Groton School Quarterly, Winter 2015

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Winter 2015 • Volume LXXVII , No. 1

J M ack ★ uh C Se am ro c e pa ma ker LE ge d & S A CA SO RO NS 26 li?

CAITLIN REED ’91

Christopher Temerson

uncovered this hat behind a blackboard during a Schoolhouse renovation in 1989.

Its style, along with old photographs, indicates that it most likely belonged to a member of the crew that built the Schoolhouse in 1899, 90 years earlier. The current Schoolhouse renovation/expansion has upended a lot of earth, but so far, according to the construction firm, there have been no hidden oddities or treasures.

Tom Schaefer ’05:

Full Circle

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ost graduates just 10 years out of Groton aren’t giving much thought to writing a will, much less considering whether to put Groton School in it.

But the U.S. Navy asked Tom Schaefer ’05 to think about it.

When Tom graduated from MIT, completing his stint with the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC), he attended the Navy’s Nuclear Power School and was about to begin his junior officer tour on the U.S.S. New Mexico, a submarine. Prior to departure, Tom’s superiors encouraged him to create a will—and asked if he wanted to include an alma mater.

Tom chose Groton. He decided to join the Navy while still on the Circle and attributes the direction of his life to his experiences here. “The place and the people shaped who I am,” he says.

Tom believes he learned to serve his community at Groton: he captained the football team and was a prefect in Olsen’s, a Third Form dorm. “The responsibility was put on prefects to be leaders and shape the Third Formers, while working with other prefects,” he says. “We had to both lead and follow.” Leading both peers and younger students proved to be valuable training for life, and Tom was motivated to apply these leadership skills to a career.

While on board the U.S.S. New Mexico, Tom was responsible for more than 30 enlisted personnel in his division; in February 2013, he took on a significant leadership role as a primary Officer of the Deck during

New Mexico’s maiden six-month deployment, a role normally reserved for senior department heads with three to five years additional experience.

He remains on active duty, but has transferred to the Chief of Naval Operations staff in the Communications and Intelligence Department. Tom, who earned a degree in materials science and engineering at MIT, plans to separate from service at the beginning of 2016. Another value fortified while at Groton, his prioritization of family, is driving his decision to make a more permanent home for himself and his wife, Kit. Tom credits favorite teachers, including science teacher Steve Belsky, and coaches Jon Choate ’60 and Charlie Alexander, as well as role models such as John Lyons and Jim Lockney, with helping him find his way first to MIT and then to the Navy. He particularly recalls the inspiring stories shared by Mr. Lockney about his service during the Vietnam War. The enduring friendships from his Groton years continually remind Tom of his positive learning experiences on the Circle, both in and out of the classroom.

Becoming a member (the youngest to date) of Groton School’s Circle Society, which includes those who have put Groton in their wills, is Tom’s exercise in paying-itforward, helping make valuable experiences, like his own at Groton, possible for future students, while also honoring those who helped prepare him for his life’s voyage.

For more information about the Circle Society, contact Betsy Ginsberg in the Department of Alumni and Development at eginsberg@groton.org or 978-448-7584.

Groton School Winter 2015 • Volume LXXVII, No. 1

The Quarterly

Ebola Detective For Caitlin Reed ’91, the question was not whether she should go to West Africa, but when. page 1425

Telling Stories New York Times columnist Roger Cohen’s inspiring lecture included an apology on behalf of white South Africans “for the hell of apartheid.” page 2025

The Headmaster, The Fighter, and Me How Muhammad Ali and Jack Crocker crossed paths, and what it meant to one impressionable Sixth Former page 2625

Lessons & Carols See more photos page 32q

D E P A R T

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Message from the Headmaster

3 Letters 5

Circiter / Around the Circle

10 Personae / Profiles 34 Voces / Chapel Talks 41 De Libris / Books 44 Grotoniana / Athletics 50 Grotoniana / Arts 54 In Memoriam 55 Form Notes Mike Sperling

Annie Card

Message from the Headmaster

B

y now you may know that Groton’s Board of Trustees passed the GRoton Affordability and INclusion initiative (GRAIN) at its fall meeting, freezing tuition for three years and ensuring that Groton will be able to accept any deserving applicants, regardless of the families’ ability to pay.

It was an important step toward making Groton a truly inclusive community, and I was inspired by my fellow board members’ wholehearted support. Soon after the meeting, Jonathan Klein, our board president, and I sent an email announcement about GRAIN to the extended Groton family.

We anticipated support, as well as some good questions and perhaps some skepticism. What we didn’t anticipate was the effusive outpouring of approval and enthusiasm. The reaction— your reaction—has been humbling and reaffirming.

I’ll share a few of the comments we received: • “This

is a game-changer for Groton … I am excited to spread the word of how Groton is again in service to these United States. Upward mobility is so inherent in our culture it is shocking to see how much it has eroded in a matter of a generation.”

• “Makes

me proud to be a graduate.”

• “It

is consistent with everything I remember at the School in the late ’40s and early ’50s ... I remember well how Mr. Crocker … helped inspire many of us to live lives of service.

It is especially heartening to know that this is the spirit of the educational community in which two of my grandchildren … are growing and learning.”

• “Well

done Groton. This would be an easy issue for the School to ignore.”

Editor Gail Friedman Design Irene Chu

Contributing Editors Kimberly A. Gerighty Elizabeth Z. Ginsberg P’16 Elizabeth Wray Lawrence ‘82 Allison S. MacBride John D. MacEachern P’10, ‘14, ’16 Melissa J. Ribaudo Amy Sim Photography/Editorial Assistant Christopher Temerson

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That last comment is certainly correct. If we look only at Groton’s admissions process, which is more selective than ever, or at the School’s healthy finances, inclusion might be an easy issue to ignore. But the story of Groton admissions is not only a story about the inspiring children who attend our School; it is also a story of lost opportunities, sometimes to very deserving children. When we think about students who would enrich the Groton community greatly but who could not attend because of limited available aid—or about those who never even dream of applying—the issue becomes much harder to ignore.

Part of GRAIN’s goal is to attract families who feel caught in the middle, those who typically assume (often wrongly) that they will not qualify for aid. Our country and our world need this cohort, like any other, to benefit from the very best education. Who is not at Groton today—and who will not be at Groton tomorrow—if tuition continues to outpace income growth? We would be missing students who would inspire their peers and teachers with their insight and intellect and make enormous contributions to our community. Many Groton families pay full tuition, and, since 2008, the School has granted full financial aid to families earning $75,000 or less. We want deserving students from all circumstances to know they are welcome to apply. And once admitted, each and every one must feel a sense of belonging.

GRAIN absolutely will not affect compensation, programming, or the care of our outstanding facilities. It will rest upon the generosity and vision of our collective community.

Clearly, the GRAIN initiative has hit a nerve. The responses to our announcement demonstrated how much the ideal of inclusion means to Groton graduates, parents, and friends. That should not be surprising: ever since Frederick Law Olmsted and Endicott Peabody were hatching the idea of an open Circle, Groton has focused on opportunity and inclusion. Over the generations, my predecessors stewarded these core Groton values with great care.

I’m proud to be associated with them, and with all of you.

Temba Maqubela Headmaster

Editorial Offices The Schoolhouse Groton School Groton, MA 01450 978 - 448 -7506 quarterly@groton.org Other School Offices Alumni Office: 978 - 448 -7520 Admission Office: 978 - 448 -7510

Groton School publishes the Groton School Quarterly three times a year, in late summer, winter, and spring, and the Annual Report once a year, in the fall.

LETTERS On the back cover of the latest Groton Quarterly is an article about charms at Groton. I am sure this has drawn many responses from proud graduates, myself included, who live increasingly in the past, but I will add my two oars’ worth. Jim Satterthwaite, one of Groton’s venerable English teachers, was the crew coach at the time and highly revered by the crews that he formed each spring. To us, at least, he was known as “The Great God Pan.” We who rowed for him, and we really did row for him, rewarded his interest and care for us by winning our races, and he rewarded us, in a temporal sense, with small gold oar charms at the end of the season. I am not sure what the basis for the award was, but judging by what I received one had to be a member of either A Boat or B Boat and had to have beaten Nobles and, preferably, everyone else.

I have two of these charms, as I mentioned, but I can think of many others who have built themselves a similarly comfortable past in memory of which they now bask.

John Higginson ’56

I have six Groton charms which my mother started collecting in 1939!

My father, Richard K. Irons, taught at Groton from 1933 to 1972 and continued after his retirement into the

middle of the 80s. I was on the Groton faculty in 200607 helping John MacEachern in two roles with the Development Office.

Clifford Irons

To answer your request for info about athletic charms on the back cover of the Fall 2014 Quarterly, I was reminded of forgotten mementoes given to the first string soccer team in my era.

Unlike the charms you pictured, I don’t recall if the soccer ball charms had anything to do with the team’s record those seasons; I don’t think so. I vaguely remember thinking of them as being consolation prizes since soccer was not a “letter” sport then.

Based on your inquiry, I dug up two sterling silver soccer balls—looks like one from Fifth Form year and a second from Sixth Form year.

You might be able to see from the lousy photo that both are decorated with red ceramic Gs: the first is engraved with my initials “JCH,” my position “HB”(halfback), and the year 1961; the second with my initials, then “LHB” (left half back), and the year 1962 (presumably coinciding with the fall soccer season of Sixth Form year).

I had completely forgotten about these items, and it took a while to find them buried under shirt studs

(which I had also forgotten about).

I have no recollection about when, or on what occasion, or by whom they may have been presented.

John C. (“Jock”) Hooper ’63 My recollection is those “awards” were given out by Mary Crocker on the Circle the evening before Prize Day when we sang “Ave Grotonia” (Mater Virum, which of course has been adjusted to “men and women”).

I recall my brother, Jack ’59, receiving a tiepin that was a gold oar with a red “G” on it as a crew memento. That may have commemorated a winning season or been recognition of his being the captain of the crew.

David Lawrence ’63 Jack Lawrence confirmed that he had received two gold oars, which were lost in a move.

Of course we had football charms (baseball too). I gave my football charm to my wife, I think. No, they were not given only to undefeated teams, nor were they given.

They were earned by defeating St. Mark’s, and they were paid for by us. My good wife poked around somewhere and found my football charm! I was pleased to refresh my memory and find that in the fall of 1942 Groton smashed St. Mark’s by the thundering score of 6-0.

I was only the manager of the 1942 football squad, but was also at the same time the third team blocking back (C team!). I think I may have been one of the few managers who ever suited up for Coach Larry Noble. He let me in the WWII wartime game with the local reform school, in which wounds were received for which the Purple Heart should have been awarded.

Coleman Hoyt ’43 In response to your inquiry as to Groton charms, I find these on a keychain: 2nd Wachusetts, Baseball, D. Howe Catcher 1940 Groton School Hockey L.W. 1943 Groton School Gym Team 1939 Fife and Drum Corps 1939 and 1940 Doc G S Museum Soc 1939 G S Chronicle Ed In Chief 1939

My late husband, Bill Mosle ’52, gave me his gold Groton football, which I wear on my charm bracelet. The football is inscribed: GS 26 SM 14 1950

Grotonian Sports Editor 1942-1943 Groton School Year Book Ed in Chief 1943 Groton Record Ed in Chief 1941 David Howe ’43

WBM Jr. F.B. Fay Mosle

(continued)

www.groton.org

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LETTERS

(CONTINUED)

Later a small cabin with windows was erected over the hatch leading to the roof, thereby capturing heat from the second floor below and allowing an occasional duck inside for relief. Groton Upper Formers were, as I recall, monitors during the day if not in class.

William A. Lawrence II ’51 PS: My sister, Mary Lawrence Curry, reminds me that she is quite sure that our mother and perhaps other ladies manned the watch, probably during the day.

Here is a function you may have missed about the Schoolhouse clock tower [“Time Out,” Fall 2014 Quarterly].

During World War II, my father, Carl A. P. Lawrence, and many other town residents and Groton faculty (F. P. Nash that I know of ) manned a rooftop listening post ’round the clock for airplane sounds. They took limited crowded refuge in the tower day and night.

Upon hearing the sound, a phone in the tower was used to call a certain dedicated phone number and a report made of the time heard and approximate direction, if obtainable.

My father had a sheepskin great coat, which he swore was useless since one had to stand a watch outside to listen all the winter nights. I am not sure of the watch time but I believe it was eight hours. If it was snowing, one could stand in the bell tower but leave the door open.

William Lawrence also identified several of the dogs pictured on the back cover of the Spring Quarterly: Harvey Sargisson’s Skipper, Phil Nash’s Buie, Mary Lawrence’s Snaffles, Charlie Rimmer’s Brandy, and Mary Crocker’s Toby.

I can tell you who the people are (“Circling Back,” Spring Quarterly back cover), but I have forgotten the names of all the dogs. I am, probably, the last living person in this picture!! No, Bobby Moss would be the youngest.

They are: Jim Waugh, Ernst Loewenburg, Bill Cushing, Harvey Sargisson, Phil Nash, Mary Curry, Hulda Moss (Bobby Moss hiding behind his St. Bernard), Dick Pleasants, Mary Crocker,

Charlie Sheerin. I am holding our dog, Snaffles, and Charlie Rimmer’s dog, Brandy.

It took quite a while to get all the dogs to cooperate in the taking of the picture!

Mary Curry (Mrs. George Curry) I missed the back cover of the Spring 2014 Quarterly—all the interesting stuff inside drew me away from that—and then I received the current issue with the identification of the faculty and their dogs. I wish I could verify that the man on the far right is my father, Charlie Sheerin ’44, but I will dissent. His dog, Rebel, was a liver and white English setter, and while he closely resembles the man in the picture down to the cigarette, it’s not he.

Jack Crocker hired my father in the fall of 1950, and he stayed until June 1952, when he and my mother married and he then went to Virginia Theological Seminary.

We returned in the fall of 1961, and some of my happiest memories are of being a “faculty brat” at Groton.

I also have a charm—“W” on a silver disc—and Doug Brown told me it is a football charm from my father’s days on the Wachusetts, and he subsequently coached the Ws in the ’60s. Many a happy fall afternoon was spent watching

football practice from the roof of the stables by the Headmaster’s House.

Thanks for the chance to chime in!

Edie Sheerin Patterson As an English boy, evacuated to America in 1940, who lived with my brother with Mrs. Oric Bates, at Puritan Hill Farm, Groton, I was fortunate to be at Groton School for four-and-a-half years, as a boarder. I can recognize, from their photographs, Ernst Loewenberg, Paul Nash, and Mary Crocker. The only other person I knew, and by whom I was taught Greek literature, was William Cush-ing. The youngish man, next to Paul Nash on his right, I do not recognize because he is not the least like William Cushing, not in looks nor age, being older in 1945 than that. He lived on his own in a house quite near the School, going toward Groton village. Mr. Oric Bates’ daughter, “Tica,” later married James Satterthwaite, who after the war was head of English at the School.

I particularly enjoyed Cushing’s class of three not long before I returned to Britain in February 1945.

John Wood ’45

Correction The Form Notes section of the Fall 2014 Quarterly said that the Form of 1985 is celebrating it’s 70th reunion. Not quite!

We look forward to welcoming them back this May for their 30th.

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wo hundred Groton students and 30 faculty members sorted food, planted bulbs, cleaned, painted, entertained, and otherwise reached out on September 30, during the School’s first Community Day of Service.

Students worked at 14 Massachusetts sites: they sorted food at the Merrimack Valley Food Bank in Lowell and organized donations at Household Goods Recycling of Massachusetts in Acton. They shared musical performances at RiverCourt Residences in West Groton and Nashoba Park Assisted Living in Ayer, played with

homeless pets at the animal shelter in Sterling, and helped with landscaping at the Heading Home shelter in Roxbury.

Other sites visited included Our Father’s House in Fitchburg; the Roudenbush Community Center in Westford; the town library and playground, Keyes Woods, and Seven Hills Pediatric Center, all in Groton; and the common and senior center in West Groton.

The Community Day of Service was a chance for students and faculty to step outside their routines and think about neighbors not far from Groton’s Circle,

and to reflect on the responsibility every member has to his or her community.

“As I watched our students reach beyond themselves, I was moved not just by the impact they were having on our neighbors, but also by the way they surprised each other,” said Director of Community Engagement and English teacher Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge, who planned the event. “We all learned something — about our world, about each other, and about ourselves.”

Clockwise from top left: Piper Higgins ’17, Feild Gomila ’17, Ivana Primero ’17, and Shirley LI ’19; Sophie Baker ’16; Nailah Pierce ’18; Carrie Moore ’17, Alec Reiss ’17, and Aidan Reilly ’18; Marco McGavick ’17, Bella Anderson (an exchange student), Mark Gallant ’19, and Zizi Kendall ’17; Elyssa Wolf ’17 and Karla Sanford ’19

www.groton.org

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circiter

Groton’s First Community Day

Sprinkles Cupcakes

circiter

Clockwise from left: Hallie Bereday ’17 and her mother, Margaret Russell; May Yang, mother of Amy Lu ’19; Yanni Cho ’16 at the international parents luncheon; Candace Tong-Li ’16, Ivana Primero ’17, and exchange student Isabella Duncan; Holly McNaughton ’15 and her father, Donald

Alumna Sweetens Surprise Holiday

T

Jon Chase and Christopher Temerson

hanks to Candace Nelson ’91 (above), this fall’s Surprise Holiday was especially sweet.

The senior prefects, looking for a creative way to announce the holiday, contacted Candace, who owns Sprinkles Cupcakes. Candace loved their idea and donated 400 cupcakes, each topped with green — the color associated with Surprise Holiday.

During Roll Call, prefect Katherine McCreery ’15 emerged from under the Schoolroom desk wearing the traditional green jacket, while the other prefects rolled in the confections.

“Surprise Holiday was one of my favorite Groton traditions,” Candace says, adding that she was “thrilled to play a part in the joyful surprise.”

Parents Weekend 2014

P

Gail Friedman

arents traveled from all over the world (and from right around the corner) for Groton’s Parents Weekend, October 17-19.

They arrived from Australia, Botswana, Bermuda, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, and Thailand. Within the U.S., they came from Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire,

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New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia.

On the schedule were nearly 2,300 parent conferences — with teachers, dorm heads, and advisors — as well as a parent reception, a luncheon for international parents, a special dinner for Sixth Formers and their parents, athletic competitions, the annual headmaster’s address, and a Saturday evening concert featuring student vocalists and instrumental ensembles.

To Engage Is to Rule

I

Mylan Cannon

n late September, Jamaal Barnes, assistant director of admissions at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, spoke at Groton about what it truly means to serve the community.

Each week, students are urged through emails and Roll Call announcements to take advantage of the many service opportunities — Loaves and Fishes every Monday, Our Father’s House on Sundays, and food and toy drives at Christmas.

Our School’s motto means “for whom to serve is to rule.” Service is such an integral part of Groton that the headmaster counts it among the four pillars holding up the School.

In fact, rather than “serve” the community, students should “engage” in the community, according to Barnes, who was a Truman Scholar in 2009. In today’s culture of “volun-tourism,” service is often another line on the checklist of

the typical well-meaning student. Despite the good intentions, Barnes said that such a mindset is neither helpful nor respectful. Authentic community engagement, as the speaker put it, is more like an exchange rather than one side giving and the other receiving. It is a chance for students to learn about other societies and cultures and also to share their own backgrounds with members of the community.

The point of a service opportunity is to better understand the community, he said, and the essence of community engagement is not sympathy, but empathy. “Authentic community engagement moves you away from sympathy,” Mr. Barnes explained, “toward an empathetic understanding of people, communities, and social, economic, and environmental structures.”

— Sowon Lee ‘15

Artist-in-Residence Spurs Groton’s Creativity

F

or a week in December, under the tutelage of artist-in-residence Donna Rhae Marder (right), Groton students contemplated gloves — and art.

Seeing Marder’s own intricate works for inspiration, students got right to work, gathering paper, fabric, and other materials to create their own hand coverings. Some dreamed up delicate sculptural gloves, while others had a more functional focus, incorporating tools or combs into the fingers. The glove project, according to art teacher and Brodigan Gallery curator Beth Van Gelder, involved not just creative expression, but also invention and engineering.

Marder started using paper in her sewing machine around 1980, and has incorporated a wide variety of items into her paper art, from old letters, snapshots, and magazine pages to teabags, coffee filters, baseball cards, and wrapping paper.

Materials inspire her, as they inspired her Groton students. The artist also introduced students to the sewing machine — a novelty for many.

Marder’s varied works of paper were on display at Groton School’s Brodigan Gallery during the fall term; she worked as an artist-in-residence courtesy of the Mudge Fellowship, established by the Mudge Foundation in 1992 to enhance Groton students’ exposure to the arts.

www.groton.org

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circiter

A Day of Global Immersion

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Christopher Temerson

roton celebrated its first Global Education Day in November, starting with a provocative mother-daughter Chapel Talk and ending with firsthand stories from alumni whose lives were transformed through global experiences.

In Chapel, Nadia Alawa, founder of the humanitarian organization NuDay Syria, spoke about the Syrian civil war and how youth inspired widespread opposition to the Assad regime. “The revolution in Syria has cost too many lives and has destroyed at least one whole generation of educated people,” she said. “It has taught us that values are more valuable than fear and that hope will keep your dignity alive and well — no matter what happens.”

Nadia’s daughter, Laila Alawa, spoke next, explaining the perspective of a feminist who chooses to wear the traditional Muslim hijab. Laila, who works at Karamah: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights, spoke of the oppressive attitudes of some mainstream feminists who urge her to discard her head covering. Laila gained notoriety in April 2013 through an essay in The Huffington Post, “I Am Not Oppressed,” defending her decision to wear the hijab.

Throughout the day, both women spoke in classes, as did other global speakers:

Groton Trustee Alex Krapf P’15, who grew up in Germany and spoke about the Berlin Wall; Modern Language Department Head Rebecca Stanton P’09, who grew up in Egypt and France and spoke about adapting to cultural differences; Peter Luis, founder of the Orkeeswa School in Tanzania, the site of one of Groton’s global education trips; and Headmaster Temba Maqubela, who told stories about growing up under apartheid in his South African village, and why that exclusionary system motivates him to talk about inclusion today without pause or apology.

To help celebrate Global Education Day, the Dining Hall served a buffet of Indian,

Peruvian, Cambodian, and South African dishes.

The day ended with an All-School assembly featuring Ben de Menil ’93, who founded the iAso Bachata Academy to teach traditional music in the Dominican Republic; Johnny Lamont ’15 and Max Gomez ’15, who discussed their trip with Groton to Peru; Christina Strater ’12, who described her Groton trip to Uganda; and Steven Bloomfield, executive director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, who has advised Groton’s global education program.

Gail Friedman

Christine Bernard ’17 and Abby Power ’17 headed to England in October for a month of study at the Bedales School, a coed boarding school about 60 miles outside London. They had attended “academic preseason” at Groton before the official start of classes, working intensively with teachers so they could re-enter classes easily after the month away.

While Groton has welcomed students from other countries and has sent numerous students on global education trips, this was the School’s first true exchange, with two girls from Bedales spending the month on the Circle while Christine and Abby were away.

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Groton Wins Exeter Debate Tourney

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n mid-September, students welcomed the pianist Max Levinson to the Circle for a concert that both entertained and introduced a vintage piano to the community.

Levinson began the evening with a beautiful performance of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata,” followed by the piece “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Mussorgsky.

Not only were Groton students treated to a world-class pianist playing exceptional music, but they also got to listen to the first public presentation of a rare instrument.

Groton’s vintage piano was made in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1930 by Mason & Hamlin, one of the most respected piano manufacturers in the world. Apart from its handmade construction, the piano is distinguished by a tension resonator that keeps the soundboard from flattening, producing the crisp, clear notes the pianos are known for. The piano’s beautiful mahogany finish is also stunning, along with some artistic touches, such as the Greek key symbols on the sides.

Groton plans to hold more concerts in the Campbell Performing Arts Center

Teaching the Teachers

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Christopher Temerson

Front: Yolanda Dong ’17, Caroline Johnston ’17, Candilla Park ’18, Olivia Potter ’18, and Ethan Woo ’16 Back: Chris Ye ’17, Eddie Uong ’17, Philippe Heitzmann ’15, Luka Bakic ’15, Victor Liu ’17, and Sophie DiCara ’16

and sought a concert-worthy piano for the space. “Pianos from the era of the 1920s30s are known to be superb, so a vintage piano made sense,” said Mary Ann Lanier, director of instrumental music and head of the Art Department. While the “new” piano is vintage, it is not the School’s oldest.

Four Groton pianos are older, including two that are more than a century old.

— Philippe Heitzmann ’15

Evan Hass ’15

n November, the Debating Society took first place in a tournament at Exeter against seven other schools. Exeter placed second and Roxbury Latin third.

It has been a “pretty good year so far” for the team, said the understated coach, Andy Reyes ’80.

While no advanced pair from any school won all three rounds, Groton’s Fifth Form pair of Sophie DiCara ’16 and Ethan Woo ’16 and Sixth Form pair of Luka Bakic ’15 and Philippe Heitzmann ’15 won two of their three rounds.

Our two novice four-person teams also performed spectacularly. Yolanda Dong ’17, Caroline Johnston ’17, Cherian Yit ’17, and Victor Liu ’17 won a combined six out of six rounds, coming in first overall. Chris Ye ’17, Eddie Uong ’17, Candilla Park ’18, and Olivia Potter ’18 won five out of six rounds, placing third overall. Out of 14 novice pairs arguing for the negative side, Candilla and Olivia and Yolanda and Caroline took first and second place respectively. Among the novice affirmative pairs, Cherian and Victor placed second. On an individual level, Candilla placed first out of 56 novice speakers.

Groton’s debate team practices long hours and receives guidance before tournaments from Michael Gnozzio ’03, a former Debating Society president.

— Sowon Lee ‘15

Rare Piano for the CPAC

roton School’s modern language teachers held four workshops at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages convention in San Antonio, Texas, in late November.

Spanish teacher John Conner spoke on “The Ideal Lesson Plan,” sharing practical ideas and illustrating several with video clips from his Groton classroom.

Modern Languages Department Head and French teacher Rebecca Stanton taught a workshop called “Bringing a Multicultural Dimension to Each and Every French Class!” Her audience learned how to incorporate

cultural content, from literature to video clips to social media, into lesson plans.

Spanish teachers Fanny Vera de Viacava and Luis Viacava demonstrated the Peruvian folkloric dance known as la marinera, explaining how the dance can translate into a cultural lesson plan. Fanny is a national marinera champion in Peru.

Two other Groton teachers, Franck Koffi and Stephen Fernandez, attended the conference, contributing to Groton’s significant presence.

Above, teachers John Conner and Fanny Vera de Viacava

www.groton.org

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Robert Stallman ’64

personae

A Magical Flute © Lisa Kohler

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“B

obby should probably try something else.”

Those were the words of Robert Stallman’s grade-school music teacher shortly after he took up the flute in fourth grade.

It turns out that the instrument—not the musician—was unable to produce a decent sound. Only a few notes on his rented flute worked, and Robert got a D in the class.

“I was in the public school system,” Robert says. “I had a defective instrument, but no one knew it.”

If not for the kindness of a classmate named Wendy, the world might not be enjoying Robert’s virtuosic talent today. He has played at many of the world’s most renowned musical venues, wowing audiences as a soloist in recitals or with orchestras and chamber ensembles.

But after that D, his future in flute looked bleak. Robert confided in Wendy as they were walking home from school. “Come over and try my flute,” she suggested.

Her offer itself was a revelation. “It was an astounding moment,” he recalls. “She was saying it could be the instrument. I’d never thought of that. Nor had anyone else.”

Young Bobby picked up Wendy’s flute and produced notes he hadn’t heard before. He then convinced his parents to buy him a flute like Wendy’s and to arrange for lessons with Wendy’s private flute teacher.

When signing up for his fourth-grade instrument, Bobby had not chosen the flute

© Lisa Kohler

in the far right section of the orchestra close to the stage, where he could see conductor Charles Munch’s expressive face. “Being so close to the orchestra, I learned a lot about music, and Munch’s passion and feverish intensity inspired me to play all out,” he says.

He also traveled to Boston for lessons, but received his most intense training during vacations. “In some ways, I lost a lot of ground musically,” he says. “It didn’t matter; I got a Groton education instead. It was a very good tradeoff.”

Today, Robert performs widely, and played to a packed Gammons Concert Hall at Groton in November. On a typical day, he practices a half hour in the morning and two to three hours in the afternoon.

The allure of the instrument remains, just as it did when he was a child. “It’s the closest

personae

randomly. “I grew up listening to classical music,” he says. “The thing that got me was the sound of the flute.” One recording—the Beethoven Serenade for Flute, Violin, and Viola—particularly inspired him.

Robert played flute throughout his childhood but turned a corner during sixth grade, the year his father won a Fulbright grant and took the family to Strasbourg, France.

There, he met Jean-Pierre Rampal at one of the renowned flutist’s recitals. “At intermission, I went backstage to get his autograph,” he says.

“I was so nervous, I couldn’t find a word of French. In a thickly accented English, the great Rampal asked, ‘You vant my autograph?’ And I said, ‘Please, sir.’”

Later, when Robert arrived at Groton in 1958, French teacher Russell Young would play music with his advisee in his study in

nothing between you and the airstream. There are no reeds, » “There’sthere’s no mouthpiece, and I like that. It’s like singing without singing.”

Hundred House, where Mr. Young kept and played the School’s Shudi and Broadwood harpsichord. “I could practice in his study and in the so-called telephone room across the hall,” says Robert. During the five years that Robert was at Groton, Mr. Young, who was in charge of the Gund Concert Series at Groton, invited Rampal to play twice, and the young flutist turned his pages. Robert would go on to study with Rampal in Paris, while on his own Fulbright scholarship, and during five summers in Nice at the Summer Academy. (He would also perform with him at Boston’s Symphony Hall, at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and on French national television.)

In those days, Groton had no orchestra, but Robert played chamber music in Mary Crocker’s parlor, coached by a cellist who came up from Boston. He also played in Chapel, sang in the choir, and led the Glee Club.

On Fridays, Robert and others would travel from Groton to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He remembers just where he sat:

instrument to the human voice,” he says.

“It’s a primal instrument. There’s nothing between you and the airstream. There are no reeds, there’s no mouthpiece, and I like that.

It’s like singing without singing.”

As for Wendy, Robert unfortunately never got the chance to thank her. She died of leukemia when she was barely 30. “As a kid, you don’t always think of thanking people,” he admits. He did think of it as an adult, and about 25 years ago, he had the opportunity to speak with Wendy’s sister after one of his concerts and thank her for Wendy’s sensitivity and wisdom.

The kindness she showed when she lent Robert her flute plays on. “Without her,” he muses, “I probably wouldn’t be in music.”

—Gail Friedman

www.groton.org

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Catherine Crowley, faculty

personae

Thoroughly Buoyant

by Jack Heise

M

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Catherine Crowley, in the stroke seat (first person facing forward)

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any Groton students struggle to wake up and get dressed for Chapel at 8 a.m. By that time of morning, physics teacher Catherine Crowley already has spent two hours rowing on the Charles River and is racing west on Route 2 to make her first class.

Catherine’s rowing career began at the New York Rowing Association during her freshman year at the Horace Mann School. As a senior, she and a friend qualified for the Under-23 World Championships in the women’s pair. Their coach gave them the keys to the boathouse so they could train independently twice a day on the Harlem River.

In 2011, Catherine trained at a selection camp for singles and doubles for the 2011 Under-23 World Championships.

She followed her passion at MIT, where she captained a team that had never won a Division I race before; her first year, varsity crew members included seven freshmen. But these freshmen stuck together, rowing and training as a unit for four years and beating rival crews from Boston College, Boston University, Columbia, and Bucknell along the way to a grand final berth at Eastern Sprints her senior year and a second-place finish in the Patriot League championships. That boat, Catherine says, was “magic” and cemented her dedication to the sport.

Catherine began at Groton in 2012 as an intern and was asked to stay on. After spending her first year living on campus, she moved back to Boston in 2013 to train twice a day with a high-performance group for womens rowers. This fall, she competed in the single at the Head of the Charles. On the

Tom Kates

is about wonder and passion and stretching yourself to » “Physicsunderstand something that you are not yet capable of comprehending.”

Physics teacher Crowley with Andrew Popp ’14

water, she feels most “connected to my soul.”

In the classroom, Catherine helps students find connections between what they observe in daily life and the laws of nature in her Introductory Physics class and team-taught section of Energy and the Environment. She has emerged as a teacher who connects naturally with students. “I try to create an environment that encourages each of my students to take ownership of the material in his or her own way,” she says. “I believe in play and that taking joy in learning and in the process of problem-solving is essential to becoming a great thinker.”

Talk of joy and play do not indicate an undemanding teacher. “I also believe in rigor,” she says, “and in the immense possibilities that lie within each of my students.” Catherine’s

affable nature and obvious excitement about the classroom material are magnetic; students often seek her level-headed advice and are buoyed by her optimistic outlook.

For Catherine, rowing and physics overlap. “I used to lead these canoeing trips in Northern Ontario,” she says, “and have always thought of whitewater as a metaphor for physics.” Learning to steer a canoe through whitewater, she says, involves looking for patterns to help understand something that’s bigger than you, that you can’t control or fight. In a huge and beautiful universe with everchanging application of the rules of physics, Catherine appreciates that mathematical models provide better understanding of the world. Physics, Catherine says, allows us to “accept our smallness but still feel connected

to the universe and everything around us.

“For me, physics is about wonder and passion and stretching yourself to understand something that you are not yet capable of comprehending. It is about collaboration and learning from those around you who might bring something new to the table. It is about appreciating the unknown while still searching for understanding.”

Catherine majored in physics at MIT and says she “fell in love” with the subject during her first high school class. “I love the beauty and mystery of it and the feeling I got when something I never understood finally came together and made sense,” she explains. “I hope I can share that love with my students.”

Jack Heise, a Groton intern, teaches Spanish.

www.groton.org

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EBOLA DETECTIVE FOR CAITLIN REED ’91, THE QUESTION WAS NOT WHETHER SHE SHOULD GO TO WEST AFRICA, BUT WHEN.

Caitlin Reed ’91, an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist, is medical director of the in-patient tuberculosis unit at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, which is known for curing especially challenging TB cases. Because she has the skills to help contain an epidemic, she felt an intense desire — a mission — to help with the

Ebola outbreak that had killed nearly 7,000 people in West Africa as of mid-December.

She spent October 13 through November 10, 2014 in Liberia, with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) working on the Ebola epidemic. After her return, she answered questions for the Groton School Quarterly.

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EBOLA VIRUS The disease “destroys families, leaves orphans behind, and most affects those who help others out of love and professional responsibility…”

Q

What sparked your decision to go to the front lines of the Ebola outbreak? Was the decision sudden, or one you had been pondering?

I’m an infectious disease doctor and public health epidemiologist with a strong interest in health equity, in the U.S. and globally. This Ebola outbreak is the biggest and most serious infectious disease catastrophe of my lifetime and is devastating one of the poorest regions in Africa, in countries with the fewest resources and the least capacity to contain this terrible disease. Ebola not only kills individual patients, it destroys families, leaves orphans behind, and most affects those who help others out of love and professional responsibility: family caregivers and health care workers.

I’ve spent the last two decades developing skills

“IF THOSE OF US WHO HAVE THE TRAINING AND ABILITY TO RESPOND DO NOT, THEN WHO WILL?”

that are needed to help contain this epidemic. If those of us who have the training and ability to respond do not, then who will? I had been thinking about volunteering since the summer, but it took some time to find the right opportunity and to arrange coverage for my patient care obligations at home.

volunteer with the World Health Organization (WHO) the month before I did.

Q

Q

No. My husband and I had a serious conversation about the level of personal risk involved, but he did not try to talk me out of it. He deeply understands me and why this work is important to me. My parents were also supportive. My work colleagues in infectious diseases understood why I wanted to volunteer— we’re all in this field for a reason—and one colleague went to Sierra Leone to

I was definitely worried about getting infected with Ebola. It requires contact with just a few viral particles to infect, and patients who are very sick, dying, or have recently died have billions of viral particles in their bodily fluids. That is why these patients are biohazards, and doctors, nurses, and close family caregivers are at the most risk of infection. It doesn’t

Did people try to talk you out of it?

What most concerned you about your trip? Was getting sick your greatest fear?

WHERE IS IT?

STAYING SAFE

The vast majority of Ebola cases have been in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, where Caitlin volunteered.

Removing the Personal Protective Equipment “can take 15 to 20 minutes and involves washing your gloved hands in a strong chlorine solution a dozen times and following an exact sequence.”

World Health Organization

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BOOT CAMP Workers’ boots are carefully disinfected.

Caitlin describes the protective equipment as “a personal sauna” and said that boots fill with enough sweat to pour out.

take much more than a small mistake—scratching your nose, rubbing your eye, things we do unconsciously all the time—to be infected, and learning to wear the PPE (Personal Protective Equipment—the protective suit, hood, goggles, boots, double gloves, and other gear) correctly is not easy.

Taking it off can take 15 to 20 minutes and involves washing your gloved hands in a strong chlorine solution a dozen times and following an exact sequence. However, when PPE is worn correctly, taking care of Ebola patients is quite safe.

I was also worried about not being able to function in the extremely physically demanding conditions required to safely take care 16

of patients with Ebola.

Wearing a thick plastic suit that covers every body surface when it’s humid and over 100 degrees is very challenging: the goggles fog up, and it’s difficult to talk. It’s a personal sauna, and [health workers] can pour the sweat out of their boots after every trip into the high risk zone. Liberia was entering the dry season when I went, and it was getting hotter; it’s hot for the patients who are too weak to leave the tents, and it’s extremely hot for staff wearing PPE, which reduces the amount of time we can spend taking care of patients.

Q

How did you end up going with Médecins

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Sans Frontières — (Doctors Without Borders)? Had you worked with the organization before?

I went with MSF because I have a friend from my class in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Epidemic Intelligence Service [a two-year fellowship and training program for field epidemiologists] who is one of MSF’s Ebola experts, and because MSF is the only organization with extensive experience with Ebola—and in particular with keeping their staff safe. Ebola is more similar to a hazmat situation than a regular infectious disease and requires special protocols; I wanted to do this with the organization

that has a strong track record. Considering the hundreds of national and international MSF staff with intense exposure to an infectious pathogen from patients who are very sick and dying, in a difficult field hospital environment, there have been few cases among MSF volunteers. A few are to be expected, and it would be surprising if there were none.

I have also always wanted to work with MSF; their ideals of equity, neutrality, and transparency appeal to me. They usually require a much longer time commitment of nine to 12 months, which is why I have not volunteered with MSF before. MSF is a truly extraordinary organization,

“WHERE ARE THE CASES COMING FROM? ARE THERE LINKS AMONG THEM?” Médecins Sans Frontières

and it includes much more than doctors and nurses—in Monrovia, MSF has all the people required to build and operate a 250-bed field hospital on a vacant lot, and to do community health promotion across the city. It has engineers, construction supervisors, logisticians, warehouse and supply chain managers, electricians, water and sanitation specialists, health educators, epidemiologists, IT specialists, map makers, an anthropologist—you name it. It’s a huge team made up of incredibly dedicated people from all over the world.

Q

How and where were you trained?

I trained at the MSF Brussels training site in Belgium for two days and spent a day in briefings before flying to Liberia.

They have an intensive training course in a large

mock Ebola treatment unit, and the course involves hours of practice in PPE, including simulated patient care activities, learning how to decontaminate an ambulance, and so on.

Liberian health care workers have been dying in huge numbers and lack the basic gear to protect themselves.

They are the people who are truly at risk, and truly heroic.

Q

Q

I don’t know, but when I applied to Groton for Second Form my mom was asked to write about my most outstanding characteristic, and she wrote about courage. I’d say that I am brave but not foolish. I did go skydiving for a milestone birthday, but I’m not constantly seeking thrills. The decision I made to volunteer for the Ebola response was one I did not make lightly—I have a husband and a 9-year-old daughter I wanted to come home to.

My feeling is that there is real risk, but it can be mitigated. Meanwhile,

Although I did some night shifts in the Ebola treatment unit, and occasionally relieved an exhausted colleague in the late afternoon, my main role was as an epidemiologist in support of the MSF Ebola response.

An epidemiologist is a disease detective. Controlling Ebola requires an intensive public health approach: where are the cases coming from? Are there links among them?

Is there a chain of transmission we could disrupt by monitoring the family

Where does your courage come from?

What kind of work were you doing in Liberia?

and other contacts of each patient, and isolating at the first sign of symptoms to prevent further infections? I worked on projects such as mapping where our patients came from to determine where the hot spots of disease transmission were—so we could bring in health promotion and disease control activities, conduct contact tracing to identify new cases quickly, and try to improve ambulance services, distribute hygiene kits containing chlorine for home disinfection, improve public knowledge about how to prevent Ebola transmission, encourage safer burials, and make other interventions.

While I was in our Ebola treatment unit, the number of admissions stabilized and then decreased: why was that? Was the epidemic slowing down, or were people avoiding

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WHO’S INSIDE? Workers must be so thoroughly covered that their names are written on head coverings to help identify them.

“SHE TOOK A SIP, SWALLOWED, PAUSED, THEN LOOKED AT ME. THE ONLY PART OF MY FACE SHE COULD SEE WAS MY EYES.”

coming to the treatment unit because they saw that the majority of patients admitted do not survive?

This required collaboration with our partners at the CDC [Centers for Disease Control], WHO [World Health Organization], and the Liberian Ministry of Health to try to figure out what was going on with the epidemic citywide and across Liberia. We have to understand the epidemic to fight it. As a field epidemiologist, it was my job to produce data for action.

Q

Please describe an experience or two that made a particular impact on you.

TREATMENT UNIT MSF’s Liberia unit “is like a small city, with more than 700 local staff.”

18

The first night shift that I volunteered for in the MSF Ebola treatment unit was a surreal experience.

The treatment unit is a

huge field hospital built on a vacant lot. It’s like a small city, with more than 700 local staff—a hospital in tents, but also one with serious infection control and safety concerns. There are chlorine sprayers everywhere, an entire laundry department running 24 hours a day to wash all the scrubs in bleach and scrub down boots with bleach solution, and staff whose only job is to help the nurses and doctors dress in their PPE and coach them about how to remove their gear safely.

Entering the high-risk zone in my PPE for the first time when it counted—not a training anymore but the real thing—made me hyperalert. We were making rounds at 3 a.m. when a huge thunderstorm erupted, and it was pouring so hard that

SUCCESS STORY Six-year-old Patrick and his father, both Ebola survivors, were treated at the MSF facility in Liberia where Caitlin worked. Before they were admitted, Patrick’s mother died, presumably of Ebola.

Morgana Wingard

there was a flood between the tents. We could hardly hear each other talking because of the rain and the protective hood and mask.

I crouched by the bedside of a woman who was so ill and weak that she could not sit up. I helped her up, checked her pulse, found her very dehydrated, and began to pour oral rehydration solution into her mouth. She took a sip, swallowed, paused, then looked at me. The only part of my face she could see was my eyes. I gave her another sip, then another.

When she couldn’t drink anymore, I helped her lie down again and squeezed her hand. There was little else I could do for her, but if we could continue to help her take fluids around the clock, there was a chance she might survive.

Another patient I saw that night had already died.

I spent a long time with a colleague checking carefully, but she had no pulse, and her chest did not rise and fall. We covered her with a sheet, where she would remain until we could have her body moved to the morgue. We also saw two girls on rounds, 3 and 6 years old, whose mother and father had both died; they were very ill and being cared for by other patients who were recovering.

Although there are many tragic losses, we also had some victories. It was heartening to see many patients weak but definitely recovering, and to see the occasional patient well enough to be discharged home.

Q

When you returned home, did you have to quarantine?

I came home in midNovember. I had a 10-day home quarantine followed by 11 days of temperature monitoring alone after my return.

I notified colleagues at UCLA hospital that I was volunteering in Liberia for the Ebola response, just in case I did become ill after my return, so I could be immediately isolated and not expose others. Fortunately all was well, and we had an end-of-quarantine party and fundraiser for MSF/Doctors Without Borders.

physiology, and Mr. [William] Hrasky, whose physics class made me feel that I was a master of a universe.

Warren Myers taught me an evening tutorial on The Aeneid when I was in Sixth Form that remains the educational highlight of my life—Micheline Myers would often make us dinner and then we would sit in the Myers’ study working through a passage, punctuated by Mr. Myers

leaping up to grab a book from his shelf and read me lines of Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton.

Groton also taught me that things worth knowing and doing don’t come easily—ad astra per aspera, as Mr. Myers would say—and helped mold my natural stubbornness into perseverance. I remember once being kicked out of geometry by Mr. [Robert] Gula for not doing my homework, which I deserved. I appreciate Groton’s high expectations. And Groton opened many doors for me.

The very generous financial aid my family received made my Groton education possible. I will always be grateful.

Q

How did Groton influence your career path and life’s work, if at all?

Groton nurtured my interest in science—I had consistently wonderful teachers and mentors, including Mr. [Stephen] Belsky, whose biology class sparked my interest in evolution and human

Caitlin at the Survivors’ Wall

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Telling Stories On November 10, 2014, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen delivered Groton’s Ron Ridenhour Memorial Lecture, in honor of the journalist whose informationgathering while fighting in Vietnam and persistent appeals to Congress resulted in an investigation of the My Lai Massacre. The Ridenhour lecture was created in 2000

by David and Jean Halberstam p’98 and the Fertel Foundation to broaden students’ scope of knowledge.

stories formed in my mind. We all have something that makes us tick. This has been mine. I watched myself watching others, waiting for the phrase that stuck. This was a condition I could not escape, my nature, if you like.

Your own story is perhaps the most difficult to tell.

Mine, like that of your headmaster, Temba Maqubela, began in South Africa in the 1950s, on opposite sides of the harsh racist lines drawn by apartheid. My parents were South Africans, born in Johannesburg, the then nascent City of Gold.

Their families were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, fleeing Russian pogroms. (Those Jews that stayed behind in Europe would perish in the Holocaust, including more than 2,400 of them on a single day, October 2, 1941, in my grandmother’s village of Zagaré). They came to South Africa and made good. In the 20th century, for a Jew, South Africa was not a bad place to be. For blacks, of course, it was a different story, of daily humiliation.

Africa took a grip on my childhood imagination.

Perhaps it was the light after the dull skies of England, the brilliance of the air on the high plateau of the Transvaal, the dark-leaved avocado trees, the glistening orange groves, the sun-plunging abruptness of the dusks. Flowers burst 20

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Christopher Temerson

I

ALWAYS wanted to tell stories. Wherever I was,

into exuberant bloom, bats swooped as night fell, and the horizon was a distant line across the dry veld. I went to live there when I was four months old, crossing the seas from London in my mother’s arms. When she had me, she wanted to go home, to the South Africa that would always take her in.

In my infancy, I lived in Johannesburg, then went back to live in England, with a return every December to the homeland. We would arrive in the midst of the African summer: the palms draped in bougainvillea, the smoke from

Valdas Balciunas

Above: A plaque in the main square in Zagaré, Lithuania, where Roger Cohen’s grandmother lived, commemorates the more than 2,200 Jews killed by Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators on October 2, 1941.

Right: Cohen’s parents’ wedding in Johannesburg, June 29, 1950

family braais wafting over the bamboo and swimming pools, as red meat sizzled. Everything seemed untroubled, unless you caught a glimpse of ragged black men in ill-fitting shoes being herded into police vans. Then a cousin might say, “I suppose they don’t have their passes. Enjoy the swimming pools—next year they’ll be red with blood.”

What, the child wondered, did he mean? What, the small boy asked himself, was this violence brewing? What was out there at the horizon? That is how I absorbed racism, like a twinge, the first hint of a microbe in the blood.

Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Durban, was never quite absent from the sunlit South African sojourns. The beach at Muizenberg, near Cape Town, was vast and full of white people. The surf leaped. White bathers frolicked. Blacks waded into the filthy harbor at Kalk Bay. They slept in concrete-floored outhouses whose single small windows resembled baleful eyes.

Our return to South Africa in 1955, the year I was born, to my parents’ birthplace coincided with my father’s appointment as dean of Douglas Smit House, the residence at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, reserved for black students. A small number of blacks could still attend the university at the time, even if they were not allowed to play rugby, that inner sanctum of the white Afrikaner. A decade earlier, my father had qualified as a doctor at

Wits. That was before the victory of the National Party and the imposition of apartheid in 1948. We lived at the residence. My parents employed a black nanny.

One of the particularities of apartheid was that blacks were kept at a distance, except in the most intimate of settings, the home. The staff changed the nappies. The houseboys brought the braziers to the right glow for the braai. Blacks cooked and set the table and cleared away; they washed and darned and dusted and beat the rugs and made the beds; and they coddled and cared for white children.

Every white household, it seemed, had its Trusted Black Mammy. After the Shabbat meal on Friday night, guests might leave some small token of appreciation on the kitchen counter (“Shame, I don’t have much change”) or slip a few rand into a callused black hand. The black women—Betty or Johanna or Doris—who bathed me as an infant touched my skin. Their world was untouchable.

We would go down to the Cape, to Duxbury, the house of my maternal grandfather, Laurie Adler. It looked out over Main Road and the railway line near Kalk Bay station to the ocean and the Cape of Good Hope. There was the scent of salt and pine and, in certain winds, a pungent waft from the fish-processing plant in Fish Hoek. I would dangle a little net in rock pools and find myself hypnotized by the silky water and the quivering life in it.

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At night the lights of Simon’s Town glittered, a lovely necklace strung along a promontory. Nobody could tire of that view. A black nanny took me across the road as a small child to the parapet above the rail track beside the sea where the kelp was never still in the tides. She perched me there over a seemingly fathomless precipice. I got the message and can still feel it, although the chasm of my imagination was in reality a drop of no more than a couple of meters.

I see now what she was saying to me as she perched me there so perilously. It is but a small distance from one state to the other, from this pampered world to the abyss—to the distant black townships of dust and dirt and drudgery where water was drawn from a communal spigot, homes consisted of a single room, clothes were patched together from scraps of passed-down fabric, and the alleys were full of the stale stench of urine. I could smell the hardship in the sweat of the houseboys. I saw it in the yellowish tint of their eyes. I felt the separation in the utensils and cups set apart for use by the staff alone. The blacks were always walking as our cars purred past. There were no sidewalks for them to walk on.

My parents left in 1958 because they could not abide the abuse and the waste of apartheid. When I became politically conscious, in my teens, I refused to go back. Among my family, there were those who resisted, an aunt in particular who joined the Black Sash anti-apartheid movement. She was always skirting arrest.

But most of my relatives went along, as did most of the Jews. I heard more than one remark that when you are busy persecuting tens of millions of blacks, you don’t have much time left over for tens of thousands of Jews. The blacks were a buffer against what had happened in Europe. For South African Jews, aware of the corpse-filled ditches and gas chambers of the Europe they had fled, the knowledge of the 69 blacks cut down at Sharpeville in 1960 or the sight of blacks without passes being bundled into the back of police vans was discomfiting. But this was not genocide, after all.

With conspicuous exceptions (proportionately more among Jews than any other white South Africans—the lawyers who defended Nelson Mandela were overwhelmingly Jews who took that risk), most Jews preferred to look away.

For that failure, over decades, it seems that this is a fitting moment and a fitting setting, in a place of tolerance and openness to every creed, an inclusive place dedicated to the proposition of our common and inalienable humanity, to apologize on behalf of my family and other white South Africans for the hell of apartheid that was imposed on the family of your headmaster, his wife, and millions of others like them. We had no right to expect the miracle of Mandela and De Klerk. Yet miracles do happen. Thank you, Mr. Maqubela. ✡

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I

WISH I could say the South African experience was

exceptional. Whether to opt for conscience or convenience is a recurrent question in life. For me, although I did not realize it fully at the time, that question was posed very early. The easy thing and the right are seldom the same. In a time of conflict, the stakes are raised because choosing one or the other can be a matter of life and death. I have witnessed such choices in every conflict I have covered, from Beirut to Bosnia, from Tehran to Santiago. To profit from another’s misfortune or seek to alleviate it; to align with evil or assail it; to save yourself or save another: It does come down to that.

Few resist. In a time of danger, the great mass is enthusiastic, compliant, calculating, or cowed. The righteous few move to an inner compass. Their anonymous acts, however hopeless, constitute the most powerful rebuke to perpetrator and bystander. Resistance is never pointless, even if short-lived or doomed. As Hannah Arendt wrote, “Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some will not. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a fit place for human habitation.”

Ron Ridenhour, whose memory we honor today, did not comply. He did not do what was easy; he did what was right.

A helicopter gunner in Vietnam, he gathered information that led to the official probe into the 1968 My Lai Massacre.

In doing so, he took on entrenched interests within the U.S. military, bureaucratic resistance, and personal hostility from culpable fellow GIs and from his superiors. He broke ranks, at considerable personal risk, in the name of truth, decency, and American values.

Would you have done the same? It is worth pausing a moment to pose that question. Of course, you may think.

But massacres tend to take place in giddy seasons when passions boil up, judgment is jettisoned, and the herd instinct of the human race rises. Suddenly the other is the enemy; suddenly all is permitted; suddenly societal restraints and taboos have lifted; suddenly the blood rises. To stand apart, in conscience, at moments like this, is the measure of us all.

When I was the correspondent of The New York Times in Germany, I attended a ceremony at a military base renamed for a soldier in Hitler’s army who disobeyed orders. Anton Schmid was an army sergeant whose conscience was moved by the suffering of Jews in the Vilnius ghetto, not far from where my family hailed from. Thousands were being shot by the Germans, helped by Lithuanian collaborators, every day.

In a letter to his wife, Stefi, Schmid described his horror at the sight of this mass murder and of “children being beaten on the way.” He wrote: “You know how it is with my soft heart. I could not think and had to help them.”

Schmid, forging papers for the Jewish underground, hiding children, managed to save more than 250 Jews before

Daniel Levy

The title of Cohen’s memoir, The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family, refers to this street in Krugersdorp, South Africa, where his mother lived.

he was arrested in 1942 and summarily executed. In his last letter to his wife, he wrote, “I merely behaved as a human being.”

But the human beings had all vanished in the Nazi death trance. “Merely” had become the wrong adverb.

“Exceptionally” would have been closer. Schmid’s resistance was almost unknown. It can be singular just to be human.

It can be very lonely. It can cost your human life. ✡

I

✡

✡

SAID I always wanted to tell stories. I’ve

told my own now in a book called The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family. After a life of movement, being still and looking inward seemed like the biggest risk of all. Most of the time, my gaze has been on the upheavals and wars of the world.

Luck—you need some—enabled me to tell stories and live by that. I became a journalist, a bearer of witness. Terrible things happen. They must be recorded. Without memory, impunity reigns. A free press is an essential guarantor of a free society, and a requirement of any just one.

I started out filing by telex from Beirut’s Commodore

Hotel, once well described as a functioning telex machine surrounded by 500 broken toilets. I was a correspondent in Brazil in the 1980s. We’d read the local papers in the morning, find something worth filing, and adjourn to a boozy lunch at which the toast was: “Yesterday’s news, today’s story!”

Now the Internet demands updates of correspondents every couple of hours, filing is instantaneous, and tomorrow’s news is today’s story. Change hurtles. Young people read online. Device distraction is a widespread condition.

To see and feel the moment in order to evoke a situation requires being immersed in it. The newspaper is dying—slowly, but still it is dying. I imagine before too long, some chip embedded in your forearm will wire words formulating in your brain directly to the electronic page.

But however it is delivered, information based upon on-the-ground reporting is essential, and gathering it is not free. To be informed is particularly important in this time of flux. I have never felt as uneasy about the state of the world as now.

Dangers multiply and the world’s ordering power since 1945, the United States, is in a phase of retreat, while the world’s rising powers, in particular China, do not want to assume global responsibilities. History

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teaches us that phases of major power transition rarely occur without major conflict. The great question of our day, as Henry Kissinger put it, is whether “perhaps for the time in history, a rising state”… can be “incorporated into the international system”… to strengthen “peace and progress.”

I recently gave voice to my unease in a column called “The Great Unraveling.” It went viral in a way I have seldom known.…

I would make just a few points about the world today: America is war-scarred. In the annual Pew Survey of America’s place in the world, 52 percent of respondents said the United States “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” Just 38 percent disagree with the statement.

This is the most lopsided balance in favor of the U.S. “minding its own business” in the almost 50-year history of the measure.

The political gridlock in Washington has led to severe political dysfunction. The checks and balances of the Founding Fathers have morphed into an unbalanced checkmate. Politics has fallen hostage to money, and statesmanship has been eroded by minute-to-minute tactical calculation that fails to advance the national interest.

Our president has been a disappointment in the international arena. President Obama should not have said early in the Syrian conflict that Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, would go, without having any serious plan to achieve that objective. He should not have set a red line on the use of chemical weapons in Syria and then, at the last minute, walked away from it. He should not have said he has no strategy to tackle the killers who call themselves Islamic State, or suggested that the best an American leader can hope to do these days is hit singles or doubles. America’s word and American power remain critical to the maintenance of peace and security. I believe there is a link between perceived weakness in the White House and Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea, his stirring-up of a little war in Eastern Ukraine, the sudden rise and spread of Islamic State, and recent Chinese actions in the South China and East China sea that have provoked its neighbors.

The hope of the Islamic Spring, outside Tunisia, has been dashed or frustrated. For a brief moment, the yearning of young Arabs for more open and representative societies seemed ascendant. It seemed the Arab world might escape the paralyzing confrontation of dictatorship and the Islamists. It was not to be. A form of citizenship that moves beyond ethnic or religious identity remains elusive, and the place in society of political Islam contested. To state the obvious, there is nothing in the Arab genome that precludes this part of the world from modernity and openness. But political forces conspire against the hopes of Arab youth.

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cause, have joined the fanatics of Islamic State in significant numbers, a troubling development 13 years after the 9/11 attack on the United States.

The persistence of Israeli-Palestinian conflict stirs wider tensions. I am a Zionist, a deep believer in the need for a state called Israel that Jews can call their home after millennia of dispersal and persecution. But a state based on the statelessness of another people driven into exile is not the one I want. A Palestinian state, living side-by-side in peace and security with Israel, must be created. To me the most precious line in Jewish ethics and teaching is that of Rabbi Hillel after the destruction of the Temple: “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man.” Or that oftrepeated phrase in the Mosaic book … Jews are to treat well the stranger for “you were a stranger in a strange land.”

Finally, in case the optimist that I am has inadvertently overwhelmed you with pessimism, an important distinction must be made. Our world, increasingly, is one of surface conflict and hidden connection. Of course, in the event of global war, the former will crush the latter. Short of that, it is important to see events on two levels—the confrontations between states and the cooperation between citizens empowered by technology and often, in this age of massive migrant flows, tied by family across continents. A lot of the hope of the world lies in this below-the-surface connectedness. It fuels innovation. It has helped pull hundreds of millions from poverty over the past two decades; it has also extended average life spans and kept the world, until now, from the catastrophes that marked the 20th century. ✡

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Y OWN family is far-flung. I’m a newly minted

American. When I became a citizen in 2005, I had to take an English test. This consisted of a dictation. The first sentence was: I want to be a good American.

The second was: I plan to work very hard every day.

So, I thought, this country gets you early to inculcate its core values. No day of rest, no Shabbat, no nothing. Work hard, America says, and you will make your way. For countless millions that has been the case, however tested the American dream is today.

A strange duality is at work in the American psyche.

Americans want the troops to come home. They want the wars over. But they dislike retreat. Americans, as citizens of a nation that represents an idea, are still optimistic by nature.

They are hardwired to the notion that their country should be a beacon to humankind, a “city upon a hill” with all eyes upon it, spreading liberty and democracy. When your aim is

Rebecca Ring

When your aim is high, you will fall short. America often has.

Roger Cohen

high, you will fall short. America often has.

The decade since 9/11 has seen many such failings, moments when our values were forgotten. Abu Ghraib, in its way, was a contemporary iteration of My Lai: young Americans in a war setting, tested by the loss of their own and by constant hostility, losing it and taking revenge through indiscriminate brutality against the people of another country. Yet aiming high is still the right thing to do.

I still believe in America and its beneficence. This is a young nation and a vigorous one, more than capable of the selfrenewal that would be the best guarantee that China’s rise, in the end, proves peaceful.

I hope for that peace, and you all, in your individual ways, can contribute to it and to a better world.

I said at the beginning of this speech that everyone has something that makes them tick. You all do, believe me. The thing is, it’s often well hidden. Your psyche builds layers of protection around your most vulnerable traits, which may be very closely linked to that precious essence. Distractions are also external: money, fame, peer pressure, parental expectation. So it may be more difficult than you think to recognize the spark that is your personal sliver of the divine. But do so.

Nothing in the end will give you greater satisfaction— not wealth, not passion, not faith, not even love—for if, as Rilke wrote, all companionship is but “the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes,” you have to solve the conundrum of your solitude. No success, however glittering, that denies yourself will make you happy in the long run.

So listen to the voice from your soul, quiet but insistent, and honor it. Find what you thrill to: if not the perfect

sentence, the beautiful cure, the brilliant formula, the lovely chord, the exquisite sauce, the unplayable fastball, the artful reconciliation. Strive not for everything money can buy but for everything money can’t buy. Don’t grumble, don’t whine, make deeds count, work hard, as I was told to do when this country took me in. Recall Czeslaw Milosz’s solemn words: “You who harmed an ordinary man/Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You may kill him—another will be born.

Deeds and words shall be recorded.”

Bobby Kennedy, in Cape Town in 1966, addressed all the people of South Africa with these words: “But the help and the leadership of South Africa or the United States cannot be accepted if we—within our own countries or in our relations with others—deny individual integrity, human dignity, and the common humanity of man. If we would lead outside our borders, if we would help those who need our assistance, if we would meet our responsibilities to mankind, we must first, all of us, demolish the borders which history has erected between men within our own nations—barriers of race and religion, social class and ignorance.”

A long road has been traveled since then but much remains to be done, in South Africa, in America, and elsewhere. You, the youth of the world, are the hope of the world. Nobody can contemplate you all and not be inspired.

Recalling Ron Ridenhour’s honor and integrity, his courage and determination, will help you set a sure path. Those paths will wind in unexpected ways. Rejoice in the unexpected discovery. Value the journey as much as the destination. Cultivate your garden, the inner as the outer. Make it bloom. Set the table for a feast. Invite the stranger in.

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, R E T S A M D A E H THE E M D N A , R E T H G I THE F HOW MUHAMMAD ALI AND JACK CROCKER CROSSED PATHS, AND WHAT IT MEANT TO ONE IMPRESSIONABLE SIXTH FORMER

BY

JEREMY J.M. HUBBALL ’65

O

N THE EVENING of May 25, 1965,

confidently accepted into college and giddy with expectations about the world that awaited me, I found myself at the improbable intersection of Muhammad Ali and Jack Crocker. Little did I appreciate the implications of the moment: Crocker in decline, his departure the abrupt end of an era, and Ali in ascendancy, heralding the cultural revolution that would reshape my world, transform our country, and even penetrate the insular circle of Groton School.

A year earlier, before changing his name to Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay had shocked the universe by defeating Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title of the world. Although Clay, the 22-year-old Olympic gold

Seven months earlier, he had knocked out the great Floyd Patterson 126 seconds into the first round. Although Liston’s raw violence and surly disposition made him unpopular, he was still the people’s choice to deliver a sound beating and humble the upstart. Clay, however, had studied his opponent, trained diligently, and was too fast and wily for Liston, who had failed to take him seriously.

By the fourth round, Clay had opened up a cut under Liston’s right eye and a red golf ball swelled beneath his left. After the sixth round, Liston stunned the crowd by refusing to leave his corner. After the fight was over, Clay pranced around the ring chanting, “I am the Greatest. I am the Greatest.”

AT GROTON, WE’D BEEN TAUGHT TO RESPECT GOOD SPORTSMANSHIP AND DECORUM IN THE “GOOD SHOW” TRADITION OF THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY. IT WAS MORE ADMIRABLE TO FIGHT A GOOD FIGHT AND LOSE GRACEFULLY THAN TO WIN WITH SWAGGER. medalist, had established a solid reputation as a loudmouth, he’d faced none of the competent fighters the undefeated and terrifying Liston had handily dispatched.

Clay’s title shot was strictly due to the promotional value generated by his striking good looks and energetic mouth.

The experts considered him no match for “America’s Number 1 menace in the blood-bath trade,” as the brutal Liston was portrayed, and the gamblers had him as a 7-1 underdog. Clay, however, was pure bravado, shouting to Liston at the weigh-in, “ I can beat you anytime, Chump!

Somebody’s gonna die at ringside tonight! You ain’t no giant! I’m going to eat you alive!”

Liston, who had served time for armed robbery and beating up a cop, wielded fists measuring 15.5 inches— the largest in boxing history, requiring special gloves.

At Groton, we’d been taught to respect good sportsmanship and decorum in the “good show” tradition of the British aristocracy. It was more admirable to fight a good fight and lose gracefully than to win with swagger.

And then along came Cassius Clay—pure mischief, inside and outside the ring. He shoved his handsome face into our consciousness in ways we couldn’t ignore, making us rethink our preconceptions about race and equality. Here was a smart, irreverent black man who dared to be defiant.

Beyond any grudging respect, he demanded our attention, but he was not welcomed by civil rights leaders, who chose to distance themselves from his flamboyant and polarizing posture. Liston and Clay were unlikely characters to intrude on Groton and Jack Crocker’s world.

Jack Crocker, born at the turn of the previous century,

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Neil Leifer Collection / Getty Images

“I AM THE GREATEST. I AM THE GREATEST.”

a member of Groton’s Form of 1918, was a great intellectual crusader for civil rights. He clearly understood equality and assimilation, and like the abolitionists before him, knew that the role of the church should be principled and strong. He felt a natural affinity for the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who accepted Crocker’s invitation to come to Groton, give a speech, and meet with students in February 1963. As a wide-eyed Fourth Former, I was inspired by King’s powerful message and embraced the civil rights movement. Schooled by the Christian imperatives that rained down upon us every day and twice on Sundays in Chapel, I summoned my full moral indignation at the prejudice and violence against African Americans that we saw on the news every day. But in hindsight it all seems so academic. From the sheltered confines of the Groton Circle, these injustices seemed isolated to the South, as if they resided in some foreign land we observed from afar.

For those who have come to know Groton postCrocker, it is almost impossible to grasp how parochial our world was back then. Under his bold leadership, the School had enrolled a black student in 1952, but there remained a great dichotomy between a Groton liberal in

By the middle of my Fifth Form year in 1964, as Clay and Liston prepared for their first match-up, America was struggling to reconcile its ideals with the unpleasant realities of racial prejudice, crushing poverty, and the inequality we could no longer ignore. And white America was struggling with its preferred version of the black man. It was becoming clear to the country that the previously considered homogenous population of “coloreds” was not so monochromatic as thought, and that African Americans were radically divided as to how to seek equality. The old guard saw every black face as a one-dimensional caricature of Sonny Liston: an unintelligent brute to be feared and caged like an animal. More progressive America, including the Groton community, responded to the intriguing picture of Martin Luther King: an articulate, restrained, and non-threatening image of nonviolence and hope. And almost everyone rejected the Muhammad Ali version: brash, demanding, militant, and disquieting. Whereas peaceful resistance and the wellmannered King had been easy for Groton to embrace, black militarism, black separatism, and the abrasive Ali were repugnant to us in 1964. There was a vast difference

WHEREAS PEACEFUL RESISTANCE AND THE WELL-MANNERED KING HAD BEEN EASY FOR GROTON TO EMBRACE, BLACK MILITARISM, BLACK SEPARATISM, AND THE ABRASIVE ALI WERE REPUGNANT TO US IN 1964.

thought and principle while highly conservative in daily function. The School believed that contact with the outside should be highly restricted so as not to corrupt or distract us from our guided journey to realize the School’s narrow definition of being a gentleman, a good Christian, and a success. And to this noble purpose, it was as if the good founders of the School had strategically deployed the Chapel, Hundred, Brooks, and the Schoolhouse like circled wagons to contain and protect us from the savage world until we were Groton-ready.

Although we’d been rattled by the Cuban missile crisis in the fall of my Fourth Form year and by JFK’s assassination in the fall of my Fifth, this sheltered, bubbled sphere still seemed secure. It was before the disillusionment that came from the Vietnam War; before cops were “pigs”; before the Arab oil embargo humbled our sense of independence. I was still confident that America was superior, that the East Coast was superior. Groton was superior. Authority, Christian beliefs, and white males ruled supreme. An inevitable smugness, condescension, and noblesse oblige permeated our narrow world view.

between King’s uplifting “I Have a Dream” speech and Ali’s mocking “Get the f--- out of my way, Chump.”

A year after Clay’s shocking victory, in the spring of my Sixth Form year, I leapt at the rare opportunity to escape the School grounds by joining Crocker, his wife, Mary, and 75 other Groton students in a protest march with Martin Luther King in Boston. Feeling absurdly out of place on the city streets in my Groton blazer and regimental tie, I tried for the first time to connect my ideals with real people and real action. Surveying the crowd that gathered to cheer and boo us, it dawned on me that there was much beyond the Groton Circle, and that I was approaching an inflection point in my life, as Groton was with Crocker’s imminent departure. Crocker and I were at opposite ends of life’s bell curve, with my world about to explode exponentially while his would now diminish.

A few days later, just weeks from graduation, it was my turn to sit at the headmaster’s table for dinner, and I remember making some offhand comment about Muhammad Ali and his rematch with Liston that was set for that night. To my great shock, the headmaster

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invited me to join him and a few select others in his study to listen to the fight on the radio. Jack Crocker, a tall, severe-looking figure with a hawk nose and patrician carriage, was entering his final weeks as headmaster after 25 years as successor to the Reverend Endicott Peabody.

Righteous from the pulpit and larger than life, he was a formidable man who believed in “muscular Christianity,” whatever that was.

Quite frankly, the man terrified me. Whereas some of my formmates had grown to appreciate the headmaster by our senior year, I remained highly self-conscious in his presence, and my goal was to steadfastly avoid him.

But now we were set to intimately share the incongruous experience of listening to two black men attempt to bash each other’s brains out on national radio. It was unclear to me where Crocker or Groton’s “official” sentiments lay on the lightning rod Ali, but I certainly assumed they were less than approving.

The rematch had originally been scheduled for Boston six months earlier. Clay had dropped his “slave name” right after his first fight with Liston, declaring himself a member of the Nation of Islam and follower

beats late and butchering the lyrics (“by the dawn’s early night”). Crocker threw back his head and chortled a loud “Ahhhh!”—his mouth wide open in one of his classic bald eagle looks of wonder and amusement. The fight itself had less drama, but not the way we’d anticipated.

Crocker leaned into the radio intensely, as if he were trying to join them in the ring. Less than a minute into the first round, the announcer suddenly grew animated describing Liston falling to the canvas, struggling to his knees, rolling over on his back, and just lying there “like a dying fish.” Few saw what became known as the “phantom punch,” a quick chopping right from Ali that came down on Liston’s head after missing an awkward left jab.

Ali himself wasn’t sure if he’d even connected, and was noticeably surprised it was a knockout blow. He hovered over Liston, refusing to go to his corner, shouting and snarling, “Get up and fight, sucker!” The picture (below) is one of the sport’s most iconic.

At this surreal moment in Jack Crocker’s study, we could only imagine the chaos at ringside from the announcer’s frenzied broadcast. Even the Reverend seemed at a loss for words. And it was early in the

TO MY GREAT SHOCK, THE HEADMASTER INVITED ME TO JOIN HIM AND A FEW SELECT OTHERS IN HIS STUDY TO LISTEN TO THE FIGHT ON THE RADIO. . . . QUITE FRANKLY, THE MAN TERRIFIED ME.

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Neil Leifer Collection / Getty Images

of Elijah Muhammad. In February, Malcolm X had been gunned down by the Nation of Islam in a power struggle.

Tensions ran high, and some feared that Malcolm’s followers would assassinate Ali in retaliation. The Nation of Islam issued open death threats to Liston and the fight’s buildup was larded with racial overtones.

By the time of the fight, every imaginable faction in America interpreted it as an epic battle between forces they supported, feared, or rejected, engendering intense national interest along a host of cultural fault lines.

Worried that the entire scene had grown too inflammatory, Massachusetts reneged on hosting the fight just five days before its date, forcing the promoters to frantically relocate it to a junior hockey rink in the tiny city of Lewiston, Maine. After 12 months of being baited by Ali, Liston’s hatred for the “pretty boy” was obvious, and we all knew that Clay’s earlier victory was a fluke. Even though the outcome was sure to be without suspense, something compelled the world to listen.

The ceremonies began with Robert Goulet, a Canadian singer, beginning the national anthem several

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EAVING GROTON that spring, full of opti-

mism and clear ideas about how I might proceed in the world, little did I anticipate the cosmic changes in mores, sexual freedom, women’s liberation, and civil rights that Ali foreshadowed. By the time I graduated from college in 1969, I was living in an entirely different country. By then, Ali’s reputation was transformed from villain to hero—an American original, praised for his principled stance against the war (“I ain’t got no quarrel with those Vietcong”), and appreciated as the greatest fighter of all time. Whereas King had taught us the power of peaceful resistance and civil disobedience, Ali taught us the power of full-throated challenge to authority and a bold intolerance of social injustice.

As society pivoted, so too did Groton eventually transform itself from old English boarding school to a more caring and nurturing place, more in tune with the world. I have to believe that Crocker, who is said to have put off needed changes to the School so his successor

moviepix / Getty Images

evening. Were we to leave, or stay and dissect the fight like old friends? As the broadcast came to an end, I found myself surprisingly elated by the outcome. To a sheltered teenager, Ali brought something electrifying—the hint of a new kind of danger, tinged with promise—and his charisma was undeniable. Still, it was hard to reconcile Ali’s youthful appeal with his offensive behavior, so out of tune with our good-taste sensibilities. At Groton, mischief, bravado, and especially disobedience were not tolerated.

Bolt upright in his wing chair, Crocker—his face animated—scanned the room’s inhabitants in expectation.

As an awkward silence hung over the study, I felt myself struggling to voice the appropriate response, cautious about expressing too much enthusiasm for what might be a controversial opinion.

Crocker leaned his head back again and almost shouted his trademark triple thunderclap laugh, a deep, staccato “HAH! – HAH! – HAH!” burst of machinegunned exclamations—a startling combination of astonishment and delight. His eyes sparkled, and he threw his head back again. “I’ll be damned!” he shouted to our astonishment. Although he verbalized no explicit approval, I like to think that Crocker, too, was pleased with the result and, beyond the ascension of one fighter and decline of the other, recognized all the promise Ali signified, albeit distastefully, of a more encompassing world view. For those last few weeks at Groton, I was finally comfortable in Crocker’s presence, pleased we seemed to share the same realization that whereas Sonny Liston was the past and Martin Luther King the present, Muhammad Ali was the future.

could take the credit, was inwardly relieved his stewardship ended before his old world era was overthrown.

However, I like to think that had he been granted another 10 years, he would have awoken to the instincts he hinted at in his study that night of the fight and ably navigated Groton through those tumultuous years.

Over the last few decades, we have grown accustomed to disruption and creative destruction. Every aspect of my life has been repeatedly turned upside-down—from fashion, to health, to religion, to science, to politics, and even to ideas about right and wrong. As I approach my 50th Reunion at Groton, I realize that my post-Groton years have been dominated by ever-increasing change.

But in 1964 and 1965, such turmoil was unthinkable— skepticism was not in vogue, nonconformity was not accepted, disruption was not tolerated. We were not yet accustomed to the unrelentless quaking of the earth beneath our feet. For me, the earliest sensation of the impending turmoil was first realized that night in Jack Crocker’s study, in the company of the retiring headmaster and the controversial fighter at the cutting edge of a new world order. www.groton.org

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Photographs by Mike Sperling

Below, the Chamber Choir. Clockwise from top right: Kriska Desir ’15 and Logan Deming ’16; Orchestra Director Tim Terranella, Edis Levent ’16, Matthew Higgins Iati ’17, Trevor Fry ’15, and Victor Liu ’17; Sophie DiCara ’16; Aaron Jin ’19; Ivana Primero ’17 and Charlie Patton ’16; Piper Higgins ’17, Lilias Kim ’18, Eleonor Wolf ’17, and Claudette Ramos ’16; Robert Gooch ’15

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LESSONS

& CAROLS 2014 THE C HAP E L filled to capacity three times and more than 500 people tuned in online for Groton’s favorite Christmas tradition. This year’s service was the first for new Choirmaster and Organist Daniel Moriarty.

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A C H A P E L TA L K

by Katerina Slavicinska ’15 September 22, 2014

Katie, Ubi,

and the Carp

I

t is September 11, 2011, and I am currently sitting on a patch of grass at approximately 42.59 degrees north, 71.58 degrees west. Sitting in a circle around me is a random selection of the people with whom I shall be spending the next four years of my life. A mysterious bearded man has told us all to go around and state two things: 1) our name, and 2) where we come from. As the bearded man begins the activity by introducing himself as William Goodenough [’12], a senior, my mind whirs frantically.

Where do I come from?

I mean, it really depends on what time I’m coming from where, I think to myself. If you asked me on May 1, 2004, where I came from, I would say that I had just come across the Atlantic Ocean from Brno, Czech Republic. If you asked me at Boston Logan just a few hours earlier where I came from, I would say that I had just come in from Atlanta, Georgia. If you asked me 40 minutes ago where I came from, I would say that I had just come out from the bathroom.

Especially at Groton, people seem to value “where they come from” as a big part of their identity, probably because it can be an easy way to distinguish yourself from the typical scholarly, spiritual, and inclusive Groton student. A fellow classmate from my expo class wrote in our first essay of the year: “Whenever I meet someone new, one of the first things I usually ask them is where they are from. The place where a person is from paints a picture of that person, and gives us a snapshot into the person’s life.”

As I sat in that circle with so many people who came from places of which I had never heard, I attempted to think of what I could say that would paint an accurate picture of me, really give my new classmates a snapshot of my life, as my expo buddy poetically put it. And I found myself struggling. What place could I put on my canvas that wouldn’t paint a slight untruth?

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I suppose I could say that I come from approximately 49.19 degrees north, 16.66 degrees east: Marie Kuderˇikové 9, a tall apartment building in Brno-Židenice, a section of the largest city in the Moravian region of the Czech Republic. It was here that I was born 17 years ago, and it was also here that I went to preschool every morning, danced at costume balls, went to theater shows and ballets, built snowmen with my friends in our neighborhood’s courtyard, lost my first tooth, and attended my first day of school as a first grader.

Despite my family moving away 10 years ago, there are certain aspects of my past in the Czech Republic that I continue to carry with me today. I think the Czech love for fairy tales, storytelling, and dressing up in costumes of fantasy characters definitely contributed to my wild

Katie (second from right) with her maternal grandparents, parents, and brother, in Atlanta

As a kid, you don’t tend to notice a lot of the negative things that are happening three feet above you in the world of the grownups.

Christmas traditions: above, young Katie faces the “devil” during a Czech St. Nicholas Day ritual. Right, baby Katie and the traditional Christmas carp, which would live in her grandfather’s bathtub until the holiday

voces

imagination. After all, I don’t think I could have not been somewhat affected by my preschool teacher dressing up as the devil on St. Nicholas Day and, in front of my entire class, personally threatening to send me to hell if I stole any more caramels from the teacher’s desk.

That brings me to another of my favorite parts of my Czech heritage: Christmas traditions. Unlike in America, where Christmas means flashing billboards, noisy commercials, and aggressive mall remixes of Christmas carols about an old white guy who unfailingly tosses a stream of endless gifts into the constantly outreaching “invisible hand” of our capitalist society that can never be satiated, in the Czech Republic, all I can remember about Christmas is glowing golden lights, heavenly Christmas carols soaring majestically above the sound of laughter, and, best of all, my favorite Czech tradition, the Christmas carp. You see, about two or three days before Christmas, supermarkets and food stands all over the Czech Republic set up huge tanks of live carp fish that one can purchase alive. After my brother and I would pick out the biggest, shiniest, most beautiful carp of all, our family would lug the fish, still alive, to our grandparents’ apartment. Our grandpa would fill up his bathtub to create a makeshift tank for the fish, where it would live for the next couple of days leading up to December 24.

(This was the only bathtub in the apartment, so I’m not really sure where my grandpa bathed during this time.)

My brother and I, meanwhile, would sit by the tub and

watch the fish every day, coming up with a name for our adorable new pet and trying to grab its slippery skin with our stubby fingers. On Christmas Eve, my grandpa would come into the bathroom and, with great precision, snatch our beloved pet out of the tub, carry it into the kitchen onto the cutting board, and violently smash the fish’s head with a meat pounder. Half an hour later, our dinner table was adorned with six plates, each with its own slice of freshly fried carp.

My Czech childhood was the best childhood I could have ever wanted; I got to grow up surrounded by a loving, creative family and be exposed to forms of art and theater unique to the rest of the world. However, as a kid, you don’t tend to notice a lot of the negative things that are happening three feet above you in the world of the grownups. After moving to America in 2004, we couldn’t return until 2008, and when I finally had the chance to Czech out my mother country four years later (get it?

Czech out?), I was shocked. In my memories, the people of the Czech Republic were creative, witty, and full of life—like me. I had never recalled all those vaguely angry faces staring emptily into the air on public transportation, or the amount of cigarette butts scattered everywhere.

As I looked out of the window on my first train ride back, I noted that the gray apartment buildings loomed out of the ground like a bunch of gravestones, and their inhabitants sometimes actually seemed like zombies rising from their graves.

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My father had explained to me back when I was 7 why we were moving to America, but I had never fully understood his reasons until this visit. While the Czech Republic did cease to be a communist state during the Velvet Revolution in 1989, remnants of communism still haunt Czech society. Czechs are, on the whole, incredibly vulgar, cynical, rude, and jealous people. My parents, feeling stifled by the constant negative atmosphere, thus decided that we would all migrate west.

I now admit with great reluctance that I have, in fact, spent the majority of my life living in the Deep South, at approximately 34.08 degrees north, 84.78 degrees west. I have lived at 51 Georgetown Drive, in a vaguely rural area called Paulding County, Georgia, for over 10 years now. Imagine a stereotypical Southern small town, minus the classic Southern hospitality and three times the amount of religious prejudice, and that basically sums up Paulding County. Our new American next-door neighbors were a particularly interesting bunch. Don’t you love people who are passionate about their jobs? Like, when you have a passionate graffiti artist who just loves whipping out spray-paint cans, his hand whizzing with the grace of a violinist holding a bow. Well, the patriarch of our neighboring family was that kind of person, except instead of being a passionate artist, he was a passionate firefighter. Unfortunately, there weren’t many fires where we live, so, with their father’s encouragement, our neighbors’ three sons frequently set things on fire, such as their toys, their backyard, and the woods behind their house. Their father would then sit in his lawn chair, beer in one hand, lawn hose in the other, calmly spraying the fire with the hose whenever it would start getting out of control or too close to our property.

Initially, our neighbors also had a bit of trouble with our names. Back in the Czech Republic, my mum’s name is Šárka, and my dad’s name is Sláva. Despite my parents insisting that they be called by their Americanized names, Sarah and Slava, during our first month, our neighbors constantly erroneously referred to my mother as Sharka and my father as Slave. The worst case of ignorance I have experienced during my impermanent stay in the South, however, was probably the time my sixth grade geography teacher introduced me to my class by announcing, “Everyone, this is Katie Slavik. She’s from Czechoslovakia, isn’t that right? Her family escaped from communism!” (That’s right. This was a geography teacher.)

Needless to say, I found myself struggling to fit into this environment from the beginning. Not only did 36

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I have a language barrier to cross, I also had a cultural barrier. But no matter. I didn’t need real friends, I could just shake it off. During my first few years in America, I spent every recess walking around the playground, talking to myself in Czech, inventing a very elaborate imaginary world that expanded every day. Gradually, I invented an entire universe that revolved around the life of an alien named Ubi that came from the planet Un. We started out as casual playmates, but soon a huge, intergalactic war broke out between the planet Red X and the rest of the universe, so naturally Ubi had to take refuge in the hole in my wall in my room. Each day as I came home from school, I would go into the hole in my wall and talk to Ubi, teaching him to write in English, learning the language of Un from him, reading to him my favorite books, sketching him, and covering the walls in the hole with my drawings.

I filled notebooks with pictures of aliens, fake newspaper articles updating the universe about the raging war, and diagrams of spaceships. By fourth grade, I could speak English fluently, but I wasn’t very interested in using it to play with classmates. I mean, I had tried to include them in my world; I had even started an alien adoption service at recess once, so that they could meet all my friends, too!

Unfortunately, my imaginary aliens didn’t interest anyone but me. So, I kept my head in the clouds. Each night, Ubi and I had a sleepover party in my room, and he and I would cuddle close and talk about our different worlds until we fell asleep. In my heart, the stars in the sky were closer than anyone down on planet Earth.

You’d think that, having been given two places that I could potentially identify as my “origin,” I would be able to choose at least one of them. However, the longer I lived in America, the more I started to find my origin, or the location from which my identity stemmed, within my own head. When thinking about Ubi eventually became repetitive and dull, I came up with other stories.

Compared to the seemingly infinite amount of imaginary universes within my mind, the real world was monotonous and discouragingly limited. There was no way I could allow my picture to be painted with the dripping disdain of the angry Czechs, or my snapshot to be taken with the speed of a Southerner’s prejudiced judgment. I would much rather have a blank picture.

It is March 5, 2013, and I am currently walking through a hotel at approximately 28.64 degrees north, 77.22 degrees east. The wooden walls of the hotel are so polished that I can see my reflection in them as clearly as if they were mirrors. The light of the sparkling chandeliers reflects on the floor, and it looks like I am walking on

Dominique Danco ’13 and Katie greeting an elephant during a Groton School global education trip to India; Katie, with her mother and brother, unpacking her mother’s elephant collection after they moved to Georgia

stars. Outside, breathing the air feels like someone is dropping tiny weights into my lungs, but in here, the air is crisp and cool. Gen Corman [’14] and Dominique Danco [’13] are asleep on the couches in the lobby, so I am exploring alone. As I turn to walk into a hallway with rooms, the ceilings suddenly become incredibly low. I call an elevator, and as soon as it arrives and I step inside, my stomach flips upside down. The corners of the elevator walls are lined with bent mirrors. Staring back from the mirrors at me is my being, distorted in the oddest way. A strip down the middle of my body is missing; therefore, my head is football-shaped, I only appear to have one eyeball, and my body is freakishly elongated. The first thing that goes through my jetlagged mind is, “Oh my god, it’s an alien.”

It was that moment at around midnight in Delhi, India, that I first felt like reality had reached a territory beyond any of my fantasies. How foolish I had been to believe that my mind could take me farther than this world, let alone the universe! It was unbelievable. Here I was, standing in a place, physically and mentally separate from everything familiar, and yet how powerfully present I was. This was when I found my first puzzle piece.

You see, I don’t think that where one comes from is really a picture painted or printed on a single canvas.

Rather, I think that where one comes from is more like a jigsaw puzzle. And India is where I found my first piece.

Within that hotel elevator on the opposite side of the planet, I had found a brilliant eccentricity that, according to my sleep-deprived and disoriented judgment, matched the brilliant eccentricity of Ubi’s world from so long ago. And, unlike Ubi’s world, this was real. This was a world I wanted to come from. This was a color I wanted to have on my canvas.

I found several of my puzzle pieces in India. I found one when I got to pet an elephant, which I view as a sort of symbol of my mother, who has a collection of over 300 ceramic elephants. I found one while cliff diving into the Ganges, and I found one when I almost got killed by a monkey.

When I came from India to America, I was worried I had left all of my pieces there. Of course, this was far from the truth. Turns out I had been walking past my puzzle pieces my entire life, too absorbed by my ideal imaginary picture to notice them in the most unexpected places: under the curtain onstage on the opening night of a play, inside the keys of my clarinet as I play a SaintSaëns piece, on top of the tree in the old Millikin’s courtyard, hidden within Sowon’s [Lee ’15] Pandora’s box, stuck between the sharp words of my favorite Democrat’s scathing political rants, and playfully peeking out from behind the flowing notes of a piano piece emanating from the music room next door.

I found that my mother’s love has the potential to inspire within me greater awe than that which I felt when I met an elephant; she holds many of my puzzle pieces, as does my father, my brother John, Slimy, Satan, and my friends. The places or people around which I feel that powerful presence, at moments when I am completely drawn out of my inner world and standing vulnerable in the whirlwind of reality, is where I, Katie, come from. And as I stand here on September 22, 2014, at approximately 42.59 degrees north, 71.58 degrees west, it thrills me to know that I haven’t even found half my pieces yet.

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A C H A P E L TA L K

by Catharine Jacobsen, Intern 1986-87 October 10, 2014

Learning

from the Best

G

roton has always had so much faith in me— more than I deserve—and this visit feels like no exception.

The final faculty meeting of my intern year occurred on my birthday. I turned 23 and sat quietly listening, a little bit shy, to teachers discussing each student, considering their strengths, ways they could grow. They spoke with such perception and skill that it took my breath away. During a break, Fred Beams, who I suspect doesn’t even remember, said, “You need to talk, you should say what you think.” I must have looked back at him in some amazement, because he said it again, “Trust yourself. What do you think?”

What I thought was that I had no clue. I had been learning like crazy, trying my best, making mistakes, and still didn’t think I knew much about anything. But what I didn’t appreciate in that moment was that the whole year I had actually been learning some of the lessons I would need most in my life. Just as archetypal travelers are sent off by their communities, fortified and equipped, ready to face some unimagined challenge or quest, I would also arrive at a moment in the future—overwhelmed, unsure— and then magically realize I had exactly what I needed. I would discover that when you aren’t looking, life will ask something of you, something you don’t expect, all of a sudden.

My first lesson came when a homesick 10th grader wanted to call home with some privacy—back before cell phones. I worked in Lincoln’s dorm, and Cathy suggested the parents could call her at my little house.

She could talk freely, and gather herself before check-in.

The student arrived, and I realized I should leave, but I was reluctant to go too far. I felt Cathy was trusting me with an important responsibility. So I walked, back and forth, along my street, watching my lighted windows and waiting for her to emerge, although it occurred to me that I didn’t know what I would say when she did. The 38

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night was clear, a dark navy sky with a moon, and when she appeared, with a tear-stained face, I couldn’t think of anything other than, “Do you want to walk?” She did, so we started on a loop around campus. I nervously asked, “Do you want to talk?” She didn’t, and so we walked together, silently, through that beautiful night. Back at her dorm, she looked right at me, simply said, “Thank you,” and went inside. Walking home, I understood for one of the first times that the goal hadn’t been solving a problem; it had been about accepting another person right where she was. She showed me that sometimes there is no right thing to say, that just being beside someone might be enough.

Later that year, a group of boys asked if I might take them to a concert in Boston. A rock concert. On a school night. They had permission; they just needed a ride. I confirmed with a dorm head, and that was that. I couldn’t believe everyone was letting us go. Initially we sat, then stood, at our seats, and then in that way that live music just fires up your nerve endings, ignites something in you, it did, and we danced. Trust me—I’m not a good dancer, but it didn’t seem to matter, and we danced the rest of the night. Afterward, we were sweaty and hot, and it was like we had grown—expanded with the space and the music. I had a convertible Volkswagen, and suddenly stuffing those long-limbed boys back into the car seemed like a ridiculous proposition. At the very least they were fogging the windows, and I couldn’t see, so we all made the call. Air. We’re putting the top down. It was cold, but as I drove through the night, seeing the white mist of their breath in the velvet dark, watching them start to slouch and relax, those boys seemed like racehorses who’d been allowed to run free. We got back late, and when each one solemnly hugged me in thanks, I saw that, for all the opportunities on campus, they felt a little cooped up here but, unfettered, had embraced the physical world in the most open, generous way. Bending the rules had

been powerfully right, and I realized I too had had the privilege of that evening because the experienced people here had already known that.

I was an English teacher, and you may have noticed a theme. Night. I am not a morning person. Gates McGavick [’15], who attended elementary school with my sons, will have absolutely no recollection of ever seeing me at morning drop-off because I was always in pajamas and never got out of the car. I may in fact be the only mother in America who outsleeps her teenagers every day, including weekends, and firmly believes that nothing worthwhile happens until after 9 p.m. So you can imagine that Chapel was a particular challenge. That I am here giving a Chapel Talk is an excellent example of irony. I had weekly check-ins with Charlie Alexander; he was my anchor, so supportive, and I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I did try. But not hard enough. The assistant headmaster, Peter Camp, was very helpful, and asked if I objected to anything at Chapel, or if I was using the time to work. I had to admit I was sleeping. He asked if I was up too late, doing my work, and I had to admit I was mostly just reading.

“What are you reading?”

My beloved Victorian novels, and trying to fill in what was apparently a gap in my preparation for graduate school—Renaissance non-dramatic. Essentially anything written during Shakespeare’s time which is not a play. He took a long, slightly surprised look. I’m sure he’d heard many Chapel excuses, but 16th-century sonnets had to be a new one. He then suggested I do a better job managing my time. I suspect he imagined he would see me at Chapel. He did, occasionally.

Until he didn’t, and I talked with the headmaster— Mr. Polk. There are some conversations that change your life, and this was one. Essentially he said two things. The first was that part of my job was to discover what I was good at and what I loved, because the intersection of those would be a happy and fulfilling professional career.

He said he thought I was headed in the right direction, which was incredibly encouraging and kind. Next, and I knew we were at the scary part, my other challenge was to discover where I struggled, my weaknesses, because everyone has them, and it was consideration of how I reacted in those moments that would define my character.

I learned that students are usually the very best teachers, and that in the moments you most want to help, you can discover yourself to be helpless.

Kate Dennison, Charlie Alexander, Catharine Jacobsen, Cathy Lincoln, Ann Alexander, Vuyelwa Maqubela; (second row) Ian Gracey, Steve Belsky, Kathy Leggat, on the day of Catharine’s Chapel Talk

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It was a long time ago, but I will paraphrase: “Each time you go demonstrates your investment in the people and the spirit of this School, and you should trust that Chapel will teach you about the person you hope to become.”

It will be no surprise that I never missed another day. And in that moment, I learned everything I’ve ever needed about leadership and wisdom, and about the kind of person I wanted to be. I’ve been working toward it ever since.

So I left for grad school and various jobs, ending up as a college counselor at Lakeside. And then the August before last, driving with a friend, I heard the radio news report that a twin-engine plane had crashed into a house while landing at New Haven airport in Connecticut. The pilot of the plane, and his 17-year-old son, from Seattle, had been killed, as had the two children who lived in the house, one a baby, still in a crib. “Take me home,” I said.

“The boy on the plane is one of my son’s closest friends; he’s my student.”

She looked back in shock. “But how are you sure?”

“It’s Friday, it’s Yale, and I helped plan the trip.”

That crash was fate at its most ruthless, and the next days were an unsparing spectrum of emotion, profoundly and devastatingly real. Holding my son Hugh in his bewildered grief is a secret scar, etched on my heart.

Amidst the anguish, the startling realization of the impact we can all have on others, and accepting a request to speak at Max’s memorial, I had a crisis of confidence. I couldn’t trust myself to know, or say, anything. I had the file—his hopes and plans we’d envisioned, first drafts of his essays.

I wanted to bring all of it alive, for his family, his teachers, his friends, but was sure I couldn’t do it, and I’d already said yes.

So I walked to the park to try to write something.

Anything at all. And on that bakingly hot afternoon, I encountered a group of Max’s classmates, my students, playing basketball, and grieving. Relentlessly they passed and they lunged, catapulted to the hoop, leaping as high as they could, toward heaven it seemed. I stopped, mesmerized by their uncompromising intensity. They played basketball as if their lives depended on it, honoring their friend. I sat down to watch, to be with them, and wept. They saw, but we all knew there was nothing to say. And then, with the rhythmic weaving of their sinewy arms and their legs, their skin glistening with sweat, the beat of that ball pounding the court, in a time-traveler way I was transported back to dancing at that concert, coming home in the car; and while it wasn’t 40

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Catharine with her son, Hugh

warm breath on a cold night, the pulsating, unifying energy was exactly the same. It was the exquisite and excruciating reminder that this is a physical enterprise and that we need to get out and live it—not in our heads, in a book, or on a screen. Those students knew how to celebrate the ever-unfolding sacred narrative that is life.

I remembered Groton, and Chapel. The bravery of so many speakers. Slouching in pews, cradles of wisdom, if we listen carefully. They have held others whose minds are quietly treasure-hunting elsewhere. I remembered being asked to trust myself, to say what I thought, and I knew I could speak. Everything I felt, the heartbreaking sadness, the cruelty, all of it was real, but I had what I needed, and I learned most of it here.

I learned that students are usually the very best teachers, and that in the moments you most want to help, you can discover yourself to be helpless. I learned how to watch, how to notice, who needs what, and when.

And I learned there’s a maturity, an integrity, to sharing in the spirit of a community, and understanding this allowed me to be the teacher, mother, the person, that I wanted to be.

So back to that question on my birthday: “What did I think?”

I think all of you inspire, more than you know, your teachers, your advisors, your coaches. Trust yourselves, and be yourselves. As much as you’re learning, every day you’re teaching, in ways you can’t always see.

I was an intern here, and I think I learned from the best. True voyagers return and say thank you.

Catharine Jacobsen is now a college counselor at Lakeside School in Seattle.

book review

The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic

by John Demos ’55 Reviewed by the Reverend William A. Fisher ’90

I

N BREAKING OPEN a little known episode in our

missionary evangelicalism. In the same way that missionaries wanted to better the people of the Pacific Rim by converting them to a Christianity that was more John Calvin than Jesus of Nazareth, there was the belief that these same people needed to adopt superior Western customs and ways. Similar beliefs continue to influence our nation’s foreign policy, not always for the better.

The school, and the enthusiasm supporting it, unravel when two Cherokee students court, and later marry, the daughters of prominent white townspeople. Demos allows much of the primary source material he quotes to reveal racial attitudes in the townspeople’s reactions to the marriages.

They love the non-white students enough to make them Christians, but not enough to allow them any real authority—and certainly not enough to marry white women. The racial attitudes portrayed in The Heathen School have lost much of their power, but they haven’t completely died, as recent events might indicate.

The story of the Foreign Mission School intersects, albeit indirectly, with the story of Groton. The same China trade that spurred curiosity about the lands of the Pacific Rim also enriched a Salem ship owner named Joseph Peabody. His great-grandson, as a young man, converted to the Episcopal Church from the Unitarian. Spurred by milder, more thoughtful missionary zeal, that great-grandson founded a church (and a baseball team) in Arizona and, then, a certain boarding school in Massachusetts. Groton’s institutional DNA formed in a more refined, but similar ecosystem to that of the Foreign Mission School. While Groton and her students will always strive to serve, there will always be a need to reflect on that service—to ask if, how, and why they are helping. Demos’ book is not a light read, but it tells a story that needs to be heard and remembered.

The Heathen School is a clarion call for humility about where we, as a nation and as a school, have come from and where we are going.

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young nation’s history, John Demos ’55 weaves a fascinating tale of good intentions, misguided missionary zeal, Anglo-American cultural hubris, and racism. The Foreign Mission School of Cornwall, Connecticut, which existed from 1817 to 1826, serves as our setting. Colloquially known as “the Heathen School,” it was founded for the express purpose of educating students from Polynesia, India, the Far East, and several Native American tribes to bring Christianity (and Western ways) back to their native lands. Its story has much to teach us today.

The Heathen School tells of a time when Cambridge and New Haven were still hotbeds of religious fundamentalism. Filled with the spirit of the Second Great Awakening and heartened by some chance events that lead several curious young Hawaiian sailors to Yale, a group of Congregationalist ministers establish the school. These founders know little of the lands from which their students hail and certainly don’t respect the indigenous culture of these places. So sure of their own righteousness, they don’t even ponder the possibility that the poverty and chaos they hear about in other parts of the world might be partly a result of war and colonialism; nor is there any sign of penitence in their complicity therein. Describing a church school, Demos’ book offers an example of how not to serve others.

Of course, the missionary work that Demos describes doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Like many developments in the history of American religion, it is influenced by larger economic, demographic, and political trends. A young nation expands its trade horizons, and with this expansion comes more contact with places such as the Pacific Islands, China, and India, and more interest in their peoples. The Heathen School details the development of Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny nurtured by early 19th-century

new releases

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► Please send information about your new releases to quarterly@groton.org.

1 Jamie Wyeth Elliot Bostwick Davis ’80

This exhibition catalog accompanies the artist’s retrospective, his first since 1980, which recently became the most highly attended exhibition ever mounted in the Torf Gallery at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The

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book presents a full range of Jamie Wyeth’s work, from his earliest, virtuoso portraits to his most current mysteriously symbolic seascapes. The catalog explores his creative process as he revisits themes and subjects central to his vision—the landscapes of the Brandywine River Valley and coastal Maine, family members and fellow artists, domestic and wild animals—and places him in the context of his own

Winter 2014

distinguished artistic heritage as well as the long tradition of American realist painting and its contemporary revival.

The more than 100 paintings and works on paper lavishly reproduced in this book invite us to discover what meets the eye of a prodigiously gifted, adamantly individualistic American artist.

Elliot Bostwick Davis, Ph.D., is John Moors Cabot Chair at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

2 America Invades: How We’ve Invaded or Been Militarily Involved with Almost Every Country on Earth Christopher Kelly ’77 and Stuart Laycock

The authors take readers on a global tour of America’s military involvement with nearly every country in the world. From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli and everywhere in between, this popular history documents the triumphs and the tragedies of American forces serving overseas.

Americans helped to invade Colombia in 1741. Our most recent invasion occurred in the spring of 2014 when American hackers invaded Minecraft Denmark!

America has invaded 84 of the 194 countries recognized by the United Nations (excluding the United States). That’s 43 percent of the total. And it hasn’t been militarily involved with just 90 or 100 countries. It has had some form of military involvement with a spectacular 191 out of 194. That’s more than 98 percent. Yep, we haven’t really been militarily involved with Andorra, Bhutan, or Liechtenstein.

Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, America has had a vast impact around the globe.

3 Silver Diaspora Christopher Rand ’55

In Silver Diaspora, Christopher Rand examines his family’s roots in a world of great wealth and power and how the family evolved within a growing nation. He chronicles family members’ confrontation with a dilemma: to dwell on their rich ancestral world or to keep up with rapidly changing times—a choice between escaping from or immersing themselves in the America of the latter two-thirds of the last century. Chris structures

his narrative around his own journey through these times and into the new century.

4 Paisley Mischief Lincoln MacVeagh ’83

At the Avenue Club, the members meet in easy camaraderie and no one wears trunks in the pool—because when you’re the right sort of person, you’re supposed to have nothing to hide.

Max Guberstein, the famously brash movie producer, is determined to join the club. Max is used to getting what he wants, but it’s still anybody’s guess if he’ll get in.

Offering an inside glimpse into the preppy world, Paisley Mischief is entertaining, intelligent, and short.

6 Ordered Steps Marichal Monts ’81

Life comes with its trials, circumstances that could bring us to our knees but could also strengthen us for the journey ahead. Marichal writes that the hope is in knowing that God is in control of those trials, encouraging followers to walk with faith in Him. Ordered Steps draws on a Christian determination to discover one’s purpose in life and callings in God’s ultimate plan. The author promotes a perspective that relies on a confidence that God will steer everything toward good.

5 My Zanzibar Revolution Peter Rand ’60

At 20, Peter Rand ’60 flunked out of college, left his comfortable home in California, crossed the ocean, and roamed the world to pursue his destiny as a writer. In Africa, this young drifter, an inexperienced stringer for the New York Herald Tribune, stumbled into revolution. He was living on Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Kenya in the Indian Ocean. Fabled as an Arab trading center, Zanzibar was also a legendary slave port where racial anger still simmered under the surface. Revolution broke out immediately following independence from British rule. It was a violent uprising. When it was over, revolution had altered the landscape of Zanzibar. It had also transformed the life of the college dropout.

This eyewitness account of the revolution on Zanzibar also reveals British and American geopolitical intrigue in the twilight hours of colonialism, when imperial power began to fade at the onset of African independence.

Book summaries were provided by the authors and/or publishers.

Così fan Flauti: Mozart for Flute and Orchestra

Robert Stallman ’64 A new CD by the prolific flutist Robert Stallman (see page 10), recorded with the Czech Chamber Orchestra

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Jon Chase

A jubilant soccer team upon clinching the division title.

Opposite page, Will Richardson ’15.

Tom Kates

FALL SPORTS

Girls Soccer 13-4-2

as though I am a part of a great team. As individuals, we have been anything but perfect. We have all made physical errors, used poor judgment at one point or another, or, in some way, let ourselves down. Yet as a group, we have been so much more. We are a backup goalkeeper who, despite knowing that it is unlikely she will play, pushes herself during a pre-match warm-up in the pouring rain to make sure that her teammate is prepared. We are a star player who, while sidelined with an injury, fills water bottles and hands them to thirsty players as they leave the field. We are a substitute player who pushes herself to be better each day in practice and who finds kind, supportive words to build up her teammates. We are a starter who embraces a change of position and plays it brilliantly in order to make the team stronger, even though it is not the role she imagined for herself.”

Congratulations and thanks to all 21 members of the girls varsity soccer team for making the 2014 campaign memorable.

— Coach Ryan Spring

Boys Soccer 3-11-1 This was a season in which statistics lied like never before. In fact, they stand in a thuggish group so far from the truth that they aren’t worth a glance, yet most will draw erroneous conclusions from that most-obvious set of num-bers, the record: 3-11-1. These numbers say little, however, since this team was as

enjoyable, with as many meaningful personal accomplishments, as any in recent memory.

More than half of the varsity team had come up from the junior varsity — three of these being seniors. It’s wonderful to see students stay with a program and then step in so effectively, all playing as if they had been with the varsity for years. With so many new faces, the challenge of the first weeks of the season was for the team to find its identity, which it did. Helping to shape this was senior Whit Lippincott’s curling shot against Cushing (an eventual New England quarterfinalist) that secured a 2-0 win in our final preseason game.

With such an auspicious start, suddenly our confidence was high as we headed to open the season against St. George’s. While that game proved exciting — a final-second header

by Ward Betts ’16 tied the game 2-2 — all left the field feeling we had let a win slip away.

That, unfortunately, was to be the team’s lone point for a long period, as they began an arduous trudge through the eventual top half of the league. This was no way for a new group to get their footing, and the Groton side struggled, despite herculean efforts against top teams such as Milton.

It wasn’t until Groton traveled up to St. Paul’s in the last third of the season that the team earned its first win. Following this, Groton topped Governor’s and St. Sebastian’s in succession, and then gave eventual ISL champion Lawrence Academy a tremendous battle.

Obviously, it says much about a group to

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Led by a talented and experienced group of Sixth Formers, the 2014 girls soccer team earned a NEPSAC Class B New England Championship and a record of 13-4-2.

Fifth seed in the NEPSAC tournament, the Zebras traveled to Pomfret in the first round and avenged an early-season loss with a convincing 5-1 victory. Next, the girls headed to top-seeded Rivers for the semifinal. The girls played their finest match of the season, and after 80 minutes and two 10-minute overtime periods, Groton stood even with the ISL champions, 0-0. In an exciting penalty kick shootout, each of the Groton players converted her penalty kick, while goalkeeper Amani Jiu ’17 saved one shot and a Rivers player hit the post.

The Zebras won the shoot-out and a place in the final against second-seeded Wilbraham and Monson Academy the following day.

In the final, the Zebras scored two first-half goals against the Titans and controlled play for most of the match on their way to the victory. The championship crown sits nicely on the heads of a wonderful Sixth Form group: Jenna Blouin, Rachel Hardej, Marie Wesson, and Captains Caroline Morss, Dorrie Varley-Barrett, and Sam Volpe. This selfless and committed group led the team to 23 total victories as well as two deep tournament runs in their final two seasons on the Circle.

I did my best to explain the team’s success at the fall athletics banquet, two days prior to the semifinal match with Rivers: “This fall I feel

Tom Kates Gary Fournier

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keep faith, to stay united rather than to curdle.

Losing heart, however, was never a risk, as the Sixth Form group of Rocky Chiu, Trevor Fry, Philippe Heitzmann, Whit Lippincott, Peter White, and Captains Tyler Sar and Jared Belsky exhibited astonishing character and commitment. Gathering for practice each day was always a pleasure, and taking the field always felt promising. When a season feels as rewarding as this one, the final record just doesn’t matter much.

— Coach Ted Goodrich

Football 3-5 The Zebra Eleven enjoyed a good season, topped off by a win for the ages against archrival St. Mark’s School on November 7. Groton was ably guided by senior Captains John Lamont, Ejaaz Jiu, and Frank Bruni.

The team began the 2014 campaign with consecutive losses to a much-improved St. George’s team and perennial ISL power Belmont Hill. In week three, however, the team began to gel after some personnel tweaks on defense

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and a renewed emphasis on the Wing-T ground game. The results were big victories against Thayer Academy and Middlesex, the latter a nemesis that has long had the Zebras’ number.

The Middlesex game marked the maturation of Groton’s Wing-T attack, as Groton rushed for 460 yards in a 37-26 win. A middling Parents Weekend loss to Rivers was followed by additional stumbles against strong St. Paul’s and Brooks squads, but the team remained focused after flashes of real growth against a Brooks lineup that would win a NEPSAC Super Bowl game two weeks later.

Groton was laser-focused in its preparation for St. Mark’s, enjoying a great week of practice up to kickoff, but no one expected what would follow when these ancient rivals celebrated their 125th clash. Eighty-six points were scored during a tilt that witnessed an astonishing seven lead changes. Groton’s plan was to emphasize the run, consuming time of possession while keeping St. Mark’s prolific passing attack off the field. Groton led by four with fewer than three minutes to play. St. Mark’s, having just scored and recovered an on-sides

kick, was marching toward Groton’s end zone when Arthur Jelin ’16 intercepted a Lion pass on the two-yard line and scampered 88 yards to the St. Mark’s 10-yard line.

Groton would score two plays later, icing the victory, and the sideline faithful stormed the field when the final gun sounded. Perennial all-star John Beatty ’16 paced the Zebras, rushing for 189 yards, scoring three touchdowns and leading the squad in tackles on defense from his perch at safety. John accounted for 331 total yards, comprising a stunning 77 percent of the team’s total yards from scrimmage.

Though the 2002 Groton-St. Mark’s game was a nail-biting 21-20 Zebra win, this most recent clash was the most exciting in the last 20 years. It certainly ranks near the top of the list in a rivalry that extends back to the Benjamin Harrison administration.

— Coach John Lyons

Field Hockey 7-7-3 The field hockey girls returned for preseason determined to improve on their results of the

Photographs by Jon Chase

Opposite page, Zahin Das ‘16, Amani Jiu ‘17 (blocking a penalty Opposite page: top, kick that led to an overtime win in the semifinals), and Annie McElgunn ‘15. This page, clockwise from top left, Anna Thorndike ‘16, Jared Belsky ‘15, Liza Greenhill ’17, and John Lamont ’15 (with Frank Bruni ’15 in the background).

past several seasons, and in order to do so, they worked hard from the first practice. Knowing that they would play seven of their 16 games on turf, the group spent each morning of preseason on the turf at a big soccer center, sharing a field with a Lawrence Academy team that was coached by Groton field hockey and lacrosse powerhouse Sam McMahon ’07. Field hockey on turf and field hockey on grass are two completely different games, and the practice on turf both improved the girls’ skills and prepared them for a speedier game.

Statistical highlights of the season include five overtime games, two of which resulted in sudden victory wins, the other three in ties.

The team had a Parents Weekend overtime victory against Rivers, who had trounced the girls last year and this year went on to win the Class C tournament. The girls notched wins against Holderness, Thayer, and BB&N after losing to each last year.

Through the course of the season, the girls worked hard at skills day after day, whether in small 1 v. 1 competitions or larger game simulations. By the final three games, the girls were

clicking well together. They beat Southfield decisively in an away match under dreary, rainy, cold conditions. The Lawrence Academy game was played across town under the lights, and the girls pulled out a thrilling 2-1 overtime victory. Rival St. Mark’s held the upper hand during the last game, but the score was only 2-1 against an undefeated team who went on to win the Class B Championship.

Seniors Lillian Harris, Luna Goodale, and Holly MacNaughton set great examples of hard work and commitment under the leadership of Captains Grace Liggett and Annie McElgunn.

All five, starters every one, some for three seasons, will be sorely missed next fall. And they will miss the inaugural season on the new turf field that Groton plans to install later this year.

— Coaches Megan Harlan and Kathy Leggat

Boys Cross Country 5-10 Captains Willy Anderson ’15 and Simon Colloredo-Mansfeld ’15, as well as Alaric Krapf ’15, George Klein ’16, Jack Fanikos ’17,

Matthew Higgins Iati ’17, Jack McLaughlin ’17, and Will Norton ’17 joined the Capen family for pre-pre-season in Maine over the Labor Day weekend this year.

Upon arrival in Seal Harbor, they summited Cadillac Mountain to gaze at the stars at night and woke up the next morning to run eight miles around Little Long Pond. Then they climbed over Sargent Mountain, swam in Sargent Pond, and hiked down Penobscot to the Jordan Pond House for popovers in what has now become an annual tradition for several members of the boys cross country team.

On Sunday, they circled Eagle Lake and went to the Blue Hill Fair, the setting for E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, before returning to Mount Desert Island for dinner in Bar Harbor.

After running up and around Day Mountain on Labor Day and taking a dip, the bus rolled down the coast to Damariscotta so the boys could jump in Biscay Pond, eat a lobster supper

by Muscongus Bay, and watch Seabiscuit outdoors. Our runners read Laura Hillenbrand¹s Unbroken over the summer, and with some additional tips that Coach Capen picked up at

www.groton.org

47

Photographs by Jon Chase

Left, Delaney Tantillo ’17; above, Jack Fanikos ’17

grotoniana

Nike’s Green Mountain Running Camp — and with Coach “Fire” Maguire back at their side — the team made great strides this season.

Several runners skimmed several seconds off of their splits and minutes off of their 5K times. One runner improved his race time by eight minutes, and even the fastest runners earned personal records this fall. The team was seeded 11th place in the ISL just before the championship race, and then came in 10th place on the course at Governor¹s Academy. We also came in 10th at the Class B New England Championship race at WillistonNorthampton School.

Will Norton earned his way into the New England All-Star race and ran it in 17:47, placing 25th. Coach Capen promised, and delivered, hamburgers from 5 Guys to our fastest five: Willy Anderson ’15, Will Norton ’17, Jack Fanikos ’17, Nick Barry ’16, and Simon Colloredo-Mansfeld ’15.

Congratulations to all the runners; onward and upward!

— Coach John Capen

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Groton School Quarterly

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Girls Cross Country 6-6 A large influx of runners new to cross coun-try provided added energy and depth to our core of returners this year. With a schedule consisting of only two home races, the Groton harriers were on the road most weekends, traversing a variety of ISL courses, ranging from hilly to mountainous.

After some early losses, the runners doubled down on their training and notched a string of wins against league rivals including Governor’s and St. Mark’s. The squad ended the regular season with six wins and six losses, squarely in the middle of the competitive ISL. More importantly, the runners practiced and raced with poise and focus, channeling their hard work on the Groton fields and Boathouse Hill into every race, home or away.

This ability to focus and work hard regardless of conditions proved particularly useful for the ISL Championships, where near-freezing temperatures and unrelenting rain turned the Governor’s course into a five-kilometer slip’n’slide. Although the cold and muddy course tried to slow them down (for one thing,

Winter 2015

by suctioning the shoe off our team’s secondplace scorer, Verity Lynch, within the first mile), the Groton runners still emerged with a slew of personal bests on the course as well as a top-15 finish for Maddy Forbess ’16.

Girls cross country had one more opportunity to toe the line at Williston Northampton for the New England Championships, where we were relieved to find sunny skies and a pristine course. There, the vast majority of the 19-person championship squad notched alltime personal bests. The universally strong performances were a testament to the team’s tireless efforts week after week.

Under the guidance of Captains Kelsey Peterson ’15, Annie McCreery ’15, and Maddy Forbess ’16, the Groton cross country team came together as a close-knit, confident, and often costume-clad team, which made working hard and running fast fun and rewarding!

— Coach Nihal Kayali

Danielle Kimball ’13

Photos by Jon Chase

HEAD OF THE

CHARLES

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rom the Form of 1956 to the Form of 2015, Groton had an extensive presence at the Head of the Charles Regatta, October 17-18, 2014.

William Popik ’15, Simon ColloredoMansfeld ’15, coxswain Rebecca Kimball ’15, Hugh Cecil ’15, and Michael Gates ’15 (at right with Coach Charlie Hamlin) placed 20th of 85 in the Men’s Youth Fours — Groton’s first entry in more than 20 years. Catherine Crowley, a Groton physics teacher, placed 12 of 21 in the Women’s Club singles. And Charlie Hamlin, the boys varsity crew coach, raced in the Senior Masters Eight boat from Team Attager, which won the Grand Master (over 60) division.

Groton alumni were all over the water, including Alex Karwoski ’08, who rows for the USA national team; he competed in the Championship Eights, finishing fourth of 36. Ted Patton ’84, P’16 rowed with his 1987 USA teammates in the Senior Masters Eight, coming in fourth of 55.

Following are some of the other Grotonians who raced at the 2014 Head of the Charles: Maeve Hoffstot ’13 and Liza MacEachern ’10 (Radcliffe), Olivia Bono ’13 and Charlotte Berkowitz ’13 (Dartmouth), Taylor Maykranz ’11 and Emma Peabody ’11 (Tufts), Faith Richardson ’11 and Fabrizio Filho Giovannini ’11 (Princeton), Gage Wells ’11 (University of Virginia), Robert Black ’10 (Union Boat Club), Henry Hoffstot ’09 and Ruth Kennedy Sudduth ’79 (Cambridge University Boat Club), Alexandra Morss ’09 (Princeton Fat Cat Rowing Club), Henry Nuzum ’95 (Harvard alumni, Rude and Smooth), Terry Harwood ’81 (Upper Valley RA), Bill Summerskill ’76 and Mark Blasetti ’85 (Princeton/Harvard alumni, Hingham Harbor), Nason Hamlin ’64 (Founders of Wesleyan Crew), and Henry Francis ’56 (Senior Veterans Singles).

BOYS CROSS COUNTRY

GIRLS CROSS COUNTRY

Most Valuable Runner Willy Anderson ’15

Most Valuable Runner Maddy Forbess ’16

Most Improved Runner Alaric Krapf ’15

Most Improved Runner Eleonor Wolf ’17

Coaches’ Award Simon ColloredoMansfeld ’15

Coaches’ Award Verity Lynch ’17

All-ISL Willy Anderson ’15 ISL Honorable Mention Will Norton ’17 New England All-Star Meet Will Norton ’17 Captains-Elect Nick Barry ’16 Will Norton ’17

All-ISL Maddy Forbess ’16 All New England Maddy Forbess ’16 Captains-Elect Maddy Forbess ’16 Varsha Harish ’16

FIELD HOCKEY

FOOTBALL

BOYS SOCCER

GIRLS SOCCER

Most Valuable Player Grace Liggett ’15

Most Valuable Player John Beatty ’16

Most Valuable Player Jared Belsky ’15

Most Valuable Player Dorrie Varley-Barrett ’15

Most Improved Player Lizzie Tobeason ’16

Coaches’ Award Daraja Foster ’15 Arthur Jelin ’16 Ejaaz Jiu ’15

Coaches’ Award Roan Guinan ’17 Peter White ’15

Most Improved Player Marie Wesson ’15

Coaches’ Award Annie McElgunn ’15 All-ISL Grace Liggett ’15 ISL Honorable Mention Sydney Pagliocco ’16 Captains-Elect Sydney Pagliocco ’16 Anna Thorndike ’16

Charles Alexander Award Frank Bruni ’15 Ryan Metro ’15 All-ISL John Beatty ’16 Joe Collett ’17 Ryan Metro ’15 ISL Honorable Mention Arthur Jelin ’16 John Lamont ’15 Will Richardson ’15 Captains-Elect Malcolm Akinje ’16 John Beatty ’16 Arthur Jelin ’16

All-ISL Tyler Sar ’15 Captains-Elect Ward Betts ’16 Alec Reiss ’17

All-ISL & All-State Sydney Brackett ’16 Dorrie Varley-Barrett ’15 ISL Honorable Mention Alexa Beckstein ’18 Caroline Morss ’15 Sam Volpe ’15 All New England Sydney Brackett ’16 Senior Award Caroline Morss ’15, Dorrie Varley-Barrett ’15 Captains-Elect Sydney Brackett ’16 Amani Jiu ’17 Ali Lamson ’16

www.groton.org

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Christopher Carey Brodigan Gallery WINTER EXHIBIT

“An Experience of Seeing” Retina prints by Elizabeth Goldring January 11– February 27, 2015

E

grotoniana

lizabeth Goldring calls her “Retina Prints” visual poems that interpret what she “sees” with her own blind eyes —“traces of laborious experiences with seeing, memories of woven words and images ‘sitting’ on my retinas.”

Goldring, the Charlotte Moorman Senior Fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, uses a medical device called a scanning laser ophthalmoscope that scans visual information onto the retina. As an artist, she interprets those images.

“Although I use many people’s retinas in my artwork,” she says, “the finished print reflects my way of seeing the words and images projected on my damaged retinas and their indelible ‘after image.’”

Several months after Goldring became blind, only able to perceive light and shadow, her retinal function was tested with a tool that projected stick-figure-like images onto her retinas. When she saw them, she asked to also see a word, “sun.”

“It was the first word I had been able to read for a long time,” she says. “For me, a writer who was beginning to forget the shape of words, this was truly a significant moment.”

She now uses the ophthalmoscope as a “seeing machine” and collaborates with physicians, scientists, engineers, and artists at MIT to create visual “poetry” for the visionimpaired.

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Groton School Quarterly

“Day Blooming Cereus”

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Winter 2015

The Brodigan Gallery, located on the Dining Hall’s ground level, is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays (except School holidays). It is free and open to the public.

de Menil Gallery WINTER EXHIBIT

“Fragile Season” Paintings by Ilana Manolson January 8 – March 3, 2015

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ur human contemplations on impermanence are expressed most often in private, quietly, and accompanied by feelings of helplessness or sadness. In her show, “Fragile Season,” Ilana Manolson uses her art to investigate the theme of impermanence through life cycles in nature. From seed, to flower, to wilting, these stages reflect the basic nature of everything we know. Through her castings and paintings, Manolson transcribes this transitory process into a record of wonder and beauty.

The works of Manolson — a painter, printmaker, and naturalist — use an abstract interplay of light, color, and shadow to pay tribute to the unspoiled beauty of natural landscapes, some inspired by locations in nearby Concord, Massachusetts, her hometown.

Manolson has been awarded the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship for Painting and has had residencies through the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, the Yaddo Artist Colony, and the Banff School of Fine Arts. Her art is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Danforth Museum, the deCordova Museum, and the Boston Public Library.

The de Menil Gallery, in the Dillon Art Center at Groton School, is open 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays (except Wednesdays) and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends (except School holidays).

The gallery is free and open to the public.

“Revealed by Rain”

“Brushing Summer”

www.groton.org

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Photographs by Mike Sperling

12 ANGRY

This adaption of Twelve Angry Men, by Reginald Rose. brought courtroom drama to the Campbell Performing Arts Center in November. The play, which follows a jury as it considers a murder verdict, sharpens the meaning of “reasonable doubt” and probes the depth of racism in the judicial system.

JURORS

grotoniana 52

Below, Malik Jabati ’15, Lily Edwards ’15, Albert Zhu ’16, Mac Galinson ’17, and Emma Rimmer ’16. Opposite page, clockwise from top left: Malik; Elizabeth Dickson ’15; Daisy Collins ’15; Lily and Mac; Daisy and Lily; Danny Lopez ’15 and Katie Slavicinska ‘15 (with Nick Godridge ’15 and Emma Zetterberg ’15 in the background); Daisy and Katie; Katie; Emma; Nick and Emma

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Garth Beckington ’68 June 5, 1950 – July 5, 2014

by James Robb ’68

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OR GROTON adolescents coming of age

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the jug bands of Groton. Garth had a cool in those days.

Garth is mentioned several times in Mr. Tambourine Man: the Life and Legacy of the Byrds’ Gene Clark by John Einarson (Backbeat Books 2005). Garth often played with Clark, co-founder of the Byrds, in Northern California, for 10-plus years after they both left the LA area for Mendocino County. For the past decade, Garth performed under the pseudonym Buddy Stubbs, on stage with the group the Blushin’ Roulettes.

Will Stenberg, of the band Kerosene Kondors, established a Garth Beckington Memorial Fund and wrote that Garth “played with Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Jesse Ed Davis, Gene Clark, Bonnie Raitt, and many others. In between he led bands with faithful cult followings, bands like Primitive Future, The Road Band, Mofoco. Tying all of these endeavors together was his guitar playing, which had the brilliance, tone, and creativity that comes from true mastery, from an almost psychic bond between a player and his instrument.”

The Steven Bates Trio posted a wonderful set of recent videos of Garth as a tribute ((www. stevenbatesmusic.com/farewellbuddy-stubbs). The track “I Know buddy-stubbs You Rider” is especially quintessential Garth.

Throughout his life, Garth stayed in his world of music and invited us in to join in the pleasure. We are so grateful to have known him! We will miss his delightful presence and immense talents. Thank you, dear friend, for enlightening us with your kindness and musicianship over all these years. Here’s a toast to Garth and his music for our ears—because, man, he could really, really play!

Nicholas Wilson

in memoriam

in the late 1960s, music was a focal element.

“Legarto,” as we called Garth, was alternative music at Groton—a real talent who ran with it, ultimately leading to a notable West Coast music career.

Garth Beckington ’68 passed away on July 5, 2014, in Northern California, of complications from a stroke—a sudden, tragic loss to all who knew and loved him.

The Garth many of us remember would sit in his study, strum his banjo, pick up pieces of tunes, and then share them with friends, who soon mustered enough steam to form the Nashoba Valley Jug Stompers. Others recall late nights in the Chapel, where Garth played Jim Kweskin’s “Buffalo Skinners” with every guitar lick in perfect place. Several of the most talented band members at Groton, influinfluenced in part by Garth, went on to musical careers of their own.

Garth’s Groton talents extended to illustrations, particularly his Aubrey Beardsleyinspired drawings, many of which are still treasured by several formmates and hang in their rooms or offices. offices. Garth was theatrical too (performing in Dramat’s Poor Bitos production), playfully expressive, and also quite the prankster.

Pat Filley ’68, who was a classmate of Garth’s at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, remembers listening to Garth and writer James Dickey playing banjo together. Garth, wearing the same oval sunglasses seen in so many pictures, some sort of a hat, and with a cigarette dangling carelessly from the side of his mouth, would join seasoned blues musicians in local bars. They played fast Southside Chicago blues riffs, nothing like

Learn more about Garth’s life at www.makethevoidfl www.makethevoidflinch.wordpress.com. inch.wordpress.com.

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Groton School Quarterly

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Winter 2015

Form notes

R Form Notes are now password-protected.

Members of the Groton community may read them online by signing in at www.groton.org/myGroton.

Tom Schaefer ’05:

Full Circle

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ost graduates just 10 years out of Groton aren’t giving much thought to writing a will, much less considering whether to put Groton School in it.

But the U.S. Navy asked Tom Schaefer ’05 to think about it.

When Tom graduated from MIT, completing his stint with the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC), he attended the Navy’s Nuclear Power School and was about to begin his junior officer tour on the U.S.S. New Mexico, a submarine. Prior to departure, Tom’s superiors encouraged him to create a will—and asked if he wanted to include an alma mater.

Tom chose Groton. He decided to join the Navy while still on the Circle and attributes the direction of his life to his experiences here. “The place and the people shaped who I am,” he says.

Tom believes he learned to serve his community at Groton: he captained the football team and was a prefect in Olsen’s, a Third Form dorm. “The responsibility was put on prefects to be leaders and shape the Third Formers, while working with other prefects,” he says. “We had to both lead and follow.” Leading both peers and younger students proved to be valuable training for life, and Tom was motivated to apply these leadership skills to a career.

While on board the U.S.S. New Mexico, Tom was responsible for more than 30 enlisted personnel in his division; in February 2013, he took on a significant leadership role as a primary Officer of the Deck during

New Mexico’s maiden six-month deployment, a role normally reserved for senior department heads with three to five years additional experience.

He remains on active duty, but has transferred to the Chief of Naval Operations staff in the Communications and Intelligence Department. Tom, who earned a degree in materials science and engineering at MIT, plans to separate from service at the beginning of 2016. Another value fortified while at Groton, his prioritization of family, is driving his decision to make a more permanent home for himself and his wife, Kit. Tom credits favorite teachers, including science teacher Steve Belsky, and coaches Jon Choate ’60 and Charlie Alexander, as well as role models such as John Lyons and Jim Lockney, with helping him find his way first to MIT and then to the Navy. He particularly recalls the inspiring stories shared by Mr. Lockney about his service during the Vietnam War. The enduring friendships from his Groton years continually remind Tom of his positive learning experiences on the Circle, both in and out of the classroom.

Becoming a member (the youngest to date) of Groton School’s Circle Society, which includes those who have put Groton in their wills, is Tom’s exercise in paying-itforward, helping make valuable experiences, like his own at Groton, possible for future students, while also honoring those who helped prepare him for his life’s voyage.

For more information about the Circle Society, contact Betsy Ginsberg in the Department of Alumni and Development at eginsberg@groton.org or 978-448-7584.

P.O. Box 991 Groton, Massachusetts 01450-0991 Change Service Requested

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CAITLIN REED ’91

Christopher Temerson

uncovered this hat behind a blackboard during a Schoolhouse renovation in 1989.

Its style, along with old photographs, indicates that it most likely belonged to a member of the crew that built the Schoolhouse in 1899, 90 years earlier. The current Schoolhouse renovation/expansion has upended a lot of earth, but so far, according to the construction firm, there have been no hidden oddities or treasures.