8 minute read
In Memoriam
THIS BEAUTIFUL ADVENTURE
BY RICK CAREY
Advertisement
For decades it was the first sign of spring at Holderness School: that moment during a winter all-school assembly when French and
Spanish teacher Lew Overaker rose in a red sweater vest to hype the Service Committee’s sale of flowers for the annual Valentine’s Day Carnation Exchange.
The Service Committee offered carnations in three colors, and Dr. Overaker’s pitch always went something like this: “Red, of course, is for love. I don’t need to describe that further. White is for friendship. You give white carnations to your roommates, your teachers, or your friends. But pink? Well, pink is a special color, reserved for those wishing to demonstrate some . . . p-o-s-s-i-b-l-e . . . interest.”
It took Lew as long to say “possible” as it took the rest of the sentence. Each vowel, each consonant was elongated and given melody. The word emerged as a
voodoo love potion of curiosity, longing, hesitation, and warmth; as a charm delivered with such sweetspot pitch and comic timing that gales of laughter broke out before the first syllable was completed.
Then, after assembly, there were Lew and his committee members at a table in the foyer of the Hagerman Center, dispensing hand-over-hand those vernal tokens of love, friendship, and possible interest.
Born in 1942, Lew grew up in Springfield, Illinois, and gravitated to the study of French and Spanish because he was good at languages and wanted to see more of the world. He earned a B.A. in French at MacMurray College in Jackson, Illinois, and then a Master’s at Indiana University, where he continued his study of Spanish as well.
For the next five years Lew was a doctoral candidate at Ohio State University while he taught French at Ohio Wesleyan University, then at MacMurray, then Ohio Wesleyan again. By 1976, though, his dissertation was still unfinished, meaning that he was ineligible for tenure at Ohio Wesleyan. Suddenly Lew needed a different job, and— remembering a happy trip he took to Vermont as a child with his family—he sent letters of inquiry (pink carnations, as it were) to a host of New England boarding schools.
Meanwhile Don Hagerman was in the last year of his long tenure as headmaster at Holderness—and French teacher Emile Poisson had resigned unexpectedly to go into business in Laconia. Then, as now, Holderness faculty members were asked to do many things well: teach in the classroom, run a dormitory, coach a sport, and capably lead kids into and out of the woods. This candidate had never run a dormitory, and was not at all an athlete, nor an outdoorsman.
Don Hagerman must have seen something in this unlikely Midwesterner that trumped his apparent drawbacks. In any event, in the fall of 1976, Lew arrived at a campus much more isolated than he imagined, working a job where the workday never ended, and being asked to take the lead in activities he had no mastery of.
The stories are still told around Holderness campfires: Lew’s headlong solo bushwhack down a mountain and back to campus during an orientation hike because he was sure a bear was stalking him; the bat that came down his chimney one night and sent him fleeing in bathrobe and slippers to the door of biology teacher Don McNeill; the various sports teams where the asylum, by and large, was run by the inmates. When once Lew confessed to history teacher Don Hinman ’55 that he was not a very good field hockey coach, Don said, “Well, Lew, we’ve tried you at everything else.”
And yet Pete Woodward—who succeeded Don Hagerman as headmaster in 1977—kept rehiring him, and Lew kept signing on again. Lew said once that it was not until 1982— on a rainy day when he was suffering through his sixth orientation hike—that he really felt at home at Holderness.
“I was out there with [former English teacher] Mike Henriques ’76, and Mike produced some cupcakes that Ki Clough [wife of former assistant head Bill Clough ’55] had made especially for my birthday,” Lew said. “So we were all there in the rain, munching on these soggy cupcakes, and it suddenly occurred to me how much happier I was than I ever would have been at a dinner party at Ohio State with wine and cocktails.”
Of course, it was never the cupcakes that kept Lew nested at Holderness for a career that would span 32 years. Instead, part of it was that bulldog tenacity that had kept him working on his doctorate so long at Ohio State—which in fact he earned in 1981, thereby becoming “Doc O,” but not returning to Ohio Wesleyan.
And another part was the conviviality and generosity of spirit that made him take so warmly to all people. Lew just liked all the people he knew at Holderness, and they in turn were all beguiled by his self-deprecating humor, his effervescent good cheer, and that radiant personal warmth. Former chaplain Randy Dales recalls the wonder of it all. “I will never forget welcoming Lew to the Holderness faculty, hardly imagining he would become for me the symbol of Holderness,” he said. “No more HoldernessSchool-for-Boys jock image, but rather a sensitive, caring intellectual who was always ready to laugh at himself.”
This intellectual became a giant in the life of the mind at Holderness. He was a charismatic teacher and department head who never stopped being a scholar as well. In 2001 he published in Marquette University’s Renascence magazine a theological analysis of a Flaubert novella that has become widely cited in the study of French literature. He earned over his career no less than twelve coveted grants for study in National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminars, dispensations that allowed him to see plenty of the world.
The depth of Lew’s Episcopalian faith not only fueled his decades of work with the Service Committee, but made him an assistant to chaplain Rich Weymouth ’70 on the school campus and also head of the altar guild, secretary of the vestry, secretary of the liturgy committee, and an usher at the Church of the Holy Spirit in Plymouth. These and his academic accomplishments earned his election to the Guild of Scholars of the Episcopal Church in Manhattan, where he served as treasurer.
What Lew Overaker was most revered for, however, was his ability on a personal level to make each and every student feel welcome and comfortable at Holderness—particularly those who (like himself) might not be the most natural fit at the school, or who for any reason were struggling.
Whether boy or girl, lovable or unlovable, Lew offered unconditional friendship and support to each student he met. Latin teacher Doug Kendall called Lew the school’s Father Confessor. “He probably knew more than anybody else did about the kids here,” Doug said, “and his biggest contribution might be that he was such a good confidant and counselor.”
Among the dozens of messages sent to Phil Peck by grieving alumni during the last days of October, perhaps one sentence from Nat Barker ’85 sums them up best: “A legendary teacher and friend to many of us as we navigated the complexities of high school, teenage awkwardness, and the journey that is growing up.”
Even Lew’s own areas of awkwardness were developed into unique species of strength thanks to his humor and courage. When he mentioned one day that he had once picked up a tennis racket and filled in as a fourth for doubles, Lew was duly christened JV tennis coach. If the inmates ran that asylum, they always emerged sane and smiling at the end of the season. “Hysterical road trips and stories,” recalled former athletic director Will Graham ’85. “Lew asked me to fire him from the job on a weekly basis—no chance.”
And if never an outdoorsman or accomplished athlete, he was an avid swimmer and a demonstrated risk-taker. For many years there was a photo in the Schoolhouse of a man leaping from a bridge into the Pemigewasset River. That photo was taken during an orientation hike, and the bridge was high enough for many students to shy away from such a leap. But if you looked closely, you could see that the plummeting man in swim trunks was Lew Overaker.
He had climbed the rail of that bridge with a pink carnation of possible interest in his heart. Then he had taken that leap, just as he had so many years before in accepting Don Hagerman’s job offer at a little school in the mountains, where possible interest indeed blossomed into love.
On the night of October 26, 2021, last rites were read over Lew Overaker by former Chaplain Joshua Hill. “We believe he tried to cross himself,” the chaplain wrote in an email that night. “Thank you all for joining this beautiful adventure of community and friendship.” n
