Groton School Quarterly, Winter 2016

Groton School The Quarterly • Winter 2016

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Groton Entrepreneurs Share Their Stories

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Groton School Winter 2016 • Volume LXXVII, No. 1

The Quarterly

The Ups and Downs of Starting a Business Groton’s entrepreneurial graduates are innovative, driven, and bold. They are also successful — but that doesn’t mean they haven’t flirted with failure. page 1325 14 Kevin Lenane ’99 18 Naa-Sakle Akuete ’04 20 Tom Gardner ’86 22 Michael Keating ’95 24 Jonathan Butler ’87 26 Virginia Rhoads ’82 28 Alex Klein ’08 30 Ware Sykes ’95 32 Jay Rogers ’91 34 Melissa Galt ’79 35 Chris Clark ’03 and Stuart Landesberg ’03 36 Christopher LaFarge ’72 37 Nina Curley ’00 38 Caroline Bierbaum LeFrak ’02

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Message from the Headmaster

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Circiter / Around the Circle

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Personae / Profiles

39 Voces / Chapel Talks 48 De Libris / Books 51 Grotoniana / Athletics 58 Grotoniana / Arts 64 In Memoriam 65 Form Notes Nancy Xue ’16

Annie Card

Message from the Headmaster

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’ve always believed that service is the most authentic form of leadership. As I’ve come to understand the powerful influence of Groton’s motto, cui servire est regnare, I realize how it inspires the thoughtful leaders that surround our Circle.

Vuyelwa and I see service, and thus leadership, at every turn. We are humbled by those who serve the mission of Groton and buoyed by their motivation to make our Circle even more perfect. Groton inspires people near and far to serve our community. Vuyelwa and I have come to think of this care, devotion, and service as Groton’s amazing grace.

We notice this amazing grace in varied ways. We see it in those who give repeatedly to the school, and those who are motivated to give for the first time. We see it in the Form of 2015, who dedicated a space in the Schoolhouse to honor their art teacher, Ann Emerson, who passed away after a brief illness.

We see it in a long-serving faculty member who, upon hearing about GRAIN (GRoton Affordability and INclusion), decided to be among the early investors in this movement. We see it in the parents and alumni who stepped forward early to help us deliver on GRAIN’s promise to provide access to the most talented students we can find.

We routinely witness Groton grace in classrooms, advisor meetings, and in our end-of-term faculty meetings, where two and a half days are set aside to discuss every child in our care. Beyond dissecting academic progress, these discussions focus on areas for improvement and signs of growth and maturity. This attention toward students as if they were our own children dates back to Endicott Peabody’s original idea of a family school, and this ethos has been maintained by every headmaster since. Vuyelwa and I had never witnessed such thorough and inclusive end-of-term meetings in our combined

Editor Gail Friedman Design Irene Chu

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Contributing Editors Kimberly A. Gerighty Elizabeth Z. Ginsberg P’16 Jessica Hart Elizabeth Wray Lawrence ‘82 Allison S. MacBride John D. MacEachern P’10, ‘14, ’16 Kathleen M. Machan Amily Dunlap Moore Amy Sim

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sixty years as teachers. That is Groton grace at its finest, as well as a major reason to keep Groton at its relatively small size. If our numbers were to get too big, the intimacy for which Groton is renowned would be compromised.

We see Groton grace in the pride that staff members take in their work. From Building and Grounds to the Dining Hall to all the offices around the Circle, our staff shows extraordinary care and demonstrates a certain brand of New England loyalty. I am reminded of this every day when I greet Rita Lalli, who has assisted the last three headmasters. Our staff showed Groton grace when I gave them the day off before Thanksgiving; they were extraordinarily appreciative and made clear that they don’t take working at Groton for granted.

We’ve seen, too, how people carry Groton grace with them beyond the Circle. It’s apparent in the overwhelming support from alumni from all cohorts—whether in the number showing up for receptions, the letters we receive, or the gifts to the school, our graduates’ warm embrace has been humbling.

We see abundant Groton grace among our devoted trustees; it was particularly notable when they decided that the GRAIN initiative was their number-one strategic priority.

With a healthy increase in the number of applications and an equally healthy admit rate of 12.4 percent, there was no urgency to act as swiftly as they did. The idea of inclusion has resonated with all members of the Groton family. This is Groton grace.

Turning to the immediate future, Groton will demonstrate its amazing grace as we, through summer work with some of our students, will tackle the diverse preparation that our students bring—and we will view it as a preparation gap that can be closed rather than an achievement gap that we must live with. That is Groton optimism, the Groton promise, and Groton’s amazing grace.

Thanks to all of you for carrying Groton’s mission with such grace, and for inspiring lives of character, leadership, learning, and service.

Temba Maqubela Headmaster

Photography/Editorial Assistant Christopher Temerson 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.

In the Spring 2015 Quarterly, we listed Groton faculty who went on to head schools. At a reader’s request, we compiled a similar list of alumni, which appeared in the Fall 2015 Quarterly.

We’ve since learned of several additional heads of school who should have been included.

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L E A D E R S H I P U P D AT E Alumni:

Faculty:

John R. Chandler ’64, headed Pingree School in South Hamilton, Massachusetts and the Koc School and Robert College (both in Istanbul)

Richard K. Fox P’89, ‘81, GP’03, former director of development and alumni, headed Dublin School in Dublin, New Hampshire

H. Ashton Crosby Jr. ’58, headed Hoosac School in Hoosick, New York

Robert H. Iglehardt, Groton French teacher from 1938–42, headed Lancaster Country Day School in Pennsylvania and Texas Country Day School in Dallas (now St. Mark’s School of Texas)

Edwin H.B. Pratt ’32, headed Browne & Nichols School (now Buckingham Browne and Nichols) in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Michael J. Theobald, Groton French

and German teacher from 1965–69, headed Hopkins School in New Haven, Connecticut Are there others? Let us know at quarterly@groton.org.

GRACE Pilot Program Launches this July

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CORRECTIONS In the Prize Day section of the Fall 2015 Quarterly, the description for the Dennis Crowley Drama Prize should have read: Initiated by Todd C. Bartels ’01 and further supported by Thomas L. Higginson Jr. ’68; given to a member of the Sixth Form who has made the greatest contribution to the theater program — The Form Notes of 1968 should have referred to Dan Godfrey (not Dan Gregory).

uly won’t be such a quiet month in Groton’s Schoolhouse this summer.

Classrooms and labs will come to life as the school launches the pilot of a four-week academic program known as GRACE (GRoton Accelerate Challenge Enrich).

GRACE — which pilots July 3 – 30, 2016 — targets students as they complete Third Form and head into Upper School. The program’s straightforward goal: to help all Groton students reach their potential. A group of Groton teachers worked last summer to develop GRACE courses at multiple levels of math, chemistry, and Latin.

For some GRACE Scholars, the program will provide a launchpad to move more quickly toward the highest levels of study in a selected subject; for others, it will enhance preparation for Upper School. For example, one GRACE Scholar might choose to shore up his or her foundation for Latin 2, while another might skip Latin 2 and move directly into Latin 3. In science, one student might prepare to skip chemistry and move directly into an AP course, while another preps for success in introductory chemistry. Some GRACE Scholars also will take English to ready them for the writing required in Upper School English and history courses.

Teachers of Third Formers, with support from other faculty in their academic departments, determine which students will benefit from an invitation to participate in GRACE. To those students, the program is recommended but entirely optional.

“We’re excited to launch a program that we know will, in turn, launch our students,” says Headmaster Temba Maqubela. “GRACE recognizes the exceptional talent of Groton students as well as the varying educational experiences they have had before arriving on the Circle.”

The program, which is led by science teacher Dave Prockop, is highly academic, but still allows plenty of time for summer fun. The GRACE schedule includes afternoon activities such as swimming, hiking, and canoeing; arts programs and field trips; and off-campus outings every weekend and two evenings a week.

The program’s $6,000 tuition covers all programming, dorm housing, and meals. Aid will be available, in some cases exceeding levels allocated during the school year. Longterm, the school hopes to raise funding to endow GRACE and secure its place among Groton’s academic offerings.

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Photos by Jon Chase

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Parents Weekend

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roton School welcomed more than six hundred parents to the Circle for Parents Weekend, October 30–November 1. Visiting families, many of them new to Groton, reunited with their children; enjoyed receptions, workshops, and the annual Parents Weekend concert (see page 62); and attended a total of nearly 2,300 parent-faculty conferences.

Parents arrived from all over the world—from Bermuda, Canada, China, Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. They also represented twenty-nine of the fifty United States.

Among the weekend’s highlights were a luncheon for international parents; a special dinner for Sixth Formers, their parents, and faculty; athletic competitions; workshops covering counseling, global education, and technology; and Headmaster Temba Maqubela’s annual Parents Weekend address.

Above: Liz McCreery P’15, ’15, ’17, Laura McLaughlin P’17, Frances McCreery ’17, and Hadley Callaway ’17.

Right: Patricia Sznip P’19 with Christopher Sznip ’19.

Katherine Bradley to Head Dana Hall

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Bob Krist

n the Spring 2015 Quarterly, when we listed Groton faculty members who had gone on to head schools, we did not realize the list was about to grow.

Congratulations to the latest addition to that list, Assistant Head of School Katherine Bradley, who has been appointed the new head of Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Ms. Bradley joined Groton School as a Latin teacher in 2001 and became assistant head in 2011. She has influenced numerous students as teacher, dorm head, and advisor, and has recruited and mentored many Groton teachers.

As Groton’s assistant head, Ms. Bradley has helped manage a variety of day-to-day operations, from residential life and the Deans’ Office to the Health Center and academic, athletic, and counseling departments. Over the years, she has taught all levels of Latin and Greek and headed the Classics Department.

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She continues, now, to teach Latin and head a dorm. In fact, “Bradley’s Dorm” has been a Groton School fixture for nine years.

“The loss of Katherine Bradley is bittersweet and a huge gain to Dana Hall,” says Groton School Headmaster Temba Maqubela.

“No one has done more to help me acclimate to Groton. A stellar teacher, dedicated dorm head, skilled administrator, and loyal friend to many, Katherine will be dearly missed.” Mr. Maqubela plans to announce a new assistant head this spring.

Amidst her many contributions to Groton School, Ms. Bradley says she is particularly proud of staying in touch with students as she moved into a more administrative role. “After twenty-five years in the classroom, I wanted to be an administrator who remained focused on the kids,” she says. When she leaves Groton July 1, 2016, she says she will most miss the “strong community around the Circle,” as well as morning chapel, relationships developed with students, friendships with colleagues, and watching students and faculty children play on the Circle in the evening.

Ms. Bradley says she is looking forward to the unique opportunities at Dana Hall, a girls school founded in 1881 that serves boarders

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and day students in grades five through twelve. In particular, she says she relishes the chance “to help girls develop into well-educated and strong leaders — girls who will have a voice in the world.”

Before joining the Groton faculty, Ms. Bradley spent eight years at Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she taught Latin and English and served as college counselor and ninth grade principal. Through her classroom work and personal study over the years, she has long nurtured a scholarly interest in Cicero and Vergil. She wrote A Vergil Workbook, which is used in many AP Latin classes, and was a member of the SAT Latin subject test development committee from 2010–15.

Groton School will miss not only Katherine Bradley, but also her husband Matt McCracken and their children. “All of us at Groton wish Katherine, Matt, Degefe, and Ajaje well on this exciting and well-deserved journey,” Mr. Maqubela said. “I know the whole community, on the Circle and beyond, joins me in thanking Katherine for her outstanding service and loyalty to Groton School.”

Cambodian Flavor for Global Ed Day

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n October, Groton celebrated its annual Global Education Day to celebrate and spread enthusiasm about Groton’s global programming.

The day began with a lecture from Loung Ung (left), a Cambodian author and child and women’s rights activist.

She told the story of her youth in Cambodia and the dangers she was forced to escape

during the rule of the Khmer Rouge.

Students were inspired by her personal story and how she was able to grow from it. One of the writers of the documentary Girl Rising, Loung Ung currently is adapting one of her memoirs for the screen with actress Angelina Jolie. After her lecture, the activist

stayed at Groton for the day, visiting classes and holding discussions with students and faculty.

In addition to the speaker, the Dining Hall and Global Ed prefects organized an international lunch, followed by presentations on forthcoming global education opportunities.

— Suzy Kuczynski ’16

Christopher Temerson

Ibante Smallwood ’16

Exchange students Orlando Goffin, Abby Aitken, Robert Caesar, and Anna Baring

A True Exchange

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roton School welcomed four new exchange students to the Circle in September — Abby Aitken, Anna Baring, Robert Caesar, and Orlando Goffin, from Bedales School and Cheltenham College, both co-ed boarding schools in England. The students stayed for a month, taking classes with Groton students and participating in activities ranging from dance to American football.

The visitors truly were “exchange” students because four Groton Fourth Formers visited the British schools for a month — Noelia Carbajal and Malik Gaye at Bedales and Layla McDermott and George Zhai at Cheltenham.

The visitors brought fresh perspective — as well as a bit of Groton’s own history — to the Circle. Groton’s founder, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, was himself educated at Cheltenham.

Motivated by his experience there, he sought to create a similar school in his homeland, which led to Groton.

— Suzy Kuczynski ’16

Wise Move Gordon Gund ’57, shown with wife Lulie and Vuyelwa Maqubela, donated “George the Owl,” a bronze sculpture, to the new Schoolhouse library. As with all of Gordon’s sculptures, the directive “please touch” applies. Many alumni will recall Gordon’s exhibition at the 2012 reunion and his talk, in which he explained that he took up sculpture after losing his eyesight in 1970.

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Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge

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Photos by Christopher Temerson

BEYOND THE CIRCLE: Above, students sorting clothing for Syrian refugees with NuDay Syria; right, Maddie Ferrucci ’17 moving furniture at Household Goods Recycling of Massachusetts; below, Millie Kim ’17 and Lilias Kim ’18 at Nashoba Park Assisted Living; below right, Peter Zhang ’17 and Hanna Kim ’17 picking corn from the school garden for Groton’s Dining Hall

CUI SERVIRE in Action

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roton students participated in two Community Days of Service during fall term, gardening, performing, teaching, playing, and otherwise taking a helpful step outside the Groton Circle.

Students pruned and cleaned at a nearby arboretum, mulched and weeded a town baseball diamond, sorted used furniture for families in need, and packed donated clothing for Syrian refugees. At a local orchard, they packed apples for the hungry, and at residences for the elderly, they performed and socialized.

The Fifth and Sixth Formers’ Community Day of Service was in mid-September, while

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Second, Third, and Fourth Formers ventured into the community later in the month. Many of the older students worked on campus with students visiting from Epiphany School, which serves disadvantaged children in Boston. The school, founded by the Reverend John Finley ’88, holds a summer program at Groton School each year. Groton and Epiphany students worked together with Laurie Sales, director of the theater program, on thespian activities, and enjoyed outdoor games led by members of Groton Community Engagement (GCE) and the Student Activities Committee (SAC).

The impact of service is felt on and off the Circle. “Service Day has been very successful,

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not only in terms of the impact that Groton School students have around the community, but also in that it sets a great atmosphere at school,” said Yanni Cho ’16, a head of GCE. Groton’s Community Days of Service, organized by Director of Community Engagement and English teacher Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge, remind students to look beyond their worlds and care about neighbors.

Gisselle Salgado ’17, another GCE head, spent her service day farming.

“Although the work was hard, the final product — not just corn and weeded gardens but also the knowledge that we helped the community — was worth it in the end.”

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uthor Alex Myers, a teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy and an advocate for transgender rights, shared his story and insights with the Groton community this fall.

Myers attracted the attention of Groton students through his novel Revolutionary, which tells the story of Deborah Samson, a soldier during the Revolutionary War. Revolutionary was Groton’s Diversity and Inclusion Group’s recommended read for summer 2015.

During Myers’ October visit, he delivered two presentations.

The first, for the entire student body in the Campbell Performing Arts Center, was starkly personal, with Myers sharing intimate details about his childhood. This included details about his own gender transition and his experience as Exeter’s first openly transgender student.

Myers also discussed his personal style of political activism.

“Change begins at home,” he said, expressing his preference for devoting time to smaller projects within his community rather than to state or national movements.

The second presentation, in the Schoolhouse’s new multipurpose room, consisted of a Q&A session with the school’s Diversity and Inclusion Group. There, Myers opened up even more, fielding a variety of questions regarding his transition, personal life, experiences at Exeter, and modern-day transgender politics.

When students asked how Groton could become a more inclusive institution, Myers suggested the introduction of a gender-neutral policy or the removal of gendered language from the school handbook. Gendered pronouns used by institutions around topics such as dress code, he explained, restrict mobility of expression for closeted transgender students, who struggle enough to

Christopher Temerson

Transformative Experience

Alex Myers

express their gender identity without having to worry about school bureaucracy.

He also advocated for gender-neutral bathrooms (of which the Schoolhouse has two) and the creation of a dormitory to accommodate transgender students, who have more extensive facility needs than cisgender (non-transgender) students. Both of these, he said, would produce safer spaces for transgender students in a boarding school environment.

Myers’ presentation was part of the Diversity and Inclusion Group’s ongoing efforts to bring attention to LGBTQ issues, including a talk by New York University law professor Kenji Yoshino and the school’s November production of The Laramie Project.

— Charlie Hawkings ’17

Gail Friedman

The Lingering Power of “Laramie”

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Barbara Pitts McAdams

n early November, Groton School turned a powerful performance of The Laramie Project into an opportunity for all-school introspection.

Students were required to attend the play, which chronicles the evolving attitudes of residents of Laramie, Wyoming after the 1998 murder of a young gay man, Matthew Shepard.

One of the original cast members of The Laramie Project, Barbara Pitts McAdams, met with student leaders of Groton’s Diversity and Inclusion Group and delivered an all-school talk, in which she explained her desire to effect social change through theater.

Pitts McAdams acted not only in The Laramie Project, but also in The

Laramie Project: Ten Years Later.

She was nominated for an Emmy for outstanding writing in HBO’s version of the play.

The actress began her talk by praising Groton’s student production, in particular “the real depth with which the audience met you back.”

She touched on a wide range of topics, from her own experience being bullied to the need to examine one’s “conditioned beliefs”— beliefs that may be deeply ingrained but that are not always consciously chosen by an individual.

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Mike Sperling

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Lessons & Carols, Groton’s favorite Christmas tradition, lifted spirits again this year during three services in St. John’s Chapel.

In addition, more than nine hundred people from all over the world viewed a livestream online. Clockwise from top left: James Hovet ’18, Clement Banwell ‘19, Christian Carson ’18, Asher Philips ‘19, Phoebe Fry ‘17, and Sunny Chai ‘16.

Learning to Uncover

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Yoshino split covering into four categories based on appearance, affiliation, advocacy, and association. In a data-filled presentation, one head-turning statistic indicated that 45 percent of straight, white men surveyed reported that they covered. Less surprising

Christopher Temerson

enji Yoshino, author of the bestseller Covering, spoke at an all-school lecture in September, providing a stark look at how societal expectations force just about everyone to hide parts of themselves — to “cover.”

Yoshino, a professor at New York University Law School, defined covering as “a strategy through which an individual downplays a known stigmatized identity to blend into the mainstream.”

He explained that covering is all around and gave examples, including former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who received training to reduce the shrillness of her voice; CBS’ Julie Chen, who had eyelid surgery to reduce her Asian appearance; and even Groton alumnus Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who as president frequently hid his disability.

Yoshino distinguished between passing and covering: President Roosevelt was not passing for non-handicapped because his disability was known; FDR was covering because he felt the need to put it out of view.

The speaker noted one politician who refused to cover: Barack Obama, who years ago ignored advisors who urged him to use Barry instead of Barack. Yoshino himself told of an employer who accepted his sexual orientation yet advised him not to write about gay rights issues. He was not passing, but he was being told to cover.

Kenji Yoshino was that 83 percent of those identifying as LGBT reported covering, as did 79 percent of blacks. Yoshino pointed out that white men cover in numerous ways — by dying their hair to hide their age; hiding their working-class background, socioeconomic status, or military service; or even by claiming to go to a meeting

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when actually attending a child’s activity.

Of women surveyed, 66 percent reported covering; they may feel even more pressure than men to hide their parenting. Said Yoshino: “Men who talk about their kids get a pay bump. Women who talk about their kids get a pay decrease.”

The speaker touched on well-intentioned but sometimes misguided corporations and organizations: 93 percent of his survey respondents said their organizations stated inclusion as a value, while 78 percent said the organizations lived up to those values.

Yoshino shared solutions, encouraging listeners to consider “what might interrupt each covering demand.” He noted leaders of organizations who “uncover” first, making it easier for their underlings, and CEOs who directly welcome same-sex partners to company events.

“There’s power in authenticity as well as in assimilation,” Yoshino said.

Covering was Groton School’s Upper School summer read. Before the lecture, at sit-down dinner with faculty, members of the GSA (Gender Sexuality Alliance) and the Diversity and Inclusion Group led talks at each table about the themes in the book.

Conversation continued after the lecture as well, when students gathered at the Headmaster’s House for further discussion with Yoshino.

Hilary Callahan ’81

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Second Nature Asiya Khaki

THE LORAX.

That’s how Hilary Callahan ’81 occasionally signs an email, referring to the Dr. Seuss character who “speaks for the trees.” As the resident plant expert and chair of the biology department at Columbia’s Barnard College, she often finds herself doing exactly that: speaking for the trees, for the bushes, for the flowers, even for the food on our plates.

“Anything plant-related, it’s always, ‘Call Professor Callahan,’” she says.

Hilary is the go-to expert for anything botanical at Barnard. Recently, she spoke for a magnolia tree, consulting when the school needed to move it away from a construction project.

She co-directs Barnard’s green roof, a lovely oasis atop an academic building, used for events as varied as biology classes and yoga lessons, but also a practical solution to rainfall that can overwhelm drainage systems.

Most of the professor’s contributions, however, are in the classroom.

She says she focuses on “very basic aspects of plants”—life cycle events such as when seeds germinate and how long they take to flower. But these basic aspects have applications to complex science around climate change and agriculture. “Is this plant going to be able to continue to grow if the climate changes?” she might ask her students. “Is the crop we’re looking at right now truly optimized?”

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personae

“It overscrutinizes one aspect of the system,” Hilary has learned that it’s important to she says. The true question should be much consider genetic makeup as well as environbroader: “Should we be growing food as ment when trying to grow a bigger crop or a we are?” tastier tomato. “I would argue that a lot of She’s been asking that question for intelligent breeding for crops should focus on matching good crop function to local environ- decades. Hilary has been involved in food co-ops and community agriculture since her ments,” she says. As a researcher who teaches, doctoral days at the University of Wisconsin; she doesn’t expect to solve the world’s planttoday, she marvels at Manhattan’s rooftop related problems. “I don’t think I’m going to discover the key solution for future crops,” she gardens. Her interest in urban agriculture led her to represent Barnard at its 2014 global says. “I am aiming to be the best teacher on symposium, “Women Changing China,” the topic.” in Shanghai.

To Hilary, that means her students are This interest in plants was second nature. fully informed and ready to make their own impact. “It is very exciting to go into the class- When she was young, her grandfather often took her hiking in woods near Ayer, Massaroom with really ambitious and curious young chusetts, where she grew up. Relatives spoke women and satisfy their craving for informaeasily and knowledgably about trees, consteltion,” she says. “They really want to underlations, and insects. “How do you get kids stand. They want to be empowered with that interested in science? I don’t think it’s in the knowledge.”

» “How do you get kids interested in science? I don’t think it’s in the

classroom. It’s by looking at the stars and going in the woods and playing in the streams.”

For example, she wants her students to understand that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are a tiny piece of the agribusiness puzzle. “I think it’s amazing that people focus on GMOs,” she says. “When you start realizing how agricultural practices can involve really nasty pesticides that might be washed off by the time the food arrives on your plate but might harm streams and wildlife and damage water quality and drinking water, you see that GMOs are such a benign change. GMOs are the result of highly industrialized agriculture, which needs to be carefully regulated and thought through.”

An engaged citizen, Hilary prepares her students to take on such issues as food safety and climate change. “What I’m really concerned about is that there has been a willful ignoring and deliberate concealing about what happens between agriculture and your plate,” she says. She thinks anti-GMO activism misses the botanical forest for the trees.

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classroom,” she says. “It’s by looking at the stars and going in the woods and playing in the streams. I was able to do that because I grew up in a rural area.”

Growing up in nature built her power of observation; as her comfort and curiosity evolved, science classes just made sense. At Groton, she loved science and remembers sampling stream water and extracting chlorophyll from plants with teacher Dick Lehrbach.

But she enjoyed other subjects too. “I loved everything—French, math, Latin. To me, it was never a conscious decision that I wanted to be a scientist.”

Her career was the natural outgrowth of what she loved to do: to watch, explore, experiment. Today, even in the middle of New York City, she’s still doing it.

—Gail Friedman

Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge, Faculty

A Search for Self in Words and Deeds BACK IN the fall of 2013, when Jonathan Freeman-

Coppadge started teaching at Groton, it didn’t take me long to realize what a terrific addition he was to our English Department. He was, after all, more than just a new colleague; he also happened to be my daughter’s Third Form English instructor—and, as it turned out, someone we all quickly came to respect for his thoughtful, conscientious, learned approach to teaching.

Jonathan grew up in Liberty, Pennsylvania (population: 500). Life in Liberty centered around his

family’s Protestant sect, the Plymouth Brethren, whom he describes as “evangelical, mildly fundamentalist, Biblical literalists.” To a teenaged Jonathan, it felt like a club.

“The ‘saved’ club,” Jonathan half joked. “It wasn’t a mean club. You tried to get people to join, but you felt sorry for those who didn’t.”

His notion of faith broadened while an undergrad at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. There he attended a progressive church (where he met his now husband, Darren) that was “much more open

Tom Kates

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to diverse points of view” than the faith community of his youth.

He was also inspired by St. John’s student-centered education, which he says influenced his own classroom approach.

His career path took hold early on. “I’m an English teacher because I wanted to be my English teachers growing up,” Jonathan says. “I thought they had the best job in the world.” He still marvels at the

role vocal performance has played in his life. Also, as an unabashed Francophile myself, I couldn’t help but like Jonathan even more when I realized how much he appreciates French culture, how well he speaks the language, and how many terrific stories he has to tell about his experiences in France.

I’m always curious about Americans who, without a French passport or a French parent, learn

» “I’m an English teacher because I wanted to be my English teachers growing up.” transformation he witnesses among his students: “You essentially watch a human being get created. They come in as lumps of clay and they leave as sculptures—not always finished, but showing real progress. I can’t think of anything more exciting than watching people come to be.”

Literature is a tool Jonathan uses to help students evolve. He relishes the authentic, lively conversation about books in Groton classes, something he did not experience in a previous teaching job. “If there’s a pause in the conversation, it’s because students are thinking,” he says.

“That’s perfect for me.”

While Jonathan and I had teaching English in common, it took me a bit longer to learn that we share two interests that have little to do with our glamorous teaching lives: choral singing and the French language. Many Groton students and teachers know that Mr. F-C loves to sing (he is a regular presence in our Chapel Choir), but may not realize what a lovely baritone voice he has and how important a 12

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to converse beautifully, and who understand that France is more than just baguette, brie, and béarnaise.

Here’s the story behind Jonathan’s French connection: Just a few months after graduating from St. John’s College, the French Ministry of Education hired Jonathan to teach English to high school students in Troyes, France—ninety-three miles southeast of Paris (a job I now wish I had pursued). Fortunately, Jonathan arrived in France with a solid background in the language: in addition to having read a number of canonical French philosophical and literary texts at St. John’s, he also attended Middlebury’s intensive French language school the summer before his senior year. Because Jonathan is the kind of person who thrives on being engaged with the community in which he lives, it didn’t surprise me one bit to learn that one of his more enriching experiences in France involved a local community choir in Troyes. As the lone American in an ensemble of mostly middle-aged Troyens, he not only had the chance

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to sing some beautiful French sacred music but also managed to make a number of good friends in town.

Jonathan is immersed in the community here at Groton, too, in part through his role as advisor to Groton Community Engagement. He expanded the school’s service program to include two all-school service days a year, and—on principle—changed its name from Groton Community Service to Groton Community Engagement. “The philosophical aspect of engagement has to do with coming alongside rather than coming down to,” he explains.

He wants students to think about building relationships when they volunteer. “I want them to think not in terms of projects but in terms of people. Look at who I met, what I learned about life,” he says.

A deep commitment to service comes not from his childhood faith (“Plymouth Brethren thought the world was lost, so why bother saving it?”), but instead from the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Conference, which he attended as a high school sophomore and served as a volunteer for fifteen subsequent years.

There are many things, of course, that I have yet to learn about the newest member of the Groton English Department, but I know that there will be plenty of dinner parties in the future where I can discover some of his other talents, experiences, and interests. I also hope that, one day, our families can find a way to spend some time together in France.

Perhaps we might even find a way to sing together there.

—Peter Fry P’15, ’17, English teacher

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Groton’s entrepreneurs are innovators and intrepid risk-takers. Some are motivated by profit, others by the chance to change the world — or the people in it.

The following stories introduce just a sampling of the Groton graduates who have built their own businesses. They don’t include the significant number who have started firms in everything from law and finance to PR and interior design.

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While these entrepreneurs have succeeded, they also have flirted with failure. Join them as they relate the ups and downs (and twists and turns) of starting a business.

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IN FEBRUARY 2015, KEVIN LENANE ’99 SOLD HIS VIDEO DATA COMPANY, VEENOME, TO INTEGRAL AD SCIENCE. HE WORKED AT SEVERAL COMPANIES, INCLUDING NOKIA, POINTABOUT, AND NAVTEQ, BEFORE CO-FOUNDING VEENOME.¶ KEVIN SHARES A FRANK ACCOUNT OF THE UPS AND DOWNS THAT PRECEDED VEENOME’S SALE, FOCUSING ON TRAITS HE CONSIDERS ESSENTIAL TO A SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURIAL VENTURE: RISK TOLERANCE, PERSEVERANCE, FLEXIBILITY, AND SELF-AWARENESS.¶

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ALL IN by

Kevin Lenane ’99 IT WAS the most decisive train ride I would ever take. But I

Daniel Rosenbaum/The New York Times/Redux

wouldn’t know that for four more years.

In April 2011, I was headed home to Washington after a trip to New York with my future wife. After listening to her well-tuned pitch on the benefits of moving to Long Island (her Amtrak ritual), I began to work out a problem in my head. And then out loud. That was my Amtrak ritual. I’d toss out my standard “wouldn’t it be cool if,” talk through my idea, and then let it die.

This time was different. I’m not sure why. I think I was just ready.

I was working at a company called PointAbout, building an app for a military contractor to help perform maintenance on predator drones. Since security was vital, soldiers had to sign in with military ID numbers, which were long and difficult to remember. Rather than having soldiers type the numbers in, we had them photograph their IDs and use image recognition software to capture the number. The problem was, the software wasn’t working: distance or the camera’s flash consistently interfered, generating the wrong ID number.

Somewhere between the trademark drone of Amtrak’s loudspeaker and the resounding chorus of conference calls, the idea struck me: why not use video recognition software instead of a photo? A few seconds of video provides many frames, essentially a blast of photos. Odds are the majority would be high-enough quality to get the ID number right. But when I looked for a vendor to provide the technology, I couldn’t find one.

I knew this technology would have uses way beyond the mobile app I was building. And so began Veenome, a journey that started on that train and included dozens of derailed sales calls, depleted funds, and even the decision to completely revamp the company’s mission eight months in.

Video recognition technology basically means identifying objects in a video. That’s a dress, that’s a car, that’s a skateboard, that’s a shoe. As I developed the technology, it seemed the best application would be in commerce. So that’s what the first iteration of Veenome

www.groton.org

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GROTON ENTREPRENEURS Paley Center

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Kevin Lenane ’99, third from right, took home the Paley Center for Media’s Next Big Thing Award.

AFTER A MONTH, I HAD PITCHED MORE THAN FIFTY INVESTORS. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM SAID NO. was (the name is a play on genome, or the “DNA” of a video). It eliminated the ads that run before videos on sites like YouTube by giving advertisers a direct channel to consumers through the video itself. Our technology identified products in videos that viewers could click on, generating a new kind of ad revenue. In other words, click to buy that dress, that car, that skateboard, that shoe.

Potential customers and other entrepreneurs expressed enough confidence in the idea that I decided to go all in. I used my savings. When those ran out, I cashed in my 401(k). When that money was gone, I sold my watch. At later stages, this risk-taking was meaningful to investors. If the founder didn’t go all in, why should they?

Soon after I poured all my personal capital into the company, I realized I needed outside investors. I talked to my mentors. I refined my demo. Once I felt I had a compelling story, I began to pitch.

It was an unmitigated disaster.

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I didn’t know answers to basic questions. I was generally nervous. I moved way too fast.

After a month, I had pitched more than fifty investors. Every single one of them said no. It was grueling. I was waking up at 4:00 a.m., working until 8:00 a.m., going into my day job an hour later, leaving at 6:00 p.m., doing investor pitches on the West Coast until 9:00 p.m., and working until 11:00 p.m.

Then I’d do it again the next day. And the day after that. At the end of each day, I had nothing to show for it. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to raise money, but I had no idea how psychologically draining it would be.

But I kept going. And eventually, after six months of talking to a hundred investors at least three times each, I found seven who actually committed to invest. Sometimes I wonder how I didn’t quit after the first fifty said no. I knew other start-up founders who had similar ratios of pitches vs. committed investors,

Winter 2016

but I think I stuck it out because I stayed in the day. If I had really stepped back and taken stock of the whole thing, I think I would have quit. Staying in the moment saved it.

Thanks to those seven investors, I raised $500,000 in angel capital. Then the work really started. We spent the next eight months building our clickable video solution and pitching it to customers. We generated great press, winning the Paley Center’s Next Big Thing award (Jenny Stybel ’99, then working for the Paley Center, helped get us an audition). We received positive coverage at SXSW and in media including the Washington Post.

But there was a problem: no one was buying the product.

Everyone we pitched was simply making too much money off of traditional pre-roll video advertising to consider our clickable products.

One rejection in August 2011 was a turning point. We had approached a

I HAD LENT THE COMPANY ALL MY MONEY; I DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH TO PAY MY OWN MARCH RENT. WE RAN THE RISK OF NOT HAVING THE FUNDING TO OPERATE. Swedish video company and, as usual, the pitch went nowhere. But at the end of the third meeting, the CEO asked if he could get the data that we created to make the clickable layer on the video, without getting the actual layer. In other words, he wanted to know what we were identifying in the videos to better match video ads to video content.

If we identified cars in a video, he could show a car ad, knowing that consumers would respond well to it since they already had chosen to watch a video that featured cars. The Swedish company estimated how much value this would add to their advertisements. They offered us $20,000 a month.

It was a big moment for the company. What if we provided data to our customers and completely scratched clickable video? Could we make this kind of revenue from everyone if we refined the product? After running the concept by a few more customers, we realized we had to make a tough decision. We had spent the last eight months building clickable video technology, the original “passion” behind the company. We had to decide whether to trash the concept and become a data provider.

Ultimately, it came down to numbers. We had to ignore the positive press, which wasn’t paying the bills, and give customers what they wanted to buy. Our adaptability allowed us to grow from a company with almost zero revenue to one with seven-figure revenue. It was hard to move away from our initial idea, but without the change, we would have burned through our initial funding and, without any revenue traction to speak of, wouldn’t have raised the subsequent $2 million that we needed to succeed.

As we transitioned, I began to analyze the exit potential of our new

company, and it became clear that we no longer had the billion-dollar potential that we once did. Venture capitalists tend to invest in companies they think can return their investments by twenty times or more. So if we raised, say, $5 million and valued our company at $20 million, then the venture capitalists would expect us to end up as a $400 million-plus company. I knew our company, while still of significant value to the right buyer, wouldn’t be worth that much, so I refined our story and raised money from investors who would be interested in a six- or eightfold return.

With so many huge ventures in the news, it was tempting to raise a larger round of capital, and the money was available. But I didn’t want to wind up having to refuse a good offer because of our investors’ expectations. This awareness of company ego allowed us to exit when we did. All of our investors were on the same page and were thrilled when the offers finally came in.

In November 2014, when we were embarking on a new effort to attract investment, four companies expressed interest in buying Veenome. After meeting all the suitors, we settled on a buyer on Christmas Day. Except the ride wasn’t over.

Multiple small issues delayed our sale, intended for late January 2015. Since we had put off fundraising and traveled around the country with seven people, we didn’t have enough money to make payroll in February, and my co-founder and I had to loan the company money.

Because I’d paid myself the absolute minimum livable wage, this loan represented every dollar I had.

February brought more delays— negotiations around taxes, new employee salaries, and other issues. As the end of

the month drew near, things got tense.

I had lent the company all my money; I didn’t have enough to pay my own March rent. We ran the risk of not having the funding to operate.

After months of grueling negotiations, more sleepless nights than I can count, and—I’ll admit it—some tears, it finally happened.

At 7:57 p.m. on Friday, February 27, 2015, three minutes before the official corporate deadline for the month, we closed the deal. Just like that, we went from not being able to turn on the lights to an eight-figure exit. All of our employees and investors, including my parents, Brian and Susan Lenane, and consultant Peter Oliver ’99, benefited from the sale.

From military IDs to clickable video to advertising technology, I think the most valuable thing I learned was that as a company, you adapt or you die. Sort of like life.

My wife still hasn’t given up on her Long Island pitch, and I still start a lot of sentences with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if.” Not sure a move is in our future, but I do know I’ll eventually think something is cool enough to start the journey again.

Hopefully this time I won’t have to sell my watch.

www.groton.org

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Naa-Sakle Akuete ’04

SKIN DEEP

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Jaclyn Brown

In 2014, Naa-Sakle Akuete ’04 was fresh out of Harvard Business School and working on Wall Street. As an analyst for JPMorgan Chase, she guided clients toward investments with growth potential. She was living the dream.

Only problem: it was someone else’s dream. An entrepreneur at heart, she had a dream of her own.

In April 2015, Naa-Sakle launched Eu’Genia Shea, a cosmetic company offering skin care products with high concentrations of pure shea butter, a natural balm that moisturizes and can hasten healing. She named the company for her mother and inspiration, Eu’Genia. That was only fair. Her mom, a successful shea butter wholesaler, had named her company Naasakle.

By day, Naa-Sakle was analyzing stocks at JPMorgan and, on nights and weekends, was packing her shea butter into tiny tins. Boxes of shea butter lined the basement of her brownstone—aka company headquarters—in the BedfordStuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.

With consumers’ increasing interest in the source and purity of cosmetics, Naa-Sakle was convinced the marketplace would appreciate shea butter from Ghana, the country from which her parents fled following a coup in 1979. She says all of her products contain 95 percent shea butter, compared to other skin care lines that advertise shea butter but use much lower concentrations, generally well under 25 percent. “It’s usually the fifteenth ingredient,” Naa-Sakle says.

Eu’Genia Shea includes products for everyday use, for pregnant women (and their stretch marks), and for customers with more serious dermatologic needs, such as psoriasis.

Subscriptions are available for customers who want their dermal indulgence to arrive monthly.

With dogged determination and a knack for attracting media attention (without professional PR help), Naa-Sakle got Eu’Genia Shea onto the New York Times’ list of Mother’s Day gift suggestions. She was profiled in Fast Company and featured on MSNBC. “I was working two jobs and got spikes in business when there was media attention,” she recalls. Working with farmers in Ghana and with container manufacturers in China—and still going to work on Wall Street each day—she realized she needed to focus. By August

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Naa-Sakle Akuete ‘04 at her wedding with her mother, Eugenia, for whom she named her company

BY DAY, NAA-SAKLE WAS ANALYZING STOCKS AT JP MORGAN AND, ON NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS, WAS PACKING HER SHEA BUTTER INTO TINY TINS. 2015, Naa-Sakle had quit JPMorgan to devote all her time to Eu’Genia Shea—a courageous leap.

She learned as she went, handling details that were entirely new to her, from finding an affordable graphic designer for the packaging to making sales calls. The journey hasn’t been as smooth as the butter. After receiving a high-quality container sample from a manufacturer in China, she ordered their tins. She didn’t realize that the new tins leaked until after she had sent products packed in them to Barneys New York, which was considering carrying

Eu’Genia. Not a good first impression.

With a new manufacturer and container problems solved, Eu’Genia Shea is in a few New York boutiques and aims to be on shelves of high-end retailers, but for now sells almost entirely online at eugeniashea.org. As the orders roll in, Naa-Sakle is still hand-packaging at home, gauging when to seek the investment that would lead to more professional manufacturing.

Through ups and downs, she’s motivated by the good she is doing—and not only for customers with dry skin.

The more Eu’Genia Shea that Americans

slather on, the better for the femalerun shea cooperative in Ghana. The company pays the women 20 percent more than the country’s median income and channels 15 percent of profits to a fund that covers the cost of educating the workers’ children.

Turn over a tin of Eu’Genia Shea and you’ll see the Ghanaian crest on the bottom, a clue that—purity aside—this is a very different kind of balm. It heals skin, supports mothers, and honors a family’s heritage.

—Gail Friedman

www.groton.org

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TOM GARDNER ’86

HIS FOOLISH BEST IN THE fall of 1985, the Groton football team was a perfect 7–0 under the guidance of legendary head coach Jake Congleton. Thanks to Facebook, you can watch a grainy video taken just before that year’s St. Mark’s game that shows co-captains Tom Gardner ’86 and David Archer ’86 firing up the team and screaming, “Are you ready?”

Tom Gardner is still asking that question today. Are you ready for the workplace of tomorrow? Are you financially ready for your retirement? As CEO and co-chairman of the board of The Motley Fool, Tom has built a business around asking these questions, and hundreds of thousands of devoted Motley Fool readers use his answers to guide their investment strategies.

Thirty years ago, Tom did not give much indication that his future would be in technology and investments. His

and long-distance driving until his older brother, David (St. Mark’s ’84 and co-chairman of The Motley Fool), lured him back to the East Coast with an idea for a new business.

David and Tom launched a newsletter with an improbable dual focus on finance and literature. It was 1993, so a newsletter meant a printed work on paper that was mailed with a stamp to a physical address. They sent out 2,000 copies of Volume I, Number 1 of The Motley Fool and asked people to subscribe for about $50 per year. Thirteen people signed up. (Tom thanks the members of the Form of 1986!).

As they tried to grow the newsletter, they also started playing around with something new called America Online, participating in online forums and building a following among people interested in getting control of their personal finances and investments. Eventually, Tom and David became so

TOM LOVES A QUOTE BY ELON MUSK: “BEING AN ENTREPRENEUR IS LIKE EATING GLASS AND STARING INTO THE ABYSS OF DEATH.” online bio notes that he “has been formally trained in just about everything but finance.” But his informal training was significant: at Tom’s birth, his father, Paul Gardner ’55, invested some savings on his behalf. The real gift, however, “was teaching us how to invest,” Tom says. “He taught us throughout childhood and adolescence about companies like our hometown Washington Post.” When Tom turned eighteen, management of the portfolio became his responsibility, but he wasn’t quite ready for the job. “I was too interested in my studies at Brown and asked Dad to just continue managing it for me, though we talked about his decisions,” he says.

After graduating from Brown with a degree in English and creative writing, Tom decided to drive to San Francisco.

Along the way, he stopped in Missoula, Montana, and enrolled at the University of Montana, taking graduate courses in linguistics and geography. He did three years of graduate work 20

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popular on AOL that The Motley Fool went 100 percent online at Fool.com, replacing the printed newsletter.

In the early days, when Internet access was difficult to figure out and expensive, The Fool was able to attract talented contributors essentially for free by offering them free AOL subscriptions. Rob deBaun ’86, known by his Motley Fool name “MF Wolf,” was one of the many contributors whose own later online ventures, such as MomsOnline, had roots in the Motley Fool chat rooms.

Tom freely admits that over the past twenty-plus years, he has “made every mistake and learned from them.” For a time after the dot-com bubble burst, The Motley Fool’s work force dropped from 350 to less than one hundred, and the company struggled under its debt burden.

Tom loves a quote by Elon Musk: “Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.” Unlike

most of the dot-coms, The Fool had real revenues and real content. Rather than folding up their tent or asking for massive concessions from investors, Tom and his team set to work building The Motley Fool into an even better company. Along the way, they paid back every dollar invested by dot-com era venture capitalists.

In 2007, Tom became CEO, and the company has thrived. Today, from its headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, the company runs its flagship website as well as websites in the UK, Australia, Canada, and Singapore. The formula is simple: provide reliable investment advice.

Snappy headlines—“3 Predictions That Were Totally Wrong in 2015”— attract readers to savvy information.

Tom and his brother, David, keep it understandable, and, on a good day, even amusing. But they always keep it solid, sharing advice about saving, investing, finding passion in your work, and serving others. “Our investment approach is to essentially buy great companies and never sell them—very counter to Wall Street,” says Tom. “If you wanted to include some of our favorites over the last twenty years: Amazon, Netflix, Google, Starbucks—all have been major wins. It’s a reminder that these investments are right in front of all of us.

We use them every day or month, and they make for excellent investments.”

Perhaps more than The Fool’s astute investment guidance, Tom—who signs his emails “My foolish best”—is proud of the corporate culture that he has helped build. The Motley Fool is ferociously dedicated to the work-life balance of its employees. As the company’s website says: “People should have the freedom leadership of legendary crew coach Todd to follow their passion every day in roles Jesdale, the boys thirds basketball team they love. We work hard to understand was 12–0. Prior to the game, Mr. Jesdale the needs of our employees and deliver gathered the team at the bench, but for them. We are confident that this, didn’t give the traditional pep talk. He in turn, makes a great business.” The walked into the huddle, asked the boys if recruiting site Glassdoor agrees, naming they were ready, then headed toward the The Motley Fool the best small- to bleachers, telling them over his shoulder, medium-sized company to work for in “Then you all coach the game yourselves.

2014 and 2015.

You’re ready.”

Back in the winter of 1982–83, They were, and they finished the Tom was on another team that entered season 13–0. its final game undefeated. Under the

These days, Tom hopes that the hours of preparation that The Motley Fool’s community members put into ensuring their financial security will make them ready for what the future holds. As he would ask, “Are you ready?”

—John Jacobsson ’86

www.groton.org

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Thushan Amarasiriwardena

“IT’S NOT LIKE BEING AN ENTREPRENEUR IS A PROFESSION. IT’S A PERSONALITY.”

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Michael Keating ’95

PERPETUAL MOTION SCOOT FOUNDER Michael Keating ’95 found his perfect

prototype quite accidentally, while browsing at a bike shop in Berkeley, California.

There it was, a simple, electric, Vespa-style scooter.

Michael described it as “the perfect combination of cheap and fast and green and fun.” Everything he was trying to accomplish fell into place around that little scooter.

Before founding Scoot, which connects San Francisco with bright red electric scooters, Michael had been working on transportation initiatives at OpenPlans, an urban-focused software company in New York City. He researched public transportation innovations and, determined to help the Earth, studied ways to reduce pollution.

Realizing that the most entrenched problem, and a hardto-break habit, was our love affair with cars, Michael wanted to offer an alternative that people would embrace. “Electric motorbikes are better than a car in the city for most things,” he says. “They’re cheaper. They’re faster. They don’t get stuck in traffic.” For short trips that don’t require high speeds, they seemed a perfect way to get around—clean, and a lot of fun.

Michael left OpenPlans and moved to San Francisco, a hub for green tech start-ups, where—inspired by bike-shares and Zipcar—he began to build Scoot. Friends introduced him to angel investors, and Michael participated in a startup accelerator for guidance. Scoot went live three years ago with thirty-five scooters, but now has 350, as well as ten two-person “quad” electric mini-cars. It is the largest private electric transportation service in the country. Riders turn on the vehicles by docking their smartphones. At $4 a half-hour (or $2 for those who pay a $19 monthly fee), the scooters draw riders who might otherwise hop on a bus or take an Uber.

Anyone who knew Michael growing up won’t be surprised that he’s running an environmentally conscious company. He was enraged by polluters even in junior high and deepened his knowledge—and his indignation—in David Black’s environmental science class at Groton. He majored in art at Wesleyan and temporarily put his environmental interests aside, but after dabbling in start-ups during the dot-com boom, he took a job with the Sierra Club. “I did eventually return to it and realized it was an important part of my identity,” he says.

Scoot may be a form of environmental activism, but it’s also a challenging business, and the multidimensional demands draw on all of Michael’s expertise (after the Sierra Club, Michael earned master’s degrees in both urban planning and business administration at Harvard). “It’s a business where we have to do a whole bunch of things well—get good scooters, maintain them, park and recharge them all over San Francisco, and track and manage them with our own software,” he says. To ensure safety, they also teach novices how to ride before letting them check out a vehicle.

“It makes it really fun—going from marketing to instruction to technology,” he says, but adds, “We didn’t really know how difficult it would be to have such a complex business.”

The bumps on the path to building a company are not for everyone. While the rewards of entrepreneurship can be great, Michael warns that it’s far from a logical career path. “It’s not like being an entrepreneur is a profession,” he says. “It’s a personality.”

Michael cites his own traits of impatience and ambition as key. “You’re not as interested in what other people think you should be doing,” he says of the typical entrepreneur. “A lot of people want to be part of an institution, a history, a team.

That’s valid and important, but entrepreneurs want to set their own priorities and define their own terms.”

Michael continues to define his. Scoot plans to launch in cities outside San Francisco in the coming year, beginning the process of bringing Scoot to the hundreds of cities that already have bike sharing and car sharing. The company is not yet profitable, but he expects it will be in 2016. And there are other measures of success. A survey last spring uncovered scores of customers who said they had given up their car because of Scoot.

That’s part of Michael’s big ambition for these little scooters. The goal is not to make a fortune, though that would be nice. “Scoot,” he says, “was created to be a part of the solution to climate change.”

—Gail Friedman

www.groton.org

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Jonathan Butler ’87

BROOKLYN BELIEVER EVERYONE KNOWS that Brooklyn is hip. The New York

City borough, once in the shadow of Manhattan, has become a symbol of creativity and independent thought. Brooklyn has become a brand. Brooklyn is even an adjective.

But it wasn’t always that way. The re-imagination of Brooklyn has been gradual, and Jonathan Butler ’87 has played an important role. He didn’t set out to rebrand his hometown, but he developed some of the businesses—Brooklyn Flea, Smorgasburg, and Brownstoner—that helped define it.

Right out of Princeton, Jonathan took what he called “the expected path”—to a job on Wall Street. After earning his MBA, he dallied with venture capital, a financial newsletter, a furniture design company, real estate investment, and tried to start a hedge fund. “I’ve done some random things,” he says.

“The common thread is that I figured out pretty early on that I didn’t want to have a traditional career path. Something in me wasn’t going to be fulfilled by that. My first job in money management—I was OK at it, but I didn’t really care about it.”

Shortly before taking a job at Merrill Lynch in 2005, he started a blog about Brooklyn real estate called Brownstoner.

He had no idea it would ultimately lead him out of finance and on the road to becoming one of Brooklyn’s foremost entrepreneurs.

Jonathan loved the house hunting that led him to purchase a brownstone in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn in 2004. “I had fun going through listings,” he says.

“I found I had a little hole in my life no longer having a house to chase down.” The only real estate blog at the time in New York, Curbed, rarely strayed from Manhattan. So he began Brooklyn-centric Brownstoner, which provided a little profit and a lot of credibility for the ventures that would follow.

Brooklyn was ascendant, but at that point, few had capitalized on it. When Jonathan asked his readers what they thought the hottest neighborhood would be in 2005, three hundred posted comments within a few hours. “I knew I was on to something,” he says.

In early 2007, he quit his job to focus full-time on Brownstoner, which then had close to a million page views each month. He lived off his Wall Street bonus for the first few months while building up an ad revenue stream to support 24

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himself. The biggest success, however, was still to come.

Jonathan had always enjoyed flea markets, and he lamented that many in Manhattan had closed when development ate their open lots. Brooklyn, on the other hand, had plenty of open space and, he reasoned, residents who would appreciate a flea market’s bargains and crafts.

Leveraging the media platform he’d created in Brownstoner, he got the word out quickly about his new idea. “I was uniquely positioned to organize a flea market because I had the biggest website in Brooklyn,” he says. After the first call for vendors, at least eighty signed up within two days. Because Brownstoner was known and respected, Jonathan was wellpositioned to navigate through neighborhood hearings and permitting.

In April 2008, he opened Brooklyn Flea. “That pretty quickly became more significant to my take-home pay than the blog,” he says.

Brooklyn Flea opened with about one hundred carefully chosen vendors. “From day one, we curated the mix,” Jonathan says. “It was more art than science.” He rejected anyone selling mass-produced goods and welcomed antiques, vintage clothing, and certain handcrafted items. But Brooklyn Flea also sold food, which became so popular that, three years later, it spawned Smorgasburg, a giant weekly food festival in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which eventually eclipsed Brooklyn Flea in popularity.

Jonathan has become the city’s go-to vendor for a bar in a hurry. He provided the booze at Mayor Bill de Blasio’s inaugural party and caters beer and food for the fifty or so SummerStage concerts in Central Park.

In 2011, again prescient about Brooklyn neighborhoods on the rise, Jonathan spearheaded a development in Crown Heights that turned a 150,000-square-foot garage into offices, a food court, and a beer hall, Berg’n. He successfully coldcalled Goldman Sachs to get their backing for what became a $30 million project .

In a way, Jonathan’s own success could limit his future opportunities. “We have to be agile; the whole business model depends on getting large spaces in New York City for not too much money, so we do it in spaces that may not be around

Matthew Stinchcomb

THIS ENTREPRENEUR BELIEVES HIS BIGGEST CONTRIBUTION IS NOT IN HIS OWN BUSINESSES, BUT IN OTHERS THAT LAUNCHED BECAUSE OF HIS. forever,” says Jonathan, who has moved his markets several times. “The down side to the boom in Brooklyn is there’s less open space.”

This entrepreneur believes his biggest contribution is not in his own businesses, but in others that launched because of his. “I think of our markets as business incubators, from an economic development standpoint,” he says. At least twenty restaurateurs have gone from launching a food concept in a tent at Smorgasburg to owning their own brick-and-mortar location. “In another time, they would have had to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to see

if someone liked their tacos,” he says.

The biggest success to date has been Mighty Quinn’s Barbecue, which was at Smorgasburg on opening day and now has seven locations.

Through all these ventures, Jonathan has tried to keep his risk low by focusing on businesses that don’t require a lot of capital. He tried to recreate Brownstoner in Philadelphia, only to realize that New York’s unique real estate market was key to profits. He also launched flea markets in Philadelphia and Washington, DC, but closed both after they failed to reach the critical mass he needed.

On his home turf, Jonathan has been

wildly successful, which he attributes in large part to being trustworthy. “I’m definitely a soft sell kind of guy,” he says. “I’m not pushy. People tend to trust me after meeting me.” He earned that trust, and built his reputation, on his track record. He was sensitive to the communities he entered, worked carefully with local politicians, and kept his promises.

The city of New York trusts Jonathan, but he has trusted the city too.

He believed in Brooklyn. Now so does everyone else.

—Gail Friedman

www.groton.org

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Virginia Rhoads ’82

LEADING THE LEADERS THE EPIPHANY came at her ten-year Groton reunion,

where Virginia Rhoads ’82 listened to herself describing her work to her formmates. Even though she had a coveted job at General Mills, she began wondering: Was managing Trix cereal how she wanted to make her mark on the world?

She couldn’t have imagined that, within a few years of the reunion, she would make that mark as a motivational executive leadership coach, using horses, wilderness retreats, and international travel to inspire and mentor the sort of executives who had once been her own bosses.

“It was like an early mid-life crisis,” recalls Virginia, who views her career moves after college and her MBA at Dartmouth’s Tuck School as a series of “easy, path-welltraveled” choices. “I no longer wanted to organize my life around continuing on that path,” she says.

When she returned home to Minnesota after her Groton reunion, she quit her job, sold her house, and planned a threemonth backpacking trip to Nepal. There, along the trekking trails and teahouses, she befriended several senior staff members from Outward Bound and realized that it might be possible to combine her corporate background with her love of adventure, learning, and teaching. With an offer to run corporate retreats for the adventure company upon her return, Virginia’s career as an executive leadership coach was born.

The first client of her own materialized right after an Outward Bound team-building workshop, when an executive offered her contract work with Nike’s leadership development group. Virginia began shuttling to Nike’s Oregon headquarters every few weeks to help design and facilitate outdoor experiential leadership programs for teams throughout the company.

Despite a steep learning curve, Virginia’s practice grew through word-of-mouth referrals by clients who saw their teams work better together after Virginia’s help. By the late nineties, her consultancy took off, with numerous year-long coaching contracts with C-level executives. Virginia was leading five or six coaching sessions in a typical day.

Even as her business expanded, Virginia was all too aware that it was no small risk to walk away from roles inside corporate America to attempt to guide it from the outside. It’s not 26

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Virginia Rhoads ’82, far right, uses a horse to help a client tap her leadership potential.

as if she were building widgets; she was, and is, her product.

“As I get older, I am moving along with my clients to ask the bigger life-business questions. How do we as business leaders enjoy success but let that success really fuel a life in balance?” she says. “It is no longer just about clients leading the business, but also about their legacies—not just within their companies, but also the impact on their families, their communities, and the environment.”

Virginia and her husband and business partner John McConnell continually refine the experiences that will aid their transformational work with clients. Over the past fifteen years, they have taken executives deep into the Amazon rainforest, trekked along an ancient trail in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, hiked at the base of the glacial fields in Chilean Patagonia, and sailed a historic hundred-year-old schooner in Puget Sound.

More recently, Virginia has used horses at their fourteenacre ranch on Whidbey Island off the coast of Washington state. “Our goal in a session with a horse is for clients to learn how to become more congruent with their thoughts, their emotions, their hearts, and the wisdom that comes from their physical body,” she says. “The horse responds immediately and without judgment to a person leading from a congruent state, and will ignore or avoid someone who is trying to persuade, dominate, convince, or pretend. There is often a profound and deeply moving ‘aha’ moment for the client, who is then able to make connections with how they inspire, lead, and motivate back at their workplace.”

Virginia credits her vision to her executive father, who prioritized employee well-being and customer satisfaction over quarterly financial results, and to her adventuresome mother, who loved to explore other cultures. But she credits Groton as well, particularly the school’s sense that “we are all in it together.”

“At Groton we had the privilege of being able to question the way things were done in the world; our opinions as young people were deeply valued and paid attention to,” she explains.

“Having that support growing up was central to believing I had something of value to teach and offer business leaders.”

—Nichole Bernier

John McConnell

“IT IS NO LONGER JUST ABOUT CLIENTS LEADING THE BUSINESS, BUT ALSO ABOUT THEIR LEGACIES — NOT JUST WITHIN THEIR COMPANIES, BUT ALSO THE IMPACT ON THEIR FAMILIES, THEIR COMMUNITIES, AND THE ENVIRONMENT.” www.groton.org

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GROTON ENTREPRENEURS

“YOU’RE THE PERSON THROUGH WHOM A LOT OF UNCERTAINTY HAS TO BECOME CERTAINTY.”

Mikael Buck

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Alex Klein ’08

Leo Dawson

TECHNOLOGY entrepreneurship, for progressed, Alex visited a classroom to Alex Klein ’08, ricochets between the test his prototype kits (“the kids groaned; fun of a childhood game and the pressure here’s another guy talking to them of a high-stakes adult gamble. As CEO about Internet safety”). He asked how and founder of Kano, a company that they thought computers worked. Their develops computer kits for kids of all answer: “cables under the ocean.” “Who ages, he makes coding simple and fun. here,” he asked them, “thinks they can But at 25 and a newly minted Forbes “30 build a computer?” No hands went up. under 30,” he finds himself in a strikingly “But sure enough, they grabbed the adult place. kits and did it. I remember this nine“As an entrepreneur, you have to be year-old who said, ‘Our parents think very decisive, move quickly. Sometimes we’re incapable. But we’re superchildren!’” it’s best not to show doubt,” he says from It cemented Alex’s belief that technology his office in London, where he moved needed to be, quite literally, child’s play. after earning his master’s of philosophy “The last PC revolution was people being at Cambridge. “It can be quite lonely able to use computers without pulling at times. You’re the person through their hair out. The next revolution is whom a lot of uncertainty has to become being able to make computers.” So far, certainty.”

Kano has sold 70,000 computer kits in Alex’s certainty has been the premise eighty-six countries. that anyone, anywhere, should be able to Becoming a high-tech innovator is build their own affordable computer— a long way from his Groton years as a and in many parts of the world, they “theater geek.” He credits Groton with need to. “Look at sub-Saharan Africa teaching him to be an independent and parts of Asia. They may have smartthinker and to settle more confidently phones, but they are interested in buildinto his own skin. “It can be a hard place ing solutions like, ‘How do I set up a to show one’s own stripes socially and small radio station and broadcast, or how academically,” he says. “I was a bit of a do I charge my battery when the grid spaz, and Groton taught me to level up.” goes down?’” His goal: to unleash the After studying politics at Yale, Alex power of computers first for children in became a cultural journalist for the New the guise of a toy, and then more broadly Republic, the Daily Beast, and Newsweek. to the population. “It’s a sea change,” he When he talks about entrepreneurship— says, “and it starts with the nine-year-old. specifically, about responsibility and They’ve had a foothold [in technology] taking risks—he draws on comparisons since they were sentient.” to journalism.

Kano was conceived in 2012, after “As a journalist, you’re always looking Alex was dared by his six-year-old cousin for information, trying to understand to make building a computer as easy as things through varying perspectives. You playing with Legos. As his prototype have to find the truth, gather as much

«

HI-TECH CHILD’S PLAY

Alex Klein ’08 created a Kano kit so even small children could use it to build a computer.

information as possible. As new data comes to light, you have to be willing to change your mind and then turn around and make it all comprehensible,” he explains.

But he says that in entrepreneurial ventures, you have to be particularly careful with whom you work. The stakes are higher. “As a journalist, if you work with someone who’s a bad source or a story doesn’t go well, you run a correction and don’t go back to them again and move on,” he says. “But if you hire someone who is not a good fit for your company, it makes it harder to get the job done. There’s not as much margin for error, and if you’re burning cash, you have a lot of people riding on it.”

When your product and expertise are recognized in a forum like Forbes, it’s “a bit of a head trip,” he concedes.

“But you’ve got to keep your feet on the ground. You don’t do it for the media coverage; you do it because it’s worth doing.”

—Nichole Bernier www.groton.org

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GROTON ENTREPRENEURS

Ware Sykes ’95

ABOUT TIME MUCH OF Ware Sykes’ life is spent in restaurants, sometimes with his two small children. So when the meal is over and it’s time for the check, Ware ’95 doesn’t wave to get a server’s attention or wait in frustration. He doesn’t wait at all. Not one to waste time, he walks right over to his waiter and hands him his credit card.

This New York native admits that he’s a little impatient.

But in his business, impatience is a virtue. In fact, his latest venture is banking on customers who are impatient in restaurants too.

In 2013, when Ware took over as CEO of Nowait, the tiny Pittsburgh company was in a hurry. It had a great product—an app to manage the wait list at casual restaurants—a skilled team, and a potentially huge market. But with its Midwestern

step was to focus not only on restaurants looking for efficiency, but also on the antsy people waiting in lines all over America.

Originally conceived to eliminate the buzzers given to those impatient patrons, Nowait’s true potential was in making the lives of those diners easier. “We had built a product for restaurants; we had not yet built a consumer application,” he says.

The approach is paying off. When Ware joined the company, two hundred restaurants had signed on. Now Nowait is in four thousand restaurants across the country, seating twenty-five million guests per month using technology that has done away with the old-school pen and paper and those annoying buzzers. Two million people have downloaded the free app, which they use, as the company slogan says, to “get in line from anywhere.”

“I JOINED A TINY COMPANY NOBODY HAD HEARD OF THAT HAD AN ENORMOUS DREAM. WE HAD SIX MONTHS OF CASH LEFT AND THREE MONTHS TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET THE COMPANY FUNDED.” roots, Nowait was not in a typical stomping ground where venture capitalists look for the next big breakout. Recruiters knew the work Ware had done at The Ladders, an employment site where he had climbed from intern to vice president. “They were looking for someone who could understand the needs of a very early stage company, but who had also experienced hyper growth and scale,” Ware says.

With multi-faceted experience in start-ups, Ware welcomed the Nowait challenge, undeterred by the distance from his home in New York and his skeptical friends. “Most of my friends thought I was nuts. Many of them said, ‘What’s in Pittsburgh? I have never heard of a tech company from there,’” he says. “I kind of ignored that.”

Ware worked with the founders to lay out a plan; the first 30

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Nowait focuses primarily on the casual restaurant market, which Ware says serves 180 billion meals each year in some 250,000 restaurants, not on the smaller group of reservationdriven restaurants served by OpenTable. Revenue today comes from restaurant fees, but other revenue-generating plans are underway, including a payment app. “If you don’t have to wait for your table,” says Ware, “why wait for your check?”

Ware likes to repeat what seems like a mantra: “We want to give you most precious asset in your life back, which is your time.” Nowait, however, has taken plenty of his. “I joined a tiny company nobody had heard of that had an enormous dream.

We had six months of cash left,” he says, “and three months to figure out how to get the company funded.” Within six months they had raised $3 million, followed by another $10 million

over the next year.

He credits Groton for many life lessons. “When I arrived at Groton, I was blown away and intimidated by the level of the students. I was a whippersnapper who needed discipline,” he says. “I left humbled, with a much greater appreciation of what it would take to succeed.”

His hard work, determination, and a good dose of gumption got Ware his breakthrough job at The Ladders. After graduating from college, he worked for several start-ups until the dot-com boom went bust. He then headed to Columbia Business School, where he heard The Ladders’ CEO speak. Inspired, Ware marched up and asked for a job.

He landed only an unpaid internship,

and—unconcerned that his friends were taking not only salaries but also signing bonuses—he accepted it. “My job the first year was basically carrying the CEO’s briefcase, making sure every presentation was ready, handling administrative details, sending out management reports,” Ware says. “As a result of basically being a grunt, I got to attend every executive meeting. I got to have a seat at the table for a company that was growing 100 percent every year.”

Most important, he got to learn, and he used his knowledge and drive to forge a path onto the executive team for a company that became one of the most valuable start-ups in New York.

It was a perfect training ground for Nowait. Today, Ware splits his time

between Pittsburgh and New York; he opted to keep his original Pittsburgh team together rather than move the company. The city is appreciative: Nowait was named the 2014 start-up of the year by the Pittsburgh Technology Council.

Ware had never been a CEO before, was “the new guy” to a staff of twelve that included four founders, and stared down a spreadsheet that showed less than a year’s operating capital.

But that was then. The wait seems to be over. “I learned at my last company how a great team could defy the odds,” Ware explains. “At Nowait, I thought we had a chance to be successful, and we continue to break records every quarter.”

—Gail Friedman

www.groton.org

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“SURE, WE NEED MORE CODERS IN THE WORLD, BUT NOT AT THE EXCLUSION OF PEOPLE WHO KNOW HOW TO MAKE THINGS.”

Evan Yoshio Yamada

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«

Jay Rogers ’91

Local Motors used a 3D printer to create this electric car at the 2014 International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago.

AUTO PILOT JAY ROGERS ’91 caused a stir at the January 2015 North American International Auto Show in Detroit when his automotive company built a car right on the convention floor, its 3D printer churning out parts made of carbon-polymer composite. The reason? To demonstrate how quickly a customized car could be made.

Arizona-based Local Motors is not your typical car manufacturer. Rather than selling volume, its focus is innovation on demand. “I’ll take what a person wants, and I’ll develop it,” says Jay, the CEO and co-founder. “Most car companies wouldn’t survive if they developed less than 40,000 cars in a year. We want to be able to express consumer desire, and the Internet has caused development to move at the pace of a conversation. The car companies of this world are not that fast. Even Tesla is on a four-year development pace, and that’s too slow.”

Crowdsourcing vehicle development, Local Motors solicits ideas from outsiders—often via competitions with celebrity judges such as car-aficionado Jay Leno—then makes those designs real using a micro-factory network. “Asking people for their opinions through the Internet is well-understood in software development, and this brings it into hardware development,” he says.

So far, his design process has yielded vehicles including the Rally Fighter, an off-road, 450-horsepower racecar for $99,000, and the Racer, an $18,000 performance motorcycle with a core resembling a customized Harley Davidson Sportster. To further customize the experience, the production of each vehicle involves the hands-on participation of the buyer, who visits the factory to work for a few days during the month it’s being constructed.

“The millennials have become professionals; they want to define their own lives. Ford and Toyota want to make vehicles work for customers, but can’t do a small number,” he says, noting the trade-offs people are forced to make. “I accept the fact that I look silly in a Prius, but I accept something I don’t like the look of because I like that I’m seen as conspicuously conservation-minded. What I’d rather have is a car that rewards me for doing good, something that looks great and is conspicuously conservationist—high miles per gallon, low fuel

usage, less noise, less impact, and great-looking. Something that truly is different.”

Clearly, Jay Rogers is not your typical automotive executive.

Grandson of an owner of the Indian Motorcycle Company, he grew up with a fascination for building things that run. From an early age, working on cars was a big part of his life; he even convinced Groton to offer an automobile engineering elective.

“For a whole semester we worked on vehicles, broke them apart, and rebuilt a couple of cars,” he says. “It was an amazing thing to do.” After attending Princeton he drifted away from working on cars; it was his passion, but it was viewed as a throwback hobby.

The hardest challenge in his entrepreneurial life, he says, has been working to convince others that a blue-collar mindset is not lost and that manufacturing isn’t dead. “We’ve had a twenty-five-year love affair with the Internet, but we’re not teaching our children how to grow food and build things.

We went from a hot-rod generation of playing with cars to a culture that says, ‘Your car is a dangerous thing; don’t touch it.’”

Jay’s early professional life included work as an investment analyst, an executive at a medical device start-up in China, and a commander in the Marine Corps. There, surrounded by people from across the country—and interacting with cultures around the world—he became convinced that productivity and learning needed to be re-balanced. “Groton set me up in respect to how to lead people, as well as how to raise capital for things—rather than how to make things,” he says. “Sure, we need more coders in the world, but not at the exclusion of people who know how to make things.”

—Nichole Bernier

www.groton.org

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Melissa Galt ’79

THE HUMAN FACTOR UNLIKE MOST of her 1979 formmates, Melissa Galt didn’t

intend to go to college. Ambitious but impatient, she wanted to “get going,” and was concerned school would emphasize generic professional skills at the expense of her individuality.

“We all start with all these original ideas, but most of us have them beaten out of us in school. We’re told, ‘That won’t work, you can’t do it that way, follow the rules,” she says. “Pretty soon we all look and sound the same.”

Although she did go to college in the end (Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration), her niche would not be in the hospitality industry, where she spent five years in purchasing, or even in interior design, where her practice flourished for the next fifteen years. Melissa found her forte in helping business owners and entrepreneurs harness their individuality for increased profits—specifically, she says, “by focusing on the quality of their clients and connection to them, rather than the quantity and lack of connection.”

“I teach entrepreneurs how to make more money with better clients in less time, and still have time for their lives,” she explains. “So many entrepreneurs end up turning their passion into a business that swallows them whole, and that goes against my philosophy. If your business is not affording you the family time, friend time, and fun time you want, then you’re not successful.”

Her first step with new clients is to pull them off social media, where she says most professionals act like billboards rather than individuals, blasting interchangeable sales pitches instead of a unique message or personality. “I teach them how not to put on a fake persona, but instead to step into their business with who they really are,” she says. “Most business owners put on a figurative mask and costume, going through each day by habit and memory without engagement or connection.

This costs them satisfaction and opportunity and costs their organization productivity and profitability.” Galt offers a series of interactive processes designed to reconnect entrepreneurs and business owners to their own unique goals. “This is about bringing the human factor alive in the workplace, so that it becomes more creative, more innovative, more profitable and engaged for all concerned.”

The daughter of actress Anne Baxter and great-granddaughter of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Melissa comes to style and creativity naturally. After five years in hotel purchasing (“if you ate it, drank it, or slept on it, I bought it”), she took 34

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a series of interior design positions before launching her own residential and commercial practice in 1994 in Atlanta. When she started, she was $70,000 in debt; within eighteen months, the debt was paid and her networking had led to success.

Fellow business owners took notice when her business doubled every year for five years straight, and then leveled off to a comfortable 20 percent growth. “They wanted to know what I was doing,” she says. “The truth is that I was lit up to my core about design. When you are tuned in, turned on, engaged, and connected with your work, you are magnetic to clients—and profits.”

She was already teaching design at Emory University’s continuing education program when she added a course on marketing magic and business success; her classes routinely filled to capacity. “When I found my sales results were five times what was considered normal, I thought, ‘Let me take a look at what I’m doing.’ And I put my actions into a system that I could teach.”

What she was doing was forging success with her own signature—sending handwritten thank-you notes after every client interaction, delivering personalized solutions, and trimming her business so it grew in quality, not just volume. This is one of the cornerstones of what she now teaches to entrepreneurs in service-based businesses, such as designers, attorneys, architects and accountants. Melissa has grown her consulting and speaking to include corporations “hungry to humanize their executive ranks and reap the benefits of an engaged workforce.”

While keeping a hand in interior design, today she is more often designing business success and organizational engagement. Melissa is quick to point out that Groton instilled a valuable work ethic—despite being a challenging time of teenage angst and homesickness.

Melissa’s mantra is: “You are a one-of-a-kind combination of education, experience, expertise, talent, hobbies, interests, and personalities. By revealing who you are in what you do, you get more of what you want, and the organization you work for gets significantly increased ROI on human capital.

“The greatest asset any of us has,” she adds, “is ourselves.”

—Nichole Bernier

Stuart Landesberg ’03 and Chris Clark ’03

CLEAN START-UP IF STUART Landesberg and Chris Clark are right, within a

decade we’ll all be shopping online for our toilet paper. And our laundry detergent, cosmetics, hand soap—just about anything we use in our homes that’s not perishable.

Home products are one of the final online frontiers, and these 2003 formmates are pioneers in the emerging market.

In April 2014, they launched ePantry, a website that sells environmentally responsible home care products. The brands use no petrochemicals or toxins, and run their own businesses responsibly. “These are companies and brands trying to do the right thing,” Stuart says.

As you might expect, ePantry has found customers among environmentally minded city folks. But this is not a niche market: the state where ePantry has the highest penetration is Kansas. Yes, Kansas. That’s because Stuart and Chris are selling more than home products. They’re selling convenience.

When the store is miles away, ePantry makes sense. It also makes sense when customers want to make conscientious choices but don’t have the time to research and find them.

An ePantry customer logs on and provides a few facts about household size and product preferences, then places an order. ePantry predicts when the products will run out and emails a suggested reorder, which customers typically modify.

Originally, Stuart and Chris imagined a “set it and forget it” system, but realized that customers wanted to engage and try new products. The business has grown steadily and now routinely delivers to all forty-eight contiguous states.

Stuart and Chris are manufacturing too—for ePantry’s popular flagship brand, Grove Collaborative. They make organic lip balm, hand sanitizer, sponges, candles, and a few other items that they believed they could produce better and more profitably themselves. They expect Grove Collaborative to grow and become even more central to the company’s success.

Growing up in an environmentally conscious family, it was natural for Stuart to choose green products—but it wasn’t always possible. Even buying plastic cups (which are petroleum based) for college parties “used to drive me insane,” he says. He tucked away the idea to someday start a business that would make doing the right thing convenient.

He started working on ePantry in earnest in late 2012.

Chris had just moved to San Francisco and, after calling his old Groton friend for a beer, found himself helping on ePantry,

Chris Clark ‘03 and Stuart Landesberg ‘03

then jumping in as a founding partner (along with their third co-founder, Jordan Savage). Chris’ technical background complements Stuart’s business sense, but more than that, they are naturally in sync. Perhaps prefecting Lower School dorms together or playing squash at Groton formed the foundation.

“The most important thing in a business partner is a shared value system,” says Stuart, acknowledging that their Groton education helped build that system—as well as their bond of friendship.

That strong bond has helped them weather the ups and downs. Their website has crashed, and funding once got so tight that they funded payroll with a personal check. They have learned to manage every detail, from buying chairs to hiring a staff that has swelled from twelve to forty-two in the last year and a half.

The headaches are great, but the rewards are greater. “At the end of the day, when I work really hard, I go home feeling good about the impact of the day’s work,” Stuart says.

Chris agrees: “Tens of thousands of families are receiving toxin-free, environmentally friendly products.”

Building a company that can help the Earth is a mission that keeps ePantry focused. “It makes everything you do simpler and easier—you have a framework against which you can evaluate all your ideas,” says Chris.

Stuart agrees: “We’re not optimizing purely for growth and success, but also asking, ‘Does this align with the mission?’”

—Gail Friedman

www.groton.org

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GROTON ENTREPRENEURS

Christopher LaFarge ’72

SERIAL INNOVATOR “I’M A SERIAL entrepreneur,” says Christopher LaFarge ’72, who has launched five companies in fields as diverse as timber, oil and gas, management consulting, and health care. “I don’t like working for other people. It’s a personality flaw. As they say, ‘doesn’t play well with others, runs with scissors.’”

His latest adventure: taking on prostate cancer with other people’s money.

In MedicaMetrix, Christopher has developed a device for more accurate prostate exams. The concept for the ProstaMetric was born in 2007 when a surgeon who knew about Christopher’s background in biomedical research (at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Hospital in Boston) invited him for a cup of coffee. “Let me tell you about a problem we have,” he began. The problem was inefficient diagnosis of prostate cancer—a disease that affects one in six men—as well as inefficient management of enlarged prostates.

As he’d learn, of men who receive prostate biopsies—75 percent of which come back negative—7 percent end up hospitalized with complications. There had to be a way to

“I DON’T LIKE WORKING FOR OTHER PEOPLE. IT’S A PERSONALITY FLAW.” cut back on unnecessary biopsies, Christopher concluded.

The result: a disposable glove with a digital fingertip device to measure prostate volume, which replaced “guess-timation” during rectal exams.

Christopher’s taste for entrepreneurship began early. He created his own graduate degree program at Yale, a joint degree with the School of Management and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. When he graduated, one of his professors suggested they start a business together, a forest products software and management business. “I got bitten by the bug,” Christopher says, “and have been doing start-ups ever since.”

The time to sell a company, for Christopher, is when the concept is firmly established, the market proven, and the business shifting toward routine manufacturing and quality assurance. “I start to get a little bored, and want to move to 36

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another area where I can create something cool.”

But creating cool things is a process riddled with risk and challenges. Eliminating glitches in ProstaMetric was like “finding Gremlins and killing them one after another.”

Navigating the regulatory process—entirely different in the United States than in Europe—is one hurdle. Ensuring that insurance companies will pay for the product is another.

“What investors and insurance companies are really looking for is, how does this particular new device compare to prevailing practice in terms of its economic and medical impact?” he says. “They’re looking for significant cost savings and significant improvement of patient outcomes. If it can’t deliver both, you probably won’t get funding, you won’t get reimbursement; you’re dead in the water.”

To Christopher, funding is the single greatest challenge of entrepreneurship. In 2007, when he founded MedicaMetrix,

»

Nina Curley ’00 has spent the past five years seeding programs in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and the UAE that support young businesses through media coverage, development, coaching, and investment. As former managing director at Flat6 Labs Abu Dhabi, she established Abu Dhabi’s first global accelerator program; before that, she was editor-inchief at Wamda, an entrepreneurship support platform targeting the Middle East and North Africa, and launched Wamda for Women. Today, Nina supports women in entrepreneurship throughout the Middle East through programs, workshops, and research in partnership with Launchpad, Grow.ME, and Ahead of the Curve. She is also a founding member of WAIN, the first women’s angel investment network in Dubai.

the recession was just beginning. In 2008, he had raised significant funding from angel investors, but they had their money in the auction rate security market, which collapsed a week before closing the round, and they could no longer access their capital. MedicaMetrix then had to bootstrap its way through the great recession, a risk he hadn’t anticipated.

But risk itself isn’t the main issue, he’s quick to point out; there’s risk in everything. “The issue is creativity,” he says. “I like to invent new solutions. A new product—it’s like creating a picture.

It’s design, it’s packaging, it’s fabrication.”

He tracks the passion for creation back to his childhood pastime, building Heathkit electronics, to the innovations he was allowed to pursue at Groton and during a gap year between Groton and Harvard.

“At Groton, my friend and I were shutterbugs; we took the pictures for the newspaper, the yearbook, and the catalog. Frustrated with dirty darkroom equipment, we decided we’d create our own darkroom,” he recalls. They turned a basement space in Hundred House into their own darkroom, cherry-picking equipment from other school darkrooms.

They were so responsible and productive that the school turned a blind eye to their temporary appropriation of school property.

“The school certainly gave me a level of self-confidence and ability to take risks,” he says. “You can always rework your own history to say what led to what.

But it’s only hindsight. If I look back as far as Groton, I see I was always creating new things.”

—Nichole Bernier

FIVE STEPS

TO START-UP SUCCESS

by Nina Curley ’00

They say that the secret to happiness is to discover that special trifecta — what you are passionate about, what you’re good at, and what you can do to provide for yourself. Today, the hunt for that elusive intersection often leads to the creation of something entirely new — whether a job, company, or product — as creative minds imagine solutions to the world’s problems.

For those inspired to launch a company or build a new product, taking a few crucial steps can help mitigate risk and enhance your chance of success. Over the past five years, I’ve worked with start-ups in the Middle East, where I’ve seen entrepreneurs succeed even in the toughest of economic and political climates. The ones that succeed often have taken most of the following steps to bake success into a company’s DNA.

1

LEARN TO LOVE INTERVIEWING CUSTOMERS. If you are inspired by a start-up idea, the most critical step is to interview a lot of customers at the beginning and determine if there is an authentic market need. There are plenty of resources available for ways to best conduct customer interviews — Ash Maurya has an excellent book, Running Lean; entrepreneur Steve Blank has good online tutorials — but the essence of the process is simple: 1) ask openended questions, and 2) listen carefully and take notes.

It’s also important to become very curious about a customer’s existing actions (“So how do you solve that problem today?”), and not only ask questions about idealized, future behaviors (“Do you think you would…?”) to see how customers will realistically use a product or service. How many should you interview? As many as you can; you will begin to see patterns after the first ten, but thirty to fifty will help confirm the strength of those patterns. The more data you have, the more easily you can build something that the market — not just you and your friends — truly needs.

2

BUILD A BALANCED FOUNDING TEAM. Every early-stage investor knows that about 90 percent of start-ups fail. Failure is its own badge of honor, but one element that will reduce operational risk is a balanced founding team. The cliché is a team in which one founder is the product person — an engineer or developer — or the person focused on the service itself, while the other is the marketing person, focusing on business development, relationships, and building the sales pipeline.

The more founders’ skill sets complement each other rather than overlap, the more likely that they will build a well-rounded business.

3

THINK AT SCALE. Once you’ve interviewed enough customers to indicate a real market need and found a co-founder whose skill set or mindset complements yours, the next step is to assess whether your idea is scalable. Before you invest too much, it’s important to have a vision of the size of your market and how you expect to reach customers. Whether you decide to go small or create a big impact, it’s essential to research the total addressable market — the percentage you can realistically expect to reach — and how quickly and easily the product can scale, which depends upon its form (is it software? hardware? baked goods?) and distribution method. Most investors and start-up enthusiasts want to be part of something that can grow and potentially solve problems at scale, and it pays to think about this from the beginning.

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FOCUS ON SUSTAINABILITY. To create value beyond profit, determine early on whether the business model is sustainable and feeds back into supporting the community and/or the environment. Building a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) division after a company is large is an antiquated model; today’s companies think about sustainability — and giving their customers a sense of purpose and loyalty to something greater than themselves — from the beginning.

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CRAFT AN INSPIRING CULTURE. Most investors would say that the key to getting early investment is traction, traction, traction — proof that the product or service already is selling. Yet after a bit of traction proves the company could be viable, an essential element for long-term success is its culture. A founding team could have all of the right ingredients — an exciting idea with early traction, an experienced team, and a compelling vision for scalability over the long term — but if the team seems arrogant, rude, entitled, or — that dirty word, uncoachable — it can alienate supporters who could otherwise give invaluable advice or crucial connections to early customers and funding. Even in early days, agreeing on cultural values can help founders stay on track. It might seem that you share the same values — until the company makes its first hire or you have your first big argument. Having a set of values to point to as a guideline helps cohesion and overall effectiveness. Transparency, honesty, humility, and responsiveness are some standards — but find your values in your words to make your company stand out.

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GROTON ENTREPRENEURS

Caroline Bierbaum LeFrak ’02

FAST TRACK WHEN CAROLINE Bierbaum LeFrak ’02 launched her

sports management agency to represent elite runners, she faced a significant entrepreneurial challenge: zero experience as an agent.

“I had no background, no reason for an athlete to choose me over a more established agent,” she recalls. Agents assume responsibility for important aspects of a client’s career: obtaining sponsorships, negotiating contracts, maximizing exposure in high-profile races, and clinching appearance fees.

Hanging her shingle in New York City, a nexus of big sports and big business, took nerve. “Getting that first client, I had to summon a lot of courage to pitch myself and my abilities,” she recalls. “I didn’t have sales experience.”

But what she did have when founding Empire Athletics Management in 2009 was a knowledge-based client empathy few salespeople can learn or imitate. Caroline had been an elite runner herself.

At Columbia University, she was a five-time All-American in cross country and track and field and the 2005 recipient of the Honda Award, given to the nation’s most outstanding women’s cross country runner. She has run the 10k in 32:44 and the 5k in 15:52. From 2006 to 2008, Caroline was sponsored by Nike—now one of the most prestigious and elusive sponsorships that she seeks for clients—but hung up her professional treads to go to law school. When she passed the bar, she didn’t want a typical desk job. “I wanted to do my own thing. I understand what runners do and what they need,” she says. “Negotiating contracts is probably the biggest part of what I do. This was a way to marry both.”

Having legal expertise helped her credibility, but has also been a practical asset beyond drafting contracts. More than once, Caroline has sent an official letter of demand to a race director who was delinquent in paying for an athlete’s appearance. Those appearances by top athletes—which lend clout to a race—are billable, negotiable parts of elite runners’ lives, and an agent’s job. “They might get X dollars to start, and if they finish under a certain time, they get more,” she says. “For example, all the elite top ten to twenty athletes in the Boston Marathon are paid to be there, completely separate from any prize money for winning.”

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Caroline at the Olympic trials, where she ran the marathon in 2:38

So far Caroline’s best year for Empire Athletics was 2011, when her stable of clients swelled to twenty, including natives of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Trinidad. But the past five years have presented new challenges—namely, running her agency after having three children. These days she consciously keeps her client base manageable, handling just a few clients at a time.

But as her children grow she visualizes growth for the firm, both in client acquisition and the variety of sponsorship deals.

Caroline has faith that hard work carries a business down the long road, which is a marathon, after all, not a sprint.

Discipline is laced into the fiber of her being, dating back to Groton, where she was an undefeated racer. “I always had to be on my game at Groton, doing the work and not slacking off and being persistent and keeping on top of myself,” says Caroline. “I think you need to have a lot of discipline to start a company; you are forced to do some things you don’t want to do. You don’t have to answer to a boss, you answer to yourself, which people think is easier, but we can be harder on ourselves.

A lot of what Groton shaped in me is still relevant to my business today.”

—Nichole Bernier

A C H A P E L TA L K

by Malcolm Akinje ’16 September 22, 2015

The Knock that Never Came

own world. I don’t fully remember how our conversation traveled to the subject, but both Joe and I started to talk about hard parts of our lives. I shared two different stories with Joe that made him one of my closest friends because I opened up to him and let him understand what truly drives me and my personality.

The first thing I discussed with Joe was how during a period in my elementary-school years I was homeless. I was dragged away from the people I knew, the places I was familiar with, and I lived with my mom in a shelter in the Bronx. Around my third-grade year, we would come home to people selling drugs on the corner, shooting dice in an alleyway, and a man stumbling around with what I now know today was the stench of alcohol.

The shelter was located on the top of a hill that overlooked the rest of the area. I did not want anyone to see me and my mom travel up that hill. I would hold my head down and not make eye contact with others as we turned to head up. The trip up the hill wasn’t too far, yet it felt as if the people who saw us were staring at me for an eternity. Most nights, after my mom put me to bed and left the room, I cried. My cheeks would be moist, and as I looked out of the window, I yearned to be somewhere else—anywhere else.

My days started off like this: I would wake at around 6:00 a.m. to a room with a lack of sufficient heat, wash, and get dressed. My mom and I would get on the 6:45 a.m. train downtown to get to school by around 7:45. I would go to my usual classes and get out at 2:45. My day starts to differ here. Most kids would either go home or go to an afterschool program. I was normally picked up by whomever my mom sent for me. You see, at the time, my mom worked for various cab companies as a dispatcher. She would normally ask the drivers who were near my school or were about to

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any times over the course of my Groton career, I have been asked in various surveys to describe myself in a set amount of words. I say things like “smart, big, passionate, athletic.”

Now, I know what a lot of you guys are thinking: “Oh, subtle brag. Oh, I’m Malcolm and I think I’m so athletic that I had to mention it in my chapel talk.” Or the entire football team is thinking, “Malcolm, it’s not all about you.”

However, this is my chapel talk, so for today, it is.

From what I’ve noticed, when I describe myself it often takes me a lot longer than most. When I start to think of adjectives that show who I am, I normally start to think of how others perceive me. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but if someone else were to describe me, they would say things like, “Malcolm’s a jokester,” “he’s always a jolly guy,” and, of course, “Malcolm is the best bell ringer I’ve ever heard” (and that’s not just because I’m probably one of the only ones you’ve ever heard).

When you ask people what I’m like, they normally describe me as a teddy bear. They say I wouldn’t hurt a fly and that I don’t get angry. Some people describe it as a fault. They say they act the way they do toward me because I don’t get angry when they do it. All I do is laugh it off and gently push them away in jest.

What brings on my jovial nature, which people sometimes describe as a fault or treat as weakness, is that I have learned multiple times in my life that life can always be harder. I remember one night last spring, I pulled an all-nighter with Joe Collett. We sat in his room. The area was only illuminated by the blue light from our phones and a small lamp in the corner. Taggart Eymer was sitting to our left, snoring as loud as could be, and Tristan Smith was sleeping in his pool of drool with his Beats headphones on.

It was about 2:00 a.m., and Joe and I were just in our

go off of work to pick me up and bring me to her job. When I arrived, I would sit and do my homework until either: a) She got off of work at around 10:00 p.m. or midnight and then either took a train or had a friend drive us home, or b) She would have her friend Rose from the shelter pick me up and babysit me until she got off work.

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Either way, my night ended the same. I would fall asleep somewhere and be woken up with the sun having gone down and my mom saying that it was time to go home. I would cross the threshold and be immediately put to bed. Of course, I would say the usual “I love you, mom;” however, when looking back I feel that to an extent those were false words. I was saying “I love you” to a woman I didn’t really know. I mean our interactions with each other were so small that I didn’t know who she was and she didn’t know me.

At the end of that story, Joe had a blank look on his face. The room was silent, and for a moment no words were said between us. Before that time, I had never shared that moment with anyone, let alone anyone at Groton.

I had never described how I felt, I never described my relationship with my mom, and I never told people my times of pain. I just never felt that was me. To everyone else,

Malcolm is the jolly guy who cheers people up and who lets people open up to him so they can have someone to talk to.

Normally, I’m not the person on the other side. However, in this instance, I was the vulnerable one. I was the one who was doing the opening up, and you know what? It actually felt good.

With all these thoughts and emotions coursing through both my body and mind, I didn’t realize how Joe was reacting to what I had just said. The next thing I remember was that Joe said, “Dude. That’s awesome that you always have a positive and upbeat attitude even though you went through all of that. I may not have as much as everyone else, but just remember that if you ever need anything, my family and I are here for you.”

I said, “Thanks bro. That means a lot.”

Joe then said, “Do you mind me asking where your father was during all of this?”

“Yeah, no problem,” I responded.

I told Joe that during the time when I lived at the shelter I didn’t see my dad often. He was off living with his other family in Pennsylvania, who didn’t even know his real name. They called him ChiChi, when actually his name is Malcolm Akinje. All I wanted from him was his presence.

I wanted interaction. I wanted compassion. I wanted love.

I would normally go without seeing him for three to six months at a time during those days. And although he said

Jon Chase

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I have learned multiple times in my life that life can always be harder.

Above, Malcolm after a football game; right, Steven Anton ‘16, Drew Bassilakis ‘16, Violet J. Papathanasiou ‘14, Will Robbins ‘16, Malcolm, and (center foreground) Anwar Mapp ‘16

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“

The shelter was located on the top of a hill that overlooked the rest of the area. I did not want anyone to see me and my mom travel up that hill.

he would come more often, most of the time he didn’t.

Picture an eight-year-old Malcolm talking to his dad on the phone for the first time in months. He asks, “Daddy, when are you coming home?” Or, “Daddy, when are you coming over?” As soon as his father says “tonight” he jumps with joy.

That innocent smile brightens, and that young face radiates with joy.

However, as the night goes on, Malcolm is sitting by the door anxiously waiting for a knock. It’s getting later and later, yet the knock never comes. His dad calls and says he’s an hour behind. Then two hours. Then three. As the hours get later, Malcolm begins to fall asleep with his head against the door. He fights to keep his eyes open, yet the energy of this eight-year-old is depleted and he falls off to sleep. He awakens in his bed the next day and runs to his mom asking why she hadn’t awakened him when Daddy got there. She says that something came up and he wasn’t able to make it. The first time this happened, the tears overflowed from his adolescent face. His mom embraced him and he cried, and cried, and cried. As time passed and that situation continued to happen, he started to cry and cry less, until eventually, when he was fifteen years old and his dad said he

was coming over, he would say, “OK,” and go about his day and then go to bed. He would wake up the next day and go, “Oh, well.”

So now, about this time, the light is starting to peek under the shades. The birds are starting to chirp. The sun is crossing above the horizon, and I have a World test that I probably should have been studying for. I may have gotten a nice B on that test, but I ended the night with one closer friend on the Circle.

So when something bad happens, whether that is a bad quiz, or test, or class grade, or Latin exam, I’m not not getting angry because that’s just me and I don’t get angry at anything just because. Honestly, to me, it’s not that bad.

Yeah, I may be a little upset, and, of course, I attempt to do better.

But I could still be in that shelter wishing to be somewhere else. Or I could be in that hallway waiting for the knock that would never come.

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A C H A P E L TA L K

by Jed Webber ’89 October 12, 2015

Longing and

Belonging

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ood morning. Thank you all for being here today, not that you had a choice in the matter. My name is Jed Webber; I graduated in the Form of 1989. I want to thank Temba for inviting me here to speak on the day that Groton School celebrates its 131st birthday.

I was all of six weeks into my Second Form year when Groton celebrated its one-hundredth birthday with a party I don’t think the school has seen the likes of since. Instead of hearing “Blue Bottles” at sit-down dinner in the Dining Hall, there was a feast under huge pole tents that covered what seemed like half of the Circle. Alums came in from all parts of the world to help celebrate, and there was a massive halfhour-long fireworks display afterward over the football field.

As an impressionable and sheltered thirteen-year-old, I have to say I was struck at how impressive this school seemed to be, and maybe how fortunate I felt to be a part of it.

The Groton that I went to back then was different in many ways. As people my age are obliged to remind people your age, there were no cell phones, and there was no Internet. The only connection to the outside world, the only way to get in touch with your parents, or friends, or old schoolmates, was a single pay phone installed in each dorm. So if you wanted to talk to anyone outside the school, you needed (1) a roll of quarters, and (2) nobody else in your dorm using the phone in front of you. The printer in the basement of the Schoolhouse was not a 3D printer, but rather a massive antique printing press with ink rollers and typeset that the school took great pride in operating to print the Quarterly and various other school publications.

Also in the basement of the Schoolhouse, right under the Schoolroom, was the student smoking lounge, where Sixth Formers who had written permission from their parents were allowed to smoke between classes and after school. It was a different school indeed.

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Today, I have been involved with Groton as either a student or alum for approximately one quarter of the school’s existence. So while I suppose at this point I may have accumulated the life experience to speak with you on the day of Groton’s birthday, I want to make one thing clear: I was not asked here today because of my achievement while I was a student here. I was a thoroughly mediocre student at Groton.

Not that I was indifferent about Groton—I loved my time here. But my affection for the school did not exactly translate into achievement. The full extent of my mediocrity was revealed to me my senior year when applying to college.

Groton did not divulge class ranks, but the one piece of collective data that it did give as a kind of measuring stick was the average grade of every class that everyone in my form took during their time here. The year I graduated, that average grade was an 83. I couldn’t help but notice that my personal average, on my transcript, was also an 83. I had nailed it, right in the bull’s-eye.

I also recall that I was right around the class average with varsity letters (five), AP classes (two), and girlfriends (zero). If instead of the Appleton Prize and the Peabody Award given to the best and brightest students, Groton was dedicated to honoring the absolutely most average student in the form, I would have been an excellent candidate.

You might expect, with such an impeccable record of mediocrity, that I would have felt right at home at Groton, running along with the pack, not so far ahead to tire myself out, but not so far behind that I was ever in danger of getting eaten by the proverbial lion. Yet there was one way in which I was different—very different. I had a trait that would guarantee that I would never completely fit in, that no matter how much I yearned to belong to this community, in reality, I was fated to always be an outsider. And I happen to

Flashback from the 1989 yearbook: Jed Webber sliding into base and, below left, with formmate Jason Wood

“

I had the distinct impression that, for some, arriving at Groton was not the beginning of a strange and new experience, as it clearly was for me, but rather just the continuation of a long journey that had started much earlier.

know for a fact that some of you in the audience share the same trait that I do.

I was a day student.

Now, in the pantheon of sources of shame, I realize that being a day student is a pretty minor offense, so I’ll try to explain how this hardship affected my experience here. For those of you who don’t know, being a day student, by almost any objective measure, is awesome. You get the best of both worlds—playing sports and eating dinner with all your friends, studying (or just hanging out) together during study hall, and then at the end of the night, when kids everywhere were sprinting back to their dorm before the tenth chime of the school bell, I would go home. I got hugs from my parents, I got to see my dog, my mom would make me a snack, I got to sleep in my own bed. And then, at roughly 7:59 and 50 seconds, I would pop through that door over there and join up with the rest of my form. Like I said, objectively speaking, it’s pretty awesome.

However, that was not how I saw it when I was a student. Within weeks, if not days, of my arrival at Groton, I had the distinct impression that, for some, arriving at Groton was not the beginning of a strange and new experience, as it clearly was for me, but rather just the continuation of a long journey that had started much earlier in their life, and perhaps a journey that I wasn’t even on. There were a series of clues that I picked up on along the way that supported this theory: four of the thirteen boys in my Second Form class coming from the same elite prep school in Boston . . . what seemed like an unusual number of formmates who lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan . . . some kids even had last names that I recognized from history books or newspapers, whose families had made a mark in the political or business world.

And a lot of these kids seemed to have some sort of connection to each other—either through previous schools, or families that somehow knew each other, or other social www.groton.org

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circles. Over time, I slowly became aware of what seemed to be an interwoven fabric of the lives of many of my formmates from before they ever arrived here on campus.

And when I contrasted the shared experiences that they had with my family, my hometown, my previous schooling . . . there was simply no connection to be made anywhere. My grandmother likes to say that our ancestors weren’t on the Mayflower, but they were the servants who came on the boat right after. Almost four hundred years later, I felt like I had somehow found myself in the same boat with them, and it felt a bit awkward.

And so it was that I went through five years of Groton with this perspective. And while I became good friends with many of these formmates I’m describing, I found my viewpoint only being solidified when, after long weekends, I would hear stories of formmates getting together in Boston or New York, or of summer camps in Maine that seemed impossibly filled up with New York City kids going to New England private schools. I was able to comfortably find my place in the Groton community, but the narrative that I eventually settled on was that I was first and foremost a day student, without the connections and networks that many of my classmates enjoyed.

Now I am a full generation removed from my experience at Groton, and I have a completely different self-narrative that frankly has nothing to do with who I saw myself as while I was at Groton. I’m a husband, a father, and a business owner. If your parents have ever taken you to the Gibbet Hill Grill, you have eaten at one of my restaurants.

But even long after I stopped defining myself as that day student looking in from the outside, I was still able to appreciate the irony when the school asked me if I was interested in hosting my twenty-fifth reunion party last year at my house near campus. I bet I’ll get invited to that one!

And it was a great party. For whatever reason, the Form of 1989 is very close, and more than half of my form returned, some from as far as South Korea and Alaska.

Toward the end of the dinner, some of my formmates stood up and said a few words about what Groton meant to them, and how they were feeling being back here with the perspective of twenty-five years. One of those who stood up was a friend of mine who, to use my analogy from before, clearly ran at the front of the pack: he was a good student, had something like ten varsity letters, and a last name that was instantly recognizable. He was, to me, a perfect example of someone who fit right in at Groton. Yet, when he stood up at reunion, he told us that when he first got to Groton, after growing up in Virginia, he was so desperate to shed his southern accent in order to fit in here that in the first months of school, during his free time he wasn’t out making new friends, or getting ahead on his schoolwork, but sitting alone in his room, practicing speaking without a southern 44

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accent in front of a mirror for hours at a time. He told me recently that he didn’t want people to think he was racist or backward, but at a more basic level, he just wanted to belong; he wanted to weave himself securely into the fabric of the rest of his form just as I did, just, as I expect, all of you do to some extent.

So, if I felt that I didn’t exactly belong at Groton, and my friend didn’t either, I’ve been wondering ever since— just who does think that they perfectly belong here? What set of characteristics and experiences make you such an ideal fit for Groton that upon your arrival here, you don’t feel any self-doubt and you aren’t forced to question who you are at all? I don’t think there was anyone in my form that fit that description, and I’ll bet there isn’t in yours either.

The self-doubt is normal. It’s unavoidable in a place like this. What’s amusing looking back on it now is that the Admission Department was specifically looking for people like this the whole time! You are a collection of people of different backgrounds and races and orientations that in the aggregate give a wonderful breadth of exposure to a wide variety of viewpoints, but individually arm each of you with some outlying trait, some fatal flaw that, if you let it, can convince you that you don’t truly belong. But you do. You do belong.

A C H A P E L TA L K

by Nena Atkinson ’16 December 17, 2015

To Live

Deliberately

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y story begins on a hot, August evening in 2013, at the New York City screening of the documentary film, Nine-Story Mountain, which depicts the trek that millions of pilgrims have made to Mount Kailash in Tibet—a sacred mountain revered by Buddhists, Hindus, and other religious sects. As moving as the film was that evening, the real inspiration for me was the conversation that I had with the filmmaker afterwards. Augusta Thomson is a passionate, smart, and incredibly accessible Oxford anthropologist dedicated to the study of nomadic women.

She is also a Groton alumna [’06 ]. My conversation with Augusta that evening wandered from the challenges she overcame in producing Nine-Story Mountain to those she would soon face on her next project—a research study and documentary film that explores how cell phones and access to the Internet are changing the lives of nomadic women in Mongolia. At that time, I was not yet aware that Mongolia—the least densely populated country on earth—has more cellphones than it does people. Nomadic tribes, which still hunt for food on horseback using giant eagles perched on their forearms to capture wild prey, come home to tents called gers, where they have access to most of the new media technologies that we have in the West.

Exactly one year after that screening in New York, thanks to the generosity of Groton’s [John Endicott Lawrence ’27] Global Issues Scholars Fund I found myself clutching my camera equipment in the backseat of a Russian military jeep, racing along the jagged mountain paths of the Altai Tavan Bogd National Park in the far west of Mongolia, near the borders of Russia, Kazakhstan, and China. In the seat next to me sat Augusta Thomson, and alongside Augusta, our intrepid Mongolian journalist, translator, and friend, Gundii.

Trying to ignore the death-defying antics of our Kazakh

driver, I would steal a glance every now and then through the dusty windshield of our Jeep at the untouched beauty of the landscape. The sky was cobalt blue, the snow-capped mountains more dramatic than any I have seen in the Rockies or the Sierras. Small wildflowers danced in the wind. I have never witnessed a more serene place.

After ten white-knuckled hours of driving, we stumbled upon our first nomadic community in the Altai. It was not like anything I had ever seen before. The massive hillside was dotted with a handful of modest, white gers. Wandering among the gers were a few children, along with some horses, goats, sheep, and yaks. Giant eagles soared above, as if they were protecting the inhabitants below. Our jeep pulled up to this small nomadic community just as the sun was setting. Augusta and I chose a place to set up camp, unloaded our materials, and made a simple dinner of rice and canned vegetables. Over our meal, we discussed plans for interviews the next day and turned in for the night.

Around 5:00 a.m., the sunrise illuminated the interior of our yellow tent. Augusta, Gundii, and I had been huddled together throughout the night to keep warm from the freezing winds that howled around us, infiltrating our sleep.

Trying not to wake the others, I slowly squirmed out of my sleeping bag, grabbed some extra layers of clothes, and snuck out. I took a seat at our portable table, and put some water over the miniature camping stove to make tea. It was the first time since we had begun our journey a week before that I was alone. The sky was now turning a deep red, and the delicate white clouds added a layer of texture to its purity. It was still cold, but the burgeoning light gradually brought a handful of bright-eyed children tumbling out of their gers.

Still, it was not the place that captured me, but the people. I watched the children play, and was mesmerized by their joy. It was innocent and complete. They splashed in

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Photos by Augusta Thomson ’06

Clockwise from left: Ashol Pan, a Mongolian girl whose eagle-hunting photo went viral, earning her worldwide fame; Nina Atkinson ’16 with a local woman; Nina with Augusta Thomson ’06 and Ashol behind the camera

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Gundegmaa Altankhuyag

I smirked to myself as I realized that these women of the Altai were not the nomads.

I was. They might physically move once or twice a year, but they were stable in the most important of ways: they were truly happy.

glacial streams and laughed more than I knew was humanly possible. There was no question that the life they were leading was one of very little material comfort, yet these children had no notion that their lives were difficult, and I could not have made them accept that notion had I tried.

At around 5:45 a.m., women started to emerge from the gers and began collecting water in buckets from a nearby stream, herding and milking the family’s animals, and cooking the morning meal. These women, up at dawn, would work until almost eleven at night, and arise again the next morning to repeat the same process the following day and every day thereafter. At first glance, their lives appeared grueling and monotonous. They took no weekends. No breaks.

No vacations. At the end of each summer, they would pack up their gers and travel to lower altitudes for the winter. I watched intently and wondered how these women seemed so satisfied with their lives.

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As the sun continued to rise, Augusta and Gundii joined me for breakfast. We sat silently for a while, but the children were clearly curious about us. Their mothers were too. Soon, we were surrounded by conversation and questions. The women graciously invited us into their gers, serving us steaming bowls of yak-milk tea, while we set up our camera equipment. The first woman we interviewed was excited to be filmed, and spent quite some time dressing up in traditional Mongolian finery for the occasion. She donned a pink turban embroidered with flowers, and her smile reached from ear to ear. She was a schoolteacher and talked about the importance of education. She gushed about her students and told us how she hoped to make a positive difference in their lives. She radiated commitment and kindness, and was clearly fulfilled by her work.

We interviewed another woman with a round, open, but thoroughly weathered face. She was small, and her eyebrows

were carefully arched. A jeweled pendant—twinkling and somehow incongruous—hung around her neck. She wore a black sweater dress over leggings, and sported a small horseshaped ring. Her table was heaped with curd, fried bread, and chocolates, which she shared generously. We asked the woman if she had a traditional folk tale or story she could share with us. She paused in thought. The room went still, and she closed her eyes and began to sing. Her cracked pitch was decidedly out of tune, and in another place her effort would have been awkward, but there was something about the authenticity in her voice that was captivating. Without a hint of self-consciousness, she lulled us into her past, singing tales of her childhood memories.

We interviewed a few other women until the sun began to set. Then we had to pack up our things. As we walked back to our tent, a golden eagle alighted on a rock no more than ten feet away, giving us a wary glance. Her feathers were cinnamon-brown, and her hooked yellow beak, ominous talons, and fierce stare warned us not to get too close. As we marveled at the sight, a young girl, no more than fourteen, approached the rock, grasping a piece of dried meat in her hand. The girl lifted her arm and in less than a second, the eagle snatched the meat from her grasp.

Nonchalantly, the girl turned around and headed into her family’s ger as if nothing unusual had transpired.

We walked back to our campsite, tired from what we considered to be a long day of work, and gathered near a fire. Halfway around the world from my own life, I stared into the flames and thought about how for these women “just enough” was more than plenty. When we asked them what they wanted in life, they said they hoped to be better mothers, to create more opportunities for their children, and to do meaningful work to preserve their culture.

They did not envy our western comforts, freedoms, or conveniences. None of this was what I had expected.

The next day, we said goodbye, got into our jeep, and headed east. This was to be the most exciting chapter of our trip. We were in search of a particular eagle-hunting family who, through social media, had captured the attention of the outside world.

Hunting with giant eagles on horseback has been practiced by nomads in this part of the world for thousands of years. Genghis Khan supposedly had over 5,000 eagle hunters in his personal guard. Today, this form of hunting is still practiced by hundreds of Kazakh people living in the Altai region of Mongolia.

Eagles are massive and fierce birds of prey, and eagle hunting is typically the work of Mongolian men. But we were setting out to find the family of a fourteen-yearold girl named Ashol Pan, whose fearless pursuit of this tradition had already made her something of a legend. Ashol Pan’s exploits caught the attention of the outside world when an Israeli photographer, Asher Svidensky, captured her extraordinary talents in a collection of photographs that he shared on social media. To see this young girl handling a

fifteen-pound eagle with a seven-foot wingspan was simply breathtaking.

When we finally arrived at Ashol Pan’s family ger it was getting dark and we were greeted, as is the custom in the Altai, with milk tea and curd. Ashol Pan’s family helped us set up our tent. We gave all the children pens and paper, and they sat on the ground and drew pictures for us while we cooked our dinner. After a meal of canned vegetables, rice, and seaweed all stewed together, we joined the children in a game of duck-duck-goose until the sun went down.

The next day, we prepared to interview Ashol Pan’s mother. We were prohibited from interviewing Ashol Pan herself because the BBC had recently come across Svidensky’s photographs and signed an agreement with Ashol Pan’s family, granting the BBC exclusive access to Ashol Pan for a documentary film they hope to release next year.

When we entered Ashol Pan’s ger, her mother greeted us warmly. Like so many women we had met, she was incredibly humble. We started our interview and she explained her simple life in the countryside. She said educating her children was the most important goal in her life. She took a particular interest in her daughters, saying that she wanted to give them as many opportunities as she could. She told us that technology had been extremely helpful in educating and connecting her family to the outside world, and that, in the future, she believed that technology could be used as a tool to help preserve and disseminate awareness of her culture. She wanted Ashol Pan’s story to empower women across Mongolia to pursue their education and learn more about the country’s noble, eagle-hunting tradition.

Presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has said that equality for women and girls “remains the great unfinished business of the twenty-first century.” The lives of girls are changing for the better, and opportunities are being opened and re-defined in ways that were unimaginable even just a decade ago.

As someone who has been fortunate to have access to a world-class education, I felt intense gratitude for my family and friends, who were so far away that night. Still, I had trouble falling asleep. My mind was filled with questions about what it meant to “succeed” in life. I smirked to myself as I realized that these women of the Altai were not the nomads. I was. They might physically move once or twice a year, but they were stable in the most important of ways: they were truly happy.

I went to Mongolia thinking I might change the perspective of the people I met there and didn’t fully realize that it might end up being the other way around. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have experienced a remarkably different way of life—a glimpse into simplicity and joy. In this Chapel, and especially at this time of year, we often celebrate the simple gifts. In Mongolia I witnessed them firsthand. Now that I have seen them, I hope to seek them out more deliberately for myself.

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new releases

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â–ş Please send information about your new releases to quarterly@groton.org.

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1 War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Duel that Stunned the Nation John Sedgwick ’72

2 The Boston Trustee: The Lives, Laws, and Legacy of a Vital Institution Thomas Bator ’79, P’14 and Heidi Seely

The Boston Trustee tells the story of a unique Boston institution—the men

3 A Man Apart: Bill Coperthwaite’s Radical Experiment in Living Peter Forbes ’79 and Helen Whybrow

Bill Coperthwaite inspired many by living close to nature and in opposition to contemporary society. Often compared to Henry David Thoreau, he led a fifty-five-year “experiment in living” on a remote stretch of Maine coast. There, he created a homestead of wooden, multi-storied yurts, a form of architecture for which he was known around the world. Coperthwaite embodied a philosophy that he called “democratic living,” which was about empowering all people to have agency over their lives in order to create a better community.

Part family memoir and part biography, this intimate and honest account—framed by Coperthwaite’s sudden death and brought alive through Peter and Helen’s monthlong adventure building what would turn out to be their friend’s last yurt—explores the timeless lessons of Coperthwaite’s experiment in intentional living and self-reliance. Coperthwaite’s unusual life and fierce ideals helped the authors examine and understand their own.

4 Green Faith: Mobilizing God’s People to Save the Earth The Reverend Fletcher Harper ’81

The Earth is an incredible gift, but climate change and other forms of environmental degradation have thrown the natural order dangerously out of balance. Through Green Faith, the Rev. Fletcher Harper explores a moral and spiritual response to the environmental crisis, and provides inspiration and practical tools to help readers strengthen their faith and spirituality while inhabiting a creation that is at risk.

With honesty and candor, he explains that it takes belief and practice, science and faith, to sustain our planet and us. Each chapter has concrete examples and tips to help people of faith care for the Earth, as well as questions to guide personal study and group conversation. There is no doubt that climate change is happening, and the majority of people are ready to take action to avoid calamity. But what action is advisable or even possible? What can ordinary people do in the face of such staggering problems? How can the world’s religious communities use

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de libris

In the summer of 1804, two of America’s most eminent statesmen squared off, pistols raised, on a bluff along the Hudson River. That two such men would risk not only their lives but also the stability of the young country they helped forge is almost beyond comprehension. Yet we know that it happened. The question is why.

In War of Two, John Sedgwick explores the long-standing conflict between founding father Alexander Hamilton and Vice President Aaron Burr. A study in contrasts from birth, they had been compatriots, colleagues, and even friends. But above all they were rivals.

A series of letters between Burr and Hamilton suggest the duel was fought over an unflattering comment made at a dinner party. But another letter, written by Hamilton the night before the event, provides critical insight into his true motivation.

The author suggests that Hamilton saw Burr not merely as a personal rival but also as a threat to the nation.

Burr would justify that fear after Hamilton’s death when, haunted by the legacy of his longtime adversary, he embarked on an imperial scheme to break the Union apart.

and women who serve as individual professional trustees and are known universally as “Boston Trustees.”

In the early nineteenth century, Boston’s closely interconnected social and cultural elite faced a problem: how to pass massive new wealth in a predictable, safe, and prudent way. The practice they adopted remains an important option today for families seeking professional trustee assistance. Boston trustees have stood at the confluence of wealth and high society in Boston for two hundred years; to understand them is in large part to understand Boston and the Boston Brahmins.

The authors guide the reader in understanding trusts and the role of the trustee, as well as the evolution of Boston as a financial and regional hub.

The book portrays the establishment of professional trustees in a city that, as one historian observed, not only knew how to make money, but also how to spend it.

their power to respond? In answering those questions, Fletcher shows how we can make a difference.

5 The New Small House Katie Hutchison ’83

de libris

Though the median size of a new single-family house is back on the rise—after a brief decline during the 2007–09 U.S. recession— many are now choosing to live small deliberately, building more environmentally and economically friendly homes. The New Small House presents small-house design strategies, as well as whole-house case studies, from across the United States and Canada for homeowners who are eager to simplify and remodelers, builders, architects, and designers looking for inspiration.

The ingenious designs of these twenty-four small houses (ranging in size from 500 to 1,640 square feet) suit young families, independent couples, single folks, and those entering retirement. The houses are categorized by their location, from waterside gems to city dwellings, and include new construction and renovations featured in 275 photographs and thirty illustrations.

6 Murder by Candlelight Michael Beran ’84, P’20

Arguing that it is “less the quality of the crimes than the attitude of the age which determines the gruesomeness of its murders,” Mike Beran brings to life the appalling crimes of a vanished epoch.

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Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Charlotte Gordon called Murder by Candlelight a “psychological thriller and philosophical meditation, murder mystery and literary analysis, written in elegant and pointed prose.

The author frames his arguments within a recounting of some of the most notorious murders of the nineteenth century, exploring how and why these tales are so fascinating.

In one volume, he cleverly feeds our appetite for horror even as he probes this appetite. He lets us contemplate our fascination at the same time we’re experiencing it, watching as he explores its origins philosophically, historically, and psychologically.”

Interweaving vignettes of the Romantic poets and philosophers who sought a deeper understanding of the nature of murder with graphic accounts of the crimes that obsessed them, Murder by Candlelight paints a terrifying picture of the skull beneath the skin of human life.

7 Scars: An Anthology Erin Pennington Wood ’96

Scars: An Anthology examines the range and nuance of experience related to scars of the body. Through personal narratives, interviews, poems, academic essays, images, a musical review, and a performance script, nearly forty contributors address self-mutilation, gender confirmation surgery, cancer, birth, brain injury, war, coming of age, pain, art, and love, all focusing on the central question of what it means to live with physical scars. The anthology includes essays by the author, as well as by Jennifer Stager ’96, a review by Stephen

Winter 2016

McNamee ’96, and a back-cover blurb

by Matthew Hutson ’96.

8 Traditional Interiors Leta Austin Foster P’98, Sallie Giordano, and India Foster ’98

Attention to detail and dedication to a client’s vision are just a few reasons why Leta Austin Foster has been hailed by House and Garden as one of the “100 Greatest Interior Decorators.” In this book, readers can see how she accomplishes her projects, with chapters focused on specific elements of her design: curtains, walls, upholstery and trim, and details.

Whether it’s a nineteenth-century Virginia family home or an early modern South Florida country club, Foster believes that any space can be beautiful and comfortable at the same time. This philosophy has inspired the design of countless homes across the country. Foster and two of her daughters, India Foster and Sallie Giordano, have created comfortable, gorgeous living spaces, showcased in Traditional Interiors.

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

Jon Chase

Piper Higgins ’17

FALL SPORTS

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Photographs by Jon Chase

JV quarterback Aidan Reilly ‘18; opposite page: Hanna Kim ‘17 and Abby Kirk ‘19

Girls Soccer 11– 4–3 grotoniana

Relationships and roles, as much as talent and effort, led to our success this season.

With the departure of seven players last year — including six starters and five future college players — we had to reconsider our approach for the 2015 season. Followers had to become leaders, substitutes had to become starters, and standouts needed to adjust their expectations. We integrated eight new players, adapted our style of play to maximize our strengths, and learned the importance of placing group success above individual goals. Our Sixth and Fifth Formers, including captains Ali Lamson ’16 and Amani Jiu ’17, were at the forefront of this process, and they did an admirable job.

Beginning with a 4 – 2 upset of Worcester Academy in our opening match, this group of girls consistently found ways to frustrate and outwork their opponents. Two of the

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leading scorers in the Independent School League (ISL), Caitlyn DiSarcina ’17 and Alexa Beckstein ’18, provided an offensive threat, while Amani, a goalkeeper, and defenders Ali and Carrie Moore ’17 anchored the back line. Meanwhile, their teammates worked tirelessly to organize themselves in order to stymy the opposition, which often out-possessed the Zebras but rarely proved threatening in the final third. This group of girls truly bought into the idea that as a group, they could be greater than the sum of their individual parts.

This selfless approach led to a thirdplace finish in the ISL, behind only Rivers and Nobles, a victory on St. Mark’s Day, and the third seed in the Class B New England Tournament. Thanks to a wonderfully supportive home crowd, we beat Pomfret 1– 0 in the quarterfinal round of the tournament before falling to Tabor, 1– 0, on a late goal in the semifinal.

Sixth Formers Sophie DiCara, Anna

MacDonald, and Ali Lamson will be missed next season, but they have left the team in a strong position for the 2016 campaign.

— Coach Ryan Spring

Boys Soccer 4–9–2 Groton entered the season with a collection of fresh faces: likely the youngest varsity team in many years. With six Third Formers (four of whom started) and seven Fourth Formers, it looked like we would take our lumps as the group adjusted to the rigors of a very competitive league. Much to the coaches’ surprise, however, Groton got off to a fantastic start, going 3– 2– 2 through the hardest part of the schedule. With wins over St. George’s, Thayer, and Rivers, and ties with Brooks and Middlesex, suddenly dreams of a playoff birth danced in our heads.

Such visions grew more vibrant when, after returning from mid-semester break,

we were up 2– 0 over a strong Nobles’ side. At about the sixtieth minute of that particular game, however, we rounded a different corner, as we then descended into a Dantean odyssey, giving up three goals to lose that match and then stumbling blindly through the wilderness of several ensuing matches.

While the coaches frantically tried to plug the leaks, the team gave up simply too many goals and, press as we might, we couldn’t find enough of our own. It was only an injury-time strike from Roan Guinan ’17 against Governor’s that secured our lone victory in the latter half of the schedule, but in all truth, Groton found its vision again in the last few games, playing quite well and even dominating a playoffbound St. Mark’s in our final match. That concluding game ultimately defined the 2015 season — resolve, talent, and more deserving than the result indicates — while pointing toward a very bright future.

This year’s seniors — Zahin Das, Stefano Viacava, Will Robbins, Adam Hauke, and Ward Betts — will be sorely missed, yet their example helped shape a foundation upon which to build with so many promising younger players.

— Coach Ted Goodrich

Football 3– 3 This year’s Zebra Gridders enjoyed a good run, posting a 3– 3 record that included wins over Rivers, Middlesex, and Thayer Academy.

In a decisive opening-day victory over Rivers, 46– 10, senior running back John Beatty paced the Groton attack with 211 yards rushing and three touchdowns, as the Zebra ground game had one of its best days of the season. Though Nobles cancelled the next game, Groton continued its winning ways with a big 35– 27 win over rival Middlesex, the second consecutive year Groton has

bested its longtime adversary from across Route 495. John again had a big day, rushing for an astounding 266 yards and scoring five touchdowns. Rookie fullback Bennett Smith ’19 burst onto the scene with his biggest game of the year, contributing an additional 120 rushing yards and leading the team in tackling on the day.

The following week, Groton managed to spoil Thayer’s homecoming celebration with an electric 27– 18 win over an improved Thayer squad. John rushed for what was — for him — an almost pedestrian 111 yards, but he scored three times. The defense was particularly stout against Thayer, tallying two quarterback sacks, a fumble recovery, and six tackles for losses.

Linebacker Taggart Eymer ’17, defensive tackle Malcolm Akinje ’16, and safety Matt O’Donnell ’17 enjoyed especially strong games.

In retrospect, the Thayer game proved to be the high point of the season. The Grotties

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Left, Walker Davey ‘19; above, Anna Thorndike ‘16.

Opposite page: runners Albert Zhu ‘16 and Paul Michaud ’18, soccer standout Caitlyn DiSarcina ‘17, Arthur Jelin ‘16 handing the football to #22, Taggart Eymer ‘17

grotoniana

were overmatched in two subsequent clashes — one against Parents Weekend foe St. George’s, who would eventually become the undefeated New England champs, and the other against Brooks, the defending New England champs.

The season-ending rivalry game with St. Mark’s would decide whether the Zebras would finish the season with a winning record. Both teams played very hard, but key first-quarter injuries to three Groton starters, two of whom were two-way starters, proved insurmountable. Despite a furious lategame rally, Groton came up short against their ancient rival, 22 –19. Despite the loss, John Beatty rushed for 149 yards and a touchdown. He would finish the season with 911 yards rushing, scoring 94 points and averaging 9.2 yards per carry.

Another highlight of the St. Mark’s game was the play of linebacker Joe Collett ’17, who returned from a nearly season-long bout with mono to post 18.5 total tackles

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against the Lions.

For the year, John Beatty scored 72 percent of Groton’s total points and accounted for over half the team’s rushing.

On defense, he shut down each opponent’s best receiver each week and shouldered kicking, kick return, and punting duties. He was the only Groton footballer in the past generation to earn All-ISL recognition for four years, including first team All-ISL in his final three seasons. As a senior, he was also named All-New England. On defense, Groton’s leading tackler was safety Matt O’Donnell ’17. Throughout the season, the team was ably led by a great group of senior players that included tri-captains John Beatty, Malcolm Akinje, and Arthur Jelin, as well as additional senior stalwarts Steve Anton, Drew Bassilakis, Will Corman, and Hayden Futch.

— Coach John Lyons

Field Hockey 8– 9 Groton field hockey is at a turning point, finishing this season with its best record in years. With a new turf field and the opportunity to practice every day on that speedy surface, the team is increasingly competitive with opponents who have been on turf for several years. A turf game is faster, and stick skills must be far better than on grass.

As one of the last three teams in the league to have a turf field, Groton has compensated over the years with practices in the rink and away practices at a soccer complex in Lancaster (MA) and last year at an indoor facility in Tyngsboro (MA).

This fall, our own field was not ready until the end of September, so we spent the first three weeks of the season playing on Lawrence Academy’s new field during the mornings of preseason and then at Lancaster

nearly every afternoon. The travel paid off.

The girls’ skills are more solid, quicker, and more precise, and that fact showed in every single game this fall.

After two away games at Exeter and Holderness, the field was baptized on September 26 with a 45-minute warm-up right after classes, followed by a team lunch, and then with a 5– 2 victory over St. George’s. Pre-game words from Athletic Director Bob Low and Headmaster Temba Maqubela, and a rendition of the national anthem sung by the Grotones, the girls a cappella group, set the tone for a special afternoon.

There were a number of other highlights of the season. In terms of goals scored, the team tied for seventh in District 3 of the NEPSAC. Dominant wins came against St. George’s, Proctor, Brooks, Thayer, Cushing, and Dexter-Southfield. Nail-biters included a 1– 0 win against Holderness, a 3– 4 overtime

loss against eventual Class C tournament champion Rivers, and a 2–1 victory against crosstown rival Lawrence.

Co-captains Sydney Pagliocco and Anna Thorndike demonstrated powerful leadership, along with the rest of the Sixth Form contingent, Sammy Johnson, Anna Nicholson, and Lizzie Tobeason.

— Coach Kathy Leggat

Boys Cross Country 10– 5 Cross country kicked off its season early with another great Labor Day weekend on Mount Desert Island, but this year we upped the training runs. All twelve runners who joined us for this pre-pre-season retreat were ready to meet the challenges, which this year included an eleven-mile run on carriage trails around Sargent Mountain and a five-kilometer run to the top of

Cadillac Mountain.

We kept climbing and our spirits rose as we soared through more familiar fields and forests around campus this fall. Peaking on Parents Weekend, our varsity and JV squads both had records of ten wins to five losses going into the ISL championship, in which varsity finished eighth of sixteen teams and JV finished ninth. Varsity then finished fifth of sixteen teams and JV finished seventh at the Division II New England Championship race the following week, proving that we continue to move onward and upward.

Jamie Norton ’10, All-American runner and now cross-country coach at Tufts, spoke to the team in early September to psych us up for our season. Many newcomers joined us this year, including Joshua Guo ’20, who ran the ISL Championship race nearly three minutes faster than he ran his first 5K race this September. Lwazi Bululu ’20 ran our 5K course nearly five minutes faster on Parents

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Weekend than he did during his first race of the season. Chris Rim ’16 ran three full minutes faster. Cherian Yit ’17, consistently our sixth fastest runner, ran our course nearly two minutes faster, crossing the finish line in 18:45. Albert Zhu ’16 shaved his 5K time by nearly a minute this season, ultimately racing our home course in 17:32.

Will Norton ’17 was not only our lead runner, but also a watchman who reset our competition when they went astray. The number-one runner for St. Paul’s took a wrong turn at the bottom of the boathouse hill during a race and Will called out to catch him before he lost himself, redirected him onto the proper path, and still finished the race at an impressive pace. The first finisher was so thankful for Will’s good guidance that he told his coaches, who told me, and then told all of our colleague coaches in the league, thinking that they ought to amplify Will’s example of someone who doesn’t run only for himself, but also with and for

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others. Thanks to Will’s leadership, the boys cross-country team was honored by the ISL with the Sportsmanship Award.

— Coach John Capen

Girls Cross Country 10– 3 The girls cross country team opened the season with a four-team sweep at St. George’s, but dropped tough races to Governor’s Academy and Nobles in week two. In their first home race of the season, however, the team made a statement by upsetting perennial powerhouse St. Paul’s, and then posted big wins in dual meets against St. Mark’s and Middlesex. After losing a fast and furious race to eventual league champion Thayer Academy, the girls capped the regular season with a sweep of Lawrence Academy, Milton, and Rivers on our home course.

Though injuries knocked several key

runners out of the ISL championship meet, the team finished fifth overall on the strength of great individual performances by captain Maddy Forbess ’16 and newcomer Abigail Kirk ’19. The team relied on its depth at New Englands, and after pulling three JV runners into the varsity seven, the team earned a fourth-place finish in NEPSTA Division II. Hanna Kim ‘17 joined Maddy and Abigail in the top ten at New Englands, and all three earned slots in the NEPSTA All-Star meet at the end of the season.

Six of the regular varsity seven will return next fall, so the team looks forward to building on the success it had this season and eagerly awaits the opportunity to race the ISLs on our home course next November.

— Coach Michael O’Donnell Follow Groton Athletics on Twitter:

@GrotonZebras

John Capen

Opposite page: Sammy Johnson ‘16, Roan Guinan ‘17; this page, clockwise from top left: John Beatty ‘16; Jack Fanikos ‘17, Lars Caspersen ‘19, Nick Barry ’16, Paul Michaud ’18, Albert Zhu ‘16, and Will Norton ‘17, at a preseason trip; goalie Patrick Ryan ‘19; runner Marianne Lu ‘19

BOYS CROSS COUNTRY

GIRLS CROSS COUNTRY

Most Valuable Runner Will Norton ’17

Most Valuable Runner Maddy Forbess ’16

Most Improved Runner Paul Michaud ’18

Most Improved Runner Hanna Kim ’17

Coaches’ Award Nick Barry ’16

Coaches’ Award Verity Lynch ’17

All-ISL Will Norton ’17

All-ISL Maddy Forbess ’16 Abby Kirk ’19

ISL Honorable Mention Albert Zhu ’16 All New England Will Norton ’17 Captains-Elect Matthew Higgins Iati ’17 Will Norton ’17

ISL Honorable Mention Hanna Kim ’17 All New England Maddy Forbess ’16 Hanna Kim ’17 Abby Kirk ’19 Captains-Elect Hanna Kim ’17 Verity Lynch ’17

FIELD HOCKEY

FOOTBALL

BOYS SOCCER

GIRLS SOCCER

Most Valuable Player Anna Thorndike ’16

Most Valuable Player John Beatty ’16

Most Valuable Player Ward Betts ’16

Most Valuable Player Amani Jiu ’17

Coaches’ Award Samantha Johnson ’16 Sydney Pagliocco ’16

Most Improved Players Will Corman ’16 Casey Forbes ’17

Coaches’ Award Walker Davey ’19 Will Robbins ’16

ISL Honorable Mention Sydney Pagliocco ’16 Anna Thorndike ’16 Elizabeth Tobeason ’16

Charles Alexander Award Arthur Jelin ’16

All-ISL First Team Ward Betts ’16 Alec Reiss ’17

All-ISL Caitlyn DiSarcina ’17 Amani Jiu ’17 Carrie Moore ’17

Captains-Elect Maddie Ferrucci ’17 Caroline Fisher ’17

All-ISL Malcolm Akinje ’16 John Beatty ’16 All New England John Beatty ’16 ISL Honorable Mention Taggart Eymer ’17 Arthur Jelin ’16 Matt O’Donnell ’17 Bennett Smith ’19 Captains-Elect Taggart Eymer ’17 Rashawn Grant ’17

Captains-Elect Tyler Brooks ’17 Roan Guinan ’17 Alec Reiss ’17

ISL Honorable Mention Alexa Beckstein ’18 All-State Caitlyn DiSarcina ’17 Cause Over Self Award Sophie DiCara ’16 Anna MacDonald ’16 Sixth Form Award Ali Lamson ’16 Captains-Elect Amani Jiu ’17 Carrie Moore ’17

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Christopher Carey Brodigan Gallery WINTER EXHIBIT

“Thornwillow Press: The Handcrafted Book in the Age of Technology”

The Brodigan Gallery, located on the Dining Hall’s ground level, is open 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on weekdays (except school holidays). It is free and open to the public.

January 7– February 26, 2016

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A celebration of the written word, the exhibit includes hand-sewn and -bound works of fiction, poetry, and history, including some with distinctly Groton ties, such as Freedom From Fear: The Life and Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

by William vanden Heuvel, about Groton’s 1900 graduate, and Civil Wars: Three Tales of Old New York, a novel by Louis Auchincloss ’35, P’76, ’82.

Thornwillow, started by Luke Pontifell P’19 when he was only sixteen, has created publications that reside in the permanent collections of the Morgan Library, Harvard University, Yale University, the British Library, the Getty Museum, MoMA, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the White House, and the Vatican library. Mr. Pontifell spent two weeks in December on campus through the Mudge Fellow Visiting Artists Program, teaching students the art of bookmaking.

“The Handcrafted Book in the Age of Technology” provides a convincing argument that, amidst social media, Kindles, and web-based news, the book remains decidedly alive.

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Woody Campbell

n an age of disposable communication, handmade books may seem a lost form of art. “The Handcrafted Book in the Age of Technology” disproves that notion through beautiful leather bindings, letterpressed fonts, and crafted papers.

de Menil Gallery WINTER EXHIBIT

“Head On” Sergei Isupov January 7 – March 3, 2016

“Boxer”

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eramist Sergei Isupov has returned to the form of the head throughout his career, using it both as physical object and a way to convey a narrative.

His work acknowledges the enduring force of the head and its counterpart, the face, in art, from Renaissance portraits to today’s pop culture iconography. Isupov wants onlookers to contemplate the head and imagine the invisible body.

The images he creates are literal and metaphorical. “The subject matter I address on the surface through painted images draws from multilateral information that passes out of our brains — our heads — as stories first experienced, then stored, and finally told,” says the artist, who has created heads miniature and colossal, twodimensional and three-dimensional. “The viewer who considers these stories then completes the circle by making connections to these images and what they suggest based on their own knowledge and experiences.”

The de Menil Gallery, in the Dillon Art Center, is open 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on weekdays (except Wednesdays) and 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on weekends (except school holidays). The gallery is free and open to the public.

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THE

LARAMIE PROJECT

In November, Groton staged The Laramie Project, a documentary play that chronicles reaction to the 1998 murder of gay student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming.

Nineteen students played more than sixty characters in the riveting drama, which sparked conversation about prejudice, tolerance, and inclusion.

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Left, James Hovet ’18; below, Mac Galinson ’17. Opposite page, clockwise from top left: Rossely Gil ’18, Elyssa Wolf ’17, Sashni-Cole Matthews ’16, the cast (foreground: Charlie Hawkings ‘17), Luke Holey ‘16

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Photographs by Mike Sperling

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Photographs by Jon Chase

Parents Weekend The Parents Weekend concert, October 31, featured a wide range of musical talent, from a cappella groups and the jazz band to the chamber choir, orchestra, and Groton’s dance program.

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Concert

1 Clockwise from top left: Brian Xiao ‘19, Land Tantichot ‘19, Dashi Rodriguez ‘19, Eddie Uong ‘17, Christine Bernard ‘17 2 Clockwise from top left: Sophie Song ‘16, Melissa Marquez ‘16, Adia Fielder ‘17, Abby Kong ‘17 3 Zahin Das ’16 4 Clockwise from top left: Alex Taber ’16, Aaron Jin ‘19, Montanna Riggs ‘19, Arthur Jelin ’16 5 Ethan Woo ’16 and Angus Warren ’16 6 Becky Zhang ‘18, Lily Cratsley ‘19, Kochoe Nikoi ‘19, Emma Rimmer ‘16, and Allie Banks ‘16 (foreground) 7 Groton’s orchestra, with Conductor Tim Terranella and Director of Instrumental Music and Arts Department Head Mary Ann Lanier

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H. Ashton Crosby ’58 June 28, 1940 – September 10, 2015

by William M. Polk ’58, Former Headmaster

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Mary Martin used to sing a song about being a cock-eyed optimist: “I’m stuck like a dope With a thing called hope, And I can’t get it out of my heart.”

in memoriam

A cock-eyed optimist who could not get hope out of his heart, Ashton never wavered from that outlook on life until his death on September 10, 2015. When I spoke with him after his stroke a year ago, he conveyed no sense of self-pity or anger. Our conversation was punctuated with his full and energetic laughter and his future plans.

Meredith Brown ’58 remembers Ashton for his “great enthusiasm for whatever he was working on.” And from Jake Cooley, “The H. Ashton Crosby I remember was fearless, very handsome, generous of spirit, and full of life. He more than compensated for his diminutive stature with boundless courage and desire.”

Typical of Ashton was his excitement at studying an opera in Amos Booth’s German class. Only he could make Wagner sound like a rock star!

A member of the form’s quintet, The Diminished Fifth, Ashton would stand on a milk crate in the middle of the group. At a party at Bill Potter’s after a Groton–St Mark’s dance in New York, Ashton stood on a chair and sang a wet solo of “How Dry I Am.” It was the hit of the evening.

Certainly the smallest lineman/linebacker ever to grace the Private School Football League, Ashton played David to everyone else’s Goliath. Jonathan Sedgwick ’58 called him “a crab, because one could never get rid of his blocking. I could never get by him. But most striking was his wonderful smile when he was doing this.”

After graduating from Williams, Ashton thrived as a teacher, theater director, director of admissions, and then headmaster of the Hoosac School. He also helped to establish the Hoosac Valley Theater Company. He concluded his teaching career after twenty-five years at Rippowam Cisqua School. His optimism, humor, energy, and talent

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made him a great teacher. He had the gift of recognizing and nurturing those same qualities in his students, in the classroom and on the stage. Wick Simmons ’58 writes: “As the only member of the form lucky enough to have him teach two of my children, I know Mr. Crosby was a great favorite whose irrepressible energy and ever-present scarf capped him forever at half his age. And all the while he was moonlighting as a professional actor, doing commercial voiceovers, telling great stories at one dinner party after another. No question, his natural effervescence and Groton/Williams education never let him down.”

After his retirement from teaching, Ashton devoted himself to acting. In his own words, he “had a life of an itinerant actor working on theater, film, and television.” His favorite roles included characters in the works of William Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

Sheldon Crosby ’67, speaking of his brother’s love of the theater in his eulogy, recounted: “In the spring of 1972, he put Hoosac on the map with his direction and production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. For those of you new to the theater, production means paying for it. This production launched the career of David Strathairn, who went on to try to drown Meryl Streep in The River Wild. Not normally a good career move. But what an extraordinary production it was—I know because I was there designing and building the outdoor stages. Ashton pulled that show off with a bunch of students trying to go on summer vacation, a few ‘theater types’ from the village, and a rag-tag group of itinerant actors, which included Mr. Strathairn. It wasn’t just his vision of the production or his indefatigable motivation of the actors; it was his sheer joy in the entire experience that caught all of us up in that moment of sheer magic. We could all see this wonderful love affair he had with the theater.”

For his family, friends, and former students and colleagues, this Diminished Fifth, H. Aston Crosby stood tall as a cock-eyed optimist with a thing called hope that he couldn’t get out of his heart. That was Ashton’s gift to us.

Form notes

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

Faculty-Inspired Giving Given the formative relationships between students and teachers at Groton, we shouldn’t have been surprised when several donors to the Schoolhouse project asked to name a room in honor of a beloved teacher.

The beautiful new building, integrated seamlessly with the old, reflects the generosity of many donors, some of whom named classrooms, entryways, communal gathering areas, and other spaces. Every named space tells an inspiring story, but five of them now publicly share appreciation for a faculty member, and in doing so, recognize that our faculty are the essence of Groton School.

Schoolhouse spaces have been named for:

HUGH SACKETT

JONATHAN CHOATE ’60

Classics With sixty-one years (and counting) at Groton, Hugh Sackett is easily the longest-serving teacher in school history. He earns another superlative, too, as the teacher most recognized within his discipline. Last winter, the Archaeological Institute of America bestowed on Hugh its highest honor, the Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement, recognizing his teaching, his fieldwork throughout Greece and Crete, and his published studies. Twenty-one donors united to name the Schoolhouse’s new central atrium—now the Sackett Forum.

Mathematics Now in his fiftieth year teaching at Groton, “Choatie” has inspired countless students in the classroom, on the ice rink, and on the football field.

A former student named a new math classroom for her revered teacher.

DOUG BROWN ’57

Wood Shop and School Archivist Doug Brown has served Groton for forty-six years. Under Mr. Brown’s tutelage, students learn not only

furniture-building, but also patience, focus, and the satisfaction of working with their hands. The shop now bears Mr. Brown’s name, thanks to a graduate who, ironically, took up woodworking not at Groton but years later.

BOB GULA

Mathematics, English, Classics, Logic Often remembered for his eclectic “General Knowledge Test,” Bob Gula also was known for his talent on piano and for reading aloud to his Second Formers before lights-out. Mr. Gula taught at Groton from 1970 until his death in 1989. An early eighties graduate used his gift to put Mr. Gula’s name on a new science lab/ classroom.

ANN EMERSON

Art Artist Ann Emerson gave selflessly to her Groton students from 1997 until her death in 2014. In thanks for the mentorship she offered their two daughters, a family has memorialized Ms. Emerson with a space in the Forum. A painting by the beloved teacher will hang there, alongside a rotating display of student art.

For more information on ways to pay tribute to these or other beloved teachers, contact Director of Development and Alumni Affairs John MacEachern P’10, ’14, ’16 at jmaceachern@groton.org or 978-448-7580.

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Christopher Temerson

AFTER WORLD WAR II, Headmaster Jack Crocker wanted to help a school in war-torn Germany. Heeding a faculty suggestion, Groton began sending supplies— as basic as cooking fat—to the Landerziehungsheim Schondorf School west of Munich.

The school sent this chessboard, delicately crafted by a student, to Groton as a thank-you gift.