Fall 2016
Allison Brooks Janney ’77 Alumni Award Winner 2016
Board of Trustees
Alumni Association Board of Governors
Charles Ayres ’77 Thomas Barry P’01,’03,’05 Robert Chartener ’76, P’18 John Coumantaros ’80, P’16,’19 Ian Desai ’00 William Elfers ’67, Vice President
Christina Bechhold ’03 VP and Chair, Nominating Committee
Chip Quarrier ’90 VP and Chair, Communications Committee
Miriam Gelber Beveridge ’86 VP and Co-chair, Gender Committee
Casey Reid ’01
Sirin Bulakul ’06
Elizabeth Ford P’11,’13
Adam Casella ’06 VP and Chair, Alumni Services Committee
Sean Gorman ’72, Secretary
Nathalie Pierrepont Danilovich ’03
Robert Gould ’77
Charlotte Dillon ’10
John Grube ’65, P’00
Meredith “Mark” Gall ’59
Charles Gulden ’79, P’12 President, The Hotchkiss Fund
Peter Gifford ’93
Elizabeth Hines ’93 Raymond McGuire ’75 Kendra O’Donnell Thomas Quinn ’71, P’15,’17,’19 Jean Weinberg Rose ’80, P’18, President
Caldwell Hart ’87, P’16,’20 Secretary and Chair, Membership Subcommittee of the Nominating Committee Keith Holmes ’77 VP and Co-chair, Gender Committee Annika Lescott ’06 Barrett Lester ’81
William Sandberg ’65 Thomas Seidenstein ’91, President Sheria Smith ’01 Thomas Terbell ’95 Michael Thompson ’66 Carolyn Toolan ’97 Gwyn Williams ’84, P’17,’19
EX-OFFICIO MEMBERS
Craig Bradley, Head of School Katheryn Allen Berlandi ’88, P’19 Past President, Alumni Association
Nisa Leung Lin ’88
Edward Greenberg ’55 Past President, Alumni Association
Roger Smith ’78, P’08
Nicholas Moore ’71, P’89,’01,’06
Charles Gulden ’79, P’12
John Thornton ’72, P’10,’11,’16 Officer-At-Large
Paul Mutter ’87
Jean Weinberg Rose ’80, P’18 President, Board of Trustees
Thomas Seidenstein ’91 President, Alumni Association
William Tyree ’81, P’14, Treasurer
Nichole Phillips ’89 VP and Chair, Alumni of Color Committee
Rebecca van der Bogert
Emily Pressman ’98
Daniel Wilner ’03 David Wyshner ’85 EMERITI
Howard Bissell ’55, P’82 John Chandler, Jr. ’53, P’82,’85,’87, GP’10,’14,’16 Frederick Frank ’50, P’12 Robert Oden, Jr. P’97 Francis Vincent, Jr. ’56, P’85
Ready, Set, Go More than 1,000 students, faculty, and staff gathered on Bissell Common on Oct. 18 to form the number “125” for a commemorative photograph to mark the School’s 125th academic year.
PHOTO BY WENDY CARLSON
Arthur White P’71, ’74, GP’08,’11
COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY WENDY CARLSON
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HEAD OF SCHOOL
Craig W. Bradley CHIEF COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER
Hellen Hom-Diamond EDITOR
Wendy Carlson MAGAZINE DESIGNER
Julie Hammill WRITER & DIGITAL CONTENT PRODUCER
FEATURES
14 The Hotchkiss School Celebrates 125 Academic Years
Chelsea Edgar
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Maria Bissell Hotchkiss: The First Lady of Town Hill
COMMUNICATIONS
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The Evolution of Teaching and Learning
COORDINATOR
Julie Vecchitto VIDEOGRAPHER AND DIGITAL MEDIA SPECIALIST
Tyler Wosleger WEBSITE AND DESIGN MANAGER
Margaret Szubra CONTRIBUTORS
Roberta Jenckes Erin Reid P’01,’05 Tom Reiss ’82 Roger Wistar The Hotchkiss School does not discriminate on the basis of age, sex, religion, race, color, sexual orientation, or national orientation in the administration of its educational policies, athletics, or other school-administered programs, or in the administration of its hiring and employment practices. Hotchkiss Magazine is produced by the Office of Communications for alumni, parents, members of the faculty and staff, and friends of the School. Letters and comments are welcome. Please send inquiries and comments to: The Hotchkiss School, 11 Interlaken Road, Lakeville, CT 06039-2141, email magazine@hotchkiss.org, or phone 860-435-3122.
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Under the Spell of Emerson, Thoreau, and The Rolling Stones, a Young Writer Found His Voice
A Glimpse of the History of School Prizes
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Breaking Down That Old-Boy Stuff: The Early Years of Coeducation
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More Than a Decade Later, a Chinese Program Thrives
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Sulpicia, Party of Two
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They Call Him “The Fentonator”
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From Punchcards to Programming Apps
32 What Does Freddie Mercury Have to Do With Venezuela’s Political Divide?
36 Annual Report of Giving 2015-2016 DEPARTMENTS
4 Campus Connection 50 Class Notes
80 In Memoriam 88 Parting Shot F a l l
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Bradley announces a Head of School Holiday after the commemorative 125th photo.
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PHOTO BY WENDY CARLSON
“We are blessed with extraordinary resources and unusually talented and motivated people at Hotchkiss, all of whom contribute to the excellent learning that happens here.”
ne of the most important and formative learning experiences I had at Dartmouth was a term living with a French family and studying French with renowned language professor John Rassias in Blois, France, in the spring of my sophomore year. It was an extraordinary experience for a young person who was attending college 125 miles from home, had not travelled outside of North America, and who had only spoken English in his day-today life. It shaped my life in profound ways, not least in our family’s eventual decision to move to France, where we have lived for the past ten years. One of the milestones in our learning in France was the point during the term when we began to dream in French. That was an indicator of the immersion taking hold in one’s subconscious, of the new environment, culture, and language displacing, at least temporarily, the native and familiar. My transition to Hotchkiss has been far less culturally shocking than a move to France, and I have been dreaming in the “Hotchkiss culture” since my first days in Lakeville. The role of head of school is complex and involves interacting with a number of different stakeholders, each of whom is important and has valuable ideas and perspectives, often expressed quite passionately. It is rewarding, as is thinking about a great range and diversity of problems and opportunities. However, an essential step in experiential learning, as in leadership, is reflection, and making time to reflect on those conversations can be challenging, given the demands on time.
There have been many highlights, especially since the students arrived on campus in late August. One of the many highlights of my time at Hotchkiss was our celebration of the 125th year since the School’s opening. It was an unseasonably warm October day, and we organized the whole community to form the number “125” on the new Bissell Common (the grassy quad outside of Edelman, Flinn, and now, Redlich Hall) for an aerial photograph. It culminated in my declaring a Head’s holiday — one of the many happy tasks of the job. Another highlight has been spending time with alumni who have returned for reunions in June and September (Classes of ’56 and ’66 reunions). Listening to the stories of our alumni and understanding the nature of the experience decades ago, including tales of the remarkable teachers who defined the experience for students at particular points in the School’s history, has been an important element of my learning about Hotchkiss. One of the striking things about reunions is the sense of time compressed. The memories that come to the fore when old friends gather on campus are as vivid as if they occurred last week or last year, not fifty years ago. How quickly time has passed since graduation! During the term we spent together in Blois, Professor Rassias would begin each day, starting on the very first day, by saying “Le trimestre est presque terminé:” “The term is nearly finished.” What he was teaching us was that as rich and rewarding our experience was every day, it would pass very quickly, as indeed it did. We are blessed with extraordinary resources and unusually talented and motivated people at Hotchkiss, all of whom contribute to the excellent learning that happens here. But the resource we all find to be permanently scarce is time. This is true for each of us, no matter our age or stage in life. I take a long view and yet approach things with a sense of urgency. There really is no time to waste — a lesson all students learn during their very full and busy Hotchkiss years. As we begin creating together the next chapter in Hotchkiss’s story, I encourage us to do so with a sense of urgency and the essential understanding that to achieve anything truly worthwhile and worthy of our heritage will take a long time. Let’s begin. Le trimestre est presque terminé.
Four New Trustees Join the Board ELIZABETH (JAN) FORD P’11,’13 is a managing director and head of compliance in the Americas at Deutsche Bank. She is a member of the global compliance executive committee, the Americas regional governance board, the North America executive committee, and the U.S. management risk committee. Prior to Deutsche Bank, Jan spent 25 years at Goldman Sachs & Co. and was most recently was the co-chief compliance officer. Jan earned a B.A. from Yale, an M.B.A. from the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, and a J.D. from Cornell Law School. From 2009 to 2013, she was also the chair of the Hotchkiss Parent Fund. She served as a Parent Agent from 2008 to 2013. Jan, her husband, Stefan, and their two children live in New York City. ROBERT R. GOULD ’77 is chairman of the Investment Committee. He served on his 25th Reunion gift committee and has been a member of the Investment Committee since 2009. Bob is a principal and vice chairman of Spinnaker Trust in Portland, Maine, and a trustee and the chairman of the Investment Committee of The Pinkerton Foundation in New York. Bob holds a B.S. in engineering from Yale and an M.B.A. from NYU Stern. He is on the board of advisors of the Yale School of Management and the boards of Squash Haven, the Portland Museum of Art, and Portland Community Squash. He is the former president of the Prouts Neck Association. Bob, his wife, Sarah, and their three daughters reside in Hamilton, Mass., and Prouts Neck, Maine. RAYMOND J. MCGUIRE ’75 is Citi’s Global Head of Corporate and Investment Banking. Ray serves on several boards, including the Alex Hillman Family Foundation, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Citi Foundation, De La Salle Academy, FAPE (Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies), Harvard Club of NY, NY City Police Foundation, NY-Presbyterian Hospital, NY Public Library, Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ray received his M.B.A. and J.D. from Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, respectively, and a B.A., cum laude, from Harvard. He earned an L.H.D. from Pratt Institute. He resides in New York City with his wife and three children. Ray served on the Hotchkiss Board of Trustees from 1985 to 1995. TOM SEIDENSTEIN ’91 is the president of The Hotchkiss Alumni Association. He is the vice president for strategy and policy research at Fannie Mae. Tom is also a trustee of the International Valuation Standards Committee (IVSC), based in London, and a member of the Development Committee of the National Presbyterian School. Tom received an M.A. in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a B.A., cum laude, from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Tom, his wife, Karin, and their two children live in Bethesda, Md.
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An Update from the Board of Trustees Almost 125 years after Maria Bissell Hotchkiss first convened her board of trustees in Lakeville in 1891, the current trustees gathered on a much-changed campus for the board’s September meeting. Though they took time to welcome a new head of school, celebrate the opening of a new dormitory, and mark a milestone in Hotchkiss’s history, the board focused largely on matters of strategy, general oversight, and planning for the School’s future.
Mission Task Force: In 2014-15, Hotchkiss completed a self-study as part of its 10-year re-accreditation process and identified the mission statement as a major priority for review. The visiting re-accreditation committee concurred, and in response the Board of Trustees appointed a Mission Task Force of trustees and faculty members to assess our current Statement of Goals and Purposes and the ways in which the School implements it. There has been no intent to create a new mission; rather, the goal is to articulate the School’s mission more succinctly and in a way that can be readily grasped by those new to Hotchkiss. The task force, chaired by Elizabeth Hines ’93 and assisted by a listening committee of faculty and staff, met with or received survey responses from more than 1,500 students, alumni, parents, and members of the faculty and staff. The results were illuminating: the sense of what defines the Hotchkiss experience is remarkably consistent across constituencies and generations. The task force noted that these unique traits fall into five broad categories: academic rigor and learning, character and values, opportunity for personal growth, community and relationships, and responsible citizenship. The group must now distill these traits into a statement that is concise, compelling, and distinctive, with an eye towards completing this process this academic year. Residential Life: The board views the opportunity for around-the-clock learning within a residential community as one of Hotchkiss’s greatest strengths. Dormitories form the nexus of residential life; they should not only furnish safe and comfortable housing for students, but also offer spaces for interaction and collaborative study and provide housing for faculty families. The reality is that the School’s oldest dormitories were completed
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nearly a century ago, when residential life was quite different. While Memorial, Buehler, Coy, and Tinker were built to last (and indeed still have their original slate roofs!), they require renovation to meet evolving residential needs. The board has begun planning the School’s first major capital campaign since our Centennial in 1991, and raising funds to renovate the oldest dorms will be a significant component, as will expanding financial aid to make Hotchkiss affordable for more families. Plans for renovations of and an addition to Memorial Hall have been developed under the leadership of John Grube ’65. Preserving the aesthetic character of Memorial, which was designed by the prominent architect Cass Gilbert and opened in 1923, remains an important consideration. Board Governance: The board reaffirmed its commitment to best practices in governance by adopting a new set of trustee guidelines. While 10 of the 21 term trustees have joined since 2014, as have all three ex-officio members, the board is increasing its outreach to recruit members who bring specific talents to Hotchkiss and represent its diversity.
School Leadership: No school would choose to have four heads of school during a fiveyear period, a statistic of which the trustees are acutely aware. That Hotchkiss remains a great school is a testament to its strong culture and a devoted faculty and staff. Craig Bradley comes to Hotchkiss with numerous strengths, notably in long-term educational planning and in building community life. While Mr. Bradley is very much in the early stage of his tenure, he expressed to the board his commitment to maintaining a culture of respect (and, as a corollary, an admiration of individual talent); encouraging creativity and appropriate risktaking among the faculty; continuing the work of Peter O’Neill in building a sense of community and addressing issues of diversity and inclusion; improving professional development and building a stronger culture of accountability within the faculty; and fostering the strong sense of place that defines Hotchkiss. The trustees are grateful to be entrusted with the stewardship of this remarkable American school. We look with confidence and optimism to the School’s exciting future. — William Chartener ’76, P’18
Redlich Hall Dedication Marks Historic Moment in Residential Life
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PHOTOS BY WENDY CARLSON
cold drizzle didn’t put a damper on the Redlich Hall dedication ceremony, held on Bissell Common on Sept. 30. The new dormitory, which opened last summer, was made possible by Christopher R. Redlich Jr. ’68, whose contribution to fund the construction is the largest single gift in the history of the School. During the dedication, Board of Trustees President Jeannie Weinberg Rose ’80, P’18, expressed deep gratitude for Redlich’s generosity and vision for the future of residential life at Hotchkiss. “As a boarding school, our residential program is at the heart of a student’s experience,” Rose said. “And so revitalizing our residential program is one of our highest and most urgent priorities as a community. We are currently developing a new residential life curriculum, new training programs for dorm faculty, and new residential spaces for our students and faculty to live and grow together. The construction of Redlich Hall is both the centerpiece and the catalyst of all these vital initiatives.”
Redlich Hall joins Flinn and Edelman Halls on Bissell Common, newly renamed in honor of the School’s founder, Maria Bissell Hotchkiss. The 60-bed girls’ dormitory also contains four faculty residences, each dedicated to faculty members whom Redlich revered during his time at Hotchkiss: Richard Gurney, Dave and Sam Coughlin, Peter Beaumont, and Bob Hawkins. With its brick facade and white columns, Redlich’s design echoes the aesthetic of the other dormitories
on the Common, unifying that part of the School’s campus. Head of School Craig Bradley praised Redlich for his contribution to the mission of the School: to foster learning in community. “In his great wisdom, Chris expressly wanted to provide comfortable, welcoming, and purposeful faculty residences in Redlich Hall, residences that would accommodate growing faculty families and would allow for some of our most experienced and talented faculty to remain on dorm,” Bradley said. Three senior proctors — Elodie Marran, Sarah Engs, and Emilia Game — also participated in the dedication ceremony, reading an acrostic poem that captured their experience in Redlich. Following the proctors’ presentation, Chris Redlich, along with several friends and family members, cut the ceremonial ribbon in front of the main entryway. A plaque honoring Redlich hangs in the foyer, inscribed with his words: “Value those who can draw on the vast complexity of the world and come to revealing conclusions.”
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Meet Erby Mitchell, New Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Mitchell joined Hotchkiss last summer. Previously, he was assistant head for enrollment at The Loomis Chaffee School. What stands out to you about Hotchkiss in the short time you’ve been here? When I arrived this summer, I had lunch with a small group of graduates who were working as teaching fellows in the Portals program. It was clear to me in my conversations with them that our alumni take tremendous pride in this school, and they have fond memories of how this place contributed to their growth as young adults.
Hotchkiss is a wonderful place with a strong reputation. I am excited by the prospect of introducing Hotchkiss to even more families who may be new to the idea of boarding school. While our enrollment situation is stable, we know that the number of families who can afford a boarding school education is declining. We need to be more articulate about the value of the experience that we offer.
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PHOTO BY WENDY CARLSON
What are some of the opportunities and challenges you anticipate here?
“Hotchkiss is a wonderful place with a strong reputation. I am excited by the prospect of introducing Hotchkiss to even more families who may be new to the idea of boarding school.” Under your leadership at Loomis, you helped shift the student body composition — the boarding population rose from 53 to 68 percent. How did you accomplish that? It wouldn’t have happened without the strong leadership of the head of school. Throughout its history, Loomis has served many day students in the greater Hartford community. However, given the dynamics of the region, which included major economic and demographic shifts, we understood that sustaining a day population of more than 350 was not possible. The head of school and board of trustees set out a clear path, and the admission team worked diligently to increase boarding applications while preserving quality and gradually reducing the number of day students. The single most important factor was the creation of innovative programs. The school leadership was aggressive about raising money for financial aid and renovating spaces that allowed us to attract the students we wanted.
Tell us about your experience working with Craig Bradley at Bowdoin. I was a member of the Bowdoin College admission team, and I overlapped with Craig [then Dean of Students at Bowdoin] for just one year before he moved to Paris. While I didn’t work with Craig directly, our offices collaborated a great deal on student of color recruitment and retention. We both championed our work with the Posse Foundation, and Craig and his team drove the process of eliminating fraternities and creating a more inclusive and healthy residential life program.
What are some of the toughest challenges for admission offices in independent schools these days?
What do you and your family like to do for fun around here? We’ve enjoyed spending time at the town Grove in Salisbury and taking short drives to western Massachusetts. We are not necessarily outdoor types, but we are learning to enjoy long walks, sitting by the water, and the quiet of this place. My family will spend this next year in a bit of transition: I have a high school senior who attends the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, where she has an extraordinary group of friends and teachers who have nurtured her love of musical theater and vocal music. We didn’t want to disrupt her experience. My wife will continue to teach at an elementary school in Windsor, Conn., where our six-year-old will also attend. Our 14-year-old will be at Indian Mountain School as a boarding student. While the year will be a bit disjointed, I know that we will all enjoy weekends and holidays here in Lakeville, where we have already established a good network of friends and colleagues.
There are a range of challenges that independent schools will face in the coming years, and while Hotchkiss may not be as affected by them as others, we need to face these issues head-on. We are facing a declining number of families who can afford our schools. We will need to quantify and better articulate the value of our experience. And given the recent attention placed on independent schools caused by sexual misconduct scandals, families are — rightfully so — asking questions. While there are other challenges for schools to consider, these, for me, represent some of the most pressing.
Do you have any specific initiatives that you’d like to implement here? I see opportunities to implement scholarship and financial aid initiatives that could be quite distinctive for Hotchkiss. I am inspired by Craig and his vision and know that in time, we will grow our financial aid budget in ways that will be transformative. Moreover, I believe that we can strengthen athletics without compromising the quality of our student body.
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Behind the Scenes,
The Hamill Family Fund Helps Fairfield Farm
harvesting. Much of a farm’s daily operating budget involves unseen expenses: seeds, fuel for tractors, repairs for broken equipment, and myriad other costs. Jon Hamill ’56 knows this well. His connection to agriculture goes back to his family’s roots as farmers in Long Island, and he grew up in
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rural Illinois, so he has a natural affinity and appreciation for the land. In March 2015, Jon and his sisters, Nancy Hamill and Elizabeth Bramsen, created the Hamill Family Farm Endowment, in memory of their father, Corky Hamill ’32, with a gift through the Hamill Family Foundation. The endowment will provide significant annual income to offset many of the farm’s
The Hamill family has also made other contributions to the School, including The Hamill Family Faculty Education and Endowment Fund: started by Jon’s father, Corky, in 2004. The income from this fund is used to support faculty members through continuing education sabbatical, travel, and seminars.
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here’s more to running a farm than plowing, planting, and
ongoing expenses, covering the cost of feed, bins, and tools, providing compensation for farm workers, and supporting the Fairfield Farm Ecosystems and Adventure Team (FFEAT) and the summer internship programs. Touring the farm this fall with his wife, Nancy, Jon was astounded both by its beauty and its contributions to the Dining Hall. The farm produces 30 percent of the produce for the Dining Hall between April and November, and last year’s harvest enabled Dining Services to offset costs, creating an even more robust local food sourcing program. He was also impressed with student involvement in the farm through FFEAT, team building events, and math, art, English, and science classes, which use the farm as an outdoor classroom. In the early ’50s, when Hamill attended Hotchkiss, such a farm would never have existed. “The issues and educational opportunities are simply so different now,’’ Jon said. “More Hotchkiss students today come from urban and dense suburban locations and may have less knowledge about where their food comes from and how it’s grown.” Jack Blum ’47, and his wife, Jeanne Blum, donated and sold most of the former cattle farm’s 280 acres to the School in 2004. Since then, Fairfield Farm has evolved into one of the most important places on campus. Jon hopes that the family endowment will help it continue to grow, covering the small expenses for which raising money can be a challenge. “The farm visit let me see this amorphous concept applied — and come to life,” he said.
A Barn-Raising at Fairfield Farm PHOTO BY WENDY CARLSON
A groundbreaking ceremony on July 21 marked the beginning of construction on the new Mary M. Graf Barn at Fairfield Farm, slated for opening in March 2017. In September, the first phase of construction was completed with the raising of the timber frame. Graf, the great-great-great niece of the School’s founder, Maria Bissell Hotchkiss, has already given generously to the Farm. Her contributions have helped ensure its continued operation by permanently endowing the farm manager position, among other vital functions. Her most recent gift has funded the construction of a 10,000-square-foot, timber-frame barn to replace the former dairy barn on the property. The new facility, which will be built using only locally sourced timber, will feature an apartment for the farm manager, ample storage and classroom space, and room for livestock. Students, faculty, staff, and alumni will be able to use the barn for teaching, learning, and social gatherings. F a l l
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Allison Brooks Janney ’77: 2016 Alumni Award Winner
In October, Hotchkiss honored its 83rd Alumni Award winner, actress Allison Brooks Janney ’77, for her distinguished career in film, television, and theater. The first woman to receive the award, Janney has become a role model through the wide range of characters she’s portrayed — from White House power player C.J. Cregg in The West Wing to a recovering addict in Mom. During her visit to campus, Janney talked to Hotchkiss Magazine about her career, her Hotchkiss days, and how success later in life can be richer.
I was a little nervous, but my good friend Chris Meledandri ’77 said, “I think this is right for you.” He talked me into coming, and I’m glad I did. Most of the time, when I find out I won an award, I think, “I don’t deserve an award. Surely there’s some other woman who’s more accomplished.” I tend to undervalue my accomplishments. But I love what I do and I love to entertain people, and sometimes, I have the added benefit of educating people. The West Wing was such a great show for that reason. Because of the part I played [C.J. Cregg, White House press secretary and, later, chief of staff], a lot of people come up to me and tell me that my character inspired them to go into public service. That’s sort of a lovely added bonus as an actress — to get to entertain and educate and inspire people.
Did you know you wanted to become an actress while you were a student at Hotchkiss? No. I don’t think that occurred to me until I went to Kenyon College. I thought at first that maybe I’d be a psychology major, but there was this whole semester where you had to deal with rats, and I couldn’t do it. And then when I met Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, I thought: OK, I guess this is where I’m heading. Paul had his own way of directing — he didn’t sit in the auditorium and yell things at us; he’d come down and put his arm around you and sort of walk you offstage and talk to you, and I would always try to mess up so he’d
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have to come over and put his arm around me. He loved actors and he loved acting and he loved talking about the craft. It was extraordinary getting to work with him. And Joanne was a very giving, loving woman.
You have more than 115 credits in film, television, and theater. Out of all the characters you’ve played, do you have a favorite? I think I can find something I love about every role I’ve played. As an actor, you rarely get to play a part more than a season on Broadway. But when you get to do a character for seven years, which I got to do with C.J. on The West Wing, that kinda stays with you. She was a great character to play, because she was a great role model for women — a powerful woman in the inner circle of the White House — which was important to me. And I like playing the crazy, floozy people, too, like my Mom role on CBS. She has no boundaries and she’s completely narcissistic, and it’s fun to play someone like that. And the show deals with serious subjects, too — it’s about these women in recovery. I love that we’re doing our bit to destigmatize recovery in this country. I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t have a loved one who’s in recovery, or should be in recovery. It’s an issue that’s important to me.
To read more about the Alumni Award, visit hotchkiss.org/alumni-award
Was there anyone in particular at Hotchkiss who was a role model for you? I always remember Blanche Hoar, the art teacher. She was a woman whom all of us looked up to. She was very talented, really strong and opinionated, but she made you want to work hard, because you wanted to please her. I loved her.
With your background as C.J. Cregg, have you ever thought about a career in politics? What if Hillary Clinton asked you to be her press secretary? No. No. No. No. In September, I went stumping for Hillary in Ohio with my West Wing compadres, and that was not comfortable for me. I’m very much voting for Hillary, but I did not feel comfortable standing up and riling the crowd as Allison Janney. If I’d been C.J., I could have gotten behind someone else’s words, but I’m not comfortable in the political world. One of the downsides of playing C.J. Cregg is that I’m usually a big disappointment to the people who think I’m that politically savvy. It was fun to play someone that smart and savvy and brilliant.
Any advice for Hotchkiss students? Having success later in life is better and richer, and you bring more to it than when you have success early on. Even though I’m an actress, I’ve taken a directing course, I’ve run the lighting board, I’ve done every aspect of the business. And that’s important.
PHOTO BY WENDY CARLSON
What went through your mind when you found out you had won the Alumni Award?
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Pining for an Iceberg Photography Instructor Greg Lock finds inspiration in the desolate Arctic landscape By WENDY CARLSON
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chaperoning a student trip to Antarctica, Greg Lock, director of photography, film and related media, first laid eyes on a tabular iceberg. The sheer enormity of the milelong, translucent blue slab captivated him. These massive ice formations quickly became a full-blown obsession, and Lock tried to finagle his way back to Antarctica several times to see more of them. An acquaintance offered him a ride on a Chilean army vessel heading to the Antarctic peninsula. He nearly caught a plane to Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city in the world, to meet an ornithologist who promised to get him on a senior citizen’s cruise. Neither of these attempts panned out. But last summer, thanks to the Robert Hawkins Fund, one of the School’s 20 endowed funds for faculty professional development and summer travel programs, Lock was able to commune with icebergs once again — this time in the Arctic, on the opposite end of the world. The fund allowed Lock to participate in The Arctic Circle, a residency program for artists, scientists, architects, and educators, who pursue personal projects while living aboard a 100-year-old brigantine. Lock, who was selected from among 300 applicants for the expedition, said that programs like The Arctic Circle challenge him and keep him engaged with his art. “And in doing that, I can teach students how to engage with the world from an artist’s point of view,” he said. In his own work, Lock uses photographs to interpret the sensation of being in space and experiencing form. Using a series of photo-
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graphs, he generates virtual, 3-D versions of the original subjects. He then takes photos of these objects; sometimes, he makes sculptures from the virtual renderings. The Arctic expedition allowed him to focus on his art, albeit in freezing temperatures and cramped living quarters, as he and the 25 other participants sailed from Svalbard, Norway, one of the world’s northernmost towns, through open seas and sheltered fjords. The group stopped for several hours each day to explore the frozen landscape, wandering over glaciers and shorelines that were often littered with trash washed in from the currents. Some artists submerged cameras into the
ocean to photograph the swirling, greenish blue turbulence; others, struck by the soft light and the snowy peaks that faded into the distance, drew inspiration from the icy landscape. Lock himself spent several hours scooting around an iceberg in a rubber Zodiac, taking photos and recording the sounds of lapping waves, creaking ice, and the occasional whale song. Besides experiencing the beauty of the icy landscape, one of the most memorable parts of the residency was being among fellow artists and working together creatively, said Lock. The group visited the ironically named Lloyds Hotel of Möllerfjorden, a remote emergency shelter the size of a shipping container, where
PHOTO BY GREG LOCK
hree years ago , while
Have Grants, Will Travel How some other faculty members spent their summers The Arctic isn’t the only far-flung place that faculty members visited this summer with the support of endowed funds. More than 20 funds exist to support professional development, providing faculty members opportunities to enrich their own personal education, which ultimately enhances the quality of teaching at Hotchkiss. In addition to the Arctic excursion, six other faculty members used the Robert Hawkins Fund to support trips to Israel, Joshua Tree National Park, China, and other destinations to study and research archeology, nature journaling and water studies, and ceramics. The
they set up a temporary exhibition of their work. They created their own newspaper on board, featuring headlines like “Cheese Doodle Stains Glacier.” They brought back ice chips from their excursions to use in cocktails, and on several occasions, they jumped into the icy water — for about 30 seconds. In the end, Lock left the Arctic without seeing another tabular iceberg; those giant ice formations mostly occur in the Weddell Sea in the Antarctic, where some of the largest ice shelves are found. But he did experience something equally astonishing. Some 600 miles south of the North Pole,
their ship moored at the “frozen sea,” the point at which the ocean turns completely into ice. There, spiky slabs of ice jutted out of the ocean, creating an eerie, desolate landscape. Feeling a bit like Shackleton, Lock left the boat with the group to venture out in what seemed to him an otherworldly place. “We were walking in places no one had been before,” Lock said. “It was incredible — like we were at the top of the world, which, really, we were.”
Collaborative Arts Fund enabled five faculty members to travel to Florence, Italy, with Hotchkiss students to study art, dance, and music. Faculty members have traveled as far away as Senegal, Ireland, and Belgium to attend educational conferences, multicultural leadership training, and take degreerelated courses.
To see more of Lock’s photos, visit hotchkiss.org/arts F a l l
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125 The Hotchkiss School Celebrates
Since Hotchkiss opened its doors to 50 students in pursuit of college preparation on October 19, 1892, the School has become an institution of academic distinction — and a diverse, vibrant community. Throughout the 125th academic year, we will celebrate the School, past and present.
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PHOTO BY WENDY CARLSON
academic years
maria bissell hotchkiss
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The First Lady of Town Hill
aria harrison bissell
was born on August 14, 1827, on Tory Hill, half a mile south of the property where the School now stands. Seventy-four years later, Maria died at the Plaza Hotel in New York City and was buried in the corner plot of the Town Hill Cemetery on campus. The story of her life is the story of Hotchkiss: how a school with humble beginnings became a globally renowned, independent institution. Maria’s education began in a red schoolhouse located on the lane leading west from her home in what was known as the Harrison District. The lane was known for its large beds of fringed gentian in the summer and its snowdrifts in the winter; it was always the first road in town to become impassible due to snow. Maria began her career as a teacher at the same school she attended in Salisbury, earning $1.12 per week. In 1850, Maria met her husband, Benjamin Berkeley Hotchkiss, who would eventually become one of the world’s leading arms manufacturers. After Benjamin’s death in 1885, Maria inherited his fortune and wanted to put it to good use in her community. She considered paving the rutted roads of Salisbury and Sharon, but in the end, she decided to found a school on the 65-acre property referred to as Town Hill, with views to the north of the Berkshire-Taconic range and Lake Wononscopomuc to the west. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University, established himself as a guiding force in the School’s early days. He believed that the School’s mission shoud be to prepare young men for college — in particular, for Yale. But Maria didn’t want to establish a school “for the pampered sons of rich gentlemen;” she believed in making education accessible to local boys whose families couldn’t afford the $600-per-year tuition. So she agreed to Dwight’s proposal on the condition that scholarships be offered to deserving students, pioneering a financial aid program long before other independent secondary schools. Maria also believed in building a strong connection with
the surrounding community, appointing local leaders and businessmen to the board of trustees. From the start, there was conflict between Maria and the men who became the first stewards of the School — namely, the board of trustees, over which Dwight presided. Some of those conflicts were rooted in contemporary attitudes about women who took on leadership roles in the public sphere. But there might also have been some not-so-subtle elitism at work: Maria was a farmer’s daughter, and the men on the board were, in many cases, well-educated captains of industry. As a result, she had to fight to make her voice heard. In the end, Maria prevailed: in its early days, Hotchkiss waived tuition for six students — three from Salisbury and three from Sharon. Although the School was nondenominational, the first order of business on opening day, October 19, 1892, was a Chapel service. Architect Bruce Price complimented the School’s outstanding location by designing a building with a 325-foot corridor running the entire length of the structure, extending along the hilltop. The physical design resulted in frequent contact among students and teachers. In keeping with the systems of democracy and self-government, the boys sat at tables in the dining room with no direct supervision. Study hall was, at first, unsupervised as well. High standards and rigorous academics were put immediately in place. Edward G. Coy, head of the Greek department at Phillips Andover Academy, was selected as the first headmaster. Along with Coy came David Y. Comstock, head of the Latin department at Andover, who would serve as associate master. Their legacy laid the foundation for the strong classics program that exists at Hotchkiss today. The basic principles of individual responsibility and personal accountability remain to this day, with a
strong emphasis on character building and service to others. Hotchkiss continues to offer a strong liberal arts education and is committed to sustaining a wide range of academic, artistic, athletic, and extracurricular offerings. The School retains its commitment to financial assistance, remaining true to Maria’s founding principle: today, nearly one-third of Hotchkiss students receive some degree of financial aid. Maria’s family motto, etched in the frame of the portrait that now hangs in the Dining Hall, speaks volumes about her ethos: “In recto decus: Glory consists in fair dealing.”
Visit hotchkiss.org/125th to read more about the celebration and view a timeline of the School’s history.
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the evolution of
teaching and learning By WENDY CARLSON
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n 1892, when hotchkiss first opened its doors, an upper mid was expected to read 1,000 verses of Ovid, translate lines from the Greek epic Xenophon, and speak fluently in German. Reciting sonnets from The Merchant of Venice or Hamlet would prepare him to compete for the Alumni Oratorial Prize — $25 in gold, or roughly $626 today. In English class, Stevenson’s Treasure Island or Longfellow’s Hiawatha were required reading, but if a student wanted to venture beyond the syllabus, he’d find the glass-door library bookshelves under lock and key. “Most of us were not widely read,” wrote George Van Santvoord, a member of the Class of 1908 and longtime headmaster. “Scholastic excellence,” he said, “was based on thoroughness of preparation. You did the work assigned, and your teachers seldom alluded to anything else.” In the 125 years since Maria Hotchkiss first donated a 65-acre tract of land and a gift of $75,000 to build the School, Hotchkiss has steadily grown from a small, independent institution that prepared young men for the Ivy League into an intentionally diverse, coeducational community. From Maria’s humble vision, teaching and learning at Hotchkiss have changed dramatically, and numerous alumni, faculty, and staff members have contributed to the School’s academic evolution. During the School’s early years, under the first headmaster Edward G. Coy and the 18-year tenure of second headmaster Huber Buehler, teaching principles at Hotchkiss were guided by the College Board system; curriculum was narrow and dictated by Ivy League requirements. Latin and Greek were mandatory; rote learning was emphasized over critical thinking. In 1896, The Hotchkiss Annual, the first student publication, declared: “The School believes it’s [sic] duty to be first a gentleman, then a scholar and then an athlete, if possible.” Hotchkiss began to shift away from rote learning by broadening the curriculum under the leadership of the fourth headmaster, George Van Santvoord ’08, who served from 1926 to 1955. Hotchkiss’s longest-serving headmaster sought out faculty members from diverse backgrounds, such as the late English instructor Robert Hawkins. In the 1985 fall issue of Hotchkiss Magazine, Hawkins wrote that he thought he was hired partly because he grew up within a few miles of the Crow Creek Indian Reservation in South Dakota. “Since almost every other master on the faculty had been born and reared east of the Hudson River, Mr. Van Santvoord apparently thought it would be novel for the boys to be
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exposed to someone who came, as he called them, from ‘one of the big square states’ and who knew an Indian language,” he wrote. Faculty, in turn, were encouraged to take a more expansive approach to teaching and design curriculum that would nurture critical thinking skills and engage students. In The Gift of His Example: George Van Santvoord of Hotchkiss, Fay Vincent ’56 wrote: “GVS identified, innately and intuitively, how to gain a student’s interest. He urged teachers to be imaginative and to experiment. Where the previous generation of instructors had been focused on teaching facts, GVS would focus on curiosity and the process of learning.” This holistic approach continues to be the cornerstone of a Hotchkiss education, grounded by a curriculum that encourages students to be flexible thinkers, discover their own genuine insights, and ultimately, develop a love of learning. As the student experience changed, faculty, too, began to expand their academic reach. From the beginning, teachers were encouraged to pursue scholarly research; many faculty published their own textbooks. Van Santvoord’s successor, Thomas Chappell ’24, created sabbatical grants as rewards for longserving instructors. Endowed programs were
“From Maria’s humble vision, teaching and learning at Hotchkiss have changed dramatically...” established to enable language faculty to travel abroad to enrich their teaching. In 2006, the Lufkin Prize was established to recognize individual faculty members for excellence in teaching. As the turbulent 1960s and 1970s rocked the country, Hotchkiss, too, felt the ripples of change. By the time William Olsen ’39 became the sixth headmaster, serving from 1959-1980, the independent school landscape was rapidly shifting, with greater student involvement in school affairs, major advances in technology, and, for Hotchkiss, the move to coeducation. The world beyond “The Hill” became an increasingly important part of the academic experience as the School strengthened its international ties. Born in China, Olsen saw the importance of expanding the School’s Asian connections and encouraging students to pursue learning opportunities beyond the campus. Hotchkiss developed a relationship with China early on, beginning with missionary trips to China with Warren Seabury, Class of 1896, followed by other alumni. Since 1979, two ambassadors to China have been Hotchkiss alumni: Winston Lord ’55 and Clark Randt ’64. More recently, John L. Thornton ’72 has helped connect Hotchkiss with educational programs and institutions in China during his time as professor and director of the Global Leadership Program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. All language students are now encouraged to study beyond the three-year requirement; international study options are available across the world through School Year Abroad, Round Square, and other academic programs. Facultyled travel programs, partnerships with other schools abroad, and a Right to Dream program for scholar-athletes gives students a broader world perspective. A sharper focus on the arts, too, evolved over time, with the introduction of an
accredited art program and the hiring of the first full-time art instructor, Robert O. Osborn, in 1929. In the School’s early years, the orchestra consisted of a banjo, two violins, a flute, and two guitars. Award-winning trombonist Roswell Rudd ’54 practiced in the boiler room of the Chapel basement. Students now have individual practice rooms, classrooms designed for lectures and rehearsals, a world-class performance space, a robust faculty, an orchestra, jazz band, chorus, gospel choir, and a cappella groups. The visual arts department similarly has expanded, moving from one room in the library where a handful of classes were taught to a renovated art wing that accommodates wide-ranging course offerings, from ceramics and architectural design to photography and video. The 1995 Main Building renovations saw the additions of the Tremaine Art Gallery, the Black Box Theater, and a new dance studio. In recent decades, more emphasis has been placed on environmental science and stewardship, global citizenship, and interdisciplinary learning through a humanities curriculum designed for preps and lower mids. Students in the humanities and prep core science programs use the Hotchkiss Woods, Fairfield Farm, and the Biomass Facility to enrich their understanding. New innovations and technologies have also changed the way students learn. From 1966, when the School pioneered a computer-sharing program with IBM, to the opening of the Watson Computer Center in 1995, to today’s School-issued MacBooks, the curriculum has adapted to incorporate the latest technology. Students now have at their fingertips access to sophisticated technology, including a DNA synthesizer in the Griswold Science Building, and a stateof-the-art observatory.
The Edsel Ford Memorial Library, which was renovated and expanded in 1981, gives students access to millions of books through an international consortium and contains more than 87,000 volumes, 275 subscriptions, and many databases. And, where once students were strictly limited to a narrow course selection, students can now choose from more than 200 courses, such “Chaos Theory” and “Intercultural Communication,” across six departments. Despite all these developments, many of the pillars of a Hotchkiss education remain. Daily Themes, a two-month intensive in which lower mids write daily essays, and the Teagle Prize, awarded for the best senior essay, are writing challenges well-known to Hotchkiss students and alumni. Although Latin and Greek are no longer requirements, students have the option to earn a Classics Diploma. Finally, throughout the years, strong bonds between students and faculty have been a constant. The design of Main Building, which houses the majority of the School’s living and learning spaces, encourages frequent interaction between students and instructors. The Harkness Table, used in most Hotchkiss classrooms, creates an open environment in which to discuss ideas and debate different viewpoints. In some cases, instructors employ a “flipped classroom” concept that allows more in-class time devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions. All of these changes encourage in students a love of learning and an openness toward exploring new ideas. As former Head of School Skip Mattoon expressed in a 2001 Chapel talk, “love of learning is the first of the core values of The Hotchkiss School.” So it remains today. “Learning,” Mattoon said,“is adventure, discovery, surprise, growth, power, excitement, and fulfillment...but none of these things comes without effort, initiative, a willingness to participate — and an open heart and mind.”
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Under the Spell of Emerson, Thoreau, and The Rolling Stones,
a young writer found his voice How a few obscure lines written on a quiet night at Hotchkiss still resonate with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tom Reiss
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hen i was asked to come up with a few words for this magazine about how my time at Hotchkiss influenced me as a writer, I immediately called my mother to ask if she could find my old school papers, the sort of thing I knew she kept neatly organized for each of her four children. I was disappointed to find that what she’d saved of the precious papers of my youth — her son, the writer — could fit in a modestly sized file folder, which she handed to me with a smile over dinner in New York with my younger brother. She noted that if he needed his school papers, somehow about five times as many had survived. (My brother, who went to Andover, is a computer scientist.) Among the most instructive documents in the file was the draft of my Hotchkiss application, whose short answers provided me an introduction to my 14-year-old self. “I am proud that I don’t follow the crowd….I like people who are friendly, intelligent, and will stick up for their own opinion without putting 18
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someone else down… People who know me well think I am reasonably smart, creative, friendly, and sometimes annoying… I feel most successful when I am writing or speaking clearly and without hesitation… Something I am striving to become or to be, is a writer.” The main essay, the prompt for which was apparently to imagine my life 10 or 20 years in the future, laid all my motley aspirations out for the admission committee to see. “If I’m not a writer, I can see myself combining a lot of related trades — scenarist, actor, stand-up comedian, director,” I wrote modestly. Picture me as a 23-year-old fairly successful writer living in New York City. My stories and articles have appeared in magazines and newspapers across the country. Lately, I have branched out and am trying to do nightclub routines using my own material. Several months ago, I made an appearance on The Tonight Show, and I thought I had a great success, but they haven’t called me back. For the past month, I have been in a creative slump. I have been lounging around in my apartment, waiting for
an idea to hit me. One does. As I am reclining on the couch, a large and powerful idea flies through the window and hits me on the chin. It’s nicely wrapped in gold foil, and appears to have come from the gift department at Bloomingdale’s. (It turns out to be a lot better than the umbrella I bought there last week!) I grabbed the idea, typed it up, and brought it to a nightclub. Tomorrow I’m going to use it in public for the first time, and tonight I’ll be rehearsing. It will be great, it’s the funniest idea I’ve had in years, but I wish it hadn’t been such a hard-hitting idea. Ouch! Yes, I am amazed I was admitted, too, but the admission department must have
PHOTO BY WENDY CARLSON
By TOM REISS ’82
been distracted in those days. Yet the hamhanded metaphor calls out to the sympathies of the “successful author” I have become, for to a young writer, nothing is as difficult as coming up with an idea that seems worthy of his or her own exuberance. Somehow I would manage to turn this adolescent obsession into a career. How did I get here? How did Hotchkiss help? I read on through the file. Before I got to Hotchkiss, I thought of myself as a fiction writer — my tastes careening from Alexandre Dumas to Graham Greene to Woody Allen — yet I read nonfiction more widely and compulsively. One of my favorite things to do
was just to sit around reading encyclopedias, especially older encyclopedias — from my father’s 1911 Britannica to random numbers of the World Book annual supplements — because I loved being able to read the accumulated knowledge of the world at a moment in time. I may not have been that interested in “carpentry” or “currents, electrical,” but if I could hear the voice of someone in 1930 or 1965 in the article, I became interested. I loved every kind of nonfiction that told a story of people in the past. At Hotchkiss, I fell under the spell of Emerson, Thoreau, and The Rolling Stones. “Who wants yesterday’s papers, who wants
yesterday’s girl, who wants yesterday’s papers, nobody in the world…” I remember walking around with this song echoing in my head, loving the sound but being bothered by the lyric. I wanted yesterday’s papers — and yesterday’s girl, but that’s another story — and where could I find these things? In the Edsel Ford Memorial Library, of course. My writer’s imagination developed by wandering around its shelves, just looking at the books’ spines, whether or not I chose to read them. (Incidentally, my own children attend a new school with no library at all — proud of the fact that all knowledge can be conjured in F a l l
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“As an adult writer traipsing through a dozen foreign capitals on the trail of a story, I’d sometimes recall these few sentences, more than any others I’d written...”
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pieces of fiction that suggested the future of my non-fiction. A novella I wrote was based on conversations with an octogenarian blues musician I met in Penn Station — I had a habit of peeling away from peers and talking to octogenarians, even on Hotchkiss weekends in New York. The story was soaked in details of the Depression and the world of itinerant players. A one-page short story in The Hotchkiss Review showed the influence of Salinger swallowing up the vestiges of Woody Allen (“She told me that she planned to go to business school next month. Rare books was interesting, but it was a maledominated profession, she said.”) and ended with a flourish that suggested I’d been reading Fitzgerald: “A million colored lights. And there were people under all those lights. All those lights in front of me. I was looking down from a hill at all those lights.” Here’s the thing: As an adult writer traipsing through a dozen foreign capitals on the trail of a story, I’d sometimes recall these few sentences, more than any others I’d written — even pieces I’d published in The New Yorker or books that had become bestsellers — these few obscure lines written on a quiet night at Hotchkiss, when I was dreaming of being somewhere in the world where there were more house lights than in Litchfield County, and I could dream about all the lives being lit by each one of them. It wasn’t that the words were so original — it was that my literary idols didn’t write them. I did. The words had come from me, and
they’d worked to express an idea that made a difference to me — and that made a difference in my development as a writer. Though I was proud as punch to get the story in the Review, read by the whole Hotchkiss community, my only really important reader at that point, the only person I needed to impress, was myself. I needed to show the 16-year-old me that an idea could flow out of my pen in a way that was as valuable to him as the light on the frost outside his dorm window, the sounds of the people talking in the main circle after dinner, and the flip of his latest crush’s brown shoulder-length hair. I needed him to believe in his bones that something he could put on the page could be as vivid and interesting as any of those things. That’s all a teenage writer needs: the belief that what you are doing is as interesting — even for an instant — as life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Reiss is the author of The Orientalist and The Black Count. The latter, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize and the PEN Biography Award, is being adapted into a movie for Sony/Columbia Pictures. Reiss’s books are in print in over 35 languages. (He also won the Prize in Philosophy and Religion at Hotchkiss, which remains a high point for him.)
PHOTOS COURTESY OF TOM REISS
virtual space on the iPads handed out every September. I guess so. To me, it’s like I fell asleep reading Ray Bradbury in one of the overstuffed leather chairs in the Ford library and woke up into one of his dystopias.) Another answer I gave in my admission essay: “If I had my life to live over again, I would have liked to live in a large city, not in a suburb.” Though I was born in New York City, I’d grown up mostly in small suburban towns — first in Texas, then in western Massachusetts — and I had spent my life imagining my way back to the big city. I imagined everything that went on in the great capitals of the world, and since these were far away from my reality anyway, it wasn’t any less real to imagine them 50 or 100 years ago — in fact, to me, they became more real that way. My family were European refugees from World War II who spoke different languages and had exotic memories I caught glimpses of during dinner table conversations or chats with my beloved great uncle when I visited him. I think, to my parents, the most exotic thing they could be was real, small town New Englanders, and part of my father’s American fantasy was what led him to the idea of sending me to boarding school. All this gave me that second-generation restlessness to find out who I really was beneath this thin veneer of America — and that led me back to Europe and, even more, to history. Along with papers on The Canterbury Tales, the WPA, the Rosenberg trial, Prussian nationalism, and Renaissance art, I found
a glimpse of the history of school prizes One of six teaching fellows from the University of Pennsylvania’s Residency Master’s program, Molly Nickerson, instructor in biology and the prep science core, wrote a graduate school paper on the history of Hotchkiss prizes. The following is an excerpt from her paper.
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PHOTO: HOTCHKISS SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
ince its founding in 1891, Hotchkiss has given awards, and while the language and names of these prizes have evolved throughout its history, their nature generally seemed to align with the mission of the School. In its earliest years, Hotchkiss claimed its purpose was to prepare young boys for college and help develop their “intellectual, physical, and moral characters” (Hotchkiss Catalog 1898). In the first few years of the School, the only awards given were book prizes for excellence in certain disciplines, called “Honors in Special Studies,” and an “Oratorical Prize.” The first Honors were awarded for academic excellence in the subjects of English, Latin, Modern Language, and Algebra to a total of 15 students. The Oratorical Prize was awarded to one student who, by the description, “shall write and pronounce English in the best manner” (Hotchkiss Catalog 1898). The narrow scope of the academic curriculum at the time limited the awards Hotchkiss gave, as did the small size of the graduating class, but the nature of the awards demonstrated some of Hotchkiss’s institutional values in 1898: teaching classical and traditional subjects, and recognizing excellence that would get students into Yale and other elite institutions. The appointment of the first long-term headmaster in 1904 saw the introduction of several more prizes, whose descriptions focused not only on academics and scholarship, but also included evaluations of character and behavior. Most notable was the introduction of the Tuttle Prize in 1906, which awarded a student who “by his industry, manliness, and honorable conduct, has done the most for the life and character of the boys of the school” (Hotchkiss Catalog 1906). This marked the first time the School officially recognized the “character” of a student through an award and thus put an institutional value on the “honor” of an ideal Hotchkiss student. This focus aligned with Hotchkiss’s explicit “aim” of moral development in its students listed in its mission statement (Hotchkiss Catalog 1906). Over the next few decades, awards at Hotchkiss began to recognize an even broader scope of values and characteristics. Specifically, awards for students on scholarship and for progress and growth, and prizes in new disciplines reflected Hotchkiss’s growing set of values and purposes. The Fidelity Prize was first awarded in 1910 to the “holder of a full scholarship who during the year has been most manly, industrious, generally excellent in scholarship, and conscientious in the performance of duty” (Hotchkiss Catalog 1910). In the next 15 years, the MacDonald, Knight, Probst, and Murphy
prizes were created to recognize the achievements of students receiving scholarships. They were recognized for both academic excellence and general growth. Beginning in 1911, Hotchkiss began to recognize with awards and prizes the growth and progress of its nonscholarship students as well. The Charles Denton Treadway Prize was given to the “member of the class of 1914 who has shown the greatest improvement during the year in scholarship, character, and spirit”; and a Music Prize was awarded that year to “the pupil making the most improvement” (Hotchkiss Catalog 1911). The Belin Prizes were introduced in 1918 to recognize progress in public speaking, and 1937 saw an Art Prize for the “boy who has made the most progress in drawing or painting” (Hotchkiss Catalog 1937). Finally, as the Hotchkiss curriculum expanded to include more languages, the arts, and the sciences, book prizes and general awards were added to recognize excellence and growth in these areas. Prizes for math, English, Latin, Greek, and public speaking had existed since the founding of the School, but Hotchkiss awarded “excellence in the branches of Natural Science” in 1936, an Art Prize in 1937, and awards for drama and theater in the 1940s (Hotchkiss Catalogs). Broadening its awards horizon and recognizing an additional set of values, the School continued to reflect its “aim” to improve the intellectual, athletic, and moral development of its students (Hotchkiss Catalogs).
Hotchkiss awards approximately 80 prizes each year for academic excellence, outstanding citizenships, and athletic achievement to students selected by faculty committees. Prizes are awarded twice a year: Seniors are recognized at Commencement, and underclassmen receive prizes at Convocation. F a l l
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Breaking Down that Old-Boy Stuff:
the early years of coeducation The first female students at Hotchkiss saw themselves as rebels, breaking down barriers to gender equality. But it wasn’t quite that simple. By CHELSEA EDGAR
One of the first female instructors, Marilyn “Sam” Coughlin, teaches a class
HOTCHKISS ARCHIVES
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he year was 1974. It was 8 a.m., the start of the first class of the fall term. Standing before a room of wide-eyed preps, the indomitable English instructor Bob Hawkins began to take attendance. When he reached the name Eleanor Close, he paused. “Close. Are you an adverb or a verb?” he asked. Without skipping a beat, a girl seated in the front row raised her hand. “I’m an adverb, sir. Thank you so much for asking.” Class went on as usual. But after the bell rang, Hawkins burst into the faculty lounge, bubbling over with excitement. “Do you have any idea what just happened?” he asked his colleagues. And then he told them how, without the slightest awareness of what she was doing, a prep girl had totally disarmed him and changed his opinion on coeducation forever. Stories like this are legion. One by one, some of the staunchest opponents of admitting girls became weak-kneed apologists. There was Bob Hawkins, undone by the quick wit of a 13-year-old girl; then there was math instructor George Stone, whose curmudgeonly resistance to the idea of coeducation came to an end during one fateful TaftHotchkiss football game.
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“No young man wanted to be shown up by a girl.” – Carolyn Demaray, Instructor in French from 1972-2005 “I’m on the sideline, drinking a can of ginger ale that I had just paid 25 hard-earned cents for,” Stone recalled, writing in an issue of Hotchkiss Magazine. “A girl from the Hotchkiss field hockey team, still aglow from a hard game, turns to me and says, ‘Do you think I could have one sip, sir?’ Is there a more ridiculous sentence in the English language? She calls me sir, and yet she’s proposing to share my ginger ale. I pass the can over, aware that she doesn’t realize the priceless thing she had told me.” Later, then-Head of School Bill Olsen would remark: “George Stone was one of those stirring around on the edges trying to kill coeducation. Five minutes after the girls came, he was acting as if he had invented coeducation.” But these tales of sudden conversion belie the much slower march toward gender equality that was taking place across the country and at Hotchkiss. For every male faculty member won over to the cause of coeducation, there were many more instances of the subtle (and overt) sexism that pervaded the culture at large during that era. The recap of the girl’s tennis team’s season in the 1975 Mischianza offers a glimpse of those attitudes: “Statistically the team’s uniforms averaged out to 34-20-34, though the first doubles team of Martha Bryan and Caroline Kenny lowered those figures noticeably.” (Years later, the editor of the Misch would personally apologize to Caroline Kenny ’77, now Caroline Kenny-Burchfield, for embarrassing her.) The fact that the girl’s tennis team went undefeated — the only Hotchkiss team to do so that season — goes unmentioned until the fourth sentence of the write-up. But for the 88 girls — including Burchfield — in the first co-ed class, the overriding sense in the fall of 1974 was the excitement of being at the forefront of something big. “We felt like we were part of the zeitgeist,” Burchfield says. “We saw ourselves as rebels. We were coming in, and we were going to break down that oldboy stuff.”
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Within the first few weeks of school, a group of girls caught wind that the alumni office was planning to film in the Dining Hall one evening — presumably, to show the alumni community how well the School had made the transition to coeducation. “Because we all lived in Buehler, we could communicate easily with one another,” Burchfield recalls. “So we decided we would all dress in coats and ties and look like boys for that dinner and completely ruin the plan. And we did. It was pretty empowering.” In the early years of coeducation, girls were sometimes outnumbered 10 to one in the classroom, inevitably altering the dynamics. Carolyn Demaray, the first female French instructor at Hotchkiss — and, along with Marilyn “Sam” Coughlin, one of the first female faculty members hired at the School — saw this shift as overwhelmingly positive for the academic environment. “In French, girls were more meticulous and disciplined in learning the grammar, and it made the boys work harder,” says Demaray, who, like Coughlin, had taught at the allfemale Ethel Walker School before coming to Hotchkiss. “No young man wanted to be shown up by a girl.” Once, a boy who had to come up with the French verb “to faint” actually held his breath until he passed out, apparently because he considered being unconscious preferable to being wrong. Burchfield says she was never uncomfortable in a male-dominated classroom, but she does acknowledge that the girls in the first co-ed classes at Hotchkiss were a plucky bunch. To thrive at Hotchkiss in those days, you couldn’t be a shrinking violet. “In a lot of ways, it was a sink-or-swim place back then,” she reflects. The same held true for female faculty members. “There was this notion of having to prove yourself,” Demaray says. “We were tested by the boys. I had to be sharper than ever. We had to prove ourselves — and prove that we were masters of our field.” That
extended to dealings with male colleagues, who often made it clear that they doubted the aptitude of female instructors. Coughlin, the first female English instructor at Hotchkiss and, later, the first female dean of faculty, struggled early on to gain the acceptance and respect of her peers. “The biggest challenge for me, and I suspect for the few other women at Hotchkiss, was earning some credibility, some sense of legitimacy,” she says. She recalls attending a cocktail party the weekend after she was hired, eager to meet a well-respected English teacher who had just retired. When she introduced herself to him, he took his pipe from his mouth, looked her carefully up and down, and said, “Woman, you belong in the kitchen!” Coughlin was so distraught that she walked away without saying a word. Eventually, Coughlin would go on to become dean of faculty from 1986 to 1992 and effect lasting changes, including rotating department headships and starting a system of independent evaluations that changed the way academic departments ran. She did her part to hire more female faculty members, but she believes that her efforts to change the male-oriented culture ultimately wouldn’t have succeeded without the support of certain men. “Even more helpful to the cause of women was the addition to the faculty of some men who believed in gender equality and were willing to fight for it — men whose voices could more readily be listened to by the predominantly male faculty,” Coughlin says. English Instructor George Faison, for instance, pushed for the inclusion of more female authors in the curriculum, and he played a key role in establishing a co-head system in student organizations, ensuring that more girls would be able to hold leadership roles. Over the past few decades, the climate at Hotchkiss has evolved to reflect an era of greater gender equality. Today, there are 73 female faculty members, compared to 83 men, and women make up a growing percentage of school leaders and administrators. The female-to-male ratio among students has risen, too; in fact, girls now make up 51 percent of the student body. Last October, the School reached an important milestone by honoring the first female Alumni Award winner, actress Allison Brooks Janney ’77. Coughlin’s reaction to this year’s honoree: “Yeah! It’s about time they picked a woman.”
More than a Decade Later,
a chinese program thrives By ROBERTA JENCKES
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n a summer day in 2014
in Beijing, the School’s longtime instructor of Mandarin Chinese, Jean Jianjun Yu, joined a dozen or so Hotchkiss students and alumni for lunch. She especially remembers that day because “they all told their stories in perfect Chinese,” she recalls, smiling. It was something she never thought she’d experience, and a testament to her years building the program. Jean Yu came to Hotchkiss in 2001 to launch the Chinese program, adding a new dimension to the modern languages curriculum. In the first four years, Yu would teach as many as five Mandarin Chinese courses. “It was tough,” she acknowledges. Both Jean and her husband, Ken Gu, who also taught courses, will retire this year. In 2008, Hotchkiss welcomed Fan Yu, a visiting instructor in Chinese, enabling more students to study Mandarin. From the beginning, the new language was popular among students; in many years, enrollment exceeded 100 from entry level through fourth-year Chinese, plus an independent study option for advanced students. This year, about 70 students are enrolled in Chinese language courses. Despite the difficulty of mastering the language, a very high percentage of Hotchkiss students continue with Chinese once they start, says Yu. Studies have shown that most Western European languages require about 23-24 weeks, or 575-600 class hours, to learn, while Mandarin Chinese can take an estimated 88
weeks, or 2200 class hours. After graduating, some Hotchkiss students continue studying Chinese language and culture in college, and, in some cases, the learning experience influences their future plans. “I loved Chinese class at Hotchkiss,” says Libba King ’12, who is currently completing her master’s degree at Johns Hopkins University in quantitative economics and international negotiation. Much of her academic and personal interests focus on US-China relations. “Jean Yu and Ken Gu introduced us to the culture and history of the country,” King says. “This led to a deep interest in studying more about China’s social system and government structure. Due to Jean’s rigorous training in class and high expectations, I was able to complete research (using my Mandarin skills) on China’s migrant laborer population in between my upper mid and senior summer.” Stuart Sweeney ’06, who has worked for the World Bank in Beijing and now works for MTS Health Partners, says, “To this day, even if I get rusty on Mandarin vocab or grammar, people always comment that my tones and pronunciation are excellent (you’d know, if you heard my accent the first year at Hotchkiss, that that’s no small accomplishment)! Jean Yu inspired and enabled a ‘Chinese dream’ in me that was life-changing.” While Hotchkiss’s language offerings in Chinese began with Yu’s arrival and blossomed under her guidance, the curricular move also further extended a legacy in
Chinese connections that goes back to the School’s early years. Non-Western history was introduced as a course offering in 1973, a year after President Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking trip to China. A decade later, what began as a senior elective became a course for preps and lower mids, focused exclusively on China and Japan. Beyond the classroom, Yu promotes language immersion and a greater appreciation of Chinese culture. There is a weekly Chinese table in the dining hall, a Chinese tutoring program for faculty and staff children, an autumn festival, a tea/lecture ceremony, a winter celebration of the Chinese new year, and a dumpling workshop. Students can also travel to China during a spring break trip and a summer study program. In addition, student teaching assistants selected from advanced-level Chinese classes enjoy the opportunity to participate in the Teachers-to-Teachers Program. The brainchild of Jean Yu, this summer exchange brings Hotchkiss teachers to Wuqing Province, near Tianjin, China’s third-largest city, to conduct English-language methodology training for 200 rural teachers of English. At the end of the school year, Yu asks her students to participate in a video about their own academic journey. “They all speak beautiful Chinese,” she says. “They talk about their hardships and how they changed and grew. Last year the video was on the Chinese theme of the bittersweet — ‘Work hard, then taste the sweet success.’”
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sulpicia, party of two Greeks and Romans teach us about modern day issues — and they’d make interesting dinner guests. By WENDY CARLSON
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arly in her career at the digital
news site Quartz, Cameron Hough ’09 found herself scanning Virgil’s Aeneid when she needed a break from her fast-paced work environment. “Just the routine of breaking each line into metrical clusters and knowing that every line had an answer was calming,” says Hough, who earned a classics diploma at Hotchkiss, then went on to major in classics at Princeton. There, she narrowed her field of study to Augustan poetry, “which basically means I know a lot about a specific period of time in history,” she says wryly. Back then, Hough didn’t give much thought to how Virgil, Cicero, or Homer would figure into a career in digital media. At Quartz, she markets revenue products for the site, like apps or podcasts. In retrospect, she says, her background in classics gave her a wide scope of knowledge and helped hone her analytical thinking skills, which she uses daily when negotiating with advertising, editorial, design, and web development teams. “I can’t look through just one lens at my job; I need to see things from a number of perspectives,” Hough says. “In classics, you learn to think more broadly by studying literature, history, politics, philosophy, and even mythology, and consider how each of those subjects relates to one another during a specific place and time.” At Hotchkiss, it’s been decades since Greek and Latin were required courses. But in the School’s early years, ancient languages, history, and literature were cornerstones of a Hotchkiss education. The first headmaster,
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Edward G. Coy, who had previously been head of the Greek department at Andover, insisted that Hotchkiss “make no provision whatever for boys who may wish to enter college without Greek.” Early classics instructors at Hotchkiss wrote their own Latin and Greek textbooks, and many headmasters were not only fluent in both languages, but taught them as well. Greek and Latin words became indelible parts of the School’s history. Robert Oden Jr., headmaster from 1989-1995, taught Greek and came up with the idea to inscribe the Greek words arete and logos in the stone facade of Main Building. Arete means the “potential excellence or virtue inherent in every person,” and logos means the “organizing principle of all thought.” The figurehead on the School seal is Athena, patron goddess of ancient Athens and of wisdom; the School motto, Moniti Meliora Sequamur, comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, which, roughly translated, means: “After instruction, let us move on to pursue higher things.” Throughout the decades, students have competed for awards and honors in either Greek or Latin. Henry Luce ’16, who earned the highest possible score in Greek in Yale’s entrance exams, and Briton Hadden ’16, co-founders of Time magazine, were such avid students of classics at Hotchkiss that they dubbed themselves “The Crazy Greek Division.” At Time, Hadden used his knowledge of ancient literature as inspiration for a writing style that would transform American media, wrote Isaiah Wilner in his biography on Hadden, The Man Time Forgot. Hadden
championed the use of a backward syntax in which the noun follows the verb (“says so-and-so”) and placing hyphenated adjectives before nouns (“a well-run establishment”), both of which have become commonplace in journalism. Hadden was known for trotting out his tattered, heavily annotated translation of the Iliad, in which he’d underlined words and phrases — “wine-dark sea,” “fleetfooted Achilles,” “far-darting Apollo” — to encourage his writers to use more inventive descriptions in their prose. By the 1950s, Greek was no longer mandatory; by the mid-1960s, Latin also ceased to be a requirement. Instead, the School began offering a classics diploma to encourage students to continue taking Greek and Latin. Today, Hotchkiss is one of few independent schools, including Exeter and St. Mark’s, to offer a classics diploma, according to classics instructor David Conti, who himself received a classics diploma from Exeter and taught at St. Mark’s before coming to Hotchkiss. Over the past decade, an average of eight students per year have earned a classics diploma, and between 70 and 90 students take Latin each year, according to Richard Davis, who has taught classics for the last decade. For those students, ancient Greek literature, Davis says, poses deep questions that are still relevant today. Some of those same questions, displayed in the English wing along the hallway in large, block letters, form the basis of the Humanities Program: “What makes a ‘good’ society? What are the elements of a ‘good’ life? What is the place of human beings in the natural world?” Instructor Douglas Kneeland ’98 first began studying Latin in seventh grade and enrolled in Hotchkiss specifically to earn a classics diploma. He went on to graduate from Swarthmore, where he majored in Latin and minored in Greek, before returning to
Hotchkiss to teach Latin. Many of his students, he says, are just as passionate about classics as he was. “The classics in general are really cool!” says upper mid Jeremy Allen Navarro, who studied Latin before coming to Hotchkiss. “I didn’t intend to pursue classics long term, but when I came to Hotchkiss, I was exposed to an amazing appreciation for the classical languages and I’d like to foster that appreciation.” Many classics diploma students continue studying ancient history and languages in college, but only a few go on to become classicists and teachers. “Most head off into other fields, like law or medicine or economics,” Conti says. “But they go to those fields with a classical background, and I like to think that the ideas and precision that they learned in Latin and Greek make them better doctors and lawyers later,” he adds. “You can see it starting while they are here: the more they study Greek and Roman rhetoric, the more they imitate Cicero and Lysias in their own writing. They no longer let a vague allusion go by without thinking about the source and remembering a passage from Virgil.” For Hough, studying Cicero helped her develop a disciplined and precise thought process, which led to more skillful, persuasive arguing. “Sure, we read a lot of Cicero and other generally argumentative and persuasive orators, but we also became comfortable debating with teachers and peers about the meaning of a certain line or phrase or act. Engaging in those debates was my favorite part of studying Latin and Greek — so much so that I wrote my college thesis supporting the argument that the Greek poet Sulpicia was an authentic female poet,” she says. If she could go back in time and invite any Greek or Roman to dinner, Hogan would pick Sulpicia, hands down. “A lot of scholars believe that there is no way a woman could have written those poems,” she says. “I’d love to prove all of them wrong.”
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Classics Instructors’ Ideal Dinner Companions
Douglas Kneeland ovid: He’s witty, and while he seems like he’d be fun, he wouldn’t be wildly over the top like Catullus. I think it would be a bit like dining with Oscar Wilde: it would be intimidating, you’d never quite be sure if he’s making fun of you, but it would be a very entertaining night.
David Conti st. augustine:
He had a perspective on Rome in transition, as a foreigner and a Roman, a pagan and a Christian. His books on philosophy, religion and daily life reveal that he was both a deep thinker and a man who had experienced all that Rome had to offer.
Richard Davis tiro (Cicero’s secretary and “chief of staff ”): Though he was eventually freed by Cicero, Tiro was born a slave, so his is a voice we don’t often hear. Legend has it he invented “shorthand” writing — Tiro was witness to some key events during the collapse of the Roman Republic.
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they call him
“the fentonator” On a roller coaster and in the classroom, Physics and Astronomy Instructor Bill Fenton, winner of the 2016 James C. Kapetyn Prize, takes an unconventional approach to teaching.
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ere’s a typical scenario: The Fentonator is lying down on the linoleum floor of his AP Physics classroom. Senior Tor Stumo is using a broom to push a bowling ball in the general direction of the Fentonator’s head. “Um, I’m getting a little concerned; don’t hit me,” Fenton blurts as the ball’s velocity increases, coming within a foot of his face. “I don’t know, you didn’t give me a great grade on my last quiz,” Stumo jokes as he pivots the broom to steer the ball, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with Fenton’s face. “Okay, that was a close one,” says Fenton, jumping up and brushing himself off. “Now, what did you learn?” These stunt-man antics may be why students call him “The Fentonator,” a sort of mashup of the Terminator and Doc Brown from Back to the Future. In Fenton’s classes, students learn by experimenting. Lectures are rarely longer than 10 minutes; then, students spend the rest of the class working out complicated physics problems by putting the principles into practice, having fun in the process. Outside the classroom, Fenton makes Newton’s laws come to life by taking students to Lake Compounce, where they reel up and down on roller coasters to learn about kinetic energy. In the observatory, he makes the vast universe easier to fathom, sometimes by drawing obscure facts from such unlikely sources as Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. “Sometimes, he’s really funny, and that helps me remember things,” like constellations with hard-to-pronounce names like Canes Venatici, says senior Elaine Chen, a member of the Astronomy Club, for which Fenton serves as faculty advisor.
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Other times, Fenton brings objects into the mix: a yoga ball, a broom, a bowling ball — tools that help students learn about acceleration and forces. When students are given only a broom and tasked to make a bowling ball move in a circle, they realize that once the ball gets rolling, a force directed toward the center of the circle is all that is necessary, Fenton explains. Ever since he was in high school, Fenton has taken an unconventional approach to problem-solving. And those problems weren’t always limited to math or physics: he would seek ways to build a skateboard ramp with limited supplies and tools or ways to get into his house when he came home after school and found the front door locked. “I grew up in a busy family, with lots of people coming and going,” he says. “So it wasn’t unusual that the door would be left locked and I would quietly mutter a quick celebration and set about finding a way in. The good days were
PHOTOS BY WENDY CARLSON
By WENDY CARLSON
“The fun was always the challenge of conveying understanding. Sure, I can impress everyone with cool images on the planetarium dome, but can I make sure everyone leaves understanding why the stars move as they do or why we have seasons?”
the days when all the paths I had previously tried were blocked. I loved a challenge.” He remembers the late nights he spent in college as a physics major, sitting in a chalk-filled study room, thinking about complex problems. “Physics problems, sure, but also the overall problem of ‘How do we leave this room with the understanding that we need?’ Sometimes it was a problem for me to understand, sometimes the challenge was helping someone else understand, but it was always fun,” he says. That enthusiasm in the face of a new challenge is what makes him an exceptional teacher, coach, and dorm head. He started teaching in high school, when he tutored fellow students in math and worked with developmentally challenged kids at a community center. “With the math tutoring, the challenge was taking a student that didn’t believe in his or her abilities and building their skills and confidence, hopefully to the point of enjoyment, but certainly to the point of good understanding. In
the gym program at the community center, the challenge was working with a disabled child to develop physical skills as much as possible. How can I keep this kid moving and getting in as many reps in as possible?” As an undergrad at Weber State University in Utah, Fenton continued tutoring, worked as a lab assistant, and visited a math class at the local high school once a week. “The fun was always the challenge of conveying understanding. Sure, I can impress everyone with cool images on the planetarium dome, but can I make sure everyone leaves understanding why the stars move as they do or why we have seasons?” These days, his greatest challenge is still in the classroom, teaching difficult concepts. “One of the things that makes me unique as a teacher is that I’m not a talker. That means that in my coaching and teaching, I try to let the students be the center of everything,” he says. For Fenton, life at Hotchkiss, where he has taught for the last decade, presents even
more opportunities to improve the lives of students beyond the classroom. “As teaching has turned into a career, I find myself with many challenges, particularly in a boarding school environment,” he says. “How can I field a competitive and fun volleyball team? How can I engage a very advanced student in an independent project? How can I run a safe and enjoyable dorm? Every year, every class, every season, every kid brings unique challenges.” In September, Fenton was recognized for his outstanding work at Hotchkiss with the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation’s eighth annual James C. Kapteyn Prize. The prize, which comes with a $10,000 award, was established in 2009 in honor of the late James C. Kapteyn, a beloved teacher at Deerfield Academy. In 2010, former English Instructor Samuel Prouty also won the award.
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from punch cards to programming apps Hotchkiss may have traded its IBM 360-50 mainframe for MacBooks, but after 50 years and several quantum leaps, one instructor’s prophesy about the future of computers still holds true. By ROGER WISTAR, Director of Computer Science
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t’s hard to imagine that there was a time when computers were completely
alien, even intimidating, to students. But in 1966, when the first terminal, about the size of small dorm refrigerator, was installed in the basement of the A. Whitney Griswold Science Building, only a handful of students who had been properly trained were allowed to operate it. They would connect via phone with an IBM 360-50 mainframe computer located in the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. Math Instructor Gerald Husted, writing in a 1967 issue of Hotchkiss Magazine, marveled at the machine’s power, noting that it could process more than 100,000 instructions per second. (In contrast, the MacBooks issued to today’s students can process 2.9 billion instructions per second.) Hotchkiss was among the first secondary schools in the country selected by IBM to participate in the experimental computer-sharing program. IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson’s son, Arthur, graduated from Hotchkiss in 1938. During the ’60s, Arthur’s brother, Thomas Watson Jr., was president of the company. Of the 20 students who used the program in its early years, one senior, Michael Liu ’67, spent several hours a day working at the terminal. “It was actually several years ahead of its time,” says Liu, who is now retired from General Electric. By the time he graduated from
According to the tech news site Gizmodo, the storage capacity of Google would require enough punch cards to cover New England to a depth of about 4.5 kilometers — three times deeper than the ice sheets that covered the region during the last advance of the glaciers.
HOTCHKISS ARCHIVES
Hotchkiss, Liu had produced 45 programs, ranging from tic-tac-toe to solutions for cubic equations. “I remember being absolutely fascinated by the computer because that was our first exposure to anything like that at all,” recalls Liu, who went on to earn a B.S. in aeronautical engineering and an M.S. in mechanics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Not surprisingly, Liu ended up working as a computer programmer for General Electric, then as network administrator. Ultimately, he was one of the architects who designed server architecture for GE Aircraft Engines (now called GE Aviation), where he worked until his retirement in 2004. Two years after Liu graduated, the school brought hardware on campus, trading the remote terminal for an IBM-1620 mainframe. Similar in size to the 360, the new model could both read and write punched cards, the earliest form of data storage for computer systems. Today, according to the tech news site Gizmodo, the storage capacity of Google would require enough punch cards to cover New England to a depth of about 4.5 kilometers — three times deeper than the ice sheets that covered the region during the last advance of the glaciers. But at the time, punch cards revolutionized information storage for students and faculty. They could not only see the results of running their programs; they could archive them for future use. As labor-intensive and tedious as it was, students were elated with the development. Interest in computing coalesced around the new machine, with the formation of a student Computer Club in 1970. Members spent most of their time investigating emerging computer languages, such as Fortran. Back in 1967, Husted had predicted the mass appeal of computers when he wrote that the only drawback was that students using the
machine did not want to relinquish it when their time was up. Teaching computer programming was still in the distant future; Husted estimated it would take up to 100 hours for an instructor to prepare one class hour Punch cards from Hotchkiss Special Collections of instruction. And, he concluded, “there is no indication that the specifically creating iPhone apps, which is a computer will replace the pipe-smoking, skill that is becoming increasingly more and tweed-jacketed types that are seen on prep more demanded in today’s world,” said upper school campuses.” mid Nick Fleisher, an App Club member. It would be a decade later, however, before This year, half a dozen students will pilot computer science arrived in the classroom. a course called “Digital Innovation” to Harriet Morrill, the school’s coordinator of computer operations, capitalized on the power create similar programs, and the Computer Club will take the lead in maintaining and of the school’s new PDP-11 computer and developing other projects. established an elective course in advanced Meanwhile, the Watson Computer Center, computer programming. which opened in 1995 through a gift from Computer science has remained an integral the Watson family, has been renovated into part of the school’s curriculum ever since. the Center for Teaching and Learning this This year, 27 students plan to take the AP year. The change reflects a fundamental shift programming course. in the direction of computing at Hotchkiss as Morrill also anticipated the future direction it moves away from a concentrated, machineof the Computer Club when she noted in oriented focus and toward a future with the The Record: “The club has changed from just student at the center and technology as a tool personal interest in the computer to helping to aid learning. the rest of the school learn how to use it.” Hotchkiss students have taken an innovative lead in developing programs to make a positive impact on life at the school. Jack Humphries ’15, now at Stanford, created apps, available on any mobile device, that have allowed the community to access the school’s dining menu and past issues of The Record. While Humphries came up with the ideas for these apps on his own, students will have the opportunity to collaborate on programming projects in the near future. “Our long-term goal is to see more students involved in computer programming,
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WHAT DOES FREDDIE MERCURY HAVE TO DO WITH VENEZUELA’S POLITICAL DIVIDE? A lot, at least, for filmmaker Tim Tracy ’96 By WENDY CARLSON
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UNICO AMIGO GRINGO,
TIM TRACY’S FIRSTPERSON DOCUMENTARY ON VENEZUELA’S POLITICAL CRISIS, IS SET FOR RELEASE TO FILM FESTIVALS IN 2017. It’s full of scenes of chaos and riots, but running through it is a story of friendship, of a bond Tracy formed with a gringo-hating revolutionary infatuated with the voice of Freddie Mercury. Tracy first met Humberto Lopez outside the Ecuadorian embassy in Caracas, when he first came to Venezuela to film students protesting the regime of President Hugo Chavez. In his beret and camouflage fatigues, Lopez looked he was auditioning for the lead role in a Che Guevara biopic — and his nickname was Che. The two immediately became friends, and Che would become indispensable to Tracy’s film. As an insider, Che allowed Tracy access to 23 de enero, a barrio of Caracas known as a hotbed of violent crime, drug trafficking, and political unrest.
But in 2013, a volatile situation threatened to drive a wedge between Tracy and Che. President Chavez had just died of cancer, and his fanatical supporters claimed that Americans had somehow gave him the disease, triggering a wave of anti-American sentiment. Che suddenly stopped communicating with Tracy. For a week, Tracy heard nothing from Che; he panicked at the thought that Che had cut him off. He remembered that Che had once told him that he thought Freddie Mercury had “a voice like a little bird,” and that he wished he could understand the words he was singing. So Tracy won Che back, in part, through music. He translated Freddie Mercury’s lyrics into Spanish for him, and introduced him to the music of Bruce Springsteen. Ironically, Tracy might not have had to work that hard to get back into Che’s good graces: it turned out that Che had simply misplaced his BlackBerry. That surreal episode is just one of several in what Tracy described as the “Huckleberry Finn/ Don Quixote” journey of self-discovery he experienced while making the documentary. Tracy’s foray into Venezuelan politics began in 2012. Smitten by a beautiful Venezuelan
woman he met at a wedding who told him stories of her country’s plight, he followed her home to Caracas. “I thought to myself, that’s my in. I’m going to save the country with my camera by exposing one of the most controversial political figures of the 21st century,” Tracy said. (In the end, the woman left him for a venture capitalist, who brought her gelato every day after she twisted her ankle.) But Tracy stayed in the country, and under Che’s wing, he immersed himself in both sides of the political divide. During the process, Tracy said he discovered that “political speech was being used to create a mirage of fiction, a distraction from what is really going in the country.” The fiction became stranger still when Chavez died and Chavez’s successor, President Nicolas Maduro, began conspiring against those who resisted his socialist regime. In Venezuela, at this point, “there was hypocrisy on a Tartuffian level,” said Tracy. In May of 2013, Tracy himself became embroiled in the political crisis when the government accused him of being a CIA agent sent to destabilize the country. His film, and his life, hung in the balance after he found himself in a Venezuelan prison under arrest for allegedly financing terrorism, inciting violence, and using false film credentials (he’d been detained twice before — once for filming a Chavez rally, and another time for recording the presidential palace). But this arrest made worldwide headlines.
Protestors fill the streets as the country’s political crisis deepens. Previous spread: Tim Tracy films while riding a motorcycle through the streets of Caracas.
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Looking back on the experience now, Tracy joked that his specialty is getting into trouble. “In a sense, my experience in Venezuela allowed me to discover my true passion,” he said. Even during his time at Hotchkiss, where he once conspired with classmates to smuggle golf carts into the Dining Hall to replace the dining tables, Tracy had a penchant for getting into a tight spot — and then, seamlessly, extracting himself. The carts never made it into the Dining Hall, and the students that were caught red-handed were given a warning, recalled Tracy. He went on to graduate from Georgetown University with a degree in English and a minor in theater and history. At Hotchkiss, he got his first taste of performing. “I was an athlete at Hotchkiss,
PHOTOS COURTESY OF FREEHOLD PRODUCTIONS
AT HOT CHKIS S
“ I’M GOING TO SAVE THE COUNTRY WITH MY CAMERA BY EXPOSING ONE OF THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL POLITICAL FIGURES OF THE 21ST CENTURY.” Tim Tracy with political activist Humberto Lopez
playing hockey, but the School had this event called Broadway Night where anyone could sing show tunes. That’s when I thought, ‘Maybe I’ve got some talent,’” Tracy said. Since Georgetown University didn’t have a hockey team, Tracy got involved in musical theater and set his sights on becoming an actor. After graduating, he moved to L.A., but after six years with only a few parts to his credit, acting wasn’t panning out the way he had hoped. Then, a colleague and producer asked him to do some interviews for a show, and Tracy found that he really liked the work. Together, they produced reality shows, including a series for the History Channel on early Nascar racing. Tracy continued to work on other films, including a documentary for the Discovery Channel, Northern Borders, and on reality television productions. But he still felt unfulfilled. “It was really cookie cutter. Reality television wasn’t about exploring the human condition; it was about exploiting it,” he said. He began soul searching, asking himself what he was contributing to society. In retrospect, he says, the events leading up to the documentary and his arrest awakened in him a social conscience. A C IA SPY
But in the spring of 2013, Tracy felt lost, stuck in a jail cell in a country fraught with anti-American tension, wondering if he would ever get out alive. He was arrested at the Caracas airport just as he was leaving the country for a
visit home. He thought it would be easy talk his way out — and he even tried evoking sympathy by saying that he’d miss his father’s 80th birthday celebration if he was detained. Instead, he was transported to a “Club Med-style” prison, where he spent his days playing ping-pong with a Russian arms dealer named Boris. The inmates jokingly called him “sniper,” because they knew he wasn’t in the CIA. “I wasn’t up before 10 a.m., and I never made my bed. It was so obvious I wasn’t CIA material,” Tracy said. But as days turned into weeks, Tracy worried that the government wouldn’t back down. Then, a week before his release, Tracy was transferred to El Rodeo prison, where he was put in a rat-infested, mosquito-swarmed cell without toilet paper or eating utensils. “I was not able to sleep for more than 20 minutes. The entire purpose of that type of confinement is that you get to feel less like a human and more like an animal, and the more you are stripped of that sense of a human being.” Just as he was losing hope, his release was was secured with the help of former U.S. Rep. William Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts. After he returned to the United States, Tracy was more determined than ever to finish the film and help expose the hypocrisy of the Venezuelan government and those most affected by it. His film is especially pertinent now because Venezuela is in dire straits — politically, socially and economically. Under President
Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, the homicide rate has risen sharply; in 2015, the independent, non-governmental Venezuelan Violence Observatory reported that Venezuela has the second-highest homicide rate in the world, behind Honduras, with 119 homicides per 100,000. “When I was there, hundreds of people died each weekend. The morgue had an underground tunnel to hide the transport of victims of murder and crimes,” Tracy said. Against this backdrop, opposition leaders are attempting to bring an end to the 17 yearreign of the socialist party. Tracy won’t be able to return to witness the outcome, because he’s been barred from entering the country. But his experience has changed the direction of his career, and his life. “I don’t know where my next adventure will be,” he said. “But I know that I do like overcoming boundaries that are caused by prejudice. And I believe that’s best achieved by human interaction.” If anything, he hopes his film will be a message about overcoming the politics of hate. “When you find yourself divided by politics, the answer often is found in getting to know someone on the other side on a more personal level. Friendship and compassion can overcome the divisiveness that we so often find ourselves trapped by,” Tracy said. And knowing a little Freddie Mercury and Bruce Springsteen sometimes helps.
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Annual Report of Giving
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The campus in 1893
Dear members of the Hotchkiss community, It is my pleasure to report the results of Hotchkiss’s fundraising efforts during the 2015-16 year. Your monetary gifts and your gifts of time and talent enabled this success, and all of us on campus who benefit from your support are deeply grateful. Over 1,000 volunteers contributed to this success. Without your great work, we simply would not have achieved the results described below. Thank you all. The Hotchkiss Fund, which provides critically important support to the operating budget, raised $5,504,187 with 41% alumni participation, surpassing its goals of $5,200,000 and 40% participation. Twenty-seven classes reached 50% participation or higher, and our youngest fifteen classes achieved 39% overall participation. Hotchkiss parents set a new philanthropic record by raising a total of $1,786,518 for the Parents Fund. Overall parent participation this year was an impressive 78%. Excellence and community are what attracted me to Hotchkiss. The principal determinant of excellence is the quality of the people who form the learning community on campus and who form the extended Hotchkiss community. Your involvement sustains your ties to the community, and your support ensures Hotchkiss’s enduring excellence.
Thank you. Craig W. Bradley Head of School
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HOTCHKISS ARCHIVES
Sincerely,
2015-2016 Annual Report of Giving
Town Hill Society
PHOTO BY WENDY CARLSON
Generosity has been a hallmark of The Hotchkiss School since its inception and continues to make a real difference in the day-today lives of our students. The Town Hill Society, established in 1994, ensures that Hotchkiss will be well positioned to educate future generations of students. This sense of legacy is a powerful and admirable spirit that connects one generation to another, preserving the past while steadfastly building an even more relevant future. We are deeply indebted to the 639 Town Hill Society members who have demonstrated their unwavering confidence in and support for Hotchkiss. We are very pleased to report that The Town Hill Society welcomed 20 new members in 2015-16. We are profoundly grateful to each of these new members, representing a range of classes from 1938 to 2011, whose generosity will help Hotchkiss to thrive in the future. Hotchkiss received $8,135,000 (face value) in new revocable estate commitments and $1,080,833 in realized planned gifts.
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2015-2016 Annual Report of Giving
at a glance
Revenues and Expenditures
Report of Gifts July 1, 2015 – June 30, 2016
The 2015-16 operating budget was approximately $49.6 million. The School takes great pride in the stewardship of its funds. Charitable giving allows Hotchkiss to continue providing an outstanding education.
24%
Percentage of Total Revenues Net Tuition (Gross less financial aid)
47.0%
Authorized Endowment Utilization
33.3%
The Hotchkiss Fund
11.3%
Fees and Other
4.5%
Auxiliary Enterprises
2.4%
Summer Portals
1.3%
Restricted Annual Gifts
0.2%
30% 42%
Percentage of Total Expenditures Salaries, Wages, and Stipends
41.2%
All Benefits
18.8%
Plant Operations
10.2%
Other General Institutional
8.7%
Plant Capital and Special Items
6.6%
Student Support
6.4%
Legal, Insurance, and Other Professional Services
3.7%
Interest on Debt
2.6%
Summer Portals
1.2%
Contingency 0.6%
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n The Hotchkiss Fund
$5,504,187
n Restricted Current Use
$123,828
n Unrestricted Endowment
$491,491
n Restricted Endowment
$3,919,966
n Property, Plant, and Equipment
$3,146,272
n Gifts Pending Designation Total Gifts
$70,000 $13,255,744
2015-2016 Annual Report of Giving
The School’s early operating budget
Giving Societies All cash gifts to the School from July 1, 2015 – June 30, 2016 Gift Level
HOTCHKISS ARCHIVES
Donors
The Hotchkiss Fund
Total Given
Minerva Society $100,000 or more
20
$902,603
$6,426,097
Head of School’s Council $50,000 - $99,999
25
$558,672
$1,433,680
Leadership Council $25,000 - $49,999
53
$921,147
$1,545,978
St. Luke’s Society $10,000 – $24,999
121
$1,083,663
$1,550,077
Maria Hotchkiss Society $5,000 - $9,999
158
$725,089
$863,148
The 1891 Society $1,891 - $4,999
223
$509,375
$566,514
Olympians (1st – 5th Reunion) $250 - $4,999
13
$6,631
$9,631
Pythians (6th – 10th Reunion) $500 - $4,999
12
$11,742
$13,442
3,640
$785,265
$847,176
Blue & White Society up to $1,890
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2015-2016 Annual Report of Giving
award WINNERS
Left to right: Elizabeth “Biz” Morris ’96, Ashley Wisneski ’96, and President of The Hotchkiss Fund Chuck Gulden ’79, P’12
Maria de Lesseps P’16,’18 with President of The Hotchkiss Fund Chuck Gulden ’79, P’12
The Armitage Award
The McKee Award
ELIZABETH “BIZ” MORRIS ’96 AND ASHLEY WISNESKI ’96
are the recipients of this year’s Thomas W. Armitage ’25 Award, given annually to a member or members of the Hotchkiss alumni body for distinguished service to The Hotchkiss Fund. Biz and Ashley began serving as Lead Agents in 2005 in advance of their 10th Reunion. Together, they’ve helped lead the Class of 1996 to a decade of fundraising and reunion successes. Amongst their many highlights, Biz and Ashley have led the Class of 1996 to achieving at least 40% Hotchkiss Fund participation in six of the last seven fiscal years. The duo also helped the Class of 1996 win the coveted Cullinan Challenge Award in 2009-2010, achieving the highest Hotchkiss Fund participation of any of the youngest 15 alumni classes in that year. Biz and Ashley have both been enthusiastic participants in numerous Hotchkiss events, including Hotchkiss Fund Phonathons in Boston, where their passionate love for Hotchkiss shined brightly, Volunteer Leadership Weekend in Lakeville, and countless Day of Service events, Hotchkiss Holiday Parties and Coast to Coasts in Boston. Their individual commitment, strength of spirit, and terrific teamwork have led to some of the most successful efforts in the young alumni classes. Biz and Ashley have never backed down from a task and have always performed their Class Agent duties with smiles on their faces. After 11 years as a Lead Agent, Ashley is stepping down this year, although we hope to see her back in the fold in time for her 25th Reunion. Biz will continue to serve as a Co-Lead Agent, with her classmate Peter Wertheim ’96 joining her. We extend our sincere thanks to Biz and Ashley for their long-term commitment to Hotchkiss, and commend them for their excellent results over the past decade.
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were honored with the McKee Award this year. Named in honor of Hugh and Judy McKee P’78,’80,’84,’89 in recognition of their tireless work for The Hotchkiss Fund, this award is presented annually to a Hotchkiss parent for distinguished service to The Hotchkiss Fund.
MARIA AND GEOFF DE LESSEPS P’16,’18
Maria and Geoff began volunteering for The Hotchkiss Parents Fund in 2012, when their daughter Stephanie ’16 arrived at Hotchkiss. Since then, they have worked tirelessly to achieve record-setting results for the Fund. In addition, Maria and Geoff were instrumental in the success of the Class of 2016 Senior Parents Gift, with their early support and exemplary leadership, enthusiastically inspiring other families to join them in support of the School. Hotchkiss is very grateful to Maria and Geoff for all of their contributions. We are thrilled to have them as active members of the community for the next two years, with their son, Anton ’18.
2015-2016 Annual Report of Giving
Hotchkiss announcements, 1893
HOTCHKISS ARCHIVES
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2015-2016 Annual Report of Giving
The Hotchkiss Fund
$5,504,187 Total amount raised in 2015-2016
41% 27 39% overall alumni participation
40% in FY14 and FY15
alumni classes that achieved 50% participation or higher
youngest 15 alumni classes participation overall
25 classes in FY15 20 classes in FY14
36% participation in FY15 34% participation in FY14
The Hotchkiss Parents Fund
$1,786,518 Total amount raised in 2015-2016
Thanks to the extraordinary leadership of Parents Fund Chairs Sandy and April Neubauer P’14,’18, and the wonderful outreach of our 60 volunteer families, Hotchkiss parents set a new philanthropic record by raising a total of $3,029,957 for the School this year. Overall parent participation this year was an impressive 78%.
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Contributions to the Hotchkiss Parents Fund totaled $2,193,811, ($1,786,518 from non-alumni parents and $407,293 from alumni parents). The Class of 2016 parents raised an additional $836,146 for the Senior Parents Gift. This special gift funded a major renovation of the iconic, neoclassical house on Fairfield Farm which was converted into
two faculty residences. The School is very grateful to the Class of 2016 parents for creating a wonderful legacy and tradition of philanthropy for their graduates, and to all parents for their thoughtful and generous support.
2015-2016 Annual Report of Giving
First faculty at Hotchkiss in 1893
HOTCHKISS ARCHIVES
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2015-2016 Annual Report of Giving
Class Giving Summary Results July 1, 2015 – June 30, 2016
Non-Reunion Classes CLASS YEAR
% OF THE HOTCHKISS PARTICIPATION FUND
DONORS ALL FUNDS
TOTAL DOLLARS ALL FUNDS
1937 1938 1939 1940 1942 1943 1944 1945 1947 1948 1949 1950 1952 1953 1954 1955 1957 1958 1959 1960 1962 1963 1964 1965 1967 1968 1969 1970 1972 1973 1974 1975
67% $291 2 $516 80% $26,665 4 $252,912 50% $1,265 3 $1,265 67% $1,000 2 $81,000 85% $5,950 11 $256,450 44% $9,260 7 $14,260 81% $24,425 17 $44,425 36% $925 10 $26,025 68% $14,359 30 $886,514 67% $17,344 18 $32,344 98% $134,000 43 $204,100 68% $46,129 23 $46,129 62% $6,400 21 $6,600 83% $148,870 40 $175,970 71% $10,922 32 $14,222 71% $53,072 32 $408,155 68% $22,458 38 $42,458 78% $40,929 42 $51,629 60% $28,300 35 $163,038 63% $64,363 27 $299,363 60% $5,630 25 $5,630 57% $46,323 29 $163,703 57% $15,755 24 $1,147,731 48% $42,722 42 $299,925 36% $38,329 26 $78,329 29% $41,436 24 $41,436 44% $57,799 37 $113,129 57% $17,057 44 $24,557 44% $66,356 41 $102,356 31% $36,261 29 $46,261 40% $50,684 40 $80,684 37% $22,125 42 $22,800
CLASS YEAR
% OF THE HOTCHKISS PARTICIPATION FUND
DONORS ALL FUNDS
TOTAL DOLLARS ALL FUNDS
1977 1978 1979 1980 1982 1983 1984 1985 1987 1988 1989 1990 1992 1993 1994 1995 1997 1998 1999 2000 2002 2003 2004 2005 2007 2008 2009 2010 2012 2013 2014 2015
28% $144,438 39 $144,658 41% $115,327 55 $149,327 40% $67,954 57 $122,715 23% $243,096 30 $1,583,504 24% $63,650 36 $71,150 33% $88,894 43 $160,574 35% $76,031 48 $85,281 39% $81,515 56 $182,765 49% $74,999 71 $99,899 34% $46,974 52 $76,989 32% $59,056 46 $101,723 36% $36,567 48 $88,272 24% $12,176 35 $12,176 35% $17,101 57 $18,906 27% $7,158 41 $27,758 22% $67,792 36 $269,915 32% $40,911 49 $40,961 16% $8,571 25 $8,821 28% $9,801 47 $9,801 35% $11,805 57 $119,305 35% $8,814 56 $8,814 36% $17,180 53 $24,830 30% $8,209 53 $9,209 43% $6,507 72 $6,507 39% $3,721 69 $4,921 56% $5,234 104 $5,860 46% $16,562 84 $16,562 36% $14,199 62 $26,699 48% $4,003 84 $7,008 29% $1,896 51 $1,946 31% $2,094 53 $2,094 42% $2,302 73 $2,302
Reunion Classes CLASS YEAR
1936 1941 1946 1951 1956 1961 1966 1971
% OF THE HOTCHKISS PARTICIPATION FUND
(80th) 100% (75th) 36% (70th) 75% (65th) 64% (60th) 100% (55th) 50% (50th) (45th) 46%
$5,468 $1,600 $10,650 $27,760 $59,862 $13,050
DONORS ALL FUNDS
2 4 15 27 33 29
TOTAL DOLLARS ALL FUNDS
$5,468 $6,600 $692,005 $302,760 $59,912 $13,550 Reunion Campaign in Progress $64,256 33 $102,256
CLASS YEAR
% OF THE HOTCHKISS PARTICIPATION FUND
DONORS ALL FUNDS
TOTAL DOLLARS ALL FUNDS
1976 1981 1986 1991 1996 2001 2006 2011
52% 39% 43% 45% 47% 24% 46% 44%
64 57 69 66 73 36 73 79
$256,857 $866,451 $78,197 $246,838 $275,529 $14,205 $7,753 $15,280
(40th) (35th) (30th) (25th) (20th) (15th) (10th) (5th)
$92,557 $232,416 $59,306 $77,906 $74,829 $6,580 $7,228 $15,280
‘Total Dollars’ reflect all cash and newly-established commitments to the School from July 1, 2015 – June 30, 2016. Multi-year pledges and planned gifts are reflected in full in the fiscal year in which they are made, and at the level of any cash received in subsequent years.
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2015-2016 Annual Report of Giving
vs. Hotchkiss-Taft Challenge In the fall of 2015, Hotchkiss and Taft once again channeled their athletic rivalry into an annual fundraising effort amongst their alumni. The Second Annual Hotchkiss-Taft Challenge took place over five days, from November 9-13, 2015. During those five days, which corresponded with Spirit Week on campus and culminated with Taft Day athletic competitions in Lakeville, alumni from the youngest 20 graduating classes at each School competed to see which group could yield the highest participation percentage in their Schools’ annual fund. Once again, the competition was a nail-biter. In the end, 613 Hotchkiss Alumni from the Classes of 1996-2015 made a gift to The Hotchkiss Fund during the week, resulting in 18.64% overall participation. This was just enough to edge Taft alumni from the same classes by a margin of merely one donor (Taft finished with 18.62% participation). The Class of 2008 led the way with 60 individual donors. The Class of 2015, the youngest alumni participating in the Challenge, finished with 59 donors of their own. The School was overwhelmed by the support of its young alumni and was thrilled to beat the Rhinos.
18.64%
overall participation from the Classes of 1996-2015
613
donors from the Classes of 1996-2015
60
highest number of donors in one class (Class of 2008)
95%
participation from class agent volunteers
1
Hotchkiss’s margin of victory, in terms of individual donors
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senior
2015-2016 Annual Report of Giving
CLASS GIFT The Class of 2016 Senior Class Gift Campaign
118
members of the Class of 2016 made a gift to The Julia Wu Trethaway FUNd during the 2016 Senior Class Gift Campaign
70% $2,207
of seniors gave, raising a total of
As a result of their successful fundraising campaign, on Saturday, May 21, 2016, the Class of 2016 hosted the first annual J-Wu Jamboree, an annual evening of laughter in memory of Julia Wu Trethaway P’06,’09, former Instructor in History and Class Dean at Hotchkiss. This annual event is funded by gifts made to The Julia Wu Trethaway FUNd.
First class at Hotchkiss in 1893
THANK A D O N O R D AY
800 of our loyal and generous donors.
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Last year, students, faculty, and staff members wrote thank you notes to over
senior
2015-2016 Annual Report of Giving
PARENTS GIFT The Class of 2016 Senior Parents Gift 62 parents supported this year’s Senior Parents Gift effort, raising a total of
$836,146
to renovate the iconic, neoclassical house on Fairfield Farm, pictured below. This beautiful building has provided much-needed faculty residences, and is now home to two faculty families. The School is very grateful to the Class of 2016 parents for their generous support.
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Messages from the Alumni Association Meet the Alumni Association of Board of Governors The BOG serves as the executive committee of the Alumni Association and strives to engage the Hotchkiss alumni community. We encourage you to reach out to us with suggestions, comments, and any questions. Contact President Tom Seidenstein ’91 at tseidenstein@hotchkiss.org.
Save the Dates We hope you have had a chance to meet Craig Bradley at some of the fall Coast to Coast events around the country and in Asia. Here is the remaining schedule of Coast to Coast events featuring remarks by Craig:
Coast to Coast San Francisco February 23 Washington D.C. April 5 Chicago May 10
Other Events and Holiday Parties Washington D.C. Holiday Party December 1 San Francisco Holiday Party December 6 Boston Holiday Party December 7 New York Holiday Party December 7 Top row, left to right: Keith Holmes ’77; Peter Gifford ’93; Nick Moore ’71, P’89,’01,’06; Barrett Lester ’81; Michael Thompson ’66; Middle row: Charlotte Dillon ’10; Nichole Phillips ’89; Bill Sandberg ’65; Miriam Gelber Beveridge ’86; Gwyn Williams ’84, P’17,’19; Chip Quarrier ’90; Bottom row: Emily Pressman ’98; Nisa Leung Lin ’88; Paul Mutter ’87; Tom Seidenstein ’91; Adam Casella ’06; Caldwell Hart ’87, P’16,’20; Christina Bechhold ’03; Not pictured: Annika Lescott ’06; Sirin Bulakul ’06; Tom Terbell ’95; Mark Gall ’59; Casey Reid ’01; Sheria Smith ’01; Carolyn Toolan ’97; Nathalie Pierrepont Danilovich ’03
Be an Advisor! Our alumni network is a valuable resource. The Hotchkiss Alumni Career Network allows users to tap into this network, pairing advisors with advice seekers. This network allows advisors to choose the services they would like to offer (i.e., career conversations, resume critiques, or mock interviews), and advice seekers can search for alumni in many fields. Signing up is fast and easy at www.hotchkiss.evisors.com.
Political Media Panel January 26, Washington D.C. featuring alumni panelists New York Forum Event: The Value of the Boarding School Model April 12 with Craig Bradley and alumni panelists Visual Arts Day May 20, Lakeville Alumni are invited back to campus to experience the Arts at Hotchkiss today 7th Annual Day of Service May 20, in various markets Hotchkiss Reunion June 16-18, Lakeville for classes ending in 2 and 7 Alumni of Color Reunion June 18, Lakeville
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Remembering Forrest E. Mars Jr.’49 Longtime trustee and devoted Hotchkiss benefactor
F
O R R ES T E. MA R S JR . ’49, P’77, ’82, G P ’ 0 9 , ’ 0 9 , ’ 1 1 , ’11, ’14 died on
Forrest accepting the 2014 Alumni Award
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PHOTO BY ANNE DAY
July 26 at the age of 84. Over many years, he played a pivotal role in the growth of Hotchkiss and made significant contributions to the campus. “Forrest was a dear friend to the School, and he will be missed deeply,” said Jeannie Weinberg Rose ’80, P’18, president of the Board of Trustees. “The School will always be indebted to him for his dedication and wisdom.” Forrest was remarkably devoted to Hotchkiss as an alumnus, classmate, parent, grandparent, and trustee. He was an active member of the Class of ’49, serving as a Class Agent and loyal reunion volunteer. He was a trustee from 19821992 and from 1995-2014. During his tenure on the board, he served with distinction on a range of committees, most notably as chair of the Building, Grounds, and Environment Committee. In May 2015, Forrest was elected a trustee emeritus. “For me, Forrest was a superb trustee whose leadership and support I always enjoyed, and over the years he became a kind and gracious friend whose company I shall miss dearly,” said retired Head of School Robert “Skip” Mattoon. His legacy at Hotchkiss is visible across the campus. Named in his honor and opened in 2002, the 212,000-square-foot Forrest E. Mars Jr. Athletic Center (MAC) has become the heart of the athletic program, housing the majority of the indoor practice and game facilities. Additionally, Forrest endowed both the Audrey Meyer Mars English Wing and Teaching Chair in memory of his beloved mother, and he helped fund the renovations of Monahan and Harris House.
“We learned here what we took to business … That’s what Hotchkiss does for you. It isn’t just an education; it gives you a way of life.”
Misch photo
Forrest’s other significant contributions to Hotchkiss include strengthening the financial aid program and funding student expeditions to Antarctica. His gifts often were made quietly, but the recipients of his generosity benefited in countless ways. “Forrest treated Hotchkiss like extended family, and the deep affection was mutual,” said Chief Financial Officer John Tuke. “Among the many things I loved about him was his willingness to engage with the staff here, and the message was always consistently clear and simple: ‘Folks, take pride in what you do. Always do it right and to Hotchkiss standards.’” Forrest came to Lakeville in 1945. In his four years at the School, he made his presence felt, primarily in his work for The Hotchkiss Record as assistant business editor and then business manager, and on the Hotchkiss Dramatic Association, as a member of the stage crew and then as its head. Recognizing this seriousness of purpose, his classmates voted him “Most Likely to Succeed” in the 1949 Mischianza. In addition to honing his business skills at Hotchkiss, he enjoyed the time he spent on the Woods Squad. “The Duke (then-Headmaster George Van Santvoord ’08) would have us cleaning up trails,” Forrest said in a 2014 interview in Hotchkiss Magazine. “There were
cabins out there at the time. We cleaned up the ski jump and kept it from falling apart. But the big experience of Woods Squad in the fall happened in December, before we went home. We put the bees to bed. The Duke would come out with his bee equipment on and say, ’Boys, the bees aren’t going to bite you.’ Well, we stayed away. We let the Duke do the bees.” After earning a B.S. from Yale in 1953, Forrest served for two years in the Army. He earned an M.B.A. from New York University in 1958 while working at Price Waterhouse in New York. He began his career with Mars, Inc., working overseas, as his father, Forrest Sr., had done. As co-president of Mars, Forrest immersed himself in the business, leading it to a greater focus on global expansion, including a move into Russia. Its diversification initiative proved successful; today, Mars owns $11 billion in brands and products, including pet care, food, and drink, as well as the world’s most popular candies — Snickers and M&Ms. The “five principles” of Mars – quality, responsibility, mutuality, efficiency, and freedom – held great significance for Forrest: They were the principles by which he and his brother, John F. Mars ’53, ran the company. In a speech at Hotchkiss in 2014, when he accepted the Alumni Award, Forrest said the principles “all come from, basically, what both of us learned at Hotchkiss. We learned here what we took to business … That’s what Hotchkiss does for you. It isn’t just an education; it gives you a way of life.” However immersed he was in Mars, Inc., as co-president and then as a trustee emeritus, Forrest always found time for Hotchkiss. As a Hotchkiss parent and grandparent, Forrest always enjoyed his conversations with students and faculty members during his
visits to campus. Between 2002 and 2013, Forrest sponsored three expeditions to Antarctica, the peak experience of a lifetime for many Hotchkiss students. One student said after her experience on the 2002 expedition, “Not only was Mr. Mars’s gift an incredible opportunity for each of us who were privileged to go, but it was an amazing thing to do for the future of Antarctica. I know we all came back in love with the magical continent so far to the south, and I hope we can be ambassadors and convey to others how important it is to preserve it.” In his other community service work, Forrest served on the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Board of Trustees and was a trustee emeritus of the Fay School and former board member of Trout Unlimited. In 2013, Colonial Williamsburg presented him with its highest award, the Churchill Bell, which honors recipients for their dedication to the preservation of history and original American ideals and values, support of education and young people, and service to the public. He received three governmental awards: Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau (1988) from the Netherlands, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor (2006) from France, and the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation (2011). “No one person has done more for Hotchkiss than ‘Forrie,’” wrote friend and classmate Peter Bulkeley ’49. “His leadership on the Board of Trustees over many years, particularly focused on upgrading the physical facilities, was exemplary. The campus today is absolutely magnificent and a living testament to his dedication.”
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R O B E R T W A LT E R T A Y L O R
D R . R O B E R T W E L L S ( B O B ) C A R T O N of Winnetka, Ill., died on Aug. 15, 2016, at age 95. Born in Lake Forest, he was a member of the Class of 1938 at Hotchkiss and graduated from Princeton University in 1942 with honors in chemistry. He graduated from Northwestern University Medical College in 1946 through the Army Student Training Program. After graduation, he was ordered to San Antonio, Tex., where he worked at Brooke General Hospital at Fort Sam Houston. Later, he served at Fort Roots Veterans Administration Hospital in Little Rock, Ark. After his marriage to Jean Aubrey Keating of San Antonio and discharge from the Army in 1948, the couple returned to Chicago, where he completed a three-year residency in internal medicine at the Cook County Hospital. After his residency, Dr. Carton established an internal medicine practice, organized a laboratory for the study of pulmonary function at the Chicago State Tuberculosis Sanatorium, and served as professor of medicine at the University of Illinois Medical School. In 1971, he joined the team to restart Rush Medical College as professor of medicine and associate dean for medical sciences and services. He served sequentially as associate dean, chief of the section of pulmonary medicine, director of respiratory therapy, and, from 1982-1984, as acting chairman of the department of internal medicine at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke’s Hospital. On his 65th birthday, he resigned from Rush and enrolled in the Divinity School at The University of Chicago, where he earned an M.A. in religious studies with a focus on medical ethics. He taught, consulted, and wrote on medical ethics as a member of the department of religion, health and human values at Rush Medical College from 1990-1994. During his career, Dr. Carton served on a variety of boards, including the Chicago Lung Association, and was active in the management of several local foundations. He enjoyed reading, writing papers, walking with his dogs, fishing, sailing, and maintaining close ties with his extended family. His wife predeceased him; Dr. Carton is survived by three daughters and a son, eight grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
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passed away Aug. 3, 2015. He was born on Sept. 14, 1920, and was a resident of Lantana, Fla.
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CROSBY WELLS,
a retired lawyer, died in Salisbury, Conn., on Sept. 4, 2016, at age 94. He graduated from Hotchkiss, as did his father, Henry H. Wells, Class of 1896, and his brothers, Tomlinson, Class of 1933, Alfred, Class of 1935, and Frank, Class of 1948. After graduating from Yale, he served during World War II as a staff sergeant in a rifle platoon of the 10th Mountain Division. He was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. After graduating from the University of Virginia Law School in 1949, he joined the New York law firm Reid & Priest, which sent him to Athens. There, he was general counsel of the newly formed Greek state power company, the Public Power Corporation, which was involved in the design and construction of a U.S.-funded new electric power system for Greece, including three new power plants, transmission and distribution facilities, and staff training. Later, he joined Ebasco as vice president and general counsel, retiring in 1990 to Salisbury, where he spent many happy days at his home in the village and at his cabin on Mount Riga. He served on the board of directors of the Salisbury Public Health Nursing Association, now called the Salisbury Visiting Nurse Association, and as a volunteer at the Tremaine Art Gallery at Hotchkiss. For many years, he was a member of the board of directors and secretary of Mount Riga, Inc. He is survived by his wife, Chany; his son, Conrad; three grandchildren, a brother, Frank Wells ’48; and a sister. He was predeceased by a son, Reed.
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JOHN ELDRIDGE BEEBE
died on May 14, 2016, at age 93, in his home, with his wife by his side. He was born in Freeport, N.Y. After graduating from Hotchkiss, he began his undergraduate studies at Princeton. In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in the Philippines during World War II in the Field Artillery, completing his service with the rank of first lieutenant. He was chosen to be the battery commander for the invasion of Japan, when Harry Truman dropped the bomb and saved his life. He was then in the occupation
of Japan for 13 months and, upon returning home, received some letters from the captives thanking him for his kindness. He returned to Princeton to complete his degree, graduating cum laude with a degree in economics, and to marry his childhood sweetheart, Margaret Sands Hubbell. Mr. Beebe enjoyed a long and successful career in investment banking, beginning with the Chase Manhattan Bank, where he worked for 18 years, and then at Paine Webber Jackson and Curtis, where he went on to become head of the investment banking division. A few years after their merger, he worked with Eberstadt, Ingalls & Snyder and Scott-Macon. He also served on the boards of various companies, including Olsten Corporation, Taco Viva, Rheometrics, Balchem Corp, and Becton Dickinson. His love for his wife, Peggy, was only seconded by his love for golf. The couple’s honeymoon consisted of touring various New England golf courses, even though his new bride could not play golf at the time. She quickly learned, and they could often be found pulling their carts well into their 80s. He was a member of The University Club (NYC), The Lake Placid Club, and the U.S. Seniors Golf Association, among others. On his retirement, the Beebes moved to Hilton Head, S.C., while continuing to spend summers at his family home in Lake Placid, N.Y. John is survived by his wife of 70 years, Peggy; his children, John E. Beebe, Jr. ’66 and Martha Knowles; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. J O H N L I G H T “ J A C K ” W O R R I L O W , age 95, died peacefully on July 1, 2016, at the Lebanon V.A. Medical Center in Lebanon, Pa. He is remembered for his widespread community interests and his service as mayor of the city of Lebanon from 1965 to 1972. A former summer employee of the city wrote admiringly of Mr. Worrilow: “The Mayor is part of the reason I wanted to study government and politics in college and why I initially started thinking about a career in the public sector. I occasionally rode my bike to city council meetings during his tenure to see him and his colleagues in action — where he was always leading by example with dignity, humor and civility.” Mr. Worrilow was educated in the Lebanon public school system through sixth grade, followed by middle-school years at The Fessenden School, and then at Hotchkiss. He graduated from Yale University in 1945. An officer of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, he
Former Trustee Fondly Remembered Frederick Augustus Godley Jr. ’38, P’65, ’73, GP’00, ’03
F
ORMER TRUSTEE FREDERICK A U G U S T U S G O D L E Y J R . died on
June 30, 2016, in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., where he resided. He was 96. Fred spoke often of his love for Hotchkiss, and he believed strongly in its mission. He and his wife, Mary, who shared his love for the School, gave generously to Hotchkiss over the years. At Hotchkiss, young Frederick displayed a range of talents and interests. In his four years here, he headed the Misch, played football and hockey, and participated in the glee club and the Hotchkiss Dramatic Association. He also played the piano. He went on to Yale, earning a B.A. in 1942 and B.E. in 1947. He served for three years as a destroyer officer and one year on the staff of the U.S. Navy Atlantic Torpedo School. Afterward, Fred returned to Yale and received a masters in mechanical engineering. He began his professional life working as a mechanical engineer and marketing executive of Sterling, Inc., and the PerkinElmer Corporation. In 1956, he made an important career move. With C. Lawson Reed ’39, his friend and former classmate at Hotchkiss and at Yale, he cofounded XOMOX Corporation, a specialty valve company. Godley and Reed were co- chief executives of the new company, whose principal product appealed to the booming petrochemical industry. Forbes Magazine wrote about XOMOX in an “Up AndComers” feature in the April 30, 1979, issue, noting that its cofounders “owe their success not to repeated scientific breakthroughs — which, after all, are rare in most industries — but rather to painstaking everyday application of engineering, aggressive marketing and common business sense quickly learned and deftly applied. In a highly fragmented commodity business, they took someone else’s new product idea and learned how to exploit its full potential at enormous profit virtually from scratch.” “It was a beautiful product about which to build a small company because it’s a fussy product,” Godley said, adding that there had been a sizable investment in molds
and plastics, as well as the patents obtained for the method used for the Teflon sleeve in their valve. In the late 70s, Fred founded a separate biomedical division called XOMED, which developed microscopic replacement parts for the ear to address issues related to hearing loss. In 1980, Emerson Electric acquired XOMOX Corporation, and in 1999, Medtronic purchased XOMED. Fred served on numerous boards, including as a director of Johnston Mutual Fund, Radio Broadcasting, and J.C. Edwards. After retirement, he went on to create several businesses both in communications (radio station WHOM in Maine) and athletic fitness outlets in Florida, where he finally retired. An active Hotchkiss alumnus, he served on the Class of 1938’s Reunion Social Committee in 1998. When he ran for the Alumni Trustee position in 1973, he won the post and served on the Board until 1978. His statement on the 1973 Alumni Trustee ballot read, in part: “The existence of a private boarding school in the future can be justified only by offering special educational opportunities to its students. Herein lies, I believe, an unprecedented exciting challenge for Hotchkiss not only in continuing and expanding the excellence of its curriculum but also in its ability to develop the individual in an overall sense.” In 1939, Fred and Mary met on a blind date and married in 1942. They lived in New Canaan, Conn., where they raised their four children. Fred was one of the founding members of the First Presbyterian Church, served on the Vestry, and oversaw the construction of its new church. In Pennsylvania, he established the Eagles Mere Conservancy and, together with Mary, founded the Godley House, a residential mental health facility, in Rutland, Vt.. Fred and Mary have generously supported Hotchkiss over the years, funding renovations of the Main Building in the mid-1980s, renovations of the A. Whitney Griswold
Science Building in 1996, and most recently establishing the Godley Family Scholarship. Fred, Mary, and Fred’s brother, Ambassador G. McMurtrie Godley ’35, made their gift supporting the Main Building renovations in memory of their father, Frederick Augustus Godley, Class of 1904, a distinguished architect and professor of architectural design at Yale. Fred counted golf, tennis, fishing, travel, and woodworking among his hobbies. Fred was known for his willingness to help others with challenges they were facing. Both friends and people who worked for him often came to Fred for advice and counsel. Anyone who knew him will remember him with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face. He is survived by his wife of 75 years, Mary McCreath Godley; his sons, Mac Godley ’65 and Rick Godley ’73; his daughter, Elizabeth Godley Spencer; and several grandchildren. He was predeceased by a daughter, Margaretta, and brother, the Hon. G. McMurtrie Godley ’35. Two nephews, a granddaughter, and grandson are also alumni of Hotchkiss.
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Hotchkiss in m em o ri a m served on active duty with the Fifth Marine Division during WWII and was recalled to active duty for the Korean War. He retired from the Corps after a quarter-century of service. For nearly 30 years, he was employed by Lebanon Steel Foundry as corporate secretary, assistant to the president, and then director, until the Worrilow family sold its half-interest in the company. Mr. Worrilow was a former trustee of Lebanon Valley College and former board member of the Pennsylvania Dutch Council, Boy Scouts of America. He was awarded the Silver Beaver, the Boy Scouts’ highest award at the local level. A recipient of the Kiwanis Outstanding Citizen Award, he served for a time as Lebanon Community Library President. He also served as PA League of Cities President and United Way of Lebanon County President and Campaign Chair. He is survived by numerous nieces, nephews, cousins, and their families.
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J O H N H U B B A R D H O L L I D AY
died on June 20, 2016, at his home in Zionsville, Ind., at age 92. He was the great-grandson of W.J. Holliday, who came to Indianapolis in 1856 from Winchester, Va., and founded the hardware and steel company, W.J. Holliday & Co., Mr. Holliday attended Park School and graduated from Hotchkiss with the Class of 1942. He attended Yale University and joined the family steel business after World War II. During the war, Mr. Holliday served as an Army Air Corps pilot, flying C46s and C47s in the Pacific Theater, and he continued to fly as a hobby following the war. Following the sale of the steel company in 1955, he founded and was president of the Clear View Bag Co. Upon his retirement, he managed the 900-acre Holliday Farm in Boone County. Active in the community, he served on the boards of Merchants National Bank, Arsenal Savings and Loan, Indianapolis Raceway Park, and Christamore House Family and Community Center. His interest in conservation led him to become chairman of Central Indiana Ducks Unlimited; he was named Boone County Conservation Man of the Year in 1973. A skilled marksman who hunted and competed all over the world, he was able to enjoy the sport into his 90s. In 1989, he placed third in the Grand American Trapshooting Championship for Veterans. Mr. Holliday was a collector of Western art and a
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supporter of the Eiteljorg Museum. An avid race fan, he attended 68 Indianapolis 500s and numerous other motorsports events across the country. To celebrate his 90th birthday, he went skydiving with his granddaughter. He was a patriot and was forever grateful for this great country. He loved family and held his friendships dear. He was preceded in death by his wife of 67 years, Phyllis Behringer Holliday, as well as his daughter, Katherine B. Holliday. He is survived by his sister, a son and daughter, three grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. L U N S F O R D R I C H A R D S O N J R . , longtime Triad business leader, died on Aug. 24, 2016. He was 92. Mr. Richardson, who went by the nickname “Lump,” was a longtime patriarch of the Richardson family and spent his career focused on the family businesses. He earned his B.S. at Lehigh University in 1946 and began his career at Richardson-Vicks, which was acquired by Procter & Gamble Co. in 1985. He served as director of Piedmont Trust Co. and Greensboro-based real estate investment company Richardson Properties until 2014, when he became director emeritus of both. Mr. Richardson was the grandson of Lunsford Richardson, who developed Vicks VapoRub and in 1905 founded the company that would become Richardson-Vicks. “This marks the end of an era,” said Stuart “Dick” Richardson, former chairman of Piedmont Trust Co. and a relative of Mr. Richardson. “His devotion to duty and his modesty and courtly manners are the stuff of legends. The ability to get the big decisions right over a long career, and the many friendships he maintained, are the hallmarks of the man.” Mr. Richardson had an immensely generous spirit. His philanthropic interests included the Hillsdale Fund, Inc., of which he was president from its inception in 1963, and the Smith Richardson Foundation, which he trusteed for over 25 years. Always active in his community, he was a trustee of Norwalk Hospital, Norwalk YMCA, Norwalk Maritime Aquarium, and the Norwalk Human Services Council. He divided his time between Rowayton, Conn., and Greensboro, N.C., with family vacations in Nantucket, Mass. He was a true southern gentleman, known for his bowties and crushing handshake. He was predeceased by his wife of 58 years, Beatrix. He is survived by three sisters, three children, and eight grandchildren, including
granddaughters Caroline and Margaret Evans who graduated from Hotchkiss in 2009 and 2012, respectively.
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R I T C H I E P. L O W R Y
died on Sept. 20, 2016, at his home in Wayland, Mass., after a long illness. He was born in Meriden, Conn., and grew up in Hillsborough, Calif. At Hotchkiss, he played football and golf. He then joined the Navy, where he rose from seaman to lieutenant and served in the Pacific. He earned his A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He spent a year in Japan, taught at California State University, Chico, and then went to Washington, D.C., as senior research scientist at the Special Operations Research Office and Professorial Lecturer at American University. He joined the faculty at Boston College as a full professor and taught there for 45 years. He wrote countless articles and many books, including Who’s Running This Town?; Sociology: The Science Society; Social Problems: A Critical Analysis of Theory and Public Policy; Sociology: Social Science and Social Concern; and Good Money: The History and Philosophy of Socially Responsive Investing. He is survived by his wife of 68 years, Betty Trishman; two children; three grandsons, and five great-grandchildren.
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EVANS WOOLLEN III
one of Indiana’s most distinguished architects, died in Chestnut Hill, Pa., on May 17, 2016. He was 88. In a career that spanned more than five decades, he was noted for designing many of Indianapolis’s best-known modern landmarks. Vic Ryckaert, writing in the IndyStar, said: “The city’s most distinctive 20th-century buildings, at least from 1963 on, are almost all his: Clowes Hall; the Minton-Capehart Federal Building; the giant, silver addition to the Indianapolis Central Library; the entrance hall at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis; and the Barton Tower in the Mass Ave. cultural district.” For 15 years, Mr. Woollen also held the post of Hotchkiss campus architect, the second Hotchkiss graduate to do so. In addition to designing Watson Hall, he improved the appearance and functionality of many campus buildings. According to Hotchkiss, the Place by Barbara M. Walker, Mr. Woollen “not only transformed Bissell,
Ford Library and Stubbins’ Main Building, but also did much to update Buehler, Tinker, and Wieler Halls and more than a half-dozen faculty houses.” He was the last to serve as campus architect. Born in 1927, Mr. Woollen grew up in a family with deep roots in Indiana. After graduating from Hotchkiss in 1945, Mr. Woollen earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture at Yale University, where he studied with Louis Kahn. Following graduation, he worked in the offices of prominent architects, including Philip Johnson, primarily designing homes in Connecticut. In 1955, he returned to Indianapolis, began an independent practice, and launched what would become one of the city’s most significant architectural firms. Clowes Hall, a 2,200-seat performance space, was praised in European architectural journals and received considerable attention from the national press when it was completed in 1963. Mr. Woollen’s success there led to numerous significant public buildings, including churches, governmental structures ranging from public housing to the Federal Building, and campus buildings, particularly performing arts centers. A high point of his Indianapolis career came with the design for the addition to Central Library, completed in 2007, which included a stunning six-story tower. His firm won more than 20 design awards from the American Institute of Architecture (AIA); he became a fellow of the AIA in 1983. Mr. Woollen continued his work into his 80s, with designs for three modernist houses in Hamilton County, Ind. He was predeceased by his wife, Nancy Sewell Woollen, a psychotherapist and longtime leader in the arts community. He is survived by two sons, Ian Woollen ’75 and Malcolm Woollen ’77; a sister; two grandchildren; and his companion, painter Yvonne Jacquette.
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GEORGE LABALME JR.
died on Sept. 15, 2016. He was 88. Born in Paris, Mr. Labalme lived there until 1939, when he moved with his family to New York City. That summer, he met 12-year-old Patsy Hochschild at Eagle’s Nest. He was taken by her charm and intelligence; she considered him a French brat. After a long courtship and one cancelled wedding, they married in June 1958. After graduating from Rumsey Hall and with the Class of 1946 from Hotchkiss, Mr. Labalme was drafted into the U. S. Army. He served with the occupation forces in Tokyo until 1947 under Gen.
Douglas MacArthur and believed that had President Truman not ended the war when he did, he’d likely have died in the invasion of Japan. Instead, he attended Kenyon College on the GI Bill, where he met and became lifelong friends with E. L. Doctorow. After graduation, he worked in Milan with architect/designer Gio Ponti, followed by five years with industrial designer (and uncle) Raymond Loewy in Paris and New York. Mr. Labalme’s best-known design was the Grey Poupon mustard jar. For nine years, he was vice president of the New York Public Library, and from 2002-14 served as a trustee and, later, as president of The Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation. He was a trustee of The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, through which he helped produce The Poetry of Light, an exhibition of 140 drawings from The National Gallery of Art, displayed at the Correr Museum in Venice in 2014-15. For many years, he was treasurer of the Renaissance Society of America and a board member of the Adirondack Museum. But it was his lifelong partnership with Patsy that was the source of his greatest happiness. To his friends, he was known for his boisterous laugh, his unconditional acceptance of people, and his faith in the future. He loved beekeeping, fly fishing, and “uncorking the claret.” A diehard New York Times reader, Mr. Labalme rarely left his Manhattan apartment in anything but a suit, as he did on his final foray into the great city, sporting Venetian-themed suspenders. He is survived by his four children, including Henry Labalme ’80, P’16, ’18, and their spouses; and seven grandchildren, including Eve Labalme ’16 and Pia Louise Labalme ’18. In addition, he is survived by a brother, Guy Labalme ’48 of Tampa, Fla., and his wife, and two nieces and a nephew. D A V I D P A G E S E A M A N of Bedford, N.Y., died on July 24 at age 88. He was born in Milwaukee, Wis., to Irving Seaman and Anne Douglas Seaman. He attended Hotchkiss and Yale University and received his law degree from the University of Virginia Law School. He is survived by his wife of 49 years, Mary; eight children, and 19 grandchildren.
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HAZARD KNOX CAMPBELL SR.,
a retired stock trader, philanthropist, and renowned conservationist who served as president of
Ducks Unlimited, died July 27, 2016, in Buffalo, N.Y. He was 87. Mr. Campbell grew up in Buffalo and attended Franklin School and Nichols School. He graduated in 1947 from Hotchkiss. He attended Colorado College before joining the Navy in 1951, serving until 1954. He worked for the Marine Trust Co., then joined Dominick & Dominick in the early 1960s, which merged in 1973 into Kidder, Peabody & Co., where he worked as a stock trader and account executive. Mr. Campbell’s love of duck hunting traced back to childhood excursions to a private hunting club in Ontario. Mr. Campbell joined Ducks Unlimited in 1956, when it was almost unknown in the Buffalo area. By 1986, the year he became president of the national organization, the Buffalo-area chapter was thriving. Mr. Campbell was involved in almost every aspect of the group over the years. He founded Ducks Unlimited’s first chapter in Canada in 1974, and he was the longest-serving member of its Canada Board, from 1978 to this year. He also served on the boards of the Waterfowl Research Foundation and the Finger Lakes & Western New York Waterfowl Association and as a director of the Erie County Fish & Wildlife Advisory Board. An active volunteer, Mr. Campbell was involved with the Fresh Air Mission and the Buffalo Museum of Science, and served on the advisory board of Women & Children’s Hospital of Buffalo. He was predeceased by his wife of 64 years, Virginia Klopp. Survivors include two sons and a daughter, a sister, four grandchildren, and two step-grandchildren.
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H A R O L D H O W E J R . of South Kent, Conn., died on May 11, 2016. Mr. Howe was born in Stamford, Conn., where he earned the lifelong nickname of “Pat.” He graduated from Hotchkiss in 1948 and went on to Yale, where he majored in English and history and excelled at hockey, which he played for four years. In 1952, he was a key member of Yale’s first team in history to advance to the NCAA Frozen Four. He continued to play hockey well into his 60s. In 1978, at a Salute to Yale Hockey, longtime coach Murray Murdoch selected him as one of the forwards on his “Dream Squad.” Following his graduation in 1952, Mr. Howe served as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps, stationed in Japan. In 1957, he married his partner for life, Shirley
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Hotchkiss in m em o ri a m Buffinton, with whom he raised five children in Wilton, Conn., travelled the world, and supported many charitable organizations. He was a passionate advocate for the well-being of children, appropriate economic development, renewable energy, and nature conservancy. He served on the boards of Save the Children, Technoserve, Friends of Norwalk Community College, and the Great Salt Pond Committee, among others. He was instrumental in working with members of his class to establish the Class of 1948 Global Understanding Fund in honor of their 50th reunion in 1998. His working life was spent building the furniture company his father started in 1928 as Howe Folding Furniture. When he sold the company in 1998, it was an international enterprise that was well respected for quality and forward-thinking design in the world of commercial furniture. Upon retirement, he split his time between South Kent, Conn., and Block Island, R.I., where he was loved for his generous spirit, ageless playfulness, and engaging storytelling. He is survived by his wife, a sister, four sons, a daughter, three daughtersin-law, a son-in-law, and 13 grandchildren.
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W I L L I A M R A N D O L P H “ R A N DY ” WAT S O N III,
84, of Lake Wylie, S.C., died on Oct. 3, 2015, at his home. Born in Raleigh, N.C., he was raised in a military family, attending schools in New York and Connecticut. He graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1954 with a B.A. in political science. Commissioned as an ensign in 1954, he served in the Navy as a Lt. JG aboard the destroyer U.S.S. Ingraham out of Norfolk, touring the North Atlantic and Mediterranean during the Suez Canal Crisis. He later served in the Ready Reserve, attended North Carolina State University, and received a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1960, graduating with honors. Mr. Watson began his career in electrical sales with Westinghouse in Pittsburgh and later worked as sales manager for several companies before founding Watson Sales Company in 1976. He, along with his son Bruce, grew the company into the thriving business it is today. Mr. Watson served his community selflessly, receiving the Distinguished Service Award for 20 years of dedicated service in the River Hills/Lake Wylie Lions Club. He was always a caring, loving, and honorable gentleman. His many
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interests included golf, poker, bridge, reading, landscaping, and poetry. Survivors are his loving wife of 28 years, Susan Cadden Watson; a daughter and stepdaughter; two sons and a stepson; a sister and brother; and his 12 cherished grandchildren.
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D O N A L D A . G R AY J R . ,
84, died on July 9, 2016. Born in Bronxville, NY, he graduated from Hotchkiss in 1950 and Yale University in 1954. At Hotchkiss he was a daring and competitive athlete, remembered as a great ski jumper for the ski team and an avid sprinter on the track team. He was a U.S. Navy Korean War veteran, serving as an officer aboard the U.S.S. Ticonderoga from 19541956. He received his L.L.B. from New York Law School in 1959 and practiced law in New York City from 1959-1973. Mr. Gray set several precedents before the New York Court of Appeals as well as before the Connecticut Supreme Court. He served as president and general counsel for The Western Connecticut Industrial Council, Inc., an exclusive association of manufacturers, retiring with more than 30 years of service. He was a member of the Litchfield County, Waterbury, and Milford Bar Associations, and also served as a commercial arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association. As a member of the Milford Yacht Club he raced Star Boats and Frostbite Dinghies. Mr. Gray loved Hotchkiss; he served as class agent for many years and helped arrange several class reunions. He had a wonderful sense of humor and will be greatly missed by his classmates. He is survived by his wife, Maria, a sister, three nephews, a niece, and several grand-nieces and grand-nephews.
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C H A R L E S P. L O R D died on Aug. 17, 2016. His grandchildren called him “Big Guy,” a reference not only to his height, but to his resonant laugh and back-slapping hugs. He served as headmaster at St. Timothy’s School in Stevenson, Md., and Holton-Arms School in Bethesda. After graduating from Hotchkiss, then Yale University, he received a master’s in philosophy in history from St. Andrew’s University. After college, he served in the Air Force. He became an educator in his 40s after a successful career in international business. He was a pioneer in issues of diversity in independent schools and
equal opportunity for women. Mr. Lord’s courage to switch careers in his 40s was an inspiration to his family and to his children. Mr. Lord was director of the Washington Bureau of Children’s Express and continued to support education for children of all backgrounds as a founding board member of DreamYard in the Bronx. He also was on the boards of National Cathedral School and The American College of Sofia in Bulgaria. He is survived by his wife, Gay; two sons, Charles and Thomas, both Class of 1983; daughter, Deirdre ’85; a brother, the Honorable Winston Lord ’55; five grandchildren; and numerous cousins, nieces, and nephews. His father was Oswald B. Lord ’22.
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ROBERT HALLAM “BOBBY” PAUL III
died July 14, 2016, with his family by his side. He was 82. Mr. Paul graduated from The Bolles School, where he served as company commander at the then-military school. After a postgraduate year at Hotchkiss, he graduated from Yale University and was a member of the Fencing Club. Growing up on the St. Johns River, he had enjoyed the outdoors since his boyhood, pursuing boating, fishing, hunting, gardening, and tennis. Numerous community organizations benefited from his attention to detail and his leadership skills. He served as chairman of The Bolles School, the former Jacksonville Art Museum, UNF Coggin College of Business Advisory Board, the UNF Foundation, and The Cultural Council, as well as trustee of The Cummer Land Trust. He served as chairman and CEO of Southeast-Atlantic Beverage Corporation, originally known as Canada Dry Bottling Company of Florida, from 1982-2007. He was instrumental in building the company from a small, local bottler to one of the largest independent bottlers and distributors in the Southeast. A member of the Beverage World Hall of Fame, Mr. Paul ushered the company through many changes. He stepped away from the beverage industry when the company was sold in July 2007. With no desire to retire, he kept working with his son as a partner in Southeast Atlantic Capital, LLC. His accomplishments were many, but if he could have written his own epitaph he might have said, “I have pursued my passions, I have loved my friends but primarily, I have lived for and loved my family who were the center of my
world.” He is survived by his wife of 58 years, Pamela DuVal Yardley, two daughters, a son, five grandchildren, and his sister. M I C H A E L D A V I D S U G A R M A N died on Sept. 24, 2016, in Schenectady, N.Y., where he had been a resident for several years. He was 80. Born in Hempstead, N.Y., Mr. Sugarman was the recipient of a Field and a Foundation Scholarship while at Hotchkiss. After graduating, he went on to earn a B.A. and an M.A. from Brandeis University. He studied English literature and went on to teach at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Skidmore College, and Union College. He later became the executive director of Albany County Opportunity Inc. He was a member of the NAACP and lifelong advocate for civil rights, registering voters in Mississippi in the early 1960s and participating in the March on Washington in 1963 and the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968. He played the viola and, as a listener and contributor to WMHT-FM, found great comfort in music. He is survived by his former wife, Abigail Sugarman, who remained his devoted friend; a sister, two sons; four grandchildren, a niece and a nephew.
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PETER A. BRIGHAM
of Wynnewood, Pa., a national activist in the field of burn injury care and prevention, died on June 22, 2016, in Media, Pa. He was 76. The founding director of the Philadelphia-based Burn Foundation, which supports burn care centers at area hospitals, Mr. Brigham was president of the organization from 1979 to 2004, while simultaneously making strides in national burn data collection. Hotchkiss recognized his achievements by awarding him the Hotchkiss Community Service Award in 2006. In the 1970s, Mr. Brigham broke new ground in his work with the American Burn Association (ABA), studying and promoting burn prevention and epidemiology. He was acclaimed for his contributions to the prevention of fires related to cigarettes, mattresses, and children’s pajamas. “His driving force was to improve the care of people, to prevent these kinds of injuries,” said Alan Dimick, a former ABA president who authored 10 papers with Mr. Brigham. Born in Pittsfield, Mass., Mr. Brigham graduated from Yale in 1961. Soon after, he became Berkshire County’s and Yale’s first Peace Corps Volunteer, teaching and coaching
sports at a high school in Nigeria. After his Peace Corps service, he studied community social work and earned a master’s degree in social work at the University of Michigan before settling in Philadelphia in 1966. He soon joined Crozer-Chester Medical Center and the Burn Foundation. He created “a firm foundation” for regional burn prevention, working not only with hospitals, but also with employers whose workers were exposed to burn risk, including oil companies, said John McCann, administrator of the Burn Foundation. After retiring in 2004, Mr. Brigham continued to be involved in burn-related work, particularly statistics. He received two ABA awards during his career and organized and chaired the Federation of Burn Foundations. In the Philadelphia area, he was known as a local philanthropist, a book lover, and an advocate for the Cynwyd Heritage Trail. Mr. Brigham is survived by his ex-wife, Judith Trustone; three stepsons; eight grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
tinued to teach English at Goldenwest and Cypress Community Colleges. Mr. Anderson was a man of great intellect, adventure, wit, knowledge, and generosity. All those who came in contact with him could count on a conversation about everything and nothing. He loved books, literature, debating current events, good whiskey, and, of course, watching his favorite sporting events: baseball and football. He is survived by his two daughters, his wife, Kathleen, and her children; his sister, and many nieces, nephews and grandchildren.
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PERRY ANDERSON
passed away at his home in Buena Park, Calif., on July 31, 2016, with his books, his dog, and his wife by his side. Mr. Anderson was born in Milwaukee, Wisc. He moved with his family at age 10 to Denver, Col. He attended Hotchkiss on academic scholarship, graduating in 1963. Mr. Anderson then attended Stanford University, receiving a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature with a minor in French. In 1971, he was drafted into the United States Army and served as a lieutenant in the Signal Corps in Vietnam. After completing his military service, he settled in Denver and began a successful career in sales and distribution. There, he met Carol Millikan, whom he married. They moved to Salt Lake City in 1979. During this time, they welcomed their two beautiful daughters, Erin and Jill. Although their marriage ended in divorce, Mr. Anderson reveled in being a father to his girls and loved sharing his interests with them. After retiring from sales, Mr. Anderson began teaching English at Salt Lake Community College. He married Kathleen Jenkins on April 22, 2000, and welcomed her three children as his own. The couple moved to California in 2005 and settled in Buena Park, where he con-
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125 Years of Hotchkiss History How well do you know your Bearcat facts? Try solving this crossword puzzle to find out. By ERIN REID P’01,’05 and CHELSEA EDGAR 1 2
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Across 2. 5. 6. 8. 9. 10. 11. 13. 15.
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Maria insisted on these To date, fifteen people have held the title Not to be dramatic First recipient of the Alumni Award Annual get-together The first art teacher Captured, escaped, then captured again in Belgium during World War I; Class of ’14er He of the eponymous quarterly He had an eagle eye for dangling modifiers
H o t c h k i s s
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17. 19. 21. 22. 23. 24. 27. 28. 29. 30.
One of two to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution He’s originally from Deerfield, but we forgave him He literally wrote the book on Hotchkiss Hey — it was this or a new road, guys Legendary, if a bit corroded Trust in them Annual page-turner We “fed” this place for years The man with the plan from New Haven Est. in 1949 to offset expenses
Down 1. 3. 4. 7. 8. 12. 14. 16. 18. 20. 25. 26. 29.
Took a walk in the woods with Kvitsinsky in 1982 A poet and he knew it A mouthful, even for the Native Americans One of two Greek words inscribed in the facade of Main Head Hop A woman ahead of her time Small in size; big in the history department It all began with a cash register Essential to surviving a Lakeville winter; used to be mandatory dress code Not a Pythian Arther Watson ’38 was the ____ to lead the board Not Dwyer We’re not talking about John Wayne
See answers in the Winter/Spring 2017 issue or go to hotchkiss.org/125th.
Hotchkiss Reunions June 16-18, 2017
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Classes ending in 2 or 7
Early Bird Registration Opens January 2017 Visit www.hotchkiss.org/alumni (Events & Reunions) For more information, please contact: Kamaren Suwijn, Assistant Director of Alumni Relations Tel: (860) 435-3114 or ksuwijn@hotchkiss.org
Hope to see you in Lakeville! Class of 1967 • Save The Date The 50th Reunion will be on October 20-22, 2017
Alumni Association
Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage PAID Permit No. 36 Pittsfield, MA
11 Interlaken Road Lakeville, CT 06039-2141 (860) 435-2591 www.hotchkiss.org ALUMNI
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