FENN: Summer 2012

Summer 2012

THE FENN SCHOOL 516 MONUMENT STREET CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS 01742-1894

NONPROFIT U.S. POSTAGE PAID N READING MA PERMIT NO. 121

Parents of Alumni If this publication is addressed to your son, and he no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please notify the alumni office of his new mailing address (978-318-3525 or aboudreau@fenn.org). Thank you!

For the Greater Good

From the Headmaster It’s an age-old question I ask Fenn boys with the broad, blank canvas of their lives in front of them: “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I sometimes make a playful guess before they answer and occasionally a more serious prediction or two in my headmaster’s graduation reflection as a boy leaves Fenn. Their answers range from a carefree “I don’t know!” to a passionate declaration of a dream. Tracking a number of the boys’ and my own predictions over almost twenty years, I’ve learned that some of my guesses and their answers have been surprisingly accurate and some could not be farther from the truth.

A certainty is that a force or influence, present or future, in these boys’ lives—a mentor, a parent, a teacher, a passion, a talent, personal circumstance, or external events—will bring them to their life’s work.

A certainty is that a force or influence, present or future, in these boys’ lives—a mentor, a parent, a teacher, a passion, a talent, personal circumstance, or external events—will bring them to their life’s work. Our hope is that they find in their work what is true to their talents and person so that their endeavors become a calling to heal or instruct or create or serve or provide, a calling that makes their lives full and enriches those whom they serve.

In this current issue of FENN we ask members of the extended school community—faculty, staff, alumni, and parents—about their callings. Each of these stories is a window on dedicated work and a fulfilled life.

I have been asked what called me to the work of educating boys and running a school. The answer, not

surprisingly, involves seminal role models across the years of my life: my parents, Peg and John, who taught me through their earnest example that caring for others is paramount; my grade school teachers, the Sisters of St. Joseph, who selflessly dedicated their lives to God and children and who taught me to love learning; my older sister, Margaret, who resolutely pursued teaching in urban schools; my brother Johnny, her twin, who served as a priest ministering in troubled neighborhoods in Boston; the social workers of the Boston Juvenile Court, where I interned in college; later my wife, Lorraine, whose love and care of all things about schools is unbounded; and finally, a headmaster, Charles Riepe, twenty years my senior, who naturally mentored me, generously giving me the chance to help him run a school for boys. Individually and at times in unison, their voices speak across time to inspire and sustain me in the work of my life and profession.

I’m compelled to end with the note that in my own work I am daily struck by the efforts of hundreds of people I’ve come to know over time who have consuming and meaningful professional responsibilities in business, law, medicine, the arts, or family, yet who are personally called to serve their sons’ or their own schools as volunteer parents, alumni, and trustees. Their primary work in life lies outside education, yet they devote themselves in singular ways to the work of sustaining a school. Their selfless and dedicated response to their second calling inspires me every day. I hear their voices, too, and see their example, as I am certain Fenn boys will as they answer the call in their own lives.

Fenn is on the move!

With $24.7 million already committed toward the $26 million goal, the Boys at the Heart campaign is now reaching out to Fenn’s broader alumni and parent community to raise the final $1.3 million needed to declare victory. Stand up and be counted!

Who is close to your heart?

While boys are at the heart of everything that Fenn is and does, the School’s faculty remains close to the hearts of all those who experience Fenn as a student or parent. Your gift to the campaign can honor that special teacher who made all the difference to you.

A contribution to the new Faculty at the Heart Fund will help provide teachers with the professional and curriculum development opportunities that inspire them in their daily work with boys.

For more information, contact Tom Hudner ’87, Director of Advancement The Fenn School, 516 Monument Street, Concord, MA 01742. Email thudner@fenn.org or call 978-318-3520

FENN VOLUME 80 NUMBER 2 SUMMER 2012

2 FOR

THE

GREATER GOOD

The Call to Teach; The Call to Heal; The Call to Serve; The Call to Preach: Personal Fenn Stories

26 FACULTY Page 2

AND

STAFF DEVELOPMENTS

Jo Anna Jameson Moves On; Susan Richardson Directs Alumni Programs at Boston University; Fenn Fellow Freemon Romero ’04; Research Project Involves Fenn Boys

30 ADVANCING FENN Library and Science Center under construction; $1 Million Challenge Gift to Support Diversity Efforts; R. Vincent “Vinnie” Lynch ’64: Distinguished Alumnus

Page 30

34 AROUND CAMPUS Founder’s Day; Cultural Heritage Fair; Fenn Grows a Garden; Youth in Philanthropy; Drama Round-up; Treble Chorus; W.W. Fenn Speaking Contest; Visual Arts Awards; Lower School Publishing Party; Andreas Sheikh ’12 in Moonrise Kingdom.

38 SPORTS HIGHLIGHTS Page 35 Editor and Feature Writer Laurie O’Neill Editorial Board Derek Boonisar Anne Ames Boudreau Thomas J. Hudner III ’87 Laurie O’Neill Jerry Ward Lorraine Garnett Ward

40 CLASS NOTES Alumni Updates; Mike O’Brien ’09, Soccer All-American; Former Faculty News; Milestones

52 REFLECTIONS “Friends for Life”

Photography Laurie O’Neill Anthony J. Santos Joshua Touster Design Michele Page

On the Cover Harvard Medical School student Sam Takvorian ’99

FENN is published twice a year for alumni, parents, and friends of the school. Letters and comments are welcome and can be sent to Laurie O’Neill, The Fenn School, 516 Monument Street, Concord, MA 01742 or email loneill@fenn.org.

For the

Greater Good

For the Greater Good

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calling, whether it comes as an “aha moment” or it evolves over time, enables us to utilize our skills and interests in a satisfying way to affect the greater good. In these pages you will meet several Fenn alumni,

faculty and staff members, and parents who have, whether in education, medicine, the military, the ministry, or in related endeavors, made the most of their talents, strengths, and passions to make the world a better place.

The Call to Teach Photo by Mark Craig. Copyright: President and Fellows of Harvard College

Helping the Past Tell its Story: Andy Majewski ’83 “Other guys are given gifts—they might be violinists or ball players. But I realized that what I can do is to digest a concept and share with others that ‘Wow!’ I get. I want them to be as jazzed as I am.”

To Andy Majewski ’83, teaching is the art of assisting discovery. He does this every day at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where he is an education specialist. Usually in perpetual motion, Andy sits in his office that is within earshot of the excited voices of children visiting the nearby Hall of the American Indian and talks about his passion for teaching at the museum, which he calls “a sacred space.”

Andy says that “without a doubt,” he was inspired in his choice of career by his “magical” experience at Fenn. He was recently chatting with a former classmate, Bejan Rufeh ’83, still one of his closest friends, and “We were saying that we didn’t recognize it at the time, but later realized how lucky we were to have been educated by the teachers we had. They treated us like the men they wanted us to become, and we rose to that unspoken challenge in the classroom, on the field, in the art studio, and in Robb Hall, when we were speaking publicly at All School Meeting.”

Andy mentions Walter Birge, Jim Carter ’54, Joe Hindle, Jim Carlisle, and Terry Miskell as among those who had a lasting impact on him.

Andover, too, played a role in the path to Andy’s life as an educator. It was the international aspect of the school’s diverse student body that inspired him to see “the places on the planet” where his classmates were from and to have “a transformative international experience” like many of them were having through study-abroad opportunities.

At Tufts University, Andy was studying biology when he realized that medicine, an early interest, was not his true calling; instead, despite completing a BS in that field, he found that “it was my love of cultures that flourished.” While at Tufts, he began taking graduate-level courses through its Museum Studies program.

Andy first came to the Harvard Museums as a volunteer in the 90s, teaching classes in animal adaptation on nights and weekends while he was studying at Tufts. He was mentored, he says, by Pete Money, “a seasoned educator who recognized and nurtured my potential.” At this point, Andy notes, “You could say I was ‘called’ to teach.” He worked as a consultant and designed adult classes in natural history. “Throw me more challenges,” was his constant request at the time. Andy began working with live animals, handling birds of prey, for example, and explaining to visitors the differences between scorpions and crayfish.

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For the Greater Good

After Tufts Andy had an opportunity to teach in Japan, and he put to use “the most valuable academic lesson I ever got.”

A university professor had once told Andy’s class that if they wanted to get the most out of a work of art, they needed to put in the effort “to meet it halfway”; in other words, they needed to learn about the artist’s life, culture, materials, styles that he or she emulates, and so on. So Andy took classes in Japanese cinema, history, performance tradition, and language before going on the teaching exchange program. Once there, he taught all levels of students, from children to adults, for three years in Matsuo-Machi, a farming village two hours from Tokyo.

“From then on, I knew what I wanted to do,” he says. Andy notes that “the Japanese had it right…they view teaching as the giving of a gift.” Hearkening back to his Fenn teachers, he adds, “I treasure

the gifts they gave me and nothing thrills me more than to give those gifts to others.” He says his experience in Japan gave him the confidence that he could adjust his style to reach people of all ages.

When a full-time education position opened at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Andy was offered the job, and in 2009, when the Peabody decided to form its own education department, he was invited to join the team. Andy works with school groups and with families, helping to design programs that involve hands-on activities with artifacts and crafts, and alongside world class experts, which has taught him that “I must be at the top of my game.”

Being an educator in a non-traditional setting is endlessly fascinating to Andy. “I get to experience the power of teaching with artifacts on a daily basis, and each

“How lucky we were to have been educated by the teachers we had. They treated us like the men they wanted us to become, and we rose to that unspoken challenge.” has an amazing story that speaks about cultures and human ingenuity. It’s my job to help these artifacts tell their stories so that people can be as excited and inspired as I am.”

Sharing his love of “the awesome story of life on our planet” at the same museum his parents would take him to almost every weekend when he was a child is “thrilling,” Andy says. He paraphrases a line by Mark Twain, saying it suits him to a tee: “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.”

The “Natural Progression” to a Life in Schools: Ben ’78, Joe ’81, and Fred Williams t was in no small part due to growing up on boarding school campuses in Connecticut and Massachusetts that Ben, Joe, and Fred Williams were inspired to pursue lives as teachers and administrators.

Fred, who once taught at Fenn, and Ben, are headmasters, the former at The Rectory School in Pomfret, CT, and the latter at Cate School in Carpinteria, CA. Their brother Joe is the assistant head at Kimball Union Academy.

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Ben says his earliest experience in an educational setting, at Pomfret School, was not as a student but “as a curious, gregarious little cuss who tried valiantly to be part of every Frisbee and stickball game the real students were playing.”

He and his brothers agree that their father, Benjamin D. Williams III, who

Ben Williams

taught at the Pomfret School and served as the headmaster of Lawrence Academy for fifteen years, was a powerful role model. But they say that a number of forces combined to lead them to their chosen paths. “Dad was my hero,” says Ben, “and doing what he did always had its appeal. But it was more than that. Our

For the Greater Good

Fred Williams with a student

world revolved around the very things that matter to such communities— learning, growing, sharing, and failing (on occasion). I think we internalized the very priorities of the schools where we lived.”

“Fenn helped me find my moral compass,” says Joe. Fred, who began working at Fenn not long after his college graduation, is “keenly aware of my father’s most important attributes: dedication, wisdom, an ability to relate to students and an interest in doing so. I cannot match him in most of these areas, but I can strive to live up to his example.” Fred says he was drawn to teaching by his love of literature and history, his interest in athletics and coaching, and his desire to work with young people.

Another observation the brothers make is that their dad, in Joe’s words, was able to strike a balance between his professional life and his family and personal interests. But among Ben and Joe’s role models are also several Fenn faculty members, too. Joe mentions Mark Biscoe, Jim Carter ’54, and Read

Albright, saying that “they, like my dad, shared the common thread of poise, professionalism, commitment, and talent.” He calls his Fenn years “very special,” cites the extemporaneous speaking contest as one of his fondest memories, and says that “thanks to a very patient and caring faculty I was able to grow up quite a bit. Fenn helped me find my moral compass,” he adds.

Ben, whose teaching career began at St. Sebastian’s School in Needham, says having a job with the word “master,” in the title is “something I try to live up to every day. Schools are ultimately about people, and so it is with people, students and faculty, that a headmaster must spend his or her time.” When he writes about

why he teaches or why education matters to him, Ben always refers to those who taught him at Fenn as having contributed “to the kind of teacher I became.” He cites his very first class and teacher, seventh grade math with Larry Piatelli, as an example. The two became close friends years later when Ben entered administration.

Steve Gardner, who many years later brought his child to interview at Cate, made Ben passionate about science, Madame (Patsy) Edes fostered a love of the French language, Peter Gilmore taught him to control his temper on the tennis court, and Bart Winchell’s biology class was “a revelation,” Ben says. Jim Carter hired Ben (and Fred and Joe) to work with him at the Concord Academy summer camp after their student days at Fenn were over. “They remain my teachers, still, some thirty-five years later,” Ben says.

Ben, Joe, and Fred followed their instincts, they say, their callings unfolding in what Joe terms a “natural progression.”

Echoing his brothers’ comments, Ben declares, “Schools are that perfect marriage of virtue and purpose. Whose life can be more meaningful than a teacher’s?”

Joe Williams with students

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For the Greater Good

Heeding the Call: Fenn Faculty ome teachers cannot recall a time they didn’t want to be in a classroom; others say they heard the call after first pursuing a different professional path entirely. A sampling of Fenn teachers shows that inspiration can come from a wide variety of muses, from a stint as a volunteer in a Central American country, from a chance meeting with a Fenn teacher, and even from a conversation with a mom who knows her son very well.

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“The greatest reward of being an educator is having the chance to make a difference.”

DEREK BOONISAR When Derek, who is a coach, Latin teacher, and assistant head of school, was a senior at the University of Vermont majoring in English with a minor in Classics, he was conflicted about his future. Should he go into law? Finance?

While home during a winter break he told his mother Kristen, a life-long educator, that he lacked a plan. His mom shook her head and smiled. “Now, am I the only one who remembers what you’ve chosen to do for each of the last several summers?” she asked.

Derek did remember: he had worked at summer camps, at Dedham Country Day 6

and at Tenacre School, as a counselor and eventually as a program director. “I’ll never forget that conversation with my mother,” he declares. “She told me what my calling was.”

Not long after his college graduation, and through a connection dating back to his days at Nobles, Derek was offered a teaching and coaching position at the Salisbury School, where it was baptism by fire, he says. He not only taught Latin; he was the whole Classics department, trying mightily to stay one day ahead of his students, some of them only a few years younger than he was. “I operated on nerves the whole year,” Derek declares, but

he persevered and acquired the kind of total experience that working at a boarding school provides.

However, being single in his early twenties and living on a campus in rural northwestern Connecticut did not provide much in the way of a personal life, and during his second year, Derek began thinking about making a move, ideally to a Boston-area day school. That was seventeen years ago and what followed was a life filled over the years with teaching, advising, serving as Secondary School Placement Director, coaching, running the Student Senate, and fulfilling various administrative duties, as well as marrying Liz and having two children.

Derek says he’s learned much about teaching in his seventeen years at Fenn, such as “how good teachers evolve, retaining time-tested approaches while changing, too.” He’s also discovered that the greatest reward of being an educator is having the chance to make a difference.

Often Derek will receive an unsolicited letter or email thanking him for doing just that.

For the Greater Good

TRICIA MCCARTHY Tricia, who teaches English and is head of the Middle School, volunteered right after her college graduation as a teacher in Belize, when “it was far from the vacation paradise it is now,” she says. “I fell in love with the kids who were so hungry for knowledge that their families would forego one dinner a week to be able to afford tuition and school supplies.”

When Tricia returned she worked for a development company as the manager of a prominent Boston Harbor marina, where the perks included enjoying fancy lunches on visiting yachts and hobnobbing with captains and crews from around the world. But education continued to call her. She began teaching, advising, and assuming duties including serving as Humanities department chair and

PETER BRADLEY Math teacher Peter Bradley’s parents were teachers, as were many of his other relatives, but he was “determined to avoid the family business,” he says. After graduating from college with a degree in accounting and spending three summers working in the Mariner Program at Mystic Seaport, Peter found himself in the Seaport’s school program during the autumn of 1980.

One fall day Bob Duncan arrived from Fenn, chaperoning a group of students.

Over coffee one evening, Bob asked Peter what he was going to do with his life, and the latter told him he wasn’t sure he wanted to follow in his parents’ footsteps.

Bob looked at Peter and declared, “You should be a teacher.” Peter listened, he said, “and the rest is history.” This is his twentysecond year at Fenn.

“I fell in love with the kids who were so hungry for knowledge that their families would forego one dinner a week to be able to afford tuition and school supplies.”

Director of Student Affairs at the Brimmer and May School. At the same time she worked on a master’s degree in counseling and spent a month at the Klingenstein Center’s Summer Institute at Columbia University.

In 1999 she joined the Fenn faculty, where lunch is at tables filled with chattering adolescents devouring curly fries and pizza and where she hobnobs with her Middle School colleagues, organizing such events as the seventh grade trip to Washington, D.C. She’d have it no other way.

For the Greater Good

“A good and authentic path”: From Fenn Student—or Parent— to School Leader mong Fenn alumni and parents who heeded the call to education, several, like Ben and Fred Williams, currently lead schools. Brad Bates ’84, headmaster of the Dublin School in New Hampshire, is the son of alumnus Nathaniel “Buddy” Bates ’49, who taught for many years at Belmont Hill School and who “has been a role model for me throughout my career,” Brad says.

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Brad, brother of Scott ’79, won the prestigious Butera Distinguished Teacher Award in 2007. He heard the call to education, he says, while “half asleep during rowing practice” in college, when his coach announced that he knew a school that was looking for a history teacher. The school was St. Andrew’s in Delaware, and Brad taught there for fifteen years. Looking back, he says, “I am thrilled I stayed in education.”

Brad can still recite “O Captain! My Captain!,” the poem he presented during the W.W. Fenn Public Speaking Contest. And, an avid woodworker, he continues to use the toolbox he constructed in woodshop. “I seem to channel some aspect of my Fenn experience almost every day,” he says.

In 1988 Matt Baker ’84 was reading a novel while in Italy for an International Relations program. It was The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, in which a young 18th-century Italian nobleman rebels against his parents by climbing a tree and never coming down.

Matt says the author proposes that a true leader is someone who communicates his ideas to people rather than one who simply inherits a title and a way of life. Inspired, Matt decided to try writing and teaching because “it seemed as if it could become a good and authentic path for my life.”

Ten years later, after working for a

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few years at another charter school, he founded the Metropolitan Institute, a tuition-free charter preparatory school for the performing arts, visual arts, and academics in Phoenix, AZ. “I had a vision of the kind of high school I wished I had gone to,” he explains, “based on some combination of Fenn and what my closest friends, Alex ’84 and Chris Abele ’82, had experienced at Concord Academy.”

Matt was in the Intensive Language Program at Fenn, which not only enabled him to read aloud better than most of his classmates when he reached the sixth grade, he notes, but which also, due to the hours of reading homework he had, “set me up to be a very serious reader for the rest of my life.” Matt is still in touch with Nancy Hall, his Fenn reading tutor and teacher. When his first novel, The Art of Confession, was published in 2002, “she read it in one night. It was a special moment for both of us.”

Among Fenn parents is at least one headmaster. Dan Scheibe, father of Tad, who is entering the sixth grade, has been appointed the new head of Lawrence Academy. Dan, like Ben, Joe, and Fred Williams, says his earliest memories involve a campus. His parents worked at Wesleyan University and Dan did what most faculty children might do: he had birthday parties in the lecture halls,

Fenn parent Dan Scheibe

“body-rolled” down the hill near the library, and later worked functions in the faculty club and labored with the maintenance crew. All the while he realized that “something powerful” was at work in the way that students and faculty “in that otherwise sleepy place in the Connecticut River Valley occupied themselves with big ideas and big hopes connected to a big world.”

For the Greater Good

“I seem to channel some aspect of my Fenn experience almost every day,” —Brad Bates ’84.

What transformed his life, Dan says, was not a particular class or teacher or sport, but rather it was “the total experience of finding my place on a campus that suited my needs and goals.” Great education, he says, “replicates a vanishing sense of place, an experience of community that is about common purpose, and an excellence defined by authentic experience.”

Matt Baker ’84 and students

ROB ACHTMEYER ’94: FROM LESSONS TO LULLABIES

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irst as an intern, then as a long-term substitute, and finally as a full-fledged member of the Fenn

Rob was a humanities teacher and fifth grade dean when he and his wife, Kate Lenane, decided that he

faculty, where he stayed for four and a half years, Rob

would stay at home to take care of the couple’s two

Achtmeyer received lots of experience working with

young children. Being with two-year-old Kevin and

children. After one year of teaching middle school and

newest addition Henry is “magical,” he declares. “I

nine of instructing fifth graders at the Maret School in

wouldn’t trade it for anything; I get to see all the

Washington, D.C., Rob was well-prepared for his

things my kids are thinking, experiencing, and

current role, that of an at-home dad.

absorbing, and I know that this is a vital time in their

When Rob started out at Fenn as a fourth grader, it was in Kathy Starensier’s class. She and several other

development.”

Life as an at-home dad has other benefits, too. Rob

teachers and advisors, including Lucia MacMahon,

has the flexibility to serve as a commissioner for the

Lynn (Devitt) Duval, Michele Tissiere, Mark Biscoe,

City of Rockville’s Historic District, is helping to start

and Jim Carter became his role models. From them he

a preschool, and is staying connected to Maret by

learned the importance of connecting with students,

tutoring two students.

he says, adding, “They all wanted me to succeed.”

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For the Greater Good

“The Toughest Job You’ll Ever Love”: Bob Duncan and Dave Duane Recall Peace Corps Service nswering John F. Kennedy’s enthusiastic challenge to young people about service, Bob Duncan and his wife, Lucinda, who had been teaching school in Lincoln, journeyed to Honduras, where they spent more than two years as Peace Corps volunteers in the late 1960s.

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While Lucinda worked for the government, Bob, who went on to fill many roles at Fenn, including assistant headmaster, for a total of thirty years, was stationed in a rural village, La Esperanza, which was twelve hours by dirt road from the capital city of Tegucigalpa. For three weeks each month Bob was itinerant, traveling by mule within a 100-mile area to visit schools and help improve them, and to assist with training not-yet-licensed young teachers.

The couple was far from emergency medical care, the area was “hotter than the dickens and dusty,” the Duncans often lived on tortillas and salt, and the country was rife with corruption. Bob kept a five-dollar bill in his passport when he knew he had to cross the border into El Salvador. But he was

once detained at a checkpoint by a guard who made him drink moonshine tequila and kept his gun on the table to remind Bob he could not leave until told he could do so.

The schools he saw were tiny, with dirt floors, poor light, and no blackboards, and they were situated in the middle of the campo, five miles from most students’ houses. Teaching was hands-on; bottle caps, for example, were used to figure problems in math class. Bob would find out what each school needed most and help provide it. “It was about whatever the community wanted,” he says, even when in one case what it wanted was to create and install a statue of the Madonna at the crossroads in town. Bob would organize the project, round up mule trains to transport materials, and find skilled labor.

Bob observed classes and worked

with teachers, helping them understand in one case that they should allow students to be creative—“To let the children write a story and not make them think it was a waste of paper,” he explains. He helped the Hondurans function as a community. “I was doing Sua Sponte even then,” he says with a smile. A local resident once told him that if Bob could train one Honduran to do his job as well as he could do it, he would be successful.

The problems were overwhelming, though, and some Peace Corps volunteers bailed. But Bob and Lucinda persevered.

“No question we were doing good work and making lives better,” he says.

“I was doing Sua Sponte even then.”

And how many Peace Corps volunteers can say a school was named after them in the area where they served? The Robert Peary School was named for Bob. Peary? It seems that the Arctic explorer credited for discovering the North Pole was the topic of a discussion in a class that Bob was observing, and one boy could not be convinced that Bob, whom the students called Robert, was not the same person.

Bob Duncan with his mule in Honduras

For the Greater Good

For science teacher Dave Duane, “wanderlust with a purpose” led him into the Peace Corps for two years in the early 1990s. A backpacker, travel bug, and adventure seeker who had been teaching at the Bement School in Deerfield, Dave wanted “to have an authentic experience and not a plastic one, and to contribute in some way,” he says.

Dave remembers that when he was in high school, he heard the Peace Corps described as “the toughest job you’ll ever love,” he says, and after that, “It was always something I wanted to do.” He embarked on the long application process that involved nine months of multiple interviews, and when asked to indicate a preference for assignment locations, he replied only that he did not want to go to the Pacific area. “I didn’t like fish,” he explains.

Some time later the Peace Corps informed him that they had a position for him, but it was in the Pacific.

Realizing with help from his friends that hating fish was not a good reason to decline such a great opportunity, Dave left for the Solomon Islands.

On his first day, after moving in with a local family, in their leaf and stick house, he was offered a meal of buma— tiny, boiled fish, “their little eyes staring back at me.” Knowing that turning down the meal would be an insult, “I ate it,” he says.

During his two months of training on the island of Rendova, made famous by the John F. Kennedy PT 109 incident, one of his jobs was to set up a model school to provide would-be teachers with experience. After training, he was sent to the island of Malatia, where twenty-five percent of the population is Pagan and where most residents were still living traditional lives.

Dave Duane, bottom center, with students in the Solomon Islands

There were few indigenous science teachers, he explains, so Dave served as a science educator, training other teachers. Like Bob Duncan, Dave says

“In my heart I believed I was making a difference, but this is when I really knew,” he declares. the aim of the Peace Corps is to have its volunteers help the country fill necessary roles in the community, and not to serve in those roles themselves.

Dave says he woke up every day thinking that the challenges he faced, including malaria, dysentery, “and giant centipedes that can kill a small child,” not to mention a lack of phones and difficulty traveling due to washed-out roads, “were all worth it.” When some

of the students at the Adana Secondary School began to show up with their books to study at his little prefabricated house with the “bush veranda” he had constructed, and when they would return the next day with a friend or two, bearing food, Dave was moved. “In my heart I believed I was making a difference, but this is when I really knew,” he declares.

When Dave was about to leave at the end of his stay, the community presented him with a pig and the honor of slaughtering it. He has kept up with some of his former Solomon Island students, he notes, and one of his students named his and his wife’s child after him. The entire experience was unforgettable, Dave adds, and left him with this realization: “We have to understand that the world is bigger than we are and that we need to do something for others.”

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The Call to Heal Deriving Satisfaction from Helping Others: Sam Takvorian ’99 hroughout his life, Sam Takvorian ’99, a fourth year Harvard medical student, says his eyes have been opened to people with needs that are not being met. This happened when he was a student at Fenn, and his history teacher, Jill Guzzi, once asked her students to sit in a semi-circle around her. She asked the first boys who arrived to sit in chairs, and the last ones to sit on the floor. Jill gave no explanation for the seating, but proceeded to teach the class, acknowledging the boys in the chairs and soliciting their comments while subtly dismissing or ignoring the boys on the floor.

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At the end Jill asked her students how they felt about what had just happened.

While the boys on the floor said they didn’t think she listened to them, the ones in the chairs said they had no idea the boys on the floor felt that way.

“Wow,” Sam declares, looking back at that moment. “She wanted to show us what systematic discrimination was like by making it real. I’ll never forget that class.”

When Sam was at Phillips Andover Academy, he spent a month between his junior and senior years in Ghana, volunteering at a rural health center. He shadowed the nurses and doctors, and helped them set up temporary prenatal clinics in isolated villages. “I was only another set of arms,” he says, “but I really wished I could come back when I had the skills to be hands-on.”

The experience “altered my perception of what I wanted to do,” Sam says. He had grown up being exposed to medicine—his father is an oncologist and his mother, a rheumatologist—and to the value of service. Mike Potsaid, who oversees Fenn’s community service efforts, recalls that “Sam was my ‘go to’ guy,” adding that “if I needed someone to help me out with a project, I’d call him, and despite how busy I knew he was, he

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would always say ‘yes’.”

In high school, Sam says, the idea of a life of service “began to gel.” The momentum continued while he was an undergraduate at Harvard. He became involved with the Roxbury Youth Initiative, an enrichment program for inner city kids. Sam was a counselor, then a director, and continued devoting time to the organization through his college years, growing more and more attached to the community.

Following college, Sam did an AmeriCorps year at the Whittier Street

Sam on his wedding day with best man Andrew Montomery ’99

Health Center, working mostly on health care coordination for adult diabetes patients. That same year the Mass Health Care Reform was instituted, requiring everyone to have insurance. “We were on the front lines,” he says, “helping people enroll in the subsidized program.” That experience got him excited about health care policy, and he spent a year in Washington, D.C., with the Alliance, a small non-profit focused on policy, health education, and outreach. In D.C., he was close to “the pulse of American politics” and got a taste of health care policy on the federal level. The Alliance, a minithink tank, sought to make sure the country’s policy makers were educated in health care.

Sam’s decision to pursue medicine did not come to him as “an ‘aha’ moment” but rather had been “brewing for a while.” As he approaches the end of medical school, he says these last few years have been an “intense” time in his life. Having completed a residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, rotating among surgery, pediatrics, and other specialties, he spent several months doing research this year at the Harvard Business School, where he explored how to drive a health care delivery system with a goal of prioritizing patient value. He worked with

For the Greater Good

Michael E. Porter, a leading authority on the application of competitive principles to social problems such as health care and the environment. This spring Sam took a clinical elective in the ER, and he is studying Spanish as he hopes to work in a Chilean clinic next year.

Sam married Melina Marmarelis, whom he met in medical school, in a Malibu

“When a patient puts his or her trust in you, well, it’s enormously gratifying.”

ceremony this May, and the couple is looking for a residency match. Focused and highly motivated, just like he was at Fenn, Sam foresees a “fairly intense five years” in which he wants to become established in a clinical career—perhaps oncology or gastroenterology, though he would like to return to health care policy. For now, “I want to see patients; it’s where I excel,

where I derive the most satisfaction,” he says.

“It still gives me a rush to think about some of the experiences I had in AmeriCorps. When a patient puts his or her trust in you, well, it’s enormously gratifying.”

For the Greater Good

“I’m honored to play a part”: Robert Urban Involved in Cancer Research n his role as Executive Director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrated Cancer Research at MIT, Robert Urban, father of Ian, a rising seventh grader, works with a group of approximately 650 research scientists, chemists, engineers, physicians, computer scientists, postdoctoral fellows, technical assistants, lab aides, graduates, and undergraduates; among the former and current faculty are several Nobel Prize winners.

Robert Urban and his wife, Dr. Mary Lynne Hedley

“There is a palpable sense of purpose and progress here,” Robert says of the Institute, which opened in late 2010 and houses nearly fifty laboratories. “MIT has assembled a remarkable community of individuals who are focused on finding innovative solutions for cancer and it is both an honor and a privilege to help facilitate this type of initiative.”

Born and raised in Texas, Robert grew up thinking he would become a medical doctor. Though he comes from an entrepreneurial family involved in cattle ranching, construction companies, and agricultural businesses, one uncle was a prominent physician, and his mother’s sister, Mary Ann Fletcher, is a preeminent scientist who was doing research on HIV viruses at the time.

“When we sat around the holiday dinner table, I was far more interested in her life than in the businesses that my family ran,” he says.

During his training, Robert spent significant time in a hospital setting. But as he went through the University of Texas system, he grew increasingly convinced, he says, “that my impact might be greater by being involved in scientific discoveries that, if successful, could help millions.”

Sitting in his MIT corner office on an early spring day, Robert talks about what

treatment for cervical dysplasia. Eventually Zycos was sold and the couple has since been involved in several subsequent biopharmaceutical organizations.

Most recently, Mary Lynne has cofounded and become president and chief scientist of Tesaro, a Waltham-based biotech company that among other projects is working to gain FDA approval of a drug meant to prevent nausea and vomiting from chemotherapy.

In 2007, Robert was recruited from another drug development company, Acretia, where he was serving as president and CEO, to join MIT. He says he was “fascinated” by what MIT was hoping to achieve.

Their vision was to build a new kind of research institute, one that would collocate some of the world’s most accomplished engineers and scientists who would be given sophisticated resources to develop highly creative and innovative cancer solutions, he says. The $100 million kickoff gift from MIT alumnus David H. Koch (pronounced “coke”), Robert recalls, was made during a particularly challenging time economically.

Yet Koch and MIT were determined to make the initiative happen. “Every building project around us had been stopped or put on hold,” Robert says, but

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led him to his current position. After receiving his doctoral degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch, he came to Harvard to join the lab of immunologist Jack L. Strominger; the research conducted during Robert’s time there led to a collection of medicallyoriented discoveries and eventually to a Harvard start-up.

“We’re working on the next generation of solutions and training a new type of cancer researcher.”

Robert, his wife, Dr. Mary Lynne Hedley, and another Harvard colleague co-founded the new company Pangaea Pharmaceuticals in the mid-90s. In the start-up Robert served in numerous leadership roles, including overseeing the company’s infectious disease and oncology drug development programs and acquiring new technologies, and was involved in fundraising. Over time, Pangaea evolved into another company, Zycos, which developed several oncology-related products, among which was a non-surgical

MIT pressed forward. “It was a remarkably bold move that truly reflects exceptional leadership of MIT’s President Susan Hockfield and Tyler Jacks, the faculty Director of the Institute.”

Cancer is not going away, Robert acknowledges, but significant progress is being made.

Far fewer people are dying from many cancers, including breast cancer and colon cancer, and the number of cancer survivors in the U.S. is rising rapidly, he notes. Over time the new HPV vaccine will reduce the incidence of cervical cancer, which is caused by a virus.

For some forms of the disease, however, including ovarian, pancreatic, and brain cancer, “we have much more to learn and lots to improve upon.”

The Koch Institute aims to become the gold standard in interdisciplinary disease-focused research, fostering collaborations that extend well beyond the walls of its towering Kendall Square building to advance the detection, treatment, and prevention of cancer.

Robert declares of his involvement with the Institute, “We’re working on the next generation of solutions and training a new type of cancer researcher,” Robert declares. “I’m simply honored to play a part.”

He grew increasingly convinced, he says, “that my impact might be greater by being involved in scientific discoveries that, if successful, could help millions.”

For the Greater Good

They Speak for the Animals: Pat Hall and Norma Harrington at Hall had never seen a greyhound the day she was walking through a New Hampshire mall some twenty-five years ago and spied a group of the lean and agile canines whose name comes from the Saxon word for “running dog.” The dogs, one of the oldest purebred breeds in the world, were with representatives from an area animal rescue service.

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For Pat, it was love at first sight. As she petted the dogs and asked questions of the people with them, she vowed then and there that she wanted to rescue a greyhound.

Some time later, Pat, who is the assistant to the Headmaster, visited Greyhound Friends in Hopkinton, MA, a small non-profit group dedicated to saving racetrack greyhounds and placing them in responsible, loving homes. While her husband, Howard, waited patiently, Pat

agonized over which dog to choose, finally selecting Toby, who settled right into the Hall home.

Pat began helping out at Greyhound Friends, walking and brushing the animals, and taking photos for their website. Soon she was the one showing off the dogs at shopping malls to educate the public on what gentle, sociable, and loving pets they are. She will correct the misconception that greyhounds, because they race wearing muzzles, are vicious and cannot get along

with other animals, which could not be further from the truth, she says. Later Pat began assisting the organization with its database, and worked on fundraising and coordinating “meet and greet” events like the one where she first discovered greyhounds. After serving as its secretary for several years, she joined the Board of Directors. Somewhere along the way, Pat, it seemed, had found her calling.

Toby was the first in a series of greyhounds who found a home with the

Pat Hall and her greyhound, Star

For the Greater Good

Halls over the years. Sara arrived as a companion for Toby. When they were asked to dog-sit Tally, a very shy greyhound, for a friend, he immediately bonded with Howard, and never left. They began fostering greyhounds, and one of them, Chick, stayed. “She was my heart dog,” Pat declares. The Halls currently have Joey, Star, and Fay, all ex-racers or dogs trained to race. Star, who accompanied Pat to school one day this spring to have his picture taken, was set to race in Lincoln, RI, but the track never opened.

Some greyhounds that the rescue organization receives are retired racers, and some were bred for racing but were not good at it or never competed. Greyhound racing is now illegal in New England, but it is a popular attraction elsewhere, such as in Florida, where rescue services are saturated with dogs, says Pat, which pains her. Each year it is estimated that tens of thousands of young, healthy greyhounds bred for racing are killed when they fail to keep up and are no longer viable racers.

Some are sold to research facilities. “We’re working hard to bring the dogs up here to place them,” she says.

Since dog racing was curtailed in the region, funding of greyhound rescue groups has fallen off as the public is not as focused on the issue as it was when the tracks were open, Pat notes. Organizations such as Greyhound Friends must work harder than ever to fund their efforts, which include spaying and neutering, inoculations, food, shelter, transportation, and publicity to attract potential adopters.

Pat and Howard attend gatherings of greyhound owners held in Delaware and in Gettysburg at different times of the year, where they trade stories, swap tips, and socialize. “When you look at these dogs you are taken by how loyal and calm and responsive they are, and how

intelligent,” Pat says. “Right?” she asks Star, who turns to her voice and gazes lovingly into her face.

Pat isn’t the only Fenn staff member whose calling is rescuing animals. Norma Harrington, director of Learning Specialists, first learned how to take care of unwanted and injured animals as a young child, with her dad’s guidance.

Always passionate about horses, she was given her first pony when she was nine, but her keen interest in the animals caused her to witness what goes on, she says, at some horse auctions and at the hands of the wrong owners. She became “determined to do what I could to help horses who have been discarded or neglected.”

Norma has stories about each of her rescues, and all are heartbreaking. Animals have arrived on her farm starving, terrified, blind, paralyzed, or crippled, or with a combination of problems. Currently she and her sons, Tim, 25, and Brian, 19, tend animals that have come from all over, as she works with rescue organizations in the U.S. and Thailand, and with the MSPCA at Nevins Farm in Metheun.

Among her furred, feathered, and hoofed charges are a Percheron horse named Remington, two miniature horses (one of which was from a load of minis that had been purchased for use by zoos as lion bait), a donkey that needed life-saving dental attention, a goose, several ducks, a pair of ferrets, three black labs, a Thai ridgeback with three legs, and a terrier that had been thrown from a car. Remington, Norma’s most recent addition, was saved from slaughter by a woman who pastured,

then neglected him. He came to the Harringtons suffering from frostbite, lice, scratches, infections, and starvation. Under their care, he has gained 500 pounds, has grown sweet-tempered and gentle, and “is a perfect gentleman,” she says.

Norma is particularly drawn to animals who have had “to struggle extra hard, who deal with handicaps, or who are victims of neglect.” There are lessons children and adults can learn from animals, she contends, and she has developed a strong

Norma Harrington

interest in humane education. Norma has founded a program called DogTrot Learning, which provides summer programs for children to partner with horses and farm animals to learn more about them and about themselves and to develop empathy. Norma says her love for animals “is just like breathing or blinking.

I do it because in my soul I just have to.”

Norma says her love for animals “is just like breathing or blinking. I do it because in my soul I just have to.”

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The Call to Serve “A way to challenge myself ”: Morgan Hall t teaches you to be flexible, to have a contingency plan, and to roll with whatever happens. It’s the military, and the decision to serve one’s country is a life altering one.

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Math and science teacher Morgan Hall is one of the few and the proud, having made the decision to join the Marines while he was in college at Bowdoin, during a period in which he was “taking an introspective look at my life.” What he saw was a young man who was a bit immature and not taking his studies seriously. The military “was a way to challenge myself,” he says. Morgan, whose father had been in the Marine Corps Reserves, decided to leave school for a while; he took a test to see if he qualified for the Corps.

While at boot camp in Parris Island, the bombing of Libyan targets in response to terrorist acts in Europe occurred. “The real world hit me,” he recalls. Morgan spent a year and a half on active duty, posted to a reserve unit in South Weymouth. He returned to Bowdoin, newly motivated, and traveled back to Massachusetts for weekend duty once a month. He remembers playing lacrosse and driving to his base on a Thursday, back up to Bowdoin for a game, then back down to South Weymouth to finish duty.

“It was good for me,” he says, adding that the work of a Marine interested him and that he liked the people he met. The spark was fanned into a flame, and Morgan attended officer candidate school at Quantico in Virginia. When he graduated with a degree in geology and environmental studies, he received a commission in the Corps.

As a second lieutenant, Morgan went off to do his service. “It was a year by year

thing,” he explains. “You serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States.” But Morgan never thought his initial interest would turn out to be a twenty-year career in the Marines. Piloting huge transport helicopters, moving material

“It was all about the people—the interaction and the relationships I built.” and personnel, and instructing other pilots, Morgan did three tours in Iraq and a fourth, non-combat, in Okinawa. In Iraq, his unit operated in the western desert out towards Syria and south to Saudi Arabia.

Much of his combat flying was done at night to minimize the risk. “We were a huge target,” he says.

In the military Morgan learned the importance of working for a common purpose and the necessity of learning by one’s mistakes. He stayed in the service because “it was all about the people—the interaction and the relationships I built.”

His being a Marine was not about politics, he points out. “We simply owned a piece of the puzzle so big we couldn’t even imagine the size, and if we took care of our piece, we’d done our job and trusted that the others had done theirs.”

When he retired from the Corps in 2010, Morgan considered environmental work, teaching, and continuing to fly, possibly doing Medevac work. But schools were in his blood—he had been a boarder

at St. Marks, where his mom was assistant director of athletics and his dad worked in admissions. He did some substitute teaching in the Southborough, MA, and other schools, and right before an opportunity at Fenn beckoned, he facilitated a master’s level online course in leadership for other officers on weekends and nights. Dad to three children ranging in age from eleven to sixteen, Morgan loves working with young people; he coaches youth ice hockey and lacrosse, and referees hockey.

Morgan is low key about his military background. “I don’t want that to define me in the classroom,” he says. “I love working with the kids as a teacher and coach, especially the interaction on the field and ice.” But having been a Marine did help equip him for the classroom. “A plan is only good until you meet in battle; then it can go out the window,” Morgan says with a smile.

“I learned that I need to have something in my hip pocket, and be ready to roll with it.”

Morgan Hall in front of the helicopter he flew in Iraq.

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For the Greater Good

CHRISTOPHER KENT ’08

hris first thought about the military in third grade, when he watched JAG on television and “wanted to fly jets.”

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Then, at Fenn, where he was affectionately called “C.K.,” he was building balsa wood bridges in shop one day and his teacher, Jay Samoylenko, told the boys about a bridge building competition at West Point. Chris, “always interested in designing and building things,” decided that’s where he wanted to go.

But it wasn’t until he was a senior at Andover that Chris was certain about what he wanted to do: apply to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he will begin his second year this fall. Dale Hurley, his crew coach and an Academy alumnus, was one of his mentors. “The military is a creative place,” Chris says. “I knew I would be doing all kinds of things, from being aboard a ship, to serving as a training officer or a department head.”

Not everyone around him understood or supported his decision.

“Some people said I’d be wasting my intelligence. They didn’t understand,” he declares.

Chris is remembered as being “an incredible history buff ” at Fenn,

Are you a veteran?

We are working to update our Honor Roll. If you have served, or know of another alumnus who has, you can let us know by emailing alumni@fenn.org.

For the Greater Good

according to Tricia McCarthy, head of

A sense of having found his calling

the Middle School. On the seventh

particularly struck Chris while he was

grade Washington, D.C., trip, “he knew

watching the Army-Navy game this

more facts than our tour guides did and

year. “We are big rivals, but I was

the kids peppered him with questions.”

reminded of the brotherhood we share,

For the W.W. Fenn Public Speaking

and I’m so proud of that.”

Contest, Chris recited General Patton’s

This spring and summer, having

STAFF WHO HAVE SERVED organ Hall is one of several

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current or recent Fenn faculty

and staff members who are veterans.

devoted a portion of his training time

JOE HINDLE, who retired in 2011,

zeal that several faculty members still

to rowing, Chris will spend a few

served in Vietnam and would pay

recall it vividly.

weeks on a fleet cruise assignment that

tribute to his “band of brothers” in an

could take him to Norfolk, VA, or San

assembly each year on Veterans’ Day.

speech to the Third Army with such

Derek Boonisar coached Chris in hockey and says that Chris, like many

Diego, and will enjoy a month’s leave.

players, had to battle hard for ice time.

Being a plebe this year was

“But he approached the challenge with

challenging, he says, due in part to the

the work ethic and resilience that I am

many rules he had to obey. He and his

sure is currently serving him well.”

classmates were not allowed to take

Chris’s “package deal” with the

curved paths and when they walked

Academy is that he will earn a BS in

they had to square all of their corners.

mathematics and will be committed to

Plebes were required to sit at the front

five years of active duty, during which

of their chairs and not lean back. But

time he may be deployed. “I haven’t

to MIDN Christopher Kent, the

given the idea of danger much thought;

challenges are worth it. “I am doing

it’s a fact of life and a part of my job,”

something important for my country,”

he says.

he declares.

Former faculty member JIM CARTER

’54 joined the army in 1960, which, he says, forced him to “grow up and develop some discipline.” It also introduced him to the world as he served as an armored intelligence specialist in West Germany and was able to travel while on leave and develop an appreciation for and love of languages and history.

Photography teacher TONY SANTOS enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1969 and served the majority of his four-year enlistment on the Weather High Endurance Cutter Hamilton, based out

HOAGIE KLINK ’57

of Boston, helping to navigate the ship, participating in search and rescue

oagie joined the Navy in the early 60s, and was opted into the Navy Seabees, which are construction battalions. He was a heavy equipment mechanic, taking care mostly of cranes and bulldozers. Hoagie recalls working twelve- to sixteen-hour days in Vietnam making sure that the equipment was “up to snuff ” so that the men in the bush would not lack food, supplies, and ammunition.

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missions, and letting passing jet pilots who might be having trouble with their LORAN systems know if they were on their assigned flight paths.

STEVE GARRISON, a Fenn technical support specialist, served in the

became a school district administrator,

Marines for three years in the mid-

back in the States, Hoagie says, he

ending his career as a school district

1970s. He attended Radio Operators

soon realized that “the public had

business manager. He and his wife,

School and was trained in

absolutely no respect for Vietnam

Patty, live in South Burlington, VT.

telecommunications. Part of his

veterans. I just held my head high,

Their daughter, Tala, is an architect.

service included deployment to the

knowing what I had accomplished.”

Hoagie is “very proud” to have

When he and his comrades arrived

Mediterranean with the U.S. 6th Fleet,

served in the Navy, and sometimes

which helped evacuate the embassy in

college and graduated near the top of

when he wears his Seabee Veteran cap,

Beirut, Lebanon in 1976.

his class, earning an AS and a BA. He

people finally say ‘welcome home’.”

After the Navy, Hoagie returned to

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For the Greater Good

ANDREW BISCOE ’79

s the noncommissioned officer in charge of public affairs at Westover Air Force Base, Andrew handles a variety of tasks. In January he arranged for a photographer to accompany the crew on an Air Force jet that did a flyby over Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, MA, during the Patriots playoff game.

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The photo ran in the base newsletter with Andrew’s story. “Just seconds after Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler sang the final notes of the

“my life changed,” he recalls. “From then on I wanted to be a pilot.”

When Andrew found out his depth perception wasn’t good

national anthem, the C-5 cargo transport jet from the Air Force’s

enough for him to fly a plane for the military, he fell back on

439th Airlift Wing flew over the cheering crowd and elicited

another passion, writing, and earned a journalism degree at the

glances skyward from Patriot quarterback Tom Brady and tight end

University of Massachusetts. Andrew is a full-time technician in the

Rob Gronkowski, all on national television,” he wrote.

Reserve, so he works throughout the week and one weekend per

Andrew served four years on active duty in the Air Force and rejoined ten years later, just two weeks before 9/11. “Needless to say the events of that day reinforced my desire to serve my country.”

The son of Mark Biscoe, who taught Latin and history at Fenn for thirty-six years, Andrew “grew up” on campus, he says. As a

month at the base, but he could be called upon at any time to serve overseas, he says.

The military is Master Sgt. Andrew Biscoe’s calling. “There is nothing else like it—its allegiance to America, its pride and its prominence,” he declares. “I am so proud to be a part of it.”

toddler, one day he watched an Air Force jet fly over the school and

CAMERON WILSON ’93

am, whose dad was a Marine officer in Vietnam, was drawn to leadership and service in part because “I was born into the kind of advantages that every person would want, and I felt it was my duty to give back.”

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Cam says the “Marine way” appealed to

come back in body bags,” he says. He had six months before the

him. “I’m an intense person and it was the best

end of his contract with the Marines when he was scheduled to be

place for me,” he declares, adding that “the way

deployed to Faluja. “I had my shots and wrote my will,” he recalls.

the Marines handled things reminded me of Sua Sponte.”

Captain Wilson worked at Guantanamo Bay “when it was the biggest story in the world” (and one he documented in the Fall 2002

Days before he was to be shipped out, a disagreement occurred about who would pay for him to be sent over, and he never went.

Cam had headed to Los Angeles to pursue a film and music

Fenn Bulletin) because the Taliban were being brought there. He was

career, when two years later he was recalled to the Marines. He

an advisor to Gen. Michael Lehnert on media and policy, whom he

had two weeks to report to Quantico, where he would work in the

prepared for TV appearances and for questioning by the press.

historical division, documenting marine activity around the world,

Cam’s three months at “Gitmo” placed him with “some of the most

interviewing marines and going on missions in Kuwait, Nigeria,

evil men in the world,” he says. He remembers watching the Super

Norway, Iraq, and Bahrain, for a year. One of the staff members he

Bowl about 400 yards from several Al Qaeda members. But “you do

interviewed had been Bryan’s commanding officer.

your job and try not to think about it; I was more excited than anything else.”

Thirteen days into the war in Iraq, in 2003, Cam’s cousin Bryan McPhillips was killed in combat, and “then my friends began to

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Cam, who held a General Management Apprenticeship at Fidelity Investments this year and hopes to work in Boston, says being in the Marines was “an amazing experience, all of it. I fell in love with the Corps,” he declares. “It was a launching point in my life.”

For the Greater Good

“For a few seconds of this life, it seemed like the eyes of the world were on our plane, our base, our people. Chills didn’t run up and down my spine; pride did—in my job, in myself, in my fellow Airmen, in the Air Force, and in the fact that I was serving my country.”

–MSgt. Andrew Biscoe ’79, whose unit did a flyby over Gillette Stadium in January.

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The Call to Preach From Fenn Stage to Church Pulpit: Chris Holton-Jablonski ’91 hen he was on stage at Fenn, playing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof and a number of other roles, Chris Holton-Jablonski realized what he wanted to do with his life, he says. But Chris’s calling wasn’t to become an actor; rather, he wanted to preach. Now he leads worshippers at South Church, a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Portsmouth, NH, with his wife, Lauren.

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“What spoke to me then,” Chris

professor who became ordained at

says, referring both to his acting and

sixty-two. His mother, Susan, and

the many antic announcements he

stepfather, Joe Snyders, continue to be

made in All School Meeting, “was

active in their church, and have served

what it was like to be in a relationship

in pretty much every leadership role

with the audience.” Preaching, he

available to lay people.

points out, “is a lot like performing.”

Chris delivered his first sermon

Kirsten Gould, who taught Chris

when he was eighteen, at his mother’s

while she was the Drama director at

church. “It was about love, and I used

Fenn, remembers her young student

a lot of quotes,” he recalls, wincing.

as “self-possessed and confident” and

Still, he knew that preaching was his

“a stand-out in all his drama classes.”

passion.

Chris “had a personality larger than

After his graduation from Nobles,

life and lots of enthusiasm. He was a

during which time he was active in

real risk taker who marched to his

his church youth group, Chris earned

own beat,” she recalls. And when he

a BA in Comparative Religion at

performed in Fiddler, Kirsten watched

Boston University. All the while, “My

from the balcony in Robb Hall, in

sense of call deepened and clarified,”

tears.

he says. Chris headed to the Starr

All of Kirsten’s observations could

King School for the Ministry in

be made by those who know Chris

Berkeley, CA, a progressive seminary

now, in his role as a shepherd for his

which “focused pedagogically,” he

flock of some 400 congregants. His

explains, “on the formation of

enthusiasm and energy are palpable as

ministers to go out into the world to

he sits in his State Street office at the

combat systemic/systematic

old church and talks animatedly about

oppression.” He started seminary just

the path that has taken him from

a week before 9/11, and found himself

middle school to the ministry. “We

living in the Mission, knowing no

are all here for a purpose,” he says,

one. This prompted him to “dig deep

“and that is to realize the fullest

into school and people,” and to find a

expression of our lives.”

support system, an experience that led

Chris’s parents were very involved with the church when he was younger. His late father, John, was a

to his conviction that community is essential.

Chris served as a minister of

religious education at the Unitarian church in Berkeley for six

ten married partners who head Unitarian congregations in the

years after seminary, administering a program involving some

country.

fifty volunteers.

Meanwhile, he had met his future wife at the Arlington

Lauren “brings a love and care for people which is deeper and quieter than mine,” Chris says, adding that the couple work

Street Church in Boston while she was working in development

well together, “like yin and yang,” as ministers and as parents to

at Harvard Business School. They became fast friends, “with an

Ben, four, and Jack, two.

instant and deep connection,” Chris says. Lauren followed him

Chris feels there is a real place for fostering a sense of

to California, entering seminary a year behind Chris. They wed

community in today’s society. “We need to remind people we are

and she began a ministry in San Mateo. The couple arrived at

connected to each other at a time when the act of coming

South Church last August, joining the approximately eight to

together on a Sunday morning is countercultural,” he says.

One of Chris and Lauren’s goals as ministers is to teach their younger congregants that they must serve the world beyond

“We need to remind people we are connected to each other at a time when the act of coming together on a Sunday morning is countercultural,” he says.

themselves. “Our mission is clear,” he declares. “We need to help people carve out lives of meaning and wholeness.”

Photo by Ellen Harasimowicz

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Faculty and Staff Developments “Life-lo ife-lon ng Le Learner arner”” Jo Anna Anna Jameson Jameson Moves Moves On er colleagues call Jo Anna Jameson a “formidable mind,” a “life-long learner,” and a “consummate professional.” Jo Anna, who has been Fenn’s coordinator of Special Academic Services and director of the Intensive Language Program for nineteen years, is leaving Fenn this spring to become a licensed behavior analyst who works with families and schools.

“I am pursuing what I consider the cutting edge in my field,” Jo Anna says, adding that she will miss working with Fenn faculty, who “really want to learn how kids learn and have always been willing to explore that with me.” Jo Anna

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“She has always been available, nonjudgmental, and incredibly helpful. Her knowledge of the boys and their learning styles is amazing.”

Jo Anna received the Martin Luther King, Jr. Jr. Medal this year. year. Also pictured with Diversity Director Tete Tete Cobblah are award award recipients Lorraine War Ward, d, left, and Jo Albright, right, who accepted the award awar d posthumously for her husband, Read.

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is known at Fenn for her generous support of teachers. “I think of her as the voice of reason,” says Learning Specialist Linda Abernathy. “She has always been available, non-judgmental, and incredibly helpful. Her knowledge of the boys and their learning styles is amazing.”

Jo Anna, who holds a BA from Northeastern University and an EdM from Boston University, where she has completed her doctoral coursework, says her job here has been both challenging and rewarding. “Every boy requires an individual plan; there’s no ‘one size fits all’,” she says.

On a typical day Jo Anna could be found testing boys to determine their learning difficulties, observing students in their classes, consulting with teachers, discussing boys with Secondary School Placement and Admissions staff, meeting with parents, talking to outside testers and therapists, reading professional journals to keep up with current research and technology, sending summaries of what she learns to faculty, and recommending specific

Faculty and Staff Developments

“Jo Anna’s collegiality and professionalism will be missed, but even more so her positive approach to the boys and their families.” strategies that might be helpful in accommodating students with learning challenges.

Those who worked with her say Jo Anna was always willing to stop what she was doing and give them her full attention if they had a question or needed feedback. “Every time I would walk away with a new perspective, idea, or suggestion,” says Learning Specialist Julie Siegal. “She has always put a student’s best interests first.”

Dr. Charles Streff, Fenn’s consulting psychologist, recalls attending a meeting about a student that Jo Anna was chairing, the first time he had observed her doing so.

Charlie “was struck by the depth of her understanding of the testing that had been done for the boy, the clarity of explanation to those present, and the way she clearly facilitated the development of a plan that would enable all of us to support the student.” He adds that “in the many years I have worked with her, that same depth and clarity have been there.”

Charlie speaks for his colleagues when he says that Jo Anna’s “collegiality and professionalism will be missed, but even more so her positive approach to the boys and their families, and her on-going support to faculty and staff.”

Living Meaningful Meaningful Lives: Lives: Resear Researcch Pr Project Includes Includes Fenn Fenn Boy Boys n 2009, Dr. Adam Cox came to Fenn as part of his project called “Locating Significance in the Lives of Boys” for the International Boys’ Schools Coalition. Dr. Cox visited twenty boys’ schools worldwide, stopping first at Fenn, and the results of his study were released this spring.

Boonisar attended a Assistant Headmaster Derek Boonisar conference in New York City in April led by Dr. Cox, who shared his research. “I was intrigued,” Derek says, explaining why he attended. “Anything that focuses on the topic of best practices for educating boys grabs my attention.” Derek reports that Dr. Cox “invoked Fenn” in his presentation, referring to the “great job” the school does in fostering “oral literacy” by giving boys time to develop public speaking skills.

“I plan to take ten items that jump out from the pages of his research,” Derek says, “and keep that list near me.” One, he notes, is that boys want to be able to communicate in a place where they are not judged. Dr. Cox will speak at Fenn in November.

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Derek Boonisar with (l to r) Andreas Sheikh, Jivan Purutyan, and Ben Stone, all class of 2012

Dr. S Str treff eff Pr Presents Researc Research on on Trauma onsulting School Psychologist Dr. Charles Streff attended the annual conference of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis in Charlotte, NC, during the March break. He continued to present his work regarding adult males who have experienced trauma. Dr. Streff was invited to submit a proposal for next year’s annual scientific meeting in Lexington, KY. The conference drew clinicians from across the country and from Canada, Mexico, France, and Jamaica.

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Faculty and Staff Developments

Susan Richardson Directs Alumni Programs at BU Susan Richardson, Fenn’s director of Constituent Relations for eleven years, has joined the senior leadership team in Alumni Relations at Boston University. As Director of Alumni Programs and Events, she “will play a critical role in continuing our efforts to engage BU alumni in meaningful ways that advance the university,” according to the vice-president of Alumni Relations, Steven A. Hall.

At Fenn, Susan worked closely with the leadership of the Parents’ Association to support their many volunteer activities that add so much to school life. She assisted the Alumni Council in planning and implementing activities to connect Fenn graduates with each other and to bring them closer to the school. Susan organized countless events, including Grandparents’ Day, reunions, major

retirement celebrations, regional alumni receptions, and the Board of Visitors Annual Meeting. She worked on the Board’s inaugural meeting in 2002 and handled all aspects of the group, from nominations to communications, for ten years. For the past seven years she taught ninth graders in the Youth in Philanthropy program.

With an interest in professional outreach, Susan continues to volunteer for the Council for Advancement and Support for Education (CASE), for which she served as District 1 Conference co-chair in 2010. She has also served as president and program chair of the Advancement Alliance of New England, a regional professional group for independent school advancement professionals.

Susan was the subject of a twopage article in the June 2012 issue of

O, The Oprah Magazine, titled “The Art of the Detour,” which was about her path from flight attendant, to cooking teacher, to her “dream” career

Susan Richardson

in school fundraising and development. Fenn will miss Susan, but we wish her luck at BU.

Fenn Fellow Rises to the Challenge Freemon Romero ’04 served as a Fenn Fellow for the winter and spring terms and will be joining the faculty next year, teaching Middle School math and Spanish, coaching, and assisting in Admissions.

Freemon graduated from St. Mark’s School and Bryant University, where he earned a BS in Business Administration, majoring in marketing with a minor in psychology. He decided to pursue teaching while working at Star Camps last summer. The coaches “saw how I was with kids,” Freemon says, and one, David Rouse, Fenn’s assistant director of Admissions, “said he could see me in the classroom.”

When he applied for the position of Fenn Fellow, a non-compensated, onetrimester appointment intended to encourage and inspire young people to pursue teaching, he wrote: “Fenn has undoubtedly played a significant role in helping me become the man I am today. I have yet to find a community as supportive and loving.”

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Faculty and Staff Developments

Freemon says he has been impressed by the demands of a teaching career. “I have sensed that this is definitely not easy and that you really need a talent to do it.” A teacher’s job, he has observed, is “to focus students yet keep them happy and motivated.” It’s a challenge, he adds, “that I’m willing to take.”

It has also been a challenge, he

says with a smile, to call his former teachers by their first names now that they are his colleagues. Those teachers include Ben Smith ’85, Dave Sanborn, Bob Starensier, Amy Stiga, Gisela Hernandez-Skayne, Jason Rude, Dave Duane, Tete Cobblah, and Mike Potsaid.

Freemon played soccer, basketball, and baseball while at Fenn. “I have

always loved sports,” he says. “It’s a big part of who I am.”

A first-generation Honduran, Freemon acknowledges his interesting first name, and says that his parents, Jose and Lizzette, named him for an uncle who was childless. But around the house, he adds with a smile, he answers to “Junior.”

Faculty and Staff . . . Once Removed Memoir Earning Rave Reviews Critics are praising Kambri Crews’ memoir Burning Down the Ground (Villard: 2012).

Kambri, who is married to Christian Finnegan Finnegan, stepson of Deborah Finnegan, an advancement assistant at Fenn, looks back on her unconventional childhood in rural Texas, growing up with deaf parents in a tightly knit Deaf community.

Kambri explores her complicated relationship with her father, who is serving a twenty-year prison sentence for attempted murder. Her attempt to reconcile her past and present is “a remarkable odyssey of scorched earth, collateral damage, and survival,” according to Publishers Weekly. Christian is a standup comedian who appears frequently on television. He and Kambri live in New York City.

USS Thomas Hudner Named for Advancement Director’s Father homas J. Hudner, father of Tom Hudner Jr. ’87, has been awarded a rare honor by the U.S. Navy, which is naming a new guided missile destroyer after the retired Navy captain. The decision was made this spring by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus. Capt. Hudner is the last living Navy recipient of the Medal of Honor from the Korean War. Upon learning the news, Capt.

Hudner “was surprised and humbled,” Tom says. “Though my father would say he was just doing his job and that it was the right thing to do, his story has always been inspiring to me.”

Capt. Hudner, a Concord resident, received the medal for intentionally crashing his fighter plane in an attempt to save Ensign Jesse L. Brown, his wingman, who had crashed after being hit by anti-aircraft fire. Ensign Brown was the Navy’s first black fighter pilot at a time when the armed forces had been

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integrated for just two years and critics of desegregation continued to question whether men of different color would risk their lives for each other.

Though he injured his back, Hudner remained with Brown until a rescue helicopter arrived. He and the helicopter pilot worked in sub-zero temperatures in the snow trying to extract the ensign, but his leg was pinned in the wreckage. Capt. Hudner remained on active duty, completing an additional twenty-two years of naval service. He flew combat missions in Korea and served as the executive officer aboard the USS Kitty Hawk during the Vietnam War. Naming a destroyer after a living war hero is extremely uncommon, according to the Navy. “Thomas Hudner exemplifies the core values of honor, courage, and commitment the Navy holds dear,” said Secretary Mabus.

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Advancing Fenn

Reynolds Baseball Field Opens To the strains of the national anthem sung by members of the sixth grade class, and to the cheers of faculty, students, and families gathered on the sidelines, the Reynolds baseball field was officially opened on April 20.

The ceremonial first pitch was thrown

by Headmaster Ward, former headmaster and baseball coach Walter Birge, former baseball coach and woodshop teacher Peter Hyde, and faculty member and alumnus Ben Smith ’85, who played baseball while a student here.

The upgrading of the existing field, affectionately called Fennway Park, was made possible by a generous gift from Bob and Laura Reynolds (Will ’11), which also funded the installation of an adjacent synthetic turf field that was dedicated last fall. The baseball field has improved drainage, clay and soil enhancements, and new backstops, benches, and fencing. A double electronic scoreboard faces both the diamond and the synthetic soccer, lacrosse, and football field, and together they are called the Reynolds Fields.

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Advancing Fenn

R. Vincent “Vinnie” Lynch ’64: Distinguished Alumnus 2012 hen Vinnie Lynch took a sabbatical in 2007 from working in finance, he wanted to shift his priorities to helping the schools that mean so much to him, including the one he attended in the early 1960s. Vinnie says he used to envy his brother Alex ’66, who, while Vinnie was living and working in Italy and London, was actively involved with his children’s schools in Connecticut. “I never had that chance,” he says, “and I felt that something was missing in my life.”

With more time to devote to other interests, Vinnie felt strongly about committing significant energy to institutions that had shaped his life and where he thought he could make a meaningful contribution. He quickly made Fenn a principal focus.

During the last six years he has worked tirelessly on Fenn’s behalf, helping raise some $24.7 million on the way to a $26 million goal in his role as co-chair of its “Boys at the Heart” capital campaign. As a member of the Board of Visitors and then the Board of Trustees, Vinnie has championed the alumni cause, helping alumni rekindle their love of their school and encouraging them to support the Fenn of today.

Headmaster Jerry Ward first came to know Vinnie about fifteen years ago, when he visited him in his New York office.

“From the first moment in our conversation, Vinnie’s huge heart and love for Fenn were clear,” he says. “When I think of Sua Sponte and its call to Fenn boys to be responsible for not only their own education but also for each other and for their school, I think of the shining example Vinnie offers in his extraordinary work of stewardship of Fenn. It’s my personal honor and pleasure to know him.”

Vinnie, who while at Fenn lived in a Concord house that was on the Underground Railroad, remembers his Fenn teachers “incredibly well,” he says, particularly Peter Keyes, Bill Dunnell, Mark Biscoe, and John O’Keefe. A trumpet player, Vinnie played in the Jazz Band with Headmaster Dave Edgar on drums, Dave Huston on oboe, and David Malcom ’63 on trombone.

For the W.W. Fenn Public Speaking Contest, Vinnie memorized Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” He still remembers some of the verses, and quoted them during a recent conversation without missing a beat.

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When asked how he fared in the competition, Vinnie says he didn’t win but adds with a chuckle, “I thought at the time that I was pretty spectacular.”

After his graduation from Fenn, Vinnie attended Belmont Hill School and Princeton University, where he majored in history and played two varsity sports. From Princeton he began a career on Wall Street that spanned more than thirty years, joining JP Morgan in 1974 and moving to Lehman Brothers in 1991, where he spent the next sixteen years until retiring from the firm in early 2007.

Two thirds of Vinnie’s career was spent in Europe, first in Milan and then in London. During that time he managed Lehman’s relationships with some of the UK’s largest multinational corporations and was appointed to head its European Investment Banking business. In that capacity he was a member of both the Lehman Brothers (Europe) Executive Committee and its Global Investment Banking Executive Committee.

On his return to New York, Vinnie was asked to help build several businesses within the growing Investment and Private Wealth management Division of Lehman and served on its Executive Committee.

When he left Lehman, he volunteered to support his three alma maters, but “I felt I could make the biggest impact at Fenn,” he says.

Upon joining the Board of Visitors, Vinnie says he was “incredibly impressed with the plan that Fenn had laid out, both physical and fiscal. And now, I’m unbelievably impressed with the way the plan has taken shape and the backing it has gotten.”

What strikes Vinnie most is “the way the capital campaign pledges marched upwards even during the dark days of ’08 and ’09,” he says, “which says an enormous amount about the school and its constituents.”

Vinnie lives in New York, not far from his three children: Barclay, 33, his wife, Amanda, and their children, Red and Mia; Rebecca, 30, and her husband Chris Rutherford; and Hallie, 25. He enjoys traveling, which includes visiting family, playing tennis and golf, and tending to his Fishers Island property.

Introduced by his brother Alex, and with his mother, Rose, in attendance, Vinnie accepted his Distinguished Alumnus Awad at Fenn’s June 1 Alumni Celebration and Reunion.

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Advancing Fenn

Library and Science Center Will Be The Heart of the Academic Campus onstruction has commenced on the new Library and Science Center, which will serve as the academic heart of the campus and which “will dramatically enrich the academic life of the school and the education of generations of Fenn boys,” according to Headmaster Jerry Ward.

The center has been designed by Imai Keller Moore, architects of the Meeting and Performance Hall, to be knit seamlessly to its surrounding buildings and to provide a natural, sun-filled connection between the Boll Building and the School House, showcasing several new spaces along the way The new library, which will triple the square footage of Fenn’s current library, will feature multiple points of entrance from two levels; it will be visually open to students and faculty as they pass by its glass walls on the way to their classes. Key amenities of the space include an upper level reading area with casual seating, a set of carpeted reading steps under a forty-foot skylight, and the lower library area, which will be the center of study, holding print

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and digital collections and a variety of seating and display spaces.

In the library space will be dedicated rooms for instruction and group studies, and an office and workroom. Digital resources, including emerging mobile media, will be supported throughout, with individual access to power and wireless data.

Print collection shelving will be nearly doubled, allowing shelves to remain low.

Storage and display space will be provided for Fenn archival material.

The new science center will dramatically improve Fenn’s academic facilities for the middle and upper schools. Four new labs will be large and airy, with support spaces designed to complement the hands-on inquiry based science education for which Fenn is known. A science prep room is designed for secure preparation and storage of class demonstration and laboratory materials, a storage room will house equipment, and moveable central lab desks will allow for a range of teaching styles.

As in the Meeting and Performance Hall, a sustainable approach to building construction and performance will be taken

Interior rendering of science lab

and features include natural ventilation and lighting, high-efficiency boilers, low-flow faucet aerators, and the use of sustainable materials including linoleum, cork, local granite, Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) wood, and recycled carpet content.

For disabled access, the center will contain two vertical wheelchair lifts where the floor levels differ, which will allow the School House to be completely accessible.

The existing elevator in the Robb Hall lobby will continue to provide access to the Boll Building and to the new first floor link that will run from Boll to the School House, past the library.

Initiation of construction of the new Library and Science Center follows the recent opening of the new Meeting and Performance Hall last November. Mr. Ward notes, “The school community across all of our constituents has raved about the new hall. Visitors, faculty, and students see its transformational effect on daily school life along with the creation of a beautiful center to the campus, complete with a school green that boys play on daily. It is a dream realized for Fenn.”

As the school anticipates completion of the Center next summer, fundraising for Fenn’s current $26 million “Boys at the Heart” capital campaign continues vigorously to gain leadership, major, and general gifts to achieve full funding of the $7.8 million Library and Science Center, which includes a redesign of the front circle on Monument Street, and to complete funding of the campaign’s $5 million endowment objective.

The campaign to date has been an outstanding success with a record setting number of gifts ranging from $25 to more than $5 million, received broadly across the greater Fenn community. A $1

million anonymous challenge gift for the Library and Science Center was met this past January and was preceded by a $5 million challenge gift that was met last November for both the Meeting and Performance Hall and the Library and Science Center construction.

“We are thrilled and grateful to receive this historic outpouring of philanthropic support for Fenn from trustees, parents, alumni, parents of alumni, and so many others,” says Mr. Ward. “As we enter the final phase of the capital campaign, we seek to enlist all of the members of the Fenn

Interior rendering of library community, whose support will ensure our achievement of full funding of the new

Library and Science Center and our endowment needs.”

$1 Million Challenge Gift to Support Diversity Efforts As Fenn strives for even greater diversity and talent in its student

equal amount by contributions from other Fenn donors. The secured

body to offer the best possible education to all Fenn boys in their

endowment funds in total will enable Fenn to enroll students from a

middle school years, some generous Fenn families have made a

broadened geographical area, including Boston and Cambridge. The

$1 million challenge gift for Fenn’s endowment to fund tuition and

challenge donors also made a generous current-use gift of $750,000

other educational expenses.

to provide initial funding for scholarships and outreach efforts for

Following many other independent schools, Fenn this year

talented students from under-represented ethnicities and

established a relationship with the Boston-based Steppingstone

communities. This second gift, which is already in hand, is not

Foundation that has resulted in the enrollment of three talented

contingent upon Fenn’s ability to raise matching funds.

boys as new students for next fall. Steppingstone is a non-profit

“We are deeply grateful to those in the past who have shown

organization that develops and implements programs to prepare

such faith in Fenn’s vision and possibility,” says Headmaster Jerry

urban school children for educational opportunities that will

Ward, “and to all members of the current Fenn community who

ultimately lead to college admission and success. For fourteen

generously accept the responsibility of supporting Fenn to realize its

months students in the program attend classes after school, on

evolving vision and to never cease in becoming an even better school

Saturdays, and during two summers, demonstrating an exceptional

for boys.”

commitment to their education while deepening their academic preparation.

The $1 million challenge gift depends on its being matched in

Mr. Ward encourages those who are interested in supporting the current endowment challenge to contact Tom Hudner in the Advancement Office for details.

AroundCampus Who Do You Think You Are? Cultural Heritage Fair Held in May In the seventh grade at Fenn, doing research on one’s family tree is an annual project. This year Henry Griffin explored the history of his great-great-grandfather, who fought in and survived eighteen Civil War battles. His classmate Alec Reiss learned more about three great-grandparents who were held prisoner during WWII and sent to concentration, labor, and POW camps.

Henry and Alec and their classmates presented the research

they had been doing for months about their ancestors at the annual Cultural Heritage Fair in early May. The boys’ subjects included WWII servicemen, community and business leaders, and family members who started new lives in America. As part of their Integrated Studies class work, they conducted hours of interviews and research with the help of The New England Genealogical Society, which each year sends a representative to help the boys begin filling in their family trees, and Ancestry.com, for which they are given free accounts. Each boy writes a paper about his project.

This year, on tables that stretched from one end of the gym to the other, folding story boards displayed photos, letters, medals, newspaper articles, copies of ship manifests, and many other documents and mementoes. At each display, a student stood ready to talk to visitors about his ancestors.

“I am proud to be related to my brave and strong greatgrandparents,” Alec told a visitor. “There are no words to describe how it feels to know that they managed to live through the horrors of the Holocaust.”

Teachers involved in the Cultural Heritage project are Ellen Campbell, Lynn Duval, Amy Stiga, and Luke Thompson.

Ryan Musumeci with his Cultural Heritage project

Boys Stand and Deliver at W.W. Fenn Speaking Contest The ultimate public speaking challenge takes place at Fenn each winter in the form of a memorized, approximately three-minute presentation of a poem, a speech, or a passage from a novel.

The W.W. Fenn Public Speaking Contest, named for William Wallace Fenn, a scholar, preacher, and public speaker who was the father of the school’s founder, Roger Fenn, was held in February, for the first time in the new Meeting and Performance Hall. Thirteen finalists in grades six through nine recited the words of such figures as Harper Lee, Susan B. Anthony, Walt Whitman, F.D.R., and Steve Jobs.

Seventh grader Maahin Gulati was named the winner. Honorable Mentions were awarded to ninth grader Andreas Sheikh and sixth grader Ben Kelly.

Judges for the competition this year were Kay Cowan, head of Nashoba Brooks School for twenty years; Michael Nerbonne, assistant head of school, director of studies and Latin teacher at St. Sebastian’s School; and Jay Beaulieu ’06, a student at Boston College majoring in communications and a former winner of the W.W. Fenn Speaking Contest.

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Andreas Sheikh in Moonrise Kingdom In the Wes Anderson film Moonrise Kingdom that opened in June to rave reviews, Andreas Sheikh ’12 plays a Boy Scout and shares the screen with several Hollywood actors including Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand and Harvey Keitel.

Andreas won a role in the movie in 2011 and spent about eight weeks filming in Rhode Island last spring.

It was Andreas’ first foray into professional acting, but he says he is more interested in working behind the camera. He studied video production at Fenn this year and received an award for Outstanding Video Short for a film he wrote and directed with two classmates. Andreas is looking forward to taking courses in film at Phillips Andover Academy, where he will be a student in the fall.

Around Campus

Fenn Grows a Garden “Convince me that you have a seed there,” writes Henry David Thoreau, who grew beans at nearby Walden Pond, “and I am prepared to expect wonders."

Such “wonders” are appearing in the new campus garden.

On Tuesday afternoons in early spring, science and woodshop teacher Mike Potsaid supervised boys who volunteered to work on the garden, situated behind the Headmaster’s house, turning over the soil, cutting and installing its rot-resistant cedar framework, and assembling a 4- by 12-foot wooden compost bin designed by Sustainability Director Cameren Cousins. The bin has three sections, one for each stage of composted material that is producing what Mike calls “gardeners’ gold.”

Cameren invited the community to plant herbs, vegetables, and flowers. A record of who has planted what is displayed on the bulletin board outside of her classroom, and she requested that all gardeners log in their crops. “Since the garden is tucked away on campus, using the bulletin board will help make it more visible and relevant to the community day by day,” she says. By late May the list included peas, carrots, watermelon,

Boys tend the school garden in early spring.

marigolds, sunflowers, lettuce, radishes, and an assortment of herbs that Jerry Cabral may incorporate into his dining hall cooking.

Fenn will be growing beets for Gaining Ground, which had a problem with its crop last season and cannot replant the root vegetables for another year. Gaining Ground grows food for people in need in the community. During vacation, Summer Fenn campers will tend the garden.

Founder’s Day Held under Sunny Skies If you build it, they will come.

Roger and Eleanor Fenn’s dream came true when the five and a half-acre farm they bought on Monument Street, with its two and a half-story house, three apple trees, one-horse stable, asparagus and strawberry beds, and hayfield, opened as a school for boys in September 1929. It had a kindergarten, eight grades, and fifty-three pupils, ten faculty members, and two and a half buildings.

Fenn celebrates its founder every year on or close to Mr. Fenn’s April 19 birthday. This year assembled students, faculty, and staff viewed photos dating back to the school’s earliest years, a presentation narrated by Athletic Director Bob Starensier and former faculty member Jim Carter ’54 in the Meeting and Performance Hall.

When a photo showed the beams rising for the New Gym in the mid-1970s, Lower School teacher Jon Byrd ’76 recalled playing in the very first basketball game held in the building. “The enthusiasm was overwhelming,” he said. Coached by Mark Biscoe, the Fenn team “crushed” its opponent, Fessenden, that day.

Following the Founder’s Day presentation, the Fenn Marching Band, dressed in snappy blue blazers, white shirts, school ties, and white trousers, made its traditional loop around campus, drums

pounding and horns blaring, led by banner and flag bearers.

Riding atop bright blue convertibles, Marilyn Schmalenberger, who works in admissions, the front office, and as an art teacher, and Bob served as honorary grand marshals for their twenty-five and thirty years of service, respectively. The parade ended in the Headmaster’s backyard, where the band played another number and the boys tucked into pieces of birthday cake.

The Fenn Marching Band makes its traditional Founder’s Day loop around campus.

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AroundCampus

Lower School Holds Publishing Party Most writers would thrill to critical reviews such as “I was hooked by the first line,” and the fourth and fifth grade boys who displayed the stories, poems, and memoir pieces they created this winter were no exception. The boys’ work was spread out on tables in Robb Hall and their classmates were asked to provide specific praise (for word choice, dialogue writing, sensory images, strong beginnings and endings, character development, and other elements) on paper laid next to each creative piece. Students circulated around the tables, reading the pieces and jotting comments such as those above.

“The boys showed courage in sharing their writing with others in the community,” noted Laurie Byron, who teaches fifth grade and chairs the English department.

Trebles Warble at Bruins Game, Festival

Members of the Treble Chorus sing “Sweet Caroline” at a Providence Bruins game.

The Treble Chorus performed in an unusual venue in March when they sang “Sweet Caroline” from the stands at a Providence Bruins game. The performance was captured on the Jumbotron. In April, Fenn hosted its first ever Invitational Choral Festival, held in the Meeting and Performance Hall. Besides the Trebles, the festival featured groups from Brookline, Nashoba Brooks School, and the Handel and Haydn Society.

Sixth Grader Competes in State Geo Bee Championships The contest was “nerve wracking,” says sixth grader Louis Gounden, but he persevered, finishing twenty-first out of a field of 100 competitors at the Geo Bee State Championships held in Worcester on March 30.

Louis “was amazing” at the Geo Bee, says Social Studies Department Chair John Sharon. “He was poised, calm, and confident.”

Louis competed against “some of the best geography minds in the entire state,” John adds, “and we are all so proud of him for getting as far as he did.” The Geo Bee, for which students in grades four through eight are eligible, is designed to encourage teachers to include geography in their classes, to foster interest in the subject, and to increase public awareness about geography. Louis won the preliminary contest at Fenn this winter and went on to qualify for the state finals.

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GeoBee contestant Louis Gounden

Around Campus

Youth in Philanthropy Donates $9000 to Area Non-Profits The Fenn School Youth in Philanthropy group presented three area service organizations with a total of $9000 in contributions this spring.

Representatives from Heading Home, the John Andrew Mazie Memorial Foundation, and the National Education for Assistance Dog Services received checks from ninth graders involved in the philanthropy program.

Ninth graders applied to take the

class with Susan Richardson, former director of Constituent Relations, and the size of the group varied from year to year. The group worked closely with the Foundation for Metro-West, represented during the awarding of checks by Jennifer Ubaldino.

The boys researched a variety of service organizations in the area and made site visits before deciding which groups to support using funding from an anonymous donor.

Youth in Philanthropy group presents a check to Gerry DeRoche of the National Education for Assistance Dog Services.

Art Students Recognized Fenn students who were honored by the SISAL (Small Independent School Art League) this spring were Malcolm Zuckerman and Cole Winstanley, who won first and second place, respectively, in the Graphic Design category. They produced their work in their photography class with Tony Santos.

Three boys were among local students celebrated in the Concord Journal for their artistic endeavors. Willie Page, Leo Feininger, and Gates Dupont were profiled in separate articles for a feature titled “Art Student of the Week.” All talked about their passion for art, with Willie saying that he tries to make each of his paintings and sculptures “a living, breathing thing.”

Drama Round-Up The Middle School Players revisited the world of Agents 86 and 99 in their winter production of Get Smart, a play based on the television series’ pilot episode and adapted for the stage by Christopher Sergel. Directed by Tiffany Toner, the production involved nearly thirty boys in acting roles, with several more helping out backstage and on the tech crew, and a number of parent volunteers.

The annual Fenn/Nashoba Brooks Upper School collaboration titled High School Musical 4.0 was produced and directed at Nashoba this year in March.

The play provided a series of scenes illustrating high school life through dialogue, song, and dance.

Sixth graders presented “Scenes from Shakespeare” under the direction of Rob Morrison this spring. They performed excerpts from Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Julius Caesar, which was performed outdoors. The Treble Chorus presented musical interludes. In late spring the Upper School Players offered The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged (and Then Abridged Some More) and the seventh grade finished off the year with a round of student-written Maxwell Smart, aka Nick Schoeller, in and performed original plays. the Middle School comedy, Get Smart

Above painting by Gates Dupont ’12 37

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VARSITY WRESTLING Highlights of the season included the Fay School Invitational Tournament for boys in fifth to seventh grade. Fourteen Fenn sixth and seventh graders participated, coached by Derek Cribb, John Fitzsimmons, and Steve Gasper. Team captains were Max Gomez, Jivan Purutyan, Odom Sam, and Andreas Sheikh. Henry Griffin took first place in his weight, Pipo Fitzsimmons took a second place and a sportsmanship award, Joey Conroy took a third place, and Hal Groome, Charlie Hibben, and Charlie Fitzsimmons took fourth place in their weights. It was one of Fenn’s best showings at the tournament.

Varsity Wrestling

SQUAD BASKETBALL The team’s 11-7 record does not reflect how excellent they were, says Coach Tony Santos, who says highlights were beating Fessenden by seven points and coming from behind to tie a game against BB&N in regulation time and winning it in overtime by two points. Tony was assisted by Kwame Cobblah and Alan O’Neill, who adds that the Hillside game was “a defining moment” for many of the players, even though Fenn lost. “It brought the guys closer together, and after that game their attitude and their offense and defense improved,” says Coach O’Neill. Captaining the team were Kojo Edzie and Mike Demsher.

Squad Basketball

JV BASKETBALL Of the team’s nine losses, seven of the games came down to the final minutes, and four of the six wins were decided under ten points, says Coach David Rouse, who was assisted

by Freemon Romero ’04. Coach Rouse calls the team “a highly athletic and competitive group who continued to get better throughout the season.” Team captains were Will Baxter and Ben Stone.

JV Basketball 38

Fenn Sports

VARSITY BASKETBALL Defeating Fay in the first round of the basketball tournament was a season highlight, says Peter Bradley, who coached with Bob Starensier. Having twice lost to Fay, Fenn had to defeat their rivals if they wanted to play in the championship game of the tournament, which they did, 62-53. “We played an inspired game, one in which Fay never quit,” he says.

Captain Austen Dorsey led all scorers in that game with twenty-five points, with Austin Hoey and Co-Captain Jack Lyne each chipping in eleven points. The team tallied a hard-fought record of 7-6.

Varsity Basketball

JV HOCKEY Coached by Luke Thompson, Jason Rude, Dave Duane, and Sean Patch, the team posted a season record of 3-5, with wins against Carroll, Pike, and Hillside. Among the players distinguishing themselves were James Sanderson, Nick Moscow, Kyle Hickey, Spencer Pava, Mark and Dan Herdiech, and Winslow McDonald, who was new to the sport and proved to be a fast learner, Coach Thompson says. Team captains were Will Haslett, Nick Moskow, and James Sanderson.

JV Hockey

VARSITY HOCKEY The team, achieving a 16-4 record, impressed their coaches, Derek Boonisar, Jeff LaPlante, and Morgan Hall with their work ethic and desire to compete. Sam Hesler captained the team, assisted by Will Robertson and Jonathan Tesoro. The eighth grade class “stepped up in an enormous way,” Coach Boonisar says. Leo Saraceno played every minute of every game, and gave up only twenty-one goals in twenty games.

Fenn tallied key victories over Nobles, Belmont Hill, Fessenden, Fay, and Dexter, and seniors Brendan Seifert, Gates Dupont, Scott Correia, and Jonathan Tesoro deserve special recognition, the coaches say, for their leadership.

Varsity Hockey 39

ClassNotes Class of 1934

Abbot Fenn wrote, “As the first student enrolled in the Fenn School in 1929, I am pleased to have reached the age of 90. As I scan the daily obituaries in the paper, I see few others aged 90 or more. So 90-yearolds must be in generally good health, as I am.”

Class of 1945 Donald Thompson has been retired for 20 years and still manages to hike, canoe, and folk dance, though not as fast or as far as 20 years ago. He is still in a literature discussion group and a part-time docent at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

Class of 1949 In November a bench was installed in West Concord in memory of Kim Smith. Kim was an ardent supporter of the Bruce Free-

40

man Rail Trail, which will eventually make its way through Concord Junction, across the Assabet River, and on to points further south. Fenn classmate Buddy Bates spoke at the ceremony, noting, “I hope this bench will inspire the citizens of Concord and Sudbury to expedite the construction of the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail. I envision Kim’s bench as being a gateway to a small park from here to the Assabet River.”

Class of 1950 In February, Fritz Kraetzer died suddenly of a heart attack. Following thirty years of practicing law, he was appointed to the bench in Alameda County in August 1992 and served as a superior court judge until his retirement in 2005. Fritz retired to Orcas Island, WA, where he was an active volunteer for the Orcas Public Library, the Senior Services Advisory Council, and the Statewide Health Insurance Benefits Advisors (SHIBA). Fritz also served on the Board of Trustees of the Orcas Center, a

non-profit arts and cultural organization, and was a member of the vestry of Emmanuel Episcopal Church. Besides his family, Fritz loved travel, puzzles, and his vegetable garden. All those who knew him would describe him as a gentleman.

Class of 1951 Fred Lovejoy was honored April 2 at an event at the Harvard Club. Jeffrey Flier, M.D., Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, announced the creation of a faculty chair in Fred’s honor which will be called the Concord Professorship in Pediatrics. Joel Naom Hirschhorn, MD, PhD was appointed as the first holder of the chair.

Class of 1954 John Hall spent 44 days working on a Coast Guard vessel in icy northern waters this past summer and got within 90 miles of the North Pole in early September.

Class Notes

Class of 1955 Stan Kellogg is working for Exxon Mobil covering installation projects offshore around the world. The main support vessel used on the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the G-4000 semi-submersible, is his design.

Class of 1959 John Chandler will be retiring as the headmaster of Robert College in Istanbul. Hoagie Klinck ’57 wrote in that his brother Jay’s death in December was due to lung cancer and noted, “He will be missed by many around the world.”

Class of 1977 Clint Bajakian and his associates enjoyed recording the orchestral score for Playstation’s Unchartered: Drakes Deception at Abbey Road Studios in London. Clint made this a family trip with his wife, Deniz, and children, Lara and Deren, joining him. Chip Orcutt shared holiday cheer last December with Nigel Bently and family.

Recognize the guy in the Fenn cap? He’s Steve Carell ’77 with his son at an NBA game last season. Send a photo of you wearing your Fenn gear, wherever you might be, to loneill@fenn.org. Don’t have a Fenn hat? Find caps, ties, jackets, and other classic Fenn gear and specialty items at https://www.fenn.org/gear or contact Bob Starensier at bstarensier@fenn.org.

Class of 1978

Class of 1982

Fenn detective Jim Carter ’54 discovered that Chris Stigum works at The Holderness School in Plymouth, NH.

Clark Aldrich will serve as a “guide” for the 2012 Acton Rising Star $10,000/$50,000 Challenge (see www.actonedinnovationchallenge.org). Clark is a top educational

An “It’s a Small World” Story from Bill Thurber ’44 hen Bill Thurber ’44 and his wife, Anne, traveled from their home in Massachusetts this winter to the Nebraska Medical Center, where Anne underwent a multiple organ transplant, he didn’t expect to discover that a fellow Fenn alumnus was one of her surgeons.

Following the successful procedure, a transplant of the liver, kidney, and portal vein, the Thurbers met with his wife’s surgical team, as Bill says, “to help us come down to earth.” One of the surgeons was Dr. Michael C. Morris, who is co-director of the Kidney and Pancreas Transplantation program at the hospital.

During the conversation, Dr. Morris asked Bill where he went to school and the latter mentioned Fenn. The surgeon, Bill says, was “astounded,” and declared that he, too, went to Fenn.

“We see patients from all over, but this is the first time I have met a Concord or Fenn connection,” says

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Dr. Morris ’68, who spent one year here, in eighth grade, before his family moved to Philadelphia. “Fenn was a fascinating and busy year for me,” he recalls. “I felt welcomed and enjoyed the camaraderie.”

After attending college and medical school at Temple University, Michael completed a fellowship in transplant surgery at the University of Pittsburgh in 2008. Prior to joining the Nebraska Medical Center as an associate professor of surgery, he served as the director of Solid Organ Transplantation at the Avera McKennan Hospital and University Health Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Bill says he was amazed that two Fenn graduates would meet in Omaha and that one of them would be the provider of life-saving medical care “while both were beneficiaries of Fenn’s great training and development.”

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Class Notes

Class of ’60 Alumni Lead Concord Parade ed Perry ’60 has close ties not only to the Town of Concord but also to Fenn, and particularly to the school band, in which he performed while a student and which “came marching through” the last Town Meeting he ran as Town Moderator in 2010.

The band played “Anchors Aweigh,”which was especially meaningful because Ned served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam era, assigned to a guided missile cruiser as part of its communications department.

Another alumnus, Stanly Black ’60, ’60, a Concord selectman, was largely responsible for arranging for the band to appear at that Town Meeting, Ned says.

When Ned was selected to lead this year’s Patriots’ Day Parade in Concord as its grand marshal, he asked Stan and three others to join him: the local fire chief, a police patrolman, and a Concord Independent Battery member. It was Ned’s way of recognizing and honoring the elected officials and boards and the emergency personnel in town.

Ned and Stan have worked together closely over the years, especially when Stan was the chairman of the Board of Selectman, and they are their own mutual admiration society. “Stan has done well for and by Concord,” Ned declares. Stan replies that his work in town

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42

“pales in comparison to Ned’s public and private efforts on behalf of Concord’s government and non-profits.”

Ned jokes that his term as “Secretary of Labor” in classmate and Fenn School President John Bemis’’ “administration” trained Bemis him well for a legal career as a civil rights attorney, and Stan recalls that as “Secretary of Defense” at Fenn, he once raised

Stan’s volunteer work for organizations including the Old Manse, the Concord Art Association, and the Planning Board “must certainly come from Fenn’s emphasis on participation,” he says, adding that Connie Crook, his Fenn art teacher, and Carl Ward, his woodshop teacher, were influential in his decision to pursue architecture.

Ned worked in the employment and labor relations field, first with the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., and then in private practice in Boston for the last thirty years. He adds that had he pursued his second choice in careers, environmental law, he would have attributed it to Roger Fenn’s science classes and to the outdoors activities in which Ned was active at Fenn.

Ned Perry

the Stars and Stripes on the flagpole in the circle upside down. Stan is “mostly retired,” but still works as an architect with many residential and institutional projects in Concord and research facilities for the space sciences community around the country to his credit.

Stanly Black pictured at left.

Class Notes

simulation and interface designer, with clients such as Harvard Business School Publishing, the Department of Defense, Microsoft, Cisco, and Hewlett Packard. Paul Bellantoni married Patricia Comstock in November 2011 at Home Studios in NYC. Award-winning New York playwright Duncan Pflaster performed the ceremony and Norm Veenstra was in attendance.

Class of 1983 Tim Cipriani and his wife, Holly, welcomed a son, Spencer, age 10, into their lives last November. They are looking forward to finalizing his adoption in 2012. Andy Majewski won a Faculty of Arts and Sciences “Impact Award” at Harvard for “sustained and oustanding contributions to the University.” Andy is an Education Specialist at the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Read more about Andy on page 3.

Class of 1984 Sandy and Sky Blackiston returned to Fenn last December to perform for the students in Robb Hall. The brothers played dueling keyboards and a creative rendition of “Rock Robb Hall.”

Class of 1985 In May Andy Krantz became a partner at The Elmore-DeRose Group of Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Wealth Management, one of the leading investment advisory and wealth management firms in the country.

Andy’s new firm is located in Denver.

Class of 1986 This past fall Roger Duncan completed the Essential Skills Video Course (ESVC) conducted at Navy Public Affairs Support Element East aboard Naval Station Norfolk, VA. The course teaches students camera familiarization, shooting techniques, interview techniques, script writing, voicing, and

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video editing. In May Roger was deployed to Afghanistan where he is managing the embedded media.

pendent Lens series during the 2012-2013 season. Josh Schohn married Carina Toledo in Tulum, Mexico, on April 6.

Class of 1987

Class of 1992

Tom Hudner and his wife, Jennifer, welcomed new daughter, Reese Georgea, to the family on March 2. Reese joins older sister Lily (7) and brother TJ (5).

An update from Reid Adams reveals that he served as a Surface Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy for five years after graduating from Tufts. Upon his return, Reid completed his JD degree at Fordham University Law School, and in 2009 he joined Ropes & Gray as an associate practicing in the corporate department of the firm’s New York City office.

Class of 1988 Peter DeRosa reports that he is married with two daughters, ages 7 and 5. After working with an internet startup in Cambridge, Peter moved back to Concord in 2004 and now builds software systems at Raytheon. Micah Stubblebine lives a few doors away and has children the same age. Peter persuaded Evan Zall, whose kids are a year younger, to move into the neighborhood as well, so minireunions are frequent. Ben McLane writes that he lives in Bridgewater, NH, with his wife, Shani, and three children: Chaselyn (12), Teal (9), and Whitaker (5). Their life is busy, but they are enjoying it. Ben currently owns a number of Plymouth State University off-campus rental properties, which keeps him busy teaching college kids how to behave. Ben adds, “I stay in forever contact with Brooke Coleman, his wife, and brand new daughter.”

Class of 1989 Chas Adams is still in the Navy and this summer will deploy to Afghanistan for the second time. Andrew White has his own psychology practice in Portland, OR. He just purchased a Fenn sweatshirt from the school’s online “gear” store and reports, “The sweatshirt is great; I’ll wear it in Portland to see if anyone knows what Sua Sponte means.”

Class of 1990 Kevin Keegan writes that his wife, Nicole, is the executive producer of a film titled The Invisible War, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It is a documentary about the high rate of rape in the military and will be coming to PBS’s Inde-

Class of 1993 Kevin White works for a hedge fund in Chicago.

Class of 1994 Sean Kolloff is living in Boston and working for Merrill Lynch. On weekends he relaxes by flying airplanes. Jon Rosen has headed west for the internet frontier and is having an amazing time. When not trekking the globe evangelizing new companies or products, he loves surfing, scuba diving, and running the largest camp at Burning Man each summer. Tyler Streetman is President of RE-STEEL Supply Co., a supplier of aerospace and electronic alloys located in Colorado. He is engaged to Cori Plotkin who started her Barefoot PR company a year ago.

Eren Tasar is currently on a postdoc at Washington University in St. Louis. This summer he’ll take up an assistant professorship at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) in Islamic world history. That means Eren, Lola, daughter Sitora (7), and son Timur (3) will be making their second move in as many years.

Class of 1998 Matt Glassman has been living in Manhattan and working for Goldman Sachs in institutional sales on the fixed income side of the business since he graduated from college in 2005. Adam Kolloff is teaching golf at the Jim McLean Golf School at the Doral Resort in Miami, FL. 43

Class Notes

D.C. or Bust, Eleven Years Later t was the night before the much anticipated seventh grade trip to Washington, D.C., But to the south, it had begun to snow. And snow.

The trip was cancelled, much to the dismay of the boys who had packed, chosen their roommates, and put away their books for the next few days.

Kwame Cobblah and his best pal Mike Spiak, Spiak, both class of ’03, were devastated. Kwame had never been on a trip of that length, and now the two boys, like their classmates, faced going to school instead of touring the nation’s capital with their friends.

“I remember being excited the whole first half of seventh grade,” says Mike, who works as a policy fellow for a non-profit called OurEnergyPolicy.org in D.C. “Staying in a motel for a few nights was just as exciting a prospect as seeing the attractions in Washington.” Kwame, who is Fenn’s Teaching and Diversity Intern this year and will return in that position in the fall, recalls, “We were disappointed and miserable.”

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Class of 1999 Harry Boileau is reportedly living in Los Angeles and doing well. Deacon Swift lives in Boston’s North End and works for a landscape design and install company while he finishes his BA in landscape architecture at Boston Architectural College. Andrew Montgomery married Courtney Morgan in New York City on April 8. The ceremony took place at 623 On Hudson. Fenn was well represented with Sam Takvorian serving as best man and Nick Azrack as one of the groomsmen. Like Andrew, Courtney

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Mike Spiak and Kwame Cobblah Class of ’03, in Washington, D.C.

The boys trudged back to classes, but sympathetic teachers allowed them to go outside and play for part of the day. The boys made snow sculptures and waged normally illegal snowball fights. And later in the year the class took a shorter trip to Philadelphia. But it wasn’t the same.

This spring, however, wrongs got righted. When Middle School Head Tricia McCarthy asked Kwame if he could serve as a chaperone on the

graduated from Georgetown. She is originally from Palo Alto, CA, and teaches first grade. The Fenn brotherhood also turned out for Sam Takvorian’s wedding to Melina Marmarelis on May 19, with Deacon Swift, Robbie Swift, Ryan Connolly, and Garen Riedel attending. Read more about Sam on page 12-13. In a switch of roles, Andrew Montgomery served as Sam’s best man. Marriage is also on the horizon for Nate Swift who is engaged to Lindsay Gillette.

excursion, he jumped at the opportunity. “I don’t think Trish realized at first,” he says, “that this was the trip I never got to go on.”

Heading towards D.C. on the bus, Kwame suddenly remembered that his buddy Mike lives in D.C., and called him. Kwame sent him Fenn’s itinerary and the next day Mike met up with the group at the National Air and Space Museum.

“He pretty much went on the rest of the trip with us, from the Holocaust Museum to the Lincoln and Martin Luther King memorials,” ,Kwame said with a chuckle, and he had dinner with the boys and their teachers.

Though they hadn’t seen each other for six years, the former seventh grade buddies had kept in touch and when they met up in D.C., according to Kwame, “We talked non-stop and cracked jokes.”

Adds Mike, “It was as if the time we would have spent chatting as roommates on the trip got bumped forward eleven years. We didn’t miss a beat.”

Class of 2000 Michael DeSantis married his fiancée, Caitlin, in Vero Beach, FL, on May 21, 2011. They are living and working in New York City. Scott DeSantis ’08 was best man for his brother. Peter Vigneron is living in Santa Fe, NM, where is he working as an editor for Outside magazine. He is still running and claims he will do so unless his legs fall off!

Network with Alums on LinkedIn The Fenn School Alumi

Class Notes

Keep Your Classmates Up-To-Date SEND US YOUR NEWS! E-mail: alumni@fenn.org Fax: (978) 318-3527 Phone: (978) 318-3526

Class of 2001 Ben Levy has graduated from Lake Forest College, where he was captain of the soccer team. He spent some time post-graduation living in Boston and working for an outsourced sales company. He moved over a year ago to be the assistant manager when the company opened a location in Denver.

Class of 2002 Nate Greenberg has been living in Seoul for the past 2 ½ years, while Meng Tan has been living in Beijing during the same time period. In 2011 Geoff Hewer-Candee taught a graphic design class at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts during the winter and summer. He was last known to be doing an internship at a design/marketing/advertising firm in Boston. Xander Mansel is working in Hong Kong, teaching literature at an international school, and loving it. He’s planning a poetry slam for his students, bringing back memories of being at the Wards’ house.

Class of 2004 Peter Crowley was selected as the All American goalie for Division 3 soccer while playing for Babson College. Eamon Hegarty graduated from the University of Wisconsin last spring and was commissioned into the Marines as a second lieutenant. KC McCarthy graduated from Suffolk University this past December. Will Ricketson is working on the support staff of the United States Olympic Sailing Team.

One of Will’s friends, Amanda Clark, and her crew will represent the U.S. in the women’s 470 competition at the London Olympics in August. Rufus Urion spent last spring interning for 826 CHI, a non-profit tutoring agency in Chicago with a focus on creative writing. Rufus graduated from Northwestern University in June 2011.

Class of 2005 Marc Buckland is studying electrical engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Krish Jaiman was accepted at his dream school, New England Conservatory of Music, for graduate work. Ben Miller was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Amherst College. He is majoring in both mathematics and economics; he is ranked number

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one in both departments After he greaduates, Sam hopes to continue his studies at the London School of Economics. Graham Roth will begin a master’s degree program in computer science at Stanford University this coming fall. After spending the fall semester in Shanghai and loving it, Christopher Woo returned to Duke and was busy applying for summer internships in both the U.S. and China.

Class of 2006 Ben Lamont managed to find time for sailing at Harvard while majoring in South Asian studies. Luke Rogers spent last spring in Barcelona at the same time as fellow Fenn classmates Tyler Davis and Both Long. Max Swanson captained the Wheaton College soccer team last season. He and Scooter Manly will be co-captains of the team next year. Henry McNamara, who spent his second semester at Bowdoin studying abroad in Cape Town, South Africa, embarked on a quest to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro at the beginning of June. His ascent is raising funds to help support the building of a new library and teacher resource center at the Nyegina Secondary School in Tanzania. As of the press deadline, Henry had almost reached his goal of $3,000 in contributions. Check out http://henry climbskilimanjarofortds.bbnow.org/ for more information on Tanzania Development Support, the organization arranging Henry’s climb.

Class of 2003 Jack Carroll is living in New York City with fellow 2003 alumnus Bronson Kussin.

He is working for investment bank Piper Jaffray in equity sales. Jack played in Fenn’s alumni golf outing last fall and promises to be back next fall. Christian Manchester is working long hours in New York City at Goldman Sachs but was able to sail on Long Island Sound most weekends during last summer and fall. He also managed to make it up to Boston to help coach and train against his former sailing teammates at Boston College. Jackson McCloy graduated from Endicott College last month.

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Class Notes

Sam Doran ’09 Helps Preserve Lexington’s Past istory is his passion, and now S. Levi “Sam” Doran ’09 has edited a book of essays by the late Lexington resident S. Lawrence Whipple.

Titled Lexington Through the Years,, the book contains Years thirty-nine essays and vintage photographs that cover the first 300 years of the town’s history.

It has been published by the Lexington Historical Society, an accomplishment that has landed Sam on the pages of local newspapers and the Boston Globe.

Globe.

Steeped in town history since he was a child, Sam knew Mr. Whipple, who would frequently come to dinner at his home. Sam’s parents, Elaine and Guy, presented their son with his own lifetime membership to the historical society when Sam was three or four. His mother, Elaine, works as collections manager for the organization.

H

Royal typewriter to write the introduction. When he was finished compiling the collection, he had to be persuaded to have his name appear with the essayist’s on the cover.

Sam, who serves as a guide to Lexington’s history, portrayed Minuteman Timothy Blodgett in this year’s Patriots’ Day battle reenactment on the Lexington Green and has worked in the archives of the society since his middle school years. At Lexington Christian Academy he was yearbook editor and captain of the cross-country team this year, and he will attend Wheaton College in the fall.

This summer Sam is working as an intern for State Representative Jay Kaufman, who has said it is unusual for a high school student to hold such an internship. But “it’s also unusual for a high school student to be as focused and self-energized as Sam,” he adds.

That’s when Sam stepped in, pulling the project together “from A to Z,” and demonstrating “exceptional maturity in showing the life’s work of his mentor . . .”

Mr. Whipple served as the unofficial town historian for Lexington for many years. He had been urged to compile the essays he wrote for community groups and the Lexington Minuteman, Minuteman, but wasn’t able to pursue the project before his death at 88 in 2012. That’s when Sam stepped in, pulling the project together “from A to Z,” and demonstrating “exceptional maturity in showing the life’s work of his mentor,” according to the historical society’s executive director, Susan Bennett.

To make sure that every page of the essay collection would be typewritten, Sam used Mr. Whipple’s 1940s

46

Sam Doran, center, as a Patriot

Class Notes

Class of 2007

Class of 2009

Andy First is studying finance at University of Richmond. Sean Gannon is currently at Brown University where he rooms with Fenn classmate Dan Giovacchini. Sean played baseball for Brown last spring.

Taking on a significant leadership role last year was Griff in Kay, who served as the student body president at Rivers School. On the college front, Wyatt Bramhall will be attending the Rhode Island School of Design next year. After taking a year off, Thacher Hoch will enroll at the University of Virginia. Julian Huertas was accepted early decision to Bowdoin. Both Peter Hughes and Jeffrey Mara are headed to Lehigh University. Mike Pigula will be close at hand studying at Boston College. Both Christian Wesselhoeft and David Shapiro will set off for North Carolina this fall, with Christian headed to Davidson College and David to Wake Forest University. David just took up lacrosse last year but still made the Middlesex varsity team this spring. Connor Neill, who was named a Dual County All-Star in track, will be taking his talents to Trinity College. Adam Lamont was one of the varsity football captains at Groton last season, and Nick Weigel will lead Phillips Exeter Academy’s varsity soccer team in the fall as one of its co-captains. In other athletic news, Carl Hesler has already made the formal commitment to attend Dartmouth College even though he will just be starting his senior year at Belmont Hill this fall. It was no surprise that to anyone at Fenn that Carl was named an Independent School League (ISL) All-Star in hockey. Andrew Wester was named a Dual County All-Star for his stellar performance as a member of the CCHS golf team. Andrew vanderWilden and Henry Bumpus were selected to play on the Massachusetts High School Coaches Association All-State team. Henry was selected as the Dual County League Small School MVP and also named a Scholastic Division III All-Star. For the second year in a row, Andrew was chosen as the Dual County League Small School Lineman of the Year.

He was also named a Division III All-Star.

Sam Doran has compiled and had published a collection of essays by S. Lawrence Whipple, the unofficial Lexington town historian.

Sam will be attending Wheaton College in Norton, MA, this coming year. For more on Sam, see page 46. Mike O’Brien was captain of the CCHS varsity hockey team during his junior and senior years. He was named a

Class of 2008 Scott DeSantis has just finished up his freshman year at Amherst College. Tucker MacDonald had an amazing senior year at Pomfret, studying abroad for two terms. Check out his website/blog at tuckermacdonald.net for a record of his experiences. In September, Tucker will be entering the Savannah College of Art and Design for a major in film production. Winston Pingeon served as a student advisor at Rivers this past year. This spring he interned with the Weston Police Department as part of the school’s senior project program. Winston was accepted early decision to American University, his first choice college. Like his brother, James Pingeon was also accepted at his first choice college and will be attending Franklin and Marshall this fall. JC Winslow will join his brother Stephen ’06 at Holy Cross at the end of the summer, and Michael Woo will head west to Stanford University for his undergraduate years. In sports news, Chris WalkerJacks was named a Dual County All Star in soccer last winter for his outstanding play for Concord-Carlisle High School (CCHS), while Andreas Valhouli-Farb was elected captain of the Saint Mark’s baseball team earlier this spring. Chris Knollmeyer just completed his freshman year at California Institute of the Arts just north of LA where he is studying digital music composition and production. As a senior at Lawrence Academy, Chris created a curriculum for a year of independent study in music, which included taking a college course from Berklee College of Music, receiving private guitar composition and piano instruction, studying digital music production and AP music theory, interning at a recording studio, and performing at Lawrence

Merrimack Valley/Dual County Hockey All Star in hockey. See page 48 to read about Mike’s honors for his excellence as a soccer player. Last spring Charlie Peters gave his senior speech during Chapel at St. Mark’s. See page 52 to find out how Fenn featured in his talk.

Class of 2010 Dylan Dove has been working on a book titled Adobe InDesign CS6 Interactive: Web Publishing for the Internet and iPad. It is scheduled to be published by Cengage in January 2013. It’s hard to imagine how Dylan also had the time to be the stroke of Tabor Academy’s first boat, which was the number one seeded crew team in New England in late April. Phil Skayne, a junior at Middlesex, was named an ISL All-Star in soccer this past December, while Arthur Whitehead was once again named an Eastern Independent League (EIL) All-Star for his performance on Concord Academy’s cross country team.

Class of 2011 Sabri Eyuboglu, who competed for Belmont Hill, was recognized as an ISL-All Star in alpine skiing. In his first season playing lacrosse, Matt Boudreau received the Best Teammate Award by vote of his Brooks School JV teammates.

Nate Sintros '11, left, and rising eighth grader Titus Wilson, at Field Day this June.

47

Mike O’Brien ’09: All-American in Soccer

ATTENDED: Concord-Carlisle High School SOCCER HONORS: High School Scholar All-America All-American All-New England All-State All-Scholastic AT FENN: Lovejoy Prize winner Fenn Scholar Senator Soccer, hockey, and lacrosse captain NEXT: University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business

“It was a tough decision not to play college sports, but I knew I wouldn’t make a living as an athlete. I wanted to focus on academics, but I’ll still play for fun.”

Fenn is proud of you, Mike!

Class Notes

Former Faculty News Jim Carter’54 is helping us keep track of former faculty, so please contact him, or FENN, with any news. You can email him at jrcarter3@comcast.net or FENN at loneill@fenn.org.

Rob Achtmeyer ’94 is taking some time off from teaching to take care of his and his wife Kate’s children, Kevin and Henry. The family lives in Rockville, MD, where Rob is a commissioner for the city’s Historic District.

Mark and Jane Biscoe reside in Brunswick, ME, where they serve as “casual monitors” at Bowdoin College, working in the three athletic facilities on campus. They check student ID’s and “keep everything orderly.” Last July, the Biscoe-Richardson-Fallon family donated four-acre Carlisle Island, which they call “Big Huckleberry,” in Maine to the Damariscotta River Association to ensure it will remain open to visitors well into the future.

Silvy Brookby is an assistant professor of Education at Framingham State University, and “teaches teachers how to teach math and science,” she says. Her son Charles loves Fenn, she declares, adding, “Who would have guessed in 1997 that I would have my own son attending fourteen years later?” Dave Conti teaches at Casilleja School in Palo Alto, CA. Mary Coogan is retired and lives in Westborough. Kimberly Evelti is assistant academic dean at Williston School, where she teaches geometry. She and her family have moved into school housing “so there’s never a dull moment,” she says.

Sue Finney is retired and living with her husband, Roy, in Wilmot, NH. Jull Guzzi lives in Lincoln with her husband Eric Harnden, Kathy Starensier’s oldest son, and their four children. Rob Gustavson is the headmaster of Fay School in Southborough. Nancy Hall, who started the Intensive Language Program at Fenn, runs Independent Testing Service and continues to write her Explode the Code books. She lives on Cape Cod. Joe Hindle is living in Lebanon, NH, where he and his partner, Jane Higgins, are skiing, hiking, biking, and otherwise spending time outdoors.

Joe continues to enjoy baking and loves the fact that King Arthur Flour is headquartered nearby.

David Hughes lives in New Hampshire and still runs his camp, Masquebec Hill.

Dave Huston is retired and living in Concord.

Peter Hyde retired from growing hydroponic tomatoes in Wellesley, where he lives. Dave Irwin still works at Camp Belknap in New Hampshire, and he and his wife, Erin, are at Deerfield Academy, where Dave assists in admissions. Clark Johnson lives in Wayland and is president of the Seth F. Johnson Sales Co. Aaron Joncas is the head of a METCO program for the Concord Public Schools; he married Erin last summer. Liza Jones teaches at Shady Hill School in Cambridge and lives in Jamaica Plain. Julie Jospe recently retired from teaching in San Francisco and is spending time with her six grandchildren. Arnold Klingenberg is associate head of Middleburg Academy in Middleberg, VA. Stacey McCarthy is a visual arts teacher at Middlesex School, where she lives with her husband, Geoff, and children William and Elyse. Bob McElwain retired to Portsmouth, NH, ten years ago and paints for the Strawbery Banke Historical Society. His daughter Helen gave birth in March to Bob’s first grandchild, a daughter named Shane Dubois.

Todd Nelson is the headmaster of The School in Rose Valley, in Pennsylvania. After Fenn he taught in Cambridge, San Francisco, Chicago, and Maine. Kit Norris heads a math consulting firm.

Kate Padden Lee-Dubons teaches English at Concord-Carlisle High School and lives in Lexington. David Okada is in his third year of medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. He says “the learning is rich, exciting, and challenging.” David has met a “wonderful girl” with whom he plans to “match,” meaning that they will do their residencies in the same city. Brooks Pettit worked at Belmont Hill School after Fenn, and is now retired in Tallahassee, FL. Jen Pineau lives in Baltimore with her husband, Scott, and son Colten; she is assistant college admissions director at the McDonough School there.

Bill Purdy recently retired as head of student health services at Duke University. Dr. Purdy says he will be playing a lot more golf in Lakeside, MI. Michael Rosovsky teaches writing at Harvard and at Emerson College, and has had his own work appear in several literary magazines,

The Biscoes on Big Huckleberry Island in Maine. The plaque honors their ancestors. L to r: Kate (Biscoe) Turlo, Mark, Jonathan Turlo, Jane, and Emma Turlo. including the Mississippi Review, Virginia Quarterly, and Harvard Literary Review. Win Sargent retired from a career in international education, during which he taught in Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela, and he and his wife, Bea, run a B&B in Tobago. Jon Schmalenberger, husband of Fenn admissions assistant, receptionist, and art teacher Marilyn, is a master cabinet maker in the Emerson Umbrella building in Concord.

Curtis Singmaster recently completed a graduate degree in sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and says he is open to gallery, proposal, and grant opportunities.

Mitchell Stern teaches math at Peabody Middle School in Concord. Heather Thomson recently retired from teaching elementary school in Newcastle, NH, nor far from her home in Portsmouth, where she continues to work as a substitute teacher. Lindley (Hall) vanderLinde is an admissions assistant at Holderness School. Tom West, who began his long teaching career at Fenn, is writing full time. The Colorado school where he was teaching literature, history, Greek mythology, and creative writing closed last year due to budgetary problems. Tom has had more than thirty short stories published in literary journals and magazines.

Pierson Wetzel is co-head of the music department at Middlesex School. Jim 49

Class Notes

Wiggenhorn is living in Scottsdale, AZ, and occasionally does tech work, he says. He’s been a high school computer teacher and a director of technology for the Springfield, VT, school district, has studied at King’s College University in London, and has worked with a non-profit partnership

between Dartmouth College and the Montshire Museum of Science to bring internet access to the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont. In an attempt, as he told Jim Carter, “to spend my days trying to get young again,” Jim rides his bicycle thousands of miles a year, swims several

times a day, and says that although he sometimes feels wistful for New England, he doesn’t miss the long winter nights here.

Elsie Wilmerding worked as a tutor in English, reading, and spelling at Park and Brimmer and May, and continues to tutor.

Please help us find our “lost” 2013 reunion alumni.

Some of your classmates have gone missing, and we hope you can help us f ind them before your reunion in June 2013. Do you have an address, a phone number, or an email that you can share? Do you know how to contact a relative? Do you know who their best Fenn friend was? We can reach out to see if they’ve stayed in touch. Please send any leads to alumni@fenn.org or call the Alumni & Development Development Off ice at 978-318-3525 to pass along your suggestions.

CLASS OF 1933 Warren F. Walker, Jr. CLASS OF 1938 Gordon Allen, Jr. Eric Billings Allen Foss Thomas Gorham, Jr. David Gramkow David Holden Peter F. Winant CLASS OF 1943 Thomas E. Barber, Jr. Harold Cabot, Jr. Richard V. Gould Peter V. L. Hamilton John H. Hollis, Jr. Gifford D. Malone Wesley E. Rich II Frederick E. Robbins Frederick E. Snow II William V. V. Warren, Jr. CLASS OF 1948 Douglas J. Arnold Donald A. Burgess John G. Cameron Christopher M. Gravina James R. Knowles James L. McMasters Ronald O. Miller Bernard C. Nelson, Jr. Sherman Peale James R. Pennington Jonathan G. Powers David W. Sherman

50

James P. Walker Paul C. Washburn, Jr. Kent M. Weld CLASS OF 1953 Jeffrey M. Arnold Anthony S. Beckwith Kenneth Cowan Nicholas Davison Robert H. Miller, Jr. William G. Moody, Jr. John C. Morse David Noble Michel Rozsa Dudley L. Short Roger D. Smith David P. Yens

A. Graham McIlwaine Robin B. Moore Pierre D. Seronde

CLASS OF 1978

Stephen B. Barton Todd A. Berkson Francis L. Bry CLASS OF 1968 John C. Coughlin III Andrew C. B. Dolan Neil Alexander Frederick S. Bigelow, Jr. Kenneth C. Harris Andrew J. Langton John T. J. Clunie Eric S. Mahlowitz Francis P. Coolidge, Jr. Jonathan S. Marley Norman L. Degelman Rhodes G. Lockwood, Jr. Joseph P. O'Connell Jason Pitts Scott M. Milliken Timothy M. Prendergast Michael C. Morris Frederick L. Reynolds Steven C. Perry John Spaulding Stephen T. Sanford Winfield S. Stanley III Richard F. Souza Bradford P. Stevens Peter M. Stout CLASS OF 1983

CLASS OF 1958

William J. Bry Dwight M. Davidsen Nathaniel P. Dean Geoffrey B. Bickford Aaron S. Goldberg John B. Eno James T. Gorman Robert Fortes Jon K. Johnson Jonathan A. Herz David P. Koch Paul R. Heuchling Peter A. Kuykendall Harry Irving CLASS OF 1963 Anthony C. Morris George P. King Frederick W. Bradley, Jr. Thomas M. O'Connor Mark S. Lee Richard W. Broome Massimo De Paoli Edward M. Pickman Henry R. Edgarton William E. Roth Christopher C. Raymond Bruce M. Fallwell Christopher Sanders Andrew Reynolds F. Bruce Foster Michael D. Taub Steffan Senders Richard W. Harte Jonathan B. Tew Mark A. Snyder Frazier C. Hollingsworth R. Christopher Turner Darryl W. Stowe Edward L. Jackson Paul A. Vinger Peter W. Taylor David E. Juda Murray J. Wand Charles J. Lee Timothy Y. Wenger Irwin B. Levine Class of Gifford Allen, Jr. Bruce U. Fairbairn David L. Kennedy James D. Tew III David B. Turner III

CLASS OF 1973

CLASS OF 1988 Jeremy B. Button Paul Tsung-Fu Chen Steven Chung R. Brooke Coleman Kevin P. Davidsen Christopher W. Kaiser Michael A. Moffa Mark P. Mullane Erik D. Norwood Carl D. Robinson James B. Seamans Damian A. B. Sutton CLASS OF 1993 Seth M. Christian David F. Garofalo Patrick O. Harney Nathan J. B. Kraft Adrian M. Liggins Benjamin F. W. Sargent Guido J. Wennemer Benjamin O. Zotto CLASS OF 1988 Adam R. Kolloff Jonathan D. Lawrence Daris J. H. Paddock CLASS OF 2003 Sean P. Butze Andrew T. Pedulla-Prouty Ian A. Wrangham CLASS OF 2008 Charles W. Hoff

Milestones Births and Marriages To Becca and Gary Artinian ’97 a daughter, Emma Madison April 17, 2012

Jon Bonoma ‘98 To Jen Gaj May 19, 2012

Andrew Montgomery ’99 To Courtney Morgan April 8, 2012

To Bethany and Tim Gibson ’85 a daughter, Faye September 26, 2011

Michael DeSantis ’00 To Caitlin Higgins May 21, 2011

Sam Takvorian ’99 To Melina Marmarelis May 19, 2012

To Kathryn and John Boger ’94 a son, Brady Digman October 24, 2011 To Kate and Edward Welles ’98 a son, Brendan Thomas November 26, 2011

Tom Hudner’s new daughter, Reese

Josh Schohn ’90 To Carina Toledo April 6, 2012

To Jennifer and Tom Hudner ’87 a daughter, Reese Georgea March 2, 2012

To Kate and Rob Achtmeyer ’94 a son, Henry Williams January 17, 2012

Rob Achtmeyer’s new son, Henry

Caitlin and Scott DeSantis ‘08

Patricia and Paul Bellantoni ’82.

Courtney and Andrew Montgomery ’99

In Memoriam William G. Doe ’37 April 26, 2012 George W. Fang ’50 April 13, 2011 Brother of Bernard Fang ’63 Virginia Gay November 29, 2011 Grandmother of Brendan ’08 and Connor ’11 Edward H. Harding ’36 April 28, 2008 Mary Jones October 9, 2011 Mother of Michael ’69 and Bob ’80 Grandmother of Timothy, 7th grade and Peter, 4th grade

Wallace A. Jones March 30, 2011 Father of Michael ’69 and Bob ’80 Grandfather of Timothy, 7th grade, and Peter, 4th grade Jay C. Klinck ’59 December 27, 2011 John F. Kraetzer ’50 February 14, 2012 David T. MacLane Former Faculty 1944-1959 November 25, 2011 Julia Meier May 23, 2011 Grandmother of Conrad ’13

Ruth B. Murphy November 23, 2011 Mother of Weezie Johnson Grandmother of Tim ’83, Mark ’86, and David ’92 Frank O’Brien, Jr. February 2, 2012 Father of Frank O’Brien ’77 Edward S. Redstone Fenn Trustee 1995-1996 December 23, 2011 Grandfather of the late Adam Redstone ’99 Russell C. Steinert July 26, 2011 Grandfather of Nicholas, 6th grade, and Max, 5th grade

Gordon R. Williams, Jr. Fenn Trustee 1990-1996 February 17, 2012 Father of Gordie ’93

Donald M. Wilson November 29, 2011 Grandfather of Sam Breault ’16

Edric A. Weld ’38 September 25, 2011

Eleanor Winstanley Childs May 2, 2012 Grandmother of Adam Winstanley ’82 and Carter Winstanley ’84 Great grandmother of Cole, 8th grade, and Jalen, 6th grade

Frederick S. Richardson ’42 August 8, 2011 John W. Leahy ’46 November 4, 2011 Robert C. Runyon January 16, 2012 Father of Scott ’03 Faith C. Smith May 8, 2012 Mother of Ben Smith ’85

51

Reflections

F RIENDS

FOR

LIFE

hen Charlie Peters ’09 delivered a chapel speech at St. Mark’s School this spring, he shared his memories of Fenn and the many friends he made here. One classmate, however, was “intimidating, and extremely smart, which I envied. I hated him and he hated me and my eleven-year-old mind told me nothing would ever change.”

W

Charlie offered as evidence a story about the time he was walking across the Fenn campus with his lacrosse stick and ball, “and this kid came out and took the ball from me and wouldn’t give it back.” They began to argue, then push and shove, and Charlie walked away and began to cry.

Relating this story in front of his St. Mark’s classmates and teachers, Charlie surprised them all with his next comment: “The crazy thing is that this kid I once hated more than anyone is sitting to the left of me, and he’s my best friend.” Charlie explained that eventually, Michael Hoffman ’09 and he became “inseparable,” spending every

Best friends Mike, Ryan MacDonald, Nick Weigel, and Charlie, all class of 2009, after Charlie’s chapel speech this spring at St. Mark’s School.

Michael Hoffman, left, and Charlie Peters, both class of 2009, receiving the Biscoe Award at Fenn

weekend together with a group that included classmates Wyatt Bramhall ’09, Nick Weigel ’09, and Ryan MacDonald ’09.

When Charlie graduated from Fenn, he was terrified that he would lose touch with his best friends. But that didn’t happen. When Mike, also a St. Mark’s student, learned that Charlie was to speak in chapel about friendship, he contacted Nick, Wyatt, and Ryan. Nick got a ride home from Exeter; Ryan, who is at Westford Academy, and his mom, Donna, headed to St. Mark’s; and only Wyatt, a senior at Concord-Carlisle High School, was unable to make it.

When Charlie’s mother, Karen, recently related the story to Headmaster Jerry Ward, she reminded him of a remark he made at the evening celebration of the eighth grade class in 2008. “When you said that Fenn boys would form friendships for life,” said Karen, “you were right!”

Did you make a friend for life at Fenn? Let us know and we’ll write your story.

Contact loneill@fenn.org.

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From the Headmaster It’s an age-old question I ask Fenn boys with the broad, blank canvas of their lives in front of them: “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I sometimes make a playful guess before they answer and occasionally a more serious prediction or two in my headmaster’s graduation reflection as a boy leaves Fenn. Their answers range from a carefree “I don’t know!” to a passionate declaration of a dream. Tracking a number of the boys’ and my own predictions over almost twenty years, I’ve learned that some of my guesses and their answers have been surprisingly accurate and some could not be farther from the truth.

A certainty is that a force or influence, present or future, in these boys’ lives—a mentor, a parent, a teacher, a passion, a talent, personal circumstance, or external events—will bring them to their life’s work.

A certainty is that a force or influence, present or future, in these boys’ lives—a mentor, a parent, a teacher, a passion, a talent, personal circumstance, or external events—will bring them to their life’s work. Our hope is that they find in their work what is true to their talents and person so that their endeavors become a calling to heal or instruct or create or serve or provide, a calling that makes their lives full and enriches those whom they serve.

In this current issue of FENN we ask members of the extended school community—faculty, staff, alumni, and parents—about their callings. Each of these stories is a window on dedicated work and a fulfilled life.

I have been asked what called me to the work of educating boys and running a school. The answer, not

surprisingly, involves seminal role models across the years of my life: my parents, Peg and John, who taught me through their earnest example that caring for others is paramount; my grade school teachers, the Sisters of St. Joseph, who selflessly dedicated their lives to God and children and who taught me to love learning; my older sister, Margaret, who resolutely pursued teaching in urban schools; my brother Johnny, her twin, who served as a priest ministering in troubled neighborhoods in Boston; the social workers of the Boston Juvenile Court, where I interned in college; later my wife, Lorraine, whose love and care of all things about schools is unbounded; and finally, a headmaster, Charles Riepe, twenty years my senior, who naturally mentored me, generously giving me the chance to help him run a school for boys. Individually and at times in unison, their voices speak across time to inspire and sustain me in the work of my life and profession.

I’m compelled to end with the note that in my own work I am daily struck by the efforts of hundreds of people I’ve come to know over time who have consuming and meaningful professional responsibilities in business, law, medicine, the arts, or family, yet who are personally called to serve their sons’ or their own schools as volunteer parents, alumni, and trustees. Their primary work in life lies outside education, yet they devote themselves in singular ways to the work of sustaining a school. Their selfless and dedicated response to their second calling inspires me every day. I hear their voices, too, and see their example, as I am certain Fenn boys will as they answer the call in their own lives.

Fenn is on the move!

With $24.7 million already committed toward the $26 million goal, the Boys at the Heart campaign is now reaching out to Fenn’s broader alumni and parent community to raise the final $1.3 million needed to declare victory. Stand up and be counted!

Who is close to your heart?

While boys are at the heart of everything that Fenn is and does, the School’s faculty remains close to the hearts of all those who experience Fenn as a student or parent. Your gift to the campaign can honor that special teacher who made all the difference to you.

A contribution to the new Faculty at the Heart Fund will help provide teachers with the professional and curriculum development opportunities that inspire them in their daily work with boys.

For more information, contact Tom Hudner ’87, Director of Advancement The Fenn School, 516 Monument Street, Concord, MA 01742. Email thudner@fenn.org or call 978-318-3520

Summer 2012

THE FENN SCHOOL 516 MONUMENT STREET CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS 01742-1894

NONPROFIT U.S. POSTAGE PAID N READING MA PERMIT NO. 121

Parents of Alumni If this publication is addressed to your son, and he no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please notify the alumni office of his new mailing address (978-318-3525 or aboudreau@fenn.org). Thank you!

For the Greater Good