The Exeter Bulletin, winter 2018

LEAP YEAR AS AMERICA LURCHED THROUGH 1968, EXETER LOOKED WITHIN

ALEX WILLIAMSON

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The Exeter Bulletin

Principal Instructor Lisa MacFarlane ’66 (Hon.); P’09, P’13 Editor Karen Ingraham Associate Editor Genny Beckman Moriarty Contributing Editor Patrick Garrity Class Notes Editor Janice M. Reiter Creative Director/Design David Nelson, Nelson Design Communications Advisory Committee Daniel G. Brown ’82, Robert C. Burtman ’74, Dorinda Elliott ’76, Alison Freeland ’72, Keith Johnson ’52, Yvonne M. Lopez ’93 Trustees President John A. Downer ’75 Vice President Wole C. Coaxum ’88 Suzi Kwon Cohen ’88, Marc C. de La Bruyere ’77, Walter C. Donovan ’81, Mark A. Edwards ’78, Claudine Gay ’88, Peter A. Georgescu ’57, David E. Goel ’89, Jacqueline J. Hayes, Esq. ’85, Jennifer P. Holleran ’86, Lisa MacFarlane, Sally J. Michaels ’82, Deidre O’Byrne ’84, Dr. Nina D. Russell ’82, Peter M. Scocimara ’82, Serena Wille Sides ’89, J. Douglas Smith ’83, Morgan C. Sze ’83, Kristyn M. Van Ostern ’96 and Nancy H. Wilder ’75 The Exeter Bulletin (ISSN No. 0195-0207) is published four times each year: fall, winter, spring and summer,

by Phillips Exeter Academy 20 Main Street, Exeter NH 03833-2460 Telephone 603-772-4311 Periodicals postage paid at Exeter, NH, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA by Cummings Printing.

The Exeter Bulletin is printed on recycled paper and sent free of charge to alumni, parents, grandparents, friends, and educational institutions by Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH. Communications may be addressed to the editor; email bulletin@exeter.edu.

Copyright 2018 by the Trustees of Phillips Exeter Academy.

ISSN-0195-0207 Postmasters: Send address changes to: Phillips Exeter Academy Records Office 20 Main Street Exeter, NH 03833-2460

WINTER

“1967-68 FELT LIKE THE YEAR THE WORLD INTRUDED ON EXETER, AND EXETER RESPONDED.” —page 22

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IN THIS ISSUE

Volume CXXIII, Issue no. 2

Features 22 Leap Year

DAMIAN STROHMEYER

As America lurched through 1968, Exeter looked within

By Melanie Nelson

28 Exeter Innovates

New courses challenge old constructs

By Nicole Pellaton and Genny Beckman Moriarty

34 Tropical Depression Remembering life after Hurricane Katrina

By David Williams ’07

Departments

DAVID NELSON

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Around the Table

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Table Talk with Larry Paul ’82

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Inside the Writing Life: English Instructor Matt Miller

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Sports: Rebecca Nevitt ’84 swims the English Channel. Plus, fall sports roundup.

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Connections: News and Notes from the Alumni Community

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Alumni Profiles: Joe O’Donnell ’63, Owen Brown ’73, Emily Germain Shea ’83, and a tribute to Kerry Landreth Reed ’91.

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Finis Origine Pendet: “A Good Day on the Ice,” by Peter Anderson, former George Bennett Fellow

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—Cover illustration by Alex Williamson

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—photograph by Christian Harrison

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AROUND THE TABLE

What’s new and notable at the Academy

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What We Must Ask of Ourselves

By Principal Lisa MacFarlane ’66 (Hon.); P’09, P’13

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he Assembly Hall is hushed as each student standing on stage takes the microphone from a peer and speaks.

“My name is Janalie … I do this work to make sure that everything that happened in the past, happened for a reason.”

“My name is Gabby … I do this work to promote compassion.”

“My name is Alexander … I do this work because lives are being lost.”

“My name is Isaac … I am here because I believe in bringing people together.”

We are together in that moment, in that space, for assembly on Jan. 5, the day after a history-making blizzard has blown through campus. Punishing arctic air lingers outside, but inside we are warm, reflective, as the student members of the MLK Day Committee, dressed in black, speak with solemn passion and concise words about the need for equity, justice and inclusion.

The assembly is a preview of our annual MLK Day, to be held the following week. This year’s theme, “Walls, Borders and Boundaries,” grew out of questions raised by the committee of students and adults: questions like, “What are we trying to construct and deconstruct when we put up a wall or boundary?” and “What kind of liberations are necessary for us to survive, to endure, to thrive?”

These are questions worthy of continuous exploration as we embrace not only the extraordinary diversity of our “youth from every quarter” here at the Academy, but also,

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and critically, each individual’s full inclusion, and feeling of welcome: a sense of belonging felt fully and completely by every member of our vibrant community. What must we change, what barriers must we remove, to fully realize this ideal?

In February, we mark the 50th anniversary of the AfroLatinx Society, incorporated in 1968 as the Afro-Exonian Society. In their proposal, the club’s founders state the “cultural problem, no longer racial, demands that people in one culture understand and identify with the people of another culture.”

Their words, like the students’ on the Assembly Hall stage, have a timeless imperative about them, and one that feels increasingly urgent in today’s divisive political environment. On campus, we are exploring these issues through ongoing dialogue and workshops with invited experts, like Lee Bebout, associate professor of English at Arizona State University. He spent a day with faculty and staff discussing whiteness and white identity formation before engaging with students during our MLK Day program. In both settings, he helped Exonians identify ways to talk more openly about race in a context that feels safe and accessible, respectful and frank.

Through these efforts, and ongoing professional development of cultural competency skills, we work to honor those students on stage, and those who came before them; and we anticipate with confidence and eagerness, the next generation. E

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Zachary Iscol ’97 Receives John Phillips Award

By Melanie Nelson

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DAN COURTER

or his tenacity and compassion in helping post-9/11 military veterans secure cost-, stigma- and bureaucracy-free mental health care as well as meaningful employment, combat-decorated former Marine Corps officer Zachary J. Iscol ’97 was honored with the 2017 John Phillips Award at a special assembly last October.

Iscol, who has given assembly talks in 2008 and 2015, served for six and a half years in the United States Marine Corps, including two tours of Iraq. For his bravery in combat during the Second Battle of Fallujah, during which he led a combined unit of 30 American and 250 Iraqi National Guard troops, he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal.

Upon departing the Marines in 2008, Iscol went on to write, produce and direct a film about his wartime experiences and then to found Hirepurpose, a business that helps transitioning service members, veterans and military spouses find fulfilling careers with top American companies.

In 2012, in direct response to the growing rate of suicide among members of his own 3rd Battalion, Iscol, in partnership with the Weill Cornell Medical Center, launched Headstrong, a nonprofit whose mission is to remove barriers to mental health treatment for post-9/11 military veterans suffering from traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, military sexual trauma and other forms of mental illness. Since its inception, Headstrong has treated some 450 veterans and now offers services in eight American cities.

In accepting his honor, Iscol was at turns humorous, self-deprecating and plaintive. He reflected on how friendships at Exeter widened his worldview and later helped him to establish trust with the Iraqi villagers among whom he and the members of his platoon lived. When describing his post-military endeavors, he harked back to Harkness: “The times in my life when I’ve been most successful are when I’ve had co-founders or have been part of a bigger team.”

Inaugurated in 1965 at the behest of the Academy Trustees and the Executive Committee of the General Alumni Association, the John Phillips Award recognizes and honors Exonians whose lives and contributions to the welfare of community, country and humanity exemplify the nobility of character and usefulness to society that John and Elizabeth Phillips sought to promote in establishing the Academy. E

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Zachary Iscol ’97 visited classes after receiving his award.

Watch Iscol’s acceptance remarks at www.exeter.edu/iscol.

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Love Is a Laser Cutter

By Patrick Garrity

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he laser cutter hums quietly while it works,

sawing a creation through a thin piece of wood that might have been a clipboard in an earlier life. Jaime Romero ’19 keeps watch, making sure the laser obeys orders.

Love Is …

Slowly a message takes shape as smoke wisps dance beneath the contraption’s glass enclosure.

It is one of those December afternoons that can’t seem to make up its mind, bathed in sunshine but biting still. The design lab’s open hours have lured a handful of students through the cold to the top floor of Phelps Science Center.

Love Is …

Another line appears. Romero seems satisfied. The upper from Massachusetts is an old pro with the indus-

trial-sized laser cutter. He has used it for class work, but today he’s here just for fun, helping out a friend.

“Happiness is our main priority” reads the message on the back of his Ewald dorm hoodie. It is suitable attire for today’s task.

Love Is Love …

The laser finishes its chore. Romero lifts the cover and retrieves his handiwork. The aroma of burning wood prevails as he peers straight through the board where the laser has carved composer Lin-Manuel Miranda’s

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Jaime Romero ’19 works on the scroll saw.

poignant words from an unforgettable Tony Awards acceptance speech.

Another student jumps onto the Mac computer connected to the laser cutter. The laser and the 3-D printer are the stars of this 21st-century shop classroom.

A band saw, a scroll saw and a drill press stand nearby, the less flashy utility players of the space. The lab is the manifestation of a growing maker culture at Exeter.

Learning how things are made, designing them with your brain, then actually building them with your hands has stretched the traditional Harkness classroom model.

Curiosity and creativity have many outlets, after all.

Some require a band saw.

Shepherding the open hours of the lab is Nico Gallo.

He’s a maker himself, a recent University of New Hampshire graduate with a mechanical engineering degree and a passion for art. Gallo serves as troubleshooter-in-chief in the lab and a sounding board for the students’ ideas. His boyish looks and easy manner could fool a visitor looking for the boss, but Gallo knows his business, and the students pick his brain frequently.

Reed Ouelette ’18, on the other hand, could easily be confused for the teacher. A full beard and his shirtand-tie earnestness cast the day student from nearby Kingston, New Hampshire, as the grown-up in the room, but he’s really just waiting for his turn on the laser cutter.

His project is a pet one: carving PEA symbols into wooden blocks. His game plan is to dole them out as stocking stuffers to teachers, advisers and others who have helped him navigate the Academy as he makes his way toward graduation.

Ouelette comes to the lab whenever he can. He’s hoping to study in Northeastern University’s celebrated Co-op Program that combines classroom study with realworld experiences.

“I love to be hands-on,” he says. “The shop is my place to be.”

Ouelette is happy to have his lab mates complete their laser work before he takes over; he has 56 blocks to cut.

He’ll be a while.

“I’ve figured out that it takes 22 minutes for a set of four,” he says. He does his English homework as the laser burns a lion rampant into a pine board.

The laser cutter hums. E

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CHRISTIAN HARRISON

ON STAGE

DAVE JAMROG

XITAI CHEN

Performing arts sparkled this fall, with a production of the 17th-century farcical play The Liar, a studentchoreographed dance adaptation of The Nutcracker, and three sold-out performances of the holiday concert at The Bowld.

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Living Non Sibi L A R R Y P A U L ’ 8 2 O N W H Y H I S F AV O R I T E TITLE IS ‘VOLUNTEER’ Melanie Nelson

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t first blush, it would appear that Larry Paul ’82 is in possession of a magical power that allows him to be in multiple places at once. As the managing principal of a family-run private equity firm, Laurel Crown Partners, which he co-founded with his younger brother in 2001, he is generally invested in five to 10 companies at any given time. As if that weren’t enough to keep the average mortal busy, Paul, who holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and an MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, currently serves as director of no fewer than nine corporate boards (most of which are portfolio holdings) while concurrently serving as a board member for Harvard Medical School, the Harvard Alumni Association, Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Institute for the Study of the Economics of Sports and Society at UCLA. Oh, and did we mention that he and his family are the second-largest owners of the Pittsburgh Steelers?

When, one wonders, does the man sleep? Paul laughs.

“I have been fortunate in that my professional life has been very Walter Mittyish. When people ask me if I planned it this way, I say, ‘I wasn’t that smart.’” But while serendipity has certainly played a role, so too have Paul’s own work ethic and formidable intellect.

“Before Exeter, I was fortunate enough to be in a school in Pittsburgh where I was advanced in math and English,” he recalls. “In fact, I was looking at the possibility of graduating high school at 16. Fortunately, my parents felt that there was more to a college experience than the academics. They knew that socially, I just wasn’t ready.”

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Paul, who’d heard of Exeter and Andover, eventually asked his parents if he could visit. “Oddly enough, when I was younger and didn’t behave, they would occasionally threaten to send me away to boarding school. I think they agreed to take me for a look just to humor me,” he says. Soon thereafter, Paul and his father flew to Boston, dined at Durgin-Park and made their way to New Hampshire.

“I saw Exeter first and just loved it,” Paul reminisces. “The tour was amazing; the campus was extraordinary; the students were mature, but still kids. I walked away thinking it’d been a very positive experience … that I could do this.”

Exeter did not disappoint. From the moment he arrived as a new lower in the fall of 1979, Paul reflects that he found the Academy “just amazingly invigorating, stimulating and exciting. I loved the emphasis not just on book learning, but on interactive learning … life learning.” The simultaneous distilling and instilling of community values and obligations were equally paramount.

“Exeter prompted the transition from ‘It’s all about me’ to ‘It isn’t all about me.’ I remember being in Lamont [Paul’s lower year dormitory], and one of my dorm mates was looking at a very late night of studying, and I felt this responsibility to ease his burden. It was this sense of ‘I understand you need help, and I have the time and desire to help you, and there’s no need for you to be up alone until 2 a.m. doing an assignment when we can stay up together and get it done by midnight.’ Non sibi wasn’t just an intellectual concept at Exeter, but something we lived in real time, in real life.”

That deep sense of compassionate accountability has been a driving force for Paul ever since, from his choice to attend medical school, to his later work in life sciences banking, to his copious volunteer work, perhaps most notably with the Red Cross. Indeed, in late October 2017, in recognition of his broad and deep contributions to the American Red Cross over 15 years of service, Paul was presented the Harriman Award for Distinguished Volunteer Service, the highest national honor bestowed by the organization.

In her introduction of him at the awards ceremony, Chairman of the Board Bonnie McElveen-Hunter described Paul, who led the United States delegation to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent statutory meetings in Kenya in 2009 and was one of the first “boots on the ground” Red Cross volunteers in Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake, as “an expression of love and what it means to mankind.”

While he is clearly proud of the honor, Paul, who is also genuinely self-effacing, is quick to shift the focus, and kudos, back to the organization, its volunteers and its impact on those whom the Red Cross calls “the least, the last and the lost.”

Accepting the award, he noted that the Red Cross is “comprised of inspiring people who have figured out how to turn tasks that some might see as ordinary or mundane into something that really is changing the world — one act of kindness, one meal, one needle stick, one pint of blood, one hug, one person at a time.” E

“NON SIBI WASN’T JUST AN INTELLECTUAL CONCEPT AT EXETER, BUT SOMETHING WE LIVED IN REAL TIME, IN REAL LIFE.”

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What We’re Reading W H AT F A C U LT Y A N D S TA F F A R E R E A D I N G ( O R L I S T E N I N G T O , O R WAT C H I N G ) O U T S I D E O F T H E I R C L A S S R O O M S A N D O F F I C E S What book are you most looking forward to reading in the new year?

CLASSICS INSTRUCTOR MATTHEW HARTNETT

SCIENCE INSTRUCTOR SCOTT SALTMAN

In Why Bob Dylan Matters, by Richard F. Thomas, a classicist traces the influence of ancient Greece and Rome on Bob Dylan’s lyrics and argues that his controversial 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature is well deserved. I became a student of the classics in high school and a fan of Dylan’s in college, so this book brings together two of my long-standing passions.

I’m planning on finishing up Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. I was a chaperone for the Equal Justice Initiative trip to Montgomery, Alabama, over Thanksgiving break, and the stories told in this book help to complete my understanding of our activities and experiences. I also hope to pick up Dan Brown’s Origin in the new year.

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT CHAIR NAT HAWKINS

I am looking forward to reading Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Roy’s second novel, it spans decades and chronicles some of the most violent times in India’s modern history. Roy plays with traditional gender roles in this work, something that I find especially compelling. I am fascinated by Indian history, mostly its colonial legacy, and I look forward to understanding its more recent post-colonial struggles through this work.

I am currently re-reading Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings. Its intensity and complexity demands a second reading, and I have proposed a senior elective focusing on James and this novel. Next up is George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, which I am looking forward to because I enjoy his sharp and quirky short stories. This is his first novel.

DIRECTOR OF GLOBAL INITIATIVES EIMER PAGE

In recent weeks, I read The Hate U Give because I heard Rev. Heidi Heath giving it a huge thumbs-up and because the author is coming to Exeter this spring. I also read a well-worn copy of All the Light We Cannot See after I found it in the Dunbar library. The student notations were fascinating, and I’d love to teach both texts.

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MODERN LANGUAGES INSTRUCTOR VIVIANA SANTOS

MODERN LANGUAGES INSTRUCTOR AMADOU TALLA

I am reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe because I wanted to truly understand the origin of the Uncle Tom stereotype. I am almost at the end of the novel, but it is surprising to see how different the real Tom is from the popular perception of representing a sellout in the black community. I also realize how deeply the book has perpetuated some of the stereotypes against people of African descent, although it is considered an abolitionist novel. E

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E/A WEEKEND: A TRADITION WITHOUT RIVAL Crisp weather couldn’t cool the enthusiasm for a terrific day of Exeter-Andover athletic competition. Big Red triumphed in boys soccer and girls volleyball and fought to a draw in girls soccer. Scores of parents, alumni — including dozens from the class of 2017 — and supporters reveled in the most storied high school rivalry in America.

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAMIAN STROHMEYER UNLESS NOTED

PATRICK GARRIT Y

CHRISTIAN HARRISON

CAMPUS LIFE AT A GLANCE

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EXETER DECONSTRUCTED T H E S C H O O L W E L O V E I N D E TA I L

ACADEMY POST OFFICE

Stevan Dohanos, father of Peter ’49 and Paul ’50, was the Academy’s artist-inresidence for two weeks in 1951 when he painted the original of a SATURDAY EVENING POST COVER (top) showing the delights of receiving a package from home. Students depicted were Harry B. Duane ’50 (with cake), and James P. Felstiner ’50, George F. Russell ’50, Stephen M. Bolster ’51, C. Grady Green ’51, and Thomas A. Whedon ’51. The original now hangs in the College Counseling Office.

THE ACADEMY’S POST OFFICE has had several homes since its first incarnation, likely in the mid19th century. It was housed in the basements of Abbot Hall and the Academy Building and, briefly, in a little schoolhouse at the back of Peabody Hall that served as the student union in the 1920s and ’30s. It moved to the first floor of Jeremiah Smith Hall in 1931, where it remained for 75 years until the opening of the Academy Center.

THE NEW SPACE IN JEREMIAH SMITH boasted 200 additional letter boxes, designed to be tamper proof, but the Academy postmistress missed getting to know the boys as they mingled in the old spot near Grill while awaiting their daily deliveries.

A 1933 headline in The Exonian describes her feelings thus: “New Post Office Improvement but Mrs. Hudson Preferred Old.” (v. clxvi, n. 19, June 14, 1933) The post office also served as the Academy’s LOST-AND-FOUND for many years. Announcements like this one from 1915 ran regularly in the The Exonian: “The following articles have been reported to the post office as lost during the past week: one New 7 School Algebra, one pair of rubber grips, two copies of Memoires d’un Collegien, one Chardenai’s French Course, one gold watch, one American History, one Junior English book, and one Wooley’s Handbook of Composition.” (v. cxiii, n. 12, Oct. 30, 1915) Today, the post office is once again housed inside a community hub, located in the east wing on the first floor of the ACADEMY CENTER. And while handwritten letters may have been more prevalent in Mrs. Hudson’s day, Mail Room Supervisor Joseph Goudreault and his co-workers remain integral to the life of the school: Processing mail for nearly 1,600 students and employees, “PO Joe” and his team handle 40,000 boxes and 100,000 envelopes a year.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF PEA ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

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All Writing is Empathy A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H E N G L I S H I N S T R U C T O R M AT T W. M I L L E R

By Daneet Steffens ’82

M

att W. Miller, now in his 11th year of teach-

to launch from there. I really wanted to pursue it. Then, as an undergrad, I thought, “This is stupid, writing is not practical, it is not logical. I’m going to try to do something else more practical.” Because I had a very practical family, not a lot of people in the arts in my family, and I respected them a lot. So, I put it away.

DAMIAN STROHMEYER

ing at Exeter, is also an award-winning poet and avid surfer. His third collection, The Wounded for the Water, is due out in February, and like his previous collections, it contains poems that hinge on the highly personal, from his father’s health and his daughter’s waterlogged sneakers to childhood friends and dorm duty. He also writes eloquently about inanimate objects (“The Beauty of a Nail”), and his poetry never feels self-involved: It’s a palpable form of connection. His poems — invitational, concrete, empathetic — linger with the reader, vivid and thought-provoking.

Q: When did you first discover your love of poetry?

Miller: I always liked writing and reading stories, but I remember in Ms. Matika’s 9th grade English class discovering Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” I had been all about big long books, and here was this eight-line poem that pretty much summed up me, my experience in the world. It’s about a guy dreaming during an astronomy lecture instead of listening to the science, and he starts floating through the stars and the cosmos, and I thought, “Yeah, I feel like that when I’m in class sometimes, like I’m just going to kind of depart. How did this guy do that in just eight lines?” And then, I think I was in high school, probably listening to The Doors a lot, and I went into a bookstore to buy a Jim Morrison book of poetry, of all things. But I also bought this other poet I had heard of — Sylvia Plath. Arial was the first real book of poetry that I bought, and I thought, “What is this?” It was doing something I couldn’t believe, and my love of poetry also started

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But I started getting more and more miserable, and you know, if you’re not doing the thing that you love, you start to die a little bit inside. I was playing football in college and didn’t have much time to write or read stuff outside of class. Then I got hurt in my senior year and suddenly I had all this time, and I started reading and writing again, and I thought, “I think I have to do this with my life or I won’t have a life worth having.”

Q: Who are your current favorite poets?

Miller: Huge question! There are some younger poets, just starting to bubble forth. Malachi Black, who is teaching at [the University of] San Diego, is amazing. Brandon Courtney, who I invited here, is a Navy veteran and a poet. Meg Day, she’s doing incredible work. Tyehimba

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Jess was just here, whose Olio just won the Pulitzer Prize.

And, of course, the poets who do their lit work here — Willie Perdomo, Todd Hearon, Ralph Sneeden, Maggie Dietz, Jill McDonough down in Boston. ... I could go on.

Danez Smith and Aziza Barnes are doing incredible work. ... Now I’m going to feel bad for the names that I don’t mention.

Q: You have a poem in your new collection, “On Nights When I Am My Mother,” with an acknowledgement, “after Meg Day.” What inspired that?

Miller: In her book Last Psalm at Sea Level, [Day] has a number of poems that use that title, “On Nights When I Am … .” There’s one where she’s Amelia Earhart, and another one where’s she’s Brandon Teena on the night he was killed, imagining that headspace. I thought this was a great exercise, and I use it as a prompt for my students: Write from the perspective of someone else, imagine their experience, what it’s like to be in their space. So I wrote one being in my own mother’s head because I know her experience of losing her husband and raising sons and the challenge of that — the challenge of me — of me being her son. I tried to empathize with that. We all can be tough on our folks, and then realize that it’s tough for them sometimes too. I wanted to try to reach across that, gaze into my own flaws.

Q: How does that work as an exercise in your Exeter classes? What kind of responses do you get?

Miller: I get great pieces. Lowers, when they do their roots projects, they research family members and, as opposed to writing about themselves, they reach outside and they often write about grandparents or parents or other relatives — their experience, say, in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. One student had had a great-grandparent who was on the Titanic and survived, but their best friend did not. So that student had to really dig into that time period and experience that fear.

All writing and art, at its core, is about empathy. It’s about reaching across and sharing that common human experience no matter the difference in culture, background, gender, language, sexuality. If you can find a common moment between people, even just by making

the attempt to do that, you’ve done something.

Q: What do you like most about being at Exeter?

Miller: The kids, the classroom, what happens at the table. You just see kids get fired up. They’re tired, they’re working their butts off — they’ve got sports, they’ve got plays, they’ve got music lessons — and they dig into a text like Moby-Dick or Hamlet or Beloved, and you just see their faces go, “Ah” and “Wow” and that’s how it stays fresh.

Anytime you feel something is wearing you down, the classroom reminds you, “This is pretty cool.”

Q: I really loved your sequence “Ordeal by Water” in your new collection. I know we’re not supposed to conflate people with their art, but your poetry feels very personal. Is that something that is intentional or just what happens when you sit down to work?

Miller: I actually wrote “Ordeal by Water” while teaching a class that was doing senior meditation. I was slotted to do a meditation, so I thought I would write it as my students were writing theirs. I knew I’d have to present one but I couldn’t find the form — I was using prose and it was just terrible. And then a girl in the class, she was writing hers as a poem and I thought, “Oh my god, I should try that.” A lot of what I write comes out of personal experience; and digging into what might be significant or universal in that experience. I come from Lowell, Massachusetts, a big town of storytellers. Not all my poems do that, sometimes I get away from that, but then I get drawn back to that story again, that experience, examining my life and what that experience has given me.

When I first became a parent, I wrote a lot about my daughter and the fear, that realization that once you bring a life into the world, you’ve also brought death into the world.

You don’t think about that when you’re becoming a parent, but then they are born and you think, “This person is going to die; I’ve created death by creating life,” and you realize the way those things are combined and connected to each other. And the beauty of that too — this is a precious thing because it will not last. Sometimes I say I’m not going to write about myself, I’m not going to write about personal experiences, and then all of a sudden something comes out and I think, “I did it again!” E

“IT’S ABOUT

REACHING ACROSS

AND SHARING THAT COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE

NO MATTER THE

DIFFERENCE ... .”

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E XO N I A N S

I N

R E V I E W

Alumni are encouraged to advise the Bulletin editor (bulletin@exeter.edu) of their own publications, recordings, films, etc., in any field, and those of classmates, for inclusion in future Exonians in Review columns. Please send a review copy of your published work to the editor to be considered for an extended profile or review in future issues.

Works can be sent to: Bulletin Editor, Phillips Exeter Academy, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833-2460.

ALUMNI

B R I E F LY N OT E D

1949—Millard “Mo” Morrison. Short Stories of Maine. (Amazon Digital Services, 2017)

1962—Larry Palmer. “Urshel: The Beautiful Black Sheep” [excerpt from memoir]. IN Blackbird. (vol. 15, no.

1, spring 2016). Named a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2017, edited by Leslie Jamison. (Mariner Books, 2017)

1961—Geoffrey Craig. The Brave Maiden: The Adventure Poem of Our Time. (Prolific Press, 2017) 1962—Paul Wilson. How Inventions Really Happen: The Sewing Machine Story, in Five Lives. (Dog Ear Publishing, 2017)

1990—John Palfrey. Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education. (MIT Press, 2017) 1990—André Landau-Remy, coauthor. From Germany to Brazil: Our Family’s Story. (CreateSpace, 2017)

1981—Claudia Putnam [former Bennett Fellow]. “As the Wind Comes Among Us” [poem]. IN bosque.

(December 7, 2017) FAC U LT Y/ F O R M E R FAC U LT Y Patrick Lacroix. “Reformation and Its Legacy in the U.S.” IN Time.com (October 30, 2017), http://time. com/5002409/martin-luther-500anniversary-1960s/

1962—Harrison Young. The Daughters of Henry Wong. (Ventura Press, 2016)

Erica Plouffe Lazure. “Why We Stole the Disco Ball from Satellite Skate” [story]. IN Southeast Poetry Review. (spring 2018). Received an honorable mention in Southeast Review’s 2017 World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest.

1972—Andrew Rowen. Encounters Unforeseen: 1492 Retold. (Selfpublished, 2017)

—“The Ugly Rug,” IN Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine. (vol. 10.2, October 2017)

1979—David Bell. Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present. (Oxford University Press, 2016) 1997—Bruce D. Edwards. The 14 Virtues of the Good Father: Navigational Tools for the Father Inside Every Man. (Archway Publishing, 2016) 1985—Langdon Cook. Upstream: Searching for Wild Salmon, from River to Table.

(Ballantine Press, 2017)

1995—Jason Jay, co-author. Breaking Through Gridlock: The Power of Conversation in a Polarized World.

(Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2017) 1999—Bryan Lowe. Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan.

(University of Hawai’i Press, 2017) 2013—Ross Baird.

The Innovation Blind Spot: Why We Back the Wrong Ideas — and What to Do About It. (BenBella Books, 2017)

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Alex Myers. “The (Boy) Scout I Never Was” [essay]. IN Salon. (October 21, 2017) —“How #MeToo Taught Me I Can Never Be a Man” [essay]. IN them.

(November 28, 2017) —“The End of Impersonation” [essay].

IN River Styx magazine. (issue 99) Matt Miller. “Mulch” [poem]. IN Salamander. (November 2017), http:// salamandermag.org/mulch/.

Allan Wooley ’54. The Curmudgeon’s Quests. (Book Venture Publishing, 2017)

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S P O RTS

Channeling a Goal R E B E C C A N E V I T T ’8 4 C O N Q U E R S S W I M M I N G ’S T R I P L E C R OW N

By Craig Morgan ’84

R

ebecca Nevitt ’84 shrugged off myriad chal-

lenges in her quest to complete the triple crown of open-water swimming: a bathing rattlesnake in a canyon lake in Arizona, excruciating foot cramps on her swim around Manhattan, shifting currents that pushed her off course in Maui, and a curious blue shark, which crossed the bow of the boat just after she had swum past, in the waters off California’s Catalina Island.

As she approached the French coast near Wissant at the end of a 21-mile swim across the English Channel on Aug. 1 last year, her quest delivered one final, psychological test. “They’re never quite sure what the currents will do at the very end, so it can be extremely long,” says

Channel, the 20-mile crossing to Catalina Island off Los Angeles, and the grueling 20 Bridges Swim, a 28-mile lap around Manhattan.

GETTING HER FEET WET

Nevitt served as captain of the swim team at Exeter and later at Wellesley College. She stuck with the sport after school to maintain her fitness and to carve out meaningful solo time, but her pursuit of open-water achievement began 10 years ago when she swam a leg of the Maui Channel Relay from Lanai to Maui. “It’s a really beautiful swim; the water is so clear,” says Nevitt, who provides visual research and treatments for film, television and

TONY MANZELLA

Rebecca Nevitt ’84 swam around the island of Manhattan in 2015.

Nevitt, whose husband, Tony Manzella, was in a nearby escort boat with an English captain to feed, encourage and monitor her. “You can see the coast for hours and it looks like you are very close, but you have to swim alongside of it because of the currents.

“I think at one point I stopped and said, ‘I don’t know how far I have to go. Is it an hour? Is it four hours?’ The captain just looked at me and said, ‘Probably not four.’”

Nevitt is one of 1,834 solo swimmers to complete the English Channel crossing, walking ashore and posing for pictures while shivering after a 14 1/2-hour swim that began at midnight in Dover, England. The feat earned her membership into a far more exclusive club: She is one of only 168 people to conquer the English

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advertising clients. “It was one of the first times that I had really swum out in the middle of the ocean. I thought it was amazing to be that immersed in nature and I realized that I wanted to do more of that.

“My inspiration was the English Channel. It’s something that was always out there. It’s kind of like the Mount Everest of swimming, and I knew that I wanted to do it, but it takes a lot of resources and a lot of time.”

It also requires disciplined training and adherence to strict rules. Swimmers must wear the same bathing suit (no wet suits or bodysuits) and the same cap, and they cannot touch other humans while completing the swim.

“The idea is we’re all swimming without any assistance in terms of flotation or retaining heat,” says Nevitt,

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COURTESY REBECCA NEVITT

was submerged by several waves before finding her whose husband perfected the art of tossing bottles of rhythm. Nevitt gave herself tasks to occupy her mind and food, tied to a rope, so that they would land within easy make sure she wasn’t experiencing hypothermia, which reach for what she calls her “feedings” at 30-minute can dull cognitive function. For the first three hours, intervals. “The English Channel is generally pretty she reminded herself of the gratitude she felt toward cold, but I was lucky because it was 63, 64 degrees for Manzella for supporting this venture, and for being on the my swim, which is considered very warm,” she says. rocky boat that night. For hours “In general, people would have four through six, she thought hypothermia after a few hours about how hard she had trained in those temperatures, so you to get to this place. As she neared have to get used to it. You have to the midpoint of the swim, she have completed a six-hour swim watched for boats to see if they in 60 degrees or lower to show were coming from the opposite you have done enough training to direction, a clear sign she had withstand cold water. It has to be passed the halfway point. Over witnessed and signed.” the final half, her thoughts turned Nevitt, who lives in Los to her dad, her sisters, her mom Angeles, checked the first box and her son. of the triple crown when she All the while, she kept reciting completed the Catalina Channel a simple phrase of encouragein 2014. She rounded Manhattan ment: “I’m brave, I’m strong, I’m in 2015, with an eerie and fast, I’m long.” touching inspiration guiding Nevitt says she received a massive her through those aforementioned foot Nevitt readies to swim outpouring of encouragement from family, cramps. across the Catalina friends and Exeter classmates. She even “My dad [who has passed away] was Channel in 2014. received mail in Dover from her Exeter from Brooklyn,” Nevitt says. “As I went roommate, Alexis Simmons ’84. “It helped me emotionunder Brooklyn Bridge, spontaneously, I started hearing ally that I had told everybody I was doing it and they were him singing in my head: ‘Start spreading the news ... .’ all following me on this tracker on Facebook,” she says. “I I was so happy and so buoyed by that song (“New York, said, ‘You can’t quit now. Everybody is watching.’”

New York”) that it just changed my mindset and it kept When Nevitt finally walked ashore, she was both me going until my feet stopped cramping. I was down elated and exhausted as Frenchmen snapped pictures of on myself for not doing a good job and then I imagined her like swimming paparazzi. my dad, if he were still alive, standing on that bridge. He would have been giggling, happy that I was trying something so crazy. He would have been tickled pink.”

FINDING THE NEXT INSPIRATION Now that she has completed the trifecta, Nevitt has set her sights on an even rarer challenge: the Oceans Seven, SWIMMING THROUGH DARKNESS which includes the frigid North Channel (between Once you commit to swimming the English Channel, you Ireland and Scotland), the Cook Strait (New Zealand), are assigned a boat captain, and your chances of starting the Molokai Channel (Hawaii), the English Channel, the swim are entirely dependent upon the weather and the Catalina Channel, the Tsugaru Strait (Japan) and the tides. Nevitt found herself third on her captain’s list when Strait of Gibraltar (between Spain and Morocco). Seven she arrived in Dover with Manzella and their son, Nico. people have accomplished that feat.

After a couple of restive days, the captain told Nevitt “I’ve already completed Catalina and the English the swimmers ahead of her were not ready. She had her Channel, so I only have five more to go,” she says, laughing. opening between a pair of forecasted storms. “Then he Her passion for swimming, she says, keeps her young. said, ‘You’re fine with night swimming, right?’” Nevitt “When I lifeguarded at the Wellesley College pool, says, laughing. there was a woman who came in every Saturday to “In those few hours, I went out to dinner with my swim,” Nevitt says. “She was in her 90s, and she was family and I don’t think I said a word because I suddenly energetic, happy, healthy, and swimming! We lifeguards realized this was happening. I didn’t think I was going used to say, ‘When I grow up, I want to be like Betty.’ I to be going so quickly. I wasn’t ready and now it was have a long way to go still, but I hope to be as active as happening at night.” she was in my 90s.” E As she plunged into the channel in heavy winds, she

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FALL SPORTS

BOYS SOCCER RECORD: 7-5-5

Head Coach: A.J. Cosgrove Assistant Coaches: Nolan Lincoln, John Hutchins Captains: Silas Lane ’18, Dolapo Adedokun ’18, Jack Baker ’18 MVP: Arian Pilja ’18

BOYS CROSS-COUNTRY RECORD: 1-3 FOURTH PLACE AT INTERSCHOLS

Head Coach: Brandon Newbould Assistant Coaches: Bill Jordan, Nick Unger ’90 Captains: Grayson Derossi ’18, John Martel ’19 MVP: Will Coogan ‘20

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL RECORD: 15-3 SECOND PLACE AT INTERSCHOLS

Head Coach: Bruce Shang Assistant Coaches: Sue Rowe Captains: Margaret Kraus ’18, Charlotte Polk ’18 MVP: Ashley Kim ’18

FOOTBALL RECORD: 1-6

Head Coach: Rob Morris Assistant Coaches: Dave Hudson, Dana Barbin, Rory Early, Patrick Bond, Tim Mitropoulos ’10, Jake Rafferty, Nick LaSpada, Tom Evans Captains: Wyatt Foster ’18, Hans Fotta ’18, Abel Ngala ’18, Nick Swift ’18 MVPs: Samson Dube ’18, Nick Swift

GIRLS CROSS-COUNTRY RECORD: 3-2 THIRD PLACE AT INTERSCHOLS

Head Coach: Gwyn Coogan ’83 Assistant Coaches: Dale Braile, Kitty Fair Captains: Josephine de la Bruyere ’18, Sara Kopunova ‘18 MVP: Ashley Lin ’19

FIELD HOCKEY RECORD: 8-9-1

Head Coach: Liz Hurley Assistant Coaches: Melissa Pacific, Christy Bradley Captains: Hannah Littlewood ’19, Emma Wellington ’18, Catherine Griffin ’19, Johna Vandergraaf ’18 MVP: Clara Geraghty ’21

BOYS WATER POLO RECORD: 13-4 SECOND PLACE AT INTERSCHOLS

Head Coach: Don Mills Assistant Coaches: Avery Reavill ’13 Captains: Taylor Walshe ’18, Jamie Cassidy ’18, Jackson Parell ’18 MVP: Taylor Walshe

GIRLS SOCCER RECORD: 2-12-2

Head Coach: Kevin Bartkovich Assistant Coaches: Alexa Caldwell, Filip Sain Captains: Lauren Arkell ’18, Anna Reaman ’18 MVP: Jennifer Zecena ’18

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PHOTO CREDITS FOOTBALL: WINSLOW TOWNSON BOYS SOCCER: WINSLOW TOWNSON GIRLS SOCCER: DAMIAN STROHMEYER F I E L D H O C K E Y: DA M I A N S T R OY M E Y E R VOLLEYBALL: DAMIAN STROHMEYER B OYS X- C O U N T RY: B R I A N M U L D O O N G I R L S X- C O U N T RY: B R I A N M U L D O O N WATER POLO: BRIAN MULDOON

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LEAP YEAR AS AMERICA LURCHED THROUGH 1968, EXETER LOOKED WITHIN

ALEX WILLIAMSON

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A

photograph of Randy Smith ’68 from the 1968 PEAN supplement may be one of the most apt

visual representations of the competing forces at play in Exonians’ lives during that year of turbulence and transformation. The black-and-white image shows Class Historian Smith in midspeech, gazing downward, his lips forming into a choirboy “O.” He looks appropriately solemn, save for one detail. “At the last minute, I decided to wear a garland of flowers in my hair,” he recalls. It was a subtle nod to hippie culture that was as much parody as solidarity, as one might discern from what Smith calls the “good-boy haircut” underneath.

The garland, it turns out, was both a sign of the times … and a harbinger of changes to come. For as significant, and sometimes traumatic, events unfolded on the national and world stages during that pivotal year of 1968, Exeter was experiencing its own quiet revolution under the leadership of Principal Richard Ward Day. Described by Trustee Emeritus Rob Shapiro ’68, chief executive officer of Ropes Wealth Advisors, LLC, as “very, very pro-student,” Day, a former U.S. Army combat parachutist and Harvard Ph.D. who had arrived at Exeter in the fall of 1964, was a vocal believer in service to others and to country.

Principal Day was eager to “broaden Exeter into the world, and to connect education with the purposeful application of it,” Shapiro says. These goals, coupled with Day’s charge from the Trustees to infuse a new vibrancy into Exeter, primed the school for the major changes of 1968 and beyond.

THE MILIEU

A longtime resident of Manhattan, Smith, today a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, found himself at Exeter thanks, in part, to Time magazine. “My father and stepmother had read a now famous article featured in an October 1962 issue titled, ‘Excellence & Intensity in U.S. Prep Schools.’ They came to view private school as something that would further their ambitions for me. Not incidentally, Exeter, at the time, was regarded as a place that could greatly improve one’s chances of getting into a good college. Something like 55 of us went on to Harvard after graduation.”

Even while Smith’s parents were eager for him to be inculcated in the ways of an elite New England preparatory school, the traditions that for so long had characterized such institutions, and their students, were starting to fray. “It was beginning to be a place of crosscurrents,” Smith explains. “On the one hand we had this great, meritocratic system of learning in Harkness. But it was funded by a fortune that came from Standard Oil and monopoly profits. Some of the animus at the time against places like Exeter stemmed from this notion that a lot of captains of industry were graduates of these private schools or sent their kids there. In some ways, there was a lot of complicity in the stuff that was being rebelled against.”

Like Smith, Lincoln Caplan ’68, the Truman Capote Visiting Lecturer in Law and a senior research scholar in law at Yale Law School, stresses the importance of contextualizing what was or wasn’t happening at Exeter during the ’67-’68 academic year, especially based upon modes of communication then available to students.

“I have to acknowledge how different Exeter was when students didn’t have phones and internet access,” Caplan explains. “Our connection with the outside world was mostly through letters. There were the TV rooms and butt rooms, but those were places that were meant to be a distraction from the events of the day.

People did read the Globe and The New York Times, and some people really attended to the news, but in general, Exeter was much more isolated in terms of communication than it is today. In those days, even Boston felt far away.”

PEAN

Feb. 27 CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite reports on his recent trip to Vietnam, declaring the U.S. war effort “mired in stalemate” and amplifying public skepticism of the war.

Feb. 17 Second Lt. Richard W. Pershing ’61 is killed in action in Vietnam. He is the third Exonian in two weeks to be killed during the Tet offensive. Nearly 17,000 more American soldiers will die before the year’s end.

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Jan. 12 Michigan Gov. George Romney delivers his first major speech of the New Hampshire Republican primary in Thompson Gym, before an audience a CBS News reporter calls “unruly and impolite.”

Jan. 31 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces attack more than 100 cities and outposts in South Vietnam at the start of the Tet holiday, affecting a major turning point for American attitudes toward the war.

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March 5 Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon makes a stop in Exeter before the New Hampshire primary, telling a crowd at Kurtz’s Restaurant, “It’s time for a new leadership to restore respect for America.”

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For his part, Shapiro recalls a school that was still “heavily structured” and governed by a strong sense of decorum. “Even as the world really was changing underneath us, we were going to have our coats and ties,” he muses.

FROM THE OUTSIDE IN

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At the same time that many Exonians were grappling with the Academy’s rigorous academics and compulsory requirements in an environment not yet known for its warmth, major national and world events were unfolding during 1968 in rapid-fire succession. “1967-68 felt like the year the world intruded on Exeter, and Exeter responded,” Caplan recalls. “It was a year when Exeter changed a lot, which had to do with what was happening outside Exeter and, internally, with what was happening between the people who led the school and the students.”

One of the first national calamities came on April 4, 1968, when, while standing on the balcony of his Memphis motel room, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death. “In terms of big events,” says Peter Scheer ’69, an attorney and journalist who served from 2004-16 as the executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, “I do remember that MLK’s assassination sent a shock wave through the community. I recall seeing teachers walking around in the hour or two after the news broke with tears in their eyes, or even openly crying.”

Yet the event engendered more than great sadness at Exeter. According to Julia Heskel and Davis Dyer in After the Harkness Gift: A History of Phillips Exeter Academy since 1930 (2008), King’s assassination prompted a reckoning at the Academy on the subject of civil rights. Less than a month later, on May 1, the school celebrated Human Rights Day, which included discussions, throughout campus, of race relations. By the fall of 1968, it had hired its first black instructor.

Two months and one day after King’s assassination, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, The assassination of Dr. Martin having just delivered his victory speech at the California Democratic primary, was Luther King Jr. ‘sent a shock shot several times by Sirhan Sirhan, and died the following day. Scheer says it furwave through the community,’ ther underscored “the sense that things were coming unglued.” Indeed, nearly remembers Peter Scheer ’69. three months later, on August 28, 1968, thousands of antiwar protestors took to the parks and streets of Chicago to register their collective disgust for the Vietnam War, sparking a violent clash with Chicago Police, Army troops, Illinois National Guardsmen and members of the Secret Service.

Supplying the roiling international backdrop for these seminal national events of 1968, meanwhile, were the three-phase Tet Offensive, which lasted from Jan. 30 to Sept. 23; the Prague Spring, which lasted from Jan. 5 to Aug. 21; and the student demonstrations and worker strikes in France, spanning most of May and June. “It was an exciting and engaging time for young people,” Scheer recalls, “but a frightening time for older people who felt the establishment, of which they were a part, was coming under attack.”

THE CHANGING ROLE OF STUDENTS AT EXETER

As the decade of the ’60s continued to elicit changes both subtle and monumental, Exeter, in its own way, strove to keep up. This was perhaps most evident in the evolving empowerment of students, encouraged by Dick Day,

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May 18-19 A two-day conference examining American involvement in Vietnam is held on campus among 52 representatives from six New England prep schools. The declared purpose is to educate and inspire action “towards combatting this problem.”

April 11 President Johnson signs the Fair Housing Act, banning discrimination in housing on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin.

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April 19 A petition by the Student Council proposing a oneday “teach-in and seminar concerning Vietnam, Black Power and dissent in America as an alternative to classes” is blocked by the faculty.

April 4 Martin Luther King Jr., age 39, is assassinated, sparking rioting in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Newark, Washington, D.C., and hundreds of other cities. Forty-six people die in the unrest. James Earl Ray will be arrested June 27 in England for the slaying.

NYPL

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March 31 President Lyndon Johnson announces he will not seek re-election.

April The Religion Department announces it will admit Exeter High School students, including girls, to its fall classes — a seminal moment in the progression toward co-education.

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March 16 Although it will not become public knowledge for more than a year, U.S. ground troops from Charlie Company rampage through the South Vietnam hamlet of My Lai, killing more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, from infants to the elderly.

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Exeter’s 10th principal, and Edward S. Gleason ’51, who’d returned to Exeter in 1967 to become school minister.

“Dick Day really believed in the democratization of responsibilities at Exeter,” Caplan says. “He and Ted Gleason together had a sense of leadership and of the character of the institution that led them to include students in pretty important decisions in a way that hadn’t been done before.” Among other overtures, Caplan recalls Day inviting students to participate in committees that had previously been the exclusive domain of faculty and trustees.

Three years after Day’s arrival at Exeter, Gleason, who would become an iconic figure to a particular era of Exonians, was hired to replace Frederick Buechner as school minister. Up to and including the beginning of Gleason’s tenure, all students, regardless of their family faith traditions, attended “chapel” in Phillips Church six mornings per week. Yet, guided by new thinking about the dimensions of moral education, as well as advances in the field of developmental psychology, Exeter had been grappling with its mandatory church requirement since at least the early 1960s. By the spring of 1966, a poll taken by the Student Council Religion Committee indicated that “more than 80 percent of the student body was opposed to the church attendance requirement,” according to Heskel and Dyer. In late May of 1968, the Trustees, taking their cues from students and faculty, abolished mandatory church attendance, Lincoln Caplan ’68 says ‘the and what had previously been called “chapel” became “assembly.” world intruded on Exeter’ “In this new era, where the weekly service in Phillips Church was voluntary, Gleason during his senior year at the formed a group called the deacons,” explains Charlie Trueheart ’69, director of the Academy.

American Library in Paris from 2007-17 and current Paris editor for The American Scholar. “We were assistants in Phillips Church, and our main mission was to plan services that would attract students who no longer had to come. We did all of the writing and choreography, and selected the music.”

According to Stephen Thomas ’68, founding director and outgoing head of school at The Oxbow School in Napa, California, Gleason granted his deacons freedom not only in the material they presented at services, but in the atmosphere they created for their fellow students. “Together with Rev. Gleason, the other deacons and I changed a lot about the religious offerings,” Thomas recalls. “We hung Sister Mary Corita’s posters all over the church and unscrewed the pews to create a more egalitarian seating arrangement.”

Beyond this opening up by faculty and administrators to student ideas and opinions, students were increasingly wary of tradition for tradition’s sake. For Trueheart, this was nowhere more powerfully embodied than in the words of his classmate Dan Wolff ’69.

“Dan made a speech one morning in chapel that blew all of us away,” Trueheart remembers. “He challenged the cynical, macho, male shtick at Exeter by talking about love … how he loved his classmates. He essentially shamed us for our hard-bitten cynicism and mistreatment of the weaker among us.

“That talk, ironically, but also not ironically, was called ‘The Revolution.’ It signified that the old ways were behind us, and that this was about joy and love and closeness. It shared a resonance with the Summer of Love, which had happened in 1967.”

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Sept. 9 The Big Mac, previously called the Aristocrat and the Blue Ribbon Burger, is added to the menu of McDonald’s restaurants nationwide.

Aug. 8 Republicans nominate Richard M. Nixon to be their presidential candidate for the second time in eight years.

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Aug. 28 Chicago police clash with Democratic National Convention protestors.

More than 100 people are hospitalized and 175 arrested. A day later, Vice President Hubert Humphrey is chosen as the Democratic nominee for president.

August The total number of American troops deployed to Vietnam peaks at 541,000.

ALAMY

May 22 The Exonian publishes an eight-page supplement, “The New Black at Exeter,” to document the fledgling Afro-Exonian Society. The publication, the editors write, is meant to “clarify for some — and for many, to reveal — the attitudes of Blacks in their efforts to come together at Exeter.”

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June 4-5 Sen. Robert Kennedy addresses a crowd at the Ambassador Hotel in San Francisco after winning the California Democratic primary. As he leaves the stage, Kennedy is shot by Sirhan Sirhan and dies in the early morning of June 6 at the age of 42.

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THE ACADEMY BEGINS TO DIVERSIFY

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On Wednesday, May 22, 1968, The Exonian published a supplement with a main headline reading “The New Black at Exeter.” Seemingly intended to take the pulse of the race issue at the Academy, it contained, among many other things, excerpts of a study of African-American Exonians conducted by Eric Gronningsater ’70; the “Proposal of Incorporation” for the Afro-Exonian Society (chartered a few months earlier in February); and a transcript of Thee Smith’s (class of 1969) chapel speech titled, “I am a Black First.”

Yet the eight-page supplement wasn’t the only thing to signal changing perceptions of race at Exeter.

Coinciding with the rise of the civil rights movement and with Principal Day’s commitment to augment public service opportunities for Exonians, the Academy amplified diversity recruiting efforts, relying on organizations such as A Better Chance (ABC) to identify and prepare talented students of color for life at Exeter. Strikingly, between the academic years ’64-’65 and’67-’68, enrollment of African and African-American boys at the Academy grew from eight to 42 students.

“Diversity and access mattered to Dick Day,” Shapiro believes. “Not just a stray black face here and there, but a critical mass.” Scheer agrees: “I think Exeter was one of the first schools to see the importance of this.” Both men recall a student body that, with very few exceptions, was welcoming of the change.

Acceptance, however, did not always translate to understanding, and alumni of the time, both black and white, remember growing pains. “I think it became clear pretty quickly that the black students felt as though they were in a place — it was a strange place for anyone, but bizarrely so for them — where they didn’t fit,” says Scheer.

As though to illustrate this point, Stephen Thomas, a founder of the Afro-Exonian Thee Smith ’69 was one of the Society, recounts a well-intended overture gone awry. “One of the topics we [AfricanAmerican students] discussed is that almost all of us had requested roommates, only to founders of the Afro-Exonian learn upon arrival that we’d all been given singles. ‘They,’ which is how we referred to the Society, today called the administration … ‘They,’ in their benevolent paternalism, apparently thought our transiAfro-Latinx Exonian Society. tion would be easier if we had private time and space. Instead, we felt exiled.

“On the whole, the Academy was doing its best with what they knew to make us all comfortable,” Thomas adds. “There were just a few faculty who could not appreciate how far from this place we were coming.”

While unquestionably imperfect, diversity efforts of the mid- to late-1960s would pave the way for more comprehensive programs in the coming decades, among them coeducation in the early 1970s, increased focus on diversity recruiting in the 1980s and 1990s under Principal Kendra Stearns O’Donnell, and the middle-income initiatives of the early 2000s.

THE COMING OF COEDUCATION

A random survey of The Exonian newspapers published from January 1968 to September 1968 yields the following headlines: “PEA Succumbs to Feminism” “Religion Department to Introduce Philosophy Course, Co-ed Classes” “Mrs. Cunningham, Math Instructor, Named First Woman Faculty Member”

September Anne Cunningham is named the first woman to hold a regular faculty position at the Academy, hired for a one-year appointment in the Math Department.

ALAMY

Sept. 24 The TV news “magazine” 60 Minutes debuts on CBS. Sept. 30 Boeing rolls out the first 747 “Jumbo Jet” in Everett, Washington. The aircraft was more than twice the size of the Boeing 707.

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Oct. 12 At the Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos display the closed-fist, black power salute during a medal ceremony. The International Olympic Committee strips them of their medals the next day.

Oct. 28 Thirty students gather outside the Elting Room in Phillips Hall to protest the presence of a national ROTC recruiter and distribute fliers: “NROTC gives you a uniform, a scholarship and lifetime membership in the death machine.”

Oct. 31 President Johnson, citing progress in peace talks, announces a total halt to U.S. bombing in North Vietnam.

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PEA ARCHIVES

Sept. 7 Women’s liberation groups, joined by members of New York NOW, protest the Miss America Beauty Contest in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Nov. 5 Richard M. Nixon is elected 37th president of the United States, defeating Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace. Shirley Chisholm of New York becomes the first black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

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PEA ARCHIVES

According to Heskel and Dyer, in After the Harkness Gift, the question of coeducation at Exeter first arose in the early 1950s — “… years before it became a focus of discussion at similar private academic institutions elsewhere.” Day’s immediate predecessor, the prescient and iconic William G. Saltonstall ’24, had been eager to transform Exeter into a “national high school,” and for some in his administration, admitting girls seemed like a logical progression.

Detractors argued that females would pose too great a distraction, and the matter was eventually jettisoned, only to resurface again a decade later.

By the time most of the class of ’68 arrived at Exeter in the autumn of 1964, small numbers of girls had been attending Exeter’s summer session since 1961, and the trustee-appointed Academy Planning Committee, chaired by Science Instructor C. Arthur Compton, was recommending that the Academy add 250 girls to the school’s population. Coeducation was in the offing; it was just a matter of how and when. The fact that the idea was moving ever closer to becoming a reality, however, did little to allay the vexation of boys who, in 1968, found no girls on campus with whom to learn and socialize.

“The most challenging aspect of being a student at Exeter or other fancy prep schools during the mid- to late-’60s is that there were no females, period. None,” Scheer asserts. “This was a very strange way to live, especially given that most of us had come to Exeter from coeducational environments or had at least been to summer camps where girls were present. This kind of separation felt unnatural from the very first day for most of us.” Caplan agrees, adding that “students were all for coeducation, which probably had to do as much with instinct and longing as with how it would inevitably impact the school.”

Indeed, polls from the era indicate that a vast majority of students — and faculty — were in favor of admitting girls. Results of a survey published in the winter 1969 issue of the Bulletin show that 88 percent of students, 77 percent of faculty and 51 percent of alumni (with much stronger support from those who had graduated after World War II and the Korean War) supported coeducation.

Fortunately for Exeter, but perhaps not so much for students of the late 1960s, the coeducation matter reached its apex in the early days of 1970. After nearly two decades, numerous studies and a proposal, as late as the spring of 1968, to establish a boarding school for girls in close proximity to PEA, Exeter’s Trustees finally approved a plan to admit day student girls to the Academy in 1970 and boarding girls the following year.

While not a direct beneficiary of coeducation, Caplan was later able to observe its effects on the Exeter community. “In 1979-80, I was a White House Fellow, and from that point, every three to five years, I was invited back to Exeter as a guest of the History or English departments. In this way, I got to see the evolution of coeducation, which I believe made more of a difference in the ambience of the school and its level of happiness than anything else.”

VIETNAM

When four-year boys in the class of ’68 arrived at Exeter in the fall of 1964, the Vietnam War was already a decade old. Many, having been born in 1950 or adjoining years, were the sons of World War II veterans whose stories of derring-do had helped to mold their boys’ opinions about what constituted patriotism, grit and worthy sacrifice. As such, several in the class came to the Academy with pro-war —continued on page 95 Nov. 9 Yale University, after 267 years, decides to admit female undergraduates.

Nov. 20 The first interracial kiss on U.S. television occurs between Lt. Nyota Uhura and Capt. James T. Kirk during the third season of “Star Trek.”

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Nov. 22 The Beatles release their ninth studio album, titled “The Beatles” but popularly known as the “White Album.”

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Dec. 21 The launch of Apollo 8 begins the first U.S. mission to orbit the Moon. The threeastronaut crew — Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders — orbited the moon 10 times over the course of 20 hours.

After the mission, one of the astronauts received a telegram that simply said, “Thank you Apollo 8.

You saved 1968.”

Dec. 3 Elvis Presley appears in his televised “comeback” special, an edit of four live performances recorded in June at NBC Studios in Burbank, California.

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EXETER INNOVATES

NEW PILOT COURSES CHALLENGE OLD CONSTRUCTS

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helps Science Center 204 takes skeletons seriously.

Shark jaws yawn open at the center of the Harkness table, surrounded by a jumble of coral, sea urchins and sea stars. Over by the large wall of windows, a pacing black jaguar, stopped in taxidermied repose, gazes upon lab tables. And up near the ceiling, a once-active muskrat hangs permanently suspended from the beak of a stuffed hawk frozen in flight.

It’s totally apt in this classroom, where reminders of life abound, that 14 students meet three times a week to discuss thorny ethical questions about life-altering science. These seniors and uppers are the first to take Bioethics, one of the new Exeter Innovates courses debuting this year.

Conceived and taught by Science Instructor Michele Chapman and Religion Instructor Nuri Friedlander, Bioethics follows the human life cycle. Focusing first on fertilization and birth — including reproductive technologies to support conception, cloning and abortion — the course then moves on to genetics with labs exploring genetic testing and CRISPR gene editing. It concludes with discussions about stem cell research, organ harvesting and transplantation, and human experimentation and euthanasia.

Throughout, students frame their discussions around ethical theories, such as utilitarianism and Kant’s imperative, and major questions relating to the human capacity to alter our world at the biological level: • What is the right thing to do?

• What are our obligations to one another and to organisms on which we depend?

• Who is responsible for the outcomes of the science?

THINKING BEYOND ‘THE NORM’

In late 2016, with the generous commitment of a five-year grant from an anonymous alumnus and his wife, Exeter announced an initiative to create an “experimental space” for transdisciplinary courses that would embrace the confluence of learning at the table and the meaningful experiences that students find in cocurricular and extracurricular activities. The call for course ideas sent to faculty cited these criteria: advanced topics with a creative rethinking of the experience of uppers and seniors; interdisciplinary and/ or problem-based focus; opportunities that blend curricular and applied or service learning; expansion of relationships with universities, alumni and organizations; innovative use of technology; and cross-department teaching with faculty teams.

Accompanying the call was a set of proposals from seniors in Religion Instructor Peter Vorkink’s class Imagining Your Future. As a starting point, the students’ 33 concepts confirmed a hunger for courses that cross subject borders, and gave insight into students’ interests, which spanned everything from deep dives (Culinary Chemistry) to broad inquiries (Exploring Foundations of Identity and

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bacteria (no potential for disease transmission); Cas9 (a protein that will be used to “cut” DNA like a pair of molecular scissors); tracrRNA and crRNA (which together tell Cas9 where to “cut”); a variety of solutions (transformation for the “cutting,” agar for growth); and collection tubes.

As the students work, Chapman and Friedlander move among the stations, answering questions. One lab group struggles with the micropipette, which does not want to take up liquid. Easily fixed by swapping out for the pipette from another team. Students work with audible excitement punctuated by occasional requests for clarification. At the last minute, there’s a scramble for a bit more Cas9 — one pair has not yet finished the lab, and the protein has been used up. The biology lab technician, Cheryl

CHRISTIAN HARRISON

Nationhood), and from quirky (Super Villain Ethics) to socially engaged (Activism in Small Communities).

After receiving a host of proposals from faculty, many building upon themes highlighted by the seniors, the Exeter Innovates review committee selected five to launch this year: Green Umbrella Learning Lab (sustainability); Identity, Empathy and Cross-Cultural Understanding; A People’s War: Digital Humanities in the Study of America’s Civil War; Advanced Ceramics + Chemistry; and Bioethics.

“We’re just embarking on the Exeter Innovates program,” says Brooks Moriarty, dean of studies and academic affairs, who has overseen the rollout of the new courses, “and it’s already clear that there’s intense interest.” All Exeter Innovates courses are co-taught, have a hands-on component, and target uppers and seniors. “Faculty want to collaborate and experiment within the ongoing curriculum,” Moriarty adds. “Students love the broadening of focus that courses like Bioethics afford, and the ability to learn experientially as well as at the table.”

This initiative follows upon years of interdisciplinary exploration that started in 1991 with Literature and the Land, a course that is still taught today. Recent highlights include popular new courses, such as Epistemology; a burgeoning number of custom-designed senior projects; and cocurricular ventures using leading-edge methodologies, like Exeter’s design thinking-based Maker Fest.

“Each step along the way has allowed us to assess student interest and need; create innovative learning opportunities that have a positive impact on curriculum across the board; and integrate tools and skills needed in the 21st century,” Moriarty says.

HANDS-ON CRISPR LAB

The excitement of working with cutting-edge technology shows in the students’ faces on a mid-October morning as Chapman invites them to pair up for the Bioethics CRISPR Cas9 lab.

Chapman briefly summarizes the main points at the beginning of class: They will replace a gene in bacteria that normally responds to an antibiotic with a gene that is resistant, and then place the bacteria into a growth medium mixed with that antibiotic. “If we come back and find little colonies of bacteria growing, we’ll know that our experiment worked,” Chapman says.

Students look wide-eyed as they move to wellequipped lab tables. Each station is outfitted with special micropipettes and tips of varying size; nonpathogenic

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Sloane Valen ’19 and Alan Xie ’19 try their hands at gene editing in the CRISPR Lab.

Rotondo, quickly locates more.

The Bioethics labs provide a grounding in biological science and a framework for understanding broader issues, both ethical and scientific. To supplement the CRISPR lab (which was entirely successful — all seven lab pairs observed bacterial growth in their specimens), students discussed the implications for human embryos of CRISPR technology.

“Coming into this class, most of the kids had heard of CRISPR, but they didn’t understand the biology involved or the ethical ramifications of the technology,” explains Chapman. “They learned that you don’t need to be in a research lab to do CRISPR — you can do it in high school.

Bioethics helped them get a sense that there’s a spectrum

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of uses for these types of technologies. Some uses seem ethical, as in treating disease, but in the case of CRISPR, the possibility of gene-editing in human embryos is much more controversial.”

—Nicole Pellaton

SUSTAINABLY MINDED PROBLEM-SOLVING

Housing close to 60 boys, Wentworth Hall sees a lot of takeout pizza boxes pass through its heavy green doors every week. Its residents order an average of three large pizzas a night, for a total of 630 gooey pies per academic year. All those pizza boxes add up to a whole lot of waste — to say nothing of the pollution generated by the pro-

DAMIAN STROHMEYER

COMMUNITY CLASSROOM GULL was born out of conversations between Jason BreMiller, English instructor and sustainability education coordinator, and Jill Robinson, senior manager of sustainability and natural resources. “There [is] a lot of work on campus that could provide positive learning opportunities for students,” BreMiller says. “And yet, it was challenging for students to find time in their schedules to do the work.

They had a lot of ideas and interest, but they didn’t have the bandwidth to be involved.”

He and Robinson decided to design a course that would allow interested students to carry out a campuswide sustainability project of their own design. “The project-based, design-thinking model had been on my radar for a long time,” BreMiller says. “To me, it seemed like the logical extension of Harkness. These kids have been developing their collaborative skills in the classroom. Why not give them the opportunity to employ those skills to do good work for the PEA community and beyond?”

Pedro Haegler ’18, Grace Gray ’19, Olivia Peterson ’18 and Jane Li ’18 with a cut-out from the material they used to construct a reusable pizza box.

duction of the boxes. Scale those numbers out to the rest of the country, which consumes 3 billion pizzas a year, and you’ve got a great big greasy cardboard mess on your hands.

A small group of Exonians may have found a solution to help manage that mess. Four students in Exeter Innovate’s Green Umbrella Learning Lab (GULL) have designed a working model of a reusable metal pizza container. Partnering with local favorite Front Row Pizza, they instituted a successful pilot program to use (and reuse) the containers for deliveries to Wentworth Hall.

The group has plans to pursue a patent on the box once they’ve perfected the design.

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BACKGROUND IN DESIGN THINKING Robinson and BreMiller divided the term into several phases. Building in time for leadership training and teamwork during the first phase, the teachers drew on curriculum from the National Outdoor Leadership School and supplemented that with a visit to a nearby ropes course.

They also arranged a visit from Eugene Korsunskiy, who teaches at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. During his crash course in design-thinking theory, Korsunskiy pushed students to rethink old ideas about success and failure. “He told them to keep working through the failure, because you’re going to eliminate what doesn’t work and come up with a better design,” Robinson recalls.

BRAINSTORMING As they began to brainstorm, students were encouraged to think about an existing issue or problem in the community, and work backward toward designing and implementing an effective solution. The class proposed 70 possibilities, which were vetted by the teachers. “One of the things we thought about was, ‘What scale projects make the most sense?’ ” BreMiller explains. “We selected those that had a reasonable chance of completion in a single term.” (Their guideline squared nicely

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with another Korsunskiy principle: “Do a small thing and do it well.”)

Four core projects emerged through a series of class votes: the “Thinking Outside the Pizza Box” project was one. Another, “Exeter Exchange: Combating our Community’s Consumerism,” worked with the Facilities Management team on relocating the student-run thrift store, the Exchange, to expand its space and provide better access to gently used, affordable clothing and goods for the community.

Students in the “PO Box Buildup” group set up cardboard box break-down stations near the post office and in Peabody Hall to raise awareness about the environmental and social impact caused by the surge in online shopping. A fourth group investigated ways of integrating more sustainability initiatives within the Athletics Department.

PROJECT WORK During the project phase, ideas became actions. Students learned how to draft professional emails, conduct business phone calls, assert their needs in a respectful way, look for ways to get the rest of the community invested in their concepts, and troubleshoot as problems arose.

When the pizza box designers discovered that the seemingly durable plastic they used in their original prototype could not withstand the heat of commercial dishwashers, “It was quite a step back,” says Pedro Haegler ’18. “We had done a lot of

“WHY NOT GIVE THEM THE OPPORTUNITY TO ... DO GOOD WORK FOR THE PEA COMMUNITY AND BEYOND?”

LOOKING AHEAD Speaking in the Academy Center amid the clangor of his fellow Exonians on a midmorning break, Haegler reflects on the experience and outlines next steps for his group, including the expansion outward of their service dorm by dorm before making

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planning, and we were really inclined to use it,” he adds. “It even had our logo.”

Fortunately, Haegler says, he had a proactive team. Jane Li ’18 suggested they go with the first thing they could find and complete at least one trial run before the term ended, so they purchased metal pans, and with the help of Gerry Hill and Marshall Miller from Facilities Management, they designed a reusable lid that would fit on top.

“That [decision] was pivotal for us in our project,” Haegler says.

When senior Olivia Peterson’s initial calls to Front Row went unanswered, the team strove to find key players in person to get the job done, keeping in mind another Korsunskiy nugget: “You can’t design without concern for the stakeholders.” They interviewed Wentworth Hall dorm faculty to learn more about their pizza buyers’ needs, invited feedback on their prototype from the staff at Front Row and presented a persuasive economic model, demonstrating how the restaurant could recoup the cost of reusable pans after just one year. To seal the deal, they offered to take on the task of dishwashing, but the Front Row staff was willing to own that chore and enthusiastic about doing a trial run.

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the reusable pans available to the wider public. “We know there’s a consistent desire for pizza. It’s ordered every day,” he says.

“And we know we have a concept that’s environmentally and economically sustainable. That’s why we’re happy to work beyond the fall term GULL class.”

To fulfill their plans, Haegler and his teammates will need to depend on Grace Gray ’19, the only group member who won’t be graduating this year.

As BreMiller and Robinson craft their vision for the future of GULL, they are pursuing the possibility of offering the class each term, which would allow for greater participation and enable students to scale up to larger projects that could be passed down from year to year.

“CREATIVE EXPLORATION AND INVESTIGATION ARE CLOSELY RELATED TO SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. ...”

“We’re planning more green building projects on campus, and we’d love to have students involved for the duration of those,” BreMiller says. “They could actually be building the campus and sustainable community that they want.”

—Genny Beckman Moriarty

CERAMICS AND CHEMISTRY, A DAZZLING DUO

LY D I A S U M M E R M AT T E R ’ 1 9, U N T I T L E D, C L AY W I T H CUT-OUTS. IMAGE COURTESY OF CARLA COLLINS

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At first glance, the colorful art studio in the Mayer Center seems an incongruous place for a chemistry lesson: Stacks of easels lean against a large Plexiglas window on the far left side of the room, and the model of a human skeleton dangles nearby, keeping watch over the paint-splattered drawing horses in the center of the room.

The light wanes on a raw afternoon in winter term but Science Instructor Fran Johnson’s chipper voice warms this corner of the studio as she explains the intricacies of molar ratios, the importance of material safety data sheets and the dangers of cobalt salts to the students in Exeter Innovates 409: Advanced Ceramics + Chemistry, otherwise known as C-Squared.

The brainchild of Johnson and Art Instructor Carla Collins, C-Squared is an interdisciplinary course designed to give ceramic artists a deeper

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Collins, who took her first official chemistry class as a fine arts major at Alfred University and later spent four months at the International Ceramic Research Center in Denmark, agrees: “For any artist serious about making their own glazes, the chemistry knowledge is important and helpful to have. ... [Learning] glaze chemistry felt so empowering and motivating; I could relate my creative passion, pottery, to the world of chemistry, math and engineering. In many countries, creative exploration and investigation are closely related to scientific research. They’re really alike in process, technique and thinking.”

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understanding of their materials and imbue a problem-solving approach to their artmaking. The class requires a degree of comfort in both the lab and studio settings, so students need to have taken Art 202 and at least one year of introductory chemistry before they enroll. With the flexibility afforded by Exeter Innovates, the course can be taken for either Studio Art or Physical Sciences credit; that choice determines the nature of the final project. But whether potter or chemist at heart, each student is encouraged to look at the creative process through the eyes of a scientist and an artist.

Their mini-lesson in chemistry over, the students take out their calculators. They begin looking for the mass of each component in three different ceramics glazes. “For our first recipe, a single ingredient, that will be easy,” Johnson says. “What percentage am I using in my recipe? Once you get the mass, you figure out the moles.” Sodium feldspar. Gerstley borate. Whiting. Every component in a clay or glaze has its own mass, and knowing the moles helps the artists figure out how many grams of each is needed to achieve the desired effect.

Johnson doles out humorous bits of wisdom as the students work, prepping them for the weeks ahead: “The most important thing is not your artistic vision but your safety.” ... “Standardization is your friend.” ... “No one is allowed to poison themselves in this class.” She cheerfully corrects a student who mentions the “art” of working in spreadsheets. (“It’s more of a science, really.”) Observing quietly from her perch at the well-worn oval table, artist Collins can’t suppress a laugh.

Later that week, everyone gathers in the spacious ceramics studio one floor below. On this sunny morning, students will be decorating premade mugs for Grill using a commercial glaze. It’s a chance to get some hands-on practice in glazing technique before taking the plunge and mixing their own recipes later in the term.

Clearly in her element, Collins touches base with the artists about their designs while her partner assists in prepping the materials.

The two teachers are excited to see how the course unfolds. “We’re pushing them to be experimental with their art,” Johnson says. “We want them to go further, to figure out, ‘Here’s my idea but here’s the calculation. How do I get a matte finish? How do I get red?’ ... The work may seem tedious at times, but it’s important to do.”

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Matthew Bates ’19 practices glazing techniques in Advanced Ceramics + Chemistry.

Johnson, who first tried her hand at the pottery wheel at her friend’s urging several years ago, is thrilled to be collaborating with Collins: “There are so many moments I’ve fallen in love with this class. One reason we’re enjoying it so much is that we have different areas of expertise.

It’s not just her or me, it’s both of us together. This collaboration just feels right.”

Collins credits her friend’s ease with calculations for helping her troubleshoot when projects take an unexpected turn. And she appreciates the chance to see her students in a different light: “In a typical art class, they can be serious about their work, but you hear about their social lives; they talk about their day while they’re working. It’s fun to see them in a different light, to watch them calculating and researching before they start creating. I love seeing their capability and their excitement to combine the two fields.”

—Genny Beckman Moriarty E

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TROPICAL DEPRESSION O N E A L U M N U S L O O K S B A C K AT L I F E A F T E R H U R R I C A N E K AT R I N A

By David Williams ’07

I

’m back in New England again, but this time, so is the storm. Driving over the Saga-

more Bridge I’m bracketed by MassDOT traffic signs: TROPICAL STORM WARNING. On cue, the props director in heaven issues forth a white and solid wall of water, arriving on a sheet of wind that pushes my little Japanese car toward the side of the road. A moment later two black birds avoid my windshield by a foot. Stop here, the birds augur, but I demur, and blindly, stupidly, once again, trust the engineers of the U.S. government. Highways are different from levees, I tell myself. America’s always been better at moving on than holding back. I shift my butt back in the seat, lean my chest toward the wheel and, opening my eyes wide, follow the pavement right on in to Provincetown — which, depending on your mood or the way you turn your face, is either the end of the road, or the start of it.

I’d left Michael Maruca’s house in Somerville that morning, where we’d shared an early breakfast, a bowl of toasted oats his wife had made, over yogurt, with thick coffee.

We sat quietly in the cool gray morning and watched the little birds play on the stump of a tree in his unkept yard. Mike and I were never meant to be friends, but the flood mixed things up, and we both found ourselves part of Exeter’s class of 2007. It’s confusing when wonderful things sprout from terrible seeds, but when it comes to Mike, thank God for Katrina. Mike is my lifetime good pal and how could it have been any different?

I pulled into Herring Cove a few hours later. Working the door against the storm I climb

out of the car and into the sand, and stare awhile into the white ocean. The wind is Provincetown cold but the drops falling as stinging wet rags from the tropical system are all Louisiana fat and warm, and I feel comforted. These are the last breaths of Jose, which had dawdled, lonely and angry, around the Atlantic for most of September. I see the surf take a bite of the beach and think of the fragile nature of the Cape, the fragile

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAVID NELSON

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nature of home, and what wisdom there is in the moments things change.

I remember when I first heard about it. Change. It was Friday night in late August 2005, at Amelia’s birthday party.

“You hear about the storm?”

“What storm?”

“Down Florida now. Turned toward us.”

“School Monday?”

“Maybe not.”

By the next afternoon change was on the horizon and moving due north at 9 miles per hour. I ate pizza with my parents under graying skies and slowly falling pressure, a feeling that’s always caused my head to spin and my heart to open. I find it thrilling. The decision was made over Caesar salad and a Coke: Mom and I would leave in the morning.

Dad would stay. Someone had to watch the house.

I brought one pair of underwear and my French books.

No one really thought we’d be gone more than a couple days. The storm always turned.

We stopped at the first open room in the South, in Selma. The TV screens in the lobby looped a solid red

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spinning disc of doom, and for the first time, I was frightened of things. Distracting myself in the great American tradition, I ate at midnight, in the little Waffle House on U.S. 80. The sweaty server skittered nervously about the empty place and kept apologizing for forgetting my place setting, forgetting my coffee.

“It’s my first day,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s OK,” was all I said, when all I wanted was to cry for her, my father, my city, my self.

A day later, news out of New Orleans was sensational and unverifiable: Every house under 20 feet of water. Gun battles in quiet neighborhoods. Fellow citizens floating.

Dad wasn’t dead after all. He had picked his way to the river — the highest point in the city — with a car and a chainsaw. A week later I found him shaken in a field in South Carolina, and like someone back from the war, he didn’t want to talk about it.

The city closed. Friends were matriculating to Houston, Dallas, Chicago, rural Tennessee. I wanted none of that. Seeking a little romance in the middle of a tragedy, I Googled (was that already a verb, then?) “best boarding schools in America.”

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A week later I was in Texas for the first time in my life, meeting then-Admissions Director Michael Gary in the lobby of a Houston hotel. He was gracious, concerned.

Friends, family — are they safe? His brow furrowed at my answers. We spoke easily. He showed me a map of campus and I asked him all sorts of questions about it. How long does it take to walk from this building to these fields here?

Are there hills? He called the next day and told me I was needed in New England as soon as possible.

Standing beside four other freaked-out boys from the Gulf Coast at my first assembly that fall, we received a standing ovation. It was humiliating. I am an actor now, as I was then. Attention, applause, confirmation — these were and remain things I desperately wanted — but something had gone horribly wrong. It was fine enough that the play was absurd, but it remained irredeemably tragic.

I hadn’t agreed to audition, I hadn’t signed a contract, yet here I was, playing the part of Stranger in his Own Land, setting: America, 2005. I was supposed to be numbly bumming along, a shy, cute junior with his brother’s old car. The flood forced me into sharpness, and as happens to animals in emergency situations, all my senses got inflamed, time slowed down and everything burned sharp in my brain.

But with no home to run away to, and knowing it unlikely the deans would give me leave to run away and scream, I dove into the role with aplomb. Asked to pose for a cover story for The Exonian, I was all too quick to assent. I keep that cover half-buried in an old chest in New Orleans with the rest of those things we carry around, too scared to cut them loose from our lives but just as terrified to look at them head-on. Viewing it now makes me cringe: Look there at my smile. See me midstride coming down the front steps of the Academy Building, as if I’m fully adjusted one week in, and with hardly enough time to stop for the photographer as I bound to my next class — my only worry in the world is who I might ask to that week’s Evening Prayer.

In point of fact, that smile masked an interior landscape that would make even Dalí recoil: a terra incognita of terrible storms and violent changes, tsunami dreams and lost companions, with nowhere safe to rest, not even my own heart. I was 17 and exhausted, horny and

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confused, in shock, cut off from everything familiar, and spirited away to a friendly, unwarm place where everyone had the same number of toes and eyes but acted slightly funny. Everything, at every level, was in motion. I was changing quickly; the world was changing even faster.

Making sense of it was like trying to describe a landslide from 11 different hillsides using 13 different sets of eyeballs. There was no control in this experiment, only chaos. I was scared of myself.

The school and town did their best to pull me down to earth. That first month was a blur of utmost kindnesses: pencils, underwear and condolences rained down steadily and softly. The little sports shop in town donated shoes

and socks so I could play squash — which, I explained to my friends when I could reach them, was, in this weird land I found myself in, a sport, not simply a vegetable.

I never really came close to crying in that numb season, but it probably would have felt good. I wonder if we can only know a thing by its absence. It’s the moments of joy that cut through and cast light upon my horror like a sunbeam. Like a mid-November late afternoon in New Hampshire, when the world is all clouds and endless dimness, and suddenly the sidewalk is blasted gold, and your chest rises toward the sky just a little, and poems seeded deep rush forth, hoping to get their roots in before the clouds come back.

Or the thrill of holding hands with a girl from West Virginia, whom I fancied so well; lying back on the icy crunch of the playing fields, thinking of nothing but her and the stars so constant above us; and she, finally,

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leaning over for a kiss. Things unsaid on a bench on Swasey Parkway. Forgetting curfew to help a teacher I didn’t know dig his car out of the snow.

Or Mrs. Morris, having me over for dinner; the rollicking conversation with her brilliant children. How fairly she treated me, and firmly, never favoring me, getting on me about cleaning my room, conspiring with Mr. Chisholm to pull my grade out of the Biology gutter. I knew from her eyes I could not hide my sadness from her.

I resented her for this, and I trusted her.

These moments help me honor the truth of my depression back then.

I think of the friendship of my comrades at Ewald, sweet to me with a wisdom beyond their adolescence.

if they were back at all. The air was dank and the mood delirious. We coped as New Orleanians best know how: with alcohol and song. No one knew what to do. It felt enough to simply be, and be back.

My relationship with the Academy is a queer and mar-

ginal one. If life is a walk down a wild, lovely, populated street, the Academy is a dapper fellow I traded an intriguing glance with, once, whose gaze sticks with me, who still inspires poems. I wasn’t born to go there. It was a job of negligent engineering by arrogant men in the city I loved that put me there. Change surges.

And yet, some things stay the same, even a decade later: I still haven’t finished that book, I haven’t stopped my nail-biting, I can’t stop saying excuse me to an empty room after I sneeze, and I’m still too intimately familiar with feelings of self-loathing. On considering such a list, one realizes maybe change, discomfiting as it is, is the appropriate and preferred way of things. Some things that should change, don’t. America still hasn’t figured out how to take care of itself, and neither have I. I’ve been in Provincetown a week now and finally the sun has hit my face and heart. However, Houston, the town that received so many of us so well a decade ago, lies hurt and shocked, grinding back to life after Harvey on a steady diet of black mold and cheap burritos. Puerto Rico is out of medicine and running out of hope, as the rest of us back on the mainland try to decide if they really are Americans, and what we owe them. Spoiler alert: everything.

After a last skinny-dip in the quickly cooling autumn Atlantic surf, I climb a dune and lie facing the sun, accepting a summer’s last whisper. Sometime later I pull on sandy shorts and start the long walk to Race Point and my car. It is time to go home to New Orleans, where I’ve got a café and theater to open before summer makes it back again. I roll through the Provincelands and hang left at the highway. U.S. 6 runs from here to Long Beach, longest road in the country, and part of me thinks you fool, make a dash for the golden land, where you’ll never need your shirt, but I’m much more comfortable in a hurricane situation than an earthquake one; besides, I have business in New Orleans, and I need to go back. I always need to go back. E

GOING HOME WASN’T EASY. THERE WERE HOUSES ON TOP OF BOATS, HOUSES IN THE MIDDLE OF STREETS, AND EVERYWHERE, EVERYWHERE THE SMELL OF MOLD.

They were a wild band of boys suddenly handed a helpless infant, and they did so well to keep me alive.

Handball in the basement at midnight, seeking me out at the dining hall, throwing the ball my way at intramural football (I caught it, we won, Go Saints), asking me for help with homework. In a season when the people of a nation and a town and a school turned their humbled hands toward fellow citizens who needed them, it was the little house at Ewald that held me closest, and I love them for it, and that, at least, will never change.

The Academy offered us full tuition through graduation, but I was dying. I needed to be home to heal, if “healing” is possible when nearly everything about a body has been shifted, violently. Going home wasn’t easy.

There were houses on top of boats, houses in the middle of streets, and everywhere, everywhere the smell of mold.

Everyone lived in new places, strange neighborhoods,

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“... FRIENDSHIPS MADE HERE ENDURE FOR MANY YEARS, AND OFTEN FOR A LIFETIME ... .”

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CONNECTIONS

News and notes from the alumni community

Staying Connected

By Ann Warren Lockwood ’81, Director of Alumni and Parent Relations

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welcoming the class of 2017 into the Exeter alumni body — a group of 21,000 strong who make up the extended Exeter community across the country and around the globe. The seniors were full of excitement and anticipation for what lies ahead, and while their time as students was coming to an end, the ceremony marked a new phase in their lasting relationship with Exeter.

I also shared with the seniors that, ironically, I had not wanted to attend Exeter. After spending my childhood on campus as a “fac brat” — the youngest child of Nancy and John Warren (instructor in mathematics, emeritus 1985), I hoped to go away to school as some of my brothers had. Thankfully, my parents would hear nothing of that idea. In the fall of 1977, I began a new chapter in my association with Exeter — first as a student, then as an alumna and volunteer, and now as director of alumni and parent relations. It is an honor to serve the Academy, and our alumni and parents, in this role.

Not everyone’s memory of Exeter is the same. Some loved every moment, while others carry mixed emotions, and still others remember a sense of having simply survived. No matter one’s experience, though, there are two messages I consistently hear: that an Exeter education is transformative and that friendships made here endure for many years, and often for a lifetime, after graduation.

Alumni tell us that Exeter is where they learned how to learn, how to think critically and to consider differing points of view, and also where they found their voice, and the courage to speak around the Harkness table. Similarly, parents talk of their child who returns home at Thanksgiving for the first time, a different person from the one dropped off in September.

Exeter continues to evolve, as it should, preparing to deliver future leaders into our world. What remain at its core are a commitment to academic excellence, delivered by world-class faculty through the power of Harkness, and a belief in the vital combination of goodness and knowledge and the spirit of non sibi. An Exeter education is a true gift.

I invite you to continue being part of Exeter — by connecting with classmates and other parents, volunteering, attending Exeter events in your area, or by returning to Exeter for reunions, Family Weekend or some other on-campus event. We hope to see you soon. E

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T H E

DAMIAN STROHMEYER

ast spring, at the Senior Class Induction Ceremony, I had the pleasure of

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KERRY L ANDRETH REED ’91

A Life Well Lived

By President of the Trustees John “Tony” Downer ’75; P’06, P’06, P’07

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erry Cathryn Landreth Reed, Exeter class of ’91 and an Academy trustee, passed away Dec. 6 following a second valiant bout with cancer. She is survived by her husband Creighton Reed ’90 and their children, Will and Bebe.

Kerry loved life and embraced it in every way, in every

COURTESY CREIGHTON REID ’90

moment. Whether it was rocking out while singing her original compositions with her band Birdseed, taking in the natural splendor or the local color in her many points of travel, pouring her considerable intellect into her responsibilities as a managing director at Goldman Sachs, or in her boundless devotion to her family, Kerry was all in with life. In her Phillips Church meditation, conducted by phone from her home in California in October, she urged Exonians to, “Be fearless in your pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.” Kerry certainly was.

That fearlessness remains on full display in Next Trip Around the Sun, her blog chronicling her embrace of life in the face of her disease (https://nexttriparoundthesuncom.blog). Eulogizing Kerry, her Exonian classmate Sarah Stuckey Coates spoke for many: “Out of an unavoidable tragedy, you created transcendental beauty.

As your body waned, your spirit shone brighter and brighter. You became a sun around which many lives and [much] magic orbited. Being part of this evolution

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will be one of the deepest and most meaningful experiences of my life.”

Exeter commanded a special place in Kerry’s heart.

In her meditation she wrote: “I came to Exeter from London as a lower in Hoyt and left with lifelong friends, a deep love of learning, a passion for singing and writing, and an appreciation for being somewhere where being smart was celebrated. I loved learning to listen to all sides of an argument, forcing myself to understand points of view I might never agree with even if it required sitting on my hands. I also married Creighton Reed, class of 1990, in 2001. Who would have guessed when I passed him on the paths in 1989!”

And we, the Exeter community, were most fortunate to receive the gift of Kerry’s energy, imagination, determination and generosity. She brought a zest, an intellect, a commitment and a laugh to our trustee table and to our school community. As her family wrote: “We are heartbroken and already miss her greatly, and will forever hold our love for her and hers for each of us and our family.”

We, her friends and colleagues in the Exeter community, join Kerry’s family in that declaration.

Among her many attributes, Kerry’s friends treasured her directness, her honesty. And so, it is only fitting to let Kerry have the final word. (Her friend and classmate Katherine Post Calvert observed, “In true Kerry form, she wrote her own best farewell.”)

Printed on the back page of the program at her memorial service were these words, taken from the epilogue to a book that she’d been working on before her death: “I hope you will remember that you are never too busy — you just need to step back and prioritize. I say thanks every day for my incredible children, for Creighton’s love and the partnership, which continues to teach us both, and for my deeply loving parents who understand me to my core.

“I know exactly who I am. I finally need no one’s approval but my own, and I have everything to live for. I hope you will forgive me for and learn from my mistakes.

I own my flaws now. I celebrate my strengths.

“When Bebe asked me what it feels like to die, I told her that we should just decide what it might be like — she suggested bubble baths and reuniting with friends and family — and make it happen. So cheers to a life that is so well lived that it is OK to say, “Auf wiedersehen.” E

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Serving up Community, by the Cup

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mily Germain Shea ’83 didn’t fully realize the impact her business, the Kickstand Cafe, had on the town of Arlington, Massachusetts, until one day in June 2015.

Shea and her co-owner, Mark Ostow, were moved to respond to the mass shooting at a Charleston, South Carolina, church. They decided to donate 100 percent of that day’s sales to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“We hardly publicized it and the day was off-thecharts busy,” Shea remembers. “We raised $9,000.

That’s when I realized how powerful community is.”

Community has been at the heart of Shea’s efforts with Kickstand ever since.

Kickstand, named for its location on Massachusetts’ Minuteman Bikeway, is the place to meet in this Boston suburb. It’s a pit stop for cyclists and a gathering place for locals, for moms with small children, and for writers, singers and storytellers. Shea is the upbeat owner who oversees it all, a former lawyer-turned-yoga-teacherturned-barista who claims “part of our charm is that we make things up as we go along.”

Shea’s arrival as an upper at Exeter seems similarly spontaneous. A native of Howard City, Michigan (population 1,800), Shea, who played bassoon as a child, learned about Exeter through friends on music trips. The daughter of a funeral home director (her father) and a pizza shop owner (her mother), “I had no idea what Exeter was,” she says. “I didn’t know what I was getting into. It ended up being a transformative part of my development.

It gave me confidence.”

After Exeter, Shea’s career path seemed set. She graduated from Middlebury College, received a law degree from Suffolk University, and became a litigator at Ropes & Gray, a law firm in Boston.

After her third child was born, she quit practicing law and began teaching yoga. In 2011, she started helping out at a friend’s coffee shop. “I loved the hustle-bustle,” she says. “A friend was stunned to see me making coffee and said, ‘That’s the happiest I’ve ever seen you.’ I thought this was something I might like to do full time.”

She found the perfect location: a cafe in Arlington Center. She and Ostow purchased the location and

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COURTESY MARK OSTOW

By Debbie Kane

opened Kickstand in 2013. On opening day, the line of visitors stretched out the door. “The town was desperate for a great gathering spot,” Shea says.

Her first year of business was educational — and frightening. “I really didn’t know what I was doing,” she admits. “I was learning on the fly how to get systems running smoothly.” She focused on providing good coffee and homemade food; in the process, Kickstand became a welcome space for people to gather.

The 80-seat cafe includes a large community table, and sharing space is encouraged. Special events pull in people from near and far, including open mic night the first Friday of each month, featuring musicians of all ages and abilities (folk singer and fellow Exeter alumna Cosy Sheridan ’83 has performed); quarterly readings and Q&As with members of the Arlington Authors Salon, a group of writers who originally gathered around Kickstand’s community table; and “Fugitive Stories,” a monthly live storytelling event modeled on National Public Radio’s popular “Moth Radio Hour.” And Shea and Ostow continue to donate to charitable causes.

Shea is surprised at the community that’s evolved around Kickstand; at least one patron admitted to her that his family moved to Arlington because of the cafe. “I think people crave places where they see other people,” she says. “I enjoy feeding and talking to people. To have a place where people care is pretty special.” E

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Telling an Endless Tale

By Sarah Anderson

Owen Brown ’73 and poet Emily Wolahan created a piece of art they hope will inspire compassion.

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ainter Owen Brown ’73 and his longtime collaborator, poet Emily Wolahan, believe that art, and the act of creating it, can open hearts, instill compassion and spur action. So they set about creating a 24-foot-long scroll printed on translucent Dura-Lar plastic film. It features Brown’s paintings and Wolahan’s poetry — both inspired by the plight of the estimated 66 million refugees in the world today.

To share their artwork and increase awareness about those displaced, Brown and Wolahan produced eight copies of their Fieldwork Scroll to send to organizations who request one for display. “Our hope is that the scrolls will circulate throughout the U.S. and even, perhaps, Japan and Europe, thus helping to draw further attention to this humanitarian crisis,” Brown says.

The collaboration began two years ago when Wolahan wandered into Brown’s studio in San Francisco and struck up a conversation with him about his paintings, which were titled with lines of poetry. That led to a collaboration on a few projects and ultimately their shared vision for the Fieldwork Scroll.

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Brown began searching for a way to create images that would correlate with Wolahan’s words. After discovering they had both lived in Japan, he lit upon the idea of a scroll, a format that seemed fitting because he saw Wolahan’s poetry as one long narrative about displacement. “With all those journeys, displacement is analogous to looking at a scroll,” he says. “You have a mental space that is similar to a physical space — memories and landmarks.”

Brown had recently moved from San Francisco to the Twin Cities, one of “the most luxurious of transfers imaginable,” he says. But even that displacement involved leaving friends and familiar places. It caused Brown to consider more deeply the plight of people who were fleeing their homes without the comfort of a chosen, new address.

As he and Wolahan began to work more closely on the scroll, Brown drew inspiration from his partner’s work: “Emily’s poetry is quiet, elusive, but this piece touches on terror, torture, destruction, detention, forced travel and, thankfully, maternal love. … [A]s the poem evolved through various drafts, and as Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Central America [and] Myanmar blossomed with blood and death, this became our response to it.”

Brown’s work evolved in concert. “I was painting more figuratively than I had for many years ... [and] trying in some ways to depict or promote attention and compassion to this problem,” he says. “We have homes. Others don’t. It should be as simple as that.”

Brown did not concentrate on the visual arts at Exeter, instead studying piano intensely. After graduating from Yale with a bachelor’s in languages, he worked for an architect who told him, “You need to learn how to draw.” So, Brown attended drawing classes and called it a “complete revelation,” adding, “I thought to myself, ‘Where have I been?’ ” Brown worked as a news correspondent in Japan for several years, then earned an MBA from the University of Chicago, raised children and ran software companies in Silicon Valley. All the while, he wrote poetry, worked on drawings at night and painted on weekends. “Every day that goes by is a day I’ll never have again,” he says.

“I need to devote myself to this.” His move to the Twin Cities was his impetus to become “more wholeheartedly an artist.”

The Fieldwork Scroll is evidence of this passion: “We hope with the piece not only to produce something artful, but to waken people to compassion. [It] isn’t necessarily something you are born with. It’s something that can be ignited by what you see in the world.” E

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To view the scroll online, visit http:// fieldworkexoduscom.ipage.com.

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By Sarah Zobel

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ne-time MVP of the Exeter baseball team Joe O’Donnell ’63

COURTESY OF JOE O’DONNELL

showed his son, Joey, how to hit the stitching off a ball. Yet he didn’t teach him to run the bases — Joey’s teammates did that for him. Because he was born with cystic fibrosis, by the time Joey’s legs were strong enough to beat a throw to second, his lungs were too weak, his body too easily fatigued.

Cystic fibrosis is an inherited disease that causes mucus to get so thick and sticky that it clogs airways, rendering breathing nearly impossible and triggering frequent lung infections. It also accumulates in the tubes between the pancreas and the small intestine, making it difficult for the body to absorb nutrients.

Today, newborns nationwide are screened for the disease, but that was not the case in 1974. Instead, Joey’s mother, Kathy, observing that something seemed wrong with her 3-month-old firstborn, took him to doctors until he was given the blanket diagnosis of “failure to thrive.” It wasn’t until a couple of months later that cystic fibrosis was pinpointed.

“It was like being hit with a tidal wave when we got that death sentence,” O’Donnell says.

At the time, that’s pretty much what a diagnosis of cystic fibrosis was for children: The sole treatment options were drugs that worked only until the child developed resistance to them, and O’Donnell says he didn’t dare imagine his son would survive more than a few years. For a brief time, however, Joey grew and lived a somewhat normal life — he was elected class president in seventh grade, and had the lead in the school play — while cheerfully educating his classmates about the disease.

“He was very comfortable advocating for CF,” O’Donnell says. “He was that kind of kid — a very engaging, sparkly kid.”

In 1986, Joey died at age 12: “It was the end of a dream,” O’Donnell says.

But rather than turn away from CF, the O’Donnells dug in and established The Joey Fund.

“It is by far the most important thing that I do. It is Joey’s legacy,” says O’Donnell of the fund, an independent organization that in 30-plus years has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars to support CF research. It’s also a family affair: The O’Donnells’ daughters, Kate and Casey, both of whom were born after Joey’s death, have been involved since they were young children.

The organization hosts a dozen or so fundraisers annually, but its signature event is The Joey Fund Film Premiere. When it debuted 33 years ago, O’Donnell had wanted to create an experience that was different from the

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traditional dinner and speaker fundraising format. He decided to offer a casual reception with food supplied by area restaurateurs and a screening of a film not yet out in theaters.

The first year, 62 people attended. Last November, about 1,200 people got a sneak peek at Molly’s Game, an Aaron Sorkin movie starring Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba and others. The event netted $1.2 million for The Joey Fund. O’Donnell attributes such support to the motivating progress being made in treating the disease.

O’Donnell’s fish-out-of-water story of coming to Exeter

carries its own hint of Hollywood. Growing up in Everett, Massachusetts, a blue-collar city in the shadow of Boston Logan International Airport, O’Donnell was captain of the football and baseball teams and an honors student at Malden Catholic High School. He already had a couple of Ivy League acceptances in hand when he met with Harvard’s director of admissions, who recommended a postgraduate year. O’Donnell, who had never heard of the Academy, admits to having adopted an “us versus them” attitude and was not the least bit interested. His parents, however, seized on the idea.

He arrived on campus in September 1962 bewildered, O’Donnell says, to find himself surrounded by so much green and greeted by a male cheerleader. That was Craig Stapleton ’63, who had been assigned to O’Donnell as a guide, and whose invitation to play squash (“I didn’t know it was a sport — I thought you ate it, and I didn’t like it, so I said no.”) was the beginning of O’Donnell’s slow realization that there didn’t have to be an “us” or a “them,” something he makes a point of conveying to young people today. The year affected O’Donnell so profoundly that at their 50th reunion in 2013, he and Stapleton, a former U.S. ambassador to France, announced a fund they were establishing to provide 10 gifts each year “to underwrite annual financial aid packages for one-year seniors and/or postgraduate students.”

After he graduated from Exeter and then Harvard College, O’Donnell’s career took some interesting turns: He coached baseball at Harvard and taught school in Everett before earning his MBA at Harvard Business School and serving as that school’s associate dean of students. He then founded Boston Culinary Group Inc. (originally Boston Concessions Group Inc.), a food service management company acquired by Centerplate in 2010. O’Donnell is chair of the merged company, which manages food service operations in 250 stadiums,

ski areas, amusement parks and theaters nationwide.

O’Donnell also founded Belmont Capital and owns Allied Advertising Agency and Kings Bowl America.

O’Donnell still finds time to be an active philanthropist, both regionally and nationally. Harvard’s baseball field and its head coaching position bear his name. He has also served on the university’s Board of Overseers and on the boards of the Children’s Hospital Trust, Malden Catholic High School, the Winsor School and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, among other organizations. He was named to President George W. Bush’s Advisory Committee on the Arts and served as chair of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s Milestones Campaign in 2010, where O’Donnell helped the foundation exceed its original fundraising goal of $175 million by $75 million.

But it’s The Joey Fund that occupies much of his passion, energy and time. In addition to the film premieres, the fund hosts billiards nights; the annual Kings Cup bowling competition, in which private equity firms buy lanes; and Hot Dog Safaris, where people can eat all the hot dogs they want.

The efforts of O’Donnell and his family, and the fund’s staff and volunteers, has paid off.

The Joey Fund has raised more than $250 million to date. O’Donnell directs as much as 5 percent of those funds toward smaller gifts for Boston-area residents with cystic fibrosis, such as an air conditioner for a Bostonian who was struggling to breathe at home, and a stationary bike for someone who wanted to exercise regularly. The remainder, after administrative expenses, goes to the national Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, money that has played a very real role in supporting the research and development of breakthrough treatments.

One such treatment is ivacaftor (brand name Kalydeco and developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals). It is the first therapy to actually address the cause of cystic fibrosis, rather than just relieve its symptoms. O’Donnell says another treatment is on the horizon, and that could potentially up the cure rate from 65 percent of cases to 95 percent.

“Things are looking good for the CF kids,” he says, acknowledging the work is bittersweet: “You can’t help but think if only [these breakthroughs] had happened 30 years earlier, things would be different for Joey.”

Yet without Joey’s eponymous fund and his devoted parents, those successes might not ever have been possible. E

“IT IS BY FAR THE MOST

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FROM EVERY QUARTER E XO N I A N S M A K E C O N N E C T I O N S AT H O M E A N D A R O U N D T H E WO R L D Please note, all photos are identified left to right unless otherwise indicated.

EXETER LEADERSHIP WEEKEND Close to 300 alumni and parent volunteers and their guests returned to campus for the 2017 Exeter Leadership Weekend in September. Volunteers attended business meetings, heard Academy updates and gathered for good company and conversation.

As in past years, the highlight for many was the dinner with the senior class: soon-to-be alumni mingled with class, reunion and regional volunteers.

Principal Lisa MacFarlane ’66 (Hon.) P’09, P’13; Trustee Vice President Wole Coaxum ’88; 2017 President’s Award Recipient Marty Cannon ’77, honored for his service to the Academy; and Trustee President Tony Downer ’75; P’06, P’06, P07. Co-recipient Monica Shelton Reusch ’77; P’08 was unable to attend.

Mike McCarthy ’61; P’97 and Linh Dan Le ’18

Hyuk-Jeen Suh ’89, Mike Moon ’87; P’19, P’21 and Melissa Fleming ’87

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Doug Halsted ’53 and Pete Palmer ’53; P’77, P’81

Karen Willis P’19, Lisa and Richard Griffin P’19, P’21 Sue Kaplan ’79 and Bob De Vore ’58; P’95, P’00

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From the class of ’03: Katie Mandel Bruce, Christianne Amodio, Case Prager, Alicia Hernandez Mehta

Tom Burack ’78; P’21 and seniors Abigail Clyde, Vivienne Kraus and Victoria Glidden with Laura Lasley ’78 (Hon.); P’05, P’10

Nadia Saliba ’95, Jackson Parell ’18 and Trustee Nancy Wilder ’75

Mika Devonshire ’08, Jackson Salovaara ’07 and Bry Kleber Devonshire ’09

Nasir Grissom ’18, Chris Sandeman ’96 and Will Douthit ’18

JASMINE LEE ’18, ALL OTHERS DAN COURTER

Chris Fuller and John Faulkingham from the class of ’85

On Saturday, the Parents Committee met to plan the year.

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COAST TO COAST AND BEYOND Alumni gatherings bring Exonians together for good conversation and good cheer.

DENVER Principal Lisa MacFarlane was welcomed to the Exeter Association of Colorado reception at the Governor’s Mansion by First Lady Robin Pringle Hickenlooper ’96 and her husband, Gov. John Hickenlooper.

Lucy Logan ’06, Karen and Newton Logan ’74; P’06, P’09, Jane Feldman ’74 and Taye Sanford ’76

Peter Williams ’51; P’17 and his wife, Lisa P’17, with Maureen Kechriota P’21

Rita Bowlby, Lisa Potvin and Rob Ross ’73

UPCOMING EVENTS Exonians enjoy reconnecting through numerous activities and events, including large receptions and small socials, sports competitions, cultural and educational opportunities and non sibi projects. You can view and register for events online at www.exonians. exeter.edu or call the Alumni and Parent Relations Office at 603-777-3264.

Sean McDonough and Yelstin Fernandes ’09

Jason Bell, Juhi Asad ’93, Eric Gershon ’93 and Sarah Miller

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CALIFORNIA

Reception in Palo Alto Tuesday, March 6 Reception in San Francisco Thursday, March 8 Reception in Los Angeles Saturday, March 10

TEXAS

Reception in Dallas Monday, April 16 Reception in Houston Wednesday, April 18

WASHINGTON, D.C. Annual Reception Thursday, April 19

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From the class of ’95: Kory Crawford Thompson and David Kim Petra Giblin ’06 and John Rush, Amy Baldor Eisenberg ’06, Lucy Clark ’03 and Drew Eisenberg

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LONDON Members of the Exeter Association of the United Kingdom and their guests toured the Courtauld Gallery in London, followed by brunch and conversation at Tom’s Kitchen, Somerset House.

SEATTLE The Exeter Association of Washington held a reception for alumni, parents and friends at Amazon. Hosting the event was Rob Green ’86, director of sales at Amazon Business Marketplace.

Josh Meske, Katie Holmes ’99, Bridget A. DuRuz P’99 and Mark Borchardt P’99

Lin Jiang P’16 and Michael Lu P’16

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS DAN COURTER

Hannah Graham ’08, Lena Papadakis ’17 and Matthew Powell

Alan Corrao, Anthony Chen ’78; P’08, Jayashree Srinivasan ’83 and Kristy Banks ’97

RHODE ISLAND Alumni and their guests toured the Providence Athenaeum with hosts Robin and Brad Gibbs ’88 and (center) guest speaker Gail Scanlon, Academy librarian.

Jesse Manyan ’88, Van Edwards ’65, Brad Gibbs ’88, Betsy Farnum ’81 and Gil Grossman

www.facebook.com/phillipsexeter W I N T E R

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www.twitter.com/phillipsexeter T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 4 9

C O N N ECT I O N S

ASIA Principal MacFarlane’s November trip to Asia included stops in Hong Kong, Seoul and Singapore.

2018 REUNIONS If your graduation year ends in 3 or 8, mark your calendar for reunions in May 2018! Events include informal gatherings, family activities, music, meals and plenty of time to reconnect with old friends and discover new ones. Check your email and register online.

May 4-6 Class of 1988 Class of 1993 Class of 1998 Class of 2003

The Exeter Association of Hong Kong welcomed Principal MacFarlane on Nov. 7.

Alumni, parents and guests in Singapore on Nov. 4

ALUMNI BOOK TOUR Exonians in four cities — Chicago, Dallas, Denver and St. Paul — heard alumni author Dan Brown ’82 speak about his newest thriller, Origin.

DALLAS Dan Brown ’82 with Lynn Dickinson P’17, P’19 and Page Money P’17

DENVER Lee Weisbard P’08, Matt Lackey and Sarah Fenn ’08

May 11-13 Class of 1963 Class of 1973 Class of 1983 Class of 2008 May 17-20 Class of 1968 May 18-20 Class of 1958 Class of 1978 Class of 2013

50 • T H E

E X E T E R

CHICAGO Karen and John Heiser P’11, P’12 and Tony and Brett Pritchard ’80; P’15

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS DAN COURTER

May 22-24 Class of 1943 Class of 1948 Class of 1953

CHICAGO Bobby Haynes ’11, Jamie Hwang ’14 and Sage Yang

PROVIDENCE, RI Young alumni at Brown University came together at the start of the new school year.

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E/A WATCH PARTIES Showing their school spirit, Exonians gathered to cheer on Big Red at locations across the country.

LOUISVILLE Alumni and family members from Exeter and Andover enjoyed traditional rivalry and good fun at the Churchill Downs watch party hosted by Carter Vance ’93.

NEW YORK Alumni at the Tribeca Tap House PALO ALTO Gathering at Nola hosted by Tom Hutton ’73

COFFEE AND CONVERSATION The inaugural social event for day student parents kicked off on Nov. 14 at the Class of 1945 Library.

Attendees heard a presentation by Academy Librarian Gail Scanlon and received a guided tour of the library.

EXETER EXPEDITIONS 2018

Educational Travel Programs

The spirit of Harkness and the passion of Exeter instructors create extraordinary travel opportunities.

LONDON THEATER

WWI – ANNIVERSARY OF THE END OF THE WAR

July 21-28, 2018

October 6-13, 2018

This is your ticket to a week of extraordinary drama and lively Harkness discussion in the theater capital of the world.

Get to know France and Belgium through the key sites of the Great War while simultaneously examining this world-changing event through a distinctly Exonian lens.

For more and registration information, visit www.exeter.edu/expeditions.

2 0 1 8 details

T H E E X E T E R B U L L E T I N •

W I N T E R

51

Finis

1968

wobbly, but she’ll do fine.

Then I grab myself a stick out of the pile and soon we are out in the fray. And it’s slapstick, slapstick, and poke away the puck. And it’s weave left, weave right, and steer through a maze of long and short legs.

I forget, for a short while, that I am older now and out of shape. This ice, this freeze, unlike the Zambonied surface most skaters are used to, has its own topography — bumps, ripples, crisscrossing fissures, mushy edges. I relearn this when I get the puck on a fast break, catch a blade in some slush, and fly face-first into a snowbank. “Yeah, it’s a little soft over there,” someone says. All too soon, the sun has gone down. By now our silhouetted herd of puck-chasers has thinned out and we part ways even more to let the little skaters make some memories.

My daughter gets the puck.

Slaps and whiffs. Slaps and whiffs. Shoots again. Score! I learn on the drive home that this game is in her blood now, as it has been, for a long time, in mine. Yes, I tell her, we will play again soon. E

leanings, or, at the very least, with inchoate views on the subject. Rare, at that point, was the pacifist Exonian, says Jeff Gould ’68, Rudy Professor of History at Indiana University. “Back then I was one of a very small handful of students who were (or wanted to be) anti-war activists.”

Yet as U.S. involvement in Vietnam intensified under the Johnson administration, and Americans were stunned by the Tet Offensive of early 1968, public support for this increasingly bloody war of attrition, including among Exonians, waned rapidly. To further magnify the issue, during the 1967-68 school year, four Exeter alumni were killed in action.

Peter Scheer vividly recalls his own and others’ shifts in thinking about the war. “In terms of international political issues, I was struck when I got to Exeter by how conservative it was … not just the faculty and the school, but the students. A chapel talk from the fall of ’65, my freshman year, really illustrates this.

“Someone involved in the Quaker pacifist movement — she’d probably been part of the ‘Ban the Bomb’ campaign of the 1950s — came to speak out against American involvement in Southeast Asia. At one point, she held in her hands shrapnel from an anti-personnel bomb to show us how they were designed to maim.

“In response to this, the student body, in order to make clear its disagreement, began stomping its feet and yelling. It turned into a roar, and the administration perhaps moved more slowly than it usually did to tamp it down.

While I had been exposed to arguments against the war through reading The New York

—continued from page 96

—continued from page 27

Editor’s note: The George Bennett Fellowship celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Established by Elias B.M. Kulukundis ’55 in honor of PEA English Instructor George Bennett, the yearlong fellowship provides writers “of outstanding promise” with support they need to pursue their craft. To commemorate the anniversary, we will feature a Bennett Fellow in each Bulletin issue during the 2017-18 academic year. Peter Anderson lives in Crestone, Colorado, and teaches at Adams State University. One of these days, he hopes to finish the novel he began working on as a Bennett Fellow at Exeter. Portions of this essay are excerpted from his most recent book, Heading Home: Field Notes (www.bowerhousebooks.com).

W I N T E R

20 1 8

Times, and was maybe a little more open-minded as a result, I still got caught up with the stomping.

“Now dial forward to ’67, certainly by ’68, so just a couple of years later, and something like 80 percent of the student body, and the same percent of faculty, were against the war. This reflected a broader shift in attitude generally toward government and authority and official pronouncements about American policy. We’d gone from respect, to at a minimum skepticism, but more broadly to outright disbelief and rejection.”

Like Scheer, Gould, who participated in the “Vietnam Summer,” an antiwar campaign mounted by the American Friends Service Committee during summer 1967 and who would go on to create at Exeter The New Liberator, a progressive student publication that debuted in 1968, recalls an expanding discourse around the war, one gradually more welcoming of heterogeneous points of view.

That’s not to say, however, that there was no pushback, as is illustrated by Gould’s proposal to his classmates to stage a walkout on the 1968 graduation speaker Dean Acheson, the former secretary of state under President Truman and an initial supporter of the Vietnam War. Having caught wind of Gould’s plans, Principal Day called the student to his house, where, says Gould, “He politely stated, ‘Well, Jeff, I never thought of you as a fascist.’”

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Rob Shapiro likes to say that 1968 was the year when the Academy’s trajectory became less centripetal and more centrifugal. “What we had,” he emphasizes, “is a very T H E

self-contained community of academic excellence reaching out to connect with a rapidly changing word.” Indeed, once administrators and faculty of the era (often with the explicit backing of students) permitted the proverbial doors to be opened, and the light to filter in, there was no denying that the resulting illumination was both a balm and a boon to the entire community. For all its angst and upheaval, its sadness and straining, 1968 was the year in which the modern Exeter began to take shape.

Today, 50 years on, a quick survey of the Academy bears this out. As of January 2018, 43 percent of current Exonians are students of color, while the gender composition of the student body is evenly split at 50 percent female and 50 percent male. From a school that hired its very first female instructor in 1968, Exeter has evolved into an institution where the majority of administrative leadership positions are held by women.

Meanwhile, the sense of faculty as approachable allies versus removed disciplinarians and of the importance of including student voices in critical school decisions and programming — concepts first introduced in the late 1960s — have, with time, blossomed to the benefit of all.

Still, Shapiro emphasizes the importance of a characteristic that remains unchanged at Exeter, even today: “There was a feistiness to the Academy long before 1968 — a substrate of independence,” he says. “We had a lot of freedoms compared to students at other private schools, but also a healthy respect for structure and rules even as we were talking about the possibility of dissolving them.” That helped the Academy weather the cultural revolution of the late 1960s. E E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 95

Reunions

2018 MAY 4-6

(children’s program available) 30th Reunion | Class of 1988 25th Reunion

|

20th Reunion

|

Class of 1998

15th Reunion

|

Class of 2003

Class of 1993

MAY 11-13 55th Reunion

|

Class of 1963

45th Reunion

|

Class of 1973

35th Reunion

|

Class of 1983

10th Reunion

|

Class of 2008

MAY 17-20 50th Reunion

|

Class of 1968

MAY 18-20 60th Reunion

|

Class of 1958

40th Reunion

|

Class of 1978

5th Reunion

|

Class of 2013

MAY 22-24 75th Reunion

|

Class of 1943

70th Reunion

|

Class of 1948

65th Reunion

|

Class of 1953

REUNITE WITH THE PEOPLE AND THE PLACE For more information, visit www.exeter.edu/reunions; or call the Alumni and Parent Relations Office at 603-777-3264.

Finis

1968

wobbly, but she’ll do fine.

Then I grab myself a stick out of the pile and soon we are out in the fray. And it’s slapstick, slapstick, and poke away the puck. And it’s weave left, weave right, and steer through a maze of long and short legs.

I forget, for a short while, that I am older now and out of shape. This ice, this freeze, unlike the Zambonied surface most skaters are used to, has its own topography — bumps, ripples, crisscrossing fissures, mushy edges. I relearn this when I get the puck on a fast break, catch a blade in some slush, and fly face-first into a snowbank. “Yeah, it’s a little soft over there,” someone says. All too soon, the sun has gone down. By now our silhouetted herd of puck-chasers has thinned out and we part ways even more to let the little skaters make some memories.

My daughter gets the puck.

Slaps and whiffs. Slaps and whiffs. Shoots again. Score! I learn on the drive home that this game is in her blood now, as it has been, for a long time, in mine. Yes, I tell her, we will play again soon. E

leanings, or, at the very least, with inchoate views on the subject. Rare, at that point, was the pacifist Exonian, says Jeff Gould ’68, Rudy Professor of History at Indiana University. “Back then I was one of a very small handful of students who were (or wanted to be) anti-war activists.”

Yet as U.S. involvement in Vietnam intensified under the Johnson administration, and Americans were stunned by the Tet Offensive of early 1968, public support for this increasingly bloody war of attrition, including among Exonians, waned rapidly. To further magnify the issue, during the 1967-68 school year, four Exeter alumni were killed in action.

Peter Scheer vividly recalls his own and others’ shifts in thinking about the war. “In terms of international political issues, I was struck when I got to Exeter by how conservative it was … not just the faculty and the school, but the students. A chapel talk from the fall of ’65, my freshman year, really illustrates this.

“Someone involved in the Quaker pacifist movement — she’d probably been part of the ‘Ban the Bomb’ campaign of the 1950s — came to speak out against American involvement in Southeast Asia. At one point, she held in her hands shrapnel from an anti-personnel bomb to show us how they were designed to maim.

“In response to this, the student body, in order to make clear its disagreement, began stomping its feet and yelling. It turned into a roar, and the administration perhaps moved more slowly than it usually did to tamp it down.

While I had been exposed to arguments against the war through reading The New York

—continued from page 96

—continued from page 27

Editor’s note: The George Bennett Fellowship celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Established by Elias B.M. Kulukundis ’55 in honor of PEA English Instructor George Bennett, the yearlong fellowship provides writers “of outstanding promise” with support they need to pursue their craft. To commemorate the anniversary, we will feature a Bennett Fellow in each Bulletin issue during the 2017-18 academic year. Peter Anderson lives in Crestone, Colorado, and teaches at Adams State University. One of these days, he hopes to finish the novel he began working on as a Bennett Fellow at Exeter. Portions of this essay are excerpted from his most recent book, Heading Home: Field Notes (www.bowerhousebooks.com).

W I N T E R

20 1 8

Times, and was maybe a little more open-minded as a result, I still got caught up with the stomping.

“Now dial forward to ’67, certainly by ’68, so just a couple of years later, and something like 80 percent of the student body, and the same percent of faculty, were against the war. This reflected a broader shift in attitude generally toward government and authority and official pronouncements about American policy. We’d gone from respect, to at a minimum skepticism, but more broadly to outright disbelief and rejection.”

Like Scheer, Gould, who participated in the “Vietnam Summer,” an antiwar campaign mounted by the American Friends Service Committee during summer 1967 and who would go on to create at Exeter The New Liberator, a progressive student publication that debuted in 1968, recalls an expanding discourse around the war, one gradually more welcoming of heterogeneous points of view.

That’s not to say, however, that there was no pushback, as is illustrated by Gould’s proposal to his classmates to stage a walkout on the 1968 graduation speaker Dean Acheson, the former secretary of state under President Truman and an initial supporter of the Vietnam War. Having caught wind of Gould’s plans, Principal Day called the student to his house, where, says Gould, “He politely stated, ‘Well, Jeff, I never thought of you as a fascist.’”

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Rob Shapiro likes to say that 1968 was the year when the Academy’s trajectory became less centripetal and more centrifugal. “What we had,” he emphasizes, “is a very T H E

self-contained community of academic excellence reaching out to connect with a rapidly changing word.” Indeed, once administrators and faculty of the era (often with the explicit backing of students) permitted the proverbial doors to be opened, and the light to filter in, there was no denying that the resulting illumination was both a balm and a boon to the entire community. For all its angst and upheaval, its sadness and straining, 1968 was the year in which the modern Exeter began to take shape.

Today, 50 years on, a quick survey of the Academy bears this out. As of January 2018, 43 percent of current Exonians are students of color, while the gender composition of the student body is evenly split at 50 percent female and 50 percent male. From a school that hired its very first female instructor in 1968, Exeter has evolved into an institution where the majority of administrative leadership positions are held by women.

Meanwhile, the sense of faculty as approachable allies versus removed disciplinarians and of the importance of including student voices in critical school decisions and programming — concepts first introduced in the late 1960s — have, with time, blossomed to the benefit of all.

Still, Shapiro emphasizes the importance of a characteristic that remains unchanged at Exeter, even today: “There was a feistiness to the Academy long before 1968 — a substrate of independence,” he says. “We had a lot of freedoms compared to students at other private schools, but also a healthy respect for structure and rules even as we were talking about the possibility of dissolving them.” That helped the Academy weather the cultural revolution of the late 1960s. E E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 95

F I N I S

O R I G I N E

P E N D E T

A Good Day on the Ice

By Peter Anderson, 2015-16 Bennett Fellow

O

ne winter afternoon in 1974, I knew how good a goalie’s life could be: skates suf-

This mountain lake lives in shadow. The sun is a rounder ... stays

ALLAN BURCH

ficiently dull to slide around in the crease (but sharp enough for stability and precision), pads snug and riding well on legs, good light and clear vision though the eyeholes of a fiberglass mask, glove hand moving with speed and accuracy, kicks to right and left bouncing out shots along the ice. On a breakaway, the Exeter player I dreaded most hit the post after a risky cross-body lunge on my part. Good mojo held up until the third-period clock ran down to all its lovely zeroes. We came out on top. Just barely.

Before the rematch on the home rink in Andover later that season, someone from Exeter sent me an unsigned note (prophetic, as it turned out) made up of letters cut and pasted from a newspaper. It said simply: “Anderson ... Your ass is grass.” Soon that dreaded skater was back, drifting out toward the red line and receiving long breakaway passes from his defensemen. He beat me a few too many times that day — a gloomy denouement in an average, though occasionally transcendent, goalie career.

Never again would I experience the adrenaline-infused task of guarding the net in an Andover-Exeter game, but the lure of a good day on the ice remained.

away longer each night, and sleeps it off behind the ridge during the day. The winds come down off the mountain, sweeping skiffs of snow across the ice. A father pulls on his skates, so much easier now with plastic and Velcro than it once was with leather and lace. He tests the freeze, first around the edges — a few feet thick — then out in the middle — clear and so deep, he can’t tell where the ice leaves off and the black water begins. He skates as fast as he can, grateful this sprint is his own — no whistles, no coach. He slides one blade in front of the other, leans into a wide rink turn, and carves two thin white lines that follow him out to the edge of the lake where his daughter, still wobbly in her new pink skates, glides toward him. He takes her hands in his and skates backward, looking over his shoulder for stones frozen in the ice, then back at his daughter, steady now, who sees only what lies ahead.

Other than a blue hole off to the west, from which a late-afternoon sun throws a prom-

ised-land glow over the hills south of Del Norte, Colorado, we are driving under a woolen-gray January sky. Gusts of wind carry billowing sheets of snow down the frozen Rio Grande toward the ranch where my daughter and I are headed. We turn off the highway and follow the signs — old-fashioned white figure skates dangling from fence posts and pasture gates — to the river. There we find several people standing around a fire, an assortment of grown-ups and kids skating between two homemade hockey goals, and a pack of ranch dogs circling the commotion and chasing the puck, all of this on a shoveled-off rink of Rio Grande river ice. As I sit down on a log bench to lace up my blades, and I hear skates carving up the ice and sticks slapping pucks, I remember a frozen scene some 45 years ago: long, strong striding with a good pal into the great beyond of a glassy, black-iced lake, sliding the puck back and forth across the smoothness of it all, faster and farther, faster and farther, world without end, amen. I could live in that flashback, but duty calls. I help my daughter lace up her skates, grab her a short stick, and show her how to lean on it for balance. She’s a little —continued on page 95

9 6 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

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Exeter for Educators Exeter’s intensive, one-week programs for secondary and middle school teachers provide enriching professional development.

June 24-29, 2018 • Anja S. Greer Conference on Mathematics and Technology • Biology Institute • Environmental Literature Institute • Exeter Diversity Institute • Writers’ Workshop • Rex A. McGuinn Conference on Shakespeare • Exeter Humanities Institute

Live, learn and find inspiration with peers. www.exeter.edu/programs-educators For conference details, including travel and lodging information.

20 Main Street Exeter, NH 03833-2460 Parents of Alumni: If this magazine is addressed to a son or daughter who no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please email us (records@exeter.edu) with his or her new address. Thank you.

The best is yet to come.

JULY 1 – AUGUST 3, 2018 Exeter’s summer experience has transformed over a century to become what it is today: a five-week journey of discovery.

EXETER SUMMER students, currently in grades 7-12, represent a rich diversity of language, culture, religion and race. Students choose among 100 courses, 10 academic clusters and 15 sports.

Whatever sparks your interest, you will find it at Exeter.

603.777.3488

| EXETER.EDU/SUMMER | SUMMER@EXETER.EDU