoor classes; build a temporary dining facility; transform office spaces into dormitories; build an outdoor hockey rink; purchase Adirondack chairs, hammocks, and firepits; and so much more. “It was the flexibility of Annual Fund dollars that allowed so many strategies to get up and running [during the pandemic],” says Director of Advancement Betsey Dickson ’94 P’27. Again, just this past summer, when devastating storms caused playing fields and buildings to flood, those flexible funds allowed the school to quickly funnel resources to the Facilities team to deal with this unforeseen challenge. “The Annual Fund is an important revenue stream for the school because it is, by definition, unrestricted,” says Chief Advancement Officer Chuck Ramsay ’88. “It allows the school’s leadership to apply those funds to the most urgent needs as they arise during the year.”

/// p o r t r a i t s b y M e g h a n H o a g l a n d ///

CHIEF ADVANCEMENT OFFICER DAVID G. POND CHAIR

The Annual Fund is an important revenue stream for the school because it is, by definition, unrestricted . . . it allows the school’s leadership to apply those funds to the most urgent needs as they arise during the year.

This past year, 3,815 donors contributed $6,877,492 in annual giving. Of those donations, more than half were under $250, proving that small gifts do add up. Support for Deerfield was worldwide: gifts came in from all 50 states and 40 countries. Alumni dollars and donors increased over last year, with 31 percent of alumni participating, and parent participation was 61 percent. “We are so grateful for everyone who chooses to make an annual gift,” says Dickson. “That support enables the Academy to carry on and do all that we do.” In response to the giving momentum of the past year, Deerfield’s Annual Fund team has expanded to a total of six full-time staff. Each member of the team is focusing on alumni from a series of different class years, allowing them to give more targeted attention to volunteers and donors from every generation. “[This] will be critical to our success this year,” says Director of the Annual Fund Kellie Houston, “because we are aiming even higher with alumni participation. Knowing that we are going into the year with both momentum and a robust team is exciting.” The energy and engagement of the past year was perhaps best captured in the annual Day of Giving, which Houston describes as “the best one we have had in a number of years.” The event takes place on or near March 1, in recognition of the day the Academy’s original charter was signed in 1797. With over $860,000 donated on March 1, 2023—the most dollars ever raised on a Day of Giving—and, with 1,146 donors, the event came very close to the highest number of participants. Donors associated with the Class of 1942 through 2023—a span of eighty-one years—participated in the Annual Fund this year. The Office of Advancement would especially like to recognize the alumni on either end of that arc: At one end are the post-50th Reunion classes, which have shown robust turnout at Reunions. “They are so engaged, and they give generously to the school,” says Houston. This year, the Classes of 1953, 1958, and 1968 set attendance records at their 70th, 65th, and 55th Reunions. “They did a great job rallying their classmates, getting people back to campus, and having a fun time when they got here,” says Dickson. At the other end of the spectrum, young alumni participation has been on the rise, with 772 alumni from the classes of 2008 through 2022 giving to the Annual Fund this past year. At Reunions, young alumni donors enjoyed the first-ever brunch in their honor. Additionally, for the celebration of the 100th Choate Day in 2022, Nathan Chong ’17 and Jeff Sun ’17, a member of the Alumni Association Executive Committee and an enthusiastic volunteer, hosted a special event in New York City. Attendees included recent graduates up to those celebrating their 15th Reunion. They gathered at a restaurant in Soho to eat brunch, watch livestreamed Choate Day games, and cheer loudly for Deerfield. During the event, Sun encouraged everyone to make a donation to the Annual Fund using a QR code; based on last year’s success, the event was repeated this year, also with great success. “Kellie and her team are finding interesting and thoughtful ways for younger alums to use all these different vehicles for giving that didn’t exist ten years ago,” says Ramsay. “We want to ensure that all generations feel a connection and have a means of supporting Deerfield, so we are meeting donors where they are.”

$6,877,492 in annual giving

3,815 donors

SMALL GIFTS ! P ADD U

2,357 gifts under $250

40 50

countries

states

Alumni donors represented the Classes of

1942-2023 772

young alumni donors

A R E P O RT O N A N N UA L G I V I N G

KELLIE HOUSTON

DIRECTOR OF THE ANNUAL FUND

“We want to make gratitude a staple of our mission... Not only are we trying to instill that in our student community, but, now that we have our bigger Annual Fund team and more bandwidth, we want to be thoughtful in showing our gratitude to all of our donors.” KYLIE LAURENITIS

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF THE ANNUAL FUND

OLIVIA JUDSON

JOSHUA GUTHMAN

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF THE ANNUAL FUND FOR YOUNG ALUMNI

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF THE ANNUAL FUND

WANDA MAURAN

JEANNEMARIE TOBIN

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF THE ANNUAL FUND

ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT TO THE ANNUAL FUND

On campus this past spring, even soon-to-be-alumni got involved when the entire senior class met on the basketball courts for a combined “Knockout Tournament” and pledge drive. Students competed to stay in the Knockout game; enjoyed an incredible amount of wings and sundaes; and made five-year pledges to the Annual Fund. Tenth Grade Class Dean Drew Philie ’09, himself a young alum, rallied the Class of 2023 to give generously by speaking about the value of staying connected and engaged with Deerfield. Students were also essential to the Annual Fund when they participated in the first ever “GratiTuesday” Event on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving 2022. Through notes and recorded short videos, students expressed their personal thanks to Deerfield’s donors. The event was so successful that the Office of Advancement plans to do it again this year. “We want to make gratitude a staple of our mission,” says Houston. “Not only are we trying to instill that in our student community, but, now that we have our bigger Annual Fund team and more bandwidth, we want to work even harder to show our gratitude to all of our donors.” One other exciting giving event in 2022-23 was the second Reunions Benchmark Challenge, in which any reunion class that reached 50 percent or more donor participation could name an existing bench on campus. Two years ago, six benches were named; last year, it was eight benches, representing half of all 2023 Reunions classes and including the classes of 1953, 1958, 1963, 1968, 1973, 1978, 1988, and 1998. A special shout-out goes to the classes of 1978 and 1988 for setting new Annual Fund records for their Reunions, and to all the class volunteers who led the fundraising efforts.

Great Giving Events: Annual Day of Giving / Knockout Tournament / GratiTuesday / Reunions Benchmark Challenge

Then, of course, there are Deerfield parents, who donated over $2.5 million—40 percent—of all annual giving last year. “We are extra grateful for the many ways that parents give back to Deerfield, including through the Annual Fund,” says Director of Parent Engagement Julia Flannery P ’21. She points out that it costs approximately $30,000 more than what is charged in tuition and fees to educate each student at Deerfield, and that gap is bridged with the help of Annual Fund dollars; “so, in essence, every single student at Deerfield benefits from Annual Fund donations.” The current fundraising environment is such that competition for dollars is greater than ever. “If someone only has ten dollars to donate, it’s hard to say, ‘you should give that to Deerfield and not somewhere else,’” says Dickson. “We are so grateful to the people who do give and make that choice to support Deerfield.” Donors do have the opportunity to choose where their Annual Fund dollars go, and many show an interest in supporting a specific area of student life, be it the arts, academics, athletics, wellness or financial aid. “There is someone who, every year, sends in her annual donation marked ‘for the Deerfield Dance Department,’ and we always send it there,” says Dickson with admiration. Most donors, however, mark their gifts as unrestricted. “I think that says something,” says Houston. “Most people feel passionate about supporting our school generally, and trust that Deerfield will spend their dollars where they need to be spent.” At the end of the day, says Ramsay, annual giving is about supporting the student experience: “That is first and foremost in [Head of School Dr. John Austin’s] thinking. Every decision he makes and everything we do here is about the students; making sure they have an incredibly engaged faculty supporting them and making sure they have access to great programs and facilities.” For Houston, one of the greatest signs of the health of Deerfield’s fundraising program is its strong donor retention. Last year, 2,080 donors gave to Deerfield for the fifth year in a row. “I find it really inspiring that so many people not only give, but give every year,” she says. “That speaks volumes to the strength of our community. We have really engaged and supportive alumni and families, we are proud of that, and we appreciate everything they do for the school. We have great momentum, and we’re excited to keep that going. Annual giving is so crucial to Deerfield and has such an impact on our community. Thank you for your support over time and for your dedication to Deerfield.” //

JULIA FLANNERY P’21

DIRECTOR OF PARENT ENGAGEMENT

CAROL ANNE BEHN

ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT TO PARENT ENGAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP GIFTS

THANK YOU PARENTS

$2.5 million

% of annual giving

At the end of the day, annual giving is about supporting the student experience: “That is first and foremost in [Head of School Dr. John Austin’s] thinking. Every decision he makes and everything we do here is about the students; making sure they have an incredibly engaged faculty supporting them and making sure they have access to great programs and facilities.”

ALBANY ROAD / DINING HALL

Why We Eat Together

/// b y H e a d o f S c h o o l D r . J o h n A us t i n ///

Each year, I look forward to Thanksgiving dinner. In some ways, mine probably looks a lot like yours. There’s turkey, stuffing, and always plentiful helpings of apple crisp. You can never go wrong with seconds (or thirds) of apple crisp. But the longstanding traditions of my Thanksgiving take place with hundreds of young people and, while the meal is always a unique one, the idea of gathering in community isn’t. Far from it. It’s something we do seven days a week during the school year. For those who may not recall exactly how a sit-down meal at Deerfield goes, it works like this: Students and faculty are randomly assigned to round tables of eight, rotating every few weeks over the course of the year. Younger students continued on page 27

in support of c ommunity:

the Deerfield Academy Dining Hall

BUILT IN 1948, the Dining Hall responded to the needs of a thriving school.

It created sufficient space for students and teachers to gather together for meals; it also represented a significant step in Headmaster Frank L. Boyden’s vision for Deerfield, in which learning was experiential, happening across the full range of school settings and, most importantly, through immersion in community. Perhaps more than any other campus setting, the Dining Hall today embodies our continued commitment to community and shared experiences, and it is vital to Deerfield’s culture, traditions, and identity—linking one generation of students to the next. Seventy-five years have passed since the Dining Hall opened its doors. Programmatically, it remains strong. Operationally, it is in need of significant renovations and expansion.

la r g e r s ou th-facing bubbl e

With a target enrollment of 650—a number Head of School John Austin and the Academy’s Board of Trustees believe is the right fit for Deerfield—part of the challenge today is the same as it was for Mr. Boyden: bringing the full school together. Currently, on a rotating schedule, between 60 and 80 students are assigned to alternative dining rather than participating in sit-down meals. The expansion of the main dining room will provide a seat for every student, at every sit-down meal, at a table with a faculty head. Also on the menu are plans to address much-needed upgrades to the kitchen and “back of house” spaces, which are essentially unchanged since 1948; to improve energy efficiency and fully abate hazardous materials; and to make all levels of the Dining Hall accessible for all community members through the installation of an elevator and by enhancing exterior pathways and entrances. Every day the Dining Hall staff prepares and serves more than 2000 meals made “from scratch” using much of the same equipment with which the kitchen was outfitted in 1948. In addition to upgrading to more efficient and modern cooking appliances, renovated work spaces will include a “grind to energy” composting system and intentional design to streamline processes without sacrificing the commitment to in-house cooking and baking.

The servery, which as any Deerfield graduate knows, plays a key role during sit-down meals, will also be redesigned and expanded to support both sit-down and walk-through meals, while maintaining full dining room capacity. And not as easily illustrated but equally important, acoustical improvements will be made to the dining room to improve overall sound and the ability to gather as a community; students will be able to better hear the person across the table as well as the one at the front of the room making an announcement. Renovations pictured to the right and on the following pages highlight additional important goals, such as updating the lobby with glass doors to improve natural light, and enhancing spaces for students to gather outside of meal times, all while maintaining the historical feel and grandeur of those spaces.

projec t timeline

REFURBISHED PENDANTS IMPROVED ACOUSTICS

din i ng / n ort he as t pe rs pe ct iv e

serv e ry / we s t pe rs pe ct ive

NEW SERVING STATIONS

ALBANY ROAD / DINING HALL

ENHANCED NATURAL LIGHT

pr opo s e d inte r ior re n de ri ng s

BACKPACK CUBBIES

lobby / east perspec tiv e

COFFERED CEILING

lobby / north persp e c t i ve 24

p r op o se d m a i n level

The servery will continue to play a key role during all meals.

The South and North “Bubbles” will be expanded to provide seating for 730 students and faculty. Construction Cost: $58 million Total Project Cost: $70 million Total New Square Feet: 16,000 Total Square Feet: 66,000

p r op o se d l ow er level 25

ALBANY ROAD / DINING HALL

BIGGER BUBBLES

ACCESSIBLE TERRACE

G e n e r at i o n s o f D e e r f i e l d s t u de n t s h av e b e n e f i t e d f r o m fa m i ly - s t y l e meals in the Dining Hall; current conventional wisdom—as well a s de c a de s o f r e s e a r c h — s u p p o r t t h e i de a t h at r e g u l a r ly g at h e r i n g a r o u n d a “ fa m i ly ta b l e ” o f f e r s c h i l d r e n a n d t e e n s a w i de va r i e t y o f benefits, such as higher self-e steem and self-c onfidence, a lower risk for depre s sion, and better academic performance.

EXPANDED SOUTH TERRACE

/// d e s i g n & r e n d e r i n g s / A R C / a r c us a . c o m ///

Why We Eat Together continued from page 20

eat with older students, and all students eat with a member of the faculty, who serves as the table head and fills each student’s plate. Students take turns helping; the First Waiter sets the table and brings food from the kitchen; the Second Waiter clears and cleans. A student dish crew works beside our kitchen staff. This is one of the ways in which we create community and connection at Deerfield. And perhaps at no time in the last century has it been more important. Today, college and school campuses are more divided than ever. With increased cell phone use, students find themselves more isolated and alone. Loneliness among teens has doubled in the English -speaking world since 2000, according to psychologist Jean Twenge. With rising political and societal polarization and its incursion into schools, life for young people has become more fractious and more full of strife. A recent poll found that a mere 20 percent of college sophomores can see themselves rooming with someone who voted differently than they did in the most recent presidential election. Moreover, many schools and colleges have adopted practices that foster separation in dorms and social spaces, and even at graduation ceremonies at colleges—a practice political scientist Yascha Mounk calls “progressive separatism.” The energies shaping the social lives of children today are largely centrifugal, driving young people apart, dividing them into self-enclosed clans, and pulling at the seams of our communities. Go into any school or university cafeteria and you will likely see the same thing. Students self-sorted by grade, gender, race, sport, and age.

At Deerfield, we eat together. Mealtime rituals bring us into contact with something beyond ourselves and remind us of our essential interconnectedness and interdependence. For schools and students, that is essential. Of course young people will always find their own. They have a special genius for self-sorting and separating into groups. Sociologists have a word for this: homophily, the tendency for people to seek out those like themselves. It’s a natural part of growing up, and it’s important that young people have strong networks of friends on whom they can rely on and trust. But, so too is learning to connect with others unlike yourself. This is a challenge many schools have been slow to meet, and students are often more likely to remain in their social silos, rarely interacting with those who look, sound, and think differently from them. At Deerfield, we embrace pro-social forms of connection, such as providing time for lunch together and by regulating the use of cell phones, which, research has now made clear, is both necessary and reasonable. We encourage face-to-face conversation across differences; reinvesting in social connection, and bringing our community together in a spirit of joy.

For all these reasons, at Deerfield, we eat together. And we will continue to do so next year in the temporary dining hall currently rising near our baseball field, and in our renovated Dining Hall when it reopens early in 2026. Gathering in the way we do is nourishing, to the body as well as the soul. That is why the ritual of meals plays such an important role in the world’s great religions and across cultures. Mealtime rituals bring us into contact with something beyond ourselves and remind us of our essential interconnectedness and interdependence. For schools and students, that is essential. So, this Thanksgiving, at a time when our society feels fractured and tender, I’m thankful for the bonds of connection and compassion these dinners provide for our school community. I’m grateful for the rituals of nourishment that foster connectiveness, especially in times like these. May they serve as a reminder, this holiday season and beyond, to reach across the divide and break bread with someone you may not know well. It’s worth it to eat together. //

THE

BACKSTAGE CLASSROOM /// b y K a t e G o d i n ///

A production at Deerfield Academy is more than meets the eye—call it the magic of theater. While the audience’s attention is riveted to the stage, something rich, complex, and formative is unfolding behind the scenes. Backstage is a classroom, a creative lab, and a community all at once. Like theater itself, it is a shared experience, one that transforms students, provides alumni with skills they draw on long after Deerfield, and brings joy to the devoted educators who translate their years of experience into hands-on lessons about making theater and being human.

We take the arts seriously, and we have high standards Mood boards and research for Dracula, A Feminist Revenge Tragedy

Catriona

Director of Theater

The Teachers This is no ordinary high school theater program. Teachers and mentors come directly from the world of professional theater and bring with them an expectation that students will engage in professional practices from the front of the house to backstage. “We take the arts seriously, and we have high standards,” says Catriona Hynds, director of the theater program since 2011 and current chair of the Visual and Performing Arts Department. “But in this world, everyone has to start somewhere.” Hynds’s own career took off when, at age 25, she collaborated with Arthur Miller on her professional debut, then began her own theater company and taught at the most prestigious conservatory in Scotland.

As part of the cocurricular program at Deerfield, Hynds directs two full-scale productions, serves as the producer for a third, and is involved in several smaller performances each year. Her shows welcome students of all levels of experience, and she finds inspiration in them whether they arrive seasoned or as novices. “I get to witness the extraordinary growth in these young people, not just as theater makers but as humans. They learn to be vulnerable, take bold and often scary risks, jump out of their comfort zones, and discover new skills,” she says. “We demand a lot, and the theater students rise to the challenge term after term.” Students also hone their skills in a handful of courses, taught primarily by Hynds, within the academic day. There are three levels of acting classes—Foundations of Acting, strictly for ninth graders; Acting Technique, for tenth and eleventh grades; and Acting and Directing for the Stage, in which students learn more complex acting techniques and work on a major directing assignment; and Film Studies.

Lori Holmes Clark teaches Acting Technique, in which students explore approaches to character-building and performance. She is herself a performer and choreographer who appeared on Broadway in Wicked, Taboo, and Footloose. “At Deerfield, we teach the common language of theater and explain the different skill sets necessary,” she says. “These conversations often spark interest in jobs backstage. For instance, if you love organizing, taking care of people, and leadership positions, stage management is for you!” Clark also directs an annual production. This year, it is Alice by Heart, slated for February, a musical inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and set amid the rubble of the London Blitz. Connection and creation are at the heart of what Clark does and central to the process of putting on a theatrical production. “Every time a show opens,” she says, “it is a collective miracle of will, skill, and bravery. Friendships made in theater last a lifetime because of this.”

Lori

Acting Technique

“At Deerfield, we teach the common language of theater and explain the different skill sets necessary . . . These conversations often spark interest in jobs backstage. For instance, if you love organizing, taking care of people, and leadership positions, stage management is for you!” Not-so-secret weapon

Peter

Backstage Classroom

Peter Hynds, whose official title is associate director in the Academy’s Admission Office, has trained countless stage managers and helped to direct over 25 productions. He was also Dominic Sessa’s academic advisor. (See THE HOLD OVER on page 36.)

Technical Director & Lighting Designer

For Paul Yager, technical director and scenic and lighting designer, backstage is his classroom. He is proud that every piece of a production is student-built, that students light the show and operate the sound, and tend to the props and costuming. “On the tech crew, no one sits the bench,” he says. “It’s about giving them an open, inviting place to come, to be who they are, and to contribute what they have to contribute.” Yager is intentional about using his project-based approach to bring out life skills in his students. He considers one of the most rewarding parts of his job to be when alumni tell him they still use what they learned on the tech crew. “I don’t know if they’ll ever build another set, but when my students learn how to safely use a screw gun, they can build that bookcase or backyard shed,” he says. When Yager arrived at Deerfield nearly 35 years ago, there was no permanent technical director position—he crafted it. “I’ve been so lucky to be here, to have the quality of the facilities that we have and the resources to build what we imagine.” This fall, Yager marked his 100th production at Deerfield: Dracula, A Feminist Revenge Tragedy. He was delighted to collaborate with even more students for this milestone. “The show calls for a squirming creature in a sack,” he says with a laugh, “and the robotics team worked with us on that.”*

Paul

Yager on the set of Fools! A sketch of this set is seen here in cardboard and scraps of plywood— an accurate vision indeed!

“On the tech crew, no one sits the bench.. It’s about giving them an open, inviting place to come, to be who they are, and to contribute what they have to contribute.” *See page 80 for more details on this creature collaboration!

“This job takes not only an understanding of stage production and a knowledge of fashion and costuming history but also a deep sense of the human condition and how to communicate without words,” Karen Costumer

Costume designer Karen St. Pierre spends her days in Deerfield’s well-stocked costume storage room, in meetings with teachers and students, thrift shopping, and preparing for the next opening night. Storytelling through clothing is a craft she has refined over 20 years in theater, film, and the television industry. “This job takes not only an understanding of stage production and a knowledge of fashion and costuming history but also a deep sense of the human condition and how to communicate without words,” she says, “It’s about much more than putting together a nice outfit.” In St. Pierre’s experience, what makes theater work well is the partnerships. “You are never a lone wolf, each area shares in making what happens on stage seem flawless,” she says. “It’s all about working as a team.” In this cooperative, collaborative environment, she has watched students change and grow in countless ways: “Confidence, teamwork, a new hobby blossoming, a release of fear, an inner strength they did not know they had, being more prepared for the unexpected— the arts strengthen these attributes within us all.”

Below: Costume sketches for Dracula—and the actual dresses seen below

Backstage Classroom

The Students While the arts work their transformative magic on them, students in Deerfield’s theater program also develop new abilities, ranging from soft skills to the very concrete. Gretchen Steever ’24 has been part of many Deerfield productions as an actor and stage manager. She served as stage manager for the fall production of Dracula which involve liaising across all the show’s creative and technical teams; overseeing sets, props, lights, and sound; and calling all technical cues during performances. Stage management has taught her about scheduling, time management, and the importance of a good email, but the most valuable lessons have focused on leadership. “It’s taught me the balance between being a peer and being a person who gives direction to other students,” she says. “It can be hard, amongst peers, to be the ‘controlling’ or ‘demanding’ voice. But for us to get work done, I know I have to step up and communicate.” Lily Pierce ’25 played a lead role in Dracula, and she’s no stranger to using a hammer and a broom, either. “Occasionally, when actors aren’t in rehearsal, we are called to work with Mr. Yager and the students in tech to help construct the show’s set,” she says. “We are also required to help strike the show at the end of the run, which means de-constructing the set, helping Ms. St. Pierre collect our costume pieces, and cleaning the Acting Lab, dressing rooms, and greenroom.” She believes these experiences have deepened both her relationships with the behind-the-scenes team and her capacity to communicate effectively and respectfully. Both Gretchen and Lily plan to pursue careers in the theater after Deerfield. Steever is applying to technical theater programs that offer BA or BFA degrees in stage management. Pierce is committed to acting. “Although it’s a difficult industry,” she says, “I want to give it a shot after the joy, fulfillment, and home I have found in Deerfield’s theater program.”

The Alumni For Stefani Kuo ’13, an actor, writer, and MFA candidate in playwriting at the Yale School of Drama, the theater program at Deerfield laid a foundation of encouragement and self-determination on which she continues to build. “With Mrs. Hynds, I felt so welcome,” she says, “and was allowed to be myself creatively.” During her senior year, Kuo and a few friends chose to stage and perform a three-character play on their own in Deerfield’s Reid Black Box Theater instead of joining the winter musical. “We were figuring out how to have agency,” she says, “and the pressure felt low because everyone was focused on the musical.” Kuo credits Deerfield with providing opportunities to sharpen her writing skills—as editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Albany Road, as a journalist at The Scroll, and in her English classes. She has discovered that writing for live theater provides something essential: “Unlike writing a novel or poetry, you have to eventually be in a room with people to make it happen,” she says. For her, the magic comes alive in rehearsal: “It feels fruitful and amazing when everyone has had a meaningful time working together before performances begin. I believe the audience can feel it.”

Deerfield laid a foundation of encouragement and self-determination on which she continues to build. “With Mrs. Hynds, I felt so welcome,” she says, “and was allowed to be myself creatively.” Stefani Kuo ’13

Playright, Actor, Poet

Eleanor MacDonald ’95 Lighting Designer

Backstage Classroom

Eleanor MacDonald ’95 recalls Paul Yager’s hands-on, can-do approach to teaching theater tech like this: “Here’s a hammer. Here’s a paintbrush. Can you do rigging? Okay, get on a ladder, and I’ll teach you.” The learning-by-doing and the camaraderie of creating a show together drew her in and set her on a career path as a lighting designer. She appreciates how robust and well-resourced Deerfield’s theater program is. “We had some amazingly fancy technology. There’s a standard spotlight used in stage lighting called a Source 4. It was brand new in 1992 and a big deal in the backstage theater world,” she says. “In a very short time, Mr. Yager had gotten six of them for the Reid Black Box Theater.” MacDonald has transitioned from theater work to industrial lighting design, and she considers her Deerfield education fundamental to her success in both areas: “The well-rounded education I got there has served me well. I can write and do math, and I’m articulate. This is important when it comes to lighting because you have to find words to describe the ethereal.”

thetanknyc.org/joan-of-arc

David Branson Smith ’02 Screenwriter

Deerfield Off-Broadway: A Creative Reunion

David Branson Smith ’02, an award-winning screenwriter who penned the indie favorite Ingrid Goes West, found his way to the theater program almost by chance. “To satisfy my arts requirement,” he says, “I signed up for Introduction to Acting my junior year, which quickly went from a weekly obligation to the class I looked forward to most. He liked the performances but enjoyed even more reading the assigned scripts. Smith kept going from there. “Mr. Reese [John Reese, Catriona Hynds’ predecessor as director of the theater program] was kind enough to let me into the Advanced Acting seminar senior year, my favorite class at Deerfield,” he says. This course deepened his interest in the field and clarified his path as a writer. And while most of Smith’s work takes place before the cameras roll, he’s been invited on set by some of the directors with whom he’s worked. “Even though there isn’t much for the writer to do other than eat Doritos and sit at the monitors and spectate, my two on-set experiences were low-budget independent movies, so there was quite a bit of on-the-fly rewriting and creative problem-solving,” he says. “To be lucky enough to be on set to see a scene you’ve written work better than you imagined—it’s really something.”//

When Kaycie Sweeney ’17 was preparing to direct her first professional theatrical production, Joan of Art in a Supermarket in California, a play by Chloe Xtina, she wanted people on the project whom she trusted and who knew her well. “I had just reconnected with a few people from Deerfield who I’d done theater with, and I couldn’t think of better people than that,” she says. “I was really fortunate that, when I asked them, they were an immediate and enthusiastic yes.” So, when the show began its sold-out run at E&S Wholesome Foods in Brooklyn in August, Sweeney was flanked by four alumnae friends from Deerfield: Healy Knight ’16 and Madeline Wasson ’18 as actors, Maya Rajan ’18 as assistant director, and Amelia Evans ’18 as choreographer. The immersive, experimental show took place in a neighborhood bodega. “The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do is stage a play in a deli,” Sweeney says. “When they locked up the shop every night, we would load in.” They played to an intimate audience of 30, with seating in the store’s aisles. “The actors really got to live inside the play,” Sweeney notes, “and so did the audience.” Sweeney credits much of her success to the support of Catriona Hynds and her husband, Peter Hynds, an associate director of admission at Deerfield and a longtime stage manager. Under their guidance, she stage-managed Cabaret with a 40-person cast. “As a 16-year-old, I got to be in the booth and call the show every night for an audience of 500+,” she says. Sweeney still draws on what she learned from them in her day job leading a technical crew at the Public Theater in New York City. For Sweeney, the power of theater is in collaboration, and Deerfield continues to be an inspiration and a source for the creative connections that sustain her: “Theater is an art form that is so present and alive. You’re all together in a moment, and when you have people around you who believe in the magic of what theater can do, it’s unmatched.”

ALBANY ROAD

THE HOLD OVER

By this winter, everyone will know who Dominic Sessa is, and yet, he’s still getting to know himself.

/// b y N a o m i S h u l m a n /// /// p h o t o g r a p h s b y W h e a t o n M a h o n e y P ’ 2 4 /// Al l i n t e rv i e ws w e r e c o m p l e t e d b e fo r e t h e 2 02 3 S AG -A F T R A s t r i k e .

November 2021, a crisp evening. The fall play, Rumors, had just wrapped, and a cast party of sorts was taking place at the Manse. Spirits were high— the show had gone off beautifully, partly thanks to Dominic “Dom” Sessa ’22, who had played one of the lead roles. With the adrenaline of the evening wearing off, the young actors were chatting with Head of School John Austin about thespian life on campus—not just Deerfield’s campus, but also St. Andrew’s in Delaware, where Dr. Austin had been a member of the faculty years ago. Many of us have seen St. Andrew’s on screen, whether we know it or not; it’s where Dead Poets Society was filmed in the late 1980s. Imagine huge stars such as Robin Williams and then up-and-coming new faces like Ethan Hawke—right there on the quad! “We were asking what that was like, having a movie filmed at the school,” Dom recalls. That’s when Dr. Austin mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that a production company was scouting Deerfield as a potential location, too.

THE HOLDOVER “I thought that was cool,” Dom says. “And the conversation sort of ended there.” The very next day, Theater Director Catriona Hynds pulled Dominic aside. She had received an email, and not the kind one gets every day. “It was from a casting agent assistant saying, ‘We want to see your boys,’” she says. “ ‘We’re casting this movie.’ ” That movie Dr. Austin mentioned? It was, in fact, coming to Deerfield, and casting agents had heard of the strength of Deerfield’s theater program, so Hynds arranged for them to see a dozen of the school’s young actors, all strong contenders. But before Dom went in, she went in herself, put her hands on the casting director’s shoulders, and said, “This is the one. I’ve been doing this for over 30 years, and I’m telling you, this kid is different.” Like many cinematic stories, it’s a coming of age tale. It’s about a mentor taking a young man under his wing. At least, that’s what The Holdovers is about—the movie that was partly filmed at Deerfield early in 2022—and starring Dominic Sessa in his first movie role. But the larger cinematic story is actually about Dominic himself and what happens when opportunity, talent, and serendipity collide.

Academics aside, Dom did not come to Deerfield specifically for the theater program. Prior to his arrival on campus as a tenth grader in 2019, ice hockey was also his thing. But then, in a strange nod to the classic good luck phrase before a stage show begins, he broke his femur, which meant he had a little more room in his schedule for something else he enjoyed: acting. And with his own mother teaching high school theater, Dom was already comfortable in the drama world. Plus, he kind of felt obligated. “I had done a musical in middle school, and had submitted a couple of videos of myself reading monologues when I applied to Deerfield,” he explains. That fall the show was Antigone, and when Dominic auditioned, Hynds knew immediately that something was happening. “He was powerful, compelling, mesmerizing, and he was able to tap into a really dramatic piece and didn’t hold back,” she says. “He had a gravitas that is really rare in a sophomore actor.” So even though Dom was new to the school, “We didn’t hesitate to give him the role of Creon, the king who berates Antigone, and he was just phenomenal —a raw natural talent—from the get-go.”

From there, the die was cast. Dominic’s leg healed, which allowed him to play hockey that winter, but the sport did not define his time on campus the way he’d once thought it might. Soon, his life was increasingly on the stage. No one was more surprised by this than Dom. “I thought I’d play a lot of hockey at Deerfield, but it all changed after that first show. I still played hockey with my friends and stuff, but I thought it would be more of my identity; I stripped away all the preconceived notions of who I was going to be at Deerfield and how I’d exist there, and just sort of . . . went for it,” he says. “Our music program is really strong, theater is robust, dance produces some amazing talent, and our visual arts has always been strong,” says Hynds, who in addition to directing the theater program currently chairs the Visual and Performing Arts Department. The “recently-renovated” Hess Center for the Arts is now eight years old, and abuzz with creativity. “There’s always a handful of students who go off to study theater every single year—lots and lots of thespians and stage managers and what have you,” Hynds says, adding,

DOM’S CAMPUS RANGE: “Just one of the guys” in Deerfield Days; over the top in Neil Simon’s Rumors ; stone cold Creon; and classmate-elected Commencement speaker ///////////////////////

Still from Deerfield Days, The Film Guys; Antigone, Ben Grimm; Commencement; Deerfield Academy/Brent Hale

///////////////////////

“People here do tend to be more focused on what happens athletically—it’s a very American thing, and a very Deerfield thing,” but Hynds, who was born in Germany and is Scottish, also points out, “But we have no dearth of artistic talent at the school.” There’s also no dearth of opportunity— working actors have made their start on campus for decades now. The particular kind of opportunity that was about to hit Dominic his senior year, however, was beyond merely impressive. “It’s the stuff of fairy tales,” says Hynds. Or maybe like something out of a movie. It was happening. A feature film was going to be shot on campus—partly, anyway—and it was the real thing: Then owned by Miramax and directed by Alexander Payne, the highly respected filmmaker behind Election, Sideways, and The Descendants, and starring Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning actor Paul Giamatti. Hynds recommended twelve current Deerfield boys to audition, all excellent actors in their own right (and one of them, Will Sussbauer ’23, would eventually be cast in a minor role, too), but she strongly suspected the filmmakers would see the extraordinary talent she herself saw in Dominic. “Sure enough, he was in the room for a long time,” she remembers. The whole casting process would prove to take a long time. Over the next two months, 850 actors vied for the same role set in the 1970s:

Angus Tully, a high school boarding student would spend his winter break on campus with a curmudgeonly Latin teacher (Giamatti) and a cafeteria cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph). Dom was called back to read again, and then again, and then again. “There were at least five times I had to read for them, over a span of like two months,” he says. Still, he knew the odds were long. It was a nerve-wracking scenario for anyone, but Dominic tried to keep cool. It was a lot of waiting and not knowing what would happen. I just went with the flow, and if I got another opportunity, great, but if not, it was a great experience.” That attitude—take it as it comes, appreciate it for what it is—is pure Dominic. “His work ethic is unmatched. We’ve cast him in roles to stretch him and bring him to the next level, and he was always open and receptive to notes. He’s the first person in the studio and the last person to leave,” says Peter Hynds, Dom’s academic advisor and co-director on several shows with Catriona, his wife. “He’s always incredibly respectful and has impeccable rehearsal etiquette. He’d stay long after everyone else and go over extra notes, and he’s just a dream to direct because the following day, or sometimes even that same rehearsal period, you could see him making adjustments and calibrations. It’s amazing to work with such a hungry and talented young actor.”

It turned out that Dom’s easy-going character—the one who loves acting for its own sake, letting audiences fade into the dark and focusing solely on the work itself—put him in a good place to handle the stress of a major movie casting audition. Soon enough, 850 boys were whittled down to a handful, and then just two. Finally, Alexander Payne, Paul Giamatti, and Dominic met via Zoom to read through the entire script, beginning to end. And then, just as Catriona had predicted, it was just one. “Alexander didn’t say much throughout,” Dominic recalls. “He read a little bit of other parts. At the end, he just said, ‘Come be in my movie,’” and Dom admits that at first he didn’t fully comprehend what Payne was saying. “Time felt like it stopped for a moment, and then . . . it was going really, really fast.” For the next couple of months, life was a blur. Dominic’s academic obligations were paused as he moved onto the film set, but in a sense, the filmmaking experience was a schooling of a different kind. “[Payne and Giamatti] are masters. That’s the best way to describe them, and it was a master class to work with them,” Dom says. “I can’t take for granted that my first experience on a movie set was with a director who is sitting right there next to the camera, watching you and coming to you after every take to give you a piece of advice, creating that personal, intimate space that goes a long way with actors.”

ALBANY ROAD THE HOLDOVER

I don’t know if I totally understand what my life will look like, but I’m anticipating some sort of change in some way.

40 | ALBANY ROAD

The relationships grew off set as well, as both Payne and Giamatti took Dominic under their collective wing. “In my eyes, Paul was a larger-than-life character whom I’d only known from seeing him on movie screens,” Dom says, “so seeing how grounded a person he is, and how down to earth and humble meant so much to me. When you’re in a position where everyone treats you like you’re made of plastic, Paul was a really good model, showing me that you can still be a good person. I’m super grateful.” And then, almost as quickly as it began, it was over—or at least filming was over— and it was time for Dominic to go back to school. Senioritis is a risk for any kid during the spring before graduation, but this was something else entirely. “I’d been in a setting where you wake up every morning and live your dream,” he admits. “It was definitely humbling to be back in a classroom setting where you know, hahaha, you’re a student again!” No more going out after working, eating in fine restaurants with Hollywood luminaries; suddenly he had classes again from 8:30 in the morning until 3:00 pm, sit-down meals, and accountability points. “Oh my God, I think it was hard to come back after making that movie,” Catriona says. It helped a little to keep in mind what lay just ahead on the horizon: In the midst of all the filmmaking hubbub, Dominic was accepted to the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University. Only six boys and six

girls from around the world are accepted each year, giving it an acceptance rate of three percent—almost as rare and life-changing as being cast in a major feature film. Still, exciting as that future is, everyone’s aware that Dominic’s life is about to change in a big way that has nothing to do with college. Let’s just say that many folks expect The Holdovers will be really, really popular. “I don’t know if I totally understand what my life will look like, but I’m anticipating some sort of change in some way,” Dom says slowly. But he keeps it in perspective. “I think just the fact of saying I want to be an actor is big,” he says. “Just committing to that was big for me.” It may be hard for Dominic to wrap his head around it, but his teachers see the terrain ahead. “It’s fascinating to be stuck in that middle—he knows his life will change, but he doesn’t know how exactly,” says Peter. “ It’s really exciting, but it’s also a hurry up and wait.” This is where the humility that both Catriona and Peter see in Dominic will come to serve him well. As rarefied as Dominic’s experiences to this point have been, in some sense, they are only a magnified version of what every Deerfield graduate—what every high school graduate, anywhere—goes through. Dominic simply happens to be in his own holdover period right now. He, along with the rest of us, will soon see what comes next. //

As of press time, The Holdovers was released in select theaters on October 27, 2023 and nationwide on November 10, after premiering at the 50 th Telluride Film Festival. It also screened at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, where it was runner-up for the People’s Choice Award. Among other accolades, Dom was named in Variety’s “Ten Actors to Watch for 2023.”

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Mr. Boyden

t h 20 e 23 Common Room Picking potatoes circa 1949

COMMON ROOM

Chip Lewis ’79 recently saw one of Deerfield’s social media posts and recognized none other than his father, Walter Lewis ’49, in an archival film with students picking potatoes back in the 1940s: Seventeen seconds into the film, there was his father, dumping potatoes from a bucket into a bag. Walter was so excited when Chip shared the clip with him. Walter turned 92 in August, and looks great (see below)!

1951 “Our grandson Willard is the fourth generation in our family to join Walker Forge. Our company has 375 employees, and we make steel forgings for many companies. They include John Deere, Mercury, Caterpillar, Ford 250 and 350 trucks, and fracking companies. Mary and I have been married for 63 years, and she has been the joy of my life. Our four children, seven grandchildren, and one great-grandchild have provided us with many happy memories. ‘Life is not a spectator sport.’ Stay healthy and safe.” —Bill Walker Jack Hodgson shared that he is “Still alive, kicking, and swimming! But travel is now a thing of the past. Thirty-four trips to the Soviet Union/Russia since 1955, and owner of an apartment in Moscow for twenty-one years. I shared the optimism of Gorbachev. I filmed the coup against him in 1991. My documentary A Swan Song for Old Icons was shown twice on PBS WCNY. I deplored Yeltsin and his ‘shock therapy’; I am devastated by Putin’s atrocities at home and in Ukraine. I hope there is truth to a Russian saying, ‘Zavtra budet luchshe. Tomorrow will be better.’” “Kate and I have spent the last several years avoiding COVID, thus far successfully. In June 2023, we celebrated our 66th wedding anniversary. We are blessed with three wonderful children and four loving grandchildren. We enjoy our rural Connecticut home all year and our Maine cottage in August and September. I am still active with Connecticut Bar Association Human Rights Section and with a local community foundation.” —Woody Anderson

John Bell offers, “Mary and I have spent the last three Covid years hibernating here on the Alpaca farm in western North Carolina.” John also reports on two recent phone conversations: Barbi and Tom Donnelly celebrated his 90th birthday with a long trip to Argentina, which took them from southern Patagonia for its renowned fly fishing and scenery all the way north to Salta and the beautiful wine country; and Laura and Ed Opler have recently retired to Wyoming after a warm winter in Ocala, FL, where they have just completed a new getaway retreat. Vic Russo shared that he “Just returned from Carol and my annual trip to Florida seeing friends and enjoying the weather! After being retired for 25 years and enjoying grandchildren and great-grandchildren, we travel the country, seeing the beauty of it all. I turn 90 this year and want to do as much as I can! ‘Go Green.’” “Louise and I moved to Greenville, SC, in 2020 to live in the retirement community Woodlands at Furman. It’s on the Furman University campus—lots of good lectures, concerts, and sports (especially golf out our back porch). Value my Deerfield education and friends more each year—feel very privileged. Greenville is a burgeoning metropolis, growing too fast, home of BMW and Michelin in a good red state. Hope ’51ers will come to visit.”

Bill Wilmot ’51 shared “a brief poem which will

likely to resonate with the oldsters we have become.”

Memory Quest

A memory is a shy night creature Shunning the light an intrinsic feature Fevered pursuit, bright searching light inside More fiercely sought, more determined to hide. Bank the ardor. Go dark and still the mind. Wake. Quickly beam. The quarry you will find Hidden no more in dark sheltered places. Deer-frozen in your mind’s open spaces.

— Dave Uehling Bob Cook passed along the news that “2022 was a busy

year for my doctors: one total shoulder ‘replacement,’ two lens implants, two colonoscopies (benign), Covid (mild), and a bad case of lymphocytic colitis. I’m back in great health, although I no longer ski or fly fish. I shoot sporting clays.” “Living alone is for the birds, but watching my birds thrive is fun. Son Michael is a professor of clinical pathology at the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine. Son Peter continues to teach at Groton. Daughter Kate will remount the stage at the Goodman Theater in Chicago next month.” – Bill Fry Dozier Gardner is “Happy to report that my wife and I are

still healthy and reasonably active. I am an emeritus trustee for lots of places, but my primary focus is on two foundation boards where I help manage the granting, much of which has been directed to organizations trying to help many of Boston’s failing public schools. Sandy and I are lucky to have nine grandchildren nearby. One of the younger ones is a lacrosse star and may take a PG at Deerfield next school year. Hope so!”

COMMON RO OM / FIRST PERSON B O OK REVIEW by Peter Gabel ’64

Here are some examples of what I learned from the book that made me shake my head in honest amazement, although perhaps they are more widely known among readers of this journal than they were to me (and some of them I myself was dimly but not fully aware of):

A House Divided: Slavery and American Politics from the Constitution to the Civil War by Ben McNitt ’64 (Stackpole Books, 2021) Reviewed by Peter Gabel in 2021

This new book by my Deerfield classmate, Ben McNitt, brilliantly illuminates the way that slavery influenced virtually all aspects of American politics from the drafting of the Constitution to the Civil War. The book is not at all a stodgy fact-filled history text, but rather is a wellresearched and animated narrative capturing the disorienting ambivalence of iconic figures in American history, such as Jefferson and Lincoln, toward Black human beings; the extraordinary drama, centered on conflicts about slavery, of such major events as the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850, the conflict over Texas’s admission to the union as a “slave state;” the amazing chaos of the local conflict between Northern free-soilers and imported white-Southern pro-slavery settlers in Bleeding Kansas; and a strikingly honest and objective chapter on “Slavery: The Thing Itself” devoted to the reality of slavery to the Black human beings who endured it. The book opened or, better, widened my eyes in seeing the history behind and meaning of today’s struggles over racial justice in the United States. 46

1. A lthough Thomas Jefferson was morally opposed to slavery, he also believed that emancipation of slaves would require the re-colonization of the entire Black population to some foreign location, perhaps Sierra Leone or Santo Domingo, because the white race was superior and the mixing of the races was a “degradation” to which any white person who loved his country could not “innocently consent.” 2. Many white Southerners felt that slavery was a moral burden but a necessary evil in the period immediately after the formation of the union, but following the growing North-South conflict over slavery extending from the Missouri Compromise to the years before the Civil War, these white Southerners came to defend slavery as a positive good . . . even an ideal form of social and economic life characterized by reciprocal affection and mutuality of care (the master for the slave and vice versa), in contrast to the anonymity and disconnectedness of Northern free labor. 3. W hile the white South developed and then thoroughly internalized the myth of the benign patriarchal slaveholder and the contented servitude of the loyal slave, the actual experience of slavery was characterized by a rounding up of Africans in their homeland, branding them with hot irons for passage on overcrowded and disease-ridden ships, the subjecting of black women to rape and sexual abuse from their initial examination on the block and perhaps throughout their lives, the tearing apart of husbands and wives, and parents and children, through the lively market in slave-trading, routinized whipping by some overseers, and working under conditions producing disease and illness and early death for many. 4. B y way of contrast to all of the above, the abolitionist movement expressed a long idealistic campaign led by Black and white women (such as Harriet Tubman and Lucretia Mott), which formed the basis of the women’s suffragette movement, revealing the way that the upward force of the movement for social justice tends to fuse across different particular struggles to bend what Martin Luther King Jr. called the moral arc of the universe. 5. The Civil War, with its half a million deaths, was not really the result of the multiple “causes” that we learn in high school, but was rather the outcome of a single, decades-long moral pathology engrained in America’s initial documents and contradicting the morally compelling and transcendent commitment to human freedom and equality expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

IN CONCLUSION: Importantly, McNitt does not present any of the material in the book in a sensational or ideological way, but rather keeps an even style and tone leaving space for the reader to respond as they will to the honest, richly-detailed story he is trying to tell. Inside me, the book provoked a powerful sense of compassion for the suffering inflicted upon Black human beings in our history and a kind of dawning awareness of how much the present-day battle over voting rights, over police violence, over specifically racial inequality in housing, education, and material resources, is but a continuation of the failure to really face and then heal the legacy of slavery itself. McNitt clearly intends for the book only to tell the story, leaving the reader eerily free to feel their own response welling up in the heart and mind. //

In Memory of Peter Joseph Gabel ’64 by Steve Stavrides ’64 Peter Joseph Gabel died October 25, 2022 in San Francisco, CA. In 2014 Peter initiated the Project for Social Justice and Environmental Sustainability at Deerfield. He believed that Deerfield should emphasize in its education the obligation of all students to contribute to the creation of a more socially just world, one in which people can more deeply experience their bond with others and do what they can to improve the lives of those in need. Peter hoped that in that process students might find their own lives enriched by the experience. Peter was a philosopher, educator, and lifelong community activist. He was a college president, a law professor, an author, and a tireless advocate for more humane and spiritual forms of commerce, polity, and community. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College in 1968 and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1972, Peter taught variously at the University of Minnesota Law School, the UC Berkeley Law School, and the CUNY School of Law. Then he moved permanently to San Francisco, where he served as president of New College of California, a non-traditional institution that emerged from the idealism of the 1960s. At the same time, he was for more than thirty years a much-beloved professor at New College’s renowned public-interest law school, where he educated several generations of law students in how to link legal activism with movements for progressive social change. As a community activist and leader, he fought to save the local bookstore Cover to Cover near his home in Noe Valley, fought for workers seeking to form a union at the Real Food health food market, and co-founded both the Noe Valley Town Square and the Noe Valley Farmers Market, which offers healthy food for residents, raises money to feed families in need, and provides food to the homeless and hungry in San Francisco. Additionally, he founded the Arlene Francis Center for Spirit, Art, and Politics in Santa Rosa, a center he founded in memory of his mother. In all his writings, and especially in his most recent book The Desire for Mutual Recognition, he argued for social transformation based upon authentic connection and mutual respect. He leaves his partner Lisa Jaicks and their son, Sam Jaicks Gabel.

1956 Joe Twichell sent along several updates from

Why include Deerfield in her will? Ana Centola, mother of Sophia ’18 and Alex ’21, explains that “Deerfield was my co-parent in those important years in my children’s lives.”

By including Deerfield in her estate plans, Ana deepens and honors her family’s bonds to the school and “hopes to give the same opportunity my children had to other children who deserve to be at Deerfield.”

L E A R N M O R E AT : deerfield.giftplans.org/ or contact a friendly staff member at 413-774-1584 or plannedgiving@deerfield.edu

classmates, including that Jon Blake continues his pro bono contribution for workable election reform as he recovers from a broken hip. Meanwhile, Denis Turko divides his time between New Jersey and Florida, dispensing investment advice as he prepares for his second back surgery. Brad Oelman welcomed his first great-granddaughter and celebrated his motherin-law’s 101st birthday in Cincinnati. Five years after the sudden death of Merrill Magowan’s wife’s, his oldest son’s family has moved into his house, providing companionship, much better food than he could manage, and a great granddaughter. He reports that everything we have heard about San Francisco is accurate or understated; downtown office vacancy is 32%, resulting in hotels, restaurants, and shops closing for good. Dennis Furbush continues his globe-trotting with the Association for Industrial Archaeology in Bath, England. Then he went to fairs in Syracuse, NY, and Springfield, MA, followed by a Viking cruise to Santiago, Chile. Hans Wurster and his wife, M.J., have burned up the national and international rowing circuit for years. Hans took time off in the spring to replace his aortic valve in Denver, CO, then returned to his high-altitude home in Breckenridge, CO, where he and M.J. will be resuming their training. Charlie Weymouth says that into his 55th year of independent architectural/urban planning practice, his design board just went empty; what’s left of his brain daily challenges land use and politicians. Due to his legs, Charlie gave up tennis a year and a half ago. His grandnephew was a Deerfield oarsman. Dave Elliott and his wife, Mai, rode out hurricane Hilary in Claremont, CA. Dave also rode out a TIA and was subsequently given a clean bill of health.

1958

Brian Rosborough shared this photo on the right from Reunions 2023 and this AI-composed sonnet from ’58s class meeting, which featured a robust discussion of the technology and a panel of current Deerfield faculty.

1974 Tim Gardner passed away on February 13, 2023, after a two-year fight against lymphoma. Tim went to the University of Colorado and received an MBA at the Kellogg School of Management. He is survived by his wife Deb Froeb, two sons, and two adorable twin granddaughters. Tim had lived in Denver for many years and retired in 2019 as the CFO of the University of Colorado-Gates Institute of Regenerative Medicine Technologies. Ironically, since getting cancer, he had a nine-month recovery after being treated with Car-T therapy, which, as part of his job, he helped commercialize. But eventually, his aggressive cancer overwhelmed him. Besides his family, Tim’s greatest love was time spent at the family lake houses in Northport Point, MI, where he spent every summer of his life. He was an exceptionally good sailor. In recent years, Tim skied several times with John Fisher, Graham Anthony, and, several years ago, with Jack Abbott and Jeff Dufresne in Park City. He had said he would be at our 50th, but maybe we’ll share a glass and some memories of him when we gather in 2024.

THE AI PROMPT:

Compose a sonnet about jellybeans using Spenserian stanza.

The (lightning fast!) result: In candy’s realm, where sugar’s magic gleams, There lies a treat, a rainbow-hued delight, With flavors rich, evoking childhood dreams, Jellybeans dance, a vibrant sugared sprite.

61 “Recovering from hand surgery, the latest in a long string of surgeries primarily due to the stresses of racquet sports over the years. I hope to recover soon, certainly in time for daughter Samantha’s (’15) wedding in early 2024, and then to continue my self-destructive racquet activities.” – Thomas Poor

Their jelly centers, tempting to the bite, From lemon yellow to a cherry red, Each tiny bean, a momentary flight, An explosion of sweetness in my head. Oh, Jellybean, in every color spread, Your sugary allure I cannot shun. With every taste, my senses are misled, Lost in the land where sugary dreams are spun. So let me savor you, dear Jellybean, In Spenserian verse, my ode to your sheen!

’92

KRISTOPHER HULL

NYC MOBILE PIANIST /// b y E r i c B u t t e r m a n ///

Kristopher Hull ’92 hauls his work to his office— but his work is the piano, and his office is seemingly anywhere. New York City is used to seeing its share of entertainment. Subway stations have buskers. Moving subway cars have backflippers looking to showcase their talents. Still, until recently, no one would blame even longtime New Yorkers for being surprised at seeing a 1964 Baldwin upright piano on wheels making its way around downtown Manhattan. No, it’s nothing like a self-driving car. It’s Kristopher Hull pushing it through the streets. And folks may be finally getting used to seeing him and his rolling piano.

“I read the great novel by Cervantes in Tangier, and I realized that there was no knight errant of the piano. Like Don Quixote, who brought justice to those in need and slept under the stars, I felt I must give everyone the gift of Chopin. As he takes in the majesty of Manhattan skyscrapers, stopping to perform Chopin at will within their shadows, Kris is sometimes reminded of the path not taken. “After Deerfield, I attended the architecture school of Rice University in Texas, but it turned out that it wasn’t my passion,” he admits. Though not classically trained, Kris did play the piano at Deerfield. “Discovering Chopin was one of my life’s first great lighting bolts. I didn’t know anything so beautiful even existed.” And as he often uses the bike lanes of New York to get his piano around, it’s also a reminder of what could have been. At Deerfield, Kris was captain of the cycling team his junior and senior years. “As a parallel track to university, the Tour de France was the ultimate goal, but Lyme disease had other ideas,” he says. He had contracted the thenalmost unknown disease after graduation. It remained undiagnosed for two years, and Kris had to quit riding. “It was a very difficult time, but my dorm at Rice had a piano in the common room, which became my solace. Before I knew it, I began practicing six, seven, eight hours daily. Just driven and excited again. I left college to become a concert pianist.” He would go on to live in Thailand, Germany, Morocco, and many other places, practicing up to ten hours a day. And then? He discovered Don Quixote. “I read the great novel by Cervantes in Tangier, and I realized that there was no knight errant of the piano. Like Don Quixote, who brought justice to those in need and slept under the stars, I felt I must give everyone the gift of Chopin. I needed to take it outside the gilded walls of the concert hall and pass it on to people from all walks of life. I had this dream, and it drove me more than anything ever had before in my life.” And now the dream is reality. Kris uses pneumatic casters to help sustain the piano’s almost 500 pounds and anti-vibration pads to help keep it in tune as he moves it from place to place. He brings the music of Chopin to sidewalks, parks, gardens—to the people. And last year, he found his breakthrough accompaniment: murals. “My music and what I do just lends itself to the visual medium of street art,” he says.

Chopin in Park Ave. Tunnel

For per formance inquiries please contact Kris directly at pianisterrant@gmail.com Instagram (@pianisterrant)

In the benevolent spirit of his Spanish hero, Kris performs primarily for free. But, when art galleries or private homes ask for him, his art tilts more toward business, and he feels comfortable charging the venue. For Kris, who tilted at windmills and continues to do so, and who lost out on the racing life but is firmly in the race of life, the greatest payment of all is when someone says they’ve never heard Chopin before and they’re grateful his music is now a part of their life. “That’s the thing,” he says. “Most of the people who have heard Chopin are those who can afford to attend concert halls. But this music is for everybody. I can’t tell you how many times people have said, ‘Thank you for giving me a chance to hear this. Thank you for making my day better.’ What they might not realize is how hearing this makes my day better.” //

When Gustave “Gus” Lipman graduated from Deerfield in 1989, his class closed out an era of all-boys education. Many of his contemporaries were deeply concerned that a coeducational Deerfield could never measure up, and, indeed, for Lipman, all-male Deerfield had been “spectacular” in all ways. He wrestled and played lacrosse, was involved in Model UN and political clubs, spun 80s hits on a WGAJ radio show, and was a self-described “Classics kid.” Three extraordinary teachers—Larry Boyle, Peter Brush, and Joe Medlicott—were so influential that Lipman later created an endowed fund in their names. Most impactful, however, were the friendships he formed. “We’ve been there for each other through the ups and the downs. My group of Deerfield brothers has been one of the greatest things in my life, and it’s a large part of the reason I am so committed to Deerfield.” After Deerfield, Lipman graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and then immediately went to work at his family’s security services company, Guardsmark. Lipman held the position of Chief Operating Officer when Guardsmark was acquired by Warburg Pincus and then merged into what is now Allied Universal in 2015. Lipman’s experience in security services led to memberships in the Overseas Security Advisory Council, International Security Management Association, New York Chapter of FBI Infragard, NYPD Shield, and the American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS). He served as one of three US delegates to the International Security Ligue based in Bern, Switzerland. This experience led to leadership roles as a Board member of the International Security Ligue from 2015-2017 and then to the Board of New York FBI Infragard, a public/private partnership for critical infrastructure protection.

T RUST E E

’89

GUSTAVE LIPMAN /// b y J u l i a E l l i o t ///

POCUMTUCK THROWBACK

“We’ve been there for each other through the ups and the downs. My group of Deerfield brothers has been one of the greatest things in my life, and it’s a large part of the reason I am so committed to Deerfield.” Since 2015, Lipman has advised security groups in bringing advanced security and defense solutions to the US government and in risk assessments and awareness technologies. In 2016, he cofounded Circadian Risk, a security assessment platform. Lipman then served as the US CEO of Voyager Labs, a global provider of artificial intelligence solutions to the security, investigative, and intelligence communities. In 2021, Lipman returned to Circadian Risk as Chairman. Lipman jokes that aside from keeping up with his children, Adam ’24 and Clara, a ninth grader in New York City, his greatest hobby is Board service. He currently serves as an ambassador for the US Navy Seal Foundation, is Co-Chair of the Community Security Initiative of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, and is a member of the Board of the American Friends of the Israel Navy Seals (AFINS). Previously, he served on the Boards of the Jewish Museum in New York, the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, Hillel International Board of Governors, and several others. At Deerfield, Lipman first served on the Executive Committee of the Alumni Association and as a Reunion chair, class agent, and class captain before joining Deerfield’s Board of Trustees in 2020. Of all the many boards he has joined, Lipman says Deerfield’s is “the best run and most seriously committed.” He is impressed by the talent and expertise of his fellow trustees: “It’s a hardworking Board, and I am honored to serve with people who care so deeply about Deerfield and inspire me to stretch myself.” Lipman, who serves as Vice Chair of the Audit, Risk and Technology Committee, says his mission as a trustee is “to safeguard and enhance all of the wonderful things that made Deerfield so special for me and my classmates.” This does not mean he is nostalgic for the all-male days—far from it. “Deerfield is an even stronger school today,” he says. “They have preserved many of the beloved traditions that existed before coeducation, and the whole experience for students has been enhanced. Deerfield today is a special place for boys and girls.” //

1980 “Spent a special week in western Canada with our youngest son, Cooper ’22, this August and had the opportunity to watch the U21 USA Indoor Lacrosse Team go undefeated at the World Junior Lacrosse Championship. The USA defeated Canada in the gold medal game. Cooper, who is a sophomore at Middlebury College, was captain of the team. Not only was this the first gold medal for the USA, at any level of international box lacrosse competition, it was the first time that Canada had lost a game in their “Summer National Sport” during international competition. Go USA!” —Bayard DeMallie ’80

1983 Fairfield University’s Vice President for Athletics Paul Schlickmann passed along the exciting news that he been selected NACDA Athletics Director of the Year. John Knight reporting after a successful Reunion Weekend! “It was a great weekend!” “Tremendous event. Absolute blast to be together.” “What a great weekend. I was a bit hesitant at first because I was concerned that I was not close with many of our reunion attendees while we were at Deerfield. Fast-forward 40 years and it was as if we were all best friends at Deerfield. I really enjoyed catching up with everyone and exchanging DA memories.” “It was a GREAT turnout, and a wonderful weekend!” THANK YOU to the 37 classmates who were able to attend our 40th reunion! More pictures will follow in future posts . . . Amazingly enough, our attendance number was enough to win the coveted Warren Agry ’41 Award (right) for attendance by a non 5th or 50th reunion class. (1988 was not happy with us.) Way to represent ’83! It can be a chore when you attend your spouse’s high school reunion, but not when a DA83 classmate is there too! Van Sullivan and Mark Czuj survived together! The great backstory is that while both were attending our 40th reunion in June, someone recognized Van’s wife and told her about the upcoming reunion for her high school this fall. And the rest is history! Huge kudos to California resident Andrew Stewart (right) for making the most of a single day in the NYC area! He visited with Doug Schmidt and Doug Cruikshank!

FROM THE ARCHIVES

19 83 THANK YOU to the 37 classmates who were able to attend our 40 th Reunion!

Beaubien, Mark Bennett, Geoffrey Blohm, Eduardo Bresnahan, Kevin Brown, John Brown, Spencer Campbell, John Cruikshank, Doug Czuj, Mark Ehmann, John Feiges, Adam Flagg, Christopher Gagne, Chaz

Guyer, Leigh Harris, Chris Jackson, Hardie Keirstead, Robert Kerr, Alexander Knight, John LeMieux, Henry Madden, Dave McGill, Robert Morley, David Munro, John Nourse, Nathan Patton, Benjamin

Peterson, Eric Rehberger, Frederick Schmidt, Douglas Sheppard, Whit Singewald, Dean Stewart, Andrew Suher, Eric Sullivan, Van Townsend, Peter Wareck, James Watts, Taylor

John Adornato ’92 has been protecting US national parks for more than 20 years, and enjoying some of the country’s best views while he works. “The better part of my job is working to protect our national parks, making them accessible and visible,” says Adornato, Deputy Vice President for Regional Programs at the National Parks Conservation Association, who focuses on policy and advocacy. “It’s about making sure their stories are told. I’m working in gateway communities, talking to those working for national parks, whether it’s friends groups, locally elected officials who care, or businesses who benefit economically from tourism. I’m also a policy wonk and passionate about lobbying Congress and educating our decision-makers on why national parks are so important to our nation.”

’92

JOHN ADORNATO

NATIONAL PARK AVOCATE /// b y E r i c B u t t e r m a n ///

A common misconception, he says, is that there are only about 63 national parks in the US, when there are actually 423. “Many people think of the big ones like Everglades National Park and Grand Canyon National Park, but there are smaller ones all over.” And John should know, as he’s been to almost 200 of them. Standouts to him? One is the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument at the southern border of Arizona and Mexico. “It’s a great hike up to these ridges to see the desert and endemic organ pipe cactus. I remember going around when the March rains had been heavy, so the wildflowers and poppies carpeted the desert floor, with an amazing view of poppies all over the desert. Collectively our national parks show wondrous beauty and tell the story of our nation’s struggles: It’s the Gettysburg National Battlefield from the Civil War to the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument that commemorates the struggle for justice. These parks have many things to teach us.” Adornato lobbies Congress since the National Parks Conservancy Association is a nonpartisan nonprofit and needs Congress to fund and protect parks, along with the day-to-day costs of related operations. “Congress has a role in funding and providing appropriations as well as policy, and educating and sharing a love of these parks,” says Adornato, who joined the Association in 2002. “The park service’s budget is a tiny, tiny sliver of the country’s overall budget and produces a great deal of value to the GDP. Without funding, there are fewer rangers to talk to visitors on the trails, which cuts down on protection and preservation and harms our ability to maintain trails and visitor centers. And the use of the national parks has only increased since the pandemic.”

One of the highlights of John’s career was helping to build a bridge on the Tamiami Trail in the Everglades. “It took so many hardworking people,” he says. It was working with the Miccosukee Tribe and the Seminole Tribe to get a solution that would work for everyone; it was working with other community members in the area—his mentor, Nathaniel P. Reed ’51, elected officials, and the Appropriations Committee in the House and the Senate—to get funding and the right policies. “It took years, but it was special when it finally came to be.” “The water flow under this bridge is about a mile long and just eight feet above the water level,” he says. “It was a critical location where water flowed historically. Characteristic of the Everglades, it was a wide swath of river—really a wetland— that flowed very shallow—just a couple of feet deep. But that sheet flow is so critical to the health and uniqueness of the Everglades. And, thankfully, this project was able to restore that.” John’s time as a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Legislative Fellow in the early 2000’s helped in working with the government on a common mission. “Working with Senator Danny Akaka and the people of Hawaii, serving in that fellowship, you learn how much an elected official has to deal with and how staff are critical to bringing them information,” he says. “You especially learn how to communicate in a way that gets to the point. When you talk to staff on the Hill, you need to get to what you are really talking about and what you are asking for.” Adornato, who earned a degree in biology from Tufts University in 1996 and a master’s in Wetland Ecology from the University of Maryland in 2002, feels his science education helps him to see problems from different angles, also having served as a research technician for the United State Department of Agriculture from 1997 to 1998. “To provide sources of food economically for an ever-growing population remains a challenge, and to do it with fewer chemicals is also challenging,” he says. “There is a lot of agriculture adjacent to our national parks between streams and wetlands, and it’s affecting fish and the overall wildlife. I learned a great deal working on the government side; it helps to understand their perspective when working with them.”

John Adornato (front left) and family

It was working with the Miccosukee Tribe and the Seminole Tribe to get a solution that would work for everyone. It was working with other community members in the area— his mentor, Nathaniel P. Reed ’51, elected officials, the Appropriations Committee in the House and the Senate—to get funding and the right policies. It took years, but it was special when it finally came to be.

The Deerfield Base Among Adornato’s favorite Deerfield instructors was biology teacher Andy Harcourt, whose AP Bio class provided a strong foundation for John’s studies in college, and director of theater John Reese, who helped him with communication skills. “My level of comfort in front of a microphone and audience is due to my mentor, John Reese. What an amazing actor and instructor!” Adornato also appreciated the Deerfield community as a whole. “People often struggle in their high school years, especially if they’re a gay man not out of the closet,” he says. “Deerfield’s message of caring about yourself and others and giving back resonated with me, and that continues to this day.” “I think of the wonders of the Grand Canyon, or seeing Redwoods that are thousands of years old, or the Statue of Liberty, which my grandfather saw as he arrived from Italy with his name on a placard,” he says. “And every day, I think about how lucky I am to have this job—where I go to these beautiful national parks, and places where people go to enjoy nature and to learn and grow—and this is where I go to work! I’m simply grateful.” //

89 89

1989 Dave Orrick and Graham Gerst took a four-day canoe trip with a couple of non-alums in the Boundary Waters, MN in August 2023, enjoying nature, fishing, DA stories, and some animated political discussions. It’s an area Dave knows exceedingly well, and he arranged a trip that Graham and the rest of the group will remember forever. “Summer reunion with my Deerfield brother, Todd Conklin, by the Bay, and long overdue introduction of our two boys, Fitzy (5) and George (8)!” (left) —Brian Higgins ’89

2001 Adam Sureau sent “Greetings from down route 2 in Concord,

MA! All is well with me and family. My wife Melanie and I have enjoyed a wild summer of activities starting with a trip to Augusta, ME, to compete in my first Ironman race. My daughter, Sophie (age 9), is busy with her passion in equestrian hunter/ jumper and competed in the Vermont Summer Festival in East Dover, VT. Currently, we are in London where my son, Alexander (age 12), is playing for the Boston Bolts soccer team and playing in a tournament amidst lots of European youth talent. Oh, and we got our first puppy, Bromley. We wish everyone big hello and please reach out if in the Concord, Boston area.” (right)

2002 Melody Marchman Schade reports, “Can’t believe it’s been so long—or that I must scroll so far to find our class year. Was at the dentist today—a man who was clearly not from the south—and what he found more interesting than my five kids, my PhD, or my swoon-worthy husband, was that I went to Deerfield. No matter where the Army sends us, I manage to find someone who agrees that “Deerfield days are days of glory... .” What a gift. Love you each of you!”

2006 Susanna Walton Foran was born February 17, 2023, in Washington D.C. to Cristina and Lincoln Foran, weighing 7 pounds and measuring 21 inches. An early visitor was Lucy Stonehill, and Susanna is already getting ready for Deerfield by sporting her DA jacket at eight weeks old with Cristina and Lucy!

2008 On November 11, 2022, Chip Daugherty married Aubree Andersen at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville Arkansas while celebrating amidst so many great Deerfield friends . . . not all made the photo! Pictured left to right: Rob Pannell, Daniel Bartus, Peter Procida, John Gray, Ben Weinberg, Aubree Daugherty, Chip Daugherty, Ben Dennis, Maxwell Getz, and Alex Bertles.

’93

KATIE GAMBLE MARVIN, MD

PRESIDENT, VERMONT ACADEMY OF FAMILY PHYSICIANS

Becca Bell, who graduated from Deerfield five years after Marvin, works at the University of Vermont Children’s Hospital in the pediatric intensive care unit, and she is an associate professor in the university’s college of medicine. A different world from Marvin’s, but one The recent pandemic was a time of uncertainty, often leaving with similar goals and beliefs. families unsure and frightened of how to navigate, particularly “We were both presidents of our when it came to their children. In Vermont, an alliance of respective specialty societies when Covid medical organizations came together to help bring clarity. happened, and it created a closer working What two key players didn’t know is that they had more in relationship with so much going on and common than their mission to help the state. Katie Gamble so many constant changes to information Marvin, MD, president of the Vermont Academy of Family and guidelines,” says Bell, who graduated Physicians through November 2023, and Becca Bell, MD, from medical school at the University MPH, president of the Vermont chapter of the American of Massachusetts in Worcester and later Academy of Pediatrics, discovered their common bond in received a master’s degree in Public the midst of Covid: Deerfield. Health from the Harvard School of Public Marvin, who graduated from Deerfield in 1993 and later from the University of Maryland’s medical school, chose family Health in 2014. “We collaborated on medicine, which is unusual for medical students in recent years, looking at areas such as vaccines and school health and safety. And it was but continues to be a vital part of many thriving communities. maybe a year ago that Deerfield finally Need a biopsy of the skin? Your family doctor can look at that. came up. To think we both came from Sprained an ankle? Your family doctor is ready with an x-ray. there; I am president-elect of the “And Covid only made us more vital,” says Marvin, who has a Vermont Medical Society and will take practice at Lamoille Health Partners, a non-profit health and wellness center, in Morrisville and Stowe, Vermont. Marvin also over at the end of this calendar year, and then Katie will be president-elect. The does rotations at Morrisville’s Copley Hospital, taking care of Vermont Society was founded in 1814, newborns. “Especially in rural areas, family doctors were a and has had about 180 presidents, and I part of the pipeline of information during the pandemic,” she think we will only be the eighth and ninth says. “As we say, from babies to the elderly, family doctors women to hold that title in its history.” take care of them all.”

Two Vermont medical leaders found a common cause—and found they had the Deerfield Experience in common, too.

/// b y E r i c B u t t e r m a n ///

Bell said Marvin’s perspective taught her a great deal about family medicine. “I gained an even greater respect for that network,” Bell says. “Family doctors are scattered across the state, and are often independent; we’re trying to improve connections between family doctors, pediatricians, and others to allow us all to become stronger.” Marvin, in turn, was impressed by Bell’s presence as a medical spokesperson during the pandemic. “She did a sensational job of communicating information and keeping everyone in the state briefed, and she has a gift for communicating topics in a way that gets people to act,” Marvin says. Marvin is getting more comfortable with the spotlight as well; once shy about the possibility of lobbying for potential medical legislation, she now looks forward to it, including having been a voice on a bill for treatment for opiate disorder in the primary care setting. “What I’ve learned is legislators are good people, but they don’t necessarily have a great deal of medical training,” she says. “They need—and appreciate— medical professionals getting in there.” Marvin also worked on a recent bill that passed to assist those who want to go into primary care; offering loan forgiveness in return for practicing in Vermont for a certain amount of time.

’98

BECCA BELL, MD, MPH

PRESIDENT, VERMONT CHAPTER OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PEDIATRICS

Deerfield Delivers

Marvin and Bell look back at Deerfield as a place of key preparation where they were infusioned with confidence. “It was my first time away from home and they made you feel you could be independent,” Marvin recalls. “It was learning to think critically, especially when it came to primary sources; it was teacher Dick Ginns confirming my love for sciences and just having fun learning; it was Heidi Valk, my lacrosse coach, encouraging me to try to be a leader in my own way, by example and effort. She taught that if you buckle down first, the results will follow.” Bell, who was a day student, recalls learning an eye for detail in Alan Fraker’s AP History class, reading thorough texts and taking positions and improving the ability to back them up. “You also learned to really listen to other people’s opinions, and see that there can be many sides to things.” They both echoed that Deerfield encouraged open minds, something so many needed during a hopefully once-ina-lifetime pandemic. “It still seems hard to believe how the medical community came together, lacking certain safeguards,” Marvin says. “Becca and I both saw medicine, people— everyone!—pull together during a very challenging time for our state and our country. It was communities finding ways to get school meals to kids (for some their best meal of the day), even though schools were shut down. The stories of kindness are so many, and we need to remember them. Covid was scary, it was challenging, and it was uniting. I’m excited to continue to work with Becca in the future based on our experience working together during the pandemic.”//

09 Sydney Shope married James Tannahill on June 10, 2023, at her parents’ home in Hudson, NY. They had hawks as their ring bearers.

2010 Hunter Huebsch ’11 shared that the 16th Annual Deerfield

Academy Fantasy Football League “The DAFFL” held its annual draft the weekend of August 18, 2023. (photo, right) The DAFFL, which held is first draft in the Greer in 2008, is the greatest fantasy football league in the history of the multiverse. Commissioner Hunter Huebsch and the Office of the Commisioner of The DAFFL would like to congratulate manager Matthew Doyle ’10 on his league-leading 4th championship. Regarding Doyle’s fourth championship, League Manager Albert Ford ’10 commented, “You know, it’s not often a blind squirrel finds one nut, but four! Seriously?!” Alex Ward ’11, who lost to Doyle in the 2022 Championship game remarked, “I just wasn’t looking to the hills hard enough this year.” Jimmy Bitter ’11, who has never even come close to winning a coveted DAFFL Championship stated, “I’m just not a football guy, I’m really in this league to keep in touch with my good friends.”

2013 Ethan Peterson-New wrote to share this news: “Over the past year I have self-published two fantasy novels under the pen name E.M. Peterson. My first foray into writing novels came during my senior year at DA, when I wrote a full-length sci-fi novel and sold it on campus. It has been wonderful to come back to that experience and share these books with the world. Look out for Carnival of the Mind and Of Earth and Sky, available now!” Greg Froelich has been named the UNC Charlotte Special Teams Coordinator/Running Backs Coach! Read full details at the link in the class notes online.

10 2017 On August 12, Madisen Siegel completed a half-mile swim with friends from Columbia University Women’s Water Polo in Swim Across America’s Boston Open Water Swim. Founded in 1987, Swim Across America hosts charity swims to raise money for innovative early-stage cancer research that has led to breakthrough treatments and therapies. Madisen’s team surpassed their fundraising goal by 50%. This year, Boston’s Open Water Swim had the most swimmers in the event’s history and raised the largest amount ever—a grand total of $439,259! Madisen is a former DA Girls’ Varsity Swim & Dive Captain and is excited to have found a way to use swimming for a good cause.

Pictured third row from left: Will Swindell ’11, Jackson Logie ’10, Albert Ford ’10, Peter Sullivan ’10. Second row from left: Sam Redmond ’11, Ted Growney ’11, Hunter Huebsch ’11, Jimmy Bitter ’11, Bobby Osgood ’11. First row from left: Matt Doyle ’10, Tucker Dayton ’10. Not pictured: Alex Ward ’11, George Wheatley ’11, and Connor Scott ’10.

T RUST E E

’95

FRANCIS IDEHEN /// b y J u l i a E l l i o t ///

Francis Idehen ’95 was “into everything” during his time at Deerfield, including playing basketball, running cross country, singing in the chorus and the Mellow-D’s, and serving as a proctor, a member of the Student Council, a member of the Discipline Committee, and, for two years, as president of the Deerfield Black Student Alliance (then the DBSC/DMA). “I must have been constantly sleep deprived,” he says with a laugh, “but it didn’t feel that way!” As a junior, Idehen also served on the search committee to find a successor to then-Headmaster Bob Kaufmann. During the process, Idehen met Arthur Clement ’66, Deerfield’s first Black trustee. “I found Arthur to be so inspiring,” he says. “I came to Deerfield as an immigrant kid [from Nigeria] who grew up in New York City, attended public schools, and got to Deerfield via Prep for Prep. For kids like me, what happens when you get exposure to [experiences like Deerfield] is ‘dreaming in the art of the possible.’” Through Clement, the idea of Board service first became a possibility. After Deerfield, Idehen earned a BA in Economics from Yale University in 1999 and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2006. He began his career at Goldman Sachs and held positions at Lintel Corporation, Exelon Corporation, Lehman Brothers, and Grosvenor Capital Management. In 2022, he rejoined Goldman Sachs as a partner in the Client Solutions Group, where he is Americas head of Alternatives Multi-Strategy Solutions. Idehen also serves on the boards of Prep for Prep, University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, and Rush University Medical Center.

POCUMTUCK THROWBACK

I came to Deerfield as an immigrant kid [from Nigeria] who grew up in New York City, attended public schools, and got to Deerfield via Prep for Prep. For kids like me, what happens when you get exposure to [experiences like Deerfield] is dreaming in the art of the possible. Given that he had been thinking about Board service since his junior year, it is not surprising that Idehen joined Deerfield’s Board of Trustees in 2020. It was an intense time: Covid, as well as the civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd, were at a peak. “I felt a duty to give back to this place that had been so special to me,” he says, “but also, as a Black male, to represent a particular type of voice on the Board. When you have students from all corners of the world, from all ethnic backgrounds and all orientations, you need to have that difference reflected in your governing body.” Idehen’s committee service includes Nominating and Governance, Finance, and Student and Community Life, where he prioritizes ensuring that every element of the student experience is inclusive and equitable. Serving as a trustee has been a wonderful experience so far: “I’ve enjoyed reconnecting with old friends, engaging with new friends, and getting to know the administration.” He has also enjoyed reintroducing Deerfield to his wife, Nicola, and his two sons, Francis, 15, and Nicolas, 13, both of whom Idehen hopes will attend Deerfield. Idehen’s priority as a Board member is “having students feel welcomed and supported in all ways—academically, cocurricularly, and personally—so that Deerfield can continue to attract the best talent and to maintain its reputation of excellence today and tomorrow.” //

During three memorable years at Deerfield, Jack Chen ’08 made many close friends among students and faculty; pursued acting, theater tech, and directing; was a proctor, president of the Chinese Club, and captain of the Math Team; but really saw himself as “a humanities type.” In the last year that students were required to write the dreaded fifteen-page research paper in Honors U.S. History, Chen won the Russ A. Miller Prize for his paper on U.S.-China relations after the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident. He was inspired to write about this event because it happened a mile from his home on the night of his first birthday. “I was really proud, coming from China and winning [that] prize,” he says. While at Deerfield, Chen also started a volunteer program in Jingyang, a village in southwest China, where he and several fellow students taught English during the summers. The program is now PEER, Peer Experience Exchange Rostrum, a non-profit dedicated to promoting education equity in urban and rural areas of China. “Deerfield was really the starting point for my commitment to service,” says Chen, who still serves as PEER’s chairman.

T RUST E E

’08

JACK CHEN /// b y J u l i a E l l i o t ///

After Deerfield, Chen majored in economics at Harvard, graduating in 2012. He returned to Jingyang to intern for the local government for a year, worked at the Hong Kong office of Goldman Sachs for two years, and then joined Taikang Insurance Group, his family’s business and the third largest insurance group in China, in 2015. At Taiking, Chen primarily works in asset management, with a focus on Chinese markets. Chen was honored to join Deerfield’s Board of Trustees in 2021. Not surprisingly, he sees his board service as an opportunity to act as an ambassador for the Deerfield community throughout Asia. “I feel it’s very important to be the voice to represent not just the students, alumni, and parents from China and Asia in general, but also the community that might be interested in attending Deerfield.” This fall, when Board Chair Leila Govi, Director of Admission Chip Davis, and Director of College Advising Mark Spencer visited Asia, Chen served as their host in Shanghai, arranging an Admission event for 100 prospective families as well as a dinner for the local Deerfield community. “I’m always thinking of all the different ways I can contribute to the school, both from an Asian perspective and just an overall commitment.” Chen has found his fellow trustees to be a fantastic group and is proud to be serving the Academy during what he sees as a challenging time politically and socially. “We are doing a good job keeping the balance between our traditions and adapting to new trends. Dr. Austin has done a wonderful job of maintaining an open environment for discussion and discourse.” For the spring 2023 Board meeting, Chen brought his wife, Swan Zhang, to Deerfield for the first time. “I was so proud showing her all the buildings and telling her all the stories about such a great part of my life.” He was also excited to bring back to Beijing some Deerfield apparel for his two-year-old daughter, Jacqueline. “She looks great in it!” //

POCUMTUCK THROWBACK

I feel it’s very important to be the voice to represent not just the students, alumni, and parents from China and Asia in general, but also the community that might be interested in attending Deerfield. 67

I N S P I R E

C R E A T E

C H A L L E N G E

WHAT IS THE EXPERIMENTORY? The Experimentory is a fantastic opportunity for students currently in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade to sample Deerfield Academy. The Experimentory is an innovative program that allows students to delve into project-based, creative learning and focuses on collaboration, communication, fostering creativity, building character, and developing how we look at the world.

E X P lore <<<more

’09

MORGAN EVANS

FASHION JOURNALIST /// b y D a n i e l l a Vo l l i n g e r ///

Morgan Evans ’09 packed lightly for her first year at Deerfield. After all, she did not intend to stay. Used to short days-long evacuations, Morgan only took a small wardrobe with her when her family left New Orleans in August of 2005, ahead of Hurricane Katrina. The ninth grader found herself displaced from a family home (to which she would never return) and staying in a Houston hotel when her father, Sydney “Skip” Evans ’73, accepted an invitation to temporarily relocate his family to Deerfield’s main campus for the fall semester. “We were known as ‘The Hurricane Family’ around campus,” laughs Morgan, her exuberant personality effervesces over the phoneline—she’s on the Portugal leg of a weeks-long vacation that ends with a stay in Paris, where she will likely cover Paris Fashion Week. “I just walked into my first day of Deerfield with a Limited Too sweater and jeans and a weird necklace,” recalls the fashion journalist. “They made an announcement about my family at School Meeting that week—I was that weird hurricane refugee girl hanging around—but everybody was so nice.”

Morgan’s father, who served on Deerfield’s Board between 2005 and 2015, enrolled at Deerfield while his father, a professor, taught abroad in Africa. “He loved it!” says Morgan of her father’s time as a Deerfield student. Skip Evans was the first African American sports captain at Deerfield (football) and helped with the Black Student Coalition. “He’s just an iconic person of color for the Academy,” she notes. Morgan remembers her father dragging her and her sister, Taylor Evans ’12, along to Deerfield events as kids. “We grew up going to Choate days when we were kids, and growing up in New Orleans, as kids going to Boston for a weekend, we hated it. We just didn’t understand it.” Before the year ended, the Evans family relocated to Washington, DC, where Morgan’s younger sister enrolled at Sidwell Friends. Given the option to remain at Deerfield or move with the family, Morgan decided to stay. By the time the first frost had settled over the valley, Morgan had become so close with all the girls in the Ashley dormitory that it was inconceivable that she boarded elsewhere once her family departed from their campus apartment. And when she wasn’t in Ashley, the self-professed drama and art nerd lived in the Blackbox theater or in the AP Arts studio. Through every challenge that comes her way—and in journalism, there are many—Morgan has a knack for seeing the upside and adapting. Due to struggling in a course while at Syracuse University, where she was studying fashion design and studio art, she decided to lean into her other strengths and switch to a major in communications. This move eventually led to her career in fashion journalism. “I was a straight-A design student but not passing actual construction and sewing,” notes Morgan as she recalls the pivot to a minor for students who wanted a career on the other side of fashion: fashion PR, fashion writing, fashion magazines, and fashion journalism. “I needed to find something I could meld all my skills into, and English was my best subject, even though I’m dyslexic.” (She was diagnosed during sophomore year at Deerfield.) “I have to work twice as hard as the average person in this industry,” says Morgan, noting the challenges of dyslexia. “It’s hard for me, but I’ve been able to be successful despite having a learning disability. I think it’s important that people know that, especially people who think they can’t do many things because of a disability they may have.” While at Syracuse, Morgan launched her fashion blog, The Miz Factor, where she would critique celebrity fashion and cover award shows, red carpets, and celebrity fashion and trends. “The Miz is short for miserable because I was always judging everyone’s fashion, and everyone called me a walking E! News,” laughs Morgan as she describes the blog that landed her an interview with Buzzfeed after college. Again, finding opportunity amidst challenge, Morgan found her way into the University of Southern California’s 40-person journalism graduate program—

where she focused on entertainment—after a rejection from Buzzfeed led to some soul searching. (They wanted someone a little less green.) “I always had something to say. I talk a lot. I write a lot. I know a bunch about the fashion industry. I’ve been called a film and television encyclopedia. I thought to myself: ‘I know more than the average person about these things, and I think I would be good at reporting them.’” After catching the entertainment bug while cutting her teeth on red carpets as a production assistant for the Associated Press (AP) during graduate school, Morgan moved to the AP’s London office, covering numerous red carpets. She has interviewed dozens of celebrities, from A-list actors and musicians to supermodels and reality stars: Zendaya, Kim Kardashian, Kendall Jenner, John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, Viola Davis, Michael B. Jordan, Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Gabrielle Union, Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively, Paris and Nicky Hilton, and more. Finding herself back in New York working as a digital newsroom reporter for Hearst after the London contract ended, Morgan recalls how she ended up the designated royals reporter for the Hearst digital newsroom team (and subsequently for PEOPLE, where she worked as a royals reporter and writerturned-editor). “I was one of the few people in the Hearst office at the time who was watching Suits live,” she recalls, noting that she was the only one who knew anything about Meghan Markle. “They said, ‘You need to write about Meghan Markle,’ and I said, ‘I can do it in my sleep!’” Morgan’s favorite time of year is Fashion Week. As a freelance fashion contributor, she enjoys sitting in the front row at her favorite designers’ shows—Christian Siriano, Patbo, and Sergio Hudson, to name a few—attending parties and writing only about what interests her these days. After racing from one event to another for a decade, filing stories between backto-back parties, Morgan has paid her dues. “When I look back, I see that I have done a lot, and I’m proud, but this industry always keeps going, and I feel there is so much left that I have to do that I haven’t done.” And the answer to the question everyone wants to know: Yes, being a fashion journalist does come with a generous share of perks: the option to pull outfits from designers, and invitations to glamourous events. And yes, Anna Wintour’s presence is formidable, but you get used to her. Morgan recalls her first day in the office as the first-ever Commerce Editor at Vanity Fair: She took the elevator up to her new office—which also happened to be on Vogue’s floor—when none other than Ms. Wintour stepped on. Not one to usually be at a loss for words, Morgan could barely muster a quick “Hi” as she hurried off to her office. “I’ve been in this industry for almost a decade, and I’ve been on red carpets and at awards shows, and I’ve interviewed pretty much everybody in terms of celebrities these days, and Anna Wintour will still get you.” //

CE R

PAUL YAGER’S 100 th SHOW AFTERPARTY AT THE INN! TECH CREW ALUMNI ASSEMBLED!

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Deerfield’s own 1970’s

Holdovers FROM THE ARCHIVES

IN MEMORIAM

James “Jim” Howard Marksbury Jim Marksbury died on September 14, 2023, at home in Chapel Hill, NC. He was 83. Jim escaped New England winters 20 years ago, following retirement from a long and cherished career at Deerfield. He joined the Academy in 1969 and held positions as an administrator (including in the alumni department) and an English instructor. Jim was happiest in the classroom. He especially loved introducing his students to the classic poets and authors of Enlightenment England, whom he never tired of reading and reciting. Students were drawn to Jim’s lively conversation, sense of humor, wealth of knowledge, and genuine care for their well-being. In 1980 he was recognized by the graduating class as an honorary member. His love of teaching and of the Academy blessed him with many exciting experiences, including attending the royal wedding of King Abdullah II of Jordan ’80 in Amman as the king’s guest. During his years in alumni relations, Jim served as editor-in-chief of the Academy’s alumni magazine, transforming it into an award-winning publication that truly captured Deerfield’s identity and mission. A social butterfly at heart, he organized the annual alumni reunions on campus as well as smaller alumni events across the country, delighting in the time spent with graduates. Jim was born and reared in the Appalachian region of southern Ohio by Grace A. and Howard Marksbury. He was the first member of either family to attend college, earning both his Bachelor of Arts (1964) and his Master of Arts (1966) at Ohio University. After completing his degrees, Jim taught English at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, where he met his wife, Judi Hurelle. Jim and Judi remained married for 31 years and had one son, John, Deerfield Class of ’96. Jim loved politics and became involved in Eugene McCarthy’s campaign for president in 1967. He next worked as a legislative aide in Washington, DC, for Congressman Henry S. Reuss of Milwaukee, chair of the House Banking Committee. From there it was off to Deerfield to fulfill his true calling. In addition to his work at Deerfield, Jim was a contributing writer to Delta Airlines Sky magazine, which published his articles on literature and men’s fashion. After retiring and relocating to Durham, NC, he taught several continuing education courses at Duke University. Jim’s wit, curiosity, and love of the arts will be remembered by all who knew him, and his spirit continues to inspire many. He leaves his son, John C. II ’96, and his wife, Kelly, of Saint Louis, MO; his brother, John C. of Truro, MA, and Palm Springs, CA, and his spouse, Chuck Steinman; and several cousins. A memorial service is being planned for the spring of 2024. — Excerpted from The Greenfield Recorder / Legacy.com

IN MEMORIAM

1946

1955

1964

James McBrayer Garvey * September 8, 2023

Douglas B. Hamilton Sr. July 4, 2023

William M. Gibby July 4, 2022

1950

1956

1968

David C. D. Rogers September 2, 2023

Ronald Peter Kolinko July 2, 2023

Fletcher L. Bennett August 20, 2023

J. Lewis Taylor July 7, 2023

1957

1971

Joseph Kostiuk Jr. June 28, 2023

David A. Talbott September 19, 2023

1958

1972

Geoffrey B. S. Cavanagh December 16, 2022

Harold B. Watson III July 11, 2023

1951

Charles P. Pydych June 11, 2023 Richard Doyle Rockwell * October 13, 2022 1952

Oliver de M. Putnam June 11, 2023 1954

Henry D. Calam August 26, 2023 Lawrence E. Wright July 20, 2023

1975

Sackett S. Cook August 1, 2023

James Dunwoody Hardee Jr. August 30, 2023

Richard P. Strubel August 6, 2023

Eugene F. Teevens III September 19, 2023

1961

1976

Elon H. H. Marquand January 26, 2021

William R. McGleughlin III August 21, 2023

Fred W. Snook February 12, 2023

Hubert G. Phipps June 18, 2023

* Boyden Society Member In Memoriam as of October 1, 2023. Please go to deerfield.edu/commonroom for the most up-to-date information on classmates, including obituaries.

B& W by JOHN SHERMAN

IN MEMORIAM

EUGENE “BUDDY” TEEVENS ’75 Beloved, trailblazing Dartmouth Football Coach Eugene Francis “Buddy” Teevens III, who revolutionized the game by instituting no-tackle practices, creating the world’s first robotic tackling dummy, and recruiting women to his staff, died on September 19, 2023. He left a powerful and lasting impact on the game, hundreds of players, their families and most everyone he met. Buddy coached at several universities, including Stanford, Tulane, and Maine, but For the past 26 summers, Buddy and his wife spent two sweltering weeks in Thibodaux, found his greatest satisfaction and success LA, helping to run the elite Manning Passing Academy, which he started alongside the at his alma mater Dartmouth College. He famous family of quarterbacks. Patriarch Archie Manning called Buddy “the rock” of was a graduate of the class of 1979, where he the program. “I would have loved to have played football for Buddy.” His son, former was known for his extraordinary athleticism, New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning, posted on social media, “I have known Coach endless energy, kindness, and humility. At since I was 12 years old when I attended Tulane football camp. There is not a better man.” Deerfield, with Buddy leading the way, the Buddy was the first college football coach to eliminate traditional tackling from 1974 football team had an undefeated season practices, instead simulating tackles with a remote-controlled robotic dummy called the and earned a New England Championship. MVP (Mobile Virtual Player) invented at his direction by Dartmouth’s engineering school. Subsequently, Buddy was Ivy Player of the The policy reduced injuries at Dartmouth by 80 percent and has been adopted by youth Year at quarterback and a leader on Dartprograms nationwide. The MVP device is used at every level of the game, including by mouth’s NCAA Final Four hockey team. NFL teams. During a hearing on concussions in youth sports in 2016, Buddy told Congress, He went on to serve two stints as Dart“I love football. But I love my players more.” mouth’s head football coach, in both cases Buddy also was a pioneer in hiring women, two of whom, Callie Brownson and Jennifer taking a program at the bottom of the league King, are currently coaching in the NFL. Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a tribute to winning five Ivy League titles. He further to Buddy at the start of the 2023 NFL Draft, “His impact both on college football and the distinguished himself as a guardian for his NFL has been enormous.” players’ safety, classroom performance, and The eight football teams in the Ivy League wore decals with Buddy’s initials on their overall personal growth. Dartmouth Athletic helmets this fall in tribute to his contributions. Buddy saw diversity as a strength and Director Mike Harrity told The Athletic, worked tirelessly to recruit players of color on his teams. He reached out to classmate “People will tell you that he’s one of the best Lafayette Ford to create the visionary Dartmouth Football Minority Mentorship Program. educators that this campus has ever seen. His Buddy Teevens was known nationwide for his ties to the game of football, but to those classroom just happens to be the football field.” in his orbit, he was known simply as one of the most thoughtful human beings they had Born in Pembroke, MA, in 1956, Buddy ever met. He treated bus drivers as respectfully as CEOs. Tyrone Byrd was on the 1970 was the second oldest of nine children. His championship Dartmouth football team and found a kindred spirit in Teevens. He became sports-obsessed siblings recall working hard an informal advisor on several fronts, including diversity. “I can honestly and proudly say and playing hard. He was known for sparking that I have never met a more genuine, honest, self-disciplined, kinder and giving person mischief, but also as a role model for his than Coach T.” younger siblings. A favorite fact among Buddy’s friends and players was that in the early mornings after Buddy remained a lifelong athlete who each New Hampshire snowstorm, it was the coach who was out shoveling the “D” logo conditioned himself as hard as his players. at midfield, so that it wasn’t buried. Not that many people would be seeing his work. He exercised daily, and in recent years, biked It was just a point of pride. across the country from San Diego to New Buddy had many favorite sayings and habits. After a loss, his motto was “A&I”: adjust England. His death came just shy of his 67th and improvise. And he finished his emails and texts with the same four letters. This signature sign-off is one that many will be using in the wake of this loss: “Tx, BT.” Thanks, birthday, October 1, and six months after he Buddy Teevens. For your history-making, hard-working, deep-loving life. Coach Teevens’ was injured while biking in St. Augustine, FL, fierce passion for the game and his players was surpassed only by that for his family. In where he and his wife Kirsten have a second home. He also took great pleasure in spending addition to his wife, Kirsten, he is survived by a daughter, a son, and four grandchildren. time with his grandchildren, fishing, swimming His loss is also mourned by his mother, Mary, and his siblings. A Celebration of Buddy’s Life will be held in the spring. in the ocean, and wood carving; whales were —Excerpted from The Boston Globe / Legacy.com a specialty.

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“THE NEED” FROM THE THEATER DEPARTMENT The script for Dracula, A Feminist Revenge Tragedy, calls for a burlap sack that Dracula throws to his two “vampire wives.” Inside the sack is meant to be a baby for the wives to feed on. Cast and crew thought it would be fun (and ghoulish in the spirit of Halloween!) if the sack squirmed. Technical Director Paul Yager thought it would be a great puzzle for Deerfield’s Robotics Team to figure out, and thus a collaboration was set in motion. A number of prototypes were built and the team finally settled on a robot that was perfectly proportioned and wriggly. The audiences’ reaction was great when they saw Dracula swinging the bag: At first they were alarmed, and then they tried to figure out how it was done.

“THE TECH SOLUTION” FROM THE ROBOTICS CLUB + TEACHER MEGAN HAYES-GOLDING Enter Dracula from stage right. He’s holding a burlap sack that twitches, suggesting something squirming inside, but what? Is it alive? “Share!” Dracula instructs as he tosses the bag to two hungry vampires. They eagerly peer inside. As the top of the bag opens, a noise escapes to the crowd: crying. Specifically, a baby crying. But in order to achieve this effect, we need a screaming baby. Could a robot be the solution to this stage illusion? The robot baby is built on an aluminum channel frame, the sort typically used for competitive robotics. At each corner is a servo motor, its wires snaking to baby’s “brain,” a microcontroller. Branching out from the servos are end effectors. The robotics team, accustomed to aluminum and lots of tidy angles, stretched outside their comfort zone to salvage limbs from a baby doll. End effectors that look like feet and hands? Yes please. The cyborg-looking robot baby looks convincing from a distance and most importantly can act through a burlap sack. Robot baby’s program commanded the microcontroller to select an angle between 0° and 180° at random for each of the limbs and then move into position. Each limb moved independent of the other and the extra-long limbs were easy to spy through the burlap sack.

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