ISSUE TEN | WINTER 2018
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EDITOR Dulcey Antonucci
A Tribute to a Legend
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Michael Schwartz ’98
ART DIRECTION, DESIGN & LAYOUT Nicole Patterson
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Clare Jackson ‘18 Steve Lisk Lauren MacKinnon ‘18 Michael Schwartz ’98 David Winner ’19
contents
PHOTOGRAPHY
Anne Amman ’98 AP Images Joanne Blitz Bloomsbury Press Blue Moon Publishers Yi Chin Lee Columbia University Press Courtesy Keri Blakinger ‘02 Courtesy Michael Diebert ‘92 Courtesy Andy Farmer ‘71 Wendy Del Terzo Eater Hayden Feddock ’20 Mary Ferris Eric Forberger Nick Gould Austin Hannis Henry Holt Publisher Houston Chronicle Lifetouch Steve Lisk LNP New York Times Meg Reed Michael Schwartz ’98 David Sinclair Godofredo Vasquez Karen Warren Donna Wilcox David Winner ‘19 Heather Woodbridge Jack Zuckerman
issue no.
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winter 2018
o n t h e cov e r
Andy Farmer in 1980 at WWBT-TV in Richmond, Va. He began as a reporter covering city government and breaking news, and soon rose to assignment manager. o n t h e b ac k
A mural in Barcelona, photographed by Michael Deibert ’92.
LCDS CONTACTS Anne Dandridge Amman ’98
Director of Constituent & Alumni Relations ext. 328 ammana@lancastercountryday.org
Dulcey Antonucci
CONNECT
Paul Dillon
Director of Communications ext. 229 antonuccid@lancastercountryday.org Director of Admission ext. 227 dillonp@lancastercountryday.org
Shelby LaMar
Chief Advancement Officer ext. 231 lamars@lancastercountryday.org
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Lancaster Country Day School Fans Lancaster Country Day School 725 Hamilton Road | Lancaster, PA 17603 717-392-2916 www.lancastercountryday.org CONNECTIONS is published twice a year. ©2018 Lancaster Country Day School
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Lancaster Country Day School
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In the News
8 Sports Highlights 12 Facility News
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Facility News
30
Interview Q&A: Writing is Easy, It’s Thinking That’s Hard
34 Graduation 2017
f eatures
36 A Tribute to a Legend
16
The Seeker
37
Class Notes
40
People & Places
42
#LCDSLoveStories
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Alumni Weekend 2017
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In Memoriam
51
FundFest 2017
24
An Ordinary Day for Keri
20
Bringing ‘Broadcast News’ to Bureaucracy
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elevating the
Dialogue W
hen the news itself is dismissed as fake news, and when the quality of our political discourse is in freefall toward ever-new lows, how we understand and make sense of our general condition today matters. Effective understanding requires a level of discourse that we seem hungry to find — or perhaps, to find again.
We continually strive to realize the promise of our motto — Fax mentis et cordis incendium gloriae — “The spark that kindles the mind and heart illuminates a lifetime.”
So in this edition of Connections, we have turned our spotlight to journalism. A well informed populace is a prerequisite for a healthy democracy. Reasonable people can disagree on any number of issues. What’s vital, though, is that we maintain a fundamental consensus on what’s true and what is not. It’s hard to imagine a time more urgently in need of thorough, thoughtful reporting and the honest information it provides.
Critical thinking is perhaps the most important skill we impart democracy. at Lancaster Country Day, and it was certainly the one that best served class of 1976 graduate Jonathan Lyons, whether he was covering the fall of the Soviet Union from Moscow or helping improve the quality of reporters’ work as a senior editor for Reuters in Washington, D.C.
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” wrote James Madison in Federalist No. 51. This fundamental observation reminds us that perfection in our politicians is unattainable. Yet, the well-being of our society and our place in the world relies on our collective ability to understand and discern the larger problems before us. From the perspective of our school, the traditional focus of a good education on critical thinking and writing skills made sense for past generations, and the need for these skills remains paramount. We have never wavered in ensuring these essentials are taught throughout our curriculum.
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A well informed populace is a prerequisite for a healthy
Lyons said, “I learned perhaps the most important lesson of my 21 years with Reuters: that the challenge of reporting and writing news lies not with the act of writing — any educated person can learn to write acceptable news copy — but in the act of thinking.” Cultivating critical thinkers and lifelong learners will continue to be among our highest goals at LCDS. So long as we continue to do our job as educators well, I have an enduring faith that our graduates will continue to go into the world and contribute positively.
{ news }
1/30/17 | The New York Times
Where George Washington Slept (Perhaps Not Well) Gina Jarvis Whelan ’74, a textile conservator, helped to preserve George Washington’s tent.
in the news news . lancastercountryday . org / in - the - news
2/14/17 | WITF “Smart Talk”
Cultivating Female Owned Businesses Melisa Baez ’04 discussed cultivating female-owned businesses in Central Pa. 5/10/17 | WGAL
Lancaster County students escort “Duck Family” to new home
For many years, students and staff have helped a duck family to a nearby stream. 5/18/17 | The New York Times
A Call to Action: Winners From Our Fourth Annual Student Editorial Contest Jack Zuckerman ’16 earned Honorable Mention for his essay “We Should Be Teaching Rap Music in Schools.” 10/24/17 | Eater
Inside the Joyfully Deranged Kitchen of Amy Sedaris
Mark Ibold ’80 was on the premier episode of TruTv’s “At Home With Amy Sedaris.”
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f aculty news
The entire LCDS faculty is engaged in a year-long professional development project to become versed in mind, brain and education science research. In addition to reading “Neuroteach: Brain Science and the Future of Education” by Glenn Whitman and Ian Kelleher, faculty will participate in blog groups, division meetings and faculty activities to discuss ideas about incorporating research into the day-to-day classroom experience. …
INTERNATIONAL DOT DAY
International Dot Day art display for preschool through fifth grade ABOVE |
S
tudents in preschool through fifth grade celebrated International Dot Day on Sept. 15, by working on their own dot-based artwork that fit the grade’s larger theme. Their work and the day itself comes from Peter H. Reynolds’ book, “The Dot," about courage, creativity, self-expression and perseverance. A teacher encourages a student who thinks she’s no good at art to just start by making a dot. From that modest beginning, she expands her work and confidence, eventually overcoming her doubts and blossoming into an artist with the strength to encourage and inspire others.
A Dot Day creation by Gabbie Groff ’27
ABOVE LEFT |
In June, James Ringlein participated in the College Board’s Annual AP Reading in AP Physics 1 exams in Kansas City. … In July, LCDS teacher Catherine Haddad taught at the Wenli International School in Zhejiang Province, China. The 20-day summer camp focuses on recitation and memorization of the classics of Chinese, English, German and Sanskrit. Students learn to recognize characters and words, even if they can’t read them per se, and through this process they commit the entire works to memory. Haddad said, “When you absorb these classic works, it cultivates your heart and makes you a more noble person. It just elevates you.”
“It just elevates you.” 6 | CONNECTIONS |
new f aculty
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since j anuary 2 017
Anne Amman ’98 Director of Alumni Relations
Jenny Gabriel Head of US
Jeff Pasternak-Post MS History
Joanne Biltz Technology
Bill Griscom US Comp Science
Pavel Pochobradsky Director of Technology
Kevin Cotchen Groundskeeper
Jesse Korff US English
Chelsea Pomponio US Humanities
Ruby Dhillon Asst. Director of Admission
Shelly Landau Special Projects Administrator
Trex Proffitt MS History
Paul Dillon Director of Admission
Starlett Murray Business Office
Sasha Shand ’02 Assistant to Head/Asst. Head of School
Mary Ferris LS Art
Harry Myrick US Math
Corinne Topper Director of Annual Giving
Joie Formando MS/US Librarian
Michelle O’Donnell College Guidance Counselor
Beky Weidner Ceramics
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board m e m bers
Lancaster Country Day School has named Lou Castelli and David Lieb to its board of trustees for three-year terms.
Lou Castelli and his wife, Mary Atlee Castelli, are the parents of Sienna ’26, Colton ’28, Rex ’30 and Bo ’32. Based in Lancaster, Lou is a private capital markets investment banker with Chapman Associates. Prior to joining Chapman as managing director in 2014, he was a partner in a lower middle market private equity firm. He earned his bachelor’s degree in finance from the Stillman School of Business at Seton Hall and his MBA from the S.C. Johnson School of Business at Cornell University.
global f aculty e x change
David Lieb and his wife, Jen, are the parents of Maddie ’22 and Annabelle ’25 and live in Birdsboro. He is a corporate restructuring consultant. He earned bachelor’s degrees in finance and accounting from Drexel University. He began his career at Deloitte, and then held chief financial officer positions in restructuring environments before beginning his own firm. f arewells
Our love and thanks go out to the following faculty and staff members who have decided to retire or move on. Paul Allen Director of Admission | 3 years Caroline Henderson Ceramics | 17 years
I
n early November, Country Day hosted Fiona Kennedy, the first teacher to visit LCDS as part of our new faculty exchange with Kelvinside Academy in Scotland. Most of Kennedy’s time was spent introducing variations of handball to students of all ages. Kelvinside’s handball team has won 15 national titles and its players make up a third of the roster for the Scottish national handball squad. Director of Global Programs Heather Woodbridge said, “Fiona would have fit in well regardless, but being a PE teacher really allowed her to reach all three divisions and experience as broad a classroom experience as you can get.” Kennedy’s visit was part of a larger faculty exchange program. Last spring, LCDS Learning Specialist Jill Englert kicked off the exchange when she spent a week teaching at Kelvinside.
Kelvinside Academy Faculty Exchange
Lori Hunter LS Art | 11 years Abby Kirchner College Counselor | 5 years Patti Maurer Assistant to the Head of School | 7 years Allen Miller MS History | 8 years Jamie Beth Schindler Admission Associate | 6 years Mike Schmelder Director of IS | 7 years Vic Taylor Head of MS | 3 years
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sports and chess highlights
After leading the Tri-Valley League with a 78.75 scoring average, Nick Hooper ’19 garnered most valuable player honors and All-Star status. After he was a District III medalist and qualified for the PIAA State Golf Championship.
The Pennsylvania Soccer Coaches Association named Matt Lane ’18 to its boys all-state team.
For the first time in school history, boys tennis won the PIAA District III Boys Tennis Team Championship. Jonah Rebert ’20 and George Markley ’19 went on to compete in the PIAA State Tennis Singles Tournament. Rebert won his first round match before falling in the quarterfinals, while Markley lost in his first round match to the eventual state champion. The team finished second in the PIAA State Boys Tennis Team Championships.
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The Country Day and Conestoga Christian School varsity boys soccer teams raised $1,170 for the American Cancer Society in the annual Cougars for a Cure game Oct. 2.
Country Day placed second in the Lancaster-Lebanon Elementary Chess Tournament. Henry Clapper ’23 tied for first place on Board One and Matthew MacKinnon ’23 tied for first place on Board Three in the championship match against the eventual winners from Our Mother of Perpetual Help.
{ news } hori z ons ’ update
j ar v is scholars
Horizons’ Third Year
T
hree years ago, Lancaster Country Day School welcomed 14 rising first-graders from Martin Elementary in the School District of Lancaster as the inaugural class of its Horizons program. Since then, the group has grown to 48 students, including every Funding for Horizons comes from grants and member of that first class. Horizons is a national organization that partners with independent schools and colleges to help lowincome students realize their academic potential. Horizons’ chief aim is to help at-risk children avoid the “summer slide” of falling behind — or even further behind — their peers over summer vacation. This year Middle School students were able to volunteer in the “Volunteer in Training” program, and a total of 52 Upper and Middle School students volunteered in the classroom.
individual donations and is entirely separate from Country Day’s budget. The program is free for students.
LCDS Awards $12,000 in Jarvis Scholarships Country Day awarded three $12,000 John A. Jarvis Merit Scholarships to area students. All Middle and Upper School applicants were eligible and scholarships are renewable each year through graduation. The scholarship honors former Head of School John Jarvis, who sought to make LCDS accessible to a wide range of deserving students. This year's recipients are Jackson Odom, Peter Josef Plaggenborg and Steven Hu Yao. • Ninth-grader Jackson is the son of Jennifer Hoffman and Paul Odom of Harrisburg. He plays soccer and golf, and also plays the drums. At his previous school, he participated in science club and qualified for the KidWind national competition the past two years, earning first and second place awards. • Ninth-grader Peter is the son of Laurie and Johannes Plaggenborg of Wyomissing. At his previous school, he was in the Junior National Honor Society and student council, and he played basketball and lacrosse.
Monica Trego, general manager of Tanger Outlets, presented Chief Advancement Officer Shelby LaMar, LCDS Art Chair Diane Wilikofsky, and Director of Annual Giving Corinne Topper with a $1,500 TangerKIDS grant. The money was used to purchase a 3D printer (shown left) for the Middle School art curriculum.
• Seventh-grader Steven is the son of Jenny Hu and Weijun John Yao of York. He plays soccer and swims, and plays clarinet in the school band. Steven also plays piano and draws. He has won a local award for piano, and state and national awards for his drawings.
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...look around to “explore the wonderful,
intriguing complexities of the outside world.
”
en v iron m ental stewards
TACO All Week at LCDS Since its inception in 2012, “Take A Child Outside” (TACO) week has sought to bring classroom lessons to life and instill in students an environmental ethic. Middle School Teacher and Green School Coordinator Barbara Bromley explained that the essence of the week is to help students learn to be good environmental stewards. “It’s also important,” Bromley said, “to provide time for students to spend away from devices or screens and look around to explore the wonderful, intriguing complexities of the outside world.”
‘Almost, Maine’ Makes Theater History
T
Teacher Barbara Bromley shows fifth-grader Llarimar Vidot how to read the sundial she made, while Addison Allen gives hers a try.
he Lancaster Country Day School production of John Cariani’s “Almost, Maine” featured the largest cast and crew in recent Country Day history: 47 students, from sixth-12th grade. The play is a romantic comedy that consists of more than a dozen “main” characters in 11 short scenes that all take place the same night in Maine, under the Northern Lights.
“Part of the reason I love this play so much is that it’s just real life. These scenes can happen and people will be able to relate to it,” said director Kristin Wolanin. According to Playbill, ‘Almost Maine’ was the most produced play in North American high schools twice since its 2004 debut. “Of everything we’ve done since I started, this play has been the most challenging one for the actors,” Wolanin said. “There’s nothing for them to hide behind. Other shows had lots of farce or iambic pentameter or something else that interposed itself between the actors’ real lives and their performances. This is asking them to just be real. That’s the greatest challenge for any actor.”
LANCASTER COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL’S RACE FOR HOME RAISED $851 FOR LANCASTER AREA HABITAT FOR HUMANITY.
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Junior Lauren Lennon lights a candle at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
O
n a balmy, mid-September day, the Lancaster Country Day junior class embarked on a field trip to Washington, D.C., and one of the most important memorials in the country.
After walking through the cold, dark hallways of the museum, you find yourself in the Hall of Remembrance. Sunlight streams through long, skinny slits of glass. It is inexplicably warm and bright; the walls seems to glow with a yellow hue. Far removed from recordings of Nazi propaganda, the room is quiet and solitary.
‘For the Dead and the Living, We Must Bear Witness’
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is dedicated to the millions of Jews, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, Serb civilians, people By David Winner ’19 with disabilities, The sound of your Gypsies, Jehovah’s own breathing Witnesses, Nazi echoes up to the political opponents, high ceiling and and LGBTQ peoples who were syscascades back down a million times tematically murdered from 1933-1945 over, creating what sound like myriad in Nazi Germany and elsewhere. It is a tiny whispers. A pleasant smell wafts museum created so that we never forget through the air, emanating from the six million Jews killed by a regime candles which adorn the walls. On the which sought to eradicate the Jewish far side of the room, resting on a block people entirely. of granite, burns a small flame. Above it, an inscription reads: It is also a sobering reminder that genocide is not a thing of the past; it “Only guard yourself and guard your continues right now, in countries such soul carefully, lest you forget the things as Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, your eyes saw, and lest these things the Central African Republic and depart your heart all the days of your Myanmar. life. And you shall make them known to your children, and to your children’s children.”
global student e x change
Spending Summer in the South African Winter By Lauren MacKinnon ’18
On July 18 this past summer, three students and two teachers met before dawn at Lancaster Country Day to begin a 21-hour journey to Cape Town, South Africa. Every year, LCDS sends three students to study at the Herschel School for Girls and Bishops College for boys for a month-long exchange. They stayed with host families, giving students the ability to authentically experience the culture of South Africa. They attended classes at either Bishops or Herschel, as well as participating in many activities with other exchange students and their host families, such as rugby matches, boat rides to observe wild flamingos, and a visit the University of Cape Town. Students also toured an ostrich farm, visited the Cango Wildlife Cheetah Ranch, went ziplining, and visited an elephant sanctuary.
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f acility news
Room to
Grow c a p i ta l c a m pa ig n
la ncast e r cou
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n t ry d ay s c h o o l
L
ancaster Country Day School celebrated its new $10 million, 27,000-square-foot Physical Education & Athletics Center on Saturday, Oct. 14. The facility is the most substantial addition to the LCDS campus in more than a decade, and it will expand the athletics and academic opportunities available to LCDS students and the surrounding community. These improvements were made possible through the Room to Grow Capital Campaign. The PE & Athletics Center includes a fitness center with a full complement of strength-training and cardio equipment; a wellness space with a dance and yoga studio, and an early childhood phys ed area; five regulation squash courts; two new locker rooms each for students and adults, as well as a sports medicine and training room; and a concession area that will serve the athletics space as well as a new theater to be built in the future.
Campaign Chair Bernadette Milner Gardner ’87 speaks at the Grand Opening Honorary Campaign Co-chair June Maier chats with Property Committee Chair L.J. Simmons Bloom’87
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f acility news
fitness center with a full
complement of strength-training and cardio equipment
five regulation
squash courts with aerial viewing
new student and adult
locker rooms
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wellness space
with a dance and yoga studio
sports medicine sports medicine and facility training room
WITH THE NEW SPACE LCDS WILL NOW BE ABLE TO: •P rovide a space for parents and
alumni to exercise. •H ost interscholastic and collegiate
squash tournaments as the third venue in Lancaster with regulation courts. •H ost multischool athletics
tournaments. •H ost robotics competitions
and science fairs. •F orm community relationships,
especially through rental of the squash courts and dance studio space. … For more information about renting the new facility, please contact Ty Book at bookt@lancastercountryday.org.
All students and staff signed exposed beams
before they were installed.
To schedule a tour or to support this important project, please contact Shelby LaMar at lamars@lancastercountryday.org.
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The
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I have an interest and the historical knowledge to chronicle stories that might otherwise go unheard.
Seeker by
michael
schwartz
“I
n the places I deal with, hope can be hard to find,” said journalist and author Michael Deibert ’92. “And I bristle whenever I hear foreign reporters talking about the ‘resilience’ of the local populace,” because it always comes off rote and condescending. “But there’s something greater than violence and barbarism and it’s the responsibility of journalists to seek it out.” Deibert’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal, to name just a few, and he has spent his career investigating and reporting on such places and paragons of corruption, violence and dysfunction as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala and Haiti. But for whatever stinging indictments his articles or books deliver, there remains a perpetual glimmer of hope and an underlying faith in the prevailing strength and beauty of mankind.
Talking to Connections from his Miami home via Skype, Deibert mentioned the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the extensive slums that run through Brazil’s second largest city and house about six percent of the country’s more than 200 million people. “Seeing the inequality of economic conditions can be overwhelming, especially as an observer, but it’s important to realize the unjust aspects of life and not be overwhelmed or lose the potential for grace,” he said. Still, sometimes that can be hard. Deibert’s 2014 book is “In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America’s Drug War in Mexico.” He spent more than five years interviewing a broad spectrum of Mexicans, from shopkeepers to federal police to children to hired killers. What they all have in common are lives that have become defined by the internecine war for turf and profit being waged between the Zetas and Gulf cartels, along all of Mexico’s northeastern border with the United States.
ABOVE | Michael Deibert presenting his latest book, “Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History” (Zed Books) at Waterstones in London, England, September 2017.
Mural in Barcelona, February 2017.
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Deibert noted that just as Prohibition made the American mob, our own vast appetite for drugs and the black market through which we acquire them guarantees the cartels an endless supply of cash to conduct their bloody business. Absent a sea change in American drug policy, Deibert doesn’t see any plausible scenario that deals the cartels any significant blows.
What draws Deibert to the sometimes desperate people and stories of Haiti, Latin America, Congo or Newburgh, New York, is the sense that, “In these places, I have something to contribute,” he said. “There are journalists doing great work in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I don’t speak Arabic or Pashto and don’t feel any particular connection to those places.
He added that incentives to maintain the status quo extend to numerous interests throughout the United States. “There’s a whole bunch of people benefitting, from the private prison system to banks laundering billions” in ill-gotten gains.
“With these, I have an interest and the historical knowledge to chronicle stories that might otherwise go unheard.”
...no country has bewitched Deibert as much as Haiti
Deibert’s work has taken him throughout Central and South America, spending years immersed in numerous countries and cultures throughout the hemisphere. But no country has bewitched Deibert as much as Haiti, which he first visited in the late ’90s “because I was bored with where my life was going,” he said. He wrote an unpublished novel about that first trip, as well as his first piece of journalism, which was published by Salon and its then-editor, Jake Tapper. The article was about the disputed 2000 election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide claimed victory with 91.7 percent of the vote in a contest marred by violence and boycotted by every significant opposition party. Despite the myriad internal and external factors seemingly arrayed to guarantee Haiti’s backwardness, Deibert retains a cautious optimism for the country’s future, because of his unqualified belief in the people and the culture of that nation. He rhapsodized about one’s first impressions of a country that news accounts relegate to a status somewhere between benighted and doomed. “The first thing you notice is all of your senses are intensely stimulated. The buses have incredible scenes painted on them, and the air smells of a burning combination of citrus, flowers, salt air, sewage and music. And the people who live in such an intense way, having to struggle, are so welcoming and gentle,” he said.
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Deibert’s path into journalism and books was decidedly indirect. He graduated from Country Day in 1992 and went off to Bard College, where he majored in English, devoured Dylan Thomas and Walt Whitman, and had decided to follow his heroes into poetry. “Yeah,” he said. “That never quite came together.” Even though he never became a poet, he did keep a lifelong love of the written word close to his heart. Deibert said his education at Country Day left him well prepared for the calling he eventually discovered, and the scholarship that helps inform his work to this day. “One great thing about the school was the ability to read such a variety of literature. I remember reading 20 books a year in ninth grade and it struck me, being exposed to such a variety of ideas and perspectives.” Deibert said. “The English and history programs were so strong, and that was a great foundation for college and the larger world.”
Fishermen in Port Salut.
For aspiring journalists, Deibert offered some words of advice.
The beach at Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil at dusk, September 2004.
“It’s not an easy life but it gives you the chance to go deeper and live a life that’s more engaged with the world. Every time someone in Haiti, or Mexico, or the Congo is willing to sit down and share their story with me, that’s a great gift I’ve been given and it’s important to respect that.” Michael Deibert’s most recent book “Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History” was published by Zed Books in August.
CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE
.
View of Havana, Cuba, November 2016
Children celebrating Eid al-Fitr in Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire, October 2007 Deibert donating books to the Konbit Bibliyotèk Site Solèy in the Cité Soleil neighborhood of Port-au-Prince.
, It s not an easy life but it gives you the chance to go , deeper and live a life that s more engaged with the world.
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“There’s been some sort of incident at TMI,” the voice on the radio said. “They say it’s under control.” TMI is Three Mile Island, and the “incident” wasn’t under control. One of the nuclear power plant’s two reactors had begun melting down about three hours earlier, and it would be 16 hours more before operators began to get the temperature in the core to fall. It was the most serious civilian nuclear accident in American history, and Farmer was one of the first journalists on the scene to report on it.
It
was around 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday, March 28, 1979, and Andy Farmer ’71 was listening to the squawk of the police
scanner as he went about his morning routine. His ears pricked up when he heard that a dispatcher was trying to find the head of the Lancaster County emergency communications center. But it was hearing the next two sentences that made him grab his camera and equipment and bolt out the door.
Farmer spent more than 13 years in TV journalism, as a reporter, occasional anchor and assignment editor. Since 1987, he has blazed new territory in advancing the public relations efforts of the Commonwealth of Virginia, from helping the Department of Health contain outbreak scares to pioneering ways to persuade Virginians to conserve energy. He traces part of his path from the newsroom to the public sector to his experience that morning on the banks of the Susquehanna. The ham-fisted response of state government and corporate officials alike left a great deal to be desired. “It was initially frustrating, because the company officials didn’t know what was going on, and then they disappeared entirely,” said Farmer, then a reporter for WLYH-TV. “There’s a pretty steep learning curve to understanding how nuclear power plants work, and nuclear physics was a little outside my realm of expertise. So I had a great view of the plant, but as to whether they’d released any radioactive material and was it coming our way and did we have to evacuate, all of those were open questions at that point.”
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However, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission deployed scientist-spokesman Harold Denton, Farmer and the local, national and international media that had made camp near Three Mile Island finally started getting some real answers. “Denton was very good at communicating,” Farmer said. “He was smart, clear, calm and patient. He answered every question and fielded the really out-of-left-field ones without getting irritated or put out. He delivered the perspective of the government’s scientists and I saw how much positive effect a good communicator can have in a time of crisis.” Farmer got his start in journalism at Washington & Lee University, where he double-majored in American history and broadcast journalism. “I was interested in the campus radio station,” he said. “They said I had a good voice.” After cutting his teeth at WLUR-FM reading and writing the news for the station’s eclectic broadcasts, he lined up a spring semester internship back home at WLYH in his senior year. “I called them up and asked if there were any opportunities for me there and they were immediately like, ‘Sure. We’ll take you.’ I realized not too long after that they needed free labor, but it worked out well for both of us,” Farmer said.
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“I had the broadcast writing experience and understood the basic television news format. Within a couple of days I was contributing on-air stories, so I ended up doing a lot of work and getting the most out of those six weeks.” Perhaps the most valuable thing Farmer got was a full-time job a few months after he graduated. The station had a small crew, so Farmer covered everything from local government to breaking news. And because the WLYH gang was so small, he was a one-man-band who set up his own camera, recorded his own interviews, chased his own stories and schlepped his gear home with him every night. So when the Three Mile Island accident happened, Farmer had three years of experience and all the kit he needed to bring the story into local homes straight away. “WLYH was a great experience for me,” Farmer said. “But I wanted to move to a larger station.” After five years at WLYH, Farmer decamped for WWBT-TV in Richmond, Va. He began as a reporter covering city government and breaking news, soon rising to assignment manager. In that position, Farmer selected stories and assigned them to a team of 15 reporters and eight photographers, while coordinating coverage with the larger network and other affiliate stations in Virginia.
Farmer delighted in the fast-paced, coordinated chaos of making last-minute tape edits and synchronizing satellite feeds for location shots and working against an ultimate deadline to bring the evening news to all the loyal, expectant viewers in the greater Richmond area. Farmer said his approach to the job was “perhaps a little less neurotic than Holly Hunter’s character in ‘Broadcast News,’” but it’s a fair thumbnail sketch of the intensity of the gig. In 1987, Farmer made a journalism-adjacent career change, leaving WWBT to become the Virginia Department of Health’s public information officer. He came aboard as part of a broader state effort to improve its media relations by poaching talent from the media. “When I joined the Department of Health, they were still very print-oriented,” Farmer said. “They hadn’t worked much with TV, and, for that matter, were still using typewriters instead of computers. It was very slow, and I helped modernize it.” The mid-80s saw the spread of AIDS, as well as misinformation and a general lack of knowledge about the disease, making the need for a modern, responsive health department all the more acute.
Country Day certainly provided me the academic tools to succeed in college, but what was more valuable was the diversity of subjects.
Not long after Farmer arrived at the department, there was an outbreak of hepatitis A in Virginia Beach. The area is one of Virginia’s most popular tourist destinations and a rumor-fueled panic threatened to create a seaside ghost town and wreak havoc on the local economy. Farmer sprang into action, traveling to Virginia Beach with an epidemiologist with the same kind of reassuring expertise and patient manner he had first seen in Harold Denton. To fully quash the media freak-out, Farmer didn’t just deploy the doctor to answer daily TV news questions, he lined up a call-in radio show to give every worried citizen with a phone the chance to speak to the expert directly. Farmer’s weeklong information blitz worked and the panic soon abated. “That’s where I took what I learned as a reporter and applied it to government,” Farmer said. The state has availed itself of his media and management acumen ever since. Farmer became a Department of Transportation public relations manager, where, appropriately enough, he helped establish and oversee a comprehensive public relations system for the department that maintains the third largest state highway system in the country.
Farmer with his award-winning team from the Virginia Energy Sense program.
Today Farmer is the education resources manager at the Virginia State Corporation Commission directing Virginia Energy Sense, a program promoting energy efficiency and conservation across the Old Dominion. “I’ve always been interested in bigger challenges, and in this job I have the opportunity to manage an integrated communications program in the broadest sense,” Farmer said. His portfolio includes coordinating PR, website development, digital engagement, community outreach and directing the work of an advertising agency to spread the conservation message.
“This job has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.” When asked if Country Day helped prepare Farmer for a career in journalism and public relations, he held forth as if spreading information was his job. “Country Day certainly provided me the academic tools to succeed in college, but what was more valuable was the diversity of subjects. Anyone interested in journalism has to be willing to learn about everything,” he said. “There’s really no better job to encourage someone’s natural curiosity.” In Upper School English, Farmer learned the basics of writing engaging prose and how to structure a story, but English wasn’t the class that got a shy teenager to embark on a career in front of a camera. “Jeanne Clemson got me in front of an audience and out of my shell,” Farmer said of the longtime Theater Department head who brought a substance to Country Day drama that infuses its work to this day. “And it’s not just that it helped me be comfortable in the TV world generally, but I learned the importance of enunciation and projection and technical elements like that are valuable regardless of whether you’re performing in a play.” For as significant as all these experiences were for Farmer, he saw a more fundamental parallel between his education and his career, a parallel that’s still relevant for news-minded students today. “Journalism is a doing field,” he said. “You learn through doing. If you write something that you think later could have been better, you don’t have time to get hung up about it because you’re too busy writing the next story and learning from what you did before. Country Day gave me the opportunity to do things that I could apply to journalism, and through journalism I got the chance to go into public service. But it’s also a natural springboard into advertising or really any kind of communications. “Journalism opens you up to a wider world.”
“It’s exciting to be able to take all that and work with some very creative folks to achieve a common goal,” he said. | ISSUE NO. TEN WINTER 2018 |
23
o an
a n d r i day fo r k e r i
Keri Blakinger's day started at 10 a.m. on the day before she spoke to Connections this Spring. That's when she took her seat in the gallery of houston city hall for a hearing on human trafficking.
When she got back to her desk at the Houston Chronicle, she wrote up a 20-inch piece (about 700 words) as part of an ongoing series she was working on. Then at 1 p.m., she talked to a homeless man for another 20-inch story on city shelters. “Then I interviewed one of the stars of ‘Battlestar Gallactica’ for a profile, and I harassed a handful of people about public info requests. Except for the ‘Battlestar Gallactica’ thing, it was a pretty ordinary day,” Blakinger ’02 said. 24 | CONNECTIONS |
by michael schwartz
When she was a Country Day student, an ordinary day meant eight hours of nationals-level figure skating practice; when she was a Cornell student, an ordinary day consisted of helping edit the college newspaper but also shooting heroin. Today, seven years clean, Blakinger’s ordinary days are those of a former Hearst Fellow, one of the top young print journalists in America. She never did graduate from the program; Hearst hired her to join the permanent Chronicle staff before she got the chance. In August, Blakinger was set to leave her home in Houston and drive halfway across the country to begin a new job reporting for the San Francisco Chronicle. That was one year after she decamped from New York City and the Daily News to Texas and the Houston Chronicle. Her two-papers-in-two-years tour was Blakinger’s reward for earning a Hearst Journalism Fellowship. She was one of five reporters chosen from a national pool of applicants for two yearlong rotations at the media giant’s largest newspapers. Fellows aren’t guaranteed a job when their gigs are up, but Hearst’s stated goal with the fellowship is to recruit aces to work at the company.
Blakinger sports a mermaid costume for the story “How to be a Mermaid.”
r a y
{ f eature }
| ISSUE NO. TEN WINTER 2018 |
25
{ f eature }
Versatile, dogged and insatiably curious, Blakinger churns out stories that stand out from ordinary news copy in their clarity, elegance and, when she gets the chance to flaunt it, her wit.
TOP | Blakinger
covering a feature about Lolita fashion.
BOTTOM | Working with data reporter John D. Harden in the Chronicle office.
Getting hired before finishing the program isn’t unprecedented, but it’s pretty rare. Versatile, dogged and insatiably curious, Blakinger churns out stories that stand out from ordinary news copy in their clarity, elegance and, when she gets the chance to flaunt it, her wit. Two pieces she wrote at the Chronicle exemplify this range. The first is her story on the death of Norma L. McCorvey, better known as the Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized abortion. It reads by turns equal parts obituary, investigation and feature. “I wanted to track down people who knew her and were with her for that experience,” Blakinger said. “It was a lot of calls long into the night, but I talked to her two lawyers and a friend and the piece ran the next day.” The second piece seems more like one of the New Yorker’s “Shouts & Murmurs” than a story in a major metro daily. Headlined “A Reporter's Quest To Find The Elusive Rodeo Jail” and reprinted in its delightfully absurd entirety here (see sidebar), the story follows a Yankee-in-exile at the world’s largest rodeo, and the Kafka-esque difficulty of getting a straight answer to a simple question.
26 | CONNECTIONS |
{ f eature }
T
r ’ s Q u es t e t to or
Elusive
Jail
ep
By Keri Blakinger houston chronicle march 2017
Days before the first trail rides pulled into Houston, I started hearing tales of the legendary hoosegow. True, they weren’t particularly impressive tales. But I was enthralled, nonetheless. As a transplant, I couldn’t imagine anything more deeply Texan than when I heard the phrase: “I had to pick my son up from rodeo jail.” And, as soon as the cowboy boot-clad teller of that tale ended her story, I had a new mission in mind: Find rodeo jail.
“I know there’s something,” a police spokesperson told me. But more details were not immediately forthcoming.
d
AR
the
R de
At least this is how I envision rodeo jail.
I decided to circle back with police again, and this time see if I could at least get concrete confirmation of the mythic stockade.
Fin
here’s a cracked painting of a bucking animal sprawled across one wall and a parched dirt floor underfoot. In one corner is a lone tattered boot with a star-shaped spur. In another there’s a mean two-headed rattlesnake with a gun in its mouth. The only food is raw hamburger meat wrapped in fried bacon, served three times a day. The only thing to drink is cowboy tears — and cowboys don’t cry.
So I went back to the tale-teller.
“Is it an office where they, like, hold one person,” I asked, “or is it a real jail?”
THE ONLY THING TO DRINK IS COWBOY TEARS — AND COWBOYS DON’T CRY.
But, just like clinging to a bucking bull, that’s easier said than done. I started by asking the tale-teller for directions. “It’s somewhere around here,” she said, pulling out a map and pointing vaguely to a corner of NRG Center. So I called the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo to confirm the location and see whether I could visit to observe. After a few days of phone tag, I decided to switch tacks and try the sheriff’s office, since they run the real jail.
She assured me, “It looked like a real jail.” “It’s in the bowels of the building,” she added. Unfortunately, with escalators only going up, it was hard to locate the building’s bowels.
I considered following an extremely drunk person until they got arrested, but thought that seemed unlikely to be a fruitful approach at 2 p.m. in the afternoon. Losing hope, I decided to wait a day and come back — this time with another reporter in tow. I figured if I was going to storm the Rodeo Bastille (or just stand outside politely and ask questions), I might need backup. Especially if the two-headed rattlesnakes are real. First, we tracked down an elevator I’d spotted a day earlier. It had a down arrow, but there was an attendant who assured us we could not go downstairs to the jail because there is no jail.
A sheriff’s spokesperson answered on the third ring — and told me Houston police were in charge of the rodeo’s lockup. But when I called the police, they said the Rodeo was in charge of it.
Dejected, I dragged my colleague to the nearest police table. They politely declined to answer my questions, but sent me in a promising direction: HPD’s rodeo headquarters.
So I tried the Rodeo again — and got a definitive answer: There is no such thing.
“This is it!” I thought. Surely, they’ll have someone cuffed in a corner, crying his little cowboy heart out.
I relayed this to my editor, who told me it was #fakenews.
But no. The nice man in charge told me there is no such thing as rodeo jail.
“We know it exists,” she said. But does it? Or does it magically move to a new location every night like the Black Fortress in that cheesy ’80s fantasy film?
I guess I have no choice but taking him at his word. But, somewhere, I’m sure, a two-headed rattlesnake is hissing in anger.
{ f eature }
BALANCING ACT
When her 10th grade English teacher, Wendy Taylor, suggested that Blakinger write for the teen-produced section of the Intelligencer Journal, she took the first step toward what has become a personal and professional calling. Blakinger has worked as a reporter more or less continually ever since, with the exception of an unplanned and unpleasant two-year interlude that might well have derailed someone without Blakinger’s drive, talent and resiliency. In December 2010, Blakinger was a senior at Cornell, who helped edit the Cornell Daily Sun, and was an English major one semester away from graduating. She was also a heroin addict who paid for her daily fix by selling the drug. “At that point, I had been using on and off for nine years,” Blakinger said. “I was balancing my habit with keeping up with classes and being at the paper, and I would tell myself I was OK if I was still passing school.” Police arrested the 26-year-old on a Sunday. She was carrying six ounces of heroin worth approximately $50,000. Cornell banned her from campus and police charged her with second degree possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell, a felony that carried a potential nine-year sentence. Blakinger made an agreement with the Tompkins County district attorney and pled guilty to third degree possession, a lesser felony.
...one of the most dynamic — if not the most dynamic — reporters I have ever worked with. She is a go-getter and has just incredible drive...
She spent the next 21 months behind bars. Once free and clean, Blakinger got a job at the Ithaca Times, the local paper where she freelanced while finishing up her education. The Times’ managing editor, Glynis Hart, called Blakinger “one of the most dynamic — if not the most dynamic — reporters I have ever worked with. She is a go-getter and has just incredible drive,” Hart said in a 2014 interview with the Ithaca Voice. Hart and more than a dozen other prominent locals wrote letters of support when Blakinger appealed to Cornell to rescind her ban from campus. The school agreed, allowing Blakinger to finish her final two classes and walk in the graduation ceremony she missed four years earlier.
LEFT | Blakinger live tweeting at a crime scene in Houston June 2017. The A1 story was about a 10-month-old boy who was fatally shot while his father was holding him. CENTER | Keri, age 15, with Mark Ladwig. PAGE 25 LEFT | At the
1994 Keystone Games, age 9. PAGE 25 RIGHT | Keri,
age 15, practicing.
28 | CONNECTIONS |
{ f eature }
AN OVERACHIEVER FROM BIRTH
Every day for years, Blakinger would leave school at 11 a.m. for skating practice, then head home for dinner, homework and studying after practice ended at 7 p.m.
At the 1994 Keystone Winter Games, a 9-year-old Blakinger won the gold medal in beginner freestyle skating. She would go on to a first place finish at the 2000 South Atlantic Regional Championships and earn a spot on the 2001 Chevrolet/United States Figure Skating Association Scholastic Honors Team. Every day for years, Blakinger would leave school at 11 a.m. for skating practice, then head home for dinner, homework and studying after practice ended at 7 p.m. Blakinger called herself an “overachiever from birth,” but given her story, that description, while self-deprecatingly droll, seems incorrect. Blakinger isn’t an overachiever, she’s simply an achiever whose gifts have allowed her to succeed in ice rinks and newsrooms, and to emerge from addiction, incarceration — and the Ivy League. She reflected on her time at Country Day, and offered some advice for aspiring journalists. “The school gave me a great foundation educationally. A lot of the skaters who left early like I did didn’t get much out of school, but I had great teachers, role models and mentors, and what they gave me was a really solid base to work from,” Blakinger said. As for what the would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins in Upper School and college should do, Blakinger’s answer was instant and assured. “Background is key,” she said. “Get involved in the college paper, to start. And then internships are very important. Besides the experience, you forge relationships with editors and those can be invaluable. For example, when I was finishing up at Cornell, I was also freelancing for the local paper.” That paper was the Ithaca Times, and its editor was one of the leading voices that successfully lobbied Cornell to let Blakinger graduate. | ISSUE NO. TEN WINTER 2018 |
29
Q&A
WRITING IS EASY, , IT S THINKING , THAT S HARD An Interview with Jonathan Lyons ’76 by Clare Jackson ’18
30 | CONNECTIONS |
{ interv iew }
J
onathan Lyons graduated from Country Day in 1976 and, after earning degrees in Russian and history from Wesleyan University, “fell into journalism.” In 20 years as a correspondent and senior editor for the Reuters news agency, Lyons lived on five continents and covered events of profound political and religious magnitude, including the elections of an Islamist president in Turkey, a moderate president in Iran, and the fall of the Soviet Union, to name just a few.
Lyons’ postings in Tehran, Ankara and Jakarta stoked a desire to explore more deeply the relationship and the divide divisions between the Islamic and Western worlds. So he left the inherently ephemeral work of daily journalism to become an author and a scholar. He has written four books, “Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in 21st-Century Iran,” co-authored with Geneive Abdo, “The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization” and “Islam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism.” He took a different turn with his most recent book, “The Society for Useful Knowledge: How Benjamin Franklin and Friends Brought the Enlightenment to America.” Lyons earned his doctorate in sociology at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia.
CJ | You were in Moscow reporting for Reuters in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. You were on hand for perhaps the biggest geopolitical event since World War II. How did you approach reporting on a story of such historic magnitude? JL | On the ground level, it was chaos at first. No one knew what was going on. There were tanks and troops in the streets — young, nervous Uzbek recruits brought in from Central Asia to support the coup and keep order in the predominantly ethnic Russian capital Moscow. Like those soldiers, reporters on the ground were part of a vast “machine” and often had trouble seeing the Big Picture. To counter that, I tried to focus on those aspects of what had always been an authoritarian society, first under the tsars and then under the commissars, that had stopped working the way the system had always functioned.
In other words, I looked for signs that the old top-down order was starting to wobble, although in hindsight we can see that it never really collapsed. That meant looking for things that didn’t happen.
| ISSUE NO. TEN WINTER 2018 |
31
Q&A
For example, Soviet air space was not immediately closed to foreign flights, so I was able to get back into the country the very day of the coup from my truncated holiday in the Netherlands. Passport control and customs officers welcomed the Western press as we scrambled back from our traditional August holidays! The telephone and telegraph lines were not cut. (There was, of course, no real public Internet at the time, so telephone and telex and the odd modem were all we had.)
News that meets our expectations and fits our view of the world is not helpful in creating an informed, active, and responsible citizenry.
The coup leaders did not shoot deposed President Gorbachev or charismatic Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. Moscow police did not follow the coup leaders, nor did they back the resistance. They, like many Soviet officials and bureaucrats, simply stayed home to see who would win. Ordinary people spoke freely to the press and brought us food and water during all-night vigils in the streets, and so on. In other words, it became clear almost at once that the old command-and-control systems were broken and that the existential fear that had ruled the country for decades was dissipating — at least temporarily. From that point on, it was just a matter of time before the coup failed and the collapse of Soviet power was upon us. Its own internal logic took over and we, the press corps, followed along as best we could. For a relatively young foreign correspondent — I was in my early thirties and this was my first foreign post — it was a career chance of a lifetime. For the millions of ex-Soviet citizens, however, it was a false dawn.
CJ | You went from reporting as a foreign correspondent to being a senior editor in the Reuters Washington bureau, to heading abroad again as a reporter. Can you describe what a senior editor does and how that influenced your approach to reporting and writing? JL | My assignment in Washington, which
followed posts in Moscow, Istanbul and Tehran, was to bring the U.S. reporting up to the standards of Reuters worldwide operations, which had a very different culture, institutional history and approach to news. Ideally, I and my senior colleagues set the tone for news coverage, determined what was covered, how resources were deployed and so on. In practice it was not so simple, and there was
32 | CONNECTIONS |
enormous resistance to change in the bureau. Our efforts were only partially successful. At that point, I chose to return to the field for what turned out to be my final assignment, covering political violence and terrorism across Asia from the bureau in Jakarta.
Along the way, I learned perhaps the most important lesson of my 21 years with Reuters: that the challenge of reporting and writing news lies not with the act of writing — any educated person can learn to write acceptable news copy — but in the act of thinking. Whenever I queried reporters about stories that were problematic or confusing, it almost always emerged that the journalist had not thought through or understood fully what she was reporting. Once the thinking is clear, the writing is the easy part. This is an insight that informs my work to this day.
CJ | You made a transition from doing journalism to writing books — how and why did you make this transition? JL | In short, both I and the institution of jour-
nalism changed. We were no longer compatible. The field was demanding shorter, faster and less insightful reporting, with more emphasis on personalities, celebrities, and instant analysis and sensationalism. Real expertise, experience on the ground, background knowledge was being increasingly discounted in favor of “citizen journalism” driven by the new phenomenon of social media and the Internet in general. In this brave new world, anyone could be an expert, and anyone’s opinion was the functional equivalent of anyone else’s. Sadly, we see the results all around us today. Meanwhile, I was moving in the opposite direction. As a young college student, I had always imagined a career in academia and fell into journalism largely by accident. By 2007, the time had clearly come to reset my life course. At age 50, I went to graduate school to get my doctorate. I had already published one book while at Reuters and had another almost completed, so the transition to author was not as radical as it might seem. My time at Reuters was fantastic, with great adventures on five continents, but I don’t miss it at all. It set the stage for the next act.
CJ | You’ve said that the Western perception of Islam hasn’t changed in any meaningful way since First Crusade-era propaganda shaped it in the 11th century. Does the West fundamentally misunderstand Islam, and if so, how? JL | My personal experience and academic
study has convinced me that the West is essentially incapable — intellectually, philosophically, even emotionally — of understanding the world of Islam. The simplest proof lies with the fact that the Western “idea” of Islam, first formulated as wartime propaganda before any real contact with real Muslims, is essentially the same today as it was 1,000 years ago. At the time, the Christian leaders of Europe admitted freely that they knew nothing of Islam but were nonetheless ready to condemn it. We are a bit more circumspect today about our lack of knowledge but in fact little has changed. How many educated Westerners realize the depth of our intellectual and cultural debts to the Muslim world? The success of my book, “The House of Wisdom,” which has appeared in a dozen foreign-language editions, suggests there is both a hunger and a pressing need for such a conversation.
CJ | Do or did you ever worry that American readers aren’t terribly interested in reading about foreign news that affects America, but only obliquely touches their own lives, if at all? JL | My early journalism career, in the 1980s, coincided with the trend on local TV stations toward “news you can use,” so this phenomenon never really surprised me. Growing up in Lancaster in the 1960s and 1970s, however, I used to love reading about “exotic” datelines in The New York Times, which my parents received every morning, along with the local paper. To this day, I prefer to read a newspaper in hardcopy, largely so I can slip through the pages in the hopes of discovering something I didn’t know I even wanted to read. On the computer, this serendipitous experience is lost, which I think is a great pity. Sophisticated algorithms — by the way the word itself comes from the Arabic and shows how interdependent we truly are — now “push” news to individual readers, further shielding us from the unexpected, the unwanted and the unpleasant. This only exacerbates the problem you are highlighting, for news that meets our expectations and fits our view of the world is not helpful in creating an informed, active and responsible citizenry.
{ interv iew }
Lyons’ Collected Works
CJ | In your doctoral dissertation you say that the “anti-Islam discourse exercises a profound and corrosive effects on a range of issues across the contemporary social sciences, including sociology, politics, the history of ideas, law, theology, international relations, human rights, and security studies.” What are some examples of these corrosive effects? JL | Three quick examples, there are countless others: the history of science; the sociology of religion; and security, or terrorism, studies.
Traditional history of science discounts the Muslim contribution to world culture, largely because the West, not the Islamic world, emerged dominant in the modern era. If an achievement of Muslim — or for that matter Hindu or Mayan — science did not lead directly to the prevailing model of modern science, then it is generally not worthy of Western academic attention and is reduced to a minor subspecialty of the field.
The West is
Sociology of religion, my own field, has done a better job, but only slightly. essentially incapable For decades, scholars have asserted that as — intellectually, societies modernize, their degree of religiosity necessarily declines. philosophically, Strong and consistent evidence from the Museven emotionally — lim world to the contrary was largely ignored or of understanding explained away. It has only recently forced a serious reevaluathe world of Islam. tion of this dominant theory, and leading experts have, albeit belatedly, now acknowledged that sociology has failed to account for the very clear religious revival going on in even the most “modernizing” of Muslim societies.
CJ | What was your experience like at LCDS? How do you think this prepared you for your extensive career? JL | I attended LCDS from the fourth grade on. First and foremost, I learned to read and write. By that, I mean to read critically and to express myself in a clear, concise and logical manner. Everything I have done since then flowed from those skills. At the time, the hard sciences were given less emphasis than English, history and the classics, so perhaps my pathway was determined by circumstance. I’ll never really know, but I am pleased at the way it all worked out.
CJ | What advice do you have for students interested in pursuing journalism? JL | At last, an easy one: Learn something,
anything, and learn it well. I am not a fan of journalism studies at the undergraduate level. The future journalist must develop the skills of critical thinking and independent research, and the ability to develop and sustain an argument. The technical skills, as I said above, are not that daunting and can be acquired later. But first, the journalist must develop a proper foundation, and that is best accomplished through mastery of a discipline or field of study. My own undergraduate degree, for example, was in Russian and history. When I “fell” into journalism, I had the basic tools that allowed me to succeed. I guess there is another lesson there: Would-be foreign correspondents should learn a foreign language or two, as well.
Clare Jackson is a senior and co-editor of the Country Day student newspaper, The Fourth Estate.
Finally, in terrorism studies, analysis focuses exclusively on what are said to be unique theological factors driving terrorist acts by Muslims while ignoring other possible motives — social, political, economic — that are generally ascribed to terrorists of other traditions and orientations, such as white supremacists, neo-Nazis, militant communists, and so on.
| ISSUE NO. TEN WINTER 2018 |
33
2017 1 0 9 T H L A N C A S T E R C O U N T R Y D AY S C H O O L C O M M E N C E M E N T carlie marie abraham
victoria eloyse gardner
mali michel rupp - musser
alesha arshad
margaret ann gregor
andrew kenneth schlager
theodore ward auman jr .
caleb matthew grenko
isaac cole schlager
quinn bilder samuel matthew brandt
david anthony izzo jacqueline anna klombers
madison leigh brown
andrew brian kopan
taliah rayne carson
katherine ann kubis
samantha anne cockroft
grace lynne landis
thomas william cody claire marie conslato lily miranda delle - levine
yuan liang maria therese lilley zhangqi luo
morgan paige ernst
sierra elizabeth miron
tayler korb eynon
lauren olivia morales
aarica zyah flowers
eric murphy nahm
lenaiya ivan flowers
madeleine merrill proulx
caroline elizabeth ford
felipe francisco rangel
daniel benjamin forman
julia isabelle runkle
abigail duff schlageter samantha duff schlageter charlotte anne scott yuelai shi amy elizabeth shields clayton printz siminski lindsay anne socie jakob thomas starzyk cole faber stevenson zoe elizabeth matina walling victoria elizabeth willis jieun yun yun zhu
Millersville University Dickinson College American University Bryn Mawr College Hamilton College Bloomsburg University Elizabethtown Villanova University Boston College University of Alabama Temple University
Drexel
Rice University Vassar College Gettysburg College New York University University of California Michigan State University University of Vermont | 34 | CONNECTIONS
University of New Hampshire Stanford
University
| maria therese lilly |
| samantha duff schl ageter |
meet the class of
| andrew kenneth schl ager |
| victoria eloyse gardner |
the trustee prize
maria therese lilly
samantha duff schlageter clayton printz siminski
Awarded to the seniors with the highest grade point average.
ruth s. hostetter award katherine ann kubis
This award honors the memory of a Shippen School graduate from the class of 1931 and recognizes a senior who, over an extended period of time, has worked selflessly and enthusiastically to enhance the school community.
| cl ayton printz simins ki |
2017
| k atherine ann kubis |
award recipients
| david anthony izzo |
ann musselman award andrew kenneth schlager
Given in honor of Ann Musselman, who was an LCDS teacher for 30 years, this prize is awarded to the student who has enthusiastic curiosity, takes intellectual risks, loves to learn and lives life to the fullest.
| zoe elizabeth matina walling |
faculty award
victoria eloyse gardner
Given to the student who embodies what the faculty most respect in a scholar and a person, an individual who has a true love of learning and is a model citizen.
head of school award david anthony izzo
zoe elizabeth matina walling
Presented annually by the Head of School, this award recognizes the seniors most deserving of special praise for exhibiting qualities such as leadership, school spirit, persistence and civic virtue.
Lafayette College Muhlenberg College University of Notre Dame
College Lebanon Valley College Tulane University Northeastern University Pennsylvania State University Wake Forest University Davidson College University of Richmond University of Pittsburgh
University
Wesleyan University
35 Georgetown University University of Delaware Haverford College Georgia Institute of Technology University of Washington Rollins College | ISSUE NO. TEN WINTER 2018 |
a tribute to a legend
Sally Jarvis Touched Countless Lives at LCDS. Lexi Jaramillo ’19 Is One Of Those, And Her Story of Gratitude Is Online At http://bit.ly/2G7IyDQ
Sally M. Jarvis Sally Melcher Jarvis, a towering presence in the history of Lancaster Country Day School, as well as an embodiment of forbearance and poise, died Sept. 15 at age 89. She is survived by her daughters, Anne Jarvis Gerbner ’72, Virginia Whelan ’74, Sarah ’77 and son, Andrew ’70. An honorary trustee, Sally’s connection to Country Day goes back to the beginning of the modern era of the school, when her husband, John, became headmaster in 1965. Sally’s vision and drive — as well as her commitment and presence — helped guide the school in profound ways that continued long after John’s retirement in 1990, and his passing in 2009. Sally Jarvis was very much the matriarch of Lancaster Country Day, and we as a school community are richer for having her in our lives.
36 | CONNECTIONS |
class notes We recognize that social media is an easier way than Class Notes for our alumni to stay in touch. Please see Page 2 for a listing of LCDS social media accounts. You’ll notice alumni news and updates increasingly moving onto these networks, even as Class Notes continues to be a place to see alumni submissions, reunion updates and event pictures. To submit a class note for print or Web publication, contact Director of Alumni & Community Relations Anne Amman ’98 at ammana@lancastercountryday.org.
1950s
1970s
Margaret Haller Hannum
Melissa Byers
717-299-3798 phannum3@verizon.net
818-719-6550 melissabyers@earthlink.net
1954
1975
Sally Rich Rohrer
Diane Eshleman Djordjevic
717-394-0847
410-919-7219 dianedjordjevic@gmail.com
1951
1955
Eunice Fulton Blocker
1971
1976
502-895-2691
Margaret Hall Norton
1958
503-638-6127 Margie.Norton@cenveo.com
Barbara Jaeger Gillis 717-299-3374 wicklawn1770@comcast.net
1977
1960s
540-338-3630
1960
Anne Campbell Slater 610-896-6468 Slater.Anne@gmail.com 1961
Alix Shuman Roth 717-507-8227 alixsroth@verizon.net 1964
Phyllis Morgan-Rupert 717-768-3322 1966
Joseph A. Myers Jr. 717-394-9854 joemyers1@comcast.net 1968
Deborah Murray Martin 717-290-2082 debbie.martin@fandm.edu
Mark Ibold ’80 was a guest on Amy Sedaris’s hospitality show, “At Home With Amy Sedaris.”
1980s 1980
Mark Ibold was a guest on Amy Sedaris’s hospitality show, “At Home With Amy Sedaris.” He was tasked with creating gross, weird and oddly beautiful food offerings. The show is a twisted take on the Martha Stewart strain of old-school hospitality shows, airing on TruTV and available for streaming at trutv.com. 1983
John F. Hinkle III 717-898-5728 jfh3rph@comcast.net
Eileen Eckenrode Vroom
1984
Kathleen Murphy Jasaitis 781-631-7899 kmjasaitis@comcast.net
1979
Sarah Miller Dorgan 717-687-6466
1985
Deborah Dodds
’85
310-415-7796 Debby@DebbyDodds.com 1986
Joanna Underhill 717-468-3788
Debby Dodds published her first novel, "Amish Guys Don't Call" by
Blue Moon Publishers in the summer of 2017. Set in Lancaster, it features many references to things that Lancaster natives will recognize and enjoy, not the least of which is the dedication page that names Mrs. Luttrell, Mrs. Musselman and Mrs. Lewis, her beloved LCDS English teachers. "Amish Guys Don't Call" was recently named one of Powell's Book Store Top Ten YA Novels of 2017 and has been picked to be a resource book for English teachers in Ontario, Canada to teach in the classroom. Part of the book tour Dodds has especially enjoyed is seeing fellow alumni at book signings: Annelisa Aubry-Walton ’85, Dave Kasperson ’85, Barry Margolis ’85, Liza Steele ’85, Brad Kendall ’84, A.J. Cooke ’84, Tracey Robbins ’86, Victor Musselman ’65, Anne Dandridge Amman ’98, and Ellen Simpson ’73. She looks forward to reconnecting with more alums when she returns to LCDS for a reading May 9. | ISSUE NO. TEN WINTER 2018 |
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1987
Kristen K. Gedeon 703-283-6187 kristengedeon@hotmail.com
Duncan Merriwether Granger accepted a position as a Medical Account Executive at HealthSmart. 1988
Jack Fulton 717-394-2255 jack.fulton@tecomet.com
Luke Bunting accepted a position as Digital Marketing Manager at Scheffey, a marketing and communications firm in Lancaster. 1989
Bob Porter pistol3667@aol.com
Carla Kihlstedt is working on a love letter to our oceans in song. The piece is called “Black Inscription.” She has created a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the live show and the album release. Each giving level is named after one of her favorite bioluminescent creatures of the deep. Are you a Nanomia Cara? A Bioluminescent Octopod? A Luminous Sea Angel?! Lend her your luminous spark!
’93 Jen Townsend launched her new book co-authored with Renée Zettle-Sterling, “CAST: Art and Objects Made Using Humanity’s Most Transformational Process,” at the Society of North American Goldsmiths conference in New Orleans in October. In December, artnet news rated CAST the #1 most beautiful art coffee table book of 2017. In addition, Townsend ’s work can be seen in Metalsmith Magazine, Showcase: 500 Art Necklaces, 500 Gemstone Jewels and in Art Jewelry Today 2. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and her work is part of the permanent collection of The Imperial War Museum in London. She lives and works in Pittsford, N.Y.
Learn more about CAST at www.castartandobjects.com.
1990s 1990
Mary Fulton Gingrich
Stacey Gregg
717-560-4908 maryfgingrich@comcast.net
919-622-4284 sgregg13@yahoo.com
1991
1995
Susan Hull Ballantyne
Carla Kihlstedt ’89 is working on a love letter to our oceans in song.
1994
Betsy Wademan Ahlstrand
717-464-3537 shballantyne@yahoo.com
415-845-7654 betsyahlstrand@gmail.com
1992
Jennifer Mikes Mullen
Kate Matwiczyk Hemmerich kmatwiczyk@gmail.com
781-558-5293 jcmikes@gmail.com
1993
Adam Griffith and wife Susan
Jennifer Gschwend McGough 610-430-7671 drgschwend@yahoo.com
Dr. Heather Conner and husband Caleb Harris announced the addition of their daughter Emery Makayla to their family in June.
McDowell welcomed a baby boy, Simon Alexander Griffith in April. 1996
Dennis M. Baldwin 484-269-4309 fcsp3@yahoo.com
Kerry Diamond Rinato krinato@gmail.com
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2000s 2000
Nicole Richie 404-216-2053 nrichie617@yahoo.com Adam Griffith ’95 and wife Susan McDowell welcomed a baby boy, Simon Alexander Griffith in April.
Carolyn Richie Tavares ’00 and Bryan Tavares welcomed a daughter, Hannah, in April.
Quyvan Le ’98 married Javier Rodriguez July 28 in Mt. Laurel, N.J.
Piera Moyer 610-376-7546 pieraesmesnyder@gmail.com
Carolyn Richie Tavares and Bryan Tavares welcomed a daughter, Hannah, in April. Hannah joins big brother Henry, who is 2. Carolyn returned to the states in January after living in London for six years, and has settled in Maplewood, N.J. (They moved into their new home just two weeks before Hannah’s arrival!). Carolyn works for Goldman Sachs Asset Management. 2001
Bianca M. Heslop BiancaMHeslop@gmail.com
Elizabeth Sudhakar Vidor elizabethsudhakar@gmail.com 2002
Corie Patterson Burton Corie.Burton@gmail.com 1997
Mark Ewing 303-859-4994 stuff@foresightphoto.com 1998
Alexandra Minehart Goodman agoodman@fraser-ais.com
Lauren Bergen Pryor 703-254-7632 lauren.pryor@klgates.com
Quyvan Le married Javier Rodriguez July 28 in Mt. Laurel, N.J. 1999
Meagan W. Dodge 415-846-8715 meagan_dodge@yahoo.com
Kate Molets has been with Pall Mall Art Advisors, an international art advisory firm, for more than eight years as their vice president of appraisal services and southeast regional director. She assists clients all over the United States and the U.K. in the appraisal, acquisition and sale of art and tangible assets. She currently divides her time between Atlanta and Philadelphia. The Heart and Vascular Center of Evangelical welcomes Benjamin Keyser D.O., to the vascular team. Dr. Keyser is a vascular surgeon and began seeing patients in September. 2003
Lauren Allwein-Andrews laurens99@hotmail.com
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regional receptions
May 3, 2017 | Philadelphia, PA LCDS alumni and friends gathered at the Museum of the American Revolution on May 3. There, Gina Jarvis Whelan ’74 offered an exclusive presentation of George Washington's Revolutionary War headquarters tent.
people places
June 15, 2017 | Lancaster, PA Local alumni and friends gathered for a networking mixer in June at Fenz Restaurant in Lancaster.
40 | CONNECTIONS |
{ people &
places }
on ca m pus e v ents
Students and their families at the John Jarvis Scholar luncheon in May.
The LCDS “Lifers� lunch was held in April. The Class of 2017 lifers are Victoria Gardner, Julia Runkle, Madison Brown, Jackie Klombers, Caroline Ford, Grace Landis, Carlie Abraham, Lindsay Socie and Thomas Cody.
Shippen Luncheon: April 2017. On April 29, alumni of the Shippen Society gathered on campus for the annual Shippen Society Luncheon, recognizing alumni who graduated 50 or more years ago.
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# lcdslo v estories
#
e v Lo
LCDS
stories
Last February, we celebrated #LCDSlovestories. If you have a similar story, we would love to hear from you. Email ammana@lancastercountryday.org.
Chris Russo ’01 and Emily Sedlis Russo ’00 connected at an alumni reception in New York City and found love in the air. Years later they married and welcomed a baby in October 2016. …
Carrie Powers Anderson ’93 and husband Eric Anderson ’87 met each other at work. On their first date they discovered they had both attended LCDS! They married in 2002 and have a 10-year-old son. …
Bob ’89 and Mary Porter ’01 met playing basketball at the weekly LCDS alumni/community pick-up basketball game. At the urging of Mary's coach, Gloria Jaremko, Mary asked Bob for help preparing to play collegiate hoops at Elizabethtown College. After spending more time together, they discovered shared interests in the visual arts and pop culture, and coaching soon became dating. The two were married in 2009 and are still involved with LCDS basketball. They enjoy living in Lancaster with their cat, Misty. …
Samantha Smith Kurtz ’05 and Chas Kurtz ’05 (not pictured) met in fourth grade at LCDS. He claims his charm and good looks won her over instantly. (As of presstime, Samantha has not confirmed this account.)
42 | CONNECTIONS |
{ class
Matthew Manacher ’06 married Kelly Murphy on Saturday, June 4 at the Castle Hotel & Spa in Tarrytown, N.Y.
2006
2004
Andrew England
Brendan Drewniany
aengland1@gmail.com
brendan.drewniany@gmail.com
Elizabeth Reidenbach
Matthew Manacher married Kelly Murphy on Saturday, June 4 at the Castle Hotel & Spa in Tarrytown, N.Y. In the wedding party were his brothers, Adam Manacher ’08 and Alex Manacher ’11. In attendance were Scott Casale ’06, Charlie Walp ’06, Chris Stonerook ’06, and Andrew Maier ’06.
717-560-9470 Elizabeth.reidenbach@gmail.com
Jacquelynn Overman and husband Andy Wills ’05 and wife Sarah welcomed a baby boy, Henry, in January.
Tee Overman welcomed a baby girl, Collins, in February. 2005
Libby Roman 717-669-8307 libby.roman@gmail.com
Andy Wills and wife Sarah welcomed a baby boy, Henry, in January. Kyle Egan and wife Alison Girschick welcomed a baby girl on Father’s Day, June 18. Jeff Enos and Courtney Enos married August 2016 and welcomed their daughter, Frankie FitzSimmons Enos, in August.
Jacquelynn Overman ’04 and husband Tee Overman welcomed a baby girl, Collins, in February.
notes }
John Boles’ music was featured before kickoff during the Super Bowl! The song is “Stories” and you can listen to it at www.alignintime. bandcamp.com.
Lauren Smedley accepted a fellowship position at the University of Texas in Austin and pursued her M.F.A. in design in the fall. She is sad to break her “never attended a school with a football team” track record, but can’t wait for two more years of 50-cent avocados close at hand in her life.
’07
Daniel Lockey IV received his M.D. and MBA from Georgetown University. He was a member of
the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society, and received the John N. Delahay Orthopedic Surgery Department Award, the Jesuit Leadership and Service Award, and the Award for Outstanding Student Achievement. He began his residency in orthopedic surgery at Georgetown University Hospital in June. Daniel and his wife, Deanna Ross ’08, reside in Arlington, Va.
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alu m ni wee k end
44 | CONNECTIONS |
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alumni w e e k e n d
Alumni Weekend kicked off with the induction of Phil Canosa ’03 and Ellen Simpson ’73 into the Athletic Hall of Honor, followed by cocktails Friday night. On Saturday, maintenance team Ty Book and Kevin Cotchen took first place in the John A. Jarvis Competitive Croquet Tournament. Saturday night, a lively and large group of alumni enjoyed cocktails in Slosser Garden.
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{ class
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2008
Erika Vernet 484-269-7483 Erika.vernet@gmail.com
Ms. Kaitlyn A. Lukehart and Chris Noel welcomed a baby girl in February.
Andrew Guenin married Sara
2009
Angle on March 25 at the Cork Factory Hotel in Lancaster.
Elizabeth Raff emceed Lancaster’s inaugural TEDxYouth event on June 17.
Andrew Guenin ’08 married Sara Angle on March 25 at the Cork Factory Hotel in Lancaster. Elizabeth Raff ’08 emceed Lancaster’s inaugural TEDxYouth event. Kaitlyn A. Lukehart ’08 and Chris Noel welcomed a baby girl in February.
’08 Sarah Kahaian was an academy judge for State Science Day at Ohio
State University on May 13. Sarah was representing her employer, Battelle Memorial Institute, where she is a microbiology technician, working with BSL-3 level bacteria and viruses. Examples of these include tuberculosis, yellow fever and West Nile virus.
46 | CONNECTIONS |
Andrew Berkowitz ’09 received an M.S. in education from the Johns Hopkins School of Education.
Alexandra (Ali) Dunlop ’10 married W. Gabriel Smith on June 11 in Charleston, S.C.
Andrew Berkowitz received his M.S. in education with a 3.97 GPA from the Johns Hopkins School of Education. Since graduating college, he has taught Spanish at Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta with Teach For America, and most recently became a recruitment director for the national organization, recruiting at both Emory and Georgia Tech. If anyone in the LCDS community is applying to either school, Andrew is happy to give a campus tour and connect them with fantastic people! 2010
Molly Umble UmbleME@hendrix.edu
Alexandra (Ali) Dunlop married W. Gabriel Smith on June 11 in Charleston, S.C.
{ class
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2011
Alumnus Jonathan Rajaseelan conducted “Gloria” on April 23 at Calvary Church in Lancaster. 2012
Kelsey Gohn
Our international students visited the University of Pennsylvania in February, where they met with Arnav Shah ’14.
717-575-9034 kelseygohn@gmail.com
Caitlin Bailey married Britaney Guzman on March 31 in Boston. Chris Andrews finished his journey on foot from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles with his “Let’s Talk” initiative. This trip inspired Chris to write a number of songs and he is releasing his debut album, “Angelfish.” Learn more at www.cburrowsmusic.com.
Alison Charles ’13 received a B.S. in childhood and early adolescent education from Penn State University in May.
2013
Kate O’Brien wrapped up four years of college squash at Franklin & Marshall with the reception of the John Pittinger Award for MVP.
Daniel Polin began his Ph.D. studies last fall at U.C. Davis.
Katie Warfel completed her
Caitlin Bailey ’12 married Britaney Guzman on March 31 in Boston.
honors thesis in chemical engineering and graduated from Bucknell University with honors in May, with a B.S. in chemical engineering and a minor in French. She is studying at Northwestern University to pursue a doctorate in chemical and biological engineering.
Jade Grove is proud to announce that she worked as an intern in the creative services department at WGAL last summer.
Katie Warfel ’13 completed her honors thesis in chemical engineering and graduated from Bucknell University.
Alison Charles received a B.S. in childhood and early adolescent education from Penn State University in May. Charles was named to the dean’s list all eight semesters and is a member of the Pi Lambda Theta Honor Society for Educators and the Order of Omega Greek Leadership Honor Society.
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’14
Sarah Hafiz spent time this past summer in Jordan, where she worked
with Helping Hand for Relief and Development to provide aid to Syrian and Palestinian refugees seeking asylum. Sarah spoke at TEDxYouth in June about what young people can do in their own town to help alleviate the global refugee crisis.
2014
In February 2017, our international students visited the University of Pennsylvania, where they met with Arnav Shah, who is working really hard and is as funny as ever. It’s nice to have an LCDS connection when visiting colleges. Thanks for your time Arnav! Our international students, Linda Zhang, Kary Fang, Louis Wen and Finley Li, were all juniors at the time of their visit.
Sebastian Peña ’15 visited with current international students at Emory University.
Jimmy Abraham ’16 and Jack Zuckerman ’16 co-started the Washington University chapter of Unsung Heroes.
Ben Fitzsimmons earned first place in the “Best Steampunk” category at the annual BrickFair LEGO Expo in Virginia. 2015
Elizabeth Warfel ewarfel@middlebury.edu
Sebastian Peña visited with current international students at Emory University.
48 | CONNECTIONS |
Ben Fitzsimmons ’14 earned first place in the “Best Steampunk” category.
On a crisp late November evening, close to 100 friends and family members gathered to toast Marilyn Wademan. Whether in her role as a parent of Marcie ’92 and Betsy ’95 (pictured left), Trustee ’88-92, ’98-01 or Admission Director ’92-’98, Marilyn’s leadership and devotion to LCDS has been an inspiration. To commemorate Marilyn’s many contributions to our school, a plaque in her honor was unveiled outside of the Admission Office.
Jarvis Family Visit
alu m ni opportunities
Teaching Apprenticeship
Andrew Jarvis ’70, Anne Jarvis Gerbner ’72, Gina Jarvis Whelan ’74 and Sally Jarvis toured the new Phys Ed & Athletics Center during construction. Joining them was Ellen Simpson ’73. Also pictured is Head of School Steve Lisk and Chief Advancement Officer Shelby LaMar.
Lancaster Country Day alumni are strongly encouraged to apply for next year’s 10-month paid Teaching Apprenticeship. This is an intensive, full-time position consisting of the equivalent of a 40 percent teaching load (two courses for Middle School or Upper School classes), serving as an advisor for about eight students, and three trimesters of co-curricular mentoring experiences. Placement options include Lower School (preschool-grade 5), Middle School (grades 6-8), Upper School (grades 9-12) or specialist classes in art, music, robotics, library or physical education. Please visit the LCDS Career Page for more information and complete an application by Feb. 28.
Alumni Coffee with Steve Classes 2014-2017 joined Steve Lisk and favorite teachers on December 15, 2017 for the Alumni Coffee with Steve event held on campus.
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{ class
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’17
Victoria Gardner was selected to display
2016
Jack ’14 and Alex Wege ’16 were so kind to join international student and senior Linda Zhang and Helen Najarian for dinner while on a recent visit to Carleton College.
Jimmy Abraham and Jack Zuckerman co-started the Washington University chapter of Unsung Heroes. Jack also wrote an Op-Ed article in Student Life of Washington University titled, “The Unsung Heroes of Wash. U.” 2017
Maddie Stover ’14 and Isaac Schlager ’17 shared dinner with Shelly Landau and Helen Najarian in Shanghai. Shelly, former parent and board president, and Helen, former parent, travel to China to recruit students for LCDS. Both alumni spoke highly of their education at LCDS, specifically Catherine Haddad, to whom they credit their Chinese language skills.
50 | CONNECTIONS |
Maddie Stover ’14 and Isaac Schlager ’17 shared dinner with Shelly Landau and Helen Najarian in Shanghai. They ate at an Italian restaurant overlooking the Bund and enjoyed great conversation.
Jack ’14 and Alex Wege ’16 joined Linda Zhang and Helen Najarian, for dinner while on a recent visit to Carleton College.
three photographs for the juried “STORYTELLERS” photo contest hosted by the CityFolk Gallery in Lancaster. Two of the photographs are images captured her sophomore year in Rome while on an LCDS photography trip, culminating that year with a show at City Hall.
IN MEMORIAM Jean Shaub Herr ’38 ( July 26) Rachel Franck Armstrong ’48 (August 9) Dorothy L. Boardman ’49 (September 28) Dr. Paul A. Distler ’55 (December 28, 2016) Dr. Paul Gschwend 3d ’62 (October 22) Wilsie Moss Hartman ’65 (May 19) Damaris Daffin Batchelor ’66 (April 2) H. Scott Poole ’81 (August 15) Sally M. Jarvis, Honorary Trustee (September 15)
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Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage
PAID
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