Milton Magazine
Milton graduates address U.S. power and the direction of our national security
Fall 2003
, ‒ William T. Burgin ’61 Dover, Massachusetts
David B. Jenkins ’49 Duxbury, Massachusetts
Jorge Castro ’75 Pasadena, California
George A. Kellner Vice President New York, New York
Edward Dugger, III Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts James M. Fitzgibbons ’52 Emeritus Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
Helen Lin ’80 Hong Kong F. Warren McFarlan ’55 Belmont, Massachusetts
Victoria Hall Graham ’81 Haverford, Pennsylvania
Carol Smith Miller Wellesley, Massachusetts
Margaret Jewett Greer ’47 Emerita Chevy Chase, Maryland
Tracy Pun Palandjian ’89 Belmont, Massachusetts
Madeline Lee Gregory ’49 Westwood, Massachusetts Antonia Monroe Grumbach ’61 Secretary New York, New York Deborah Weil Harrington ’70 Washington, D.C. J. Tomilson Hill ’66 New York, New York Franklin W. Hobbs, IV ’65 President New York, New York Barbara Hostetter Boston, Massachusetts Ogden M. Hunnewell ’70 Vice President Brookline, Massachusetts Harold W. Janeway ’54 Emeritus Webster, New Hampshire
Richard C. Perry ’73 New York, New York John P. Reardon ’56 Vice President Cohasset, Massachusetts John S. Reidy '56 New York, New York Kevin Reilly Jr. ’73 Baton Rouge, Louisiana H. Marshall Schwarz ’54 Emeritus New York, New York Frederick G. Sykes ’65 Rye, New York Jide J. Zeitlin ’81 Treasurer New York, New York
Milton Magazine Features
Editor Cathleen Everett Associate Editors Shannon Groppi Heather Sullivan
Class Notes Editor Heather McConnell
Photography Doug Austin, Michael Dwyer, Tom Kates, Michael Lutch, Bill Moore, Tracy Pun Palandjian, Nicki Pardo, Robert Sheehan, J.D. Sloane, Elanor Starmer, Martha Stewart, Heather Sullivan, Vaughn Winchell
Two points of view in Washington today Avis Bohlen ’57
International law the greatest weapon against terror Chas. W. Freeman Jr. ’60
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First-rate planning to confront new risks Douglas Kinney ’63
The war against drugs in Colombia Elanor Starmer ’96
Designer Moore & Associates
U.S. History students examine patterns and personalities
Printed on Recycled Paper
Milton Magazine is published twice a year by Milton Academy. Editorial and business offices are located at Milton Academy where change-ofaddress notifications should be sent. As an institution committed to diversity, Milton Academy welcomes the opportunity to admit academically qualified students of any gender, race, color, handicapped status, sexual orientation, religion, national or ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs and activities generally available to its students. It does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, color, handicapped status, sexual orientation, religion, national or ethnic origin in the administration of its educational policies, admission policies, scholarship programs, and athletic or other school administered activities.
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War Memorial lectures challenge students and graduates
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’ Rod Skinner ’72
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Departments Master plan meets mission
Grade A Jazz The Boston Globe
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An all Asian cast stages a Mishima classic William Moore
Freedom Flashing Blake Gilpin ’97
Headlines, 2003
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News and notes from the campus and beyond
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, , : Last fall, the Bush administration delineated its national security policy, which asserted the value of preemptive military action. The war in Iraq, responses to acts of terror throughout the world, actions relative to international agreements—environmental and arms control for instance—have demonstrated the administration’s policy in action, and have affirmed the global power of the United States. Opinions vary widely on how we should use that power, what constitutes our national self-interest, how best to assure our long-term security, and what rationale should guide our international activity. We interviewed two Milton graduates who have devoted their careers to affecting international policy; the positions they achieved in service to their country acknowledge their intellectual and personal leadership. We invited a third Milton graduate to write about U.S. activity in Latin America, from the vantage point of her work as an advocate for the continent closest to the United States. A fourth, a career Foreign Service officer, addressed graduates on Graduates’ Weekend. We hope that learning about their points of view will enliven your thinking as the discourse regarding our national direction continues. Cathleen Everett
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Coping with Unrivaled Power Avis Bohlen ’57
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Avis Bohlen was most recently a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, working on a lengthy paper on the rise and fall of arms control. Avis had spent 25 years working on arms control and European security issues. She served as assistant secretary of state for arms control from the Clinton administration (1999) through the first two years of the George W. Bush administration. Prior to that, Avis worked with the first Bush administration on arms control issues. She served as ambassador to Bulgaria (1996–1999); deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Paris; and deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs. Recently, as she worked on numerous articles and prepared for a State Department speaking tour, Avis shared her views, excerpted here:
he great central fact of the interntional situation today is the United States’ position of unrivaled power. The enormity of that power is most obvious, of course, in military might—our global capacity to exert force. We have no rivals. It’s also clear in the economic domain: we produce 30 percent of the world’s GDP (gross domestic product). We also have cultural power: quite apart from Coca Cola, McDonald’s or jazz, our democratic institutions hold tremendous appeal, even today in view of our relative unpopularity. How we come to grips with that power, how our allies do, will set the direction for this century. We are all grappling with that reality, and there are no set answers. “In Washington today there are two points of view. The first is that we should act in what we define is our own selfinterest, in response to what we perceive as threats. While having willing partners is desirable, we should not be constrained by the lack of allies. This view creates its own legitimacy; it is the position of the current administration. “The second view is more reluctant to deploy military power. It is more conscious of the unintended consequences of military action, is more heedful of allies’ views, and is hesitant to act alone. This group believes in the value of developing and cultivating coalitions. Those of this persuasion seek to use military power only as a last resort. “There are also two views in Europe, as we saw during the Iraq War. The British decided to hew closely to the U. S. and attempt, from within, to influence our
action. The French tried to counterbalance American power, more strongly than at other times, and in that way to restrain us. Neither of these two approaches was successful, ultimately, in significantly influencing our course of action in Iraq.
“ . ; ’ .” “The outcome of the war might be seen as a vindication of the first point of view, but we cannot say that yet. Winning the war was relatively easy compared with the difficulty of winning the peace. We were laggard in our planning for the post-war phase, and while we may have anticipated such problems as the gaps in electric power and the water supply, we did not anticipate the breakdown of law and order, the problem of needing a police force. “This outcome is one reason why I hold the second point of view: We should not renounce the use of force, but we should 3 Milton Magazine
only use it as a last option. Use of force inevitably gives rise to a complicated chain of unintended consequences; it’s hard to pick up the pieces. “‘Rebuilding’ has not been a real success in any other of our recent engagements: Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Afghanistan. Despite the resources we’ve committed, we have not been able to create lasting order. As a country we have not faced up to the fact that reconstruction requires a complex, sustained effort—an ongoing need for money, people and skills. We are risking the development of failed states, and failed states are fertile ground for anarchy and terrorism (as is the case in Afghanistan). In Iraq’s case, competing groups—Kurds, Suni, and Shia Moslems—increase the difficulty.
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“ , — , . , ...” “Solving the Israeli-Palestinian situation is absolutely crucial and yet seems to be almost hopeless. It would be simple if it were simply a land for peace situation, but the issues are intractable and both sides have groups opposed to negotiation. Both sides have been guilty of serious miscalculation. How could the Palestinians not perceive that suicide bombers would make the Israeli people feel more intransigent?
On the other hand, the Israelis are shortsighted if they feel that repression and occupation will work. “The right of preemption is recognized in international observance, as justified in the face of imminent threat, for example in the case of the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Preventive war, which is the correct name for the administration’s doc-
trine of preemption, means using force to prevent what you believe your enemy’s intention is, that is beyond what the evidence shows. “Managing the proliferation of nuclear weapons is an area where coalitions work. Whereas traditional arms control dealt with the balance of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and Russia, the concern today is international proliferation. Nonproliferation—preventing the spread of nuclear and biological weapons in particular (many states already had chemical weapons)—became a central policy preoccupation in the ’90s. The NonProliferation Treaty and the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions provide us with tools that establish norms. In addition, like-minded countries, mainly industrialized nations, work together through supplier groups, such as the Australia Group and the London Group, to maintain export controls over the sale of, for example, chemical and biological precursers. These rules supplement formal conventions.
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“In some cases they have support from industries. The chemical industry, for instance, lobbied hard on behalf of the chemical weapons conventions. Still, controls only work if the politics are right: India developed nuclear capability because of concern about China. Pakistan is following suit because of India. North Korea is worrisome particularly because it is so hard to fathom. It is hard to imagine a satisfying solution. “In the longer run, I believe that we will inevitably move back to the greater reliance on diplomacy, that our current disposition toward unilateral and preemptive action will self-correct. With a continued difficult situation in Iraq, public awareness will build. What’s done is done, but we will need the cooperation of others to achieve the outcome. “Over the next 10 to 20 years, our real security will depend upon diplomacy, upon building coalitions. We should not be cavalier about getting rid of allies; we need allies.”
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Ambassador Chas. W. Freeman Jr., president of the Middle East Policy Council since 1997, was assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs from 1993-94, earning the highest public service awards of the Department of Defense for his roles in designing a NATO-centered post-Cold War European security system and in reestablishing defense and military relations with China. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia (during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm). He was principal deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs during the historic U.S. mediation of Namibian independence from South Africa and Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola. Chas. Freeman served as deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires in the American embassies at Bangkok (1984-1986) and Beijing (1981-1984). He was director for Chinese affairs at the U.S. Department of State from 1979-1981. He was the principal American interpreter during the late President Nixon’s path-breaking visit to China in 1972. In addition to his Middle Eastern, African, East Asian and European diplomatic experience, he served in India. Today, Chas. Freeman is also chairman of the board of Projects International, Inc., a Washington-based business development firm that specializes in arranging joint ventures, acquisitions and other business operations for its American and foreign clients. Prior to one of his frequent trips to the Middle East, Chas discussed his views of the United States’ use of power in the world.
The Cost of Unilateralism Chas. W. Freeman Jr. ’60
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or some purposes, the use of military power is essential, but those are limited. The use of force should be the exception, not just on moral grounds, but because it is ineffective. The ‘war on terrorism’ for example, is a misleading term. This is not a war; it cannot be won on a battlefield. There’s no ‘ism’ in terrorism; it is not an ideology. It is a criminal form of struggle, unacceptable to normal, civilized people. Whether or not the cause of the struggle is just, the means must be condemned. We can understand the Palestinians’ resistance to occupation and ethnic cleansing through land seizures as just, for example, but see their use of terror as a means as unjustifiable. The way to deter and minimize criminal forms of struggle is to apply the rule of law: stringent enforcement of law. Our greatest weapon against terror is international law and cooperative enforcement. Military action should hold a secondary role. “The effort to end terror, then, is a reason not to abandon the 20th century American enterprise: building a world based on law. To disregard law, to become a scofflaw (and therefore to become anti-democratically dismissive of the right of others to differ with us) is not just wrong. It is self-defeating and destructive, and leads to an increase of terror.
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“The doctrines based on preemptive use of military power originated in German thought in the 1920s and ’30s. Applied in the Middle East, they have failed and have been counterproductive. The notion that the U.S. should adopt them is bizarre and unjustified both on moral and pragmatic grounds. “The irony is that during the 20th century, the United States was the greatest champion of a rule-bound national order. We succeeded in marketing our ideas and bringing them to fruition in international institutions. In the 21st century, the great champions of international law are France, Germany and Japan. The people we sought to persuade are persuaded. In the meantime we seem to have lost faith in our own vision, and now seek to substitute a vision of might making right and the ends justifying the means. “This small group of strategic thinkers, with their intellectual roots in pre-World War II German political theory have essentially hijacked the Republican party. This situation has a corrosive effect beyond foreign policy, with two particularly objectionable domestic effects: • The imposition of political correctness, which has been most devastating to the
American Jewish community that has been intimidated into silence; great damage to public debate • A more indirect effect: the implementation of policies with indifference to foreign opinion, based on Caligula’s formula, ‘Let them hate us as long as they fear us’; greatly restraining openness, due process and civil liberties “In a series of desperate and ill-considered reactions to the September 11 assault on us we have greatly restrained civil liberties. We have suspended habeas corpus for certain classes of people, chiefly Muslims and immigrants. We have suspended the protections of due process for property for Arabs, whose property is subject to seizure without evidentiary hearings, and we have violated the Geneva Conventions with the Taliban held at Guantanamo: They were not stateless terrorists; they were captured defending their government against a foreign invasion of their country. “It is anomalous that a country normally guided and strengthened by the rule of law, dispenses with the rule of law, and thereby legitimizes the forms of behavior we object to. Why are the British and French, who have had greater experience with terror than we, able to maintain a relatively open society, while we cannot?
“At the moment, getting a visa to enter the U.S. is hard, and is often impossible for Arabs, Muslims and Chinese (for some reason). Arabs or Muslims suffer a high risk that they will be humiliated at our borders, by law enforcement on the spot, by customs officials, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) or even airline crews. We are damaging our export position and our place in the global economy by giving up what gave us the edge, our openness and our fundamental decency of behavior and by being brazenly xenophobic. As a result of our lack of regard for the rule of law at home and abroad, our economy will suffer. We should not be surprised if, nine months from now, we discover that 30 to 40 percent of our exports have disappeared.
should be unacceptable to analyze this situation and call a solution ‘impossible.’ The U.S. arms and supplies Israel; if we had the courage to use the leverage that we have to compel Israeli rethinking of counterproductive policies, the majority of the American people and of the Jewish population in America would applaud that action. It is unacceptable that a small, vicious struggle in the holy land should have the clear potential to ignite something harmful to Americans on a much larger scale, and that we do nothing.
“As a country, we have had earlier lapses in international and domestic behavior, and we have ultimately self-corrected. Consider the idiocy of the post-World War I period and the similar anti-foreign frenzy culminating in the so-called Palmer Raids and the Sacco and Venzetti trial. We interned Japanese-American families and took their property during World War II. When the consequences of our mistakes sink in, we change personality and rethink our behavior. American history inspires faith in the possibility of repentance and redemption.
“The devastating economic effects of escalating mutual brutality have, at the time we speak, turned the Israelis and Palestinians to the task, once again, of trying to determine their future. There’s no reason for anything but pessimism in the short term, however,
“ - .” because the shared toll of the dead and of seriously maimed survivors has made the polarization complete. Neither group now has a majority who can accept the notion of coexistence; with what both have witnessed and experienced, they have internalized the impossibility of coexistence. Arab and Muslim identification with the rage of Palestinians suffering under occupation, however, in the absence of a solution, makes the situation a nuclear trigger: a small explosion in a small, contained space with the potential to ignite a broader conflict, fueled by reactions to our invasion of Iraq and other actions. The fifth of the human race that is Muslim, is now profoundly alienated from the U.S. It regards America and American policy as unjust and indifferent to the suffering of anyone other than ourselves and people who look like us. It 7 Milton Magazine
“When will we self-correct? It might come from the perceived complexities of failures in Iraq. The president justified the invasion on five grounds: “He purported the need for regime change, but the regime has been replaced with anarchy. He asserted the threat of weapons of mass destruction, but we have learned that even if they are in Iraq, they were essentially inconsequential as a menace. We would democratize Iraq, he said, but thus far we are desecularizing Iraq. We would strike a mighty blow against terrorism, but so far the terrorists have not noticed. Finally, by banging Iraq on the head, the kaleidoscope of the Middle East would rearrange into a new and more advantageous pattern we have yet to see. “Perhaps the American taxpayer having to pay for Iraq’s reconstruction, directly or indirectly, will get our attention. Perhaps obnoxious American behavior will lead to coalitions of the unwilling and recalcitrant, blocking our unilateral behavior. Perhaps our exports will decline. Perhaps we will no longer be able to import brains as we always have to staff our university research and laboratory positions. If so, we will respond appropriately. Americans have an effective election system, and we are fundamentally a good and just people.
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“ , ; .” “We have a long tradition of attracting talented people because of our remarkable open environment and their ability to be more productive here than where they came from. As we call that atmosphere into question, and destroy that openness or jeopardize the attractiveness of our society, we risk losing our leadership edge. In the end, the cost of unilateralism in political terms will be American isolation; in economic terms it will mean losing our economic primacy. “I believe that we are in one of the pivotal moments of American history, a transitional period. During these transitions—we’ve gone through them before-—the compact of governance is renegotiated, the relationships between the layers of government are re-
arranged, and the purposes of the country are redefined. We have all the symptoms of transition to a new era; typically the pattern seems to take 12 to 16 years. The new era, the nature of which we can’t predict, has not arrived and is not yet defined. “What is the best way to manage our security for the next 10 to 20 years? It will not be by drawing a gun and pointing it at the rest of the world, thereby amassing enemies rather than friends. We should remember Teddy Roosevelt—‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’: maintain military superiority; do not boast about it; use it sparingly. We should rely primarily on diplomacy and focus on enhancing our attractiveness, on what others want to imitate. Our global leadership is based on the fact that others have wanted to emulate American society; they see our society as aspiring to a higher standard of decency than any other. Maintaining ‘the city on the hill’ is vital, for our own self-image, and to keep alive our traditions of aspiring to higher spiritual and ethical standards. If we lose the capacity to inspire, we will lose the capacity to lead.”
Douglas Kinney ’63 Delivers ‘Dare to be True’ Address
‘ ’ , ‘ ’ . : According to Douglas Kinney, career Foreign Service officer and currently a specialist in crisis management and conflict management, “daring, truth, valor, skill and confidence are key in facing terrorism.” Douglas Kinney ’63 teaches crisis management at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center, and trains Marine expeditionary units poised off all major littorals should Americans need rescue or evacuation. He has conducted crisis management exercises in 100 cities around the world since the bombings of U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. As a Foreign Service Officer, Douglas was a politico-military affairs specialist. He served as director of U.N. policy, public and congressional affairs in the State Department, and as a deputy chief of mission and counselor of embassy for political affairs abroad. He was twice seconded to the Forces in the field as a political advisor for Operations Desert Storm and Northern Watch in Iraqi Kurdistan.
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haracter is at the heart of how and how well we deal with the core challenges of terrorism—with global, asymmetrical unlimited guerrilla war; with unseen and uncountable enemies; with indiscriminate, amorally deployed weapons of mass murder; with a conflict without foreseeable end—what strategic doctrine calls the long war. “The core problem with long war is maintaining what you are fighting for. The danger is that without a moral compass there is a slide to expediency, then rationalization, then amorality, and then butchery. “I am fully convinced that character is not an adjunct or a nicety but rather the heart of facing those challenges. From inner strengths stem the very simple determination, self-reliance, sacrifice and social cohesion that will see us through in a way we can be proud of. “We must defend what we are and yet not defend it so fiercely that we lose what we are. As individuals, a nation and a civilization, that is the core challenge.... “‘Dare to be true’ is not simply an ideal but a survival skill for ourselves and our society and indeed our civilization....
“We are facing challenges few have experienced and lived to tell us about. Shall we despair? Hardly.... We need a strategic sense to get a grip. We need perspective, confidence, indeed [we need] optimism.... “A crisis poses a threat to lives, and demands immediate, sustained action and original solutions based on first-rate planning and thorough preparation. The scale and scope of the looming crises demand of us: new thinking tools and skillsets— thinking in scenarios,... out on the edge of probability and credibility,...—and group skill sets such as working better in teams.... We must admit our limits and deal with them frankly. We must determine our crisis behavior in advance.... “We need, too, to re-engineer our thinking.... We need new imagineering tools to study the low-probability, high-consequence event, to look anew at key processes and people, at sensitive vulnerable points.... “We need to be less predictable. Randomly varying routines deters, the very preparing deters, and deterrence works.... “We must think clearly and coldly about our opposition; we must respect our opposition, and understand our opposition, profoundly.... We must find and embrace common ground, whether [our 9 Milton Magazine
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opposition] does or not.... Remember that your culture is more in the habit of reaching out, is more conflict-averse, and considers compromise a worthy means to higher ends. If we think cross-culturally we can perceive who can be engaged in different ways, and who cannot.... “The new risk curve to the 21st century... means that we cannot wait for terrorism to come to us... we need to play a forward game; in fact, we need to play several games at once. “We must build our own and our community’s resilience so we can live real lives, but live them prepared, so we can function through crisis and then recover deeply.... “A dark future, the 21st century? No—we have the potential to add to human creativity in all fields, indeed to revolutionize many... Yes, I am painting severe potential challenges. We are more than up to them. But we can best them ... if we start retooling now ... in many ways [going] back to what we learned here (at Milton): • Dare to keep the passion even when the lessons are harsh • Respect others so as to find the hidden common ground, across pain—and over time • Embrace diversity to build community and a common humanity—the essence of the long game on the bottom board • The pursuit of excellence—including in defending ourselves • The bolstering of confidence and character, our last line of defense • Creative and critical thinking • Fearlessness in expressing ideas, including knowing and naming evil when one sees it • Daring to be true... “Is there a core rule here? The answer is the same as in peacetime: Do the right thing. ‘Dare to be true.’”
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Elanor Starmer ’96 is a policy analyst with the Latin America Working Group in Washington, D.C.
Unsavory Allies: U.S. Power and the Drug War in Colombia Elanor Starmer ’96
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arly this year, outside an elevator at the National Defense University, I met an old, balding man named General Carlos Ospina Ovalle. Recently appointed head of the Colombian army, Ospina was in Washington to receive an award from the U.S. government for his leadership and military excellence. In my three years working on Colombia with a human rights and policy organization in Washington, I had heard Ospina’s name mentioned frequently—but quietly and carefully, as if speaking the name itself could somehow do harm. This is because Ospina, who cheerfully greeted me on his way to the elevator, is best known in human rights circles for his participation in Colombia’s 1997 El Aro massacre, in which a brigade under his command aided a private armed militia as they entered a town, rounded up civilians, and murdered them in front of their families. General Ospina is by no means the only military commander in Colombia with such a past; in fact, among Colombia’s military elite, a history of “excesses”—to use that euphemistic term—is frighteningly commonplace. Despite these abuses and the impunity enjoyed by those who commit them, Colombia is the thirdlargest recipient of U.S. military aid in the
world, trailing only Israel and Egypt. Shortly after Ospina’s award ceremony this spring, the U.S. Congress passed another in a series of massive aid packages to the armed forces he controls, bringing U.S. assistance to Colombia in the last three years to a total of over $2.5 billion. U.S. power in the form of military aid to Colombia was not intended to promote the abuse of human rights by Colombian generals, but was first wielded as part of a domestic war on drugs. The hemisphere’s largest producer of cocaine, Colombia is now the front line in America’s war. But in our quest for measurable successes in the drug arena, our aid has had far broader repercussions. In choosing a brutal military as our drug war ally, we have fueled a civil war and eroded the trust of Colombian citizens, undermining the ery institutions that could help ensure the hemisphere’s long-term stability. ................... The late 1980s first brought U.S. law enforcement to Colombia’s dense jungles and urban battlefields in search of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. Following Escobar’s assassination in 1993, and U.S.sponsored drug eradication efforts in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador which effec-
tively shifted coca production to Colombia, that country became a major exporter of cocaine. Communities in poor, isolated provinces such as Putumayo, on Colombia’s southern border, welcomed the modest income that coca brought them. In the words of one Colombian peasant leader, “We prefer growing coca to dying of starvation.” Putumayo’s rural areas have no major markets or banks and few paved roads, and traffickers used the underdevelopment to their advantage by bringing money and supplies in by helicopter— something few governments were willing to do at that time. By 1999, Colombia was producing 80 percent of the hemisphere’s cocaine, and Colombian President Andres Pastrana asked the international community for social and economic assistance. Backed by President Clinton, the U.S. Congress passed a $1.3 billion package called Plan Colombia, most of which funded the Colombian armed forces for anti-drug work. But this was not a continuation of the hunt-to-kill operations of the Escobar era. Plan Colombia stepped up the fight against a more benign and less specific enemy: the coca plant, and, by extension, the people who grew it. Trained, equipped 11 Milton Magazine
Witness for Peace
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A farmer displays his peanut crop, which was ruined by fumigation.
and funded by the United States, Colombian military battalions now fly aerial fumigation missions that drop herbicides on fields in Colombia’s southern provinces with the hopes of reducing coca yields. The policy of aerial fumigation is outlawed in Bolivia and Peru, and has never before been used on such a massive scale. In the spring of 2002, I traveled to southern Colombia to document the impact of U.S. fumigation policy. There I met Juan Ramirez, a Colombian farmer who owns three acres of land on which he plants corn, yucca, and plantains for his family. Some of his neighbors plant coca. In November 2001, spray planes dropped herbicides throughout the area. And despite the claims of U.S. officials that only coca fields were targeted, Juan Ramirez’s food crops withered and died a few days later, along with both the food crops and coca crops of his neighbors. In 2000, the U.S. Congress pledged to use fumigation as a “stick” to scare communities out of growing coca, but farmers like Juan Ramirez, who never grew coca, were 12 Milton Magazine
not supposed to be targeted. After their cash crop had been destroyed, his neighbors were supposed to receive the “carrot” of alternative, legal crop assistance, so that they would not go back to planting coca. The U.S. funded the fumigation of almost 300,000 acres of land last year alone, but since the beginning of 2001, has provided alternative crop assistance to farmers on only 30,000 acres. The Colombian government’s Human Rights Ombudsman— an official mediator between the government and the people on human rights issues—has documented numerous cases in which U.S. spray planes have actually fumigated alternative development projects by accident, including several funded by USAID. The result has been a humanitarian disaster for all who find themselves under the wing of the spray plane. “Sometimes,” a Colombian development worker told me, “I go to the communities and sit with the men in their doorways, and they have nothing to do now that they cannot farm. Sometimes we play cards. On bad days, we look out at their withered crops and we cry.”
There is no accurate way to calculate the extent of the human damage from our fumigation policy. The numbers, though, can tell at least part of the story. In 2001, after the fumigation of 200,000 acres of land, drug cultivation in Colombia rose by 25 percent as farmers with no alternatives moved their families elsewhere and planted coca again. Last year, although statistics showed a moderate decrease in Colombian cultivation, coca planting in Bolivia and Peru rose for the first time in seven years-along with record numbers of refugees fleeing to those countries from Colombia. As the drug reformers on Capitol Hill frequently remind us, one of the few laws Congress can’t repeal is the law of supply and demand. ................... In 2000, U.S. policy toward Colombia was only supposed to be about drugs. But like our search for coca fields, we tried to pinpoint Colombia’s drug problem on the map of its complex history, intervening only there—and we missed. Getting involved in Colombia is risky business for
reasons besides the profligate drug lords who made the country famous. It is also home to the longest-running insurgent war in the hemisphere: for 40 years, the government has been battling self-professed leftist guerilla groups, the largest of which is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Over the course of the civil war, the FARC has earned a reputation for slaughter and moral corruption, and the Colombian military has earned the worst human rights record of any state security force in the hemisphere for its attacks on civilians living in FARCcontrolled territory. In the mid-1980s, private right-wing paramilitary groups gained strength as well, and now work hand-in-hand with some sectors of the Colombian military to attack the FARC and their suspected sympathizers. The paramilitaries are responsible for some 70 percent of human rights violations in Colombia each year, and fund their activities from, among other sources, drug trafficking. To Colombia’s many ironies, then, we have added our own: the United States is sending antidrug funding to a military that works with drug traffickers.
“ , , .“ In response to concerns over paramilitarymilitary ties, administration officials have highlighted training programs designed to teach the Colombian military respect for human rights and deference to civilian laws and institutions. This faith in the potential of military-to-military relations has been exercised before during U.S. missions in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Despite the tragic outcomes of those experiments, Congress continues to act on the belief that U.S. power, in the form of massive appropriations and the on-the-ground presence of U.S. military personnel and contractors, can help wash Colombia’s corrupt institutions clean of their past, protect civilians, and, most important, keep the hemisphere safe from drugs and “narcoterrorists.” Three years
and nearly $3 billion into this policy, however, we have failed to achieve these goals. And in a country where drug profits, corruption and the armed conflict are so intertwined, it is not surprising that our anti-drug aid would have negative repercussions beyond the sphere of drugs. Putumayo, for example, has seen a massive increase in paramilitary activity since U.S. military assistance began in 2000. In Villa Garzon, where one U.S.-funded brigade is based, paramilitaries parade the streets openly and have begun systematic murders of civilians. “How is it,” asked a community leader of international observers, “that we’ve been taken over by the AUC [paramilitaries] in broad daylight... when these places are entirely controlled by the public forces?” The Colombian government’s human rights ombudsman concluded in a recent report that “the public security situation in Lower and Middle Putumayo [areas with a presence of U.S.-funded Colombian troops] has worsened considerably and the presence of illegal armed groups has grown.” Caught between a corrupt military, armed groups from the left and right, and the threat of fumigation without
The herbicide used in fumigation does not discriminate between illegal crops and legal ones, like these plantains.
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broader, deeper repercussions: The worst outcome of our policy is the weakening effect it has had on institutions that could improve life in Colombia in the longterm. U.S. policy toward Colombia, while focusing on drugs, has also outlined broader policy goals which include “peace, prosperity, and the strengthening of the state.” These broader goals are much harder to achieve because they are complicated by factors over which the U.S. has little control—history, family and community ties, the desire for profit or revenge. To reach them, we will have to rely on and support institutions like the Ombudsman’s office, which has shown itself able and willing to stand up to entrenched corruption even within its own administration, or a mediating party like the United Nations. Instead, our unilateral approach has been to write human rights into our policy goals with one hand, while with the other to fund a military that has no reason to respect human rights or go after drug trafficking allies as long as the money keeps flowing.
A children’s mural in Putumayo depicts the damage done by fumigation.
alternative crop assistance, many farmers in Putumayo have fled in search of a stable life. But others have joined either the FARC or the paramilitaries, who offer security and a salary. The fumigation campaign in Putumayo may be a farmer’s nightmare, but to the armed groups, it is a recruiting field day. ................... On my last day in Colombia last year, I sat in the office of the government’s Human Rights Ombudsman, who was sharply criticized by his superiors for condemning the fumigation program on 14 Milton Magazine
human rights grounds. On the wall was a poster for the agency’s newest anti-violence campaign. It was a photograph of a man on the ground, his chest bloody, with the circle and cross of a rifle sight positioned on top of him. At the bottom, in lilting Spanish, was a weak appeal: “If you get him in your sight a second time, think about whether it’s really worth it to shoot him again.” The official sitting below the poster looked as tired and desperate as the meager plea printed above him. While fumigation has failed as a drug policy, our choice of the Colombian military as an ally in the effort has had much
Imagination is needed as we begin to hammer out our own policy alternatives. Ending military aid and fumigation in Colombia is a start, but the effort must be accompanied by support for those programs and institutions that protect human rights: crop assistance and training for small farmers, judicial reform, protection of human rights defenders, and fair trade; drug treatment and prevention programs at home. All of this, of course, is exceptionally complicated; there is no easy remedy for what ails Colombia. But our experiences in Central America in the 1980s highlight the shortcomings of a hope for reform that is pinned on aid to military regimes. With each dollar we continue to send to militaries like Colombia’s, the meaning and power behind the words we value—democracy, freedom, rights, liberty—is slowly disappearing. If we hope to support those values abroad, they must be the starting point of our foreign policy, and not an afterthought. Reach Elanor at estarmer@lawg.org.
Examinations of Power
Students explore U.S. initiatives in their history research papers A rite of passage for nearly all Class II students is the U.S. History research paper. Most students choose a 20th century topic, according to the history faculty, and engage with primary sources. They work as historians: to discern events, movements, causes and effects from the writings of players in that time period. This year, among the students who chose to write about the power of the United States, are those that follow. Their theses and findings are interesting on a number of levels: why they chose their topics; how they analyzed events; what conclusions they have drawn about this country, its leaders and its actions.
maneuvers, calculated but enormous risks, smart tactics with coordinated technology—in service of a tenaciously held goal. Avoiding confrontation with the Japanese in more conventional sites, MacArthur isolated them and applied massive air, sea and land firepower. He used a relatively lean fighting force, and MacArthur himself has argued that his campaign was efficient and economical in terms of loss of life. Ultimately, he captured two harbors and three airfields, and positioned himself positively for what would be his triumphal return to the Philippines.
Nick Danforth ‘04
MacArthur’s New Guinea Campaign: A Road to the Philippines
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eading about the Pacific campaign in World War II led Nick Danforth to William Manchester’s books about General Douglas MacArthur: Good-bye Darkness and American Caesar. As have many before him, Nick became engrossed in MacArthur’s character—military genius; charismatic leader; ambitious conqueror—and particularly his direction of the 1944 New Guinea campaign as a strategy to get back to the Philippines. Nick’s paper thesis proposed that MacArthur’s New Guinea campaign, over nine months and 1,300 miles, demonstrated wartime strategy based on bold
Nick was interested in what shaped MacArthur’s power as an individual and a leader. Prior to the War Memorial Lecture given by David McCullough this year, Nick concluded that MacArthur exhibited a set of personal characteristics that Mr. McCullough named as typical of the earliest fighters for American independence: boldness, resoluteness, courage, resourcefulness, inventiveness, will, humor and good spirit. MacArthur’s personal complexity was not lost on Nick, who picked up on MacArthur’s marriage between military drive and his sense of personal obligation. Nick wrote his paper while observing the United States leadership argue for intervention into Iraq. Nick said he supported President Bush’s invasion, but hastened to add that the conflict in Iraq was not comparable in any way to the situations in World War II. “It’s hard to imagine how absolutely uncertain everything was at that time,” he said.
Ben Hur ‘04
The Bay of Pigs
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nterested in the role of the CIA in a democracy, and fascinated with the character of John F. Kennedy, Ben Hur examined the failed Bay of Pigs operation. Asking about the political context of the idea, its goals, the path of decisionmaking that led to its launch, and what went wrong, Ben’s thesis argued that the reasons weren’t as simple as Kennedy’s refusal to authorize a second air strike to support the brigade that had landed on the island. Instead, Ben found a network of patterns, typical of many, if not most, modern power struggles. New to Ben was the notion of a bipolar political world: two strategic rivals vying for economic dominance and powerenhancing alliances on either side of the 15 Milton Magazine
Cold War coin. The posturing of political leaders interested in their own longevity was a factor; Castro’s relationship with the Soviet Union developed because of the latter’s promised nuclear protection, and the perception that the United States was planning an intervention into Cuba. The United States’ feeling of vulnerability was a shaping dynamic as well. Perceiving itself to be lagging in scientific progress, economic development, and securing spheres of influence, the United States leadership was threatened by a nearby communist state and its military alliances. The CIA’s analyses during the Eisenhower administration gave rise to the CIAauthored plan for intervention. The authors’ emotional connection with the idea of the intervention propelled it forward. Later, critics would say that the desire to see it happen superseded the desire to see it succeed. The mission was relocated, down-sized, and the timetable was changed—in response to Kennedy’s concerns about appearing to be the aggressor, the invading force (plausible deniability was the essential requirement of the operation). Political, intelligence and military leaders close to the president chose to support or oppose the mission based on perceptions of their roles in a team, the hierarchy of decision-making or the preservation of status. Kennedy was not well advised, Ben believes. National policy-makers, Ben asserts, did not adequately or realistically inform the decision-making process or the president, so a series of serious mistakes ensued. Ben closes with a look at Arthur Schlesinger’s note to President Kennedy about two actions he could have taken that may have proved more effective. One option was to induce Castro to take offensive action first, thereby legitimizing an open U.S. intervention against Cuba. The second was to state the values case: set forth for the hemisphere Kennedy’s concept of inter-American progress toward individual freedom and social justice. Schlesinger’s idea was that by making other nations aware of the threat Castro posed to their ideology, the U.S. would garner support from them in actions against Castro. 16 Milton Magazine
Ben concludes, “It was his cabinet’s and the CIA’s role to help dig Kennedy out of the emotional battle between the two superpowers and think logically, assessing what would be best for the country, but unfortunately they failed to do so. Forty years have passed since the invasion and the U.S. relationship with Cuba has not changed.”
Tiz Mogollon ‘04
Theodore Roosevelt: The Progressive Era and the Panama Canal
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s a Colombian, Tiz Mogollon looks at the building of the Panama Canal from the point of view of someone whose national history was affected by Theodore Roosevelt’s driving vision. Panama was a part of Colombia when Theodore Roosevelt became interested in taking over the bankrupt French effort to build a crossisthmus canal. The thesis of Tiz’s paper is that each aspect of building the canal: the strategy Roosevelt used to wrest Panama from Columbia, the definition of the project, the justification of it in the face of critics, and its ultimate success, are defining examples of the Progressive Era’s core values. The Progressive Era enshrines the vision of an active government executing decisions with broad positive implications: making changes that include the potential to improve the human condition over time. The power that Roosevelt extended unilaterally in this case has been deemed permissible by the court of history. The
United States has extended itself continually into Latin American countries and their destinies, over the last century through the present, Tiz asserts, under the mantle of national values but with cultural insensitivity, and grave negative implications. Progressivism urged governmental action to create and sustain equality of opportunity and alleviation of poverty. This movement connected action in support of enlightened vision with righteousness, and under that rubric, endorsed the broad uses of power, within the United States and in its foreign relations. In fact, the vision’s inherent righteousness compels action. When the advancement of humankind is at stake, the means justifies the end, which in this case included inciting the Panamanian revolution, broadly interpreting the treaty of 1846 (right of transit across the isthmus) to build a canal through another nation, or crafting the corollary to extend the Munroe Doctrine. America saw itself as the helping hand, Tiz says, not as the invaders, and in order to advance humankind, the U.S. felt entitled to supremacy over any other government. Tiz cites Henry Pringle’s biography, Theodore Roosevelt, which claims that Roosevelt stereotyped Colombians, who rejected the treaty declaring Panama’s sovereignty and independence, as “foolish and homicidal corruptionists who should not be able to bar one of the future highways of civilization. ...The interest of highly civilized people took precedence over those of backward peoples; and advanced peoples were morally obligated to support the onward march of civilization,” Pringle summarizes. Roosevelt answered some critics and dissuaded others from their protest when he declared the canal a neutral zone, open to all inter-ocean transit. He let Congress debate the taking of the Canal Zone while the canal was already being built, and asserted to the public that taking it was a righteous act. He expanded his power to benefit his country. Establishing U.S. political supremacy obviously also secured economic domination, as well. After researching and writing her paper, Tiz found the comparison of Roosevelt’s
foreign policy and the current administration’s description of its foreign policy goals unavoidable. She found Bush’s policy of “implementing America’s supremacy and righteousness over other countries overwhelming. While Teddy’s foreign policy approach and objectives were reasonable and virtuous, Bush’s approach and objectives are radical and revengeful, making them hard to compare.”
Albert Kwon ‘04
U.S. Influence on South Korean Economy and Politics in the 1950s and 1960s
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n his home country, Albert Kwon says that anti-Americanism among South Korean students is high; Koreans are challenging the long-standing, close economic and political ties with the United States more that ever. The resentment has roots in local issues. A Korean short track skater who finished in first place at the 2002 winter Olympics was disqualified, thereby transferring the gold medal to an American. Koreans are very serious about their short track skaters and expect to win the gold; they feel that the judges were biased and robbed Korea of the medal. A second inflammatory situation involves Korean celebrities. Many are U.S.-Korea dual citizens, and leave for the United States rather than serve their mandatory
military duty, as other young Korean men must. Albert is considering his father’s advice, that he seek American citizenship and not plan his adulthood in Korea. In the face of these recent developments, Albert researched the U.S.-Korean interactive economic and political developments of the 1950s and ’60s to determine the outcomes of the long mutual dependency.
Korean exports increased. “President Johnson helped Koreans establish KIST (the Korean Institute of Science and Technology) so that South Korea could develop its own technology,” Albert noted. “The United States provided a large market for Korean products; the strong technology base in Korea helped South Korean compete internationally.”
America’s hasty decision in 1945 with the Soviet Union to divide Korea along the 38th parallel (and to send U.S. troops into South Korea) was disadvantageous for the South, as more than 80 percent of the country’s heavy industry and the lion’s share of the natural resources were in the North. The South Koreans needed substantial foreign aid to survive and America needed their survival to achieve its interest in containing Communist ambitions. “Korea became dependent upon the United States economically and politically. The dependence deepened after the Korean War when North Korea attempted to unify the peninsula,” Albert writes.
The United States also played a major role in setting the foundations of South Korean democracy and in influencing politics over time. Among other things, the U.S. has influenced elections, applied pressure to force power from the military to civilians, forced key policy initiatives such as neutralizing the country’s relationship with Japan, and helped establish the KCIA— the national intelligence operation.
American troops that had withdrawn from the peninsula by 1949 returned to help South Korea against the North, attempted to reunify the country and destroy the communist regime, and remained in South Korea from that time forward. During the next two decades and the administration of presidents Rhee and Park, the United States’ military commitment to South Korea significantly affected the country’s economic and political development, because South Korea’s survival was important to the United States interest in a non-Communist front in Asia. South Korea’s political stability and economic prosperity today are outcomes of a relationship based on a perception of shared goals and a record of significant and diversified foreign aid. The South Korean story proves again the interdependence of economic stability and political stability. U.S. forces rebuilt Korean roads, schools, and hospitals; they helped in ways from restoring water systems and communication systems to teaching Korean medical students. Annual aid continued at a high level during the ’50s and when aid began to decrease in the ’60s
Albert concludes that although South Korea is more self-reliant, it is still dependent upon the American government and its support, and the relationship should continue. The U.S. market is vital to the South Korean economy, and mutual threats still confront the two countries.
Armeen Poor ‘04
Reagan’s Rogues: The Iran Contra Scandal
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s an Iranian-American, Armeen Poor was interested in researching a topic that involved these two countries. He began work on the hostage crisis of 1979, 17 Milton Magazine
but soon discovered the Iran-Contra weapons scandal. That series of events both intrigued and confused him. How could leaders within the executive branch of the U.S. government do what they did? What does the outcome of that scandal mean for the way we should understand the power of the presidency? Armeen found that the National Security Council operatives who, in the mid1980s, executed the sale of weapons to Iran and the transfer of funds to the Nicaraguan Contras had violated his sense of democratic values and principals, in spirit and in the law. He further concluded that the administration’s foreign policy goals in this situation were at best confusing, and at worst served United States economic interests in spite of grave humanitarian consequences in three countries: Iran, Iraq and Nicaragua.
President Reagan had imposed an embargo on sales of weapons to Iran and pressured other nations to honor the embargo, opposing the extremist government in Iran and its sponsorship of terrorism. The U.S. supported Iraq, financially and politically, during the Iran-Iraq war. Lt. Col. Oliver North of the National Security Council staff, along with national security advisors Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter set and implemented policies with regard to Iran and Nicaragua in direct contradiction to our public foreign policy posture and to Congressional mandate. They sold weapons to the fundamentalist regime, and diverted the resulting funds to the Nicaraguan “contra” rebels, when Congress had prohibited such aid through the Boland Amendment. When the scheme was revealed and subsequently investigated, the operatives leading it admitted to lying to Congress, shredding documents and falsifying evidence. The
operation implicated CIA officials and even Secretary of State Caspar Weinberger. In overtaking foreign policy, and defying Congress’ control of funding for foreign policy initiatives, Armeen asserts that the executive branch defied the constitutional separation of powers. Further, if a democracy is based on elected officials’ truthfully representing the common people of the country, members of the executive branch of government “poorly represented the nation’s people though an abundance of secrecy and deception.” This set of foreign policy actions effectively extended debilitating conflict in three countries; these actions arguably improved economic opportunities for the United States in the case of cheaper oil from Iran and Iraq, and sustained our economic and political dominance in South America, in the case of Nicaragua. Were economic goals, especially the access to inexpensive oil, the true drivers of foreign policy?
Research and Writing in History at Milton Formative intellectual experiences “The American History research paper feels different to students,” says Carly Wade, history department chair, even though they do research papers in Classes IV and III (in Ancient Civilizations and in Modern World History). The American History paper is longer, but perhaps more importantly, students are intellectually more mature when they undertake it. They approach this project differently: less as a process, more as an opportunity for discovery. They often know what they’d like to write about and why; the topic reflects a curiosity borne of an academic experience, an unanswered question, an emerging area of interest. “U.S. History students usually focus on the 20th century,” says Carly, “they look at things that are the foundation of their experience. We see lots of cultural history papers—exploring the development of music, theater, dance, media, images 18 Milton Magazine
of groups, experiences of groups. For many students, because of where they are intellectually when they do the American History paper, the experience is a formative one in their academic lives.” For the American History paper, Milton faculty ask students to use as many primary source documents as they can. Younger students use primary source material as well, but they can’t write the whole paper based on these original documents. Interpretation of medieval and ancient documents is a more difficult prospect. For Class II students writing about 20th century topics, however, using primary source material is a natural. Their work, in discerning events, movements, causes and effects from the writings of players in that time period, more closely approximates that of real historians. Plenty of documents are available to them.
All Class I history electives involve research papers, but for those students especially excited about research and writing, Milton offers a logical next step. Students enthused about their American History paper can elect to take the Senior Seminar in history, founded as a more intense and rewarding extension of the research experience. Students in Senior Seminar spend their first few weeks looking at historiography (the writing of history). As a group they choose a decade for study, and for the rest of the semester they research individual topics framed by that decade. Throughout the semester they meet weekly to talk about what they’re finding—about the research process itself, and about their subjects. The course concludes with some outstanding papers, and a number of accomplished, enthused young scholars.
Armeen ends his examination of the use of power by several individuals within the Reagan administration with abiding questions about the legitimate use of power, constitutional checks and balances, relationship of an administration and its top operatives to the public, and the public trust. The criminal convictions by jury of both North and Poindexter were set aside because of the grant of immunity extended to them by the investigating Congressional commission. North, who lied to Congress and shredded evidence, is an unapologetic, well-known public figure with many supporters today. What does this tell us about the use or misuse of the extraordinary power of the United States? Furthermore, as he now watches the actions in the Middle East of a new administration, Armeen is left with the question of the role of oil—its intrinsic relationship with the U.S. economy—as a driving force in our use of power throughout the world.
Amelia Wilbur ‘03
Economy and Empire: U. S. Intervention in Latin America from 1901 to 1931
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rying to sort out the role of economic interests in the formation of U.S. foreign policy led Amelia to study U.S. relations with Latin America from roughly
1900–1930. Acknowledging the complexity and interdependence of economic, political and ideological influences, Amelia nevertheless contended that “most historians would agree that there are periods in the history of foreign policy of the United States that can be characterized by a chronic disregard of a foreign people for the economic benefit of the United States.” This period in U.S.-Latin American history is an example. Ameila’s paper describes the military interventions that characterized the policy in the decades before World War I (specifically in Cuba and Nicaragua) that protected U.S. business expansion, followed by “the non-violent ‘economic intervention’ as a result of the Good Neighbor Policy and Herbert Hoover’s efforts to link the interests of American business with those of the U. S. government.” While the U.S. policy changed from military intervention in support of economic interests to “new systems of direct economic control,” in both cases the social needs and political and economic well being of the native population were discounted in favor of U.S. economic interests. From 1901–1920, America used the Platt Amendment and the 1904 Corollary to the Munroe Doctrine to justify intervening in Cuba, and fomenting revolution in Nicaragua respectively. The 1917 U.S. military action in Cuba secured the conservative President Mario Garcia Menocal. He allowed U.S. troops to be stationed in Cuba to protect American sugar interests. American investment dollars flowed into Cuba, vastly increasing the scope and productivity of the sugar industry, but undermining other types of agricultural subsistence, forcing people off land, and impoverishing the local population. In Nicaragua, American businessmen provoked right-wing Nicaraguans into a revolution-cum-civil war and ultimately (with naval presence) secured the presidency for General Juan Estrada as well as the Dawson Agreement, guaranteeing the rights of foreigners in a new constitution. After World War I, with the realization that peaceful relationships were more conducive to economic advances than mili-
tary instability, the U.S. pursued more direct controls over governments and policies in Latin America. The Open Door Policy —stating that every nation had an equal opportunity for economic expansion —benefited the strongest economic competitor. Given the U.S.’ existing base in Latin America, the upshot of that policy was boxing Latin America out of the international economy and increasing its dependence on the United States. The Good Neighbor Policy also “signified the start of an era of severe economic imperialism on the part of the United States... which left much of Latin America is a state of complete economic subservience and dependence,” Amelia asserts. “The economic intervention of the U.S. in the form of corrupt loans, networks of financial advisors and businessmen employed by Washington, and policies based on the close connection between government and business, had an equally disastrous effect on the people of Cuba, and Latin America as a whole, as the prewar policy of military intervention,” writes Amelia. Amelia was particularly interested in the fact that the prevailing ideology at that time was broad humanitarianism: the idea of protecting these countries from themselves, policing them in their own best interests. Business leaders believed that furthering the economic interests of the United States was doing a service to humanity, “extending the American dream of capitalism and democracy.” It is not uncommon, Amelia says, for diplomatic historians to split along pro- and anti-capitalistic lines in either condemning U.S. foreign policy as imperialistic of defending it as humanitarian. Amelia concludes that “while Latin American countries suffered from economic dependence and political domination, the United States got richer and richer at their expense, and government and business interests grew progressively more entwined until...foreign policy and economic self-interest became all but indistinguishable.”
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Milton During War David Snider ’03
Reprinted from the April 25, 2003, edition of The Milton Measure.
D
ressed in blazers and slacks under their overcoats, two Class IV boys walked around the roof of the Chapel keeping their eyes fixed on the sky. The boys had agreed to take turns throughout the long, cold February weekend to keep watch from the highest point on the Milton campus. The boys were soon glad of their seemingly mundane weekend task when on Friday one of them spotted a plane beginning to loop. Suddenly its pilot jumped from the aircraft and opened his parachute as the plane crashed to the ground. The students immediately flashed a report to the Boston Information Center of the First Fighter Command indicating that the accident had happened and the coordinates of the pilot. After rescuing the pilot from the branches of a tree in the Blue Hills Reservation, the Army called the Milton Academy Chapel Tower Observation Post to thank the young men for their service. Manning the observation tower at the Chapel was one of the sacrifices and contributions that Milton made during World War II to help the nation’s war efforts. During Milton’s 2003 spring vacation the United States military embarked upon armed conflict in order to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. On April 1, classes at Milton resumed and life at school seemed unchanged, even while intense battles were being fought for the control of Iraqi cities. Since that time, beyond comments from administrators to be sensitive to other students’ viewpoints and a sparsely attended Public Issues Board meeting, the Academy has proceeded exactly as normal. Though many in the community may feel that “life as usual” is the best course of action, previous American wars have had different impacts on Milton. In March 1917 the faculty sent a telegram to the President of the United States in support of his decision to send American troops to aid the Allied Forces in Europe. Throughout the course of the war, five teachers left Milton in order to perform military or naval duty. Students also contributed significantly, by creating a volunteer infantry company of 75 20 Milton Magazine
boys who drilled with dummy guns during part of the spring term. Over the summer, some students, with the support of the Academy, went for military training at Fort Terry and Plattsburg, while 12 others worked at the Milton Academy Farm Camp at Petersham. The farm camp and the conversion of several acres of campus into farmland were both the result of the President’s appeal to Americans to dedicate more land to food cultivation. By 1918 at least six students had left for duty and a wireless telegraphy class was added to the School’s curriculum. The Girls’ School raised money through plays and other ventures to donate toward humanitarian aid, and Hathaway House brought students together to make garments and surgical dressings. Milton’s contributions during World War II were similar with the notable addition of the Chapel being used as an observation tower to spot German planes. Mr. Millet, who was a teacher here in 1942, remembered air raid alerts and the self-imposed School blackouts that accompanied them. While the war in Vietnam shared similarities with previous American wars, the reaction of students and faculty was different. Rather than supporting the war effort, the community sought ways to help end it. Rod Skinner (director of college counseling) remembers from his Class III year at Milton in 1969, that the bombings in Cambodia ignited activism in the Milton community, especially among the faculty. The faculty voted to allow any student who was in good academic standing to suspend his or her classes provided that he or she was working 30 to 40 hours a week on an endeavor related to ending the war. The students’ vote on the same issue supported the decision. Mr. Skinner remembers going daily to the MIT strike center and protesting on street corners, as well as collecting signatures. Most students were in good enough academic standing and took advantage of the opportunity. While many students used the time to participate in something they believed in, others did not take the break from classes seriously, and spent that spring relaxing. The
David Snider ’03
school’s radical decision angered many alumni, which left the school in a precarious financial position. According to Mr. Millet who was teaching at the time, “The school almost disintegrated.” Thankfully Mr. Millet’s fear did not occur and the campus was not significantly affected by war again until 21 years later. On January 16, 1991, the day after the U.N. deadline for Iraq expired, people packed into the student center to watch CNN for late-breaking news. An anti-war group was immediately formed by students and there was a discussion group in Straus during lunch and another in Cox Library each period throughout the day. Recognizing the importance of the event, former Headmaster Edwin Fredie ended classes early and opened a discussion with faculty and students in Straus. Mark Hilgendorf (history) vividly remembers the discussion because it had an “atmosphere like a teachin, open mic[rophone].” He recalls that he and the rest of the faculty spoke “not as teachers, but as Americans.” The equality of viewpoints among students and faculty was memorable for Mr. Hilgendorf, because he has not seen it happen to the same extent since that discussion. Both Iraqi wars have occurred in a climate and under circumstances different from World Wars I and II. As time goes on, and the nature of warfare makes civilian involvement seem less important, the students and faculty must decide what role they will play in supporting or opposing the military actions of the United States. Both Mr. Skinner and Mr. Hilgendorf described their experiences with Milton during previous wars as unique and beneficial to their education. Continuing with “life as usual” at Milton may be the safer course of action, but in doing so, the community may miss learning important lessons.
Generations Hear From World Leaders Poets, Politicians and Activists Remind Students of Responsibilities and Dangers in Democracy
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ince 1922, the Academy has hosted some of the world’s most creative, important and provocative thinkers as War Memorial Lecture speakers. Lecturers have included Franklin D. Roosevelt, T.S. Eliot, Gen. George C. Marshall, Carlos Fuentes, William F. Buckley Jr., Helen Suzman, Oscar Arias, Maya Angelou and J. Robert Oppenheimer. The great thinkers have not always been met with great and universal applause, however.
Dr. Oppenheimer’s appearance on campus in 1965, for instance, brought alumni outrage according to Peter Keyes (history). “During McCarthyism, Oppenheimer lost his national security clearance,” Peter explains. In 1953, at the height of U.S. anticommunist feeling, Oppenheimer was accused of having communist sympathies. A documented lie in Oppenheimer’s file—not directly related to political leanings—was the reason given for stripping the scientist’s clearance. “Many alumni wrote letters suggesting that this single lie was an indication of general unreliability,” Peter says.
audience for books, made possible by advances in production capabilities and a larger population of readers, might have a dark side in commercialization. “[These dangers] may be summed up as the one danger that a democracy of educated individuals who think for themselves may transform itself into a democracy of masssociety which does not think at all … These are dangers that must be combated if we are not to be led in the wrong direction by the wrong people.”
With leadership in a democracy as a theme, many guests have pondered out loud how progress affects a democracy. Speakers have also addressed the role the United States has played in the international community—and how freedom at home and abroad are inextricably linked. Mass culture might make citizens less capable of leadership, Eliot says
Author and publisher John Buchan delivered the Foundation’s second address in 1924.
In 1948, having just been awarded the Nobel Prize, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Class of 1906, returned to Milton to deliver the 17th lecture, “Leadership and Letters.” He discussed what the relationship of literature to leadership in a democracy might be and mused on the evolution of the publishing world—how a widening
Sir Frederick Whyte, first president of the All-India Legislative Assembly and advisor to the government of China, delivered the 1932 address.
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In 1997, Dr. Oscar Arias (center) spoke to students about the link between military expenditures and poverty, especially in developing countries. “Imagine what we could do if a portion of world military spending was instead invested in human security…When human security needs are not met we force the recycle of violence,” Arias said. “When we allow militaries to use their power to control increasingly desperate populations, we have failed to address the root cause of conflict.” Arias served as president of the Republic of Costa Rica from 1986 to 1990 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987.
Eliot also suggested that, in a democracy, leadership should not be total but be specialized and that there should always be, in our following of a leader, a voluntary element. Eliot said that the ideal of democracy is most closely met when “we
find it impossible to distinguish clearly who are the ‘leaders’ and who are the ‘led.’ For there we find the widest diffusion of freedom and responsibility, of submission and initiative.”
Service to others means service to ourselves, Franklin D. Roosevelt asserts Twenty-two years earlier and before his Presidency, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered, “Whither Bound?”, a review and analysis of past and present world achievement, and calculations of how changes might affect citizens’ lives. A cousin of FDR, James Alfred Roosevelt, was among the Milton Academy graduates killed in World War I. Roosevelt said that following without thinking endangers our country and world. He said that materialism and conformity might not destroy our greatness if we embrace “something spiritual.” “Service to mankind has been much taught of late, and this word ‘service’ is, like the material things, still in its infancy of development. True service will not come until all the world recognizes all the rest of the world as one big family. To help a fellow being is not enough. We treat that help too much as a duty, too little as an interest,” Roosevelt told students.
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In democracy, laws should be acceptable to majority Helen Suzman, founder and former leader of Britain’s Progressive Party and leader of the Helen Suzman Foundation promoting liberal democracy in South Africa, addressed Milton Academy at the 1988 lecture; she discussed apartheid and the lasting effects of “separate and unequal” in South Africa. “If laws are passed that are
not acceptable to the majority of the people to whom they apply, the normal process of the law will not suffice to maintain law and order,” Suzman told students. "I hate bullies. I stand for simple justice, equal opportunity and human rights,” Suzman says on her foundation’s Web site. “[These are] the indispensable elements in a democratic society—and well worth fighting for."
The Alumni War Memorial Foundation At Milton Academy
Statement of the Plan Adopted March 7, 1922 There has been established at Milton Academy, in memory of the twentytwo alumni of the School who gave their lives in the World War, a permanent Foundation for lectures and informal conferences dealing with the responsibilities and opportunities attaching to leadership in a democracy. It is intended that the lectures shall be given and the conferences led by men of preeminent ability and attainment in various fields of political or commercial administration or professional work, and that the Foundation shall provide an income adequate to the payment of appropriate stipends to such men, and for the publication in suitable form of the lectures delivered whenever such publication shall be authorized by the Head Master and the Executive Committee.
It is further provided that the names of the men commemorated shall be recorded on a tablet to be placed in the Chapel at Milton Academy, and that this tablet shall bear a symbolic divide in bas relief, expressive of the memorial and adapted for reproduction in miniature on all books and documents in which the further development of the memorial shall from time to time find expression. Such a memorial as this will never grow old or wear out or be forgotten. Its full strength may be applied over and over again through the years to come to the solution of problems like those which led our country into the war, and to whose solution the men we commemorate intended their sacrifices to contribute.
Keeping peace at home and abroad are the lifeblood of democracy In 1932, Sir Frederick Whyte talked with students about, “The Unfinished Task,” citing Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” as an example of how complacency—even when success is reached—is not compatible with greatness or with goodness. “I ask you to mark two things in Abraham Lincoln’s mind,” Whyte said. “At Gettysburg he speaks of the unfinished work and defines, in some of the noblest words in English oratory, the great task which still remains to be done. And, secondly, in the Inaugural Address delivered only 40 days before his death he links the American duty of establishing free government and a lasting peace at home with that other great duty of all men, to keep peace among the nations of the earth. These two are the life-blood of our political destiny. “They make together the Cause which shall not, must not fail…At present, nations are cling[ing] to their old security in arms, yet denounce war as an instrument of national policy. They wrestle with the problem of limiting armaments, but only dimly realize that there is a moral disarmament which must precede the abolition of war…So, once more the human race is at the cross-roads, confronted by a great decision.” Victory of peace lies ahead In 1945, at the close of World War II (in fact, just one day after Victory in Europe Day on May 8, 1945), Headmaster Cyril Hamlen Jones introduced Sumner Welles, an ambassador to Cuba and foreign policy advisor, as the War Memorial Lecturer. The headmaster told students, “We are gathered here this evening, ladies and gentlemen, in a great cause—the Cause of Peace. That is the cause in which 24 members of this School laid down their lives in one great war. And now, in another tragic conflict, 36 of our beloved graduates have already made the greatest sacrifice which lay within their power.
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“ . - James Reston, head of the New York Times Bureau in London during World War II, with Headmaster Arthur Perry in 1955. The title of his address to Milton Academy was “A Report on the Cold War.”
“They have striven in their youth and gallantry, to crush for all time the monstrous shape of evil which twice within our memory has arisen to threaten our peace and menace our security. “It is the solemn task of everyone of us to assure, each to the best of his ability, that such a need for sacrifice shall not arise again. Within the last few hours a mighty
.” victory has been won and a page of History turned… And yet the greatest victory, a victory of peace, still lies ahead,” the headmaster asserted. Sumner Welles, a strong force in FDR’s administration through 1943, talked to students that evening about the war and its implications for the world’s future:
“No greater contribution could be made towards the establishment of that new and free world of which we wish to create than the swift eradication from American life of every last trace of class hatred and of religious or racial antagonism.... Unless the present generation can procure for the peoples of the earth the assurance of peace, the opportunity for reconstruction, and the chance to achieve moral regeneration, and arrest the plunge towards further regeneration, the inevitable outcome will be the total destruction of every manifestation of civilization which still survives. “You and I know that the modern weapons of destruction which the development of science has made possible can in the most literal sense bring about a total physical destruction of every part of the civilized world. You and I also know that unless peoples make up their minds to co-operate together with understanding and good-will, hatred and antagonisms between them will bring about further civil and international strife.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, inventor of the atomic bomb, wrote much about the problems of intellectual ethics and morality toward the end of his life. He talked with students in Straus Library, during his visit to Milton in 1965—two years before his death.
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“The great problem before the coming generation of Americans is whether they will see to it that their country, as, because of its power and its influence, it can, leads the nations of the world along the roads of progress, towards freedom, and towards peace.
“We are heading into a period when this country of ours is going to have many setbacks and many disappointments in the field of international relations. There is often going to be pressure from many elements within our own midst to seek the immediate and selfish interest rather than the enlightened and long-range interest which can only be found in the general welfare of the community of nations,” Welles told students. He closed, saying, “Only by helping to safeguard the future of the world, can we hope to safeguard our own national destiny.” Scores of esteemed leaders in their fields have spoken to Milton students and graduates, urging them to aspire to the highest standards of citizenship in often-uncertain times. Heather Sullivan (Editor’s note: The texts cited are from the Milton Academy archives.) Jean Mayer, international nutrition expert and the president of Tufts University from 1976 to 1992, delivered the War Memorial Lecture in 1975. His lecture notes (above) outline his talk on the world food crisis.
Former Headmaster Arthur Perry escorts lecturer Gen. George C. Marshall across campus in 1953. General Marshall served as Army chief of staff during World War II. His Marshall Plan for global economic recovery following the war is an enduring model of compassion and statesmanship.
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McCullough Argues for Historical Literacy Cites founders’ bravery, idealism, intellectual courage as key to escaping tyranny
“History is a journey dealing with two mysteries: human nature and time,” historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough told the Milton Academy community on April 24, 2003, when he delivered the 47th War Memorial Lecture.
invaluable,” McCullough said. He told how George Washington contributed £100 so that his son’s friend could study at Princeton. Washington explained his generosity: “‘[This is] not only to promote his own happiness but also for the welfare of others.’” The young man was meant to become educated, making himself a more able contributor to others’ health and happiness. McCullough noted that a true student’s education is never complete: When one is done learning, one is not done, for there is always more.
War has been much on our minds of late,” McCullough said, referring to the wars in Iraq and on terrorism. “War is simply a fact of life in history. Wars have changed history. Some wars are good: one was the American Revolution.”
McCullough said, for example, that John Adams began to read a 16-volume history of France—in French—at age 80. Quoting President Harry S. Truman, McCullough concluded, “‘The only new thing is the history you don’t know.’ You have to know where you’ve been to know who you are,” McCullough said.
McCullough, who is at work on a new book about the Revolutionary War, used our nation’s founders as grist for his talk, “First Principles.” He also focused on the power and necessity of education—and the tenacity and focus sometimes required to secure one—as keys to a strong and prosperous country. McCullough noted that at the start of the war the Americans had no uniforms, no money, no supplies—but that George Washington’s natural leadership sustained the rebels in their fight to secure their rights as Englishmen and, later, to succeed in their mission to gain independence. The men were fighting for the chance to work hard and prosper, McCullough said. “Who were these [founding fathers]? They were men used to long, hard days,” McCullough said. “We want to know them because we are a society that respects individuals: they had bravery, courage, idealism and intellectual courage. They never deviated from their purpose—from what they wanted to achieve.” McCullough said that a person’s success is never his or hers alone. “There is no such thing as a self-made man, woman or person,” he asserted. Achievement is always 26 Milton Magazine
David McCullough delivered the 47th War Memorial Lecture on April 24, 2003. The prolific, Pulitzer Prize-winning author has written all of his books on the same typewriter, which he purchased in 1965. "It has about 650,000 miles on it," he said.
tied to a teacher who recommends a lifealtering book; the influence of friends and relatives; and the words of great writers and historians whom one may never meet. McCullough told the story of John Adams, who included “a radical passage” in the Massachusetts State Constitution. Adams wrote that it is the duty of legislators to cherish the interests and promotion of literature and the sciences, as well as to inculcate principles of general benevolence in its students. “If there’s one sustaining theme, it is this age-old idea that a good education is
McCullough’s books include The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, The Path Between the Seas, Mornings on Horseback, Brave Companions, Truman and John Adams. As may be said of the work of few writers, none of his books has ever been out of print. Milton Academy established the War Memorial Lecture series to honor the 22 Academy graduates who gave their lives serving in World War I. Conceived of in 1922, the lecture series became a living memorial to the graduates. It now honors all graduates who lost their lives in war. In 1924, John Buchan, British author of A History of the Great War, delivered the second memorial lecture, emphasizing the utility of history “as a great reference book to which man may turn, and find recorded there innumerable experiments of life and their results.”
2003 Commencement
Response to Clinton’s Remarks on the Occasion of Milton Academy’s 2003 Commencement Rod Skinner ’72
H
emingway would have called it a beauty day: the first day of sun in a seemingly endless run of rain, New England spring in its glory, a perfect day for a commencement. Whether the occasion took its cue from the weather or vice versa is immaterial; either way Milton Academy’s graduation was magical. Chief among the ceremony’s magicians were Anna Elliot and Luke Harris, the valedictorians. Both gave us laughter, Anna with her travails in the French school systems, Luke with his Broadway medley, but both also went after the big ideas. Luke lamented that “the fear of the moment, of Columbine, of the Twin Towers, microscopic powders in the mail...has been morphed into a cold sweat about being different from others. In our politically correct zeal to tolerate each other’s individuality, we have ironically become more homogenized.” Anna spoke of “a certain kind of hollowness” that comes from conformity, from not listening to “this little voice” that summons in us the “courage to confront what is deepest within us.” Both Anna and Luke exhorted classmates, as Luke put it, to “fight the forces that block their individuality, their passion, their humor.” Their speeches were so good, so compelling, that only a master speaker on the scale of a Bill Clinton could have followed without embarrassment. Fortunately, Bill Clinton was exactly who followed, and, in keeping with the serendipitous (dare I say synergistic?) nature of the day, his remarks spoke directly to the concerns and hopes of Anna and Luke.
Rod Skinner ’72 congratulates daughter Eliza ’03. Eliza’s grandfather, David Skinner ’47, was among family in attendance on June 6, 2003—the “beauty day.”
The former President made himself immediately at home. He noted first his long friendship with the Magaziner family, whose son Jonathan was among the graduates, and then the Milton graduates who have touched his life (T.S. Eliot ’06, Elliot Richardson ’37, Edward Kennedy ’50, and Deval Patrick ’74). The story of Deval’s time at Milton ended in a thank you to all the teachers at Milton “for taking in those who have been left out and for challenging the privileged to reach beyond comfort to service to others.” This idea of reaching beyond comfort to others formed the core of President Clinton’s
speech. Distinguishing between the sensationalism of “the headlines” and the longterm significance of “the trend lines,” he urged us to understand “challenges we face today...in a broader context.” The “huge” trend line is that “the world is growing more interdependent” and that therefore “the major job of citizenship for the next 20 years will be to spread the benefits and reduce the risks of interdependence, to try to build a world community of shared benefits, shared responsibility and shared values.” We can express that citizenship most visibly in community service. 27 Milton Magazine
2003 Commencement But, Mr. Clinton said, there is another equally important aspect of citizenship. Echoing Luke and Anna and citing the recent demonization of France and the unilateral patriotism that surrounded discussion of the Homeland Security Bill, he decried the silencing of healthy disagreement, of debate, in public discourse. Terrorism will not destroy us, but the silencing of dissent could. “We can only be destroyed or permanently scarred if we react to the present moment in a way that changes the character of our nation or
Luke’s “fear of the moment.” There lay the antidote to Anna’s “hollowness.” As President Clinton spoke and as I review his speech now, I found and find myself thinking of the journey of the Class of 2003 through Milton. As father of one of its members and as a college counselor, I had a bird’s-eye view of those four years. They were, as Head of School Robin Robertson noted in her opening remarks, not without incident. At various times, the class was accused of lacking fire, lacking substance, lacking unity, but, when all was said and done, it provoked some of the most meaningful community
understand intuitively Mr. Clinton’s admonition that we cannot escape each other; faced with becoming builders or wreckers, they chose builders. Seen in this light, is it any wonder that Anna and Luke, with their powerful calls to action, were the class’s choice for valedictory speakers? Some final, more personal thoughts. I will always remember the grace former President Clinton showed in muting his considerable presence and letting the students have their day. He could have grabbed center stage but didn’t. I will always remember the Class of 2003 stand-
“ , , ... . ... .”
compromises the future of our children. It is our reaction that is at issue here.” Fights over ideas and ideals are the lifeblood of democracy. So, Mr. Clinton urged the seniors, “I want you to serve, I want you to vote, but most important I want you to think and talk and debate...You have to see the big things and keep your eyes on the big picture. And you have to yearn deep down inside to make the world different...Freedom requires thought and then action.” The former President likened human history to “a race between builders and wreckers” and declared that “every single time—before it was too late—the builders have prevailed. It will come out that way again if only you do your part.” There lay the answers to
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dialogue in recent years. Their finest hour may have come this past April just as they were readying to leave. Profoundly disturbed by the emergence of racist attitudes on campus in particular and by stereotyping in general, class leaders worked with administrators and faculty to create an assembly program that addressed both issues. A panel of seniors spoke to the student body about their histories, their beliefs, and the difficulties they faced living in the Milton community. It was a powerful presentation, one that led to organized and informal discussions through the rest of the spring and that laid the groundwork for programs in the year to come. Most impressively, at a time when students could have become enraged and bitter, they kept their cool and sought solutions. They seemed to
ing and applauding as each of its members received a diploma. In the past, only pockets of friends would stand when a student came forward so that, in effect, the awarding of a diploma also became a referendum on a senior’s popularity. I will always remember the easy patience that reigned over the day and that allowed me to wheel my father (David Skinner, Class of 1947) up to the podium to present the diploma to my daughter, Eliza, without feeling as if I were holding up the show. In all three memories I see the interdependence that President Clinton talked about, and it gives me great hope for this world. Transcripts of remarks by President Clinton and valedictorians Anna Elliot and Luke Harris are available on our Web site.Go to www.milton.edu and click on “News.”
2003 Commencement
Milton Academy 2003 Awards and Prizes Cum Laude Class I Elizabeth Jean Abernathey Jonathan David Magaziner Matthew Frederick Basilico Esther Liebe Martsinkovsky Sarah Howard Blackwell Jidenna Theodore Mobisson Elizabeth Ann Bondaryk Lauren Elizabeth Murphy Hannah Vose Brady Krista Mary Nylen Julia Harman Cain William Drake Pijewski Jonathan Derek Cho Katherine Elizabeth Riley *Margaret Aandahl Cochrane Benjamin Alfredo Saltzman Jessica Leah Comras Heidi Rebecca Schaul-Yoder Gina Marie Di Cienzo Stacey Frances Slate David Caverly Dryer David Andrew Snider Edith Hemenway Eustis Benjamin Joseph Steiner Julianne Yulan Gale Robert Hallock Svensk *Marissa Wagner Geoffroy *Jennifer Ching Man To Dana Rose Goldman Amelia Harmon Wilbur Taylor Elliot Jacobson Fletcher Ingrid Wolfe Georgiana Levy Konesky Eliza Evrard Lane Class II Suzanne Leonor Levy Kathryn Larkin Lenehan Parker Andrew Rider Longmaid
The Head of School Award The Head of School Award is presented each year to honor and celebrate certain members of Class I for their demonstrated spirit of self-sacrifice, community concern, leadership, integrity, fairness, kindliness and respect for others.
Corey Benjamin Baker Henry George Shepherd Thomas Edward Coleman, Jr. Robert Hallock Svensk Jonathan David Magaziner Chloë Theodora WaltersWallace Monica Bohyung Rhee Fletcher Ingrid Wolfe
The James S. Willis Memorial Award To the Headmonitors.
Cecil José Hunt III Michelle Elizabeth Vines
The William Bacon Lovering Award To a boy and a girl, chosen by their classmates, who have helped most by their sense of duty to perpetuate the memory of a gallant gentleman and officer.
Gina Marie Di Cienzo Andrew Calkins Fink Cecil José Hunt III
The Louis Andrews Memorial Scholarship Award To a student in Class II who has best fulfilled his or her potential in the areas of intelligence, self-discipline, physical ability, concern for others and integrity.
*elected to Cum Laude in 2001
Emily Tsanotelis
Former President William J. Clinton, commencement speaker, with Fritz Hobbs ‘65, president of the board of trustees
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2003 Commencement
2003 student speakers, Anna Elliot and Luke Harris
The Korean War Memorial Richard E. Sherbrooke Scholarship Award Memorial Head of School Robin Robertson
Frank Millet, faculty, with Richard Perry ‘73, trustee
Created in 1956 in memory of Frederick Sprague Barbour ’46, Thomas Amory Hubbard ’47, George Cabot Lee, Jr. ’47, and Sherrod Emerson Skinner, Jr. ’47, who gave their lives for their country and the United Nations. Awarded to a boy or girl from a developing region to further his or her education at Milton Academy, enriching the school in the process while enriching the School by their presence.
Bayarmaa Erdenekhuu (Mongolia)
The Leo Maza Award Awarded to a student or students in Classes I – IV, who, in working within one of the culture or identity groups at the School, has made an outstanding contribution to the community by promoting the appreciation of that group throughout the rest of the School.
Thomas Edward Coleman, Jr. Monica Bohyung Rhee
Walter A. Beyer Memorial Presented in memory of Walter A. Beyer, student and teacher at Milton Academy, to a boy and a girl in Class V who, in every aspect of School life, give of themselves cheerfully and thoughtfully in a manner that best exemplifies the qualities for which Walter Beyer is remembered.
Hannah Frey Lauber Steven Sando
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Presented by the Class of 1963 to a boy in Class VI who, in his relationship with his classmates, best illustrates the qualities of consideration, unselfishness and responsibility.
Spencer Kames Gaffney
Edward R. Foley Award Presented to a Class VI girl who works hard to develop her unique talents while maintaining a strong sense of community. This Class VI girl best exemplifies the qualities of straightforwardness, caring and unselfish contribution to her classmates and school which Mr. Foley most valued in students of the Middle School.
Angelica Cristello
The A. Howard Abell Prize Established by Dr. and Mrs. Eric Oldberg for students deemed exceptionally proficient or talented in instrumental or vocal music or in composition.
Jennifer Diana Mei-Lyn Chang Charles Edward Higgins Jonathan David Magaziner
Harrison Otis Apthorp Music Prize Awarded in recognition of helpful activity in furthering in the school an interest and joy in music.
Matthew Frederick Basilico Heidi Rebecca Schaul-Yoder Jamal Malik Shipman
2003 Commencement
The George Sloan Oldberg Memorial Prize
The Robert Saltonstall Medal
Awarded in memory of George Oldberg ‘54, to members of the school who have been a unique influence in the field of music.
For pre-eminence in physical efficiency and observance of the code of the true sportsman.
William Drake Pijewski Monica Bohyung Rhee
The Science Prize Awarded to students who have demonstrated outstanding scientific ability in physics, chemistry and biology.
William Drake Pijewski Jennifer Ching Man To
The Wales Prize
Kyle Adams Lee
The A.O. Smith Prize Awarded by the English department to students who display unusual talent in expository writing.
Julia Harman Cain Frederick Openshaw Taylor Deknatel
The Markham and Pierpoint Stackpole Prize
Awarded in honor of Donald Wales who taught Class IV science for more than 36 years. It recognizes students in Class IV who have consistently demonstrated interest and excitement in science.
Awarded in honor of two English teachers, father and son, to authors of unusual talent in creative writing.
Jarvon Nicole Carson Alexander John Mercuri Katherine Yingqi Han Oliver Pechenik
The Dorothy J. Sullivan Award
Emily Phelps Claire Tinguely
To senior girls who have demonstrated good sportsmanship, leadership, dedication and commitment to athletics at Milton. Through their spirit, selflessness and concern for the team, they served as an incentive and a model for others.
Elizabeth Courtney Keady 31 Milton Magazine
2003 Commencement
The Donald Cameron Duncan Prize for Mathematics Awarded to students in Class I who have achieved excellence in the study of mathematics while demonstrating the kind of love of the subject and joy in promoting its understanding which will be the lasting legacy of Donald Duncan’s extraordinary contributions to the teaching of mathematics at Milton.
Hannah Vose Brady Lauren Elizabeth Murphy Benjamin Joseph Steiner
The Performing Arts Award
The Priscilla Bailey Award
The Alfred Elliot Memorial Trophy
The Modern Languages Prizes
To a senior girl who has been a most valuable asset to Milton Academy athletics and to the Milton Academy community – an athlete who has demonstrated exceptional individual skills and teamwork, as well as true sportsmanship.
For self-sacrifice and devotion to the best interests of his teams, regardless of skill.
Awarded to those students who, in the opinion of the department, most exhibit the qualities of academic excellence, enthusiastic participation, and support of fellow students, both in class and outside.
Kristin Marie Savard
The Henry Warder Carey Prize To members of the First Class, who, in Public Speaking and Oral Interpretation, have shown consistent effort, thoroughness of preparation, and concern for others.
Presented by the Performing Arts Department for outstanding contributions in production work, acting, speech, audiovisuals and dance throughout his or her Milton career.
Julia Harman Cain Julianne Yulan Gale
Sarah Howard Blackwell Scott Joseph McHugh Travis Van Healy David Andrew Snider Jonathan David Magaziner Benjamin Michael Payson Stevens
memory and honor, this prize in Classics is awarded to the student from Latin 4 or beyond whom best exemplifies Mr. Daley’s love of languages.
Katherine Elizabeth Riley
The Richard Lawrence Derby Memorial Award
Awarded for outstanding contributions to Milton Performing Arts throughout his or her career in both performance and production.
To an outstanding student of the Second Class in mathematics, astronomy, or physics.
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The Gorham Palfrey Faucon Prize Established in 1911 and awarded to members of Class I for demonstrated interest and outstanding achievement in history and social science.
Julia Harman Cain David Andrew Snider Jonathan David Magaziner Robert Hallock Svensk Benjamin Alfredo Saltzman Rebecca Anne Wilsker Lucas Kondoleon Wittmann
The Robert L. Daley Prize The Benjamin Fosdick Created by his students of 1984 in his Harding Latin Prizes
The Kiki Rice-Gray Prize
Alexandra Smith Miller
Henry Adams Roth
Albert Hyukjae Kwon
Awarded on the basis of a separate test at each prize level.
Level 5: Margaret Aandahl Cochrane Level 4: Katherine Elizabeth Riley Level 3: Caitlin Barry-Heffernan
Robert Tod Chubrich Robert Hallock Svensk Georgiana Levy Konesky Amelia Harmon Wilbur Alexandra Smith Miller Fletcher Ingrid Wolfe
The Milton Academy Art Prizes Awarded for imagination and technical excellence in his or her art and for independent and creative spirit of endeavor.
Sarah Howard Blackwell Whitney Agnes Meza Kathryn Larkin Lenehan Julia Marie von Metzsch
’
Steven Wald ‘53 P’04 and wife Sheila enjoy the “Dare to Be True” luncheon. International Miltonians traveled from as far as Finland and Thailand. Among the travelers were Chip Vincent ’63, Diana Shand ’63, Aryeh Sternberg ’93, Tina Aspialo ’93, Joan Dine ’58, Eeva Makela Sankila ’78 and Jon Zonis ’83.
Lucius Wilmerding and Robbie White, both of 1948
John Clarke and Kate Greer, Class of 1998
Steve Heckscher ’78, Alexander Stephens ’83, Tim Marr ’78, Randall Dunn ’83 and Dave Mushatt ’78: High spirits erupted at a last-minute 20th versus 25th reunion softball game. Alexander Stephens presented the ball as a trophy for the School in hopes that the classes of 1979 and 1984 might play in 2004.
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Reunion tour of the student-faculty center, which was completed in September 2003
Fran McLean ’82 and son Colin play peek-a-boo.
Board members Fritz Hobbs ’65 (left) and Richard Perry ’73 at the trustee panel
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Mary Forbesy Russell ’68 and faculty emeritus John Zilliax
Vivan Wu Wong (history), pictured at right, shares sushi-making with Lindsee Redmond ’03, Ted Fiske, Mike Cobb ’88, Hallock Svensk ’03 and Pip Shepley ’73.
Representatives from class reunion committees present to the Academy a check for $1,180,600; front row (left to right): Connie Pendleton ’88, Jane Blumgarten Miller ’68, Matt Hoffman ’78, Steve Fitzgibbons ’88; middle row: Roger Perry ’43, Brad Richardson ’48, Mal Nickerson ’63, Anne Marie Nesto Filosa ’73, Betsy Leggat ’78, Jay Quinby ’73, Andrew Stern ’93, Muffy Nichols ’38, Ted Kane ’83; back row: David Cornish ’68, C.P. Howland ’63, Joan Dine ’58, Upper School Principal Hugh Silbaugh
From the Class of 1988: James Slavet, Andrew Churchill and Mark Simmons
Gerald McClanahan, Chase Bradley and Alexander Stephens from the Class of 1983
Bryan Cheney (art) with Campbell and Graham, sons of Richard Robinson ’78 and Hilary G. Robinson (standing)
Nearly 500 hundred alumni returned to Milton May 2-3 to celebrate with friends. On Saturday evening, they enjoyed cocktails under the Blue Star tent.
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Dan Dwight and Maggie Jackson, Class of 1978, at a panel based on Maggie’s book, What’s Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age
David Wood ’83 and Sheldon Ison ’93 improvise in a workshop led by Peter Parisi (performing arts). Here, a blond braid doubles as a wristwatch.
During the trustee panel, Ogden Hunnewell ’70 explained the campus masterplan. Check www.milton.edu for details.
David Ball ’88 (history) led a class for graduates and friends: Freedom Fighters? 18th Century Revolutions in the Atlantic World.
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Scott Johnson ’78, Peter Keyes (history), Gail Hoffman, and Matt Hoffman ’78.
Connie Pendleton and Patrice Jean-Baptiste, Class of 1988, with a daughter of classmate Ali Danois
Members of the classes of 1983 and 1978 vied for the title in the first annual 20th versus 25th reunion softball contest. 1983ers prevailed 14-10.
Elinor Lamont Hallowell, Jenepher Ryce Lingelback and Ann Higgins, Class of 1953
Daddy and daughter share a special drink.
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The Head of School Hyperlinks: Master Plan and Mission
W
hen I arrived at Milton Academy four years ago, the academic and extracurricular strength of the School in combination with a newly-completed facilities master plan made that the right moment to think about our best and boldest hopes and dreams. The School’s future as a nationallyknown, leading educational institution was clearly linked to our response to the master plan. The challenge and the opportunity had come together: we needed to integrate our direction, toward everincreasing excellence inside and outside the classroom, with new spaces that would best serve our work. The planners had proposed draft solutions for us to consider. At the same time, we undertook work on re-stating our mission, an exercise required by the 10-year reaccreditation process. The synergy of the two efforts was fortuitous. We articulated our goals and values clearly and thereby sketched out the rubric against which our decisions—on all directional issues—and our action could be measured: Are we cultivating a love of learning and a respect for others? Are we pursuing excellence and embracing diversity? Do we develop competence, confidence and character in our students? Does our environment support active learning, in and out of the classroom? Are our students comfortable expressing their ideas; do they (and will they, in the future), “Dare to be true”? This fall, new academic spaces in Wigg and in Warren that honor the centrality of 38 Milton Magazine
teaching and learning reward us for our patience and flexibility, especially over the last disruptive year. With 10 new classrooms—enough so that faculty members will again be able to “live” in their classrooms and establish them as offices—we are thrilled at the bright, adaptable learning spaces, with increased connectivity to technology, in buildings that are either historically reverent or boldly visionary. At the same time, ground is broken for two dormitories west of Hallowell House: homes away from home that will replicate the aspects of living at Milton valued by our boarding students and dormitory faculty. Each of these new Milton houses has a distinctive character. New England brick and clapboard exteriors unite them with other Milton buildings; dormers and the variegated roof lines maintain the feel of the existing campus. They are linked by a common dining room that overlooks the varsity soccer and lacrosse fields. Together they form the core of another residential quadrangle on campus. A passageway through Hallowell House creates a cluster of houses centered on their own green. Each house welcomes 42 students next fall, and four faculty families. We are rebalancing Milton’s enrollment (equalizing boarding and day student numbers) not only because it will restore Milton’s historical identity and tradition, but also because it enriches the educational experience for all students. When neither boarding nor day students are a minority, we make gains that benefit the School overall: • Embracing diversity is a key element of our mission. Living, playing, sharing leadership, performing, competing and serving, let alone discussing and debat-
ing in classrooms, are all richer experiences with friends from different backgrounds or from around this country and the world. • When we focus on providing a full, round-the-clock environment and care for the psychological and developmental needs of students, relationships with adults and mentors are deeper and more beneficial for all students. • When half the students live on campus, weekend social and artistic life is more expansive for all students. We’ve had great success in the last three years upgrading weekend events, and students are quite happy with weekend life on campus. • Boston area families have long welcomed boarding students into the warmth and ease of their families, an element of School life that distinguishes a Milton education from others. Taking advantage of our location near Boston means increasing the connections between Milton parents who are researchers, scientists, writers, medical professionals, foreign dignitaries and political leaders and the academic work of students.
• To make sure that we support students as they confront the challenges of adolescence and of the academic world ahead, we have designed new extended orientation events over three fall weekends. We have welcomed a new interfaith chaplain, Ed Snow, from the Baylor School in Tennesse, who developed the Baylor chapel program into an aspect of life valued by all students. • The long-awaited student-faculty center fulfills the dream of establishing a shared space for all students and faculty, where they can join together for fun, for planning, or for studying—day or night. The energizing intersection of master plan and mission has not only stimulated thinking about students’ developmental needs, but also about innovations in teaching methods and curriculum. Our work in science, for example, is notable. Preparing for the renovation of Milton’s science building, Warren McFarlan, trustee chair of academic life, led a team of distinguished scientists and educators in working with the Milton faculty to focus on the science curriculum. Among the data that the committee considered were the results of surveys sent to some 2,000 graduates from 1990 to the present. Visiting other schools and considering research on science pedagogy, the committee sought a definition of excellence in the teaching of science, an outstanding plan for the Milton curriculum, and a building to support it. The program for the Middle School years as well as the sixth grade program are the other major areas of study for faculty and administration. Last year a faculty Middle School Study Committee undertook the task of defining a structure that would support the best experience for Middle School-aged children. Their recommendations included implementing: smaller class sizes; a revised schedule; a discrete Middle School faculty; and a division principal. We have made a great beginning in welcoming Mark Stanek as our Middle School principal. Mark was most recently Middle School Dean of Students at The Athenian School in Danville, California, and he will lead the effort to implement
the additional recommendations, and to design a distinct intellectually and developmentally appropriate Middle School program. The sixth grade garnered attention as a result of the enrollment plan that goes into effect this spring. The plan accomplishes the necessary decrease in day students primarily from reducing the numbers of students moving from the Milton Academy Middle School into Class IV. Openings for new day students at Class IV will remain roughly equivalent to what they have been in the recent past. After the 2004 admission season, the Class VI entry point will be closed; Grade 6 will be the new entry point, for 10 students. We have not yet determined whether Grade 6 will be part of the Middle School, the Lower School, or an independent transitional year. Instead, we will energetically examine the Grade 6 experience. We will use our history and research about adolescent learning, personal and intellectual development and curriculum to ensure that the strengths of the current Milton Academy program continue, particularly in developing leadership skills, and are enhanced. At the conclusion of the study, the principals’ committee will make a recommendation regarding the optimum structural configuration for Grade 6. Athletics is another area where we have made strides in continuing to pursue comprehensive excellence. Among the faces now helping to manage Milton’s large and layered athletics program are two new assistant athletic directors, Sue Landau and Paul Cannata. Prior to her arrival at Milton, Sue taught physical education and coached field hockey and women’s lacrosse at Wellesley College. Her teams won nearly 20 championships; she was named coach of the year by the New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference—20 times in total for her two sports—and was named Northeast Regional Coach of the Year in 1995. Paul Cannata will be Milton’s varsity hockey coach in addition to his role as assistant athletic director. After six years as assistant coach at Northeastern University
(1997–2002), Paul last year founded a small ice surface hockey rink in Norwood, Massachusetts, and provided a hockey training curriculum for male and female players. During recent summers Paul served as an assistant coach and head coach of U.S. National teams competing in international tournaments. This past summer he was an assistant coach of the Mass Select 17 Team that won a gold medal at the USA National 17 Festival in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Paul has published articles, made presentations, implemented specialized skill training sessions and created numerous training videos during his coaching and teaching career. As is the case with Mark, Sue and Paul, talented and experienced teachers continue to be attracted to Milton. Our environment, where the life of the mind is the pulse of the School, is a rewarding culture within which to work—to devote oneself to the development of young character. Sustaining this ability to attract and retain the best faculty; to ensure an economically diverse student body through the availability of financial aid; to offer the broadest possible range of opportunities for individual growth; to renovate, restore and care for our physical plant, requires significant resources. The financial need exceeds tuition revenues, and the Annual Fund supplies a critical 8 percent of what it takes each year to provide a Milton education. The strength of the Annual Fund is as gratifying as it is important and the need to strengthen the Milton’s endowment, our financial foundation, is everpresent. We have begun the first stages of planning for a comprehensive campaign to build endowment to meet School’s essential needs. The student-faculty center, the new dormitories, and the extensive renovations of our historic academic buildings have been accomplished through the generous gifts of individuals. We have more of that work to do, and ultimately, our success in increasing the endowment will guarantee Milton’s strength, long-term excellence and continued national leadership in secondary education. 39 Milton Magazine
The Milton Classroom
Grade A Jazz Bob Sinicrope, an Inspired Teacher at Milton Academy, Helps Young Players Really Toot Their Horns By Jack Thomas, Globe Staff
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n the campus at Milton Academy, in the basement of the Kellner Performing Arts Center, down in Room 113 among the trumpets, saxes, cymbals, and electric guitars, and surrounded by posters of John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and, of course, Louis Armstrong, there in the center of the room, in stocking feet and filling in on drums, is Bob Sinicrope, 53, the Mr. Chips of jazz. His best quintet this year is setting up for a class, minus drummer Matt Basilico, who’s in Maine for a New England skiing championship, and as they play warm-up riffs, the mood is what it always is just before live jazz, full of titillation and hope.
“OK, guys, it’s getting close,” he says. “Wednesday, March 12, we head for South Africa, and as you know, we’re playing about 14 gigs, including the US Embassy and twice at the Green Dolphin in Cape town, which is on the waterfront and it’s, like, the Regattabar of South Africa, cool and classy.” Suddenly, the freedom of jazz surrenders to fear of war. Cradling his trumpet, Ian Stewart, 18, raises a question on everybody’s mind: “Like, if there’s a war, we’re not going, right?”
To get the attention of his class a few weeks earlier, Sinicrope taps on the drum, a-rum-atum-tum, and they fall silent.
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Republished with permission of Globe Newspaper Company, Inc.
In his 29th year of teaching jazz at Milton Academy, Sinicrope is riding high. He led the Milton Academy Jazz Combo in a sold-out performance at the Regattabar in Cambridge on Sunday, and he leaves tomorrow with 22 Milton Academy students and 11 adults on a 19-day concert tour of South Africa.
Milton Academy jazz players (left to right) Jessica Lawrence, Lindsey Dashiell, Jonathan Lubin, and John Keefe played a sold-out show at the Regattabar in Cambridge.
“Well, at the meeting tomorrow, we’ll talk about what’s going on internationally and what our options are.” Designed for joyful sounds, Room 113 is solemn. “What happens if war breaks out while we’re there?” asks Tyler Simmons, 18, who plays tenor sax. “Until something happens, we can’t deal with it,” says Sinicrope, “but I assure you that the people who make decisions at Milton care first about your safety.” They are all silent for a long moment until the tension is broken by bass guitarist Joe Posner, 18. “When can we start playing?” Republished with permission of Globe Newspaper Company, Inc.
Sinicrope hits the drums. Posner follows on bass, Stewart and Simmons join in on trumpet and sax, and suddenly, once again, the Milton Academy Jazz Quintet is blowing jazzy, toe-tapping, great-to-be-alive sounds. The Language of Jazz Later, when the instruments are put to bed and the students have headed off to more traditional academic challenges, Sinicrope tinkers with the playlist for the South Africa tour and talks about what he calls his baby, the teaching of jazz to teenagers at Milton Academy, which he’s done for nearly three decades. “I came across a great quote: that jazz can be learned, but not taught,” he says. “In other words, I can put the stuff in front of them, but they’ve got to come to it. It’s one thing to talk about chords, but it’s another for them to hear the language of jazz and be inspired. “We have a first-year student, Lisa Campbell, who’s conscientious, but in terms of playing, she wasn’t speaking the jazz language. Coming back after Christmas, she was delayed in Detroit six hours, and she did nothing but listen to jazz—really listen for the first time—and she came back a different musician. She got it, and that’s not unusual for these kids.” Sinicrope is teaching four full-credit courses in jazz to 40 students who arrive with an instrument, an ability to play scales, and an appetite for hard work. “We had a student now getting a lot of attention, Aaron Goldberg, who graduated in ’91 and has played piano with Joshua Redman for four years,” Sinicrope says. “He knew nothing about jazz when he walked into this course in 10th grade. In the liner notes of one of his albums, he recalls that when I asked him to play a C-major chord, he didn’t know what I was talking about, and so he started playing Rachmaninoff.
Bassist Joe Posner studies with Milton Academy’s Bob Sinicrope.
“I want them to have fun but get to the next level, and for most people, there’s discomfort in growing. If I let them, they’d fall back on simple blues, like ‘Watermelon Man,’ but if I press them, they look back and say, ‘Wow, look what we did.’ “Check out our ‘1959’ CD with the tune called ‘Giant Steps.’ That’s a rite of passage for a serious jazz musician because it changes key 11 times in 16 measures. I can’t believe high school kids play that tune as great as they do.” Teaching jazz calls for skills different from those in traditional academic courses. “Some days they say they just got out of a math test and want to play rock music,” Sinicrope says. “But if we did, we wouldn’t be able to switch to a beautiful ballad by Coltrane. So I have to say, ‘You can’t.’ They’d have fun but wouldn’t grow.” They may be growing, but are they having fun? Sometimes it’s difficult to tell.
“But that’s not why a program like this exists. This is a high school, and many of these kids are not going to play jazz in an organized way after they leave Milton. 41 Milton Magazine
At a press party last month to introduce the spring schedule at the Regattabar, the Milton Academy Jazz Combo players looked good in jackets and neckties and sounded good technically, but they appeared not to be having much of the fun associated with jazz. Simmons, the sax player, has heard the complaint before. “Actually, we are having a good time,” he says, “although we know we look like we’re not happy. But none of us have mastered our instrument, and so we focus on that. Sometimes, right after I solo, I realize I was in some kind of music zone and paying attention to nothing but the music. I try to look bouncy, but it’s hard to focus on music and a stage presence.” It’s a message Sinicrope drives home: Have fun, be cool. “I know that sometimes you’re anxious about whether you’re playing right,” he tells one quintet after a technically competent but low-key rendition of “Fungii Mama.” “Take your practicing seriously, your playing playfully. There’s a time to be serious, a time to say, ‘OK, I’ve done what I can to prepare. Now it’s time to see what I’ve got.’ “If this were a pensive piece, that’s one mood, but this is island music, fun and playful, and you’ve got to infuse that into the music. Think this way - ‘No snow, no ice, no history paper.’ You’re smart kids. You’ve got the nuts and bolts, but get the spirit. Have fun!” Shaping the Future Sinicrope’s jazz program has drawn visits by Poncho Sanchez, Dick Johnson, Herb Pomeroy, James Taylor, and Rebecca Parris. Milton’s jazz players won Down Beat magazine’s award for best high school combo in the country in 1992 and 1999 and played at the White House in 1999 and 2000. Among those making the trip to South Africa is Frances Scanlon, the graphic designer Sinicrope married eight weeks ago. He has two daughters, four grandchildren. Sinicrope grew up in Connecticut. In fourth grade he took up the trombone, in fifth he filled in on bass, and four weeks later he was playing in the local symphony alongside his teacher. “In junior year, there was a stretch,” he says, “when I was out 30 nights in a row for piano lessons, symphony rehearsals, or for a rock band I played in.”
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He dreamed of teaching math and jazz, and after graduating from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a degree in math, serving a term in the Peace Corps in Jamaica, and dabbling in guitar at Berklee School of Music, he was hired in 1973 by Milton Academy to teach math. The next year he inaugurated the jazz program with a class that included a grandson of President Truman. Now in his fourth year under Sinicrope, Simmons enjoys the regimen. “There are classes when we’re totally on and playing is so much fun because the music sounds so good,” he says. “Freshman year, you play simple songs, a jazz experience, but you’re not really learning to play. Sophomore year is an introduction to improvisation, but more tutorial. Junior and senior year, it’s advanced jazz combo, more performance-oriented. This is not a gut course. Listen to Sinicrope on improvisation: “Here’s an option on the bridge. You know how the dominant cycle works? D-7? The reason D-7 wants to go to G is because there’s an unstable interval in the chord between the third and the flat-7. It’s called the tritone. It turns out there’s an F sharp in the C, which is the tritone in the D-7. If you invert it, it’s still six half-steps, and that same tritone becomes the flat-7 in the third. So every dominant chord has a kissing cousin that has the same tritone, the same unstable interval. So find the chord a tritone away, which is a substitute tritone, and then you have a chromatic line.” What Sinicrope is molding at Milton Academy is the future of jazz, says Fenton Hollander, who books musicians for the Regattabar. “We want young people to decide jazz is a good thing and to start following jazz,” Hollander says. “Sunday’s performance was sold out weeks in advance, and we suggested a second show, but Bob didn’t want to push the kids too fast. But it was so successful it’s scary, and I know we’ll book more groups from colleges and high schools.” Copyright 2003, Globe Newspaper Company The Boston Globe. Reprinted with permission.
Faculty Perspective Mounting a Japanese Play with an All-Asian Student Cast Mishima’s The Decline and Fall of the Suzaku
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had wanted to work with an Asian play for some time, using an all-Asian cast, and lo and behold, a collection of translated Mishima plays suddenly materialized on the drama shelf of Wordsworth Books in Cambridge. I was immediately drawn to The Decline and Fall of the Suzaku for several reasons. Japanese literature in translation has held me in its thrall for several years, and I have included short stories and novels in my courses. I have a special spot in my heart for Mishima, his work, so visceral and image-laden, the translations so beautiful. Perhaps the least of my reasons was the timeliness of the subject of war. As the months we worked on this play wore on, however, strange connections did occur with the American preparations for war with Iraq, even down to language. For example, the father in Mishima’s play, Tsunetaka, comments to his brother, “Our Lord the emperor says, ‘Give up your life.’ When he does that, you just go and give up your life.” One day after rehearsal, I heard on the radio an American military officer firing up the troops with these words, “When the President says ‘Go!,’ it’s hammer time, you go in there and give it your all!” I did not, as I say, pick the play in a gesture of protest, because as a work of art by one of Japan’s greatest 20th century authors, it explores much more than the futility of warfare and the cultural cost to Japan of its militaristic build-up in the ’30s and defeat in World War II, a subject dear to Mishima. Enamored of the beauty of Japan’s culture, and mystified by its cruel imperialism
Bill Moore, director
during World War II, I have longed for any artistic treatment of this subject that would get at such a defining mid-century phenomenon both East and West—I’m speaking about Fascism—for those of us who grew up in the shadow of those times. For all his late renown as a rightist dedicated to a militaristic cause at the end of his life (when he committed suicide through ritual disembowelment), Mishima, as an artist, dared to take on the difficult subjects of blind idealism, cultural myopia, rampant patriarchy, and to present the issues theatrically for us to examine. He speaks to us from a privileged position, inheritor of an ancient theatrical tradition, the No and Kabuki drama, and then most consciously of the Western tradition stemming from Greek tragedy. He specifies in the title that his play The Decline and Fall of the Suzaku is “based on Euripedes’ Heracles,” and by that he meant The Madness of Heracles. In Euripedes’ play, Heracles, in a fit of god43 Milton Magazine
induced madness, slays his wife and children. He is dissuaded from suicide once he regains his sanity, and lives on in a state of perpetual grief. Aside from weaving a plot with the ancient Greek model in mind, Mishima clearly wanted to study the very Japanese concept of perfectly passive loyalty as exemplified by the aristocratic father in his play. The female characters are also so strong one wonders whether Mishima suggests that the aberrations of the period might have turned upon an unbalanced male-female energy, the sorry triumph of yang over yin. In any case, the playwright chose to study the demise of the old order through the fall of a nobleman, as in the Greek model, possessed of a tragic flaw. The name “Suzaku” has resonance as the name of an ancient emperor, of a palace in Kyoto and of one of that city’s boulevards. The decline of the aristocracy, and indeed, of all that was refined in ancient Japanese tradition appear as leitmotifs in Mishima’s work, and here he works out his themes in the conflict of a traditionalist head of house against those who can, or would, and even do, adapt to the new order. This is a play about an ancient, Asian culture influenced, then invaded and taken over by, a Western one. The music chosen for the play intended to convey that process—using truly authentic traditional music at times, and then hybrid sounds of Japanese and Western instruments, and
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finally modern adaptations of groups like the drummers of the group Kodo. In the last scene, when the Americans finally conquer the country, Peggy Lee and the Benny Goodman Orchestra even made an appearance with “Winter Weather.” The play absolutely calls for a rich musical accompaniment if only by virtue of the fact that the Suzaku family prides itself on its patron goddess who plays the biwa, an ancient Japanese lute, preferred over the popular shamisen of street and puppet theater fame. In the music picked for the play, itself, there are examples of the true biwa sound, kabuki theater music, ancient airs, traditional tunes, all threaded throughout the production. Needless to say the actors experienced something special participating in this play, mounted far away in both time and place from the culture described. The five major roles were taken by students of various Asian backgrounds: Chinese (Joanna Chow ’04, Jesse Cheng ’04), Korean (John Choi ’04, Ed Choi ’05) and Japanese (Hidde Tonegawa ’05). The actors all dealt with the issues one might expect to be raised in such a production, sometimes stemming from their own family members who lived through the era. Invited by the Asian Society to talk about production problems, we talked about lingering anti-Japanese sentiments stemming from the War. The more general, Asian problems of family hierarchy, saving face, deference to authority all found their
moment of examination as we tried to plumb the motivations of the various characters: the father who bends to authority and sends his son off to certain death; the mother who puts life before any concept of honor; the son who sees war as a glorious adventure; the intended daughter-in-law who senses the terrible power of war mania. Wonderful surprises were in store for us. For example, Mrs. Tonegawa, Hidde’s mother, helped with costumes and make-up, and during one memorable rehearsal dressed the girls in her own traditional kimonos. Barbara Baum (wife of faculty member Larry Pollans) who worked magic in silk for costumes and décor, produced a superb wallhanging that illuminated the shrine. The actors slipped easily into the spirit of the piece, striking poses that recalled Japanese prints, and the stylized acting of Kabuki. My ultimate hope was that the impetus for this production would be clear—a great love and admiration for Japanese culture and a deep desire to give Mishima, an airing in this School. His play asks us a fundamental question: How do we keep alive the wonder of our cultural roots, as flawed as they may be in some ways, in the hurly-burly of the modern world in which we are compelled to live? William Moore English and Modern Languages
Post Script Post Script is a department that opens windows into the lives and experiences of your fellow Milton alumni. Graduates may author the pieces, or they may react to our interview questions. Opinions, memories, explorations, reactions to political or educational issues are all fair game. We believe you will find your Milton peers informative, provocative and entertaining. Please email us with your reactions and your ideas. cathy_everett@milton.edu.
Freedom Flashing A sentence for overachievement
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have finished my stint in the stir. I emerged from the inside glinting at the sky, choking at the air in my lungs. It has, as they say, finally ended. I tell myself, in adolescent absolutes, that I’ll never set foot on that ground again. God willing, that’ll be the way the dust settles. What have I done, you might ask? For the last two years I have been serving a sentence for overachievement. My prison: Cambridge University. The typical conversation went as follows: “What are you up to?” “I’m the Mellon Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge,” I say. “Oh my, you must love it!” And a delicate reply must be crafted, as I try to tiptoe around the fact that I absolutely detest Cambridge, the University, the city, food, weather and on into the night. For if I take a stab with something like, “It’s been pretty disappointing academically,” I’m bombarded with incredulous and confused questions adding up to: “How could it be so? One of the world’s premier universities subpar...it’s impossible.” It is doubly hard that such exchanges smack of spoiled brat-i-ness. How entitled must you be to complain about two years of free living; free school, free food and opportunity?
But by way of explanation, I lived on the high-octane for twenty-two years before I got to England. Ideas, people and information circling and combusting, spurring me further on. I grew up at Milton, born into Forbes House, reared in Goodwin and a house behind Hallowell. Even if I
“ . , ’ . .” never quite found my place socially, Milton as an academic institution has always been cast in strictly romantic terms. Round classroom tables running like free flowing fields, reading lists that flung you into them like a racecar or a jetplane boy. After stumbling awkwardly through halls filled with girls, popularity and who knows what, I found classes
ready to unleash the fast passionate flow of information. This flow quickened, river into rapids when I got to Yale. I found professors spurring me on like a jockeys on a gelding. Or in a horserace for the masses, I became a greyhound chasing that foam bunny ‘round the track. Now, the beautiful culmination of my metaphor, that bunny was a fellowship at a British university, Rhodes, Marshall and so on. The perfect ribbon wrap for any star-studded collegiate nerd. And I won a Mellon Fellowship, and the octane kept flowing, as I anticipated a world that would further inspire and nurture me. But as the workers of the many dogtracks of the world know so well, that isn’t a real hare that zings around in oblong circles. The rabbit is merely an illusion. But I chased it anyway. I chased it across an ocean and through a bunch of noname English towns. And I found myself forced to live on kerosene. Life watered down, slowed to hardly a crawl. I discovered a world where enthusiasm and excitement are held in utter disdain. A world where creativity and pushing the proverbial envelope are considered unnecessary. I found a university that described itself as ‘one of the few remaining feudal institutions on earth.’ A place where getting a library card is akin to building a fission device from orange peels and paperclips. A place which does not deign to inform you of simple things like when to arrive or 45 Milton Magazine
where to go. I imagine a swim from Barcelona to the Barbary coast would be far easier than getting rudimentary information about classes, papers and procedures. There is no centralization. Each college in Cambridge (of which there are more than 40) has a separate endowment, discrete staff, and a unique admissions department. Don’t expect orientation week. You won’t be doing trust falls with your new roommate. Don’t look forward to anyone knowing who you are or what you’re doing. You see, you’re American (learn to say that with complete contempt). You are most certainly not in Kansas anymore. As I explain to people who may be going to England for school, it is like going to Thailand. When you travel to a foreign country, you expect a cultural gap. But when people come to England, especially for school, they observe the language overlap and they figure “how different could it possibly be?” Think about Thailand, and you’ll better understand yourself in Cambridge. I don’t doubt that some people enjoy the British and find their time in the UK to be exciting and fulfilling. Unfortunately for any outside understanding, these same people often return speaking with hilarious appropriations of a British accent, singing the praises of sherry and port, eager to return to the races at Henley in a pink jacket. Forgive me if I can’t take these folks seriously. Me? I returned from the UK with notebooks documenting my atrocious encounters, my cynical observations, a book-length collection of citations on the depressing peculiarities of British life. My time there might have been an utter waste. I did get a master’s in philosophy in British history, but I have trouble considering the degree worth the paper it is printed on. This entire master’s degree required the equivalent work of at most two classes in an American graduate school. A Ph.D. from any British university hardly covers the written component of
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trading lines with someone hoping to learn wheel alignment at an auto shop in New Jersey. We’re putting Prague prostitutes next to sailors searching for the Loch Ness monster. We take the people you’ve read about and have them write themselves, in their words, about the world and the way they’re seeing it.
The New Yorker and Harper’s served as inspiration for Blake’s magazine, Topic.
an American doctorate. So if I scratch the academic piece off the table, how do I account for these two years of my life? As a salesman, I’ll flash a big smile and say, go visit www.topicmag.com and you can see these two years in vivid action. Better yet, drop down your $30 and subscribe to the magazine I started. Behind an able-bodied captain, a champion among men, a Yale classmate and Gates Scholar named David Haskell, Topic magazine began in the fall of 2001. A quarterly non-fiction glossy magazine inspired by The New Yorker and Harper’s, Topic focuses each issue around a particular theme and solicits articles from every conceivable angle. In the year we’ve been publishing, Topic has printed authors T.C. Boyle, Arianna Huffington, David Leavitt, and Alain de Botton, Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta, artist Tom Slaughter and photographers Noe DeWitt and Steve McCurry. But names aside, we got in this game to throw out the kerosene. This was a magazine borne of an empty space. Suddenly we felt as though we had been dropped into some remote and ignorant corner of the world. We wanted to know what was going on elsewhere. We wanted to chase the words that filled us with the octane, the white heat burning hard and swift. We founded the magazine on the presumption that there aren’t many places where you’ll see a National Book Award finalist
It is a rollercoaster throwing yourself and your magazine out into the world—an even dicier ride when you’re in the midst of haughty accents and disdainful glances at any trace of “Americanism.” And we’re young. We’ve stumbled and tripped as we’ve tried to run. Miniature triumphs and catastrophes seem to bombard us with each new day. We’ve got no money, all we’ve got is a desire to get new voices going in a conversation. We need subscribers, we need people who are turned on by the world. For me, this is a journey that began at Milton, a place that opened my eyes to possibility, to difference, and the excitement of knowledge. So if you’re thinking of a trip to England, think again; for me, it was like traveling a dead end street. But it inspired me to ask what was going on in all the other streets of the world. Don’t take my word for it, pay a visit to those places, check out Topic magazine. Fill up on the high octane juice. Blake Gilpin ’97 robert.gilpin@yale.edu
Blake Gilpin
Sports Spring 2003 Headlines Baseball team wins league title With the score tied at 6 all and Mike Brown ’03 on second base, Kyle Lee hit a single. At the crack of the bat Brown sprinted home and slid underneath the Groton catcher’s tag to win 7–6 and clinch the ISL Championship for Milton.
Tennis team takes it all The Boys varsity tennis team finished the 2003 season undefeated with a 15-0-0 record. A mid-season win at the seventh annual New England/Mid-Atlantic Tennis Invitational in Blairstown, New Jersey set the course for a championship season. Ned Samuelson ’03 was awarded ISL MVP and ALL-league.
Golf’s Sheldon invited to Intercity Challenge For the second year, Claire Sheldon ’06 was selected as one of Massachusetts’s top six girl golfers by the Women’s Golf Association of Massachusetts, which qualified her for the annual Junior Girls’ Intercity Challenge Match in Greenwich, Connecticut, this spring.
Ryan breaks 100m school record Randy Ryan ’05 broke the school record in the 100m dash at the Independent School Track Association meet on May 10, 2003, with a time of 11.26 s (FAT). Randy won the league championship in the same event. For more on the 2002-2003 season or 2003-2004 previews, visit us online at www.milton.edu. 47 Milton Magazine
Sue Landau and Paul Cannata Named Assistant Directors of Athletics
“M
ilton’s athletics program is large and complex,” says Mike Kinnealey, athletic director. “To provide the best options and opportunities for students, we needed more eyes and hands to help make that happen. “I’m thrilled that Milton’s commitment to an even stronger athletic program has brought Sue Landau and Paul Cannata to Milton.” Assistant Director of Athletics Sue Landau was the first girl to play Little League baseball in Brookline, Massachusetts, where her three brothers also played ball. “At age 9, I made the All-Star team,” she remembers. While sports were important in her formative years, she never intended to work in athletics. “I pursued psychology and counseling at Connecticut College,” she says. “It turns out that coaching is about understanding people and their motivations, too.” Sue leaves a 12-year position at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she coached field hockey and women’s lacrosse and taught physical education. Her teams won nearly 20 championships; she was repeatedly named coach of the year by New-8 Conference and NEWMAC (New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference) and was named Northeast Regional Coach of the Year in 1995. She is especially proud of turning around Wellesley’s once-faltering field hockey program and making the NCAA Division III Final Four Tournament. “I want to focus more on teaching athletes and less on recruiting, which has become so central to college athletics,” Sue says. “I’m interested in making the game fun and inspiring young athletes—creating a passion in them. Passion will inspire them to keep learning and to understand that the scoreboard is not the only measure of
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Sue Landau
Paul Cannata
success. The parallels to life are important: cooperation, teamwork, strategy and communication.”
as a coach and director of state select programs. This past summer he was an assistant coach of the Mass Select 17 Team that won a gold medal at the USA National 17 Festival in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
In addition to helping administer Milton athletics, Sue will coach field hockey and girls’ lacrosse, and teach Project Adventure and Fitness Concepts. “Coaching Division I college hockey was an experience I’m excited to bring to Milton,” says assistant athletic director and boys’ varsity hockey coach Paul Cannata. After six years as assistant coach at Northeastern University (1997–2002), Paul last year founded a small ice surface hockey rink in Norwood, Massachusetts, and developed a hockey-training curriculum for male and female players, mite to collegiate. During recent summers Paul served as an assistant coach and head coach of U.S. National teams competing in international tournaments. During the summer of 2001 he was an assistant with the U.S. National 17 team, which competed in Fussen, Germany. During the summer of 2002 he served as head coach of the U.S. National 16 team, which won a gold medal in Prague, Czech Republic. Paul has also been a mainstay in the Massachusetts Satellite Training Program
Hockey has always been Paul’s game. He began playing pond hockey at 4 in his native West Roxbury. For 10 years, he’s enjoyed the strong camaraderie of Boston’s hockey community. “I enjoy the physical and mental aspects of the game,” he says. “Things happen so fast and you have to think just as fast.” Prior to his Northeastern coaching role, Paul was the head coach at UMass Boston and North Adams State (1992–1993) and assistant coach at American International College (1990–1992). Paul has published articles, made presentations, implemented specialized skill training sessions and created training videos during his coaching and teaching career. Both coaches spoke about what makes a successful coach: a knowledge of a game and the pursuit of continued development as an athlete; the ability to understand and respond to different learning styles; and a passion for the game—playing and teaching it.
In•Sight
Convocation, on September 8 in the Fitzgibbons Convocation Center, launched the 2003-2004 academic year.
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OnCentre Celebrating the Legendary Michael Bentinck-Smith Community gathers to recognize teacher’s talent, dedication On January 31, more than 350 members of the Milton Academy community gathered in Pieh Commons to celebrate the birthday of Lower School wood shop teacher Michael Bentinck-Smith. His birthday was an excuse to celebrate his 37 years of exceptional teaching and the remarkable impact that his dedication has had on generations of Lower School students. Former and current students toted wood shop projects—from castles to robots to go-carts and more— to display at the event. “Michael teaches children more than meets the eye,” said Jane McGuinness, third grade teacher. “He teaches them to rely on themselves and to trust their instincts. He’s also well known for his strength at assessing the whole child,” Jane said. Originally, Michael—whose love of cars is also legendary— had intended to teach automotive repair to high school students. Luckily for the Academy, that search was not initially successful and, said Michael, “I figured I’d take this job for a year.” After his first year on the job, the late Betty Buck, Lower School principal, gave Michael a glowing evaluation: “One of your greatest contributions has 50 Milton Magazine
been your boundless enthusiasm and your very real insight into what makes children tick…You show [these students] how to be worthwhile people and how to make the most of their assets and how to think.”
“This is a man,” said community member J.D. Sloan, “who has incredible power with children. He has faith in them.” Michael alludes to a philosophy that allows for different
kinds of success and “winning,” when he says, “Some schools have every child make the same pair of owl bookends in wood shop. In my class, children make choices.”
New to Milton
Neal Litvack
Mark J. Stanek
Fidelity Executive Named CFO
Named First Middle School Principal
Neal Litvack joined Milton’s team of administrators this past spring as chief financial officer. Neal is responsible for overseeing Milton’s business and financial functions, including budget, endowment management and strategic financial planning in addition to overseeing buildings and grounds, dining services, security operations, and human resources services.
To provide distinct and focused leadership for the experience of middle school-aged students, Mark J. Stanek joined Milton this summer as the first Middle School principal.
Neal’s career in marketing, operations, and financial leadership at Fidelity Investments— where he most recently served as president of Fidelity Retail Marketing, a unit of Fidelity Investments—prepare him well for the challenges Milton and all schools confront in maintaining financial equilibrium in challenging times. His avocation, however, singled him out as a person capable of and enthusiastic about participating in life at Milton.
Neal’s experience as a trustee at Dedham Country Day School (1997–2002) gave him indepth experience with the school issues he will now supervise. In addition, work in the school environment was so gratifying that it stimulated his career change from finance to education. Neal’s colleagues have found him an energetic and a tireless worker, a person who listens well, values input and process, and is a good team player as well as a leader, as had his colleagues in business and at Dedham Country Day. Neal received a bachelor’s in economics and psychology from Vassar College, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. Neal lives in Weston with his wife and two children.
A native of upstate New York, Mark comes to Milton from the Athenian School in Danville, California, where he was dean of students for the middle school, a mathematics teacher and coach of the school’s track and field team. Mark’s experience as a teacher, administrator, coach and leader of extracurricular activities began in 1992, upon his graduation from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. In addition to his work at the Athenian School, Mark’s independent school experience spans Culver Academies (Culver, Indiana), Kentucky Country Day School (Louisville, Kentucky) and Samuel Proctor Academy (Trenton, New Jersey).
“I was drawn to Milton Academy because of its commitment to respect, diversity, creativity and challenging academics—important and continuing School traditions,” Mark says. Mark earned a master’s in educational administration, with a concentration in private school leadership, from Columbia University’s Teacher College and attended the University of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. In a 10-year career, Mark has won five awards for excellence in teaching and coaching. He was also awarded the Rose Fellowship and Klingenstein Fellowship at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is also apparently a believer in lifelong learning: “My three biggest accomplishments over the last few years,” Mark said, “were running a marathon, learning elementary Spanish, and standing up on a surfboard.”
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Retiring Faculty Members
Peter Keyes History Department, 1974 to 2003
Peter Keyes
It is always a daunting task, when one tries to represent adequately a life of service to this School in a five-minute speech to the faculty in June or, on one page of the Milton Magazine, to do one’s subject justice. We all know how much thought and conversation and activity go into just one day of our work, and to describe many years of work well and truly done, on one page? The task is doubly difficult when the subject is Peter Keyes and his 29 years at Milton. He has been a teacher of United States History, of Modern World History and of Economics. He initiated courses in American Government and Comparative Governments. He founded Class I elective courses on timely public issues, including the inter-
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disciplinary Nuclear Age, a course taught with several of his colleagues. He was honored with the Talbot Baker Award for excellence in teaching in 1983. His learned and discriminating counsel has been essential to the progress of his department. He served on dormitory staffs for 20 years—in Wolcott House from 1974 to 1987—thereafter in a small house on Lindbergh Road and in Faulkner House after the boys moved in. He was a coach from the beginning—first of boys’ varsity tennis and later of girls’ third team tennis and of various boys’ soccer teams. Some would argue, however, that his great claim to coaching fame would be based on girls’ squash, a two-year-old program he took on in 1978 and led to a 152–79 record over 20 seasons.
Peter’s work in the classroom, the dormitory and on the courts and fields provides us a fine example of the teaching life well lived, and for most of us, the story of our work at Milton might end there. I am passing that story by too quickly, however, because there is another story to tell, and one I want to tell in greater detail. In 1974 Peter was the Legislative Director of Common Cause, Massachusetts. In the same year the family of John and Ruth Long conceived the idea of the Civic Service Educational Foundation, a fund that would make resources available to Milton and to two other high schools for developing programs “to promote the interest of students in public affairs and in the political process, educate students in all aspects of governmental affairs, attract outstanding students into governmental service ... ” Peter was hired to be director of the foundation and, with that, the face of Milton changed. When he began here there was one club, in the Girls’ School, that concerned itself with current events; and lectures by visiting speakers, while notable, were infrequent. Peter brought speakers to Milton: War Memorial lecturers and Veterans’ Day and Theme Assembly speakers. He organized the first Seminar Day in 1977 and then many others in subsequent years. He brought after-dinner speakers
to dormitories, and, as attendance grew, he founded the program of Straus desserts. He moderated debates on timely issues, most recently the debate between representatives of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidiates in 2000. The speakers have been famous—Julian Bond, Ralph Nader, William F. Buckley Jr., General Gavin, Maya Angelou, Helen Suzman, Bruno Bettleheim, and Stephen Breyer, for example—and they have been local leaders and activists on problems of world population growth, civil rights, the war against drugs, veterans’ affairs, Cold War politics, wilderness protection—again, a few examples from a much longer list. The speakers’ views have represented the political spectrum and have provoked debate within the school community. Peter took students off campus —to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library and Ford Hall Forum—to hear other voices: Andrew Young’s and David Duke’s were two. He led student groups at Model United Nations and Model Congress sessions, at Harvard Law School Mock Trials and Close Up seminars in Washington. He helped students find internships in political and public policy organizations, spring projects and summer jobs. (The list of graduates who work in public affairs, run for office or report on current
Ann Cook-Franz Lower School Music, 1980 to 2003 events continues to grow.) At the School Peter started the Oxfam hunger banquet, a yearly event, and the Public Issues Board, a club that meets once a week to discuss issues of the day and to plan other student opportunities for discussion and action. Over these years others of us have founded student organizations, taught new courses and held seminars, many of which have fostered those debates and that engagement. Peter’s work introduced the climate in which such efforts could flourish. We have come to take such activities for granted; indeed we would not recognize Milton today without this intense engagement in questions of our time, without this proliferation of student organizations and initiatives to bring the world to Milton and Milton, in turn, to the world. Because he showed us the way, because he never lost his confidence in the desire and ability of our students to become citizens in a free society, because his enthusiasm for these tasks continued to grow, and because we value the School that he did so much to shape—for all these reasons we celebrate Peter Keyes on the occasion of his retirement. Carly Wade Chair, History Department
On Friday mornings when most of the Lower School welcomes a shorter day, Ann Cook faces the weekly assembly. Whether the assembly is hers or not, she has a role to play. Adding a song here, an instrumental back-up there, making connections with the Upper School, or finding the sheet music for a talent show participant, she is on the job. And, that’s her easy day! What is it like to have been the musical heart and soul of the Lower School for 22 years? Ann’s challenge has been to help our children appreciate music, sing with gusto, play with confidence, and feel that music is necessary to happiness. The path begins in kindergarten with movement and play, instruments and listening. From the breathtakingly short and adorable Anansi play come the seeds for second grade Shadow Play accompaniments, the third grade’s annual dropdead contribution at the holiday sing, and, of course, the sixth grade play. Woven through those experiences for children are piano keyboarding, recorder, and perhaps a little guitar. We haven’t even mentioned a little song here to support the assembly about geography, and a little number there to bind together our thematic salute to friendship. As the person focused on music in the Lower School, Ann Cook represents a single point of excellence.
Picture Ann, poised at the piano, and intently appearing in front of her is the chorus, the third grade, a talent show act, a group who needs some shoring up before curriculum night – just fill in the blank. With unabated intensity, high standards, and an amiable grin, she bullies all of us to be the best. Ann lives in a small region: the intersection of rigor and creativity, and she invites us to some spend time with her there. If truth be told, Ann is not perfect. She has an impossibly large cache of materials to pass on to her successor, stored in closets, cabinets, files, and, one suspects, secret hideaways. She has been known to misplace keys, and her makeshift office next to the Xerox machine is littered with telltale snippets of the performances she is managing, supporting, creating, or saving. But all is forgiven when first graders sing about global harmony, when the chorus performs with grace and beauty, warmth and skill, when fifth graders belt out a heartfelt ode to the environment, or when sixth graders come together as a graduating class and share the gift of themselves. Each assembly is an opportunity to learn something new, and even the grand December event in the King Theater sacrifices polish for experimentation and unapologetic joy. When our graduates come back and sing, Ann is proud but not surprised.
Ann Cook-Franz
Watching her face at those moments is a pleasure. Beyond her role as music teacher, Ann’s concern for peace, global respect, environmental responsibility, and thoughtful communities is evident in the way she lives her life and helps us live ours. The music we sing represents many different cultures, and the refrain that is most common is of hope and responsibility. Working with Ann has been a joy; she had the grace never to hold my musical untalent against me. To plan, to laugh, to brainstorm, to enjoy together has been a gift. Perhaps her greatest satisfaction will be her legacy, which goes beyond the musical education to the core place that music has earned in all that the Lower School does. She is leaving on the highest and sweetest of notes! Annette Raphel Lower School Principal 53 Milton Magazine
Words of Thanks for Retiring Trustees
Jessie Bourneuf
Margaret Bergan Davis ’76
Trustee, 1990 to 2003
Trustee, 1989 to 1993, and 1995 to 2003
Milton has depended upon Jessie Bourneuf ’s eagle eye for 13 years. Safely described as a numbers person, but certainly not sufficiently described that way, Jessie reliably provided clear budget analysis during the administration of three heads of school: Jerry Pieh, Ed Fredie and Robin Robertson. Her in-depth understanding of dynamic building blocks that support Milton’s educational mission—tuition revenues, salaries, and financial aid— allowed Jessie to help the board and the School make the most effective decisions over time. In fact, whenever members of the board wanted to know the history, the reasoning, or the status of a financial matter, the call went out: “Ask Jessie.” Budget is always an expression of policy and priorities, so Jessie’s role as the budget czar enhanced her influence on all deliberations with financial implications (that is, virtually all the decisions). Jessie’s point of view on every initiative—from building and operating the Athletic and Convocation Center and updating Milton’s technology core through designing a new Warren Hall, student-faculty center and Wigg Hall—were astute, tenacious and important. She has always been a supporter of Milton’s
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Mountain School Program. In short, Jessie has had a hand in every aspect of Milton’s current strength and success. Jessie also understood a wider responsibility as a member of Milton’s board. She graciously and effectively connected the women on the board with each other, and she promoted the election of women as new board members. In addition, both Marshall Schwartz and Robin Robertson can attest that Jessie is a gracious host; a lovely December party in her home included alumni and parents who have been and will be Milton supporters. Having been elected to the board in 1990, Jessie served not only as Budget Committee Chair, but also on the Lower School, Buildings and Grounds, Investment, Audit and Executive Committees and most recently as the board’s treasurer. Jessie’s son Mackey graduated in 1999, and her daughter Jennifer is a member of the Class of 2002. Throughout years on the board Jessie was always accessible and available to Milton. We thank Jessie for her generosity of time and energy, and her devoted service to Milton Academy over more than the last decade.
During two distinct periods of service to the board, Margaret has concentrated on programs that cultivate those folks who will affect Milton’s future: donors, prospective families, and boarding parents. Margaret’s expertise in institutional advancement helped Milton during our deliberations prior to launching the Challenge to Lead campaign. She returned to us at the close of the campaign, and made Milton’s effort to enroll the best students her primary domain. Fully versed in the elements that affect our enrollment success, Margaret participated in strategic discussions on financial aid, national recruiting strategy and the quality of student life on campus. Margaret even promoted a successful challenge to round up trustee frequent flier miles for ferrying admitted students back to campus, and in Chicago she has been a oneperson promotion team to interest Chicago families in sending children to Milton. None of us was surprised to learn that Margaret’s daughter, Caroline, excelled on the Milton Speech Team and in theater; she came by her confidence and facility honestly: Margaret’s reports to the board have always been beautifully delivered, well-organized and
thorough, and in true Milton style, often provocative or questioning. Margaret loves posing a challenge as much as she loves responding to challenges. Margaret has served on the Budget, Development, Academic Life and Executive Committees during her tenure. Most recently she has been a member of the Student Life and Lower School Committees, along with CoChair of Enrollment. Margaret honors her numerous family ties to Milton in her service to this board and her alma mater. We are grateful for her vigorous and discerning support for Milton’s direction and progress.
Alumni Authors
Mordecai: An Early American Family Emily Bingham ’83
Mordecai: An Early American Family reads like a romanfleuve except that this saga is a meticulously researched nonfictional account of the Mordecais, a Jewish family seeking to establish social and religious identity in 19th century America. Kirkus Reviews, a long-time barometer of the publishing industry, suggests that Emily Bingham’s history of the Mordecais is a narrative that might have even captivated Thomas Mann, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 for his classic saga Buddenbrooks. The Kirkus review reads, “…the author paints distinct, expressive portraits of Rachel, Moses, Ellen, George, and all their kin; the distaff side is particularly vivid, perhaps because the women were prolific writers who produced considerable primary-source material…Depicted with precision and sympathy: the adventures of a single family prove to also be the story of how America changed Judaism in the 19th century.”
Emily’s book also won a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, another influential publishing periodical. Publishers Weekly writes: “The Mordecais’ history is deftly charted through three generations beginning with Jacob and Judith moving to Virginia from Philadelphia in 1785, through Jacob’s founding, with his own grown children, of a renowned primary school and the conversion to Christianity of some family members during the Second Great Awakening of the mid19th century. From there, Bingham follows the family sundering that occurred in the 1860s, when most of the family supported the Confederacy, and Alfred, refusing either to side with them or to support the war in any way, resigned from the Union army. But as thrilling as this family history is, Bingham’s great feat here is to show, through the social, political and religious evolutions of one family, how class, ethnicity, region and intellectual affiliation profoundly affected assimilation in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Bingham’s prose is as fluid as fiction, but she never sacrifices historical insight for narrative drive or soft-pedals such uncomfortable material as the Mordecais owning slaves. This is an important addition not only to Jewish studies but to the literature on family and gender relations in the 19th century.” Rave reviews and declarations of “importance” aside, Mordecai is a great read—a riveting tale of failed business ventures, barely veiled incest, intellectual yearning, fortune-finding and devastating loss. Its narrative texture
and depth might easily make readers forget that it’s both a true story and educational. Mordecai is poised to become a staple on shelves of historians and lovers of literature. Hollywood filmmakers might also take notice as this story boasts elements that make for cinematic sweep as well as moving character development. In short, Mordecai passes the page-turning test.
How to Grow When Markets Don’t Adrian Slywotzky and Richard Wise ’82
We’ve all heard the anecdotes: A once-innovative pager company is unprepared for the onslaught of affordable and multi-functional cell phones; the company fails. A staple of the retailing world loses staggering market share as newcomers offer better customer service and price. A restaurant, dependent on its high-traffic location, can’t survive when reconfigured traffic patterns destroy its “drive-by” customers. In organizations large and small, simple and complex, leaders are often forced to adapt swiftly and smart—or die.
Product saturation and market crashes can make company growth seem unattainable— even when the only adversary is a haphazard economy. In a book praised by the Boston Globe, Barron’s and Miami Herald, How to Grow When Markets Don’t (Mercer Management Consulting) outlines how companies such as Progressive Insurance, GE Medical Systems and John Deere Landscapes turned market challenges to their advantage. The strategy, known as “demand innovation,” abandons traditional profit models and offers advice on how to mine a company’s hidden assets. The book departs from the didactic how-to manual, common among business books. It reveals why the innovators of the ’80s, who created clever and effective business designs (e.g., Wal-Mart and Southwest Airlines), are also losing steam. Product-centered strategies alone aren’t good enough anymore, say Richard and bestselling co-author Adrian Slywotzky. “The vast majority of companies are now finding that product innovation is, at best, a source of profit replacement or profit protection; it isn’t a source of new, long-term growth.” International expansion and acquisition are also less effective at boosting growth than the numbers of the ’90s might suggest. So what now? How to Grow When Markets Don’t outlines “demand innovation” within its 300-odd pages. Readers walk away with ideas on how to approach long-term strategies and with (Chapter 16) “Some Moves for Monday 55 Milton Magazine
Morning” and (Chapter 18) “Tools and Techniques You Can Use Today.” Visit the book’s Web site at www.DemandInnovation.com.
The narrator’s storytelling, shifting between the past and the present, offers respite from the overwhelming situations she and her family now endure. Elizabeth’s voice is honest; the mother of two daughters, one of whom is autistic, she depicts a realistic account of a family’s struggle with a non-typical child.
Tilt
Elizabeth has won the Academy of American Poets Award, the Foley Award, the Gertrude Stein award for Innovative Writing and the Lenore Marshall Award for prose and for poetry. She teaches writing and women’s studies in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Elizabeth Burns ’77
Elizabeth Burns’s debut novel, Tilt is for anyone who wants to better understand life with a disabled child, and the devastation of mental illness. Burns’ heart-wrenching tale begins in New York with the narrator, Bridget Fox’s decision to divorce her philandering husband. Bridget heads to Portugal where she meets her second husband, a talented artist named Pierce. The couple returns to the States to settle in Minnesota; from there things go from bad to worse. Bridget loses both her father and cousin to cancer, her oldest daughter is diagnosed as autistic and her husband is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Without a support system, Bridget struggles with her daughter’s autism alone. An award-winning poet, Burns has a sophisticated sense of humor and eloquent style. 56 Milton Magazine
The Art of Cause Marketing Richard Earle ’49
Remember the “Crying Indian” spots for the Keep America Beautiful Campaign? “This is your brain on drugs”? “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk”? These are just a few of the cause marketing campaigns Richard Earle discusses in his book, The Art of Cause Marketing.
From choosing an ad agency and the importance of campaign planning and strategy, to the television production for a cause campaign and preparing a media plan, this hands-on book is aimed at those in the advertising field. According to Robert P. Keim, president emeritus of The Ad Council, The Art of Cause Marketing is “sine qua non— the best work on cause marketing and advertising I’ve read. Dick Earle defines, explains, illustrates, and teaches as an experienced, talented advertising professional who has walked the walk.” Richard has spent over 30 years in advertising and says that the pages of his book “summarize lessons learned from years of personal experience…perhaps the lessons learned from the cause campaigns with which I have been involved can help you steer clear of the many pitfalls inherent in this very specialized kind of advertising.” During the past five years, Earle has served as advertising and media consultant to a number of public interest and political initiative organizations such as U.S. Term Limits, Massachusetts Department of Public Health (Tobacco Control Program), the Maine Department of Human Services, Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling, and Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. Richard lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with his wife Pat.
Teaching Comprehension Strategies All Readers Need Nicole Outsen ’88 and Stephanie Yulga
A fifth grade teacher at The North Hampton School in New Hampshire, Nicole Outsen ’88 and coauthor Stephanie Yulga invite you into their classrooms in Teaching Comprehension Strategies All Readers Need. Complete with mini-lessons and children’s work and words, Teaching Comprehension is a collection of the work Nicole and Stephanie did in order to introduce, extend and deepen comprehension strategies to help their students become better readers. Informative sidebars identify good books and articles on the subject. Photographs of actual conference notes and classroom charts illustrate the work the authors did in their own classrooms and the reproducible forms in the back of the book enable readers to extend Nicole and Stephanie’s work into their own classrooms. Published in September 2002, Teaching Comprehension Strategies All Readers Need, is a valuable teaching resource.
Changing of the Guard The Flahertys bequeath Wolcott to successors after 21 years Last spring, Tom and Fran Flaherty bid farewell to Wolcott house. They bring with them, as they move on, the love and gratitude of hundreds of graduates, for whom they created a unique “family” and vivid memories. The Flaherty’s were Wolcott house heads for 21 years. For “their” boys, Wolcott felt like home. “Students always felt well tended, well nourished, comforted and cared for,” says Lukie Wells, new dean of students but well aware of the Flaherty’s tradition. They worked as a pair—Tom’s skillfully applied words of wisdom, and Fran’s warm and firm support. Their window on teenagers—developing young men, adolescents confronting the myriad challenges that are part of the territory—was wide and deep; little surprised them and they drew on a wealth of awareness in helping boys cope. They developed an atmosphere of camaraderie in Wolcott and peppered boys’ lives with traditions graduates remember: breakfasts during exams, weekly cookouts after study hall on fall and spring evenings, playing pool in the “war room.” Wells Hansen of the classics department will succeed Tom and Fran, and he easily expresses for all of us the gifts that the Flaherty’s gave us: “Tom Flaherty’s skill as a coach brought out the best in the house over the years. Also, as a historian, Tom made sure that each class of boys felt connected to the history of the house and the Academy as a whole.
Tom and Fran Flaherty, Wolcott House
As a result, they treated each other, their house, and their relationship to Milton with great reverence. Tom strove to bring the guys together and to create opportunities to make a few strategic interventions at the moments at which they were needed. He is a master of understanding group dynamics. He can say the right words to the right person at the right time, and keep the house healthy and comfortable. Tom chooses his few words with confidence and good humor. Tom and Fran seemed to embody the history and tradition of the house, as well those qualities that are the best of what the Academy stands for. To win praise from Tom and Fran was to align oneself with honesty, integrity, and hard work. The fact that they were able to set this tone without
ever articulating it is part of a special family dynamic that was distinct and wonderful.
in a time of rapid change is something for which the Academy should be grateful.”
The boys felt pride and investment in their house as a direct result of Tom and Fran’s quiet coaching on the one hand and mothering on the other. The Flaherty’s respect for tradition
We are happy that the Flaherty’s have not left campus; they are living on Churchill’s Lane this year, and remain deeply involved in many aspects of the life of the School.
Editors note: Milton is grateful for the extraordinary commitment and devoted care provided to students in Forbes House for eight years by Laurel Starks of the history department, and for five years in Hallowell House by Leigh Hutchinson and her husband Jamie LaRochelle of the science department. Laurel, Leigh and Jamie tended to the needs of Forbes’ boys and Hallowell girls respectively, and were enthusiastic advocates for the quality of students’ residential experience. The role of house head is uniquely challenging and gratifying, and Milton depends on the professionalism of our house heads to achieve the residential environment of which we are all proud. We are also enthusiastic about the opportunities presented by the experienced faculty leadership in new house head roles: Chris Hales in Forbes House and Heather Sugrue in Hallowell House. 57 Milton Magazine
Sixth Grade Students Construct House o’ Dreams Dream houses are easier to build in the imagination than in real life, where contractor availability, the cost of custom windows and adhering to building codes can interfere with the idea of perfection. Last spring, sixth graders tested their creative powers against practical limitations when they designed and built models of their dream houses. They followed guidelines of the fictional Greenleaf Design Associates when planning their homes, ensuring that bathrooms would be at least 5 by 8 feet, for example, and that the number and location of egresses matched the home’s functional needs and degree of formality—all this within a $200,000 budget. Samara Bliss ’09 (pictured below), said she gave the project great thought, and that her first design came in $300,000 over budget requiring her to slash a storey and make other compromises. “Everything in my house revolves around the pool,” Samara said, indicating
the model pool, which she fashioned from a disassembled Altoids box. The pool view looks up to a glass-block roof; an indented living room floor also marks a departure from the ordinary in Samara’s house. Outside, a gazebo with Jacuzzi and a pond extend the focus on flow and water. Upper School faculty member Bryan Cheney (art), who is also an architect, was among the faculty and parent experts who advised sixth graders on how to develop a program and a list of considerations, such as natural and artificial lighting, that can affect a home’s look, feel and function. The house project is a perennial favorite in the Lower School, requiring abstract and creative thinking, prioritization, using tools and mathematical precision. “I learned about the Pythagorean theorem while I was making the roof,” Samara noted. Was it all hard work? “I really had a lot of fun decorating my house,” Samara said.
Samara Bliss ’09 needed to slash $300,000 from the building costs of her plans. The home-building project is a highlight of the sixth grade curriculum.
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Marvin Minsky Visits Third Graders
Marvin Minsky (center) enjoys the success of a student who just completed a challenging engineering assignment.
Marvin Minsky, author of The Society of the Mind and a pioneer of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, visited third graders in the Lower School on Thursday, May 8, 2003. Known as the father of artificial intelligence, Mr. Minsky engaged children with a backto-basics engineering assignment, inspired by a box of popsicle sticks found on teacher Jane McGuinness’s desk: Each child took four popsicle sticks and attempted to weave them together, so that they would hold fast—then explode apart when thrown to the floor. Mr. Minsky talked with students about the challenges of creating thinking-machines. “You can teach a person by showing examples. But computers don’t understand examples,” he said. “Until a computer knows a lot, you can’t tell it anything.”
When a student wondered whether Mr. Minsky had ever built a computer, he replied that building them now is much easier than it was when he began working at M.I.T. nearly 50 years ago. “In the old days, I needed about 100 parts—instead of five—and it took a lot of work.” Mr. Minksy also talked with students about garage doors, elevators and robots that he made and programmed. Mr. Minsky is at work on The Emotion Machine, a look at the roles played by feelings, goals, emotions and conscious thoughts in terms of processes that motivate and regulate activities within our personal societies of the mind. Mr. Minsky’s inventions include the first LOGO “turtle” device, the confocal scanning microscope and SNARC, the first neural network simulator.
Milton In The News Princeton Poetry Prize Won By El Paso Student
Service Earns Local Coverage
On February 28, 2003, the El Paso Times reported that Claire Tinguely ’04 won the Nancy Thorp Memorial Poetry Prize for her poem “Poppies.” Her prize-winning poem—one of 800 entries—was published in spring 2003 in Cargoes, the Hollins University literary magazine. Later in the semester, Claire won another prestigious poetry contest, the Princeton Poetry Prize, for her prose poem about a dancer in El Paso, Texas, who is resentful of Mexicans. It becomes clear that the dancer’s anger is concerned with identity issues: she is, in fact, part Mexican. “‘How to be a Ballet Dancer in El Paso, Texas’ is written as a ‘how-to’ piece. Every sentence is a command...it’s because of Mr. [Jim] Connolly’s teaching and advice that I won the contest,” Claire said. Claire’s poetry centers on the culture of Southwest Texas, where she grew up.
On April 30, 2003, The Milton Times ran a story on the Academy’s Community Service Day. The story quotes Andrea Geyling, community service advisor, who said, “Community Service Day is an opportunity to recognize the dedicated work many of our students do all year. In fact, the idea was first proposed by the Self Governing Association as a way for all the students to escape from the campus ‘bubble’ and be reminded of the world beyond.” In all, about 600 students traveled to 31 sites as well as staffed on-campus events; they walked and talked with the elderly, helped out at day care centers, performed yard work at Milton’s Town Hall, sorted food at the Greater Boston Food Bank, walked dogs at the local animal shelter and helped
Students clean up the grounds at Milton’s Town Hall.
Boston personality Sidewalk Sam beautify Boston with brightly painted murals.
Saturday Course Reaches 30 Metropolitan Towns for 25 Years In the Canton Citizen (Canton, Massachusetts) on May 29, 2003, an article quoted Olga Mahoney—Saturday Course co-director with Gary Schrager—on the value of the Academy’s 25-year-old enrichment work with independently motivated fourth, fifth and sixth grade public school children. Courses available to them include Blood and Guts, Extreme Math and Invention Convention. “We’re proud of our program’s long connection with so many children from so many towns,” Olga said. “Enrichment programs like ours have often struggled to obtain the resources to survive and flourish as this program fortunately
has. The Saturday Course depends on tuition, foundation grants, corporate donations and financial support from parents and friends of the program. It also benefits tremendously from using Milton Academy facilities.”
Media Covers Former President Clinton’s Address News of Mr. Clinton’s address and Milton’s commencement was covered by National Public Radio, the Associated Press, yahoo.com and MSNBC, to name several outlets. The Nielson audience for all television segments was 1,355,561. Mr. Clinton told members of the Class of 2003 to differentiate between the headlines and the trend lines—between today’s packaged messages and the larger, more complex direction of our world—remembering to see the big picture, and remembering to think.
The poetry of award winner Claire Tinguely ’04 centers on her native Southwest Texas.
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Debbie Simon Inducted Into Hall of Fame “For good or ill, we cannot escape each other,” he said, “And, therefore, the major job of citizenship for the next 20 years will be to spread the benefits and reduce the risks of interdependence, to try to build a world community of shared benefits, shared responsibility and shared values.”
country. This year five coaches were inducted into the hall of fame for their “contributions to the speech community.” Debbie’s first reaction to the good news: “Coaching is not a one-person thing; it is beyond collaborative.” An interview with Debbie about her accomplishments always steers from her to her fellow coaches and Speech Team students, past and present.
National Title Secured by Milton Speech Team As reported by the Boston Globe this spring, members of Speech and Debate Team are no strangers to success. They won the won the National Catholic Forensic League Tournament’s Overall Tournament Sweepstakes and the Speech Sweepstakes in Arlington, Virginia. Jon Magaziner ’03 won the national championship in dramatic performance. The Milton team competed against 450 schools from 50 states; more than 200 students competed in each event. The 25 Milton students who qualified for nationals represented one of the largest school entries in the tournament. Wrote the Globe, “[The competitors] have rigorous practices, do warm-ups before tournaments, and some members even cling to superstitious rituals they believe are key to their performance. Julia Cain ’03, co-captain, told the Globe that a Nutrigrain bar and a Twinkie have been passed down as talismans at least since 1999.
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Debbie Simon, Performing Arts
Last June, performing arts faculty member Debbie Simon was delighted—though few in the community were surprised —to be inducted into the National Forensic League Coaches Hall of Fame. According to Milton Speech Team member Josh Bone ’04, “Debbie’s contributions to Milton Academy, especially to her students, dwarf anything on her impressive resume.” To skim the surface of that resume, Debbie has cocoached the Milton Academy Speech Team for 21 years. She has coached 20 individual National Catholic Forensic League (NCFL) and National Forensic League (NFL) Champions; she received the Bruno E. Jacob Coaching Award in Forensics, the NFL Double Diamond Coaching Award and the NFL Distinguished Service Key; and she’s received the NFL’s coach-of-year honors. Inductees into the NFL Hall of Fame are nominated by a NFL member and elected by a vote from coaches around the
Debbie feels fortunate to have worked with so many talented students from around the country. “One of the best parts of coaching is having one-onone time with students to create something from scratch.” Debbie hosts more than 35 student tutorials per week, but students flock to her office for more than just tutorials. “Debbie is willing to open her couch and office to any and all,” says Josh Bone. “If you’re having a bad day, Debbie will attempt to cheer you up reminding you that no matter what happens, someone on campus really cares about you.” One of Debbie’s proudest moments was the return of David Ball ’88 and Patrice Jean-Baptiste ’88, former Speech Team folks, several years ago as Milton teachers and speech team coaches. Many of Debbie’s former students now coach forensic teams—spreading a bit of Debbie’s magic across the country. Milton students are not the only ones to benefit from Debbie’s tutelage. For more
than 12 years Debbie has spent the summers coaching and directing speech camps. Most recently, Debbie worked with students at the Interpretive Speech and Debate Institute at the University of Texas in Austin, a camp she co-directs. “For me the joy of coaching comes from the people I work with and their spirit,” Debbie says. “The whole team knows what they are striving for; but it’s not about winning, it’s about what we can accomplish together as a team.”
Power Plays Sophocles’s Antigone for 2003 “I’d like them to walk away with a sense of the power of risking your life for what you believe in,” said Patrice JeanBaptiste, director Those familiar with Sophocles’ classic tale of heroism and woe, Antigone, may remember that a young woman, Antigone, takes a stand for what she believes in, risking everything else she holds dear—family, society’s approval, love and life. In the original version, King Creon of Thebes decrees that the traitor, Polynices, is not to be buried, but Polynices’ sister Antigone defies the order. She is caught, and sentenced by Creon to be buried alive, even though she is betrothed to Creon’s son Haemon. After the blind prophet Tiresias proves
Patrice Jean-Baptiste ’88 (performing arts) and her Class IV cast members stage Antigone
that the gods are on Antigone’s side, Creon changes his mind, but too late: Antigone has hanged herself. When Creon arrives at the tomb, Haemon attacks his father and then kills himself. When their death is reported, Creon’s wife, Eurydice, takes her own life, leaving Creon alone. Patrice Jean-Baptiste ’88 (performing arts department) directed the Class IV play, Antigone, using Jean Anouilh’s version of the play, adapted by Lewis Galantiere and published by Samuel French, Inc. The closing lines of the script are from the Chorus, who in classic Greek fashion have kept watch over the protagonists and watched their tragic flaws develop into tragedy: “Chorus: And there we are. All those who were meant to die, have died: those who believed one thing, those who believed the contrary thing, and even those who believed nothing at all, yet were caught up in the web without knowing why. All dead: useless, rotting. Creon was the most rational, the most persuasive of tyrants. But like all tyrants, he refused to distinguish between the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s. Now and again—in the three thousands years since the first Antigone—other Antigones have arisen like a Clarion call to remind men of this distinction. Their cause is always the same—a passionate belief that moral law exists, and a passionate regard for the sanctity 61 Milton Magazine
of human dignity. Well, Antigone is calm tonight. She has played her part. (The three guards enter through arch right and resume their former places on the steps. They begin playing a game of cards) A great wave of unrest now settles down upon Thebes, upon the empty palace, upon Creon, who can now begin to long for his own death. Only the Guards are left, and none of this matters to them. It’s no skin off their noses. They go on playing cards.” Just days before Antigone goes up, Patrice talked about her production, and her choices. Milton Magazine (MM): Why Antigone? Patrice Jean-Baptiste (PJ-B): I chose the play because it is important to empower young girls [age 14] to make a choice to stand for something— despite the powers and the pressures that keep them from being who they want to be. Girl power. I love it. MM: Why is now is a good time to tell this story? PJ-B: This version of Antigone is timely in that it reflects the voices of many people—not all people, but many people— responding to the war in Iraq. As I began this project, we had not yet made the decision to go to war. Since then we’ve done it. MM: What considerations weighed heavily when casting the play? 62 Milton Magazine
A New Mascot for Milton?
PJ-B: For Antigone, I was looking for a girl who, beyond the stage, represented a self esteem [so strong] that it could potentially border on rebellion if tested. She had to be fearless, on stage and off. MM: Is your Antigone set in the present day? PJ-B: Yes. I wanted an industrial-looking set because Thebes is war-torn and taken over by a dictator whose decisions are hard and fast. I was inspired by images of the construction site of our new student-faculty center. MM: Does Antigone kill herself in this production? PJ-B: No. Antigone is very much alive. She walls herself up in a cave. This play was written by Jean Anouilh during the Nazi occupation of France. MM: The chorus is traditionally the voice of the people. How does your chorus function? PJ-B: In Anouilh’s version, the chorus is one man. The biggest difference between Anouilh’s version and Sophocles’ version is Anouilh has added, because of the state of France during the German occupation, a political twist which gives Creon an edge that makes his action more justifiable than Sophocles’ Creon. Creon is bad, but he’s bad for a reason. He’s deliberately making a political statement to the city of Thebes—not unlike politicians today.
I’ve split my chorus into four parts and made them all girls. The chorus is all-knowing, and I’d like the all-knowing in this version to be female. They also have seen tragedy before, and they already know the end of the story—however, they have a bias toward Antigone. They still maintain the hope that Creon might not make the wrong decision and that tragedy may be averted. So they’re godly; they’re omniscient. MM: What would you like the audience to take away? PJ-B: Beyond getting a sense of the power of risking your life for what you believe in, would be the importance of evaluating human choice or human law, human dictate against the laws of nature and God. MM: Is this a modern political statement?
The swift and sleek mustang has long been Milton’s mascot, but it was a mother snapping turtle making her way across the Academy’s track and fields, that captured attention during the summer season. “The turtles are laying their eggs near the football field,” explained Michael Edgar, science faculty member. “I tried to find out if anyone saw baby turtles heading back to the pond.” The plodding turtles will grow to about one to oneand-a-half feet in length in their carapace (shell) and are more aggressive on land than in their preferred environment, water, Michael said. “If they feel trapped they will try to bite, and they can move their head very quickly. I would not suggest putting any digits near the mouth of the turtle.
“They come onto land to lay their eggs,” Michael said. “They will pick a sandy location and dig a hole and lay eggs there. Then the mom is back to the pond. As with most reptiles they give no parental care. But they are great animals, and add a lot to pond ecology,” he adds. Because of its location just eight miles from Boston, Milton Academy is often perceived as an urban boarding school. But Milton also enjoys the rich natural world on its campus and beyond in the nearby Blue Hills Reservation, which is home to flora, fauna, coyotes, turkey vultures and dragonflies, as well as several rare and endangered species in Massachusetts, such as the timber rattlesnake.
PJ-B: Creon’s dictatorship of Thebes ... feels strongly connected to our direction as a country. If the acting and production is done well, the connection will be glaringly clear without being forced. This [script] is timeless. Unfortunately, every era has had its Antigone. If I could say one more thing, it would be that I have been moved by the drive and professionalism of my cast. These students want to do well. They’re excited—regardless of all the other pressure they have in their lives and the fatigue of being a Milton Academy student. I’m honored to direct them. 63 Milton Magazine
The Seal Story
Milton Academy’s institutional identity roll out in the spring of 2001 spurred discussion among faculty, staff, alumni and local drivers. For years the Milton Academy seal had many looks; some renditions were hand drawn, others surrounded by laurel leaves, newer versions incorporated the Arabic numerals 1798 within the shield, while others were drawn with 1798 floating above the shield. Some versions showed blue in the bottom of the shield and orange in the top, while others showed the reverse. To communicate a single identity Milton developed an official School seal and logo. The “new” seal is an adaptation of the original, incorporating the shield, the School motto, “Dare to be true,” the year of incorporation, the words Milton, Massachusetts, and the roman numerals MDCCCXCVIII. A recent call to the communications office from a local driver prompted quite a stir. The caller explained that
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he was driving behind a Milton Academy van and noticed an error in our School seal. The alert driver explained that while the seal is emblazoned with the Arabic numerals 1798 beneath the shield, the roman numerals surrounding the shield read 1898. Indeed he was correct, but we are happy to announce it is not an error, but rather history. Milton was granted a charter from the Great and General Court of Massachusetts in 1798, led by the founder Edward H. Robbins; thus the Arabic numerals 1798 in the School seal. The school didn’t actually open its doors until nine years later, on a site near the current Milton Town Hall. It ceased operation in 1866. In 1884 the trustees reopened the Academy at a new site (Warren Hall). Under the leadership of Headmaster Harris Otis Apthorp, Milton celebrated its centennial in 1898. It was at that time Milton adopted a seal and the School motto, thus the date of
1898 around the seal. The seal was designed for the School’s Centennial Celebration, held December 7, 1898. Created by a Mr. Robinson at Gorham Manufacturing Company in New York, the seal, which was first done in black and white, was steel engraved; hand-painted color was added later. While there is little history on the choice of orange and blue as the official School colors, the Orange and Blue magazine was first published in 1894; the School colors were probably chosen for the athletic teams before that. In early versions of the shield, the top half of the Milton seal was in blue and the bottom in orange. For many years the colors switched between top and bottom until the School’s Bicentennial celebration in 1998 when for consistency’s sake and visual balance, School leaders decided that the official seal would contain orange in the top half and blue in the bottom half.
Young Republican Online Conference is an Active Place Whether students are paper-writing, working out or building sets, they still seem to have time to provoke classmates, share news articles and hash it all out online, through Miltonline conferences.
death or worse. Things were bad in Iraq. I am a first generation Iraqi-American. I have family in both Iraq and around the world who have had to flee their homes from the terrorizing Saddam regime.
Lively discussion peppered the Young Republicans Conference and Public Issues conferences last academic year: on the choice of Bill Clinton as Milton’s graduation speaker; on the resignation of Environmental Protection Agency Director Christine Todd Whitman; on President George W. Bush’s tax cuts; and, not surprisingly, on the timing, wisdom and efficacy of military action abroad.
From: Daniel Lee ’05 Subject: Britain vs. U.S. speeches Conference: Public Issues Date: 4/5/03
The British speech (Lt. Col. Tim Collins):
A glimpse of last spring’s conference discussions: From: Robert Chubrich ’03 Subject: Re(4): Cartoon Conference: Young Republicans Date: 3/9/03
There is a level of international awareness in France and Germany, the so-called “Old Europe,” that most of America doesn’t even begin to approach. If you have been there, the difference is evident in myriad details of day-to-day life as well as in the outlook of its citizens. We would do well to take some lessons from the Germans and French. For two countries that have come close to annihilating each other not once but TWICE in the past century and plenty of times before that, they have achieved far more for the cause of peace than one could ever expect. They have been among the most powerful agents in the development of the European Union, one of the most effective models of international cooperation the world has seen. The French invented the Système International for measurement—the metric system. We are just about the only country on this earth to have failed to adopt it in the past two hundred years. We are not upholding some ideal of moral measurement; the United States just has a history of ignoring the rest of the world for NO
GOOD REASON…we have repeatedly “thumbed our noses at the international community” on hugely not-trivial issues like climate change, nuclear proliferation, and the international criminal court. From: Mo Kirdar ’03 Subject: Re (8) the war Conference: Young Republicans Date: 4/10/03
[In response to another student acknowledging that life in America is relatively comfortable] If anything, that statement makes me proud to live in a country where injustices that Saddam has put in place on the Iraqis are so far from our understanding that people can assume that it is not that bad. The truth of the matter is that there is not a single Iraqi that doesn’t have a bad life. It’s hard sometimes to appreciate the freedoms we have, because they seem so natural to us. But imagine living somewhere where you can’t even trust your own brother enough to have a conversation about the Bush administration for fear of
“If you are ferocious in battle, remember to be magnanimous in victory. We go to liberate, not to conquer. We are entering Iraq to free a people, and the only flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Don’t treat them as refugees, for they are in their own country. If there are casualties of war, then remember, when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury then properly and mark their graves. You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest, for your deeds will follow you down history. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birth of Abraham. Tread lightly there.” The U.S. Speech (Vice Admiral Timothy Keating): “When the president says ‘Go,’ look out—it’s hammer time.” From: Ashley Bradylyons ’08 Subject: Re (10): the war Conference: Young Republicans Date: 4/11/03
On NPR [National Public Radio] yesterday they had a doctor on from Iraq. He was the head [of a] hospital. From the last 20 days they had one patient. Not because no one else is hurt, but because they can’t help anyone. [The doctor] said that he hated Saddam, but these 20 days have been the worst of his life: They have power, yet not enough blood to do an operation. They have no clean test tubes, and no running water. 65 Milton Magazine
Class Notes After seeing her six children out into the world, Jane Dexter Rosenow lives in Saint Louis Park, Minnesota. She enjoys travelling to visit with her 13 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, most recently during trips to Colorado and Hawaii.
Jean Pierce Stetson lives in a retirement home, The Village, at Duxbury (Massachusetts). She is keeping happy and busy.
Florence Mills welcomes any 1937 graduates to her home on Martha’s Vineyard. In July her children, grandchildren and one great-grandchild, Dalton, came to swim, eat and hug. Best to all.
Silence (written in 1999 after my husband John went to the nursing home) Jane Dexter Rosenow ’31
Simon and Garfunkel sing of “The Sound of Silence” Does silence have a sound? By definition doesn’t it mean “lack of sound?” I now know the sound of silence It is loneliness. It is empty rooms. It means no one to talk to except myself,
It is quiet by myself and I think he must be asleep. I turn and there’s no one there. The kitchen is empty. I have no appetite I talk to myself and it breaks the silence
A poor substitute for my lover.
But I wonder if I’m losing my mind.
The music is beautiful. It haunts and saddens me And everything I hear now is better than silence I cough and no one says “I thought your cold had gone” I sneeze and no one says “Bless you” I cook and no one says “Something smells good”
A noise at night makes me long for silence again. When I’m with him I ask questions, And the answer is always the same “I don’t remember.”
I reach out a hand and no one squeezes it.
I suppose I’ll get used to it But I know that nothing will be the same After 60 years together it is hard to be alone.
Laura Richardson Houghton ’19 Laura Richardson Houghton, age 102, died quietly April 9 at her home in Corning, New York. Wife of Amory Houghton, former chairman of Corning Glass Works and American Ambassador to France under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mrs. Houghton was born in Providence, R.I., a graduate of Milton Academy in Milton, Mass., she moved to Corning with her husband in 1921. Their marriage lasted six months shy of sixty years.
She served on the Boards of national institutions such as the Girls Scouts of America, Project Hope and Hobart and Williams Smith College; and numerous local charities. She received two honorary degrees. Once asked to become President of the Girls Scouts of America, she declined citing the need to be near her family. Several years later, she accepted the vice-chairmanship.
In the late 1950’s, The Herald Tribune bestowed the name “L’Ambassadrice Souriante”(the Smiling Ambassadress) to Mrs. Houghton. The paper also referred to her as “the undisputed First Lady of the Diplomatic Corps and of the American Colony in Paris.”
Mrs. Houghton is survived by four children: Elizabeth H. Weinberg, Congressman Amory Houghton, Jr., James R. Houghton, Chairman and CEO of Corning Inc., and the Reverend Alanson R. Houghton II, 18 grandchildren, and 32 great grandchildren. She was predeceased by daughter, Laura H. Beer on September 22, 2000.
“I would say she was the most gracious woman I ever knew,” said Thomas Buechner, former director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Corning Museum of Glass.
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“She possessed deep personal beliefs which brooked no shoddy behavior,” said her son, Congressman Amory Houghton, Jr. (RNY). “She had the endearing capacity for laughter—in happy times, contagious; in times of stress, lightening the load.” “When someone of her stature passes away, we have to say a generation is going,” said Thomas P. Dimitroff, a noted Corning historian. “She was a lady in the best sense of the word.”
Reprinted with permission from The Leader (Corning, New York).
Francis and Ann Cobb Thorne celebrated their 80th birthdays and their 60th wedding anniversary in 2002. Francis is a composer and the president of the American Composers Orchestra; Ann runs the library lectures at the Colony Club, in New York, and serves on several boards.
Samuel Campbell proudly reports that his son, Peter Campbell ’85, and Peter’s wife, Heather, are the happy parents of their first child, Sam. This is Samuel’s fifth grandchild. Class of 1938 (left to right) Elisha Atkins, Bill Eustis, Muffy Nichols, Peg Jones, Amabel Barrows, Doris Walker, Dorthea Anderson
Amabel Eshleman Barrows moved from Wilton, Connecticut, to Marion, Massachusetts, where she built a small house next to her daughter, Madeline Cooke. She is within a two-hour drive of each of her three children and six grandchildren. William Thurston found his trip in February 2002 to Ecuador and the Galapagos interesting; the country has changed and has dealt with a huge population growth.
“Quito, which was wonderful 20 years ago, now has guard dogs, police with dogs and soldiers with dogs and rifles at every corner. Galapagos was equally overstressed.” William noted Sam Worthen’s absence during Graduates’ Weekend 2003; “Sam used to reach 100 percent participation in giving to Milton from the class of 1938.”
Cecil Drinker is settled in a new, smaller retirement home in the Rockland area of Victoria, British Columbia, and is delighted to be able to walk to the downtown restaurants, theaters and museums. His travel has been restricted to short trips to Oregon. Connie Kernan Sevigny is doing well. Her husband, Pierce, retired at 85 after a 36-year career teaching at Concordia University in Montreal.
Stephen Washburn practices psychiatry three and a half days a week, plays tennis twice a week, and skis most weekends in the winter. One of Steve’s granddaughters is in the engineering program at UMass Amherst and another is at his wife’s school—Gould Academy in Bethel, Maine. Gib Warren keeps telling Steve jokes in Vero Beach and Pete Robbins hits golf balls way beyond in Portland, Maine. Steve’s brother, Bill Washburn ’39, died April 14, 2003, at 82.
John Desmond Callan ’43 John Desmond Callan ’43, died on July 22, 2002—the eve of his 77th birthday. He attended Harvard University and, shortly after, enlisted in the Army. He arrived in Europe in October 1944; two months later, he was a prisoner-of-war in German camps, suffering winter weather, meager food rations and poor working conditions combined with forced retreats as the Allies advanced through Germany. When the POW camp near Muhlberg was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945, Desmond suffered from malnutrition, beriberi and dysentery. Many other POWs in the infirmary died—many because they traded food for cigarettes! He was henceforth an implacable foe of tobacco. In February 1946, Desmond entered Columbia University. He newly embraced the ideals of the left, becoming a lifelong social activist. With a degree in history from Columbia—but with a wife to support—Desmond studied electronics and worked as a technician in a neurophysiology lab at Columbia. This inspired him to earn a medical degree from Columbia. Thereafter, his career was driven by social activism: From protesting the exclusion of black doctors from medical societies in the South, to working for health
care access for African-Americans in Mississippi, to providing health care through community centers in the Bronx. During the ’70s, Desmond moved to Hillsdale, New York, where he built a practice for geriatrics and adults with chronic illness. He retired from clinical practice in 1994, then trained young doctors at a medical center in Massachusetts. In 1987, he married Georgine Gardner, whom he had met 20 years earlier at a health center on the Lower East Side. She survives him. Desmond believed the practice of good medicine carried an obligation to engage in rabble-rousing. “To get health care, you’ve got to make noise, got to make trouble, got to speak out,” he said. His personal style was more subdued: “I’m a quietly noisy radical.” Desmond is also survived by his daughter Lyndie Callan, of New York, his son Richard Callan, of Williamstown, Massachusetts, sister Mary Callan Bailey (Class of 1945), of Concord, Massachusetts, and Cristine Callan, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and stepson Jason Gardner and two grandchildren.
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Class of 1943 (left to right): Dave Richardson, Susan Richardson, Ed Gorman, Casey Freeman, Ann Freeman, Roger Perry, Nancy Perry
Class of 1948, front row (left to right): Walter Gamble, George Harris, Bradley Richardson, John Belash, Robert White; row 2: Charles C. Cabot, Jr., Lucius Wilmerding III, Glenn McCrillis, George Ames, Jim Bushby
Ardis Fratus Porter’s husband, Richard, died on February 22, 2003, at 89. He was a great companion to Ardis for 22 years. Their six children and nine grandchildren all live within home range of her cell phone. Two of their granddaughters are in college; one a sophomore at Babson and one a freshman at Bucknell. Their oldest grandson joins the college ranks this fall at either Colby or
Bowdoin. In addition to having spent two weeks in Florida with her sister on Hutchinson Island, Ardis plays bridge weekly with classmate Jean DeForest Kurtz.
The World Learning Web site, www.worldlearning.org, has a photo tribute to William Rotch. Bill was chair of the board at World Learning for nine years
and served as a board member for 38 years. World Learning was founded in 1932 as The Experiment in International Living, one of the first organizations of its kind to promote intercultural living and learning.
Katharine Brown did not attend her 55th reunion in May as she moved to Bath, Maine, at that
time. She and her family are doing well and enjoying jobs, interests and grandchildren.
Emery Goff ’s granddaughter Aquinnah Emery was born on December 17, 2002. Aquinnah and her mother, Katrina Van Brugh, live in Freeport, Maine, one hour south of Emery and Bill. Emery and Bill are enjoying the
Horatio (Ray) Rogers ’46 Horatio (Ray) Rogers Jr., who died February 26 in Red Bay, Florida, will be affectionately remembered by his classmates for his kind disposition, resonant singing voice and athletic skills. At Milton for six years, he captained one of the School’s rare undefeated football teams and starred in the 165-pound class in two of legendary coach Louis Andrew’s five undefeated wrestling teams. He sang in the Glee Club and several choirs. After attending Harvard and serving in the Army in Germany, he married a Milton girl, Sheila Stires ’49, spending his honeymoon salmon fishing with her in Alaska. An outdoorsman and sailor all his life, Ray moved in 1955 to Cape Cod, where he bought a small newspaper, The Dennis -Yarmouth Register, to which he devoted the next 20 years of his life as editor and publisher. Ray slipped naturally into the role of the affable and humorous but cause-driven country editor. He turned his paper into a force on the Cape on educational and, ahead of his time, on environmental issues. The Register was in the forefront in championing the National Seashore Park, a natural treasure later designated by President Kennedy. Ray took passionate joy in messing about in boats in all
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weathers, fishing, duck gunning, camping “overnights” on the Barnstable sand flats with his family and local friends, raising the children in his pond-side house, and acting in amateur theater productions. He was later married, for the second time, to Lois Ineson. Buffeted by personal tragedies, among them Lois’s early death, he gave up the newspaper business in 1976 and moved to Florida, where he lived at first aboard his 35-foot sailboat Argonaut amid a vagabond flotilla of houseboats. With his third wife Dottie (Dorothy Taylor Rogers), he sought out adventure—at a Colorado ranch, two homes in the Florida Keys and aboard a tug-hulled cruiser and converted Maine lobster boat. They eventually found serenity on a small farm in Florida’s panhandle. Ray leaves four children from his first marriage, two stepchildren from his second, and 11 grandchildren. They, like his Milton friends six decades ago, remember him for his rough-cut, disarming, sometimes a bit solemn but always genuine attention to their real concerns. Milton classmates Gerry Livingston, Garry Valentine and Rusty Bourne, Class of 1946
Massachusetts. Dick retired from his job as rector of The Church of the Redeemer (Episcopal) in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Sherrell and Dick are getting used to “small is beautiful” with their new home. Nathaniel Goodhue writes, “It was great to get to the top of Hancock Hill (the final reunion weekend activity for our class).”
Edith Stebbins Sweeney congratulates her classmates on passing the “six-0” mark. “Time to relax and enjoy!” She hopes to see everyone soon. Class of 1953, front row (left to right): Kim Parker, Anna Hunt Brown, Minty Raymond Maloney, Phil Andrews, Ann Higgins, Sandy Boyd Earle, Elinor Lamont Hallowell, Jane Cheever Carr and Alan G. Carr; row 2: Stan Emery, Elfy Bingham Shapere, Sally Baker Uhle, Jenepher Lingelbach, Penelope Starr, Conrad Nobili, David F. Sheehan and Tom Jones; row 3: H. Malcolm Ticknor, Bob Twombly, Hugh Marlow, John Webster, Eberhard Faber, Rolf Olson, Joel Wechsler, Russel S. Beede and Stephen Wald. Row 4: Robert Batchelder, Bradford Swett, Fritz Schwarz, John Stackpole, Tom Lewis, William H. Rawls, John Fiske, Mike Robertson, Win Hall and Toby Baker
baby immensely. Recovering from recent accidents, Emery is nearly healed after physical therapy in the United States and England, where Emery and Bill spent three months last year.
After David Belash graduated from Dexter School, Milton Academy, Haverford College, and the United States Army, he worked for Codon Corporation for whom he operated a PDP10 mainframe computer. He then worked for a group funded by the Carnegie Mellon Foundation. After his first wife died, he moved back to Massachusetts to look after family affairs. He remarried and has retired.
tenured headmaster of Milton Academy, serving from 1917 to 1942. Helen’s decision was difficult, as her grandmother died one month before her parents were married, and she only knows Rebecca by way of wonderful anecdotes. However, the Schlesinger staff assured Helen
that the diaries—written from 1896 to 1933—will be a trove for historians of women’s lives.
Sherrell Downes and her husband, Dick, recently bought a four-bedroom condo on Saint Mary’s Street in Brookline,
David Fuller had dinner with Jim Kaplan and Perry Miller at Jim’s home in Northampton, Massachusetts. David enjoyed seeing friends at his 40th reunion in 2002 and summited the 14,400foot Mount Harvard in Colorado in July 2002 to celebrate. He’s looking forward to his 50th reunion. Susan Sherk has worked for AMEC, one of the world’s largest engineering companies, for six years as a socio-economist. Most of her work focuses on the impact
Helen Twombley Watkins is making a gift of the diaries of her grandmother, Rebecca Swift Gill Field, to the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Rebecca Field was the wife of William Lusk Webster Field, Helen’s grandfather, who was a biologist and the longest
Class of 1958, front row (left to right): Nat Goodhue, Tally Saltonstall Forbes, Victor Miller, Elisabeth Morgan Pendleton, Betsy Farnham Blair, Andrea Forbes Schoenfeld; row 2: Neilson Abeel, Philip Tobey, Eliza Kellogg Klose, Joan Corbett Dine, Star Martin Hopkins, Ralph Forbes
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lems in Japanese multinational corporations. He has written ethnographies based on fieldwork in subsidiaries of Japanese companies in Thailand and France. This winter, he celebrated the birth of a daughter, Georgina.
Class of 1963, front row (left to right): Roger Feldman, Sunny Ladd, Kathy Weston Reardon, Arthur Chute, Olivia Tarleton, Ann Farnham Deming, Mal Nickerson, Jane Cheever Talbot, Jane Gratwick Bryden, John Bihldorff; row 2: James Roberts, David Sargent, Douglas Kinney, Peter Robbins, Alaric Faulkner, John Cunningham, Peter Forbes, Chip Vincent; row 3: David Trott, John Russell, C.P. Howland, Ben Wellington, John Grandin, James Sise, Bob Moss, David Taylor, Jeff Ross
of large-scale projects on the human population. Her recent work has been conducted in Russia, Thailand, Nepal and Pakistan. Recently, her studies have been closer to home.
Helen Locke Ladd spent the first six months of 2002 living in Cape Town, South Africa. She won a Fulbright and was teaching in the economics department of Cape Town University. With her husband, Ted Fiske, Helen is writing a book on South Africa’s efforts to create a more equitable and democratic education system. “The country and the people are lovely, and the challenges are huge, but we’re optimistic.” In the meantime, she is back at Duke as the associate director of the Sanford Institute of Public Policy.
Peter Nash is back in Washington after four years in London developing outlet centers in Europe. ChiChi and their three children are all well. Peter enjoys tennis, skiing, and golf and watching the children close the gaps in all three sports. Peter is working on his next career 70 Milton Magazine
with the luxury of having some time to make a good next move.
Nancy Voss Greenough Bliss sends a message to her classmates: “I thought I ought to say hello before the 40th reunion rolls around. What’s happening? Not much. I have two excellent children, no pets at the moment, no job, no money and no home.”
James Black summarizes the past 32 years in the following few words: “I married Martha Mihaly in 1982; in 1986 she gave birth to our beautiful daughter, Madeleine; in the mid-1990s I survived cancer twice; and now we are helping Madeleine visit and select colleges.” Professionally, James spent a couple of decades in the printing business until the computer industry took over. Seeking revenge, he went to work in the field of technology management. In April 2003, Martha Soule married Gary McDonald in Dedham, Massachusetts. One of the ushers at the wedding was Stephen Sheptyck. They live in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Martha
Macy Lawrence Ratliff lives in Seattle and enjoys the beauty of the Northwest, but tries to visit New England family and friends frequently. Macy works part time and volunteers in her children’s schools. She loves to walk, run, ski and swim. Her 12-year-old loves swimming, drama, running and singing. Her 10-year-old loves origami, gymnastics, soccer and art.
has worked at the New England Journal of Medicine for 15 years, specializing in computer applications support for Macs and PCs. Martha has “three wonderful stepchildren, ages 17, 15 and 13, as well as three dogs. All is well.”
Peter Frechette started a video production company, Fields of Vision, specializing in documentary and fund-raising videos for organizations and individuals. Fields of Vision is based in Waban, Massachusetts, where Peter lives with his wife and daughter.
Mitchell Sedgwick is a senior research fellow in cross-cultural studies at the Business School of Oxford Brookes University. Over the last decade, his research has focused on cross-cultural prob-
David Ajemian enjoyed participating in the Distinguished Alumni Seminar and catching up with life at Milton at Graduates’ Weekend 2002. Of current events, Father Ajemian writes,
Class of 1968, front row (left to right): Nathaniel Ayer, Forbesy Russell, Jane Blumgarten Miller, Roger Haydock; row 2: George Gibson, Tony Kane, David Cornish
“It is a challenging time to be a priest in America 2003, but the call has not dimmed.” After more than 20 years in the software industry, Jeremy Marr returned to school and was recently elected editor-in-chief of the Boston College Law Review. He lives in Newton Centre, Massachusetts with his wife, Karen, their son, Tucker (7), and daughter, Dixie (5).
After 16 years in San Francisco, Jenny Link has returned to the East Coast; she is an artist and arts administrator in Florida. With a fund-raising call last year, she and Sean McVity renewed a close friendship. Sean has written a song about Jenny called “Away.” His album is available on CD through smcvity@kbw.com. James Scullin lives in Geneva, Switzerland, with his wife, Cecilia, and two children. He is the senior vice president at a Swiss private bank, EGF Private Bank, where he works with Robert Mehm.
Class of 1973, front row (left to right): George Ticknor, Mitch Strei, Richard Perry, Carrie Place Wiznitzer, LaVerne E. Austin, Jonathan Goldbloom, Jay Quinby; row 2: Ed Giandomenico, Gordon Means, Sarah Cleveland, Adele Brainard, Jean Barrett; row 3: Crichton Ogle, Tamsin Knox, Peter Alduino, Sue Inches, Linn Cary Mehta, Richard H. Lamere, Margaret Barron Lawrence, Anne Johnson Hayden, Marguerite Graham, Laura Jackson; row 4: Sam Carr, Elfie Forbes, John Hughes, Bill Perkins, David Mark, Pip Shepley, Catie Marshall, Anne Marie Nesto Filosa, Steven Gordon, Kent Lamere, Ann Robbart
Samuel Solomon works at Northeastern University. He is involved with the activities of his children and politics of his town, where he is a member of the planning board and Capital Outlay Committee.
As a senior project manager for Bono Brothers, Inc., Kevin Cooke just completed construction of One Western Avenue for Harvard Planning and Real Estate. Along with his wife, Lori,
and daughters Jaimee (11) and Katy (9), Kevin welcomes their newest family member, Daisy (16 months). After 11 years in Manhattan, Polly Duke and her husband, Ben, left their Upper West Side apartment for a carriage house built in 1850, surrounded by fields, trees, and horses. “Along with the contrast in settings is the contrast in jobs: rather than teaching at Columbia, I am now chairing the language department at Friends Academy, a Quaker school on the North Shore of Long Island. Big bonus: close proximity during the school day to my children, William (8) and Peter (4).” David Silk and wife Meredith are delighted to announce the arrival of their son, Gabriel, in January 2003.
Class of 1978, front row (left to right): Mike Miller, Brenda Elam, Katherine Howard Bolton, Debbie MacDonald Amato, Kathy Astrue, Bill Adams; row 2: Amanda and Samantha Weil, Janet Albers English, Carin Ashjian, Jonathan Wells, Brad Blank, Greg Jacobson, Karin Mahony, Frances Marshman, Priscilla Reed Anderson and Lily Anderson, Betsy Leggat; row 3: Carolyn Hurter, Andrea Grillo Massar, Capel States, Steve Heckscher, Charlie Duffy, Pru Murray Bovee, Telly Jorden, Ellen Starbird with son Frank Sammartino, Lee Brown, Janet Auchincloss Pyne; row 4: Michael Zieper, Oliver Radford, Wendy Carr Ellison, Scott Johnston, Eeva Makela Sankila, Laura Appell Warren, Becca Badger Fisher, Andrea Amaral, Tim Marr, Holly A. Getch Clarke, David M. Mushatt
Andrew Whitney and his wife celebrated the birth of their second child, Oliver, in January 2003.
After 11 years at Milton, Amy Grillo Angell graduated from Westtown School, a Quaker 71 Milton Magazine
school in Pennsylvania, then she received a bachelor’s from Brown University in studio art and education. Amy earned a master’s and doctorate in human development/psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and taught and became dean of students at Marlboro College in Vermont. She is a professor at Vermont College of Union Institute and University. Amy has two daughters, Paxton (4) and Julia (2), and is married to Sam Angell, one of her brother Conrad’s friends from Putney School, and a childhood friend of Nat Burke and Matt Huntington who is an attorney in Brattleboro. They just bought a big old 1970s farmhouse in Townshend, Vermont, and report that life there is “pretty good.” Amy misses her old Milton friends, and would love to hear from them. Her address is P.O. Box 357, 510 Jay Road, Townshend, VT 05353, email angells@sover.net. David Calnan’s work as an environmental engineer involves designing and implementing haz-
Class of 1983, front row (left to right): Tina Cortesi; Class of 1983 children: Giovanna Cima, Raching Samek, Samara Watkins, Hunter Dunn, Chase Dunn, Maia and Charlotte Zonis; Debby Carr with Haley and Rebecca Friedman, Michaele Wylde with Ella and Alex Thomas, Donna Shakur-Bracey, Gary Bracey, Matthew Fallon; row 2: Julia White (behind kids of Class of 1983), Anne (Nan) McLean, Gwenna Toncre Williamson, Wyman Fraser Davis, Ben Garrison, Steven Walker; 3: (on floor, at left) Maude Chilton, Roanne Kolvenbach with Baker, (on riser) Charles Ford, Stephen Epstein, Laura Donohue ’81, Jon Zonis, Lisa Donohue, Ann Smith, Louisa Daley Winthrop with Robbie, Catha Day-Carlson, Jim Griffin, Marc Soto; row 4: Jay Samek, Peter Creighton, Gerald McClanahan, David Wood, Cliff Levin, Randall Dunn, Liz Hopkins Dunn, Cindy Powell, Alexander Stephens, Jennifer Marcus, Michael Marcus
ardous waste treatment, minimization and recycling programs for Industrial Manufacturing. Most of his work involves the treatment of heavy metals, which he learned in Polly Keller’s Class V Introductory to Physical
Chemistry Class. His job is extremely similar to the “Sludge Test,” and he would like to thank Ms. Keller for getting him started in a job he loves: “I save the world on a daily basis.” David lives in Hingham, Massachusetts, with his
wife, Aylene, and daughters, Emily (9) and Sarah (6). In the summer, David runs sailing and fishing trips in the Boston Harbor Island National Park area. This year, he plans to fish for tuna in September and is looking for crew ready to spend 12 hours on a boat. Grace Phillips welcomed her second child, Ivor Alexis Lloyd. The baby is named after Ivor Phillips, his grandfather, and Alexis Belash ’51, Grace’s stepfather. Between baby Ivor and his sister Adelaide, Grace is kept busy negotiating and she’s still acting, among other things. She just saw Julia Shepard and her children, and Veronique Choa Pittman and her family. Grace is happy to report that her sisters, Eve Zimmerman ’77 and Claire Zimmerman ’79 are doing well and living in Tokyo and Berlin respectively.
Class of 1988, front row (left to right): Leslie Stikeleather. Patrice Jean-Baptiste with Nate, Mike Kobb, Naomi King, Annie Elliott, Robin Viola Buonato; row 2: David Ball, Ben Russin, Xander Perry with Wade and Nate, Philippa Cully with Miranda Cully, John Cully and Caitlin Barrett with Desmond DeVaul
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Elisabeth Donohue lives in Chicago as does her sister Carolyn Donohue Grant ’80. Carolyn works at Northern Trust
Ann Smith is married and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she works in community health research at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
Taylor and Blair Clayton, children of Cassie Robbins ’87 and Tom Clayton ’85
Elisabeth Strekalovsky has been on a steep learning curve, balancing new motherhood (Marina, born December 19, 2001) with a part-time job as a school psychologist in Medfield. “Hard work, but I love it.” Joshua Thayer is now a partner at Palmer and Dodge, LLP and engaged to be married in October 2003 to Eunha Koh, an associate at Hemenway and Barnes.
Edie and baby Cecelia, daughters of Lindsay Jewett Sturman ’88
and chases after sons Sean (6) and Duncan (2). When traveling to NYC, Elisabeth often sees Asher Lipman ’84 and Rob Davis ’81. Last year, Erica and Macgill James moved from Baltimore, Maryland, to northern New Hampshire where Macgill started a business as an international propane broker.
While James Karp and his wife, Wendy, were in London they had three children, Maxwell (3), Elizabeth (2) and Caroline (9 months). They also reconnected with Chris Cabot and his growing family. They are happy and doing well. While James and Wendy miss London, they are excited to be back and hope to attend more alumni functions and see old friends. They would love to hear from any classmates living in the Greenwich, Connecticut, area.
and special needs consulting firm. She would love to hear from classmates: edavis@eadassociates.com. Daniel Quinn was admitted as a fellow of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons in February 2003. He and his wife, Jennifer, live in Needham, Massachusetts, with children Eben (6) and Kate (3). Lynda Ruiz and her husband, Tom Leach, announce the birth of their daughter, Isabell Ruiz Leach, on March 5, 2003, in San Francisco.
Alexandra Callen and her husband, James Bailey, were delighted to welcome their son, Miles Callen Bailey, to their family. He was born on June 20, 2002, and joins big brother, Alexander (Zander) Callen Bailey who is 4. Ellen Dunne lives in Paris and is a freelance graphic designer and Web designer. Marcien (Skip) Jenckes did not attend his 15th reunion, but for a good reason; his wife, Sophia Cellarosi, just gave birth to their second child, Noah Jenckes. Dan and Lindsay Jewett Sturman are thrilled to announce
the birth of their second daughter, Cecelia Esther Sturman (Cece) born September 8, 2002. Their older daughter, Edie is 1.
Ina Jacobs is the road manager/tour accountant for John Mayer. She will tour with him for the next year and a half. This summer, they performed on the U.S. and Canadian tour with the Counting Crows. Anna Weymouth was married to Michael Nicholas in Hingham, Massachusetts, on September 7, 2002. Fellow Milton classmates who attended the reception at the Weymouth family home were Meredith Talbot Litvak, Jennifer Ford Barrett, Jill Bernheimer, Peter Barrett and Will Carswell.
Sarah Culver is excited to announce the birth of her son, Samuel Lloyd Culver, born April 17, 2003! His visitors included Amy Smith ’90 and Sarah Horsley ’91. Ethan Ladd and his wife had a baby girl, Margaret Ladd, on February 12, 2003.
Laura Norton Agarwal and her husband, Akash, are pleased to announce the birth of their daughter, Sonia Tirabassi Agarwal on January 24, 2003. They live in San Mateo, California, where Akash and Laura work in the high-tech industry.
Pamela Jimenez Parizek and her husband, George, are delighted to announce the birth of their son, Kyle Richard, in December 2002. Their daughter, Amelia Margaret turned 3 in August.
Heather and Peter Campbell welcomed a new son, Sam Campbell. Baby Sam Campbell’s grandfather and great grandfather were also Milton Academy graduates (Samuel Campbell, Jr. ’43 and Samuel Campbell ’17).
Bruce Prenda lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his two daughters, Zoe (4) and Sadie (1). He is a deputy county attorney and hopes to get back to Milton for the next reunion. He writes, “Sorry we missed this year’s!”
Lizzy Davis and her husband, Luis Penalver, welcomed their first child, Madeleine Isabelle, this past January. This has already been a busy time for Lizzy as she left her position with NYC Post 9/11 Service to launch an emergency
Front (from left to right): Meredith Talbot Litvak ’89, bride Anna Weymouth Nicholas ’89, groom Michael Nicholas, Jennifer Ford Barrett ’89; back row (left to right): Jesse Zigelstein, Jill Bernheimer ’89, Peter Barrett ’89, Will Carswell ’89 and Karen Sigel
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Tyler Young and his wife had a baby girl, Isabelle Katherine Young, in May 2003.
Kerin McGlame Adams welcomed the newest member of her family, Luke John Adams, in November 2002. Anne McManus taught English at Milton this year and married Matthew Hurlbut, also a teacher, this June. Sarah Millet and Spencer Hoffman live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with their daughter, Celia. Courtney Monnich is the proud mother of baby Luke Henry Monnich, born February 2003. Alexander Morss continues his residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he works with Brendan Everett, Meghan Baker, and Pat Yachimski ’92. Peter Ryan married Kelly Gahan on November 2, 2002, in Belmont, Massachusetts. The reception was held at the Winchester Country Club. Milton alumni in attendance were Jason Greenfield ’90, Liz Hanify ’93, Jon Hansen ’90 and Stu Polk.
borhood businesses in New York City. He hopes to have seven books on the shelf by November. This September in Rome, Marc married Susanna Bozzetti, who performs with a modern dance company in New York and was feverishly trying to teach him Italian in time for the wedding.
Sarah Bacon lives in New York, and is director of communications for a public arts organization, Creative Time, which produced the 9/11 light memorial, Tribute in Light. She sees Galt Niederhoffer and Isabel Ames McDevitt often.
Kelly Gahan and Peter Ryan ’91
Celia, daughter of Sarah Millet ’91
Amy Diller spent the summer of 2002 biking across the country from Seattle, Washington, to Eastport, Maine. She is currently an aspiring telemark skiing instructor and teaches seventh grade at Stratton Mountain School in Stratton Mountain, Vermont.
three years of going to school at night!), I’ve started a little side business, doing in-home infant and toddler photography. I do classic black-and-white portraits; please check out my site at www.jessicahaynes.com, and mention the Milton connection so I can give you a discount.”
Jennifer Noon graduated from Dartmouth Medical School in June 2002 and started a residency program in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital in Boston, where she is finishing her internship.
“Anybody having a baby?” Jessica Haynes writes that after “using my hard-earned MBA (finally finishing this summer, after
Elizabeth Hren La Rowe is in her first year at Stanford Business School.
After four years in Hong Kong with Yale-China, Julia Travers will return to New Haven for an MBA in nonprofit management. Albert Yu has lived in San Francisco for five years.
Ryan Younger and his wife are the proud parents of Madeline Rose Younger, born in Boston in September 2002. Ryan is senior marketing manager at Partners HealthCare and Janine is an assistant professor at Tufts Dental School. On June 21, 2003, Chase Arnold married Nicole Marie Palezer in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts.
Kara D’Esopo-Mollano had a baby boy, Theo, in January 2003. Marc Kirschner graduated from Columbia Business School in May 2002 and started a publishing company. He is writing/developing a series of books called The Short List that focuses on neigh74 Milton Magazine
Class of 1993, front row (left to right): Doug Chavez, Jenny Vendetti Fernandez, Lindsey Ollman, Bob Seltzer, Celina Kennedy, Sue Lee, Emily Reardon, Christine Griffin, George Vrattos; row 2: Juan Fernandez, Aryeh Sternberg, Liz Hanify, Nancy Lainer, Rose Sargent, Oona Coy, Kyle Cetrulo, Michael Fitzgibbons; row 3: Arkadi Gerney, John Twiss, Kem Poston, Mike Sweeney, Jessica Banderob, Fell Ogden, Andrew Stern, Caleb Clark, Gigi Saltonstall; row 4: Laurence Sacerdote, Sheldon Ison, Julian Cowart, Graham Goodkin, Spencer Dickinson, Douglas Goodman, Greg Hampton, Ian MacLaren, Remington Korper
Front (left to right): Bryan Shirley ’91, Spencer Campbell ’91; center: Daniel Isaacson ’91; back row: Margaret Siegfried, Lucy Siegfried ’86, bride Caroline Fischer, groom Tom Siegfried ’91, Ursula Siegfried 2019, John Siegfried ’85, Rob McCloskey ’91, Edward Siegfreid (faculty, computer programming)
Katrinka Hrdy ’96 and husband David Joffe
After spending a very cold winter with Dune Thorne in Cambridge, Samantha Drohan relocated in Santa Monica, California, and works in acutecare pediatrics at Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA. “In April, we had an informal gathering of Milton friends at Dune’s apartment. Here is some news from those in attendance:
Kathryn McCarthy recently got engaged, Lisa Hurd recently eloped in Mexico, Dune Thorne was preparing to graduate from Harvard Business school in June, Anna Rosefsky is living in Cambridge and applying to graduate school, Hillary Drohan ’96 is living in the North End and working at Wellington.
Whitfield Growdon graduated from medical school in June 2003 and will begin a residency in OBGYN practice in Boston, Massachusetts. Whitfield married Amanda Sarah Palumbo on May 26, 2003.” John Serafini is stationed on the Korean DMZ as an officer in the United Nations Joint Security
Area, which is located a few hundred meters from North Korea. He returned to the States in April to compete in the Best Ranger Competition.
After three years as an investment banker with JP Morgan, Dana Carey works in Los Angeles with a private equity firm. He planned to spend the summer in New York. He keeps in touch with Phil Lintz, Drew Pozatek, Liz Mahoney, Will Lyons ’96 and several other Milton alumni. Scott Tremaine is in his first year at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business working toward a master’s in international relations. He married Maria Lafuente in Spain in July 2002 and planned to work in equity research at UBS Warburg in London in the summer of 2003.
Class of 1998, front row (left to right): James Antoszewski, Ian Cheney, Laurie Richmond, Angie Tseng, Tze-Ngo Chun, Harrison Blum, Torrey Androski, Annie Fishman, Katherine Snead, Addi Lyon; row 2: Reif Larsen, Sara Leventhal, Andy Kelly-Hayes, Lizzy Carroll, Emily Sigman, Alexa Carter; row 3: Chad Bright, J. Ryan Harvey, Steve McGuinn, Dehn Gilmore, Victoria Entine, Bill Hilgendorf, Maria Demeke, Rachel Nance, Paul Bercovitch; row 4: Adam Segal, Dan Blumenthal, Michael Lanzano, Jon Clarke, Tod Hynes, David Modigliani, Alexis Lefebvre, Greg Ruth, Justin Basilico, Nicholas Harlow, Tom Adkins, Gabrielle Jacquet
Moriah Campbell-Holt attended Alexandra Fredie’s marriage to David Madzunovic on January 31, 2002. Other Milton graduates in attendance were Laura DeGirolami, Thomas Cleveland ’45, Julie Tremaine, Chris
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Fredie ’00 and former headmaster and his wife Edwin and Marcia Fredie, parents of the bride. Michael Connolly, Christopher Bonacci and Michael O’Brien are roommates in Somerville, Massachusetts. Last September, the trio traveled to St. Louis with Peter Huoppi to attend Dan Grosso’s wedding to Carrie Lampe. Katrinka Hrdy married her college boyfriend of five years, David Joffe, on June 23, 2002, at the Harvard Memorial Chapel. The reception was held at the Fogg Museum. Maggie Ridge was in the wedding party and sang a solo and duet in the ceremony. Katrinka and David are history teachers at Emma Willard and Duane Stuart, respectively. Katrinka is also a houseparent and a crew coach. They plan to attend graduate school in 2004, possibly in New York City or Washington, D.C. Sunny Reyna lives and works in the Windy City. He hopes to attend graduate school next year and keeps in touch with Milton graduates in the area.
Jeff Cooper lives in California works at Stanford University as a research assistant. This winter, he went skiing in Lake Tahoe with Ethan Kurzweil and Pete Curran, who were visiting on vacation.
Deaths
Mike Descoteaux is the head musical director of the Second City Training Center in Chicago where he teaches musical theater, plays at shows and writes curriculum. He directs and writes music for shows around Chicago in venues such as Davenport’s Cabaret and The Royal George Theatre. His name appears on the jacket of the CD Last Five Years working with Jason Robert Brown on the 2002 Broadway musical. In June 2002, Mike graduated from Northwestern University with a B.S. and musical theatre certificate.
Thomas Kramer is moving to Guatemala City, Guatamala, to teach first grade at the American School of Guatamala.
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Sarah Kahan became Sarah Abbett when she was married on Sunday, June 15, 2003, to Jonathan Abbett. The wedding went off without a hitch and the sun was even shining! Many Milton alumni attended, including bridesmaids, Emily Bruskin, Julie Bruskin, Morgan Bradylyons and Liz Simon; as well as Emma Doggett, Julia Morgan, Liz Jalkut, Katherine Snead, Sarah McGinty, Zoe Lasden-Lyman, and David Kahan ’92, the brother of the bride. Diana Potter graduated from Trinity and lives in Rhode Island. This summer she taught English at the Taft School, and will teach at Rocky Hill this fall. This spring Diana won a scholarship to attend both the Wesleyan Writers’ Conference and the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and her first short story will be published in the November 1 issue of Carve Magazine.
Thomas Leung graduated summa cum laude from Yale with distinction in both economics and biomedical engineering. In recognition of his exceptional performance and promise of future success, Yale awarded the Arthur Twining Hadley Prize to Thomas. In July, 2002 Thomas began his work as an analyst at Morgan Stanley in New York.
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Brent Bucknum is spending his third year of college abroad in England, India, Phillipines, New Zealand and Mexico on the International honors program. He plans to return to Carleton College for his senior year.
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Julia Coquillette is finishing her third year at Boston College and looked forward to seeing other Milton Academy graduates over the summer. She looks forward to seeing new Milton faces on the Boston College campus this fall.
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Laura Richardson Houghton Thomas Spratt Kernan Anita Hinckley Hovey Howland Shaw Warren John Underhill White Lawrence Lowell Reeve Dudley Nickerson Hartt, Jr. Marjorie English Little Norris Poole Swett Margaret Eustis Curtis Warland Wight, Jr. Mary Ayer Hartzell Olivia Peters Henry, Jr. Seth Chandler Crocker David Otis Ives John Winthrop Ballantine Henry Alden William Washburn Robert York White Seth Turner Crawford Horatio Rogers Stephen Abbott Sanderson Mary Law Francis Edmund Converse Cabot Adelaide Lutz Ladd Elisabeth B. Emerson David Stevenson Stone
After graduating from Milton Academy, Ken Nakamura was in Tokyo for seven months working and saving money. He is currently enjoying Middlebury and all the skiing that Vermont has to offer.
Keep in touch using Milton’s Web site: Our new online alumni directory, available soon; up-to-date campus news; great Milton gear from our online bookstore—all at www.milton.edu
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“ , .” Abigail Adams
Please help build Milton’s endowment by including us in your estate plan. If you would like to make a gift to the School through estate planning or would like more information, please contact Ben Phinney, director of development, at 617-898-2374 or ben_phinney@milton.edu.
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Barn-raising: As testament to its commitment to innovative education, sustainability and old-fashioned hard work, 90 students and 15 faculty members from Milton Academy’s Mountain School Program in Vershire, Vermont, built a 56 by 56 foot post-and-beam timber frame barn the week of August 4, 2003. The structure, which required 1,243 pieces of joinery, shelters hay, cows, pigs and turkeys at the school. For details, go to www.mountainschool.org.