Hotchkiss Magazine, Winter 2013

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Board of Trustees Thomas C. Barry P’01,’03,’05 Katheryn Allen Berlandi ’88 Ian R. Desai ’00 Thomas J. Edelman ’69, P’06,’07 William R. Elfers ’67, Vice President John E. Ellis III ’74

Howard C. Bissell ’55, P’82

Keith E. Bernard Jr. ’95, Chair, Alumni of Color Committee

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

Adam Casella ’06

Frederick Frank ’50, P’12

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

David L. Luke III ’41

Patricia Barlerin Farman-Farmaian ’85, Chair, Gender Committee

EMERITI

Dr. Robert A. Oden, Jr. P’97 Francis T. Vincent, Jr. ’56, P’85 Arthur W. White P’71,’74, GP’08,’11

Quinn Fionda ’91, Chair, Communications Committee

Lawrence Flinn, Jr. ’53

Caldwell Hart ’87, P’16

Diana Gomez ’76, P’11,’12

Keith Holmes ’77

Sean M. Gorman ’72, Secretary

Alessandra H. Nicolas ’95

John P. Grube ’65, P’00

Nichole R. Phillips ’89

Elizabeth Gardner Hines ’93 Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet ’85 Eleanor Green Long ’76 Forrest E. Mars, Jr. ’49, P’77,’82 GP’09,’09,’11,’11,’14, Vice President Malcolm H. McKenzie P’10, Trustee Ex Officio Christopher H. Meledandri ’77, Vice President Kendra S. O’Donnell Thomas S. Quinn III ’71, P’15 Jean Weinberg Rose ’80, President Roger K. Smith ’78, P’08 Jane Sommers-Kelly ’81 Marjo Talbott John L. Thornton ’72, P’10,’11, Officer-at-Large William B. Tyree ’81, P’14, Treasurer

Alumni Association Board of Governors President Katheryn Allen Berlandi ’88 Vice Presidents Christina M. Bechhold ’03 Edward J. Greenberg ’55, Chair, Alumni Services Committee

For more information, please contact: Megan Denault ’03, Associate Director of Alumni Relations, at (860) 435-3114 or mdenault@hotchkiss.org.

You may also visit www.hotchkiss.org/alumni and click on Events & Reunions.

Hotchkiss REUNION

Daniel N. Pullman ’76 Ex-Officio Thomas S. Quinn III ’71 Ex-Officio Casey H. Reid ’01 Peter D. Scala ’01 Thomas R. Seidenstein ’91 Bryan A. Small ’03 Michael G.T. Thompson ’66 Carolyn H. Toolan ’97

George A. Takoudes ’87, Chair Nominating Committee Douglas Campbell III, ’71, P’01, Secretary and Chair, Nominating Subcommittee for Membership Lance K. Beizer ’56 Miriam Beveridge ’86 William J. Benedict Jr. ’70, P’08, ’10

Daniel Wilner '03

What’s New? HOW TO SEND IN CLASS NOTES

Updates, reminiscences, and photos for Class Notes may be sent to your class agent or to the Communications Office at The Hotchkiss School, 11 Interlaken Road, Lakeville, CT 06039-2141, Attention: Divya Symmers, or by e-mail to dsymmers@hotchkiss.org.

June 14-16, 2013

October 25-27, 2013

Classes of 1933, 1938, 1943, 1948, 1958, 1968, 1973, 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008

Class of 1963 - 50th Reunion Class of 1953 - 60th Reunion Photo by Jonathan Doster

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HOTCHKISS

COVER ARTIST: GREG LOCK

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HEAD OF SCHOOL

Malcolm H. McKenzie EDITOR

Roberta Jenckes DESIGNER

Christine Koch, Boost Studio CLASS NOTES EDITOR

Divya Symmers Communications Writer

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As this issue goes to press, 91 students and 16 faculty members are exploring and learning about the unique and fascinating Antarctic bioregion. Forrest Mars Jr. ’49, sponsor of this trip and two previous Hotchkiss journeys to faraway Antarctica, sees in this travel the potential for students to come face-to-face with critical environmental and geopolitical issues of our time. In sharing this educational opportunity, he carries on a powerful Hotchkiss tradition of giving back to the generations that follow him at the School. In this issue, we include profiles of alumni whose class years range from 1932 to 2003. They have in common the place of their formative learning and the messages of enduring consequence that they received here. More than one learned at Hotchkiss to work at being the best he could be in the area of his interests. A scholar of the classics, 2012 Alumni Award winner John Humphrey ’67, who is featured in this issue, would recognize this

WRITERS AND CONTRIBUTORS

quality as arête in action.

Christina Cooper Daniel Lippman ’08 Molly McDowell

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Malcolm McKenzie Henry McNulty Alan Murphy Nathaniel Sobel ’08 Divya Symmers

The Hotchkiss School does not discriminate on the basis of age, sex, religion, race, color, sexual orientation, or national orientation in the administration of its educational policies, athletics, or other school-administered programs, or in the administration of its hiring and employment practices.

Hotchkiss Magazine is produced by the Office of Communications for alumni, parents, and friends of the School.

Letters and comments are welcome.

Please send inquiries and comments to: Roberta Jenckes, The Hotchkiss School, P.O. Box 800, Lakeville, CT 060390800, email to rjenckes@hotchkiss.org, or telephone 860-435-3122.

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Media Makers

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History Makers

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Alumni Names and Faces

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True Blue

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Class Notes

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In Memoriam

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It’s My Turn

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FROM

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Perhaps the truest measure of a really fine school can only be calibrated

over time, many years of time. Viewed through this lens, success is to be gauged not by a criterion such as where graduates go to college, important as this most

certainly can be, but by what they do after that, for the rest of their lives.

The investments that we make in our students at Hotchkiss, both the material and the less tangible, must bear dividends over a lifetime.

That is why we do it, and that is why generations of graduates support our endeavors in all manner of magical ways.

The people celebrated in these pages, different as their lives are or have been, are emblems of this type of productivity. Whether they are young, older, or deceased, they represent good works and deeds that have the legs of longevity. John Humphrey, John Hersey, Henry Alford, Adam Sharp, Rocio Mendoza, and Ned Goodnow: a roll that includes these amongst many others rings out like a gong.

Scholarship, compassionate internationalism, humorous creativity, innovation, civic commitment, and inspiring philanthropy: all are strong and valuable qualities, exemplified by these graduates.

What is it that we do here, in a few teenage

years, to achieve such lasting impact? I cannot comment on the ways that worked in the past, but I can describe some of the modes in which we are trying to nurture and sustain such motivation now. For me, they are essentially qualitative. Here are a few, drawn from many.

Touch, the finger on the pulse, is one. Another is to be unfailingly an optimist, to see the good in all. Pessimism, and focusing on the negative, seldom work well in the education, the drawing out, of young people. Collaboration and participation is a third. Closeness, not distance, is a fourth. Learning through direct experience is a fifth. Dare I use the word, yes, I must: love, is a sixth. And to return to something like touch, breathing, not constricting, is a seventh.

In a boarding community such as Hotchkiss, all of us need to see ourselves as leaders in different ways, in varying capacities. I like the image of a leader as a conductor. Otto Klemperer said that the best conductors are

those that allow an orchestra to breathe.

Students and teachers in schools should breathe freely if they are to use and create opportunities to grow. Too many schools are asthmatic. But conductors of another type assist the flow of electricity and heat. In schools, leaders are channels for the passage of energy. They need to practice and promote conductivity. There is a third type of conductor that has less to do with coordination or flow and more with gate keeping. Conductors on buses and trains check that fares have been paid and that passengers are comfortable, seated correctly and comporting themselves appropriately. Leaders do this, as well. Oh yes, they do. Giving the quotidian its due is essential.

These are some of the school ways through which we set ourselves up for lives of compassionate and enduring action: breathing, releasing energy, and paying attention to daily, domestic detail.

In dedicating a recent Hotchkiss holiday to Ned Goodnow, I did so not for the endowment that he has given us but for the example that he has granted us. I chose my adjectives carefully in describing Ned to our students in auditorium: humble; generous; gracious; patient; smart; attentive; and devoted. Had I had more time to think about it, I might have been more succinct. Roberta Jenckes, who wrote this magazine’s profile on Ned, chose just three: service; loyalty; love. A true measure, verily.

LEFT: At a campus conference in the fall, Malcolm McKenzie listens with faculty members to the discussion underway.

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KEVIN HICKS APPOINTED TO BE NEXT HEAD OF SCHOOL Respected Teacher, Mentor, and Administrator B y

r. Kevin Hicks, currently the Dean of Faculty and Associate Head of School, will be the 13th person to head Hotchkiss in its 120-year history. His appointment was announced December 13 by Jean Weinberg Rose ’80, President of the Board of Trustees. “Through his scholarship, passion for school life, dedication as a mentor, and integrity as a leader,” she said, “Kevin demonstrates an inspiring commitment to the School’s purpose and to its enduring values – intellect, curiosity, discipline, and character.”

Hicks earned a B.A. in Religious Studies from Yale and a Ph.D. in English from Princeton. He has taught English at secondary schools and colleges, coached high school and collegiate lacrosse, and served as Associate Director of Admissions at Bennington College. Immediately before coming to Hotchkiss, Kevin served for five years as the Dean of Berkeley College at Yale University. In that role, he advised hundreds of undergraduates through academic and personal challenges, served on a range of standing and special College and University committees, and taught one course a year, a junior seminar on Nathaniel Hawthorne. He lives on campus with his wife, Cornelia Cannon Holden, who has led mindfulness courses for athletic coaches and student-athletes, worked with the athletic directors on a range of mission-driven departmental initiatives, and directs a new summer Portal in Leadership and Social Change. In April 2011, they welcomed the birth of their first

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child, Zuleika Alice.

Since coming to Hotchkiss in 2010, Hicks has been responsible for the hiring of approximately 40 new faculty members.

At the same time, he has helped revise the School’s strategic plan, created a distinctive Summer Faculty Symposium for Hotchkiss teachers, and enhanced the School’s approaches to teaching, learning, and administration.

The Summer Faculty Symposium, initiated this past August, brought together 20 faculty volunteers for a week of intensive study, discussion, and practical training.

The group met for six hours a day, and focused its attention on critical reflection and learner-centered pedagogy.

“The Symposium was the single best professional development experience in my time at Hotchkiss and in my profes-

sional life,” recalls Thomas Drake, Class of 1938 Chair and Instructor in History. “The heart of the program was our training in how to observe what was happening in a classroom non-judgmentally and in how to deliver feedback to colleagues in that vein.

The result was that teachers being observed were free of defensiveness; they could hear the feedback being offered and began to consider alternative ways of working with students. Kevin’s capacity to develop this kind of openness and to acknowledge and work through vulnerability is something I have not experienced before. There is a depth, wisdom, and spirituality to the leadership he offers the School.”

Hicks has demonstrated a similar ability to influence and inspire the students he has come to know and advise. They speak admiringly of his approachability, sensible nature, and willingness to spend time with them in conversation. His chapel talks, punctuated by literary and classical allusions, as well as anecdotes of Hotchkiss people, are cited frequently by students. (Some quotes from students accompany this article.)

Senior Devin White reflected his classmates and other students. “The Board of Trustees has made an excellent decision,” he said. “Dr. Hicks will lead the school in the best way he sees fit, but he will undoubtedly go about it in the correct manner. In his time as Head, the school will see no shortage of inspiration. I think I speak for a large portion of the student body when I say that the Hotchkiss community is excited for what is to come.”

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Nathaniel Sobel ’08, who knew Hicks and Cornelia Holden at Yale, says, “Kevin Hicks was my dean in Berkeley College at Yale. Both he and Cornelia are educators who inspire. At Yale, they were known across campus for their ability to connect with and empower any student they encountered.”

Aleca Hughes ’08 also knew the couple at Yale. “Dean Hicks’s warmth, wit, and leadership made me feel at home in a new, foreign place,” she recalls. “Over the years, Kevin and Cornelia were always there to offer guidance as I navigated my path as a student-athlete and young adult. But it was the little things, like a good luck email before a big exam, spotting them in the stands at Ingalls Rink on a Friday night, or a simple high five in the dining hall that truly demonstrated how much they cared.

Their strength as leaders and teachers is unparalleled. I know they will lead Hotchkiss with integrity and grace.”

Cornelia Cannon Holden graduated summa cum laude from Bowdoin College, where she was a NCAA Division II giant slalom ski racing champion and a member of both the varsity tennis and crew teams.

She also holds a Master’s of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, where her program of study included courses at Harvard Business School. The founder of Mindful Warrior (www.mindfulwarrior.com), Holden has spent her career helping individuals and teams achieve remarkable performances. From 2006 through the 2010 Winter Olympics, she served as the sports psychology and team-building consultant for the U.S. Women’s Ice Hockey Team. In

RIGHT: Kevin Hicks, daughter Zuleika Alice, and Cornelia Cannon Holden OPPOSITE: Catching up with students on their latest news

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‘‘

I think I speak for a large portion of the student

recent years, she has taught or implemented leadership and team-building programs at Bowdoin, Boston College, Middlebury College, Georgetown University, Yale, and a number of independent secondary schools.

Director of Summer Programs Stephen McKibben said of her: “Cornelia's vision for the Leadership and Social Change Portal reflects her personal and professional values: she is an individual who values the collaborative process, an idealist who searches for pragmatic solutions, and an entrepreneur whose core purpose is to make a difference.”

“We on the Board are eager to work with Kevin in building on the strategic initiatives that Malcolm McKenzie has advanced with courage and creativity,”

body when I say that the Hotchkiss community is excited for what is to come.

’’

Devin White, Hotchkiss Senior

said Board President Jeannie Rose. “Kevin is the right person to lead the School at this critical juncture.

Inspired by his enthusiasm and sense of shared purpose, we look forward to our collaboration. Together we will continue to make Hotchkiss a school that offers a world-class education to students from all walks of life.”

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KEVIN HICKS’S ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

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am deeply honored to accept this appointment. To join with all of you – students, faculty, staff, parents, and alumni – in contributing to the historic mission and purpose of this remarkable School is humbling, inspiring, and thrilling.

Knowing that the announcement of this meeting came suddenly, and that we all have pressing business in what remains of the day, I will speak for just a few minutes.

For more than 120 years, this is where the future has come to rehearse: in classrooms and common rooms; in labs and on stages; on grass and wood, in water and on ice; on the lake and rivers and now on the Farm; using hearts, minds, and hands. To come here in any capacity has always been to challenge others, be challenged by others, and to challenge oneself: to define and pursue excellence free of perfectionism; to dream big and master the art of the possible; to learn how to work well alone and together. I am dedicated to the School’s central proposition: “that education is the means by which we both discover our world and contribute to its transformation, and that one’s education is best pursued in the company of others, for others’ benefit as well as one’s own.”

In that spirit, I will add this: the living of one’s life is meant to be a joyous experience, especially for those who live in and around schools. That doesn’t mean that we are always joyous, or that things always go our way.We know that isn’t so, just as we know that the truest tests of character come when we face hard times, and the curriculum of those struggles – up to a point – gives this School its enduring value. That said, if we take mindful account of our own human ecology, and

move at a pace and with a purpose that respects the dignity of all souls, we will be happy and whole more often than we are not, we will reap as much as we give, and we will serve as honorable stewards of an enterprise that was here before we were and will remain after we’re gone.

To the faculty and staff, I will repeat what I have said elsewhere: to give any portion of one’s life to a school – and offer daily the colossal, unique energy that Plato has in mind when he describes teaching as “the art of turning the soul” – is both an act of courage and a testament of faith in the power of institutions to do good. You are truly the spine of this place, and it is an

honor to serve in your company.

To the students, I will simply say for now thank you for your warm support, and offer congratulations on reaching this well-deserved holiday. Along with your teachers and all of the people who make this School run, I wish you safe travels as you depart from and return to campus, and bid bon voyage to those of you who will soon be headed way, way south. I look forward to doing a lot of listening in the second semester, as I continue to solicit your views on what we can do here over the next few years working together.

Thank you, and best wishes for a happy end of term.

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STUDENT AND FACULTY REACTION “Mr. Hicks has been an incredibly approachable and available resource for students. In chapel talks, English lectures, and casual conversations, he offers a calming, insightful voice. A meeting about a college essay with him often turns into an hour-and a-half discussion about anything and everything. His dedication to getting to know us students on an individual level is appreciated by all.”

Charlotte McCary ’13 “The chapel talk he gave the spring of my sophomore year was one of the first times many of the students had heard him speak. I was enthralled by his storytelling; his unique mixture of intellectual mindfulness and fervent wit makes him the perfect Head of School for 600 motivated, but easily distracted, high-schoolers.

“Above everything else, Dr. Hicks has instilled in me a ferocious desire to learn, a fervent excitement about the possibilities of the world and my role in it. I believe he can shape Hotchkiss into the intellectually-driven, outwardly compassionate, vigorously alive place it has the potential to become.”

Avery Baldwin ’13 “Time and time again he has surprised me with how friendly and casual he is with all students. He once shared with me his perspective on educational stress. It’s people like him, constantly nudging the people in his life and in his school in a new direction, that help us become better people.”

Mark Vella ’13 “Even when he was in a rush to a meeting or having just a generally busy day, he has always made time to ask how I was feeling.

Whenever I was stressed, I could just slip into his office. Dr. Hicks is more than a faculty member, dean of faculty, or now, head of school, to me. He is a person I can trust.

When you forget his credentials, his titles, and his esteemed background, he is just sim-

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ply a well-rounded, genuine human being.”

Irisdelia Garcia ’14 “The LSC summer portal is a new program Ms. Holden created to teach young adults to become mindful leaders through the practice of nonviolent communication. For the social change component, we learned the basics of documentary filmmaking and made our own documentary, all in three weeks. My documentary 'Homegrown' captured the change in the Hotchkiss dining hall in relation to the Fairfield Farm. The program was intense, but I can say it was a transformative experience for all of us who participated as we were invited to walk the practice of nonviolent communication. Since the program ended, I am lucky to still have access to Ms. Holden, guiding me in the practice of being mindful of myself and others around me. I am so thankful for her presence in my life, and I am excited for more Hotchkiss students to learn from truly amazing mentors.”

Sunwoo “Sunny” Kim ’13 “I had the chance to work with Kevin in community-wide discussions about The New Yorker article, ‘The Story of a Suicide,’ our all-School read by the journalist Ian Parker on the suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi. Kevin listened carefully to the students gathered, genuinely interested in their thoughts and reactions to the article. Most important to Kevin was that the students take the lead in shaping the way the community could approach the issues raised.”

Dean of the Class of 2013 and Instructor in English Christina Cooper “Kevin has helped us to craft a team approach, ensuring that everyone who is involved in designing or implementing program is present, so that each idea (or possible setback) is allowed, encouraged, heard, and entered into the collective design.

“This principle guided a team of us who

were working on making some changes to the advisory system. We looked at the academic, co-curricular, dormitory, and more holistic needs of students over the school year. As a result, we developed a Faculty Advisory Calendar that details those actions for our weekly advisory meetings, and we keep parents apprised of those actions through the Parent Central portal of our School website.”

Dean of Residential Life and Instructor in Biology Jennifer Craig “Cornelia is now in her third year working with the Athletic Department on various initiatives. Last year, she helped the Athletic Department to design a formal coaching evaluation process. This process has proven to be so valuable for observing practices, facilitating professional development, and encouraging reflective learning, thus furthering the high standard and strong tradition of coaching excellence at Hotchkiss. Cornelia's background and expertise with her Mindful Warrior program have also been a terrific asset, as she continues to do great work with some of our teams this winter.”

Co-Director of Athletics Robin Chandler “Cornelia truly cares about people and is committed to social change. She’s steady, determined, and kind. When we worked together in Admissions, visiting families quickly saw her as a sensitive and forthright mentor. Her advocacy for a more introspective admission process challenged us to see ourselves as educators, as well as admissions officers. On a more personal level, she and Kevin were a source of deep support last year when my mother passed away. Both of them provided me with a safe and comforting haven when I needed one. I am truly excited about Hotchkiss and the road ahead!”

Senior Associate Director of Admission and Coordinator of Institutional Outreach Dana Brown

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Hotchkiss explorers revel in an unforgettable journey ON DECEMBER 29, 107 INTREPID TRAVELERS BEGAN THE TRIP OF A LIFETIME, STARTING FROM LAKEVILLE AND MAKING STOPS IN CHILE

The trip for 91 students and 16 faculty marked the third venture for Hotchkiss people to the far-off continent; all three trips have been sponsored by Vice President of the Board of Trustees Forrest Mars Jr. ’49. In this unique and fragile Antarctic bioregion, visitors confront firsthand the critica l environmental issues that are growing precipitously in our time – diminishing ozone hole that threatens the existing food supply for in digenous species, over-fishing of the seas, geopolitical struggles involving oil rights, among others. The students and faculty mem bers sent back thrilling reports and amazing photographs from their experiences on the trip; their blogs can be found at www.hotchkiss.or g.

AND ARGENTINA BEFORE BEGINNING A CRUISE THAT WOULD TAKE THEM TO THE ANTARCTIC REGION.

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2012 Alumni Award winner John Humphrey ’67: Committed to the scholarly life B Y

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Growing up in England, John H. Humphrey ’67 was always aware of history and historical places. “I had a collection of perhaps 200 guidebooks for historic sites in my bedroom, next to my bed,” he says.

BELOW: John H. Humphrey

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“My parents were very educated and well informed,” John recalls. “And they loved the countryside. They loved history. So every chance we had, we would go for a walk on the Downs, or we would visit Roman villas – not so much museums, but we visited historic sites, which in England are very well maintained. Historic churches, too. Any archaeological site we passed, we stopped at.”

At that point, John did not have his eyes set particularly on archaeology. “I did classics,” he says. “My mother taught high school Latin, so it almost came naturally to me.”

After he had graduated from the British equivalent of high school in Bath, he spent a year at Hotchkiss in an English Speaking Union program. Once again, classical languages were among the subjects he enjoyed.

“Allan Hoey taught Latin,” he says. “He was a real academic – a serious, serious scholar.”

But he also had other academic interests, winning a School music prize. “It was for a paper on Bartok’s string quartets,” John explains, “which I’m a bit embarrassed about now, because when you get older you realize that what you did when you were young wasn’t very good. The Bartok string quartets are very difficult works to disentangle.”

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He enjoyed his year at School. “All the faculty were so friendly and supportive,” he says. “Even those I didn’t have classes with knew me, and then made arrangements for the summer, when I decided I was going to travel all around North America. Some got in touch with their relatives to arrange for me to stay with them on my travels, as did several of my classmates. People were incredibly hospitable to a foreigner.”

Developing a Passion It was when he returned to England, to start studying at Cambridge University, that he focused more and more on Roman archaeology, especially outside of Italy. “When I was at [high] school in Bath, which is a Roman city, I had done my first excavation on Hadrian’s Wall, and I liked it,” he says. “At Cambridge, my adviser, Michael Vickers, worked quite a lot in Greece, and so I was always hearing about the Roman provinces from him. Then when I did my dissertation, more of my time was spent traveling around the Roman empire. I became very interested in the provinces early on.”

John’s classmate, Mark Pierce ’67, who now lives in Connecticut and is vice president of a pharmaceutical company, studied in England after Hotchkiss; he spent the Christmas of 1967 with John and his family in Sussex. “The atmosphere was warm and lively,” he says.

“John made a point of showing me the sights in the area of historical and architectural interest. It was obvious that history was his passion.”

He became particularly knowledgeable about circuses – structures designed for chariot races and other shows. “What I was really interested in was how the buildings were built for the sport of racing chariots,” he says. “The answer is they were designed very, very carefully. They didn’t just enclose a field and have the char-

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iots run around; the buildings followed the requirements of the sport to make it as exciting and as fair as possible for the competitors. And it took a while to evolve. The one that was best preserved, which provided a lot of the answers, was in Libya, where we worked for one summer: Lepcis Magna. That circus was the key to understanding what the main issues were. These are gigantic – 500 yards long – bigger than five football fields.”

His 1986 book, Roman Circuses: Arenas for Chariot Racing, is still the definitive word on the subject, more than 25 years after its publication.

An Honored Professor After returning to the U.S. to earn a Ph.D. degree, John became a professor at the University of Michigan, where he taught for 20 years and became an internationally acknowledged leader in Roman archaeology and scholarship. Mark Pierce, who also lived in Ann Arbor at the time, remembers that John had his home modified to house his extensive library “by converting his garage into stacks, completely filling the space from floor to ceiling. The car was permanently displaced to the driveway.”

John stopped both archaeological digs and classroom teaching in 1995 to devote himself to editing the Journal of Roman Archaeology, which he had founded almost a decade earlier. “The Journal is a full-time job,” he says.

“This year’s issue is 1,030 pages, and we also publish six supplementary volumes a year, which are hardcover books on themes – for example, ‘Science in Roman Archaeology.’”

The Journal, with a circulation of 1,200, publishes articles not only in English, but in French, Spanish, German, and Italian as well. “Why should everybody – Italians, for example, who invented Roman archaeology – have to write in English, if they don’t want to?”

John asks. He knows those languages well enough, he modestly admits, “that I can correct mistakes; and if something really needs rewriting beyond my competence, I will give it to one of the editorial board, who will help me.”

Groundbreaking Journal Before John created the Journal, says Richard Davis, co-head of Hotchkiss’s Classics and Modern Languages

Department, “Roman archaeology was regionalized, each country publishing the work of its own archaeologists. There was no forum for synthesis or comparison, no venue to write about empire-wide trends – in other words, no place to discuss Roman archaeology as it appears from Britain to Syria. It is almost unthinkable, especially in today’s connected world, that this was the state of affairs only 25 years ago. That it is not the case today is testament in part to the success of the Journal. It has encouraged archaeologists to be less provincial, and to encounter material from elsewhere that is relevant to their own work.”

John’s wife, Laura, oversees the business aspects of publishing the Journal, from its offices in their home in Portsmouth, RI. Their daughter, Leah, a graduate student of Egyptology at Penn, runs the Journal’s website. The Humphreys’ son, Graham, graduated from Brandeis with a degree in art history.

John’s return to Hotchkiss in October to receive the Alumni Award was just one of many trips he has made back to his alma mater over the years. “Whenever I come back, I go to as many classes as I can,” he says, “and I am absolutely bowled over by the sophisticated level, which is I would say just as good as college. In some cases, undoubtedly better than college.

“The quality of the Hotchkiss education is extraordinary. I don’t know of any other school, even in England, that really teaches kids to think at this age.

Most of the teaching when we were growing up was memorization. They don’t do that here. And a lot of it is by dialogue, forcing the students to answer deeper questions about the subject. That’s why this school is so good.”

TOP: Sharing the day with classmates, l-r: front row, Carlton Smith, Chris Casler, and Art Thorn; second row, John Burke, Brendan Harrington, John Humphrey, Mark Pierce, and John Welles; back row, Bill Elfers, Eric Bruenner, Neil Wallace, Tom Loucks, and Steve Koch ABOVE: At the Alumni Award ceremony, Humphrey is congratulated by Malcolm McKenzie and Katheryn Berlandi ’88.

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ARCHITECTURE

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Design is sweet in this Architecture 530 class B Y

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he world of contemporary art is in a state of constant flux, as artists young and old compete to stretch boundaries ever further and to shake up our notions of what constitutes art. One trend we’re seeing is the blurring of mediums and formats. Whether it be avant-garde composer John Cage’s anarchic compositions, architectural structures that bring the outdoors in, or contestants on TV’s “Project Runway” browsing through a hardware store for dress materials, doing unexpected things with unusual materials will get you noticed.

Students in Instructor of Art Brad Faus’s Architecture 530 class are taking on a project recently completed by apparel design students at RISD: fabricating shoes out of candy. They’ve raided the local five-and-dime in their quest for sweet feet. But this wasn’t a grab-and-go race so often played out in reality competition TV

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RIGHT: the completed paizar .

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shows. Students first sketched plans and carefully considered shoe armatures that would keep their confectionary creations together. Some students used hardware cloth or cardboard to serve as their structural foundations, while another decided to get creative with flippers.

After that came the painstaking process of getting the selected candy to adhere, typically with the use of heat guns and glue guns. As so often happens in art, plans changed as students grew more familiar with their materials. Martinez Bertoni ’14 had plans for a rock candy stiletto heel, but ended up going with a stack of colorful gummy worms instead. Several students found fruit leather to be useful for hiding armatures.

Maihan Wali ’14 created some fanciful elfin shoes made from sprinkles, while John Walton ’13 opted to go the sports route, constructing a pair of cleats from Mike and Ikes with marshmallow insoles.

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“The best part of the project was using something in a way in which it was never intended. Half the time i forgot the things we were gluing together were edible. I actually just photographed my shoes for my college supplements. I hope that they will add an unconventional flair to my portfolio.” – Cody Cintrón ’13 THE ASSIGNMENT: SKETCH

In your 11x12 pad document research and begin a series of brainstorming sketches. Sketches may be simple silhouettes or more substantially developed drawings with detail. Shape, proportion, scale, and detail are all areas to which you need to pay close attention.

How many different kinds of shoes can you document, list, imagine and explore? Taking your time to explore, research and document is an essential part of this process. We will discuss and critique your research and sketches. Color and texture are important parts of your idea work at this time.

BUILD A SKETCH MODEL

Using mat board, corrugated cardboard, paper, and other scrap materials, build a simple prototype scale shoe model. Lifesize relative scale is required. Proportion and concept are an important part of this stage of the process. Hot glue is an appropriate adhesive. We will try to access mesh screen and make wire, hardwood dowel, balsam and basswood components available as well.

FINAL CANDY CONSTRUCTION

Final armature, color planning and resolution, candy research, sorting, sizing, shape and texture selection; development of expression, meaning...Discreet, clean, careful, well-crafted construction…

TOP: Lace-up ankle boot by Dexter Puls ’13 ABOVE: Jamaican track spikes created by Jonathan Walton ’13 RIGHT: “Moccasinful” Delight by Cody Cintrón ’13 .

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ISGP ‘‘

Independent Schools Gender Project Conference

By Molly McDowell

This conference B R O U G H T

nice strong women, T O O .

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TODAY’S HOTCHKISS GIRLS, BORN IN 1995 AND LATER, HAVE ONLY MODEST HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE OF 20TH-CENTURY FEMINISTS, ACTIVE FROM THE EARLY 1900S AND WORKING THROUGHOUT THE CENTURY IN THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT, EQUAL RIGHTS, AND BIRTH CONTROL ACTIVISM. EVEN THE MOTHERS OF CURRENT STUDENTS ARE MOST LIKELY TOO YOUNG TO HAVE FIRSTHAND AWARENESS OF THE WORK OF FEMINIST LEADERS IN THE MID- TO LATE 20TH CENTURY.

One way in which Hotchkiss girls have come to know more about the issues around which women have coalesced has been through the biennial Independent Schools Gender Project (ISGP) Conference, which Hotchkiss has hosted for the last decade. Last year, nearly 200 people from 28 schools across the country converged at the School for the conference, whose theme was “Media, Messages, and Me.” Conference participants were asked to examine the content of television programming, movies, magazines, music, and the Internet and consider the impact it has on how women and girls both perceive themselves and are perceived. One teacher attending the conference commented, “I feel so much more aware of the messages that are being sent via the media. I had never sat and really thought about how devastating it is, and how much teenage girls are up against these days.”

The idea for the conference’s theme came after the ISGP steering committee saw a preview of “Miss Representation” (www. missrepresentation.org), a documentary that explored similar themes and featured Carol Jenkins, mother of Hotchkiss Trustee Elizabeth Gardner Hines ’93.“The steering committee members felt that both the topic and those that had participated in the making of the film would be a perfect fit for our work with girls and women,” said one of the conference organizers and Counselor in Health Services at Hotchkiss Nancy Gaynor P ’99,’04.

The ISGP met for the first time in 1996 in Ukiah, CA, when

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33 women and one man from 27 independent schools met to examine the status of women and girls in their schools. Out of that meeting came some ideas: one was to keep meeting, and the other was to survey students and teachers at ISGP-member schools every three years about the impact of gender on their experience in schools.

The decision to focus on women and girls was a difficult and controversial one, wrote co-founder Ellie Griffin in 2003. The survey itself does collect data on boys and men, and the data is compared with data from earlier years for trends, similarities, and differences. However, the decision to focus on the survey’s data on girls and women is true for the conference and for some of the organization’s other activities. And, although early on a group of men from member schools had expressed interest in conducting a parallel study that focused on boys, that initiative did not take off the way that of the group’s study of girls did.

Sixteen years later, what started as an informal meeting in California has become a much anticipated event in Lakeville.

Each participating school sends small groups of students and faculty members, with delegations ranging in size from one adult and one student to four adults and seven students. Workshops at the conference included “The Media’s Impact on Women of Color,” “Healthy Hookups, Responsible Relationships,” “What is Feminism?” and “Food as Fuel.”

Keynote speaker Jennifer Pozner gave her audience much food for thought with a searing critique of reality television programming – which, she was quick to state, has even less to do with reality than we acknowledge. Pozner, a journalist and author who is also the founder of Women In Media & News (WIMN) and appeared in “Miss Representation,” exposed the myth that this programming is “what the viewers want” – in fact, higher-rated, scripted shows have been cancelled before their lower-rated reality

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RIGHT: For 15 years, the ISGP has surveyed students and teachers at member schools about the impact of gender on their experience in schools.

TV counterparts – and is simply more profitable, not needing union actors or writers nor elaborate set pieces, and being fertile ground for sponsors’ advertising dollars (see: the “American Idol” judges’ red Coca-Cola cups). And in clip after clip, Pozner showed the narrow definition of feminine beauty (always thin, mostly blond, usually white) and aspirations (either to marry a man, ideally a wealthy one, regardless of how he treats his partner, in a fairytale wedding as in “The Bachelor”; or to party hard, a la “The Jersey Shore”), as portrayed in these reality programs.

Hotchkiss teachers, alumnae, past parents, and current students who led a workshop at the conference included Elizabeth Gardner Hines ’93 and her mother Carol Jenkins, Instructor in Philosophy and Religion Emma Wynn, Anna Beck ’06, Danielle Jacobs ’13 and Meaghan Kachadoorian ’12. Other participants from Hotchkiss included the conference coordinators Nancy Gaynor, Wendy Levithan, and Nancy Bird, coordinator of student workers (who are also Hotchkiss students) Betsy Beck, and support staff Jo Anne Lakin and Peggy Hsia.

Many adult participants at the ISGP conferences, who are usually faculty members at their respective schools, attend multiple years because of their personal and professional interests and expertise and to steward forth their school’s work related to the ISGP. In contrast, student participants very rarely attend as participants more than once – but some do return as presenters. This year’s Youth in Action speaker, Brittan Berry, attended the ISGP conference in 2004. Now a Harvard graduate, she works at Google.

That community of people is a large part of what makes the ISGP conference so meaningful for those who plan, attend, and present at it. “To me, it is the collaborative work between women and girls of a mix of generations, both in the planning, the offering of workshops, speakers, and then the conference itself [that makes the conference such a valuable experience],” said Nancy Bird P’02,’03. “Mentoring is so important, and we create this process intentionally in all we do,” agreed Instructor in French Wendy Levithan. Said one conference participant of the experience in attending this year, “I realized I want to be a mentor to girls, and it’s important to believe in and support each other.”

Danielle Jacobs and Meaghan Kachadoorian, both of whom attended the 2010 ISGP conference, were so inspired by their experience that it informed a film they made and presented in

2012. Their short documentary, comprised of interviews with Hotchkiss community members, many of them women, examined the role of female students and faculty members in boarding schools and the variety of their experiences.

The ISGP conference has had a positive, though gradual, influence on gender issues at member schools whose delegations have taken action upon their returns. According to Bird, “Many schools have started gender committees (as Hotchkiss has), women’s and/or girls’ support groups, or have joined the ISGP study.” And like Berry, Jacobs, and Kachadoorian, many of the student attendees have returned as workshop presenters or gone on to write articles about gender issues.

Small-group discussion was perceptive and often lively, revolving around such topics as how so many girls and women shy away from the “feminist” label citing that they don’t, as one participant put it, “hate men,” while also considering more subtle issues of boarding school life.

The conference ended with a rousing call-to-action keynote given by Sofia Quintero, a self-proclaimed “Ivy League Homegirl” who began as a policy analyst and advocate before pursuing a career in entertainment. The author of several books who also manages to serve up a healthy dose of media-based activism armed attendees with some tools they could use to make sure their voices are heard, like using Twitter to rally an army of similarly minded folks to speak out in the name of social justice or making and uploading flip camera videos critiquing problematic portrayals of women in advertisements.

Bronwyn Donohue ’14 echoed the sentiments of many on the relevance of the conference, saying, “I come from a small, conservative town in the Midwest where I felt marginalized and like I couldn’t speak up [with feminist views] besides within my family. Hotchkiss is better – it’s the first place besides my house where it was good to be female, but there’s not a large feminist population here. This conference brought us together with a community of nice women who are strong women, too.”

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DNA Science, Debate, and Piano – three new Portals – will debut this summer or the last ten years, the Hotchkiss Summer Program and the study “portals” within it have informed and complemented the mission and values of the School by serving as an incubator for innovative curricula and exciting new initiatives in pedagogy. “As Portals enters its second decade in June 2013,” says Director of Summer Programs Stephen McKibben, “it remains committed to the model of distinctive educational programming and exceptional teaching for which it traditionally has been known.

“Ten years ago, for example, very few schools had Environmental Science programs for middle-school students that allowed them to engage in field-based scientific research,” he says, “and the Hotchkiss Environmental Science Portal was the only summer program that offered an integrated three-year curriculum that prepared students to conduct original, independent research.

“Similarly, the pedagogical vision for the Hotchkiss Chamber Music Portal – a professional chamber music in residence supplemented by three (one per week), internationally-renowned visiting chamber music quartets –was sui generis, unlike any other music program in the country.”

That pioneering spirit of exceptional programming and distinctive teaching continues today. The 2012 Summer Program saw the introduction of the inaugural Leadership and Social Change Portal, a unique, transdisciplinary curriculum integrating training in narrative techniques, mindful leadership, nonviolent communication, and conflict transformation. And 2013 will see the introduction of three new Portals: DNA Science, Debate, and Piano.

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LEFT: Portals Summer Program students practice yoga by the lake.

BELOW: The Leadership and Social Change cohort, with Yale Dean of Undergraduate Admission Jeffrey Brenzel to the right, were photographed atop Lion's Head.

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The DNA Science Portal will introduce students to the mechanics of DNA structure and function, the process of taking the genetic code and transcribing and translating it into protein, and the advances that have been made in how we understand the human genome. The Portal will culminate in an independent project in which students will sequence a small portion of their own genome that correlates with a specific physical trait such as the ability to taste bitter molecules or the inability to digest the sugar lactose.

The Debate Portal draws on the long-standing tradition of world-class debaters at Hotchkiss – champions such as Priyanka

Sekhar ’13 and Daniel Wilner ’03 – and is ideal for either novice or experienced debaters and public speakers who wish to hone their craft and to take their cases and presentations to the next level. The program will introduce students to the various forms of debate popular in DANEIS – the Debating Association of New England Independent Schools; these include Lincoln-Douglas debate, cross-examination debate, and, most commonly, Parliamentary Extemporaneous debate.

Students enrolled in the new Piano Portal will work on technique, repertoire exploration, and performance preparation in both private lessons and group master classes while

being inspired by leading concert pianists.

Students will be challenged to question their practice methods, to enhance their listening abilities, and to seek their own interpretative answers. All performances will take place in the Esther Eastman Music Center’s Katherine M. Elfers Hall, featuring our beloved Fazioli 308 concert grand, and will be recorded in high-definition audio and video.

In 2013, the Hotchkiss Summer Program will take place June 23-July 21. Information about all of the portals, including a catalog and application form, is available on the Hotchkiss website at www.hotchkiss.org/ summer-programs/index.aspx .

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ALUMNI AUTHOR’S VISIT Newly published author John Randolph Thornton ’10 visited with students in Poet-in-Residence Susan Kinsolving’s Creative Writing class.

Before the class the students received copies of two of his short stories — “Into the Water” and “Hang Tight”— and so they used the class period to ask him questions about his writing. Thornton recently published a novel, Beautiful Country (Wanrong Books) and won the Le Baron Russell Briggs Fiction Prize and an Artist Development Fellowship at Harvard.

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

GET LINKEDIN TO THE HOTCHKISS ALUMNI GROUP

The Hotchkiss Alumni Association Board of Governors invites you to get “LinkedIn” to the Hotchkiss Alumni Group. LinkedIn is a social media site which boasts the world’s largest professional network on the Internet in over 200 countries and territories. LinkedIn members have the ability to search for new career opportunities, request references, and much more.

Over 1,050 Hotchkiss alumni currently belong to the Hotchkiss Alumni LinkedIn Group. The Bearcat-exclusive group is intended to help Hotchkiss alumni keep in touch and build professional relationships. As members of the group, alumni may make new professional connections, post and find job opportunities, and learn about networking events.

To become a member of the Hotchkiss Alumni LinkedIn Group, you must be a member of LinkedIn. To create a LinkedIn account free of charge, visit www.linkedin.com/home and follow the prompts.

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To join the Hotchkiss Alumni LinkedIn Group, log into your LinkedIn account and locate the LinkedIn search box. You can then search for “Hotchkiss Alumni” to locate the group and become a member. A member of the Office of Alumni and Development staff will approve your membership request.

In addition to LinkedIn, Hotchkiss alumni may also professionally connect through the School’s Hotchkiss Career Connections (HCC) Online. Any registered user of Hotchkiss’s Alumnet – the general online directory – has access to HCC Online and can search the network across various criteria (city, class, etc.). HCC is a network of alumni who have volunteered to provide career advice about the field in which they work. This online tool is intended solely to assist alumni in connecting with each other to discuss careers, relocating, and/or their specific company or organization.

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Hotchkiss Alumni in Print The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

BY TOM REISS ’82 CROWN PUBLISHING, SEPTEMBER 2012

Born in the sugar colony of Sainte Domingue (present-day Haiti), General Alexandre (“Alex”) Dumas was the illegitimate son of a black woman slave and a French nobleman who became a hero of the French Revolution and the very real inspiration for The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, novels written by his son, Alexandre Dumas. Based in Paris during a brief but heady decade of emancipation and racial equality, the swashbuckling young man rose to command the cavalry in France’s massive invasion of Egypt before finally becoming a threat to Napoleon, who had him cast into prison – and subsequently erased from the history books. The Black Count, which was named one of the best books of 2012 by The New York Times, sheds light on a remarkable and unjustly forgotten life.

The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America

BY JAMES T. PATTERSON ’52 BASIC BOOKS, DECEMBER 2012

Watts burning, the assassination of Malcolm X, anti-war demonstrations – these are iconic images from the year 1965. But it was also a time of groundbreaking legislation, including the Voting Rights Act, and a moment when reform flourished purely because of idealism. In The Eve of Destruction, James T. Patterson, distinguished Ford Foundation Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University, examines the pivotal mid-decade point when “America’s social cohesion began to unravel and …the turbulent phenomenon …called ‘The Sixties’ broke into view.” At the start of 1965, Lyndon Johnson declared that the country had no “irreconcilable conflicts”; by year’s end, it was deeply divided over issues ranging from civil rights to Vietnam. Professor Patterson notes how LBJ’s progressive social initiatives and the countercultural revolution combined to spur a backlash of conservatism still in effect today.

Two Roads to War: The French and British Air Arms from Versailles to Dunkirk

BY ROBIN HIGHAM ’44 NAVAL INSTITUTE PRESS, JUNE 2012

Unflinching Zeal: The Air Battles Over Britain and France, May-October 1940

BY ROBIN HIGHAM ’44 NAVAL INSTITUTE PRESS, SEPTEMBER 2012

In Two Roads to War, Professor Higham, a former RAF pilot who taught military history at Kansas State University for 35 years, examines the evolution of the Armée de l’Air and the Royal Air Force during the inter-war period from 1918 to 1940, describing the different paths these two allies took while evaluating their respective governments’ support and deficiencies. “An impressive achievement…filled with fascinating details,” wrote one reviewer. In Unflinching Zeal, Higham continues his in-depth comparison of French and British policies, adding the status of the Luftwaffe as all three forces prepared for battle on the eve of World War II. The second book not only fills a significant void in the story of the defeat of France but also more fully explains the Battle of Britain and the influence it had on the Luftwaffe’s 1941 invasion of the U.S.S.R.

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Hotchkiss and Hiroshima: The formative years of John Hersey ’32

BY NATHANIEL SOBEL ’08

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In August of 1946, a thirty-two year old John Hersey, just

fourteen years out of Hotchkiss – profoundly altered the world’s perception of nuclear weapons. A full year after the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Americans continued to view the Japanese as the subhuman

SOURCE: THE JOHN HERSEY PAPERS, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY.

creatures depicted on wartime propaganda posters.

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Hersey’s 31,000-word article “Hiroshima,” which the editors of The New Yorker boldly published as the sole editorial content of the magazine, forced readers to confront – for the first time – the humanity of the more than 100,000 Japanese men, women, and children who perished in a flash.

Unlike most reporting about the bomb, which focused on its immense physical power, Hersey documented the hours and days after the bomb fell through the eyes of six individuals: two doctors, a seamstress, an office clerk, a Japanese Methodist preacher and a German Jesuit.

Reconstructing each character’s survival through sights of “wholly burned faces” and “hollow eye sockets,” Hersey placed the reader directly in the scenes of destruction. Yet, even as Hersey’s portrait of the human suffering caused by the bomb was stark, he withheld all judgments about the use of the bomb throughout the entire piece. He instead left his readers to face the inescapable moral judgments on their own.

The article sold out within hours and in the words of The New Yorker editor Harold Ross, “kicked up more fuss than any other magazine

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OPPOSITE: Hersey's passport photo from a reporting trip in China in 1939

article I ever heard of.” Albert Einstein famously sent 1,000 copies to the world's leading scientists with a note explaining that Hersey’s portrait “has implications for the future of mankind which must deeply concern all responsible men and women.” The day after the magazine hit newsstands, a radio host in New York explored what made Hersey’s account so chilling: “those who read John Hersey's issue of The New Yorker may go through two stages of feeling.

One is to realize, with almost unbearable horror, what an American action meant to fellow human beings. The other is to realize that this may well happen some day to America.” In the morning of that same day, George R. Caron, the tail-gunner on the plane that dropped the bomb, and the first person in the world to witness the mushroom cloud, called The New Yorker office to request a copy of the article.

According to a carbon copy of a memo in The New Yorker archive, a secretary, “Miss Terry,” mailed it to him that afternoon.

For my senior thesis, I spent the better part of my senior year at Yale – also Hersey’s alma mater – in search of Hersey as a young man.

Writing behind wooden desks in New Haven that he must have known too, or imagining him in the Main Building at Hotchkiss – places that had also shaped me – he felt within my grasp.

Before his death in 1993, Hersey donated 68 cardboard boxes of his papers to the library at Yale. And during my first weeks at school in September, I tore into those files in pursuit of anything that might reveal Hersey to me. What I initially found offered surprisingly little of his character. Through the course of the year, I extended my search to The New Yorker records at the New York Public Library, his correspondence at the Library of Congress, and Hotchkiss.

SOURCE: THE HOTCHKISS SCHOOL ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

RIGHT: John Hersey photo from the July 1965 Hotchkiss Alumni News

Last January, I called the Hotchkiss library on the chance that Hersey’s student records had been preserved. When school archivist Peter Rawson told me that the 80-year hold on Hersey’s student file had expired just two weeks before, it seemed to be fate. Later that week, I was following Mr. Rawson up the carpeted stairs to a familiar table in the library’s mezzanine. Crouched over what remained of Hersey’s four years in Lakeville, I discovered an unexpected story about the very best of Hotchkiss.

In February of 1927, a 12-year-old John Hersey applied for a scholarship at Hotchkiss.

According to a health report folded inside his now-yellowed application, he weighed 105 and 3/4 pounds and measured five feet, four inches tall. But after Hersey completed the school's entrance exams that summer, his application was denied. George Van Santvoord, the legendary headmaster, explained the decision to Roscoe Hersey, Hersey's father, in a frank letter dated June 28, W i n t e r

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1927. “John is not yet ready for our work in Latin or English,” Van Santvoord wrote, “and in view of his youth the committee felt that we had best not accept him as a candidate for a scholarship this year. He is very young and is not developed physically quite as much as we think desirable of a scholarship boy.”

Unlike the majority of the school's students at the time, Hersey’s family could not afford the cost of tuition. Hersey was born and raised in China, where his mother and father were missionaries with the YMCA. On a famine relief trip, Roscoe Hersey, who his son described as of a generation of “worldly social gospel missionaries who wanted to help improve the quality of life of the Chinese,” contracted encephalitis. In 1925, when Hersey was 11 years old, his father fell so ill that the family had to return to the United States.

Hersey's father remained bedridden and unable to hold a job until he died in 1945. In a note attached to his son’s application, he explained: “I am applying for a free scholarship because of the financial situation in which I find myself due to ill health. I have been floored by the disability-hat, making it imperative that John became as nearly selfsupporting as feasible.” Hersey carried this weight with him throughout his life.

Hersey submitted a second application to Hotchkiss in 1928. On the night of May 15, 1928, he slept in Van Santvoord's home and took the entrance exams the following morning. This time, his scores – an 86 in English, an 80 in Latin, a 72 in Scholarly Aptitude, and a 140 on an IQ test – were high enough for the admissions board to grant him a scholarship for the 1928-1929 academic year. But, scholarships were awarded with expectations of serious responsibility. As Van Santvoord informed Hersey's father, “most important of all, [John] will be expected to maintain a high rank in scholarship and to set a good example

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SOURCE: THE NEW YORKER RECORDS, MANUSCRIPTS AND ARCHIVES DIVISION, NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY.

RIGHT: A memo to William Shawn, then the assistant editor of The New Yorker

in industry, spirit, fidelity, thoroughness, moral influence and all other matters affecting character. Beneficiary aid may be withdrawn at any time when the conditions are not properly met, and will be continued from year to year only when the recipient of such aid has shown himself to be highly worthy of it.” When Hersey arrived in Lakeville in September, he was aware that he would have to earn his admission three more times.

As a scholarship student from China, Hersey experienced Hotchkiss differently than many of his peers. Scholarship boys, Hersey told The Paris Review in 1988, “were in a separate social class.” But he never resented his duties, which included cleaning classrooms and serving other students during meals.

“Waiting on tables, you were at the nerve center of gossip and understanding – you knew everybody, what they were like, what they were about,” he later reflected. Presented with a situation that might have destroyed some, he never submitted to self-pity. He instead

learned to view his unique background as a source of strength.

In a eulogy delivered for George Van Santvoord in 1975, Hersey recalled one of his first days as a prep. Walking through the Main Building, Hersey felt a hand “slither” under his elbow. Before he knew whom the hand belonged to, Van Santvoord asked him “what was Stradivarius’s first name?” “Dizzy with homesickness,” Hersey could only muster: “uh, sir, I don’t know,” and walked away demoralized. Some days later, Hersey again felt the “flexible hand” turn him around. “Is it true that eeny, meeny, miney, mo is counting in Chinese?” Van Santvoord inquired. This time, knowing the answer, he replied, “no, sir,” and counted in Mandarin, “yi, erh, san, sz, wu, lyon, chi, ba jyou, shr.”

Van Santvoord’s eccentric questions initially unnerved the teenager. But, undoubtedly, being able to answer the headmaster afforded him a degree of confidence. Van Santvoord had been able “to breathe an identity into the

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shapeless clod of a homesick 15 year-old that I was, for not only had he known my name, he had known that I had been born in China, he had known that I played the violin,” he told the audience in the Chapel.

As a student, Hersey wrote two articles about China for the Literary Review. During his junior year, he published “Sky Dragon,” a page-long sketch of a rural Chinese village on the evening of a solar eclipse. The entire school must have known that Hersey grew up in China, and from his eloquent descriptions of how “the bright full moon, rising from the hill-less horizon makes the group of squarish mud and straw huts look like child's blocks” or a man with “long black hair wound into pig-tail, dull eyes set in a sallow, shrunken skin and a faded blue coolie coat covering his soiled black cloth shoes,” it was clear that Hersey was writing about a place he knew well. Yet, Hersey's relationship to the content is ambiguous. As the story closes with an image of an old Chinese man staring “at the rustling cornfield beyond, a harp played by the winds, at the tranquil Moon, queen of the sky, mother of the earth,” it ends on a note of fantasy.

By contrast, in Hersey’s second piece “Why?” which he published as a senior, he wrote himself directly into the servants’ quarters in the kitchen of his childhood home in China. Told in the first person, Hersey explains that the servants “were used to having me around and often forgot I was there, for I used to sit still watching the old cook lazily lift and put down his rose-water pipe, punctuating his puffs of the pale smoke with sage sayings.” The narrative turns when Hersey overhears the servants discussing his family’s Christmas celebrations. They simply cannot comprehend why the family first includes them in the celebration and offers them presents only to banish them to the kitchen to prepare a feast. They are further perplexed when Hersey cannot explain the meaning of the family’s “tree worship.”

In the story’s closing lines, Hersey records the wise cook’s reasoning: “I know why I put incense before the Food God: it is so that my meals will not burn, and my cakes will not be

hard. The farmer knows that he kowtow to the Rain-God so that his crops will be plentiful. The maiden knows that she sighs before the Child-God so that she will conceive. We know why. These people know not.”

Provocatively presenting an eastern worldview as more rational than the western tradition, Hersey questioned the meaning of his family’s Christmas rituals. He held nothing back even as he challenged a holiday that was likely sacrosanct to his audience.

As he closes the piece with the short paragraph: “I crept away puzzled, troubled. It was then that I began to search for the why,” the difference between the two pieces is marked.

Writing towards the end of his senior year, Hersey was not only willing to put his unusual background on display before the entire community; but he also described an intimate moment of vulnerability. And in this moment of self-realization, Hersey identified his particular instinct to reach for a deeper truth, the defining characteristic of “Hiroshima.”

By his senior year, Hersey earned the highest respect of both his teachers and classmates. In The Mischianza, he was voted “most influential” member of his class and the “boy who had done most for Hotchkiss.”

At commencement, he won the Treadway Prize for the member of the senior class whose “industry, courage, leadership and honorable conduct have done most for the School." Van Santvoord described him as “the outstanding boy of his class” in his college recommendation.

Hersey, who lived a life of letters, writing long-form journalism and more than twenty books until he died in 1993, remained connected to his teachers at Hotchkiss throughout his entire life. When he graduated from Yale, and before he left for a year-long fellowship at Cambridge, he inscribed a self-published volume of poetry to Van Santvoord in blue ink: “please, sir, think of this as nothing more ambitious, nothing less important, than an affectionate farewell, a wish for speed to the days of absence from friends.” In 1937, he even corresponded with Van Santvoord about potential openings in the English department.

According to Fay Vincent ’56, who recently

published a comprehensive biography of Van Santvoord, when Hersey was awarded the Alumni Award in 1961, “Van Santvoord spoke affectionately about his former student at the event. Hersey had been a Van Santvoord favorite.” George McChesney, the storied English instructor known to his students as “Mr. Mac,” also left an indelible mark on Hersey’s development as a writer.

Reflecting on McChesney’s death in 1985, Hersey described “one act of [McChesney’s] that changed my life” when McChesney gave Hersey a copy of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. “I don’t know that I was ready for that book just then, at sixteen,” Hersey wrote, “But the shock of discovery, which is surely what Mr. Mac was after, turned one callow youth right around in his tracks.”

For Hersey, Hotchkiss was a place of immeasurable stimulation and growth. In four years, he developed a sense of self and an instinct for language that guided him throughout his career, and propelled him towards “Hiroshima.” He enriched the community of the school through his distinctive perspective, intellectual curiosity, and commitment to leave Lakeville a richer place than when he first arrived. In Hersey’s achievement lies an exemplary story of Hotchkiss between the wars, a school where the vision of great educators like Van Santvoord and McChesney inspired students to discover themselves and their passions, and to serve as a force for good in the world.

Hersey spent much of his senior year at Yale investigating the life of the famed Revolutionary War-era painter, John Trumbull, for his own senior thesis. In his introduction, he explained that “Trumbull was by no means a great man.” The subject of my senior thesis was indeed a great man, one who embodies Hotchkiss’ highest values. In those brittle records of the past is a beacon for the Hotchkiss of the future – a testament to the school’s historical commitment to nurturing language and conscience.

NATHANIEL SOBEL ’08 GRADUATED FROM YALE UNIVERSITY IN MAY OF 2012. HIS AMERICAN STUDIES SENIOR THESIS WAS TITLED “SEARCHING FOR JOHN HERSEY.”

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The Elevating Etiquette of Henry Alford ’80: An Investigative Humorist Turns to Manners

BY DIVYA SYMMERS

In his 2012 book on manners, Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?, author and occasional NPR commentator Henry Alford – a member of the Class of 1980 – describes a few dubious modern mores: The check-out girl at a local supermarket who accepts a customer’s apology after she drops his apple; the distressing ubiquity of “no problem” instead of “you’re welcome”; people who hit “reply all” on group e-mails merely to say “thanks” (or worse, “thx”).

“Some of my interactions with fellow humans literally make me glad to be alive, and some of them make me pig-biting mad,” he confessed recently, graciously explaining that “pig-biting” – a term that regularly reoccurs in his writings – comes from an article he read years ago in The

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Weekly World News, a supermarket tabloid known for its firm grasp of reality and alien abduction stories.

“The entire sentence was, ‘I’m pig-biting mad about pantywaist liberals,’” he remembers. “It has so many great comic tropes in it: Frustration, pork, biting, underwear. It’s the Platonic ideal of comic sentences.”

Alford, who writes a monthly New York Times column on modern comportment, knows his comic sentences: His oeuvre consists of articles on everything from posing as a psychic reader to finding a swimsuit that made him look like Jude Law to visiting the New York Stock Exchange in pajamas. Some of these appeared in his debut humor collection, Municipal Bondage (1993), including an adventurous account of driving the governor of Colorado around Manhattan during a Democratic Convention; his next book, Big Kiss (2000), won the Thurber Prize, and in 2009, he published How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth).

“Writing in the mode of S.J. Perelman and Flann O’Brien, Alford produces pieces of participatory journalism that are arch, smart, and exquisitely absurd,” enthused The Village Voice Literary Supplement.

At Hotchkiss, Alford was more involved with theater and film than writing, although he proudly cites getting a poem “about throwing rice at weddings” into The Review, the School literary journal of the time. “The bigger coup for me was getting cast in “Promises, Promises” (chorus, patchwork gingham pants), “As You Like It” (Silvius, burlap sack), “Oliver!” (Artful Dodger, rags).

The roles kept getting bigger and the costumes more threadbare. It felt like I was building up to a nude King Lear.

“This is sort of a recovered memory, and thus a little shaky,” he continued, “but I’m pretty certain that the great Allison Janney [Class of 1977] was present at Hotchkiss Dramatic Association meetings I attended my first year. I remember her huge, sympathetic, doe eyes. Even as a teenager, she had this wonderful, timeless, classical vibe; I remember looking at her and thinking the equivalent of, ‘She has been teleported to us from the 1940s.’ ” All schools have their share of all-around students who sail through exams and honor rolls en route to the college and grad school of their choice – the kind of talented young people whose future seems as set and shining as the mountain of gold stashed inside Fort Knox. But there are others, secret and not-so secret rebels, who – even with 14-karat academic records – temporarily follow their bliss into places as metaphorically messy as a pile of fresh cow patties.

Sometime during his upper-mid year, Alford found himself in the latter group, as he candidly admits on his website, and after indulging in excessive “party animalism,” was asked to leave.

In truth, the late 1970s – the legendary days of disco, Studio 54, and New York’s raucous CBGB’s – were probably one of the best times in history to party. The Sixties were becoming an unfashionable memory, but their influence lingered in a generational urge to tip at authoritarian windmills, and there was a general recklessness in the air.

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However, time passes, things change, and people grow older, as Stevie Nicks sang at around the same time. “It doesn’t feel great to have wasted other people’s time and money like that,” he observed ruefully by email not long ago. “But teens will be teens; the heart wants what the heart wants.

Sometimes dissipation is a pathway to creative discovery, and sometimes it’s just a lack of imagination or a desperate attempt to be popular. You can’t always parse it. I’m embarrassed that I got kicked out. But I’m glad that I now know that people’s affection for me has nothing to do with whether or not I party.”

Today he recalls Hotchkiss both fondly and as being especially blessed when it comes to location.

“I remember first visiting and thinking, ‘A

campus in the middle of a golf course?!?!

That is both the preppiest and the most dangerous thing I’ve ever heard of!’ But that golf course at sunset is gorgeous to behold, of course. And I have many sweet memories of sitting at the Boathouse during spring and summer, and of tromping and cross-country-skiing through the Woods in winter.”

Among the teachers who made an impression, the Hawk – whom he had for French – looms large. “Mr. Hawkins’ insistence on discipline and intellectual rigor was a refreshing corrosive to that self-indulgent, slackjawed period in my life,” he notes. “Then I got to have dinner at his house once, and it was lovely to see how he threw all that rigor into joyfully making a great meal.” He still counts former classmates among his closest friends, including Carl Sprague ’80, who

ABOVE: Henry Alford with friend and NPR colleague, Korva Coleman W i n t e r

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QUESTION / ANSWER

A Q&A with Henry Alford Who do you think are the funniest writers in history?

The writers who make me laugh the most are James Thurber, Paul Rudnick, Tina Fey, and Stella Gibbons, in the novel Cold Comfort Farm. The writers whose worldview or voice is the most admirably comic to me are Anthony Lane, Sam Lipsyte, PG Wodehouse, David Sedaris, and Lorrie Moore.

Are you thinking about/working on a new book? If so what will it be/what is it about?

If you could choose anything, what would be your ‘dream’ writing project?

My family and boyfriend tell me that, re: discussing my upcoming work at any given time, I am best described as "closet-y."

Telling people what you're dreaming about can, uh, deflate the balloon. I'm trying to twist this long skinny balloon into the shape of a dachshund, and if you tell me it looks like a flower, then you've momentarily impeded my dachshund mastery. Let the little dog emerge, people! He is shy, and prone to piddling.

My ‘dream’ writing project would, of course, be one that wrote itself. This has never happened to me. And anyone who tells you that "the words just poured out of me" is probably describing his Twitter account.

What advice do you have for students interested in pursuing acting or writing? Is it something you would encourage them to do? Are the arts a good escape in a bad economy?

Do it! Or, rather, do it because you love it, and not because you think you should be doing it. And be OK with the fact that you may not be able to make a living

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from it. The pain comes from people who set out to support themselves from their art, and then discover that they cannot.

But what's wrong with going the Wallace Stevens route (work at insurance company, write poetry on the side) or the Anthony Trollope route (work as civil servant, write many wonderful, extremely long books each morning before going into work)? Or what's wrong with raising two kids during the day and then doing community theater at night?

Professional writing is, of course, a pain in the ass, although there are also lots of joys to be found. If you write for magazines or television, you’re prey to a lot of notes and suggestions and shortenings; if you write fiction, you might as well try to open a store on the prairie that sells dirt.

As a friend of mine who writes fiction said to me recently, "You can't even GIVE it away." So, as with professional acting, professional writing should probably be pursued by people who NEED to write, who would feel like they weren't living if they weren't writing.

Of all the things you write and have written about – life experiences, the pursuit of success, graceful aging, manners – which are the most important to you?

Manners. Not the raised-pinky-andasparagus-forks variety, but the empathetic-responses-to-situations variety. Some of my interactions with fellow humans literally make me glad to be alive, and some of them make me pig-biting mad.

As I see it, every day we inherit the toilet seat. Life is like a public bathroom, and each time we emerge from that bathroom, the world assumes that the state of the toilet seat is of your doing, even though you

were only in the bathroom to mess with your hair for the sixth time today. So let's start cleaning those seats off!

What story, article or book has been the most satisfying to write? What was the hardest?

The two most satisfying things to have written were a “Shouts and Murmurs” in The New Yorker (a monologue about a cabdriver in England who recites Auden poems to his passengers, as some English cabdrivers were actually doing to celebrate Auden's centenary) and my book How to Live (while interviewing lots of people over the age of 70 about their hard-won wisdom, I was inadvertently the catalyst to my mother and stepfather's divorce). The first because it's always thrilling to create a character who has his own way of speaking, the latter because navigating that scenario's bittersweet tone was a really fun technical challenge. That book was thus also the hardest thing to write.

Besides your Mom, are you still in touch with any of the people you write about in

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How to Live?

Yes, I'm still in touch with a few of those folks. Charlotte Prozan, the woman I met on a Nation magazine fundraising cruise, had long been running ads in The Nation and The New York Review of Books looking for a companion, to no avail. When How to Live came out, she came to a bookstore reading I gave in San Francisco and befriended the gentleman sitting next to her.

Reader, she married him.

Ideally, what role could/should manners play in the current political divide? The world in general? In everyday life?

Everyone thinks politicians' name-calling and negative campaign tactics are worse than ever, but in the elections of 1796 and 1800, the choice between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson was, according to the former's camp, a choice between "God and a religious president, or Jefferson and no God!" Pious people buried their Bibles in their gardens because they thought Jefferson-as-president would burn them.

It would be great if, in elections, we could focus on the issues not the people.

In general: We always think of bad manners as something that THE OTHER GUY has. It's never our fault. We always have an excuse for our own misdeeds: we didn't get enough sleep, or we were in a rush, or...or...or...But the truth of it is, we all probably have some terrific manners, and some not-so-terrific manners. Like, maybe you (like me) don't RSVP no to events until the very last minute. Or maybe you (like a lot of my friends) answer your cellphone at the dinner table. Or maybe you always ask people who have heavy foreign accents where they're from. None of these actions constitute good manners. But many of us are guilty of them. So, don't necessarily cast your disapproving glances outward. Look first within, my child.

lived across the hall from him in Coy their first year and whose son is Alford’s godchild.

“I knew right away that Carl was interesting: he had a bust of Byron in his room! Hello!

We developed a mutual interest in film while at Hotchkiss, and made a 40-minute movie together junior year.”

(Carl, he points out, has gone on to work as production designer or art director for Martin Scorcese, Wes Anderson, and Bruce Beresford, among other great directors. “I like to say I gave him his first job in the industry,” Alford adds, “but it’s kind of a lie.”)

After majoring in film at NYU, Alford worked as a casting director for four years; he cast the extras for a Michael J. Fox movie called “The Secret of My Success” and all the speaking roles for actor Brad “Midnight Express” Davis’s last movie, “Heart.” He also helped his boss, Joy Todd, cast the speaking roles for “Cobra” with Sylvester Stallone and Ridley Scott’s “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Eventually he started submitting quirky essays and articles to some of the trendier New York publications, along the way developing a genre of performance-art journalism that involved a certain degree of first-person humiliation, like entering dog-grooming competitions or trying out to play Santa at Radio City Music Hall.

Honing his powers of comic observation while a staff writer at Spy magazine, he went on to sell stories to Vogue, the New York Observer, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. (In a comic coup, two of his “Shouts and Murmurs” pieces are featured in Disquiet Please, the recent New Yorker anthology of humor).

At the same time he managed to satisfy an inchoate longing for stardom: Big Kiss, his 2000 book about trying to “claw his way to the top” of the acting world, chronicles the unabashed thrill of being hired by VH1’s “Rock of Ages” to ask disparate viewers – a bunch of third-graders paired with residents of a retirement home, say – to comment on the music videos of Madonna and Marilyn

Manson. As an admiring Time review put it, “cheery co-host Henry Alford elicits lines from small children that Bill Cosby sweats whirlpools trying to score.”

Of his five books to date, How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth) resonates most, and not just because in it he profiles his retired social worker mother’s gutsy move from a longtime home and marriage to a brave new solo life.

Featuring advice from elder luminaries such as Granny D, who walked across the country for campaign finance reform, New Age icon Ram Dass, and Harold Bloom, respected Yale academic, it also includes the words of ordinary folk whose lives and circumstances have left them in possession of a certain, well, wisdom.

Charlotte Prozan, a semi-retired San Francisco psychotherapist whom he met on a cruise to Alaska, explained, “One of the nice things about being old is that I don’t care about being popular any more. It’s a tremendous freedom.” She also felt smarter, she said, because she had more time to read.

Exposing us to these and other musings of an older generation, which he does with characteristic humor and grace, dovetails neatly with Alford’s new mission of restoring the art of good manners to its rightful place.

Empathy is essential, he points out, especially when it’s you dropping the other person’s apple. And it extends beyond putting yourself in their painfully small shoes.

“Possibly the loveliest gesture of all is recall,” he writes in Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?. “The person who remembers – even though you told him five weeks ago – that today is the day your loved one is being shipped overseas, or being given an important medical diagnosis, is a person who is a joy to have around.”

WOULD IT KILL YOU TO STOP DOING THAT? A MODERN GUIDE TO MANNERS (2012; TWELVE, NEW YORK) IS NOW IN PAPERBACK.

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Adam Sharp ’96: From HTV News at Hotchkiss to Executive Post at Twitter

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BY DANIEL LIPPMAN ‘08

On July 6, 2011, Adam Sharp was in the Green Room of the White House

chatting with President Barack Obama about Twitter, as Mr. Obama

For this 1996 Hotchkiss grad, that one day from his life shows how his three main career interests – politics, television news, and computers – have converged into what he calls his “dream job.”

Sharp, who lives in Washington, DC, is the head of Government, News, and Social Innovation at Twitter, the social media company that has in recent years become an evermore important player in technology, politics, journalism, and daily life, counting more than 500 million active users in 2012. During the 2012 presidential election, he attended both parties’ conventions and all the presidential debates, and was called on by major media outlets to comment on how social media was changing politics.

Sharp, who previously worked at NBC and C-SPAN, has also been a top aide to a U.S. senator. But he first began to cultivate his interests in computers and TV news at Hotchkiss, where he revitalized HTV and turned it into the most popular club at the time, at least judging by the number of people who worked on segments throughout the year.

During his time at Hotchkiss, HTV produced 100 hours of television.

A native of Stamford, CT, he visited high schools with his mother; after touring

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was about to take part in a Twitter Town Hall.

Hotchkiss one day, he knew that the School was the place for him. Since graduation, Sharp has been to every reunion of his class and always enjoys catching up with his former teachers in Lakeville.

“I think at Hotchkiss there’s an attitude of not trying to create a Hotchkiss person, but just creating a person who could, for whatever he or she was interested in, try to be the best in the world at it. There was a very strong sense at Hotchkiss of ‘we don’t care if you don’t get this imprint’ – as long as you have something that you love and are willing to work at it, the School will give you the resources and the opportunity to do that,” he says.

He first became interested in computers after his dad bought him a Coleco “Adam” computer to play with on weekday afternoons in elementary and middle school. He says his passion for TV news comes about because he likes to tell stories visually and because both his parents had been television journalists.

“I think in high school, you’re always looking for what you’re good at and what distinguishes you. And it wasn’t going to be football.

So I think part it of was that it was something I enjoyed and something I was good at,” he says. “And I just liked the notion that here all these pieces could come together and result in

this creative work that also had a strong technical component and allowed me to talk about news and allowed me to write and follow politics. So it was a great way of synthesizing all my interests and calling it an activity.”

While Sharp was at Hotchkiss, he was given free rein to become better at producing TV news and credits teachers Robert Haiko and Tim Acker for giving him the space to develop his interests. He says they told him, “listen, you’ve got a lot of expensive gear here. Play with it, and if you break it, we’ll get it fixed.

Just don’t break it too often.”

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RIGHT: During his time at Hotchkiss, Adam Sharp revitalized HTV, turning it into the most popular club at the time. Its energy is evident in this 1996 Misch photo, where Sharp appears at left.

In Sharp’s lower mid year, HTV was something that would only air in the snack bar once every couple months. But he expanded HTV to the point where it was being shown in the auditorium before Saturday night dances. By his senior year, HTV had enough people to do a weekly show, alternating between Hotchkiss News and the Sports Show.

“I look back and realize that they gave me such a long rope and so much opportunity to just play and experiment. And now as I’ve grown older and have had a couple of rounds in the TV industry and actually do TV production as part of my Twitter job, it’s almost every day I’m doing something or making some shortcut that resulted from experimentation I got to do at Hotchkiss,” he says.

He admits he wasn’t the easiest student and was very “bullheaded” at times, but relied on his senior-year adviser Lou Pressman for both long philosophical discussions and advice on how to ensure that he did well in his classes.

“The parallel to my independent streak was not taking rules very well and I bore easily, and so there were things that I was very interested in and there were things that I wasn’t that interested in. And if I was interested in it, I put a lot of effort into it and if I wasn’t, I didn’t,” he says.

Pressman says Sharp was “bursting with energy and ideas [and] passionate about wanting to make HTV a serious venture with the highest standards.

“Already, as a teenager, [Adam was] extraordinarily knowledgeable about communications, media, and TV journalism; long before Twitter, Adam was always eager to share his

ideas and excitement about how developing information technologies could transform journalism and politics,” Pressman says.

After graduation, Sharp attended Northwestern University, where he majored in journalism and minored in political science.

That is also where he met his future wife Cynthia, who is a journalist with the Associated Press in Washington.

After graduation, he worked for NBC in New York and helped in its coverage of the 9/11 attacks and the 2000 elections. He also worked on its 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, where several times he ran into Dick Ebersol, then the head of NBC Sports, and chatted with him about Hotchkiss sports scores, relayed from Ebersol’s son Charlie, who was at the School at the time.

After leaving NBC, Sharp spent eight months on New York City’s official camera crew documenting the recovery process at World Trade Center after 9/11. The shocking images of that scene are etched indelibly in his memory.

In 2004, he moved to Washington, DC, where he worked on Capitol Hill for Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) as a communications adviser and then deputy chief of staff.

“Particularly in the period after Hurricane Katrina, it was equal parts maddening and rewarding because it was a front-row seat to

the real importance of government in a time of crisis and an opportunity to be part of making things better for people and also incredibly frustrating to be at the front line of seeing how government can get in the way in a crisis and stifle the recovery,” he says.

In November 2010, Sharp joined Twitter as its first staffer in Washington, DC. He believes that Twitter has changed politics in three important ways. He says it’s made campaigning and governing more personalized, giving elected officials an opportunity to directly engage their constituents. It’s democratized access – if one has a compelling and unique message, people anywhere can see the Tweet if it spreads virally on Twitter. And it’s allowed measuring Twitter users’ attitudes towards the candidates and issues, based on their Tweets in the Twitter Political Index.

For the 2012 presidential election, says Sharp, “It’s tracked pretty closely to Gallup so far, and then you hit rewind to 17 years ago, and my senior year independent study with Mr. (James) Marshall where my final thesis was on methods of predicting elections. So it really is the closing of that arc where I got curious about something in Lakeville and now get to realize it at Twitter.”

DANIEL LIPPMAN ’08 IS A JOURNALIST IN WASHINGTON, DC. HE CAN BE REACHED AT DLIPPMAN@GWMAIL.GWU.EDU.

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Rocio Mendoza ’03: Inspiring a campus

audience with her message of unity and sharing

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“Hotchkiss gave me so much and changed my life forever. It helped

me and my family reach the American dream. It gave me the ability to be able to navigate mainstream America without losing sight of my roots. …”

The words spoken by Rocio Mendoza ’03 in her speech in Auditorium on September 21 reverberated powerfully throughout the School that Friday. This young lawyer, busily carving a path of significance and purpose in her life in Houston, was invited to return to Hotchkiss to speak in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month. After Auditorium, she met informally in the Faculty Room to talk with students and faculty members and answer their questions. A graduate of Stanford University and the University of Texas School of Law, she is currently an associate at Baker Botts LLP. On that day and even after she left campus to return home, Rocio Mendoza’s words echoed in the hallways and classrooms. People on campus were particularly affected by the way in which she expressed the need for students to find kinship and understanding with each other, at Hotchkiss and when they went out into the world.

Hers is a compelling story, told with candor and insight. Here is her Auditorium talk, from that day.

Thank you for having me today. I remember the caliber of speakers I had the opportunity to listen to during my time at Hotchkiss; so it

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is an honor to have the opportunity to speak to you all today.

So, I have been asked to share a little about what it was like to be me at Hotchkiss. But before I can do that, I have go further back and tell you some things about exactly who

that 13-year-old Mexican-American girl was who set foot on this campus the Fall of 1999.

I was born in Mexico City, the second child of two hard-working but poor parents, neither of whom attended college, and only one who attended high school. And like the millions of

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OPPOSITE AND RIGHT: Rocio Mendoza met informally with students in the Faculty Room. Seated next to her is Senior Associate Director of Admission and "second mother" Patricia Redd Johnson.

immigrants you read about in newspapers, my parents decided that if my sister and I were to have the chance at a better life, we would have to try our luck somewhere else. My father had already been to America to work as a seasonal farm laborer, even though he was an electrician by trade, and despite the rough conditions of that occupation, recognized the opportunity this great nation provided. And thanks to an amnesty passed by Congress in 1986, the Mendoza family embarked on a journey in search of the American dream.

But the reality was nothing like what we dreamed it would be. When we first got to Houston, and like many recent immigrants in the history of the U.S., my family shared a tiny apartment with about ten other people. A small walk-in closet, where everyone hung the few items of clothing they owned, was our bedroom. I remember waking up at night and in the morning as the adults opened the door to get a change of clothes to go to their next job. Less than a year in, my mother threatened to return to Mexico with my sister and me. This life was no better than the one she’d left. If anything, it was worse. We did not know the language, we did not like the food, we did not know many people, and we did not even have a home to call our own. And so my father picked up a third job and moved us into our own one-bedroom apartment.

My parents remember the next six years as still being pretty rough, but to tell you the truth, I remember them fondly. We did not have much in the way of possessions, but we had made some significant progress, according to me. My sister and I had worked our way through bilingual and ESL to English-

only. We were both excelling academically, an achievement that was not optional according to my mother. My mother had become a housekeeper in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city, which of course meant my sister and I got to go with her and admire these mega-mansions during the summers. We had worked our way up the apartment complex hierarchy in our immigrant neighborhood. We had gifts at Christmas again. We had become a hardworking American family.

Then in 1995, a man by the name of Michael Feinberg entered my fourth-grade classroom and changed the path of my family’s life forever. He came to tell a bunch of fourth-graders about a new school, KIPP Academy, where you went in earlier than anyone else, got out later than anyone else, and went to school on Saturdays and during part of your summer (even if you had not failed the year before). And then he said the school would serve McDonald’s at every Saturday school. I was sold. You see, in the previous six years, I had visited McDonald’s a grand total of one time. And so the dream of a happy meal lured me into making the best educational choice of my life.

The next four years brought even more success. My sister graduated from high school and enrolled in college. My sister started to work for KIPP as a homework helper while she was a college student. My parents bought a

home. But as my time at KIPP came to an end, I faced what would become another lifechanging choice – where to go to high school.

When I enrolled at KIPP, my sister insisted that Mr. Feinberg guarantee that I would be able to attend one of the magnet high schools. Yet here I was, applying to the most prestigious private schools in the city of Houston and in the country. As much as my mother, my sister, and I dreaded being away from each other, my mother decided that, since the children of many of the families she worked for attended the Houston private schools I was admitted to, it would be best for me to go halfway across the country. She knew my transition into this new world would be hard enough, and that entering into that world as the housekeeper’s daughter would not make it any easier; so we embarked on a two-week trip to visit boarding schools. In the end, after falling in love with this campus and after my mother identified Ms. [Pat Redd] Johnson as a suitable second mother, Hotchkiss was our choice. And so in the fall of 1999, I set foot on the Hotchkiss campus for the second time, filled with excitement and dreams.

But like my transition to this country, my transition to Hotchkiss was not as smooth as I had imagined it would be. The second my mom pulled away in her taxi after dropping me off at orientation in the main circle, my excitement turned to fear. I had never been W i n t e r

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around so many white people in my life.

Matter of fact, I had never been in contact with any white person who was not my teacher or one of the families my mother worked for. As it turns out, my English was heavily accented, a fact lost on me given that everyone where I came from spoke the same way. By the time I made it to lunch, my anxiety grew. I had put way more food on my tray than what appeared to be socially acceptable based on the food selections of the girls at the table I chose to join. And then came time to share what everyone had done for the summer. I had never gotten on a yacht, been on a safari, or on any kind of family vacation.

Luckily, lunch was over before it got to be my turn to share.

The next few months only got harder. My clothes clearly were not as nice as the other girls’. I missed my family. I missed my mom’s cooking. I was struggling academically for the first time in my life. But then things finally started to turn around.

After attending a couple of meetings of BaHSA (the Black and Hispanic Students Association) and being taken under the wing of a few of the older students in BaHSA, I began to feel at home. I know that having seemingly “exclusive” groups like BaHSA is controversial in campuses all across the country. Trust me, I heard the criticisms here and during my years at Stanford. But consider this: Imagine if you were dropped down in the middle of Compton, the South Side of Chicago, or the South Bronx one day. And not merely to walk through, but to live there.

Imagine feeling like no one else at this place was like you or understood you. Imagine how scared you would be. The same environment that would arouse fear and anxiety in you is the place students like me call home. It is a sanctuary hidden in the northwest tip of Connecticut that I found absolutely petrifying. And I also want to make clear that I, speaking for myself of course, did not limit the friendships I built to my fellow BaHSA students. I left here with tons of friends completely different from me. But having that safety net and group of people who understood me in a way that not even some of my closest friends could was invaluable. Who

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else would understand it if I was stressing out whether my parents could pay all the bills, if a cousin my age was having her first child, or if an uncle had been to jail for drug-dealing?

After those first tough months, I began to succeed in this new environment. Pretty soon I was on the Dean’s List, involved in various extracurriculars, and well on my way to finally speaking unaccented, grammatically correct English. During those years, the students in BaHSA worked relentlessly to improve diversity awareness at Hotchkiss. We went from having the Harlem Boys’ Choir’s performing at Auditorium as the only way to commemorate MLK Day to having the fullfledged MLK Day celebration you have today. We extended meetings to those students who were NOT black or Hispanic. We encouraged those members who tended to keep to each other to extend their social circle. It was at Hotchkiss that my commitment to diversity was born.

After four years of receiving the best education I have ever received, even compared to Stanford’s (but shhhh, don’t tell them), I was a changed person. I was no longer the scared and at times abrasive little Hispanic girl with an accent any more. I had gotten the opportunity to interact and become friends with people very different from me. But all the while, I was able to maintain an appreciation and recognition of the importance of where I came from. I remember parading my mother and my sister around at Parents Weekend. It did

not matter that my family was too poor to get their own hotel and had to stay in my dorm room with me. It did not matter that we could not afford to go into New York City for the weekend. I was proud to introduce them to every new person I’d met, so that they got to understand who I was just a little bit better.

Hotchkiss gave me so much and changed my life forever. It helped me and my family reach the American dream. It gave me the ability to be able to navigate mainstream America without losing sight of my roots. And while it is a dichotomy I continue to struggle with as a lawyer in a major law firm and a board member of KIPP Houston today, nothing could have prepared me better than my experience at Hotchkiss.

Since graduation, I remember focusing on all the things Hotchkiss had given me. That was until a couple of months ago. I was having a “grown-up sleepover” of sorts with an old Hotchkiss friend. After having a discussion about various social issues that inevitably wound down to a very real conversation about race and ethnicity in this country, my friend all of a sudden got very quiet.

I, of course, thought I had finally gone too far and perhaps offended her. But just as I was mustering up the courage to apologize, I heard her say two words – “Thank you.” To which I said, “what for?” She responded, “for saving me.” There was a brief pause, and then she continued, “from becoming a racist.” She went on describe the race tensions in her hometown and how all of the interactions she had with Mexican-Americans prior to meeting me at Hotchkiss ranged from bad to horrible, as many of them were very vocal about their disdain for whites. I was shocked and did not know what to say. So I thanked her, for welcoming me into her life despite any initial reservation.

You see, Hotchkiss will give you many great things. But you should always remain willing to give to it right back. Let each other into each other’s life. If you are from the Upper East Side, get to know the little MexicanAmerican girl from Texas. Learn from each other, and when you leave here, inspire others to do the same out in the real world.

Thank you.

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Edward B. “Ned” Goodnow ’44: An outstanding example of dedication and caring for Hotchkiss

BY ROBERTA JENCKES

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Ned Goodnow ’44 loved his Hotchkiss days, loved the time he spent

on the campus, where he remembers being surrounded by “a very congenial group of people.” But as much as he loved the

School and his classes, on a perfect October day full of beauty and promise, he likely will remember a day out of school.

“One of the pleasant memories for me was the Hotchkiss holidays,” he volunteers. “The Duke always picked a beautiful fall or spring day. We didn’t have to go to class.” A great outdoorsman, Ned found plenty to enjoy around the Lakeville-Salisbury area on those rare free days.

How appropriate then that on a resplendent day in May last year, Head of School Malcolm McKenzie called a holiday in honor of Edward B. “Ned” Goodnow, Class of 1944.

“Mr. Goodnow came to Hotchkiss as a full scholarship student,” McKenzie told the students in announcing the holiday. “He did not think before he came here that he would have the kind of education that he received. He made the decision to be absolutely committed in all kinds of extraordinary ways to Hotchkiss throughout his life.

“I’ve grown to know him well over the past few years. He very much likes to come and sit in on classes. He’s been a great supporter of our Humanities Program. Over the years he has endowed two teaching chairs at Hotchkiss and given to the annual fund and to financial aid. Recently, he has done some-

thing quite remarkable for the School, establishing two endowed funds – The Goodnow Family Scholarship Fund and the Goodnow Family Teaching Fund, to support teaching and learning at Hotchkiss. Next year we will have our first Goodnow Scholar in the School. (For more on the gift, see the accompanying article.)

“In his personality Mr. Goodnow exemplifies precisely what we should all be taking from Hotchkiss and giving to Hotchkiss.

He’s humble, he’s generous, he’s gracious, he’s patient, he’s smart, he’s attentive, and he’s devoted.”

“The holiday was a stunning surprise,” says Goodnow, his modesty at once apparent.

“He’s never had any airs,” says his son Carleton T. Goodnow ’80. “He’s had a large impact on people, but he’s not someone who talks a lot or looks for attention. He’s always been incredibly grateful to Hotchkiss for the opportunity to attend that wonderful institution on a full scholarship.

“His father passed away during the Depression, when my father was about seven years old. It was after a stay in the hospital, but it was very sudden. His death left the family less well-off than it had been,” says Carl.

Until this time, Ned (and his brother Wes ’41) had enjoyed a happy and unruffled childhood in Norwich, CT, where he was born.

At the urging of their uncle, E. Carleton Granbery, and with support from him, the W i n t e r

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Goodnow boys enrolled at Hotchkiss. Mr. Granbery’s two sons, John and Carleton, had graduated from Hotchkiss in the classes of 1930 and 1931, respectively. For Ned, who arrived in the fall of 1940, Hotchkiss was life-changing.

“It was an essential building block in my life,” Ned remembers. “I just know that from the moment I arrived it was a very stimulat-

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ing atmosphere, and my classmates were a great group of guys. It seemed to me we were all quite congenial. I’m sure there were boys who had somebody they didn’t like, but I just don’t remember any great friction or hostilities. One of my best friends was Chandler ‘Chan’ Moore, whose whole family became close friends. We did quite a few things together, including a canoe trip down the

Housatonic River in June, 1943. It ended in disaster in rapids near New Milford. The canoe got stuck on a rock, broached, and was broken in half by the current.

“I remember vividly and with great affection the old masters – Pop Jefferson – European history; Mr. Wilson – Prep Math, who used to grind pieces of chalk to dust in his fingers in frustration over our slowness; elegant Tom Parsons – Prep English (Ivanhoe is one book I recall); Charlie Berry – German and club football; Happy Edgar – Lower-mid English (Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd and Galsworthy’s The Forsyth Saga); and Dr. David Northrop – Upper-mid Advanced Math – spherical trigonometry, navigation, and permutations and combinations. Also Jack Bodel – Prep Science, who took us out on clear nights on the seventh fairway to learn the star formations – the Big Dipper, etc. I haven’t thought about these classes much in recent years, but when I do, the memories come flooding back.

“Everybody had to take Latin at Hotchkiss.

I hated Latin, but have found it helpful in learning other romance languages. But I realized at Hotchkiss that I was poor at languages. I barely passed German. I think my teachers probably said, ‘Don’t put this boy in a French class!’”

Ned graduated from Hotchkiss in three years. “They graduated some of us a year early because of the war,” he says, “so that we could get in some college before we went into the service. Colleges were going 12 months a year in those days. I started Princeton in June of ’43, finished classes in December, and went into the Army in January ’44. I was at Princeton for six months, and they gave me credit for freshman year when I came back. The key point was that I had already been admitted to college. In 1946 it would have been difficult to get into Princeton, but I had already matriculated in 1943. I think there were 400 civilian undergraduates at Princeton in 1943, and there were probably at least 2000 V-12 mid-

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OPPOSITE: Some of Ned Goodnow’s Hotchkiss activities, as seen in the Mischianza RIGHT: Ned in his office at the Goodnow Investment Group, 2009

shipmen. They were so anxious to have at least some civilians that I started classes a week after applying. Quite different today …

“Being in the Army was ‘slightly’ different from being in prep school or college. One thing always amused me. When I entered the Army, I had basic training in Georgia, and many of the men habitually complained about the food. I assure you that after Hotchkiss food in wartime, the Army food was fabulous.”

When he entered Princeton in 1943, he planned to major in engineering, so he studied physics and chemistry and other courses that were required for engineering. When he returned from the war, he enrolled in the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs, where he studied history, politics, and economics. “I know now, because my wife tells me so,” he says, “that I wouldn’t have been a very good engineer. She says I would connect the gas line to the water line and the water line to the gas line.”

After graduating from Princeton in 1949, Goodnow joined the Kidder Peabody & Co. securities firm, hired by Fred Moore, the father of his old Hotchkiss friend, Chan Moore. His career there was interrupted when he was recalled to serve in the Korean War. “I was in the Reserves and was assigned to the Fourth Infantry Division as an artillery forward observer. This was when NATO was being set up, and the Fourth Infantry Division went to Germany, much to my relief.”

Ned had received the Purple Heart after being wounded in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, in which he served as a rifleman. But, he reflects, “The Korean War was probably the worst war we’ve ever been

in, from what I’ve read. We were so unprepared, undermanned, and underequipped.

And it was bitterly cold, down to 25 degrees below zero, even colder than the Ardennes in the winter of 1944-45. I recall that two days before Christmas, in 1944, it got down to nine degrees below zero. Patton’s Third Army was moving up to relieve Bastogne.

When they passed General Patton at a crossroads, the men riding in open trucks stood up and cheered.”

After his service, he returned to Kidder Peabody where he worked for 17 years before joining with a partner to found Goodnow, Gray & Co. in 1969. He still heads this well-established firm, now called Goodnow Investment Group, which has offices in Darien, Connecticut. Was he well

prepared after Kidder, Peabody to start his own company?

“I thought I had been well prepared,” he says, smiling. “I learned a few things starting the business. Experience is a great teacher.

Hotchkiss and college develop your critical thinking and ability to analyze problems – experience teaches you what works and what doesn’t work. I credit Hotchkiss for helping develop my analytical ability, which is essential for investment judgment.”

During a successful career that has now stretched over more than six decades, Goodnow has seen and survived many ups and downs in the investment world. “There were two really tough periods in the business,” he reflects. “The first one was the bear market of 1973 and 1974, when the market W i n t e r

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dropped by about 50 percent over a two- year period. It was just a grinding bear market … week after week the market declined as the Nixon impeachment hearings droned on. We had a combination of slow growth, high inflation, and a destabilizing political scene.

Interest rates rose to 10 percent.

“The other period was the recent crisis of 2008. The collapse of Lehman Bros. and the sub-prime mortgage market came close to collapsing the banking system. That’s a tough environment for being responsible for other people’s money, to say nothing of your own.”

Does he follow tried-and-true rules of investing?

“Be an optimist, especially about the United States. Here’s another rule, and I didn’t make it up. Warren Buffett did: Rule #1 – don’t borrow any money; Rule #2 – don’t forget Rule #1; Rule #3 – don’t forget Rule #2.

I have to admit that I didn’t follow this rule literally, but I never overleveraged.

“I’m in the office most of the time. I don’t spend a lot of time picking stocks any more.

I’m looking for good investment managers and doing a lot of paper shuffling, which isn’t very stimulating,” he says. “I recall a tax lawyer we had years ago telling me, ‘the more senior the position, the more clerical the job.’ I didn’t understand what he meant at the time, but now I realize the truth in that statement. I’ve always enjoyed the investment business, because it offers high returns for hard work, intelligent analysis, and judicious risk taking. And the opportunities for applying fundamental, commonsense analysis are infinite.”

Sometimes, he will travel out West to Silver Tip Ranch in Montana with his family – Dee, his wife of 57 years, daughters Olivia and Tracy, and son Carl. Carl and his wife, Anne, have a son, Lance. A favorite holiday for Ned alone involves travel to a small river, the Tabusintac, in New Brunswick, Canada. “It’s all catch-and-release salmon and trout fishing,” he notes. In addition, he’s fished in Russia, Tierra del Fuego, and other great fishing spots. He also finds time for bird shoot-

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ing. He has always loved skiing and tennis – “a great game” – but he’s had to give up those sports – “lack of balance,” he notes.

“Dad’s done a lot of skiing and a tremendous amount of hiking,” says Carl Goodnow, who notes that his father has had two kneereplacements. “In the early ’80s he took up rowing,” Carl recalls. “He rowed for six or eight years, and his four-man boat, which they called The Honorables and Ancients, won the National Masters Championships for 60-65 year-olds in 1991. They practiced several times a week at 6:30 a.m.

“He’s been immensely successful, but he doesn’t have any affectation. He’s a person who has a lot of friends, a person who has

made a great contribution in many areas. I remember a conversation I had with the librarian at the Darien Library. When she heard my name, she said, ‘I’ve known your father for a very long time. Your father is responsible for putting this library on sound footing – he recommended that we stop investing through banks and start investing through funds. (They began investing in one that he recommended, and 33 years later they’re still investing in that.)

He’s a wonderful person.’

“He is very thoughtful and intelligent,” observes Carl. (He would have been a success in any event.) “His life might have been very different if he’d never gone to Hotchkiss, but I do know he is grateful.”

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GIFT SUPPORTS FINANCIAL AID AND TEACHING INITIATIVES LAST SUMMER HOTCHKISS ANNOUNCED THAT THE SCHOOL HAD RECEIVED A $6-MILLION GIFT FROM EDWARD B. “NED” GOODNOW ’44 TO ESTABLISH THE GOODNOW FAMILY SCHOLARSHIP FUND AND THE GOODNOW FAMILY TEACHING FUND.

manent endowment that will support the work and activities of The gift, in support of the School’s financial aid, and teaching the Hotchkiss Institute for Teaching. The Institute will promote and learning initiatives, continues Goodnow’s decades-long critical reflection by the faculty, acquaint teachers with learnersupport of scholarship and excellence in instruction at centered classroom strategies, and integrate the School’s key iniHotchkiss. In 1991, he endowed the Russel Murray Bigelow tiatives with the full range of teachers’ practice. Last summer, the and E. Carleton Granbery Teaching Chairs, and he has made Institute’s weeklong significant contriHotchkiss Summer butions to the Class Faculty Symposium of 1944 Memorial brought together Scholarship, the Hotchkiss teachers general scholarship in a progressive diafund, and The logue exploring the Hotchkiss Fund. craft that is their lifeAcademics at long work.

Hotchkiss are of “Ned’s generosity special interest to is transformGoodnow. Says ational for the Dean of Academic School,” said Head Life Tom Woelper, of School Malcolm “When we talk, I McKenzie. “His gift am impressed by ABOVE: The Hotchkiss Summer Faculty Symposium, August 2012 recognizes that the his broad and deep caliber of and thoughtfulness about teaching and learning knowledge of the national discussion about education and its at Hotchkiss must be superior in depth, rigor, innovation, implications for Hotchkiss. I first met Ned some ten years ago and meaning. Both funds will foster a community of students to discuss the Hotchkiss curriculum review after he read an artiand teachers joined by a sense of shared purpose and intelleccle about it in the Hotchkiss Magazine. In every meeting since tual curiosity.” then, he has asked discerning questions that reveal not only a Added Board of Trustees President Jean Weinberg Rose ’80, keen interest in our curriculum and the Humanities Program, “We are grateful to have such a broad-thinking and interested but also an abiding passion for Hotchkiss. He has challenged us alumnus in Ned at this important time in the School’s life. in productive ways and supported our efforts generously.”

Through his continuing involvement and support of the The Goodnow Family Scholarship Fund ($5 million) is a School, he epitomizes the kind of enduring relationship permanent endowment that will help the School maintain the founding tradition of scholarship aid put forth by Maria Bissell and leadership that we hope to see in all our graduates. The Goodnow Family Teaching Fund allows us to focus on the Hotchkiss in 1891. This gift honors Hotchkiss’s charge to craft of teaching. Constantly critiquing and improving how we attract bright and talented students from a diversity of backteach is instrumental in ensuring that the institution remains a grounds, regardless of their family’s ability to afford tuition.

Each year, one or more high-achieving students whose families leader in today's educational world. Importantly, the Goodnow Family Scholarship Fund also enables us to demonstrate financial need will be recognized as Goodnow attract the students that we want to bring to Hotchkiss and to Scholars and will receive scholarship support from the fund. support them while they are here.”

The Goodnow Family Teaching Fund ($1 million) is a per-

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‘Love has been my greatest teacher’

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EXCERPTS FROM THE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH OF THE 2012 LUFKIN PRIZE

BY CHRISTINA COOPER P ’08, ’11

I’d like to thank Mr. Lufkin both for being here and for establishing this prize. …

When Mr. McKenzie asked me if I would accept it, I thought immediately of the many people who deserve this award, virtually

any one of my colleagues. My respect for and appreciation of them is mighty, and I am grateful for all they have taught me in my time here and all they will continue to teach me.

I truly do not know a more dedicated, intelligent, thoughtful, and compassionate group of people. The second place my mind went was to the kids with whom I’ve missed, those whom I didn’t do right by or showed not enough patience or kindness. I would like those moments back. …

What I really want to do with this time I have been given is to tell you a love story. In my life it is love that has been my greatest teacher about all that is most important in the world. Witnessing love, feeling love, giving love, the mystery of love….that is what has taught me who and what I aspire to be.

My parents, Bernie and Lennie McKinnon, fell in love in college. My father was a poor kid, a good hockey player from Nova Scotia, and my mother was a smart, multi-talented, pretty girl who’d gone to high school in Ohio. They both lost their fathers at a young age, and both were raised by people other than their own parents. My father moved away from Nova Scotia with his older sister and her husband, eventually landing in Hamden, CT, when his brother-in-law took a job as a research scientist at Yale. They chose which town they would live in based on which town’s hockey team might help my father land a college scholarship. My mother lived with her aunt and uncle and her two cousins after her mother remarried the only grandfather I ever knew, a man who worked

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in construction and therefore was constantly moving from job site to job site. She needed to be in one place to go to school. She spent summers and some vacations with her mother and her new stepfather -- the mystery? a man with whom she shared the same birthday, and from the start it was clear that he would do anything for her.

And so my parents married and eventually found their way back to the college town where they had met. My father became a teacher and a coach at the college and my mother a high school English teacher. They had two children, my older brother Michael, and me. When I was in fourth grade, my father’s sister died. My father flew to her funeral in Nova Scotia, and when he returned home, he had my cousin, now my sister, Kitty, with him. The circle was complete. The mystery? My parents, who had both lived with others because of the loss of a parent, were now together, with love, raising a child who had lost hers.

My parents taught me many things. I remember vividly when I was heading out for my first teaching job in a small town in central New York, my mother told me that there were two types of people who were most important to befriend and respect in a school…..the custodians and the secretaries.

They, she told me, were the people who were truly the heart of a school, the people who

ran the place. How true that has proven to be for me here at Hotchkiss. I cherish my friendship with John Wheeler, whose family has been at this school for over 50 years, and I may be shortchanging them, and who has been there every step of the way to watch me raise my children. And what would I do without Jackie Nichols, who is at once my counselor, my assistant, and my friend. I am thankful every day for all of the staff here.

They are the heart of this school. My mother also taught me about the importance of showing up. And despite the fact that she told me that she would not be able to make it today, she surprised me and is here. As are my daughters, who also apparently received the lesson about showing up, and surprised me here today. I was an athlete in high school, and I don’t think my mother missed one of my games. It mattered to me that she was there, probably more than I would ever admit. And while I know that that is different for many of you, who are, in many cases, far away from your parents, I understand that that is one of my roles as your surrogate parent here. I need to show up, to be there for you as you dance or play or sing or perform.

It matters.

THE ENTIRE SPEECH BY CHRISTINA COOPER, INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH AND DEAN OF THE CLASS OF 2013, CAN BE FOUND AT WWW.HOTCHKISS.ORG/CHAPELTALKS.

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Board of Trustees Thomas C. Barry P’01,’03,’05 Katheryn Allen Berlandi ’88 Ian R. Desai ’00 Thomas J. Edelman ’69, P’06,’07 William R. Elfers ’67, Vice President John E. Ellis III ’74

Howard C. Bissell ’55, P’82

Keith E. Bernard Jr. ’95, Chair, Alumni of Color Committee

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

Adam Casella ’06

Frederick Frank ’50, P’12

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

David L. Luke III ’41

Patricia Barlerin Farman-Farmaian ’85, Chair, Gender Committee

EMERITI

Dr. Robert A. Oden, Jr. P’97 Francis T. Vincent, Jr. ’56, P’85 Arthur W. White P’71,’74, GP’08,’11

Quinn Fionda ’91, Chair, Communications Committee

Lawrence Flinn, Jr. ’53

Caldwell Hart ’87, P’16

Diana Gomez ’76, P’11,’12

Keith Holmes ’77

Sean M. Gorman ’72, Secretary

Alessandra H. Nicolas ’95

John P. Grube ’65, P’00

Nichole R. Phillips ’89

Elizabeth Gardner Hines ’93 Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet ’85 Eleanor Green Long ’76 Forrest E. Mars, Jr. ’49, P’77,’82 GP’09,’09,’11,’11,’14, Vice President Malcolm H. McKenzie P’10, Trustee Ex Officio Christopher H. Meledandri ’77, Vice President Kendra S. O’Donnell Thomas S. Quinn III ’71, P’15 Jean Weinberg Rose ’80, President Roger K. Smith ’78, P’08 Jane Sommers-Kelly ’81 Marjo Talbott John L. Thornton ’72, P’10,’11, Officer-at-Large William B. Tyree ’81, P’14, Treasurer

Alumni Association Board of Governors President Katheryn Allen Berlandi ’88 Vice Presidents Christina M. Bechhold ’03 Edward J. Greenberg ’55, Chair, Alumni Services Committee

For more information, please contact: Megan Denault ’03, Associate Director of Alumni Relations, at (860) 435-3114 or mdenault@hotchkiss.org.

You may also visit www.hotchkiss.org/alumni and click on Events & Reunions.

Hotchkiss REUNION

Daniel N. Pullman ’76 Ex-Officio Thomas S. Quinn III ’71 Ex-Officio Casey H. Reid ’01 Peter D. Scala ’01 Thomas R. Seidenstein ’91 Bryan A. Small ’03 Michael G.T. Thompson ’66 Carolyn H. Toolan ’97

George A. Takoudes ’87, Chair Nominating Committee Douglas Campbell III, ’71, P’01, Secretary and Chair, Nominating Subcommittee for Membership Lance K. Beizer ’56 Miriam Beveridge ’86 William J. Benedict Jr. ’70, P’08, ’10

Daniel Wilner '03

What’s New? HOW TO SEND IN CLASS NOTES

Updates, reminiscences, and photos for Class Notes may be sent to your class agent or to the Communications Office at The Hotchkiss School, 11 Interlaken Road, Lakeville, CT 06039-2141, Attention: Divya Symmers, or by e-mail to dsymmers@hotchkiss.org.

June 14-16, 2013

October 25-27, 2013

Classes of 1933, 1938, 1943, 1948, 1958, 1968, 1973, 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008

Class of 1963 - 50th Reunion Class of 1953 - 60th Reunion Photo by Jonathan Doster

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