100 Faces of New Canaan Country School by New Canaan Country School

NEW CANAAN COUNTRY SCHOOL

In the one-hundred-year history of New Canaan Country School, thousands of students have experienced an education that challenged them to go boldly into the world. To commemorate the school’s centennial, the one hundred alumni featured here reflect the collective story of all the alumni listed on the front and back covers. This is your story. I want to thank my fellow alumni on the Editorial Advisory Committee for their guidance and role in compiling 100 Faces of New Canaan Country School. We reached out to the Country School community, looked back at our Alumni Award winners, and reviewed peer and faculty nominations to find alumni of all ages whose interests include creative arts, athletics, education, environmental causes, finance, military, philanthropy, social engagement, business, volunteerism, and technology, among others. Their stories are a part of our greater story. You may recognize some of these faces from homeroom, woodshop, rhythms class, the Medieval Faire, and stacking trays in the cafeteria after lunch. You may remember them from the ferry ride to Nantucket, the dunking booth at the Frogtown Fair, or from your tug-of-war team on Blue and White Day. This is your journey. We are proud to present these one hundred alumni whose individual stories, and collective story, reflect the mission and exemplify the nature of New Canaan Country School “to inspire students to be lifelong learners with the courage and confidence to make a positive contribution to the world.” This is your book. Steven Bloom ’03 Alumni Council President August 2016

H. Keith H. Brodie ’54 It was during recess in 1953 when the venerable NCCS English teacher Mr. Bensen told Keith Brodie to read Sinclair Lewis’s novel Arrowsmith about a young physician’s relentless search for truth, because the ninth-grade Keith was ready for it. “I did and it changed my life. That book, that year, influenced me to go to medical school.” Keith not only went to medical school, he became a nationally recognized psychiatrist, researcher, author, and educator, culminating in his tenure as president of Duke University from 1985 to 1993. Keith attended NCCS from kindergarten through ninth grade, and recalls his teachers with clarity and respect. Admittedly “non-sporty,” he managed the football team for Mr. Bensen and developed a keen interest in theater lighting. Keith quips that he parlayed his backstage experience in the ninth-grade production of Our Town to become a “lighting expert at Milton Academy and Princeton.” After graduating from Princeton in 1961, Keith attended Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (’65) and did his psychiatry residencies in New Orleans, the New York Psychiatric Center, and the National Institutes of Health. The West Coast beckoned, and in 1970 Keith headed off to teach at Stanford University with his wife, Brenda, a Columbia Nursing School graduate. Four years later he was recruited by Duke to chair its Department of Psychiatry, and the Brodie family pointed the station wagon back east to Durham, North Carolina, where they raised four children. His research into the biochemistry of mental illness and innovations at Duke led to his appointment at age forty-three as the president of the American Psychiatric Association, the youngest president ever. Duke then asked Keith to serve as chancellor in 1982, and three years later at age fortysix he was named the university’s president. In that role, Keith was a visionary leader credited with raising Duke’s elite academic stature nationally; increasing faculty diversity, student diversity, and women’s programs; expanding the public policy, environmental, and integrated medicine departments; and playing a pivotal part in Duke’s divestment of companies with assets in apartheid South Africa. Keith retired from the presidency in 1993 and spent a year authoring a book and chairing a federal AIDS research commission before returning to Duke as president emeritus and James B. Duke Professor of Psychiatry. He continues to practice psychiatry in Durham, mentor Duke chief medical residents, serve as a consultant to Coach Mike Krzyzewski and the Duke Blue Devils men’s basketball team, and spend summers in Maine with his wife, four children, and three grandchildren. He received the NCCS Alumni Award in 2002.

“I did and it changed my life. That book, that year, influenced me to go to medical school.”

Christopher Bancroft Burnham ’72

“It would have been impossible to have a better academic start in life.”

For Christopher Burnham, serving as a trusted deputy to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and to both Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice at the State Department was an honor and privilege, surpassed only by the opportunity to help liberate Kuwait in the first Gulf War. In his multifaceted career, Chris has also been a successful investment banker and CEO and was elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives at age thirty-one and as Connecticut state treasurer seven years later. Chris was a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve when he volunteered for active duty on Thanksgiving Day 1990. He took command of a Marine rifle platoon and led them into Kuwait City as part of the first Allied forces to reach and liberate that nation’s capital in February 1991. “It was the greatest honor of my life—to have a chance to lead a group of incredibly talented young men in the liberation of a country.” Chris was enrolled at NCCS from kindergarten through ninth grade and said, “We had the very best of a classical education, guided by superb teachers. It would have been impossible to have a better academic start in life.” After graduating from the Kent School (’75) and Washington and Lee (’80), Chris did an active duty tour in the Marine Corps and remained in the reserves for twenty-two years, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. He graduated from the Merrill Lynch training program after active duty, traded options and futures for three years, and in 1986 entered the master’s program at Georgetown’s Center for Security Studies. In 1987, he was elected to his first of three terms in the Connecticut House of Representatives. Switching from Georgetown to Harvard University in 1989, he graduated with a master’s degree in public administration in 1990. Chris was elected state treasurer in 1994 and quickly reformed the office. He returned to finance in 1997 and then joined the Bush administration and State Department in 2001, where he served as assistant secretary of state and chief financial officer, acting first under Secretary of State Colin Powell, whom he called “the greatest man I’ve ever met,” and then under Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. In 2005, Secretary-General Kofi Annan chose Chris to be under-secretarygeneral of the United Nations, the “chief operating officer” of the U.N. and the highest-ranking American. At the end of Annan’s term in 2006, Chris joined Deutsche Bank as a vice chairman and co-head of private equity, and in 2013 he founded Cambridge Global Capital, a merchant bank headquartered in Washington, D.C., where he lives with his wife, Courtney, and their three children.

Mickela Mallozzi ’97 Mickela Mallozzi is not only living her dream to experience the world one dance at a time, she’s sharing it on her award-winning TV and web series. She first felt the thrill of connecting with a culture through dance while studying abroad in Florence, traveling to festivals to perform the tarantella with the locals for fun. “It was this transformative experience for me. It was immediate and very genuine. I was connected even if I couldn’t speak the language.” Today the ebullient host of the Bare Feet with Mickela Mallozzi series has tangoed in Buenos Aires, waltzed in Vienna, reeled in Scotland, and performed a sword dance in Croatia, just to name a few. A classically trained dancer and dance teacher, Mickela graduated from NYU in 2005 with a BA in music and went to work as an assistant to the metal rock band Slipknot. But she still felt the lure of travel and dance and wanted to start a travel company. She put the idea on hold when the economy went south in 2008, until a friend suggested she start a TV show. “At that moment the light bulb went off. And I haven’t slept since.” She admits that launching, producing, and performing in Bare Feet was a bold idea for someone who had never appeared on camera, but she was undeterred. “Before I started this journey I had to rediscover my own roots through music and dance.” So she hired three friends and set out for Minturno, Italy, where she danced and dined and aired the footage on a blog and on YouTube. Her Bare Feet series was picked up by the NYC Life channel and began airing nationally on PBS in 2016. She has won two New York Emmy Awards, for best magazine program in 2015 and best on-camera talent in 2014. The daughter of Italian immigrants, Mickela is still grateful for the opportunity to attend NCCS from sixth through ninth grade on scholarship. “I got to be creative every day, not just in music and art but in history and social studies. The environment fostered creativity and curiosity.” She draws on her boundless creativity and curiosity when choosing her locales for the show and also for her experiential travel company, Bare Feet Tours. When not traveling, Mickela splits her time between New York City and Nashville, Tennessee, where her husband, Paul DeFiglia, is a musician. Not surprisingly, their 2011 wedding trip to Dublin included a detour to learn Irish step dance.

“At that moment the light bulb went off. And I haven’t slept since.”

Emily ‘Amie’ McMurray Mead ’41

“I think we have a gene in our family that points to civic involvement.”

Amie Mead could not have predicted her passion for politics would lead to the domestic policy office at the White House almost five decades later. But her spirited interest and involvement in government and public policy paved the way to Washington. “I think we have a gene in our family that points to civic involvement,” she told NCCS students when receiving the 2003 Alumni Award. Her grandfather was a congressman from Iowa and the family dinner conversation with her parents and later with her husband and three children always centered on politics. She attended NCCS from sixth through ninth grade, and her mother was one of many parents who held positions at the school during the Depression to help defray tuition costs. The boys and girls were in separate classes until the ninth grade, “since there were only five of us—two girls and three boys. Before that, we giggled from a distance.” Amie enrolled in Barnard College after graduation from Abbot Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. An enthusiastic conservative, she majored in government and history and found the lively political debate at Barnard invigorating. In 1948, she was a young campaign volunteer for GOP presidential candidate Gov. Thomas Dewey and was one of a dozen people in the room when he learned of President Truman’s upset victory—a memorable moment in presidential election history captured by an erroneous “Dewey Defeats Truman” newspaper headline. After graduation, she married Edgar Mead and began working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and volunteering in her community. They raised three children in New York and then Hanover, New Hampshire. Amie worked on political campaigns on the local, state, and national levels, including John Lindsay’s successful run for mayor of New York. In 1987, the Meads relocated to Washington, D.C., where Amie worked in the domestic policy office for President George H. W. Bush for four years, which she has called “the culmination of a dream.” The couple returned to New Hampshire after Bush’s defeat and founded the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, independent think tank focused on state and local public policy issues that affect the quality of life for New Hampshire’s citizens. Amie remained involved with the foundation, which she called a “very fulfilling” coda to her political career. She was 89 when she passed away in August 2016.

Mehdi Akacem ’92 Mehdi Akacem still has the Navy pilot test preparation book he purchased at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum gift shop during his ninth-grade Expanded Studies trip to Washington, D.C. “If there was a moment in time when I decided joining the Navy was for me, it was that trip. I wasn’t necessarily ‘I’m going to go to the Naval Academy and fly jets off of aircraft carriers,’ but the civics lesson of being in the nation’s capital with my class had an impact.” He did indeed go on to the Naval Academy, and not only learned to fly fighter jets off boats but today he is a Navy commander leading the Sabrehawks, a jet training squadron based in Pensacola, Florida. Mehdi is executive officer of the unit that prepares new Navy, Marine Corps, and allied nation flight officers from Germany, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia to fly various tactical aircraft, such as the F-18D Hornet and the EA-18G Growler. Mehdi came to NCCS in seventh grade and said the academic rigor and challenge of the Upper School “definitely put you on a path to high achievement. My aspirations were raised based on the population of students there. I thought more about what I could become.” After NCCS, Mehdi attended Stamford High School and then Proctor Academy (’95) when his family moved to New Hampshire. He went straight to Annapolis after graduation for his “plebe summer” at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he earned his BS in astronautical engineering (’99). In 2005, he went back to school to earn a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering (’06) from the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology and subsequently survived a grueling year at the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School. He became a test pilot for sophisticated electronic warfare jets and took the EA-18G Growler to sea for its first aircraft carrier landing tests. In addition to testing jets and training young aviators, Mehdi has served four deployments in the last decade, providing air support to U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and providing a naval presence in the delicate South China Sea area. He was assigned to the U.S. Navy base in Atsugi, Japan, from 2012 to 2013 and then returned to Washington for a two-year assignment with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ Joint Staff. While working at the Pentagon, he met his future wife, Kathryn, a U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant commander who was serving as an admiral’s aide. Their first child, Daniel, was born in 2016. While in Washington he recalled the ninth-grade trip, particularly when the chartered bus was traveling down New York Avenue and the students saw the dome of the U.S. Capitol in the distance. “The class spontaneously broke out into the Star-Spangled Banner. I think even the teachers were surprised. It was a great moment.”

“I thought more about what I could become.”

Katherine Ward ’79

“Why do we get to the point of war?”

Kathy Ward has traveled the globe as an international humanitarian lawyer committed to preventing and resolving deadly conflicts. She has worked on the ground with refugees in war-torn Croatia and also at high levels of policy-making for the U.S. and human rights organizations. “My area of interest is conflict, and why do we get to the point where the way to handle a conflict seems to be to kill each other. Why do we get to the point of war? The law is one of the tools we use to keep us from getting to that point and to keep a check on what happens within a war.” She shared her experiences when accepting the 2014 NCCS Alumni Award, exhorting students to “live real. There’s value in the effort and in the journey. Be aware. Be open . . . and do something.” Acknowledging that the junior high school years are tough, Kathy said attending NCCS from seventh through ninth grades “encouraged me to continue on a process of learning to know myself, to know my interests and to value what they can do not only in terms of enriching my own future but also the communities in which I live.” Kathy then went to Exeter and received her BA in East Asian Studies and Soviet Studies from Yale (’87), her law degree from the University of Chicago (’92), and a master’s degree the following year from Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. While still in school, she conducted human rights investigations in Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand. During the 1990s, she worked on cases in Uzbekistan and Rwanda, helped to initiate the Kosovo War Crimes Documentation Project, and led efforts to resettle refugees in Croatia and Bosnia. In 2000, she was named a White House Fellow and assigned to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. She then served as deputy director for the International Crisis Group, focusing on conflicts in Asia, Africa, Iraq, and the Balkans, as well as the HIV/AIDS crisis. Kathy now lives in Hawaii with her husband, Rear Admiral Patrick Peirsay, also a 2000 White House Fellow, and their two children. She is a professional editor supporting humanitarian relief and development groups. In policy-making roles, Kathy said she always remembered the “real lasting imprint” left by her daily work with refugees in Croatia. “What it’s all about is the people whose lives are affected by violence and by war. Those are the people you are there to serve.”

David Gens ’61 David Gens recalls that Monday afternoon in 1981 as if it were yesterday. He was in a routine meeting on his first day as the trauma chief surgical resident at George Washington University Medical Center when the call came in. “The president has been shot.” Moments later, David was in an emergency room bay working to save the life of President Ronald Reagan, who had been shot in the chest in an assassination attempt outside the Washington Hilton. Press secretary James Brady, critically wounded with a bullet in his brain, and a Secret Service agent were also rushed into the ER with Reagan. The seventy-year-old president was having difficulty breathing and had lost a lot of blood when the trauma team took over. “He was a patient—it had nothing to do with him being president. Everyone did their job, from top to bottom, and followed protocol. And it worked.” It was only when the president was in the recovery room and David saw a TV news report that he realized the enormity of the day’s events. “I thought, ‘This is the president. This is a global deal.’” David continues to practice and teach trauma protocol. He is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and a surgeon at the school’s Shock Trauma Center, the nation’s highest volume trauma center for the critically injured and ill. His time at NCCS began in the little red building for preschoolers across from campus. “In addition to a full education, the school prepared us for life. My wife and I wanted our two children to have that experience, and we sent them to a country school with the same philosophy.” Noting that he found himself “in a little bit of trouble a lot of the time,” any discipline was handled by Mr. Merryweather—and never Headmaster Henry Welles. David graduated from Choate and the University of Pennsylvania and received his MD from the University of Brussels. He most recently put his NCCS and medical school French to good use during three volunteer relief missions in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. He lives in Annapolis with his wife, Dr. Rose VerElst, who recently retired from her obstetrics/gynecology practice. Interestingly, his role in that fateful March 1981 day received little publicity until the 2011 publication of the book Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan. The book details that evening as well, when David returned to the president’s bedside to inform him the surgeons had removed the bullet, repaired his lung, and “Mrs. Reagan did fine through all the excitement.”

“He was a patient—it had nothing to do with him being president.”

Richard Ogden ’54

“I was inspired by the president and his call to help America create a better and safer world.”

Dick Ogden was a senior at Stanford University when President Kennedy delivered his stirring 1961 inaugural address challenging Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” The question resonated, and ultimately influenced Dick’s decision to embark on a Foreign Service career that spanned three decades, four continents, and seven nations. “I’m very much a child of the Kennedy generation. Like many of my colleagues, I was inspired by the president and his call to help America create a better and safer world.” From 1964 through 1995, Dick’s world included postings in Thailand, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Great Britain, and Spain as well as service at the State Department in Washington. “It was a great career. It offered change almost every day, excitement, and an opportunity to pursue American values including peace, democracy, economic development, trade, aid, and human rights.” Dick’s wife, Laura, and their three daughters accompanied him to his embassy posts, “even when conditions were unstable.” One such example was Argentina in 1976, when the Ogdens left the chaotic country just before a military coup. Years later in Peru, Dick helped run a large embassy while Shining Path rebels were an active threat. By contrast, their post in London in the late 1980s was a more upbeat time, coinciding with the positive bilateral relationship between the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Dick’s nascent interest in world affairs began at NCCS, which he attended along with his brother Bob (‘49). “NCCS encouraged us to learn, grow, and explore while promoting good citizenship.” A nationally ranked junior tennis player, Dick graduated from Deerfield Academy (‘57) and then took his racquet and schoolbooks to Stanford (’61), where he played No. 1 on its competitive tennis team. He did graduate work at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (’63) before his first assignment in Thailand. Dick’s final posting was Madrid from 1992 to 1995. He notes that today’s diplomats face a different set of challenges than he did. “Sadly, the world is still a very dangerous place. I am sure most current Foreign Service officers are involved one way or another in dealing with terrorism and other security threats.” Since Dick’s retirement, the Ogdens are based in Washington and spend winters in Florida, where he still plays competitive tennis, and summers visiting Laura’s family in Florence, Italy. “My current project is to finally learn to speak Italian well—which makes my wife happy.”

Matthew Heineman ’98 Matthew Heineman describes his Academy Award–nominated documentary Cartel Land as an “intense, wild adventure and a grueling film to make.” The gripping, often harrowing, movie chronicles the story of two modernday vigilante groups on either side of the Arizona-Mexican border battling a shared enemy—the murderous Mexican drug cartels. As director, producer, and cinematographer, Matt earned the trust of both groups by literally risking his life to document their story. “Cartel Land led me to dangerous places—I filmed shoot-outs between vigilante and cartel members on the streets of Mexico; a crystal meth lab on a dark, desert night; torture rooms. . . . The story kept changing, and I followed where it led me.” When he began the two-year project, Matt thought it would be a simple story of good versus evil, “but the lines became even more blurry. It’s a story about what happens when government institutions fail and citizens take the law into their own hands.” In addition to the Oscar nomination, Matt received the Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary Award from the Director’s Guild of America for the film, and the Courage Under Fire Award from the International Documentary Association “in recognition of conspicuous bravery in the pursuit of truth.” He was also named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015. Cartel Land also garnered the 2015 Documentary Award from the prestigious George Polk Awards in Investigative Journalism. The recipient of the 2012 Alumni Award, Matt said his NCCS education from second through ninth grades “set the foundation for an interest in understanding who we are as people and for being open-minded.” “Country School taught me to think critically about the world—to be analytical, to be curious—all the things that are very applicable to what I do now.” After NCCS, Matt attended Brunswick (’01) and received a BA in history from Dartmouth (’05). His post-graduation travels with a group of friends led to the 2009 documentary Our Time. His next projects were the Emmynominated HBO series The Alzheimer’s Project and the documentary Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare. After a busy year on the film awards circuit, Matt has already begun developing other projects and is excited to return to the creative work. Matt frequently recounts the advice of a mentor who told him “if you end up with the story you started out with, then you weren’t listening along the way. That held true every day while making Cartel Land and also throughout my career.”

“I filmed shoot-outs between vigilante and cartel members on the streets of Mexico.”

Christopher S. Chivvis ’86

“NCCS helped encourage my curiosity in things beyond my immediate environment.”

In a world imperiled by terrorism every day, Chris Chivvis is a leading expert on threats to our national security in three highly volatile regions. Chris is associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center and a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan, objective think tank that primarily advises the U.S. government. He specializes in national security issues in Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Western Eurasia, including NATO; military interventions; and deterrence. He is also the author of three books and articles for national and international publications and policy journals, a frequently quoted commentator, and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins’ Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Chris sees our nation facing unprecedented challenges from what he calls “non-state” and “state” threats. “The non-state threats include jihadist groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, which pose an immediate threat to the security, especially of our allies in Europe but also to the United States.” He said the resurgence of state-based threats, particularly in Russia and China, “aspire to reduce America’s role in the world.” Chris’s focus on international affairs developed after college, but he felt his seventh through ninth grade years at NCCS helped foster that interest. “Country School helped encourage my curiosity in things beyond my immediate environment. There was also an emphasis on strengthening my writing skills, which has been an essential part of my career.” After graduating from Hotchkiss (’89), Chris began his studies at Johns Hopkins, earning his BA in writing in 1993, his master’s in international relations and economics four years later, and his PhD in European studies in 2003. He also completed a postdoctoral year of study at New York University. His credentials also include policy research positions in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy and fluency in French, German, and Spanish. In 2010, he worked at the Pentagon for a year, developing and implementing U.S. defense policy on Russia and Eurasia. Chris’s three books are The Monetary Conservative (published in 2010), Toppling Qaddafi: Libya and the Limits of Liberal Intervention (published in 2013), and The French War on Al Qa’ida in Africa (in 2015). He lives in Georgetown with his wife, Sumona Guha, a policy planning official with the State Department, and their three young children. Noting that time is a “precious commodity,” Chris still teaches a graduate course each semester at Johns Hopkins. “I love it and I get a lot out of it.”

Shanté Paradigm Smalls ’90 A “super curious child,” Shanté Paradigm Smalls maintains a personal and professional focus on hip-hop, global blackness, queer theory, race and genre fiction, pop culture, and academia. As a tenure-track assistant professor of African American Literature and Culture at St. John’s University, she is introducing undergraduates and grad students to all of the above, drawing on her scholarly research and real-life performance experience. It is the perfect fit for the hip-hop artist with a PhD. In 1986, she was Shanté Smalls, a self-described nerdy kid who lived for Saturday trips to the Norwalk Public Library with her mom and was easily bored at her small elementary school. Her parents, both pastors, were concerned she would lose her love of learning. “When I moved to Country School in sixth grade, I was excited and challenged. I found my place. I found an outlet for my intellectual curiosity.” In addition to academics, she valued her opportunity to pursue both performing arts and athletics, first at NCCS and then at Greenwich Academy. “I didn’t have to choose in those years, which was lovely.” She did choose performing arts at Smith College and moved to Brooklyn after graduation in 1998. She formed the hip-hop group B.Q.E., chose the professional name Shanté Paradigm, released two albums, and toured nationally, and she also acted, worked in films, and wrote and performed her poetry. She continued her studies in film, music, and theater at New York University, earning her master’s in 2005 and her PhD in 2011, exploring race, gender, and sexuality in hip-hop, film, and visual arts. Her current book project is a revision and expansion of her doctoral dissertation titled Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City. Shanté was an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow and visiting professor at Davidson College for two years and taught at the University of New Mexico before returning to New York in 2014. She is a nationally recognized, frequent commentator on hip-hop, queer politics, and black literature. She finds being back in New York, and close to home and family, personally and culturally invigorating. The St. John’s professorship allows her to work with undergraduates— including a first-year seminar—and doctoral students, all while continuing her research. “It’s as if I had written the job description myself.” She already has a second book project, Androids, Cyborgs, Others: Black Futurism, Black Fantasy, investigating black posthumanism from the nineteenth century to the present, and is planning a third, exploring blackness in China.

“I found my place. I found an outlet for my intellectual curiosity.”

Taggart Adams ’56

“My biggest fear was that I wouldn’t be able to make up my mind.”

In his distinguished legal career, Tag Adams prosecuted high-profile civil rights cases in New York federal court and argued complex corporate litigation in the civil arena. In 1999, he was presented with a compelling opportunity—a nomination to serve on Connecticut’s Superior Court. “It seemed a very interesting thing to do. I had enough experience. My biggest fear was that I wouldn’t be able to make up my mind, which is a critical part of the job. But I haven’t had any problems with that. Sometimes you wrestle with a hard case, and a judge must articulate the reasons for a decision.” Today Tag is in his third term as a trial judge in the Stamford/Norwalk Superior Court, not far from where he grew up with his brother Tom (’54) and sister Lucy (’63). He attended NCCS from seventh through ninth grades and said his education prepared him well for both the Hotchkiss School (’59) and Hamilton College (’63). His years at Hamilton were his most rewarding, academically and as the captain of the football and lacrosse teams, and he later served on the Hamilton Board of Trustees and created a scholarship named for a classmate. He spent a year in London studying British and European history at the University of London and then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1967. For the next three years, Tag served as an assistant to Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff, working on tax issues, welfare reform, and other legislation on Capitol Hill. In 1971, he joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York, serving for six years with an emphasis on civil rights cases, including a hard-fought effort to force the city’s all-white construction unions to open up apprentice positions. The young prosecutors got immediate trial experience. “We tried more cases—and serious cases—at an age when lawyers in large firms had never been in court.” Tag moved to private practice in 1977, joining a Connecticut firm to open its litigation department. It merged with Kelly, Drye and Warren, and he became head of its Connecticut litigation department, with clients ranging from individuals to large corporations in all matters of civil and some criminal law. His move to the bench has been “very rewarding.” In the 1980s, Tag re-established his connections with Country School. His children Will (’90) and Anda (’93) attended, his wife, Inta, was an involved volunteer and NCCS trustee, and he developed a new perspective. “I came to recognize and appreciate the culture of Country School much more as a parent than as a seventh-grade boy.”

Allison Williams ’03 Allison Williams “always, always” knew she wanted to be an actress, and she was destined to play Peter Pan. Her first star turn was in HBO’s comedy-drama series Girls, which premiered in 2012. In real life, the only similarities to her character Marnie are their age (twenty-something) and residence (New York City). Peter Pan is a different story. She began practicing for the role at age three, some twenty-three years before taking flight in the 2014 NBC musical special Peter Pan Live! Allison would play Peter, and her grandmother, longtime NCCS teacher Pat Stoddard, was Wendy. “I always related to Peter Pan, to never wanting to grow up. I think part of that was the sense of what I got from Country School is that being a child and being full of curiosity and innocence is okay. Not only is it okay, it’s something to celebrate and cherish while it is there.” Allison said her years at NCCS gave her both a community and a belief “that learning was cool and that intellectual curiosity is perhaps the single most important characteristic to possess.” “It sent me out in the world with a sense of open arms and openmindedness.” Allison continued acting at Greenwich Academy (‘06) and Yale (’10), where she performed with the improvisational comedy troupe Just Add Water. After graduation she posted a music video on YouTube that caught the attention of the producers of Girls, who invited her to audition. In addition to her career, Allison is equally committed to Horizons National. She is an official ambassador for the award-winning, tuition-free, summer academic program serving low-income, public school students across the country. Along with her entire family, Allison became involved with Horizons at NCCS. “A lot of the ills in our country right now boil down to the deepening inequality in education at a very young age. I really think Horizons is one of the most effective ways of combating that.” Through personal appearances and her commanding social media presence, Allison is an enthusiastic advocate for Horizons. When she married College Humor co-founder Ricky Van Veen in 2015, Allison asked guests to donate to Horizons in lieu of wedding gifts. The result: a new Horizons program opened in Austin, Texas, in 2016. As an actress, Allison looks forward to more roles that will allow her to pivot between very different characters. “I want to keep making ninety-onedegree turns.” She admits there will never be another role like Peter Pan, calling it “just the most blissful creative experience I could ever imagine.”

“I always related to Peter Pan, to never wanting to grow up.”

Henry ‘Harry’ Stebbins Noble ’29

Remembered as a “behind-thescenes person who found ways to make things work.”

Harry Noble earned recognition as a pillar of his community, serving as first selectman in New Canaan during the crippling ice storm of 1973 and a leader in his church and more than two dozen clubs and charities. Never one to seek the limelight, Harry was remembered as a “behindthe-scenes person who found ways to make things work.” Harry attended the New Canaan Community School on Park Street for seven years beginning in 1922, when he competed with Harriett Brewer to be first in class. He also happened to notice her younger sister Elizabeth, and they become reacquainted a decade later commuting by train to New York City. Harry and Elizabeth married in 1942 and reconnected with their alma mater. The Nobles became one of seven three-generation NCCS families, with alums including their four children—Tim (’57), George (’58), Beth Noble Tinch (’59) and Kate Noble Davies (’63)—and Tim’s children Andy (’93) and Emily (’94). After NCCS, Harry graduated in 1934 from the Kent School, where he returned later to serve on the board of trustees, and from Yale University in 1938. Harry was the fifth generation of his family to become a member of the New York Stock Exchange, the longest family string at the time, and he spent his entire Wall Street career as a partner in the odd-lot broker firm of DeCoppet and Doremus. While working in New York, he also served nine terms as a justice of the peace in New Canaan, from 1952 to 1972. After his retirement at age fifty-seven, the lifelong resident was elected to the first of his three terms as New Canaan’s first selectman. He was praised for his handling of the devastating December 1973 ice storm, which shut down the town and left many homes without power for a week. A longtime vestry leader at St. Mark’s Epsicopal Church, Harry was a trustee of the Union Theological Seminary and president of the Episcopal Church Foundation. He was also an avid yachtsman, sailing mostly out of Norwalk Yacht Club, where he served as commodore in the late 1950s. In the 1970s Harry provided guidance and support for several U.S. contenders in the Little America’s Cup Class C catamaran race, ultimately taking America’s best boat, Weathercock, to Australia to challenge unsuccessfully for the trophy. As for his Community School academic competition with his future sisterin-law Harriet Brewer Hopkins, family lore has it that she only triumphed when Harry was out sick. At the time of his death in 2005 at age eightynine, Harry was predeceased by Elizabeth and survived by his four children, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Elizabeth Spelke ’64 Liz Spelke has the utmost respect for her pint-sized, often boisterous, and sometimes stubborn study subjects. “Babies are the most prodigiously effective learners on the planet.” And what she has learned from them has revolutionized our understanding of the basis of human knowledge. It has also earned Liz recognition as one of the world’s preeminenth scholars in her field of cognitive psychology and the infant mind. Liz’s official title is professor of psychology and director of Harvard’s Laboratory for Developmental Studies, where she continues her four decades of groundbreaking research into what babies know and how they learn. Why infants? “At the deepest level they make sense of the world in the same basic ways we do.” And just as importantly, “their brains aren’t stuffed with a lot of facts.” Liz began her studies while at Radcliffe (’71), and she received her MA from Yale two years later and her PhD in psychology from Cornell in 1978. She taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the Harvard faculty in 2001. Her early experiments established that infants have implicit, innate knowledge about objects, numbers, time, and space, and she remains just as curious and excited about her work today. Liz’s cadre of graduate students refer to her always-active “baby lab” at Harvard as “Spelkeland,” where she personally oversees curious infants and collaborative research with fellow psychologists throughout the world. The recipient of NCCS’s 2007 Alumni Award, Liz said she first discovered the joy of learning with others when she arrived on campus as a painfully shy sixth grader. “It had a profound impact. It was the first school at which I felt learning was fun and takes place within this community of people who are learning with you and at the same time. That’s something that stayed with me and kept me in this business all my life.” She combined her work and love of travel by raising two children with her husband, retired psychology professor Elliot Blass, between their homes in Cambridge and France. As an observer of today’s parents and more importantly as a recent grandmother, she gently but firmly stresses the importance of babies learning in a social context. Her advice? “Turn off the TV, take away the iPad, and interact with your kids. There’s lots we still don’t know about the minds of infants, but I’m pretty sure that they grow best in families that have fun together.”

“Turn off the TV, take away the iPad, and interact with your kids.”

Dorcas Eason MacClintock ’47

“It all revolves around animals in my life.”

For Dorcas MacClintock, a single thread connects her accomplishments as naturalist, author, sculptor, and conservationist. “It all revolves around animals in my life.” Dorcas grew up on a farm in then-rural Wilton, where her passion for animals began. “I had great freedom to explore the natural world and lots of time to do it.” Her keen observations and feeling for the subject matter are evident in her ten books and in her sculpture, which has been exhibited in museums and galleries across North America. “My inspiration and ideas come from seeing animals in their natural habitats.” She has written about squirrels, raccoons, and their relatives, giraffes, zebras, red pandas, and horses, as well as animals in art. Dorcas arrived at the NCCS campus in seventh grade and “came under the spell of the faculty.” She vividly recalls the influence and inspiration of Mrs. Morris in science and Mr. Swallow in English. They were teachers “who made a mark on all of us. It was a wonderful introduction to excellence.” After NCCS, she went to Greenwich Academy and spent summers working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. She graduated in 1954 from Smith, which honored her thirty-three years later with its highest alumnae award, the Smith College Medal. As a teaching assistant, she went on to gain a master’s in zoology at the University of Wyoming (‘57), where she met and married Copeland MacClintock, a geologist. Then they headed further west to California where Copeland pursued a PhD at the University of California at Berkeley and Dorcas worked at the California, Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Their return to Connecticut and to Yale afforded the chance for Dorcas to continue her interests at the Peabody Museum and the British Art Center. They found a home in nearby Hamden, adjacent to a three-hundred-acre park, where they raised two daughters. The family’s assortment of animals has included flying squirrels, hedgehogs, bush babies, raccoons, ferrets, and even an otter. Currently in residence are two collies, two cats, and a fifteenyear-old owl. The property includes a studio, where Dorcas works in clay that is cast in bronze. Her first model was a Maltese terrier she sculpted in clay at age five. Today her sculptures include mammals of all kinds. Some were exhibited at the 2011 Alumni Art Show, and Dorcas was delighted to return to campus. “It still had the same feeling, a vibrancy that is missing in so many schools.”

John Dauer ’95 Jason Young ’95 Jason Young and John Dauer, of the four-man indie rock band The Ruse, get a good laugh when other groups talk about chemistry and longevity. “We started this band when we were in second grade at Country School. It’s been lifelong.” Back then, the band was called Shotgun and played at the NCCS talent show The Happening, a benefit concert for Horizons, and other local gigs. Even in Lower School, Jason was on drums and John was the lead vocalist. Today The Ruse is known for epic ballads and electrifying live performances across the U.S. and on world tours. The band released its fourth album, Interstellar Stowaway, in 2015. Jason attended NCCS from first through ninth grades, graduated from New Canaan High School (’98), and went to Manhattanville. John was at NCCS for ten years and graduated from Fox Lane High School (’98) in Bedford, New York, and Cornell University (’03). It was a month before college graduation when John got the call from Jason and their other bandmate from childhood, guitarist Jim Bilus. “We’re putting something together for real in New York City. Are you interested?” The three lifelong friends added a bass player and The Ruse was formed in 2004. The band relocated to Los Angeles the following year and released its first album, Light in Motion, in 2006. The Ruse took off, garnering national attention on the MTV Awards, Billboard, iTunes, and in the hottest clubs in Los Angeles and New York. The band’s next two albums—Midnight in the City (2008) and Love Sex Confusion (2010)—were accompanied by coast-to-coast tours. The Ruse opened for the global chart-topping group Muse in successful arena tours in Mexico in 2013 and in Asia in 2015 The nucleus of the band has remained a constant. Both Jason and John admit they were “not the cookie-cutter type” during their years at NCCS starting in the mid-1980s. Said Jason: “When we were there, I kind of felt like an odd man out, being a creative person.” But he remembers great friendships and supportive teachers. For John, the NCCS years were about music, friends, the faculty, and “a strong work ethic. It’s universal, with everyone I know.” Looking ahead, John said their goal is for The Ruse to continue evolving musically and “to perform for as many people as humanly possible.”

“We started this band when we were in second grade at Country School.” 17

Eliza Golden ’98

“Country School instilled in me a commitment to community and to service.”

Eliza Golden’s community outreach started close to home, when the fifteenyear-old ice hockey standout founded a charity hockey camp for young girls. In the ensuing decade, she traveled to South Africa, London, Guinea, Tanzania, Lesotho, and Cambodia as a health and human rights advocate while earning her undergraduate and law degrees. She is closer to home again, now an attorney in the New York office of the global law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Her specialty is the growing field of impact finance—investments with the dual purpose of generating positive social or environmental impact alongside a financial return. The youngest of three Goldens to attend NCCS, Eliza said her years at Country School “instilled in me a commitment to community and to service.” She was only fifteen when she founded the Future Stars hockey development clinic for girls at Terry Conners Rink in Stamford, recruiting teammates from her premier girls hockey league to help coach. She continued to run the camp, which benefited A Better Chance scholarship programs and relief efforts in Kosovo, for three summers. “Using a sport I loved to contribute to important causes and encourage young girls in sports—all of that was a product of the culture and values we learned at NCCS from an early age.” After NCCS, Eliza attended Groton (’01) and received her BA four years later from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs. She studied in South Africa while at Princeton, and after graduation she worked with the International Rescue Committee in Guinea, West Africa. She returned to the States and spent two years with the Touch Foundation, working to strengthen the health system in Tanzania. She enrolled in Harvard Law School in 2008 and continued her international human rights and healthcare efforts in Cambodia, London, and Lesotho. Through her varied experiences, Eliza became increasingly convinced that sustainable, market-based initiatives held greater potential than litigation approaches to fuel the protection and promotion of basic human rights in communities around the world. Eliza turned her focus to the emerging field of impact investing and social enterprise, and after graduation she secured a fellowship at Orrick to work with innovative companies and investors in this field on a pro bono basis. In that role, Eliza led the establishment of Orrick’s Impact Finance practice, and after two years she transitioned into the firm’s corporate group to continue developing the firm’s work in this area. She’s still lacing up her hockey skates, playing in a coed league at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan with two former NCCS classmates.

Christopher Jessup ’14 Seventeen-year-old Christopher Jessup is an aspiring classical pianist, composer, and singer who learned to play music by ear on a well-utilized toy piano. To the audiences and judges who have heard him perform at Carnegie Hall and concert venues across the U.S. and in Italy, his instinctive talent and dedication are immediately evident. “I’ve just always loved music, ever since I got a toy piano when I was two and banged away all but three of the keys. I started playing by ear, mostly jazz or whatever I heard on the radio. But I didn’t learn to read music until I was eight, which was very late.” Christopher has more than made up for his late start and is enrolled in the Professional Children’s School in New York City. He studies composition at the Juilliard Pre-College Program and also studies piano privately at Juilliard. He has won national young artist competitions and played with professional orchestras and chamber music ensembles. He received the “best performance award” at the Carnegie Hall winner’s recital of the American Protégé International Competition of Romantic Music. In 2015, he performed his own composition—Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Minor—as a soloist with a full philharmonic orchestra at the MusicFest Perugia in Italy. In addition to academics, music lessons, and the commute from Darien to New York, Christopher practices the piano three to four hours a day. When he arrived at NCCS in seventh grade, Christopher was confident at the piano but otherwise shy. “I had a very positive academic and social experience at NCCS. I discovered so many things about myself such as my love for cross-country running as well as my passion for French, history, and English. I never considered myself as someone who was into sports, but once I started cross-country, it was great being on a team.” Christopher has also sung with choral groups and was a featured soloist with the Rockland County Choral Society. In 2011, he performed the lead role in the Gian Carlo Menotti opera Amahl and the Night Visitors at Western Connecticut State University. After graduation from the Professional Children’s School in 2017, he plans to major in music at a university with a conservatory. A supporter of animal rights and environmental causes, Christopher recently performed at a benefit concert for the Friends of Animals in Darien and wants to do more events and outreach. “I hope to use my music to make a difference.”

“I hope to use my music to make a difference.”

Amy Chan Downer ’72

“It transformed my life. Completely.”

For Amy Downer, the Horizons Student Enrichment program was more than just a six-week exposure to science, hiking, and swimming. “It transformed my life. Completely. Horizons gave me the confidence to come to Country School, which opened the doors for me to receive a full scholarship to Exeter, to go to Princeton, and to want to give back.” Amy was in fourth grade when her family immigrated from Hong Kong to Stamford, knowing little English beyond the ABCs. Three years later she stepped on to the NCCS campus as a Horizons student, awed by the bucolic setting, the hiking trails (and introduction to poison ivy), and modern science classrooms. At first she was terrified of the pool. “I learned to swim in six weeks. I was so proud. It was a phenomenal achievement after spending the first half of the session praying for thunderstorms. “ At the end of the summer, NCCS headmaster George Stevens had “miraculously” found her a spot and a full scholarship to attend NCCS as an eighth grader—the first Horizons participant to do so. “It was a scary time. I came from a very poor family. Everything was foreign to me. Everyone was as curious about me as I was about them.” She found the teachers and students welcoming and supportive, particularly Mr. Stevens in her ninth-grade English class. Struggling to translate her thoughts about a Mark Twain passage, he would encourage her to step outside the classroom, practice, and come back in to speak. “I knew I was safe. The courage he gave me was so important. He wanted me to have a voice.” Amy majored in art history at Princeton and after her 1979 graduation began a ten-year career in commercial banking with Chase Manhattan and Bank of New England. She met and married fellow Exeter alum Tony Downer and moved back to Connecticut with their twin boys (and their daughter on the way). She received a call about volunteering for Horizons and has played key leadership roles ever since. She served on the Horizons New Canaan Board for fourteen years (chairing the Board for three years) and has been on the Horizons National Board since 1997, including a five-year stint as chair. She was also an NCCS trustee while her sons Nick and Chris (‘03) and daughter Caroline (‘04) attended. Active in several Fairfield County community organizations, Amy’s priority is Horizons, which now serves four thousand students in fifty schools in seventeen states. “I am over the moon that we can give this opportunity to kids across the country. And I am proof that it is the start of a lifelong transformation.”

Hardy Jones ’58 In the crystalline blue waters north of Grand Bahama Island, filmmaker Hardy Jones discovered an elusive treasure—a school of wild dolphins that welcomed humans into their undersea world. That 1978 encounter changed Hardy’s life, and his films and advocacy helped inspire a global campaign to save dolphins and whales from brutal slaughter and ocean contamination. Hardy had been fascinated by dolphins as a child and started scuba diving at age fifteen. He was a television journalist researching the consciousness movement in the late 1970s when he set out to learn more about dolphin intelligence. “I thought, ‘I’ll just go out and make a movie.’ I was more than naive. Even Jacques Cousteau told me it couldn’t be done.” Hardy’s immediate, momentous connection with the pod of equally curious spotted dolphins was captured in his first award-winning documentary, Dolphin. “I was enthralled.” He would return to film these dolphins over the next three decades, including his 2005 PBS film The Dolphin Defender. Shortly after his initial bond with the sleek, smart marine mammals, Hardy learned that Japanese fishermen were killing dolphins by the thousands. “My personal contact with dolphins created a sense of obligation in me to do something about that atrocity.” Hardy exposed that atrocity and others and has won numerous filmmaking and conservation awards for his twenty-plus documentaries and his series for PBS, Discovery, and National Geographic. In 2000, Hardy and actor Ted Danson founded Blue Voice, an ocean conservation organization dedicated to protecting dolphins and whales from slaughter and exposing the harmful level of toxins in the marine environment. For Blue Voice executive director Hardy, the chemical pollution crisis became personal when he was diagnosed in 2003 with multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer. His test results showed highly elevated levels of toxins also found in ever-greater concentrations in dolphin populations. He underwent treatment and has been in remission ever since, living in St. Augustine, Florida, with his wife, Deborah. Hardy received the NCCS Alumni Award in 2008 and said, “I consider my time at New Canaan Country School one of the most wonderful gifts imaginable. It enabled me to go forward in my life with a sense of competence and confidence.” After NCCS, Hardy graduated from Choate (’61) and Tulane (’66). He served in the Peace Corps for two years then worked for United Press International and CBS News before becoming a filmmaker. In his book The Voice of the Dolphins, Hardy recounts his decision to film The Dolphin Defender, about his life’s work. His health was improving, so “I decided to the throw it all in. I thought, ‘Fortune favors the bold.’”

“I was more than naive. Even Jacques Cousteau told me it couldn’t be done.”

Sally Jesup Rue ’67

“Children need multiple adults in their life.”

When Sally Rue headed to Alaska in 1977 for her first job out of graduate school, she couldn’t have predicted she’d stay, raise a family there, and find a dream position that combined her public policy skills with her passion for education. Sally and her husband, Frank, were job hunting on the East Coast after both earned master’s degrees in regional planning from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. “We were told we needed experience and heard about opportunities in Alaska. We thought, ‘Wow, Alaska—we both like the outdoors.’ And so we moved to Juneau.” Sally went to work for the governor’s office in policy and planning. She was a consultant part-time while her daughter and son were young and became actively involved in local education. She continued that volunteer involvement when she returned to state government, including her role as chief of staff for the lieutenant governor. In 2003, Sally was named director of the Association of Alaska School Boards’ Initiative for Community Engagement (ICE) program, bringing together her professional experience and her vocation. “I felt really lucky to be able to match skills from one and passion from another. It was really challenging but I knew it was important work. “ The goal of the Alaska ICE program is to engage adults to help children in their community succeed, and Sally said her NCCS experience played a role in her decision-making. “Country School was a touchstone for me to remember what child-centered progressive education is like in a community of caring people.” She attended NCCS from kindergarten through ninth grade, graduated from Miss Porter’s (’70), and received her BA in urban studies from the University of Pennsylvania in just three years. Early on in her Alaska ICE tenure, Sally attended a workshop where participants were asked to recall an adult who made a difference in their lives. “All of a sudden I thought back forty years to my bus driver Mrs. Lyons.” A “super shy little girl” at the time, Sally would sit alone until the last stop on the long bus ride. “Mrs. Lyons invited me to sit on the radiator next to her. She made me feel special and showed she cared about me, for years. That illustrated for me the power of this idea of supportive adults helping kids, even when they do have two engaged parents at home. Children need multiple adults in their life.” Sally was director of Alaska ICE until her retirement in 2014 and is gratified the program continues to thrive. Alaska remains their home base.

Bradford Bull ’82 Brad Bull is both a bold mountaineer with lofty ambitions and a family man, architect, and volunteer guide with his feet firmly planted on the ground. His first significant climb was a 1989 college graduation trip with his father. “One thing led to another, the mountains got bigger and bigger, and the next thing you know we were at Mount Everest.” The pair did not summit on their first attempt in 1992, but three years later Brad did reach the top of the world’s highest mountain for the first time. He described the vista from 29,029 feet as “farther than the eye can see.” When they returned in 2001, Brad and Sherman Bull were the first American father-son team to conquer Everest together, and his sixtyfour-year-old surgeon dad was the oldest climber. Rather than focus on their accomplishments, Brad said he was proud to be a guide for Erik Weihenmayer, the first and only blind climber to reach the apex of Everest. Brad’s wife, Reba, was also at the Himalayan base camp and supported the effort as the expedition baker. During his ten years at NCCS, Brad said his strong friendships helped “shape who I am. The school also encouraged a broad range of thinking, which led to more opportunities.” Brad graduated from Kent in 1985 and received his degree in economics and psychology from Vandberbilt (’89). He took architecture classes at Columbia before heading to the Rockies to teach at the University of Colorado’s Outdoor Adventure Program. In 1993, Brad enrolled in the University of Colorado Denver’s College of Architecture, receiving his master’s in architecture and landscape architecture four years later. He is an architect in the Denver office of the global firm Gensler, focusing on hotel and resort projects. Brad’s “life ambition” as a climber is to complete the Seven Summits—the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. He has completed the three in the northern hemisphere—Mount Ebrus (Europe), Mount McKinley (North America), and Mount Everest (Asia). But for now he is focused on his family—including three adventurous children ages eight through thirteen— his work, and volunteering as a Boy Scout leader and a guide. His rewarding experience on the 2001 Mount Everest team led Brad to volunteer with Soldiers to Summits (S2S), which helps disabled veterans climb mountains. He has guided S2S trips in Nepal and Ecuador and numerous training outings in Colorado. “We’ve found that climbing is really motivating for the vets.” Until he resumes his pursuit of the Seven Summits, Brad said, “This is very satisfying for me.”

“The mountains got bigger and bigger, and the next thing you know we were at Mount Everest.”

Holly Donaldson ’04

“I would go to AmeriCares and empty my piggy bank on the front desk.”

Holly Donaldson’s first exposure to the world was in Lower School, when her class would line up chairs like an airplane and take off for the country to be studied that entire year. “The teachers did a really good job of opening our eyes to the whole world at an early age.” Twenty years later, she is helping to introduce NCCS students to AmeriCares and the humanitarian aid organization’s lifeline to the world. Working with schools is but one facet of Holly’s role as manager of community and donor engagement at AmeriCares. In 2015, she also launched the AmeriCares Young Leaders program, tasked with involving young professionals in the disaster relief and global healthcare nonprofit now headquartered in Stamford. Her connection to AmeriCares also dates back to childhood, when she would contribute all of her $6 allowance to the charity—even the $3 earmarked for spending. “I would go to the AmeriCares office on Cherry Street in New Canaan and empty my piggy bank on the front desk. It was such a part of my life and my parents’ life.” Holly attended NCCS from kindergarten through eighth grade and graduated from Taft (’07) and Hamilton College (’11) with a BA in public policy and environmental studies. She interned at AmeriCares as a rising college senior and joined the staff as an associate after graduation. When reaching out to a younger demographic, Holly stresses AmeriCares’s dual mission of responding to global emergencies and improving community healthcare in the U.S. and across the world. She has witnessed the AmeriCares team mobilize moments after a natural disaster and seen the results of longer-term healthcare initiatives during a trip to Guatemala. “People are always drawn to emergency response at the time of a crisis. Healthcare access is always a compelling cause.” Another compelling cause of importance to Holly is Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children, a New York adoption agency founded in 1908. Holly’s parents adopted her through Spence-Chapin, and today she is co-chair of Spence-Chapin’s Young Leadership Council. She said it has been rewarding to reconnect with other adoptees and also birth mothers on the council. The group’s goal is to educate young people about adoption in general and Spence-Chapin’s work, including its focus on international, special needs, and sibling group adoptions. Personally, the word engagement from her work title has another meaning for Holly. She is happily engaged to Adam Casella, with a Vermont wedding planned for August 2016.

Juliana ‘Topsy’ Post ’66 Topsy Post still recalls the year, the country report, and the teacher “that made me look beyond my world.” It was an eighth-grade report on Burma for Mrs. Burnes, who had lived and taught school in China. The experience played a pivotal role in Topsy’s twin lifelong passions—education and travel—and her professional aspirations. When Topsy returned to NCCS to teach twenty-five years later—after ten years teaching in Pakistan and working for UNICEF as a literacy consultant— she was determined to do the same for her Upper School students. “I wanted to open our students’ eyes, to see the world beyond, and to try and expose them to what I had learned. I felt I could bring that experience back to my classroom, as Betty Burnes did for us.” She designed the school’s eighth-grade world cultures curriculum and, closer to home, spearheaded community service efforts and co-led the ninth-grade civil rights trip to expose students to disparity in our own country. An avid photographer, she showcased her portraits of “people who are living on the margin” to give them a face and a voice. Topsy attended NCCS from first through ninth grades, and as a child her family hosted an inner-city student to live with them through the school’s “City/Country” group. It made an impact. “As a kid, seeing the inequality was really eye opening.” After NCCS, Topsy went to Foxcroft and then to the University of Wisconsin, where she earned her undergrad and master’s degrees in South Asian studies. After earning her master’s in education from Teacher’s College, Topsy moved to Pakistan. During her decade there, she traveled to villages as a literacy consultant for UNICEF, opened a nursery school, and taught at the International School of Islamabad. She returned to the States in 1985 and to teaching, and her daughters Samar Jamali (‘95) and Alexandra Jamali (‘00) enrolled in NCCS. Topsy joined the NCCS faculty in 1992. She retired in 2014, having challenged, enlightened, and inspired a devoted following of students. In a nod to her “fabulous and demanding” NCCS choir director John Huwiler, Topsy is still actively choral singing as well as traveling with her husband, Roy Pfeil, and enjoying time in Maine with her family, including a granddaughter. And she is back at school training to teach English as a second language, with a goal of working with refugees. “It goes back to giving people a voice. I know what it is like to go to a foreign country and not be able to communicate. Teaching is clearly what I love to do.”

“I wanted to open our students’ eyes, to see the world beyond, and to try to expose them to what I had learned.”

Dana Chivvis ’96

“I thought, ‘The last thing I’ll do is radio.’”

Radio was not even remotely on Dana Chivvis’s radar when she worked as a photo editor for National Geographic for four years after college. She then earned her master’s degree at Columbia Journalism School in 2009 and segued to digital media, working as a reporter, writer, and multimedia producer for CBS, AOL, NBC, and other outlets. “I thought, ‘The last thing I’ll do is radio.’” And so Dana continued to think until she landed a fellowship with the public radio show This American Life. The show’s team had created and was about to launch a spinoff—a weekly podcast called Serial—and asked Dana to sign on as a producer. “That was fortuitous.” First released in 2014, Serial was a breakout hit, captivating listeners with weekly investigative reports about the1999 murder of a popular high school senior from Baltimore and her ex-boyfriend’s murder conviction. The show has been described as “TV for your ears” and hailed as “an audio game changer.” Dana and her Serial colleagues weren’t sure where their reporting of this true crime story would lead from week to week or how the listening public would respond. “We had hoped for three hundred thousand listeners for the entire twelve-week season. We hit three hundred thousand in four days. There was an explosion of coverage and the show took on a life of its own.” The first season of Serial has now been downloaded 134 million times and won the prestigious Peabody Award. Season Two focused on Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who walked off his post in Afghanistan and was captured and held by the Taliban for five years. Season Three is in the works. Noting that she didn’t even know “what a podcast was” while at National Geographic, Dana said the format allows the creative team more flexibility than traditional media. “It gives us the freedom to let the story dictate the format, not the other way around. We can be our own bosses, even going bi-weekly in Season Two to allow more time for reporting.” And while radio wasn’t on her radar before Serial, Dana realized “it doesn’t matter what the medium is, but rather do I like the stories we are telling, do I think they are captivating and engaging.” Dana attended NCCS from kindergarten through ninth grade and graduated from Greenwich Academy (’99) and Tufts (’03). “Country School was like my second home growing up. The teachers were unparalleled. There was a feeling of community there that I’ve taken with me and sought out in the rest of my life.”

Maurice ‘Mo’ Vaughn ’82 Mo Vaughn’s prowess at the batting plate is well-documented in the record books—belting home runs for the Boston Red Sox, being crowned the American League’s Most Valuable Player in 1995, and averaging over .300 as a three-time Major League Baseball All-Star. Less publicized, but equally rewarding, is Mo’s baseball “afterlife,” leading a company that buys and renovates distressed urban apartment complexes to make the buildings and neighborhood safe and livable again. “I’m forty-eight years old now. We all get to grow into the people we want to be. This is my way of giving back.” During his six years at NCCS, Mo played three sports and a mean set of drums in the Ragtime band. He still reflects on life lessons learned from “tough but fair” teachers. “They were always developing our minds and broadening our horizons. My experience at NCCS helped me as an athlete and in business, in terms of what I am doing now with affordable housing in New York City and making a positive contribution to society.” After NCCS, Mo went to Trinity-Pawling and Seton Hall University, where he earned the nickname the “Hit Dog.” He was drafted by the Red Sox in 1989 and played his first major league game at Fenway Park in 1991. The imposing first baseman was the heart of the Sox lineup for the next seven years, intimidating opposing pitchers and wowing fans with home run blasts into the bleachers. In 1998, Mo signed a multimillion dollar contract with the Anaheim Angels, but his three years there and final two seasons with the New York Mets were hampered by injury. He retired in 2003. Determined to make it in New York, the following year Mo and two partners founded Omni New York LLC, which has renovated more than seven thousand units of housing in New York State and is expanding nationally. Mo’s home base is in Ohio, where he is raising his son and daughter and also runs Mo Vaughn Transport. In his twenty-plus years as an athlete, Mo said one game still seared in his memory never made the record books. He was the captain of the NCCS basketball team charged with helping a “more studious than athletic” teammate, who was new to the United States and to the game of basketball. “It was my thing to make sure he scored a basket that day. And he did. Those are things you remember. You put your hands out, you put your arms around somebody and you help them. Those are the things I learned.”

“We all get to grow into the people we want to be.”

John Varick Tunney ’49

“It is important to continue your education from the day you leave school until the day you die.”

When liberal Democrat Varick Tunney contemplated his first run for national political office from a conservative California district, his close friend and law school roommate Ted Kennedy relayed a succinct piece of advice from his older brother, the president. “President Kennedy said to Teddy: ‘If your pal Tunney is going to run for Congress, he needs to run as John, not Varick.’“ Family and NCCS classmates had always called the would-be candidate by his middle name Varick, the surname of a Revolutionary War ancestor. A poll of potential constituents found that two-thirds associated the name Varick with Russia and/or Communism, not one of our nation’s founding fathers. That settled, soon even Varick’s wife was calling him John. Tunney’s last name was already legendary. He was the son of world heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and wealthy socialite/ philanthropist Polly Lauder Tunney. After a romance and marriage that made headlines across the world, the Tunneys settled on their twohundred-acre Star Meadow Farm in North Stamford and sent their three sons to Country School. John attended NCCS from seventh through ninth grades, was the “tall, skinny kid” on varsity football, and recalled Mrs. Morris as an “extraordinary teacher.” He graduated from the Westminster School (’52), Yale (’56), the Hague Academy of International Law, and the University of Virginia School of Law (’59). He was a judge advocate in the Air Force for three years before moving to Riverside, California, where he entered politics. Running as John Tunney, he was elected to his first of three congressional terms in the 1964 Lyndon Johnson Democratic landslide. He ran for U.S. Senate and won at age thirty-six, serving one term from 1971 to 1977. Reflecting on his time on Capitol Hill, John is most proud of his leadership roles in the passage of key environmental and civil rights legislation, including the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act. “It was a tough, tough fight and a great triumph.” John was narrowly defeated in his 1976 re-election bid, became a senior partner in an Los Angeles–based law firm, and was a political commentator for ABC News for fourteen years. Now retired, John is an avid reader and “feels passionately it is important to continue your education from the day you leave school until the day you die.” He and his wife, Kathinka, a former Swedish Olympic skier, have six children and six grandchildren. They spend most of their time in Sun Valley, Idaho, enjoying the outdoors, fishing, hiking, and skiing. John acknowledges that he can’t keep up with his wife on the ski trails. “At 82, my goal is to keep her in sight.”

Marjorie ‘Gigi’ Brush Priebe ’74 Gigi Priebe considers herself an accidental museum founder. “I never said I wanted to start a children’s museum. I just said we could use one.” Gigi was a mother of two toddlers in 1992 when she made that observation to her father, the founding president of Waveny Care Center. His response: Why don’t you find out if anyone else thinks we need a quality, hands-on children’s learning center? The challenge commenced with a tentown survey of over eleven thousand parents and educators throughout Fairfield County. Eight years later, Stepping Stones Museum for Children opened. Since 2000, the Norwalk museum has doubled in size, won national awards, and welcomed more than two million visitors. For Gigi, the museum’s success confirms that learning by doing is a transformative educational experience for children. “It’s a powerful way to learn. Hopefully they leave the museum asking new questions and looking at the world in a different way.” When helping shape the Stepping Stones curriculum, Gigi recalled her eleven years of “experiential, hands-on learning” at NCCS. “We dissected frogs, studied science in the woods, and learned math with Cuisinaire rods. That worked for me.” “NCCS was a place that felt safe and nurturing. The teachers saw something in me that I didn’t see. I always felt supported, encouraged, and engaged.” Gigi graduated from Hotchkiss (’78) and Lesley College (’83) and returned to NCCS as a parent of Haley (‘03), Chelsea (‘06), and Hunter (‘08). When the family transferred to London with husband David’s job in 2004, Gigi’s second accidental career as a children’s book author was born. “I joined a writing group on a whim. We lived near Windsor Castle, home to Queen Mary’s Dollhouse, a lifelike mansion built on 1/12th inch scale— complete with running water, electricity, and even flushing toilets. I had an idea for a story.” She spent seven years developing the story about a young book-loving mouse named Henry who lived in Queen Mary’s miniature masterpiece, with his family, friends, and even foes. The resulting book—The Adventures of Henry Whiskers—will be published next year by Aladdin books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. Gigi has begun writing the second book in the Henry series, geared toward readers aged seven to ten. Back in the States since 2006, Gigi has divided her time between writing, volunteering, and providing philanthropic advisory services. “The thread that connects most of what I’ve done is children. My degree is in early childhood education, so I guess that shouldn’t come as a surprise, but I never imagined all the ways it would translate.”

“The teachers saw something in me that I didn’t see. I always felt supported, encouraged, and engaged.”

Laurie Grassi Redmond ’90

“I wondered, ‘How can we imagine schools differently?’”

As a dedicated teacher and mother of two young daughters, Laurie Redmond challenged herself to think boldly about providing a unique educational opportunity in her rural Maine community. “I had toyed with the idea of opening a school before. After twenty years of working in classrooms, I had my own ideas about how children learn best. As I was encouraged to do by my professors at Mills College, I wondered, ‘How can we imagine schools differently?’” She met with area parents who homeschooled their children but also wanted them to spend time with other students in a brick-and-mortar setting with a fully developed curriculum. In a fortuitous turn of events, her parents had retired from Connecticut to Maine and were renovating a two hundred-year-old grist mill at Freedom Falls, adjacent to her brother Prentice Grassi’s (‘87) organic farm. The family agreed that the second floor of the mill would be the perfect location for a school, and within months the Mill School was created. That was three years ago, and it has been operating at its chosen capacity of twenty students in the first through eighth grades ever since. The youngsters attend school Tuesday through Thursday and are homeschooled on Monday and Friday. Laurie’s first teaching in a formal classroom was through the NCCS apprentice program. She attended Country School from first through ninth grades, then Greenwich Academy (‘93) and Trinity College (’97). She had also worked summers in the Horizons program and decided to “test the waters” for a year apprenticing in fourth grade with Kristin Quisgard. “It was a great experience. Kristin taught me so much. I loved every aspect of it, and I thought, ‘And I’m getting paid for this!’“ Laurie moved to northern California to earn her master’s in education from Mills. She also met Chris Redmond, and they relocated back to Maine to begin their married life closer to their families. Laurie took time off from teaching in the Maine public schools after their daughter was born, and the idea for the Mill School took shape after their second daughter began to approach kindergarten age. In creating a school where each individual child is honored for his or her strengths, Laurie drew on her experience as a student and an apprentice at NCCS. “We also have a dog in the classroom, just like at NCCS!” The Mill School currently has a waiting list, but Laurie is not in any rush to expand. “We’re trying to do what we do well, and it’s on a scale that works for us.”

Edward Hoagland ’47 Ted Hoagland has struggled his entire life with the spoken word but has elevated the written word to unparalleled heights in his books and essays on nature, travel, and the human condition. Rather than lament the severe stutter that limited his ability to speak with all but a few friends as a child, Ted once wrote that his handicap gave him a distinct advantage. “Words are spoken at considerable cost to me, so a great value is placed on each one. That has had some effect on me as a writer. As a child, since I couldn’t talk to people, I became close to animals. I became an observer, and in all my books, witnessing things is what counts.” The author of twenty-five books, twelve short stories, and more than one hundred essays, Ted has literally witnessed the world. He has enlightened readers about the exquisiteness of nature from the Louisiana bayou to Antarctica, life as a traveling circus hand, famine in Africa, the seedy side of prize fighting, and even his years of temporary blindness. He just published his sixth novel, In the Country of the Blind, which he began in 1992, written as always on his manual typewriter. Ted attended NCCS from fourth through ninth grades. In addition to his stammer, his vision difficulties posed challenges academically and on the baseball field. He found his athletic calling as a left guard on the NCCS varsity football team with his signature moves, “tip upside down in blocking” and “tackle low.” After graduating from Deerfield Academy (’50), Ted went to Harvard (’54), where he roomed with three of his NCCS classmates. He spent two college summers as a cage hand with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which led to his first novel, Cat Man, published when he was twentythree. He wrote four more novels and then turned to nonfiction, prompting John Updike to call Ted “the best essayist of my generation.” He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982 and received the NCCS Alumni Award in 2010. In addition to travel and writing, Ted has taught at ten different colleges, including Brown, Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, and for, eighteen years, at Bennington College in Vermont, where he spends six months of the year in a cabin without electricity. During the winter months, Ted lives in Martha’s Vineyard and visits in New York with his daughter and two grandchildren. Facing loss of vision again, Ted said his success has far surpassed his expectations. “If a soothsayer told me when I was eighteen that I would publish twenty-five books, I wouldn’t have just been in seventh heaven, I would have been in seventeenth heaven. I’ve fulfilled my dreams.”

“Words are spoken at considerable cost to me, so a great value is placed on each one.”

Joan Dominick O’Brien ’53 Jonathan B. O’Brien ’53

“You have to love kids. Even the naughty boys.”

The remarkable union of Joan and Jon O’Brien began with their first date in seventh grade, decades before students at St. Andrew’s School would come to know and admire them as Mr. and Mrs. Headmaster. Jon was the new city kid at NCCS when he squired a very nervous Joan Dominick out on the town—with his older brother Don driving. Joan was asked to name her favorite baseball team and answered the Brooklyn Dodgers—“of course.” The O’Brien boys approved. Said Joan: “The rest, as they say, is history.” That history is a sixty-five-year partnership in marriage, parenting, and academics, including twenty years at St. Andrew’s with Jon as headmaster and Joan as the associate director of admissions at the Delaware boarding school. Respected as a dynamic and innovative leader who still taught tenth-grade English each year, Jon called being a headmaster “the greatest job in the world.” Their home allowed Joan unprecedented flexibility in admissions. Said Jon: “She always over-enrolled. She could never say no, so some years we had five or six students living with us in our house.” When the couple accepted the NCCS Alumni Award in 1998, Jon urged the students not to measure success by money but rather to “do something with your lives that matters and that you enjoy.” He cited his decision to quit his job as an attorney to become an educator. “It was the happiest thing I’ve ever done.” Joan and Jon remained a duo through secondary school, Westover School, and Hotchkiss, respectively. They were married in 1958 after their sophomore year at college (Smith and Williams). Jon graduated from Williams in 1960 and Columbia Law School three years later. Disillusioned with the law, Jon met with the head of the Westminster School about a teaching and coaching job in 1966 and took it on the spot. The O’Briens became dorm parents and Joan joined the admissions staff. When Jon was offered the St. Andrew’s position eleven years later, the only condition imposed by the Board was that Joan continue her admissions work at St. Andrew’s. For the next twenty years, serving as surrogate parents to so many students was challenging at times, but great fun and rewarding. Said Joan, a mother of three daughters: “You have to love kids. Even the naughty boys.” Both Jon and Joan drew on the sense of community that teachers and students shared at NCCS in their careers. Said Joan: “My seven years at NCCS were probably the most important in my life for learning and friendships.” Said Jon: “Mine too. I met Joan.”

James Rogers III ’60 Nationally recognized architect Jim Rogers has left an imprint on every building on the NCCS campus over the last twenty-five years. His multiple designs had a singular goal: to create ideal spaces for learning. For projects ranging from the design of the Thacher Building to the sweeping renovation of the Upper School, Jim drew on his professional expertise and personal understanding of NCCS’s approach to education. It was never about a flashy facade. “We’re focused on the quality of the interior of our buildings, rather than trying to create an aggressively eye-catching exterior. When I stand at the entrance of the Stevens Building and see the students, the gallery space, and the sun streaming in through the skylights, I think that’s one measure of the success of that building.” As the founder of his own architectural firm, Jim’s success stories include educational facilities, sports and recreational venues, private clubs, and corporate offices. In 1992, he was named a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, recognizing professional excellence reflected in his significant contributions to architecture and society on a national level. Jim attended NCCS for eleven years, and his family was integrally involved with the school. He recalls the supportive faculty, particularly the “wise and thoughtful” Ray Burnes. Jim then went to Exeter (’63) and received his undergraduate degree from Yale (’68), where he played No.1 on the varsity golf team as a junior and senior. He also studied at the University of London and graduated with a master’s in architecture from Columbia in 1973. He was a principal and founding partner of the award-winning firm Butler Rogers Baskett in 1979, opened a Connecticut office of that firm in 2002, and launched South Norwalk–based James G. Rogers Architects in 2009. The Rogers family influence on American architecture is far-reaching. Jim’s grandfather James Gamble Rogers was renowned for his design of the collegiate Gothic buildings on the Yale campus and at other universities, and two of his sons were prominent architects. Jim has remained an active alumnus at NCCS and Exeter, where he served on the Board of Trustees for sixteen years, including four as president. He also served for six years as a trustee of the National Association of Independent Schools. Jim has two daughters, Amy and Kate, and a son Jamie, who attended NCCS (‘02). Jim has also been a member of the Horizons National Board for seven years. He and his wife, Jayne, reside in Stamford and Morris Plains, New Jersey. When the expanded Stevens Building re-opened in 2007, it was lauded as the “greenest school” in Connecticut. For Jim, who advocated renovating the building rather than tearing it down, it was particularly gratifying to see former headmaster George Stevens at the ribbon-cutting. “I was glad we were able to preserve a big part of the Stevens Building.”

“I think that’s one measure of the success of that building.”

Virginia ‘Kip’ Macdonald Kegg Farrell ’46

“I’ve driven down all 348 roads and twenty-three square miles of New Canaan to do so.”

Photographer Kip Farrell has traveled every road in New Canaan, traipsed down dirt paths and over stone walls, in her mission to catalog and preserve the town’s historic barns. To Kip, the barns are more than just structures. “The barns are our history, a long-standing part of our heritage, and they deserve to be protected and preserved for future generations.” She has photographed more than two hundred barns and created a detailed map identifying and detailing the provenance of each one, including the thirty barns that have been demolished since she began her project in 1995. “I stood in the pouring rain one day and watched a yellow backhoe destroy a century-old barn that still smelled of animals and hay. I was just devastated. I decided to start counting barns. I’ve driven down all 348 roads and twenty-three square miles of New Canaan to do so.” Armed with her map and photos, Kip has successfully lobbied town officials to take steps to preserve historic barns through zoning and other permits and works with barn preservation groups nationally. She’s quick to note that the first two barns in her life were on her family’s property in Norwalk and at NCCS, which she attended from seventh through ninth grade, part of a graduating class of eleven girls and ten boys. There, she was introduced to two new subjects that became her favorites—French with Mme. Robert and shop, located in the one-hundredyear-old working dairy barn on campus. Her teachers at NCCS also introduced her to “quality of life in the classroom—manners, respect, and honesty.” Six years after she left NCCS to attend Miss Hall’s School, Kip married William Kegg Jr., from the NCCS class of 1942. One of the highlights of their 1952 honeymoon to Switzerland was a visit with their then-retired teacher, Mme. Robert, who was “so special to us.” They lived in Paris and New York and had three children before Bill passed away in 1965. Kip returned to college, graduating from Sarah Lawrence in 1976, the same year as her daughter. She remarried Mike Farrell in 1987 and returned to New Canaan, pursuing her interests in art, photography, and her barn project. She created a book of photographs titled Thank You, New Canaan. Kip has exhibited her photos at NCCS, the New Canaan Library, the Carriage Barn, and the New Canaan Historical Society. She hopes to complete her book The Barns of New Canaan, featuring the history of more than 175 barns, this year.

Ryan Oakes ’93 When Ryan Oakes received his first magic set for Christmas at age five, and later debuted his tricks at an NCCS talent show, magic was merely a hobby. But thanks to talent, mentors, and timing, Ryan is an acclaimed professional sleight-of-hand artist, magician, and mentalist who has performed across the U.S. and internationally, on television, and even at the Clinton White House. He has been described as “one of the hottest magicians working today.” When not dazzling his audiences, Ryan is equally committed to evolving as an artist and mentoring the next generation of magicians. “Although the magic world seems fully shrouded in mystery, it is a very open arms community if you express a legitimate interest in learning.” That first magic set led to magic camps, shows, and encouragement from elder statesmen of the craft who recognized his passion. Ryan was performing professionally at age ten—specializing in birthday parties—and in 1990 became the youngest person ever to win the Society of American Magician’s National Magic Competition, one of the highest honors in magic. He continued doing gigs through high school and college and planned to go into advertising and new media after graduating with a psychology degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000—just when the economic downturn hit. So he decided to commit to magic for a year and never looked back. Ryan is not a traditional top hat and cape magician, nor is he a glitzy Vegas-style performer. His is a unique brand of magic and mentalism with a signature style and sense of humor, and he primarily performs at corporate functions. His home base is Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and young son. And while “constantly trying to evolve” and change his act, Ryan is also looking to the future as a mentor and an entrepreneur. He is the consultant/ spokesman for his own line of magic sets under the Ideal toy brand, adding, “It’s nice to be able to help create the next generation of magicians.” Ryan attended NCCS from kindergarten through ninth grade and still feels “very connected” through his return visits and his mom, longtime school employee Patricia Oakes. He credits his NCCS teachers for instilling in him an “excitement about learning” and being tolerant when he practiced repetitive coin tricks under his desk during class. “Every once in a while I’d drop a half dollar coin and there would be a loud clunk. Even when I got caught, the teachers were encouraging.”

“Even when I got caught, the teachers were encouraging.”

Peter Prescott ’50

“Years were to pass before anyone offered me money to read a book again.”

Peter Prescott was a twelve-year-old NCCS student when his book critic father offered him $10 to read H. G. Wells’ Outline of History, a two-volume, 1,103-page tome. “I never collected. It seemed a lot of money when I began, but by page 43 it seemed nowhere near enough,” he wrote in his book Never in Doubt. “I think I was right, but years were to pass before anyone offered me money to read a book again.” Bumpy start notwithstanding, Peter became a leading book critic of his generation, penning a weekly review for Newsweek for twenty years. He was also an accomplished memoirist and investigative journalist before his death at age sixty-eight in 2004. The son of New York Times book critic Orville Prescott, Peter was born in New York City and attended NCCS when his family moved to New Canaan. He mined his next academic experiences for two books. Peter’s years at Choate were the basis of his 1970 memoir, A World of Our Own: Notes on Life and Learning in a Boys’ Preparatory School. In 1974, he wrote about his freshman year of college in A Darkening Green: Notes on Harvard, the 1950s and the End of Innocence. After Harvard, Peter studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and began his literary career as an editor at E. P. Dutton in New York. He reviewed books for Women’s Wear Daily, Look, and then for Newsweek for two decades. In 1981, Peter published The Child Savers: Juvenile Justice Observed, a detailed and disturbing inside look at the legal, ethical, financial, and functional chaos of the juvenile justice system of New York City. He spent months observing the daily agonies of the family court and was honored with the 1982 Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award. Six years later, Peter won the prestigious George Polk Award for criticism. Peter was also president of the Author’s League Fund, a national charity that supports indigent writers, and taught writing seminars at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. In his 1986 book, Never in Doubt: Critical Essays on American Books, 1972– 1985, Peter defined his role as a book critic. He did not consider himself a literary critic who examined books “applying great labors to narrow areas,” nor a book reviewer who was “content to describe a book’s contents.” “Somewhere in between, the fellow I call the book critic plies his trade. . . . Most important, he demonstrates how a book works, or why it doesn’t.” Peter was survived by his wife, Anne, his two children, NCCS alums David (’75) and Antonia (’79), and three grandchildren.

Allison Kessler Vear ’00 Allison Kessler is a powerful and positive force of nature—a rehabilitation doctor undaunted by a ski accident at age fifteen that left her paralyzed from the waist down. “I try to lead by example rather than telling people I know what they’re going through. And that to me is the point. It’s more showing them it doesn’t matter if you have a physical limitation. If there is something you are passionate about, whatever it is, we can help you do it.” She has turned her passion to help others recover into reality by returning to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC), where she underwent rehab in 2001. When Allison went back to Choate Rosemary Hall in a wheelchair after the accident, the talented, active athlete who loved lacrosse was told the school would waive its sports requirement for her. “I said that’s not acceptable. You just pick a new sport.” She became the coxswain for the Choate women’s crew team and continued to call the strokes for the heavyweight men’s team when she attended Harvard and later for club teams. And it was through the Lincoln Park Boat Club in Chicago that Allison met Benjamin Vear, a tech consultant and entrepreneur, whom she married in 2014. Following her 2007 graduation from Harvard, the biology major earned a master’s degree at the London School of Economics, studying biomedicine and society. She returned to Chicago for Northwestern University medical school and to RIC for her residency. Both her parents are physicians—her father a neurologist who shifted the focus of his research to spinal cord regeneration after Allison’s accident. Allison cites her mother—who had a solo OB/GYN practice “and delivered half my Country School classmates”— as an inspirational role model as a strong woman in medicine and a mother. Allison attended NCCS from kindergarten through eighth grade on the heels of three older brothers, all four skilled at catching frogs at the Winter Club pond for the Frogtown Fair. She recalls eagerly awaiting her turn to be part of the Medieval Faire—she studied Eleanor of Aquitaine—and building a life-sized narwhal in the parking lot after the Nantucket trip. “I remember learning across multiple environments.” She is committed to continued learning during her spinal cord injury fellowship next year and listening to her patients. “I want them to know I hear them. I know it isn’t easy, and it will be an ongoing struggle. Being a confident, good doctor is the way to lead them.”

“I try to lead by example rather than telling people I know what they’re going through.”

Diane Monson ’51

“I’ve seen changes at every school I attended, and at various college campuses where I taught.”

As a student and a college professor, Diane Monson has witnessed sweeping changes in coeducation and opportunities for women. When she attended NCCS from seventh through ninth grades, the boys and girls had separate homerooms and academic classes. The girls studied French, the boys took Latin. She went on to the all-girls independent school Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, before it merged with all-boys Choate and relocated to Wallingford, Connecticut. And she received her undergraduate degree in 1958 from Radcliffe, when it was an all-women’s college taught by Harvard faculty. “I’ve seen changes at every school I attended, and at various college campuses where I taught. In time these same-sex educational institutions could not make their payroll until they became coeducational.” When Diane graduated from Radcliffe, she chose not to follow the typical path of becoming “a secretary, a nurse, or getting married.” She attended New York University, receiving a master’s degree in education and then her PhD in political science in 1963. She commenced a lengthy career as a teacher and a scholar, proudly noting that she was the only female professor in the political science department during a four-year teaching tour at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Diane has taught classes at Connecticut College, Briarcliff, Hofstra, and Manhattanville. She has also been a visiting scholar at Columbia University School of Law and a postdoctoral research fellow at Yale. Diane’s interests in education and government stemmed from her NCCS experience. She highly valued every teacher at Country School, especially Headmaster Henry Welles and his wife, Josephine, who had returned from a missionary trip to China. Mr. Welles was “a commanding, kind influence” and Mrs. Welles was memorable as a teacher of a nondenominational Bible class that had a “humanistic value to it.” She still has her King James Bible from that class. Diane stepped back from academics in the 1980s to be a full-time caregiver for her aging parents, which she called “the most noble thing I ever did.” She has continued her passion for music, both as an organist at a church in Scarsdale, New York, and as a member of the West Point Community Choir, which sings with the Cadet Choir. Diane re-established her NCCS connections in 1991, joining the Alumni Council and continuing to serve as an involved member and earning the designation of member emeritus. “I’ve been on the Alumni Council forever—and joyfully so.”

Matthew Earl Jones ’72 Matthew Earl Jones tried his hand as a Madison Avenue ad exec, an actor, a model, and a recording artist before he found his place in the entertainment industry. And unlike his legendary father and half-brother who commanded both stage and screen, Matthew’s place was behind the camera. “I started at the bottom as a set production assistant in Los Angeles, sweeping the stages and hauling equipment. If there was a dirty job that someone needed to do, it usually fell to me.” The dirty jobs led to a thirty-year career as a television, film, and commercial producer with such talent as Leonardo DiCaprio and Queen Latifah and his current project—a documentary on his late father, the pioneering actor Robert Earl Jones. His production experience also led Matthew to change the focus of the nonprofit organization his father founded in 1983, to assist women and minorities producing plays. With the blessing of his older half-brother James Earl Jones, Matthew took over in 2004 as executive director and renamed the foundation the Earl Jones Institute for Film and Television. The goal is to create and support cultural diversity in film, TV, and digital media by recruiting and training young minorities and women for production careers. “I’m the guy who watches the credits roll, and the cast takes a half of a second and the rest of the crew is huge. That’s where the job opportunities are. Tech allows young people to be creative and have a steady career.” Matthew learned the importance of a first job opportunity when NCCS headmaster Henry Welles hired his mother, Jumelle, to teach kindergarten in 1961. She had been an apprentice for a year and was finishing her college degree. “It was groundbreaking at the time. My mom was the first African American teacher at the school.” As a faculty kid from Beginners through ninth grade, but one of the very few students of color, Matthew recalls NCCS as a “tight-knit community. Despite the lack of diversity, I always felt very welcome. It helped that my mother was loved and lots of classmates had her as a teacher. The world was not as accepting.” After NCCS, Matthew graduated from New Canaan High School (’75) and Dartmouth (’79). Today he divides his time between Los Angeles and Phoenix, where his nine-year-old daughter lives. In addition to the institute, his current focus is the documentary on his father’s pioneering acting career. “It will be a labor of love.”

“It was groundbreaking at the time.”

Ned Rimer ’76

“How do you make things better? How do folks get engaged in their own destiny?”

It had been forty years since Ned Rimer dusted off his NCCS eighth-grade capstone project, a photographic essay chronicling the lives of two Fairfield County families of different races and socioeconomic circumstances. He was prompted to review his work and one-page feedback from his English teacher Mrs. Stoddard when his daughter undertook her own eighth-grade capstone project last year. And it underscored the “profound impact” that assignment had made on his thinking and career path since 1975. “These families generously let me into their lives, and I tried to capture it visually. In doing so, I learned so much about people and the life circumstances they are born into or find themselves in. It gave me a real sense of confidence as a student to explore challenging issues.” As an educator and social entrepreneur, Ned continues to tackle tough issues. After NCCS, he went to St. George’s School and then to the University of Vermont (’83), where he volunteered as an EMT crew chief of the UVM Rescue Squad. He worked in education and international health in Washington for five years and then spent four years teaching at an agricultural college in Honduras, where he reflected on that 1975 assignment. “We’re born into circumstances. How do you make things better? How do folks get engaged in their own destiny?” Ned sought to answer those questions back in the States. In 1995, he and his college roommate founded the nonprofit Citizens Schools in Boston, aimed at educating middle-school children in low-income communities through hands-on apprenticeships. Ned taught first aid in the trial term and served as managing director for thirteen years. Today Citizens Schools operates more than thirty schools in seven states. Ned also earned his MBA from Boston University in 1995 and his master’s in education from Harvard three years later. He worked in both for-profit and community healthcare and joined the BU faculty. Today he directs the health sector management program at BU’s Questrom School of Business. “I’m passionate about education. I’m passionate about healthcare. This role allows me to pursue both and help educate leaders for mission-driven organizations.” The role still allows him time to discuss school work and life with his daughter and son and wife, Katie, an ordained Episcopal minister and director of spiritual care at a Boston area hospital, and to email Mrs. Stoddard about his project, forty years later.

Hedrick Smith ’47 In his award-winning, six-decade career in journalism, Hedrick Smith has been on the front lines of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Middle East conflict, the Cold War, and six presidential administrations and has authored best sellers on diplomacy from both Moscow and Washington. Today his attention is on the homefront, reporting on issues that are threatening the American dream and, equally important, identifying the individuals and groups who are confronting those socioeconomic problems and working out solutions. The intrepid reporter is once again crisscrossing the nation to promote his new effort, articulated on the website reclaimtheamericandream.org, with the goal of mobilizing the middle class to generate change. “It’s up to us.” Born in Scotland, Hedrick moved to the U.S. at age six. He remembers his seventh through ninth grade years at NCCS as impactful. “It wasn’t just a classroom or the business of education. It was a creative process of imbuing curiosity and excitement about the adventure of learning.” He attended (and ran the student newspapers) at the Choate School and Williams College, served in the U.S. Air Force for three years, joined United Press International, and in 1962 began his twenty-six-year-career at the New York Times. In 1971, as chief diplomatic correspondent, he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize–winning team that produced the Pentagon Papers. Three years later, Hedrick won a second Pulitzer for international reporting. His book The Russians, based on his experience as the Times’s Moscow bureau chief, was a No. 1 best seller translated into sixteen languages. His next book, The Power Game: How Washington Works, was another best seller and required reading inside the Beltway. In 1989, Hedrick moved from print to television documentaries, producing prime-time specials and miniseries for PBS on such varied topics as terrorism, educational reform, healthcare, teen violence, and jazz greats Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck. Two of his Frontline programs won Emmy Awards, and the documentary form allowed him to not just report on problems but to delve into solutions. His PBS reporting opened the way to his 2012 book, Who Stole the American Dream?, which was hailed by critics as a sweeping, authoritative analysis of political and economic trends that undermined the middle class. It also served as the springboard for his ten-step manifesto for reclaiming that dream. “Curiosity is the great driver. Discovery is the great adventure.” When not traveling and writing, Hedrick lives in Washington with his artist wife, Susan Vox, hosting visits from four kids, two stepchildren, and eight grandchildren. He received the NCCS Alumni Award in 1999.

“Curiosity is the great driver. Discovery is the great adventure.”

Byron Meinerth ’02

“Talent doesn’t mean anything without hard work and sweat.”

Byron Meinerth’s commitment to renewable energy and clean transportation predates his current role as a global supply analyst for Tesla Motors, the innovative electric car manufacturer. It started with a bicycle, specifically the BMX GT Raider that was his goto mode of transport and healthy escape during his adolescent years at NCCS. Cycling has continued to play a role in his work and travels through Southeast Asia, Spain, South America, and Tanzania. “Biking is something I’ve always been passionate about, first as a teenager looking for an outlet to vent my energy and frustrations, and now as I think about sustainable transportation and minimizing our carbon footprint.” Byron came to NCCS as a fifth grader and credits the faculty for encouraging students to challenge themselves. When one Upper School teacher told Byron he wasn’t working up to his potential, “It really hit me. It was a very positive moment, one that I always come back to. We learned that talent doesn’t mean anything without hard work and sweat. Your effort counts for so much.” After NCCS, Byron went to the Hill School (’05) and majored in Spanish and international studies at Colby (’09). During summers he led teenagers on Overland Travel study, hiking, and biking trips across the U.S. and overseas. When two of his postcollege graduation plans didn’t pan out, Byron’s dad advised him to “figure out a way to get yourself to East Asia.” Byron took a position teaching English in China and thought he might stay six months. A year later he enrolled in the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, a graduate program jointly administered by Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University, which is located in the east China region. He earned his master’s degree in international economics in 2014 and became proficient in Chinese. Byron began zeroing in on renewable energy in 2011 and knew he wanted to pursue a career at Tesla after graduate school. He joined the company in 2014 as an inside sales adviser at its Silicon Valley headquarters and moved to the global supply analysis team in 2015. Admitting that the global supply chain doesn’t sound very sexy, it is an important nexus in delivering a quality product at the right price. He looks forward to personally recommitting to renewable transportation in late 2016 when his office moves and he can safely ride his bike to work.

Alison Mleczko Griswold ’90 AJ Mleczko Griswold was six when she informed her dad she wanted to play ice hockey as well as figure skate, so he rummaged around the New Canaan Winter Club lost-and-found to outfit her for the game. Thirty-four years, two Olympic medals, one collegiate championship, and four children later, she still shares the same passion for hockey. She and her husband, Jason Griswold, even have a rink in their yard in Concord, Massachusetts. As a parent, a coach, a part-time NBC commentator, and a board member of the USA Hockey Foundation, her emphasis now is on strengthening the game at the grassroots level. While others focus on interscholastic and professional hockey, she’s all about developing eager youngsters. “We’ve got to get kids playing hockey and loving it. That’s where my passion lies.” AJ and her two siblings were Winter Club rink (and pond) rats during her eleven years at NCCS, where she was the first girl on boys’ varsity hockey and the coach was her aforementioned dad, Tom Mleczko, a school science teacher and coach for twenty-two years. The happy “fac brat” headed to Taft and then to Harvard, where she took two years off to train with the national team for the first Olympics to include women’s ice hockey. It paid off. Team USA won the gold medal at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, and she returned to Harvard to set scoring records and lead the Crimson to the 1999 NCAA championship. She was also named the 1999 USA Hockey Player of the Year, among other honors, and added a silver medal to her collection in the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. She retired from competition to marry Jason and start a family but stayed involved with hockey, chairing an annual fundraiser for the nonprofit Nantucket Ice Rink for ten years, coaching, and serving on the board of USA Hockey. In 2006, she signed on with NBC as a part-time commentator for the Olympics and has continued honing her skills behind the microphone in the last three winter games. But her first priority is coaching. “I’m on the ice four nights a week during the winter season. It’s fun. It’s exhausting. It’s the perfect way to give back.” As a former Olympian and a parent, she stresses the importance of children being well-rounded athletically and socially—and not playing one sport exclusively twelve months a year or feeling pressured to succeed. She keeps her gold medal handy for occasions such as her 1999 visit back to NCCS and always tells her young audiences she didn’t play hockey to compete in the Olympics. “I did it because I loved it.”

“I did it because I loved it.”

Neil Nair ’04

“I thought, ‘This is crazy—I’d never been in a situation like this.’”

Neil Nair vividly remembers the second day of seventh grade when terrorists launched the September 11th attacks on America. “I was in Miss Friborg’s class when we got called to an emergency meeting of the Upper School. I remember later that day watching the TV footage of people running away from the burning World Trade Center tower and the first responders running in. There was no fear, which I respected.” For Neil, that moment added clarity to his future goals. “The sense of community at NCCS always made me want to pursue a profession where I could give back to my community. The events of 9/11 played a huge part in my decision to want to really go out there and provide hands-on help for people as a first responder, not just show up for a job.” As a New Canaan High School senior contemplating becoming a police officer or firefighter, Neil decided to get hands-on experience as a volunteer emergency medical technician. He passed the rigorous EMT exam and joined the New Canaan Volunteer Ambulance Corps. “It was a learning curve in medicine and public safety 101.” Neil attended college in Florida for three years and returned to Connecticut to take classes at the University of Connecticut and work fulltime as a paid EMT in New Haven, which presented “a whole new learning curve.” “It was culture shock. My first night there was a shooting in the projects over a drug deal. When we arrived there was a police officer in the stairwell with his gun drawn. I thought, ‘This is crazy—I’d never been in a situation like this.’ After five years it became the norm.” While an EMT, Neil also volunteered with the New Canaan Fire Department for five years. Neil is currently working for a private EMS company in Stamford and completing his degree in psychology. He is actively pursuing a career in law enforcement, with the ultimate goal of working on a federal or city anti-gang violence task force. “My work in New Haven has motivated me even more to achieve my goal to be in law enforcement, especially after seeing first hand the effects of gang violence and how gangs can manipulate kids to do some horrible things.” The sense of community Neil felt at NCCS remains strong. “My Country School classmates are still my best friends and will be at my wedding in October 2016.”

Patricia Lawrence Gates Lynch Ewell ’41 To her millions of radio listeners worldwide, Pat Gates was the popular host of the Voice of America’s Breakfast Show for twenty-five years. Patricia Lawrence Gates Lynch Ewell was also a poet, actress, journalist, disc jockey, author, press secretary to First Lady Pat Nixon, and one of the first women named as an ambassador by the United States. She was an Army wife, divorced once and widowed twice, and a mother of two and a grandmother. Pat passed away at age eighty-five in 2011, leaving a memorable legacy as a career woman way ahead of her time, chronicled in her 2008 autobiography Thanks for Listening: High Adventures in Journalism and Diplomacy. Addressing NCCS students after she received the 2009 Alumni Award, she encouraged them to “always be ready for the next adventure” and offered a timely example of why “not to take no for an answer.” She was Pat Lawrence, an NCCS eighth grader, when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. She wrote a poem titled “War” and hand delivered it to the desk of the editor of the New Canaan Advertiser. When told the newspaper didn’t publish poetry, she asked him to please read her work. He did and agreed to publish it. “That’s how it all began,” she said. In her late teens, she pursued acting and then married West Point graduate Ink Gates. They had two children and were posted nationally and in Europe. In the late 1950s, she launched her disc jockey career as Pat Gates, spinning tunes on a suburban Washington, D.C., AM station and interviewing celebrities such as Fred Astaire. When her husband was dispatched to Iran, she took the kids to Munich and worked as a reporter for NBC and the Armed Forces Network. In 1962, she joined the federally sponsored Voice of America and soon began her first stint as co-host of the news-and-interview Breakfast Show, striking an immediate rapport with fans. In 1969, she served as press aide to First Lady Pat Nixon and accompanied the president and Mrs. Nixon to Vietnam and other countries around the world on Air Force One. Pat then returned to the VOA Breakfast Show. In 1986, President Reagan named her U.S. ambassador to Madagascar, one of ten women at that time to hold that top diplomatic post. Three years later she was back in D.C. and remained active in radio and diplomacy groups until her passing. On the VOA’s Breakfast Show, Pat was known for her sign-off at the end of each program: “If you meet someone without a smile, give him one of yours”—a simple act of kindness she accomplished on air for decades.

“If you meet someone without a smile, give him one of yours.”

Judith Erdmann Makrianes ’45 John F. Erdmann II ’47 John ‘Jeff’ Erdmann III ’78

“You get so much more than you give.”

Judy Erdmann Makrianes, John Erdmann, and Jeff Erdmann are linked by more than a last name. They share a commitment to volunteerism in the truest sense—quietly and consistently devoting time and energy to people in need and places that strengthen a community. Judy spoke for her brother and nephew when she said volunteering was never work and was its own reward. “As so many have said, you get so much more than you give.” Her turf was New York City. To the young boys in East Harlem, she was their “Mrs. Mak,” a reassuring adult who never let them down. To the emaciated AIDS patients at Bellevue Hospital, she was Judy, a cancer survivor and confidante who wasn’t afraid to hold their hand. New York City was home until her family moved to New Canaan and she enrolled in NCCS as a sixth grader. The school was a “small, tightly knit community” during World War II, and students would walk everywhere to collect scrap metal for the war effort. After NCCS, she went to Abbott Academy, Bennington College, and received her MA in early childhood education from Columbia Teacher’s College. She taught school in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, married Jim Makrianes, a widower with four children, and they had a daughter five years later. Once the five children were in school, Judy decided to volunteer at the Boys Club of New York. “I started out one day a week, then two, then four days a week for thirty-one years. It was so important for the boys to have someone constant in their lives. It made it more comfortable for them to talk with me. Many had never been listened to nor asked for their opinions. I spoke with them, I listened to them, and I encouraged them to express themselves.” In 1986, Judy expanded her outreach. Grateful to have survived a challenging medical crisis, she signed on to comfort AIDS patients at Bellevue. “I did that mornings at least once a week for nineteen years. The cultural, racial, and age differences melted away in the intimate ‘friendly visitor’ context.” Longevity and a passion for marine life are the hallmarks of John Erdmann’s equally impressive commitment to the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk. His retirement coincided with the 1988 opening of the then Maritime Center, so the avid fisherman enrolled in a five-week volunteer

training class. “I’ve always loved the water and the Long Island Sound, so I signed on.” Twenty-eight years and some 6,150 volunteer hours later, he is still on duty every Monday. Known as the “king of the touch tank,” John has coaxed countless reluctant youngsters to roll up their sleeves and put their hands in the water to feel the tickly feet of a sea star or the smooth skin of a gliding stingray. “That’s the essence of the place, watching the kids take sea creatures in their hands and learn. I’m still learning.” For John, volunteering was a given even when he was commuting to New York and raising three sons in New Canaan with his wife, Tanis. He was a mentor in the Norwalk School System, an auxiliary police officer, and a member of the Exchange Club. “It sounds corny, but I felt a responsibility to give back in exchange for what the community had given me.” John, who had long struggled with reading, came to NCCS in fourth grade. “Nothing fell through the cracks there. They detected the problem and got me to read.” He felt the teachers and the sports program emphasized the importance of community, teamwork, and resilience. He is also the proud patriarch of one of NCCS’s seven three-generation families, which includes his sons Jeff (’78), Greg (’80), and Rob (’82) and Jeff’s sons Thomas (‘10), Charlie (‘13), and Willie (‘20). After graduating from the Choate School (’50) and Colgate (’54), John served in the Air Force and received his MBA from Columbia in 1959. He became involved with Soundings magazine before spending several years teaching at the Buckley and Trinity Schools in New York City. Following that experience, he became a member of the New York Stock Exchange. After he retired from there many years later, he worked in real estate in New Canaan, while enjoying his many volunteer activities. He does not plan on relinquishing his current post at the Maritime shark and ray pool any time soon. “It’s all about the kids and the future.”

“It sounds corny, but I felt a responsibility to give back.”

As a kid, Jeff Erdmann remembers his father putting on his auxiliary police officer’s uniform and going on night patrol after a long workday in Manhattan. “My dad was a great role model. As a parent, I try to do the same and engage my three boys in volunteering.” Jeff, his wife, Barbara, and their three sons have focused on “helping young children in Norwalk—in our neighborhood—that don’t have the opportunities to participate in the education and activities that we were given.” With an emphasis on Norwalk children that are on free lunch programs, Jeff has expanded educational opportunities for children through a Maritime Aquarium summer camp, a year-round STEM-based science and technology class, and programs for the Boy Scouts of Norwalk, the Carver Community Center, and Horizons Student Enrichment. (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE)

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Another important part of the Erdmann family volunteer initiative is their support of the Open Door Shelter in South Norwalk. In addition to often serving meals and interacting with the residents of the shelter, Jeff has played a key role in securing funds from the state of Connecticut and others to build a new facility that will provide apartments, job training, and medical facilities to those in need. Jeff’s emphasis on educational opportunity for children stems from his experience. “I was dyslexic and struggled academically. The support I was given at Country School made it an incredible experience for me.” In tenth grade Jeff went to the Salisbury School (’81) and began his career with Merrill Lynch in 1985 right after graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University. Today he is consistently ranked as the firm’s leading financial advisor in the nation and heads a twenty-eight-member wealth management team in Greenwich. In addition to his father, Jeff counts NCCS headmaster George Stevens and English teacher Ben Bensen as important mentors. Every Thursday at 10 a.m. Jeff would meet with Mr. Stevens, pipe in hand and a cup of sharpened pencils on his desk, to go over his ninth-grade English paper. “He was the headmaster—helping me.” “In Mr. Bensen’s classroom, he never used the word test or quiz—it was always an opportunity. He taught us that everything is an opportunity. In life those are the simple things that carry you through.”

“My dad was a great role model.”

Willy Oppenheim ’01 Willy Oppenheim’s decision to forgo college until he felt certain his elite education could benefit others led to a defining moment in the fall of 2004 in India. He was an eighteen-year-old volunteer teaching Tibetan refugees and was “suddenly invigorated” by the realization that his relationships with local educators could be built into a greater, global good. The following year Willy founded Omprakash, a web-based nonprofit that creates transformative educational experiences by connecting grassroots social impact organizations around the world with an audience of volunteers, donors, and classrooms that can learn from and support their work. The beginnings were indeed humble—while living in a tent and teaching skiing in Colorado, Willy worked from a public computer to build an online database of Indian schools seeking foreign support. Today, the Omprakash network includes more than 150 grassroots social impact organizations in more than sixty countries, and the platform has helped these organizations connect with more than seventeen thousand volunteers and more than $5 million in funds since 2005. With Omprakash launched, Willy enrolled in Bowdoin College, majoring in religion, anthropology, and education and living in a tent all four years. In 2009, he was named a Rhodes Scholar representing the United States to study at the University of Oxford in England and is now completing his PhD in education. Today he’s an ardent advocate for learning, but it was a more rebellious Willy who decided in sixth grade that he didn’t want to “go right to college and be on an academic treadmill. I felt confined, trapped by this bubble of privilege. That inspired me to want to see and do other things.” As founder and executive director of Omprakash, the Seattle-based Willy travels the world creating liaisons, teaching, and fundraising. He is particularly proud of the organization’s new EdGE (Education through Global Engagement) program, which provides extensive online training and personalized mentorship to volunteers and has been accredited by schools across North America. “We want to be a leader in experiential global education.” The second of five “Opps” to graduate from NCCS, Willy said his years at Country School taught him the importance of community, hard work, and curiosity, and still allowed him time to be a kid and to play. When he returned to campus in 2015 to speak on a panel titled “The Art of Giving Back,” Willy exhorted the school community to make an intellectual and moral commitment to understanding the root causes of issues challenging our nation and the world. “It’s not enough to write a check.”

“I felt confined, trapped by this bubble of privilege.”

Jane Stoddard Williams ’72

“I would love to see us put ourselves out of business.”

Jane Williams believes too many children don’t have the opportunity to pursue the American dream “just by virtue of bad luck and the financial circumstances they are born into.” That belief has driven her more-than-two-decades-long commitment to the Horizons program in New Canaan and her current role as Board chair of Horizons National, expanding the academic and enrichment program across the country for low-income children. “It has been the philanthropic passion of my life and our lives as a family.” Her goal for Horizons? “I would love to see us put ourselves out of business.” She admits that is a “pretty lofty goal” but points to Horizons’ proven track record of transforming children’s lives through education and enrichment since it was founded at NCCS in 1964. A commitment to education runs in her family, going back two generations. Her mother, Pat Stoddard, joined the NCCS faculty in 1968, paving the way for Jane and her two brothers to attend on full scholarship. Jane was initially reluctant to transfer from West School and showed up on the first day of sixth grade “dressed inappropriately” with a purse, stockings, and lip gloss. “But there was zero transition once I got there. In a way even then I was aware Country School was protecting childhood.” For Jane, NCCS and family are “so blended together it’s hard to define where the influence of one stopped and the other started.” The faculty families were very close and created their own “middle class” in her grade. “It was our community. And it was such a gift to get to know teachers as people.” Following NCCS, Jane graduated from New Canaan High School (’75) and Duke University (’80), majoring in political science and Russian. She interned at the State Department and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace before embarking on a successful career in television and radio in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., New York, and Connecticut. When Jane and her NBC newscaster husband, Brian Williams, moved back to Connecticut in 1995, she renewed her involvement with Horizons. While their children Allison (’04) and Douglas (’06) were at NCCS, Jane chaired both the NCCS Horizons Board and the NCCS Board of Trustees. Jane always felt fortunate that both she and her siblings and her children had the opportunity to attend NCCS and to pay it forward with Horizons. “To see Horizons open up doors and unlock the American dream for other kids is just a joy.”

G. David Forney Jr. ’54 Dave Forney has had a distinguished scientific and industrial career. He not only designed groundbreaking communications products that were the basis of his small company’s commercial success, but he has also been a leader in theoretical research in information theory and digital communications. He credits NCCS for a strong start. “I’ve always felt that the most important school is the first one, because that’s where you get excited about learning.” He says that he will always be grateful for the full scholarship that he received from the school. He was proud that everybody knew his mom, “Mrs. Forney,” as the go-to person in the school’s front hall office. Dave felt lucky that his teachers and fellow students encouraged his intellectual interests: “I was always a brainy kid, and it was just fine to be a brain at the Country School.” Dave went on to Choate, and then enrolled in Princeton as an engineer, which he says was a “bit of a fluke,” given his broad interests. He graduated summa cum laude in 1961, winning the top prize in the Engineering School, and then continued to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a master’s degree (‘63) and doctorate (’65) in electrical engineering. After graduation, he joined Codex Corp., a small start-up company, where he was employee No. 13. His first project was to design and implement a coding system for NASA’s Pioneer satellites. In 1970–71, he designed the first modern “high-speed” (9,600 bits per second) telephone-line modems—a game changer for Codex and for data communications. Dave was vice president of research and development at Codex when it was acquired by Motorola in 1977, and he subsequently served in executive and technical positions as a vice president of Motorola until his retirement in 1999. He has taught graduate classes at both MIT and Stanford and since 1996 has been an adjunct professor at MIT. Dave was introduced to his second wife, Elizabeth Coxe, as a direct result of attending his 50th NCCS reunion in 2004. “I tell everyone: go to your reunion!” he says happily. He and Liz live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spend summers in Westport, Massachusetts, welcoming visits from his three children and nine grandchildren. Dave has received numerous national and international awards. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. In 2016, he received the Medal of Honor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the highest award of this fourhundred-thousand-member global professional society. Finally, and not least, he says that he has been very touched to receive the 2016 NCCS Alumni Award.

“I was always a brainy kid, and it was just fine to be a brain at the Country School.”

Lucy Adams Billings ’63

“It was a time of great change.”

As a lawyer and a jurist, Lucy Adams Billings has been at the forefront of groundbreaking civil rights cases impacting the health and welfare of generations of New Yorkers. When Lucy entered law school in 1970, there was no playbook for crusading women attorneys. For those who have followed, her career is that playbook. Today, Lucy is an elected New York State Supreme Court justice. In her eighteen years on the bench, she has presided over complex, high-profile cases on issues ranging from recognition of same-sex marriages to workers’ rights. During her twenty-five years as a civil rights lawyer, she was a trailblazing advocate for disenfranchised and minority groups and led the effort to protect New York City’s children from lead paint poisoning. Lucy attended NCCS for eleven years, riding the bus with her older brothers Tom (‘54) and Tag (‘56). At the time, girls were treated reasonably equally in academics and in sports, and all were encouraged to think beyond the campus and their world. “There was an emphasis on service to community and the needy.” She went on to Miss Hall’s School, graduated from Smith College, and enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley Law School. “It was a time of great change.” Her first year, women comprised only 15 percent of the class, and that number doubled by the time she graduated in 1973. In her Manhattan courtroom, she sees an equal number of women lawyers as men approaching her bench but notes there is less gender parity elsewhere. She married John Billings, her classmate at Berkeley. After graduation, she was a legal aid attorney in Vermont and then in John’s home state, Utah, until they moved to New York, where John is now a professor at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Lucy welcomed the opportunity to move closer to home and joined Bronx Legal Services as director of litigation. Four years later she became staff counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union national headquarters and continued to fight for equal justice for those who couldn’t afford legal representation. She was first elected to the New York bench in 1997 and continues to draw on her experiences to adjudicate the law fairly and with compassion. Lucy also found time to umpire and coach youth soccer and softball teams. When asked what she considered her most important accomplishment, she didn’t cite any precedent-setting decision but rather her daughter Marion Billings, now a pediatric resident at NYU Medical Center, “even though the accomplishment is not truly mine; it is hers.”

Renee Oni Brown ’97 If asked, Renee Brown would enjoy expressing herself through dance as much as spoken communication any day. “When I dance, I feel like I’m truly myself. When I move, I feel I can express things that words never could.” Renee is a dancer, choreographer, actress, and dance teacher with experience in many genres. She is also the artistic director of MONIFA, a production company created to form theatrical presentations inspired by Afro-Caribbean culture and history. Her family immigrated from Jamaica to Stamford when Renee was four. “My mom put me in my first ballet class when I was five and I haven’t stopped since.” Renee’s initial training was grounded in ballet, jazz, and tap until the Connecticut Ballet Theater’s Dance Exposure Project introduced students to modern, West African, and Afro-Brazilian dance. “As a child it was so important to have this window opened into other forms of dance.” The other turning point in Renee’s childhood was joining the Horizons Student Enrichment program in third grade. “It was fantastic, a beautiful program with great vision and a big heart. The teachers showed they really cared about the students and I looked forward to it every summer.” Through Horizons Renee was offered a scholarship to attend NCCS in seventh grade. “There was definitely a little bit of culture shock going from public school in Stamford to private school in New Canaan,” but she found the community “warm and welcoming.” Renee, then known as Oni, went on to Miss Porter’s School (’00) and Tufts University (’05) and after graduation stayed in Paris for a year to start a small dance company. She detoured to Costa Rica to dance and teach before returning to Connecticut, studying dance and working at Horizons as a program associate for two years. She moved to New York in 2008 “to pursue this passion of mine full-time.” Since then, she has danced and acted in many venues and off-Broadway. Through a Kickstarter fundraising campaign and her participation in the Field’s Emerging Artist Residency Program, Renee produced a solo AfroCaribbean dance and drumming performance. Renee also just completed choreographing a creative short film titled Her Song. While the film is being submitted to festivals, Renee is teaching dance in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with the American Repertory Ballet and working on her “next inspiring idea.” “Dance is incredibly freeing and therapeutic. Dance is probably the one love that will be with me for my entire life, and if there is anything after that I bet I’d be dancing too.”

“When I dance, I feel like I’m truly myself.”

Roderick Gander ’45

“This is serious business. Everything I do is based on social justice.”

Rod Gander referred to himself as an “academic underachiever” who attempted careers in banking and playwriting before finally landing a $27.50-a-week job on the clip desk at Newsweek in 1954. It was the beginning of an impressive twenty-six-year career that saw Rod rise from reporter to news editor and then chief of correspondents. Equally impactful were his second and third acts as the president of a small New England college and a respected member of the Vermont State Senate. Rod grew up in Wilton and graduated from NCCS in 1945. He went to Andover (’48) and Hamilton College (’52), which recognized him with an honorary doctor of laws thirty-seven years later. At the 1989 ceremony, Rod was introduced as a hockey goalie “whose netminding verged on perfection” and the “least likely to become a college president.” At Newsweek, he was known as the “solid and muscular right arm” of the magazine during the tumultuous 1960s and ‘70s. In his fifteen-year role as chief of correspondents, Rod commanded a network of sixty-eight reporters in twenty-five bureaus across the world. He was also instrumental in creating more opportunities for women and minorities at the magazine. In 1980, Rod was ready for a new challenge and was offered the presidency at Marlboro College, a near-bankrupt institution in southern Vermont with an enrollment that had dwindled to two hundred students. Rod launched the school’s first capital campaign and introduced new development programs and aggressive recruitment strategies. He told the faculty, “keep teaching, keep working, don’t worry”—he would solve the financial crisis without jeopardizing Marlboro’s unique tutorial and town meeting model. By the time he retired in 1996, the school was financially secure, enrollment was on the rise, and Marlboro had earned a reputation as an innovative small liberal arts school. After a year of fishing and “keeping technology at bay by typing on my old Remington,” Rod grew restless in retirement and decided to run for the Vermont State Senate. As a seventy-two-year-old freshman senator, Rod said in a newspaper interview that he could be “unabashedly liberal” without worrying about legislative votes impeding his future career plans. “This is serious business. Everything I do is based on social justice.” Failing health forced Rod to retire in 2006, and he was hailed as the “social conscience of the senate.” He passed away the following year at age seventy-six, following a four-year battle with lung cancer. Rod was survived by his wife, Isabelle, three children, and five grandchildren.

Nicholas Britell ’96 For Nicholas Britell, a highly acclaimed composer, producer, and pianist, writing a film score means immersing himself in the moment. “Every movie is like a different assignment in a way, where you get to inhabit a totally different world and bring a totally different style and mindset and do different research. Every movie is its own story that you have to start from scratch.” When he wrote and researched the songs and on-camera music for the 2014 Academy Award Best Picture 12 Years a Slave, that world was the pre– Civil War South. In the opening scene, he had to re-imagine and re-create the spiritual music and lyrics the slaves would sing while chopping sugar cane in the fields. “I felt such a huge responsibility to get it right. It was an unforgettable experience.” Composing the complex soundtrack for last year’s The Big Short took him to yet another world, one of greed and frenzied trading as Wall Street careened toward its calamitous meltdown in 2008. “It was surreal.” Not surprisingly, his first musical inspiration was a film score. “I heard the theme from Chariots of Fire when I was five and went to the piano to try and figure out how to play it.” He began studying classical piano, studied at Juilliard’s Pre-College Division while at NCCS and during high school, toured with the instrumental hip-hop band Witness Protection Program during college, and even played in cocktail lounges while launching his career. Nicholas came to Country School from Buckley, an all-boys school in Manhattan, in seventh grade, when his family moved to Westport. “It was completely different—in a good way. It was the right time to change it up, and I had wonderful teachers.” He reversed his commute to the Hopkins School in New Haven for high school and graduated from Harvard (’04) Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in psychology. Nicholas scored his first film while still in college, and his impressive credits include features, documentaries, and projects with the Amoveo Company, a multimedia production company he co-founded. He was co-producer of the 2014 movie Whiplash, which won three Academy Awards, and he also helped record and produce songs for the soundtrack. Nicholas is currently working on several projects from his music studio in the Lincoln Center apartment he shares with his wife, professional cellist Kaitlin Sullivan. When tasked with writing the music for the dramatic ending of The Big Short—the massive global economic collapse—Nicholas returned to what he knew best: his classical piano roots. The resulting twelve-minute classical piano solo, “The Big Short Piano Suite,” is a hauntingly exquisite depiction of the world that day.

“I felt such a huge responsibility to get it right.”

Susan Haigh Carver ’51

“It was parental, in the nicest sense of the word.”

When Sue Carver returned to NCCS for her 50th reunion, warm memories of her happiest school years came flooding back. It was as if she had never left. She recalled the start of lifelong friendships, horse and chariot races on the front lawn, conversing in French with Mme. Robert, and enjoying the bus ride to and from Darien every day. She remembered Mr. Bean reading aloud the novella The Snow Goose—a moving tale about the regenerative power of love and friendship. “New Canaan Country School was very special. It was parental, in the nicest sense of the word. It was such a special place; it felt like home.” Sue attended Country School from fourth through ninth grades. As an only child, her classmates and school community were like an extended family. Five decades after her graduation, Sue still felt “the spirit and warmth of the school.” After NCCS, Sue attended the Ethel Walker School (’54) and Smith College. She met John Carver at a wedding in Darien in 1957, and she moved to San Francisco five days later. They stayed in touch, and when John moved from New York back to his native California, he tracked her down. He proposed after a double scorpion at the legendary Trader Vic’s in San Francisco, and they were married a year and a day after they met. The Carvers settled in the Bay Area, returned to Fairfield County for three years, then moved back to Hillsborough, California, for good in 1969. Sue and John raised three children—Thomas, Amy, and Jonathan—and became involved in both hands-on and philanthropic endeavors. After John’s retirement from the retailer the Gap, the couple decided to “invest in education” as a shared legacy. John was a trustee and benefactor of his alma mater, the Thacher School, in Ojai, California, founded by the grandfather of former NCCS head of school Nicholas Thacher. When the Carvers returned to NCCS for Sue’s reunion in 2001, Nick Thacher welcomed them back to the Ponus Ridge campus. It was a joyous return for Sue and left a lasting impression. In 2015, Sue and John announced their gift to NCCS for a new dining room and community space. It was the single largest gift in the school’s one-hundredyear history. For Sue and John, who have eight grandchildren, it was important to support children and a space “that touches everyone—students, faculty, staff, and, frequently, parents. We like that the space will support community building.”

Elizabeth Barratt-Brown ’74 Liz Barratt-Brown traces her environmental activism back to carefree days of catching frogs at the New Canaan Nature Center and measuring science plots and trees on the NCCS campus. Liz started her career with the National Resources Defense Council in 1981 after graduating from Brown University in its first class of environmental studies majors. “But my mom will say I was determined to fight for the environment when I was at Country School. The campus was my first outdoor ecology class. And there was a moral core to the school which left a lifelong impression on me.” Liz was schooled in Rome for tenth grade, graduated from Taft in 1977, and then Brown. After graduation she went to Washington, D.C., to work for the NRDC and for New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg, where she crafted the nation’s first community right-to-know act on toxic chemicals, called the Toxic Release Inventory. She came home six years later to earn her JD degree from Yale Law School in 1991, and returned to the NRDC, one of the nation’s largest and most effective environmental organizations. In her more than two decades there, she has applied her legal and policy expertise to critical national and global environmental problems. Seven years ago Liz launched the campaign to block the proposed $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline across America’s homeland, to draw attention to the risks of expanding our reliance on high-carbon tar sands oil. That effort culminated with President Obama’s 2015 executive order rejecting the pipeline permit as “not in the national interest.” Said the recipient of the NCCS 2013 Alumni Award: “The pipeline has literally become a line in the sand and has helped grow the climate movement in a way we would never have predicted. It has been an amazing rallying point for a diverse coalition ranging from Nobel laureates to student activists. It gives me great hope.” In 2012, she became a senior advisor to the NRDC, allowing her to spend more time with her husband, Bos Dewey, and their teenage son and daughter and as proprietor of Pedruxella Gran, their organic olive estate set in the mountains of Mallorca, Spain. The family relocates each summer to the centuries-old villa and sixhundred-acre property, working with student volunteers, hosting retreats and events, harvesting olives and organic vegetables, producing small batch extra virgin olive oil, and raising lambs. “To be able to be in nature again and to share it with others is the greatest luxury.”

“The campus was my first outdoor ecology class.”

Carl Brodnax ’76

“It was never about wins and losses for me.”

In his seventeen years coaching NCCS boys’ and girls’ varsity teams, Carl Brodnax had his own definition of a championship season. “It was never about wins and losses for me. It was about skill development and character development and being part of a team. It was about seeing the kids grow and improve.” Carl attended NCCS for ten years and returned in 1998 as a teacher and a coach, learning of the job opportunity at an Alumni Council meeting. In between he attended the Wooster School (‘79) and received his degree in physical education from Hampton University (’84). He spent thirteen years in sales support with Xerox and then taught for a year in Norwalk, just as his parents were retiring from the Norwalk and Stamford school systems. “It was great to be back at NCCS as a teacher but very strange to call the faculty members I so respected by their first names.” As a student, Carl was admittedly “the kid who couldn’t sit still” and lived for recess and team sports. “It didn’t matter what we were playing.” While some of the boys groused about Mrs. Perrine’s rhythms class, “I secretly loved it, the wooden hula hoops and all. She was one of the best.” Carl taught and coached both middle and upper schoolers, and his “big three” were the football, basketball, and lacrosse teams. He enjoyed the challenge of introducing fifth and sixth graders to new sports and working on skill development with the older students. “I don’t know what was better, playing as a student or coaching as a teacher.” Carl coached the children of his classmates, along with his three sons— Brendan, Cuyler (’11), and Cayden (’16). With Cayden heading off to the Salisbury School and Carl and wife, Stephanie, empty nesters for the first time, Carl left NCCS to pursue other opportunities in teaching physical education, coaching, refereeing, and emergency medical technician work. In the summer, he teaches at the Horizons Student Enrichment program at NCCS and teaches tennis throughout Fairfield and Westchester County. He volunteers with his fraternity at a homeless shelter and continues to mentor teenage boys. Looking back, Carl was particularly proud when five of his players were named senior captains of their respective high school football teams in 2015. They cited Coach Brodnax as a positive influence. “I was happy that they developed from boys into fine young men. It was special to think I contributed to that in any way. The de-emphasis on winning and losing made them think about how to contribute to their team and in turn become better leaders.”

Zachary Iscol ’94 Even as a kid, Zach Iscol knew he wanted to join the military. And after two combat tours in Iraq, he returned as a decorated Marine infantry officer equally determined to share the lessons of the horrors of war. His mission was defined: “All of us have a responsibility to live our lives for the people we lost in Iraq.” To that end, Zach has founded two organizations to assist returning veterans, worked to aid Iraqi refugees and translators who supported U.S. efforts, and wrote, filmed, and produced The Western Front, a riveting documentary on his experiences that premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. Zach retired from active duty in 2007 and struggled with what he had seen and done during the violent battle for Al Anbar Province in western Iraq. He postponed enrollment in the Kennedy School of Government and went back to Iraq with a flak helmet and video camera to try to make sense of it all. He learned that building alliances finally succeeded where violence and sheer force had failed. “If those lessons were lost, it all would have been for nothing,” he told NCCS students when he received the 2015 Alumni Award. In his ten years at NCCS, Zach told the assembly he was a “good but not great” student and generated laughter admitting he held the record for the most detentions (37) in one term from his French teacher. He credited his teachers who “made me feel special and gave me the confidence to pursue my own passion, to find my own purpose.” Through Exeter and Cornell, he continued to work toward his military career, and today his focus is on his fellow servicemen and women who all face the same reality he did: “When you get out, you’re hit with the fact that the rest of the world is not at war.” Zach is founder and CEO of Hire Purpose, an organization that offers personalized career guidance, job market analysis, industry networking, and job matching to veterans, military service members, and their spouses. He is also the executive director of the Headstrong Project, which provides support and treatment for veterans struggling with mental health issues associated with combat. He finds the work immensely rewarding and looks to continue to expand the services offered to veterans. In addition to running the two organizations and fundraising, Zach and his wife, Meredith Malling, recently welcomed their third child.

“All of us have a responsibility to live our lives for the people we lost in Iraq.”

Virginia Mahoney ’13

“Being kind is the most important thing we can do.”

Virginia Mahoney believes in the power of simple acts of kindness and is proud to sound a clarion call to spread that message. “Being kind is the most important thing we can do. That’s what my dad always said to my sister Jojo and me, and to everyone. It’s engraved in our minds.” Virginia and Jojo (’10) are co-directors of the B kind Foundation, which was established in 2014 in honor of their father, Bill Mahoney, who lost his battle with pancreatic cancer at age fifty-five. When friends gathered to celebrate Bill’s life, the family printed up bumper stickers with his initials, the years 1958–2013, and his credo “Be Kind.” Soon more and more supporters were requesting more and more bumper stickers, which then led to “Be Kind” t-shirts and water bottles and a realization for the girls and their mom, Alice. “We saw how much of an impact this simple message was having for people everywhere. So we created a foundation to carry on his legacy of always encouraging kindness. Now it’s worldwide.” The family was involved in the effort to redesign the logo to B kind, noting their dad would want the emphasis on the message, not himself. Led by the Mahoneys and a volunteer board, the foundation supports educational charities at home and war relief efforts around the world. Virginia’s role is that of “ambassador to kindness,” serving as liaison to schools and organizations starting B kind clubs. There are eleven clubs from Connecticut to California encouraging “simple acts of kindness” as well as outreach and fundraising. One such club is Grassroots Tennis and Education in Norwalk, where Virginia has volunteered as an academic tutor and tennis coach for innercity girls since ninth grade. The New Canaan Community Foundation named Virginia its 2015 Youth Rookie Volunteer of the Year for her work with Grassroots and B kind. She also started the B kind Club at St. Luke’s School, which she attended after her kindergarten through ninth grade years at NCCS. “I owe a lot to Country School in terms of building my character and exploring my creativity. It wasn’t all about perfect grades or homework. It was more about how you did your work and who you were.” Her next stop is joining her sister at Boston College, and establishing B kind on campus. “Of course I want to bring this with me throughout the rest of my life. The best reward for me is sparking engagement with other students and people. It’s so simple and you can really see people changing for the better.”

Peter C. Goldmark Jr. ’55 Peter Goldmark is best described as a dedicated public servant, accomplished executive, weekend poet, and in his words, a troublemaker. Peter has held high-ranking posts in government, philanthropic, news, and environmental organizations. In each role, he has been an articulate advocate for social change and innovation, and he continues to do so in the public arena. “I’ve been so lucky. I’ve had interesting jobs at interesting moments. I’ve never had a boring, non-relevant job.” It’s also an understatement from one of the architects of the deal that rescued New York City and State from bankruptcy in the 1970s, and who later became the first non-PhD to lead the estimable Rockefeller Foundation, where he served as president for ten years. Among other career highlights, Peter was chief of staff for New York mayor John Lindsay at age twenty-nine, Massachusetts cabinet secretary for human services at age thirty, head of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey from 1977 to 1985, chairman and CEO of the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate and Air Program. Peter’s first glimpse of a worldview was at NCCS, which he attended from fourth to ninth grade. He lived a short walk from campus with his mother and father, Peter Carl Goldmark Sr., who invented the first long-playing record and color television. “It was my first experience in a really challenging, focused, intellectual environment. It also opened windows on the rest of the world.” He still recalls when Headmaster Henry Welles and his wife, Josephine, returned from their travels to China. “They made China real in 1949. That was unheard of at the time.” He returned to NCCS in 1997 to accept the Alumni Council’s first Alumni Award. After ninth grade he attended Choate, graduated from Harvard, and in what turned out to be an astute career move, went to the Putney School in Vermont to teach history. It was there he met his wife, Aliette Misson, with whom he has three children and six grandchildren. He has long been a prolific, yet unpublished poet and practical joker. He has taught courses at Harvard, Yale, the New School, Brandeis, and Princeton and served on numerous boards. Peter retired from the Environmental Defense Fund in 2010 and is currently a “fitful newspaper columnist” and an independent consultant and strategist on critical issues, particularly the environment. Concerned that his generation failed to adequately address the global climate change and energy crises, he also mentors a group of young people around the world “who are stretching the envelope”—an exercise he knows well.

“I’ve had interesting jobs at interesting moments. I’ve never had a boring, non-relevant job.”

William A. Shutkin ’80

“I couldn’t have predicted this.”

William Shutkin’s daily bus ride from Stamford to NCCS traversed two disparate worlds and left an indelible impression on the boy who became a social entrepreneur, environmental lawyer, and educator. “I experienced a kind of dissonance between the pristine environment of NCCS and more blighted urban neighborhoods just a few miles away, where people lived so differently. It really affected me.” That recognition helped influence his career advocating for both the environment and social justice and his current leadership position in the forefront of the nation’s burgeoning sustainability movement. In his role as president and CEO of the Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco, William is shepherding the next generation of leaders committed to transforming business and public policy and creating a more just and sustainable world. Though a natural evolution of his career, he admits, “I couldn’t have predicted this.” The 2004 Alumni Award recipient said he felt a “deep sense of gratitude for the privilege” of attending NCCS from Beginners through ninth grade. He was also cognizant that others did not have the same opportunity and chose to attend West Hills High School for a more diverse school environment. In the next decade, he received his BA in history and classics from Brown (’87) and a law degree and master’s in history from the University of Virginia (’91), followed by PhD studies at the University of California at Berkeley. After clerking for a federal judge in Vermont, William co-founded Alternatives for Community & Environment, a national environmental justice law center in Boston. He also taught at Boston College Law School, MIT and the University Of Denver Sturm College of Law, and authored two books on the environment. In 2011, he was named CEO of Presidio, which offers advanced degrees in sustainable management and has earned the reputation, according to the New York Times, as the go-to graduate school for “people who want to change the world.” Professionally, the role is tailor-made for William, who was advocating the economic, environmental and social benefits of sustainable management long before it became a buzzword. He believes the rising generation of consumers and investors will demand that all businesses be sustainable—“or they will be out of business.” Personally, the avid outdoorsman splits his time between San Francisco and Boulder, Colorado, where his two teenagers live with their mother. In both places, he enjoys trail running, skiing and their progressive, forwardthinking cultures.

Mary Thorne Gould ’40 Mary Thorne Gould thrived during her nine years at NCCS and wanted her nine children to have a similarly enriching experience. Her husband, Kingdon Gould Jr., felt the same way about independent schooling. Their eldest child was due to start kindergarten in 1954 when the Goulds moved from New Haven to rural Howard County, Maryland. The nearest independent schools were a thirty-mile commute to Baltimore or Washington, leaving Mary and Kingdon with a dilemma and what they termed “one obvious answer.” “And so we inquired: ‘How does one start a school?’” The Goulds were advised to “engage a person to run it and find a place to hold it.” They promptly enlisted four other families, hired a headmistress, and rented the vacant Glenelg “manor” house and its surrounding fifty acres for $100 a month. Along with other volunteers, Mary and Kingdon spent the summer sprucing up the building and property. The Glenelg Country School opened its doors that September with thirty-five students in grades K through six and five teachers. Today, Glenelg has 750 students—in pre-K through twelfth grade—on a ninety-acre campus surrounding the original manor house. For lifelong board trustees Mary and Kingdon, their continued sixty-year involvement with Glenelg “has substantially enriched our lives.” The bucolic Glenelg property reminded Mary of her years at NCCS. After the confines of the New Canaan Community School in town, she appreciated the playing fields and opportunities to explore nature on the Ponus Ridge campus. For the four Thorne siblings, NCCS was “one big family.” Their mother, Peggy, taught in the lower school, and Mary’s godmother was Mrs. MacIntosh, the headmistress. Mary’s interests at Country School, beyond academics, were athletics, rhythms, music, and shop. She was particularly proud when she gave an assembly performance on a harp she built in shop. After NCCS, Mary attended Miss Porter’s School, worked in a munitions factory during World War II, and married Kingdon in 1946 after a wartime romance. They raised their four sons and five daughters in Laurel, Maryland, and overseas in Europe when Kingdon served as ambassador to Luxembourg from 1969 to 1972 and the Netherlands from 1973 to 1976. Mary remained involved with Glenelg and other community organizations while presiding over a family that now includes twenty-eight grandchildren and twenty-five great-grandchildren. She did admit there was one practical advantage to co-founding the Glenelg Country School located near her home—it certainly simplified dropoff and pickup with nine children.

“And so we inquired: ‘How does one start a school?’”

Penfield Comstock Mead ’25

“I want to live to be eighty to see the new century.”

Penfield Mead was a civic leader and descendant of the early settlers of New Canaan with an eye toward the future. A decorated war veteran and an attorney, Penfield was New Canaan’s probate judge for four terms. He was directly descended from about half of the thirty families that founded Canaan Parish and the Congregational Church in 1731, and his ancestors helped incorporate the town of New Canaan in 1801. He reflected on that legacy in a lengthy interview with the New Canaan Historical Society in 2000, just after his eightieth birthday. “When I was a kid I said, ‘I want to live to be eighty to see the new century.’ Well, I’ve seen the new century and I’d like to live ten more years.” The Comstock/Mead family was also involved with the New Canaan Community School, which was expanding on Park Street when Penfield was a student from 1925 through 1930. “We went to school in a big old Victorian house, run by two ‘maiden ladies’ [Miss Edith Dudley and Miss Effie Dunton] as they used to call them.” Penfield always said he appreciated the “special privileges” and educational opportunities he was afforded growing up, and as a judge that made him more keenly aware of the needs of those who were less fortunate. After attending the Community School and St. Luke’s, Penfield was in the first class to enter Saxe Junior High School and graduated from New Canaan High School in 1938. He had just completed his junior year at Yale when he was inducted into the Army as a private two months before America’s entry into World War II. He served in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany and earned six battle stars. Penfield returned to Yale to earn his undergraduate degree in 1946 and his law degree in 1948 and then joined his father and uncle in the Stamford law firm Mead and Mead. In 1973, he was one of five candidates for the Republican nomination for probate judge and lost the party endorsement at the caucus by one vote. He carried the challenge to a primary and won three more elections before retiring in 1987. While in office for thirteen years, he was also executive director and president of the Connecticut Probate Assembly. Penfield passed away in 2003. He was survived by his wife, a son, and a grandson.

Lee Dionne ’04 When Lee Dionne sits before a concert piano, he wants his performance to transcend the composer’s notes and the polished ivory- and ebony-colored keys. “I’ve recently become aware that it’s just like acting. You really have to project what you are doing and play the room. It’s all about connecting with the audience and trying to lead them emotionally, whether they know anything about the music or not. You have to feel their response in between pauses and movements.” Though only in his mid-twenties, the conservatory-trained pianist has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in major recital venues in the U.S. and with orchestras at home and abroad. Most definitely “biased toward the classics,” his repertoire also ranges from Baroque music to 1960s French avant garde. Lee admits his audience awareness has evolved since the annual spring recital he gave during his NCCS years. “I was just a kid trying not to be nervous. I thought it was a normal thing to play ninety minutes of totally memorized music.” During the ten years he attended Country School, the demands of Lee’s schedule were different than those of his more sports-oriented classmates. He lived in Ridgefield, had private piano lessons every Wednesday afternoon, and attended Chinese language school each Saturday. “While it was harder for me to be a part of the community, I still made a lot of friends. I’ve always been kind of a shy and introverted personality. I took it for granted that it was so easy to make friends while I was there.” After NCCS, Lee attended Andover (’07) and then Yale, where he earned his BA in literature (’11), two graduate degrees in music, and is continuing to work toward his PhD. He also continued his graduate studies in Germany and completed a solo tour in Europe before returning to the States last year. He’s “very excited” about launching his career in New York, performing classical music and working with living composers. He is also a core member of a new vocal and instrumental chamber ensemble called Cantata Profana. As an added bonus, Lee’s Brooklyn apartment can accommodate the Steinway S grand piano his parents gave him when he was in eighth grade. “People always ask classical musicians, ‘How much do you practice?’ When I have a busy week it can be up to ten hours a day, rehearsing or learning new music. I’d say it’s five hours tops for solo practice before taking a break.”

“It’s all about connecting with the audience and trying to lead them emotionally.”

Susan Sargent ’66

“I’ve always focused on colors that are strong and vivid and balanced.”

Susan Sargent’s passion for color and textiles is evocative of the classic Carol King song “Tapestry” and a life of rich and royal hue. Susan has applied her palette of bold and bright colors to her custom tapestries, three books, a collection of fabrics, rugs, bedding, pillows, furniture, wallpaper, a line of paints, and ceramic dinnerware. “I’ve always focused on color, and on colors that are strong and vivid and balanced. I truly believe there is an emotional impact in having color in your home.” Susan has refined her palette since her first decorating project in seventh grade, when she painted the walls in her bathroom orange, pink, purple, and black. Her family lived on Wing Road adjacent to the NCCS campus, and the Sargent siblings would cut through the playing fields to get to school each day. In her seven years at NCCS, Susan said the concept of being artistic was encouraged in all classes, not just art. “Creativity was a part of everyday life at Country School. I remember when we read The Hobbit and wrote poetry in fifth grade with Ms. Lucas, who was way ahead of her time.” After NCCS Susan attended Milton Academy (’69) and studied art history at Tufts for two years. She went to Sweden for her junior year and stayed for four years studying at a textile school and working at a family textile business. She learned to weave and dye wool and brought those skills home with her to Vermont. For the next twenty years, Susan was at her loom weaving intricate tapestries, some up to 8 x 17 feet. Ready for a change, she was hired in 1993 to develop a collection of pillows and rugs and began working with artisans in Hungary, India, and other countries. Susan discovered she loved the travel and the artistic opportunities and started her own business in 1995, developing collections for the wholesale market. Her products were sold by more than one thousand specialty retail stores and one hundred direct mail catalogues, and she designed private label collections for major retailers such as Neiman Marcus and Laura Ashley. She wrote three books on color and even opened two retail stores encompassing the full Susan Sargent line of products. Susan has stepped back from design and licensing and returned to weaving tapestries and exploring painting and other mediums. She has two sons and two granddaughters in Colorado and recently illustrated the book Far Away Grandma. Susan now resides on the coast of Massachusetts with her husband, Tom Peters, author of the business best seller In Search of Excellence. After forty years of Vermont winters, they opt to spend the winter months in balmy New Zealand.

L. Paul ‘Jerry’ Bremer III ’56 Career diplomat Jerry Bremer knew he faced a daunting task in 2003 when President Bush appointed him to lead the coalition government to rebuild a devastated Iraq after Saddam Hussein. What he encountered was “chaos”— which became the title of the first chapter of his book My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope. “Baghdad was burning when we landed on Monday, May 12. Those fourteen months were the biggest challenge in my career. It was a lot harder than anyone in our government thought it was going to be.” Jerry knew challenges, having served twenty-three years on four continents with the State Department. He was on the personal staffs of six secretaries of state and was ambassador to the Netherlands for three years and ambassador-at-large for counter-terrorism from 1986 to 1989. He retired from the Foreign Service in 1989 and held private sector posts in consulting and crisis management and was appointed chairman of the Bipartisan National Commission on Terrorism in 1999. Four years later, after September 11th and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, he got the call to head up the occupational authority in Iraq. “We did the best we could given the situation. We put them on the right path to a better future.” For his service, Jerry was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. Ironically, Jerry only intended to spend a couple of years with the State Department when he and his new bride, Francie, volunteered to go to Afghanistan for his first posting in 1966. He traces his interest in the Foreign Service back to his NCCS eighth-grade French class with Mme. Liotard. “Her teaching method was essentially revolutionary at the time. From day one she addressed us only in French. It enlivened my lifelong interest in languages, which became an important part of my life and the Foreign Service.” After NCCS, Jerry attended Andover and Yale (’63). He studied for two years at the Institut D’Etudes Politiques at the University of Paris before earning his MBA from Harvard (’66). Jerry retired again in 2006 to write My Year in Iraq. Five years later he published From Sea to Shining Sea, his account of leading a four-thousandmile cross-country bicycle ride with sixteen wounded warriors. He has become an exhibited painter and the literary executor for former secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s papers at Yale. Jerry and Francie, who have two children and five grandchildren, divide their time between Maryland and Vermont. Jerry was honored with the NCCS Alumni Award in 2006.

“Baghdad was burning when we landed on Monday, May 12.”

Barbara Wheeler Du Val Spaulding ’37

“We as women were in the minority but we embraced the challenge.”

Barbara Spaulding takes great pride in her deep and enduring connection to NCCS, one that spans eight decades, the transition from a small community school in town to the current campus, and most importantly, three generations. She was one of three Wheeler sisters from Darien to attend New Canaan Community School on Park Street and was in the inaugural tenth-grade class at the relocated and newly renamed New Canaan Country School. In the early years, many of the girls would stay beyond ninth grade, and in Barbara’s class there were seven girls in tenth grade. When the students excitedly explored the classrooms in Grace House that fall of 1936, Barbara couldn’t have predicted that her three children and two of her grandchildren would receive their NCCS diplomas on the same front lawn as she did. “One of my proudest moments was when my granddaughter Nikki Bongaerts graduated from Country School in 2004, and I was there near the front steps of my school building to witness it. I love the fact that three generations of our family have benefited from small classes, dedication of their teachers, and diversity of the student body.” While at NCCS, she studied Latin and began an enduring love of languages. She graduated from the Shipley School (’39) in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and majored in French at Sarah Lawrence College (’42). Barbara returned to New Canaan in 1952 with her husband, Philip Du Val, and enrolled their three children—Cookie (’61), Philip (’69), and Alexandra (’72)—in NCCS. The matriarch of one of seven three-generation families at NCCS notes that she personally knew five heads of school—from Mrs. MacIntosh at Community School through Henry Welles, George Stevens, Nick Thacher, and Tim Bazemore, who was the head of school when Alexandra Bongaerts’s son Flip (’02) and daughter Nikki (’04) were students. In addition to being one of the founding families of the First Presbyterian Church, Barbara was an entrepreneur. In 1963, she opened her own ladies apparel shop called Clothes Incorporated on Elm Street shortly after her friend Judy Stinchfield opened the Whitney Shop across the street. “As you can imagine, we as women were in the minority but we embraced the challenge.” When Barbara remarried Ed Spaulding and moved to Santa Barbara in 1971, she opened Whitney Shop West and operated that retail gift and accessory store for almost fifteen years. And when the cover of the 2004 NCCS Bulletin featured a photo of Barbara, Alexandra, and Nikki after her granddaughter’s graduation, she was more than delighted to share it with friends and family on both coasts.

James Vanderbilt ’91 Hollywood screenwriter/producer/director Jamie Vanderbilt knew he wanted to be a writer when he was five and enthralled by his father’s bedtime stories. “I thought what an amazing thing to do, to just magically take someone and transport them just by telling a story. As soon as I found that being a writer was an okay thing to grow up to be, I thought, ‘I’m sold.’” In fifth grade a determined Jamie and a classmate founded the NCCS newspaper, The Keys—“anything to get published, by hook or by crook.” Getting a byline in the Ponus Papers proved to be much more of a hard sell, which he laughs about now. “I thought I’m the only one here who wants to do this for a living and I can’t get a story in the Ponus Papers. I finally got published in the ninth grade.” Jamie came to NCCS in kindergarten, and he got to “fall in love with theater and acting and storytelling” working with Eric Garrison in the Upper School productions, swapping drama for sports whenever possible. After NCCS, Jamie went to St. Paul’s School (‘94) and the University of Southern California screenwriting program (’97). He sold his first script two days before graduating, but the film was never made. His breakout year was 2003, when three of his screenplays hit theaters, including Basic with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson and The Rundown starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Jamie is best known for 2007’s Zodiac, the box office megahits The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), and as writer and producer of White House Down (2014). He scripted and made his directorial debut in 2015 with Truth, a political docudrama starring Robert Redford, Cate Blanchett, and Dennis Quaid. “It was an incredible cast. It’s like the first time you get to drive a car and it’s a Ferrari.” Million dollar budgets aside, Jamie draws a parallel between a seventhgrade play and a Hollywood movie. “It’s still just a bunch of people trying to put on a show. That’s the wonderful thing about it. That’s the thing that never changes.” Jamie co-founded his production company, Mythology Entertainment, and currently has several screenwriting, directing, and producing projects in the hopper. He was an aspiring screenwriter when he met his wife, Amber, on her twenty-first birthday in 1999, calling it “a turn-of-the century romance.” They married in 2005, have two young sons, and the family has settled permanently in Malibu. Said Jamie: “I’m still shocked I’m raising Californians.”

“It’s like the first time you get to drive a car and it’s a Ferrari.”

Thomas G. MacCracken ’66

“It is a lifelong project that continues to engage me today.”

Tom MacCracken’s passion for music began early, starting with a toy clarinet and piano. He quickly mastered the play-by-number tunes and requested more songs. He started piano lessons with Elspeth Macfarlane at NCCS in second grade and was introduced to the recorder in third-grade music class. In seventh grade he began flute lessons and performed on that instrument with the Norwalk Youth Symphony as a ninth grader. At Exeter he learned to play the harpsichord while continuing to study both piano and flute. In college, he found his calling. “I was an undergrad at Yale when I discovered the history of music, combining the two things I enjoy most. The interests planted early came together in that way.” Today, Tom is a nationally recognized independent scholar specializing in the history of Renaissance and Baroque music and a freelance performer of early music based in the Washington, D.C., area. He graduated from Yale in 1973 and went on to study musicology at the University of Chicago, receiving his MA in 1978 and his PhD in 1985. In Chicago, and later as an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, he performed with a number of different early music ensembles. Tom’s then (and current) lineup of instruments includes the harpsichord, fortepiano, and continuo organ as well as the Baroque flute, recorder, and viola da gamba. In 1991, he moved to Washington and began a research fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, documenting all surviving antique viols from the mid-sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. A viol, or viola da gamba, is a stringed instrument, held vertically and played with a bow. “That research has become a lifelong project that continues to engage me today.” Tom also studies and edits the music of French Renaissance composer Jean Mouton and was editor of the Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society from 1996 to 2006. Noting he is “first and foremost a music historian,” Tom continues to enjoy performing early music, including with his wife, Alexandra, who plays the Baroque violin. One of Tom’s early mentors was the late John Huwiler, who headed the music department at NCCS for thirty-eight years and conducted the Norwalk Youth Symphony. He wrote Mr. Huwiler about ten years ago to express appreciation for his role in Tom’s musical education, to which the teacher kindly replied. “I also told him that I was active as a professional recorder player, and that goes back to third grade at Country School.”

Rick Ackerly ’60 When Rick Ackerly speaks of finding the genius in every child, he isn’t talking about IQ tests, SAT scores, or an inner Mozart. He is harking back to the original meaning of the word genius—as in “the spirit of a person or place.” “I think of it as the voice of our character. Each of us is called to make something of ourselves. You need to make sure you listen to your genius to do so.” In forty-five years as a nationally recognized educator, Rick has done just that. After graduating from Williams, he was on track to follow the family tradition and become an attorney. He had second thoughts after taking the law boards, landed a boarding school teaching job, and then went to Harvard for his master’s degree in education. A pivotal career moment occurred when he was asked to move to Kansas City and turn around an inner-city Catholic school that was most definitely on the ropes. “I lucked out. I knew then I was a fish that had been thrown into the right river.” He went on to lead three more independent schools and is now an educational consultant, speaker, and author. His book The Genius in Every Child: Encouraging Character, Curiosity and Creativity in Children focuses on bringing out the best in children in school, and in life. When tasked with making fundamental changes at troubled schools, Rick turned to what he called the “essential progressive education” embodied by NCCS in his fourth- through ninth-grade years, ending in 1960. “It’s as if the education I got there was a model for me for the rest of my career.” He returned to NCCS in 2011 to accept the Alumni Award, and said it was a profound feeling to be honored on the same stage where he bounced around barefoot in his fourth-grade rhythms class. He told the students that success was not about test scores or getting into the best schools. “Success is about two things: 1) Find work that you love to do. 2) Find someone to love. Start now and don’t stop until you die. It is a lifelong, infinitely challenging, and infinitely interesting project.” Rick found success in his work and happiness in family life, with his wife, Victoria Podesta, four children, one stepdaughter, and seven grandchildren. And he’s on to his next book with the working title: Schools without Bullies. How? The answer: creating a culture of leadership. “That was the genius of NCCS.”

“Each of us is called to make something of ourselves.”

John Pratt ’56

“Anything you need to know you can learn from Homer Simpson.”

John Pratt learned about decision-making from his first boss, the legendary Admiral Hyman Rickover, known as the father of America’s nuclear navy. And though John went on to work with brilliant scientists and esteemed lawmakers in his thirty-five-year-career, he also drew inspiration from an unlikely source: TV’s animated, humorous antihero Homer Simpson. The associate director of the prestigious Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, John tuned into The Simpsons nightly. According to John’s family, “His motto was, ‘Anything you need to know you can learn from Homer Simpson.’” John attended NCCS from kindergarten through ninth grade, then Phillips Exeter Academy (’59), and earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Yale (’63). He was a naval officer from 1964 through 1969, serving as a lieutenant under the crusty and often controversial Rickover. He told the Boston Globe: “The admiral always kept his staff clearly focused on their duties. Nobody ever sat around waiting for a decision to be made. He was very strong, very forceful and influenced a lot of people who served under him.” John was known for his thoughtful decision-making and strong leadership skills throughout his career. After the Navy, he received his MBA from Harvard (’71) and joked that he was proud his decision to go into government brought down the average annual income of his class. He joined the planning staff of the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services that year and held various posts in state government under three gubernatorial administrations. In 1979, he was named the state’s commissioner of public welfare, succeeding fellow NCCS alum Al Sharp (‘55). Two years later, he was hired as the associate director of the newly created Whitehead Institute, which grew to become one of the world’s preeminent institutions dedicated to improving human health through groundbreaking biomedical research. The founders said John “really made the institute happen from the ground floor up” through his intelligence, decency and leadership. When John retired in 2006, he was still known as Employee No. 1. In addition to being an accomplished sailor, John was a mountain climber and led treks in New Hampshire’s White Mountains and the Himalayas in Nepal. John was seventy when he died of prostate cancer at his home in Cambridge in 2012, survived by wife, Suzanne, two children, and four grandchildren.

Jessica Vascellaro Lessin ’98 As an award-winning journalist covering the technology industry, twentysomething Jessica Lessin decided she wanted to do more than just write about people who build companies. She wanted to build one of her own. So she became a “reportrepreneur,” resigning her post as the Wall Street Journal’s Silicon Valley correspondent to found The Information, an online subscription-only news site featuring in-depth technology reporting for industry professionals. Jessica launched the new venture in 2013, saying, “technology news needs a reboot” with an emphasis on quality over quantity. To do so, she drew on knowledge she had gleaned covering fascinating entrepreneurs who took risks to create a new product or business. “I’m passionate about journalism and also realistically perceptive about how challenging a start-up can be.” The catalyst for her career? Working on The Keys, the NCCS student newspaper. “I tell the story often. I blame or give credit to Ms. Post and The Keys for getting me hooked on journalism, and everything I have done since then. I vividly remember it was so exciting to be involved interviewing and learning about people at school and then putting together a publication.” Next stops were writing and editing roles at the student newspaper at Greenwich Academy and then the Harvard Crimson. She received her Harvard diploma on a Thursday in May 2005 and started at the Wall Street Journal in New York the following Monday. After three years in the Journal’s New York bureau, Jessica transferred to San Francisco to cover the burgeoning high-tech industry. Her tech and media column “The Valley” was a must-read on both coasts, and she was part of a team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a 2011 series on digital privacy. Confident in on-camera roles as well, Jessica has appeared on CNBC, CNN, and PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show. Her decision to leave a high-profile WSJ position to join the crowded digital field surprised many media watchers, but Jessica felt confident in her business model. In two years, the number of subscribers paying a $399 annual fee for The Information’s in-depth business articles are “in the thousands” and showing strong and steady growth. One of her well-known columnists is former Facebook product whiz Sam Lessin, now a tech entrepreneur. He is also a Harvard classmate whom she met after sophomore year and married in 2012.

“I’m realistically perceptive about how challenging a startup can be.”

Mary Birnbaum ’99

“I realized it didn’t really matter if I was on stage as long as my ideas were on stage.”

Mary Birnbaum’s career as an opera and theater director could be compared to a bright and ascending comet. But unlike a comet, it has a limitless trajectory. Her productions have drawn rave reviews across the country and abroad. At age twenty-nine, she was nominated for Best Newcomer of 2015 at the International Opera Awards in London. She was introduced to her first opera at age three and performed with the Metropolitan Children’s Chorus at the Metropolitan Opera in New York at age ten. For the NCCS seventh grader who had a bit part in the school musical Li’l Abner then graduated to the second lead in The Music Man in eighth grade and a starring role in Oliver the following year, her gravitation toward directing was natural. “I always wanted to do collaborative work. I realized it didn’t really matter if I was on stage as long as my ideas were on stage. I loved seeing the whole story. . . . the lights, the costumes, and where people are in space. “And as my NCCS classmates will tell you, I was always really bossy.” Mary spent ten years at NCCS and said, “Some of the best training in collaboration and creative development that I ever received was in Ms. Piggot’s rhythms class.” She also credits her music teachers Mrs. Shackelford and Mrs. Whitman for encouraging her love for music and Ms. Quisgard for teaching their fourth grade class that “anything can happen if you believe in it.” Mary graduated from Greenwich Academy (‘02) and took a year off before college. She spent six months in Paris studying voice and then toured with Greenwich Academy’s production of The Laramie Project at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and in London. Her next stop was Harvard, graduating in 2007 with a BA in English and participating in more than thirty productions as an actor or director. Mary moved back to New York at age twenty-five and started the Art Party Theater Company, producing and directing audience participation and site-specific productions. The following year she was invited to teach acting to opera singers at the Juilliard School and is now the associate director of Juilliard’s Artist Diploma in Opera Studies program. Her directing career gained immediate traction. Mary has directed opera and theater productions in Santa Fe, Seattle, Costa Rica, London, Tel Aviv, Houston, Taipei, and Berkeley, California. In New York, she has staged productions at Juilliard, Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. The director did find herself back in a leading lady role in 2014, when she married attorney, Justin Shane, with whom she lives in New York City.

Samuel Sachs ’50 After an illustrious career leading major American art museums and rejuvenating the Frick Collection in New York, Sam Sachs attempted to retire. It was a fleeting attempt. “I flunked retirement. I went to the other side, as they say. Instead of begging for money as a museum director, I’m giving it away as a foundation director. And I find it much more agreeable.” His current leadership roles with the Noguchi Museum in Queens and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation are perfect for Sam, in his own words an unlikely art historian. He started out as a chemistry major at Harvard and deferred law school twice after graduation, but all roads led back to art history, thanks to an unsolicited offer to be a “gofer” at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He received his MA in art history from NYU in 1964 and returned to Minneapolis, where he rose from curator to director. In 1985, he was tapped to be director of the renowned Detroit Institute of Arts. During his twelve-year tenure at Detroit, Sam was credited for more than doubling the museum’s membership and boosting its endowment from $20 million to $75 million, all while facing severe budget cutbacks from the state. In 1997, he received the offer to run the Frick, an internationally recognized premier museum housed in Henry Clay Frick’s former Fifth Avenue mansion. Sam, his wife, Beth, and four children returned to Bedford, two miles from his childhood home. In the 1940s the original four Sachs siblings rode the bus each day to NCCS, where Sam’s introduction to Latin in the fifth grade was his “first sense of academic accomplishment.” His goal at the Frick was to “breathe a little more fresh air into the place” and for visitors to feel welcomed, not just tolerated. He launched the Frick’s first “blockbuster” exhibit—Victorian Faerie Paintings in 1988— and strengthened the museum in terms of outreach, the collection, and endowment. Sam has now turned his attention across the East River to the Noguchi Museum, which was founded and designed by the Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi. He is also president of the foundation created by Jackson Pollock’s widow, Lee Krasner, which has distributed $60 million and counting to “needy and worthy” artists in seventy-nine countries. The 2001 Alumni Award winner is also enjoying travel with Beth and his six grandchildren, advising on art forgeries, and developing his personal art collection, which he describes as “eclectic but fun.”

“I flunked retirement. I went to the other side, as they say.”

Eric Woolworth ’80

“Horizons taught me more about life than I learned at any other juncture.”

A rink rat who spent his formative years on skates and captaining the NCCS and Taft hockey teams, Eric Woolworth “never dreamed” he’d have three NBA championship rings. Though not on the court, Eric has been a key player in the Miami Heat organization since he joined the NBA franchise in 1995 as general counsel. Five years later he was elevated to president of business operations for the Heat Group, and today he oversees all aspects of the company from marketing and finance for the team to operations of the AmericanAirlines Arena sports and entertainment venue—in short, “everything you don’t see on the court.” One of four Woolworth brothers at NCCS, Eric never played a lick of basketball until a pickup intramural game his freshman year at Georgetown. Quickly realizing he was better suited to the ice than the hardwood maple of a basketball court, he became a fan at hoop-crazy Georgetown and played on its club hockey team. Eric graduated from Georgetown (‘87) and Georgetown University Law Center (‘91). He was a successful environmental attorney in Washington when offered the Heat job and “never looked back at the legal profession.” Looking back on his ten years at NCCS, Eric said the academics, athletics, and friendships formed at the school “laid the entire foundation for who I am today.” But it was the three summers during high school that Eric worked for the Horizons program at NCCS that had the biggest impact on him. “Lyn McNaught and all of the people at Horizons taught me more about life than I learned at any other juncture in time in terms of what the real world was all about.” The Horizons experience has stayed with Eric and informed his work as a board member of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Miami for the past fourteen years and leading the Heat’s community outreach in south Florida. “A lot of what we do here I would trace back to Horizons and how I perceive the world in terms of being able to change children’s lives for the better.” In addition to overseeing the Heat and the arena, Eric is focused on expanding the Heat’s presence internationally. He saw the net result of that effort on a family safari in Tanzania last year. “The first person I saw getting off the plane was wearing a Heat jersey and hat. It was very gratifying.” Even more gratifying was his decision to attend Georgetown Law. He met Jocelyn Frank the first week of classes and they were married in 1991. The Woolworths are raising their teenage son and daughter in Coral Gables, Florida.

George Grove ’38 George Grove was eighteen when he entered the U.S. Naval Academy in 1942. He retired as a U.S. Navy captain three decades later, having served his country through war and peace aboard ships in oceans across the world. For the next ten years, George was an executive with the technology company Intel in Los Altos, California. Today he presides over a six-hundredacre farm and home in West Newbury, Vermont, where a framed photo of the naval destroyer ship John Paul Jones is prominently displayed. “I started out as a junior officer on a destroyer and my last command was aboard the John Paul Jones. By then I was commodore of a squadron of eight destroyers off the coast of Vietnam. As I got older, the number of ships got bigger.” When George and his two siblings attended NCCS during the Depression, their mother worked in the cafeteria to help offset the tuition costs. “It was a tough time, but the atmosphere at school was positive and we felt very fortunate to be there.” There were six boys in his grade, schooled separately from the girls. “We stayed in one classroom and the masters would come in to teach their subject and leave. We stayed put.” Once classes were done, the boys were more than ready for playing football, hockey, and baseball. Even though there were often only nine boys on the football team, “we still played anyway.” After NCCS, George attended St. Paul’s School and decided to follow his father’s footsteps to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. His father was killed while flying with the British air force in 1941, before the U.S. joined World War II. For George, being a midshipman at the academy during the ensuing war years rather than being on the front was frustrating. “I would come back to New Canaan and some mothers would say how lucky I was that I didn’t have to go to the war. I didn’t feel that way. I wanted to be in the war along with my buddies, not in the U.S.” The nation was at peace when he graduated, but he did serve during both the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The father of two daughters also attended the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and was stationed in both Newport and San Diego. After working for Intel, George inherited his family’s two-hundred-acre Vermont farm and then purchased an adjacent four-hundred-acre parcel. “I’m not a practicing farmer, but I do enjoy preserving and maintaining my farm.”

“I wanted to be in the war along with my buddies, not in the U.S.”

Francis E. Weed ’26

“Living with animals teaches you respect for the environment and life.”

Frank Weed was known and respected throughout the Florida Everglades as the man with the cats—as in cougars, leopards, lions, bobcats, and tigers. Frank left Connecticut in 1955 to begin his career as a breeder of big cats as well as a trainer of exotic animals for wildlife films and photography and television shows such as Miami Vice. He also served as a consultant to the state of Florida’s multimillion dollar effort to save the Florida panther, an endangered species. A descendant of one of New Canaan’s founding families, Frank attended the New Canaan Community School from 1922 to 1926 and New Canaan High School. He succeeded his father as head of the family lumber business that became known as Weed and Duryea and then joined the Marine Corps and served in World War II. After the war, Frank and his wife, Ellen, moved to Brookfield, Connecticut, where they ran a game farm for ten years, raising more than two hundred dogs and other animals. The Weeds relocated to Florida in 1955 and began breeding big cats, which they sold to public agencies, private individuals, and Native American reservations. Happiest when surrounded by his menagerie, Frank believed it was important to live with animals “because it teaches you respect for the environment and life, including that of humans.” In his obituary, Frank was remembered as a “dyed-in-the-wool animal lover and caretaker.” Frank and Ellen lived on a five-acre spread in Immokalee, bordering the Florida Panther Wildlife Refuge on the edge of the Everglades. Visitors to their home would routinely encounter a wolf puppy and a cougar kitten playing together in the living room, otters in the bathtub, or bottle-fed leopard kittens in a bedroom. Wildlife photographers from around the world traveled to the Weeds’ oasis for photo shoots, and Frank’s favorite puma named Morris was a sought-after subject. Frank was also always willing to rustle up a poisonous snake or other wild animal to add authenticity to a photograph. Though typically a behind-the-scenes trainer, Frank had an acting role in the 1967 film Death Curse of Tartu in addition to wrangling the ten-foot anaconda that had a pivotal role in the movie. He also caught the alligator that appeared in the campy horror film. When he passed away in 1995 at the age of eighty, Frank was survived by his wife, two sons, a daughter, five grandchildren, and two great grandchildren.

Elizabeth ‘Souci’ Smith Crow ’61 Elizabeth ‘Souci’ Smith Crow had a Midas touch with magazines, relying on instinct and experience rather than market research. When she revitalized Parents magazine as editor-in-chief from 1978 to 1988, the working mother of three made it okay to admit that raising kids could be downright difficult at times. And when she took the helm of Mademoiselle in 1993, the girl who admittedly “wasn’t the best” sought to empower young women to be independent, eager, and ambitious for success in their personal and professional lives. “I’d have been thrilled to have had the best grades, the most beautiful singing voice, or the fastest legs in school, but I didn’t,” she told NCCS students when she received the Alumni Award in 2000. “When that fact sank in, though, I knew something important, which is this: Most of us, except maybe the saints and the real villains among us, are good people with normal hearts. We have to work hard, and we don’t always know the answers. That’s what binds us together—not the bits and pieces of ourselves that are superlative.” The eldest of six children, Souci Smith attended NCCS from sixth through ninth grades. She cited her teachers, “who radiated their pleasure at teaching us the subjects they loved.” She graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall and Mills College in 1968 and got her first job at the New Yorker. She pursued a master’s degree at Brown, but the lure of journalism bested academia. She returned to Manhattan and was an editor at New York magazine for a decade. Souci married New Yorker editor Patrick Crow in 1974 and raised a son and two daughters in Manhattan before divorcing. While at Parents, Souci overhauled the magazine’s content and appearance and created a line of books and videos on child development. In 1988, she accepted the top job at Self magazine, but Parents enticed her back as CEO of its American division, Gruner & Jahr USA. There she redesigned all seven of its magazines. Five years later she turned her attention to Mademoiselle, where her redesign led to a major boost in circulation and a new editorial attitude. “My big idea with Mademoiselle was to help twenty-something women get a life.” She closed her career in the editorial executive ranks at Rodale Publications and at Primedia. Her final professional role was as the editorial director at Consumers Union, and her final personal role was as a grandmother. Souci passed away from cancer in 2005 at the age of fifty-eight.

“Most of us, except maybe the saints and villains, are good people with normal hearts.”

Jennifer Robbins Manocherian ’53 Vicky Robbins Cowal ’55

“We’ve had to reinvent ourselves many times. And it’s been fun.” 80

When the feminist movement in the 1960s challenged women to want more than just a nice husband, home, and family, sisters Jennifer Manocherian and Vicky Cowal joined the revolution. Both Jennifer and Vicky had been enrolled in top women’s colleges, Barnard and Bryn Mawr, respectively, but dropped out to marry at age twenty and start a family. Said Jennifer: “Back in the days before the women’s movement, we—or at least I—didn’t have any career aspirations. College was a placeholder until marriage.” According to Vicky: “The word career was never mentioned when we were in school.” Jennifer was raising four children in the Westchester suburbs when she read Betty Freidan’s groundbreaking 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. “That was an aha moment. My life was turned upside down. It made me realize I wanted in. I wanted to get out there and do more.” And more she did, finishing college, having a fifth child, earning a master’s degree in counseling, and becoming a family therapist and divorce mediator for ten years. She then decided to “leap in” to a career as a Broadway producer, backing over thirty productions on and off Broadway, including Spring Awakening, August: Osage County, and the long-running smash Stomp. Jennifer also co-wrote the 1997 independent film Hudson River Blues with her son Jon. Vicky Cowal’s path was more circuitous. She moved with her husband to Canada and then to Mexico in 1970, had three children, and divorced. Vicky stayed in Mexico City, finished college in 1975, and earned her master’s degree in 1990. She managed a foreign correspondents’ office in Mexico City and began writing about food and culture for several English-language newspapers. In 1990, she opened a catering business and published a cookbook in Mexico and one in the U.S. In 2003, she moved to Malinalco, a town ninety minutes from Mexico City, where she and her son operate a successful restaurant. She also teaches English classes twenty hours a week in her community. Both Jennifer and Vicky said they had an excellent role model in their mother, Ann Roe Robbins, who was a noted cooking teacher and cookbook author. In addition to their five children, Jennifer and her husband, Fred, have thirteen grandchildren. Vicky has six grandchildren and one greatgrandchild. Neither Jennifer nor Vicky has any plans to retire. Jennifer said balancing the demands of family and a career was a struggle at times, but she wouldn’t change a thing. “It’s been quite a ride.” Said Vicky: “We’ve had to reinvent ourselves many times. And it’s been fun.”

Jonathan Isham ’75 Jon Isham’s journey from New Canaan to West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer to leading the Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Middlebury College began in an Upper School classroom in the fall of 1973. “I often tell a story of the impact of my eighth-grade experience on everything I’ve done since. It was the year Pat Stoddard and Sue Speers decided to tear up the eighth grade playbook and do something that was quite a risk, introduce a new curriculum in anthropology.” It was a different approach to learning, and the subject matter was wideranging and mind-expanding. “It really began the path that I’m on now because it got me to think about the world outside of New Canaan.” Jon went on to major in social anthropology at Harvard. After graduation in 1984, he joined the Peace Corps and spent three years in the Frenchspeaking West African nation of Benin. There he helped to lead a program to promote fuel-efficient cookstoves and to build a primary school. He returned to the States to earn his MA in international studies (’90) from Johns Hopkins, work as a researcher for the World Bank, and complete his PhD in economics from the University of Maryland in 2000. His interests in economic development, the environment, and sustainability led to Middlebury, where he began as a lecturer in 1999. From 2011 to 2014, he was the director of Middlebury’s Environmental Studies program, the oldest in the country. In 2012, he co-founded Middlebury’s Center for Social Entrepreneurship, the first of its kind within the liberal arts. Jon feels that he has found a perfect fit in leading the CSE, with its goal of building on the school’s commitment to liberal arts and educating students to become effective agents of social change in the twenty-first century. “The key to teaching social entrepreneurship is getting people to think about who they are and what they want to be. . . . about what is a life of meaning and purpose. There’s a radical aspect as well—if you want to make a difference you have to do the hard work of challenging what you think you know.” For Jon, the hard work is rewarding, as is the opportunity for him and his wife, Tracy Himmel Isham, to raise their three daughters in Vermont. In 2016–17, they will be in Ghana, where Jon will serve as a Fulbright Scholar at Ashesi University College, the first residential liberal arts college in Africa. He still references his eighth-grade year when lecturing on teaching, effecting change, and creating a vision of the common good. “That experience was as formative as anything I’ve had.”

“That experience was as formative as anything I’ve had.”

Thomas Adams ’54

“I love history. I love basketball. I love baseball.”

With his rapid-fire delivery and knowledge of all things sports, Tom Adams was set on becoming a sportscaster. Then in his senior year at Princeton he met the headmaster of an all-boys day school in Dallas, talked a little history and a lot of baseball, and decided to give teaching and coaching a try. His family figured Tom would be back east in just a couple of years. That was 1961. Tom is still coaching at St. Mark’s School in Dallas, and though he retired in 2009, he holds the school master’s teaching chair in history and delivers a lecture at every spring alumni weekend. “I’ve really been lucky. I love history. I love basketball. I love baseball. I wouldn’t have wanted to do one without the other. ” Tom played basketball and baseball during his eighth- and ninth-grade years at NCCS, at Deerfield Academy, and at Princeton (’61). He joined the St. Mark’s faculty in 1961, followed the headmaster to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for three years, and returned to Dallas for good in 1969. During the summers of 1964–67, he studied and earned his MA from Harvard. And for the next twenty-five summers, he returned home to New Canaan to coach summer baseball at Mead Park. Frequently referred to as a “legendary” history teacher by St. Mark’s alums, the self-effacing Tom describes himself as a “firm guy in the classroom and as a coach” who sought to combine intensity and humor to motivate his pupils and players. He recalls his NCCS teachers setting a standard of being “really interested in the students.” Tom also prefers talking about “imparting knowledge to the boys” rather than the number of conference championship titles his baseball and basketball teams captured (fifteen and six, respectively) during his years as head coach. He employed his sportscasting skills, calling St. Mark’s football games and minor league baseball games, and his speed talking was captured in a video entitled Fast Talking Guy. Noting that practically no human can speak articulately at a sustained speed of more than three hundred words a minute, the clip introduces Tom. He does indeed cite the fifty states, the fifty capitals, the alphabet backward, the twenty-eight presidents, the sixty-six books of the Bible, the thirty-two points on a compass, and the twenty-eight train stops between New York and Chicago—346 words in less than sixty seconds. Enjoying semi-retirement with his wife, Marcy, whom he married in 2006, Tom says he is “still learning” and designing defensive plays, now as an assistant basketball coach at St. Mark’s.

John Horgan ’68 John Horgan’s first book, The End of Science, was a 1996 best seller, was translated into thirteen languages, and was denounced by many of the highest-ranking leaders in science. “It was extremely controversial, which was great. The book provoked a huge debate about the limits of science, which was exactly what I had wanted.” John revisited his provocative thesis when the book was reissued in 2015. “I decided I’m still right, that science is still ending.” The veteran science journalist and professor said his goal is to foster debate and get people to challenge their assumptions about knowledge, science, and moral values. “One of the biggest continuing thrills in what I do is to make people argue and introspect and get angry and sometimes change their minds.” Not one to follow a straight path from New Canaan High School (’71) to college, John had “no regrets” that he traveled the world and painted houses for eight years before enrolling in Columbia University. He graduated with BA in English (’82) and a master’s in journalism the following year. Always intrigued by science and writing, John wrote for an engineering journal after journalism school and landed his “dream job” as a senior writer at Scientific American in 1986. John left Scientific American after eleven years amid the controversy over his book and began writing award-winning pieces for national magazines and newspapers and lecturing in North America and Europe. He has also written three other books: The Undiscovered Mind (published in 1999), Rational Mysticism (published in 2003), and The End of War (published in 2012). In 2002, he co-authored Where Was God on September 11? In 2005, John joined the faculty at Stevens Institute of Technology, a premier private research university in Hoboken, New Jersey. As director of the Center for Science Writing, he runs a lecture series that brings prominent science communicators to campus, and also teaches courses. John called his fourth- through ninth-grade years at NCCS a privilege and his teachers “dedicated and passionate.” Known to his NCCS classmates as Chip, he has still maintained his enthusiasm for outdoor ice hockey in the winter. In addition to teaching and parenting a son and daughter in their early twenties, John is active on social media and writes the Cross-Check blog for Scientific American. He is working on a new book on the mind-body problem, an age-old philosophical question addressing how the brain makes memories, emotions, thoughts, and perceptions. “It’s the deepest problem in science, and I just want to really jump into it.”

“I decided I’m still right, that science is still ending.”

Donald Burnes ’56

“Today’s homeless crisis is appalling and unacceptable.”

For the first twenty-plus years of his career, Don Burnes focused on civil rights, poverty, and education issues—both on the grassroots level and working within state and federal governments. Today his attention and advocacy skills are set squarely on the nation’s homeless crisis, which he calls “appalling and unacceptable, a social and economic injustice.” Determined to impact policy and practice, Don founded the Burnes Institute on Poverty and Homelessness in Colorado in 2013 and is currently a scholar in residence at the University of Denver School of Social Work. His second book—Ending Homelessness: Why We Haven’t, How We Can—was published this year. His first book—A Nation in Denial: The Truth about Homelessness—was cowritten with his late wife, Alice Baum, and published in 1993. It was based on his three-year experience running a Washington, D.C., church-sponsored nonprofit organization serving the poor and homeless. He believes the two most distressing developments in recent years are the increase in the number of homeless families in America, with children as the fastest growing subpopulation, and the failure of the public and the private sectors to respond to the overwhelming needs of those experiencing homelessness. “What is the moral symmetry in requiring and allowing every child to go to school but not have a roof over his or her head? It doesn’t make any sense.” A commitment to education and social activism are in the Burnes family’s DNA. His parents, Ray and Betty Burnes, were highly respected teachers at NCCS for nearly three decades. Don said he and his twin brother, Dick, were very conscious that as “faculty brats” they were much less affluent than their NCCS classmates. His first exposure to that “bifurcation of class and status” was reinforced when they played summer town baseball with teammates even less fortunate. After NCCS, Don went to Exeter, received his BA from Princeton (’63), an MA in teaching from Washington University (’66), and a PhD in education from Columbia (’75). His government policy work focused on the education of poor and disadvantaged children, and his emphasis shifted to homelessness in the mid ‘80s. Don’s move to Denver after his wife’s death was providential personally and professionally—he married “an old flame,” Lynn Gisi, started the Burnes Institute, and began teaching graduate students at the University of Denver. Not surprisingly, the teachers’ son “discovered teaching is something I love to do.”

Devon Chivvis ’89 Devon Chivvis had two “eureka moments” that inspired her to become a photographer and filmmaker. “The first was when I was eight and got my first camera and fell in love with storytelling through imagery.” Sixteen years later, she was studying photography in Santa Fe when she realized the stories she wanted to tell needed multiple, moving images. “That’s when the light went off and I decided to go into film.” Devon co-founded Wild Life Productions in 2002 and has written, directed and produced both documentary and narrative television and films for the National Geographic, Discovery, and Travel channels as well as private and government clients. She came to NCCS as a fifth grader and said it was unique compared to other schools she attended because “you could be yourself, and be creative, but within a safe community. It was also such a down-to-earth, honest place.” Devon stayed through ninth grade, then graduated from Pomfret (’92) and Johns Hopkins University (’96) with a double major in international relations and French. Her first job was with an Internet start-up for a year, and then she traveled with camera in hand. After her “eureka moment” in Santa Fe, Devon enrolled in the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and received her MFA in writing and directing in 2002. She was mentored by director Robert Zemeckis and named an “upcoming director” in 2010 by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Devon’s films for Wild Life have taken her from Tanzania to the Polynesian islands to the Rocky Mountain wilderness and reflect her passion for travel, art, architecture, conservation, wildlife, and the study and storytelling of indigenous cultures around the world. She also wrote and directed the 2003 award-winning short film Dance with Me, set in 1939 Paris. Closer to her childhood home, Devon is currently working on the documentary The Harvard 5 on the five architects who changed New Canaan in the 1940s by designing striking midcentury modern homes, most notably Philip Johnson’s “Glass House.” Many of her productions have been in collaboration with Wild Life Productions co-founder Mark Fowler, a filmmaker and wildlife conservationist whom Devon met in New Canaan in 1993. They married in 2002 and live in Santa Monica. In addition to her film projects, Devon is moving into the virtual reality space, developing short form programs filmed around the world that can give the viewer an immersive, 360-degree experience. “It’s an amazing tool to introduce people to the broader world and hopefully inspire them to care about it in different ways.”

“I fell in love with storytelling through imagery.”

Mary Mountcastle ’69

“It’s not just a moral imperative. It’s a business imperative too.”

Mary Mountcastle brings a unique perspective to the world of philanthropy. For the past thirty-plus years, she has held important leadership roles with both grant-making foundations and vital nonprofit organizations helping low-income families and communities. “I understand the perspectives from both sets of shoes, from being able to translate the challenges faced by nonprofits to the importance of strategic thinking by foundations to make sure your grants add up to something that is greater than the sum of the parts.” As the former board chair of the national organization Council on Foundations, she speaks frequently on the need for nonprofits and grant makers to become more diverse and include younger voices in order to be effective in reaching their constituencies. “It’s not just a moral imperative. It’s a business imperative too.” The bookends of Mary’s career have been in politics. After graduating from Ethel Walker (’72) and Williams College (’76), she volunteered with Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign. She served on his 1976 transition team, became a White House intern, and then spent two years working on Capitol Hill. Her next stop was San Francisco for a public leadership fellowship followed by a two-year stint in local government, which prompted her to return east to earn her MBA from Yale (’83). Mary moved to New York for five years to work for the city’s small business lending program and then to head up MetLife’s first social investment initiative. Her involvement with two family foundations—the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation—led Mary to her parents’ native North Carolina. She soon established her own roots there with her husband, Jim Overton, and their daughter. She worked in rural economic development for five years and in 1993 began her nineteen-year association with Self-Help, a Durham-based nonprofit community development lender, real estate developer, and credit union. Mary has also served as the board chair of the National Center for Family Philanthropy and remains actively engaged in the Reynolds and Babcock Foundations. She left her leadership position at Self-Help in 2013 to return to politics, working to move North Carolina back to a forward-thinking and progressive state. Reflecting on her fifth- through ninth-grade years at NCCS, she said school “instilled in us a real sense of curiosity. I don’t remember textbooks, I just remember looking outward into the world.”

Lisa Pike Sheehy ’83 A teenage Lisa Pike discovered her “passion for wild places and protecting them” over the course of three Wyoming summers, surrounded by the majestic mountains in and around Grand Teton National Park. “It was there that I felt I had that wild spirit in myself come alive in understanding nature and its beauty and its importance. It just clicked for me that this is something that I wanted to then go out and protect and be a part of taking care of for future generations.” Lisa returned to Jackson Hole after graduating from Colorado College in 1991 to follow that path, leading to her current high-impact role as vice president of environmental activism for Patagonia. She was elevated to the newly created position in 2015, having directed environmental philanthropy at the outdoor gear and clothing retailer for a decade. Implementing Patagonia’s pledge to donate 1 percent of sales to the preservation and restoration of the natural environment, Lisa oversaw distribution of more than $7.1 million to some eight hundred grassroots organizations throughout the world last year. “We have a deep belief that true and lasting change happens from a diverse and vibrant grassroots environmental movement.” She also leads Patagonia’s multiyear campaigns to publicize environmental issues and increase environmental activism among Patagonia employees and customers. Lisa attended Country School from sixth through ninth grades and has vivid memories of tapping the maple trees for syrup, hiking the Appalachian Trail on the Outdoor Action Trip, and most importantly, the sense of community. “When I look back, I’m really struck by how much the school felt like a community, that the teachers and the kids and the parents were very much invested in us and each other.” Going forward she sought to replicate that strong sense of community in other experiences, “right up to my current job at Patagonia.” After Country School, Lisa went to Miss Porter’s (’86) and Colorado College and received her master’s in environmental policy from Tufts in 1997. Her first job out of college was with the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, where her connection to the wilderness first began. She then worked for the Sierra Club in Washington, D.C., and with the Environmental Grantmakers Association in New York for five years before joining Patagonia, located in coastal Ventura, California. She feels fortunate that her job allows her to combine “my vocation and my avocation.” Balancing her work responsibilities, travel, and family, Lisa finds inspiration in her two school-age children. “My amazing kids motivate me every day to get out there and really make a difference.”

“It was there that I felt I had that wild spirit in myself come alive.”

Will Speers ’72

“Hamlet is just about the answer to any question or problem.”

Will Speers decided after third grade in Mrs. Brown’s class that he wanted to be a third-grade teacher when he grew up. He amended that goal the following year, resolving to become a fourth-grade teacher just like Mrs. Westcott. The trend continued. And while the respective grades changed, the determination to emulate his teachers at NCCS never did. “All of my teachers were amazing. They didn’t just teach the subject, they totally engaged in the life of the kids. The patience, humor, and joy they brought to the classroom every day got me excited about being a teacher.” His first teaching experience was with Horizons after eighth grade, and he continued every summer through high school and college. Will relished the opportunity to learn from and work alongside his teachers, including Peg Brown and Sarah Westcott, “who were like Olympic gods to me when I was a child.” Fast forward to 1991, when Will was honored as a distinguished teacher by the White House and received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. After eleven years at Country School, Will graduated from Milton Academy (’75) and Princeton (’79). He received his master’s from Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English in 1984. Will was a senior at Princeton when he interviewed with 1953 Country School alum Jonathan O’Brien, the headmaster at St. Andrew’s School, and began his teaching career at the Delaware boarding school that September. In his thirty-seven years at St. Andrew’s, Will has worn many hats, including that of father to his three sons. Today he is associate head of school and dean of faculty, and he teaches three English courses and coaches squash. He and his wife, Heidi Rowe, married in 2007. Though Will’s family didn’t live on the Country School campus, it felt like home for the four Speers siblings. Will’s mother, Sue Speers joined the NCCS Upper School faculty in 1967 and retired in 1992. Many of the teachers were members of the First Presbyterian Church, where his father, the Rev. T. Guthrie Speers Jr., was the founding pastor. Will still teaches three classes in different grades in addition to his administrative duties, “even if it means going without sleep.” He appreciates the “unlimited curriculum” afforded to an English teacher but is hard-pressed to name his favorite book. “Hamlet is just about the answer to any question or problem you could have. So is Anna Karenina. So is Beloved. So is Pride and Prejudice. And I still teach Huckleberry Finn, which George Stevens first taught to me and introduced me to the human quality of the river.”

Edmund L. Resor ’66 For most of his forty-two years since graduating from college, Ed Resor has focused on helping people in rural Africa adapt to and benefit from appropriate technology. Those markers of progress have ranged from introducing ox plows in the 1970s, to vaccinations in the 1980s, and satellites, cell phones, and the Internet in the 1990s and beyond. The innumerable challenges of implementing change in countries ravaged by war and poverty were never a deterrent for Ed. “Although successes are rare, the gratitude of the people I have worked with has provided an emotional reward unmatched by any other work.” In 1974, Ed signed on to volunteer for one year with Catholic Relief Services in South Sudan. “But first I had to look it up on a map.” He stayed for four years and continues work there today. His first projects were helping rural communities access clean water utilizing hand pumps and boreholes and convincing the local Dinka farmers they could train and safely use their oxen to pull plows and carts. As a kid, Ed wanted to be an inventor and then an engineer, as evidenced by the dams he would build in the drainage ditch behind the NCCS kindergarten classroom. One of five Resor brothers to attend Country School, Ed went to St. Paul’s School (’70) and Yale (’74). He refined his consulting skills at the Yale School of Management (’80) and then with McKinsey & Company for five years. In 1986, Ed took over the Save the Children emergency relief programs in western and eastern Sudan and managed the transition from relief to public health and long-term, community-based development. “The vaccine was a real invention. Mothers would carry their children three miles across soft sand to get to a vaccination point because they trusted you.” When he returned to New York in the 1990s, Ed leveraged his telecommunications expertise to bring telephone and Internet service to countries in Africa and to Bangladesh and Haiti. His main focus now is education and working with the nonprofit organization World Possible and its efforts to provide free, off-line educational content for students in developing countries. Both Ed and his wife, Anne Marie, still support the peace-building efforts of Ed’s oldest Sudanese friend, Bishop Paride Taban, who married them in New Canaan in 1983. After the Sudan, the Resors raised their three children in New York City. The recipient of the NCCS 2005 Alumni Award plans to continue what he started in 1974. “I love this work and I wanted to give something back. So this is what I do.”

“The gratitude of the people I have worked with has provided an emotional reward.”

Grace O’Halloran ’13

“I feel very lucky. I’ve seen clearly for so long.”

Grace O’Halloran has worn eyeglasses since she was three years old. So when an NCCS fifth-grade math assignment challenged students to wisely spend $1 million to bring a Kenyan village out of extreme poverty, she opted to put her money toward eye care. The project was the genesis for Gracie’s Glasses—a nonprofit organization with a mission to provide used prescription eyeglasses to needy people in developing countries. “I feel very lucky. I’ve seen clearly for so long. When I learned that people go a lifetime without glasses, it was revolutionary for me.” Grace said she continued to think about the lack of eye care in the village of Sauri that summer of 2009, long after her class had completed its research and PowerPoint presentations. “I realized I don’t need a million dollars to fix it. I have a pile of old glasses and I’m sure other people do too.” She brought the idea back to her teacher Kristen Ball, created and presented a plan to NCCS administrators, and got the okay to start collecting glasses at school. Gracie’s Glasses was formed in 2010, and she expanded her collection efforts to her church. The Stamford Lions Club then heard about Grace and donated three hundred pairs of glasses. The collection total has since escalated to two thousand, stored in the O’Halloran’s basement family room until distribution. Gracie’s Glasses has distributed almost one thousand pairs of glasses to needy communities in Tanzania, India, Ghana, Nepal, Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Kenya. The greatest challenge is matching the prescription to the person, particularly in the poorest villages where even dependable electricity is scarce. Since 2009, Grace has tackled that challenge, working with nongovernmental relief agencies such as the Millennium Promise organization as well as contacts she has made personally. “It’s so rewarding. I’ve established relationships with a nun who runs an orphanage and convent school in Tanzania and a businessman from Uganda, who delivered a duffle bag full of glasses to his community.” Now a confident public speaker, Grace said she was painfully shy when she arrived at NCCS as a fifth grader, and her first presentation to a school assembly was “a milestone. It helped me come out of my shell.” The 2016 graduate of St. Luke’s School, who presented a research paper on visual impairment and poverty as part of the school’s Global Scholars program, said she plans to continue Gracie’s Glasses while attending Wake Forest University.

Kent Findlay ’80 Jeannie Staunton Bean ’83 Barbara van der Kieft Latimer ’85 Joshua Ziac ’86 Abigail Manny Newport ’89 Maria Sette ’92 Marshall Johnson ’04 For Kent Findlay, Jeannie Bean, Barbara Latimer, Josh Ziac, Abigail Newport, Maria Sette, and Marshall Johnson, the Country School really is a circle. All seven alums have returned to NCCS as full-time faculty and staff— circling back at different junctures in their lives, and for different reasons. What they share is a genuine commitment to the school community and its mission. As a ninth grader in 1980, Kent Findlay never thought she would return to NCCS. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved my ten years at Country School, but I was soooo ready to launch, ready to get to Choate, ready for life.” After Choate and Guilford College, she embarked on a successful twenty-five-year career in global sports marketing with Coca-Cola and then MasterCard. When her sons Thatcher (’20) and Beck came along, Kent shifted career gears and relocated to New Canaan. She joined the Country School marketing and communications department in 2012, the day after receiving her master’s in education from the University of Bridgeport. “When I close my eyes, I am always surprised that the sounds of the school haven’t changed at all. The squeals of children, the distant whistles of athletic practices, the clacking of trays in the cafeteria, the thump, thump of the four square ball at recess. My absolute favorite thing to do is find an excuse to be in Lower School and spy on rhythms.” Jeannie Bean was at NCCS from kindergarten through ninth grade, along with her four siblings and classmate/future husband, Chris Bean (’83). She attended Miss Porter’s School (’86), majored in elementary education at the University of Vermont (’90), and married Chris in 1995. She spent the ensuing years starting a family, juggling teaching during the day, and taking night classes toward her master’s degree in reading from the (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE)

Marshall Johnson ’04, Abigail Manny Newport ’89

Kent Findlay ’80, Maria Sette ’92

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Barbara van der Kieft Latimer ‘85, Joshua Ziac ‘86

Jeannie Staunton Bean ‘83

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College of New Rochelle. “I was preoccupied and busy. It wasn’t until I had my own children and was researching the best schools for them that NCCS returned to my radar. I didn’t hesitate sending my daughter Bella (’14).” Daughter Anna (’15) and son Finley (’17) would follow. Jeannie was at her first Beginners parents’ night when she knew she wanted to teach at Country School. “The memories of my own childhood came flooding back and I knew that I would be most productive working in this environment.” She joined the faculty in 2008 and is now a Beginners lead teacher. In her final year at the Ethel Walker School, Barbara Latimer thought being a photojournalist in Bermuda was a perfect senior year project. Her parents didn’t concur and suggested she pursue a proper internship. Happily, Barbara’s mom was volunteering at NCCS and arranged for a twoweek apprenticeship teaching Latin and math with Anne Barnes. The experience clinched it for Barbara, who majored in education at Boston College ‘(92) and received her master’s in middle school education the following year from Lesley College. She taught in Boston, married Bill Latimer in 1996, and continued to teach when his jobs took them to New York and London. She could hardly believe her good fortune when they were transferred back to Connecticut and there was an opportunity to teach math in the NCCS Upper School. “It has always been a dream of mine to give back to the place that gave me so much. I feel so lucky to be home and to raise my daughters Sloane (‘17) and Kyle (‘19) with the same amazing experience I had. I just hope that I’m making as big an impact on my students as my teachers made on me.” For Josh Ziac, the NCCS director of safety and security, returning to campus was all about family. Growing up, the school was his second home. His dad, John, was a key administrator at NCCS for forty-two years and his mom, Nancy, was with the school for thirty-two years in the Extended Day Program and as a music teacher. Josh worked in financial services for seven years after graduating from Greenwich High School (’89) and Boston College (’95) but changed course in 2001 after he and wife, Emily, had Christopher (’17) and Catherine (’15). “I saw coming back to NCCS as an opportunity to take my life, and my family’s life, in a new direction. It was an opportunity for a job where the personal fulfillment outweighed financial gain. It will certainly sound cliché, but the most rewarding aspect of working here is interacting with the kids. No question.” Abigail Newport recalls the names of every teacher she had during her nine years at NCCS, Wednesday grammar lunches, earning Hershey’s kisses

for remembering math facts, “and feeling like we were the coolest when we were in ninth grade.” As a student, she thought she wanted to grow up to be a teacher “because I loved my teachers, and I loved school.” Her next stops were St. Paul’s School (’92) and Harvard (’97). “After college it took a few years in the business world before I came to my senses and grabbed hold of my dream.” She earned her master’s from Bank Street College of Education (’04) and began teaching second grade at NCCS in 2007. “When families embrace a school mission that respects childhood, I believe that creates a community of people with wonderful values.” She and her husband, Jason, have three children, daughters Riley (’22) and Maggie (’24) and son, Tully. Maria Sette “truly developed a love of learning” in Upper School. She graduated from King Low Heywood Thomas (‘95) and the University of Connecticut (‘99) and received her master’s in education from Sacred Heart University (‘03). She was drawn to teaching while working at Horizons during her high school and college summers. She signed on as an NCCS apprentice after University of Connecticut, “and by the second month, I knew I had found my calling.” “I knew I wanted to work somewhere where teachers were valued, respected, loved their work, and were happy.” Two years later she was back as a fourth-grade teacher. Maria married Robert Faugno in 2008, and they have two sons, Michael (‘27) and Christopher. Marshall Johnson was contemplating a legal career after NCCS, Hotchkiss (’07), and the University of Virginia (’11). But following a one-year postgrad stint at a Washington, D.C., law firm, he decided to try his hand at education, accepting a seventh-grade history teaching position at the all-girls Hockaday School in Dallas. “After three great years, I knew it was time to head back to the East Coast before I developed a permanent Texas twang.” When he returned to the familiar halls of NCCS, the decision to join the faculty in 2015 as a seventh grade teacher was “a no-brainer.” Marshall said his NCCS teachers such as Mr. Fredo and Miss Friborg were “fantastic role models who instilled a firm sense of responsibility while also fostering a genuine curiosity in the material.” “I feel so incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to step into Miss Fri’s former classroom and work side-by-side with Mr. Fredo.”

With gratitude and appreciation to the 100 Faces of New Canaan Country School 1920s Penfield Comstock Mead ’25 Francis E. Weed ’26 Henry Stebbins Noble ’29 1930s Barbara Wheeler Du Val Spaulding ’37 George Grove ’38 1940s Mary Thorne Gould ’40 Patricia Lawrence Gates Lynch Ewell ’41 Emily McMurray Mead ’41 Judith Erdmann Makrianes ’45 Roderick MacLean Gander ’45 Virginia Macdonald Kegg Farrell ’46 Hedrick Smith ’47 Dorcas Eason MacClintock ’47 John F. Erdmann II ’47 Edward Hoagland ’47 John Varick Tunney ’49 1950s Samuel Sachs ’50 Peter Prescott ’50 Susan Haigh Carver ’51 Diane Monson ’51 Jennifer Robbins Manocherian ’53 Joan Dominick O’Brien ’53 Jonathan B. O’Brien ’53 Thomas Adams ’54 H. Keith H. Brodie ’54 G. David Forney Jr. ’54 Richard Ogden ’54 Vicky Robbins Cowal ’55 Peter C. Goldmark Jr. ’55 Taggart Adams ’56 L. Paul Bremer III ’56 Donald Burnes ’56 John Pratt ’56 Hardy Jones ’58

1960s Rick Ackerly ’60 James Rogers III ’60 Elizabeth Smith Crow ’61 David Gens ’61 Lucy Adams Billings ’63 Elizabeth Spelke ’64 Thomas G. MacCracken ’66 Edmund L. Resor ’66 Juliana Post ’66 Susan Sargent ’66 Sally Jesup Rue ’67 John Horgan ’68 Mary Mountcastle ’69 1970s Christopher Bancroft Burnham ’72 Amy Chan Downer ’72 Will Speers ’72 Matthew Earl Jones ’72 Jane Stoddard Williams ’72 Elizabeth Barratt-Brown ’74 Marjorie Brush Priebe ’74 Jonathan Isham ’75 Carl Brodnax ’76 Ned Rimer ’76 John Erdmann III ’78 Katherine Ward ’79 1980s Eric Woolworth ’80 William A. Shutkin ’80 Kent Findlay ’80 Bradford Bull ’82 Maurice Vaughn ’82 Lisa Pike Sheehy ’83 Jeannie Staunton Bean ’83 Barbara van der Kieft Latimer ’85 Christopher S. Chivvis ’86 Joshua Ziac ’86 Abigail Manny Newport ’89 Devon Chivvis ’89

1990s Alison Mleczko Griswold ’90 Shanté Paradigm Smalls ’90 Laurie Grassi Redmond ’90 James Vanderbilt ’91 Mehdi Akacem ’92 Maria Sette ’92 Ryan Oakes ’93 Zachary Iscol ’94 John Dauer ’95 Jason Young ’95 Nicholas Britell ’96 Dana Chivvis ’96 Renee Oni Brown ’97 Mickela Mallozzi ’97 Eliza Golden ’98 Matthew Heineman ’98 Jessica Vascellaro Lessin ’98 Mary Birnbaum ’99 2000s Allison Kessler Vear ’00 Willy Oppenheim ’01 Byron Meinerth ’02 Allison Williams ’03 Lee Dionne ’04 Holly Donaldson ’04 Neil Nair ’04 Virginia Mahoney ’13 Grace O’Halloran ’13 Christopher Jessup ’14

New Canaan Country School Alumni Award Recipients This award is presented each year to honor an alumna or alumnus who best embodies the statement from the school’s mission: “New Canaan Country School inspires students to be lifelong learners with the courage and confidence to make a positive contribution to the world.” 2016: G. David Forney Jr. ’54 2015: Zachary Iscol ’94 2014: Katherine Ward ’79 2013: Elizabeth Barratt-Brown ’74 2012: Matthew Heineman ’98 2011: Rick Ackerly ’60 2010: Edward Hoagland ’47 2009: Patricia Lawrence Gates Lynch Ewell ‘41 2008: Hardy Jones ’58 2007: Elizabeth Spelke ’64 2006: L. Paul Bremer III ’56 2005: Edmund L. Resor ’66 2004: William A. Shutkin ’80 2003: Emily McMurray Mead ’41 2002: H. Keith H. Brodie ’54 2001: Samuel Sachs ’50 2000: Elizabeth Smith Crow ’61 1999: Hedrick Smith ’47 1998: Jonathan B. O’Brien ’53 and Joan Dominick O’Brien ’53 1997: Peter C. Goldmark Jr. ’55

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The 100 Faces of New Canaan Country School was compiled under the guidance of the Editorial Advisory Committee: C. Daniel Bergfeld ’58 Steven Bloom ‘03 Lyn Bremer Chivvis ‘60 Gigi Brush Priebe ‘74 Stephanie Bowling Zeigler ’81 Gina S. Ely, Director of Alumni Affairs Profiles written by Kate McMahon Upson. Cover design and profile template by Good Design, LLC. Published by Reedy Press, LLC. Photo Credits: Elizabeth Spelke, page 15: Laboratory for Developmental Studies, Harvard University Dana Chivvis, page 26: Meredith Heuer Hedrick Smith, page 41: Foster Wiley Roderick Gander, page 54: Marlboro College Penfield Mead, page 64: Town of Darien, Probate Court With special thanks to the New Canaan Historical Society; Mark Macrides, NCCS archivist; Terry Gumz, NCCS Director of Advancement; and the many Country School alumni who nominated their classmates and friends for this special alumni publication. The more than four thousand alumni names listed on the front and back covers of this publication were drawn from multiple archival sources. As with all historical research, there may be some errors or omissions. If this is the case, please accept our sincere apologies and contact us at alumni@countryschool.net so that we may correct our records.

New Canaan Country School Alumni Council 2016–2017 Steven Bloom ’03, President Emily Coughlin Basaran ’98 C. Daniel Bergfeld ’58 Carl Brodnax ’76 Richard Colligan ’01 Philip Ford ’99 Corey Gammill ’95 Heather Weed Goldberg ’89 Frederick Golden ’90 Benjamin Halsell ’87 Hugh Halsell ’59 Paula Kennedy Harrigan ’81 Marshall Johnson ’04 Caitlin Maguire ’04 Diane Monson ’51 Carl Rohde ’66 Katharine O’Brien Rohn ’78 Kelsey Hubbard Rollinson ’86 Michael Sachs ’97 Richard See ’75 Stephanie Bowling Zeigler ’81 Ex Officio Members Robert P. Macrae, Head of School Gina S. Ely, Director of Alumni Affairs Terry M. Gumz, Director of Advancement

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