Groton School Quarterly, Spring 2008

May 2008 | Vol. LXX, No. 2

Groton School Quarterly

GROWTH ON THE CIRCLE

May 2008 | Vol. LXX, No. 2

Contents Circiter | Featured on Campus

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Into the Woods Sondheim Musical performed February 22, 23 and 24

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Gallery News Campus galleries feature mixed media collaboration and detritus transformed into art

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Per Circulum Locuti Sunt | Voices on the Circle 9

Farmers, Meadows and Glaciers: Reading History in the Landscape

By John Tyler Phd, instructor in History

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By the Rev. Brian E. Fidler, Chaplain

15 A Sense of Place

By Dola Davis Hamilton Stemberg, Trustee

13 Perspective

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Families and Porcupines

By Tess Russell, member of the Form of 2004

18 Hrs My Rasrvayshin

By Hannah Wellman, member of the Sixth Form

20 My Dream With Two Faces

By Tucker Fross, member of the Sixth Form

23 Product and Brand: Can the Groton

Experience Be Marketed?

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By Richard B. Commons, Headmaster

Groton School Quarterly Contents 25 Daisies in December: A Trailmix

Memoir of Hiding and Seeking

by Katie Hamm,

Member of the Sixth Form

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28 Old Texts, New Eyes

By Aimieclaire Roche, Assistant Head of School

Grotoniana | All Things Groton

31 Intimate and Diverse: The 2008 Financial Aid Initiative

33 Winter Sports

38 New Releases

39 School News

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In Memoriam | As We Remember

43 Shepard Krech, Jr. ’37, P’62

45 James Buckley Satterthwaite

49 David Rogerson

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Notabilia | New & Noteworthy

52 Form Notes

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PERSONAL GROWTH:

Groton School Quarterly May 2008 | Vol. LXX, No. 2

How Does One Exhibit It?

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everal years ago, Groton and twenty other boarding schools here in New England joined together to survey their combined pool of inquiring families, as well as their faculties, students and alumni, seeking better to understand the perceptions of New England Boarding Schools. Such a study had never been done before in the region. It yielded a wealth of information about how boarding schools in our part of the country are viewed, and what issues are most important to families seeking admission to them.

The study’s final report stipulated that a “top priority” in selecting boarding schools over other educational options and a “pivotal theme throughout the findings” was the agreement across groups that exceptional “personal growth” was expected to be an outcome of the boarding experience.

Compared to all other school types, applicant families credited New England boarding schools with higher quality teachers, better individual attention to students, more intellectual challenge and superior college preparation. Our schools got high marks as well for their facilities and their arts and sports programs. But if all of these attributes did not ensure a student’s personal growth, the costs of boarding school (financial and emotional) were seen as too high by parents and candidates.

As one ponders this central finding of the study, the questions come quickly.

How does a school show the personal growth of its members, its faculty, and its students? What does personal growth look like? Can it be photographed or videoed? Would faculty or student John M. Niles, Director of Communications accomplishments prove its presence?

Are increased proficiency in technique, mastery of material, increase in playing time, won-lost records, leadership positions attained, or college matriculation – are these the markers of personal growth? Surely.

But there are also important personal attributes, the kind one sees develop over time, like self-confidence, responsibility, independence, tolerance, perspective, resilience, courage of ones convictions - these must also be markers of one’s growth.

Through its tradition of daily chapel talks, Groton openly displays the scale and scope of personal growth in our membership, beyond the superficial markers. In the words and ideas of our school’s students, faculty, Alumni and trustees, we witness personal growth made manifest. In this issue we devote much of our space to chapel talks from all our constituents, and we hope you enjoy the diverse presentations.

Each is representative of the speaker’s personal journey, and collectively they suggest the rich medium of ideas and perspectives beyond the classroom in which our community grows.

John M. Niles, Editor Quarterly@Groton.org

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Editor John M. Niles Graphic Designer Jeanne Abboud Contributing Editors Julia B. Alling Amybeth Babeu Elizabeth Wray Lawrence ’82 John MacEachern Melissa Ribaudo Rachel S. Silver William V. Webb ’93 Editorial Offices The Schoolhouse Groton School, Groton, MA 01450 Phone: 978-44-7506 E-mail: quarterly@groton.org

Other School Offices Alumni Office 978-448-7520 Admission Office 978- 448-7510

The views presented are not necessarily those of the editors or the official policies of the School.

Groton School of Groton, MA 01450 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.

Circiter | Featured on Campus

Into The Woods

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wish, a witch and a curse. So begins Sondheim and Lapine’s brilliant blending of fairy tales. Directed by Susan Clark and performed by Groton students, the musical direction was by Mary Ann Lanier and Rob Humphreville ’76. The characters and their appreciative audiences learned the meaning of “Be careful what you wish for” from three colorful performances this past February.

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Circiter | Featured on Campus

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Above: Little Red Riding Hood (Hannah Wellman ’08) encounters the Big Bad Wolf (Nate Blair ’09) in the Woods. Below: Jack (Bubba Scott ’11) listens as his mother (Caroline Boes ’08) pleads with him to sell their cow.

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Page 3. The Witch from next door (Haley Wilis ’08) explains how the spell on the Baker’s House can be removed.

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Into the Woods Right: Please provide photo caption.

Below: Please provide photo caption.

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Circiter | Featured on Campus

Gallery News The de Menil Gallery S pring

E xhibit

“A Place for Everything: The Art of Peter Madden”

April 7 - June 2, 2008

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he spring exhibition in the de Menil Gallery will be on view from April 7 to June 2. Madden is perhaps best known for his one-of-a-kind artist’s books. Using hand-made papers and specially crafted bindings he incorporates text and imagery that explore particular moments in his life. In addition to displaying a selection of books, this show will also include prints and photographs. Some of these are included in projects where the artist has sewn together sheets of vellum imprinted with pictures and text into paper “quilts,” revealing personal narratives in a less linear fashion. An inveterate collector of found objects, Madden has assembled a studio full of discarded treasures, which he assembles into patterns and then photographs and prints into cyanotypes, like the one shown below.

A special aspect of the spring show illustrates the artistic process, following the creative steps by which the ordinary detritus of daily life is transformed into art.

Born and raised in Greenwich Village, Peter Madden lives in Provincetown and Boston, where he teaches book arts and alternative photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. He leads workshops throughout the United States and around Europe, including the Guild of Bookworkers, Massachusetts College of Art, Bennington College, the Center for Book Arts in New York City, the San Francisco Center for the Book, the Greek Island of Skopelos, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Madden studied at Pratt Institute, Parson’s School of Design, and Massachusetts College of Art. All shows at the de Menil Gallery are free and open to the public. This exhibition at the de Menil Gallery will run from April 7, 2008 to June 2. The gallery is open from 9 to 3 on weekdays (except Wednesdays) and 11 to 4 on weekends (except holiday weekends.)

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Gallery News

Christopher Carey Brodigan Gallery S pring

E xhibit

Cathy McLaurin and Gayle Caruso “Hybrids”

April 7 - May 18, 2008

Description: A provocative, mixed media collaboration between 2 artists who combine images to make statements which are both personal and universal.

Artists statement: The work in “Hybrids” is a conceptual whole made up of complicated and related parts from two very different childhoods (one urban, one rural), creating a first generation of offspring born out of creative collaboration—a window into some dimly lit truth, transcending reason. — Cathy McLaurin Hybrids” is the recognition and response to the unexplainable complexity of the baggage from our past and the questions asked by modern life.

These creatures ask to be cared for, with hope that any combination of qualities can exist and be nurtured, no matter what the outward appearance. — Gayle Caruso

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athy McLaurin grew up in the heartland of North Carolina.

She holds an undergraduate liberal arts degree, with a concentration in studio art, from Meredith College, Raleigh, N.C., where she studied classical painting in an apprenticeship program in Paris, France. Since 2001, she has been creating audience participatory installations and work on found paper—wallpaper, paper bags, player piano scrolls.

Gayle Caruso is an artist graduating from the school of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the SMFA fifth Year program. She has a studio in Andover, MA. Caruso has studied in Venice and Umbria Italy, as well as attending many workshops in New York, Pennsylvania and Florida. Most of her work is shown in the Museums and Galleries of Colleges and schools, also in art centers and alternative gallery spaces.

Caruso was selected at the Emerging Arts show of New England in addition to many solo exhibits throughout New England. In addition to showing her work she has collaborated with artist Cathy McLaurin to produce and curate many group shows.

Gayle Caruso is a painter, mixed media artist, printer, and book maker working primarily on paper and installation.

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Per Circulum Locuti Sunt | Voices on the Circle

Beginning some 30 years ago, Chapel Talks other than the Sunday homily gradually became regular occurrences at Groton. Now an ingrained tradition, parents, trustees, alumni, faculty, and students continue to address the school in weekday Chapel. Their talks are the centerpiece of services enriching the Groton experience by virtue of the points of view, ideas, and opinions expressed in this more formal setting. Over 100 speakers present at Chapel each academic year. Nine talks, representing all Groton constituencies, are featured here, and afford a sampling of the “voices on the circle� during the recent fall and winter terms.

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Farmers, Meadows and Glaciers

Farmers, Meadows and Glaciers: Reading History in the Landscape A Chapel Talk by John Tyler October 8, 2007

Dr. Tyler in class

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ike a deaf man,” complained Leo Tolstoy in a famous indictment of history-writing, “the historian is always answering questions no one ever asked.” I offer Tolstoy’s remark as a weak defense of why I will take the next five minutes or so discussing the answers to questions most us would never think to ask.

But first a word about me and my interest in history: As a teacher, I sometimes need to remind myself that when I in my mind’s eye see pageants of kings and queens with out-sized personalities and gorgeously arrayed knights on horseback, some of my students just see lines and lines of text with hard-to-remember dates and funny-sounding names. When I think about how it was that the past became so vivid for me, part of the answer involves art history and looking at lots of paintings. But while the art historian looks at the same paintings, examining color, form, composition and brushwork, I am peering at tiny buildings and figures in the landscape background, looking at what people are wearing or doing or what is on the table. It is an odd way of looking at art, but it feeds my historical imagination.

Another key to imagining the past has been travel. Way back in the 1950s, long before the Internet or catalogue marketing, people sold encyclopedias door-to-door. I can remember being very excited when my family first bought a World Book Encyclopedia, and I would spend hours (sad but true!) paging through each of the volumes looking at the pictures and the maps and dreaming about a time when I would be old enough to visit Petra or Ankor Wat myself. Travel unlocks the past. Nothing you can read about the battle of Gettysburg can substitute for standing on Missionary Ridge looking out over the field of Pickett’s charge. The historian Samuel Eliot Morison was a superb prose stylist, to be sure, but part of what made his volumes on the voyages of the early explorers so popular was that Morison himself was a sailor and had made a point of retracing the voyages of Columbus and visiting every landfall where he dropped anchor. I suspect I became an American historian because while I was a child my family crisscrossed the

Eastern seaboard visiting many of the locales where the most dramatic events of American history were played out, and, therefore, American history was always more vivid and exciting to me than it was to other people.

But now I would like to talk about imagining the town of Groton in earlier times. I have spent more of my life in Groton, Massachusetts than in any other place, and the landscape here has often posed more questions for me than it has provided answers. A simple jog around the Triangle will acquaint you with the variety of soil conditions that exist in Groton quite close to one another: from rich loam to heavy clay to thin, sandy soil, all within the mile or so that it takes to jog from the lacrosse fields to the open fields of Groton Place near where the crews finish their races. If you are observant, you will also notice that the woods change as well from a mix of beech and birch and maple to tall stands of white pines on the more sandy soils. Is this an accident? Did it just turn out that way? Or is there a reason?

Some of you may be aware that the Indian name for Groton was Petapawaug, or “swamp on top of a hill,” which certainly seems apt enough for any of you who have endured the swarms of mosquitoes that are everywhere in late spring. But why would Native Americans, who surely did not face any sort of housing crisis, choose to live in such a place? The extent of the wetlands surrounding the original town of Groton is perhaps clearest when you jog along the bike trail that follows the old railroad bed. But then you encounter another puzzle; the street that crosses this swamp is called Broadmeadow.

Why not Broadswamp instead? Was this just seventeenth-century real estate hype?

Jogging along Main Street and back along Route 111, there are still more puzzles. Architectural clues make it clear that from about 1790 until the Civil War, Groton was a very prosperous place. The number of ample-sized, if not even grand, Federal-style and Greek Revival houses make it clear that farming paid well in Groton. But then very few new buildings were built on such a scale until the 1880s and 90s when Groton became a fashionable country retreat Quarterly May 2008

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Per Circulum Locuti Sunt | Voices on the Circle for rich people from Boston. What happened to agriculture in Groton? And why are there so many apple trees here? And why do these apple trees only seem to be planted on hillsides? Are they like the grapes in the Rhone River valley that need a particular orientation toward the late afternoon sun?

And just one more riddle to ponder as you are jogging home: Route 111 is called Farmers Row. Wasn’t everyone in Groton a farmer? Why distinguish just those people living in more isolated homesteads in these upland pastures as “farmers”?

The answers to these questions snapped into place last year when I read a book by Brian Donahue called The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord, a title for which I had to endure a certain amount of ridicule from my friends while I was reading it on the beach in Provincetown. But I found Donahue’s book riveting because it answered so many questions about the landscape in which I had been living for much of my life.

Massachusetts was a glacial dumping ground, that much I knew already, and that fact accounts for all the drumlins and moraines, the peculiar-shaped small hills and ridges so characteristic of places like Groton. But what I did not know was that Groton’s history as a glacial dumping ground also accounted for a diversity of soils in such close proximity and that those soils, in turn, would dictate how the land would be farmed. To oversimplify greatly: the jumble of rocks pushed along by the glaciers would become rocky uplands that were good for little more than woodlots for much of the colonial period. The sandy outwash from underneath

“ Some of you may be aware that the Indian name for Groton was Petapawaug, or ‘swamp on top of a hill’.”

the glaciers could, with heavy manuring, bear some undemanding crops but was more likely to become summer pasture. The most valuable lands of all, as far as both the Native Americans and the first European farmers were concerned were what we would now call wetlands in rich alluvial soils left behind by the draining away of glacial lakes.

These wetlands, or “meadows” as colonial farmers would call them, grew a variety of wild grasses that were useful fodder for animals during the long winter months when pastures no longer provided enough sustenance for domestic animals to survive on their own. Indeed, these meadows were the key to colonial husbandry, since the central difference between farming in Old and New England was the much longer winter here during which domestic animals would have to be fed. Thus, the meadows needed to be “improved,” ditched and drained in such a way that they could be flooded during the winter, thus enriching the soil, and yet dry enough that men, wagons, and oxen could move across them during haying season.

The heavy investment in labor in both ditching the meadows

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and building dikes meant that such fields needed to be managed collectively. Thus, the early proprietors of Groton each owned small strips of the Broadmeadow and decided together when it should be flooded and when it was drained. Also, the importance of these meadowlands explains the location of Groton. The early settlers of the town were not locating their houses next to a swamp; instead their home farms overlooked their most valuable asset: the meadow that would be their principal source of winter fodder so conveniently placed near their barns and domestic animals.

Just as the early proprietors of Groton each owned a strip of meadow, so also they divided the rest of the town into small parcels of land for tillage, pasture and woodlots, not only insuring a proximate equality, but also insuring that each family had the requisite variety of types of land required for colonial husbandry: wood lots provided the timber for building houses and barns as well as firewood during the long winters; the rocky pastures, though too difficult to plow, could provide summer grazing for cattle and sheep; and highly-prized arable land (in far too short supply) grew corn and rye. Being Englishmen they would have preferred to grow wheat (for white bread) and barley (for beer), but New England winters proved too harsh for winter wheat and the sandy soils of the most easily worked land too impoverished for barley. Thus, cider became the common man’s beverage in New England, and much to their delight, the early farmers discovered that apple trees grew best in the rocky uplands, which were far more likely to retain water in dry summers than the sandy soil of their tilled fields.

To fast forward through two centuries of agricultural history, the small scattered plots of the earliest settlers gradually became consolidated, especially plots at some distance from the center of the town. New England’s rapidly growing population meant that there was less and less land per family in the village center and forced the sons of the third and fourth generation of settlers to place ever more marginal land under cultivation, thus moving out to rocky pastures that had only been used for summer grazing before. Such independent homesteads far from the village center were called “farms,” hence the name “Farmers Row.” More and more land was cleared with less satisfactory results until by the late nineteenth century much of the land was disforested. (For example, when Groton School was first established all the land from the Circle to the Nashua was clear, and only subsequently has it grown back into woodland.)

So the landscape we see around us isn’t accidental. It has a history, and there are powerful reasons it looks the way it does. It pleases me that the school has decided to once again farm some of its unused lands rather than let it sprout up in secondary growth which it would surely do if left untended. There is a long history here of how human beings have interacted with land.

So what’s the point? Where’s the exhortation? I hope that during the next few weeks when the New England countryside is at its most beautiful, you’ll find the time to bicycle, jog, or walk around the town of Groton and that as you do, you’ll look carefully, reading the clues that are everywhere around us about how the town used to be. The landscape contains the answers to questions we never thought to ask.

Families & Porcupines

FAMILIES & PORCUPINES A Chapel Talk by Dola Davis Hamilton Stemberg, Trustee and Parent 1998 and 2010 January 25, 2008

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oday is nostalgic for me because it is the day before my last as a trustee of this School. However, I will still proudly have Will in attendance, just as his brother Rylan was here and in this Chapel 10 years ago when I gave my first talk at this podium. I asked Rylan for his advice given this occasion and given his experience of having been here in the audience. Rylan told me, “Whatever you do, keep it short and they will love you.”

I must admit it is difficult as a parent with a son in this audience to address you. First and foremost, it is my duty not to embarrass my son, any of my sons, by what I say here. Secondly, is it extremely hard to avoid it because I know that my very presence before you must in some way do so. That is second nature in the relationships of adolescents and their parents—embarrassment.

While we parents still view you adoringly as children, you yourselves are growing apart in body and mind from being children, yearning for more independence and believing that we could not possibly understand who you are and what you want. This is the essence of the natural transition for parents and children as they grow apart from each other.

the Internet if you have not heard it before. It is a poem written

by Max Ehrmann over 55 years ago in 1952. In fact, that was the year I was born. When I first read it, I realized I could not pass on thoughts that were truer, better said or more everlasting in meaning.

That is the essence of great literature. It never dies, remaining timeless, inspirational, spanning many generations. The words and phrases also take on new and deeper meaning as we age and reread them. I keep this poem on my bulletin board and I hope that if you do not have it, you copy or print this poem, entitled, “Desiderata”, and keep it and refer to it during your years here at Groton and beyond.

“ Words and phrases also take on new and deeper meaning as we age and reread them.”

There is a species of porcupine whose need for each other parallels that of the pulling and pushing of parent and child. These porcupines like to cuddle for warmth and comfort. However, they need to constantly readjust their closeness to each other. If they get too close they risk pricking each other, and if too far away they lose the warmth from each other. Such is the dilemma for the parent adolescent relationship.

In thinking about speaking today, I remembered a poem I sent my three sons. I must now confess to the tendency to email them perhaps too many words of wisdom as one of my embarrassments.

And, while not being terribly original, sharing that poem with you today accomplishes both of my objectives—not sticking my foot in my mouth with too many of my own words, yet sharing something worthwhile. You can find it in the library or on

Dola Stemberg, Trustee, P ’98, ’10 with family from L to R top Clyde Stemberg, Will Stemberg, ’10; bottom, Rylan Hamilton, ’98, his son, Harrison and wife, Kristin.

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Per Circulum Locuti Sunt | Voices on the Circle Desiderata Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery.

But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.

Especially, do not feign affection.

Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.

But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.

Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

Be cheerful.

Strive to be happy.

Max Ehrmann, Desiderata, Copyright 1952.

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Joanna Hamer ’08 in choir rehearsal

Perspective

PERSPECTIVE A Chapel Talk by The Rev. Brian E. Fidler Friday, November 30, 2007

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here is a line in Chapter XII of 19th century English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel entitled The History of Henry Esmond that reads, “…how well men preach and each is the example in his own sermon…” If that is true—and I believe there is much truth in it— then it is no surprise as I look back over the weekday Chapel Talks that I have delivered at Groton School that a significant number of them have to do with journeys. There was a talk about flat tires and lost luggage; another about an unreliable car I no longer own, the most noteworthy characteristic of which was the amount of time it spent broken down on the side of the road having slipped its drive belt; and, two more talks reflected on the most unlikely experiences of roadside prayer with perfect strangers! In keeping with the importance of this metaphor of journey in what I preach, I begin this morning with a brief account of a journey unlike any I have ever taken before now.

This story begins some two-and-a-half years ago when, for my wife’s birthday, I gave her the gift of a hot air balloon ride.

I did so with a certain amount of fear and trepidation knowing that I would be expected to accompany her despite my decided preference for keeping my feet firmly planted on the ground.

I had no idea just how fickle the process of getting a hot air balloon safely off the ground and back again could be; our journey was postponed seven times in two-and-a-half years for a variety of reasons ranging from too much wind to not enough wind to wind that would simply have taken us in the wrong direction; from temperatures that were too hot or too cold, to conditions that were too rainy. It was not until a month ago—late in the afternoon on Skip Day, in fact—that we finally lifted off from southern New Hampshire, some 40 miles north of here.

The experience was, quite simply, extraordinary! Everything about the journey, from the assembly of the rig and the inflating of the balloon on the ground, to the gentle, nearly imperceptible lift-off was fascinating. Even the measure of altitude, ultimately ascending to a height of 3,000 feet, took on a surreal quality to which my anxiety about heights responded more with amazement than with fear. But it was the perspective—the extraordinary 360-degree perspective—that amazed us into silence. One hundred miles to the north the stark outline of the White Mountains of New Hampshire stood in majestic relief against the sky; 45 miles to the east the Atlantic Ocean sparkled in the late afternoon sun

Rev. Brian Fidler in Sacred Texts class

with the skyline of Boston rising up on its shores; and due west… the sunset. It was an unremarkable sunset really, at least so far as its colors were concerned. What was fascinating to realize however, was that, at 3,000 feet we were still bathed in the suns’ warming rays while the ground below us had already slipped into the shadow of dusk; it was almost as if our suspension so far above the ground had rendered us impervious to the passage of time below us! We were free, not only from the constraints of the ground, but we felt as if all the cares and occupations of life were suspended in that moment. It was unlike any perspective I have ever had before, suspended above the earth in a moment of timelessness and limitless distance.

A great many of the Chapel Talks we hear in this place represent the efforts of those who deliver them to share their perspective; to show us something they have seen and to help us understand life with something of the clarity with which they have come to understand it. These are perspectives on life that are typically viewed from some distance, whether the distance of time, or space, or of both. These are perspectives that, more often than not, look back on a journey already made, distances already traveled, years already lived: “…this is where I have been…this is what I have learned…” Perspective on the journey at its end.

But, perspective is important too for the ways in which it might show us the possibilities that lie before us. It is one of the most striking things I encounter when graduates of this place come back to visit, many of them exuding a poise that had not crystallized while they were here; a perspective that they attribute to seeing a larger world and gaining a clearer sense of the possibilities of their own place in that world. It is a perspective that I suspect has caused many a graduate to realize that, as real as the busyness of this place is, much of what all of us describe as our stress-filled lives is stressful because we have lost perspective about our place in the world beyond the gates of this School.

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Per Circulum Locuti Sunt | Voices on the Circle I am not saying our stress is not real, but when it is placed alongside the realities of war and homelessness, disease and starvation, ethnic cleansing, well…you get the point. Let’s face it, a community like ours has a tendency to narrow and, at the same time, magnify the narrowness of our worldview so that we begin to forget that there is a larger world outside the gates where realities different from our own exist. I am grateful for this vision offered to me by graduates whose own broadened perspectives enable them to return to this Circle, to smile and to recollect, to celebrate and to place their experiences here in some kind of perspective, but to realize how much more there is in the possibilities of life than we see from where we sit. It is for this reason almost more than any other that I value the sharing of perspective that we hear sitting in this place, inviting us, as it so often does, to step outside ourselves.

But, I resist the notion that we cannot gain something of this forward-looking perspective until we leave the Circle behind. How do we begin to gain a glimpse of where our journeys may yet take us even while we are still so firmly grounded here? * * * “Stop, look, and listen.” I think I learned that phrase in a very different context when my mother was teaching me how to safely cross a busy street, but I suspect the information is no less lifesaving when trying to gain perspective on one’s life than it is when teaching a child how not to get hit by a bus. For indeed, most of us travel incessantly, racing from one class to the next, one practice, one rehearsal, one meeting, one commitment to the next without so much as a pause until our heads hit the pillow. Why should we expect to gain perspective if we do not stop, if we do not pause long enough to see the world around us without moving by it so quickly as to not be able to apprehend it, except as a blur? While much of our busyness here is chosen for us (classes, meetings, and the like), we are—all of us—able to make choices for ourselves about how we use at least some of our time and what sorts of things to which we may choose to commit ourselves. Why shouldn’t we choose to stop—once a day, twice a day, three times in a day—and simply look at what is going on around us? I daresay we will be surprised at what we see: beauty, simplicity, complexity, wonder, seriousness, joy, pain, vulnerability, and humor, to name but a few.

Siddartha Gautama called this process of seeing life, “being awake.” We must awaken and see life for a moment or two if we are to gain and retain our perspective, and not see it only as we want to see it when all the framed diplomas and degrees are neatly hanging on the wall and we have “arrived,” but now, in these moments that we will not get back again.

And, as long as we have chosen to stop, and to look, it might also be worth listening, and not only to the voices that chatter incessantly or to those who are telling us what we want to hear, or to those that are agreeing with what we are saying. We must also learn to listen to those voices that annoy us, that grate on our nerves, that disagree with us. There is room for discernment, to be sure, for not every voice is one that will tell us something that is worthwhile or even true, but why not let our perspectives

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be stretched by those to whose voices we are not accustomed to listening? When we find ourselves in the midst of a Groton gripe session or a Groton gossip session, why not change the topic? And, if that doesn’t work, we might politely excuse ourselves from the conversation, for there are other perspectives in the world than the familiar, worn-out rant of all that is wrong with our narrow, magnified perspective. Stop, look, and listen!

But our search for perspective need not stop there. We might also consider stepping outside the narrow confines of this magnified slice of life we call school. We might take a walk outside the gates, not for the agenda-driven purpose of going to Donelan’s, Filho’s, or CVS, but just to take a walk. We might take a new path, a new street, breaking free of the familiar in order to see what new perspective we might gain on our surroundings.

We might allow ourselves to float high above familiar ground by losing ourselves in a good book that is not required reading; a story that transports us to another place, another time, in the company of those whom we have never met, who speak of things that are not associated with this slice of life in which we live. We might go home on a weekend, or accept the invitation of a friend to travel to their home. We might arrange to get away for a day.

And finally, if we are feeling really daring, we might initiate a conversation with someone with whom we have never had any extended conversation before except, perhaps, to say hello. We might listen to their voice, look at the flash of their eyes, and experience their humanness, their perspective on life. Who knows how our own perspective may be broadened and enriched?

Our hot-air balloon ride lasted just over an hour, traveling a distance of a mere three miles before we drifted down over a tree line on the edge of a field, descending out of the warm glow of the setting sun into the shadow of dusk that had already consumed the earth. Waiting for us there was an unsettled landowner who had serious reservations about our landing in her field, despite the fact that we had little choice in the matter. I watched and listened as our pilot did her the courtesy of stopping to hear her concern, of explaining the relative lack of control that a balloon pilot really has over the direction in which a balloon drifts and the choice of a landing site (especially in the heavily wooded state of New Hampshire)! Our pilot was a good listener, hearing the reality of her concerns, and assuring her that her greatest fear that she could be held liable for injury sustained on her property was, in fact, not the case. We seven passengers were the human tether for our giant balloon for close to fifteen minutes while our pilot patiently listened and explained; it was not only the perspective I had viewed at 3000 feet that taught me something about perspective that day!

We sit here—in St. John’s Chapel—at the beginning of a new term. Perhaps we took some time over the Thanksgiving Break to place the fall term in some sort of perspective, even as we began to anticipate the possibilities of the months to come. Regardless, my greatest wish for this community as we begin again is nothing more than that we live into the possibilities of new and ever-broadening perspective on our lives together. Travel well on your journeys; may your perspectives be so much greater than you imagine they can be!

A Sense of Place

A Sense of Place A Chapel Talk by Tess Russell ’04 February 1, 2008

G

ood morning! Before I begin, I would like to extend a few thank yous—to Mr. Commons, Mr. Fidler, and Will Webb for having me back today, to the Beamses for hosting me last night, and to my two Senior Prefects, Nas Akuete and Theo May, for giving me a couple familiar faces to look at in the front row. I’m actually amazed at how few of you students I recognize, but I suppose it makes sense, given that this is my first visit in over three years.

So why am I here now, when these Friday slots are usually reserved for older, far more distinguished alums and friends of Groton? I have not pursued a career in the Foreign Service or the armed forces, nor am I a school trustee. I was thinking a few days ago about the placard on the front door of this chapel which lists the speakers for the coming week and wondering if I warranted any description beneath my name. “Tess Russell ’04: Middlebury French Major on the Six-year Graduation Plan” certainly leaves something to be desired. Hopefully, I can return here in a few years time with a much more impressive title, but today I’ll just address you as Tess, a college kid who procrastinated a little while (four years or so) on the writing and delivering of this talk.

Tess Russell ’04

Which brings us to the Beams’ dorm common room, circa 2004. A fellow senior and I are seated on the couch engaged in a heated round of Mario Party. The game stops abruptly as the first of twelve chimes resonates through the crisp spring night, and she propels herself out the door in a swift, obviously practiced, motion to begin her sprint around (or quite possibly across) the Circle. I drop my controller and reluctantly inch over to a Diet Coke-canlittered desk in the corner of the room, from which my laptop beckons.

A few days earlier, with my chapel talk date fast approaching and several long nights of staring at an empty screen already under my belt, I had done as any desperate Grottie would have and enlisted the help of several capable classmates. A disconcerting number of them nominated me to single-handedly uphold the filibuster tradition, arguing that if anyone could talk all the way through first period, it was I. Members of my Expo section proposed that I adapt a paper I had written about my retrospectively disgusting personalized nutritional pyramid, which then drew primarily from four food groups: candy, potatoes, fro-yo, and Easy Mac. Another friend suggested I recount the always-lengthy story of my family tree: of my half siblings through both of my parents, who have lived together for my whole lifetime but never married, and who remain on bizarrely close terms with their exes. (See? It’s hard to summarize.) He reminded me that my winding explanation had fascinated and distracted Ms. Leggat so much that our V Form Precalculus class had won an extra night of studying for a quiz that had been unfortunately scheduled on the morning after an extrainnings Red Sox game and also pointed out that I could live in chapel talk infamy forever by beginning with the line “I was born a bastard child.”

Unfortunately, all of these ideas—while funny—were decidedly trivial, and would have involved a level of self-deprecation with which I was not entirely comfortable. Looking back, I had unrealistic expectations for my talk. I wanted it to be both riproaringly hilarious and deeply revelatory, a standard which makes sense only when one considers some of the year’s other offerings— Senor Conner’s delightful chess talk, or my formmate, Stefan Quarterly May 2008

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Per Circulum Locuti Sunt | Voices on the Circle Mikhail’s, brilliant call-to-arms advocating the importance of artistic contributions to society. I knew for sure I was doomed when I found myself seriously considering the opener: “Giving a chapel talk is kind of like brushing your teeth when you’re really, really exhausted and already in bed. You dread it and fight it, but in the end, you’re so glad you did it.” Ultimately, however, I backed out two days beforehand, to the rightful chagrin of Mr. Fidler, and I’ve regretted it ever since.

So when Will Webb paid a visit to Middlebury this fall and offered me a chance to finally make good on my deep-seated desire to speak in this hallowed space, I jumped at the opportunity and assured myself it would be much easier this time around. For one thing, I had amended my expectations from “giving the best speech in the history of the world” to “not making any of you wish that you’d cut chapel this morning.” Besides, I like to think of myself as more capable, more adult, and at least a fraction wiser than I was four years ago. I like to think that, so why, when I sat down to write this talk last week, did I again find myself drawing a blank? Had I learned nothing at all in my two college careers and the eighteen months of work experience sandwiched between them? Questions like these have been at the forefront of my mind lately while I watch my contemporaries prepare to graduate and enter the real world in a few short months. As I wondered whether my 21st birthday in December officially qualified me as a grownup, I was reminded of a college trip I took to Princeton during Fall

“ To be honest, it still irks me a little to see all of you strangers going to my school, and when I returned here for Lessons and Carols after graduating, I really did feel the pain of a divorce.”

Long Weekend of my Sixth Form year.

I had boarded the New Jersey transit and met up with my sister, who is four years older and was thus also a senior, after an eventful (if ultimately scandal-marred) evening with my fellow Grotties in New York. We immediately went back to her suite where we caught up with all of her friends and unloaded my bags before heading to dinner. As I looked around her modest single, I remember being so envious of its stylish decoration and its sense of order, especially by comparison to my woefully messy Groton room, with linens chosen by my mother and piles of dirty clothes exploding in every direction. She, on the other hand, had cool Life magazine covers and vintage albums framed on her walls and a simple, sophisticated white blanket gracing her bed. This ownership of the space she occupied, though manifested in superficial ways, seemed to me symbolic of larger transformations I had noticed in her.

She was taking responsibility for her actions, no longer relying on our parents to set up appointments or counsel her through major decisions.

Call me a materialist, but I really do believe that understanding how we interact with and relate to the physical world around us

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is among the more important discoveries that we make about ourselves. As one of my favorite writers, the inimitable Scott Russell Sanders, explains: “Loyalty to place arises from sources deeper than narcissism. It arises from our need to be at home on the earth. We marry ourselves to the creation by knowing and cherishing a particular place, just as we join ourselves to the human family by marrying a particular man or woman. If the marriage is deep, divorce is painful.”

That passage is taken from a piece entitled “After The Flood,” which Sanders wrote about the burial of his childhood home at the hands of dam-building developers. My creative writing professor at Middlebury distributed the essay to our class this fall along with an assignment to venture out into our lovely surroundings and complete a work of nonfiction nature writing, in our choice of verse or prose. I certainly like the outdoors as much as the next girl and significantly more than a friend of mine who also took the workshop, an Istanbul native and self-proclaimed “nature-hater,” who ended up composing a satirical love poem which she called “But No, I Will Not Live in Vermont With You.” Still, as I found myself increasingly frustrated with the topic, I started to worry that maybe I simply was not cut out for the country life. Indeed, I see an interesting dichotomy in myself when I consider where I might like to settle after college. On the one hand, I’m a total city girl whose ideal afternoon involves a double feature at an arthouse cinema followed by a healthy dose of window-shopping. I hate when businesses or restaurants close before midnight, and I always wear whichever shoes best complement my outfit even when there’s a deadly blanket of ice on

A Sense of Place the ground. And yet when I informed my Columbia friends of my decision to transfer, they had all remarked that Middlebury was perfect for me, their relatively “crunchy” friend. I am, after all, a vegan, and I’m always yelling at them to take those fairly standard conservation measures—recycling, turning off lights, and using public transportation whenever possible.

Suffering from writer’s block, I again went the Groton route and turned to my fellow Middlebury student Theo for inspiration and, crucially, a ride. Take me somewhere outside was my only instruction to him, and the next day found us following a trail from which (he assured me) we might spot a moose at the right hour. I looked around at the admittedly beautiful and vibrant fall landscape convinced that my inner urbanite had triumphed,

“ I can no longer sleep past 9 o’clock, and though I would never expect Mr. Beams to believe it, I have become a born-again neat freak whose favorite Sunday night date is with a washcloth and a can of Pledge.” because this just wasn’t doing it for me. But then, as the visible realm gradually began ceding its brilliance to the stars, sunset diffusing into twilight and then dusk and eventually a pervasive fog of lightlessness, I drifted off in a reverie -transported to my favorite patch of land in the entire world - and it wasn’t in New York or London or even my hometown of Baltimore.

I found myself jogging the Triangle on a perfect day, sunny and mild, as a thick cushion of leaves helped to relieve my aching feet. Surfacing on the lower fields, I slowed my pace to a walk and retired beneath that large tree—you know the one—lining the paved walk to the gym. As I swilled my water, I thought about my first week at Groton, when I had sat in the exact same spot to complete a journal entry at sunset, required for my IV Form English class. I vividly remember being so homesick that my tears were actually smearing purple ink across the pages of my composition book as I wrote. The same canopy later became a haven on the sweaty days of cross-country preseason when we would do circuit training or 4 X 400 relays.

When I think of what I value most about Groton, there are things that come quickly to mind, such as the close relationships I forged with friends and faculty, the high value the school places on service, and the intellectual rigors of the curriculum. But I’d never before given much thought to how formative my physical connection to this place was, or to how much I missed Groton’s buildings and paths and vegetation—how I ached for them the same way I ached for my friends. I used to hate when recent graduates would come back and tell me to really cherish Groton while I could because these were the best years of my life, not because I didn’t believe them but because I already knew all that. I knew that the strong sense of community and tradition here was unique and fleeting, and so do all of you. But, VI Formers, if you’ll allow me to offer just

one piece of advice, it’s this: as Prize Day approaches and you move your couches outside and devote countless hours to hanging out with your friends, don’t forget to slot in some time for your favorite spots on campus. Stick around for the postlude and run your hands along the aged wood of these chapel benches, or do your work in the solitude of the schoolroom during 10-12. Because your bonds to your formmates will evolve and, in many cases, become even stronger after you leave here, but the one thing that you will never have again—not unless you join the faculty—is the privilege of waking up here every day, of loafing around the mailroom and playing soccer on the Circle and nodding silent hellos to other students when you meet them in the dark.

If, like Sanders suggests, our relationships to places are like relationships to people, then I definitely don’t wear my heart on my sleeve. I will never be the Environmental Studies major who flirts with every landscape she sees, but I challenge you to find someone more fiercely enamored of the places with which she shares a true history. Perhaps that’s why I’ve stayed away for so long. To be honest, it still irks me a little to see all of you strangers going to my school, and when I returned here for Lessons and Carols after graduating, I really did feel the pain of a divorce. After a little distance, though, I’m more inclined to believe that our marriage to Groton is a lasting one—our time as students may be the honeymoon, but it’s a lifelong commitment and separation is simply not an option. I am inclined to quote Sanders again here since he says it much better than I can: “You may love the place if you flourished there, or hate the place if you suffered there. But love it or hate it, you cannot shake free.”

I sincerely love Groton, though, like many of you, I alternately flourished and suffered here. And I truly mean it when I say I would fight to defend this place. I’d venture a guess that most of you out there would join the cause as well, and if it ever comes to that, I am pretty sure Dr. Reyes could deliver an inspired pre-battle oration in Attic Greek. I guess it just took me a lot of moving around—from college to college and even across the Atlantic, in the case of my time spent living in Ireland—to understand exactly how much this place (again, not just the friendships and the experiences but the place itself) has shaped me. So maybe I can read into that new-found understanding that I’m finally growing up. I eat protein now, and vegetables. I can no longer sleep past 9 o’clock, and though I would never expect Mr. Beams to believe it, I have become a born-again neat freak whose favorite Sunday night date is with a washcloth and a can of Pledge.

A few weeks ago, one of my oldest friends—a Baltimore girl I have known since we were four—visited me at Middlebury. As I led her into my spacious room, she paused to look around, taking in first the Chagall prints and vintage movie posters and then at the subtly coordinated pillows I have accumulated over the years.

Finally marveling at an Ikea shelving unit stacked with cubbies of meticulously color-coded clothes, she turned to me and said: “I love this room. It’s just so you.”

But fear not: I’m still young and feisty enough to bring my A-game to the Reunion Spelling Bee that I hope to attend this spring. So look out, Manasa, I’m ready for our rematch.

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Per Circulum Locuti Sunt | Voices on the Circle

Hrs My Rasrvayshin A Chapel Talk by Hannah Wellman ’08 January 17, 2008 Please provide caption for the above photo.

W

hen I was little, my backyard was my life. My family did not watch TV, and my mom refused to buy me and my little sister Barbies. So, besides reading, the obvious answer was to play outside.

There was a pond, a sandbox, a swamp, and a gulley that still floods with water each spring. And trees. Pine trees, maple trees, apple trees, and the old chestnut. If my backyard had been a slab of lawn, I might have been bored. But for me, my backyard was a utopia, and my imagination, which was classified by my doctor as “impressively overactive”, made it 10 times as wonderful. I amused myself for hours on end, developing imaginary worlds that were then acted out in my backyard along with Emory, my younger sister.

But it was more than acting. We were living these other worlds.

We were pilgrims, newly landed at Plymouth via the Mayflower.

We harvested the apples in the fall, got water from the pond, and gathered the chestnuts that fell from the tree by the garden. We cooked using the sand from the sandbox, the chives and rhubarb that grew on the edge of the swamp. When we tired of that, we were a pair of sisters living in Lexington during the Revolutionary War working as spies. We wrote important messages using our beloved quill pens and ink and delivered them to Paul Revere and Abigail Adams. And in my last years of childhood, we were fairies, living in a dangerous forest, fighting evil and wielding our very, very cool, or so I thought at the time, wooden swords. It was a paradise, an escape, and a place where my historical knowledge came to life, and my imagination flourished.

Feel free to judge me in whatever way you wish, but my overactive imagination that drove such intense, and at the time realistic, fantasies made my childhood perfect. That was when everything seemed either deceivingly simple or impossibly complex, and either way, belief was not difficult. Because I could imagine just about anything, I believed I could do anything, and I believed that anything could happen.

This Christmas, I was searching my dad’s desk for scissors. In one drawer, a holiday stamp and large, awkward writing caught my eye. I picked up the envelope. “Nothe Pale Santa Closs.” The stamp was not a stamp after all, but a sticky holiday greeting tag, labeled, “To: Santa, From: Hannah.” My address and phone number covered the entire left side of the envelope. For a moment I was excited. I assumed it was an old Christmas list. I turned the

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envelope over, ready to see what I had wished for in my youth. But it was unopened. First I was puzzled. And then a little hurt. Surely my parents, who did the Santa thing so convincingly, must have read my lists, and knowing my mother, had probably tucked them away somewhere for posterity.

“Dear Santa” I wrote. “I wod like to be a elfe hrs my rasrvayshin.

I will be a frand I will shair and be good for the elfe who’s sike I will be a good supstatot nexy year if I can. Love, Hannah.”

I did not know that when I wrote that letter, I would discover it in 11 plus years and be shocked at how much I have changed. I cannot even conceive of putting so much faith in anything now, as I did in Santa with that letter. Everyone believes in Santa when they are younger, but from what I have heard, relatively few write requesting passage to the North Pole asking for a job. I have been told on a

“ Feel free to judge me in whatever way you wish, but my overactive imagination that drove such intense, and at the time realistic, fantasies made my childhood perfect.” separate occasion that I also made Valentine treats for the reindeer one year. I am guessing a lot kids do not do that either. Yet when I found that letter, I felt as though a Pandora’s box was opened.

The first thing that hit me, and I was surprised by it, was distress that my parents had not opened the letter. I probably told them I was writing a letter to Santa, or that I wanted to be an elf. But based on the spelling, reservation is spelled “R-A-S-R-V-A-Y-S-H-I-N,” I am sure they did not help me write it. Didn’t they want to read it? See how I expressed my beliefs? Or did they just take the letter out of the ashes in the fireplace and hide it away, knowing that inside the envelope rested a child’s unfaltering belief in something that was not real? The result of my imagination stayed locked up and hidden in a desk drawer, safe from discovery. Locking the letter up at the time was a sensible idea. Six or seven year old me could not discover that my parents were really Santa, and that what I had believed in was not real. My parents were protecting me, trying to shield my imagination, and my childhood, from reality. Of course, by the time I found it, my childhood was gone

Hrs My Rasrvayshin and reality was all too poignant, and I found myself wishing they had burned the letter. Then, I would not have found the letter this year as an 18 year old, and I would not have to rekindle the disappointment in smashed hopes, and the realization that I have not believed in anything with the conviction that I did in Santa coming to bring me to the North Pole.

So where has my belief gone? Where is my imagination? I can assure you, wherever it is, it will not manifest itself in my running around the Circle screaming and waving my wooden sword. But really, why can I not believe, or trust in anything like I once did in Santa? Is it because Santa never came for me, even after I wrote him and fed his reindeer? Or is it simply a product of growing up?

My neighborhood friends had always gladly played along with my created fantasies, but sometime around fifth grade they lost it. But I had a younger sister who was still in the throes of childhood, so I clung to my imagination as other friends turned to malls and makeup. My friend Sarah was the only other girl who was still willing to imagine things. I don’t think it was a coincidence that she also did not have TV, and that she too had a woodsy backyard with a fast running stream. I realize now, though, that I was shedding my childhood rapidly, just prior to coming to Groton. I will never forget the day Emory cried, because I had to do homework and could not play with her. So is it the world? We are forced, by nature of growing responsibilities, to grow up. In this way, my loss of childhood whims and imagination happened gradually, but when I look back, it hit in a hurry.

By the time I was in eighth grade, I had been ignoring the hints for some time, desperately trying to retain what would now, I am sure, be regarded as foolish day dreaming and silly indulgence.

And then the fateful day. I tried to climb my favorite tree in the backyard, the tree from which I saw Squanto approaching, the British troops sailing into Boston Harbor, and the ogres coming from the forest. I had always been able to scale about half the height of the large tree in three minutes. But this time, the thicker branches were harder to come by, and the openings in between branches were narrow. I couldn’t find places to put my elbows or legs, and every so often a branch would snap under my weight. I made it a quarter of the way before I realized I was stuck, clinging pathetically to the trunk that I loved. It was then that I knew I had grown up a lot more than I ever thought I had. It was pretty clear that making it up to my branches of childhood were not an option, so instead I carefully worked my way down to the lowest branches of the tree, only three feet off the ground. In case I was still going to mentally cling to my childhood, my tree forced me to admit that it was physically impossible as well. But is our childhood, or at least moments of tree climbing and innocent, basic fun, still out of our reach?

It is true that we are growing up in times of national anxiety outside the Groton bubble, and within, an extremely competitive environment. But we choose to feed into it. We get depressed because Groton is “miserable”, Groton is “this” and “that”. I think we are growing up in a world of video games, YouTube (I plead guilty) and instant gratification. We do not have to work for our own entertainment anymore like I did when I was putting effort

into imagining the battle I was fighting in, or the lackadaisical air of climbing my favorite tree. We do not have the simple joys of childhood anymore.

The most fun I had this year was the first night the seniors had ten to twelve. A fairly large group of us went to the dark Schoolhouse and played manhunt, running through the halls, screaming, and generally enjoying ourselves. Afterwards, several people mentioned how intense they had felt, running in the dark, and actually feeling some sense of danger, and how they could “Get into the game.” This intensity quickly took a real turn when the night watchman kicked us out. We went to the student center half-heartedly considering a dance, when headlights turned on the dance floor. It was the night watchman again. I do not know why his appearance elicited such a reaction, but in about three seconds of unnecessary panic, half the form had dropped to their stomachs

“ Each time I try to climb my tree, it will be progressively harder to make it up to where my imagination was once at its strongest.” on the dance floor, and the other half had sprinted back to the game tables, laughing and tripping and, once again, just being silly. Perhaps that night did not involve any elaborate storylines, or historical accuracy as it might have for me 10 years ago. But it was fun, and foolish, and we did not have to focus on being grown-up, or mature, or setting a good example for the younger students.

Oftentimes, when my male cousins are being extremely obnoxious or immature, I say “Oh, come on grow up.” Now, whenever someone is being cynical, or excessively serious, I want to say, “Don’t grow up!” Hang on to some little bit of imagination or childish whim a while longer. I hope that everyone in this Chapel believed in something ridiculous and far-fetched at one point.

It might be in a letter from your past, hidden by your parents, or maybe you yourself locked it up, thinking that you would be better off without it as you go to face the reality of the world we live in. Perhaps it is easier to leave your beliefs and childhood behind. But I do not want to. Not completely at least.

Years ago, I thought, that at this point in life, I would be happily living in the North Pole, making toys and feeding the reindeer, not telling the Groton student body about my childhood. But Santa never came for me. And he never will, and I no longer court even the smallest belief that he will. I have grown up, and in the process I have left most of my imagination at the top of the tree I loved so much in my backyard. I am Wendy being dragged away from Never-Never-Land. Each time I try to climb my tree, it will be progressively harder to make it up to where my imagination was once at its strongest. If I went back and tried to climb that tree today, only the lowest branches could hold my weight, barely a foot off the ground. But I am alright with that. I know that at 18, there is not space for me at the top of the tree anymore. I need to be grounded in reality. But not completely. One or two feet off the ground, cannot really hurt, can it?

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Per Circulum Locuti Sunt | Voices on the Circle

MY DREAM WITH TWO FACES A Chapel Talk by Tucker Fross ’08 February 5, 2008

I

love little silences. I love the small tranquilities, the pauses and breaks in our days like brief eddies on a churning river. I love the quiet of dawn, and the rare mornings when I wake before the alarm summons me to the daily rush, and I lie in rapture, as an audience of one before a symphony—only to be disappointed by a shrill beep. I love the pause between breaths, the tiny infinities of quiet breaking the measured noise of speech.

I love the stillness after evening service when we spill out of this chapel onto a circle hushed by our absence and find ourselves hushed still, unknowing, by the remnants of silent prayer trailing in our wakes and the simple sanctity of a temporary peace. We break the peace with laughter, yet it is the contentment that I remember with a smile.

Groton is that calm. We call it a bubble, yet it may as well be a shield, our own fortress of solitude with the added company of three hundred and fifty equally sheltered peers. It’s as though we live under the arms of a very old oak, and are so small beneath the canopy we can hardly remember that outside, there are storms, and wind, and axes. I love the silence beneath these branches. I love the tranquility and calm—and I love our peace.

But ours is not a silent world. The way of man from his beginning has been not peace but war against neighbor and self and nature and God. Ours is the struggle. The mill of so-called “progress” turns with a mingled flood of tears and blood, with sweat to grease the gears. And yet what we are struggling for or fighting with we can not say. And so we grasp at vague resemblances of truth and call them philosophy, theology, and science. We make our battles smaller, because we cannot understand the war, or know our enemy, or see anything for the smoke and choking dust.

We pick one battle for ourselves, not knowing that they’re all the same. So those who choose to struggle for an unnamed common good focus on their own pin of the grinding wheel that turns the world, hoping that they’re pushing in the right direction. We must simplify our struggles, or we would surely lose.

We are all faced when we leave here with the choice between service to others and service to our selves. Whenever I am asked what I want to do with my ephemeral life, I feel I’m trapped between these two, with little room for both. And yet I think I’ve come to believe the paradox: that service to others is service to self.

In the economic sense of course, the opposite is true as well, as

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the mill of economy ends up making bread for everyone, though sometimes we find the flour is our dreams and the better part of our lives have been spent in indentured servitude to a misplaced desire for material gain. I believe in the words inscribed upon our walls and crests, that it is through service that we truly rule.

Through service we find meaning, and in meaning we find joy, and in joy we find freedom.

The way to meaning is to live a purposeful life. For those of us at this school, in this country, in this world, it is far too easy to survive. It is almost inconceivable that we might not thrive. Most of us were born to ease. Yet when we become too comfortable, we get itchy. We are so swallowed in our easy decadence that, as though covered in a blanket by the fire, we become at first warm, and then hot, and then suffocated by our own luxury. And so we seek struggles we could easily avoid in hope that we may find, when it comes our time to die, that the world is changed because we lived, that we are noted beyond an engraving on a tombstone, that history will secure our immortality, and we are not erased by years as footprints washed away in sand.

And yet I return to silences, the opposing face of my two-headed dream, and the side of me that prefers the fleeting footprint in the sand to the undying stamp on history. For my choice is less between a private and a public life than that of finding a tranquil cove or of entering a noisy world. I’ve lately found that I have

Tucker Fross ’08 in history class.

My Dream With Two Faces

The Circle in late spring.

lost my home. The house of my childhood still stands, but my childhood home has been suddenly removed, and replaced with an emotionally sterile contraption of the same design. I have found of late that the place that I would call home is three thousand miles overseas, and that I have not seen it for over seven years.

It was a house called Highwayman’s cottage, in southern Britain. We lived there during my third and fourth grade years.

It was all old English charm. The walls crawled with ivy that, on cold nights, would reach in through the window like the fingers of some leafy giant. The garden had two parts: the wilderness and the cathedral. The first behind the house ran straight up to the backdoor as though the thick grass would spill into the kitchen. For the second part, there was a path and a small clearing like the nave of a church with trees bending towards the center to form a ribcage.

I once caught a doe praying there. Its fawn stood by on awkward legs, with the white spots of innocence still marking its fur, as the mother lay still, eyes closed and ears pinned back. I stood as quiet as the tree beside me until she rose and walked away.

Highwayman’s Cottage and all it was slowly slipped away, until we moved in our third year overseas to be closer to our new school. And then we left, to return to what I thought was home, in Concord, Massachusetts, to a place where my old friends were no longer the second graders I had left behind. Within a year I had left the Concord middle school for Belmont Hill and then, in

ninth grade, here I was. Before Groton, I had not gone to the same school for more than two years in a row.

Yet here I am now, in a home for the educationally deported.

Groton is a place for the placeless. Boarding schools are an odd collection, like a garden with plants from around the world. We have each left a hole in our old homes, and few of us find that it fits us as well when we return for vacation. But Groton is now

“ Whenever I am asked what I want to do with my ephemeral life, I feel I’m trapped between these two, with little room for both. And yet I think I’ve come to believe the paradox: that service to others is service to self.” the closest I have to a home outside of a romanticized memory.

And that home, and the peace that I have found here, is about to scatter away.

Groton is not meant to be an eternal limbo. It is a preparatory school, though what we are preparing for is rather subject to debate.

I suppose service to the public or to God, depending on how you translate Latin, but the days when our alumni moved en masse Quarterly May 2008

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Per Circulum Locuti Sunt | Voices on the Circle to Washington have passed, and few of us seem destined to be preachers. Wall Street is a more popular destination than Capitol Hill. I am not lamenting. Groton is not meant to be a factory of noble minded crusaders with teachers manning the assembly lines, churning out by hundreds a robotic intellectual army. But perhaps we are meant to be the city on the hill that Mr. Row spoke of this Sunday. Somehow, I imagine our school, small as it is, as a lighthouse, rising above the emptiness of rural Massachusetts to cast light out in ever dimmer circles to the corners of the earth.

“ I imagine our school, small as it is, as a lighthouse, rising above the emptiness of rural Massachusetts to cast light out in ever dimmer circles to the corners of the earth. Perhaps it is for us to educate.”

Perhaps it is for us to educate. This could be our greatest act, to share our gift of learning, and erase the ignorance that breeds fear and hate, racism and genocide, terrorism, oppression, and poverty.

Our knowledge has the power to change the world, and power, they say, corrupts, but the real difference between knowledge and power is that when you truly understand a thing, you must love it, and yet when you have complete power over it, you can only despise it.

We have been told that much is expected of us, beyond even any task of education. We are the inheritors of a broken world, the golden generation tossed into a place of corruption, hoping that we cannot rust. So we have been told. We will be forever weighted by the immeasurable failures of our fathers, the anguish of ancestors, and the collective angst of our society. So we have been told. In words and ink, in writing and in lectures, from the flickering light of silver screens to the classrooms of this very school, we have heard the forecast of our doom. We are saturated with it. Some days I expect to flip from news to weather and find the two blended, with the anchor giving the one-day prophecy—“Cloudy, with a chance of the apocalypse.” Our parade of eminent lecturers bombards us with either the immensity of our own material gluttony or the inevitability of its consequences. At times it seems that the more common doomsayers, frequently found on street corners carrying cardboard signs, have suddenly sprouted podiums and Ph.D.s And always, with the final line of the speech, the buck is passed to us. The generation before us seems at times to have given up on itself, assured by a comfortable present, and hopeful for a distant future more or less devoid of catastrophe. We are less like excited teenagers handed the keys to daddy’s car than like frightened children, left alone in an empty house with thin walls and leaking pipes.

The barrage is desensitizing. We are numbed to distant suffering even as we are made its voyeurs. The exploitation of guilt draws resentment and weariness. Wherever there is outrage, there is often an unaddressed question of why we should care. Why is charity a virtue? For there are many who believe it is not. Ethical Egoism, or the belief that only selfish action is moral, has unquestionable

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appeal. I struggle whenever something is labeled as evil, even as I find myself increasingly drawn to the Christian message.

I cannot believe that we are, as Jonathan Edwards said, “sinners in the hands of an angry God.” Yet it is my greatest fear that I am wrong. I hope for a God of love, an inhuman god, before whom we are but a piece of an immense creation. And yet we find a different God in the Old Testament, in words that I have not heard uttered inside this building, and yet find a place among the Christian canon. This is the sender of plagues, who says of the idolaters in Jerusalem, “To me belongeth vengeance and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.”

I am more apt to believe these are the words of an embittered critic of ancient Israel than the words of a jealous and angry God. I have drifted from faith in higher morality and divine retribution, falling to the belief that imperfect ethics are what they are because they are useful to society, and that before a God who created all, no part of creation is hateful. But I believe there is right action for us all. And as I have become more inclined to the New Testament teachings of charity and love, I have found an unexpected comfort in the message of Christ. Though I doubt the divinity of the man, I find enough divinity in the message—or perhaps enough divinity in mankind.

Yet that message is one which I am certain I can never truly meet. Can I eliminate thoughts of anger, or turn the other cheek when struck? Humanity can never be perfect, but the point of our collective strivings is the striving itself. The Reverend King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. In our struggle for divinity against corruption, we live as though stuck together in a chimney, pushing against one another’s backs to reach the air above and escape the fire below. We may either walk together or scrabble to the top of the heap—only one will take us higher. We are approaching the kingdom of heaven, but it will take something more than man to get us there.

Our position here grants us one thing: we do not need to be sheep, hoping to be brought to a better world. We are to be the leaders, and not the led. But as we are not sheep we must be either shepherds or wolves, either leading mankind to greatness or amassing it for ourselves. This is our freedom, that we are not born destined to do well or ill, but brought up in a grey world, of indecision, and doubt, but also of hope. Yet even as I long to be a shepherd, I cannot condemn the wolf, for I do not believe that God would either.

I have spoken already of the peace that I have lost, the peace of childhood that we all have lost. I have found solace in the ancient words of the Beatitudes. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the Children of God.” And once again, through the prayer of St. Francis, who wrote; “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” I have found my mission and the way to live both sides of my two headed dream, that I may have both tranquility and purpose, a mortal life and immortal impact, even if I am unnamed by history, so that my tombstone may read: I came and went like foam upon the sea Yet all the world was changed because of me.

Product and Brand

PRODUCT AND BRAND: Can the Groton Experience Be Marketed?

A Chapel Talk by Richard B. Commons February 12, 2008 Headmaster Rick Commons in English class.

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hat is it about Starbucks? What is it about that green circle in a shop window or jutting out from the side of a building? Why is it that, among all the other signs designed to draw me, only the green circle will widen my eyes, force me into an illegal U-turn, and extract three dollars from my tight little fist for something that is free in the faculty room?

Dunkin Donuts does not do it to—or for—me. The ubiquitous pink and brown rectangle just does not speak to me, any more than the golden arches do. I see those signs only as blights on the suburban landscape. But when I glimpse the green circle on the horizon, or even on a white cup in some passing stranger’s hand, I feel an immediate, almost desperate desire for something

grande. Like Gatsby searching for the green light across the wide, unbridgeable sound, I will lose myself down soulless streets and infinite airport corridors in pursuit of the dream of Starbucks.

Is it just the coffee that draws me? It is tasty, sure, but is it really that much better than Dunkin or Peet’s or Coffee Bean or even the faculty room? No, I have to admit to myself and now to you, I must be drawn by something else—something less rational than the quality of the coffee, less defensible than even the habit of caffeine. A marketing expert, I am quite sure, would call it “the lure of the brand.”

Brands are designed to draw consumers, regardless of product quality. Lexus or Ford? There is an allure in the Lexus brand, and many buyers pay a hefty premium for what a Lexus conveys, regardless of how it drives. Google or Yahoo? Both are completely free, but when was the last time you Yahooed something? Google has become a ubiquitous verb, synonymous with searching the Internet. That is remarkable brand recognition.

Googling around a bit myself, I found a BusinessWeek ranking of the top 100 global brands, including a rating of how much the brand value had increased or decreased in the last year. All of the products I have just mentioned are on the list of top global brands. Yahoo and Ford, however, are deemed to be weakening in brand value, while Google, Lexus, and Starbucks, despite ferocious competition, are strengthening.

This discovery brought the sad realization that I must be just another hapless victim of highly effective marketing, drawn more by the brand than by the product. The Starbucks circle suggests good coffee (that is its product), but its brand is carefully constructed to suggest other things too: upscale, sophisticated, urban, hip. I guess in my secret heart I want to be those things, or at least to taste them once in a while. And upscale, urban hipness just does not flow from the coffee machine in the faculty room.

Does it flow from the machine in the Admission Office? I would not know, since it is off limits to all non-admission personnel. OK. I sometimes walk down the hall and turn into the reception room pretending to have business there, and then I look for a chance to slip casually behind the door for a little fresh Sumatra and a sugar Quarterly May 2008

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Per Circulum Locuti Sunt | Voices on the Circle cookie. But let us think a bit about why there is nice coffee there and tasty cookies: what we are about in the Admission Office, from September to January anyway, is mostly marketing.

When I walk in to the reception room and meet the people who stand between me and the coffee machine, I’m trying to make a good impression, one that will make the prospective student and her parents want to come to Groton. On the occasions when I go without interest in a cup of coffee, which does happen, you could say that I am there for the sole purpose of promoting the Groton brand. So is the marketing of the Groton Circle so different from that of the Starbucks circle?

Yes, I think so, in three important ways.

One, we’re not trying to make money by selling our Circle. Our financial goal is to break even every year. To make the distinction vivid, imagine Starbucks refusing to sell more than 350 lattes regardless of demand. Imagine if they selected the 350 deserving customers by a special committee charged with determining who among those applying for a latte is fit for the experience of drinking their brew. Imagine further that the cost of producing a latte were six dollars, but Starbucks charged each consumer only three; and if three dollars was too much for a selected customer, the latte would be offered for two dollars, or one, or free. Why? Because, in this imagination, Starbucks believes that what matters is not the ability to pay for your coffee, but the readiness to drink it with integrity and commitment, and then to make the best possible use of its uplifting effect.

“ Why is it that, among all the other signs designed to draw me, only the green circle will widen my eyes, force me into an illegal U-turn, and extract three dollars from my tight little fist for something that is free in the faculty room?”

That is the Groton business model. Our bottom line is not financial. It is intellectual and moral. So if you are a student giving a tour, or a faculty member who greets a prospective family in the dining hall or in your class, you are not a salesperson for the School. You are helping to give opportunity to deserving students, a select few of whom will come here to learn how to use their talents to make a difference in the world. That is why you are sitting in this Chapel…. Remember?

The second important marketing distinction between Starbucks and Groton is that at Groton, we depend upon “self-selection” to bring us applicants who will benefit from the experience here and contribute to it. The goal at Starbucks is to sell to as many customers as possible, without consideration of what effect the coffee will have on their lives or how the customers will interact

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with one another in the store. That’s very different from what our Admission Office does.

Let me give you an example of marketing that has this selfselection in mind. Mr. Gracey and I held an admission reception in Connecticut in the fall, which featured Teddy Bunzel, Maggie Goodlander, Alia Aziz, and Sharyar Aziz, all Groton graduates currently in college. They spoke about their experiences at Groton and shared how the School had affected them, and then they answered questions. I remember Maggie’s description of her final Modes paper for Mr. Tulp and Teddy’s favorite athletic memory—a football game against St. Mark’s. Maggie said she stayed up all night writing the paper, despite the fact that she had already been admitted to college. And Teddy said that the game ended in a loss, the last game he would ever play.

Marketing genius, right? There were probably a couple of kids nudging their parents toward the door, or vice versa. But there were a number who leaned forward and wanted to learn more about modes of order and disorder, or what Mr. Lyons said at the end of the game to make Teddy look back on the loss with such appreciation. That is what we want to happen in our admission process—self selection by students who have a lot to give and a lot to gain from one another….Remember?

The last distinction I will draw between the attractions of Starbucks and the attractions of Groton is a bit finer. The value of the Starbucks brand, I would argue, is ultimately greater than the value of its product. In other words, the expectation when I see the green circle in a shop window is actually greater than the experience of consuming the coffee. Groton should be the reverse.

Product and Brand

“ So is the marketing of the Groton Circle so different from that of the Starbucks circle?

Yes, I think so, in three important ways.”

No matter how well we present the opportunity in the admission process, I want the experience to exceed all expectation.

That does happen in small, singular moments as well as in larger, evolving self discoveries. Think of the last Chapel Talk we heard here: Tucker’s reflections on how he might reconcile his urge for silence and reflection with his obligation to do something selfless, for others. Blessed are the peacemakers, he told us. And I know many of us were affected. Would I have wanted that talk to be heard by prospective students and parents? Certainly, but if Tucker had given it by design on Revisit Day, it would not have had the same effect. It would have remained a jewel, but one encountered as part of a display rather than one that caught us, brilliant as it flashed unexpected in a nearly perfect gesture.

Another example: Winter Formal. Everyone dancing…except for me and Ms. Roche. The lead singer called out as the band played a repeated refrain, “can anyone out there sing?” Aaron was pushed forward, and then Sage, and then Conner. Did you see the face of the lead singer when Aaron began to sing? He expected some kind of Karaoke, I think. What he got were kids with trained voices. And then Chris on the sax. Do you think the musicians in the band expected that?

As much as I loved the profoundly exceeded expectation visible in the faces of the band members, my favorite part of the experience was the raucous cheering of the student body. It sounded like a hockey game, but these cheers were for members of the choir and the jazz band. That is not an experience that can be branded; it has to be lived in the moment.

Last example: I subbed in on duty in Webb’s dorm a couple of weeks ago, and Ashley and I were sitting in the common room doing our homework during study hall. I was dozing off a bit, when one of the third formers came in a little after 9:30 and asked

if she could check-in early and go to bed. This seemed to me to be a wonderfully reasonable idea, and I started to say yes, and then looked at Ashley. “Are you feeling OK?” she asked the third former. “Just tired.” was the answer. “Then wait ten minutes,” Ashley said. “It’s important that we all be together.” I nodded as if that would have been my answer too.

At check in, nothing spectacular happened, other than the disappearance of three cold pizzas, a pan of homemade brownies, and four packages of Klondike bars. The sleepy third former was wide awake and happy. And when our heads did hit our pillows, at least two of us had learned something about the importance of being together and about small, unexpected exercises in leadership.

I am told by prospective families that the biggest difference in how they view the School is made by their tour guide. And that makes perfect sense, because the education of each one of you depends significantly upon the intellect and character of your peers.

But the tour guides cannot listen in on a great Chapel talk, enter the Winter Formal, or show the family a dorm check-in. Imagine if they could! We would double our applications overnight.

But all of you sensed what was here, or what could be.

And now it is up to you to make sure that the Groton product remains superior to the Groton brand. We need customers just like Starbucks does, but their coffee does not improve because of the people who drink it. The quality of your experience is determined largely by you. I have heard rumblings this winter

that things just do not seem to be as much fun around here as they used to be. Actually, I hear that every winter. And then the students, bright, good kids who sense what could happen here, make it happen.

And then suddenly it’s Prize Day, and handshaking takes four hours, and you go off somewhere and somebody sees your Groton sweatshirt and says, “You went to Groton? Great school. Did you like it?” I hope your answer will always be some version of, “More than I ever could have expected.”

Let us make sure that it is true.

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Per Circulum Locuti Sunt | Voices on the Circle

Daisies in December: A Trailmix Memoir of Hiding and Seeking Frame Twelve: At Groton: Listening to a Chapel Talk A Chapel Talk by Katie Hamm ’08 Date?

Katie Hamm ’08

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he approached the podium slowly, her legs weighted with trepidation and her hands shaking with anticipation.

So this is what it all comes down to. One chance to say something that might touch their lives for an instant, one hope to say something that might affect their lives forever.

Nervously, she smoothes her hair again, breathes deeply once, twice, pauses for effect— Then begins.

Want to hear a secret?

There. Hear it? Listen…

Maybe it would help If you closed your eyes.

I’m serious. Close your eyes.

Okay, that’s better…

Don’t concentrate too hard.

Just Breathe.

I want you to picture a moment When you were truly happy.

Not half-happy— Not the I-just-aced-a-math-test Kind of happy (which, of course, I wouldn’t know about) But instead the spontaneous, unplanned Kind of happy.

The deep contentment Of waking up from a rainy day nap To rays of new sunlight and a rainbow The latent euphoria Of tasting the first snowflakes of the winter Maybe it’s more a feeling Than a circumstance.

Maybe it’s more a shadow Of a memory than a feeling.

I remember the first time We decided to go swimming in our clothes

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It was April—or perhaps early May The Nashua smarted our exposed limbs As we inched away from our sneakers on the log Then, without warning, The silty water engulfed me entirely Tackling the breath from my aching lungs And stinging my eyes with sand.

We lingered there Numb to the cold and to the smell Until the crew boys’ wakes nudged us shoreward And the Schoolhouse bells Reminded us of previous obligations.

But even as we wrung out our Saturated clothes and hair on the bank I turned back And marveled at the incredible force of the current And the power of the moment That cleansed my perceptions in the mire.

And, almost four years later Why is there still nothing funnier Than smearing handfuls of chocolate frosting Over our faces like war paint And running from responsibility In Pashmina turbans?

A wise Sixth former once said in her chapel talk: Life is what you make of it.

I want you to take that advice and run with it Literally, sloshing through puddles of slush and mush In pursuit of a chance encounter.

I want you to build memories and friendships That will outlast term paper grades.

I want you to run an unknown trail through the forest And take the chance of losing yourself And read books for pleasure on weeknights

Daisies in December Even if it means finishing a problem set at recess.

I want you to dance to bad techno in sequins and stilettos And dress up in study hall just for the hell of it I want you to laugh so hard you cry And not be afraid to cry so hard you laugh again.

But what authority do I have to say these things to you?

I am not the Senior Prefect In fact, I have been told that I am not Even a very good example of a sixth former.

This may be true But consider: who judges?

Imagine: Groton is a bakery Known for its specialty gingerbread men A secret recipe governs the ingredients And a specific procedure must be followed To produce these specialty cookies: The dough must be rolled to a precise thickness, cut into identical shapes, and baked in a temperature controlled oven to golden-brown perfection.

Groton’s reputation depends on the Quality and consistency of its products.

To produce what it advertises And as a result, the bakers Are held to the highest standard.

I am the one-armed gingerbread man That never made it to the oven I am the one they don’t decorate with frosting And put in the display counter I am the one they leave on the tray in the back.

Over the years some of the bakers have made Botched efforts to reattach my severed limb But it never looked quite right.

I appreciate your efforts But I know by now that I will never be a perfect gingerbread man And I know now that it’s okay I have all the basic ingredients And, with any luck, I’ll encounter enough people Who like the raw dough.

Of course we can’t be happy all the time.

But sadness comes and goes As naturally as the seasons And when tears fall like raindrops They thicken the spring with flowers.

I didn’t cry here until Fourth Form, And what a great release it was!

I let down my great wall of expectations To the tune of “Hide and Seek” on repeat And heard my sobs echoed in the night air.

Tell me you’ve never cried.

Maybe you’re not lying But I think you’re not listening

I’ve been told that it’s impossible to remain friends with someone who’s hurt you deeply.

That you should plant a garden to decorate your soul Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

But I must contest this.

Why can’t we pick flowers together?

Belittling heartbreaks into shallow scrapes Laughing at our mistakes How impractical to go through life Forgetting the people you loved most.

Even if the result is not perfect The effort is always worth it And there are times when I’m convinced That I prefer thorns to rose petals.

One thing I’ve learned at Groton Is that life is not meant to be perfect.

Sometimes you have an entire Friday afternoon free To get lost running in the woods And overcome your fear of heights.

Sometimes you spend an entire Wednesday Walking around Ayer, Groton, and Pepperell Putting up posters in the freezing rain.

The challenge is learning To make light of antagonism And finding the humor In seemingly dire situations.

On the rare occasions When I am completely alone And my thoughts are my own Unburdened by internal anticipation Devoid of foreign expectation, I wonder at my good fortune.

That in four years I have laid footprints alongside The future leaders of this world And their inspirations— The people who gave advice Who illuminated the pathways Who explained that there might be More than one right answer In life, love, and trigonometry.

To the English teacher who recommended a book, mailed a letter, And held up a mirror to my character failings Thank you.

To the roommate who listened to my opinions late into the night And told me to keep singing Thank you.

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Per Circulum Locuti Sunt | Voices on the Circle And never lets me take life too seriously Thank you.

To the new friend who let me forgive my past mistakes In an unexpected conversation Thank you.

To my parents who love me In spite of everything I don’t deserve you.

And thank you all For the unexpected wink In the Dining Hall For starting the first Snowball fight on the Circle.

For wearing all black in solidarity And wearing the onesies.

For laughing with me When I wiped out on the mountain.

And dancing with me, in costume, on the squash court.

For belting Rent And burning monkey bread.

For discovering a Shortcut and a swing.

For enduring the Security guard’s interrogation Even though you could’ve escaped.

For eating those disgusting brownies And listening to the dead baby jokes and pirate pick-up lines.

For writing the poem that made me laugh And leaving the one that made me cry.

For snow tubing down the mountain— And down Mark’s hallway… Ouch.

For hiding a 3 pound box of Cheez-Its in the elevator And french fries in the bathtub.

For having a late night shower fight And singing for tips at the Mobile Mart.

For making the pact And playing the game—victory never smelled so much like Pastore’s.

For attempting the fire in the common room.

For imitating my obnoxious wave And giving me backstage advice.

For letting me run alone when I needed it, And pulling an all-nighter just to talk.

For picking me up When you saw me crying And not asking any questions.

When I think of these moments And of these people Whose fingerprints decorate The soundtrack of my senior song Like their handprints decorated The dusty blue rugs in our fourth form loft I know that I have been truly happy here

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And now that the swing set is gone From the deserted field At the end of Joy Lane It seems fitting That I should soon follow.

But before I peel the Polaroids off the wall And let my face Be buried forever in the dusty archives I have some requests of you: Savor the small moments Rejoice in the unlikely and the unsought-after Search for the things, and the people That make you happy—and surround yourselves with them.

Don’t make yourself so busy That you forget to listen And every now and then When you find yourself wandering alone Take a moment for yourself To lie down in my field And gaze up at the mackerel sky Wondering at its beautiful simplicity Wait there and listen for a while And smile to know that although Seasons change and footprints fade The memory endures The moments remain And the people never really leave you.

Old Texts, New Eyes

Old Texts, New Eyes A Chapel Talk by Aimeclaire Roche, Assistant Head Tuesday, February 19, 2008

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ecently Mr. Alexander, whose classroom I usurp for a period a day of teaching, passed me a tattered article from The New York Times.1 Here Mary Lefkowitz, Professor of Latin and Greek at Wellesley College, offered thoughts on creating course syllabi at the start of each fall term. Lefkowitz writes, “Last year, when I asked my students if they would like me to add or drop anything from the reading list, they requested more of what we were reading already: why not read the whole of “The Aeneid”? Why not read all of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”? So this year again,” Lefkowitz seems to lament, “by popular demand, we will be reading the same old texts, all by dead white males.” A strange and surprising conundrum for a professor at one of the nation’s most revered women’s colleges—one that boasts among its many graduates the likes of Senator Hilary Clinton, and National Public Radio political commentator Cokie Roberts, as well as own faculty Melinda Stewart and Cathy Folts.

Professor Lefkowitz both assuages her feminist guilt and satisfies her students with a rationale: “…the real reason I don’t put new authors on the reading lists is that the old books are new enough: every year I find that the same texts can be read in challenging new ways.” And she goes on to discuss how even “The Odyssey,” that venerable tale, has held her in excellent stead through what ultimately would be a 40 year teaching career. Lefkowitz recalls, “When I first started teaching… I talked a lot about the archetypal journey of the hero. [Then] twenty years ago, I concentrated on plot development—on how Odysseus’s newfound knowledge of others helps him realize he must return home in disguise …. [But] In the past few years I have begun to discuss how long it takes Odysseus to imagine how he might look to other people. As our society has become increasingly diverse, I have learned to question my own assumptions about other people’s attitudes and thoughts.

Like Odysseus, I have not always found it easy to look outside myself. Now I look at Odysseus also from the point of view of the peoples he encounters or intrudes upon, and whose lives he interrupts or destroys altogether.”

1 Lefkowitz, Mary, “2,800 Years Old And Still Relevant.” The New York Times 21 August 1999: Opinion

It is a novel idea to consider Homer’s text from a vantage of contemporary issues, in this last case: diversity, racism, and tolerance (or its lack). I believe it was not merely coincidence that on the same day that Mr. Alexander gave me that article, Mr. Low approached me about his Second Form English class’s next project: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the proposal that we take the class—tonight, in fact—to a production of the play at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge. Shakespeare’s play, produced in 1599, is based upon the writings of ancient historian Plutarch, penned some 1500 years earlier in first century. A 2008 production, of a 1599 play, based upon writings from the first century, about events from 44 BCE. That is a lot of dead white men; and I think it is a fair question to ask: why is Julius Caesar even on the reading list?

“ It is a novel idea to consider Homer’s text from a vantage of contemporary issues, in this last case: diversity, racism, and tolerance (or its lack).”

Some might argue that nothing better suits the Groton curriculum where a disproportionate number of students will have studied Roman history in Latin I or II or while reading Tacitus or Sallust or Cicero; this crowd is likely to know the significance of the Ides of March. Others might argue that the struggle depicted

by Shakespeare between the forces of the Roman Republic and the forces of the Roman Empire is, very simply, a seminal moment in Western development. Still others will say that Shakespeare’s literature belongs in every educated person’s canon. Certainly what one chooses to study, and why one chooses it, are as complex and loaded educational questions as any.

Perhaps the answer to why we read this piece lies in Shakespeare’s portrayal of events where oddly enough the title character spends the bulk of the play either off stage or dead! Rather than Caesar, the conspirators Cassius and Brutus are tragedy’s focus. Take Brutus, and his unrelenting or what some call “uncompromising Quarterly May 2008

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Per Circulum Locuti Sunt | Voices on the Circle idealism”2 about the value of the republic and the life-and-death danger of tyranny. Right or wrong, Shakespeare’s Brutus is a black and white thinker, who sees his cause as an idealist would, with ideology that shields him from foreseeing the true consequences his actions will have. He says with raw conviction and with hands purposely stained the blood of his victim: If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all freemen? (3.2.21-25) Brutus realizes too late that his great moral victory—Caesar’s assassination—can not by itself retard the Empire’s approach. It is only a matter of time before Antony and Octavian come for him, and a cycle of revenge, and war and death begins again.

The play is, too, about the public majesty and public machinations of political figures; it is a memorable moment when Antony, seeking his revenge for Caesar’s murder, employs his uncanny ability to rouse the citizens with those famous words.

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears….” he begins and in three short pages he shrewdly humbles himself, catalogues Caesar’s many accomplishments and has turned the public tide against Brutus.

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech

Assistant Head Aimeclaire Roche in Latin 2 class.

To stir men’s blood. I only speak right on.

I tell you that which you yourselves do know, Show you sweet Caesar’s wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths, and bid them speak for me. But were I Brutus, and Brutus Antony, there were an Anthony would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue in every wound of Caesar that should move the stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.” (3.2. 233-243) “We’ll mutiny!” Convinced, the crowd replies, “We’ll burn the house of Brutus.”

And finally (and possibly because I myself spent two years at Wellesley College where Mary Lefkowitz was my professor) I note the limited role of women in this play; they are remarkably ineffectual as Shakespeare depicts this power struggle.

Commentator Coppélia Kahn notes that this play is about a group of men—their relationships and their competitions—but also about their full enfranchisement into the political ambition and civic matters. “The politics of gender in Julius Caesar is governed by relationships among men…rather than between men and women. Male friendships are indistinguishable from politics itself,

2 Kahn, Coppélia “Julius Caesar: A Modern Perspective” Julius Caesar ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square Press 1992. p.224

30 | Quarterly May 2008

from which women are formally excluded...”3 Caesar dismisses his wife’s superstitions and warnings about attending the senate meeting that particular day, “How foolish do your fears seem now, Calphurnia! I am ashamed I did yield to them. Give me my robe, for I will go.” (2.2.110-112) Alas the wisdom of hindsight! And, as Professor Lefkowitz suggests, today’s reader can approach this very old story in a challenging new way; our contemporary vantage gives us wider context in which to interpret the weight of ancient tales, particularly this tale of politics as we enter a high stakes presidential election year. At various junctures the play has been produced during times of political flux.4 At its opening, the balance of power between Queen Elizabeth and Parliament was delicate and openly questioned; the first American production in 1864 coincided with Abraham Lincoln’s re-election to the Presidency and Civil War raging on US soil. In reading Julius Caesar today, it seems ever more pressing to emphasize the value of balancing power among the branches of our government and to remind ourselves of the ways in which democratic rules of engagement work. Regardless of your political leaning, if we fear some tyranny, our weapon is the voting booth and not the sword; if we seek change, our allies are the electoral college and not shadowy conspirators.

3 Ibid. p.222 4 Bartley, S and Botvinick, M. “William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, A Study Guide” The American Repertory Theater. Cambridge. 2008: p.3-6.

Old Texts, New Eyes

“ Our contemporary vantage gives us wider context in which to interpret the weight of ancient tales.”

Moreover, in most cases—the war in Iraq, health care, public education—these are not, I believe, stark ideological issues, but a complex series of decisions with inherent consequences of which we and our leaders must be fully cognizant and fully responsible.

Thus the debates and caucuses do matter; for they are how the public is swayed and convinced of who will serve the country’s interests best. While most of you can not yet vote, this election likely marks the first during which you are able to decipher the issues and consider strategies. You will grow into adulthood under the next administration’s policies. Know what those policies are and be prepared to vote when you can.

Further we live in the United States with fortunately rare examples of violence in the political arena; President’s Day and recent celebrations for Rev. Dr. King remind us that there sometimes are costs to political leadership in this country. There are nations, however, that struggle to make political change in any way but with violence or civil unrest. Shakespeare offers us an arresting, voyeuristic moment viewing life through the assassin’s or conspirator’s lens. We know each and every thought Brutus has as he plans and executes his mission; Shakespeare has made that real for us. And I don’t think it is a stretch to say that the next time CNN shows scenes of unrest in places that appear far away, I will be less likely to dismiss the disturbing image with a simple touch of the remote control to something more palatable. Does it take a play from 1599 to remind us that we must be more sensitive? More appreciative? More aware?

Consider, finally, the times in which we live now, on the verge of the first presidential election with both an African American and a woman contender for the Democratic nomination. Whether Obama or Clinton represent your views, or not, we must agree that neither is ineffectual and the Presidential politics not only of gender but of race are now governed by relationships between men as well as women, black as well as white.

In Julius Caesar, the conspirators wash themselves in Caesar’s blood, a bold and public sign of their resolve. Conspirator Cassius then acknowledges that this drama will be something on which others reflect over time: How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown! (3.1.124-126) And indeed, tonight Mr. Low’s class and a handful of faculty will see a 2008 production, of a 1599 play, based upon writings from the first century, about events from 44 BCE. It is hard for me to say whether the play triggers my thoughts about democracy today or if my contemporary experience colors my reading and watching. Professor Lefkowitz would likely say either way it doesn’t matter. She writes: What will people be teaching about Odysseus 20 years from now? Probably not what I’m emphasizing now. New experiences in their lifetimes will help them find new meaning in these same texts…No one in the course of a semester or even of a lifetime can completely grasp everything these books have to tell us. We will always be surprised and enlightened by what our own lives have taught us about how to see.

Figures of ancient tales round the Schoolroom.

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Grotoniana | All Things Groton Intimate and Diverse:

The 2008 Financial Aid Initiative

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t their November 2007 meeting, Groton’s Trustees a fund, the interest to be used for the benefit of poor scholars”. Just voted to offer the Groton experience free of charge to three years later Endicott Peabody, founding headmaster, reported any admitted U.S. student whose family income is less to the board that he wanted to change the plan by which boys were than $75,000. Along with discontinuing student loans admitted and to charge a $25 fee for each enrollment to establish a as part of the financial aid award package, the new financial aid fund over time for masters’ salaries and scholarships. initiative will take effect in the 2008–2009 entry year for returning An even more transformational step came in 1908 after Pierre students as well as for those being newly admitted.

Jay, the Board’s treasurer, wrote of his concern for enrolling boys Inspired by Harvard University’s financial initiatives in recent who would be “as representative of the various classes and sections years supporting access and affordability, Groton becomes the first of the country” as possible. His proposed changes to the admission boarding school of its size in the country and the third school plan set aside places each year for boys “born and residing south in New England (after much larger St. Paul’s of the Potomac River or in Chicago or farther School and Phillips Exeter Academy) to west.” These changes addressed the school’s dedicate its endowment strength to afford admission procedures, typical at the time, more access to applicant families. which simply enrolled boys off a list by the When reached for comment, Harvard’s order in which they signed up. This practice Director of Admissions, Marlyn Lewis, a effectively denied the school the opportunity former Groton trustee said, “Groton’s dramatic to admit boys who were often better qualistep will be a powerful signal to the great fied and from new regions and economic cirsecondary schools that their gates must be open cumstances because their families, inquiring to talented students from all backgrounds—if perhaps a year or two ahead of an intended they intend to educate the nation’s leaders. The enrollment, did not know that they had to new policy is great for Groton, and is sure to register almost at birth for one of the few enhance its traditional excellence.” places at Groton.

At the time of the decision, Groton board Examples repeat both in the area of policy chair, James Higgins wrote “In its desire and in the record of gifts to the School, indicto attract the most dynamic and inspired ative of Groton’s abiding effort to combine students, Groton is acutely aware of the issue the highest academic standards with a diverof affordability. One of our on-going top sity of backgrounds within its membership. priorities has been the dedication of substantial As the School moved into the mid-twentieth resources to financial aid, and this further step Hannah Jeton ’08 and Tyler Rodriguez at century, its second headmaster, Jack Crocker, St. Mark’s Day roll call. will make Groton free for 2/3rds of American actively sought to add ethnic diversity to geofamilies. We want to challenge the myth that only the wealthy graphic and economic. His correspondence with other headmashave access to this kind of exceptional educational experience.” ters and college presidents of the time shows the planning that Although several schools and colleges have recently been taking went into the enrollment of first black student in 1952, a landsteps with financial initiatives to expand socio economic diversity mark moment upon which the school has been building for over on their campuses, ensuring affordability is not a new notion to fifty years.

Grotonians. In spite of its reputation for enrolling only the sons of There are now 79 named funds in the School’s endowment well to do Boston and New York families during the early decades whose incomes are designated to support modern day scholars of its history, the facts would argue that access to Groton was foreat the School. This year 124 of Groton’s 352 students receive most in the mind of its leadership, from the start. For example, one over $3.7 million in financial support. And the School is actively of the first substantial gifts to the school was a gift to the endowengaged in an effort to raise further sums to endow its financial aid ment from Miss Sarah Brooks, the daughter of then President of program In the words of Rick Commons, Headmaster, “As a small the Board, Rev. Phillips Brooks. Only four years after the School’s boarding school, Groton has always been intimate, and [our] new founding Miss Brooks stipulated in March, 1889 that her gift “be policy will ensure that we are also wonderfully diverse.”

32 | Quarterly May 2008

The 2008 Financial Aid Initiative

As I look forward to my fifteen-year reunion and think back on my years at Groton, I am always conscious that none of those formative experiences would have been possible without the School’s generous financial assistance. Before coming to Groton from rural central Pennsylvania, I was spending three hours a day on the school bus to attend the honors program offered by my local district.

The opportunity to attend Groton truly changed my life, and I am proud to see that Groton is continuing and expanding its commitment to enrich the lives of its

– Adam Doerr ’93 students and the School itself.

Without financial aid, neither my sister nor I would have been able to attend Groton. Anybody who ever saw my sister (Krista DespotovicJacobson ’82) in a musical or a play at Groton—saw her talent and energy and creativity—they would have to agree that financial aid recipients add enormously to the richness of everyone’s Groton

– John Jacobsson ’86 experience.”

When I tell people I grew up in Barcelona, the follow-up question is usually about whether my father was a diplomat or an international executive. The reality was quite a bit different from that. I could not have even come close to affording Groton without very generous financial aid. In 1986, the year preceding my arrival at, my hometown had been in a frenzy of excitement about the possibility of its hosting the 1992 Olympics. Barcelona won the right sometime in those first few weeks of Third Form, and I was elated. I printed out an enormous BARCELONA 1992 poster on one of the (then cutting edge) dot matrix printers and hung it outside my cubicle. I remember the other kids asking about it, being curious about my history and about another country. This was also the fall when the routine ground ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs—an event the importance of which was totally lost to me. So we all had our horizons broadened that fall.

– Jeremy Barnum ’90

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Grotoniana | All Things Groton

WINTER SPORTS Boys Varsity Basketball | 5-15

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roton’s Varsity Basketball team finished a scrappy, hustling season, earning five victories, three of them against stiff Independent School League competition.

A young squad, led by co-captains Alex Karwoski ’08 and Tom Raymen ’09, it played an up-tempo, quick-shooting style that kept opponents back on their heels when shots fell, and let them back in the game when they did not. A high point was a third-place finish out of six talent-laden teams at the GrotonLawrence Christmas Tournament, which culminated with wins against ISL rival Thayer and Cheshire Academy of Connecticut. A win against St. George’s after the winter vacation made it three in a row. And all too many victories slipped away at the last moment: a wild, back-and-forth, four-overtime game at Milton Academy ended in a three-point loss; games against top-flight Belmont Hill and Holderness were not decided until the final buzzer sounded.

Andrew Daigneault ’10 averaged over 20 points and 7 rebounds a game, despite often drawing the opponent’s best defender. He was named Most Valuable Player and a member of the ISL AllLeague team. Tom Raymen ’10 (14 points, 3 steals per game) won Best Defensive Player and an All-League Honorable Mention. He will return as co-captain along with shooting guard Nick Hennrikus ’09 (8 points, 3 assists per game) and Cole Papakyrikos ’09, who was also selected as the team’s most improved player. A tough defensive player, always a competitor, whether throwing himself on the floor for a loose ball or mixing it up inside with centers five inches taller and thirty pounds heavier, Cole embodied the heart of this year’s team, which will be largely intact in 2008-2009.

Departing are senior captain Karwoski, guard Andy Surinach, and Michael Phillips, all of whom provided outstanding leadership.

Tom Raymen ’09 takes jumper in Christmas Tournament game.

34 | Quarterly May 2008

Nick Hennrikus ’09 makes move against pressure in Cushing Academy game.

Coach Ron Mazzaferro was pleased with the progress made this season: “We’re building a program, year by year,” he said. “And whatever team we play, we compete.”

Girls Basketball | 15-7

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he Lady Zebras have established themselves as one of the top programs in New England Class B women’s basketball. For the third year in a row, the Zebras advanced to post season play, they were repeat winners of the Groton School / Lawrence Academy Holiday Tournament and for the first time in school history, they finished 4th in the ISL, no small feat considering the strength of the league.

Groton would drop its first two games of the season, including a loss to cross-town rival Lawrence Academy. But the Lady Zebras redeemed that loss a week later, defeating the Spartans on their home court by a score of 35-28. Groton would go on to win 6 games in a row, including a win over Class A Northfield Mount Hermon. Their win streak was snapped in a very close game with Class A, perennial power house, Worcester Academy. The Zebras had the game within 6 points, but were forced to foul down the stretch. Worcester hit their free throws and won the game 57-46.

Groton would go on to defeat 4 out of 5 ISL Class A schools (BB&N, Thayer, St. Paul’s and Milton). The Zebras lost a close battle (47-38) with ISL champions Nobles, holding the high scoring Bulldogs to only 14 points in the second half.

Groton received a 5 seed in the New England Prep School Women’s Basketball tournament. In their quarterfinal game, the

Grotoniana | All Things Groton

Gabriella Flibotte ’09 in the open court against Brewster Academy.

Zebras traveled to Cushing Academy. The two teams had met the year prior in the quarterfinal round on the Penguins home court, with the Penguins securing the victory and going on to win the Class B title. This year the Zebras arrived with confidence and poise, defeating the reigning champions by a score of 41-38. In the semifinal game, Groton would travel to Suffield Academy to take on the #1 seed. Groton was hit with early foul trouble that continued throughout the game and the Zebras’ championship dreams ended with a 56-37 loss to the eventual Class B champions, Suffield Academy.

A major part of our success this season was the tremendous support the team received from the school, alumnae, student fans and parents throughout the season. This year’s Lady Zebras were honored to have original Dream Team members Katelynn Clement (’07), Jenny Desrosier (’07), Katie Gannett (’06), Dede Grenier (’07) Kelsey Maguire (’07) and Jes Huang (’06) back at Groton supporting the team. We were humbled by the number of fans who followed us to Cushing and by those who took the long bus ride with us to Suffield.

Danny Rainer ’09 takes aim in the paint.

Winter Sports We will always remember our trip to the final four. And there will be pride associated with that memory. But that pride will pale in comparison to the memories we will have of our time together off the court—the dinners, the trips to college games, pictionary, Family Fued, our party at the Mitchells. Time passes quickly and before you know it, these Lady Zebras will be driving from a board meeting to pick up their kids from piano lessons only to rush them to soccer practice. And then they will hear on the radio, “I get knocked down” and they will begin to smile. Undoubtedly they’ll change the words when the chorus plays again to, “She gets knocked down.” That music will transport them back to our bus rides – dressed in black, singing the entire trip. When the music ends, a tinge of sadness will consume them, longing for the feeling of camaraderie and togetherness they felt all those years ago. It is rare for an entire team to connect on such a deep, emotional level.

And the coaching staff was extremely proud and honored to have had the privilege to coach this special group of young women.

Coaches’ Award: Kaitlin Mitchell ’08 Most Valuable Player: Danny Rainer ’09 Most Improved Player: Gabriella Flibotte ’09 Best Defender Award: Elizabeth Small ’10 Holiday Tournament MVP: Kailtin Mitchell ’11 NEPSAC All Stars: Gabriella Flibotte, Danny Rainer ISL First Team: Gabriella Flibotte, Danny Rainer ISL Second Team: Elizabeth Small

Boys Varsity Hockey | 11-7-3

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f ever a song was written that aptly summarized this years Boys Varsity Hockey season, it was Frank Sinatra’s, “It was a very good year.”

The 2007-2008 varsity hockey team completed one of its best records in thirty-five years. The season ended with an 11-7-3 record, and the team came within one win of gaining a post-season playoff birth.

The season started slowly for the Zebras, who managed to post a meager 2-3-2 record before the Christmas break. Even though it was a tough start, optimism ran high because of the potential of this team. During the last month of the season, this potential was finally realized as the team went 7-2 for their final nine games.

The season ended on a high note with a thrilling 2-1 win over St. Mark’s in Southborough.

What was most impressive about this year’s group was the character of its older players. Through their leadership they developed a unified atmosphere, focused and committed to a total team approach. This was true for the managers, Hannah Jeton and Kerrie McKie, as it was for the players.

The common elements characterizing this year’s ice-Zebras were their hard work and respect for each other, on and off the Quarterly May 2008

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Grotoniana | All Things Groton ice. To a player, they took great pride in always performing at their best. Better than any group in recent memory, this team understood that success didn’t happen with a single act of effort, but rather, success was the culmination of working hard every time they stepped on the ice.

Highlights of the season include: • Beating both Middlesex and St. Mark’s twice in the same season.

• Winning eight of nine one-goal games.

• The work of goaltenders, Dale Adams and Julian Bloom, and defensemen, Sean LaLiberte, Ian Brennick, Ben Sargent, newcomer Charles-Eric Boutet and Dennis Cottreau. Their combined effort held our opponents to less than 2.5 goals per game.

• The inspired play of the Blue line, led by senior Diego Russell. He was ably assisted by Remy Knight, Connor Baharozian, and Luke Deary.

• The skating ability of the Mustard line, including Will Lee, Alex Machikas and Jono Turchetta.

• The forechecking prowess of the members of the Red line, including Connor Robinson, Nils Martin, second former Michael Doherty, and Scott Fronsdahl.

• Big wins include a last second victory over traditional division 2 powerhouse Vermont Academy, and beating Pingree for the second time in twenty years.

Nils Martin ’11 gets airborne in the crease against Rivers

Girls Varsity Hockey | 14-8

To cap off a fine season for Groton, ISL Eberhart Division coaches selected defenseman Sean LaLiberte and forward William Lee to its First Team of all-stars. Goalie Dale Adams and forward Jono Turchetta received honorable mention.

Indeed, it was a very good year!

T

William Lee ’10 faces off against Rivers

Captain Kim Herring ’08 attacking the cage.

36 | Quarterly May 2008

he Girls’ Varsity Hockey Team has had the most successful season in its historyt. Our record is 14-8, qualified us for us our first ever playoff birth in the New England Prep School Athletic Conference Tournament. We placed in the 6th seed and drew the 3rd seed, Governor’s Academy in the first round regrettably losing 3-1. As I look back across the season, our team has had to work extremely hard to make history happen. The team consists of 12 skaters and 1 goalie, and quite apart from their opponents, they have had to fight to overcome medical issues and sicknesses during the season.

Grotoniana | All Things Groton

Jamie Haddad ’12 breaks free.

The team is led by sixth former, Captain and leading scorer, Kimberly Herring. Kimberly has been able to mold this squad into one of the best teams of which to be a part. The girls enjoy playing hard but they also had lots of fun at the same time. On the blue line, sixth former, Deana Ezzio, guided the way for her fellow second and third form blue liners. Between the pipes Ashleigh Corvi did a wonderful job for the Zebras this year, keeping us in every game.

The most memorable game this season was our final game at St. Mark’s. Away on their ice and being a bit of the underdog, we were able to take the game from them, winning in overtime 8-7.

This game was the most intense game ever. Groton was leading 3-2 after the first, down 4-5 after the second and 5-7 with only 3 minutes to play in the final period. The girls never gave up no matter what was happening. They scored with 1 ½ minutes left and tied the game with 1.6 seconds left in regulation. Fighting complete exhaustion and excitement, the girls pulled together as a team and won the game 1 ½ minutes into overtime. The team never stopped supporting each other and always played as a team.

It was the best team effort one could ask for. Congratulations team!!!

Girls’ Varsity Hockey looks forward to more successful seasons to come. Thank you to the Groton community for all their support this season!

–Coach, Keri Allen

Winter Sports because of a series of wonderfully close challenge matches with new winners each week; in fact, we hardly had a full challenge match all year, because, in fact, the line-up switches were due to a whole assortment of never ending illnesses and injuries, and hence the paucity of challenges: we had to just hope we were healthy and ready to go on match day! Of the nine players who practiced with the varsity, vying for the seven match slots, no fewer than four had back ailments (one eventually finding that he had two hairline fractures), one had troubled quads for the entire season, one a badly strained hip flexor, a few had the flu, one a badly turned ankle, and then there were the foot blisters, the head cases, and the infected finger from the Giants giving the Patriots too much to handle in the Super Bowl (don’t ask).

But for all of that, the boys managed to bring home their share of wins and a pretty good finish at the New England A Championships, held at Groton School for the second time in three years. A big part of our success was the top of our order where, steady as a rock, Captain Sam Clayman ’08 and Andrew Fulham ’08 played one and two (respectively) for every match, each winning 7 and dropping 5 against many of the best players in the region. The next five positions were a rotating carousel of seven individuals who, it turns out, often had as much to do with our wins as did the top two, particularly since four of the teams seven victories were by the narrowest of margins, 4-3. Deerfield and St. Mark’s fell into this category, but in both cases our four wins came early and the match was decided without a great deal of fret. Not so in our St. George’s and Nobles encounters. In the former case, Chris Ahn ’08, playing #5 for Groton that day, was on court with the match on the line, the teams knotted 3 all, and in a lengthy and incredibly tight fourth game, Chris emerged victorious with a 9-7 win. Not long thereafter, down at Nobles, #7 Reed Simmons ’09 found himself in the last match of the afternoon, again with the teams deadlocked, and his match 2-2. When he found out that the match was riding on him, his eyes got big like saucers and he was raring to go. Reed streaked out ahead 8-1 in that fifth game, only for all of us to watch slack-jawed as his lead slipped inexorably away, settling for a moment at 8-5 handout to Reed, ooops, lost

Boys Squash | 7-6 new england finish:

#9

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erhaps some of you have seen puzzles that consist of a series of almost identical drawings, the point being to find the only two that are exactly the same. One could play that game with this year’s boys varsity squash dual match line-ups and be quite challenged, since, as it turns out, there were ten different orders in our twelve team matches. And this was not

Andrew Fulham ’08 executes a backhand rail

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Grotoniana | All Things Groton

Captain Sam Clayman ’08 takes the T.

Captain Morgan Smith ’08 stretches for a rail

point, then again at 8-7, but this time Reed hit a winning short ball (a mis-hit?) which won the match for Groton. Those were the thrillers, but those wins and others couldn’t have happened if not for team members James MacGregor ’08, Henry Hoffstot ’09, Alex Southmayd ’11, Sahin Naqvi ’08, and Wyatt Hong ’08 doing their part in less tense moments.

In the New Englands, we were without #4/5 Alex Southmayd (aforementioned lower back problem), so a few of our players were playing up. After Saturday (day two of this three day event), it looked like we would place 12th, respectable considering our team’s situation (with an eleventh different line-up, by the way). But the boys had a very fine Sunday, and we managed to grab the #9 spot in New England. When the dust had settled we noticed that our five team losses during the regular season were all to teams that had finished at #6 or better in the tournament. A pretty decent season after all.

Post season honors: Sam Clayman was selected All-League for the second year in a row; Henry Hoffstot and Reed Simmons are captains-elect.

the Choate Invitational. Due to injury the team was not always at full strength, but they still finished third in the ISL, sixth in the Nationals, fifth in the New England Division A tournament at the end of the season and had the third best season record amongst the New England Schools.

At the New England tournament #1 Sommer Carroll ’09 finished fourth, #2 Kyla Sherwood ’08 finished third, #3 Morgan Smith ’09 finished second and #4 Ripley Hartmeyer ’08 finished second in their respective divisions. The team also had a good core of young players, as Georgianna Brinkley, Abigail Lincoln, and Hilary Evans made an impact this year, competing hard for some important wins. Sommer Carroll, Kyla Sherwood and Morgan Smith were all selected to the ISL all-league amongst the 9 that were selected. Ripley Hartmeyer was given honorable mention.

The co-captains for next year are Sommer Carroll and Ripley Hartmeyer. Morgan Smith and Kyla Sherwood were awarded the coaches award trophy and Shanna Hsu the most improved player.

The Girls Varsity Squash team looks to improve further in the ’08-’09 season, with many players from this year returning.

Girls Squash | 7-3 5th in class a new england tournament

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irls Varsity Squash team had a successful season this year, even though injuries hurt the team at times. Led by senior co-captains Morgan Smith and Kyla Sherwood, the team managed to pull off some impressive wins including those over Choate and Deerfield at the Choate Invitational, and St. Paul’s at the National High Schools.

The team competed hard even in its losses, losing narrowly to St.George’s during their ISL dual match and at the Nationals, and to St. Paul’s during their ISL dual encounter. Fifth formers Sommer Carroll and Ripley Hartmeyer and sixth former Shanna Hsu also competed hard, winning some key games. The team competed successfully in both the Groton Invitational and the Choate Invitational, placing third in the Groton Invitational and first in

38 | Quarterly May 2008

Sommer Carroll ’09 sets up drop shot.

School News

SCHOOL NEWS GWN

W

hile the “old boys network” has been around for a while, we continue to build a new version for the Groton women. The Groton Women’s Network (GWN) began nearly seven years ago in an effort to reach out to the women of the Groton School community, to strengthen their ties to the School and to stimulate communication and interaction. Alumnae, mothers, grandmothers, female faculty members, and even some spouses have gathered in cities around the country to bond during community service projects, cooking classes, art tours, book signings, career-building discussions, and other events.

GWN is also supporting Sixth Form girls through a fundraising initiative to help endow the self-defense program, Impact: Model Mugging. This program is designed to improve their ability to detect danger, to develop the skills and confidence to defuse difficult situations, or to defend themselves, as they move beyond the Groton Circle.

For the past three years, I have had the privilege of serving as Chair of the Groton Women’s Network. During this time, I have had the opportunity to meet and

’07 graduates

work with many Groton women who have given their time and energy to build the GWN and coordinate its programs. While I would like to thank all of them for their hard work and inspiration, there are four women who I would like to acknowledge for their support during my term: Betsy Lawrence ’82 for all she does to support GWN through the Alumni and Development Office; Eliza Storey Anderson ’79, P’04, ’06, ’08, ’10 for her endless support as Vice-Chair; and finally, Ainslie Mackay Sugarman ’92 and Chandler Bass Evans ’96 for all their hard work on the GWN: Self-Defense Endowment initiative. I know the organization is in great hands as Merrill Stubbs ’95 takes over as Chair this April, and I look forward to watching the GWN continue to build the “old girls network.”

Sarah Casey Forbes ’86 Groton Women’s Network Chair

Groton Alumni of Color Network

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our New York area alumni, Kristen Carter ’02, Justin Ifill ’02, Steven Hill ’80 and LeRoy Watkins ’70 have joined together to establish a volunteer network for the support of families of color who are going through the Groton experience. They hope to support prospective families who may have questions during the admission process, as well as to provide support after acceptance letters have gone out, early in the school year, at Parents Weekend and over Long Weekends. They also plan to provide a networking database for Groton graduates of color during college and professional years. Interested alumni who have responded enthusiastically to the fact that such a group was developing are: Walter Baddoo ’03 Edilsa Bueno ’06 Charles Choice ’06

New CD on diversity at Groton, produced by the Admission Office and Kate Milliken ’90.

Tony Ducret ’96 Amyna Esmail ’03 Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend ’97 Pia Hargrove ’96 Tunesia Jeter ’02 Gabe Menendez ’02 David Peagler ’95 Sandra Revueltas ’01 Henri Smith ’03 Lakia Washington ’98 Alethea White ’03 Cort Pomeroy, Associate Director of Admission and Financial Aid reports the idea for the network grew out of a meeting last spring in New York City with several Groton graduates who wanted to create an alumni group that would support Groton’s efforts to promote diversity at the School.

LeRoy Watkins ’70 was instrumental in organizing and formulating ideas. Out of this meeting came several initiatives, the first being the well-received video, released this past fall, which focuses specifically on the experiences of students of color at Groton.

Expanding the Circle: Reflections on Diversity stars alumni Stephen Hill, Kristen Carter and Justin Ifill as well as sixth former Diana Morales and Headmaster, Rick Commons. Kate Milliken ’90, owner and founder of Milligrace Productions in New York put together the short documentary about the student of color experience at Groton. The video debuted at an admission reception in New York held at the Boys Club with close to one hundred people in attendance. It stimulated the panel discussion that night and has been used throughout the course of the 2007–2008 admission season, bringQuarterly May 2008

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Grotoniana | All Things Groton ing a better understanding to families of color of Groton’s expanding circle.

When asked about his decision to dedicate his time and efforts to expanding and promoting diversity at Groton, LeRoy Watkins ’70 responded: “I still remember my Groton experience, beginning with first visiting Groton in 1963 or 1964 when I accompanied my father as he brought the family of one of his former Harlem, New York junior high school student’s, Jerry Gadsden, to Groton for Parents Weekend. I think that telling the Groton “story” to diverse prospective students and their families is as relevant and important today as it was in the 1960s. When I entered Groton in the fall of 1965, the environment was quite different from Groton in 2007. The school was

all male, and the first African American students had just started arriving in the late 1950s. Now, Groton’s student body represents more than fifty years of ongoing diversity, growth and advancement.

It was great to be part of the fall 2007 Boys Club event. [It was] a superb turnout, talented young people, interested, supportive families and a relevant and on-point DVD chronicling the Groton of today. Future efforts for us will include ongoing info sessions, increasing individual outreach efforts and broadening the involvement of diverse alums. Our overall goal [with the Alumni of Color Network] is to expose diverse families to Groton and share with them our individual experiences and perspectives about the opportunities and challenges of the Groton boarding school experience.

Green Cup Challenge a Success

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ongratulations to the Enviro Club and the all the participants

who stepped up to the Green Cup Challenge this February. In its third year, the Challenge now extends to 32 participating boarding schools that compete against one another to lower their respective rates of energy use.

The school whose rate drops the most wins the Cup! Special thanks go to sixth form Enviro Heads, Mary Cooper, Chris Pitsiokis, and Clarissa Perkins who spear headed the project. Congratulations go as well to all the students and faculty who pledged to participate as well as to the dinning hall staff and buildings and grounds crews who also collaborated on energy saving schemes for the month.

Groton came in 8th out of the 32 schools by dropping its energy consumption 12.48 % over the month. Special thanks to faculty sponsors, Mrs. Sarah Webb, Dr. David Black ’80 for their help and support. Find the final tallies for schools participating in the 2008 Green Cup Challenge at http://www. greenschoolsalliance.org/greencup/results.html.

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Alumni Games Day­— January 6, 2008

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n a wintry Sunday in early January, only days after students returned from Christmas break, scores of alumni (young and young at heart) took to the ice and hardwoods for their annual tilts with their respective varsity teams, or at least members thereof. The games were spirited and fun with all participants getting solid work outs and plenty of sass and support from the crowds.

Reunion Weekend

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eturn to the Circle to celebrate Alumni Day and Reunion Weekend May 16 through 18, 2008.

The festivities kick off the afternoon of Friday, May 16 with Athletic contests at 4:00 p.m. Registration will begin Friday at 4:00 p.m. and will be ongoing throughout the afternoon on Friday and Saturday morning. Receptions will be held Friday beginning at 5:00 p.m. for all returning Alumni and their families at two locations. The Forms of 1925-1968 will be in the McCormick Library, while the Forms of 1969-2003 will be at the Athletic Center Terrace. A special farewell dinner and program of tributes celebrating Charlie and Ann Alexander’s 48 years at Groton School will begin at 6:30 p.m. under the tent on the Circle, complete with entertainment provided by Soul Sauce, the Groton School Jazz Ensemble. We hope to see as many of you as possible to share some laughter and fond memories of the Alexanders! Highlights on Saturday include a speaker panel entitled Performing Arts of the Future featuring, among others, Sam Waterston ‘58, the Headmaster’s welcome in the Hall, lunch under the tent on the Circle beginning at 12:15 p.m. (including an interactive magic show for children!), athletic contests, the Edward B. Gammons Memorial Recital, Form dinners, and much more. You will receive a detailed invitation listing all the exciting activities occurring throughout the weekend. We look forward to seeing you around the Circle in May!

Alumni Games Day­—January 6, 2008

School News

Top left: Alumni and varsity team member gather after the game.

Top right: Karwoski brothers on left Alex ’08 and Nick ’06 compete again Second row left: Stephen Hill ’80 shows he still has the handle.

Second row middle: CT Toms ’99 goes over the top.

Second row right: Katie Gannett ’06 transitions to defense.

Third row middle: former team mates Kate Gannett ’06, Jessica Huang ’06 and Kelsey Maguire ’07 reunite with coach Sue Wynn.

Third row right: Coach Jon Choate ’60 addresses player before the game.

Bottom: Alumni and varsity players gather after the game.

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Grotoniana | All Things Groton

New releases Shakespeare’s Kinsmen John R. Hauge ’69 | Xlibris Corporation | July 2007 “While visiting an English relative, Adam Branch finds an Elizabethan manuscript that could be in William Shakespeare’s own hand. In his effort to have the document authenticated, Branch becomes enmeshed in a deadly game of cat and mouse with someone supporting another candidate as author of the immortal plays. Carefully researched, Shakespeare’s Kinsmen brings to life the 16th and 17th century world of Shakespeare and his potential rivals for authorship: Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe, and Francis Bacon, as well as the contemporaneous Authorship Question waged by their advocates.”

The Bear Went Over the Mountain Carll Tucker III ’69 | Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. Publishers | March 15, 2008 In this eloquent and amusing memoir, Carll Tucker provides an eye-opening account of his path to rediscovery in midlife. At age 50, Tucker set out on a journey of self-discovery. After 26 years of marriage, three grown children, and a lifetime of doing what was expected of him, he took to the open road in an RV to discover America—and himself—visiting the gravesites of our nation’s Presidents and Vice Presidents along the way.

The Greatest Game—The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of ’78 Richard P. Bradley ’82 | The Free Press | March 18, 2008 A look back at the 1978 pennant race between the Yankees and the Red Sox, culminating in a onegame playoff at Fenway Park and an infamous home run by Yankee shortstop Bucky Dent.

Groton School Annual Fund 2008 – 2009

cui servire est regnare

Groton School offers students outstanding academics, exposure to ethical and spiritual education, and diverse athletic and artistic opportunities all in an intimate environment where faculty and students live and work together like family. To ensure that Groton can continue to impact the lives of every student in its care, please donate to the Annual Fund. Contributions to the Annual Fund support all aspects of Groton’s operations and help make possible such key elements as the incredible faculty, small class size, and financial aid. Please consider a gift today.

As of xxxx, xx, 2008, the Annual Fund is at $x,xxx,xxx, xx% of our goal for this fiscal year. With a goal of $2,550,000, we need your help to continue to impact the lives of every student in Groton’s care. Please consider a gift today.

To make a gift or complete a pledge, please go to www.groton.org and click on Online Giving; send a check to Annual Fund, Groton School, P.O. Box 991, Groton, MA 01450; or call the Development Office at 800-396-6866 to make a gift of securities.

42 | Quarterly May 2008

In Memoriam | As We Remember

SHEPARD KRECH, JR. ’37, P’62

1 1918 – 2008 Eulogy given by his son, Shepard Krech III ’62

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ad was this elemental force. Inclined to action and not reflection, he was always on the go—so much so that his grandchildren called him Gogo (and his great-grandchildren, Great Gogo), and, more verb than noun, conjugated him as went-went, gone-gone, and so on. You get the

picture.

But Dad was not merely active, he was competitive. He loved games with stakes and he could not stand to lose. That’s why a small collection of broken number two pencils might appear underneath a bridge table. Or why during a game of poker, his pile of chips dwindling, he might suddenly invoke house rules, which, we knew, spelled doom.

His competitive nature was never more apparent than in the field or on the water. There is no doubt: he was a crack shot and he would have put Izaak Walton to shame had the two been side by side with rod and reel. On the Spey River in Scotland he paid his bar bill and more with salmon. I know: I helped drink the profits and create the need for more fish that he effortlessly supplied.

In the field, his pals all saw him make shots that left them shaking their heads. I heard of the time when a left and right, and then another, with his grandfather’s Purdeys, sent four birds to grouse heaven simultaneously— crumpled in the air at once—and brought the other butts to stunned silence, then shaking with roars of approval.

When I shot with him, which was often, I was struck not just by the fact that he rarely missed but at his opportunism. I remember the old days, especially in Dorchester County bottomland where the corn practically obscured the sky and the doves flew especially high and hard, when Dad was in his prime and never missed the chance for a shot and nearly always managed to finish before anyone else. He loved to hunt with a good dog like Mike, Koko, Queenie, or Laddie—his favorites. At these times, his ruddy face shone, his blue eyes sparkled, his voice was strong, and he was full of life.

At his desk, Dad worked under the gaze of a likeness of Endicott Peabody, the founder and longtime Rector of Groton whose Protestant values and moral force guided Dad throughout life. Like each of us, Dad was a complicated person. A hagiographer might ignore that from time to time he struggled, could show a temper, or let internal contradictions get the better of him. Importantly, however, he would always return to what he told me the Rector emphasized: the virtues of a simple life, humility,

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and the importance of drive, hard work, and tending to others; as Louis Auchincloss ’35, who was at Groton with Dad, put it, piety not materialism. When people remarked to me that Dad could be demanding, I often thought, Yes, but no more so than he was of himself. At Groton, Dad was a star on the athletic field and in the leadership of his Form—the two arenas where it counted in his day—and in many ways he remained a sixth former and a prefect throughout life.

Dad reveled in his careers as a physician and environmentalist. He loved to tell stories of nighttime forays to Tilghman Island or of having to get a ride by boat to wherever those who needed him happened to be. He took care of all who asked regardless of the color of their skin, who they were, or what their means were. Most of my life I have run into folks here, black and white, rich and poor, who were delivered by him, sewn up by him, counseled by him, or sent by him to Hopkins to be taken care of by others who had the specialized know-how and technology. He was out early in the morning and late at night, and often so in demand that my sister Amy and I hardly saw him. But we ate the fish, crabs, and vegetables left in payment on the front steps.

As for Dad-the-environmentalist, he was a lifelong T.R.-style conservationist. He cherished the farm and cycle of growth and decay, and bemoaned the decline of the Chesapeake Bay, its waterfowl and grass and crabs and oysters and fish. He took on environmental projects even when the odds were long, which, in the environmental field, they tend to be. Sometimes he succeeded, as in the fight to preserve Wye Island, and sometimes he had to leave the battle for others. By example and advice, he urged younger people into conservation and mentored them. And with apologies to any who may be present, he took pride in his adversaries who developed the shoreline for profit alone without regard to the fallout on the ecosystem. For him, again, this was a grand game with high stakes. It still is.

Dad did not speak much about faith. He did not wear it on his sleeve, but it coursed through him when hymn or text evoked the emotions of Chapel at Groton. He made notes on his service, which Amy and I found in the top center drawer of his desk and use today.

Now in memory, Dad might just enter myth if the stories about him amplify through time. He was placed in the ground next to Mother, his partner of 66 years, whom he missed terribly. As it happens, in the distance is one of his favorite dove fields, and nearby is his great old friend, Rogers Morton.

His grave is adjacent to two other old pals: August Belmont [parent 1957] and Francis Low. Like many others who could not leave the Eastern Shore once they discovered it, all three came here from somewhere else; in their case, New York. Francis kept careful count not just of the birds he shot but of his spent shells; he and Dad were fierce competitors in the field, and it is tempting to think that they are back into conversation started long ago. Augie, whose farm adjoined Dad’s, gave new meaning to the Legal Limit Dove Club when he sprinkled wheat in his field and the law hauled the club—members and weapons all—into court for a red-faced day of explanation; no doubt Dad and Augie are speaking anew about that, or so it is nice to contemplate.

Dad did not reflect on what happened after death, at least not in terms learned in sacred studies at Groton. Instead, some years ago he remarked to Amy that he wanted to come back as an osprey, and in later years told me he wanted to return as a great blue heron. Now I don’t think he really believed in reincarnation—the notion is esoteric if not heretical in Christianity—but he spent a lot of time in nature and thinking about birds, especially these two at the top of the food chain, and he said these things more than once, and I pass them on to you here in the hope that you will never again think of any of these icons of the Chesapeake in the same uncomplicated way.

Spoken at Old Wye Church, Wye Mills, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, on February 23, 2008.

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In Memoriam

JAMES BUCKLEY SATTERTHWAITE

1 1915 – 2008 Tribute to a Colleague by Hugh Sackett

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fter a start in life at St Paul’s, and later at Yale and Cambridge Universities, Jim was already at Groton as a young teacher before the Second World War, in 1941-2. Then he served for three years in the United States Navy, and worked on decrypting Japanese code messages for the State Department. It was after his return that he made his name here as an unforgettable English teacher and as a hugely successful crew coach during the following 25 years (1946-71).

Apart from serving as department head and varsity crew coach, he produced the school plays, sang in the Choir, and ran a large Brooks House dormitory. As an assistant crew coach (initiating the beginners), I was fully aware of the quality of his training; he gave an account of his oarsmen’s successes and later activities in the Quarterly of August 1998, brashly but unforgettably titled “The Rowing Disease”! Here he was able to describe the lifelong rowing activities of so many of his oarsmen, at very high levels. These included Harry Pollock ’60 and Seymour Cromwell ’52, both Olympic oarsmen in 1964 (Seymour later served as a Groton crew coach in the years 1973 – 76, and even took time out to help with our novices); others, like John Higginson ’56 and Nason Hamlin ’64, lifelong friends of Jim and Tica, were among some twenty oarsmen at the memorial service at Brunswick, Maine, on February 16th. (Nason’s and Emory Clark’s short tributes to Jim as well as those from Nick Tilney ’54 and Fred Kellogg ’60 follow below.)

I myself was also initiated into the very human processes of how he ran his dormitory (firmly but with fun), when I stood in for Jim during his 1957-8 sabbatical, down to details of how the Halloween party goes best; and about the Christmas tree decoration etc.; and I inherited it full time when he, ‘a confirmed bachelor,’ surprised us all by getting married to Tica Bates comparatively late in life [“A pattern you copied,” I was told at the Brunswick reception.] But he was only 45, and they decided to retire seven years later (1971) when he was 52,

finding an Earthly Paradise at the near 50 acre land-trust Tidebrook, on a coastal peninsula at Freeport, Maine. Their delight (and that of their guests) in this beautiful, wooded, grassy and flower-filled property featured large in the memorial tributes, not least by his nephew and two nieces, one of whom contributed an original poem, which would have warmed his creative heart. St Paul’s church was filled with his friends and relatives.

Jim and Tica’s thirty seven years of ‘retirement’ were full of activities (recorded in careful detail by the New York Times on Feb. 10): they included teaching at North Yarmouth Academy and Bowdoin College, working with the Maine Civil Liberties Union and the Literacy Volunteers, as a docent at the Walker Art Museum, and studying creative writing at the University of Southern Maine. He was a member of the Harraseeket Yacht Club, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Fraternity Club, where the topics of some 22 papers which he delivered included Berryman, Yeats, and Shakespeare, old silver, landscapes, and rowing, as well ancient art, Mapplethorpe, mythology, and God. His life with Tica has been a life well lived, enjoyed to the full, an inspiration to others.

Personal Remembrances: Emory Clark ’56 “Slats” is how we knew him (thinner than a rail). “Mr. Satterthwaite” is how we addressed him. He taught us English (“If music be the food of love, play on…,” and how to read and write) in his classroom.

He formed us into relatively fast crews on the Nashua.

Amazing what you can do for a kid with a boat and an oar.

For more than a few of us, those spring afternoons on the river were the lifeline that got us, intact, to Prize Day.

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Frederic R. Kellogg ‘60

Some Octobers past, four of us from several of his ’50s crews were gathered for dinner at Tidebrook with Slats, then 92, at the head of the table. He did not give a toast, per se, but spoke eloquently of the bond formed by men with a common love for water and rowing boats. What each of us heard was his acknowledgement of our affection for him; and each of us was humbled by his gift of wisdom and character that still nurtured us after half a century.

Nason Hamlin ’64 “Hamlin! If you go through life spelling like that people will ask, ‘Where did you go to school?’ and you will say, ‘Groton’ and they will say ‘I thought so.’”

This was my terrifying introduction, as a new Second Former, to the man who would become one of the dearest people in our lives. Erica’s and my parents died before they could be sustaining grandparents, so Jim and Tica “adopted” our family, to the delight of all. We visited them when we could, and called them every Sunday for decades. It was great fun to trade puns and snippets of verse with Jim, who remained sharp well into his nineties. A year or two ago he asked me to unpack a newly arrived lawn lamp. I inspected the package carefully and said solemnly, “When I consider how your light was sent” (Ed note: Milton’s Sonnet 19) he did not miss a beat and followed with “Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide.”

In our yearbook, Jim’s summary of the 1964 crew season described our winning the New England championship by writing “They sprinted from fourth place to seventh heaven.”

Fiercely independent and still driving until two weeks before he died, it was a blessing that Jim did his own sprint to Heaven.

“Good row! Good row! Good row!”

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Jim Satterthwaite, during the 1950s, was a living example of something close to my understanding of the Groton School ideal: erect, vigorous, and vigilant in mind, body, and character. He could be scary, as when he strode over to our table as first-formers (that’s the seventh grade! Some of us actually spent six years at Groton. But I digress) to demand who had overzealously pronounced the “amen” to Jack Crocker’s dining hall invocation (Kim Bingham fessed up and got a couple of black marks.)

Jim’s deep voice as head crew coach—regally steaming in his launch—was much-parodied by paddlers on the Nashua (“Get off my river!”) He was an exacting coach and teacher, but more. In six years, as our class grew from basically children to young adults, shedding childish traits and acquiring precarious new ones, he related increasingly as friend and confidant to those willing to engage him. As a product of a similar education, he seemed to remember from his own youth that what we most needed to learn (beside English literature) was not the vague concept of maturity, but the palpable one of selfconfidence. Through a million tiny hints he gave me much of my ability to believe in myself.

In retirement in Maine, Jim and his wife Tica found new purpose in the preservation of their spectacular waterfront land, named Tidebrook, and kept up their contribution as surrogate parents -- adopting young people as replacements for the children they might have had if married earlier. Jim leaves Tidebrook, the product of much post-retirement work and care, as a public resource. It will be a fitting reminder of the dedication he brought, and transmitted, to generations of Groton students.

Nick Tilney ’54 I knew Jim Satterthwaite for nearly 60 years, beginning with an English class in 1949 and ending with our last lunch together a year ago. He was my teacher, advisor, role model, mentor, and friend.

We interacted in a variety of capacities. As an educator he was unparalleled, instilling in us students not only proper use of the language but an enduring love of literature. Several of his trainees became authors. His teachings, articulated in precise stentorian tones, inevitably entered my consciousness during my own academic career as I struggled with words. He critiqued my books, always with good sense and suggestions.

As a crew coach he was a master, always confident, clear in his instructions, and forceful in his execution. After all, he had

In Memoriam I N

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rowed at Yale and Cambridge. His contributions to the sport and to those he coached were legion. His oarsmen responded well. In our sixth form year, for instance, all three boats were undefeated. He was rightly proud of the Groton crews he brought to Henley. An imposing number of his trainees rowed in college boats. Some became varsity captains. Others were Olympic medalists. Several have continued to compete internationally throughout their lives.

Our friendship grew inexorably.

As a surgical resident, I spent time in the Burbank Hospital in Fitchburg.

Occasionally, on the way home to Boston on my nights off, I used to stop for tea and chat with Jim and Tica in their little house near the school. In later years my wife and I were frequent visitors to the beautiful place in Freeport, Maine, that they had made into a natural paradise. Always, our conversations turned to books. Our visits with the two of them, which included swimming, sailing, and excellent dinners, were inevitably pleasant and long remembered.

Jim had the ability to attract and retain a loyal group of followers: ex-students of similar interests, ex-oarsmen, Anglophiles of comparable tastes. All of us in this eclectic and interesting group miss him. He enriched the lives of those privileged to know him. His passing leaves a void for many of us.

F.L. (“Peter”) Higginson ’55 JBS’s nature was arguably elusive which explains, I think, why those wanting to capture the essence of the man tend to revert to a common denominator: he was both a peerless crew coach and an extraordinary teacher. Yet that is only part of the story. In an oddly symbiotic way, he was able to do what few before or since have accomplished, namely unite, in what for many might seem to be a morganatic marriage, the grunting oarsman and the lyric poet. Meaning? Meaning that JBS brought literary elegance to the river and the focused passion of the oarsman to the learning of Shakespeare. First, a word on JBS as coach.

Only those of his friends who have no connection to the

world of the oar can be unaware of JBS’s inspirational approach to getting the best out of the boys he had selected for Groton’s three varsity boats. The love that every man jack of us had for this exhausting sport grew from, and hence correlated directly to, the reverence in which we all held him. His crews would have rowed to hell and back for him. Too John Wayne-y? Well, OK, how about to East Millinocket and back?

And JBS certainly turned out some crackerjack oarsmen. Speaking only of his achievements during the three years when I was on “his” river, he gave the rowing world the likes of Nick Tilney, Emory Clark, and my brother, John, giants all in the rowing world. Each of them left, in later years, an indelible mark on the sport both nationally and internationally. And not at all coincidentally, each has, to this day, a love for and skill in the use of language that traces directly to JBS. This brings me to the teacher in him.

Who, under his learned and provocative guidance, failed to become addicts of spoken and written English? His classes crackled with his love of the ludic, his zany literary allusions, arcane references, and surgically executed put-downs when one of our number succumbed to the temptation to pooh pooh the timidly advanced theory of someone in the back row, or strayed from the subject at hand. For him, everything was teachable and worthy of reflection. No one, he seemed to say, should have a dictator’s steely grip on deciding what was sublime and what was ridiculous.

In a typical moment that lent itself to his special skill in combining humor and what educators call “set induction” (which in plain language means getting an audience ready to listen to what you have to say), he arrived in class one bitter Groton winter day and, betraying no emotion, remarked, “It’s colder than a teacher’s wit out there” continuing, with scarcely a pause, “yesterday we discussed the proposition that Jack Falstaff was not only witty in himself but the cause that wit is in others.” Thus and amid sheepish, behind-the-hand snickers at his daring Spoonerism, the class was on its way.

I can never, in these few lines, do justice to this iconic man but feel compelled to go a “dight” beyond simply recalling his teaching and coaching days. These skills, joined at the hip as it

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were, most assuredly sprung from some aboriginal source buried deep within him. We exchanged long letters, especially during the past 10 years, in which themes like “validation” and the need for “grounding” recur. They give a clue, I believe, to how JBS saw himself in relation to others and especially to the boys in his class/dorm/crew line-up. The matter is, of course, open to interpretation, but perhaps readers will see some truth in mine.

JBS loved his teaching and coaching but these were, in my view, means not ends. The expressions “choreography” and “mise en scene” come closer to describing their function in his life since they were vehicles that made it possible for him to accomplish what was surely his higher purpose, that of creating life-long viability in young people. His great gift was to see real people in each of us. Unwashed, callow, imperfectly formed, we were, for him, still and all people. Flattening the lingering Victorian notions of hierarchy and propriety of the day, he gave each of us the astonishing gift of legitimacy, asking no more in return than that we accept the gift at face value and, more important, that we assume its implications. Frightening, heady—that and more—but also empowering.

In developing his oft-quoted “Hierarchy of Needs,” the psychologist Abraham Maslow (a JBS contemporary) famously said, “what a man can be, he must be,” a pretty radical concept

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for the authoritarian ethos of the day. It seems unlikely that JBS —more a man of letters than a social scientist—had ever heard of Maslow (I had never heard of him until the early 70’s), but they certainly shared converging views. JBS went a step further, however. For someone to “self-actualize” (Maslow’s language), one needed first, as JBS put it, to be “grounded.” Without it, a boy’s efforts to “self-actualize” were likely to be futile. Grounding the young, then, became his unspoken mission.

The concept of “grounding” has many meanings today, but the one that particularly commends itself to my personal recollections derives from how an oil painter prepares his canvas.

For paint to stick to it, for the finished image to have depth, the artist must first lay down a “ground” on the virgin canvas.

Today, of course, “you’re grounded” has quite a quite different meaning in American parlance, but JBS had another usage in mind. In the last years of his life, he never failed to peer at each of us closely to see whether we were, after all, “grounded people.” Isn’t that, after all, what he always hoped for each of us?

He certainly did his part: he carefully and lovingly laid down the “ground” on which each of us came to shape our final form, to be what we had to be. That’s quite an achievement. Others will decide whether we held up our end of the bargain.

Cambridge, 11 March 2008

In Memoriam

DAVID ROGERSON

1 1931 – 2007

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ast December, the School was saddened to hear of the death of David Rogerson, former Athletic Director, Admission Director, history teacher, and coach of football, hockey, and baseball at Groton from the academic years 1967-68 through 1989-90. During his tenure at Groton, Dave Rogerson, known to many as “Rogie,” was advisor, mentor, and friend to scores of students and faculty of the era. A graduate of Middlesex School in 1950 and Bowdoin College in 1954, Rogie joined the Groton faculty in 1967. All of his children graduated from the School and his wife, Anita, who started the dance program at Groton, taught dance from 1975 to 1983. Included in this memoriam are two reflections given at services for Mr. Rogerson in December, the first from Phillip Blood ’82 a former student of Rogie’s at Groton and colleague at Cardigan Mountain School, the second from longtime friend and faculty colleague at Groton, Jon Choate ’60.

A graveside service will be held at 2 p.m. on June 20th at 1344 Greengate Road in Bridgewater, Vermont. All are welcome.

My first formal memory of Rogie came when I interviewed at Groton. There was Rogie, welcoming me to the Admission Office, escorting me into his office and making me feel like I was family. He sat across from me, his legs crossed, his eyes never leaving mine. Honestly, I can’t remember what we spoke about, but my dream of this moment tells me that Bobby Orr, Carlton Fisk, and Gerry Cheevers were the topics of conversation. It was, in all honesty, his presence I remember most.

Like any great schoolmaster, education never ceases. Sport, for Rogie, was the perfect catalyst to help change young, pliable teenagers. Such was the case in my second form year.

As the goaltender on his third’s hockey team, I never dealt well with giving up a goal. Early in the season—a game fittingly at Middlesex—after giving up a nearside goal late in the game, I turned, raised my stick high above my head, and leveled it against the crossbar. To this day, I distinctly remember seeing

Remarks given in memory of David Rogerson

by Phillip Blood ’82 I have to imagine that we are all better people having walked

by Rogie’s side throughout his 76 years. Rogie left an indelible mark on me as my advisor at Groton and later as a confidant and friend.

My walk with Rogie began when my family moved to Groton School in 1969. That first year, we house sat for Junie and Muffin O’Brien, who were on sabbatical. The Rogerson’s lived directly across Farmer’s Row from us. Adults then, for me, were larger than life figures: Choatie, Charlie Alexander, Jake Congleton, the Myers, the Dilworths, Johnny Kapenas, John Ryan—the list can and should go on. But it was Rogie who held my seven-year-old attention just a bit more. Whether it was those tan gloves he wore as he gracefully stick handled around the rest of us young aspiring hockey players at the outdoor rink back in the early ’70s or that wry smile and that laugh, that beautiful knowing laugh—those are my youthful images of Rogie.

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the horrified look on my father’s (Mark Blood ’50) face on the other side of the glass. As we exited the ice, Rogie put his arm around me and we walked away from our locker room, into the small room adjacent to the Zamboni room. Looking through my sweat-stained glasses, never raising his voice, but firmly communicating his point, Rogie told me he would never dress a player who would separate himself from the team in such a way. Simple, direct—the perfect remedy for my ailment. He turned me back to the locker room—a boy slowly, very slowly, turning into a young man.

There were moments of great levity, too—also involving Middlesex hockey teams. The next year, the third’s team was up a goal late in the game. Rogie shortened the bench and played two lines. We played our hearts out. Rogie realized, however, that we needed a breather. Relying on years of experience and cagey guile, Rogie called the ref over to the bench. The next thing I know the ref skates up to me, looks me in the eye and says, “Son, your coach said your glasses are foggy, so you better

50 | Quarterly May 2008

go towel them off.” I still don’t know how Rogie knew my glasses were foggy!

Rogie had a way of seamlessly melding wisdom with humor.

It was a true gift; I just didn’t always see it that way. During my junior year, in my most humbling athletic moment, Rogie offered his sagest advice. Skating on defense for one of the few times I dared, I carried the puck into the neutral zone. In a flash, Middlesex’s best player stepped up from his blue-line perch and leveled me. I’ve never been hit so hard in my life; in fact, when I opened my eyes, everything was bathed in a yellow glow. I coasted to the bench, all the while trying to shake out the cobwebs. Of course, Rogie was there with the door already open. With his typical Rogie grin, he advised, “Hey Pippa, next time skate with your head up so you can see who hits you.”

Years passed and I’d see Rogie and Anita occasionally.

Remarkably, however, our relationship rekindled in the mid-90’s. At the time, I was doing about the only thing I knew—teaching English and coaching soccer and baseball, in Ohio and then in Illinois. I’d run my course in the Midwest, however, and wanted to get back to New England. I sent my resume to a number of schools—Chip Dewar, the headmaster at Cardigan Mountain School, called to set up an interview.

Timing is everything. A couple of years earlier, Chip, a Polar Bear himself, asked Rogie to do some marketing work for the school—and to oversee the admission office during a change of directors. When Chip offered me the admissions job, Rogie quickly and definitively encouraged me to take it.

Working in the admission office at Cardigan was like going to hockey practice. With so much to learn about the admissions field, my learning curve was steep. Yet, I could not have asked for a better situation. We were four former hockey players—I was certainly at the bottom of this depth chart. Andy Noel, a Polar Bear, and Carl Lovejoy, a Mule, were the other two officers at a school known for its ice hockey program. And there was head Polar Bear, Coach Rogerson, ever-present with wise counsel, but always dipping into his goody bag for choice comments to keep things light. Using laughter as a barometer, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—Rogie’s office days— were the best days at work. All we had to do was listen to his stories. His lock-box memory was truly a gift of his and a treat for us!

Anita, Laura, Gus, Nini, Hank…thank you for sharing Rogie with all of us. I am forever indebted to your husband… to your father…because I, like many in attendance today, am a reflection of his good work.

In Memoriam I N

M E M O R I A M

Remarks given by Jonathan Choate ’60 It should come as no surprise to those of you who have known Rogie for a long time that the first time I met him was after a Nobles-Groton hockey game in 1965. At that point in my life I was just out of college, going to night school, teaching in a remedial reading school, newly married, coaching at Groton because I needed the money, and had no idea of what I wanted to do with my life. Little did I know that I had just met someone who would become a colleague two years later, and who would have a significant impact on my life and my family’s life in the years to come. I will never forget the smile on Rogie’s face when I told him that the arrival of Choate baby number two had a twist to it as Choate baby number two had arrived along with Choate baby number three!

The Rogersons came to Groton in 1967, a year after I started teaching there. I took a leave of absence in 1968 to get a master’s degree at Bowdoin. When I returned, I took over the Groton hockey program from the legendary Frank O’Brien.

Rogie was going to assist me. That’s a laugh! Rogie had forgotten more hockey than I knew. That was the beginning of the education of a young coach. As you all know, Rogie was not a man of many words, but when he spoke what he said was well worth hearing. Thanks to him that was the beginning of a long and very rewarding coaching career, not always as a head coach but also as an assistant coach.

Rogie was probably the most natural athlete I have ever known. Be it throwing a football, hitting a golf ball, or shooting a hockey puck, he did it with a grace unknown to most of us. He understood games and was instrumental in the success of some very fine Groton teams, both on the ice and on the gridiron. Working with him helped me become a better coach. His understanding of both games and young people helped him in his final years at Groton to become an exceptional athletic director.

Rogie’s role in helping Groton make the transition to coeducation was significant. As director of admission, he was instrumental in bringing in many of the extraordinary young women who helped make the School into the wonderful place it has become.

In short, Rogie filled many roles during his time at Groton.

He taught history, coached football and hockey, was a very effective admission director, and did a lot to help Groton athletics when he took over as AD. During it all, he also showed many of his colleagues, myself included, what it took to be an effective prep school teacher.

It was no accident that when I was going through that time in my career when I was being lured away from Groton that I went to Rogie for advice. Lefty Marr was leaving Milton to become a headmaster, and they needed a hockey coach. I was just beginning to become active in the math education world and was torn between pursuing my love of coaching or my budding mathematical interests. His advice was brief: “Remember, Jon, life isn’t always a Saturday afternoon.”

With that in my mind, I decided to stay at Groton and have for the past 25 years had a very rewarding and rich life pursuing many of the new developments in mathematics. I have also continued to coach.

Rogie understood how schools work in a way that a lot of the people I have worked with did not. He understood that we all had a responsibility to take care of those we accepted, but just as important was the responsibility to take care of the children of our colleagues. My children all had the good fortune to be taught, coached, or advised by Rogie. He helped make their Groton experience a very positive one.

But the Rogie I remember most is Rogie the father and family man. Not only because he had four wonderful children, several of whom I had the privilege of teaching or coaching, but because of the example he and Anita set for all of us on how to be good parents. He adored his children, was always supportive of all the interesting ways they chose to lead their lives, and was so very proud of their accomplishments.

I will be forever grateful for all that Rogie did for me as a mentor, as a role model, and probably most importantly as a friend.

Quarterly May 2008

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