Spring
2022
SPECIAL ALUMNI NEWSLETTER EDITORS NOTE: I hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane. It has been an honor to gather all your memories and create this hard copy newsletter to be enjoyed especially, by the digitally challenged. It has been requested that you NOT copy and upload to any websites. The idea is to keep it just for us. Our Buxton history. Gratefully, with hugs, Smokey Minot ’62
1954 Alan Salisbury The Short Hills era! Writing for myself and my brother, Wade “47. Both Wade and I went to Buxton in Short Hills. Wade went to the “Upper School” where he was #11 on the sixman football team and among Mrs. Sangster’s many “favorites”! Of course, the class was so small they were all her favorites. (In their graduation year book, each member of the class was given a Shakespearean quote by Mrs. Sangster. For Wade, she selected, “He hath eaten me out of house and home.” Wade went on to be an epicurean and amateur chef.) I remember walking up the hill from the Lower School to the big house that was the Upper School on occasion. One of the highlights of Wade’s years was travelling to Tennessee to put on the play, “The Great Big Doorstep,” for a local audience. They had also done, “Arsenic and Old Lace.” Following graduation, Wade studied accounting at Rutgers Newark in a work-study program, interrupted by the Korean War in 1950, which saw him enlisting in the Air Force. Trained as a weather observer, he was sent to Germany for three years. Following the Air Force, he returned home (we lived in Maplewood) and completed his accounting degree at Rutgers. With a high recommendation from one of his professors, he was recruited and joined Price Waterhouse (forerunner of today’s PWC) where he began his career as a Junior Accountant in the San Francisco office. From there to Sacramento as a Senior Accountant, and then, promoted to Manager, was sent to open the first PW office in San Jose. There he excelled in building the audit practice, bringing in some small (at the time), but promising new client companies, like INTEL and AMD. Right time, right place, right man. He was made Partner at a young age. Next on to Dallas/Ft. Worth and finally to Los Angeles. For a number of years, Wade was the Partner in Charge of both the Emmy’s and the Academy Awards, appearing regularly on stage as “The man from Price Waterhouse” bringing the sealed envelopes with the names of the winners. Wade retired to Austin, Texas with his second wife, Mary. He passed away in 1999, leaving a son, Bill Salisbury of Los Angeles, and a grandson,
Jonathan Salisbury. He was predeceased by another son, Jonathan P. Salisbury. I can also report that Bruce Bohrman, also class of ’47, aka “Boofus,” is living with family in Maine. Bruce and Wade were extremely close friends and I was delighted to reconnect with him several years ago. He turned a hobby of knife-making into a hobby-business producing artistic knives. Bruce’s wife, Judy, passed away in 1996. He attended Buxton, Short Hills, from Chatham, NJ where, as I recall, his father was publisher of the Chatham Press local newspaper. I identified myself as Class of ’54 which is my actual year of high school graduation, but not from Buxton. I attended Buxton from first grade through sixth grade which I completed in 1948. That was the year that Ellen Gear Sangster, after inheriting the property in Williamstown, moved Buxton to Massachusetts. The lower school remained but was sold by Mrs. Sangster to the group that rebranded it as Far Brook Country Day School, which continues to thrive today as a progressive private school. I have visited it a few times in recent years and was amazed to find that most of the buildings that I remember so well, are still there, well refurbished and cared for. The Upper School house is long gone. So many of the traditions I recall remain intact and there are many new ones as well. The Far Brook Song Book is filled with songs I remember from Buxton. I left Buxton at the end of sixth grade and integrated into public schools, attending Maplewood Junior High School (now Maplewood Middle School), and graduating from Columbia High School in 1954. In what turned into a life changing experience for me, I received an appointment to West Point where I had a commitment to serve in the Army for three years, following graduation in 1958. I was commissioned into the Signal Corps (communications and electronics) where I found myself on the ground floor of bringing computers into the Army. Three years turned into thirty years. Along the way, the Army sent me to Stanford twice, for a total of four years of graduate school, first to get an MSEE and then teach at West Point, and later to get a Ph.D. in computer engineering and computer science. My last assignment was as a Major General, commanding the Army’s Information Systems Engineering Command, a world-wide organization with 4600 professionals. After retiring in 1987, I spent twelve years in industry with Contel Corporation (President of the Technology Center Division); the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp (MCC) (EVP/COO), and Learning Tree International (President). In 2011, I founded the Code of Support Foundation, a non-profit supporting service members, veterans and military families, where I remain active as a board member today. I married my wife, Florence, in 1971. We
have two daughters living in Raleigh, NC and Summit, NJ, and have four grandchildren. alanbs58@aol.com
1959 Frosty Puestow Montgomery After 52 years in New York City, and in the midst of the pandemic, I escaped to the Berkshires. I left just 2 days before the city closed down. I thought it might be for a few months but as we all know, it turned out to be one and a half years. During that time of walking the dog and hibernating, I realized that Lenox, MA was the perfect setting for me going forward, so I bought a condo in a nice community and by last May, I was packing up boxes to journey up to the Berkshires, for my permanent residence going forward. New York is a great city and I had a good ride, for all those years. As my first love was the theatre, this was the town in which I needed to be. In order to afford my arts habits, I needed to find myself gainfully employed. I have had a number of careers, starting in the publishing world with Time-Life, as it was originally called back in 1969. First, I was at Life International in the promotion department and then later I moved over to Sports Illustrated, still in promotion. From there, I moved into industrial film making, which was great fun and I learned a lot about what is involved in making a film. Later, I became a freelance producer in multimedia and joined up with VisualScope, where we produced movies and multimedia for some of the people with whom I had worked, at Time-Life, as well as moving into the networks to produce promotional material for NBC, ABC and CBS. That was really a lot of fun! Ultimately, I left the world of multi-media. For the last 25 years, I was a real Estate Broker in residential sales, first at Corcoran and then Brown Harris Stevens. I hit that market shortly after the city recovered from the recession of ’88, and it was a great ride for most of that time, until the end. All of that allowed me to catch a lot of theatre among other things.