INSIDE: r The Inclusion and Celebration of Otherness r We Are the How and the Why r Catching Up with Pete Woodward r Proctor Day 2017
FOR MANY TWELFTH-GRADERS, SENIOR THESIS IS AN OPPORTUNITY TO PARTICIPATE IN SERVICE PROGRAMS AROUND THE WORLD. TAWN TOMASI ’18 TRAVELED TO RURAL UGANDA AND WORKED WITH IMAGING THE WORLD, AN ORGANIZATION DEDICATED TO CREATING A SUSTAINABLE MODEL FOR ULTRASOUND IMAGING, MAKING BASIC LIFE-SAVING DIAGNOSES ACCESSIBLE IN THE POOREST REGIONS OF THE WORLD.
f e at u r e s
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The Inclusion and Celebration of Otherness Inclusiveness and equity are nothing new to Holderness; as community values, they’ve been around since the school’s founding, both in the school’s mission and in the daily practices of the school’s inhabitants. But lately, with both a new chaplain and director of equity and inclusion, the words have taken on new meaning, depth, and dimension. BY RICK CAREY
above: Director of Equity and Inclusion Jini Sparkman introducing the day’s events at the student-led conference on Ability, Disability, and Access. “I challenge you to question today,” she said. “Question what you think you know and imagine what you have yet to learn.”
We Are the How and the Why
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When Holderness set out to rewrite its strategic plan in 2014, one of the top priorities the committee chose to integrate into the plan was social justice. But why teach social justice? And what does a social justice curriculum look like? Can it be taught or is experience the best teacher? By emily magnus ’88
Catching Up with Peter Woodward What does retirement look like for an independent school headmaster? For former Holderness Headmaster Pete Woodward, it seems to involve a lot more work and service than rest! By rick carey
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d e pa r t m e n t s Board of Trustees Sandeep Alva Neale Attenborough Christopher Carney ’75, Treasurer Carolyn Cullen ’87 Bob Cunha The Rev. Randolph Dales, Secretary Chris Davenport ’88 Andrew Davis Paul John Ferri, Jr. Victoria Frei Tracy McCoy Gillette ’89 Robert Hall, Chair Susie Hayes The Right Rev. Robert Hirschfeld, President Burgwell Howard ’82 Chris Keating ’81 Peter Kimball ’72 Robert Kinsley ’88 John Liu Alex MacCormick ’88, Alumni Association President Sue MacGrath Kevin Mattingly R. Phillip Peck Thomas Phillips ’75 Nell Reynolds Andrew Sawyer ’79 Harry Sheehy Gary Spiess Poppy Staub ’85 Matthew Storey Sander van Otterloo ’94 Richard Vieira Headmaster emeritus The Rev. Brinton W. Woodward, Jr. Honorary trustees Warren C. Cook Jim Hamblin ’77 Piper Orton ’74 W. Dexter Paine III ’79 Will Prickett ’81
3 From the Schoolhouse 4 From the Editor 5 Proctor Day 30 Around the Quad 36 Sports 40 Update: Faculty and Staff 42 Update: Trustees 44 Alumni in the News 50 Class Notes 76 At This Point in Time
Holderness School Today is published two times a year. Please send notice of address changes to the Advancement Office, PO Box 1879, Plymouth, NH 03264, or advancement@holderness.org. © 2018 Holderness School editor: Emily Magnus ’88 editors emeriti: Jim Brewer, Rick Carey assistant editors: Patrick Buckley, Suzanne Dewey, Neal Frei ’03, Andrew Herring, Stacy Lopes, Kim Merrow, Darren Moore ’99, Phil Peck, Mark Sturgeon, and Clay Dingman design and production: Clay Dingman, Barking Cat Productions Communications Design photography: Emily Magnus, Ken Hamilton
Holderness School Today is printed by R. C. Brayshaw and Company on sustainably produced, chain-of-custody stock certified to Forest Stewardship Council® (fsc®) standards. on the front cover: Each fall ninth-grade students spend a morning volunteering at local non-profits. Here, William Clouse ’21 helps remove invasive Oriental bittersweet at the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center. aBove: Proctor Day 2017, the Bulls rush the field after the girls’ field hockey team victory.
from the schoolhouse
Contributing to the Life and Energy of the School As each school year draws to a close, I often take the time to reflect on what the Holderness community has accomplished. While there are always bumps in the road, this year in particular has felt filled with energy and progress, especially in the area of service and social justice. Take, for instance, the programming created by Director of Equity and Inclusion Jini Sparkman and Chaplain Joshua Hill. The care they have put into their programs and planning is inspirational. The response from the students has been impressive as well. You will learn more about one of their joint efforts in the feature article, “The How and the Why.” One story the author shares is from early last fall, when Jini and Athletic Director Rick Eccleston ’92 created a campaign that targets the common words and phrases people use that often marginalize or discredit the lives and convictions of certain people. The signs the students created for the “We Don’t Say” campaign still hang all over campus and are a constant reminder to me of the courage and conviction with which our students live their lives and participate in this community. Not surprisingly, our alumni also continue to be aspirational in how they live their lives. This spring, I took an extended trip out West to visit with members of the Holderness community, and I was humbled and inspired by the other-centeredness of our alumni, doing their part to fulfill the motto and mission of Holderness in their lives and professions. This issue of Holderness School Today tells the story of other alumni working for the betterment of humankind. They follow their passions and individual interests, but they never forget to care for others, to look beyond their own lives and ask how they can make the world a better place. The stories of Emilie Lee ’99 and Bro Adams ’65 both share this selfless quality. And while it is outside the realm of service, I also have been impressed with the accomplishments of our athletes. No less than four teams were NEPSAC champions this year: the
Head of School Phil Peck with the girls’ varsity basketball team, celebrating their nepsac Class D victory
girls’ field hockey team, the boys’ and girls’ Nordic teams, and the girls’ basketball team. Of course, skill and strength contributed to their wins, but I think the successes of each team had a lot more to do with their togetherness and support of each other. You can read about each team’s journey to the championships in our sports section! is year we have also been involved in renewing Holderness School’s accreditation through the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Led by History Department Chair Kelsey Berry and Assistant to the Head of School Andrew Herring, the accreditation process is lengthy and takes the effort of everyone on campus, culminating in a 100+ page reflection that reviews everything from compensation to curriculum needs to
administrative support of instructional as well as non-instructional employees. It was truly a community effort and ultimately is a selfless act that goes far beyond personal agendas and helps determine the continuity of the school far into the future. Soon, on a warm day in May, we will be celebrating the accomplishments of our graduates—those that have, each in their own way, contributed to the life and energy of this school. We are also pleased that Bro Adams will be sharing reflections with our graduates as this year’s Commencement speaker. I look forward to seeing many of you there! • Phil Peck Head of School
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from the editor
Survey Results Reflect Community Support of HST How often do you typically read Holderness School Today?
EVERY ISSUE: 60%
MOST ISSUES: 28%
OCCASIONAL ISSUES: 10%
NEVER: 2%
As many of you know, in January we sent out an invitation to all the addresses on our mailing list and requested your participation in a survey regarding Holderness School Today and the other ways in which we communicate with you. As Holderness continues to grow and change, and the ways we communicate as a society grow and change, we want to make sure we are responsive to our audience—to alumni, parents, faculty, students, and friends. From January through the end of March, 128 people responded to our survey—63% were male; 36% were female. 58% were alumni, while 40% were parents or relatives of alumni. While the majority of people who responded were over 65 (39%), we did receive surveys from all ages: 50–64 (35%), 35–49 (13%), 25–34 (9%), and 25 or younger (2%). ank you to those who did respond. We appreciate the time you took to provide thoughtful answers! One of the first questions we asked our audience was where they receive their news in general. e majority of people (46%) rely on television and radio for their news, but following closely behind, at 45%, were people who use
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online news apps. In contrast, however, most people receive news about Holderness School the old fashioned way—on paper. 66% receive all or most of their information from Holderness School Today. Email (35%), the school’s website (21%), and other school publication (15%) also contribute to people’s knowledge of the school. e good news is that people are reading the HST; 88% of those surveyed say they read all or most of every issue! What do they like about the HST? Pictures clearly speak louder than words; 94% rated our photography as excellent or good. In the comment section, many people again emphasized their approval and interest in the photographs. e writing in the magazine received high ratings as well (93%). It was no surprise to us that 71% of our readers like to read alumni news, both in the class notes and in the alumni profiles. 71% said they also like to read about current events on campus and the life of the school. Faculty/staff stories, student articles, and historical perspectives are also of significant interest.
HOLDERNESS SCHOOL TODAY | spring 2018
As a writer and lover of words, I was drawn to the open-ended questions in which I had the opportunity to hear the voices of our readers. What is it that you like? What is it that you dislike? One reader wrote, “It’s a terrific capsule of all that is great about Holderness. HST perfectly captures the sense of community that exists at Holderness.” I like the idea of a time capsule; while it is not our primary goal, as we look back over the years, HST is that historical document for the school that records the passage of time and allows us to see the bigger picture. I also like that many readers want to hear more from current students. As one responder to the survey wrote, “[e HST] is currently curated and scripted by adults. I’d like to hear from students—and not just the Picador writers. Maybe a podcast from those who don’t like writing or a what’s hot musically on campus? Again, I’d like to hear more from students and what is foremost in their worlds.” I agree. It is their energy and their passions that give the school joy. eir stories are worth sharing. e open-response questions, while perhaps not as concrete, help us to see new possibilities. What if we did invite students and alumni to contribute to the magazine? What would it look like if we interviewed ordinary alumni who have lived ordinary lives? What if we gave more room to archival images? e thread here for me, is community. Let the voices of the community be heard. We don’t know what that will look like, but we will think about it. e voices of the community will, somehow, make more frequent appearances in the magazine. ank you, again, to all who responded. ank you for your faith and loyalty to Holderness and to this magazine. We appreciate your feedback and will do our best to utilize it as we plan for the next issue. • Emily Adriance Magnus ’88 Editor, Holderness School Today emagnus@holderness.org
proctor day 2017
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proctor day 2017
This fall Holderness School and Proctor Academy renewed a rivalry that dates back to at least the 1930s. The celebrations began on a Thursday evening with a bonfire, dancing, loud music, and lots of “war paint.” Cheers of “H-o-L d-E-r n-E-S-S” could be heard floating off into the night, carried on the sparks from the fire.
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proctor day 2017
Scenes from Proctor Day in Years Past
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ost likely the rivalry between Proctor and Holderness began when football was the only fall sport; based on a 1932 game summary (see facing page), a rivalry was already well-established at the beginning of the 20th century. By the 1950s, as other teams were added, the whole school began to contribute to the win-loss tally; girls’ teams began to add their strength and school spirit in the mid-1970s. But no matter the number of teams competing, the fans have always come out in large numbers; in addition to all the students on the sidelines, alumni, parents, and friends of Holderness often support the Bulls as well. Today, all wins and losses—no matter whether they are varsity or junior varsity teams—count equally.
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proctor day 2017
Scenes from Proctor Day 2017
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n Friday evening, under the lights on the Robert T. Low Turf Field at Holderness, the boys’ and girls’ varsity soccer teams faced Proctor in sub-freezing temperatures. In low-scoring games, the teams both traded possession of the ball and fought hard for the upper hand. Ultimately, the boys lost to Proctor 1-0, while the girls tied with no points scored. On Saturday the weather warmed a bit, and the Bulls traveled to Proctor for another day of games. All the teams matched up, including the mountain biking teams who participated in a tandem relay race, a hurdle jump, a long-distance wheelie competition, and a skid test.
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HOLDERNESS SCHOOL TODAY | Spring 2018
proctor day 2017
The highlight of the weekend for the Bulls was the final game on Saturday, played by the varsity field hockey team. Fans from both schools gathered on the sidelines—cheering, waving banners, and leaning in to watch the action. During the second half of the game, the lady Bulls took possession of the ball and dominated until the final buzzer, winning 3-1. The overall record for the weekend ended in the Hornets’ favor, but the field hockey win was a reminder of the tremendous pride and unity of the Holderness community. Go Bulls!
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Jini Sparkman in her English classroom, where she often uses literature and writing to discuss social justice
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holderness school today | Spring 2018
The Inclusion and Celebration of Otherness HolderneSS ScHool HaS a cHaplain, aS it alwayS HaS. More recently tHe ScHool HaS added a director of equity and incluSion. nowHere doeS Hope blooM So brigHtly aS in tHe coMMon ground tHey Spade. by rick carey she spoke not just from the podium of the Chapel of the Holy Cross, but from— as described by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his “I Have a Dream” speech—“the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.” “It is from these hilltops on which we ski and hike and camp and gaze that King imagined freedom resoundingly ringing,” English teacher Nicole Furlonge said on Martin Luther King Day, 2018. “Rightly so, we remember Dr. King as a champion of equity and inclusion. It is equally important to remember, however, that this on-going struggle for equity and inclusion is often personal, intimate work. To that end, I will share with you my story—one that is also an American story, intricately intertwined with assumptions about race, class, and gender.” It was a story that was told with that famous dream in the background, that vision of a nationwide joining of hands between “all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics.” But of course in the America of today that sort of brotherhood and sisterhood remains a dream. To New York Times columnist David Brooks, writing a few weeks after King Day, it seems more remote than ever in a country riven by “the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, [and] the decline of citizenship and neighborliness.” Nicole’s story was about her efforts—as a bi-racial child given up for adoption—to reconnect with birth parents driven apart by the racism Dr. King had challenged. And she spoke that night, as she well knew, to a
diverse community itself engaged in an “ongoing struggle for equity and inclusion.” The fact that the students and faculty of Holderness were in a chapel underlined the fact she spoke not just to a school, but to a church school. In some places that might lend a certain complication to the struggle, a nagging element of Jews versus Gentiles, Protestants versus Catholics, perhaps. But not at Holderness. In fact, here it rather helps.
i. two warriorS Holderness School recruits its faculty on a nationwide basis, but as a northern New England independent school, it just seems to work out that its hires usually have a lot of New England in their backgrounds. Yet The Rev. Joshua Hill and Director of Equity and Inclusion Jini Rae Sparkman—both of whom are relatively recent hires—grew up in parts not usually represented here. Joshua arrived last fall. Raised in the suburbs of Knoxville, TN, he aspired first to be a pastor in his native Methodist Church, and then an environmental lawyer. After attending Virginia’s Emory & Henry College as a religion major, he applied to the Vermont Law School, and also to the Yale Divinity School, this for its programs in environmental ethics and environmental theology. He got into both schools, but Yale offered a better financial package. “Unlike lawyers,” Joshua says, smiling, “ministers are presumed not to be able to pay back loans.” Then at Yale he fell in with some other students training for the Episcopal ministry. “I was impressed,” he says. “We could sit around a table with beer, wine, food, and
have intellectual conversations where nothing was considered too scary or taboo. It was okay to admit to doubt, okay to be completely honest.” He was no less impressed by the Episcopal liturgy. “Maybe I had been overexposed to guitars and videos, but the services were beautiful, the liturgy as if it were carved in stone,” he says. “This seemed like a church, where you could be an adult, a grown-up, and at twenty-five I was ready for that.” A posting to a seminary in Connecticut was followed by three years as director of youth ministries at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in New Canaan, CT, and then five years as chaplain at an Episcopal K–8 independent school in Knoxville. By 2017 he was ready for work with older kids, and the family came to Holderness. Meanwhile Jini Rae Sparkman grew up on the Texas Panhandle, in the Southern Baptist church mostly, where she did not so much aspire to be a pastor, she says, as she was “groomed to be one.” She was also an athlete, playing volleyball and basketball at Iowa’s Graceland College, then at Trine University in Indiana. At both schools, however, she dropped out, either to begin or continue what she describes as her “rogue vagabond years,” wandering about the Midwest, the Southwest. She never saw a place that felt like home, she says, until—visiting a friend and her family—she got off a plane in Manchester, NH. “I loved it immediately,” she says. “I found I have an affinity for green things—trees and grass, also water and seasons.”
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So she stayed. She finished up her undergraduate degree at Plymouth State University, then earned her master’s in education there, joining the Holderness English Department in 2014. She assumed the directorship of the Office of Equity and Inclusion last year. Maybe Jini uses that word “rogue” to describe her vagabond years because in moving through those different parts of the country, she found herself questioning so much of her world and the cultures in those places. “Until then, things like racism, sexism, classism, and xenophobia were normalized for me,” she says. “I’ve said racist things. I’ve accepted imposed messages and roles about gender. I didn’t know until I saw so much of the country, met so many different people, that there were other ways of seeing the world.” They complement each other well, these two outdoors-loving Southerners, yet they come at the problem of inclusion from very different perspectives. For Jini, the phrase “social justice” denotes the necessary political and social efforts to achieve a world where racism and other pathologies are put to flight, where justice, civil rights, and prosperity are distributed more equitably. “Political? Okay,” Jini says. “But basically it’s about people—caring for people.” As an Episcopal minister, however, Joshua has no choice but to be wary of a coinage that provokes backlash in certain quarters, just as he has to be wary of being seen as a proselytizer in a school community that includes many different religious—and non-religious—backgrounds. “The Episcopal Church, and the product we offer—to cite the language of marketing—is something that must appeal to all people, Democrats and Republicans alike,” he says. “That product is a restored relationship to God, and if we succeed in that, social justice will be the logical outcome of such success—the realization of a
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community that not only gathers up all humanity, but all God’s creation as well.” Echoes of the Holderness school mission statement are not coincidental. Nor can Joshua quite hide his fondness for that logical outcome. “My father-in-law has a nickname for me,” he laughs. “Social Justice Warrior.”
ii. it’S about all of uS We remember that Holderness School was founded in 1879 on behalf of a certain form of inclusiveness. Distressed that New England’s existing Episcopal schools were charging tuitions unaffordable to its clergy, New Hampshire Bishop William W. Niles envisioned Holderness as a school that would offer “the highest degree of excellence in instruction and care-taking,” he wrote, but at a much lower charge for room and board. This proved difficult, but along with that economic inclusiveness came a related affinity for what then fell under the rubric of “fairness.” So after a catastrophic fire in 1931, Rector Edric Weld instituted the Job Program that still flourishes today. Partly this was a smart cost-cutting measure, but it also abjured the classism that previously had assigned cleanup duties only to scholarship students. During World War II, Weld would courageously welcome—among those scholarship students—several JapaneseAmerican boys whose parents were confined to West Coast internment camps. Don Hagerman became headmaster in 1951, and he would spend the next three decades raising tuition, pulling the school out of debt, and planting the seed of an endowment. But in 1963 Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial unleashed polarizations— exacerbated by the Vietnam War—that shook all schools and colleges, including Holderness, to their core. The next headmaster, The Rev. B.W. “Pete” Woodward Jr., had grown up in
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Kansas, in a diverse city where he himself had been turned away from restaurants and lunch counters when in the company of black friends. In 1964, while attending the General Theological Seminary in New York, he traveled to Selma to march to Montgomery with Dr. King. Pete arrived in 1978 at what was still the Holderness School for Boys, and which counted then only one black student among those boys. Holderness had excluded women for all its history by virtue of its founding as a single-sex school, but there was nothing official or intentional in what had effectively become the exclusion of students of color. The women came first to a community that by that time was ready for co-education. At the same time, Holderness became purposeful in its efforts to attract students of color and also of various nationalities and ethnicities. As the endowment steadily grew, so grew the means to bring to campus more students from middle and working class backgrounds. In the 1990s, Pete and his faculty established a Diversity Committee to support student whose identities—or at least components of which—made them minorities on campus. The co-chairs of that original committee were Phil Peck and Nigel Furlonge, Nicole’s husband and now the Associate Head of School. More recently, in a change of terminology championed by Nigel, that committee has become the Office of Equity and Inclusion, which Jini heads. “It comes down to, yes, being more inclusive,” says former Diversity Director Tobi Pfenninger. “We believe that each person in the community should be treated with respect and dignity, should enjoy a welcoming climate where every member is valued. It’s no longer about ‘them’—it’s about all of us.”
tHe incluSion and celebration of otHerneSS
iii. courageouS converSationS Jini Rae Sparkman believes in the basic goodness of people, but she also believes in the persistent presence of history, and in the lingering effects of stereotypes and such old presumptions as she admits to once holding herself. Even Nicole Furlonge, that night in the chapel, confessed to hesitating to pursue her lost father because of a stereotype she had been handed about black males. Even Pete Woodward, who pioneered co-education here, confesses to once being doubtful about the Episcopal Church’s 1976 decision to ordain women. But Nicole would eventually reach out to her father, and of course Pete would hire the school’s first female chaplain, Beth Hilgartner, in 1993. “As an individual—or an institution—you want to get beyond that stuff,” Pete says. “Which means that the hope of redemption is a critical component of the goals and the work of social justice.” But the biases underlying that stuff, and the exclusions they engender, are insidious. “They begin with these small messages that arrive from our environment, from authority figures, from our family or others close to us,” Jini says. “We incorporate them unconsciously, uncritically, and they begin to guide our decision-making without our being aware of it. It’s the way people work at this subliminal level.” She points out that even the various social justice movements have their blind spots, but those groups are nimble in addressing them. “The Women’s March movement, for example,” she says. “Originally it didn’t include women of color, of different nationalities, women who are transgender. But they made adjustments.” A document that Jini distributed to the faculty a year ago, “Five Things to Know About Equity Education,” begins, at #1— “We Can’t Opt Out”—with the necessity of teachers examining themselves for their own biases, gender conceptions, presump-
Joshua Hill in his classroom, where he teaches “World Religions” and often discusses the universal theme of service to others
tions about sexual identity, etc. Items #2–5 enlarge on the difficulty of this sort of education in a world suffused with such biases, a world that may not be, she writes, “safe or kind or respectful of [students’] identity,” and she warns such perils exist on campus as well. “If we do not take the time to explore these issues and challenge ourselves to have courageous conversations about race and gender and sexual identity and religion and privilege and ability,” she continues, “then we are not living up to our mission.” Where that mission intersects with such conversations is in the strength to reach beyond the self to larger interests and purposes. “Our motto has always exhorted us to work for the betterment of others, to be not self-centered but other-centered,” says Head of School Phil Peck. “In the last fifteen years—in the language we use in our mission statement and core values, in our experiential programs and Job Program, in
our sports and every element of our curriculum—we’ve become more intentional and deliberate about that.” So the school’s mission statement is dominated by the phrase “to work for the betterment of humankind.” Its core values have been boiled down to only three, each of them in some way other-centered: Character, Community, and Curiosity. In the leadership program, where once the four strengths of character by which students were elected to office were Initiative, Dependability, Fairness, and Leadership, that last element has been replaced by Empathy. Jini has a dream of dozens, scores, hundreds of Holderness alumni who will call out injustice and speak fearlessly to power, not out of political tribalism, but rather an encompassing empathy and the capacity to care. But even if there aren’t hundreds of such, even if there is only one—“Then I’ve made a difference,” she says, “and that’s why I teach.”
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iv. to experience tHe Holy Joshua Hill regrets that so few of his students at Holderness arrive already familiar with the beauty of the Episcopal liturgy, and that so few can hear in the Holderness motto—Pro Deo Et Genero Humano, “For God and Humankind”—its references to passages in Deuteronomy and the Gospels. And he remembers the 19th century bravado of all Christian churches, each on a mission to change the world on the strength of its own brand of orthodoxy. Today, in what New Hampshire Bishop A. Robert Hirschfeld calls the “postChristendom era,” Episcopal schools nationwide find that no more than a fourth of their enrollment comes from Episcopal backgrounds. At Holderness and elsewhere, most students have been raised in other belief systems or are of no religious persuasion at all. Yet no matter their background, Joshua sees the symptoms of a spiritual malaise, here and nationwide. “Our various social, economic, and environmental issues?” he asks. “I would argue that they derive from a series of estrangements: from God, from others, and from ourselves.” And the remedy to those estrangements? “The message we hear from Jesus throughout the Gospels,” he says, “is very simple—love God and your neighbor as yourself.” The grace of Joshua’s position at Holderness is such that his work in promoting this remedy is so free of dogma, so steeped in an orthodoxy that is in its essence inclusive. The fruit of a long history of ecumenism and tolerance in the Episcopal Church, this reflects in turn to the unqualified nature of that love described by Jesus—not some of your neighbors, not just this sort of neighbor, but all of them—and has left that church well suited to the challenges of the postChristendom era and the 21st century.
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Joshua smiles, saying, “No, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.” He cites a letter recently written to Holderness by The Rt. Rev. Hirschfeld, one that offers a blueprint for the school going forward. Today a school like Holderness, writes the bishop, must exhibit an understanding “grounded in the valid, even orthodox, theology of the Church that is robust and expansive enough to embrace and celebrate the abundant diversity of the student body as a sign of God’s mission in the world.” So this is a sort of umbrella that not only encompasses the breadth of a diverse community—Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, and more than that—but also rejoices in that breadth. “This is the way the Church offers a language of hope that connects to the real world,” Joshua says. “In exhorting us to expand our loving gaze to the other, it offers us a wholeness, an authenticity we could not achieve otherwise. In overcoming our estrangement from others, we overcome as well our estrangement from ourselves and from God.” Bishop Hirschfeld adds that “the inclusion and celebration of otherness” is the very means “through which we experience the Holy in our lives and in the world. Conversation, without the presumption of converting the other, then becomes the whole point and end of true evangelism. And those conversations would not be constrained to ‘chapel talks,’ but would take place anywhere.” These prodigious hilltops will serve very well, thank you.
v. poSSibilitieS eMerge Jini heard a story that had two different endings: the joyous one of the warm and ongoing relationship Nicole enjoys now with her birth father; the heartbreaking one of her birth mother’s capitulation to the persistent racism of her immediate family. It’s an ending as disjointed as America itself, but one that underlines the impor-
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tance of the conversations Jini describes in that document to the faculty: “As the many truths of others are revealed through dedicated time and active listening, fear and distrust dissolve, and possibilities emerge.” On one side of the family, that listening occurred; on the other, it was cut short by those who refused to hear Nicole’s voice, who preferred to lie bunkered within their fear and distrust. On the most personal level, this is an example of the sort of estrangement that Joshua Hill describes, one that cuts down through flesh, blood, and kinship to the bedrock of spirit. On Mondays in the chapel, Joshua speaks—among many things—of his conviction that a whole person is a servant to others, and a fair measure of how “othercentered” Holderness students have become is to be found in the vestry program run by the school’s other chaplain, The Rev. Rich Weymouth ’70. That voluntary activity now attracts as many as 65 students of various religious and non-religious backgrounds, all doing public service work—blood drives, hurricane relief, Relay for Life, etc.—that lies largely outside the school’s service requirement. They do it just to help. As they do so, they discover—both among themselves on campus and as they go abroad—“the many truths of others.” Joshua Hill’s respect for this multiplicity reminds Jini what an ally she has in him. “Our modes may be different,” she says, “but our work is not.” Whether through the medium of mind, heart, or spirit, they insist in synchrony that we belong in a community, that we are all of one family, that no one is to be excluded. They urge, as Dr. King did, the joining of hands. •
We are the Why and the How Social juStice can’t juSt be taugHt; it MuSt be experienced and lived. at HolderneSS it’S a coMMunity effort, engaging not only faculty and adMiniStrative leaderS but Student leaderS and tHeir peerS aS well. by eMily MagnuS ’88
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he school year was just about to begin. Rev. Joshua Hill, soon to be the Holderness School chaplain, had just moved into the yellow house on the south side of campus. All was still quiet, the kind of quiet that falls over campus in the middle of a long summer day when there’s no rush to get anything done and the most important thing on anyone’s todo list is a trip to the Schoolhouse mailroom, or perhaps a late afternoon swim in Squam Lake. Into this quiet came the news of the Charlottesville protest and the clash between white supremacists and counter protesters. Tweets and posts on social media erupted with news from outside. “I hadn’t even lived at Holderness for a month, but I felt as the school’s chaplain I had to do something,” Joshua remembers. “I had no idea what type of response I would receive, but I sent an email to the whole school inviting them to attend a vigil with me in Concord.” With families taking last minute vacations, few faculty and staff were even on campus to read Joshua’s invitation. Only one person responded. Director of Equity and Inclusion Jini Sparkman said yes. Neither of them knew it at the time, but it would be the first in a series of many collaborative efforts, of working together to develop curriculum and experiences for the community that would focus attention on issues of social justice.
defining Social juStice Even before Joshua was hired to work at Holderness, he encountered the work of Jini Sparkman. “When I came for my interview I was really impressed with the school; I loved its connection to the outdoors, and I loved my conversations with [Head of School] Phil Peck,” recalls Joshua, “But when I met with Jini, I remember her asking me to define social justice, and that’s when I knew Holderness took this conversation seriously. While Jini and I may approach the subject from different angles, our visions are the same.” Jini’s commitment to social justice has been consistent throughout her adult life; “I teach from a social justice platform,” she says without apology. And when Jini first arrived at Holderness, that teaching was in an English classroom; it wasn’t until the fall of 2016 that she also took on the title of Director of Equity and Inclusion. It became her job, therefore, to translate the mission and the strategic plan into intentional programming and practical experiences. Written in 2015, the strategic plan challenges the Holderness community to “live our values in ways that are measurable and effective beyond our own classrooms, residence halls, and zip codes. We must question assumptions and be courageous about change.” More specifically, one of the goals of the plan reads, “We will integrate concepts of social justice, specifically notions of empathy and fairness, throughout our curricula, seeking to promote an
understanding of how to learn and lead in a complex, inter-connected world, and to educate our students toward a richer humanity.” Since the 1990s, Holderness has had a Diversity Committee whose mission it has been to develop awareness of and answer the needs of minority groups on campus. But with the new strategic plan, the efforts were broadened and developed with the goal of creating curriculum—both in and outside the classroom—that is intentional about educating empathic citizens who are open to multiple perspectives. There was a name change as well; the Diversity Committee became the Office of Equity and Inclusion in 2016. One of the initiatives of the office included bringing together groups of students from around the Lakes Region, giving them a chance to talk, listen, and collaborate. First organized two years ago by former Diversity Director Nicole Glew, the conference was established for students of color from independent schools in the Lakes Region. Originally the conference featured adult speakers and faculty-led discussions. Now in its second year, the New England Students of Color Conference (nesocc) is run by students, and the topics of the workshops are chosen by the students. Using the “unconference” style, the students participate in student-driven discussions, which examine issues of
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Senior Leader Piseth Sam ’18 at the New England Students of Color Conference, helping to organize student initiated topics into workshop groups
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leadership, inclusion, equity, race and the media, social justice, and more. “When the topics are chosen by students,” Jini explains, “they are empowered to engage in conversations around social justice, topics from where they are at and based upon their personal interests.” This year Jini organized the Love Wins: lGbtQ Conference as well, providing a safe place for all students to share their experiences and support each other. The Office of Equity and Inclusion is also in charge of programming for the annual social justice topics. Each year, on a rotating basis, one of the following topics is tackled: Race, Gender and Sexuality, Privilege, and Ability. For the 2017–18 school year, Jini chose to expand on Ability and made this year’s topic Ability, Disability, and Access. Speakers throughout the year have included Kristen Cameron ’04, who became a paraplegic after she was hit by a drunk driver while riding her bike seven years ago; KC Christiansen, a local golf pro, who went into a coma after a horrendous car accident and now lives with the effects of a traumatic brain injury; Mike Veny, who works to transform the stigmas surrounding mental illness, especially in young males; and Hugh Herr, who heads the biomechatronics group at the mit Media Lab and is engineering bionic limbs that emulate the function of natural limbs. In late winter during a third conference, this time including all students, the topics of Ability, Disability and Access were explored for a full day. While the conference has been run for several years, Jini again chose to change the format and to utilize the unconference style. In the morning students ran workshops on topics important to them; the vaccination debate, mental illness in schools, the daily routines of a blind person, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and depression were among the 30 workshops
One of the photographs created for the “We Don’t Say” campaign, originally inspired by a similar campaign at Duke University
that were organized and led by Holderness students. “These were topics students wanted to discuss,” says Jini. “They were willing to take risks, stand up in front of their peers, and engage in discussions that mattered to them. And it wasn’t just the senior leaders; ninth-graders volunteered to share their stories as well. It was impressive.” In the afternoon, students participated in experiential and similarity awareness opportunities; from wheelchairs on the basketball courts to sleds on the hockey rink to sit-skis on the slopes of Cannon and Loon, students had a chance to walk in the shoes of athletes with differing abilities and experience some of the same thrills and frustrations they experience. “When we accept one definition of what a sport is and looks like,” says Jini, “it limits us. The afternoon activities students experienced, helped them recognize the limitations of their assumptions and their able-bodied social constructs; it opened
doors to what competition and athleticism can be.” At the beginning of the conference when students gathered in Weld, Jini shared a quote with them from comedian and journalist Stella Young whose ted Talk is titled “I am Not Your Inspiration.” Stella speaks of people with differing abilities and argues that, “We do overcome some things. But the things that we’re overcoming are not the things that you think they are. They are not things to do with our bodies. I use the term ‘disabled people’ quite deliberately because I subscribe to what’s called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses. Disability doesn’t make you exceptional, but questioning what you think you know about it does.” After reading this quote to the students, Jini said, “I challenge you to question today. Question what you think
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StudentS working toward Social juStice In the life of Holderness School, there are countless opportunities to practice our motto, For God and Humankind, that go above and beyond the 40 hours of service required for graduation. And at the center of all the opportunities are a team of faculty, leading the students, coaxing them and often working alongside them. For years Chaplain Rich Weymouth and Service Coordinator Janice Pedrin-Nielson have led this charge, using their connections in the Plymouth community to find out who is most in need and how Holderness students can be of help. Kathy Weymouth, Joshua Hill, Jini Sparkman, Carol Dopp, and many others have joined Rich and Janice in helping students engage in social justice and the caring for others. Below are just some of the opportunities in which students have engaged this year. • r nintH-grade fall Service day: Each fall in October, the
ninth graders take a morning off classes and fan out across the greater community to help those in need. Their services range from working at a local thrift store to gardening at an organic farm to pulling invasive species for the Squam Lakes Association. r tHe nortHern paSS proteSt: In early October, Erica Ashby ’18, Luke Valentine ’18, and Bridget Pope ’18 witnessed and participated in a Northern Pass Protest in Plymouth as part of Erica’s research for a Picador article. The Northern Pass is a proposed 192-mile transmission line project that will bring 1,090 megawatts (MW) of energy from Hydro-Québec’s hydroelectric plants in Canada to New Hampshire and to the rest of New England. Members of the sec and policy makers were visiting downtown Plymouth to do a second inspection of the town as it is a potential pass through for the Northern Pass. r blood drive: 67 students, colleagues, and parents donated 54 units of blood in October. Other members of the community donated food and drinks to nourish those who gave blood. Student leaders for this drive were Abby Wiseman ’18 and Aldie Anderson ’18. r joSepH HayeS’S HoMe renovation: Joseph Hayes has been working in the kitchen at Holderness for almost 50 years, and he is about to retire. Under the leadership of Rich Weymouth, the Holderness Vestry has been doing work to get Joseph’s house ready for his retirement in August. On weekends students have helped clear brush, paint both the
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exterior and interior, dig out the cellar hole, and remove ceiling tiles. aidS MeMorial quilt: In December, school counselor Carol Dopp arranged to have several blocks of the aids Memorial Quilt brought to Holderness; she spoke to students about the quilt and her personal connection to it during a Thursday evening chapel service. The quilt blocks, which hung in Weld Hall for a week, continue to celebrate the lives of those who have died from aids-related causes. care packageS for uS troopS: Each fall before Veterans Day, the Holderness Vestry packs and sends care packages to family members in the Holderness community who are serving, or have served, our country. This year, students mailed 20 packages filled with baked goods, coffee, toiletries, sweets, and much more. tHe bridge HouSe: On Fridays after sports, students travel to the Bridge House, a homeless shelter, where they play with the children and help them with homework. Students get to know all the residents and share an evening meal with them, always providing some part of it. In the fall, students and faculty participate in collecting warm winter coats and jackets for the residents. The students also organize fundraisers to provide holiday parties for the residents and the children, and to fund the Secret Santas gifts they leave for the children to open on Christmas morning. MealS for Many: Meals for Many is organized by the Plymouth Congregational Church and Plymouth Area Community Closet. Together they serve dinner every Thursday evening to all who choose to attend. Students take a day off from athletic practice each week to help prepare the meals, serve the families, and clean up. They also pack weekend food bags for local children who live in food-fragile homes. Students who participate in the Meals for Many program in the fall also organize a Thanksgiving Basket drive for families who are in need and who are not being helped by other organizations. This year, we provided Thanksgiving dinner and grocery staples to five local families. project outreacH: Each year in March for ten days, ninth graders travel to Lowell, MA, where they volunteer for a wide variety of non-profits in the area, including Lowell Transitional Housing, Rosie’s Place, the Special Olympics, the Lowell Boys and Girls Club, Mill City Grows, and Christ
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Church United. Students also travel into Boston where they are given a tour of the city by Matthew, a man who used to be homeless on the same streets. relay for life: In April every year, Dean of Students Kathy Weymouth and several student leaders organize a schoolwide fundraising event. This year students have been hard at work organizing a Relay for Life, an event that will raise funds for the American Cancer Society. peMi youtH center: During the fall and spring terms, students may opt to complete their service requirements at the Pemi Youth Center. Holderness students arrive at 3:30 and greet middle and high school students who choose the center as their after-school experience. Our students help them with homework and then participate in the activity of the day. They act as positive role models and encourage the Youth Center kids in their life goals. end-of-tHe-year clotHing and book drive: At the end of the school year, Maggie Mumford and the recycling crew work for several days collecting, washing, and sorting clothing that has been donated by the Holderness students. The clothing is then given to local schools to distribute to needy families and to the Plymouth Area Community Closet. Additionally, Maggie collects textbooks and media that will no longer be used at Holderness and donates these to organizations who distribute them to schools in the US and abroad. Gently used school supplies are donated to the Bridge House for the children there. one love foundation: The One Love Foundation works to ensure that everyone understands the difference between a healthy relationship and an unhealthy one. Holderness School partners with One Love each spring, beginning with the senior leaders who receive training in how to lead conversations about relationship violence. The leaders then, in turn, share the information with their peers. It’s an
you know and imagine what you have yet to learn.” The programs of the Office of Equity and Inclusion are designed to educate, yes, but in a way that provides students with a variety of perspectives and gives them time to question and logically consider their assumptions and their beliefs. In a world where biased information is sometimes presented as fact, the equity and
Chaplain Rich Weymouth helps set up scaffolding outside Joseph’s house, where ninth-graders were painting this fall during their volunteer day.
opportunity to raise awareness about relationship violence and what to look for. r bell tolling: In honor of the Day of Remembrance for Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated 50 years ago on April 4, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, TN, Holderness School joined with churches, universities, schools, and other organizations in a moment of reflection and ceremonial bell-tolling. Dr. King was shot at 6:01 pm (Central). Just as the news of Dr. King’s death was first known in Memphis and then spread around the United States and the world, so did the bell tolls. Bell tolling began at 6:01 pm at the Clayborn Temple and at 6:03 pm in Memphis. The national bell tolling was at 6:05 pm (7:05 pm for New Hampshire, Eastern Standard Time). The bells were rung 39 times, for Dr. King was 39 years old when he was assassinated. Isaiah Jubrey ’20 was the bell ringer in the Chapel of the Holy Cross at Holderness School.
inclusion programs teach students to seek multiple views so that they can make informed decisions.
courageouS converSationS While speakers and workshop days are certainly part of her plan, Jini understands that social justice can’t just be taught in classrooms; it has to be lived and experienced and applied in every day life. The
skills she hopes students will develop during their time at Holderness are based upon the work of Glenn Singleton who wrote Courageous Conversations About Race. The protocol for Courageous Conversations has four agreements: 1. Stay engaged: No matter how difficult a conversation may become, don’t walk away; keep the dialogue going.
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“wHen we accept one definition of wHat a Sport iS and lookS like, it liMitS uS. tHe afternoon activitieS StudentS experienced, Helped tHeM recognize tHe liMitationS of tHeir aSSuMptionS and tHeir able-bodied Social conStructS; it opened doorS to wHat coMpetition and atHleticiSM can be.” — director of equity and incluSion jini SparkMan 2. Experience discomfort: Discomfort is inevitable when dealing with topics of race and equality, so it’s important to acknowledge this without letting it end conversation. 3. Speak your truth: Don’t just say what you think others want to hear but be open and honest about what you know to be true. 4. Expect and accept non-closure: There are no easy solutions, so it’s important to be comfortable with on-going conversations; solutions can’t be found overnight. To this, Jini added a fifth tenant from Glen Singleton’s work: 5. Assume positive intent: Assume that there is good in everyone and they too are working for a better world. “Right now all the dorm and day leaders go through Courageous Conversations training at the beginning of the year,” says Jini, “My hope is that soon all students will go through the training with their advisory groups.” In the meantime, she is finding other ways to initiate courageous conversations. Shortly after her road trip last fall to the prayer vigil in Concord, Jini, in conjunction with Athletic Director Rick Eccleston ’92, initiated a series of posters that were hung, and still hang, around campus. On the posters, Rick and Jini asked studentathletes to think about the language they use in the dorms, in the locker rooms, and
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with their friends and to identify those phrases that are hurtful and demeaning. “Each poster begins with the phrase, ‘We don’t say,’” explains Jini. “The students chose the words they wanted to emphasize and the explanations are theirs. Rick and I may have initiated this campaign, but these are changes the students are seeking.” With the help of photography teacher Franz Nicolay and Associate Director of Communications Emily Magnus ’88, the students took part in a photo shoot so they could literally stand by their words. Ellie Batchelder’s ’18 poster reads, “We don’t say ‘hardo’ because working hard should be an expectation not an insult.” Erica Ashby ’18 wrote, “We don’t say ‘Jesus’ or ‘God’ in anger because someone’s religion shouldn’t be anyone’s expletive.” The list goes on. From homophobia to depression, from racial slurs to body image, the students focussed on words they found hurtful and demeaning, challenging their friends and classsmates to stop and think. “This campaign isn’t about banning certain words,” explains Jini. “The intent was, and continues to be, about raising awareness about certain words and understanding why some words are hurtful. It’s about taking the time to consider the language you are using and examining it from another’s perspective.”
coMMunity effort What’s important to note is that Jini isn’t alone in this work. In addition to Rick, many
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other students and faculty recognize the importance of talking about and engaging in topics around social justice. One of her biggest collaborators is Joshua Hill. In fact, Joshua invited Jini to collaborate in the planning of the chapel services that occur twice per week. It’s a opportunity on a weekly basis for Joshua and Jini—along with the other committee members Rich Weymouth ’70, Bruce Barton, and Alec Sisco—to intentionally support the work of each other and collaborate when the opportunities present themselves. “Because Jini’s work focuses on defending the dignity of all people, it is certainly part of the work of the Episcopal church,” says Joshua. “She is the how and I am the why.” As the new chaplain, Joshua’s goal is to invigorate the chapel program, providing a structure in which as many different voices as possible can share their stories and be heard. He also hopes to balance this with his own passion for teaching how Christian symbols express truths relevant in modern life. “I think the liturgy of the church is a preview and a foretaste of society turned right,” says Joshua, “one in which we apologize and forgive. We give our money away and get nothing in return. We celebrate and mourn together. We kneel down before that which is greater than ourselves. “Practicing these things regularly in chapel services and in our lives,” he continues, “makes us authentically human enough to face gigantic societal problems,
we are tHe wHy and tHe How
the root causes of which are things like greed, fear, and envy. The blessing of the pets on the Feast of St. Francis beckons us to understand ourselves in sibling relationship with the created world. The feast of the Holy Cross compels us to strive even sacrificially in service to love and justice. The Ashes of Ash Wednesday are about coming to terms with our failures and relying on the grace of God to continue on joyfully. We also try to meet once per month in the outdoor chapel, a space that makes connections with the environment without my needing to speak a word of eco-theology.” The school’s motto provides further structure for exploring social justice. “‘For God and Humankind,’” says Joshua, “If we take the motto seriously, then it’s clear that one of the school’s most basic responsibilities is to educate people who will change the world, to form people who understand themselves as doing God’s work.” “It all goes back to the old testament,” Joshua explains. “The prophet Amos warned the Israelites about their selfish behavior—cheating the poor, exploiting the weak, and using power to reinforce inequitable systems of power. Amos, and Dr. King, and the Hebrew Scriptures all stand for the same thing—paying attention first to those who need it most.” Furthermore, he says, spirituality is important in the work of social justice, because social justice work is hard. “The path to doing something good is often fraught with failure and disappointment,” he explains, “and sometimes that work confronts people with existential threats. Spirituality not only helps with the calling but also gives you the motive and courage to continue on.”
it’S not juSt about people Joshua’s philosophical and spiritual approach to social justice doesn’t stop at society and the injustices that plague peo-
Lars Ivarson ’18 learning to play basketball in a wheelchair during the school’s Ability, Disability, and Access Conference
ple. He includes the environment as well. “Creation has intrinsic value,” he says. “Climate change, rapid species extinction, air and water pollution, over-fishing and deforestation are all signs that the human relationship with Creation and its Creator is broken. According to scripture, humanity has been appointed as stewards or caretakers of the Earth. We need to take care.” Joshua sees another important intersection between environmental conservation and social justice. “Nuclear waste, landfills, and water pollution are more likely to affect those least likely to feel empowered to fight,” he explains. “How do we help the environment?” he continues. “Our environmental problems are a symptom of a spiritual disease. If we want to heal the symptom we need to treat the disease by becoming people who foster meaningful relationships with God, our neighbors, and Creation.”
As Earth Day approaches and he begins to plan programming for the spring, environmental concerns weigh on Joshua and what impact he can have on the students and the community. For starters, through a collaborative effort between the English Department, the Science Department, and the Chaplaincy, on Earth Day, Devi Lockwood will speak in Outdoor Chapel. Devi is in her mid-twenties and travels around the world collecting stories about how water and climate change have impacted people’s lives. Her goal is to record 1,001 stories. This collaboration—between students and adults, academic departments and the Vestry, outside speakers and internal audiences—is just what Joshua and Jini have in mind. It’s a long-term plan that will require hard work and commitment, but its results, when accomplished will bring about healing, reunion, and social justice. •
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Pete Woodward, during the early years of his tenure as the headmaster of Holderness School
Catching Up With Pete Woodward OUR KIDS, HIS EDUCATIONAL MINISTRY Former Headmaster Pete Woodward came out of Kansas to make the opportunity to attend Holderness more available to all. In retirement he is focusing all his tireless energy on help for the vulnerable and disadvantaged. by rick carey if you ever visit the rnd corner grill in Lawrence, KS,
struction of the Hagerman Center, the Alfond Library, the Gallop Athletic
you’ll enjoy a good meal over a piece of ground important to the family of
Center and adjoining Alfond Arena, the South Campus dorms, and the
The Rev. Brinton W. “Pete” Woodward—and to American history.
renovation of a half dozen other buildings. He would re-institute manda-
The restaurant sits inside the Round Corner Drug Building, which occupies the site of a drugstore founded by the original Brinton W.
tory Chapel and the theology requirement, bolster the arts, and assemble the school’s envied array of Special Programs. He would hire more than a
Woodward, Pete’s great-grandfather, in 1855. Eight years later, in one of
dozen faculty members who would then go forth to head other independ-
the most notorious episodes of the Civil War, Quantrill’s Raiders—a pro-
ent schools.
Confederate guerilla group that included Frank and Jesse James—swept unopposed into Lawrence. They slaughtered 180 civilians and burned a good portion of the city, including that drugstore. That Brinton Woodward survived the attack by hiding in a well. Then he rebuilt the drugstore in that building which today bears an historical
But let’s consider this lens: the expansion of opportunity, which you might also say the Civil War was about. For starters, Pete immediately transformed the Holderness School for Boys into the co-educational institution it is today. “Sure, but that really wasn’t so hard,” Pete says on a February morning
marker identifying it as the oldest drugstore in Kansas in continuing
in the home overlooking Squam Lake that he shares with his wife Kathy.
operation. The business remained in the Woodward family for well over
“The ground work had already been laid and the community was ready
a century.
for it. Among the entire faculty, there were only two votes against.
Pete himself grew up in the aisles of that drugstore, in a white middle class neighborhood, but also in what had become a very diverse city still scarred by its history. In nearby Topeka, he was co-captain and the only
Afterwards one of the trustees came up to me and asked very anxiously, ‘What about girls on Out Back?’ ‘They’ll do fine,’ I said.” They did do fine, as did the women Pete brought on to the faculty and
white starter on his high school basketball team (he went on to play at
elevated to leadership positions. He and his faculty’s pointed commit-
the University of Kansas). When going out for meals or drinks with black
ment to diversity for the student body—and its implicit expansion of
friends, he saw what it was like to be turned away at the door. Soon he
opportunity—brought more students from black and Hispanic families,
would put himself on history’s firing line; while attending the General
from middle class and working class backgrounds, and from a rainbow
Theological Seminary in New York in 1965, he went to Alabama to march
coalition of other nations. By the 1990s, the social climate on campus was
from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King Jr.
such that several students felt safe enough to reveal that they were gay,
Then there are so many lenses through which to view the Woodward years at Holderness. He was chaplain at the Kent School in Connecticut
and one—R.C. Whitehouse ’00—was elected school vice president. “I always had brilliant people on the faculty helping to make the
when he was hired in 1977 to succeed the retiring Don Hagerman as
school a broader and more welcoming community,” Pete says, “but I think
headmaster. Over the next quarter century, he would increase the
the character of the school from its very origin helped as well. We were
school’s endowment by a factor of over twelve. He would oversee the con-
founded as a school affordable to the sons of clergymen, and so a certain
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CATCHING UP WITH PETE WOODWARD
facet of diversity—socio-economic—was there from the very beginning. I
groundskeepers come to take care of my lawn, no maintenance crew to
think that helped pave the way for others.”
mind the plumbing, no tech department to fix my computer…”
Also in the 1990s, Pete and his faculty created a Diversity Committee
The list goes on. Yet after his retirement from Holderness in 2001,
to provide support for students who identified with any facet of being dif-
Pete went right on working, both for the Educators’ Collaborative, a con-
ferent. Current Head of School Phil Peck was a co-chair of that
sulting group, and the New England Association of Schools and Colleges
committee, as was current Associate Head of School Nigel Furlonge.
(neasc). “I enjoyed both those jobs,” Pete says. “But there wasn’t any
Today English teacher Jini Rae Sparkman leads what has been renamed the Office of Equity and Inclusion. This reflects the next thematic step to what Pete set in motion in the ’80s and ’90s and that Phil has
direct contact with kids involved with either one.” In 2007 he resigned from the consulting group, and in 2012 from neasc—but not before earning a 2009 Honorary Doctorate of Humane
kept going—the affirmation of a single school-wide community that gath-
Letters from Endicott College for his work in international education.
ers up together its clergymen’s sons, its women, its African-Americans, all
Meanwhile, Pete had been doing pro bono work as chair of the board of
its differences and all its samenesses, into equal access to the opportuni-
the Whole Village Family Resources Center, which helps connect low and
ties that a Holderness education affords.
moderate income families in eastern Grafton County to various educational and support services.
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S And speaking of kids, there is in America perhaps no population more
The only difference between being retired and working, Pete observes, is
lacking in opportunity, or mere safety and security, than those who have
he doesn’t get a paycheck anymore. Then he laughs, adding, “And no
fallen into the court and foster-care system. Through Whole Village Pete
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CATCHING UP WITH PETE WOODWARD
learned about casa—Court-Appointed Special Advocates—a national program tailored to the needs of such children and youths. “Since 2013 I’ve been among the volunteers who serve as such advocates,” says Pete. “So far I’ve represented twelve kids who in various ways have been abused and/or neglected.” He explains that in New Hampshire, when circumstances become
Indeed the bishop’s charge to the commission is to urge congregations to “move away from asking how can we get more young people from our community into the doors of our church, to how can we go out the doors of our church to serve the needs of young people in our communities.” Such support costs money, of course—that old able-to-pay thing—and Pete’s first responsibility on the commission is to lead its fundraising com-
such that the state takes responsibility for a child, the Department of
mittee. One of the services already on line, however, is that of tutoring,
Child and Youth Services (dcyf) and casa collaborate, with casa recom-
though really it’s more than that. “It’s sort of like the Big Brother Big Sister
mending an adult (approved by a judge) as someone to learn about the
program, or casa,” Pete says. “And the research will tell you that there is
child; to meet with parents, relatives, teachers, counselors, and other rele-
no factor more key to success in school than the availability of a mentor.”
vant adults; and to represent the child’s best interests in finding a safe S
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and stable home situation. Pete’s experience with teenagers has translated into assignments with
If opportunity and inclusion were among the founding values of
casa’s oldest clients in this area, the sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds on
Holderness School, so did they become matters of peculiar urgency to
the cusp of aging out of a program for non-adults.
Pete with the birth of his son Brint 46 years ago. Pete’s four other chil-
“There are ways that jurisdiction can be extended, but the unfortunate
dren are flourishing, and in fact only a month ago he took his son young
thing is that most choose to go their own way,” Pete says. “I remember
Pete ’93 for a visit to Lawrence, KS, and the University of Kansas. Young
one girl, I arranged enough financial aid through the New Hampshire
Pete was co-captain of three sports while at Holderness, but his brother,
Charitable Fund for her to attend community college in Manchester, but
this fourth of the Brinton W. Woodwards, was born blind and develop-
instead she ran off with her boyfriend.”
mentally disabled.
It can be heartbreaking work, and there is a heartbreakingly common
Therefore Pete sits on the board of Lakes Region Community Services,
element in many of these cases, Pete finds: “Over and over, it’s opioid
which provides counsel and help to such children and adults and their
use—not the child, but the parents or somebody very close.”
families. “I just couldn’t be more grateful for what they’ve done for Brint
The good news? “On the other hand, I’ve met so many saints I never knew existed—teachers, dcyf workers, and foster parents who themselves
over the years,” Pete says. In speaking with this 78-year-old man, you get the feeling that he went
take so much abuse sometimes, but who keep reaching out to help. And
back to work after leaving Holderness because, well, if he has this much
we have an incredible need here for more foster parents.”
energy now, what to do with such energy then? It was put to good use:
Then there are broader problems of opportunity and equity that need
those twelve years of continued paychecks went to establishing a charita-
solving. In 2016, New Hampshire Episcopal Bishop A. Robert Hirschfeld—
ble remainder unitrust with Holderness that will support Brint for the
inspired by sociologist Robert D. Putnam’s book Our Kids: The American
rest of his life.
Dream in Crisis—created a commission to address in this state the nationwide “opportunity gap” lamented by Putnam. In Our Kids, Putnam argues that economic inequality in America has brought profound changes to family life, to neighborhoods, and to schools—changes that endow a small percentage of children at the top
With that accomplished, Pete could get down to the serious and unpaid Pro Deo Et Genere Humano business of what might be called his educational ministry, his pursuit of equity and opportunity for those with less of it—which he did. Pete has taken Brint back to Lawrence as well, and a story about the
with huge advantages and that make it ever harder for children less fortu-
visit ran in the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper last summer.
nate to work their way up.
Accompanying that front-pager is a photo of Brint reaching out to touch
“Education is supposed to help level the playing field,” wrote The New York Times in its 2015 review of Our Kids. “Horace Mann called it the ‘great equalizer.’ Now it’s closer to the great fortifier—compounding the
the bricks of the rnd Corner building, and its historical marker, while Pete looks on. The fingers touch, and a circuit in time is closed between the
advantages of class, since the affluent come better prepared and more
Woodward who hid himself away from hate and iniquity, and then rebuilt
able to pay.”
what he had lost, and this fragile, gentle namesake, warm-hearted and in
So the purpose of this commission, Pete explains, “is to help Episcopal parishes develop programs to support local schools: music programs, cafeteria breakfasts, arts enrichment, tutoring, after-school programs, various things to help these kids catch up.”
certain ways eerily brilliant. Brint lives and flourishes in a better world than that era’s. His father, who has done so much in New Hampshire and elsewhere to combat hate and iniquity, to propagate opportunity and inclusion, has helped bring that about—and he is still at it. •
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Strategic Planning Scorecard: Equity and Inclusion e Scorecard is a series of articles in which Head of School Phil Peck discusses what Holderness School is doing to move forward on the initiatives outlined in the 2015 Strategic Plan. When we began writing the current strategic plan, we intentionally created four primary goals that were all-inclusive. We didn’t want a strategic plan that was organized in traditional silos— facilities, finances, academics, athletics, etc. Instead, we wanted to create a plan that would impact all areas of learning and all aspects of the student experience. It was about enhancing and sustaining the greater community. at’s why equity and inclusion became so important and why two of the four goals mention relationships with others; community is about including all and about making sure everyone has equal opportunities. “Charity begins at home,” says one of the goals. “We aspire to be continuously critically reflective about our relationships with each other.” One of the objectives beneath that goal reads: “Respectful Engagement: We will develop and strengthen the practices needed to continuously and deliberately build a respectful, safe, and diverse community.” Noteworthy are the words “continuously” and “deliberately.” is is an ongoing process that we will shape and nurture and direct through the coming years. We recognize that equity and inclusion are not subjects that can be taught once and checked off a list. ey require active discussions and consistent and frequent opportunities for questioning and pondering. Our Director of Equity and Inclusion Jini Sparkman has done much to help encourage the community’s questions and discussions. She has partnered with athletics, residential life, admissions, communications, student government, and spiritual life to move Holderness forward. Recent initiatives have also worked to help all of us be more aware of how opportunities around equity and inclusion impact every
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Why teach social justice and develop experiences for Holderness students that examine issues of equity and inclusion? Head of School Phil Peck shares the goals of the current strategic plan and why they are so important.
aspect of our lives, often in ways that are surprising and unexpected. Under the fourth goal of the 2015 Strategic Plan another objective reads, “Global Education and Outreach: We will integrate concepts of social justice, specifically notions of empathy and fairness, throughout our curricula, seeking to promote an understanding of how to learn and lead in a complex, inter-connected world, and to educate our students toward a richer humanity.” Social justice at Holderness represents our community’s commitment to proactively develop curricular experiences that promote empathy, equity, fairness, and freedom. at community, however, is not limited to our immediate campus; it extends beyond to include the paths students take all over the world when they travel and when they eventually graduate. Students, in fact, have been leading many of these initiatives. From the “We Don’t Say” campaign, to students speaking in chapel, to two student-led diversity conferences on campus, to
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the day-long abilities workshops—which were almost entirely student led—our students have taken the lead and moved us forward in this important area. Cultural growth and change can only occur when the students own initiatives, and that has certainly been the case this year as our students have partnered with our adults to “work for the betterment of humankind and God’s creation.” Next year we will finish our accreditation process and will then use the results of our review to begin writing a new version of our strategic plan. It is an iterative process, one that allows us to reflect on where we have been, where we are, and where we hope to be in the future. e result is that our school is constantly learning and growing. And while the objectives will certainly reflect that moment in time and the present needs of the school, there’s no doubt building a strong community aligned with our calling, Pro Deo Et Genere Humano, will still remain the ultimate goal. •
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Accreditation: A Critically Reflective Process ere are many ways to seek improvement: obtaining feedback, tracking progress, measuring results, making comparisons. One of the ways that Holderness works toward improvement every ten years is through a formal accreditation process, overseen by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC). is process involves an intensive selfstudy and a peer review study and visit. Our self-assessment takes 12–18 months. While it serves as an assurance of quality, it is also a catalyst for improvement and innovation. An unexpected by-product has been strengthening the bonds of community. Beginning in late summer, the entire organization set about a planned self-reflection that included structured analysis, reflection, and many conversations in the 15 standard committees. Each committee took a deep dive into a specific area of the school and reviewed data, conducted interviews, and then submitted their section’s written report. Chair of the History Department Kelsey Berry and Assistant to the Head of School Andy Herring are the chairs of the overall process. ey set up the intricate schedule, revamped surveys, made committee assignments, coached, and mentored the massive process forward. With the end of the self-assessment nearing completion, Kelsey and Andy are pleased that issues that have been identified in the preliminary report are already being addressed in support of an improved school. Earlier in the year, when sharing their approach with the Board of Trustees, Kelsey and Andy admitted they knew the school would pass, so they wanted to inspire the school to look further and perhaps deeper. ey revamped the surveys, trying to create tools that would evoke more meaningful responses from a far-broader audience, including all employees, students, parents and alumni. In partnership with the accreditation steering committee (Head of School, Associate Head, and Chief Operating Officer), Kelsey and Andy also deter-
Both instructional and non-instructional employees were involved in the review and reporting process for the school’s accreditation. Above, history faculty and Assistant Athletic Director Chrissy Lushefski, Strength and Conditioning Coach Morgan Llewelyn, and Associate Director of Alumni and Parent Relations Stacy Lopes review their report on the health and wellness of the community.
mined that they would create one additional standard to understand the experience of adults, and they revised the infrastructure standard, hoping to make it more relevant to the challenges facing boarding schools. “We deliberately delayed the accreditation so that we could immediately transition into a strategic planning process,” states Andy. “Knowing this, we needed to ask more detailed questions following the belief that to transform, you have to be informed.” Some of the questions that Kelsey and Andy considered about the assessment early in the process included: r How do we facilitate conversations between instructional and operational staff? r How do we collect good data and make time to understand that data? r How do we get the entire community to embrace this abstract process? As the process unfolded, some of the questions organically resolved. e committees were designed to include employees from all parts of the school; instructional and operational voices mingled in the examination of indicators and
provided a natural facilitation and co-learning environment. Scheduling time together was done by Kelsey and Andy and accommodations were made into the busy, overall pace of the school schedule. Most of the committee chairs would add that time remains a scarce resource and finalizing their reports was challenging. ose same committee chairs also might add that they have learned from their fellow committee members and from the process overall. ere has been an augmentation in the understanding of what various departments do and new, cross-organizational relationships have pulled the community together in a surprising manner. “is is one of the many benefits of being a part of an accreditation process,” states Head of School Phil Peck. “We are a greater school when we know ourselves and can be critically reflective together.” •
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Connecting with Nature
left: Nick Spanos ’21 in the Kelso Dune Field in the Mojave Desert in December; right: Halle Barker ’21, with guidance from climbing instructor Erik Thatcher ’08, scales one of the many rock formations that sprout out of the arid landscape in Joshua Tree National Park
L.L.Bean encourages their customers to “Be an Outsider.” REI has an Instagram challenge, #OptOutside. Countless schools and environmental preservation organizations dedicate pages of their websites to outdoor activities, encouraging their readers to choose an adventure. It’s no surprise to hear this same call to action at Holderness. Since its founding, headmasters and teachers alike have encouraged students to get outside. In the 1880s, it is recorded that Headmaster Gray supported the building of forts throughout the woods surrounding campus, a tradition that continued well into the 20th century. e first official ski team raced in 1936 and grew to provide many Olympians with a strong base from which to launch their careers. Out Back sent its first groups of students into the White Mountains in the 1970s, and most recently the climbing team has developed into a year-round program, teaching student-athletes the pleasures of ice climbing and hiking the high peaks of New Hampshire in the winter.
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Outdoor adventures have always made the weekend activity list and have been a favorite pastime for the Bulls. In fact, Holderness receives more emails from alumni who meet on mountaintops than any other place on the planet! For Director of the Climbing Program Erik atcher ’08, this link to the outdoors is more than just a catchy campaign or merchandising slogan; it is his mission. “e human experience is so far removed from nature that we have forgotten we are a part of it,” says Erik. “ere are plenty of studies that show that this disengagement can lead to anxiety, depression, and attention deficit problems. at’s what I want to address.” In fact, Erik feels so strongly about his mission that he is willing to give up weekends and vacation time to get kids outside. is fall, he took a group of students to Pittsburg, NH, to fish, and in January he led a winter ascent of Mt. Washington, New Hampshire’s highest peak at 6,288 feet. Fortunately, while it may
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have been a bit cold, the winds were gentle and the skies were clear. “In all my time on the rock pile I’ve only had one other winter day as nice as this,” says Erik who, with the help of Director of Out Back Randy Houseman, guided nine students to the summit. “It was truly an inspiring day.” In addition to these weekend trips, for the past two years, Erik has used part of the school’s winter break to travel with students to other climbing areas around the country. Last year they visited Chattanooga, TN; this year they traveled farther afield to California, visiting both Joshua Tree and the Mojave Desert. “I wanted to take the students to a place that is very different from what they are used to. e landscape in the Southwest is so different, it makes you stand up and take notice,” says Erik. “e climbing in Joshua Tree is also ideal because it’s accessible to all levels.” Which gets to the second part of Erik’s mission. He doesn’t want to just “preach to the choir” so to speak. He wants to encourage
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Continuing the long Holderness tradition of outdoor adventuring, many current Bulls have been on multiple adventures this year, including a January ascent of Mt. Washington (top right) and a fall fly fishing trip to Pittsburg, NH (bottom right).
people who are new to the outdoors as well. On the trip to California, for example, Erik and climbing coach Tim Mijal took with them four seniors and three ninth-graders. ree of the students had climbed with Erik previously, but four had little to no experience at all. Will Bayha ’18 and Anna Jones ’18 were two of the students who had little climbing experience. For them, the landscape and the chance to explore a different part of the country were what prompted them to sign up for the trip. “The last time I tried rock climbing, I wasn’t comfortable with the heights,” says Will. “But Mr. Thatcher made it easy. He was good about picking locations that had several different levels of climbing so that it was open to everyone.” Will also took advantage of the expansive night skies to experiment with long exposure photography. But while the climbing lessons and photographic opportunities were valuable, ask Will and Anna to share their most memorable moments from the trip, and they talk about waking up in their tents and watching the sun rise. ey also talk about visiting the Kelso Dune Field in the Mojave Desert and listening to the low-frequency booming of the dunes as they shift. For Erik, that’s mission accomplished. His work, however, is far from over; he has many more weekend adventures planned that he hopes will entice more students to join him on the trails and cliffs around campus. In April, Erik is also organizing a weekend long celebration of women in the outdoors. “We’re hoping to partner with Plymouth State to increase the impact of this event and make it open to the local community as well,” says Erik. “We’ll be
bringing in an all-female adventure film festival called No Man’s Land and are currently working on getting local partners to lead all-female trips and activities for the weekend.”
In the meantime, Erik’s mission is worth repeating and adopting. Get Outside. Be an Outsider. Opt for an outdoor activity. •
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around the quad
Behind the Scenes of #Protecting the Quarterback
Monique Devine-Robichaud working on stage directions for the school’s fall play for which she was both the playwright and the director
Sitting in the seats of Hagerman Auditorium, a loud cheer erupts backstage; it’s difficult to tell whether it’s rowdy thespians blowing off steam before the start of the play or if it is the beginning of the play itself. Is it reality or fiction? As the cheers grow louder and the door at stage right opens, it is clear that the play has begun. Boys dressed in football uniforms spill through the door, cheering loudly again and carrying their star player onto the stage. So begins #Protecting the Quarterback by Monique DevineRobichaud, this fall’s play at Holderness School. e focus of the play was on star quarterback Jake Lafoon, who learns in the first scene that his grandfather has died. Jake must return home for the funeral, but as Coach Burns and Coach Dings know, Jake rarely stays out of trouble when he is with his family, and his girlfriend casts a spell he just can’t avoid. e coaches send along a trainer to watch his every move, but Jake still manages to get into plenty of trouble. As
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the play progresses, it is unclear if he will return to college in time for the playoffs. Monique, who is also the theater director at Holderness, began writing #Protecting the Quarterback last August as part of a master class in playwriting. “e germinal idea came from a story on CNN about a basketball player who needed to be taken care of because he was always getting in trouble,” says Monique. “But as I started to write, Will Blatz’s mullet was also a huge inspiration for the show.” (Will Blatz ’18 took Monique’s theater course last fall and does indeed have a lovely mane.) Even before she began to write, Monique had an intimate knowledge of the characters and their stories in her mind, but she reached out to the Holderness community as she brought them to life in her script. Her close friend and fellow actor Lisa Lovett (sister of Dean of Students Kathy Weymouth) read the first draft, and when she was ready for feedback on the second draft, Monique got help from former Holderness thespians Becca Kelly ’15 and Kendra Morse ’13. “Even as we began to rehearse, I continued to rewrite scenes,” admits Monique. “For a while, I was coming to every rehearsal with a new script.” Jake didn’t have much to say at first and needed to talk more; the stage directions for the sportscasters of Jake’s championship game needed clarifying; and Gretchen and Owen, Jake’s aunt and uncle, needed a scene to show their affection for each other. #Protecting the Quarterback is a play wellsuited for Holderness; in fact, the fictional world sometimes mimics campus life. Jake is the same happy-go-lucky young man Ben Jerome ’18 is in real life—minus the crazy girlfriend—and it’s not hard to imagine Ben and Will Blatz ’18, who are brothers in the play, digging a mud pit behind their dorm and spending the weekend wrestling in it—minus the grave of their grandfather. And although the play is intended to entertain and amuse, there’s another side to the plot
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that intentionally tackles more serious themes. Gender equality is addressed throughout the play, with strong female characters often lending voices of reason to the chaos. ere’s also an openly gay couple in the play that struggles to find acceptance in a socially conservative family. “I wanted to create a play in which students are able to see themselves on stage,” says Monique. “For some that’s rare in a high school play.” e challenges of writing a play and directing it are not new for Monique, or even for the Holderness drama program. In the spring of 2007, with then Music Director David Lockwood, Monique wrote Free to Ride, a Holderness musical; another one-act play, Buddha-fest, was performed the following fall. In addition, Monique wrote several plays that were performed at the Little Church eater, a local community performing arts center that organizes theatrical and musical events during the summer. Goldfish Girl, Ice Out, and Summer of Faith were all local successes, offering glimpses of families in which generations clash and interact, struggling with their own humanity and love for each other. At the dress rehearsal for #Proctecting the Quarterback, two days before opening night, Monique was still working out the final scene and still wasn’t convinced that the costume for the grandmother was quite right. e advantage, and disadvantage, of writing and directing your own plays is that things can always be changed, improved, and added to; coaxing a play into its final form can be eternal. Ultimately, however, the two-night showing was a huge success, thanks to all the contributions the community made to the production. e play came together—even as the characters within it fell apart—and the audience was drawn into a timeless story about family and the ties of loyalty. •
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clockwise, from aBove: Coach Burns, played by Peter Reynolds ’18, celebrating an important win with his team, the Buffs; Jake Lafoon’s girlfriend and athletic trainer, played by Phie Miles ’18 and Sarah Rogers ’18 respectively, arguing about what is best for Jake; brothers Donald and Jake Lafoon, played by Will Blatz ’18 and Ben Jerome ’18 respectively, greeting each other at their grandfather’s funeral
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nepsac Champs: Field Hockey, Nordic, and Girls’ Basketball e 2017–18 year opened with a thrilling NEPSAC championship for the field hockey team just as the leaves were falling from the trees. Winter brought lots of snow and more NEPSAC honors for the boys’ and girls’ Nordic teams in February. In the final weeks of the winter semester, the girls’ basketball team pulled off a surprising Cinderella storybook win and added a fourth NEPSAC championship title to this year’s record book for the Bulls.
Field Hockey When someone asked Head Coach Kelsey Berry during the first week of school what she thought of the field hockey team, she remembers saying that they were a talented group. But it wasn’t until November when the team played the final game of the regular season against Proctor that the girls switched from responding to their opponents’ style of play to actually setting the tone of the game. Coach Berry admits she knew they were a talented group, but she didn’t know if they could stop playing as individuals. At the beginning of the season, the team wasn’t even thinking about the tournament. Instead, the stated team goal was to build confidence. “In field hockey, the whistle is always blowing,” explains Coach Berry, “which means someone is always making a mistake. If you let the mistakes get to you, it can be paralyzing. e entire team, coaches, too, worked really hard to build confidence so that even when mistakes were made, the girls could keep going.” At the close of the regular season, the team’s record was 12-5. ey were first in the Lakes Region—losing only to Kimball Union Academy early in the season—and their Class C record was 10-1. After winning both the quarterfinals and semifinals, the lady Bulls were matched with Ethel Walker, and they knew it was going to be a challenge. Ethel Walker came out really strong, earning a corner in the first five minutes. en after about 10 minutes of battling the Ethel Walker
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team in the defensive end, the Bulls took a time-out, took a deep breath, and went out and started to adjust their style of play to evade the Walker’s excellent block tactics. e girls put many shots on goal for the rest of the first half; the Walkers had a few opportunities as well, but the half ended 0-0. Early in the second half, the Bulls had many opportunities, but after a series of defensive corners, the Walkers netted the first goal of the game. e Bulls answered that goal about 10 minutes later. With six minutes left in the game, the Bulls took the lead. Although the Walkers peppered Holderness goalie Kiely Smiga-McManus ’18 with shots in the last five minutes, the girls’ field hockey team held their lead and won the championship! Field hockey has always been a strong program at Holderness. In the past three decades, the team has won five NEPSAC titles—in 1998, 2003, 2006, 2013, and happily again this year. ey may very well be the most decorated team on campus.
Nordic On a warm day in February, the Nordic team competed at Proctor Academy for the NEPSAC Championship title. In the 5-kilometer skate race in the morning, the Bulls finished strong with four skiers in the top ten for the boys and three for the girls. e boys were ahead for the day and were assured a win as long as they did well in the relay. e future for the girls, however, was uncertain. Although Holderness was in the lead, Dublin had a strong enough relay team to beat Holderness. Would it be enough to win the day? In the afternoon, the boys 3 X 2-kilometer relay took off first, with Eli Misavage ’20 leading for Holderness. As the first lap commenced Eli hopped into the tracks of Dublin’s lead skier, maintaining a close second but never closing the gap. It was in the second lap, skied by Ben Jerome ’18, that the Holderness Bulls pulled ahead of Dublin and never looked back.
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Holderness’s final skier for the relay was Buzz Fisher ’18, who finished by a healthy margin. e boys were the clear winners of the 2018 Nordic NEPSAC Championship. Abby Wiseman ’18 was first off the line for the girls’ relay. But despite her power and technical skills, Abby couldn’t stay with Dublin’s lead skier and finished the first lap in second place. Amanda Vansant ’20 skied next, powering her way through the ascents and tucking the descents. She too came up short and Dublin maintained their lead. Rebecca Feist ’18 finished the relay for the girls, maintaining a strong second place but never catching the strong Dublin team. Fortunately, although they finished second in the relay, the girls’ strong finishes in the morning race were enough to keep them in the lead. Both the boys’ and the girls’ Nordic teams were NEPSAC Champions! In post-season events, the following Nordic athletes continued to represent Holderness. Rebecca Feist ’18 traveled to Soldier Hollow, UT, to ski at Junior Nationals. Buzz Fisher ’19, Eli Misavage ’20, Amanda Vansant ’20, Sam Walzak ’19, Charlotte Mae Whitcomb ’21, and Gus Whitcomb ’20 all represented Holderness at NENSA Eastern High School Championships in Rumford, ME. Finally, Lilly Magnus ’20, Amanda Vansant ’20, and Charlotte Mae Whitcomb ’21 competed in NENSA U16 Championships at Gore Mountain, NY.
Girls’ Basketball Head Coach Joe Arsenault emphasized fun and teamwork on the 2018 girls’ varsity basketball team: “Our program is founded on two principles: hard work and team first. e team is a family. It is an opportunity…to come together around their common love of basketball and support each other in every aspect of their lives.” at philosophy served the girls’ basketball team well as they worked toward becoming the NEPSAC Class D champions. Facing strong and highly competitive teams, the Bulls regular season ended with a 10-14
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record; they entered the NEPSAC tournament stronger from their competitions, perhaps more than the actual record reflects. Post-season play began against Montrose on the Holderness home court, and the Bulls enjoyed an easy victory with a 54-16 win. ey next faced MacDuffie in the semi-final round, whose regular season record was 13-9. e MacDuffie girls had an aggressive defense and controlled the early portion of the game; it took the Bulls some time to hit their stride, but in the last quarter of play, something clicked and the Bulls were victorious. In the final round of the championship, the Bulls faced Vermont Academy, who had beat them soundly twice during the regular season; the Holderness team was considered the underdogs for the final match. e Bulls, however, employed fierce focus, relied on excellent coordination, and commanded the game from the start. Head of School Phil Peck thought the team played their best game of the season; the girls were not intimidated and they worked together. Not able to control his enthusiasm, Phil Peck noted, “The girls were amazing and the game, all the games in the post-season, were wonderful.” By defeating Vermont Academy (last year’s NEPSAC Class D champs), the Holderness girls’ varsity basketball team won the Class D championship for the very first time. e final score of the game was 65-54. is is the first-ever New England championship for the girls’ varsity basketball team that was started in 1989. Athletic Director Rick Eccleston ’92 was impressed with the win: “Last year, in his first year coaching the girls as head coach, Joe and his team finished with a 2-17 record. is year is no comparison!” • from top: The girls’ varsity field hockey team; the entire Nordic squad on their home course; the girls’ varsity basketball team with Coaches Pope and Arsenault
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KC Carter ’19 Scores 1000th Point in Basketball We are so proud of KC, who scored her 1000th point in basketball while playing for Holderness! She hit the mark on our home court against Vermont Academy on January 17. By the end of the season, KC’s record had increased to 568 points, for a total of 1,327 over three years. She was also named the 2018 Player of the Year for Class D and E. For those who don’t know, scoring 1,000 basketball points is a significant feat for a high schooler and even more impressive as an eleventh grader. KC might be the first to admit that hitting such a goal was the result of hard work, consistency, and the support of her coaches and teammates. KC is a true student-athlete, for she applies the same work ethic to her studies as she does to her athletic pursuits. When she arrived at Holderness in ninth grade, she discovered she really liked math and wanted to learn more, faster. Last year, she doubled up on math courses to do just that. Her professional goal is to become a physician, and with her diligence and discipline, that will likely be another goal that KC reaches. •
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HOLDERNESS SCHOOL TODAY | spring 2018
sports
Changes to the Holderness Football Program e following letter was emailed to the Holderness community in March. If you did not receive it, we apologize for the inconvenience. You may need to contact the Advancement Office and update your contact information. Dear Holderness Community, I am writing to share some important news with you about our football program. Holderness has a long tradition of football which started in 1889. We’ve enjoyed stellar coaching tenures from the likes of Ford Hinman, Norm Walker, Duane Ford ’74, Rick Eccleston ’92 and most recently Jordan Graham. During the 1980s, 1990s and up until 2005, we often had 40–50 students playing. Not only did we win a lot of games (six undefeated seasons in 30 years), but more importantly, our students learned life-long lessons about personal sacrifice, teamwork, and grit. In recent years, sustaining an eleven-player program has become increasingly challenging. We have struggled to get enough players to field safe, competitive teams. Our struggle to fully populate the football team’s roster is not unique to us. We’ve spent some time talking to other schools, college football coaches, athletic directors, admission officers, members of our own athletic council (Division I and III athletic directors and thought leaders connected with Holderness athletics), and we have determined an exciting course of action through these conversations. We will be joining New England Prep School Eight-Player Football for the 2018–19 academic year. Many might wonder about the specifics of eight-player football. What is it exactly? Prevalent in smaller schools where fielding an eleven-player football team is harder to do, eight-player football has the same football-specific attributes, the same rules and overall structure. e field is slightly smaller than a traditional field, generally 40 yards x 80 yards. Because there are fewer players, games tend to
Football was one of the first athletic teams at Holderness and has a long and powerful tradition. While the football tradition will continue, changes need to be made to adapt to today’s current circumstances and to keep our athletes safe.
be faster and scores higher. It is still tackle football. Just like eleven-player programs, participants in high school eight-player programs go on to compete in college football. One peer school coach said, “The more wide-open format depends on athleticism, fitness, and finesse.” Several boarding schools in California have eight-player programs as do many schools in less-densely populated areas. For more information about their perspective and some of the noted differences between eight and eleven-player programs see a video at www.ne8playerfootball.com/video. At Holderness, we want to instill a lifelong habit of fitness and recognize the value of three-sport participation and the other benefits generated from being a part of a team. We strive to have all of our athletic experiences foster learning about discipline, teamwork, resilience, and good citizenry.
Some of you might have questions about this change. If that is the case, please reach out to me or Athletic Director Rick Eccleston ’92. We would very much appreciate your thoughts as we move forward. We believe this is an exciting opportunity for Holderness and will attract athletes who would otherwise not consider football because of safety issues. As suggested in the New England Prep School Eight-player Football bylaws, the hope is to keep “a viable, sustainable, and mission-appropriate version of the sport [at our school].” By selecting an eight-player program, our players will be safer; the program will be sustainable, and as an added benefit, our philosophy around three-sport participation appropriately aligns with this program. • Phil Peck Head of School
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update: current faculty and staff
Tobi Pfenninger Accepts Role as Associate Head of School
Tobi Pfenninger assisting with the timing of the Human Iditarod during this year’s Winter Carnival
It’s a Sunday in the middle of January. The Human Iditarod, a race that involves students pulling their dorm mates around the Quad on flimsy plastic sleds, has just finished. The cheering and competitive energy that just minutes before echoed off the façade of Niles has been replaced with a quiet calm as students and faculty hurry off to their dorms and homes, coveting every lazy moment of a Sunday afternoon. But a small group of students lingers, still giddy on the competitive spirit and playful joy of the race; they huddle together, making plans for a next time. “We used to do laps on skis,” one student offers. “Yeah, and it’s more fun at night with torches around the Quad,” adds another. With the students is Dean of Faculty Tobi Pfenninger, listening and taking note of their ideas, her energy and enthusiasm lending an air of possibility. “How can we restructure Winter Carnival for 2019 and bring back a few of the
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old traditions?” she asks, letting the students lead the conversation. Student event planning may fall outside her role as dean of faculty, but it is part of her nature to want to help, to identify roadblocks and ideas that have potential and figure out how to make the future better. Simply put, Tobi is a problem-solver. Which is important as she prepares for next year; in July she is scheduled to take on the role of associate head of school. It is with sadness, but with equal pride, that Holderness says goodbye to current Associate Head of School Nigel Furlonge and his wife, Director of Teaching and Learning Nicole Furlonge, who have both accepted positions in New York. is summer Nigel will become the upper school principal at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, in Bronx, NY, while Nicole has signed on at Columbia University as the Director of Teachers College’s Klingenstein Center for Independent School Leadership. Nicole will also join Teachers College’s faculty as a Professor of Practice in the Education
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Leadership Program within the Department of Organization and Leadership. As Nicole and Nigel prepare for their new roles in New York, Tobi has the spring and summer to prepare as well. e way Tobi sees it, however, experience has been an excellent teacher already. “All the leadership opportunities I’ve had at Holderness,” she says, “have given me different perspectives that have allowed me to approach my current job and next year’s job with understanding and empathy.” In addition to teaching Spanish, throughout her 20 plus years at Holderness, Tobi has served as a dorm parent, a coach at both the varsity and junior varsity level, the interim director of admission, the diversity director, a liaison for international students, and the interim assistant head of school. She helped with a time/motion study that led to significant changes in the school’s daily schedule; she also continues to be an advocate for a global certificate at Holderness that will require students, if they choose to pursue it, to take classes and participate in experiential learning opportunities that have a global perspective. Tobi’s proclivity for problem-solving hasn’t just focused on students and programming issues. She has also frequently advocated for a better balance between the personal and professional demands placed on Holderness faculty, particularly those who are in midcareer and have families. “In the late 1990s we had to start thinking outside the box to make the faculty roles more manageable for midcareer women and their families,” recalls Tobi. A maternity leave policy had already been written by the fall of 1996 during Tobi’s second year at Holderness, but in 2008 Tobi became involved in establishing a partnership with the White Mountain Montessori School on Mt. Prospect Road. In addition, when Tobi first arrived at Holderness, the triple threat—faculty who could teach, coach and live in dorms—significantly influenced who could be hired and how
update: current faculty and staff
faculty were assigned responsibilities. Tobi recognized that this model wasn’t always possible, nor desirable. With her help, the administration chose to develop other ways for faculty to have multiple points of contact with students. “I am continually in awe of the Holderness faculty and what they do to support the school’s programs,” says Tobi. “I see it as my job to make sure my colleagues have what they need so that their workload is manageable, sustainable, and rewarding.” More recently that has involved working on a comprehensive feedback platform with the goal of improving teaching and professional learning. “It is a strategic planning goal to focus on creating systems of formative feedback—for both students and adults on campus,” she says. Indeed, the strategic plan, written in 2015, reads, “We will honor the creativity and commitment of our faculty and staff by investing in the tools and education they need to become innovative and visionary leaders in their professions.” To meet this objective, while remaining flexible to the needs of the school, the FolioCollaborative software Holderness has chosen to adopt helps manage faculty and staff growth. With over 150 schools in the nonprofit collaborative, Tobi sees it as an opportunity to be part of a new professional learning community. “I really like knowing what excites my colleagues,” says Tobi. “My job is to push them to be their best selves, and I think this platform will really help accomplish this. I am also meeting monthly with other members of the collaborative, so we can work together and learn from each other as we try to provide constructive feedback and engage in informed conversations for growth with our colleagues.” Even as Tobi’s attention turns to her future role as associate head of school, much of her focus will remain on supporting programming. While each dean at Holderness focusses on different strategic initiatives and different areas of day-to-day school programming, Tobi’s job is
In addition to her administrative roles, Tobi continues to be a dorm parent and advisor. Above she talks with her advisees at the start of the student-led ability conference in February.
to review the big picture and see how the parts can, and will, support the whole. “It’s easy to get caught up in the immediate and the important and lose sight of long term strategic initiatives,” Tobi adds. “I’m here to help the deans continue forward progress on their strategic goals and to work closely with Phil to oversee the well-being of the school and the community.” “What excites me the most about taking on the role of associate head is that I will get a really big picture view of what’s happening,” continues Tobi. “A lot of time and effort went into creating the 2015 strategic plan, and we’ve been blessed with having so many thoughtful voices contribute to the initiatives prompted by that plan. In my new role, I will get to build on the past and continue to support the programming that will move Holderness forward.” It also helps that Tobi has an open-door policy—no appointment necessary; Tobi tries to be available to celebrate the school’s successes but also help problem-solve when roadblocks
occur. It’s a proactive and positive approach that was instilled in her at an early age. “When I was little, if I came downstairs in a bad mood, my mother would send me back upstairs with instructions to find something to be positive about,” says Tobi. “She used to tell me, ‘Nobody likes a grumpy person.’” It’s an attitude that has helped her bring a positive vibe to her role and be present to the needs of her colleagues, as well as the students—no matter whether the task involves designing new guidelines for Holderness School’s professional development program or taking on the role of associate head of school or organizing relays through the snow on the Quad. She’s ready. •
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update: trustees
Holderness Welcomes a New Group of Dynamic Leaders
Burgie Howard ’82
Chris Davenport ’89 P ’19 ’21
by ANdREw hERRINg
right into any project, discussion, or meeting. is class of new trustees is no different; each individual has already contributed at the committee and full board level with an impact that will make Holderness better and stronger.” Returning for his second stint on the board, Burgie Howard notes that, “It has been wonderful to return to the Holderness board. Holderness has always held a special place in my life, and I credit the school for launching me into a career working in education, where I recognize that many lessons are taught and learned outside of the classroom.” As the Associate Vice President of Student Life at Yale, Burgie’s expertise in residential life, student life, and issues of social-emotional well-being will no doubt enhance our ability to support our students. Board Chair Bob Hall P ’13 ’16 says, “Burgie brings tremendous perspective on the hopes and concerns that our students are living with every day.” Alumnus and current parent, Chris Davenport brings a passion for snow and adventure that few can match. Head of School Phil Peck calls Chris “an avid outdoorsman and
e Holderness Board of Trustees doesn’t quite play into the stuffy, suit-and-tie image that might come to mind when you think of a governing body. Rather, the board is incredibly dynamic, a multi-faceted group of leaders who are just as comfortable discussing endowment draws around a conference table as they are leading sunrise hikes up Mount Livermore. ere’s a commitment to the mission and values of the school that allows the board to think strategically and, most importantly, focus on the immediate and long-lasting impact of their work. Our new class of trustees—Burgie Howard ’82, Chris Davenport ’89 P ’19 ’21, Matt Storey P’20, and Richard Vieira P’20—are no strangers to Holderness or the important work of a board. While their expertise varies, their resolve to see Holderness succeed is unwavering; Board Governance and Nominating Committee Chair Carolyn Cullen ’87 says, “One of the most notable traits of all Holderness trustees is their ability to jump
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HOLDERNESS SCHOOL TODAY | spring 2018
a world champion extreme skier, who is also an author, adventurer, and one of the best-known personalities in the skiing world. Chris will be a remarkable resource and can help Holderness continue as a preeminent snow sports school in America.” Writing from the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, Chris says, “e opportunity to stay involved not only as a parent of two boys at the school but also as a board member is a huge honor and a responsibility that excites and motivates me!” “Having just skied in Japan with Dav,” recalls Bob Hall, “I am impressed with his perspective on sports and his huge profile. He also doesn’t miss many turns!” With an extensive background in outdoor education, marketing, and business management, current parent and Executive Director of Camp Dudley Matt Storey brings a unique perspective to the Holderness board. He says, “I have been struck by the amazing sense of community that exists at Holderness, and I am grateful to now be a part of it. Holderness has been a terrific fit for my son, and I am happy to share any relevant experience I have that will
update: trustees
Matt Storey P’20
Richard Vieira P’20
support the school.” When asked about Matt’s work, Phil Peck beams, “Not only is Camp
Dudley one of the premier summer camps in the East, but also their motto of ‘the other fel-
low first’ aligns with the other-centered nature and servant leadership culture that defines Holderness.” Richard Vieira’s expertise in finance, investment, and service to schools—most recently as a board member of The Pike School—will help prepare Holderness for a bright and wellmanaged future. After just one meeting, Bob Hall commended Richard: “He has quickly developed a thorough understanding of the boarding school landscape and brings a wonderfully balanced perspective.” In reflecting on this opportunity, Richard says, “Holderness has had an immediate impact on our family, and there has been a strong sense of belonging from day one. Joining the board was an opportunity to contribute to a mission and a community to which we are committed. I hope to have a positive impact to the currency of a Holderness education.” We are grateful for their service and look forward to seeing them around campus! •
wE wANt to hEAR fRom you! What’s happening in your world? Holderness School Today wants to know! Have you: r Changed your mailing address or email? r Had an addition to your family? r Volunteered for an important cause? r Embarked on an exciting professional or personal adventure? r Experienced a chance encounter with another Holderness alumnus or alumna? Send your photos, updates, and news to alumni@holderness.org. We look forward to hearing from you!
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ALUMNI IN THE NEWS
What Is Best In America Bro Adams ’65 is year’s Commencement speaker Bro Adams ’65 led the National Endowment for the Humanities during a time when the agency had the complete support of the executive branch in Washington—and then it didn’t. ings change in politics, but not in the former chairman’s commitment to and advocacy for the humanities. by rick carey It must have been something like being a Red Sox fan, and the game has gone into extra innings—that same exquisite degree of emotional investment, that same lack of power to influence the outcome. e difference here was that in the course of American history, a baseball game doesn’t matter, one way or another, even if it involves the Yankees. e humanities, on the other hand…Well, William D. “Bro” Adams has strong opinions about this field of studies—especially from his perspective as the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NeH). “e humanities are critical any time we’re in a situation where our values as a nation, the nature of our culture and the content of our ideas, are called into question,” he said. “And of course, the political divisions that we’re experiencing now are all about values and ideas.” Bro spoke from his home in Falmouth, ME, from the midst of a busy Bro-Adams version of retirement. It was March, less than a year since he had resigned from the NeH, at a time when the new Trump administration had vowed deep cuts to the NeH, or even complete elimination. Now, at this point, on the turn of the year into spring, a Republican-dominated Congress was about to rule on the agency’s budget. Bro went on to point out, however, that knowledge of our history and cultural legacy is always crucial, regardless of the political moment. “How are we to grapple with the issue of race relations, for example—or of immigra-
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tion, or of climate change, and the list goes on—without an awareness of our history with those issues?” he says. “It’s just ironic that at this particular moment the humanities are being marginalized in both educational settings and the public imagination.” Q
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By “ironic” Bro means disturbing as well. e humanities were never marginal to the imagination of a man who has devoted the greater part of his life to those educational settings where they are taught and celebrated. ere was a detour into the US Army during his undergraduate years at Colorado College—he served three years, including one in combat as an infantry
years later president of Bucknell University. In 2000, Bro was named the 19th president of Colby College, where he would lead a successful $376 million capital campaign, the largest ever in the state of Maine, and substantially enhance the school’s environmental studies and visual arts programs. en, in 2014, President Barack Obama appointed him to the helm of the NeH. While Bro found himself frustrated at times by the deliberate speed at which a federal agency moves—“We couldn’t move fast enough to pick up on trends,” he said, “but that’s just the way it is, no way around it”—he was enchanted by the sea-to-shining-sea breadth of activity the NeH could engender, support, and foster.
The humanities are critical any time we’re in a situation where our values as a nation, the nature of our culture and the content of our ideas, are called into question. And of course, the political divisions that we’re experiencing now are all about values and ideas. — BRO ADAMS platoon leader on the Mekong Delta—but his faith in the humanities and the higher values they affirm survived even that crucible. “Vietnam reinforced my view of the power of the humanities,” he said,“even as it undermined my previous view of human beings.” Bro went on to a year as a Fulbright Scholar in France, and then earned his doctorate in the University of California-Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness program. He taught at three different universities before taking an administrative position at Wesleyan University in 1988. Much as he missed teaching, Bro found that he was good at educational leadership, and that big-picture things on behalf of education could be accomplished thereby. Within five years he was vice president of Wesleyan, and then five
HOLDERNESS SCHOOL TODAY | SPRING 2018
“Inside the universities, of course,” Bro said, “there was a lot going on, but outside them too—well, it was eye-opening for me, a much bigger universe than I imagined, with all the work being done at regional museums, at cultural centers, at our historic sites, and more.” During his tenure Bro added to that breadth with several new and innovative programs. One such, e Common Good: Humanities in the Public Square, funds projects important to any community, region, or state in meeting social challenges related to the humanities. For example, among the activities funded now by e Common Good: “Democracy In Dialogue,” a series of community conversations and public events surrounding migration, segregation, and gender equality mounted
ALUMNI IN THE NEWS
by Humanities New York; the Louisiana Humanities Council’s “A More Perfect Union,” a series of initiatives aimed at strengthening civic education in that state’s schools; “Citizenship Under Siege,” a series of public forums at community colleges throughout the nation on questions of who is to be included in our notions of “We the People”; and dozens more. Other programs are more narrowly focused, including one that speaks to Bro’s own memories: “Standing Together: e Humanities and the Experience of War,” which supports projects that in various ways use art, literature, film, historical narrative, etc. to help returning veterans reintegrate into civilian society. After the 2016 election of a president critical of any public support for the arts or the humanities, one whose first budget proposal to Congress for Fy18 included not a penny for the NeH (though it did include $42 million to provide for the agency’s “orderly closure”), Bro took the long view. In a January 2017, NeH press release, he cited the $5.3 billion dollars over five decades the NeH has disbursed to some 63,000 different projects, and all that has been and still is being accomplished with those funds. “at public investment has led to the creation of books, films, museum exhibits, and exciting discoveries,” Bro said. “ese grants have reached into every part of the country and provided humanities programs and experiences that benefit all of our citizens. Residents in Whitesburg, KY, are preserving the photographs and films of their local Appalachian region though Appalshop. Veterans returning from war in Iraq and Afghanistan connect with classic texts and the public through the Aquila eatre. Students, teachers, and historians have access to the papers of Founding Father George Washington. rough these projects and thousands of others, the National Endowment for the Humanities has inspired and supported what is best in America.” Bro resigned that following May, a move that was a function, as he delicately put it, “of
Bro Adams, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and this year’s commencement speaker
the complexities of the presidential transition process—something that was inevitable once the Democrats lost the election.” In an interview after his resignation with Maine’s Portland Press Herald newspaper, Bro said, “It’s difficult to live under the threat of defunding. at is an obvious thing to say, but organizationally it makes life challenging in ways that I think everyone can relate to. e particular challenge at the National Endowment for the Humanities is how do we keep our heads down and how do we keep up the great work we do while this budget discussion is going on.” Indeed the discussion goes on, since on the day of Bro’s talk with HST, Congress still had not passed an Fy18 omnibus spending bill. e
former chairman has yet to be replaced, and Bro knows that morale at the NeH is low. “But the good news is that Congress has been steadfast in its commitment to the agency,” he said. “at could change, of course, but I think it’s likely they’ll continue funding it.” Meanwhile Bro is continuing where he left off. Last August he was named to a one-year appointment as a senior fellow for the Mellon Foundation, a New York-based philanthropy that supports the humanities, the arts, museums, and environmental conservation among its core interests. “e position with the Mellon Foundation,” reported the Portland Press Herald, “gives him a national platform. ‘It’s a wonderful way to continue the work I am doing to make the case for
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ALUMNI IN THE NEWS
philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty—whose work and thought was the subject of Bro’s doctoral thesis—and the painter Paul Cezanne. “Merleau-Ponty’s interest in Cezanne flowed from his interest in painting, and his interest in painting flowed from his interest in perception and vision,” Bro said. “Painting, he felt, has much to teach us about how and what we see.” Q
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Former Vice President Biden performs the Ceremonial Swearing In of National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Adams, at the White House, on July 22, 2014. (Official White
Looking back to where it all started, he is grateful for all that Holderness taught a much younger Bro Adams about how to live—not just
er support. But federal agencies such as the NeH and the similarly imperiled National Endowment for the Arts not only conspicuously nurture and enrich our cultural legacy—they are symbolic of a united national commitment to, in Bro’s ringing phrase,“what is best in America.” It is rare these days for anyone to suspect Congress of such a united commitment, but on this occasion Bro Adams’s faith in that body would be rewarded. He spoke with HST on March 21, the first day of spring. Twenty-four hours later a final version of the Fy18 budget was passed with bipartisan support in the
House Photo by David Lienemann.)
the NeH and the humanities,’ [Bro] said. ‘I want to continue to address the way in which the humanities help us understand our contemporary circumstances, and I plan to both speak and write around the country about that very important issue and hope to take some of the things I have been working on at NeH and develop them further.’” He also has a couple of book projects in the hopper. One is a collection of the speeches he made and the essays he wrote during his years leading the NeH. Another very scholarly work concerns the relationship between the French
SHARE YOUR NEWS Have you recently encountered a milestone in your life? Share your news with your classmates! Please contact us at alumni@holderness.org.
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I want to continue to address the way in which the humanities help us understand our contemporary circumstances… — BRO ADAMS as a student or an athlete, or a humanist or a technician, but as a whole person. He said,“I hope Holderness always remains devoted to this idea of teaching the whole person, of preparing students for the entirety of the lives they will lead as adults—their professional lives within the economy, of course, but also their political lives as citizens, and the lives they live in other settings with family, friends, and community.” While Bro admits to not being himself a religious person, he is grateful as well that the life of the spirit is as much a part of the Holderness enterprise as the disciplines of the mind and body. “No matter your religious beliefs, or if you have any at all, the questions that lie behind the religious experience are important to all of us,” he said. “How do you find meaning in the life you lead? How do you lead a moral life? How do you sustain a moral imagination? ese questions rest at the foundation of a meaningful life.” Schools like Holderness, and colleges like Colby, and philanthropies such as the Mellon Foundation ensure that such questions will be asked, and that history and art and literature will endure in America, with or without taxpay-
HOLDERNESS SCHOOL TODAY | SPRING 2018
House of Representatives. e spending bill was expected to move through the Senate with similar ease. e bill not only maintains funding for both the NeH and the Nea—Congress has increased their appropriations by a net five million dollars. At least in New England, this is like an early morning win for the Sox. •
5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5
over 150 years ago, this man led his family to make an investment that is still paying dividends and is still directly impacting the learning experiences of Holderness students. 2 2 2
Please consider making a similar investment by becoming a member of the Balch Society at Holderness School. 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5
the rev. lewis p. w. balch, jr., circa 1867
the balch society honors a group of forward-thinking individuals who support Holderness School by combining charitable giving goals with estate and financial planning goals. Do you, like Reverend Balch, want to make a lasting impact on Holderness? If you have questions about the ways in which you can support our mission, visit our website at holderness.planmygift.org. Plan a gift based on your age, assets, or amount you would like to give; download brochures on popular types of gifts; and get your plan in motion with our Personal Estate Planning Kit. For more information, contact Senior Associate Director of Major Gifts Peter Barnum at 603.779.5221 or pbarnum@holderness.org.
ALUMNI IN THE NEWS
Painting With a Sense of Purpose
Emilie Lee painting on the American Prairie Reserve
Emilie Lee ’99 In 2015 Emilie Lee ’99 had the start of a successful career as an artist in New York City. But something was missing. So Emilie returned to what had once been an everyday habit: she went outside. Imagine for a moment standing in the middle of the Great Plains. e grasslands stretch to the horizon, uninterrupted by human structures. e weather is relentless, the wind pushing across the flat landscape; no shade or shelter is available for protection. Nature’s infinite power is impossible to ignore. It was in this landscape that Emilie Lee reconsidered her life’s direction and was inspired to commit to a free lifestyle that would allow her to travel, paint, and share her experiences through both visual and written forms. Emilie first came to Holderness as a snowboarder and artist. “My parents were surprised that I wanted to go to boarding school,” she recalls, “but I had heard that you could go snowboarding at noon every day and there was a whole building dedicated to art, so I begged to go.” Emilie fell in love with rock climbing at Holderness and went on Out Back three times, solidifying her love of the outdoors and any activity associated with it. “My three years at Holderness might be the happiest years of my childhood,” she says.
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After graduation, Emilie earned a degree in illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004 and has returned to campus twice to share her artwork in the Edwards Art Gallery. From 2008 to 2012, Emilie studied at the Water Street Atelier at Grand Central Academy in New York City. Under the direction of her teacher Jacob Collins, she became skilled in the methods of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School, skilled enough to then become a resident artist and instructor at the Grand Central Atelier in Queens. She was taking commissions, teaching, visiting galleries, and earning enough money to scrape by. Technically she was on the way to leading a successful career as an artist. But her heart wasn’t in it. “Despite my accomplishments, a bitter attitude crept over me as I realized how much I had changed: I’d stopped climbing years ago and couldn’t imagine how anyone had the free time for such nonsense,” Emilie shared in an article for she-explores.com. “I knew this wasn’t the life I had worked so hard for, and I knew this wasn’t the best version of myself. Something had to give” (“Painting the American Prairie Reserve”). at’s when she read about the American Prairie Reserve (aPr), a privately funded conservation organization that is buying privately held land, leasing adjacent government parcels, and stitching together a 3.5-million-acre swath of intact prairie in the northern Great Plains. When complete, it will be the largest protected landscape in the continental US. Emilie said she was immediately drawn to the aPr’s vast landscape and consequently found time to visit the reserve three times in the last two years, learning about it and painting over 40 paintings. “As part of my research,” explained Emilie in an article on Patagonia’s blog, “I spent a week shadowing a group of volunteers from Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation. I wanted my paintings to be informed by more than just an outsider’s first
HOLDERNESS SCHOOL TODAY | SPRING 2018
impressions of beautiful scenery. When I learned the tender lifecycle of the gumbo primrose and the fierce strength of greasewood, I took more interest in these plants and they became poetic characters in my paintings” (“Painting the Prairie”). e majority of Emilie’s paintings were made in the plein-air tradition by painting on location in oils. Several large-scale paintings were made in the studio from memory, but no photographs were used in the process. “Memory plays an important role in my process,” Emilie explained in an interview with newwaveart.com in September. “I don’t have the exact quote, but I read that omas Cole believed his memory filtered out all unnecessary clutter from a scene, leaving only the essential information that actually made an impact on him at the moment of inspiration. I’ve found this to be true, and with practice over time, relying on my memory has strengthened my observation skills, improving my painting efficiency by leaps and bounds” (“Let’s Talk Art: Emilie Lee”). In November, Emilie’s paintings were on display in Bozeman, MT at the Old Main Gallery; 10% of the proceeds went to the American Prairie Reserve. “I’ve realized that painting has allowed me to access a much deeper, more meaningful experience,” says Emilie, “one that goes far beyond painting pretty scenes and has given my work a sense of purpose.” Since her time on the reserve, Emilie has continued to paint full time; she also moved to California in the summer of 2017. e landscapes in the paintings that are for sale on her website range from Vermont to California to Utah and now Japan. ey represent a body of work that has led to that better version of herself, one that spends a great deal of time outside, observing nature and capturing its infinite mysteries. •
ALUMNI IN THE NEWS
CloCkwise from top: Lone Bison; September Wind; detail from Prairie Dog Hole
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CLASS NOTES
Milestones IN MEMORIAM Hugh Thompson “Tom” Mckenny ’52, February 12, 2017 Arthur Sweeney ’41, March 8, 2017 John Newton ’47, May 26, 2017 Harry Perry Jeffries ’47, July 31, 2017 James Thornton Kirkpatrick ’73, September 14, 2017 Jonathan Milne ’62, October 23, 2017 William Woodruff Niles III ’60, November 27, 2017 James E. McKee Jr ’35, December 3, 2017 Walter Vernon “Vern” Jones Jr ’50, December 5, 2017 Bruce A. Crane ’65, December 9, 2017 Richard “Dick” Brady ’54, December 28, 2017 George Bruce Upton ’62, December 31, 2017 Justin Booska ’09, January 6, 2018
BIRTHS Will Richardson ’96 and Devon Richardson: Lila Blair Richardson, May 24, 2017 Alex Palmisano ’03 and Katherine Palmisano: Cooper Morgan Palmisano, May 28, 2017 Fiston Kahindo ’03 and Rosa Tesfai: Hana Kahindo, June 13, 2017 Channing (Weymouth) Warner ’02 and Luke Warner: Michael Insley Warner, August 2, 2017 Rachel Jastrebsky (employee) and Brian Jastrebsky: Annabel Shirley Jastrebsky, August 15, 2017 Julia Haley ’99 and Michael Malafronte: Reid
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William Malafronte, September 12, 2017 Joe Arsenault (employee) and Jodie Arsenault: Eliana Grace Arsenault, September 16, 2017 Stephen “Jay” Connolly V ’03 and Nicole Connolly: Rose Maria Connelly, September 22, 2017 Jed Hoyer ’92 and Merrill Hoyer: Archer Andrew Hoyer, September 22, 2017 Andy Collado ’00 and Jheramis Collado: Eva Collado, September 26, 2017 Te Tiffany ’89 and Amanda Tiffany: Henry Dyer Tiffany V, September 26, 2017 Ben Mitchell-Lewis ’06 and Frances Mitchell-Lewis: Hank Herter Lewis, October 5, 2017 Putney (Haley) Wendell ’97 and Kevin Wendell: Peter Garthwaite Wendell, October 11, 2017 Andrew Sullivan ’00 and Rachel Heisler: Anna Devlin Sullivan, October 20, 2017 Lucy (Randall) Archibald ’06 and Paul Archibald: Georgia Iselin Archibald, November 2, 2017 Ryan Mullen ’94 and Heidi Mullen: Tate Alexander Mullen and Asher Theodore Mullen, November 3, 2017 James Jung ’98 and Molly (Biscone) Jung: James Patrick “JP” Jung, November 4, 2017 Evan Mullen ’00 and Jenny Mullen: Rowen Arthur Thomas Mullen, November 16, 2017 Cambria Grace (Hempton) Brockman ’07 and Ross Brockman: Warren Miller Brockman, December 4, 2017 Jarod M. Warsofsky ’02 and Katie Warsofsky: Scarlett Dawn Warsofsky, December 10, 2017
holderness school today | SPRING 2018
Eliana Grace Arsenault, daughter of Joe (faculty) and Jodie Arsenault, was born on September 15, 2017.
Jae Yun Lee ’03 and Han Areum: On-Yoo, January 28, 2018 Susan (Taylor) Wasp ’05 and Garrett Wasp: Jack Wilder Wasp, January 30, 2018 Dan Hale ’04 and Lea Hale: Luna Rae Hale, February 13, 2018 Erik Thatcher ’08 (employee) and Liz Wilson: Wren Marie Thatcher-Wilson, March 10, 2018 Emily (Whiteman) Caldwell ’01 and Alexandra Caldwell: Olive “Ollie” Emerson Caldwell, March 15, 2018
MARRIAGES David Wright ’60 and Diane Klem, December 15, 2016 Emily “Emma” (Schofield) Phipps ’05 and Chris Phipps, June 30, 2017 in Lyons, CO Brie (Keefe) Healy ’09 and Michael Healy, July 15, 2017 in Richmond, VT Emily (Marvin) Rider ’09 and Joe Rider, August 5, 2017 at the Winthrop Carter House, Boscawen, NH Caroline (Walsh) Andren ’10 and Derek Andren, August 12, 2017 at the Sagamore Resort, Bolton Landing, NY Jenny (Calver) Gaudet ’05 and Joseph Gaudet, August 13,
2017 at The Quechee Inn at Marshland Farm in Quechee, VT Shannon Fallon ’03 and Briar Bouthot, August 19, 2017 in Osterville, MA David “Doc” Potter ’03 and Jesse Rose, September 3, 2017 at the Winona Camps in Bridgton, ME Crosby Nordblom ’08 and Greta Hutchinson, September 16, 2017 at Ohana Camp on Lake Fairlee in Fairlee, VT Ariana Nicolay ’04 and Joey Curran, September 30, 2017 at Yosemite Park in Groveland, CA David Campbell ’04 and Audrey Nelson, October 1, 2017 at Devils Thumb Resort in Tabernash, CO Britt Ruegger ’02 and Ella Margarey Bennett, October 7, 2017 in Aspen, CO Mimi O’Connor ’07 and Stavros Bozampalis, October 29, 2017 Elizabeth (O’Leary) Abelson ’07 and Stuart Abelson, November 23, 2017 at Punta De Mita in Nayarit, Mexico Keith Tyler ’02 and Brianne Giovannini, January 28, 2018 at Mountain Springs Lodge in Leavenworth, WA
CLASS NOTES
’45 Want to connect with your classmates? Consider becoming a class correspondent and encouraging your classmates to reconnect in the HST class notes. Contact us at alumni@holderness.org for more information. Thank you!
’46 Want to connect with your classmates? Consider becoming a class correspondent and encouraging your classmates to reconnect in the HST class notes. Contact us at alumni@holderness.org for more information. Thank you!
’47 John Newton’s wife Linda wants to inform John’s classmates of his passing in May. While John passed very suddenly, he was surrounded by family when he died. CLASS CORRESPONDENT Bill Briggs ’47 magdalenabriggs@ymail.com
’48 (reunion) Bart Chase reports, “Life in the Northwest has been good. Being near our family has been so important for us. Our only greatgranddaughter is almost four years old, and it’s a special pleasure for us that she lives close to us. Our youngest granddaughter was just married, which is wonderful, but the age seems to increase too fast. My wife Bunny and I are active in our retirement community; it’s nice to have close friends who remember many of the same things. Wishing all my classmates the very best, both now and in the future. Holderness has been so good for us.” … John Codman says that not much has changed since his last update,
“Although I have a new girlfriend. My previous girlfriend of 35 years passed away in 2014. I still live in the same house in Kennebunkport, ME, but I spend most of my time with my new girlfriend. We have been doing some traveling. My daughter lives in New Zealand, so I have the excuse to travel there. It has to be the most beautiful country in the world—a stable government, beautiful people, great wines, and a favorable exchange rate. I enjoy good health except mild arthritis, and my golf game is terrible but still fun. I am planning to attend our 70th reunion coming up in June.” … A telephone visit with Tom Loemker on January 31, indicated that he is well, with some health challenges familiar to all of us. Tom is no longer driving, and conflicts in June will probably prevent him from attending our 70th reunion. … Paul Wilson and I connected by telephone in late January. He is well, using a cane to help prevent falls, with many friends having died in recent months. Paul plans to attend our 70th reunion in June. Still a passionate Red Sox fan, he was hoping for another New England Patriots Super Bowl LII win. … As for me, Rik Clark, 2017 and 2018 to date have been busy ones with many changes, some travel, fun golf, and a few health bumps along the road. During my 2017 annual physical, I was diagnosed with cMl, a treatable form of cancer, which has, thus far, responded well to medication. A left eye cataract surgery in January was routine with improved vision. February included a five-day trip to Bermuda to celebrate Sandy’s 80th birthday. In March, we’ve planned a twoweek return visit to Palm Springs, CA, with an Alaska cruise following in July. Remaining very close to Holderness is important to me,
as the school it is today and as it prepares for the future. Counting Phil Peck, Head of School, as one of my dearest friends is a joy for me. Above all, our 70th reunion takes place June 1–3, 2018. It appears that there will be a few of us there.
an environmental publication that addresses New England fresh water lake issues. During the mild seasons, I’m still biking, a daily routine, to collect the paper and get the mail. It’s about a five mile trip—a big deal for an 84-yearold.”
CLASS CORRESPONDENT Rik Clark ’48 capeclarks@aol.com
CLASS CORRESPONDENT Frank Hammond ’50 fhammond64@comcast.net
’49
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Jim Coulter writes, “Pat and I are still active. We recently hosted my son Jim and his wife Lorinda, who were burned out of their condo. They bought a house and moved in December. Best to all my ’49 classmates.”
Want to connect with your classmates? Consider becoming a class correspondent and encouraging your classmates to reconnect in the HST class notes. Contact us at alumni@holderness.org for more information. Thank you!
CLASS CORRESPONDENT Bill Baskin ’49 william_c_baskin@sbcglobal.net
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’50 Frank Hammond reports, “My wife Squidge and I are doing well in our condo here in New London. Bebe and her family have taken over our house on Old Main Street. Unsurprisingly, our daughter is busy working for a management consultant firm, Oliver Wight, as well as sitting on the local school board. Her husband Jim commutes to the Boston airport every day but doesn’t seem to mind the hour-plus trip. He has books on tape to keep him occupied. Our grandson Henry is at Plymouth State, and our granddaughter Megan is a senior at Proctor Academy in our neighboring town of Andover, NH. She is waiting to hear from the colleges to which she has applied. Being fully retired, I spend a lot of time staring at my computer screen, reading dailies and weekly magazines. I’ve done some writing for
CLASS CORRESPONDENT Al Teele ’52 859.734.3625
’53 (reunion) Want to connect with your classmates? Consider becoming a class correspondent and encouraging your classmates to reconnect in the HST class notes. Contact us at alumni@holderness.org for more information. Thank you!
’54 CLASS CORRESPONDENT Berton Chillson ’54 bbmchill56@aol.com
’55 Want to connect with your classmates? Consider becoming a class correspondent and encouraging your classmates to reconnect in the HST class notes. Contact us at alumni@holderness.org for more information. Thank you!
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CLASS NOTES
Bill Byers ’55, and his trusty shadow, Xian Lubec, photographing sandpipers
Bill Byers writes, “Susi and I traveled lightly this past summer with short trips to upstate New York and Pennsylvania and several weeks in Maine. In the fall Susi devoted time in the pot studio to get ready for the Artist Open Studio Market in November. I had photo assignments throughout the summer and fall, working for a multi-state landscape construction company. Additionally, I put up a photo exhibit for the month of October, then had meniscus surgery on my left knee. It’s been two months and, well, I’m looking forward to being free of knee pain. After all, there is much to see, explorations awaiting, and a mid-February date to supervise a 40-acre wood product harvest in Blue Hill, ME. PS: Just turned 82. Bye, you guys!”
’56 In order to solicit notes from class members for the spring issue of HST, I wrote a letter that could be sent by both email and snail mail since less than half of our classmates has an email address. Consequently, the message was longer than usual and contained more personal information than I usually put into the request. Some of the replies refer to statements in the letter. Anyway, Tom Anthony wrote, “Our daughter lives in Shelby Township in Michigan, where she is a financial advisor in Rochester and has two children at Eisenhower High
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Al Taylor ’56 floating in the Dead Sea on a recent trip to Jordan
School. Her son is a hockey player and a junior; her daughter is in ninth grade. We went out to visit them during that first snowy week in December. Otherwise, it seems like I write the same thing every year. I had a great time in Sicily last May and will be returning this May. I took introductory Arabic this fall and found it daunting; I had to keep reminding myself that there are little kids all over the Middle East who speak it fluently. My wife is currently in Florida visiting our other daughter, who teaches creative writing to graduate students at a residency program at the University of Tampa. The rest of the year she teaches creative writing at Bates and works on her own writing projects. She was in a writing residency on the Danube in Slovakia for 10 weeks last summer. I’ve been biking a lot, both indoors at the gym and out when weather permits and am back at writing again now that Arabic has finished. Peace.” … Gardner Lewis let us know that Peg, his wife of 59 years, passed away from cancer in October. … Al Taylor writes, “I have almost given up on golf, as the distance I drive the ball has greatly diminished and the score keeps going up. We have taken a few trips in the last couple of years including to Philadelphia, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Mt. Shasta in northern CA, and Santa Cruz Island off the southern part of California. We also took a trip to Jordan to see Petra and lie on the top of the
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Dead Sea. One of the major highlights was a trip to the Baja of Mexico, where the gray whales (about 50 feet long) have their babies. We stayed on a lagoon where there were more than 200 whales. Some of the mothers would bring the babies up to the edge of the small boat we were in, and we could lean over and touch them. What an awesome experience.” … Dick Endlar responded to my letter with this: “Sounds like you have a great family. As I always say, there is nothing better than being with your children and grandchildren. I am not sure about great grandchildren—yet. Unfortunately, my wife passed away seven years ago. We had three daughters and now have seven grandchildren. The oldest are twin girls, and the youngest are twin boys (different mothers). The oldest granddaughter, by 24 minutes, got married in October of 2016, and her twin is getting married in April. I spend about seven months in Naples, FL, and the other five months in Newton, MA and East Sandwich on Cape Cod, which is not such a bad life. (If I could afford it, it would be nicer—but, what the hell.) Have a safe, happy, and healthy new year.” … Peter Kingston also got my letter and wrote: “You are setting new standards with such a good letter written on Christmas Day. Great! Life is wonderful in every respect. Six years ago, my wife of 42 years passed during transplant surgery at Ucla. Then almost five years ago, at my first dinner with my first date on Match.com, I met the widow of comedian Milton Berle, and we have been living happily together ever since. In April we will spend a week at our farm in Chile. Last year marked my sons’ purchases of small companies. They are both MBa grads, and it is very rewarding to see how they are fol-
lowing in my footsteps in manufacturing. My oldest, Peter, already owns most of the company where I spent 30 plus years, and his new company develops load cells for aerospace and prostheses for those who have lost limbs. Best wishes to all our classmates and may 2018 be a great year.” … The saga of Dick Meyer at the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad continues: “I didn’t get either car that I wrote about last time ready in time for the Polar Express train that runs weekends between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but we had a banner year in spite of a near disaster during a wind storm less than a month before opening day. The entire roof was blown off one antique coach (1890) that was waiting for restoration, and onethird of the roof on a combine (i.e. the car can accommodate both freight and passengers). The combine is critical to the operation of the Polar Express, because the freight section houses the power and audio equipment as well as the handicapped chair lift, and the available seating was already sold out as first class. The roof contains compound angles, so we were not skilled enough to make the repairs ourselves. Instead we built an ugly, squared-off platform over the damaged area to keep the rain out and billed it as a hobo platform, which worked well because a hobo is a part of the story. Fortunately, insurance will cover most of the professional cost of repair to the roof.” CLASS CORRESPONDENT Dick Meyer ’56 richard419@roadrunner.com
’57 Want to connect with your classmates? Consider becoming a class correspondent and encouraging
CLASS NOTES
March to enjoy the fruits and flowers, as well as the mostly indigenous people (Quechua), of the region. I also assist several Quechua communities in the high Andes (14,000 ft. elevation), helping them to improve the health and productivity of family alpaca herds and working with a cooperative of elderly spinners who make alpaca yarn for the regional and sometimes US market. I hope to attend the Holderness reunion this summer and catch-up with friends from long ago.”
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Doug Rand ’58 still kicking in Montana!
your classmates to reconnect in the HST class notes. Contact us at alumni@holderness.org for more information. Thank you!
’58 (reunion) Want to connect with your classmates? Consider becoming a class correspondent and encouraging your classmates to reconnect in the HST class notes. Contact us at
alumni@holderness.org for more information. Thank you! Doug Rand says he’s “still kicking in Montana.” … Brooke Thomas reports, “My wife Shirley and I are presently in the high tropical forest of Peru, where the first foothills of the Andes rise out of the Amazon Basin. We have a small house here and come every year from mid-January to early
SHARE YOUR NEWS! Have you recently encountered a milestone in your life? Share your news with your classmates! Please contact us at alumni@holderness.org.
As I write this column in midJanuary, I’ll be enjoying my last week of winter in Maine. When I get to read the HST printed version, I’ll be poolside with a margarita in hand in sunny Florida. We leave here with our dog Mia next week and return the middle of April. That’s my news for now, so onto more interesting tidbits from our classmates. … I always hear from Charley Murphy, usually informing me that he missed the deadline for sending out his news. Not so this time. I am enclosing his email to me in its entirety. “Ash, I was aWol on the last round of class notes, so here’s an attempt to redeem myself. The big news for me is that my active service here in the Senate is coming to an end, although I may retain some kind of informal advisory role. I have over fifty years of government service, including four years of active duty in the Marine Corps, along with appointments in the US House and Senate and Defense Department. Since 1993, I have worked for Senator Chuck Grassley doing oversight and investigations, rooting out fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the government, and trying to hold responsible persons accountable.
Most of my watch-dogging was aimed at the mighty Pentagon where waste is a way of life. It has never been just a job. It’s been much bigger than that. It’s been a crusade—a labor of love that grabbed hold of my heart and soul and wouldn’t let go. While always fair, I like to think of myself as being tough and relentless in tracking down wasted tax dollars. Well, I know the war on waste has not been won—far from it—but it’s time for me to bail out. I am running out of steam. I gave it my very best shot. Now, others need to carry on the fight, as my energy and enthusiasm are slipping away. Plus there is a disease working on me. It’s called myasthenia gravis (MG). I have a wonderful doc on the medical staff at George Washington University. He is a real pro on MG. With aggressive drug treatment he is able to keep those pesky symptoms at bay—most of the time. I am thankful for each day. I try to live by this creed: I may not beat it, but it’s not going to beat me and break my spirit. I am still hand-loading and hunting and doing all the things I love to do but just not as much. Fortunately, my grandson, Michael, has become a hard-core hunter and a source of inspiration. I am happy to see that Holderness is once again fielding a track team. My best to all.” … News from the class agent Buster Welch informs us that as a class we do quite well in the giving category. Hopefully, we keep this up as it allows more young people to benefit from the unique experience that we had. To hear Buster say that nothing exciting is going on at the moment is a rare comment indeed. His Arctic experiences could fill many lifetimes with unparalleled events. Buster’s life is right up there with many adventurous people who I
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have had the pleasure to know. Maybe a few 40-pound stripers off of Cape Cod will prove to be excitement enough to keep him going. … Thank you, Mark Morris. I am truly sorry to hear of the loss of your wife of 50 years, but as most of us know, life goes on. No doubt, the fact that your grandchildren have turned into real people helps immensely. A safari to South Africa with the entire family must have been quite an experience. Mark has been summering on Nantucket, so it seems to me that in spite of all the ailments of aging, he is doing just fine. By the way, Mark, don’t give up on reunions. … It was great to hear from my ex-roommate Bruce Vogel. He was back East in September while I was away riding horses in the UK. His daughter and granddaughter are living in Easthampton, MA, so hopefully we will see each other during his next visit. As he wrote, his trip to school was impressive, both the physical campus and the curriculum. It was very easy for Bruce to see how different the life of a student is 58 years later than our time. However, one thing remains the same. To quote Bruce: “Samaha’s store and juvenile delinquent training center is still on the corner. And yes, a la Bill Spangler ’60, you don’t have to walk over the top girder of the Pemi bridge to get there.” … Well, Lee Miller, nice to hear from you, as always. Like you said, you were just saying hello. I was able to fill this column with some news from other classmates, but I may need you next time. Stay in touch and that goes for the rest of you. CLASS CORRESPONDENT Jerry Ashworth ’59 ashworth.kemah@gmail.com
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Members of the Class of 1967 with their wives at a 50th reunion dinner during Homecoming and Reunion Weekend at Holderness School in September 2017
’60 Since this is my maiden voyage as class correspondent, I will certainly attempt to maintain the high standards of the late Len Richards. My recent appeal to all of you for updates on your lives did not get the responses that I had hoped for, but I shall not give up. … I did hear from Ross Deachman who is headed south on January 26, for his time in Coco Beach. He will then fly to Puerto Rico to join his son John and his family for a week on his boat. Ross states that it is a brand new experience; he has never been sailing before as he is a “lake guy.” He also states that he is wrapping up his law practice in 1918. I’m sure Ross meant 2018, so I hope that age is not creeping up on him. Haha haha. He says though, it is difficult for him to wrap up the practice. … Also, I received a response from Dick Gardner, who assures us that all of his “body pieces” are still in
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working order. He continues: “The kind of news I have is that, knock on wood, things remain pretty upbeat around here. The body pieces are still (mostly) all working; the majority of time I do not know what day it is, plus one, minus one, or maybe two; I don’t always hear what my wife, Nina, swears she just told me, but I always apologize; I can still see pretty damn well! I think that amounts to being blessedly lucky. I’ve been busy on the local scene with the planning board and the capital improvements program. The family’s small manufacturing plant is up for sale; leased out real estate is quite an albatross— freedom is the goal! Fortunately, the two girls are doing well on their own, busy, happy, self-supporting. Like I said, blessedly lucky.” … As for Gerry Shyavitz, he is still chugging along, awaiting the warmer weather so that he can take out his kayak again and hopefully not get lost again around Plum Island,
Newburyport, MA, where he needed the assistance of the Newbury police last year: “My small law practice, specializing in estate planning, is still going strong, and I am one of the nice guys at the Internal Revenue Service, if you can believe that. Pearl is constantly smiling and is a wonderful companion over these 51 years, and my daughters and grandchildren are great.” … Just before this went to the press, I heard from more classmates. … John Despres has officially and largely been retired since 1997. He writes, “I’m responding to your message in Miami Beach, where Gina, my wife of 53+ years, and I have lived since we left Washington, DC, in 2011 after 35 years. We visit our two daughters’ families, including three grandsons, in LA and DC, several times a year. We also take them on vacations when their schools are out and travel abroad for a month or so by ourselves twice a year. To avoid Florida’s summer heat and
CLASS NOTES
humidity, we also spend a few months a year near the beach in Santa Monica, CA. I often go to DC for board meetings of The Phillips Collection and the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. So I’m still active and healthy, despite the drag of a few aching joints.” … Dave Grant says he is not a goalie anymore. “I gave that up when I was about 30, a long time ago,” he notes. “Not much has changed since my last update a few years ago. I am still living in the same house I was living in when I went to Holderness; it has been in the family since 1864. I am still a registered land surveyor in Massachusetts but practice very sparingly. I was laid off in 2008 and thought it was a good time to retire. I started working in a senior program for the town, working in the Engineering Department. I worked for about 90 hours and received a $750 abatement on my real estate taxes. Then the Engineering Department decided they wanted more of my time and hired me on part-time (19 hours per week). I now work all day Wednesdays and Thursdays and half days on Fridays. I am having a blast doing what I like to do. My responsibilities include field work, preparing plans from the field work, updating the parcel and utility layers in the town GIs, researching documents and plans, and whatever else I can do to ease the engineer’s workload. When I am not working for the town, I stay busy with genealogy, creating a database for all the streets in Mansfield, and for the Spring Brook Cemetery here in Mansfield (over 8200 entries with 25 categories for each entry). As for my family, as you know, my oldest son, David, passed away in 2006 from mesothelioma. He was a manager for Stop & Shop before his illness. He has three sons,
David, Joshua, and Matthew. My other son, Andrew, is the plant manager for a division of Emerson. They make large and high-end valves for ships, etc. He started out as their IT guy, was then put in charge of the nuclear division, and now runs the show. He has two daughters, Kirsten and Samantha. My daughter is an ER night shift nurse at Sturdy Memorial Hospital, which was run for many years by Linda Shyavitz, a cousin of Gerry’s. She did a great job. Every year she was there, the hospital had a net profit of between $8M and $14M a year. The person who took over when she retired only had a net profit of about $3M. My daughter has three children, Jack, Olivia, and Reese. So eight grandchildren, four boys and four girls. My wife Janis is a retired nurse and stays very busy cooking and shopping. She also takes old windows, mirrors and such, and with an epoxy applies shells, seaweed, netting, etc. Most everything she uses is from things she has picked up on the beaches of Naples and Sanibel Island in Florida. We usually get down there for a month each year. Thank you for taking over for Len. He and Bill Niles III will be missed.” … Alan Dewart is still involved in real estate development, but on a much-reduced scale, and also teaches a course in real estate finance at the University of Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning. Alan writes, “Carolyn and I are in the process of downsizing into a patio/condo home in East Aurora, and let me tell you, this ain’t easy. We’ll be glad when our current house sells and we are settled in our new home. We continue to enjoy traveling and spending time with our kids and grandkids (eight now!). Having discovered e-bikes, we have been doing frequent bike trips with VBt to such places as
South Africa, Croatia, Sicily, and Italy. Can’t say enough about Croatia! We’ve also done a couple of Lindblad National Geographic expeditions and have enjoyed them very much. We spend our summers at our cottage in northern Quebec, where we are fortunate to have visits from some of our kids and their families. We are thankful for our good health, our loved ones, and all the blessings that we have received!” … Don “Soko” Sokoloski writes, “Nothing much is going on in my world these days. Sad to see Bill and Len pass on—part of our ‘hard core’ alumni class. After many years of living in England, my daughter Jennifer is finally going to learn how to drive a car over there, on the left hand side of the road. She has been riding a moped for several years. I remember that she wasn’t that eager to learn when the time came here in the states either. But she’s 45 now! That’s about all that’s shakin’ round here.” … Rick Bullock reports, “My wife Patty and I are still healthy and happy in Princeton, MA, and lucky to have all our children and grandchildren nearby. I am still active in the aviation business but stopped flying as a pilot ten years ago. I have sadly lost two sisters to cancer—both of them graduates of St. Mary’s. Thoughts of them add to many good memories of the North Country. Best regards to you and to our fellow classmates, and to any of our faculty members who may still be around to read this. Thanks to all of them for being so good to us.” … Loren Berry is successfully recovering from a recent procedure and doesn’t sell Subs at Hampton Beach, NH anymore. Oops, that was 60 years ago! … Dave Wright shares, “On her 60th birthday, December 15, 2016, I married Diane Klem. We just celebrated
our first anniversary. We have been dating for 42 years. I own four heritage boats in the Bahamas and run a 501(c)(3) corporation, Abaco Boat Restoration Inc. I live in the Abacos, working on these boats in the winter. Diane lives and works in Punta Gorda during the winter. We both spend our summers at home in Massachusetts. I have attended the Galax Virginia Old Fiddlers contest for the past 31 years in my 1928 Model A Ford, which I have driven 481,000 miles since I bought it in 1960. For more information you’ll have to go to my website, www.tomspock.com.” … So that is all, Class of 1960. Hopefully, I will hear from all of you real soon. CLASS CORRESPONDENT Gerry Shyavitz ’60 g.shyavitz@comcast.net
’61 Want to connect with your classmates? Consider becoming a class correspondent and encouraging your classmates to reconnect in the HST class notes. Contact us at alumni@holderness.org for more information. Thank you! John Cleary reports, “My life during the past year has probably been similar to most classmates of my era: the onslaught of old-man medical issues that I never considered until I was suddenly and rudely facing them. Bottom line: my kryptonite is fizzling out, and my life is evolving into those areas associated with too much excitement. Nevertheless, I remain above the ground, not below it. My love for dancing has been curtailed by a forthcoming hip replacement, and I face the possibility of the big C in my prostate. Hopefully, these two issues will be corrected shortly and successful-
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ly. Meanwhile, I continue to enjoy playing in the dirt. (If you are interested, check out my new website at pastures-rockstrees.com.) While I write this update, our Louisiana temperatures have hit record lows (a week of low teens) with a skiff of snow on the ground, and I am surprised that I still can harvest fresh lettuce from my garden. My very brave dog Lulu religiously keeps 24/7 company with her seasonal best friend, Miss Woodstove—a tremendous commitment. My one cup of coffee tastes better every day. My social life has been cut off temporarily from the world of dancing; for now I am focusing on my local Master Gardeners’ continuing purpose to save nature and to my Saturday morning coffee conversation (under my town’s live oaks) to save the world. Unfinished house projects somehow seem to require more and more time before completion; encouraging a smile on anyone’s face remains my daily goal. I wish all of my Holderness schoolmates the ability to relish the sweetness of their lives. Hopefully, we will be able to say the same next year. Happy trails to all!” … Bill Seaver sent a lengthy and newsy Christmas letter. We are sharing a shortened version: “2017 has been a year of transitions for us as our adult children have started taking the baton from us, expanding their lives, and moving forward. On the other hand, we are acknowledging the inevitable effects of aging by slowing down a bit, refocusing on what is important, and realizing our own limitations. We seem to have more need of healthcare practitioners, more trips to physical therapy and the doctors’ offices, and more accommodations. The big news is that Dana and Alicia were married on October 7, in a destination wedding at Kingsley
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Pines Camp in Raymond, ME. Dana and Alicia are now happily married, appreciating and supporting each other while living in their artist’s condo in Somerville, MA. Abby has now put down roots in Encinitas, CA, settling in and building several communities for herself, most especially a community of surfing friends. She is also working diligently to gain more acupuncture patients both locally and in San Pedro, where she works two days a week; this is the location where she worked before she moved to Boston and then back to CA. Sherry joined her three brothers in Virginia Beach in late September to help her mother celebrate her 95th birthday.” Bill also reported that he had a malignant mole (melanoma) excised and will have a partial cornea transplant in March. So far, his medical issues have all been curable. However, he is refocusing on what is important to him and pruning out old stuff and activities, so he can lead a simpler, more rewarding life. He still believes that a positive view of life and new adventures will help him age gracefully. “We love living in our small neighborhood of Conantum,” he continues, “enjoy being surrounded by nature, and like interacting with our neighbors. This led us to look at what would prevent us from living in our house for as long as we possibly can. We decided to make some major ‘accommodating aging’ changes to our home, which will allow us to stay here. The result is delightful but the work to get to this point has been stressful, chaotic, and all-consuming for most of the year. In the wider world, we are concerned about how this country is dealing with refugees and immigrants. We find ourselves more aligned with the viewpoints of the aclU (American Civil Liberties Union)
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and wish we could find ways to be more powerful in counteracting what we observe happening in national politics. We have also become increasingly aware of omnipresent racism. One of the reasons Abby moved back to California from Boston was the rampant racism in Boston compared to California. The more we learn about this, the more we understand how much needs to change in society. At this season, and every season, we are hoping for, praying for, and working for a world where each human being is loved and valued for himself/herself, regardless of race, gender identification, sex, ethnicity, country of origin, or social class. Maintaining friendships helps keep us vital. We utilize email, telephone, Skype, and Facebook for much of this, but nothing compares to face-to-face meetings. We would love to facilitate more of them.”
’62 Want to connect with your classmates? Consider becoming a class correspondent and encouraging your classmates to reconnect in the HST class notes. Contact us at alumni@holderness.org for more information. Thank you! David Upton ’67 shared the sad news of his brother’s death: “George Bruce Upton died on December 31, 2017, of complications from coPd. Bruce graduated from Holderness and Harvard University and served in the US Marine Corps. He was a voracious reader of history books and an inquisitive traveler, who researched the history and culture of his destinations. Perhaps his most infamous adventure (preInternet) was assuming a dot on a map indicating an airfield in Iran was a real airport. After reaching
the spot, he discovered it was closed to civilians. He and his partner, Joan Fitzgerald, continued their travel adventures until his coPd limited his international travel. Bruce enjoyed being part of the growing Fitzgerald family.”
’63 (reunion) George Textor writes, “On a visit to Squam Lake in September I got a chance to see Tom McIlvain. My wife and I had a fun lunch with him and Claudia at their home in Center Sandwich. Steve Wales called during lunch, so I also got a chance to speak with him as well. Tom probably wins the ‘most grandchildren’ award, as there were twelve little Adirondack chairs in a semicircle on the front lawn! We later drove through the Holderness campus on our way home but did not have time to visit. The school looked beautiful.” CLASS CORRESPONDENT Dave Hagerman ’63 david.s.hagerman@gmail.com
’64 Terry Morse had plans this past fall to bike across the US again, this time from west to east. After a good start in southern California, he was sidelined in Arizona with a case of too much sun and the same symptoms as snow blindness. In addition to eye drops and better glasses, the doctor advised Terry to quit the tour. Putting aside his desire to stay with the group, Terry did the right thing and returned to Moab to recuperate. He plans to travel extensively this winter with Anne Vitte and to attend his 50th reunion at Middlebury this summer. Terry’s bike blog can be read at bikesouthernroute.com. …
CLASS NOTES
Cliff Buell ’69 and David Lowe ’69 enjoying lunch together
road trip to find better snow conditions than we are having in southwestern Colorado. Sadly, the skiing wasn’t much better at Alta, and Craig and his wife were headed to Zion National Park for hiking instead. After I hit slopes in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, I inquired a second time about Utah’s conditions. No dice, so my ski day with Craig will have to wait. In the meantime, Craig and his wife are volunteers during the Sundance Film Festival. … I am always happy to hear from classmates; give me a shout. Painting done by John Coles ’68 at his local church
During a phone call around the same time in September, Rick Hintermeister informed me that his home in Fort Myers was unscathed by Hurricane Irma. Rick had gone north to stay out of harm’s way, and he was on the road headed back when we spoke. In December I received some photos of Rick’s enormous crop of Thai peppers with his wish that simply looking at them would heat up the holidays. … I ran into Jeff Milne ’63 this summer at a talk given by the New England Ski Museum on the assignments of the 10th Mountain Division during the Italy campaign during World War II.
Jeff mentioned that an effort is underway to get a northern New Hampshire cabin built in memory of Ned Gillette ’63. … A Christmas card from Sam Stout let me know that his family made their annual trip to Sun Valley for the holidays. Sam’s daughter Annie has been a ski patroller and fire fighter there for many years. Sam said that he worked with Bill McCollom in an attempt to have Don Henderson named to the National Ski Hall of Fame. Don’s nomination made it into the final 15 but he was not selected. They will try again next year. … I spoke/emailed recently with Craig Blouin, as I was planning a
CLASS CORRESPONDENT Sandy Alexander ’64 salex88@comcast.net
’65 CLASS CORRESPONDENT Terry Jacobs ’65 haj3@jacobswyper.com
’66 CLASS CORRESPONDENT Peter Janney ’66 pj@apllon.com
’67 CLASS CORRESPONDENT John Pfeifle ’67 603.938.5981
’68 (reunion) John Coles is “still painting— working for private clients as well as commercial conservation projects. My most recent jobs have included work at Harvard Medical School, Texas A&M, and the Christian Science Mother Church. It’s all very interesting and keeps me busy. My daughters are grown and living in Washington, DC, and Austin, TX. Wish they were closer. I’m off to ski in Italy in March!” … John Nessel reports, “I have been a snowbird for the last ten years, splitting my time between Cape Cod and Sarasota, FL. Living the dream. After Holderness I went to nyU for a few years before dropping out after the draft lottery and moving to Aspen. I came back to Boston a few years later and decided to go back to college. I graduated from Cornell (ecology) and went off to graduate school at the University of Florida, where I got my master’s in environmental engineering. After graduating, I moved to Burlington, VT, and got a job as a water resource planner for the state. I got bored shortly thereafter and opened my first restaurant in Burlington in 1982. From 1982 to 1999 I owned and operated many restaurants from Burlington, VT, (where we lived
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CLASS NOTES
Nat Mead ’72 and his wife Audhild in November 2017
Fox and Fuzz: aka George Fox ’75 and Tom Phillips ’75
’69 Jon Porter writes, “I was lucky enough to see Avery ‘Cliff’ Buell and David Lowe. I bump into Avery every so often, as he lives near me.” CLASS CORRESPONDENT Jon Porter ’69 jwoodporter@cox.net Jeff Little ’71 and Roger Clarkson ’71 meeting up on the green for some rainy golf
for 20 years) to the Boston area. I had a small chain of bagel bakeries in the Boston area in the mid to late nineties (Aesops Bagels). After I sold the business, I tried to retire but was bored playing golf, so I got back into the business as a consultant. It looks like I turned my evening steward job at Holderness into a good living. I was married for 35 years—now with three kids, one each in Sarasota, New York City, and Cape Cod. I’m in good health and playing lots of golf now as well as riding my bike. Currently most of my work is in marketing and selling my software EZchef (www.ezchef.com). I currently have over 8,000 customers the world over.” … Grafty Biddle notes, “Still livin’ the dream in Florida: surfing and dancing.” CLASS CORRESPONDENT John Coles ’68 j.coles@rcn.com
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’70 CLASS CORRESPONDENT Peter Weiner ’70 prepco@ncia.net
’71 Congratulations to Deborah and David Taylor who became grandparents this year. Their son Joshua and daughter-in-law Tyler gave birth to a daughter Ainsley in June. … Lew Hinman writes, “2017 was a big year: my wife Krista retired, and we moved from Connecticut to Maine, where we are building a house near Brunswick. We were lucky and found a great site looking west over Casco Bay. It has been an exciting building process, although the winter has brought its challenges. I am more or less retired, but helping out some start-up ‘green’ businesses in the region, along with rediscovering fly fishing. It would be good to reconnect with any classmates who might be headed this way!” …
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Dick Conant ’73 atop Gannett Peak in Wyoming
Roger Clarkson reports, “After graduating from Holderness, I went to Dartmouth in Hanover, NH, and never left. I’ve had a small real estate office for 40+ years, and recently have been joined by my son Colby, KUa ’06 and St. Lawrence ’10. He is slowly taking over as his old man slows down. After working weekends for years, I recently bought back a winterized summer cottage on Drakes Island in Wells, ME, that my dad built in the 1940s; I have been escaping there for a walk on the beach any chance I get. My daughter was married there last fall, overlooking the marshes and ocean. I frequently see Jeff Little for a round of golf. In fact we are headed to Ireland and Scotland next fall on a golfing expedition as part of our bucket list (for the third time!). Jeff introduced me to my wife Karen and was our best man. He is a wealth manager for rBc in Portsmouth, NH, and he and Kathy enjoy wintering at his part time Florida ‘office.’ Rob Hier is the other member of our class who went to Dartmouth from Holderness. I believe he is retired, living nearby in Cornish, NH. It’s been a brutal winter in New Hampshire. We are ready for spring!”
CLASS CORRESPONDENT Roger Clarkson ’71 roger@rogerclarkson.com
’72 Thanks to those of you who sent me class notes. Here is what we got this time. … Cash Hoyt writes from Missoula, MT, that he and his wife Molly have two daughters, who went to school in Montana and never came back. He and Molly fell for Montana, too, and decided to retire there. “It’s a special community in an incredible part of the county,” Cash writes. “My son lives in Louisiana and he loves visiting Missoula. We all love Montana and have adopted it as our home.” Cash adds that he and Molly spent five months last year traveling the country in their van, “exploring and always looking for adventure, fun and new friends. We camp all over and have visited many parts of the West, which I never knew growing up, being a Midwest/East Coast guy. We use Missoula as our base and will keep exploring in our van.” … Nat Mead writes from Norway that he has had some nice exchanges with Gary Circuit, his roommate, “tour comrade, and treasured friend from Eaglebrook and
CLASS NOTES
David Parker ’78 trekking through Nepal, including Everest Base Camp
Members of the Class of 1982 with Peter Barnum and Lew Overaker during Homecoming and Reunion Weekend in September
Holderness. Personally and family-wise I am still, and most likely will remain, in Norway,” he says. “I moved here in 1986 with my Norwegian wife, Audhild, and have been working with the development of ecological farming and gardening for the last 32 years, 29 as a teacher at Norway’s National College for Organic Farming and Gardening. Subjects I teach are as down-to-earth as soil fertility management, organic vegetable and fruit production, and mechanization. I guess I am still a child of the flower-power generation. Check out our website at www.sjh.no.” (Of course, you’ll need to be able to read Norwegian.) Cross-country skiing, Nat adds, is a natural part of his life. He and Audhild have three daughters, one who is an ecologist, another a public health coordinator, and a third a registered nurse. … From central Massachusetts, Dave Nicholson says that by the time this appears in print, he expects to be a grand-
father. “Dave Jr. and wife Laura are expecting a girl on January 21, or thereabouts, and son Scott and wife Kelsey are expecting in early July,” he wrote in early January. “Bring ’em on—can’t wait to move on to the new experience.” Dave continues to be a general manager at the Endeavor Tool Co., in West Boylston. “Happy 2018 to all and hope it’s a happy and healthy year for all Holderness friends,” he adds, a sentiment I would like to echo. … Chuck Fisher continues to work at scaling the nonprofit he runs, which transforms schools into places where children can access their innate resilient nature. With requests for their work from over 35 countries, it is a big task. He encourages you to check it out at www.dovetaillearning.org and says be sure to watch the brief introductory video. He lives in beautiful Sonoma County, CA, with his fourth grandchild on the way. Even though the world is slightly mad, he quotes Wendell Berry, “I
choose joy, even though I have considered all the facts.” … Good to hear from Cash, Nat, David, and Chuck. Hope to hear from more of you next time. CLASS CORRESPONDENT Dwight Shepard ’72 shepdb@comcast.net
’73 (reunion) I hope that 2018 is off to a good start for all of you and thank you to all those who responded with class news. … I met up with Tom Carver—who lives just over the river from me on the Stonington side of the Mystic—for a couple beers and some reminiscing about our respective misdeeds at Holderness. Unsure of the statute of limitations on some of those deeds, I will reveal nothing in writing, so you will just have to show up at our 45th reunion for all the dirt! Tom is now back in Stonington full time after working out of state for years in the rail-
road industry. His time now is spent working from home, consulting and doing editorial work for various railroad operations. Tom hopes to make it back for our reunion, possibly on his motorcycle! … Peter Bennett reports, without sounding too smug, that the skiing is fine at Whistler/Blackcomb, and he recently did a back-country heli drop into a touring lodge. He logs 100+ days of skiing in the winter and then during the off-season flies to Maui to kite, windsurf and surf! His business and professional development have morphed into avalanche and crevasse rescue courses; instead of reading medical journals, he watches YouTube videos and reads manuals for stuff like operating GPs emergency beacons, repacking airbag backpacks, and counter steering a sled for side hilling and deep powder turns! He mentioned that he ran into Glenn Cousins in Zermatt in 1977, William “Truck” Cosgrove in Seattle 15 years ago, Rusty Gunst about 10 years ago in the Bay Area, and Jim Sargent in Maui a few years ago. He has three grown kids, all married, and two grandkids with another on the way. A late addition was his youngest, now eight. What does he say after 45 years? “So much to be thankful for, so much grace.” … Larry Johns sent me a brief note indicating that he is alive and well and living now in Hanover, MD. It’s always good to get updates on
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CLASS NOTES
’75
Chris Zak ’86 and his son, Theo, during in fishing trip in Yellowstone National Park
low classmates. The dorms will be available for accommodations; maybe we can relive/repeat some of those misdeeds that Tom and I were recounting the other day! Best to all, Dick CLASS CORRESPONDENT Dick Conant Jr. ’73 rconantjr@msn.com Tory Stine ’86 and family at the Rockywold-Deephaven Camps in Holderness, NH
addresses and contact information, so we can try to keep the class database up to date. … Mike Mixter also provided a new address and notes that he and his partner Patrice love living in their new house in the woods near the river, south of Durango. Lots of beauty and quiet. He is basically retired, but picks up work as it presents itself. Music continues to thrive with voice, guitar, mandolin, and drums. Life is good. … Morgan Dewey plans to attend our upcoming reunion and has been in contact with Sam Richards, who also hopes to attend. … And finally, Tom Mawn, who had somehow found his way onto our MIa/fearing the worst list, writes, “If you are a betting man, bet that I am still alive....at least as far as I can tell. Aside from me being dead, you have got all my other information correct.” To borrow from Mark Twain, we are all glad to hear that rumors of Tom’s demise were greatly exaggerated! Tom spends time these
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days rescuing feral honeybees that have nested in places that people find inconvenient. He then relocates them to either his own apiary or a volunteer host location. Check out his website at www.beepals.com. … As for my news, I am working part-time now with the Groton Shellfish Commission trying to reconnect with my marine biology roots, while also spending inordinate amounts of time writing grant applications and sitting on the board of the Avalonia Land Conservancy here in New London county. I managed a trip out West in September to climb Mt. Borah in Idaho and Gannett Peak in Wyoming with my eldest son. I hope to do Rainier and Hood next year. … I will finish with another plug for our 45th reunion on June 1–3, this spring. Stan Theodoredis, Tim Scott, and I have signed on to help get the word out and drum up interest. Please give serious consideration to attending and work on your fel-
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’74 Ben White had some good runs with Jack Thomas and Steve Morse at Sugarloaf last winter. … Dave Rossetter notes, “After retiring in 2016, Pam and I recently moved to our ‘forever home’ in Tucson. It’s great for hiking, music, and astronomy. Pam is a docent at the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum. Let us know if you are in the area!” … Walter Malmquist was recently featured in an article about ski jumping in the Laconia Daily Sun. After Holderness, Walter skied for Dartmouth. He also competed in the 1976 and 1980 Winter Olympics, finishing twelfth in the 1980 Nordic Combined, which is ski jumping and cross-country skiing. CLASS CORRESPONDENT Walter Malmquist ’74 wmalmquist@kingcon.com
Baird Gourlay recently retired from his city council job, noting that 19 years was enough! “I put Chelle back to work,” he says, “so I now ski every morning, walk the dogs, and read poetry (with a Budweiser). Cheers.” … John Putnam writes, “Just sat out the coolest storm in Vinalhaven, ME; 60–70 mph winds, hard rain, trees down all over. Nice day to sit one out and watch the show!!” … Ed Cudahy chimes in from Colorado: “Doing well, running our two companies. All of our four kids live close to us in Denver. Susan and I are blessed with four granddaughters and a fifth on the way. I rarely get to the East Coast, but if anyone travels this way, please give a shout.” … Linda Noyes writes, “Hi all. Hope you are well and enjoying the new year! Our youngest daughter had a baby boy on February 2. Henry weighed 8.7 lbs and was 19 1/2 inches. Our oldest daughter has a boy (two years old) and a girl (one year). Love being a grand mom! Cheers!” … Tom Phillips shares this important thought: “Folks, as a heads up, we might tip our caps to Chris Carney. He has spent 9–10 years on the board as the school’s financial shepherd. He has literally herded cats. Thanks, Chris.” CLASS CORRESPONDENT Mac Jackson ’75 skifarmer@live.com
’76 CLASS CORRESPONDENTS Charlie Bolling ’76 chasgolf7@aol.com Biff Gentsch ’76 biffgentsch@gmail.com
CLASS NOTES
Nina (Bradley) Smallhorn ’88 visiting Lisa (Hand) Cicero ’88 in San Diego for the first time in 29 years
’77 Ham Boynton reports, “I have retired from being a professional golf caddie and now write children’s books. I have seven on the market as of now, all on the adventures of a housefly named Sly. He is a very cool fly who loves to have adventures. My North Pole adventure finished 41st out of approximately 1,200 books in a national book contest. Sly has a Halloween adventure, which came out in October. I also got engaged to a childhood friend. No date has been set. We moved from the Denver area to Tucson, AZ, with our two dogs. We are grandparents of eight. Let life roll on.” CLASS CORRESPONDENT Peter Grant ’77 pete@grantcom.us
’78 (reunion) There has been lots of interesting news coming from the Class of 1978 as we approach our 40th reunion in June. … David Parker spent last October trekking and mountain climbing in Nepal. “My trek was called the three-pass
trek which took me over Renjo Pass, Chola Pass, and Kongma La Pass, each approximately 18,000 feet,” Dave writes. “I visited Everest Base Camp and also climbed Island Peak (elevation 20,305 feet) with a Sherpa. Island Peak is essentially the same elevation as Denali in Alaska for reference.” Dave says the trip was incredible. “Walking in the world’s most majestic peaks did not disappoint,” he wrote. “However, more rewarding was meeting and seeing how the people live. Life is not easy for the Nepalese, yet they are very happy and generous people.” … Blaise deSibour and his wife Leslie Clapp are spending five weeks this winter touring Japan. Blaise describes the trip as a “three-part adventure for culture, birds, and hopefully a little warmth by ending up in Okinawa.” When they’re not travelling, Blaise is working at the Blue Hill Garage in Maine and restoring older vehicles and machinery at his own shop. … Unlike Dave and Blaise, our resident flyboy Fred Roys claims he hasn’t been doing a lot of globetrotting, but methinks Fred doth protest too much. Let’s see what
Peter Driscoll ’88 and his son Donovan
Fred’s recent dance card looks like: a trip to Jamaica with the entire Roys brood in January 2017, a trip to the Canadian Maritime provinces with his motorcycling buddies in August, a wedding anniversary trip to Jamaica with wife Tracy in December, and a skiing trip to the Rockies with son Christian in January 2018. Of course, in fairness to Fred, he does spend enough time at the Roys homestead in Portsmouth to see neighbor and fellow ’78er Chris Beal. Fred’s kids are doing well. His oldest child, Gabrielle, is studying psychology and working at Ri Ra, an Irish pub in Portsmouth. Christian is a junior at the University of New Hampshire, where he is studying chemical engineering and looking for a summer internship. Fred and Tracy’s youngest youngun, Katie, is a senior at Portsmouth High School and has heard from two of the 10 colleges to which she has applied. … Speaking of families, classmate Matt Riley just keeps adding to his. Matt and his wife just had another kid, which brings the offspring count to four. The baby, Jack, was born last fall and joins 12-year-old Christopher, six-
year-old Sarah, and four-year-old James. Matt works for the chief of staff at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. … More familial milestones to report from Colin “Spud” MacLeod, J.D. Hale, and Dave King. Spud’s son James is in his junior year at Davidson College in North Carolina, where he is a Quest Bridge Scholar. Before matriculating to Davidson, James led his high school academic quiz bowl team to a state conference title in Virginia. Spud spent some time last summer reconnecting with classmates Loric Weymouth and John Mitchell in Maine. Spud recently earned his US Coast Guard credential as a 100-ton master with a sailing endorsement and will be looking for yacht delivery work this year as well as assisting Mitchie on his boat Zora. … Dave King and his wife Danielle celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary last September. Danielle is a speech pathologist in Old Saybrook, CT, and David is still working for Bayer. Their sons, Jack and Cameron, are both students. Jack, who is 24, is attending the Thomas Jefferson School of Public Health, and Cameron is a junior at the
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CLASS NOTES
Drew Kesler ’88 (left) coaching at a Salisbury Rowing Camp in Connecticut; he is rowing with Norman Walker, son of Steve Walker ’88 and grandson of the late Coach Norm Walker. Norman, age 15, rows for Phillips Andover.
University of Delaware, where he is studying math and education. … J.D. Hale has two kids, who both have wedding bells in their futures. Dalon and his fiancée, Kristen, are scheduled to tie the knot in February 2019. They both work for the state of Massachusetts. Charlie and his fiancée, Ava, are living in Los Angeles and haven’t set a date yet for their wedding. Charlie is a software architect for the insurance industry and Ava is an actress. Jud and Cindy’s daughter Lacey graduated from Connecticut College last spring and is working in sales and marketing for Carbon Black, a Waltham, Massachusetts company that produces computer security software. Lacey recently received a promotion and will be moving out to Colorado, where her sister Rosie is already working for healthcare start-up LevelEx. Cindy is chief marketing officer at KhJ, a healthcare advertising agency in Boston, and Jud is helping guide a new Yankee Magazine venture—a national television show called “Weekends with Yankee”—that is now in its
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second season. The show, which is being done with WGBh, is airing in markets that cover 91 percent of all US households. … Mitch Kamarck works as a lawyer in Los Angeles and recently finished an interesting project, during which he completed all the legal work on Nickelodeon’s first virtual reality experience, SlimeZone. It will be released in an IMaX VR Experience Centre before the end of February, he says. … And last, but certainly not least, Prescott Smith checks in from Florida, where he spent some time hanging out with Rob Bacon ’77 and our own Don Whittemore. Pres says they did a little cycling on Sanibel Island. CLASS CORRESPONDENT Luther Turmelle ’78 lturmelle@spc.global.net
’79 Want to connect with your classmates? Consider becoming a class correspondent and encouraging your classmates to reconnect in the HST class notes. Contact us at
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Christy (Wood) Donovan ’89, Sara (deLima) Tansil ’89, Jen (Murphy) Robison ’89, Sarah (Trainor) Pflaum ’89, Tracy (McCoy) Gillette ’89, Amanda Black ’89, Jen (Comstock) Reed ’89, and Jennie (Legg) Gabel ’89 during their annual trip to Vail in January 2018
alumni@holderness.org for more information. Thank you!
’80 CLASS CORRESPONDENT Greg White ’80 ggnh@aol.com
’81 CLASS CORRESPONDENT Bill Baskin ’81 william.baskin.law.90@aya.yale.edu
’82 CLASS CORRESPONDENT Chris Pesek ’82 cpesek@yahoo.com
’83 (reunion) CLASS CORRESPONDENT Jane (Randolph) Jensen ’83 jjensen@uky.edu jane2jensen@gmail.com
’84 CLASS CORRESPONDENT Fred Ludtke ’84 ludtke4@gmail.com
’85 Kathy Garfield just joined the empty nesters group. “It’s definitely an adjustment,” she writes. “My children love their colleges, UVa and Davidson; just wish they weren’t so far away.” CLASS CORRESPONDENT Jean-Louis Trombetta ’85 jeanlouistrombetta@gmail.com
’86 Matt Reynolds says he has finally begun to call Atlanta home after moving there in 1994. “I continue to enjoy my counseling work with adolescents and young men in an outdoor setting in the heart of Atlanta,” he reports. “My four daughters (ages 7, 12, 14, 16) attend Paideia School (still hoping one may end up at Holderness). The whole family pitched in last summer and fall to help my wife Jennifer get elected to the Atlanta City Council. Meanwhile, I’m dealing with the reality of turning the big 5-0. If any Holderness alumni pass through atl please look me up.” … Tory Stine writes,
CLASS NOTES
David ’88 and Julie Warren’s two-yearold, Knox
“Well, there are two fewer bodies now in the Stine household, going on our second year, and it’s lovely. (Don’t tell the boys I said that.) Christian is now a sophomore at Oregon State University and is studying business. He’s one of those who is motivated to make a lot of money after he graduates! He’s living with four of his friends off campus and says he is starving. Guess it is time to learn how to cook? Taylor decided to leave the University of Idaho (too conservative in this political climate) and is now a sophomore at Oregon State University. Yes, we are a ‘divided household.’ He is studying digital (or now called new media) communications. He just moved off campus, so we’ll see how that goes. Isabel, now 11, is not quite sure what to do with herself now that her brothers are gone. She is in fifth grade and spends her free time taking piano lessons, and playing soccer, basketball, and lacrosse. I am still a trauma nurse coordinator at Emanuel Medical Center. I feel old having been at the same place since we moved out here in 1994. I recently returned from a medical mission in Uganda with Project Helping Hands, am now a
At a gathering hosted by Tracy (McCoy) Gilette in Vail, CO, the Class of 1989 had an amazing showing: Jen (Murphy) Robison ’89, Sara (deLima) Tansill ’89, Sarah (Trainor) Pflaum ’89, Tracy (McCoy) Gillette ’89, Amanda Black ’89, Christy (Wood) Donovan ’89, Jennie (Legg) Gabel ’89, Chris Howe ’06, Elizabeth (Meck) Knight ’97, and Jen (Comstock) Reed ’89 (seated).
Concord, MA,” she notes. “I recently saw Jenny Ellis, who stayed with us during her daughter’s hockey tournaments nearby. I am also hoping to visit her in Slovenia this summer, where she is living with her family for a year. On the travel front, I was able to go to Ghana in West Africa last March with four other Fenn teachers. It was an incredible travel and curriculum opportunity and has inspired me to think more about teaching opportunities abroad for the future. Last year, I also stopped in to Holderness and had an awesome chat with Franz Nicolay. It was really amazing to see how Holderness’s art program has progressed. As a teacher, I realize what an incredible educator Franz is and how lucky I was to have taken three years of photography in high school.” CLASS CORRESPONDENT Chris Zak ’86 chriszak@gmail.com
’87 CLASS CORRESPONDENT Kathryn (Lubrano) Robinson ’87 kathryn.robinson@gmail.com
Current Holderness board members Alex MacCormick ’88, Bob Hall, and Chris Davenport ’89 met in Japan during a ski vacation. Bob Hall’s sons attended Holderness, while two of Chris’s sons currently attend.
disaster response nurse for International Medical Teams, and have joined the Red Cross. Five years ago Matt started his own business in ecosystem restoration and watershed enhancement. It has been a very successful endeavor for him. He loves not having a boss or employees! Krys Ellison came up from California to visit for a long weekend and we had a great time. It is now my turn to go and visit her! She luckily didn’t need to evacuate from the
Ventura fire, but it came awfully close to her. We go to Squam Lake every summer, and I was able to see Mr. Lockwood this past summer! He brought his piano trailer to Rockywold and sang for us. What a treat. If anyone is in Portland and needs a bed, we now have a couple extra! Hope you had a good year.” … Elise Mott is still teaching social studies and is now running the Service Learning program at Fenn. “We are still living in
’88 (reunion) Our 30th reunion is just around the corner, and I hope to see many of you there. As I have always said, the more the merrier. … Renee Dupre writes, “I am still living in Steamboat, and we just launched our ski brand, Harvest Skis. I’ll give any Holderness student (you don’t even have to have graduated) a pro deal.” Check out their 122 underfoot PowCow skis at www.harvestski.com. … Matt Schonwald is busy writing a few guidebooks about backcountry skiing in Washington and running a guide service, all while trying to
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CLASS NOTES
James ’98, Molly Biscone Jung, and their newest addition, James Patrick “JP”
Jon Hatch ’91 and his family living the dream in Boulder, CO
keep up with his daughter Charlotte as she starts hitting black diamonds. Check out Matt’s website at www.bcadventureguides.com. … Chris Keeler is now working for Calypso Lemonades—King Juice Co. as the new Pacific Northwest/Northern California regional manager. “Life is good,” he says. “Marriage is good, 13-year-old dog is great, and two cats are awesome. No kids. I’m still living out my youthful fantasies—going to rock concerts, seeing live soccer matches, and surfing as much as possible.” … Nina (Bradley) Smallhorn writes, “All is well on the West Coast. I had a great visit with Lisa (Hand) Cicero in San Diego. It had been 29 years since we last saw each other, but fortunately, we both look exactly the same and had an easy transition like no time had passed. We discussed making it happen for our 30th. Liz Ganem and I have also been chatting about making the journey across the country.” … Chris Stewart writes, “Baja and I had our requisite photo op with former Holderness student and teacher Jim Connor ’74 at St. George’s parents weekend. We also towed our kids into Phish’s Bakers
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Dozen at MsG. I had a blast in Jackson Hole this fall with Steve Jones ’87 and Scott Esposito at the premiere of Teton Gravity Research’s latest movie. I spent another epic night at MsG with Bruce Bohuny ’87 and his wife Colleen for Dead & Co. Last but not least, I had an awesome three-day weekend in Stowe with Dix Wheelock ’87 and all the kids.” … David Warren says he is still living in Dallas with his wife Julie and their son Knox, who recently turned two: “I’m covering the news of the day for The Associated Press and enjoy grabbing dinner and drinks with old classmates who pass through town, like Steve Walker, Drew Kesler and Derek Anderson.” … Pete Driscoll is still in the investment business wholesaling mutual funds in the mid-Atlantic. He says, “Hello to all from Annapolis!! Hope to catch up in June!” … Paula (Lillard) Preschlack shares that she is in her 12th year as Head of Forest Bluff School in Lake Bluff, IL. Paula writes and speaks about Montessori education nationally. “My husband and kids are great,” she says. “Stanley, age 15, goes to a Montessoribased high school in Evanston, IL,
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called Beacon Academy, and our daughter, Lillard, is 13 and finishes at Forest Bluff next year. They both love their summers at a canoe expedition camp called Keewaydin. You can check out my Montessori-approach advice to parents at forestbluffschool.org/ blog. My warmest regards to all Holdernessers!” … Joel Rifkin’s karate school in Missouri has grown very quickly since leaving LA. “Life is busy here with our kids (some grown) and our two granddaughters, six and seven.” … Liz Ganem met up with Lauren (O’Brien) Smith in Boston for lunch while in town to visit her parents. Liz wrote, “It was great to catch up with her like no time had passed. And we talked about how amazing Holderness was for each one of us.” … Nate Foran is on the move again, heading a hair north to San Rafael, CA, in August. “Otherwise, I’m just trying to keep the body together, playing some tournament tennis in the area and looking forward to a possible heli-skiing adventure in Alaska this winter with none other than Steve Walker!” … Steve Walker reports, “It’s been a great joy playing hoops with Bob Abbott ’87 in the Boston area recently. Time has had little effect on Bob. He was dominant on the court in high school and now he’s twice the player. I’ve been catching up with Nate Foran over a number of trips to the Bay Area this past year. Bob must have shown Nate where to drink from
the fountain of youth, because Nate’s ranked at the top of his division in San Francisco and is running 18-year-olds off the court. I caught up with Matt Schonwald in Seattle this fall as well. Matt had just finished teaching an evening class on avalanche survival skills at reI when we met up for dinner. It was great to hear all the things Matt has been passionate about over the past 30 years, most of all his daughter Charlotte, who is 11. I couldn’t help asking for advice on climbing Rainer. I spent two weeks last August with Drew Kesler and his family in France. Between our five kids we covered ages 15, 14, 13, 12 and 11. We had a ton of fun throwing the disc with Drew all over Paris and Colmar.” … Emily (Adriance) Magnus reports from Holderness School: “My oldest daughter, Liesl, just graduated from Holderness and is off to St. Lawrence next year. My youngest daughter, Lilly, will be a sophomore. I did the Mt. Washington Hill Climb in June; my time was slower than it was two years ago but the views were incredible! If anyone is in the area and wants a partner for trail running, let me know” (emagnus@holderness.org). CLASS CORRESPONDENTS Alex MacCormick ’88 amaccormick@centerlanellc.com Steve Walker ’88 stevewalkeremail@gmail.com
’89 Tom Donovan’s parents let us know that Tom has just finished building a new and roomy house for his family. He is an independent remolding contractor in Prescott, AZ. … Tracy (McCoy) Gillette writes that four members of our class now have children attending Holderness; Chris
CLASS NOTES
Members of the Class of 1997 during Reunion and Homecoming Weekend in September
Davenport’s sons Stian Davenport ’19 and Topher Davenport ’21, Jen (Comstock) Reed’s son Brooks Reed ’21, Cara Cargill’s son Thomas Inwood ’20, and Tracy’s daughter Lily Gillette ’19 are all proud to be Bulls! … Also, Chris Davenport was just invited to be on the Holderness School Board of Trustees. He began his term in the fall of 2017. Chris was also inducted into the Colorado Ski Hall of Fame in October 2017. In April 2015 he was inducted into the US Ski Hall of Fame, but he’s now in this special society as well. … In other notes, over MlK weekend Tracy (McCoy) Gillette hosted another incredible Vail trip. This year’s group included Tracy, Jen (Comstock) Reed, Sara (deLima) Tansill, Amanda Black, Christy (Wood) Donovan, Jennie (Legg) Gabel, Sarah (Trainor) Pflaum, and me, Jen (Murphy) Robison. We had great snow and even better laughs. … In baby news, Te Tiffany and Amanda welcomed Henry Tiffany on September 26, 2017. They are living in Marblehead, and it is so much fun to see them. … It was great to see Brad Greenwood,
who was in town in July for Marblehead Race Week. … I am lucky to ski most weekends at Mt. Sunapee with Sarah (Trainor) Pflaum and family. I also just ran into Shields Day up at Mt. Sunapee where our kids were competing in a mogul event. CLASS CORRESPONDENT Jen (Murphy) Robison ’89 jennifermrobison@yahoo.com
’90 Johannah (Hatch) Mackin and her family enjoyed a recent visit to Holderness on their way to Maine. “I was so impressed with the many ways Holderness has grown and the unique ways it has stayed the same,” she writes. “Some of my fondest memories were at 33 Chapel Lane.”
The Rayburn family on a road trip: David ’91 and Leila Rayburn, daughters Ryanne (six) and Reese (10), and puppy Mia
your classmates to reconnect in the HST class notes. Contact us at alumni@holderness.org for more information. Thank you! David Rayburn writes, “I just moved the family to Dallas, TX. It’s colder here than expected, but nothing like those early mornings chipping ice from the sidewalks with the outdoor crew. Hope to get back to Holderness for a visit soon.” … Jon Hatch reports, “The Hatches are living the dream in Boulder, CO! Our kids are 16 and 13 and almost as tall as their dad. I just returned from Thailand after an epic twoweek family journey with Ethan, Phoebe, and mom Kristin. Have been in the real estate marketing and sales business over 14 years now. So good. I had a great Holderness reunion in Boulder before the holidays.”
CLASS CORRESPONDENT Nina (Cook) Silitch ’90 ninasilitch@gmail.com
’92
’91
CLASS CORRESPONDENT Kelly (Mullen) Wieser ’92 kelly@wiesermail.com
’93 (reunion) CLASS CORRESPONDENT Lindsay (Dewar) Fontana ’93 linds_dewar@yahoo.com
’94 KC Carpenter completed his first Boston Marathon in 2017. He runs for Children’s Hospital and will run again in 2018. … Heidi and Ryan Mullen just welcomed twin boys Tate Alexander and Asher Theodore into the world. They currently live in Scottsdale, AZ. CLASS CORRESPONDENTS Sam Bass ’94 samuel.g.bass@gmail.com Ramey Harris-Tatar ’94 rameyht@yahoo.com
’95 CLASS CORRESPONDENT John Farnsworth ’95 jpfarns@yahoo.com
Want to connect with your classmates? Consider becoming a class correspondent and encouraging
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CLASS NOTES
Tara (Walker) Hamer’s ’98 daughters, Vivian (nine), Lola (six), and Etta (three) at a Walker family wedding in 2017
’96 CLASS CORRESPONDENT Heather (Pierce) Roy ’96 heatherbpierce@hotmail.com
’97 Shannon Mullen compiled some epic notes for our class. Thanks, Shannon! … There’s nothing like a 20th reunion to wrangle up some notes, and we the Class of 1997 made one of the strongest showings! Naturally, none of us has aged a day! The big event fell on a gorgeous fall weekend. I caught up first with Chris Day, who is busy running a new kombucha brewery he recently launched in Arizona. … Andy Humphrey flew in from the Midwest to join us: “Reunion was awesome and it was really great to see everyone; let’s do it again soon. I’m now in the middle of my final season as the volunteer president of the Grand Traverse Ski Club. We have 300+ athletes ages 5 to 14, and it is awesome to see the excitement for skiing and racing here in Michigan. Our kids are growing up fast; my son (14) now waxes his own skis, my 12-year-old daughter is into basketball and volleyball, and my 8-year-old daughter loves gymnastics and dance. We’re
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building a house overlooking Grand Traverse Bay and will be moving in at the end of March. … Over reunion weekend I caught up at Biederman’s with Kris Langetieg, who came over the hill from Cardigan Mountain School, where he is director of secondary school placement. … Gasper Sekelj joined us at reunion, traveling from upstate New York, where he teaches economics at Clarkson University: “It was great to see so many from the Class of 1997. It was fantastic to catch up with familiar faces at the school, to see all the improvements to the campus, and to see that the spirit of the school we attended 20 years ago is alive and well. I was particularly happy to be able to bring my older daughter, Ella, to see Holderness. My younger daughter, Kinsley, and I were also very excited to meet with fellow Holderness alumni in Canton during a Holderness event in upstate NY. It was great to see the number of Holderness students who attend St. Lawrence and Clarkson. I also had the pleasure of having a Holderness alumnus in my class in the fall 2017 semester.” … Other New Englanders who made appearances at reunion were Garrett Kemble, Rob Johnson, Ben Dulac, Will
holderness school today | SPRING 2018
Sophie Moeller ’01, who won “Best Actress in a Dramatic Role” at the Oregon Short Film Festival
Chris Rodgers ’02, Dave Madeira ’03 (with his bulldog Millie), and Ave Cook ’02 taking in a hike
Van Dorn, and Becca Hanson, who lives in Plymouth, where she chairs the town’s planning board. Becca is the director of conservation at the Squam Lakes Association and recently earned her MS in environmental science and policy at Plymouth State University. … Putney (Haley) Wendell couldn’t join us, as she was pregnant and due any day; she gave birth to son Peter Garthwaite Wendell two weeks later. … Andy Tankersley couldn’t make it either because he was getting married that same weekend out in Montana. Congrats, Putney and Andy! … Allie Barker was otherwise occupied too, on the farm she runs in Chickaloon,
AK, where she was “in the middle of fall harvest and hunting season.” … In the weeks leading up to reunion, I also heard from Adam George, who wrote from Switzerland where he lives with his wife: “We have a little girl, who is now five! We both work as mountain guides and run a small business here: intothemountains.com. So we are staying busy and spending a lot of time outside! I’m hoping to get back to New Hampshire one of these days.” … Bryan Landers also checked in from California: “I’m keeping busy here in Los Angeles. I’m a design principal at Backstage Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in tech
CLASS NOTES
Channing (Weymouth) Warner ’02 and Luke Warner celebrated the birth of their son Michael Insley Warner in August.
startups led by underrepresented founders. I help support our 80+ portfolio companies with design/product consulting and content marketing, primarily by producing/co-hosting “The Bootstrapped VC” podcast; I also help assess potential investment opportunities. I’m still playing music when I can! I’m slowly making progress on a recording, with my life partner Kate Conklin, of contemporary arrangements of Bulgarian folk music for voice and banjo. I miss winter terribly; I’ll trade you a hot, sunny day for a glorious pile of snow. Deal?” … Liz (Meck) Knight couldn’t make it to reunion, but I heard she put in a cameo appearance, representing the Class of 1997, at the Holderness gathering in Vail in January. … Tad Davis sends this update: “This winter has been full of family ski days with a few chances for me to get out skinning before sunrise. We split our time now between Stowe, VT, and Easton, MA, which keeps me very busy juggling my business in Vermont and family in Massachusetts. Our kids (Faye, eight; Gwen, four; and Teddy, four) are skiing and learning hockey and lacrosse. I am still bummed I missed our 20th reunion this last summer! I will
make the 25th! I hope more folks can do the same. I miss everyone.” … As for me, Shannon, I’ve been back and forth between London and my family’s home not far from campus, while researching and writing a screenplay. It turns out the White Mountains are highly conducive to the creative process! I’ve also been enjoying a lot of time with family here, including Kelly (Mullen) Wieser ’92 and Evan Mullen ’00. I loved seeing everyone who made the trip back here for reunion and hope we can pull an even bigger bunch together for the next one! CLASS CORRESPONDENT Putney (Haley) Wendell ’97 putneypyles@gmail.com
’98 (reunion) Tara (Walker) Hamer writes, “Over the last five years so much has happened—and it has gone by in a flash! In 2014 we welcomed our third daughter, Etta, into our family; within months we lost mom, Phyllis Walker, to pulmonary fibrosis, but her spirit and dad’s live on in all of us! In the last five years I have also been lucky enough to photograph multitudes of Holderness families on
Evan Mullen ’00, Tim ’00 and Lindsey Barnhorst, Joe Sampson ’02, Melissa Adams ’02, Katharine Lynch ’97, Will Regii (brother of Mindi (Regii) Wright ’03), Brett Patten (spouse of Megan (Bristow) Patten ’98), and Neal Frei ’03 skied together regularly this winter at Gunstock Mountain in New Hampshire.
Charley Gaylord ’01, Britt Ruegger ’02, Andy Gaylord ’02, Dave Madeira ’03, Chris Rodgers ’02, Fordy Sinkinson ’02, Blake Barber ’01, and Olive Barber (2035?) at the wedding of Britt Ruegger in October in Aspen, CO
their wedding days, in family portraits, and with their newborn babies! Most recently I was named the newborn photographer for Wentworth Douglass Hospital here in the Seacoast New Hampshire region, a great honor and a goal of mine since I committed to running my business full time ten years ago. I will be photographing Anna Lockwood’s ’03 wedding on June 2, in Holderness but hope to come by the reunion afterward! I can’t wait to see everyone! I cannot believe it’s been 20 years!!!” … Jim Jung reports, “This
November, my wife and I welcomed our first child, a boy. James Patrick ‘JP’ Jung arrived happy and healthy. We’re still living in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, and we take him into Central Park often. I see Gabriel Sherman ’97 and Erik Dane frequently, and am in touch with Zach Zaitzeff ’93, Matt Tanz, Tim Barnhorst ’00, and Sam Pope ’97. I hope to see lots of you this June at reunion.” … Alexandra Schilling (aka Margot A. Cooper) recently left New York City for West Palm Beach: “I’m working for a private equity firm
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CLASS NOTES
The Martin family: Stephen ’07, Kourtney (Brim) ’07, Mitchell, Julia, and Aubrey
and love living down here in the sun. I’m playing some tennis, surfing, and doing lots of boating; they’re just a few of the best parts about the Florida lifestyle. My little Chihuahua is also loving it here, particularly the fact that he no longer has to brave freezing temperatures and get dressed up in ridiculous puppy coats. I see Terry Connell in the summers in Osterville but otherwise am missing connecting with the old Holderness crew. Reach out if in my area.” … We also heard from Jim Chalmers: “Nate Hicks and I try to catch up every once in a while in the Portland area. I was glad to learn that Andrew Walter ’99 moved to Portland recently, and we will be connecting soon. On a professional level, I have (along with one of my cousins, Dottie Chalmers-Cutter) purchased Chalmers Insurance Group from our fathers, making the transition of the business to a fourth generation of Chalmers family ownership.” CLASS CORRESPONDENT Tara (Walker) Hamer ’98 taraphotography@gmail.com
’99 Emilie Lee had an art show in Bozeman, MT, at the Old Main
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Gallery for the month of November this year. “I made a series of paintings on the American Prairie Reserve, a conservation area in the Northern Great Plains,” she writes. “Over the past two years I’ve visited the reserve three times and spent six weeks exploring and learning about this area, which is one of only four large-scale intact prairies in the world! A percentage of the show sales will go to the American Prairie Reserve. I’m living in Santa Barbara now, painting landscapes, teaching workshops, traveling, and finding more time for rock climbing and snowboarding than I have since college! Living the dream in 2018!” ... Darren Moore is back at Holderness! He has taken on the role of director of the Holderness Fund, so you will be hearing from him soon! CLASS CORRESPONDENT Brooke (Aronson) McCreedy ’99 brooke.mccreedy@gmail.com
’00 “I am not sure if I have ever submitted a class note, but here goes,” writes Andy Collado. “My wife and I recently welcomed the newest addition to our family, Eva, in September. Our oldest daughter, Noemi, is not ready to
holderness school today | SPRING 2018
Amy (Laverack) ’03 and Todd ’04 Nordblom skiing with their daughter Lucy on the Holderness Nordic trails
hand down her stuffed Holderness bull, so I will have to stop by school and pick up a new one. After 15 years in private finance, I made the decision last year to move to the non-profit world. I am overjoyed to work for The Financial Clinic, a wonderful organization focused on increasing financial security and improving financial mobility in low-income communities. I still keep in touch with many classmates and faculty, who remind me of the gift that was my time in New Hampshire. I don’t get up there often, but if you are ever in New York City and want to catch up, feel free to look me up and reach out.” CLASS CORRESPONDENT Andrew “Sully” Sullivan ’00 myireland20@gmail.com
’01 Sophie Moeller writes, “I am currently living in Reno and working for a non-profit that helps women in addiction recovery. The name of the agency is steP2, if you’d like to take a peek! I am currently in the process of completing the Reno Lullaby Project, in which steP2 clients, along with the Reno Philharmonic and a local nonprofit music therapy agency (Note-Able music), write, sing, and professionally record original lullabies. It has been a magical and profound process, something that Dave Lockwood would appreciate very much! I am still active in the theater/acting world and recently won ‘best actress’ in the Oregon short film festival, and ‘best actress in a dramatic role’ at the 2017 Reno Forte awards. Both awards were an unexpected but
CLASS NOTES
Mimi O’Connor ’07 and her husband Stavros Bozampalis on their wedding day
wonderful surprise. No marriage or baby announcements to report, but I am about to return to school full time (for musical theater) for the first time in over fifteen years. Wish me luck! I am missing my dear friend Amanda FrenchGreenwood who moved from Reno back to the East Coast last year. Looking forward to her return to the biggest little city. Right Mandy? Wink, wink.” CLASS CORRESPONDENTS Karyn (Hoepp) Jennings ’01 karynpjennings@gmail.com Adam Lavallee ’01 a.l.lavallee@gmail.com Sophie Moeller ’01 sophmoe@gmail.com
’02 Ave Cook writes, “Happy New Year! Things are good up in the great white north. My kids were pretty psyched about Santa this year, which made Christmas fun. I’m not sure you’re aware, but Heidi Webb ’00 began working with her dad at Shelburne Farms in the last year and half. It’s been a great new challenge for her, after leaving Middlebury College. I’m still with LandVest, doing real
Abby Alexander ’10 and Ashleigh Boulton ’10 on top of Mt. Moosilauke in October 2017
estate throughout the state of Vermont, and really enjoying it. I see Dave Madeira ’03 and Chris Rodgers on a (somewhat) regular basis. We spent the weekend at our place on Lake George this past fall, while taking our dock out. That’s always a good time. We saw Kerry Douglas last fall at a Shelburne Farms event, which was great, too.” … Christopher Nielson reports, “We did a grownup thing and bought a house! It’s a train wreck—we are living amidst the construction— but at least our plastering skills are really coming along. While we really miss living in the Boston area with Betsy Pantazelos, we did get to spend a fantastic reunion weekend on Squam Lake together. I’m ashamed to say I left Betsy solo on the dance floor (along with the rest of our class); however, I was glad to see that Bruce Barton stepped in.” … Joe Sampson says that the Sampsons’ world revolves around Elodie Mae, their soon-to-be three-yearold: “She is addicted to all our favorite things (somehow), and we are so thankful for that. We ski, hike, bike, camp, and go boating together as much as we can. Kait is busy working for the Circle Program in Plymouth, NH; I’m in
Betsy Pantazelos ’02 with Erik Thatcher ’08 and the Holderness ice climbing team (Keagan Penny ’18 and Nick Spanos ’21) in Kinsman Notch this winter
Annie Carney ’08 with Julia Ford ’08 in Steamboat, CO
my second year as principal of the Wentworth Elementary School, and Elodie just moved up to the pre-school room at daycare! We also squeezed in a visit to Brooklyn to visit Auntie Betsy Pantazelos. We are doing great!” … Ally Keefe still loves living in Reno. She recently started a new job in the Emergency Department at the hospital in Incline Village, NV, on Lake Tahoe: “Transitioning back to working in a mountain community has proven to be a great decision for me!” … All is well with Maddie Fiumara: “I’m living just north of Boston in Hamilton, MA, and have two boys
(Sam, four, and Peter, two), who keep life busy, messy, and fun. I had a great time celebrating at Jenn Dinkel’s wedding with Kerry Douglas, Kate Vlahakis, Betsy Pantazelos, and Joe Sampson; it felt like no time at all had passed! I’m honored to be a bridesmaid in Kerry’s wedding later this year and am looking forward to celebrating Kate’s wedding in September! My work at Carney Sandoe keeps me pretty connected to Holderness; earlier this year, I ran into Kathy Weymouth and Chris Day at a conference, and it was nice to catch up and reminisce. Over the
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CLASS NOTES
Roland Nyama ’13 playing basketball professionally in Germany
years I’ve met countless people with Holderness connections and gotten to reconnect with lots of former classmates. My specific job is helping schools hire English teachers, so I’m lucky to spend my days interviewing and getting to know some great people—and it has made me realize just how lucky we were to have such unbelievable faculty members at Holderness. I hope everyone is well!” … “Still in nyc,” writes Kerry Douglas. “I moved out of Manhattan a little over a year ago and am currently not too far across the river in Brooklyn (Boerum Hill). My fiancé Andrew Pearce and I were engaged this summer, while skiing in Portillo, Chile. We’re very excited to be getting married this June! My current role, career-wise, as a member of Patagonia’s visual design team, really feels like an extension of Holderness. It’s a gift to be surrounded by co-workers who not only share a love for the outdoors but also recognize the importance of sustainable business practices and inspiring others to make the world a better place.” … As for me, Betsy Pantazelos, I had a nice time at a few Holderness events this past year including reunion, a Holderness gathering in New York City, and Jenn Dinkel’s wedding. I really enjoyed making new friends from other class years at
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Thomas Jackson ’16 and his Post team matched up against Daniel Cabassa ’17 and his St. Michael’s team this winter. They are both doing well!
reunion, and I remain in awe of how the common thread of Holderness can unite people across generations and geography. I was sorry to miss many of you at reunion, but was delighted to see Channing (Weymouth) Warner and her gorgeous new baby, gab with Bruce Barton, and see Neal Frei ’03. I met up with Linden Mallory ’03 for a quick lunch at Patagonia’s home office earlier this winter, and he’s doing well out in California. Many of you have come to visit me in New York City this year (Liz Norton ’01, Joe Sampson, Shannon Mullen ’97), which is a delight—and my door is always open if you find yourself in Brooklyn this year. Earlier this winter, I was ice climbing in New Hampshire and met Erik Thatcher ’08 and two current students who are on the climbing team (how cool!). The following day on the gondola at Loon I met two more current students on the freeride team. For such a small school, I bump into this community everywhere!
holderness school today | SPRING 2018
Past parent and former trustee Grace Bird, Anna ’03 and Emily ’99 Lockwood, Macy Jones ’13, Sam Macomber ’11, and Christopher Nalen ’13 at a Kelly Brush Inspire Denver fundraiser event this past winter
CLASS CORRESPONDENT Betsy Pantazelos ’02 b.pantazelos@gmail.com
’03 (reunion) Jay Connolly sent this quick update: “All is well here. My wife Nicole and I welcomed our second child on September 22. Rose Maria Connolly just turned four months and is doing great; her older brother JB is is three and a half. I’m looking forward to our 15th reunion this summer.” … Neal Frei writes, “As I think most of my classmates know from my annoying emails, I am back at Holderness in the Advancement Office. I am excited to see everyone at the summer reunion and am hoping for an amazing turn out. Evan Mullen ’00 convinced me to join a ski (beer) league this winter at Gunstock with a number of other Holderness peeps. It’s been a bunch of fun skiing, connecting, and generally being outraced by the likes of Lindsey and Tim Barnhorst ’00, Joe Sampson ’02, Melissa Adams ’02, Kate Lynch ’97, Will Regii (Mindi (Regii) Wright’s brother), and Brett Patten (spouse of Megan (Bristow) Patten ’98). It was also
great catching up with Matt Sopher after the New York City Christmas party. He is doing well and still enjoys the big city and Vermont on the weekends. I routinely see Amy (Laverack) Nordblom and Todd Nordblom ’04 on the Holderness ski trails, teaching their daughter Lucy how to ski, a.k.a. training her to be a Nordic phenom. Last, but not least, I enjoy the daily Snapchats from Brendan Murphy, mostly of his daughter Rhoda. If you are not Snapchat buddies with Murph, get on that. He is still pretty funny. Murph is still in Abu Dhabi, but I hear that he and his family will be back stateside for good by the end of the summer (hope I didn’t spoil the surprise). Excited to see everyone at reunion in June.” CLASS CORRESPONDENT Nick Payeur ’03 ndpayeur@gmail.com
’04 CLASS CORRESPONDENT Ryan McManus ’04 rbmcmanus@gmail.com
CLASS NOTES
Matthew Nolan ’10 shredding it out in Utah!
’05 Hi all! Brie (Keefe) Healy here, still reporting from Vermont! Life is good up here. I was busy in 2017: I earned my MEd from UVM and married my husband Mike, and then we bought our first home. I’m still enjoying my work as a middle school teacher and am looking forward to getting a dog once school lets out. I hope everyone is doing well! … Ashley Saba writes, “I’m moving to Amsterdam this summer and would love to meet up with other European-based alumni. Other than that I’m looking forward to a few Holderness weddings coming up this year!” … Emma (Schofield) Phipps reports, “I got married on June 30, 2017, in Lyons, CO, to Christopher Phipps (hence my new last name). I am still a high school counselor as well as a licensed professional counselor; however, I am now at a different high school that is actually more similar to Holderness; it is public but it has about 240 students and is located in the foothills of the Rockies. I am an assistant ski coach and head soccer coach there. Hope all is well!” … Justin “JJ” Hall is staying busy too: “I moved to Palo Alto, launched a startup recruiting agency called PopShop, and am
Adam Sapers ’11, Sam Macomber ’11, and Cole Phillips ’11 skiing in Jackson Hole
training for the Napa Valley Marathon in March and the Berlin Marathon in September.” … Han Min Lee hosted an informal Holderness gathering in South Korea this past December. … Jenn (Calver) Gaudet is also a newlywed: “I am now a married woman as of August and was lucky enough to have Susan (Taylor) Wasp, Caitlin (Connelly) Cooper, Ashley Saba, and Jaime Pauley at the wedding! I also recently caught up with Blair (Thompson) Bruning ’06 out in Los Angeles while on a work trip for Dartmouth, and I grabbed coffee here in Hanover with Allison O’Connell ’04! Always love to meet up with fellow Bulls.” CLASS CORRESPONDENT Brie (Keefe) Healy ’05 brie.keefe@gmail.com
’06 Want to connect with your classmates? Consider becoming a class correspondent and encouraging your classmates to reconnect in the HST class notes. Contact us at alumni@holderness.org for more information. Thank you! Tory Hayssen is living in Jackson Hole and working at Stio. “I hang out with Ashley Babcock, Ben
Betsy (O’Leary) Abelson ’07 and Stuart Abelson at their wedding in November with Betsy’s family, including James O’Leary ’09 and Charlotte O’Leary ’11
Peters, Ryan Caspar ’05, and Ryan Walters quite a bit!” she notes. “We have quite the 2006– 07 Jackson posse going.” … In September, Blair (Thompson) Bruning moved from New York City to Santa Monica, CA, where she’s working for an arts-related PR firm. “If you find yourself in SoCal, please reach out!” she writes. … Anne Richardson is also on the move: “I recently moved to the Boston area for a new job. It’s great to be back up North and in the same town as Carlie Bristow again!” … Molly Nissi writes, “I recently ran into Ax Hayssen ’07 and saw him win a squash tourna-
ment! And then I saw Tory Hayssen not long after; we caught up and missed Laney Hayssen ’09 a lot.” … Congratulations to Frances and Ben Mitchell-Lewis who had a baby, Hank Herter Lewis, in October. Ben writes, “I’m living in Portland, ME, and skiing with Brett Wagenheim ’04 and Nate Winebaum. Life is good. Cheers!” … Jess Saba is working on her first book, A Toolkit for Environmental Giving. She’ll be traveling the country for the next year to interview businesses with environmental grants programs. She will also be working in
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CLASS NOTES
Hope Heffernan ’15, Teagan Mosenthal ’15, Maggie Roberts ’15, and Celia Fleckner ’15 at the John Lennon Wall during the fall of 2017 in Prague, CZ
remote areas with non-profits to learn methods for solving environmental issues related to land, water, and wildlife conservation as well as solutions to climate change, pollution, and food systems issues.
’07 Tanner Mathison is working as a lawyer and living in Washington, DC. … Tim Hill writes, “I’m living in South Boston and working in commercial retail real estate for Conviser Property Group. I spend as much time as possible on Nantucket in the summers (never enough) and fly fish as much as humanly possible in Boston/Nantucket for striped bass. I have been the head coach for the Boston Youth Lacrosse team for the past six years and am currently serving as the director/president.” … Mimi O’Connor is also in DC: “I am currently working at The Watergate Hotel. I enjoyed seeing Taylor James and Mike Antoniou ’08 at a wedding in Watch Hill this June. I also celebrated my wedding volume one in Manchester, NH, and am looking forward to volume two in Kavala, Greece, this August! Hope everyone is doing well!” … Congratulations to Hannah
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(Corkery) Collins who was recently named the head women’s lacrosse coach at St. Lawrence University. … Arla Casselman is completing her master’s degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. … Stephen and Kourtney (Brim) Martin are stationed at Camp Lejeune, NC, where Stephen continues to work as an eod Technician in the UsMc, and Kourtney is a detective at the local police department. They have three children— Mitchell (four), Julia (three), and Aubrey (one). … Ax Hayssen reports, “I’m in San Francisco and Molly Nissi ’06 just moved to my ’hood. We hang out rather frequently, and it is always fun. Greg Ramey ’08 came to visit me when I wasn’t here, but he did get to stay in my apartment and left a great gift basket. Tory Hayssen ’06 is moving to Lake Tahoe (proud of her!) soon, and we’re looking forward to skiing Squalleywood together. Also, I ran into Dr. Richard Parker last week in Los Angeles on my way to Japan.” … Sarah Morrison writes, “After six years, I recently transitioned out of my role as lead of events and marketing at Foothold Technology and am now working as an independent producer for
holderness school today | SPRING 2018
Jon Courchesne ’17 playing junior hockey for the Seacoast Spartans
Elizabeth Johansson ’17, Emily Clifford ’15 and Chaselyn McLane ’17 at dinner in Paris while they all were studying abroad earlier this year
events and production, mainly in the realm of fashion.” CLASS CORRESPONDENT Annie Hanson ’07 annie.e.hanson@gmail.com
’08 (reunion) Craig Leach writes, “I work at a data storage company in Boston, right now, called Nasuni, with six of my closest friends from college. I recently moved from a long stint in South Boston, to the narrow, quiet streets of the North End. I enjoy seeing many Holderness alumni in the Northeast regularly.” … Annie Carney also lives and works in Boston. She is a senior
producer at MulleLowe US: “I have enjoyed visiting Holderness classmates in the past year, Amber (Stewart) McCormack in PeI and Julia Ford in Steamboat. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone at reunion!” … Jessi White reports, “I am working as the contract manager for a general contractor in Boston and living in North Quincy. I’ve been lucky to see a few Holderness alumni this year; I was with Betsy (O’Leary) Abelson ’07 and her family this summer and visited Amber (Stewart) McCormack with Annie Carney in October. I can’t wait to see everyone again at reunion!”
CLASS NOTES
Annabel Shirley Jastrebsky—daughter of Rachel (faculty) and Brian Jastrebsky—who was born on August 15, 2017 Will Prickett ’15 celebrating with a swig of maple syrup at the finish line of the Appalachian Trail this past spring
CLASS CORRESPONDENT Jessi White ’08 white.jessica.madigan@gmail.com
these students achieve higher levels of independence every day!”
’09
CLASS CORRESPONDENTS Abby Alexander ’10 abigail.jane.alexander@gmail.com
CLASS CORRESPONDENTS Meg McNulty ’09 mmcnulty@mail.smcvt.edu
Ashleigh Boulton ’10 amayboulton@gmail.com
Allison Stride ’09 astride@elon.edu
John McCoy ’10 johnsmccoy92@gmail.com
’10
Em Pettengill ’10 ehpettengill@gmail.com
Abby Alexander is finishing up her second year of medical school at Dartmouth. … Matthew Nolan recently moved to Utah to take a position with Goldman Sachs Bank. … Karen Abate reports, “I am finishing my third year of teaching at a school for students with autism and other severe disabilities. I am also currently deciding what to get my post-masters in! I would like for it to revolve around working with autism and behavior. I absolutely love my job. It is amazing to see
Elise Steiner ’10 elisehsteiner@gmail.com
’11 Jamie McNulty writes, “I’ve been living a ski bum’s dream out here in Alta, UT—working at a ski lodge, making minimum wage, and living with three roommates. I’ve seen plenty of familiar Holderness faces on the ski hill. If anyone is in the Salt Lake City area, gimme a holler!” … Sam
Macomber is in law school at Cornell in Ithaca, NY. He writes, “I will be working in New Hampshire this summer and am looking forward to checking in with the Holderness homies! I found Cole Phillips and Adam Sapers for some killer skiing in Jackson Hole in January.” … Nick Ford reports, “Ashleigh Boulton ’10 and I are both at Proctor. Ashleigh is a dorm parent, teaches in the learning skills department, and coaches Proctor’s eastern ski team. I am here just to pilfer the dining hall.” … Julien Klaudt-Moreau has been busy! “In September 2017, I started my masters in public health at Boston University while continuing to manage a surgical nGo in Vietnam. During my free time I trained for an ultra-marathon and ended up getting third place on January 6.” … Desi Bennett is currently at UMass Medical School. … Cecily Cushman lives and works in Boston, where she is a sales and event manager at the Charles Riverboat Company. “I love spending time with fellow alumni in the Boston area!” she writes. … Emily Hayes notes, “At
the end of the summer I moved in with Juliet Dalton! We love having friends from the Holderness Boston crew over to our place in Brookline. This winter I also went on a ski vacation with Amanda Engelhardt. At Alta we met up with Emily Starer, Madde Burnham, and Jamie McNulty. From there we saw Adam Sapers, Cole Phillips, Andrew Howe, and Klaus Vitzthum in Jackson Hole. On our last stop we found Josie Brownell ’12 in Sun Valley! All around it was an amazing week filled with Holderness friends.” … Juliet Dalton writes, “I’m training for my second marathon, still living in Boston, and enjoying spending time with other Holderness people here. I’m headed to Sri Lanka in March!” … Derek Pimentel is working at a boutique investment bank focused on mergers and acquisitions in the tech sector. He writes, “I’m still playing some good ol’ men’s league hockey. h-o-l-d-e-rn-e-s-s!” … Chandler Grisham writes, “I’m on a road trip to see Alex Obregon in Denver and Jamie McNulty in Utah this win-
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CLASS NOTES
During a trip to Denver, Neal Frei ’03 met up with a fine group of Bulls at the Rhine Haus in downtown Denver: current and past parents John and Susie Hayes, Blake ’01 and Kristin Barber, Madde Burnham ’11, Brandon Marcus ’12, Robert Sullivan ’13, and current parents Celia and Steve Rogers.
ter. After the road trip I’m going to Thailand and Bali for a month.” CLASS CORRESPONDENTS Cecily Cushman ’11 cncushman@gmail.com Amanda Engelhardt ’11 amanda.engelhardt29@gmail.com Sam Macomber ’11 samuel.macomber@gmail.com Jamie McNulty ’11 jamcnulty20@gmail.com
’12 Eliza Cowie reports, “After graduating from St. Lawrence in May, I drove cross-country with a friend from college and saw plenty of Holderness alumni in Jackson Hole, WY. I then took a job working for Congresswoman Ann McLane Kuster in her Washington, DC office.” … Nick Renzi writes, “I am the lead mechanical engineering intern at iRobot in Bedford. I will be there until June, and then I have to decide if I want to stay or head back to New York City.” … Sara Mogollón is working and playing hard: “I’ve been at the same influ-
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encer marketing company for a year and a half as an inside sales coordinator. I’ve been promoted with an expedited sales position and am now an account executive with my own book of business. Living in Manhattan makes me super restless so I’m going on two trips this spring. The first is a ski trip to Chamonix, and the second is a wine tour around Portugal. That’s my life in a nutshell!” … Owen Buehler is living with Jules Pichette and working at Groupon as a software engineer. … Oliver Nettere is living with Brian Friedman ’10 in Stamford, CT, and working for FarWide, a hunting and fishing tech start-up. … Stephanie Symecko writes, “I’m working in Austin, TX, and loving this city!” CLASS CORRESPONDENTS Matthew Kinney ’12 mnkinn12@gmail.com Alex Leininger ’12 alexbleininger@yahoo.com Kristina Micalizzi ’12 kmicalizzi08@gmail.com Steph Symecko ’12 ssymecko@gmail.com
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A group of Boulder Bulls gathered at Sanitas Brewing Company last November. The event was organized by John Hatch ’91, and gathered a wide-ranging group of alumni and friends. Academic Dean Peter Durnan also joined the fun. Pictured at the hearth behind the brewery are, front row: Peter Durnan, Charlie Sheffield ’14, Bobby Wassman ’14, Robby Larkin, Joy (Erdman) Larkin ’04, and Maddie Baker ’08 and friend. Second row: Sam Bass ’94, Ryan Bass, Kate (Stahler) Starrett ’94, Phoebe Erdman ’07, Jason Peck ’95, Jake Norton ’92, Melissa Tamplin ’94, Mike Whalley ’02, Bill Gleason ’69, John Hatch ’91, and John Leavitt ’04.
Assistant Director of Alumni and Parent Relations Neal Frei ’03 took a trip to northern New York to visit with this great group of young Bulls in December: Brooke Hayes ’17, Sam Smith ’16, Sasha Jones ’15, Celeste Holland ’14, Anna Soderberg ’16, Drew Houx ’14, Henry Day ’17, Garret Phillips ’14, Lindsey Houseman ’15, Parker Densmore ’15, and Gasper Sekelj ’97 and his daughter Kinsley.
’13 (reunion) Roland Nyama played in his first professional basketball season in Germany. … Macy Jones reports, “I am a senior at the University of Denver working toward a BS in psychology with a concentration in cognitive neuroscience and a secondary major in Spanish. I am the president and cofounder of the Food Recovery Network at
DU, an organization that delivers leftover food from DU dining halls to a homeless shelter in Denver. I am also the food waste diversion intern for Sodexo, and I am looking forward to graduating in the spring!” CLASS CORRESPONDENT Kelly DiNapoli ’13 kelldinap@gmail.com
CLASS NOTES
Tori Chernin ’17, Will Tessier ’15, Connor Marien ’14, Carson Holmes ’15, Kaelen Caggiula ’14, Perry Craver ’14, and Dave Leclerc ’16 met up during a pizza party at the University of New Hampshire in December that was organized by the Holderness School Advancement Office.
’14 Will Brandwijk was featured in an article in the Indiana Gazette recently about his basketball performance with the Crimson Hawks. CLASS CORRESPONDENTS CoCo Clemens ’14 conner.clemens@hws.edu Tess O’Brien ’14 tmobrien@uvm.edu Samuel Paine ’14 sfpaine@gmail.com
summer I hiked the Appalachian Trail which goes from Georgia to Maine, a total of over 2,192 miles. Along the way, I met hikers from all over the world and saw bears, snakes, and mountain lions. I helped a lost person out of the woods, hitchhiked with a woman who believed the government controls the weather, and dodged lightning bolts on a mountain ridgeline. It was a great experience and I’ve made some lifelong friends with whom I plan to do the Pacific Crest Trail in a few years.”
Garrett Phillips ’14 gwphil14@stlawu.edu
CLASS CORRESPONDENT Hope Heffernan ’15 hheffer1@villanova.edu
Elizabeth Powell ’14 epowell@conncoll.edu
’16
Stephen Wilk ’14 802.786.2255
’15 Hope Heffernan, Teagan Mosenthal, Maggie Roberts, and Celia Fleckner all studied abroad this past fall. The group all came together for a visit in Teagan and Celia’s host country of Prague, CZ. … William Prickett writes, “This past winter, spring, and
Want to connect with your classmates? Consider becoming a class correspondent and encouraging your classmates to reconnect in the HST class notes. Contact us at alumni@holderness.org for more information. Thank you! Former Holderness teammates Thomas Jackson and Daniel Cabassa ’17 met up at the college level, Post vs Saint Michael’s (respectively), for a good game of basketball.
The Class of 2012 ladies at their five-year reunion
’17 Chase McLane writes, “Since graduating, I have been enjoying exploring Paris and Europe! I am attending the American University of Paris for my freshman year, and it has been incredible to experience all that Paris has to offer. I am eager to attend my dream school, the University of Southern California, starting this fall!” … Kayli Cutler reports from Yale, “It has been an easy transition from Holderness and living the boarding school lifestyle. I am really enjoying my classes and am leaning towards being a history major.” … Sam Mason is “Chillin’, club skiing, and enjoying life at college. I’ve been working hard, am a writing tutor; all is well.” … Jon Courchesne has been traveling to Toronto, Montreal, Lake Placid, and all over New England playing junior hockey: “I play 80 games a year and spend every day with the same 26 guys,” he notes. “The season is coming to a close, and I will begin my spring and summer training at the end of March.” … Elizabeth Johansson writes, “I hope all is well back at Holderness. Emily Clifford ’15, Chase McLane, and I were able to coordinate a dinner abroad in Paris! It was great to reconnect and catch up on each other’s
adventures both near and far. Our gathering reminded each of us of the bonds Holderness imparts— and how it transcends the Plymouth locale!” … Ella Mure reports, “Following graduation at Holderness, I decided to take a gap year to travel, work, and just take a break. Since then I have traveled to Japan where I hiked Mt. Fuji, to California, and to Florida where my aunt lives. I also went to the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, ran in the Philadelphia Marathon, and volunteered in Morocco. I’m currently at the Island School in the Bahamas, taking part in a gap year program that includes getting certified in scuba diving, participating in an internship, going on camping trips, and having a blast. When I get back I’m planning to head back down to Florida to help my aunt with her art business. Besides that, I’d also like to just take some time off from travel and stay at home and spend some time with my family and friends. This year has been so much more than I could ever have hoped for, and I’m so glad I took the time to explore the world and make some great memories before college.” CLASS CORRESPONDENT Elizabeth Johansson ’17 ecjohansson17@gmail.com
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The Order of the Tie
Look closely for a Cubs tie appearance in this photo from commencement in 1983. (The photo was shared by Jamey Gallop, Class of 1983.)
by rick carey At Holderness there exists a necktie of such talismanic power that it just might have helped win the 2016 World Series. Tradition. In Fiddler On the Roof, Tevye the Milkman mentions several examples of such in his Jewish village of Anatevka: the practice of wearing a shawl while you pray, for example. “You may ask how did this tradition start?” Tevye says to the audience. “I’ll tell you—I don’t know.” e origins of traditions, religious or otherwise, are often shrouded in mystery—which has something to do, probably, with their hold over us, the power they exert. Sometimes it’s almost as if a tradition starts itself, independent of human agency. Which brings us to an odd little tradition, but a powerful one, that unites Holderness School and Major League Baseball’s Chicago Cubs. You may ask—the Cubs? Seriously? Not
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the Red Sox? No, it had to be the Cubs. Call it magic if you like. It’s too improbable for science.
You’re Wearing My Tie Among the Holderness alumni attending Reunion 2017 in October was Chris Pesek ’82. And one of the events of that weekend—well, it’s a tradition—was a panel in which a mix of faculty, staff, and current students describe what life is like today at the school. Chris had grown up in Lake Forest, IL, and he had been happy enough to come East for boarding school because there were other kids from Lake Forest at Holderness. Last fall, returning so many years later, he found this panel discussion inspiring. “e school has changed in many ways, of course, but I was thrilled to learn how vibrant this little ecosystem remains,” he said.“e enduring principles—like the importance of community, the commitment to developing the whole student/athlete/citizen, and others—are still there.” He was also still glowing from a chapel talk the previous evening given by Director of
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College Counseling Bruce Barton, a talk in which Bruce conceded that as the school has changed and evolved, some things have been lost—yet much is still the same: sit-down dinners, for example, or singing in chapel, or moaning about pantry job assignments. “But here is one last one—the students who are here today would be your friends if you were here today,” Bruce added. “I often say this to alums because it is the single most comforting thing I can find to say in the wave of change that is the human experience. Through all the changes and evolution, we still have wonderful kids who pitch in and help, who say hi and smile, and who seek lives of balance and meaning.” Sometimes we’re surprised by what holds fast through change and evolution, and Chris could hardly contain his own surprise as during that panel discussion he noticed the necktie worn by one of its participants, school President Nick Grammas ’18. It was a plain Navy blue tie, more than a little frayed. At its bottom, in faded royal blue and strawberry red, was a Chicago Cubs team logo. Once the panel discussion concluded, Chris sought Nick out, introduced himself, and said, “I think that’s my tie.”
Leave It to Mom at previous commencement, in 2017, Nick had been presented that tie he wore to Reunion by Connor Preston ’17, who in turn had received it exactly a year before from Sam Meau ’16. “Sam caught up to me in the dining hall after graduation and he brought me outside to give me this tie he was wearing,” Connor said. “He told me what he knew about it, which was not much, actually. But he emphasized that there were three occasions each year that the tie had to be worn: the first day of school, the allschool photo, and commencement. en I pass it on to someone I think deserving. And I had no idea that this was done.”
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Connor brought the tie home to Lake Placid, NY, where his mother Tricia couldn’t help wondering about this tie that needed a cleaning, but that was so tattered she didn’t dare—and a Cubs tie, of all things? Conversation ensued. Why was this given to Connor? Something to do with character, sort of an honor, he said, but he wasn’t really sure. How long has this been going on? Don’t know. How did it get started? Shrugs. “Well, we’ve got to find out about this stuff.” “Mom, you know how boys are,” Connor said. “We don’t really care—we just do it.” Nonetheless an investigation was launched, which began with the moms, not the boys. Tricia sent a text to Sam’s mother, who was able to enlarge on selection criteria: qualities of character, leadership, athleticism, rather like what the school admissions office has in mind. And Sam received the tie from whom? Charlie Day ’15. It soon got to be archeology, carried out not with spade and brush, but rather email and social media. Tricia was able to trace in reverse the Order of the Tie from Charlie Day to Matt Gudas ’14, and then to Gavin Bayreuther ’12, and so on through the decades. It was only when she got to origins—as happens so often in that borderland between myth and history—that things got murky. Well, she had come to the ground floor of a tradition that no one really intended to start in the first place and that needed a jolt of serendipity to gain momentum. And to even think that a Chicago Cub tie could become a Holderness student heirloom? Well, the odds on that were as good as the Cubs ever winning the World Series—slim to none.
Percival the Grocery Clerk Like Chris Pesek, Boyd Boggess ’81 was from the flatlands of Lake Forest, and yet he grew up a ski racer. So did his brother Spencer ’85. They raced on winter weekends in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and
they loved Holderness for its balance between the ski program and other sports—which included baseball. And for Lake Forest kids, baseball in a spiritual sense meant the Cubs. Each year on Spencer’s birthday the whole family went to Wrigley Field. Boyd came to Holderness with several ties that had belonged to his father, among them a couple of hand-made beauties from Smith’s Men’s Shop in Lake Forest and emblazoned with the Cubs logo. “I was just a die-hard Cubs fan, and I wore those ties a few random times—nothing ceremonial or meaningful about it,” Boyd said. “Now Spencer—he was much more of a radical than I was.” Chris Pesek was more or less Boyd’s contemporary, and Chris had a brother whose birthday in April happened to coincide each year with opening day for the Cubs. So a birthday observance at Wrigley was also a Pesek family tradition. With two such cake-fed, Cubcrazed families represented on campus at the same time, perhaps it’s not implausible that as many as two students would occasionally be sporting a Cubbie tie from the same apparel shop in Lake Forest. Like Boyd, Chris had nothing in mind in his apparel beyond showing brave allegiance to a team that hadn’t won the World Series since 1908 and was laboring under the Curse of the Billy Goat (incurred in 1945 when the owner of the nearby Billy Goat Tavern was barred from bringing his pet goat into Wrigley). “I just wore the tie a few times,” Chris said. “And I did wear it to commencement. Afterwards Jamey Gallop [’83] asked if he could have it. en I lost track of it.” As Jamey recalls, he didn’t really ask—he was just sort of handed the tie. He was from Tarrytown, NY, was more or less a Yankee fan, though not seriously interested in baseball. But he enjoyed, let’s say, the challenge of carrying the colors of another team in the heart of Red Sox Nation, especially one that surpassed even the Sox for World Series futility.
And indeed Jamey wore the tie to his own commencement—and he passed it on, but he couldn’t remember to whom. Eventually it was found that he had given it to Craig Westling ’84. Meanwhile Spencer Boggess, once he arrived on campus, was proving himself the iconoclast his brother claimed him to be. “I was an absolutely rabid Cubs fan, and I wore my Cubs tie relentlessly,” he said. “e Cubs weren’t even lovable losers in those days—more like mildly endearing. e Red Sox at least were competitive. e Cubs, by contrast, were beyond pathetic. ey didn’t even earn the respect of contempt—all you could feel was pity. I mean, this is the club that gave up on Lou Brock. And to advertise yourself as a Cubs fan at a place like Holderness was rather exotic, an unorthodox enthusiasm, sort of like enjoying medieval poetry.” But it wasn’t merely the Cubs, or even the poetry of it all, that made Spencer such an inyour-face sort of tie wearer. “I never wore what you could call polite ties at Holderness anyway,” he said. “It was a way to calibrate my sustained rebellion against the tyranny of the blue blazer, or I guess what passes for rebellion at an Episcopal boarding school. So of course at commencement I made a point of wearing a tie that was regulation blue, but also subversive in several ways.” Spencer remembers nothing premeditated about the aftermath—just a mock-heroic flourish, whipping the tie off after the ceremony and handing it to Jason Frasca ’87, a friend who lived on his same dorm floor, with a cry of “Keep the tradition going! e Cub tie shall prevail!” Of course Spencer knew there was no such tradition at Holderness—which was exactly the point. He also probably believed that, in the long run, a silk tie had a better shot at prevailing at, well, whatever, than did the Cubs. Jason, of course, remembers it differently— sure, this wouldn’t be genuine history otherwise. He describes a try-out period in which Spencer challenged him to prove his
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worth by, for example, memorizing the Cubs’ team roster, but alas, failing to do so. After commencement, “when Spencer was strutting off, I didn’t expect him to relinquish the tie when I hit him up—especially to lowly me,” Jason said. at’s when—deus ex machina— legendary English teacher/football coach Norm Walker interceded. “At the time, Coach didn’t know me from any other un-athletic and generally un-inclined submale,” Jason said.“But he did overhear my sincere pledge and offered to act as trustee on the deal. So at that very moment, to my surprise, Spencer pulled off the tie and handed it over.” When presented that version of the event, Spencer effectively gave a shrug and said, “Well, that sounds as right as anything, I guess.” Perhaps in the end it was none other than Mr. Walker who ensured that the tie would prevail—because this whole tradition did have trouble getting out of the batter’s box, as it were. Craig Westling, who was about to succeed Jamey Gallop as a lacrosse co-captain, remembers feeling touched to receive the Pesek tie, “super-honored” to accept the tie in recognition, he was told, of hard work and contributions to the community. But he’s not sure that he was aware of the special occasions on which it was supposed to be worn. He did wear it to commencement, and that’s when the mists of time thicken into soup for this branch of the tradition. Craig thinks, maybe, he gave it to Angus Christie ’85. Angus says no, and it appears that Chris Pesek’s tie was just lost in transmission that year. Meanwhile Jason Frasca thinks of himself as “an undeserving Percival in what sounds like this emerging Excalibur legend.” A sophomore in 1985, he kept Spencer’s tie two years, and as he understood it, he was supposed to wear it on Holderness game days. “Unfortunately, this is where the story takes a shameful turn, as I didn’t do so,” he said. “But I did wear the damned thing to my graduation. And of course immediately afterwards Coach Walker came over and got me to hand it off.”
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Jason gave it to Jake Eismeier ’88, and with that the Cubbie tie was not just out of the batter’s box at Holderness—it was on its way to prevailing. Looking back, Jason continues to find ways to suggest how unlikely all this was. To shift metaphors once more: “I was just a grocery clerk,” he said,“delivering, um, the Grail.”
The Billy Goat Eclipsed Even the Red Sox were on their way to prevailing, winning their first World Series since 1918 in 2004 (and so claiming that different sort of Grail), and winning two more championships in 2007 and 2013. One of the important people to share the credit for those first two series wins happened to be Jed Hoyer ’92, who—after a stellar baseball career at Wesleyan, and then scuffling through several different jobs—landed an internship with the Red Sox in 2002. That same year the Sox hired young Theo Epstein as general manager, and young Jed made himself invaluable to the new GM with his skills in budgeting, statistical analysis, player evaluation, and persuasion. In 2003 Jed was the point man, for example, in convincing right-handed power pitcher Curt Schilling that he could win in Fenway Park. Schilling subsequently accepted a trade to the Sox and became the ace of the ’04 series-winning pitching staff, a pillar of the ’07 staff. Okay, it’s one thing to defeat the Curse of the Bambino by raising a competitive baseball franchise to greatness—what about the Curse of the Billy Goat and that pathetic operation in Chicago? In 2011 Epstein assumed that challenge by leaving the Red Sox to become president of the Cubs—and he immediately installed Jed, who had been general manager of the San Diego Padres since 2009, as the Cubs’ new general manager. For the next three years the Cubbies finished last in the National League Central division, results that felt like déjà vu all over again to the Boggesses, the Peseks, and the rest of that long-suffering fan base. But at the same time, Jed and Epstein were rebuilding the Cubs’
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farm system, sniffing out young talent, and attracting such productive free agents as former Red Sox pitching ace Jon Lester. In 2015 the Cubs actually reached the National League Championship Series. In 2016 they won 103 games, swept through the NLcS, and then beat the Cleveland Indians in a sevengame October classic to claim the World Series, the Grail, and the total eclipse of the Billy Goat. A still incredulous Spencer Boggess remembers the day: “‘Did that just happen?’ I was saying that to myself over and over. ‘Really? Did that really happen?’”
A Trade That Had to be Made So you may ask—did Jed Hoyer wear the Cubbie tie while he was at Holderness? “No,” Jed said. “And if I was ever aware of it at all, I’ve forgotten.” But he became aware of it as a consequence of that series win. e feat of helping to pull off back-to-back impossible dream turnarounds with Major League Baseball’s two most historically snake-bitten franchises not only made Jed one of the game’s most decorated executives, it also made him the 2017 commencement speaker at Holderness. And as he was preparing for this appearance, in a conference call last spring with several current students, this weird sort of Excalibur tale—some of it anyway—came out in bits and pieces: Connor Preston has this Chicago Cubs tie, he got it from Sam Meau, who got it from somebody else, and nobody knows why this Cubs tie is here or where it came from, or when, but somehow it’s here, like the velvet Elvis that appears at both ends of every all-school photo. No one on the conference call knew this, but over the decades the responsibilities of wearing the tie had been formalized into those three ceremonial occasions: first day, all-school photo, and commencement. And the qualifications for wearing it had evolved into some combination of the character strengths used as the basis for school leadership elections— except instead of an all-school vote, it’s a
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Connor Preston ’17 with Jed Hoyer ’92 after commencement in 2017
one-guy vote. Sam had voted for Connor, and now the general manager of the Cubs, a Holderness alumnus, was coming to speak at graduation? “Well, Connor just went through the ceiling when he heard about that,” Tricia Preston recalled. Never was a ratty old tie worn with such pride as was that item around Connor’s neck as he lined up with classmates that morning in June for their entrance into the Livermore terrace. Connor was wondering if Jed might somehow notice the tie as he came up for his diploma, hoping he might have a chance to talk with the speaker afterwards. Not to worry. Jed was on the lookout for Connor during the line-up, and the two were introduced by Jed’s old classmate, Director of Athletics Rick Eccleston ’92. en Jed drew
Connor aside in order to enlist his help in something he wanted to accomplish during his speech. Later, at the podium, Jed described an assignment he once had—in theology class, from chaplain Walt Kesler—to describe how he saw himself in the future. “I wrote about how I hoped to be general manager of the Boston Red Sox,” Jed said, “and, candidly, I felt a bit foolish. I will never forget that Mr. Kesler, a well-known Red Sox fan, wrote at the top, ‘Me too!’” en Jed described the various jobs after college that had little or nothing to do with that dream, but that taught him skills with numbers, analysis, evaluation that he would use later when he heard one day from a friend that the Sox were looking for an intern. Once Jed
had reached that career point in his speech where he was GM of the Cubs (yeah, had to settle for that) and the series was won, he mentioned that GMs are called upon to make trades sometimes, and there was one he wanted to make today. He called Connor forward, and ceremoniously that ratty old tie was exchanged for Jed’s most recent World Series ring. It was, as you may ask, a good moment.
Another Way to Remember Kip It was also one of those trades that was good for both teams—even if it was only ceremonial, since the trade was reversed when Jed and Connor rendezvoused afterwards. “e tie has great sentimental value, and the ring has great sentimental value,” said Jed with a smile. “In
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School President Nick Grammas ’18 (current owner of the Cubs tie) with Chris Pesek ’82 (one of the possible original owners of the tie) during Alumni and Homecoming Reunion
that case, the tie-breaker has to be the object with diamonds on it.” Jed had much enhanced that sentimental value, however, as well as begun an ongoing friendship/mentorship with Connor. When Connor in turn presented the tie to Nick Grammas, it was given and received with a gravitas, no doubt, greater than ever before. And yet even then the Cubbie tie might quietly have returned to its previous Delphic obscurity had not Nick worn it to Reunion the next fall, and had not Chris Pesek attended that panel. In the glow of such magic, it became too big a phenomenon to be left alone, and suddenly there was a hungry market for Tricia Preston’s arcane research. And as with the series win, Spencer Boggess remembers the moment he heard about it: “at tie is still there? Jesus, how the hell did that happen?” In one corner, though, Tricia’s dogged success in tracing the lineage of the tie, from neck to neck through all the decades, occasioned some heartache. Said Jed Hoyer, “When I
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learned that the kid who had worn it in my class was Kip Garre—well, I wish I had known that at commencement. I would have said something. I would have woven it in. It would have been a wonderful place to honor a terrific classmate.” Indeed. Kip and Jed had been friends, and Kip had gone on to became a famed ski mountaineer—until he and his girlfriend died in an avalanche on California’s Split Mountain in 2011.
Like Prayer Shawls in Anatevka Like the rest of his brotherhood, Kip had worn the tie quietly, with hardly anybody else noticing. Suddenly Nick Grammas blinks in the klieg lights of celebrity, or at least a small boarding school’s version of it. And the tie itself? Well, you can’t buy that in Lake Forest anymore, but Chris Pesek thinks he might be able to arrange the making of a good hand-made facsimile. Spencer Boggess thinks the current tie should be sent
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post-haste to the Smithsonian: “It seems to have talismanic powers.” Meanwhile there is conversation at Holderness about a gathering of the entire Order of the Tie at—where else?—Wrigley Field, Jed Hoyer hosting. Yet Chris can’t help but feel a bit uneasy about the attention this little custom is drawing now. “This is has been something that’s been going on all by itself, and underground, for 35 years,” he said. “Some traditions are more fragile than others, and I wouldn’t want to see any pressure exerted about who gets the tie next, or any gaming of the system. It’s always been just a natural, sincere little gesture. Can it stay that way?” Another lesson history teaches is that what’s famous today is chopped liver tomorrow. Nick indeed might feel some pressure in choosing his successor this year, and that worthy knight might feel it too in 2019. But sooner or later, as with most traditions, the mists of time will thicken again, and—like prayer shawls in Anatevka—we’ll have no idea why we’re wearing it. We just do it because it’s something our friends—who pitch in and help, who say hi and smile—have always done, and shared, and remembered to keep doing. •
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