Hotchkiss Magazine, Winter 2011

134825c 4/28/11 4:21 PM Page 1

HOTCHKISS M

A

G

A

Z

I

N

E

Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage

PAID Permit No. 8

P. O . B O X 8 0 0 LAKEVILLE, CT 06039-0800 (860) 435-2591 w w w. h o t c h k i s s . o r g

Lakeville, CT

HOTCHKISS M

A

G

A

W i n t e r

Z 2 0 1 1

I

N

E

134825_01_11:toc 4/28/11 4:44 PM Page 2

FROM

THE HEAD of school

A

Although you will only receive this magazine in April, I am writing in

mid-February, at the end of a winter Head of School holiday. Monday, February 14, has been warm and clear and the perfect day, Valentine’s Day, for a break.

Today’s holiday was declared in honor of Strobe Talbott ’64.

The thermometer has climbed towards 50 degrees, and the ice has started to slip and slide. The past six weeks or so have been tough, and there are huge gobs of snow all around, despite a sun that today seems almost tropical. I am told that this is the snowiest winter for many years. It is amazing, and lovely.

As always, life here has been really busy. I shall mention just a few of the important events of the past few weeks. Near the end of January, we hosted our annual College Admission Forum for the parents of Upper Mids. This is the start of the college application process for the Class of ’12. Our college visitors were Greg Buckles (Middlebury), Eric Furda (UPenn), Gail Sweezey (Gettysburg), and Chris Watson (Northwestern). Our Gap Year program, coordinated by Elsie Stapf, featured prominently; more and more students, supported by their parents, are interested in the possibility of a year of work and service between Hotchkiss and college, as are more and more colleges. Parents came from the Far East, from countries such as China and Mongolia, and also from the Far West, California, for an event that even those who have taken children through the application process before found valuable. We are a college preparatory school, and we take this aspect of our mission seriously.

Our Summer Portals program is developing further with the introduction of a new track this summer called the English and Theater Portal. This will be offered to nearly 30 Chinese students from the international division of the Peking University High School. Next year we hope to expand this to around 40 students. All these are students who plan to come to American colleges and universities, and the course will prepare them

2

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

linguistically and culturally for this move. In 2012, a fourth Portal will be introduced.

Starting on Thursday, January 20, we hosted what turned out to be a very powerful weekend workshop organized by Cornelia Holden, Robert Barker, and the rest of the Portals staff.

There were 39 participants drawn from the three fields of documentary filmmaking, mindfulness training, and peace and conflict transformation. Some current students and four alums participated, the alums being trustee Ian Desai ’00, Dan Wilner ’03, Brian Young ’05, and Clemantine Wamariya ’09.

The plan for the weekend was to produce a curriculum outline for the fourth Portal, currently called Citizenship and Leadership through Story-making.

Plans for the woodchip powerhouse proceed well. The four options that were considered by the Board have been fully researched.

A functional yet beautiful design has been selected that will incorporate tremendous educational opportunities for our students.

The educational aspects of this project, and ways in which it both links into existing aspects of our curriculum but will also stimulate us to develop exciting new components, have been articulated in detail by Josh Hahn.

Star Childs, a current Hotchkiss parent, is an adjunct of the Yale School of Forestry, and his family owns and manages Great Mountain Forest near Norfolk. This is the 6000-acre sustainably managed forest that will help supply us with wood fuel. He recently wrote the following to Josh Hahn: “On the wood fuel/steam plant front, I noted the hoist today and certainly am impressed by the relatively low stack height it indicates. The topography of the site, in-ground nature of the building design, and the green roof will make this plant one of the most exquisite in the coun-

try. Your whole team should be commended for what you are trying to accomplish there...

I continue to harangue my board about this project and the phenomenal opportunities it will bring to GMF, the forest industry and landowners alike, not to mention, but I do, the teaching and research opportunities as well.” This was before the second P&Z town planning hearing, which we passed quickly and easily. We are now permitted to go ahead with the building.

In the academic arena, Frina Lin ’11 has received a Siemens Foundation Award for Advanced Placement performance in science and math. Only one female and one male student in each of the 50 states are recognized in this way. A different, but equally prestigious, achievement is that of Jiweon Kim ’11. Her essay on Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as wartime leaders who suspended civil liberties has been accepted for publication this spring in The Concord Review.

We seem to have poets, artists, speakers, musicians, and other interesting visitors all the time and every day. This is stimulating.

Near the end of January, students went to the Model UN at Yale and won the competition for the sixth time in the last eight years. A week later, the Hotchkiss Dramatic Association produced You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in exuberant and charming fashion, and then took it ‘on tour’ to local schools.

Romeo and Juliet starts in two weeks.

It is indeed exciting and challenging to work and live here. I wish that you could visit soon.

134825_01_11:toc 4/28/11 4:44 PM Page 3

READERS

w ri t e

‘Courtesy, compassion, and creativity’: Two alumni respond to Malcolm McKenzie’s recent letter THE 3CS COINED BY HEAD OF SCHOOL MALCOLM MCKENZIE IN HIS DECEMBER END-OF-TERM LETTER – COURTESY, COMPASSION, AND CREATIVITY – CAPTURED THE ATTENTION OF TWO ALUMNI, WHO WROTE IN WITH THEIR APPROVAL. (MALCOLM’S LETTER CAN BE SEEN AT: WWW.HOTCHKISS.ORG/ABOUTHOTCHKISS/HE AD-OF-SCHOOL/INDEX.ASPX).

Dear Mr. McKenzie, I graduated with the class of ’75, distinguished as the first coed graduating class at Hotchkiss.

My class went from “white coats” serving family-style dinners in the dining room to the first of many very good field hockey teams.

I want to commend you on your December letter.

You have addressed something that I have been thinking about a great deal without directly stating it; that is the importance of emotional stability, and how does one teach it and can it be taught? I believe it can. By channeling [Peter] Matthiessen [Class of ’45], you write, “…this feeling of contentment and stillness, of having arrived at an authentic point of poise, could serve additionally as a powerful emblem for college preparedness of a high level,” and I would add preparedness for life, which in my mind is the real goal.

These thoughts remind me of John Knowles’ A Separate Peace that may still be taught on campus, and is still my favorite book. The qualities you write of can be found in Phineas, the protagonist.

One cannot enter “this state of resolved being” without emotional stability. I have to deal with this issue every day in my job as an equity portfolio manager. Stocks go up, and they go down. Are they a buy or a sell? If one cannot think rationally, one is not in the business for long. Maybe with 30 years of experience, I have done something right.

But think of the application of emotional stability more broadly. Our lives are based on both big and little decisions. The big ones are whom do I marry, what career do I pursue, and where do I live, among others. The small ones are small, but they add up over time. Do I eat that piece of fruit or the piece of cake?

Do I watch TV or read almost anything? Do I sleep in an extra hour or do I get to work an hour earlier? Both large and small decisions need emotional stability to achieve a level of excellence in life. One need not be perfect, for that is impossible, but one should get a fairly

high percentage of the large decisions right and maybe 75% of the small ones.

There are other applications as well. I am thinking here of stressful situations we may come upon in life and how we react to them.

For example, how do we react to an aggressive TSA agent at an airport? How do we react if a police officer pulls us over on the road? What is our reaction when someone (loved one, teacher, student, colleague) we are talking to becomes emotionally unglued?

I think your three qualities are a good start.

Courtesy is the informal version of what all mainstream religions are built on: “Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.” I think the examples you use of notes of appreciation, lack of envy, excellence creating inspiration rather than resentment, actually go beyond courtesy towards graciousness and generosity of spirit.

Compassion is another biblical trait: to walk in someone else’s shoes and to forgive.

What is the right thing to do and do it, particularly when no one is looking.

Creativity brings me back to the field hockey team. My guess is that Robin Chandler knows something about teaching emotional stability even if she is doing so subliminally. I can’t imagine that a bunch of All-Americans walk on her field every fall, she rolls out the balls, and tells them to have fun. Yes, I’m sure she teaches them great technique and then proceeds to run them into the ground with wind sprints. I’m writing about the idea that she teaches them to keep their poise when things aren’t going well, or when they have to play from behind, or when they’re in a tough battle for the championship against Greenwich Academy and every little possession matters. Just maintaining one’s composure and thinking about and acting upon how to fix the problem go a long way.

I really enjoyed your letter. I have been out of school for 36 years, and this is the first time I have responded to a headmaster’s letter.

“Thou hast prevailed, well done.”

Frederick A. Brimberg ’75 THE FOLLOWING LETTER BY CRAIG “SKIP” NALEN ’48 IS A RESPONSE TO THE “IT’S MY TURN” IN THE FALL 2010 ISSUE OF THE MAGAZINE, WRITTEN BY HIS SON, PETER NALEN ’79 AND ADDRESSED TO PETER’S SON, JACK, A LOWER MID AT HOTCHKISS.

On Growing Up (Part II) I noted with interest a message your father recently sent you from his “Away to School” blog which he titled “On Growing Up.” He had some excellent advice, but on at least one

point I have a major disagreement. As a grandfather, is it O.K. if I add my “two cents?”

I think the most important thing you can learn now that you are off on your own is that growing up never means growing away from the values that have been passed on to you by your parents from early childhood. And now that you’re off and “out of the nest,” so much more is expected of you and so much more responsibility falls upon your new “independent shoulders.” Whether you like it or not, these indeed are the times that will test you.

Does your newly discovered independence mean a time to fly off and simply celebrate by “having fun?”; “self-fulfillment”?; “self-indulgence”? Or is it a time to exhibit responsibility, balance, maturity, and the realization that life is not all about “ME” and what “I” require to have unbridled self-fulfillment, which are traits that all children exhibit during early childhood. Rather, it is how you, as you approach adulthood, fit into the system (i.e. “life,” or in your case right now, “Hotchkiss”); how much should one try to “give back” instead of just “take?”

I noted with interest in your father’s message to you that he emphasized on several occasions that now that you’re off on your own, you should capitalize on your independence by making decisions based on what you can do or could do….not what you should do….” And he goes on to say “…don’t be imprisoned by ‘should’…” Sorry, this grandfather must disagree. Your newly found independence, or freedom from your home and family, isn’t just a license to see how much you can do or take under the guise of “self-fulfillment.” But rather what you can do in a way that does not hurt or damage others. In other words test your new found independent wings to fly high, wide, and far into unknown spaces, but never lose your way, never leave behind your moral compass, and never forget respect for others.

Finally, I wonder if you have had a chance to read a recent letter from your Head of School in which he summarized his observation of the three qualities of character he felt all members of the Hotchkiss community strive to embrace: courtesy, creativity, and compassion. That says it all, don’t you think?

Craig A. Nalen ’48 CORRECTION MOLLY MCDOWELL WROTE THE ARTICLE ON JULIA ZHU ’87 IN THE FALL 2010 ISSUE. HER BYLINE FOR THE ARTICLE DID NOT APPEAR, BUT SHOULD HAVE; WE REGRET THAT ERROR.

W i n t e r

2 0 1 1

3

134825_01_11:toc 4/28/11 4:44 PM Page 4

CAMPUS

connection

W

K

I

S

H

O

T

C

H

K

I

S

S

R

A

D

I

O

WKIS: FROM UNDERGROUND OPERATIONS TO SCHOOL-SANCTIONED SOUND B

y

A

n

d

r

e

a

T

u

f

t

s

COLOR PHOTOS: COLLEEN MACMILLAN

LEFT: THE TWO DJs

NO DOUBT, ALEXANDER (SASHA) SCHELL AND GUNNAR OLSON, BOTH MEMBERS OF THE CLASS OF 2011, WILL EXPERIENCE MANY SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS IN THIS, THEIR SENIOR YEAR. IN FACT, ONE HAS ALREADY OCCURRED. ON JANUARY 11, OLSON AND SCHELL CELEBRATED THEIR 100TH BROADCAST TOGETHER ON WKIS, HOTCHKISS’S RADIO STATION.

S

chell is the general manager, and Olson is a club head along with seniors Jeremy Exstein, Meag Irvine, and Haley Miller. For their 100th broadcast, Schell and Olson marked the occasion by inviting back guests they have had on the show.

“Once a week, since the first week Sasha and I arrived at Hotchkiss three and a half years ago, we have had a radio show,” said Olson. Among their tasks, which are shared with the other club heads, are creating the on-air schedules and controlling the quality of each evening’s broadcast.

For them, radio has been a powerful medium that allows freedom of expression and connection with the whole Hotchkiss community. And the 100th broadcast

4

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

marked not only a milestone for them, but also for the radio station, which has evolved from surprisingly clandestine beginnings.

Today, WKIS disc jockeys, whose ranks are primarily students with some faculty members, conduct their shows from a dedicated facility just off the rotunda in the Main Building. The radio station has a full schedule of up to four broadcasts a night, Mondays through Fridays. Its faithful listeners enjoy music from the realms of classic rock, hip-hop, country, and world music simply by tuning into 91.5 FM or accessing the station through iTunes*.

Such ease of access and robust radio broadcasts provide sharp contrast to the

early days of Hotchkiss radio, which had its publicized beginnings in the era of the transistor radio and 78 rpm records.

Alumni from the 1960s or earlier will remember that it wasn’t always this convenient to access a broadcast at Hotchkiss, much less give one. What is now a Schoolsupported activity was once underground “pirate” radio, broadcast illegally through the radiator pipes and electrical systems of the dormitories. Thanks to some inventive student pioneers, the radio station evolved to what it is today: a venue for learning, expression, and communication with the entire Hotchkiss community.

One of these students was Jim Hemingway ’63, who entered Hotchkiss as a Prep. The only electronic appliance allowed in the dorms his sophomore year was a record player, he recalls, and only Upper Mids and Seniors were permitted to have one. Transistor radios, which were just coming onto the scene, were strictly forbidden. “Kids would often bring radios, hide them under their pillows, and plug them in after hours. That’s what I did,” he confesses. Full of rebellious adolescent energy and the ’60s spirit of activism, Jim began to take an interest in subverting the rules.

Hemingway, who has the problem-solving brain of an engineer, began an endeavor to set up “sort of a home-brew affair” to get around the radio ban. A member of the Ham Radio Club from 1959-1963, he knew that one could transmit audio with a

134825_01_11:toc 4/28/11 4:44 PM Page 5

RIGHT: A time capsule of the 1960s – Jim Hemingway's desk

powerful amplifier through the electrical wiring in the dorms.

“I stealthily moved my Philco radio into the basement of Coy and fed the audio output of the radio into a pathway that existed between the neutral side of the AC outlets and ‘earth ground,’ which consisted mostly of the plumbing and heating pipes,” Hemingway said. This enabled people with headphones to plug them into the electrical outlets in their room, making the connection between the neutral side of the AC and the steam radiator pipe, according to Hemingway. Despite the potential shock hazard, students were secretly able to listen to WMGM-AM out of New York City from 10:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m., at which time the radio would automatically shut off with the help of a timer.

This covert operation was eventually discovered by the administration. However, they were not able to uncover the source of the mysterious broadcasts.

Hemingway’s friend and fellow Ham Radio Club member, Roger Liddell ’63, said, “No faculty member walking into a room and seeing a student with headphones on would have understood how

one can get radio from connecting into the radiator. We knew it could buy us freedom from getting a censure.”

Then came a dramatic announcement at an All-School Meeting by then Head of School A. William Olsen Jr. ’39. “They were ready to throw in the towel and change the rules,” said Hemingway. “We were told ‘we will allow juniors and seniors to have radios. In return, we want the nightly clandestine radio broadcasts to be shut down. That is how radio legitimately made its way into dorm life at Hotchkiss,” he said.

In the spring of 1963, the first radio show originating from a small AM radio transmitter was unofficially broadcast on campus. “Senior year I was the electrical guy,” said Hemingway. He set up the transmitter in the basement of Memorial dormitory, the senior dorm, with its antenna wire strung up the side of the dorm out to an elm tree 100 feet or so away. And so WAWO Radio Free Hotchkiss was born.

“WAWO, ‘770 on your radiator dial.’

That’s what we called it, after WABC radio 770 AM – which was the rock music sta-

W i n t e r

2 0 1 1

BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS: COURTESY JIM HEMINGWAY '63

BELOW: Jim Hemingway at Hotchkiss

5

134825_01_11:toc 4/28/11 4:45 PM Page 6

CAMPUS

connection

LEFT: Schell and Olson celebrated their 100th broadcast this year.

BELOW: The center of WKIS operations

tion of the time,” said Liddell. “If you graduated from a class between 1962 and 1982, you would know what those call letters stood for. The first W indicates a United States radio station and the rest of the letters stood for Albert W. Olsen, who was our head of school.”

“My classmates would come down and do radio shows in the late afternoon, after athletics and before evening study hall,” said Hemingway. But this was the ’60s, and not all of the radio commentary was particularly tasteful, and so it wasn’t long before Hotchkiss’s first pirate radio station, WAWO, was shut down.

Over the next 30 years, the radio station became a School-sanctioned activity,

6

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

known as WKIS. Marc Dittmer, head of the classical and modern languages department, now advises the club. His predecessor, David Thompson, coordinator of international programs, oversaw many changes during his advisorship.

“For years it was an AM station (680), and when I took it over in 1999, it was an AM station that hardly ever worked,” said Thompson. It also utilized the electrical system of the School to transmit its signal. To remedy the situation, then Head of School Skip Mattoon put him in touch with Jim Hemingway, Skip’s former colleague, who was teaching at Deerfield Academy and had helped to build WGAJ, Deerfield’s non-commercial FM radio

station, in 1982. “He came down and set up a one-watt FM transmitter, and that was the first time the radio ‘worked’ in my time here,” said Thompson.

Hemingway recalls purchasing the transmitter online for $100, which worked for many years. “I had no idea it would last that long,” he said.

In the age of mp3 players and iTunes, the radio station was eager to stream live broadcasts over the Internet. Ezra Velazquez ’06 figured out how to do it, and Dittmer worked with Information Technology Services to refine it. “Now it works great, streaming through iTunes, and has more listenership than ever,” said Thompson.

“We love the radio station,” say Schell and Olson. “Mr. Dittmer has done a great job working with us through our years with WKIS, and we owe him a lot for that.

Overall, our WKIS experience has been one to remember. ”

134825_01_11:toc 4/28/11 4:45 PM Page 7

STUDENT

SAFETY

STUDENTS GET ADVICE ON INTERNET SAFETY ow many Facebook “friends” does the average high school junior have? Why is it so easy for kids to be mean online? How can privacy be protected while one is using the Internet? These are some of the questions that Doug Fodeman, educator and expert in online safety, Facebook, and social networking sites, answered for teachers, staff, and students in a series of campus meetings in February. His organization, ChildrenOnline.org, focuses on the impact of the Internet on the social, emotional, and language development of young people.

While Fodeman acknowledged that “technology is a wonderful tool for learning, taking down walls, and bringing about social change,” he also pointed out that the Internet “facilitates bad behavior” for many reasons including the feeling that our activities are private or that some websites encourage poor interpersonal decisions. Unlike classroom and home environments, there are no boundaries, rules, or consequences, or adults setting expectations for youth on the Internet. In addition, the screen makes it easier to say and do things one would not normally do in real life. It can also provide a cloak of anonymity. Since young people have not had the benefit of time to develop sound judgment and a moral foundation from which to act, technology can become a conduit to trouble. However, Fodeman educated the audience on how to thwart potential danger.

H

THINK BEFORE YOU CLICK

Speaking from his knowledge of child development, Fodeman explained that while a student can be coordinated on the athletic field, the frontal lobe of the brain, which controls judgment, is still developing in students of high school age. For young people, “Impulse is often the first strategy in decision-making,” he said. He provided the mantra, “think before you click.” The audience learned that it is actually more difficult to resolve conflicts using instant messaging, Facebook, chat, email, and texting. Using these venues, communications involve fewer words and letters. Without the benefit of hearing voice inflections and reading body language, further misunderstandings result in hurt feelings. It is best to get off these venues when angry, he said, adding that in this way, young people learn that having difficult conversations face-to-face builds character. All too often, teens are using the anonymity and disinhibition of the Internet to avoid difficult face-to-face conversations.

REAL-LIFE SOLUTIONS TO ISSUES FACED

BY YOUNG PEOPLE ONLINE

Fodeman gave the students strategies for dealing with cyber-bullying and protecting their personal information, two risks inherent in Internet use that have been highlighted recently in the media.

“The best way to respond (to a cyber-bully) is just to disappear.

Don’t talk back or let yourself be manipulated. Don’t give them

B Y

A N D R E A

T U F T S

the satisfaction, and they will move on to something else,” said Fodeman. He challenged the students to be witnesses, rather than bystanders, when it comes to harassment and to speak up.

“Don’t worry about the bully. Protect the victim,” he said.

Since adolescents are often too trusting, and their decisionmaking skills are still emergent, they are often the targets of online deception. Fodeman explained how scammers pull private information from teens while they are online, sometimes with the unfortunate results of identity and bank theft. He encouraged the audience not to fill out online surveys, take quizzes, or download free music and ringtones. These are just the bait used to attract what the scammers are really after – personal information, especially cell phone numbers. Many of these activities also transfer malware onto personal computers.

“Don’t let people take advantage of you because of your age,” he said. Fodeman noted that 95,000 new malware threats are discovered each day for the Windows operating system, according to Graham Cluley from Sophos.com, while 1 to 2 are discovered each week for the Macintosh. There are about 2000 known threats against the Mac operating system, Fodeman said.

FACEBOOK: A BRILLIANT PIECE OF SOFTWARE, BUT NOT WITHOUT RISKS

The average high school junior has 779 friends on Facebook, much higher than the Facebook statistic of 130, and it is likely that some are complete strangers. According to a study done last October by TRUSTe, 68% of teens friend strangers. While it is wonderful to enjoy easy connections with other people through social networking sites, it is important to guard privacy. Fodeman suggested that teens be more discerning when it comes to “friending” people online, and to check their privacy settings often, especially when Facebook makes changes to their software. He explained how risky it is to log on to a Facebook account in public places such as airports or coffee houses. And, he instructed, never post what scammers think of as the golden nugget – a cell phone number – on Facebook.

AVERAGE NUMBER OF FACEBOOK FRIENDS OF INDEPENDENT SCHOOL STUDENTS:

9th grade - 414 10th grade - 561

11th grade - 779 12th grade - 746

Students who share their passwords with a friend are 2.5X more likely to have an online account broken into and misused that a student who doesn’t share a password.

30.6% of all high school students report having friends online whom they have never met in person.

W i n t e r

2 0 1 1

7

134825_01_11:toc 4/28/11 4:45 PM Page 8

CAMPUS

connection

Geoffrey Wolff: Remembering what’s true

Visitor

By Divya Symmers

THE DUKE OF DECEPTION, GEOFFREY WOLFF’S REMARKABLY CANDID 1979 MEMOIR ABOUT HIS “ELUSIVE, DANDIFIED, DEBT-RIDDEN” FATHER (AS JOHN UPDIKE PUT IT), A LARGER-THAN-LIFE CHARACTER WHO ROUTINELY LIED, STOLE, AND SKIPPED OUT ON BILLS, WAS THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT’S ALL-SCHOOL READ LAST SUMMER, SOMETHING THE 73-YEAR-OLD AUTHOR SEEMED TO FEEL

PHOTO: COLLEEN MACMILLAN

WAS PRETTY REMARKABLE IN ITSELF.

ABOVE: Geoffrey Wolff, author of The Duke of Deception, speaking to his Hotchkiss audience

8

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

“It’s wonderful to be here,” he said in October, peering through his glasses and beaming, as the applause from Hotchkiss students and faculty died down. “I think the very act that you were invited to read it at all shows how far we’ve come in boarding school culture and perhaps in the culture at large.”

After visiting classes during the day, Wolff spoke at the Esther Eastman Music Center’s Katherine M. Elfers Hall, where he observed, with another smile, that because it was required reading, everyone present at least had to pretend they’d read it.

The compelling tale of “a bad man but a good father” (as the author puts it) and what John Irving called “the complexities and contradictions of family sympathy” have made The Duke of Deception a classic of the genre. More than three decades after becoming runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in biography, it’s not only still in print but also on countless best-memoir lists.

Geoffrey Wolff’s authorial career also includes a book about Maine, where he now lives, plus a collection of personal essays, six novels, and several biographies whose subjects include writer John O’Hara, jazz-age publisher Harry Crosby, and most recently 19th-century sailor and adventurer Joshua Slocum, whose own memoir, Sailing Alone Around the World, was written in 1844 and remains a beacon of nautical lore. (Reviewing Wolff’s The Hard Way Around: The Passages of Joshua Slocum for The New York Times last October, author Nathaniel Philbrick called it “the best of books: a literary biography that also happens to be an adventure story.”)

Like many writers, his early road was a bumpy one, Wolff somewhat gleefully admits. “As a student at Choate, he was informed by his headmaster that he was ‘the weak link in an otherwise strong Choate chain,’” said Associate Head of School and Dean of Faculty Kevin Hicks, in his introduction. “His writing teacher at Princeton, having read through his first attempt at a novel, instructed him to ‘lock [the manuscript] in a drawer in his desk, throw away the key, and then burn the desk.’ One of his first employers, the legendary newspaper edi-

134825_01_11:toc 4/28/11 4:45 PM Page 9

‘‘

Writing the book had A H U G E

I M PA C T,

BUT I DON’T THINK OF WRITING AS THERAPEUTIC.

’’

O R AT L E A S T , T H AT ’ S N O T W H Y I D O I T .

tor Ben Bradlee, told him he was the worst obituary editor in the history of The Washington Post.”

It was Bradlee, however, who also gave him a job as book critic for the Post, which led to similar positions at Newsweek and Esquire. He has taught at numerous colleges and universities, including Princeton, Brown, the University of Istanbul, and the University of California at Irvine, where he is professor emeritus of English and comparative literature and served as director of the graduate fiction program from 1995 to 2006. His teaching style, influenced by his student days at Princeton, is encouraging and egalitarian even when critical, traits amply demonstrated while he was in the classroom at Hotchkiss.

“In his teacher’s hard response to his undergraduate novel,” Hicks pointed out, “Mr. Wolff said he learned something fundamental to his work as a teacher, and I hazard to say…as a parent. There was, he recalls, ‘never the slightest hint of contempt in my teacher’s voice. He made it clear that he was remarking on an utterly unremarkable phenomenon: that a kid had written a bad first novel.’ ” “He was gracious, self-effacing, and humble in class. Keen to speak about writing, he went against the grain and extolled the importance of telling, but he hooked the kids in by asking, ‘Have you been instructed to show, not tell?’” reported Geoff Marchant, L. Blair Torrey ’50 Chair and Instructor in English, who invited Wolff to his English 150 class. “Once he had them nodding assent, he trotted out his view about the value of showing. The kids were partly just being polite, but the larger point is, he was working on their level, writer to writer.”

That evening, Wolff read a passage from The Duke of Deception in which he described his experiences in grade school in Old Lyme, CT, where he fell in love for the first time – an unrequited love that drew a chorus of softly sympathetic “ooohs” from his audience. He talked about his younger brother Tobias Wolff’s account of growing up with their mother, This Boy’s Life, another remarkable story about the same fragmented family. He hoped the audience would be comfortable asking him any kind of question. “Writing the book had a huge impact,” he admitted in answer to the first, “but I don’t think of writing as being therapeutic. Or at least, that’s not why I do it.”

Whether or not a memoir is true was a question he considered carefully. “In the kind of book this is, the writer makes an agreement with the reader to try and get it right, to try and remember

everything as it was, not as it ought to have been. Understanding full well that memory is a liar. My ground rules were that any quotations used, I was either there, or my mother recorded it, or somebody wrote that’s what X said about Y. I didn’t make any composite characters; the characters are as I remember them.”

There is something about this biography of “a Jewish doctor’s son, expelled from a series of boarding schools and rejected by the Army for dental problems” who “reinvented himself as an Episcopalian, a Yale alumnus…an RAF fighter pilot and O.S.S. man,” as Francine Prose noted in The New York Times Magazine in 1979, that continues to resonate with readers. The late Time book reviewer Paul Gray explained, “It is not just the story of a ‘wreck of a desperado’…it is an engrossing, often moving search for the troubled bond between sons and fathers that is known as love.”

The compassion Wolff shows his father, despite a lifetime of lies that left him “alone and half-mad” at the end, is heartbreaking as well as illuminating. It is also based firmly in reality.

Repeating something he said in class earlier that day, Wolff said: “There are two ways to honor this contract with the reader, which I take to be pretty sacred. You say, look – bear with me. If you will believe in my good will, I will not abuse it. I won’t horse around with what I think happened. Because I grew up being lied to systemically about everything: who my father was, where he went to college, everything, I did rely on documents, to the degree that I could. But you don’t fictionalize this stuff. That’s an abuse of trust.”

Months later, Geoff Marchant’s students still remembered his visit clearly. “Mr. Wolff gave us really helpful advice on writing, like the uses of candor and reticence. He made me think about my own writing, in terms of how much information is actually important to the story I’m trying to tell,” one commented. “He said, ‘When describing a moment in time, write not what you think you felt in that moment, but what you actually felt,’” said another. “He struck me as very loyal writer…and also an introspective one,” a third reported by email.

Kevin Hicks cited three Geoffrey Wolff quotations he felt would have been “in and of themselves sufficient grounds on which to invite Mr. Wolff to spend the day at Hotchkiss, the summer assignment of his book notwithstanding.” The last one was this: Q: WHAT CAN BE TAUGHT? A: HOW TO GET BETTER. NOT HOW TO GET GOOD, BUT HOW TO GET BETTER.

W i n t e r

2 0 1 1

9

134825_01_11:toc 4/28/11 4:45 PM Page 10

CAMPUS

connection

The Edsel Ford Memorial Library has a new Director Ms. Barbara Doyle-Wilch has been appointed to serve as the Interim Director of the Edsel Ford Memorial Library for the next two years.

Ms. Doyle-Wilch succeeds Walter DeMelle, the director of the Ford Library, who is retiring in June after a 41-year career at Hotchkiss. Kevin M. Hicks, associate head of school and dean of faculty, made the announcement of her appointment.

Ms. Doyle-Wilch comes to Hotchkiss from Middlebury College, where she was Dean of Library and Information Services from 2001-2008 and Director of Cultural Affairs from 2008-2010. She is also past president of the Vermont Library Association. Prior to working at Middlebury, she was the library director at Skidmore College and Augustana College. She received a B.A. and M.A. from Butler University and M.A. from the University of Denver’s Graduate School of Librarianship and Information Science.

“Barbara’s gifts are an ideal match for the immediate needs of the library that Walter DeMelle and his team have built,” said Kevin Hicks. “She is an attentive mentor, a natural administrative architect, and an appealing advocate for the library’s rapport with our program of study. We were blessed with an impressive array of candidates for this important post. As we considered the crucial relationship between the priorities of the next two years and our long-term goals, we all soon realized the wisdom of drafting Barbara to our cause. It is our good fortune to find her at a moment when she could make herself available for this service.”

“My resume explains what I have done but not what inspires me,” Ms. Doyle-Wilch writes. “The highlights of my career in librarianship are those that have allowed me to reshape the relevance of the library in order to align it with best practices in teaching and learning. I care deeply about students and the quality of their learning experiences. I look forward to finding what is important at The Hotchkiss School while honoring its brilliant history and seeking new ways for students to become serious researchers: investigative, reliable in their findings, and substantive in their conclusions. I look forward to working with the faculty and staff to make this happen.

This is a new chapter and we will build it together.”

Since its opening on campus in 1952, the Edsel Ford Memorial Library has been a vibrant center of School life, providing students and staff and faculty members and their families with impressive resources for study, research, and entertainment. The library houses more than 100,000 volumes in a comfortable facility with individual study spaces and well-used reading rooms.

The original building was a gift in memory of Edsel Bryant Ford given by his wife, Eleanor Clay Ford, and their three sons: Henry Ford II ’36, Benson Ford ’38, and William Clay Ford ’43.

Designed by Henry S. Waterbury of Delano and Aldrich, the library underwent a major expansion and renovation, increasing the size of the library six times, in 1981 under the direction of architect Evans Woollen ’45. The first floor of the library was renovated in 1999 to provide a teaching and reference center combining print, microform, and digital resources. An environmental and energy-efficiency upgrade of the entire building was completed in the summer of 2009 through the generous gift of Martha and William C. Ford ’43. The project included complete insulation of the original structure, replacement of all windows and ceilings, installation of a new HVAC system, and an upgrade of light fixtures throughout the library.

10

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

134825_01_11:toc 4/28/11 4:45 PM Page 11

DANIEL WILNER ELECTED TO BOARD OF TRUSTEES

“CLAY – THE ART OF EARTH & FIRE” CONFERENCE

DANIEL WILNER’03 JOINS THE HOTCHKISS BOARD OF TRUSTEES.

A coterie of South African ceramic artists representing both contemporary and ancestral Zulu pottery traditions will converge at Hotchkiss on May 14 and 15 for “Clay – The Art of Earth and Fire,” an international symposium organized by Instructor in Ceramics Delores Coan.

The two-day conference, subtitled South Africa: New and Traditional Works of Zulu Pottery, brings together vibrant modern works from the famed Ardmore Ceramic Art studio in the midlands of KwaZulu-Natal with the richly somber hand-fired Zulu ukhambas (beer vessels) created by rural women throughout the region.

Artists from both arenas will be on hand in Lakeville for workshops and outdoor demonstrations. All events at the conference are free and open to the public.

PHOTO: JONATHAN DOSTER

HE WILL BEGIN HIS FIVE-YEAR TERM IN JULY 2011.

WELCOME TO WEI ZHENG: AFTER A LONG JOURNEY, EXCHANGE TEACHER

WEI

ZHENG

ARRIVED

ON

CAMPUS

FROM

CHINA

IN

FEBRUARY TO AN ENTHUSIASTIC WELCOME. WEI

WILL

BE

AT

HOTCHKISS

FOR

TWO

YEARS,

TEACHING

THROUGH

HOTCHKISS’S AFFILIATION WITH THE CONFUCIUS INSTITUTE HEADQUARTERS INTERNATIONAL DIVISION (HANBAN) IN BEIJING. THIS AFFILIATION ALSO PERMITS THE SCHOOL TO DESIGNATE A “CONFUCIUS CLASSROOM.” SHOWN

HERE

ARE:

BACK

ROW,

LEFT

TO

RIGHT,

INSTRUCTOR

IN

CHINESE KEN GU, HEAD OF SCHOOL MALCOLM MCKENZIE, HEADS OF THE CLASSICAL AND MODERN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT RICHARD DAVIS AND MARC DITTMER; AND FRONT ROW, ASSOCIATE HEAD OF SCHOOL AND DEAN OF FACULTY KEVIN HICKS, DIRECTOR OF THE CHINESE LANGUAGE AND CULTURE PROGRAM JEAN YU, WEI ZHENG, AND ASSISTANT HEAD OF

A graduate of Harvard and a Rhodes Scholar, Wilner describes himself as “working at the nexus of education, the arts, and entrepreneurship.”

By day, he says, he works with Professor Robert Austin, an innovation specialist at the Copenhagen Business School, to found a Centre for TwentyFirst Century Schooling. The Centre will be based in Canada and will have operations in North America and northern Europe. It will bring together educational specialists from a range of countries and disciplines, with the goal of developing and implementing a rigorous new model for K-12 education in the 21st century. The model will systematically foster skills underlying creativity and innovation, entrepreneurship, and global citizenship.

By night, Wilner is building credits in film and theatre. In 2009 he spent six months in South Africa, working for an independent film company that produces socially-oriented documentary and fiction films all across Africa. Since returning to his native Montreal in January 2010, he has completed two short films, which he wrote, directed, and produced. He is currently developing a series of short films and a television series.

While at Hotchkiss, Wilner won numerous academic awards and captured First Place at the World Public Speaking and Debating Championship.

At Harvard, Wilner studied Philosophy, with a focus on the philosophy of mind, ethics, and moral psychology. He also worked extensively as an actor, producer, and director in student theatre. Most notably, he played the title role in Hamlet and directed Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

Wilner continued to pursue these interrelated tracks as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He continued to act in and direct plays, most notably Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman. He earned a First Class Degree in June 2009.

Over two summer breaks, he worked in New York City with the International Rescue Committee (IRC). He taught at and eventually served as an administrator of the IRC Summer School for Refugee Youth.

SCHOOL AND DIRECTOR OF GLOBAL INITIATIVES MANJULA SALOMON.

W i n t e r

2 0 1 1

11

134825_12_23:features 20-27 4/28/11 4:48 PM Page 12

BROKEN, BRUISED, & LOVIN’ IT:

BY KRISTEN HINMAN ’94

12

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

T

PHOTO: COURTESY OF STEVE BOLMER

Alumni remember club sports at Hotchkiss

he war was on. The blue and white jerseys were off.

And the club sports program at Hotchkiss gained a new lease on life.

It was the fall of 1942, and Hotchkiss was set to open for its 51st year – a year that would play out very differently on the athletic fields. “Of the six schools on our football program, one has closed completely and two others have given up interscholastic games,” announced a School bulletin. “Restrictions on travel make games with the other three highly problematical.”

Hotchkiss had long had a robust interscholastic program with a varsity squad, dubbed “the school team,” in football, baseball, track and several other sports. But wartime gas rationing suddenly made interscholastic play impossible. Not wanting to forego competition altogether, the faculty decided to institute a new club athletic program that would prove to even the playing field for all.

Baker, Hoyt, Monahan and Taylor – four club teams named for the School’s sports venues – were formed. Every student was randomly assigned to a club upon matriculating at the School and remained in the same club until graduation. Once a Baker boy, always a Baker boy.

But if the break with tradition was ballyhooed at first, the new system soon showed its merits.

In pre-war days, students who hadn’t made cuts for the school team joined their class squad. The class squads played each other: preps vs. seniors, lower-mids vs. upper-mids, and so on. It was a brutal system, according to graduates of the first affected class, 1945. “It was just sadistic,” recalls Clinton Ely. “There were some really fine athletes in that period. I was on the prep team, and when we played the seniors (in football), it was a slaughter.”

In the new athletic system, classes were mixed within each club team. And competition was fierce. Practices were held four days a week, with games on Fridays.

Though not hugely attended, those games always had spectators.

“The 1942 soccer season saw the newly-inaugurated club system meet with unexpected success,” pronounced the 1943 Mischianza. “The superiority of this new system over the senior-dominated class league of former years was conceded by players and coaches alike. The new league of four clubs produced evenly matched games of a brand of soccer far better than that indicated by the top-heavy scores of the past.”

Everybody was expected to participate in the club program. In fact, the only way out of a seasonal sport was to sign up for Headmaster George Van Santvoord’s

134825_12_23:features 20-27 4/28/11 4:48 PM Page 13

134825_12_23:features 20-27 4/28/11 4:48 PM Page 14

PRECEDING PAGE: An action-packed club football game in the 1950s, from former faculty member and coach Steve Bolmer’s photo collection INSET: Former faculty member and coach Dick Gurney

cal, the clubs became less competitive. It wasn’t a bad thing; it was a different thing.”

Instead, the School created less formal club programs primarily for students who weren’t up to interscholastic competition. Some, like squash and tennis, capture overflow from sports without enough team positions for willing participants. Others, like beach volleyball, climbing, and ultimate frisbee, offered a wholly new alternative. Occasionally – as in the case of ultimate frisbee – a club team has earned enough critical mass to acquire varsity status.

Below we give you some personal remembrances of Hotchkiss alumni, from the rough-and-tumble heyday of club sports in the 1940s to the lower-key vibe of the aughts.

Bill Campbell ’45 “I arrived in Lakeville as a prep in 1941. At that time the teams were divided by class year, so the first-year boys were playing the seniors in football. It was disastrous, physically, for the smallest boys in the school. The seniors just ran all over us and trampled us into the ground! I remember being run over by a senior named Ricky Sumner when I was in a defensive position. He wasn’t a huge boy, but he was compact and fast, and he just ran right over me. I know there must be a lot of people out there with bad backs because of those games.

“I think the club system – I was a Monahan – was a much more interesting and fair way to divide up the school. We had some interesting coaches in football.

One was Dick Gurney, an English teacher, and a very kind but rather rugged man who I believe had played

BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS: COURTESY OF THE HOTCHKISS SCHOOL ARCHIVES, EXCEPT AS NOTED

BELOW: A 1945 club swimming team

Woods Squad, a small group who cleared paths and maintained the School’s forested property.

Clint Ely says the new system had multiple advantages. “First, boys who otherwise would have been excluded from participation, because of limited numbers on the previous class teams, now could benefit from athletic competition,” he remembers. “Second, many more students were able to bond as teammates. Third, many faculty serving as coaches, refs, umps, and officials were able to relate to students outside of the classroom.”

Instead of blues and whites, the Hotchkiss fields became a kaleidoscope of colors. Gray for Baker and blue for Hoyt. Monahan donned green and Taylor, red.

It was a system that persisted well into the 1950s, even as interscholastic competition resumed and some juniorvarsity squads were formed. “If you only knew!” recalls Cynthia White, wife of former headmaster and Hoyt club football coach, Arthur White. “The Harvard – Yale game was nothing compared to the club football matches when we were first there! Oh, they were wonderful. Art used to wake up in the middle of the night to run over and write down a new play. Nothing else was so important.”

But by the mid-1960’s, the four clubs began to be phased out as Athletic Director Nels Corey formed even more junior-varsity and thirds teams. “Most of the other schools had them, and we were way behind,” he remembers. “We were late getting into that phase of athletics. Our kids wanted them.”

The advent of coeducation, in 1974, also played a role in squeezing out the four clubs, particularly in highercontact sports like hockey. Recalls Corey’s successor, Rick Del Prete: “Because the play couldn’t be as physi-

14

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

134825_12_23:features 20-27 4/28/11 4:48 PM Page 15

rugby in England. His wife would come to our games. We played each other, of course, but there was also competition within the team to see who was going to play what position.

“In the spring I went on to pole vaulting in club track. I have a distinct recollection of Ben Labaree ’45 and Tom Stewart ’45 raising the bar six inches on me one time when my back was turned. They didn’t mean any harm; they just thought I could do better. When I went to vault, my bamboo pole buckled in the middle and dropped me headfirst into the sawdust pit.

Everything up and down my spine went cricklycrackly, and I wouldn’t move till they got a stretcher. Those two guys, Coach Smith, and another guy whose name I don’t recall had to haul me close to a mile up a hill to get X-rayed. I was OK. I thought it was quite poetic that the two guys who had raised the bar hauled me up the hill.”

Clinton Ely ’45, faculty ’50 - ’63 “I remember there was some disappointment when it was announced there’d be no more varsity. But in the end, many more people were able to participate. And it was tight, particularly in football. The coaches ribbed each other, and you had pride in your color! I remember our maroon jerseys. I can just see ’em now, those damp, grubby jerseys that got all stained and didn’t even have numbers on them. When the maroon ones got wet, they looked almost brownish. And I remember that people driving along Lime Rock Road would stop to watch the games.

“I played fullback on the Taylor football team. I was a powerful runner, but I’d always fumble. A guy named Larry Goodman would recover my fumbles in the end zone for a touchdown. When it came to the end of the year they finally put me at guard. In the winter I switched to basketball. Who can forget those line drives you had to shoot because of the low ceilings in Monahan gymnasium? And then came spring and club track. George Kellogg was our coach. We were able to manage about three meets, not too far away. I remember he had a wood-paneled station wagon, and he would drive us in that.

“As a coach I will always remember crawling in the mud during calisthenics. The exercise I liked to do involved wriggling on your belly, moving yourself with your elbows, and I’d do it with my Hoyt football team.

For that, we got the nickname ‘the reptile.” I remember being an intense competitor with Steve Bolmer and the other coaches. We’d stay after practice to play a kicking and passing game. I remember kidding each other.

“And basketball! That coaching job was a lark, because I didn’t even know the rules of the game! I didn’t know what charging was, or blocking, or anything. I was supposed to keep score, which everybody thought was funny because I’d have to ask for help from the kids on my team. That was the era when some of the faculty members would scrimmage with the kids. I remember

that Butch Stearns was an absolute legend; he was probably close to 60 years old out there and sweating.

“Baseball was similar. But at least the club sports got the faculty out of the classroom. I discovered there were all kinds of relationships you had on the field that you didn’t have in the classroom. There were strong rules, and a high level of deportment on the field, but the stiffness was gone. All in all, there was a great esprit de corps.”

ABOVE: The 1951 Hoyt club football team

Ed Jadwin ’45 “Swimming was my major sport. We had a wonderful coach, a man by the name of William Stakeley, a chemistry teacher. He was just a super guy. He couldn’t have been a nicer person to young kids. I’m not sure swimming was a major sport in many places, but Hotchkiss did a great job with it.

“I remember that we competed in several ways. There was the competition between the four clubs, in the 20yard pool, which was typical in those days. But then we also had what we called telegraphic meets. We’d swim the race, and then we’d telegraph the times to our opponents and compare them. It was really quite competitive, because we had no choice otherwise. I remember that at one point I was within two-tenths of a school record, and I was really pretty pleased with that. But it was club! I thought, ‘Ah, if I could only come back one year and swim in some real meets I bet I could break the official record!’

“I went on to swim at Princeton, was captain of that team, and went to the 1948 Olympics. I wound up swimming against all my old Hotchkiss friends, because they were all Yalies. One of the stranger things that’s happened to me since: In October 2009 I got a call down here in Vero Beach, Florida, from a fellow named Len Marshall, Class of ’43 at Hotchkiss. He and I had swum the same events when I was a prep. We met and had dinner several times and had a lot of fun talking about the coaches and about what Hotchkiss was like back then.”

Ben Labaree ’45 “I thought the club system was terrific because it evened the field for the little guys. The coaches were very big on giving the little guys a chance. I don’t remember that W i n t e r

2 0 1 1

15

134825_12_23:features 20-27 4/28/11 4:48 PM Page 16

134825_12_23:features 20-27 4/28/11 4:48 PM Page 17

PHOTO: ISTOCK

any one club was considered any better than the other; the assignments were totally by chance, and it seemed to work out to be a pretty good mix. Everybody knew what club everybody else belonged to, at least in your class. It was something that definitely identified you.

“I played soccer for Baker and was captain by my senior year. I don’t remember exactly how we arranged it, but somehow the four clubs put together an all-star team at the end of the season. I remember that in the fall of 1944, the gas rationing had eased off a little bit, and we were able to get a game in New York City with a high-school team. I think Peter Matthiessen arranged it.

We played somewhere on a public playground; it was all dirt. There wasn’t a blade of grass in it! Just this hard, hard dirt. And those guys played hard. They were a very physical team, if I remember; it was a very different kind of soccer from what we were used to! I was goalie. We lost 1-0, but it was a hard-fought match.

“In the spring I did track, and I remember that by 1945 we were able to have four track meets. You have to realize what a great thing that was, after three years of virtually playing nobody. I remember the meet with Taft in particular because at the school I’d gone to before Hotchkiss, I’d had a buddy named Larry Munson; he was my great rival in everything, and he was at Taft.

When the final event came, we were tied; it was a halfmile relay. I was the anchorman for Hotchkiss, and Larry was the anchorman for Taft. And we won the relay and the meet! But he probably caught the girl.”

Dave Steffen ’45 “The Duke of Wellington once remarked: ‘The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.’ Some have said much the same thing about World War II. Viewed from a modern perspective, these are outrageous statements on several counts: elitism, arrogance, failure to recognize the contribution of enlisted men and women, etc. But there remains a large kernel of truth.

“The club sports program that Hotchkiss started in the 1940s was very democratic. Nearly everyone participated. You may have been on the ‘school’ team in one sport, but you were part of the club program for others.

The club system was the bedrock. Its importance was underscored by the efforts of faculty members in coaching and umpiring. Some of them were more into it than others, just like the players. But everybody was a good sport. Van Santvoord, the headmaster, said on more than one occasion, ‘It’s a community.’ It was pretty neat to feel that you were a part of it.

“I was on Baker; I played soccer, basketball, and baseball. I just loved getting outside in the afternoon after morning classes. I remember in particular that each sport had an all-star team assembled at the end of the season. And it was fun because the all-stars of track, for example, challenged the all-stars of baseball to a baseball game. We took them on, and we won.

“In life today it’s almost like we either have too much or too little competition. And I think the beauty of those intramural sports was that they exposed everybody to a healthy sense of competition. You get competitive, and

you have got to cooperate with your teammates, to figure out your role. I think you also begin to figure out what you’re good at, and what you’re not good at. You experience this conflict between what you’d really like to do and what you’re capable of doing, which are often quite different. We’ve all got to work out that balance in life, and I think competitive sports can help.

“It’s my belief that this part of the School’s culture was of great help to many of us in dealing with the unforeseeable challenges that came later. The unexpected always throws you back on your heels. It helps to have had prior experience with rough-and-tumble situations!”

OPPOSITE: Club hockey team, 1980 BELOW: Former faculty member and coach Ron Carlson, 1975

Forrest E. Mars, Jr. ’49 “Club sports were good. Everybody got to play, and that was a good thing.

“I was on Taylor. I played football for two years. I wore big glasses and wasn’t very athletic, and so, after getting my face pushed in the mud a few times, I decided that I did not want to do that anymore.

“I joined the Duke’s Woods Squad. I really enjoyed that. The Duke talked to us, and you learned not to be terrified of him.

“During winter time, I swam with Stakeley and Bodel. And I tried out as the manager of the varsity baseball team. You had to keep your feet in, because the coaches [Gurney and Stearns] spit, and you’d come home with tobacco-stained shoes.

“You went to the upstairs of Monahan for boxing or something awful like that. I didn’t like boxing, because I couldn’t see. My athletic experience at Hotchkiss was not the greatest. I did get my letters; I think they were for swimming. I finally got coordinated when I joined the Army. ….”

W. Ernst Minor ’50 “I was a member of Coach (Charlie) Berry’s ‘Baker 11,’ in football. I remember returning to my seat after a study-hall break on Thursday night before the Friday afternoon tilts, and being reminded that many of my body parts would be tweaked in the ensuing contests with Hoyt, Monahan, and Taylor.

“On a particular Friday afternoon the Baker Gray were playing the Monahan Green, and I had my beak tweaked asunder and the claret was all over my Baker Gray uniform. We were playing on the field closest to the Monahan Gym, and the green Cadillac Coupe stopped in back of our bench. Out popped Dr. Wieler with his black bag in hand. He asked me if there was any possibility I would refrain from playing the second half, and I asserted, ‘Nah, we are going to beat Monahan and Lufkin (Dan,’49).’ Dr. Wieler then sat me down and inserted those long cotton swabs into each nostril and stated, ‘See you in the mo-o-o-rning.’

W i n t e r

2 0 1 1

17

134825_12_23:features 20-27 4/28/11 4:48 PM Page 18

OPPOSITE: Late-afternoon, returning to the dorm, 2010

“Toward the end of the game we were behind by less than a touchdown, and about to score when Coach Berry sent in a fancy play. As we were about to cross the Monahan goal line there was a ‘fee, fi, fo, fumble!’

Monahan recovered.

“We lost. Lufkin and the Green had won. Club football was a great learning experience.”

Steve Bolmer, faculty 1947 – 1991 “I was the Taylor football coach and the Baker baseball coach. Baseball was a little less competitive, but the football was pretty good ball, for not being varsity. As a coach you’d have like 20 to 25 guys in your club, whom you didn’t pick, and you had to figure out where they fit in. Some of them didn’t want to be linemen, for instance. Everybody had to be the quarterback.

“But we had some good teams. Taylor wanted to beat Baker. Taylor wanted to beat Hoyt. And Taylor wanted to beat Monahan. And they all wanted to beat us. We played two games with each team. And at the end of the season we added up the wins and the losses and said, Hey, you’re the winner. That was us a couple of times.

“I’ve still got some pictures of club football in the 1950s here at the house hanging on the wall in my study. They’re mostly action shots. When kids come back to Lakeville and stop by the house, they really love seeing them.”

Joe Woodward ’50 “I was invited down to the varsity football team, but my father said, ‘No way. You’re too small.’ I was a 135pound senior at Hotchkiss – not too big – so I stayed with club. I played for Taylor and Coach Bolmer, who was a very fine coach: stern, professional, fair. He and all the coaches were very competitive; we all wanted to win and worked our tails off to do so. I think Taylor won the league two years in a row.

“I was one of Coach Bolmer’s running halfbacks, and maybe one of the better ones. I was a starter every game.

We did four quarters and ran plays, had timeouts and halves, shoulder pads, the whole works. But we played both ways: offense, then defense, each way. That’s why it was called club.”

Arthur White, faculty ’52 – ’89 “My first two or three years as a faculty member, I coached the Hoyt football team. I also coached Hoyt’s hockey, basketball, and baseball teams for a spell.

“After classes, at 2:45 p.m., we’d all go out to Taylor Field for football. Gil Smith was the super chief, the head of club football, and he’d run us through calisthenics – jumping jacks, knee bends, and pushups – for maybe 20 minutes. Then we’d separate in our respective clubs and have our own practices to get ready for the games, which Gil officiated.

“The football coaches – George Kellogg for Monahan, Charlie Berry for Baker, and Steve Bolmer for Taylor – all really wanted to do well by our teams and were very competitive. My first club game was against Baker, and they were picked to win it. That was the day my son

18

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

Damon was born – it was a Friday, October 2, 1953. He arrived in the morning, we played the game that afternoon and beat them 35 to nothing. It was wonderful.

“We were all practicing on the same field, so we had to have secret gatherings. If you had a play you didn’t want anyone to see, you had to sneak around when walking through it with the kids. One night I jumped out of bed when a play came to me so I could write it down. We were going to play Steve Bolmer’s team, and I told the quarterback, Bill Manion ’55, I said, ‘You may not call this play! I have to call it!’ Well, the game was going on, it was getting late, and there was no score, so I sent in a youngster and I said, ‘Tell Bill to call that play.’

So he did. And Jack Butler ’54 ran 40 yards! It was the last play of the game, and he was running when the time expired, and scored and we won six to nothing!

“The kids were very enthusiastic and took great pride in the competition. If you won the championship in club football, it was a big deal. But it also gave a lot of youngsters who weren’t very athletic exposure to something they wouldn’t have done otherwise. I remember one parent came to me and said he’d received a letter from his son who played club football and who was so excited because he’d never done anything like that in his life – never thought he’d be part of any team—and he got such a thrill from it.

“My hockey team was phenomenal; I only coached it one year, and we were 11 and 0. We picked teams differently in that sport. We had general skating, and the four coaches would look everybody over and then have a drawing of sorts: I get first pick, he gets second pick, and so on.

“This one boy, Walter Briggs ’77, had gone out for basketball and didn’t make the team. We hockey coaches had already picked by the time this boy got to the rink, but I was one short. The other coaches said, ‘Art, you can have him.’ What they didn’t know – and what I didn’t know – was that he’d played hockey in high school before he came to Hotchkiss. He could dominate! He’d sit on the bench with me most of the time, and then if we needed a goal I’d say, ‘Hey, Walter, we need a goal!’ And he’d go in and op! – two goals.

We also had an exchange student from England who’d never been on skates in his life. The only way he could stop was by hitting the boards; he could only go in one direction. But by the end of the season he could play. It was fun to watch.

“I remember less about baseball, although I do remember that George Stone, who was not athletic at all, used mathematics to create all his signals. Somebody would get on first, and he’d go ‘27, 31, 18,’ and it was supposed to mean something to the basemen.”

John R. “Rusty” Chandler ’53, faculty ’64 - ’00 “I remember outside of the athletic office in the old Main Building there was a wooden plaque that showed the annual winners of the club competition. Football, which I played for Hoyt and Coach ‘Tiger’ Tom Hall, was a hotly contested league. We had two fields marked

134825_12_23:features 20-27 4/28/11 4:49 PM Page 19

John Titcomb ’68 “As I recall, club sports were a big deal in these years, at least in theory. Even if one played on a School Varsity or JV team for part of the year, you still had your club to participate with the other parts of the year.

Sports were a required activity, and there were very, very few alternatives, such as social service or noncompetition fitness activities.

“In coming to Hotchkiss as a prep, I had never previously seen soccer played, and so I thought to try it. But there was never any instruction that I recall, and when I got injured there was no trainer-care, no rehab or follow up.

Unfortunately, my knee injury never got better, and I didn’t try any team sports at Hotchkiss after prep year.

“I still had the problematic club sports requirement for the winter and spring. The solution was club skiing and then club golf. It turned out a few preps and LMs lobbied the athletic department to begin club skiing that winter. The School’s Indian Mountain ski area was a work in progress at this point, the runs uphill of the ski jump and the rope tows someone’s half-finished dream.

Whether newbies could somehow learn to ski, with gear collected from who-knows-where, must have driven some debate higher up, but eventually we did, and was it ever fun!

Skiing was my sport for decades, starting right after my first crash and sitzmark part way down the very scary 9th fairway, probably just at the tee box! This on a found pair of definitely not safety-tested bear claw binding skis.

We learned immediately how to herringbone back up!”

Nels Corey, faculty member ’65 – ’80 “After I became athletic director in 1966, club sports didn’t have the same prominence it had had previously.

That’s because we put in thirds teams and a lot of JV teams. But we did maintain a number of single-team clubs, like hockey and basketball, tennis, and golf.

“Club hockey was initially a boys’ sport, and then

the girls joined when they became a part of the School.

That was a great league, a very vibrant sport at that time. We moved it up to the outdoor Bierwirth Rink.

We were allotted a certain amount of time to play, four days a week, and even that we had to fight for. I was a so-called coach. We did very little coaching because we didn’t have much time to do anything except play the games. We’d be two at a time ‘practicing’; 90 percent of that was for the game. I think the faculty probably enjoyed it as much if not more than the players.”

Dan Mahoney ’72 “I played club soccer for Taylor for four years. It was a great chance to meet other schoolmates whom you didn’t normally encounter.

“Since score was kept, there were standings, and because our coaches also served as refs, things could get competitive – i.e., physical. With lots of yelling and even screaming, even the shyest player managed a good effort.

Taylor usually finished near the bottom, but we didn’t care. For my last two years, Jeff Reichel was Taylor’s coach. His nickname was Baron Von Reichel. I think the quote about our team was, ‘Taylor was strictly

PHOTO: ANNE DAY P'09,'11,'13

out on Taylor Field. It was a very spirited competition, with faculty members like Gil Smith and Jack Bodel refereeing. They did a pretty good job, considering they weren’t professionals.

“I remember that Steve Bolmer, who coached Taylor, had a ‘T’ formation that was really the best of the four clubs. Taylor was pretty much the perennial champion of the club competition when I played. They had a very good machine, and Coach Bolmer used his players very, very well. I remember a number of games playing against Taylor when I was the center linebacker for Hoyt; you’d try to make a tackle and about five guys were pouring through the line and getting in your way. Their backs usually made long gains.”

a fair-weather team.’

“During one game when I played goalie, I got kicked in the thigh making a save, and, unbeknownst to me, had severely torn my thigh muscle. When it was time for dinner, I was feeling pretty woozy and just about passed out in my food – at the Headmaster’s table. I remember overhearing my table-mates say, ‘Is he going to eat that, or can I have it?’

“During another game, again playing goalie, I saved the ball and hit the post head-on. As I was standing up and shaking it off, one of my teammates ran over, checked the post and announced, ‘The post is fine; it just has a small dent.’”

W i n t e r

2 0 1 1

19

134825_12_23:features 20-27 4/28/11 4:49 PM Page 20

ABOVE: Former faculty members, from left, George Kellogg, Walter Crain, and Rusty Chandler OPPOSITE: Former athletic director Nels Corey

20

H

O T C H K I S S

M

Ron Carlson, faculty ’71 - ’81 “When I got to Hotchkiss to teach English, I couldn’t skate. So Blair Torrey taught me one great night on the black ice of Lake Wononscopomuc. I went on to coach thirds hockey, but my favorite years were 1980 and ’81, when Rick Del Prete and Nels Corey made me ‘Commissioner of Club Hockey.’

“A couple of days we all skated on Long Pond, and there is a terrific photo of our group on that bright ice in the sunshine. But mainly we fought it out on the open-air Bierwirth Rink, where Eddie Stacken ran the zamboni, and we divided 16 boys into two teams and played like demons.

“I remember skating until dinner had started, tied one to one. It was the year David Izard ’79 captained the other team, and John Price ’81 served as goalie for both teams, a half at a time. The other end was manned by anybody with a stick; the rule down there was ‘no-lifties.’ When the final goal was scored, one team would holler and we’d all walk back to the dorms, sticks over our shoulders, in the winter dark. It was exactly what it was supposed to be: fun.”

Sara Eddy ’78 “I came to Hotchkiss as a prep the first year the School had girls. Our softball team was a club team for two years before we became varsity. And it’s funny, if you go back and look at the yearbook, you can see that the first year we don’t even have uniforms. The second year we got shirts that said Hotchkiss.

“We had between 15 and 20 girls for each of those first two years. I remember generally that it was really just a fun group, and that we played a couple games with other schools. But my clearest memory is of Ron Carlson, our coach, coming out every day in his green baggy sweatpants. We played on Taylor Field, and he would always talk about ‘Fun-go Land,’ where he’d hit fly balls. ‘Fun-go land.’”

A G A Z I N E

Dan Sayre ’81 “Club softball was probably the least ‘competitive’ sport available. We didn’t follow the Baker/Taylor/Monahan/Hoyt system; I think we just picked teams and played. The sport was coed and attracted a large proportion of students who were more musically or artistically inclined. For many of us, it was more like sunbathing, interrupted. I recall a lot of tiedye, batik, and bandanas.

“One highlight I remember occurred during the spring of 1981. As I was winding up to pitch, the umpire, Mr. [William] Massengale, called a timeout. He wanted us all to know that about a decade earlier, the batter’s uncle (Gore Vidal) had called the catcher’s uncle (William F. Buckley) a ‘crypto-Nazi’ during a nationally televised debate, to which Buckley responded with a threat to ‘sock him in the jaw.’ Only at Hotchkiss …

“I don’t recall the score or victor that day, or any day.”

Karl Saliter ’84 “I played varsity football for Hotchkiss, probably sooner than I should have. I was less-than-qualified as a medium-sized lower mid, but varsity maintained a squad of second-stringers lovingly referred to as the ‘Humpdees.’ Our main function was to provide the starters with live bodies for scrimmages at practices.

“Upper-mid year, I returned to the team having shown all the forward progress and speed of a glacier with a flat tire: a Humpdee once again, basking in the tolerance of the faster and stronger players. It was a second season of tough workouts and frequent high-speed blocks, after which I often found myself on my back, gazing at the clouds through the grey bars of my helmet, wondering what I was doing on this field. My goal was to score invisible points in my father’s esteem.

These points were in short enough supply, and my results on the football field were earning me the proverbial goose egg.

“I finally sat down with Coach Del Prete and asked if I could leave the team. I will always respect what he said to me at that meeting, and the way he let me go without further loss to what was a fairly fragile sense of self. Coach Del Prete is a good man.

“As the leaves fell from the trees and we turned the corner to winter in 1983, it was with gratitude boundless as the skies themselves that I walked into the warm, wet embrace of club water polo. There were girls on the team, and even one of the heroes from varsity water polo, out with a bad knee, laughing and splashing in the huge, clean pool.

“I saw students smiling secretly. We all knew we were ‘bagging it’ here, and we were flat delighted. The water was a peaceful place. You belonged and were accepted as soon as you jumped in. Mistakes in club polo meant you might get a good-natured laugh or maybe take a ball to the head. You might chance a mouthful of chlorine, but never did you find yourself knocked to the ground eating some dude’s shoulder pads. Club water polo was a bizarre democracy. None of us were stars; the sport made us all stars.

PHOTO: ISTOCK

Henry Sethness ’74 “I played club hockey my freshman year for Nels Corey. We played on Bierwirth Rink outside, and you’d freeze your tail off playing out there. Especially on a windy day, going against the wind – it was like you were going in slow motion.

“Mr. Corey really took it seriously. He wanted to win as badly playing a club sport as he did when he was coaching the varsity. He’s as vivid in my mind today as he was 35 years ago. He had this distinct Maine accent, and he’d yell at everybody, ‘You candyasses!’ I also remember that he had this laugh that would carry throughout the rink. It was a real pleasure playing for people like him.”

134825_12_23:features 20-27 4/28/11 4:49 PM Page 21

134825_12_23:features 20-27 4/28/11 4:49 PM Page 22

OPPOSITE: Watching a game, forgetting time

“My biggest athletic struggle at Hotchkiss had taken place inside my head. In the end, I charged ahead with everything I had, and, stiff-arming the inborn urge to please my dad, chose a sport that fit me. The smiles and laughter at club water polo taught me that I had made the right choice. For good or ill, I found my people among the misfits and rejects in that pool.”

Caroline Deans ’86 “I played Club Golf my senior year. It was wonderful to be able to play with little skill in a friendly manner, especially given the locale...overlooking the lake. Truly how surreal is it that you could play golf in high school whenever you like, right outside your door. Of course, there were a few embarrassing moments...like shanking a tee shot which almost hit the Main Building.”

John Hyland ’01 “Although I started out in basketball at Hotchkiss, I switched over to paddle tennis for my upper-mid winter.

I was primarily a football and lacrosse player and was looking for something a little more relaxing in between those two seasons. I’d played a little paddle as a kid and just thought, you know, this could be something cool, something different. It was a sport that people who didn’t get accepted into the special exercises program ended up doing by default – nothing too competitive about it.

“Traditionally, though, Hotchkiss did play Salisbury’s club team in paddle tennis once a year. And the morning after the tournament, the Salisbury coach would publish the results in the local newspaper. I found this out and I thought, ‘All right, I’m going to get a bunch of buddies to play in this.’ Many of them were already coming out anyway on days when they didn’t have a game, or in the afternoon between class and practice. We ended up beating Salisbury for the first time ever: every single match, every single set, we beat them. Their coach then refused to publish the results in the newspaper. He said, ‘Oh, it was really just a scrimmage; it didn’t really count.’

“Well, I decided that this paddle tennis victory needed to be commemorated somehow, so I took a paddle tennis ball and had everybody on the team sign it. I put it in a trophy case like you’d use for a baseball and presented it to Skip Mattoon at the next auditorium. You know the tradition at Hotchkiss: if you win a tournament, you present the trophy to the headmaster at the following auditorium, and he puts the trophy in his office. The whole thing was somewhat humorous because nobody took paddle tennis that seriously, except for us. But then, word got back to Salisbury that we’d hosted a special allschool meeting just to commemorate our victorious paddle tennis event, which, of course, was total crap. For years after that they refused to play us.

“My senior year, paddle tennis got even bigger. Some friends who’d played JV hockey switched over to paddle, and my now-wife, Emily (Bohan) Hyland ’02, and a bunch of her friends also signed up. We played singlesex and coed matches, and sometimes people would wear costumes. At a school where it’s so cold for so much of the year, it was fun to have an outdoor sport.

22

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

“Someday down the road I’d love to build the school a heated paddle tennis hut, for spectators, and name it after Andrew Dwyer ’01, who was killed in a car accident when we were in college. Andrew was always my paddle tennis partner. I feel like for a school that has everything, it would be a pretty cool way to promote this great outdoor sport that meant so much to us when we were there.”

Whit Rothe ’01 “Club sports played a major part of my life at Hotchkiss. In fact, I was a four-year veteran of club soccer, hockey, tennis, paddle tennis and basketball. What I relished most was the competitive spirit mixed with a social atmosphere: a healthy respite from the academic and social pressures that embody the Hotchkiss experience that allowed me to bond with peers that I didn’t go to class with or see every day in my dorm.

“When I signed up for club ice hockey as a prep in 1998, the majority of our games took place on the outdoor Bierwirth Rink in its last year of existence. While relatively intolerable in the dark winter months, the open-air atmosphere and the gusts of wind in the face during fast breaks only enhanced the fast pace and exhilaration of the game. Surveying the cracks in the boards, the creaky wooden benches and the worn-out lines, you could feel the ghosts of games past: the glory, the heartbreak, and the fleeting sense of camaraderie. I later learned that my father, who was in the class of ’59, had been in the first club hockey group when the rink was brand-new.”

Devin McEwan ’02 “Club sports at Hotchkiss have a reputation as an excuse for nerds and slackers to idly fulfill their athletics requirement in a noncompetitive, sweat-free environment – this impression being based, I think, on the assumption that athletic endowment and competitive fire are meted out by nature in equal measure.

But my experience playing four years of club soccer was quite different.

“Club soccer in my day was an opportunity for nerds and slackers to vent our own considerable competitive fires in a soccer-esque mêlée whose ferocity was untempered by our laughable motor skills and utter ignorance of soccer’s basic strategy and, indeed, its rules. By and large, we had no patience for soccer conventions like ‘positions’ or ‘passing’ or especially ‘good sportsmanship.’ The sort of taunting and grandstanding frowned upon in intramural play were elevated to an art form on the club soccer field. For example, Andrew Kryzak ’01 would unfailingly pull his shirt over his head, spread his arms to his sides, and run about the field like an airplane whenever he scored a goal.

“The pinnacle of my club soccer career came when we played against the girls’ varsity team, which I’m sure every club member remembers vividly, and everyone else involved has completely forgotten. We won, not thanks to superior skills (ha!) but because while Girls Varsity was treating this as a casual scrimmage, to us it

134825_12_23:features 20-27 4/28/11 4:49 PM Page 23

was the most important – in fact, the only – match we would ever play.

“Clearly we teammates weren’t the only ones who took our victory much too seriously, as our fearless faculty leader, Mr. [Lou] Pressman, made sure to gloat about the win in chapel, referring to club soccer, as he always did, as ‘the sport of the gods.’”

Christina Claudio ’04 “I played club soccer my prep year...in fact I was the only girl on the team that fall! It was my first time ever playing soccer, and I probably only touched the ball a handful of times the entire season. I would stand by the goal and run toward anyone coming my way, desperately hoping that I would win the game of chicken and that they would abandon pursuit of the goal (from my side anyway). It actually worked most of the time! The rest of the time we just collided and wound up sprawled out on the grass looking like a bunch of crazy people. The times I wasn’t insanely running around, I was trashtalking with Lou Pressman, faculty ‘advisor’ and resident Yankee-hater. Being from New York and a diehard fan, I had quite a lot to say to Mr. Pressman during those two months. He was probably the first faculty friend I made, and lucky for me the first of many.

“After deciding soccer was definitely not my sport, I moved on to club climbing with Mr. Noyes. Climbing helped me discover my fear of heights…fabulous. Mr. Noyes forced me to learn how to deal with said fear by sending me up as many times as possible, regardless of the fact that I was sure that little cable was not going to keep me from crashing to my doom. I wanted to shoot that man by the time I got back down. However, at the end of the season I proved that he could turn out a respectable climber.

“On the final day we had a competition. Two climbers were tied together at the feet, a strong climber with a weak climber. The pairs had to go up as fast as possible while communicating the whole way. I was paired with some poor boy who clearly was not pleased to be my partner. Pushing my fear of plunging to my doom aside, we raced up that wall and back down with the fastest time!

“All in all, I have only fond memories of club sports. I never would have tried soccer or climbing without them.”

ized the league we were competing in. In my junior and senior years the girls on the team combined with a team from Andover High School in order to attend a national tournament. We finished in the top-five out of 16 teams both years. And during my senior year, Hotchkiss made ultimate a varsity sport.

“Some people at Hotchkiss certainly didn’t see frisbee as a real sport, but that’s the challenge any new sport faces. We knew we were working as hard as any varsity sport, and I personally didn’t feel any need to prove to anyone what ultimate was all about. The few times I had peers come see us play, they were astounded by the athleticism required for the sport.

“If my brothers hadn’t taken it upon themselves (with the help of Mr. T!) to launch a team, Hotchkiss would not have been as fulfilling for me. The sport has also ended up contributing to my life in a pretty unique way. My siblings and I founded and now run two related companies, Five Ultimate and Five Bamboo.”

Daniel Lippman ’08 “I had really great experiences with club sports, especially club squash, which I did during two fall seasons. I had not played much squash before Hotchkiss, and my squash skills got much better as a result (although, I never was able to play on the varsity or JV teams). I think the level of competition was just about right, because in playing the same bunch of students many times over, I could track my improvement. We all had a sense of shared purpose. And while club sports didn’t get the plaudits of varsity sports, I think other students respected the fact that students in club sports were doing their best at improving their skills.

“I’m now in college in Washington, D.C., and I play squash at least once a week with friends. I definitely credit Hotchkiss club squash with sparking my enthusiasm for this particular sport, and I’m grateful that Hotchkiss had the high-quality athletic infrastructure to support Bearcats in many sports.”

PHOTO: ANNE DAY P'09,'11,'13

Rohre Titcomb ’05 “My brothers Zahlen (’00) and Xtehn (’01) founded The Hotchkiss Naugahyde, the club ultimate frisbee program, in 2000. They loved the sport – which we all grew up playing in our native Seattle – and weren’t going to settle for playing something they didn’t feel passionate about.

“When I was on the team, there was some really great competition out there. Our coaching staff, and Mr. [David] Thompson in particular, put a lot of work into setting up games and tournaments for us to attend. He eventually founded NEPSUL, the New England Prep School Ultimate League, which formalW i n t e r

2 0 1 1

23

134825_24_29:alums 4/28/11 4:53 PM Page 24

E XTRAORDINARY

e d u c a to r s

The Second in a Series of Interviews with Hotchkiss Teachers

BY ROBERTA JENCKES

LEFT: Teaching students listening and problem-solving skills in the classroom BELOW: In the lab, demonstrating the “wonderful, exciting things”

PHOTOS: COLLEEN MACMILLAN

one can do in chemistry

“Mrs. Faus” Virginia Faus Instructor in Chemistry Education: A.B., Hobart & William Smith College; M.N.S., Worcester Polytechnic Institute Joined Hotchkiss: 1987 Currently Teaching: Two sections of Chem. 350 and two sections of Science 250, the first year of the science core curriculum “I’ve always taught – even during my sabbatical year. I like teaching too much to ever give it up. I would miss the kids too much.

“I came from a long line of teachers; and I was raised to believe that it was very important. I had worked with autistic children while I was in college and enjoyed that; I taught swimming in high school. My summer jobs involved teaching.

“I have an identical twin sister, and in high school we were both interested in science. I thought I was going to be a biology major.

But I got to William Smith College and switched almost immediately to chemistry. I loved my chemistry professor at college my first year, Charles Barton. Professor Barton

24

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

was in a wheel chair with muscular dystrophy; he couldn’t write anything on the board.

And that’s where I really learned to listen in a classroom; we were solving complex problems by listening and taking notes. You’d miss if you weren’t listening. It was all discussion about the problems.

“In the last semester of my senior year, I joined some friends who were going to interviews to be teachers in Australia. There were 300 people in Rochester for these interviews; the auditorium was packed with people. I was accepted, and I said yes. It was serendipity; I taught chemistry at a high school in Queensland and then hitchhiked in New Zealand for six months. When I returned, I wanted to be in New England, in the mountains, to be able to climb, to ski, to hike. I joined the faculty of the Tilton School and was assistant dean of admission. My husband, Brad, [Instructor in Art] and I came here in 1987.

“Now at Hotchkiss I do four interviews a week for Admissions. I’m a faculty interviewer. I love meeting families who are interested in Hotchkiss.

What is most important to you that kids take away from the classroom?

“I want them to be willing to take risks in the classroom. I want them to be able to look

at a problem that they haven’t seen before and be able to sit down and work at it, and try to come to a solution. I don’t care whether they give me the right answer or the wrong answer.

“I think that sometimes you learn more from a wrong answer than you do from a right answer. There are just so many more things you can discuss. You know, ‘Why is it wrong?

Why doesn’t it make sense? What predictions can you make based on the patterns that you see? Yes, there are going to be exceptions, but what I want you to recognize are the patterns.’

“By the time students get here, they want to use their calculator. ‘Well, my calculator says that’s the right answer,’ they will say.

They don’t even think about it. There are habits of mind that they develop that are hard to undo. They don’t want to make a mistake on a paper; they want to white it out, or rip it out, or recopy it. We’ve gone back to

134825_24_29:alums 4/28/11 4:53 PM Page 25

keeping lab notebooks, so that students have their original work. We want them to be able to go back and look at their thinking and see how they got where they got, whether they made a mistake or not.

‘Sometimes it’s serendipity.’

“We teach the scientific process. It’s not a neat process, and discoveries don’t all happen

the same way. They don’t all start with a question. Sometimes it’s serendipity. I tell my students the story of the discovery of radioactivity. It’s purely serendipitous how Henri Becquerel came across it. And it’s not neat.

“Today in chemistry we do a lot more demonstrations, a lot more practical and hands-on work. Those labs are really fun. If I were teaching in a public school, I wouldn’t be

able to do those labs. Because we’re in a place like this, we have the resources, which are unbelievable, to do all those wonderful, exciting things with the kids that they wouldn’t experience in a regular high school.

“I like this secondary school age group.

They’re young, they’re exciting, they’re fun. I think I get as much from them as I hope they get from me.”

The kids are genuinely interested and engaged. So, you get to have these wonderful co-workers, as it were, every day.

“And I love the collaboration with the other teachers in the Humanities Program.

You’re working with other people and helping each other out. In the five minutes between English and history, we can turn on a dime and make adjustments to what we plan for the next class. It is a living thing, this course. It changes and gets better every year.

“I do eight interviews a week for Admissions. Most of the families who come

in already know about Humanities. I do ‘sell’ the Program like mad, however!

RIGHT: Russo, talking with advisees at a dinner in her home

“Ms. Russo” Paula Russo Instructor in History Joined Hotchkiss: 2006 PHOTO: JONATHAN DOSTER

Education: A.B., Princeton University; M.A., Harvard University; J.D., Harvard Law School Courses taught: Humanities 250, two sections; History 471 (The Middle East 5701917); and History 472 (The Middle East Since 1917) “Wow, Humanities today was great! Our class dovetailed beautifully with the philosophy class that preceded it. The class was on ‘Doubt,’ the crisis of anxiety in Europe following World War I, and the students were making connections to Nietzsche and to Freud, both of whom they are reading in philosophy. I love it when they make the connections. Sometimes they don’t even say, ‘That’s from philosophy,’ or ‘That’s from English.’

“In class, you’re with the best colleagues possible – I’d so much rather go into a room with 12 kids than a bunch of cranky lawyers.

9th Grade: Teaching skills and watching preps grow in intellect “When you work with preps, it’s very clear that what you’re giving them in the ninth grade year is skills; we choose certain skills that we definitely want them to know. We’re not trying to teach them everything. It’s a different set of skills the next year.

“In ninth grade, you start them with orgaW i n t e r

2 0 1 1

25

134825_24_29:alums 4/28/11 4:53 PM Page 26

E XTRAORDINARY

e d u ca to r s

PHOTO: COLLEEN MACMILLAN

nizing their binder. ‘Is everything in the right place?’ ‘Do you have folders?’ ‘Can you find things?’ And what’s amazing is – they really need to develop this skill. Mostly, they’re just stuffers: they stuff things in their backpacks, and then they never see them again. They resist organizing their binders, and sometimes I give them a pop quiz.

“And we work on organizing their thoughts – determining the main idea, writing a five-paragraph essay. What’s fascinating about high school teaching is seeing how their brains develop over the year, especially in

26

ninth graders. I swear, they go home, and they’re fed some special Christmas food, because they come back after the Break, and they’re thinking analytically. I am thinking about their learning much more consciously, more deliberately than I did when I taught at the college level, where you just figure, ‘they’ll get it.’

“If there is one thing that I hope students take away from the classroom, it is curiosity.

I like to surprise them with facts or statistics.

In Middle Eastern class the other day I asked them what country in the world has the most

Muslims and how many are there? The answer in Indonesia, with 240 million people.

And I talk about things that would interest them and then give them the knowledge that the questions they ask in class are really good questions. There’s so much more potential in what they’re asking. I let them know that.

Sharing academic interests and cooking for teenagers “After college, I worked for Catholic Relief Services in Egypt for two years, and I have done research in Egypt. And my academic interests and teaching include Middle Eastern history.

“Here at Hotchkiss, I advise students, at least informally, if they are from the Middle East, or they are Muslim. But the really deep and lasting relationship has been with two students who came here from Palestine. It’s more than an advisor-advisee relationship. When they first came to Hotchkiss, they lived in my house for two or three weeks until school started. I didn’t know how much teenage boys ate; I saw that they were eating five times a day. And I thought, ‘I have to actually cook for these boys. I have to make pot roasts.’

“We spent a lot of time together their first year; now, of course, they’re much more acclimated. They’re each having their own unique Hotchkiss experience. It’s been a really enriching experience for me.

“The teachers in my department are amazing. They got me really excited about what they were doing with the Humanities Program. It made coming here the right choice for me.

“Now, I feel like I’m matching what I can do with what I want to do. It feels like a really good fit for me – kind of like breathing, you know….”

LEFT: Russo talks with Humanities students in the classroom.

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

134825_24_29:alums 4/28/11 4:53 PM Page 27

“Mr. Fall”

“The 450 is a very interesting class. It’s really a mix of history, contemporary world literature, and current events. The course has a component called ‘Contemporary French World,’ in which each student keeps up with the news in one country each semester and presents to the class weekly. We had a student who was focusing on North Africa when the uprising started in Tunisia. Another is keeping us updated on the Ivory Coast, where they currently have two governments and two presidents. One student presented on the preservation of Lake Chad. He showed us photos of the lake, which used to be one of the largest lakes in Africa but which is rapidly shrinking.

“And of course, we study literature. We are reading Jean-Paul Sartre and talking about existentialism. We sometimes work on aspects of French history, such as a unit we did on Vichy France under Marshal Pétain.

“French 450 goes beyond the traditional class, although we still study language and grammar. And the students are having a great time in the class and growing in terms of their worldview. I enjoy listening to them and sharing my perspective, based on my own educational background, because the French system is a little different from the American system. In Senegal, French is the official language, and French practice is followed in many areas.

PHOTOS: COLLEEN MACMILLAN

Abdoulaye Fall Instructor in French Education: Diploma and M.A. degree, the University of Dakar, Senegal; Teaching Licensure, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Senegal; M.A. in Teaching a Second Language, Bennington College Joined Hotchkiss: 2005 Currently teaching: one advanced beginner’s class, two sections of second-year French, and one section of fourth-year French, FR450

“I coach boys thirds soccer here, with Simon Walker, who is from England. We are both crazy soccer fans! I played in high school. I think it would be true to say that everybody in Senegal plays soccer; it’s our national sport.”

Tell us how you came to teach at Hotchkiss.

“I was born in a small village in Senegal, where my mother was an elementary school teacher, posted there as a civil servant. In high school, I went to a boarding school for four years and then moved back to Thies, then Dakar, to study at the university. To be a certified public school teacher in Senegal, you need to get a B.A. or M.A. in one discipline, and then you have to complete one or two years of study at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, a Teacher Training College. After I completed that study, I began teaching in Senegal public schools.

“The first day that I taught, I entered the class, and I said to myself, ‘This is my life.’

TOP AND ABOVE: Abdoulaye Fall and students in French 450 share news of events unfolding in Frenchspeaking countries.

W i n t e r

2 0 1 1

27

134825_24_29:alums 4/28/11 4:53 PM Page 28

E XTRAORDINARY

e d u ca to r s

Do you like working with this age group?

“Yes, I like listening to kids, especially when they have things to say and they feel that there is space for them to say something.

Through their readings, through the discussions, and through hearing my perspective and other students’, it can be very interesting.

“Also, I like how students relate to you here. There is a real human dimension.

After you teach a class, they say, ‘thank you,’ and you feel that they really mean it. I think that my favorite time at Hotchkiss is in the classroom.

“Two years ago, I decided to work on another master’s degree. I just completed the Master of Arts in Teaching a Second Language (MATSL) at Bennington College. One aspect of the program that I really loved is the chance it gives you to reflect on your classroom practice, on things you do on a daily basis. There are so many things out there that can be helpful for you to learn. When I was involved with the MATSL, I did some research in the area of teaching intercultural sensitivity. My observations have informed some aspects of the way I teach and also triggered new areas of academic interest. Now, I am very much interested in the assessment of intercultural sensitivity, and in the fall of this year, I took part in the IDI (Intercultural Development Inventory) qualifying seminar. The IDI is an

28

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

assessment tool used to determine an individual or a group’s level of intercultural sensitivity. I have learned through my research that intercultural competence can be acquired; it doesn’t always come as a given. And there is work to do in that area.

and speak it accurately. But also there is something more that is important, and that has to do with immersion in another culture, another way of looking at things, another way of doing things. That kind of immersion really can open your eyes to how big this world is.

“I hope the students learn to be open to other people, open to what they have to share. Connections – especially the friendships I have made at Hotchkiss – have been very important. Tom Drake has been wonderful. He and his wife, Verena, have been so helpful to me and my family.”

What do you hope students get from your class in language?

“I hope they grow as more aware human beings. I think foreign languages serve humanistic purposes as well as linguistic goals. You teach language for people to be able to write it

On Performing

PHOTO: MARK ZELINSKI

“After teaching for a few years, I was lucky to be selected for a Fulbright exchange program. I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which was really a life-changing experience. It was wonderful. Later, I taught French and English as a second language at the British School in Olsztyn, Poland. I wanted to teach abroad to have a different experience, but also to financially assist my family back home. I thought, ‘I will just try the U.S.,’ and so I had interviews at schools here.

“I came to Hotchkiss, and I was really impressed with everything. It is a special place in many ways.”

“Mr. Witkowski” Fabio Witkowski Co-head of Arts Department, Director of the Music Program, Conductor of the Hotchkiss Orchestra Instructor in Piano, Music History Joined Hotchkiss: 2002 Education: B. Mus., Hartt School of Music, M. M., Hartt School of Music

“For some reason, I love it. Of course, I get nervous. Everyone gets nervous. When you’re a child, you’re a little clueless. Somebody tells you to go out there and perform, and you do it. When you turn 11 or 12, you start realizing the potential for disaster. You learn to control that over the years.

“There’s always a moment before you enter the stage when you think, ‘Why on earth do I do this?’ That lasts about 20 seconds, then you just go there. And the joy of communicating your ideas and emotions with the audience – books could be written about those wonderful moments. Just walking from backstage to reaching the piano – you feel such a high volume of different emotions. It’s fascinating. It’s addicting. It’s a good addiction.

“New students will ask, ‘Do I need to perform?’ I say to them, ‘What do you want to do in your life? Being a lawyer, in court arguing a million-dollar case, you’re not going to be performing? That’s not a performance? Anything that has a specific window of time, where people are watching and you have to deliver results; anything that involves butterflies and you need to control them – that’s performing.’

“We require every student to perform, because it’s a wonderful skill. We offer various levels of performance. And, of course, for someone who just started playing the flute

134825_24_29:alums 4/28/11 4:53 PM Page 29

OPPOSITE: Practice with the Hotchkiss Orchestra RIGHT: Performing with the Hartford Symphony

this semester, for example – we’re not going to put that student in Elfers Hall in a concert for Parents Weekend with 600 people there.

We have very small, casual performances that take place in one of our large teaching rooms, where kids can start getting used to being on stage. Towards the end of senior year, they’re playing in Elfers Hall – getting nervous, of course, but as we established, that’s normal.

“It’s wonderful to watch our most talented, experienced students perform. And it’s wonderful to have more and more of them. Just as important, and a parallel mission to that, is to try to develop the appreciation of music in every single student. When a student says, ‘I thought it was going to be boring, but I came to the concert, and it was really nice.’ Those moments are really, really wonderful.

The conductor and the ‘techie’ “Teaching music technology? Yes, that is a different experience. That’s where my ‘geeky’ side can come out. It goes back to my childhood. I loved playing with buttons and gadgets; the computer fascinated me right away.

“The first time I recorded something, I simply loved all that equipment. But I didn’t have the vocabulary to relate to the engineer. ‘I want my music to sound more’ …WHAT? I didn’t know how to describe the sounds. I started going deeper and deeper into studying recording engineering, and it’s been wonderful.

“By the time I reached 18, I didn’t know if I wanted to be a computer science major, a pilot in the Air Force (because I had learned to fly), or a diplomat. By then I had done so much with piano, and my love for music spoke louder. Of course, I’m convinced that I made the right choice.

“Orchestra is so much fun; it involves a lot

PHOTO: JONATHAN DOSTER

Orchestra on campus

of teamwork. We collaborate with the music teachers, and it’s a big institutional effort.

And when we are performing, every moment is a teaching moment.

“As a conductor, I need to tell the students what to do. But we are sharing success or failure together. The students know that I’m there in the same boat with them. And they are so proud; ‘I am in the orchestra,’ they’ll say. And they’re high-fiving each other and saying, ‘You nailed the solo.’ That’s priceless.

Teaching the art of practice “The more I teach, the better I feel I play.

I can’t tell you how many times I find myself telling something to a student, and I think, ‘Oh, that’s a really good idea.’ When I am talking to my students, I have the luxury of looking at a score, without needing to do it myself. I am only thinking about it; I am not also struggling to learn it.

“When I talk to students about how to practice, I give them the example of driving. If you’re driving the car and you’re just following directions from somebody in the car, with absolutely no brain engagement, you haven’t learned anything. If you do that with the music score, just taking directions from the

paper with little engagement, that’s not practice. Every time you enter the practice room, you must have a plan – start by establishing a goal for the practice section – something like, ‘I want to improve this measure, section, or page.’ Then, identify the specific problems.

It’s much better to work on just one measure and fix all the problems than marginally improve a large section of the score.

“At Hotchkiss we are really blessed. We have one of the best collections of pianos of any school, about 20 Steinways and one Fazioli. We have never purchased a Steinway; all of them have been given to us. Our oldest one is still in use. It was given to us in 1896.

My piano on which I teach every single day is from 1914, and it’s a gorgeous piano. These pianos are so valuable, and all of them could use a refurbishing.

“The Esther Eastman Music Center has a completely professional recording facility, and some important recordings have already happened here. The facilities make a huge statement; they show the institution’s support.

“I like to think of them as the entrance gate; the really great stuff happens with what we are doing in the classroom and on stage with our students.”

W i n t e r

2 0 1 1

29

134825_30_35:alums 4/28/11 4:55 PM Page 30

ALUMNI

n a me s a n d f a ce s

The Lost Teagle Prize

I

BY RAY FINUCANE ‘61

I grew up in Blountville, a small town in the hills of East

Tennessee, second oldest in a family of 13 children.

When I first got to Hotchkiss, I was an indifferent student, but as a Lower Middler my mind was awakened by Mr. George Norton Stone, who taught me mathematics and opened my eyes to the world of science.

Other memorable names from that era are Robert Hawkins (English), Peter Beaumont (French), Allan Hoey (Latin, and how to do well on English SATs), and Richard Gurney (English). I ascribe all the successes of my professional career to these individuals, whose names I remember after 50 years: Royce, Torrey, et alia.

30

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

My father was at Hotchkiss, Class of 1931, and I believe his brother Dan was also a Hotchkiss alumnus.*

The Teagle Prize is given to a member of the upper-middle or senior class who writes the best essay on one of several topics approved by the English faculty. As a senior in Mr. Gurney’s English class, I wrote my essay on Joel Chandler Harris, author of Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings. The essay itself has been lost, and I have no memory of its contents, but it was good enough to win the Teagle. My prize, appropriately enough, was a copy of the 1895 first A. B. Frost-illustrated edition of Uncle Remus. I won several other awards at graduation,

including the Allen Prize and the Fidelity Prize, each commemorated by an inscribed silver bowl.

In the fall of 1961, I went to Yale, carrying these objects with me. Burdened with a somewhat exalted opinion about my intellectual ability, I signed up for a daunting array of classes at Yale: advanced mathematics, physics, astronomy, German, classical civilization. I struggled through freshman year, managing to get a C average. After my freshman year, I joined Yale’s Silliman College, but my academic record did not improve. I continued to drift, aimlessly changing majors, unsure of my future, and lacking the personal mentoring I’d taken for granted at Hotchkiss. In April of 1963, animated by the conflicting emotions then befuddling my naive adolescent self, I decided that I should quit Yale. The military was a ready-made, available option. One Saturday, I walked to the recruitment offices in downtown New Haven. The single open office was the Marine Corps, and I enlisted as a private.

I had all my worldly possessions with me at Yale, including the Teagle Prize and other memorabilia from Hotchkiss. None of these impedimenta was to be taken to Parris Island: We were instructed to arrive with only the clothes on our back. I boxed up

134825_30_35:alums 4/28/11 4:55 PM Page 31

OPPOSITE: Ray’s senior entry in the Mischianza LEFT: Newly recovered Teagle Prize in hand, Ray stands next to a painting commissioned by his grandmother when he returned from Vietnam in April 1967.

everything and entrusted it to Earl Potter (Hotchkiss Class of 1961), who was my roommate at Silliman.

Shortly after my arrival at Parris Island, it became clear I had made a serious error in judgment, escaping to the wrong place. The intellectual climate at boot camp was noticeably diminished from that at Yale. The stultifying atmosphere at Parris Island and future prospect of carrying a rifle through jungles, while enduring all the privations of the infantry, pushed me to find an alternative. The Marine Corps allowed recruits to take a variety of tests to qualify for officer training. I signed up for several and was accepted into the Marine Aviation Cadet program (MARCAD).

The MARCAD program offered a better career opportunity than the life of the foot soldier. I went to Pensacola, began a preflight program studying aerodynamics and aviation technology, and learned to fly military airplanes. Two years later, I graduated from the program as a carrier-qualified jet pilot with the bars of second lieutenant. In 1966, I went to Vietnam for 13 months. I

flew 180 combat missions in the A4-E Skyhawk, a single-engine, single-seat light bomber, escaping without being shot down and with no injuries.

I returned to the United States in April 1967. I got married and retrieved my lost belongings from Earl, who was best man at my wedding. The boxes contained my Hotchkiss records and the Allen and Fidelity prize bowls, but the Teagle Prize was missing.

For the next 43 years, I often wondered what had become of it, but judged it to be irretrievably lost.

In 1968, I left the Marine Corps and entered Northwestern University. Five years of life experience had reawakened the academic confidence and drive that were nurtured at Hotchkiss. I graduated with a B.S. in mechanical engineering, first in my class. My wife, new daughter, and I moved to Los Angeles, where I went on to get an M.S. in mechanical engineering from UCLA while working for Hughes Aircraft Company in the high-power laser business.

I left Hughes in 1976 and went to work for Exxon Production Research Company in the

Arctic, where we developed techniques for operating drilling equipment in offshore Alaska. I invented new techniques for building large structures of man-made ice, including ice roads, ice islands, and ice barriers used to protect drilling rigs from offshore moving ice sheets. One winter, I spent seven months leading a joint industry project that ultimately culminated in an operational drilling system that saved Exxon $1 billion, drilling a single offshore well.

After seven years at Exxon, I was recruited

by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where I joined the high-energy laser program. For the last 10 years, I have been working as a senior engineer with the National Ignition Facility, a project designed to produce fusion energy, support stockpile stewardship, and carry out high-energy density experiments in support of basic science.

In July 2010, I visited my brother Richard, who owns a horse farm in Rush, Kentucky, where he raises and races thoroughbreds. He spoke of his son, Brian, who had completed his Rhodes scholarship and was attending Yale Law School. As if an afterthought, he mentioned casually that a few years previously Brian had met a professor who had a box of books that might belong to me. This was an electrifying bit of news. I began to wonder if the long-lost Teagle Prize might be one of the books in this collection. Over the next months the story emerged.

The professor Brian met was D. Michael W i n t e r

2 0 1 1

31

134825_30_35:alums 4/28/11 4:55 PM Page 32

ALUMNI

n a me s a n d f a c e s

Risinger, John J. Gibbon Professor of Law at Seton Hall University. In the fall of 2008, Professor Risinger attended a retirement celebration at Yale Law School, where he happened to be seated next to Brian Finucane.

Following introductions, Risinger said to Brian: “Finucane. You wouldn’t happen to have a relative around my age named Raymond Finucane, would you? I have a book that he might want back.”

At his father’s urging, two years after this chance meeting at Yale, my nephew emailed the professor. And on August 17, 2010, two days before my 67th birthday, an extraordinary package arrived at my home, layered babushka-doll fashion and accompanied by a letter from Professor Risinger. Carefully unwrapping it, my anticipation and wonder increased with each discarded layer. Risinger wrote that in the 1960s he was a student at Yale, and lived in rooms in Silliman College close to those I had occupied a few years before his arrival. In the adjoining attic space, he found the Teagle Prize buried in a box of books. At the end of the year, fearing the book would be discarded with the trash, bibliophile Risinger rescued Uncle Remus and kept him safe. His letter continued, “One thing led to another and I gave Brian my card and told him to get in touch if there was any interest in getting the book returned. I guess one thing didn’t lead to another for a long while, and I had pretty much put it out of my mind when I got his email about a week ago. And here, with my compliments, after nearly a half a century, is the Teagle Prize.” *EDITOR’S NOTE: RAY’S LATE UNCLE, DANIEL FINUCANE, WAS A MEMBER OF THE CLASS OF 1931, AS WAS HIS LATE FATHER, THOMAS FINUCANE. THREE OF RAY’S BROTHERS ALSO ATTENDED HOTCHKISS: JOE FINUCANE ’70, PAT FINUCANE ’73, AND BARNEY FINUCANE ’80.

32

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

While writing his story, Ray contacted Earl Potter, his roommate at Yale and classmate at Hotchkiss, to see if their memories of events were the same. Earl wrote back from his home in New Mexico: The essay was much more than good enough to win the Teagle Prize.

As Nabokov said, “Speak, Memory.”

I’m on the warm spring lawn at Hotchkiss, sunbathing with Doug Brady and others on the last spring School holiday of senior year. Someone says to us, “Finucane won the Teagle Prize.”

There is silence. Then some hushed “No kiddings?”

No real surprise, just another telegram from the universe about the most interesting person we knew. “Yeah,” the voice says, “and he wrote about an author I bet you never heard of: Joel Chandler Harris.”

“The guy that wrote Uncle Remus?” Now we are stunned. All we know about Harris are infantile Disney cartoons. What if anything worthwhile could be said of such a subject?

Now the essay is in my hands, neatly typed on the crinkly paper of the day.

I don’t remember the words, but my feelings about what I read then are here with me now.

The voice of the writer coming from these pages is full of wisdom and compassion way beyond his years. He carefully explains Harris’s deep respect and affection for what we now are educated enough to call African-American culture. He leads us through the courageous process the author followed in presenting to the world a form of expression which almost all previously regarded as backward and childish.

For me, the essay was my first window into this world. It left some seeds of understanding for a part of my country and a people I did not know at all.

I’m really sorry it wasn’t in the box with the Prize.

Earl Potter ’61

134825_30_35:alums 4/28/11 4:55 PM Page 33

Stuart Parnes ’66: Bringing creativity and 21st-century relevance to beloved museums

R

BY MOLLY MCDOWELL

Residents of the Constitution State often guide themselves to local

produce via “Connecticut Grown” signs that dot roads across the state.

Such a sign could also lead to the office of the new Executive

Director of the Connecticut Humanities Council Stuart Parnes ’66.

Before being appointed interim director of the council in July 2010 and his permanent appointment in February 2011, Parnes spent nearly four decades developing programs for and revitalizing interest in Mystic Seaport and the Connecticut River Museum in Essex, both on the Connecticut coastline, and the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michael’s, Maryland. He has served on numerous regional, national, and international museum boards. He currently serves as the secretary general of the International Congress of Maritime Museums and as a peer reviewer for the American Association of Museums.

Parnes did not have his career path mapped out since childhood, nor did he come to it on a whim. Rather, his life spent in the museum world came about thanks to many converging points of interest and bouts of opportunity presented to him in his 20s.

“I studied European museums on a Watson Fellowship after graduating from Middlebury College with a degree in art history that qualified me for almost nothing,”

W i n t e r

2 0 1 1

33

134825_30_35:alums 4/28/11 4:55 PM Page 34

ALUMNI

n a me s a n d f a c e s

he said, laughing. “I gained insight on how these museums worked and what their programs were like. I also learned that my intended career in art conservation held no interest for me, as it was more about chemistry than art.”

Back in the U.S., Parnes followed the woman he loved, crossing his fingers that he’d find a job where they lived.

Not only did he get the girl (now his wife) – but also he got the job that launched his career. “My path into the history museum world was a total left turn,” said Parnes. “I’m very lucky to have gotten a call from the Mystic Seaport director, and I certainly had no idea how much it would shape my career.”

His introduction to the Seaport was no simple coat-and-tie interview. The director charged him with creating an exhibition to the liking of the Mallory brothers; two trustees from a prominent maritime family.

Notoriously hard to please, they posed an intimidating challenge to Parnes.

“When I met Clifford Mallory and we discussed my background, we discovered that his nephew was my classmate at Hotchkiss.

The School became something we had in common, and served as somewhat of a seal of approval for me. That connection made a difference. The initial project worked out, and then another project did, and suddenly I had been creating exhibitions at and helping shape the direction of Mystic Seaport for 27 years,” said Parnes.

He left Mystic Seaport in 2000 to become director of the Connecticut River Museum in Essex, CT, where the mouth of the river opens into Long Island Sound. When regional commerce depended heavily on waterways, Essex’s seaport served an impor-

34

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

tant role in resource shipment and distribution throughout New England.

Parnes spent the next six years raising the museum’s profile and finding ways to revitalize attendance at an institution that preserved and chronicled such an important piece of early New England history and culture.

Since the bicentennial, he said, “there has been a steady decline in interest in our country’s history in general, and that has definitely affected public perception of historical museums and their importance. At Essex, I worked with my team to connect the historical story of the Connecticut River with its physical, natural, and cultural history. Since people have become more interested in environmental and ecological issues over the past several years, we spent a great deal of time connecting those ideas with the river’s historical impact on Connecticut and New England.”

In 2006, Parnes took his expertise south to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.

During his tenure, the organization emphasized its relevance by connecting the cultural and commercial history of the Chesapeake Bay to the unique environmental issues it presents as the largest estuary in the U.S. As the executive director of the Connecticut Humanities Council – a division of the National Endowment for the Humanities –Parnes leads a foundation that allocates federal, state, and privately donated funds to programs and organizations in Connecticut that connect people with history, literature, and art. He credits Hotchkiss with preparing him for this position, and for enabling him to advance professionally.

“The rigor of academics has kept me in good stead to this day, particularly the abili-

ty to read and write quickly and well,” he said. “I spend a lot of my time writing, whether creating proposals or text for exhibits – I take that back to the Hawk [Robert Hawkins] and his hideous and amazing daily themes.”

Parnes describes his new role as a great challenge and a wonderful opportunity.

“Connecticut has one of the country’s leading humanities councils, and I am thrilled to be the one asked to lead the organization,” he said. “We facilitate many ways in which people learn to see themselves in the full context of their history and culture.”

He also credits Hotchkiss with more than just getting his foot in the door at Mystic Seaport with his classmate’s uncle, Mr. Mallory. “Having come from a middle-class background as a first-generation Hotchkiss student, I had an education there that was a life-changing experience,” said Parnes. “My parents firmly believed in investing in the quality of their children’s education. By doing so, they changed the direction of my life. My classmates helped open my eyes to the world outside of the Northeast. I’ve maintained relationships with some of those Hotchkiss pals for more than 40 years.

“I wouldn’t have gone to Middlebury if I hadn’t gone to Hotchkiss, and I wouldn’t have known that I could make a life in museums or art. Lots of little things that I didn’t recognize as influential when I was there, or even after, have in fact had an impact on me.”

Along with his own hard work, dedication, and passion for his career, Parnes’s Hotchkiss experience has taken him from his very first project for Mystic Seaport to his leadership role in the historical museum world.

134825_30_35:alums 4/28/11 4:55 PM Page 35

A MESSAGE TO ALUMNI f ro m t h e B o a rd o f G o v e r n o r s o f t h e A l u m n i A s s o c i a t i o n

CONNECTING HOTCHKISS ALUMNI

If you have participated in a Hotchkiss event, spent a day on campus, or met another Hotchkiss alumnus/a through work or a volunteer activity, you know the powerful bond shared by recipients of a Hotchkiss education. One of the most important roles of the Alumni Association’s Board of Governors (BOG) is to nurture and facilitate those connections. Networking, whether in the context of career and professional pursuits, avocational interests, topic-based discussions, or social conversation, is at the root of the School’s alumni programs.

The BOG Communications Committee and the staff of the Alumni and Development Office are currently focusing their efforts on several programs and projects that enhance networking opportunities for alumni.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR CAREER NETWORKING Hotchkiss Career Connections includes options for both online and in-person networking. HCC Online, a part of Alumnet, is a network of alumni who have volunteered to provide advice about the field in which they work, relocating, and/or their specific company or organization. Any registered user of Alumnet – the general online directory – has access to HCC Online and can search the network across various criteria (city, region, class, company, industry, etc.).

In addition to HCC Online, there is also a Hotchkiss group on LinkedIn. It is a growing community of more than 550 Hotchkiss graduates. Look for “Hotchkiss Alumni” when you sign in.

The BOG Communications Committee and the Office of Alumni and Parent Programs also sponsor HCC events that provide forums for alumni to discuss specific professional areas/expertise. Areas of focus have included finance, law, and non-profits, as well as an event for college-age alumni entitled “Ten Strategies to Manage and Accelerate Your Career.”

OTHER OPPORTUNITIES TO CONNECT If your interest is connecting with fellow alumni socially, a variety of options are available to you. Hotchkiss has groups

or pages on several social media sites. Managed in some cases

by School staff and in others by alumni, these sites facilitate connections to and discussions among alumni and provide timely information about the School and our students, faculty, and alumni. The most frequently used sites are:

FACEBOOK The Hotchkiss Alumni page includes postings about upcoming events and alumni accomplishments. It also has links to individual class, sports team, club, and other alumni Facebook groups (for example, Alumni in the Military, Shades of Hotchkiss, Alumnae of Hotchkiss) that have been created and are managed by alumni.

TWITTER If you are interested in quick and immediate connections to life on campus today, follow @HotchkissAlumni on Twitter.

VIRTUALHOTCHKISS VirtualHotchkiss is a blog featuring travel journalstyle posts by students and faculty members who travel on School-sponsored trips. Alumni who have their own blogs are linked to VirtualHotchkiss on the right side of the page.

ONE-STOP NETWORKING In order to help alumni navigate the social media sites on which Hotchkiss has a presence, the School has recently launched HotchkissYou (see the back cover of this Magazine).

HotchkissYou serves as an Internet hub on which you will find links to Hotchkiss on Facebook, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter, as well as the VirtualHotchkiss blog.

Hotchkiss’s networking sites and programs are designed to be yours. We hope you will use them frequently to keep in touch with the School and with each other and to share your memories of the School, your accomplishments, your expertise, and your thoughts and ideas. Hotchkiss Career Connections, as well as the School’s social media sites, can be accessed from the Alumni homepage: www.hotchkiss.org/alumni/index.aspx.

W i n t e r

2 0 1 1

35

134825_52_56:memoriam 4/28/11 4:57 PM Page 56

IT’S

MY t u rn

The most glorious secondary school in the world

I

BY MARVIN DECKOFF ’49, P’87

In the fall, 100 alumni and parents came to

campus for Volunteer Leadership Weekend. The volunteers talked with students and faculty members, ate in the dining hall,

attended the annual Alumni Award ceremony, and cheered on Bearcat teams.

Afterwards, two volunteers were asked to share their reflections. Here is what Marvin Deckoff ’49, P’87 wrote: I was sitting in the new music complex on Volunteer Leadership Weekend, listening to the presentation of the Alumni Award, when my eye was attracted to a wooden handrail immediately in front of me. It was so beautifully crafted, so lovingly finished, that I couldn’t help running my finger over the surface just for the pleasure of feeling a superb example of the cabinetmaker’s art. When I first saw Hotchkiss in the fall of 1945, there wasn’t much in its physical fabric that you would care to run your finger over. The school I remember was pretty rinky-dink. Our swimming pool (that was three swimming pools ago!) looked like a Turkish bath on Canal Street. The ceiling over the basketball court was too low to accommodate a set shot. The classrooms in Old Main looked like a movie set for the production of “Nicholas Nickleby.” Torn maps of ancient Greece, printed in German, dangled from the walls… I can’t explain how that building could have become so bedraggled only 54 years after it was built.

Stuff from King Tut’s tomb looks considerably spiffier than the Hotchkiss of my memories.

Am I proud that my generation, or at least my contemporaries, rebuilt and expanded Hotchkiss to make it the most glorious secondary school in the world? You bet I am! I wouldn’t go back to the Hotchkiss of 1945 for all the tea in China. However, I have been asked for my personal reactions to the changes, and I want to be honest. “Odi et amo,” wrote Catullus. Well, I love it, and I hate it, too. The old Hotchkiss was an ascetic, frugal sort of

56

H

O T C H K I S S

M

A G A Z I N E

place. Saint Benedict would have felt right at home on our hill. We prayed, albeit begrudgingly, every day and twice on Sundays… unrelenting sermons from visiting clergymen exhorting us to eschew commerce and do God’s work instead. The schedule was rigid.

Dessert on Saturday night before the movie was one cookie. The atmosphere was one of “tough love” or, truthfully, no love at all. We were constantly being censured or even sequestered for what seemed like minor infractions. And most noticeably, it was an all-male society. There must have been about 500 people living on the hill in those days, and I can recall only four women, wives of Hotchkiss masters, who kept very far from school business and were spotted in public about as often as the Shogun of Japan. As a result, the atmosphere among us boys was often truculent and surly. There wasn’t much reason to be civilized, or even pleasant. It was a hard place. But with all that (and looking over what I have written, I admit it sounds bad), Hotchkiss had all the incandescence of a medieval monastery. There was pride, dedication, toughness, some spiritual awareness, and best of all, a lovely confidence that if you could make it here, you could make it anywhere.

So I adore the myriad improvements at Hotchkiss. We were very parochial then. The range of our outlook extended from Amenia to West Hartford. Today, well, I hardly have to tell you about Malcolm McKenzie’s emphasis on global perspectives. And in those days there was very little emphasis on the arts.

Generally we were philistines. Today we have state-of-the-art concert venues and ample stu-

dios for the pursuit of the visual arts, and plenty of activity going on in every one of them. Let’s face it, the students themselves are better adjusted socially than we were. I never remember greeting a visitor in the corridor or asking a master if I might sit with him at breakfast or shooting the breeze with a member of another class, all of which I witnessed during my 36 hours at Volunteer Leadership Weekend. The young woman who showed us around the campus was as charming, informative, and energetic as you could wish, but what utterly amazes me is that when we accidentally crossed paths again an hour later, she greeted me by name and asked if I had had a chance to explore the library! I simply can’t imagine such an exchange taking place in 1949. George Van Santvoord was a great headmaster and one of the chief influences in my life, but no one ever claimed that “togetherness” was one of his goals.

Is there any way to infuse the asceticism and dedication of the Hotchkiss I remember into the milder, more luxurious Hotchkiss of today? Once when I brought this subject up at a trustees meeting, a friend answered, “Marvin, it wasn’t just Hotchkiss that changed. It was the whole nation. We could never attract students to a school with the values of Tom Brown’s School Days. This is a different age.”

Of course he was right . . .

Reprinted from www hotchkiss.org MARVIN DECKOFF CURRENTLY SERVES AS A LEAD AGENT FOR THE HOTCHKISS FUND. HE SERVED ON THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES FROM 1981 TO 1988 AND HAS WORKED ON MANY REUNION COMMITTEES OVER THE YEARS.

134825c 4/28/11 4:21 PM Page 2

June 10 – 12, 2011 Board of Trustees

Alumni Association Board of Governors

Thomas C. Barry P’01,’03,’05

EMERITI

Katheryn Allen Berlandi ’88

Howard C. Bissell ’55, P’82

Christopher M. Bechhold ’72, P’03, Vice President and Chair, Nominating Subcommittee for Membership

Ian R. Desai ’00

John R. Chandler, Jr. ’53, P’82,’85,’87, GP’10

Lance K. Beizer ’56

Thomas J. Edelman ’69, P’06,’07

Edgar M. Cullman ’36, P’64, GP’84

William J. Benedict, Jr. ’70, P’08, ’10

William R. Elfers ’67, Vice President

Frederick Frank ’50, P’12

Katheryn Allen Berlandi ’88, President

John E. Ellis III ’74

David L. Luke III ’41

Lawrence Flinn, Jr. ’53

Dr. Robert A. Oden, Jr. P’97

Keith E. Bernard Jr. ’95, Co-chair, Alumni of Color Committee

Diana Gomez ’76, P’11,’12

Nancy Watson Symington P’76,’78, GP’00,’10

Douglas Campbell ’71, P’01

Sean M. Gorman ’72, Secretary

Francis T. Vincent, Jr. ’56, P’85

Charles A. Denault ’74, P’03, Ex Officio

John P. Grube ’65, P’00

Arthur W. White P’71,’74, GP’08,’11

Kerry Bernstein Fauver ’92

Elizabeth Gardner Hines ’93 Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet ’85 Eleanor Green Long ’76 Forrest E. Mars, Jr. ’49, P’77,’82

Quinn Fionda ’91, Chair, Communications Committee

Malcolm H. McKenzie P’10, Trustee Ex Officio

Seth M. Krosner ’79

Christopher H. Meledandri ’77

D. Roger B. Liddell ’63, P’98, Secretary

Kendra S. O’Donnell

Jennifer Appleyard Martin ’88, Chair, Gender Committee

Jean Weinberg Rose ’80, Vice President Roger K. Smith ’78, P’08 Jane Sommers-Kelly ’81 Marjo Talbott

Class of 1961 (opening reception on the evening of October 27) For more information, please contact Caroline Sallee Reilly ’87, Associate Director of Alumni and Parent Programs, at (860) 435-3892, creilly@hotchkiss.org, or visit www.hotchkiss.org/alumni, then click on Events & Reunions.

Brenda G. Grassey ’80 Edward J. Greenberg ’55, Vice President and Chair, Alumni Services Committee

Peter J. Rogers, Jr. ’73, P’07, ’11

October 28 – 30, 2011

Meredith Mallory George ’78, P’09,’11

GP’09,’09,’11,’11,’14, Vice President

Philip W. Pillsbury, Jr. ’53, P’89,’91

Classes of 1936, 1941, 1946, 1951, 1956, 1966, 1971, 1976, 1981, 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001, and 2006

Alison L. Moore ’93, Co-chair, Alumni of Color Committee Alessandra H. Nicolas ’95 Daniel N. Pullman ’76, Ex Officio Peter J. Rogers ’73, P’07,’11, Ex Officio

John L. Thornton ’72, P’10,’11, President

Wendy Weil Rush ’80, P’07, Vice President and Chair, Nominating Committee

William B. Tyree ’81, P’14, Treasurer

Peter D. Scala ’01 Bryan A. Small ’03 George A. Takoudes ’87 Jana L. Wilcox ’97

To learn more about The Board of Governors, please visit www.hotchkiss.org/Alumni/BoardGov.asp

Hotchkiss REUNION

134825c 4/28/11 4:21 PM Page 1

HOTCHKISS M

A

G

A

Z

I

N

E

Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage

PAID Permit No. 8

P. O . B O X 8 0 0 LAKEVILLE, CT 06039-0800 (860) 435-2591 w w w. h o t c h k i s s . o r g

Lakeville, CT

HOTCHKISS M

A

G

A

W i n t e r

Z 2 0 1 1

I

N

E