Winter-Spring 2016 Hotchkiss Magazine

Winter

Spring 2016

Board of Trustees

EMERITI

Barrett Lester ’81

Charles Ayres Jr. ’77

Howard C. Bissell ’55, P’82

Nisa Leung Lin ’88

Thomas C. Barry P’01, ’03, ’05

John R. Chandler, Jr. ’53, P’82, ’85, ’87, GP’10,’14, ’16

Paul Mutter ’87

Robert Chartener ’76, P’18 John G. Coumantaros ’80, P’16 Ian R. Desai ’00 Thomas J. Edelman ’69, P’06, ’07 William R. Elfers ’67, Vice President

Frederick Frank ’50, P’12

Nichole Phillips ’89 Vice President and Chair, Alumni of Color Committee

Forrest Mars ’49, P’77, ’82, GP’09, ’09, ’11, ’11, ’14

Emily Pressman ’98

Dr. Robert A. Oden, Jr. P’97

Chip Quarrier ’90 Vice President and Chair, Communications Committee

Francis T. Vincent, Jr. ’56, P’85 Arthur W. White P’71, ’74, GP’08, ’11

Diana Gomez ’76, P’11, ’12 Sean M. Gorman ’72 Secretary Edward J. Greenberg ’55 Ex Officio John P. Grube ’65, P’00 Charles F. Gulden ’79, P’12 Elizabeth G. Hines ’93

Casey Reid ’01 William Sandberg ’65 Tom Seidenstein ’91 Vice President and Chair, Alumni Services Committee

Alumni Association Board of Governors

Christina Bechhold ’03 Vice President and Chair, Nominating Committee

Bryan Small ’03 Sheria Smith ’01 David Tan ’91 Michael Thompson ’66 Carolyn Toolan ’97

Kendra S. O’Donnell

Miriam Gelber Beveridge ’86 Vice President and Co-Chair, Gender Committee

Thomas S. Quinn ’71, P’15, ’17, ’19

Sirin Bulakul ’06

Jean Weinberg Rose ’80, P’18 President

Doug Campbell ’71, P’01 Secretary and Chair, Membership Subcommittee of the Nominating Committee

EX-OFFICIO MEMBERS

Adam Casella ’06 Vice President

Katie Berlandi ’88, P’19 Past President, Alumni Association

Roger K. Smith ’78, P’08 Marjo Talbott John L. Thornton ’72, P’10, ’11, ’16 Officer-at-Large William B. Tyree ’81, P’14 Treasurer

Nathalie Pierrepont Danilovich ’03 Charlotte Dillon ’10 Peter Gifford ’93

Daniel J. Wilner ’03

Ed Greenberg ’55 President, Alumni Association

David B. Wyshner ’85

Dan Pullman ’76, P’14 Past President, Alumni Association Chuck Gulden ’79, P’12 President, The Hotchkiss Fund

Mark Gall ’59

Rebecca van der Bogert

G. Peter O'Neill Jr. Head of School

Jean Weinberg Rose ’80, P’18 President, Board of Trustees

Caldwell Hart ’87, P’16 Keith Holmes ’77 Vice President and Co-Chair, Gender Committee Annika Lescott ’06

A Glimpse of the Cosmos This image of the Pinwheel Galaxy was taken by Observational Astronomy student Colin Hussey ’16 at the new observatory.

The galaxy, otherwise known as Messier 101, is a spiral galaxy about 21 million light-years from Earth, meaning that the light processed by Hussey left the galaxy 21 million years ago. The Pinwheel measures approximately 170,000 light-years across and contains about a trillion stars. Students and members of the community can stargaze on Wednesday nights. To learn more about the new observatory, see story on page 5.

COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY WENDY CARLSON

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HEAD OF SCHOOL

G. Peter O'Neill Jr. CHIEF COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER

Hellen Hom-Diamond EDITOR

Wendy Carlson

Instructor Jason Larson, who is hearing-impaired, writes about overcoming stereotypes (page 12).

GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Eugene Wang STAFF WRITER

Chelsea Edgar COMMUNICATIONS COORDINATOR

Julie Vecchitto VIDEOGRAPHER AND DIGITAL MEDIA SPECIALIST

Tyler Wosleger DIGITAL MEDIA MANAGER

Alan Murphy CONTRIBUTORS

Joan Baldwin Keith Bernard ’95 Tom Drake Roberta Jenckes Julie Hammill Jason Larson Daniel Lippman ’08 The Hotchkiss School does not discriminate on the

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14 Celebrating 10 Years: Esther Eastman Music Center 20 A League of Their Own 24 The Graveyard Next Door 28 Perfume Genius 32 When Gravity = Art 36

Motorcycle Diaries

basis of age, sex, religion, race, color, sexual orientation, or national orientation in the administration of its educational policies, athletics, or other schooladministered programs, or in the administration of its hiring and employment practices.

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

Letters and comments are welcome. Please send inquiries and comments to: The Hotchkiss School, 11 Interlaken Road, Lakeville, CT 06039-2141, email magazine@hotchkiss.org, or phone 860-435-3122.

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Campus Connection: Visitors and News

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40 Class Notes 60 In Memoriam 64 Parting Shot W i n t e r / S p r i n g

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n my first day at Hotchkiss,

I quoted Emerson in a meeting with the faculty and staff and have reiterated those words throughout the year. The quote came to mind again when I read “Turning the Tide,” a recent report released through an initiative of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and endorsed by more than 80 top college admissions professionals and colleagues.

The report calls for college admissions offices to look beyond scores, grades, and résumé-building lists of personal achievement and extracurricular activities — to look more deeply at the qualitative dimensions of a young person and reward demonstrated citizenship.

The report asserts that the admissions process

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can be a powerful tool to encourage high school students to develop a greater depth of character through community service, ethical engagement, and contributions to the public good.

“In some communities,” the report reads, “students suffer from a lack of academic resources and opportunities. In other communities pervasive pressure to perform academically at high levels and to enter selective colleges takes an emotional toll on students and often squeezes out the time and energy students have to consider and contribute to others. A healthy and fair admissions process cannot simply encourage students to devote more time to others: It needs simultaneously to reward those who demonstrate true citizen-

ship, deflate undue academic performance pressure and redefine achievement in ways that create greater equity and access for economically diverse students.”

I encourage you to read this report and reflect on how a Hotchkiss education has helped prepare students for higher education.

Our students are all too familiar with the stress of the college application process and the pressures of creating a résumé of impressive achievements. But we should always remember that service is at the core of our mission, as stated in our goals and purposes: We expect that “graduates will leave Hotchkiss with a commitment to service to others.”

The very nature of a boarding school provides an amazing opportunity for students

PHOTOGRAPHS BY WENDY CARLSON

“Character is higher than intellect.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Letters to the Editor DAILY SHOULD MEAN DAILY

The fall issue of Hotchkiss Magazine has an article titled “Daily Themes: Then & Now.” When I asked about this program on my last visit to the School, I was told the “daily” requirement had been reduced to four times a week, equaling the number of times the class meets. The article does not mention this fact. I write to urge going back to “daily” themes, as your article proclaims. Having to write a daily theme (five a week) during the winter term of lower mid year was the single most valuable part of my entire education. “Daily” should mean “daily.”

— Jon O. Newman ’49 HOTCHKISS BOOKENDS O’Neill gives visiting poet Will Langford a Hotchkiss T-shirt on MLK Day.

to develop a sense of service; we are a residential community that is large enough to learn something new from someone from a different background, but small enough that no one is anonymous. We are enriched by our differences.

Service to each other and a concern for the common good can be seen, heard, and felt throughout the campus. Look at an average student day — classroom discussions, Chapel talks, Auditorium announcements — and a sample of active student groups that meet weekly: Women to Women International, WISER, Kucetekela Foundation, Habitat for Humanity, Songs for Smiles, and St. Luke’s Society.

A remarkable demonstration of working towards a common purpose occurred during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day commemoration. The School Presidents and the leaders of Black and Hispanic Student Alliance cancelled the dance the night before the official holiday and held a community meeting. Nearly half the student body came to the student center to talk about instances of racial insensitivity and unintended consequences. In Community Voices (see page 7), there were heartfelt expressions of pain, anger, fear, and hurt; apologies were made; feelings of hope and pride were expressed.

This was a genuine and spontaneous demonstration of civic engagement.

The students were motivated by the desire

to create a better place to live — not by the prospects of getting into a good college.

This level of community engagement and awareness has led to the formation of a Strategic Planning Committee on Diversity and Inclusion, chaired by Associate Head of School and Dean of Students Kate Jones and Chemistry Instructor Richard Kirby. With the full support of the Board of Trustees and incoming Head of School Craig Bradley, the purpose of this committee is to assess community needs related to inclusion and diversity. This includes, but is not limited to, race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, ability, religion, and ethnicity.

There is so much to look forward to, and so much work ahead of us. When I reflect upon the School’s Latin motto, Moniti Meliora Sequamur (“After instruction, let us pursue higher things”), I remind myself that the sum of a Hotchkiss education extends well beyond the classroom. The full education includes how each student learns to contribute to the life we live together as a community. Character-building through community-building is a hallmark of the Hotchkiss education.

To learn more about “Turning the Tide,” visit http://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/collegeadmissions.

The recent glorious issue, highlighted with the “Writing at Hotchkiss” section on daily themes, resurrected memories of my most memorable hours on the hill. I came to Hotchkiss from Kent, where my dad taught at Kent School, but “faculty brats” were not allowed to attend. I struggled prep year and was flunking algebra, French, and Latin fall term, as my local elementary school had not prepared me for the Hotchkiss rigors. By year’s end, I had passed those but managed a 59 from “The Hawk” (Bob Hawkins) in prep English. That taught me a great lesson – you get exactly what you earn in life. I had to write themes all summer and take a make-up exam in the fall to get into Torrey’s lower-mid English.

Torrey was tough, inspiring, and a real motivator. When we had theme-a-day in the winter term, he would pick three or four of his favorites for the week and read them on Fridays. I was ecstatic when one Friday, he read mine on “Pop’s Novelty Shop” (a favorite haunt of mine on the boardwalk at Rehoboth Beach, Del., where we vacationed in August). I received an 85. From then on, I was confident I could write. Senior year with Dick Gurney, we had one of the greatest classes in the school on the Romantic poets, which inspired me, years later, to venture to the Lake District and roam the hills and valleys where Wordsworth and Coleridge had communed with nature. Even more inspiring was the 84 grade I received on the final exam, the highest in our class. I had learned another key life lesson — you can do whatever you set your mind to do.

My Hotchkiss bookends, the 59 from Hawkins and 84 from Gurney, have stood me in good stead. Burch, Charlie, and the rest of the English department continue to enlighten, inspire, and teach great life lessons.

— Kip Armstrong ’63 W i n t e r / S p r i n g

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co n n e c t i o n A P P O I N T M E N T S DEAN OF FACULTY

Longtime Hotchkiss faculty member Tom Drake has been named dean of faculty, succeeding Tom Flemma. Drake’s one-year appointment will begin in the 2016-17 academic year.

With more than 34 years of service teaching and living at Hotchkiss, Drake brings a wealth of experience and knowledge of boarding school life to this role. He earned a B.A. in history from Lawrence University and an M.A. in European diplomatic history from Brown University. He started his teaching career at St. Paul’s School, and subsequently held positions at Wilbraham and Monson Academy and Cheshire Academy before coming to Hotchkiss in 1982. His Hotchkiss experience includes living in four dormitories over a span of 13 years, serving as the dormitory head of Buehler, Wieler, and Garland. Additionally, he has coached soccer and basketball. As an administrator, he has served as chair of the History Department and as the School’s first technology coordinator from 1999 to 2005. He lives on campus with his wife, Verena, instructor in art history.

Drake says he looks forward to “supporting my colleagues in introducing our students to the joys of cultivating a life of the mind.” Drake will assist incoming Head of School Craig Bradley in the search for a long-term dean of faculty.

DEAN OF ADMISSION AND FINANCIAL AID

Erby Mitchell Jr. has been appointed the next dean of admission and financial aid, succeeding Jane Reynolds, who will retire at the end of this academic year. His term begins on July 1, 2016.

Mitchell comes to Hotchkiss from the Loomis Chaffee School, where he has served as assistant head for enrollment since 2009. During Mitchell’s tenure, the number of boarding applications has risen by 47 percent, and the boarding population rose from 53 to 68 percent. He also oversaw the transition to an online applicant file review system and bolstered a scholarship initiative focused on yielding top underrepresented students of color. Prior to working at Loomis Chaffee, Mitchell was director of admission and financial aid at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. Mitchell earned his B.A. at St. Joseph’s College in Maine and an Ed.M. from Harvard University. He began his career in higher education as an assistant director of admission at St. Joseph’s College in Maine. He then held various positions at Bowdoin College, including admission officer, assistant dean of admission, director of multicultural recruitment, and associate dean of admission. At Bowdoin, he worked alongside then-Dean of Students Craig Bradley, now the incoming head of school at Hotchkiss. The idea of working with Bradley again drew Mitchell to Hotchkiss. “I was compelled by the prospect of locking arms with this person whom I had admired from the other side of campus during our days working at Bowdoin College,” he said.

“I am excited about joining the Hotchkiss community and look forward to bringing my energy to the challenges we will face and the opportunities that we will explore together.”

Erby joins Hotchkiss with his wife, Jennifer, two daughters, Olivia and Kennadi, and son, C.J.

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New Fund to Bolster Health Services At their 50th Reunion last year, members of the Class of 1965 established The Student Health and Wellness Fund to augment programs and training in counseling services and mental health screenings at Hotchkiss.

“The idea for the Health and Wellness Fund percolated from the ever-increasing awareness of society in mental health and addiction,” said Jerry Sprole ’65, who co-chaired the gift committee.

In thanking the Class, Dean of Student Health Quincy McLaughlin said her interactions with students and other members of the Hotchkiss community about mental health, decisionmaking, and drugs and alcohol have reinforced the value of this fund.

“My conversations with the committee members who started the fund last spring have already informed our programming and efforts on campus,” McLaughlin said.

“At the beginning of this academic year, faculty, security staff, and health center staff joined me for training by FCD Prevention Works, a non-profit organization that provides substance abuse prevention education for schools worldwide. I’d like to thank the committee and the entire Class of 1965 for their care and attention and deep commitment to this community. We are very grateful.”

By establishing the Class of 1965 Student Health and Wellness Fund, McLaughlin added, the committee has provided a source of annual income that will allow Hotchkiss to expand the scope of its efforts to educate the Hotchkiss community and provide more resources on campus.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY WENDY CARLSON

Starstruck

Just before students drifted into the observatory for its first stargazing night in January, Physics and Astronomy Instructor Bill Fenton aimed the telescope at the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.3 million light-years away. “To give you an idea of how far away that is, our own galaxy is 100,000 light-years across. I learned that from watching Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. My students know where I get my information,” he joked as he adjusted the motorized base, producing an eerie hum. The night was perfect for stargazing: 28 degrees and clear with a

waning crescent moon, dim enough to ensure that other objects in the sky would appear bright. The 20-inch reflecting telescope, purchased with a gift from Roger Liddell ’63, P’98, enables viewers to see galaxies hundreds of millions of light-years away.

The telescope also has a camera mount, allowing Fenton and his students to take photos of the sky. “Having this new observatory makes a world of difference,” Fenton said. “The mount reduces setup time, and the structure helps block stray light, so we can get the clearest possible views.” — Chelsea Edgar W i n t e r

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Poet Will Langford recites a piece from his collection on MLK Day.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Sparks a Conversation about Inclusion

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his year, Hotchkiss honored the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with an open forum to discuss race and inclusion on campus, followed by a day of speakers and presentations.

Teni Odugbesan ’16 and Cahleb Derry ’16, co-heads of the Black and Hispanic Student Alliance (BaHSA), felt that this year’s commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day marked a watershed moment for the Hotchkiss community. “The events that happened that day, and the hours leading up to it, were some of the most incredible moments that I have ever experienced,” Odugbesan said. “The empathy and thoughtfulness that Hotchkiss students displayed reminded me of why I came to Hotchkiss in the first place. My hope is that the empathy and thoughtfulness won’t end with this weekend, but will proliferate throughout the rest of the year and engender more discussion and action.”

Derry echoed that sentiment: “These events were a powerful representation of the empathy that is so present in our community, but so often hidden. I have never felt more comfortable while voicing my discomfort in front of my peers. I hope this sparks a fire that continuously heats Hotchkiss up and molds the entire

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community into one in which every single student feels safe, supported, represented, and loved.”

On King’s birthday, Detroit poet Will Langford performed several of his works, and Keith Bernard ’95 gave the keynote address.

During the Community Voices segment of the program, many students and faculty members read personal essays in which they reflected on their experiences with stereotypes about race, gender, and sexual orientation.

English Instructor and BaHSA advisor Rachel Myers, who helped organize the day’s events, applauded the maturity and poise the students displayed in sharing their stories. “Everyone was really open with each other — people needed to talk about their pain and listen to other people share theirs,” she said.

Head of School Peter O’Neill commended the entire community, particularly the students, for their willingness to share and listen.

“Leaning into discomfort resulted in a positive sense of momentum in addressing the difficult issues that we face as both a school and a nation,” he said. “The students displayed an openness and a vulnerability that will help us build bridges across lines of difference — and, in the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., find things that unite us rather than divide us.”

From

The Lost Boys

by Will Langford

Words from

Community Voices I am tired of having to cautiously highlight that I was born in New Jersey, so I don’t elicit being treated as a foreigner and being alienated from the rest of conversation, because Africans can’t possibly understand the rest of the world. I am tired of mumbling the “Nigerian” part of my ethnicity of Nigerian-American.

— Agnes Ezekwesili ’16

We exist in the margins Yes But so do we fill those margins with ink with song with rhyme Penning for Pining for A crab to escape our barrel we love hip-hop for the pauses it gives our spines from holding our heads high most days it is solace enough to nod when the bass drops we are the hard things between harder places we are the lost boys found every day on milk cartons we are the sub nation undulating to the rhythm

I could tell from the glare in their eyes that they felt off about me, a bronze, sweaty, shirtless boy working solitarily. The father approached me and made the attempt to speak to me in Spanish. I quickly wondered why he didn’t approach me with English. Was I offended? No. But most of them will have a preconceived idea that we don’t speak their language simply because we are brown.

— Abraham Pineda Jr. ’16

Despite my experience with racial and ethnic discrimination, despite my experience with living in various cultures, despite my experience with being a part of an extremely diverse family, I have made racist remarks to my peers. I have played into the hands of the very evil that I have tried, and continue to try, to escape.

This day marks the genesis of black boys for whom the sun’s rays will be too bright to stand back unburdened by the bricks stacked against them Victims of the absent-daddy diagnoses Spines slowly curving Away from the light It is the darkness We love most —

For the full text of “The Lost Boys,” visit www.hotchkiss.org/MLK

— Noah Ahmed ’16 W i n t e r / S p r i n g

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Ref lections on a Changing Campus

by KEITH BERNARD ’95

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hile I was at Hotchkiss in the ’90s, diversity was by no means accepted as a given. Resentment towards affirmative action — especially since the idea was often unnecessarily associated with quotas — was palpable in certain quarters. As a minority student from a working-class or poor background, you felt an insistent need to prove you belonged on campus. The effort sapped you emotionally and taxed you intellectually. While the scale tilts towards joy when reflecting on my time at the School, there is no denying that most of us left Lakeville nursing some wounds.

Those words are not meant as a condemnation. To expect Hotchkiss to exist as a haven of tolerance would be illogical. After all, despite its exceptionalism, Hotchkiss is a microcosm of the triumphs and tensions in the wider world. More importantly, the majority of students entering Hotchkiss are learning about the legacy of racism for the first time. Before they come to Lakeville, many students might be aware of racism as a concept, but they don’t yet appreciate its tangible, far-reaching effects. Many of their parents haven’t fully grasped racism’s repercussions, so we can’t expect their teenage children to become champions of diversity overnight.

Therein lies the opportunity for Hotchkiss. By fully embracing the role and value of diversity and inclusion in the community and facilitating genuine, sometimes uncomfortable conversations, Hotchkiss can fortify the strength of its education and promote cultural understanding in a way that is needed in the 21st century.

The School has been headed in this direction for decades. It began by moving past tokenism and admitting greater numbers of students of color in the ’80s. Hotchkiss then started formally acknowledging the impact of racism in the ’90s, with the implementation of extracurricular programming celebrating diverse cultures. Finally, the last decade saw an increased respect for diversity embedded in the Hotchkiss curriculum itself, with the arrival of the Humanities and Social Sciences department and the Human Development Program. The goal of these programs is to imbue students with a sense of citizenship in a gloriously heterogenous world.

I witnessed the results of these endeavors when I visited campus on Martin Luther King Jr. Day this past January. During my visit, I listened to impassioned, yet reasoned commentary from a wide range of students as they discussed how racism and other forms of bias have touched their lives at Hotchkiss. As they shared powerful,

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heartbreaking anecdotes, I watched these young women and men grapple with issues that people twice their age have trouble navigating. It was a stirring experience.

These students were energized. Nourished on the current activist zeitgeist, they were insightful, incisive, and — in the best way — incendiary. Despite their anger and frustration, it was a testament to the School that they felt empowered to tell their stories and voice their concerns. I found it encouraging that many of the students listening and actively participating in the discussions were white. This amazing dialogue was certainly evidence of the School’s progress.

Having acknowledged this slow but steady movement, Hotchkiss undoubtedly has more work to do. A dearth of African-American and Latino faculty remains, and minority students still lack an adequate support system for candidly discussing issues of race on campus.

Fortunately, the School’s administration and the Board of Trustees have recognized this need. Recently, they started a Strategic Planning Committee for Inclusion and Diversity, tasked with finding more ways to shape Hotchkiss into an even more inclusive environment.

Given the School’s track record when it comes to setting its collective mind to an enterprise, I’m optimistic about the future.

The responsibility of making Hotchkiss more inclusive extends beyond Lakeville, however. We alumni must accept our personal role as well. That means writing to the School to inquire about the status of the new diversity committee. It means joining the Shades of Hotchkiss Facebook group and working with the Board of Governors’ Alumni of Color Committee. It means donating to the Walter J. Crain Jr. Scholarship. And it means reaching out to classmates whom we might have hurt when we were young and oblivious to the power of our words. It’s not too late. Let’s make Hotchkiss — both the actual place and the one we hold in our hearts — better than ever.

Under Pressure, Making Ping Pong Balls Fly

PHOTOGRAPHS BY WENDY CARLSON

The Hotchkiss Science Olympiad team put its quantitative reasoning skills to the test at Yale’s third annual Undergraduate Invitational in January. Fifteen students took part in 18 timed, Yale-undergrad-supervised events, including a fossil identification lab, a homemade electric vehicle race, and a projectile launch. For several events, contestants had to build their own devices and bring them to Yale on competition day, testing their design acumen against students from more than 48 secondary schools across the region. Agnes Ezekwesili ’16, one of the three co-leaders of the Hotchkiss team, said the day was a success. Her favorite part? “Science Olympiad draws students from different corners of the Hotchkiss community and unites them in their love for the sciences,” she said. Next on the agenda: the state competition at the University of Connecticut-Storrs on April 2. — Chelsea Edgar

From left to right: Upper mid Wan Lin Qin adjusts the projectile launch, senior Carina Zhang and upper mid Alan Wong brainstorm during an experimental design lab, senior Isabel Weil identifies fossils, and lower mid Charlotte Somerville works on an invasive species lab.

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Visitors

Nosarieme Garrick CREATOR, “MY AFRICA IS”

When writer, filmmaker, and entrepreneur Nosarieme Garrick addressed students at Auditorium in November, she began her talk with a question: “When you hear the word ‘Africa,’ what immediately comes to mind?”

There was a brief pause. One student called out, “Surfing!” Another yelled, “Safari!”

Nosa showed the next slide in her presentation, an image of a rhino, a giraffe, and an elephant silhouetted against an orange sunset.

“When you Google images of ‘Africa,’ this is one of the first things that comes up,” she said.

The other images that surface quickly tend to be grim depictions of poverty and hunger: starving children and mud huts. But Garrick, who’s Nigerian, sees a different Africa. Three years ago, she created “My Africa Is,” a documentary series that highlights people and places not often seen in mainstream Western media — from the ingenuity of young entrepreneurs in Lagos, which boasts

one of the fastest-growing startup cultures in the world, to the engineer in Togo who built a 3-D printer from scraps of electronic waste.

Garrick has introduced viewers to WeCyclers, a group dedicated to solving the trash crisis in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city and Garrick’s hometown, and to Dakar’s nascent surfing scene.

Garrick and the people she profiles are well aware of the challenges facing Africa today. The goal of her project, she said, isn’t to pretend that these problems don’t exist, but to shift the focus to the African people who are coming up with innovative ways to solve them.

Garrick, who lives in Germantown, Md., spent her youth in Lagos and moved to D.C. with her family when she was 14. When she returned to Lagos for the first time after 12 years of living in the U.S., she was struck by how much had changed since she left, particularly in terms of the political climate, which had been marked by the authoritarian regime of Sani Abacha during her childhood. After going back home, Garrick decided that she wanted to chronicle the seachange taking place on the ground in Lagos and

beyond. Since 2012, she’s produced more than a dozen mini-episodes, ranging from a minute-and a half to 15 minutes in length, and she’s currently working on a pilot for PBS. — Chelsea Edgar Listen to a podcast of an interview with Garrick at hotchkiss.org/podcasts.

Croatian Ambassador Josip Paro and Ambassador Robert Beecroft ’58

In recognition of the 20th anniversary of the Dayton Accords, which ended three-anda-half years of war in the Balkans, Hotchkiss hosted two ambassadors in November: Josip Paro, ambassador of Croatia to the United States, and Ambassador Robert M. Beecroft ’58.

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Both ambassadors have had distinguished careers in diplomacy, and they encouraged students to use their Hotchkiss education to become stewards of peace. During his visit, Paro expressed admiration for the way Hotchkiss prepares students to engage in complex discussions. “Here, you don’t just learn information; you learn how to think,” he said.

On Nov. 16, Paro spoke about the diplomatic process, using the Dayton Accords as an object lesson in global conflict resolution. He analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the agreement, giving students invaluable insight into the negotiations and the challenges of addressing the crises facing the world today.

He outlined several key principles in brokering international agreements, the most important of which are qualities that Hotchkiss nurtures in its students: humility in the face of challenge, studiousness, and courage. Paro stressed that in any successful treaty, no party can be the clear winner; each side must acknowledge the other’s point of view.

After addressing students in Auditorium on

Nov. 17, Paro and Beecroft visited several classes, including a joint meeting of Tom Drake’s “World War II as Global War” and Lou Pressman’s “International Affairs and Ethics.” They talked about their paths to foreign service (Paro joined the foreign service during the war in Croatia, driven by the impulse to help end the conflict; Beecroft, moved by John F. Kennedy’s assassination, took the foreign service exam after earning his B.A. in French at the University of Pennsylvania), the international community’s duty to monitor and enforce agreements between groups in conflict, and the major diplomatic challenges ahead. Both Beecroft and Paro believe that meeting those challenges will require rethinking the balance between military power and negotiation, and that building a strong coalition of nations should be a top priority for the next generation of leaders.

“You can’t be servants of what is given to you,” Paro told students, emphasizing the importance of creativity and critical thinking.

“You can’t just take and carry; you need to be innovative.” — Chelsea Edgar

Visitors

Quinn Fionda ’91 FORMER U.S. NAVY SEAL

In honor of Veterans Day, Quinn Fionda ’91 came to Hotchkiss to talk to students about his experience in the military and the importance of commitment.

What were some of the highlights of your experience at Hotchkiss?

Looking back, Hotchkiss was definitely a major building block in my foundation, more so than college or graduate school in many ways. I deeply appreciated the academic exposure, having classmates from all over the world, the lifelong lessons I learned through playing tennis and hockey, and the experience of going through those formative years with my classmates and the lasting friendships that developed as a result.

Above, lower mid June Perteet stretches in a wokshop led by visiting dance troupe Abraham in Motion in December ; below, Connecticut Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin reads from a selection of his work during a visit to Hotchkiss in January.

Were there any aspects of your Hotchkiss experience that you drew on in the Naval Academy and in your time as a SEAL?

The daily grind, for sure. But I mean that in a very positive way. I remember having conversations about character with my English teacher, Blair Torrey, who had been a Marine. And being well-read and understanding history served me well. When I was going through SEAL training, I distinctly remember drawing upon moments from the locker room under the coaching of Jeff Kosak, Damon White, and Blair Torrey, where I learned what it means to persevere, to not quit. At the end of the day, I think you have to find it in yourself to push through adversity, but those kinds of experiences helped give me the perspective I needed to do so.

How does having been in intense, high-stress, high-stakes situations affect the way you approach day-to-day life?

PHOTOGRAPHS BY WENDY CARLSON

I think you have a broader set of data points, a wider spectrum of experience, upon which to rely. Your idea of stress is naturally going to vary from someone else’s. You are faced with life-threatening situations all the time, even in training: sky-diving, explosives, weapons.

In recent decades, fewer Hotchkiss alumni have enlisted in the armed forces than in the mid-20th century. Do you think young people today are less drawn to the military? What’s your perspective on that generational shift?

I think it’s good, on some level, that there isn’t as much interest today — people now understand the real ramifications of war. But I believe that part of our country’s DNA is protecting those who are unable to protect themselves, to stand up for what is right, and I think that conviction will withstand any sort of generational shift.

To read the full interview with Fionda, go to hotchkiss.org/quinn-fionda.

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Teaching

m a t t e rs

You Belong Here

How Philosophy and Religion Instructor Jason Larson defied the odds

by J AS ON LARSON

PHOTOGRAPHED

by WENDY CARLSON

This really isn’t the best career choice.

This strikes me as an exercise in futility and frustration.

I would not recommend this. You should try something that works within your limitations.

You’re deaf. You’ll be much better off if you do something that works better for what you are.

I really should not be here.

I

’ve heard these words throughout my life. No one

expected that I would become a teacher of religion, philosophy, and history, or be fortunate to live and work in a community like Hotchkiss.

I was born with congenital hearing loss, and my deafness was gradual. My parents didn’t notice until I was about three years old.

One night, I heard my mother say: “Hey, Jason, it’s time to start getting ready for bed. It is time to go ...sh your ... eet. ” Most children probably would have realized that she’d said, “Brush your teeth.” That’s how language works; our ability to comprehend doesn’t always require us to hear every word perfectly. But a three-year old probably hasn’t heard that combination of words often enough to understand the implicit meaning of “ ...sh your ...eet.” So I took a guess: I got into the bathtub, turned on the water, and washed my feet like nobody’s business.

Growing up, I felt like I couldn’t meet my parents’ expectations. I equated deafness with not being able to please people or do the things most kids did. I was, in effect, creating a scapegoat.

In ancient Hebrew religion, scapegoats were actual goats upon which priests transferred the sins of Israel. The animal would be led into the wilderness, never to return. But my scapegoat, my deafness, was not wandering off into the wilderness. It kept coming back. By the time I was in high school, that goat had moved into the backyard of my consciousness. Deafness became a convenient excuse for my insecurities, and I grew adept at devising excuses for anything I was afraid of trying.

My doctors steered me toward activities that didn’t depend on being able to hear. There’s a perception that the deaf cannot enjoy things that auditory folks take for granted. Deaf kids don’t go to movies. Deaf kids don’t play instruments. Deaf kids don’t play sports. I allowed myself to

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believe those stereotypes. As a result, I became an avid reader, and I learned to value quiet. I came to enjoy being alone. But in other situations, I thought: “I should not be here.” I didn’t have a lot of friends, didn’t play any sports, didn’t go to dances, didn’t go to movies or other social events. I came to believe in the lie: To be important, you had to do those things, and I convinced myself that I couldn’t.

But my parents, teachers, and church leaders knew that I didn’t really believe the lie. At age six, three years after I got my first hearing aid, I asked my parents if I could take piano lessons. I was still too young to be aware of the stereotype that deaf kids don’t play music. I played the piano for the next 13 years; I performed in choirs, church groups, and bands, wrote a lot of truly awful music, and entered college as a music major. When I changed my major to history, it wasn’t because I couldn’t hear a thing in music theory class. It was because, for the first time, I believed I could do something: teach.

After graduating from college, my hearing worsened. I was down to 10 percent hearing capacity in the right ear and two percent in the left. Yet I went on to grad school at Miami University, where I found a mentor, Dr. Edwin Yamauchi, who believed in me.

While in grad school, I went to an audiologist who told me that my hearing loss was progressing faster than could be accommodated with hearing aids.

“What do you want to do in life?” he asked.

“I’m a grad student, and I plan to earn my doctoral degree and to teach,” I said.

“You’re deaf,” he said.“You’ll be much better off if you do something that works better for what you are.”

I did not take his advice. I completed my master’s degree, then earned a second in library and information studies at the University of Kentucky.

Eventually, I earned my Ph.D. in religion from Syracuse University. I went on to teach at eight different colleges and universities before finally ending up here, at Hotchkiss. I should be here. I belong here.

We are not the sum of our weaknesses, insecurities, and vulnerabilities. We need others to help us realize this, to look us in the eye and say to us: “You can do this. You should be here. You belong here.”

This essay was adapted from a Chapel talk. To hear a podcast of Jason Larson reading the full text of his talk, go to hotchkiss.org/podcasts.

Jason Larson at home with his hearing assistant, Hopper

Celebrating

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Years

After decades in the Chapel basement, the music program is thriving in its new home

The Esther Eastman Music Center is much more than a wing in Main Building. Since it first opened in 2005, it has become a vital part of community life at Hotchkiss, drawing top-notch artists from all over the globe — like violinist Midori, pianist Leon Fleisher, and the Guarneri String Quartet. It has also created a more robust music program, enhanced the Summer Portals free concert series, and given students an opportunity to perform on a world-class stage. Hotchkiss Magazine sat down with Fabio Witkowski, chair of the visual and performing arts department and director of the music program, to talk about how the facilities have changed the School.

What was the music program like when you and your wife, fellow piano instructor Gisele Nacif-Witkowski, first came to Hotchkiss in 1999-2000?

When we first arrived, the music department was located in the basement of the Chapel. We only had six or seven windowless rooms, and it was very dark.

All the concerts were performed in Chapel, which was beautiful acoustically, but we couldn’t fit many people into that space. At that time, music teachers were contractors, not regular employees.

There was no real emphasis on music in the academic program — some students didn’t even know we had a music program. Admission tours would only show a prospective student the music facilities if he or she was really committed, really passionate about music. Then, in 2001, the School started a major music and arts initiative, and everything changed.

map of music and bring in some amazing performers, and the new facilities make a very strong statement to prospective students. The quantity and quality of students applying to Hotchkiss because of the music program is beyond exciting, and it keeps getting better. That’s had a wonderful snowball effect. For example, every year, I say to the orchestra students, “You guys are the best orchestra ever!” and they say, “You said that last year.” It’s true! Now we have an orchestra that plays standard symphonic repertoire, not the modified educational editions.

Whatever the New York Philharmonic is playing, that’s what we’re playing.

attracting the students who want to become professional musicians, and to instill a love of music in the students who want to go into business or medicine or law, or whatever it is they want to do. We are delighted to welcome accomplished music students. Just as important, though, are the students who don’t plan on becoming professionals, but still enjoy learning about music. I want all of our students to have a meaningful experience.

What do students gain from studying music at Hotchkiss?

They learn discipline, how to overcome obstacles. Sometimes students ask me, “Do I have to perform, even though I don’t

What are your hopes for the next 10 years?

We’re starting at a level that I never imagined we’d reach. I want to keep working towards our two most important missions: to continue

How has the Esther Eastman Music Center changed the course of the music program?

The Katherine M. Elfers Hall has allowed us to put Hotchkiss on the world

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Fabio and Gisele Witkowski

What impact has the Esther Eastman Music Center had on the Hotchkiss community as a whole?

Hotchkiss already does an amazing job of bringing in people from all over the world. I think the new music facilities have allowed us to create a different layer of diversity: a diversity of passions. The stage in Elfers is a stage to celebrate different student achievements. It’s amazing when 50 kids perform in the orchestra and their peers say, “You’re really good! I didn’t know you could do that!” So it’s really helped build an appreciation for different talents. And the fact that students are studying music and developing a sensitivity to the arts is very important. I decided to pursue a career in music because I think that if we can all learn to be sensitive to music — both playing it and listening to it — we’re connecting to other human beings in a nonverbal way. Call me a romantic, but I think our world needs that.

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PHOTOGRAPHS (PP. 14-17) BY PETER AARON FOR ESTO; (UPPER LEFT) JONATHAN DOSTER

want to be a professional musician?” Well, if you’re going to be a lawyer and argue a case before a judge, that’s a performance. If you’re going to be a businessperson and address the board, that’s a performance. And if you’re going to be a surgeon — if you screw up that performance, it’s a huge deal. So performing music on stage is fantastic training. I still get nervous before I perform. There’s always one minute before I go on stage when I think, “Why am I doing this? I could make a fool of myself. I’m about to play 3,000 notes!” But we always have those moments. With experience, you learn how to control your anxiety.

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seats in Katherine M. Elfers Hall

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1.5 seconds

reverberation time in the concert hall

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total number of construction hours

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number of golfballs that have cracked a window in Elfers

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Where Passion Takes

Center Stage

Incoming Dean of Faculty and Instructor in History Tom Drake reflects on a few memorable performances

by TOM DRAKE

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hen I feel drained after a long day of grading papers in the history wing, I make a point of walking through the Esther Eastman Music Center and listening to the students practice. It clears my mind and reminds me just how talented and dedicated our students are. One afternoon, I heard a Chopin étude that I thought was coming from a Horowitz performance I had been listening to on my iPhone. Only when I took the phone out of my pocket and checked to make sure it wasn’t on did I realize that it was a student, Brian Wong ’19, in one of the practice rooms, playing the same piece.

Moments like this come to mind when I think of the many opportunities the Esther Eastman Music Center and the Katherine M. Elfers Hall have provided over the last 10 years for student performers and the entire Hotchkiss community.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JONATHAN DOSTER

World-renowned violinist Midori

Consider Right Brain Logic, the student ensemble led by Jazz Guitar Instructor Michael Musillami and Instructors Charlie Tokarz on saxophone, Rich Syracuse on double bass, and Beth Chinery on flute. In a December 2013 performance, Sam Bartusek ’15 stood in front, stage left, the lead guitarist in a row half a dozen strong. After a short trumpet introduction by his brother, Joe Bartusek ’17, he launched into a jazz guitar solo, moving his fingers so rapidly along the frets that he had to shake his hand out after each phrase.

He performed with an unassuming intensity, the signature mark of Musillami, with whom Bartusek took private lessons.

Musillami, looking every inch the jazz musician with his long, wispy beard and black attire, encourages his young performers — or “cats,” as he calls them — by snapping his fingers in time and pacing back and forth. Often, his students play songs he has composed. And when Musillami is on stage, with his own trio or with artists like 2016 Grammy nominee Jimmy Greene, his incredible guitar talent inspires his students to reach their full potential.

Students of classical music perform with the same passionate intensity. Imagine three students — cellist Niels Larson ’13, violinist Lillian Lee ’13, and pianist Johnny Cruz ’16 — playing Beethoven’s triple concerto for cello, Opus 56, in front of a packed house in Elfers. Suddenly, Larson snaps a string, and everyone shifts to the edge of their seats, watching him as he continues to play with the remaining strings. Then, calmly, he rises from his seat, walks down to the principal cellist, Grace Cheng ’16, in the orchestra below, takes her cello, and returns to his seat. Cheng responds with poise to the unexpected development. It takes a few minutes for Larson to find his place in the music, and then the trio regains its stride. Such grace under pressure was amazing to witness. For those of us without musical training, the performance seemed flawless.

I can remember seeing a student pianist, Tony Zhang ’15, play the first movement of a Romantic concerto with precision and feeling.

At the end of his performance, he stood, and, reaching out with his hand to steady himself on the piano, bowed to the audience with

“Ten years ago, I never imagined music would become such an essential part of our school.” unmistakable exhaustion, having given everything to his performance.

That moment reminded me of Daniel Barenboim playing the Appassionata in Berlin, when he, too, bowed in exhaustion so palpable that the audience worried he might not be able to return for the next sonata.

Fabio Witkowski, chair of the arts department and a concert pianist, conducted both of those magnificent student performances. His wife, Gisele Nacif-Witkowski, also a concert pianist and instructor, works with our accomplished piano students, who spend countless hours practicing. She instills in them a deep understanding of the composers’ intent in the pieces that they perform. I have known Fabio and Gisele since 2001, when they performed Brahms’ Hungarian Dance suites for piano four hands at my wedding celebration.

Jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd ’54

What’s in a

Name?

The donors behind the scene Guarneri String Quartet

I am humbled to be their colleague.

Elfers Hall has allowed students to experience this stellar duo, whether Gisele is performing Schumann with a trio led by Glenn Dicterow, principal violinist and concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, or Fabio is playing the Brahms Sonata for Piano and Cello with Robert deMaine, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s principal cellist.

Perhaps my favorite performance was when Fabio played piano in the Beethoven Fantasy while conducting the orchestra on stage and the chorus in the balcony.

Ten years ago, I never imagined that music would become such an essential part of our school. When I first arrived at Hotchkiss, Annette Hunt was teaching piano students in the basement of the Chapel; the music department was struggling for a place in the academic program. Despite the fine acoustics of the Chapel, the space was designed for worship, not concerts. The absence of a stage door made for awkward entrances and exits for the performers.

The Esther Eastman Music Center and Elfers Hall have been so thoughtfully designed and effectively used that they’ve already become part of the School’s legacy. The Tang family has endowed the Hunt Concert Series in honor of Annette Hunt, a longtime piano teacher at Hotchkiss who retired in 2002, and, with her colleague, David Sermersheim, struggled mightily to keep the music program vibrant during the last three decades of the 20th century. The strength that the program has achieved in the interim is built on her efforts — indeed, it was she who found the Witkowski duo and brought them to Hotchkiss. Every time I hear a Hunt Concert Series performance in Elfers Hall, I seek out Annette at the end and congratulate her on this vindication of her efforts.

Barbara Walsh Hostetter ’77 and her husband, Amos, were instrumental in the development of the music program and the Esther Eastman Music Center, named in honor of Barbara Hostetter’s grandmother. Three of Esther Eastman’s grandchildren attended Hotchkiss, and one of her great-grandchildren, Bennett Eastman Rathbun, is a member of the Class of 2003.

The Hostetters’ gift, made through the Barr Foundation, has helped transform Hotchkiss into a world-class center for the performing arts.

The 7,400-square-foot concert hall was named in honor of Katherine M. Elfers, the mother of former trustee William Elfers Sr. ’37, and grandmother of William R. Elfers ’67, vice president of the Board of Trustees.

At the dedication of the new facilities in October 2005, former Head of School Robert H. Mattoon Jr. praised the Hostetters’ generosity. “From our perspective, the working relationship between the School, Barbara, and the Barr Foundation could not have been more perfect. The fact that the music program held equal weight in their eyes as the building was a simple but brilliant concept,” he said.

On May 7, a special anniversary concert will be held in the Katherine M. Elfers Hall, featuring the chamber music ensemble, Fine Arts Quartet, with pianists Fabio and Gisele Witkowski.

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Two alumnae are making history in the country’s first professional women’s hockey league

by CHELSEA EDGAR

Connecticut Whale defenseman Jordan Brickner ’09, left, and Boston Pride goalie Kelsie Fralick ’11, on the ice in Stamford

PH0TOGRAPHS by WENDY CARLSON

Since ice hockey became a varsity girls sport at Hotchkiss in 1977, the program has produced many talented athletes. Gina Kingsbury ’00 played on the gold-medal-winning Canadian Women’s Olympic Hockey Team in 2006; Caitlin Cahow ’03 was a member of the bronzewinning U.S. team that same year and the silver-winning team in 2010.

In 2015, women’s ice hockey reached a milestone with the founding of the first professional hockey league. Two Hotchkiss alumnae have joined its ranks: Jordan Brickner ’09, a graduate of Colgate University, plays defense for the Connecticut Whale, and Kelsie Fralick ’11, a graduate of Connecticut College, is a goalie for the Boston Pride.

Before the former teammates faced each other in a game last December, Jordan and Kelsie sat down with Hotchkiss Magazine to talk about their passion for the sport, the lessons they learned at Hotchkiss, and their hopes for the next few years.

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Boston Pride goalie Kelsie Fralick ’11, right, fist-bumps a teammate.

WHEN DID YOU EACH START PLAYING ICE HOCKEY?

Jordan: I started skating when I was four or five. I started out figure skating, actually, but that lasted one day. My brother was at the other end of the rink playing hockey, and my mom said that I stopped at the red line and watched him the whole time. So the next day, she bought me black skates and returned the white ones.

The rest is history.

Kelsie: That’s so cool. I didn’t start early, like Jordan. I started late. How old are you when you’re in second grade? Actually, was that the same age?

Jordan: No! (laughs) Kelsie: See? I don’t even know! So I started in second grade. We lived in Kansas when I was growing up, and there wasn’t really any ice. When we moved to Pennsylvania, my new school didn’t have basketball, which is the sport I’d been playing, but they had skating and hockey. So I figured I’d try hockey. Like Jordan, I tried figure skating at first, but I was like, “Heck, no.” And then I went right to hockey.

WHO WERE SOME OF YOUR MENTORS AT HOTCHKISS?

Jordan: When I played field hockey, Robin Chandler [athletic director and varsity field hockey coach] taught me so much about sports in general. For ice hockey, I had [John] Cooper as my coach all four years, and he was also my academic advisor, so I spent a lot of time with him and his family. Ms. Chandler and Mr. Cooper were my two go-to teachers and coaches.

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And we also grew up with them. I mean, we went as preps our first year — 14 years old, left when we were 17 or 18, so we really grew up, and they were second parents to us.

Kelsie: Exactly. Especially the Cooper family.

And Chan’s [Robin Chandler’s] dogs — the first year she had Gunnar, he would run down the hallway in Buehler and steal my recycling. And I’d be like, “Chan, I have to go get my water bottle and not study!” Everybody was connected through sports.

WHILE YOU WERE PLAYING FOR HOTCHKISS, DID YOU EVER IMAGINE YOU MIGHT PLAY PROFESSIONALLY?

Jordan: I didn’t think it would happen, so it was a pleasant surprise, because I wasn’t ready to give up my passion for the game. I’ve been playing since I was five, so it had been a good 18 years of play, and then after your last college game, you’re like, “It’s over? Is that it?” I was fortunate enough to spend two years playing hockey in Europe after I graduated from college — first in Salzburg, Austria, then in Lugano, Switzerland — and it was amazing.

Even when I was there, the National Women’s Hockey League didn’t exist yet. No one knew it was even in the works, and I found out about it from one of the girls who was in Switzerland with me. Then, it ended up happening, and I am so glad that I’m part of the league.

Kelsie: You always have the dream of going to the Olympics. After Hotchkiss, I went to a Division 3 school, and I was like, “OK, the Olympics

probably isn’t going to happen.” I figured I’d do a pickup league, a beer league, something, because I wasn’t done playing, When the women’s league started, it was a really happy accident. I was in the right place at the right time, so I’ve been really lucky. The talent in the league is unbelievable, and it’s been amazing to see girls that are two, three-time Olympians knocking my helmet off. Hilary Knight was at my first practice, and she knocked my helmet off. I was like, “This is the coolest thing ever!” I fangirled a little bit.

WHAT DO YOU GUYS DO WHEN YOU’RE NOT ON THE ICE?

Jordan: I’m originally from Chicago, and I moved out here and signed a six-and-a-half month lease to play for the season. I coach and do private lessons in the mornings, but beyond that, I’m just playing. I think I’m actually going to stay here in Connecticut, and hopefully keep playing. But Kelsie’s the one doing it all.

Kelsie: I work at St. Paul’s in the Penn Residency Master’s in Teaching program. I’m getting my master’s in education while learning to teach — I’m teaching classics. (Hey, Mr. Davis and Mr. Kneeland!) So I’m there for two years with the program, and I’m coaching, advising, and doing dorm duty — all normal prep school faculty jobs, and then master’s work, and then playing here.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE THE NEXT FIVE YEARS WILL BRING?

Jordan: I’d love to keep playing for at least

one more season. We actually don’t have that much information on what next year will be like — everyone signed a one-year contract.

But I’d love to play one more year, and then I’m looking to go to law school, so I’m studying and preparing for that.

Kelsie: That’s awesome! Jordo, I didn’t know you wanted to do that!

Jordan: Yeah, well, check you out, working that life right now.

Kelsie: I don’t know if next season is a possibility for me, just because of the workload ramping up in my program at St. Paul’s, and I’m sure there’s a better goalie out there somewhere.

Jordan: Oh, stop.

Kelsie: You know, someone who lives closer and can be an asset right away. If they ask me to play, I’ll consider it. But I’m expecting that I’ll just be working up at St. Paul’s next year and coaching.

DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR HIGH-SCHOOL GIRLS WHO THINK THEY MIGHT WANT TO DO WHAT YOU’RE DOING SOMEDAY?

Jordan: I’d say keep at it, keep working hard.

Now that the dream has become a reality, it’s a great thing for girls.

Kelsie: Now there’s actually something you can aspire to. The Olympics is for a select few, but with more teams and more opportunities for girls to play beyond college at a high level, you can reach out and grab it.

Jordan: And I also think it’s important to keep the passion alive. I know a lot of athletes get burned out, especially people who have been playing since they were young, but I think it’s really important to just enjoy what you’re doing. Have fun with it.

WHAT WERE SOME OF THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSONS YOU LEARNED AT HOTCHKISS?

Jordan: Hockey wasn’t our primary focus in prep school. If I had stayed home, it would have been all hockey, but I don’t regret missing that at all. I loved going to Hotchkiss, and playing three sports taught me a lot about myself and life in general — balancing everything. I was able to do so many more activities, join clubs, be part of school politics.

We were both proctors, and we were

very involved in dorm life and academics.

It was a great balance.

Kelsie: You’re there to prep for college, but you’re also learning how to be a human being.

You’re living independently from your parents at such a young age, so you have to grow up really quickly and figure out how to get everything done between classes and practices and club team tournaments on the weekends. So we had to figure out how to get through — well, “get through” sounds horrible. It wasn’t horrible. But we had to figure out how to — Jordan: Manage our time.

Kelsie: Yeah. And do our best. Which made college really easy for me.

Jordan: I would second that, for sure.

ANYTHING YOU’D LIKE TO SAY TO ROBIN CHANDLER AND JOHN COOPER?

Jordan: Thanks so much for helping us grow as people, as players, as athletes — we really appreciate it. We developed as women and athletes under you guys, and we owe you a lot.

Kelsie: I’m doing what I’m doing because of you guys. So thank you.

Jordan Brickner ’09, defenseman for the Connecticut Whale, takes a shot on goal.

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T he G rav eyar d N ext D oor For humanities students, tombstones are a window to the past

by WENDY CARLSON

ot many secondary schools have their own cemetery, much less one that figures into the curriculum. But the centuries-old headstones in the School’s Town Hill Cemetery that students pass by daily take on new meaning through a lower-mid humanities project.

The cemetery dates back to colonial times, but it became part of Hotchkiss in 1891, when the School’s founder, Maria Hotchkiss, donated 65 acres on Town Hill. Back then, the property was comprised of open fields bounded by stone walls, a few houses, and the town burial ground.

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Over time, dormitories and a golf course replaced the bucolic fields and interlacing stone walls, but the cemetery remains a campus fixture.

The 425 headstones include the graves of Maria Bissell Hotchkiss, Revolutionary War soldiers, women and children whose lives ended abruptly due to illness, and men from around the area who toiled in the mines of Ore Hill in the early 19th century. Since 2010, the headstones have served as the basis for The Cemetery Project, an interdisciplinary assignment for which lower mids write a fictional memoir, letter, journal, or diary entry of a person buried between 1800 and 1870 in Town Hill Cemetery.

Ce m et ery P ro ject Port r ai ts From top, left to right: Miranda Wilson ’16 by Augie Rice; Paul Oberto, instructor in biology and chemistry, by Pete Assakul; John Cooper, instructor in mathematics, by Carter Pearen, and Amanda McClure, senior class dean and instructor in humanities, by Claire Jennings W i n t e r / S p r i n g

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ask them to apply it to a poem they write.

The goal is get them to engage with a text and mine it for the details that they can use to construct a believable character," he said.

Jessica Craig, who works in Alumni and Development, models a period costume during an art class.

“The names and the headstones are a catalyst that the students use to create a fictional life that’s rooted in reality. They use local history to inform their essays,” said Joan Baldwin, curator of Special Collections.

Students take photos of the headstones and copy the epitaphs, drawing inspiration for their subjects from artifacts — a baby’s shoe, a school primer, a woman’s glove — available to them in the Edsel Ford Memorial Library in a box reserved for the project.

And they draw from primary and secondary sources about Salisbury and Lakeville to include historical attitudes about race, gender, religion, and class.

All students begin the Cemetery Project by watching Salisbury, 1800-1870: A Town in Transition, a video directed by Ann Villano, instructor in film, and written by Peter Vermilyea, chair of the social studies department

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at Housatonic Valley Regional High School.

This year, for the first time, the visual arts, photography, and theatre departments took part, adding a new dimension to the project.

Art students made sketches of a model arrayed in a satin evening dress of the day, and they painted landscapes in the style of the Romantics. Photography and video students took portraits of students or faculty styled to look like the subjects of their essays, then used Photoshop to create images resembling early tintypes and daguerreotypes.

Parker Reed, instructor in theatre and English and director of the Hotchkiss Dramatic Association, stretched the limits of his students’ imaginations by asking them to perform monologues drawn from characters in Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, a collection of free-form poems in which deceased residents of a fictional small town reflect on their lives.

Then, Reed asked his students to write a poem in the style of Spoon River, in the voice of the person whose headstone they selected from the cemetery.

“We asked them to be more expansive in their creative process,” Parker says, explaining that students start by dissecting the Spoon River poem and thinking about what the character’s language reveals about them.

“From that information, they tell the story through movement, gesture, voice, and facial expressions. After they’ve mastered that, I

essays are graded for their historical accuracy and use of bibliography, footnotes, and primary and secondary sources — and for how realistically they depict 19th-century life.

In a diary entry written in the voice of Nancy Bushnell, who died in 1842, Amy Li describes, in Bushnell's voice, her despair for her sick infant son while alluding to 19thcentury medical practices: “I am praying that the illness will soon pass. If the illness does not recede in the next few days, I will take further action and call upon a doctor to bleed him.”

Although there are stark differences between contemporary and 19th-century society, Li was struck by how similar they were.

“Technology wasn’t nearly as advanced, and women’s roles solely focused on domestic life, but people still went to dances and parties, listened to music, and talked about fashion.”

Robert Doar gained an understanding of how waterpower helped start the area’s iron ore industry in a letter he wrote in the voice of his subject, Frederick A. Reed, buried in 1893: “I have so far found three good spots for a dam and waterwheel to power the factory along my stretch of the creek. The water flows like greased lightning down the creek and in many places produces some powerful, dangerous rapids.”

Doar and Li now view the cemetery — and the towns of Salisbury and Lakeville — much differently.

“Before, I had always viewed the cemetery as a little out of place here. After the project, I realized that it carries so much history,” Li said.

“It’s definitely cool to have a place on campus that is a little piece of the 19th century.”

Support for Salisbury, 1800-1870: A Town in Transition, came from the Teaching and Learning Initiative Fund at The Hotchkiss School, the Connecticut Humanities Fund, the Salisbury Historical Society, and the Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area.

PHOTOGRAPHS: (PAGES 24, 26) BY WENDY CARLSON

nglish and history

Ce m et ery P ro ject Port r ai ts From top, left to right: Robert Hilliker, director of the Edsel Ford Memorial Library, by Kuma Matsukata; Rory Hart, instructor in history by Harry Tower, Christy Olson and son, August, by Claire Gould, and Lucia Chrysler ’18 by Isabel Wheeler

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PERFUME GENIUS Erika Shumate ’02 has a nose for fragrance and a head for business b y C H E L SE A E D G A R

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here are certain scents

that take Erika Shumate back to her Hotchkiss days. A whiff of Betsey Johnson perfume evokes her prep-year roommate, Emily Bohan᾿02. The eggy aroma of breakfast sandwiches reminds her of weekend mornings at the snack bar. And the smell of damp earth calls up memories of the first outdoor sports practices in early spring, just after the snow has melted.

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Shumate has been obsessed with scent for as long as she can remember. Her nose is so discerning that her friends have long relied on her to help them pick out perfumes, and she remembers the fragrances worn by her Hotchkiss classmates the way other people remember birthdays.

Farrell Jeffers ’02, she’ll tell you, wore Fracas. Emily Bohan wore Betsey Johnson.

(Shumate herself favored Tommy Girl, Ralph Lauren Romance, and CK One.)

Now, she’s making a career out of pairing women with the right perfume. With her business partner, Christine Luby, she launched Pinrose in 2014. The San Francisco fragrance startup makes perfumes to suit specific personality types, using a quiz that analyzes color, music, and shape preferences to match people with their ideal scent.

Shumate has always been a bit of a science geek. In her Hotchkiss years, she spent summers at home in the Chicago suburb

of Oak Brook, mixing her own perfumes using essential oils. She liked the process, if not the actual fragrances. Some of her favorite Hotchkiss memories come from working in the lab — once, she and her lab partner accidentally blew up a beaker of zinc during a hydrogen pop test; in her senior year, she designed an experiment to see if green tea molecules would protect bacteria from UV light damage.

As an undergraduate at Yale, she majored in the history of science and medicine, an interdisciplinary program that explores how culture affects scientific thought.

Intrigued by the lack of research on the olfactory sense, she spent her last two years studying the science of smell. She interned at the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago — where she learned, among other things, the theory that grapefruit notes in a perfume can shave up to five years off a man’s perception of a woman’s age. At Stanford Graduate Business School, where she met Christine Luby, Shumate realized that she wanted to start a business that combined her background in science with her passion for fragrance. Thus, Pinrose was born.

Pinrose founders Erika Shumate ’02, seated, and Christine Luby

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ERIKA SHUMATE

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hen Shumate and Luby came up with the concept for Pinrose, they jettisoned the idea of the “signature scent,” the holy grail of the perfume industry.

“It’s such an anti-feminist idea that women need a signature scent, because that’s based on the notion that men should be able to recognize their wives by their perfume,” Shumate says.

Instead, she wants Pinrose customers to find a range of scents to suit their mood, the season, or the outfit they’re wearing.

She and Luby have tried to eliminate all the things that can make perfume-buying unpleasant: the over-eager salespeople, the inscrutable language (base notes? sillage?), and the agony of plonking down upwards of $90 on a tiny bottle. Pinrose has adopted the try-at-home paradigm, giving prospective buyers a chance to find out how a fragrance will wear on their skin before they buy it.

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Shumate and Luby sample a new Pinrose fragrance, Gilded Fox, with perfumer David Apel, far right, at Symrise lab in New York City.

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their right brain, where they think more intuitively. It’s meant to be a split-second decision,” Shumate says. The most predictive factor, according to Shumate, is shape preference: People who select the jagged shape in the questionnaire are more likely to go for brighter scents, like citrus or wood, while those who prefer the rounded shape tend to gravitate towards milder florals.

Shumate and her partner developed the quiz using research by neurologist Alan Hirsch, director of the Smell & Taste Research and Treatment Foundation in Chicago, where Shumate interned, and Avery Gilbert, a fellow at the Association for Psychological Science who specializes in the study of smell. Shumate and Luby tested a group of 500 women, asking them to choose the colors, shapes, and sounds they liked the most. Then, they gave the women

fragrance samples to see if there was any correlation between their previous answers and the scents they preferred. Based on their findings, Shumate and Luby came up with an algorithm. To date, nearly 40,000 women have taken the quiz. Shumate says it’s fairly accurate, but it can’t account for people’s cultural backgrounds or their associations with certain scents. One of Pinrose’s pilot perfumes, a neroli-and-lavender fragrance called Surf Siren, didn’t sell — mainly, Shumate says, because lavender can be divisive. For some, the scent is soothing; for others, it's reminiscent of cheap sachets and health food stores.

Of course, the idea behind Surf Siren wasn’t cheap sachets and health food stores; Shumate and Luby were aiming for something akin to a French men’s cologne. For most designers, the process of making a fragrance begins with a brief, a short, written description of the scent a designer wants to evoke — a campfire, a garden at night, a day at the beach. In lieu of the traditional brief, Shumate and Luby use playlists and Pinterest boards to convey their vision to perfumers in the lab. Pinrose contracts with several perfumers known for their blockbuster fragrances — including Tom Ford Black Orchid, Ralph Lauren Blue, Vera Wang Princess, and CK One, among others.

As for her own favorite scent, Shumate is partial to the sharp, cedarwood aroma of No. 2 pencil shavings. No word yet on whether there’s a Pinrose fragrance in the works, but it's probably safe to assume that she's putting together a pencil-themed mood board right now.

TOP PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ERIKA SHUMATE; LEFT PHOTOGRAPH BY WENDY CARLSON

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he scent matchmaking begins with a questionnaire, much like the ones in glossy women’s magazines, that evaluates color, music, and shape preferences, then generates a personalized scent profile with three suggested fragrances. For $24, customers can sample three sachets of each fragrance before committing to a 30-milliliter bottle. Pinrose sells 10 perfumes online, which retail for $55 each. This spring, they’ll launch in 20 Sephora locations and add two new fragrances to the lineup.

But Shumate doesn’t just want to build a brand; she wants to change the way people think about fragrance. “As a culture, we have lots of words to talk about sounds, colors, and tastes, but our vocabulary for scent is pretty limited,” she says. The three words she most often hears used to describe scents are “fresh,” “musky,” and “strong,” all of which mean different things to different people. When people call a perfume “strong” or “musky,” she says, chances are it’s a scent they haven’t encountered before.

Hence the quiz, which is designed to help customers tune into what appeals to their senses on a gut level — bright green or deep purple? Electronic music or acoustic guitar?

A jagged shape or a rounded one? “We try to get people out of their left brain and into

Hotchkiss & The Great War

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF HOTCHKISS ARCHIVES & SPECIAL COLLEECTIONS

Rations in the Dining Hall and a battalion of their own by J O A N B A L D WI N The early 20th century was the golden age of American boarding schools. Like other New England schools, Hotchkiss offered its students not only entrée to college, but also a moral compass to guide them after they graduated. Courage & Character: Hotchkiss and the Great War, displayed in the Main Building Rotunda this past winter, captured the School's commitment to building character and instilling a sense of civic duty.

The exhibit complemented the screening of The Millionaires’ Unit, a documentary based on a book by Marc Wortman that chronicles the lives of a group of Yale students, including four Hotchkiss graduates: Albert Ditman ’04, Artemus “Di” Gates ’13, Kenneth MacLeish ’14, and Kenneth Smith ’14. These young men were part of a private air militia that trained on its own to prepare for America’s entry into World War I. Dubbed "the millionaires’ unit" by the the press, they became the founding squadron of the U.S. Naval Air Reserve. The MacLeish name may be familiar; Kenneth was the younger brother of the poet Archibald MacLeish ’11.

For many Hotchkiss students at that time, the June 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, marking the start of World War I, was a sidebar in a summer of travel, sailing, or camp. By 1916, Headmaster Huber G. Buehler knew the Great War would test students and alumni.

When School opened the following fall, the effects of war were felt in a number of ways — notably in the Dining Hall, where Headmaster Buehler cautioned, “There is a world shortage of meats, which are always the most expensive of foods and are now very high-priced.” The kitchen ledger was among the items included in the exhibit.

The School also showed its support for the war effort by joining 34 other boarding schools to create the School League for National Service, a collaborative effort to provide volunteer opportunities for students.

Hotchkiss also joined other schools in growing food on its own campus as well as working with local farmers. During the summer of 1917, Hotchkiss hired 25 of its students at $4 a week to plant lima beans, cabbage, corn, and potatoes on land leased from the Cleaveland, Belcher, and Landon families.

When they weren’t farming or bemoaning smaller dinner portions, Hotchkiss students raised money for the war effort. The School partici-

On left, George Van Santvoord, Class of 1908; above, a poster of the Hotchkiss Battalion during a drill

pated in two bond drives, raising a total of $39,800, or about threequarters of a million in today’s dollars. The funds purchased an ambulance for the American Field Service and donated to the YMCA War Friendship Campaign and the United War Work Campaign. Hotchkiss students also participated in military training. A week before President Woodrow Wilson declared war, Headmaster Buehler wrote, “I am heartily in favor of compulsory universal military training.” By June 1917, the School military training program, known as the Hotchkiss Battalion, practiced daily using imitation rifles until the war ended in November 1918.

Throughout the war, Hotchkiss students heard about the importance of service and sacrifice in weekly sermons, all-School lectures, and poems and novels they read in their English classes. As George Norton Phillips Class of 1909 wrote in an essay, “After you leave, you will realize how little you can do for Hotchkiss in comparison with what you have received. Don’t wait until you leave before trying to pay that debt.

Begin now. Make your life at Hotchkiss a triumph of principles.”

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he Tremaine Art Gallery was silent except for the staccato echo of artist Field Kallop’s boot heels click-clacking across the hardwood floor. Tall and lithe, dressed entirely in black with her long, blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, Kallop moved with the grace of a dancer, methodically pouring white sand into 28 sealed plastic vessels suspended from the gallery’s rafters. With a measured flick of her hand, she sent each vessel into motion, one by one.

Opposite page, Chroma Drawing done with ink and rubbing alcohol, based on chromatography, a scientific technique of separating mixtures.

On right, Kallop at Fairfield Farm

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Above, Kallop installed The Melody of Structures in the Tremaine Art Gallery last November as art students watched. Opposite page: Top photo, a drawing from Kallop’s sketchbook. Lower photo, Emma Franklin ’17 at Fairfield Farm fashioned a branch into a tool to create an ink drawing.

The weight of the sand turned the vessels into pendulums, which, once unsealed, released a stream of sand to form delicate concentric circles on the gallery floor. At the end of her performance, Kallop stood at one end of the gallery, her hands on her waist, overlooking a sea of intersecting elliptical spirals covering the floor.

Student and faculty members seated around the gallery perimeter were entranced. “It was very meditative, peaceful,” said upper mid Ian Duncan.

“While she was in the process of making the piece, it seemed very random, but by the end, you could tell that there was a distinct method.”

Kallop’s method is part mathematical, part mystical. The Melody of Structures created a “mind space,” a contemplative place in which the audience is transported wherever their imagination might take them. But it was also a reflection on how math and science can blend harmoniously with art and movement.

Long before she realized she was an artist, Kallop was intrigued by the connection between the fields of math and science and the world of art.

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At Hotchkiss, she remembered feeling a sense of satisfaction after solving a particularly difficult algebra equation. Years later, she felt the same gratification while applying complex formulas, like the theory of gravity, in her art.

This winter, Kallop helped art and ceramics students understand the inherent beauty in math and science — first with her installation in the Tremaine Art Gallery in November, followed by workshops in which she encouraged students to use new techniques and mediums in their work.

“I always felt there was an artfulness in math that was particularly appealing to me,” she said. “And there’s this long, rich history of math and science and art. Pythagoras and Plato both believed that math and music had an inherent connection, and during the Renaissance, artists were obsessed with the Golden Ratio of balance and proportion, reflected in the work of Michelangelo and many others. As a visual artist, I’ve always loved the forms and patterns created by equations and formulas, but also that they’re grounded in math and science.”

Becoming an artist was not on Kallop’s

radar when she was growing up in New York City. Her father was president of a towing and transportation company, which operated tugboats and ferries in New York and Connecticut, and her mother worked in real estate. But they instilled in her an appreciation for the arts, making regular trips to the ballet, the theater, and museums.

“We lived literally around the corner from the Met,” she said, “and I spent a ton of time there as a child. I used to wander around the American Wing, and I loved the works by The Hudson River School, in particular a painting of a rainbow, The Aegean Sea, by Frederic Church.”

She often stood, transfixed, staring at that painting. In those moments, she discovered there was something truly magical in the way art could take her to another time and place.

Art and math first started to meld together at home, where she spent countless hours playing with a Spirograph, creating intricate, intersecting circular geometric designs that would figure into her own work years later. And, in fact, she keeps the same Spirograph set she had as a child in her studio.

While at Hotchkiss, Kallop took classes in

painting, dance, and ceramics, where she was fascinated by the hypnotic rhythm of throwing pots. While she excelled in math and science, she wasn’t passionate about either one.

After graduating from Princeton with a degree in art history, Kallop was on track to become a fine arts curator. She took an internship at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where she worked in the department of drawings and prints. There, her career trajectory would soon shift.

On days that the museum was closed to the public, she would walk through the empty galleries, captivated by the art.

“Being surrounded by all that incredible art was inspiring. I had this nagging feeling that I just couldn’t shake, and I realized that making art is what truly excited me,” she recalled.

After leaving MoMA, she found work as an assistant with New York painter and photographer Chuck Close, and she soon landed a studio share with another artist. Three years later, hungry to learn more about painting and wanting feedback on her work, she enrolled in graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she earned a master’s in painting.

Before she began incorporating math and science into her work, she thought about art in a very traditional way.

“I’ve always had such a love for the history of painting. Because of that, I wanted to make paintings myself. But while I was at RISD, I was really pushed to explore other mediums, to think about the different forms that art can take, and it opened so many doors for me,” she said.

By then, math and science had begun to filter into her work. For several years, she collected images of outer space and other astrophysical phenomena, which she used as inspiration for her oil paintings. She used chromatography, a technique of separating ink and rubbing alcohol, to create drawings on Japanese paper. Then, one of her professors suggested she stop painting for a month to push her art in a new direction.

“It was so freeing,” Kallop recalled.

Not long after that, she started filling her sketchbook with formulas and equations.

In a broader sense, she was drawn to these concepts because of how they relate to

“The world is so incredibly complex and beautiful, and while there are laws that dictate how things work, there is still a great sense of mystery about it all.”

more spiritual, even mystical, beliefs.

“In my work, I am always trying to evoke that feeling you have when you see a rainbow or look at the stars,” she said.

Making visible the unseen forces of nature, like gravity, became more central in her work. Two 20th-century spiritualists inspired her: Hilma af Klint, a Swedish scientist who turned her equations into large-scale abstract paintings, and Emma Kunz, a Swiss healer and artist who used a pendulum to create equally large, colorful drawings on graph paper.

Experimenting with Kunz’s use of fulcrums, she first tried pencils secured in clay forms, then paint brushes, and eventually, sand-filled vessels to create huge fabric pieces. She found that people who visited her studio enjoyed watching her work, so she began performing installations.

At Fairfield Farm in November and in classes in January, Kallop also encouraged students to go beyond their comfort zone and use objects found in nature — splintered twigs, twisted branches, and delicate ferns — and also their own bodies — fingers, hands, and arms — as tools.

“I thought getting students out of the classroom and into nature would be liberating for them. I wanted to shake up their conceptions of art, get them thinking about other materials, encourage them to explore new processes,” she said.

And they did. They dripped, blotted and smeared globs of black ink onto drawing paper. An earthworm that accidentally landed on a drop of paint became a tool, leaving a squiggly black trail on the paper. Kallop crouched down, watching with amusement as the worm left its mark. Sometimes the unexpected can produce great art instantaneously, as Kallop knows.

Other times, it takes days, weeks, or longer to create. “I go to the studio every day. I think of my practice as an artist as a job,” said Kallop, who now lives in New York City with her husband, Peter, who works in commercial real estate, and their one-year-old daughter, Camilla.

“Some days are slow and not very productive, but other days are really exciting and fulfilling,” she said. “And it’s that feeling that keeps me going.”

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John Hopkins ’56, seated on the “White Nile,” and Princeton friend, Joe McPhillips

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THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES John Hopkins ’56 writes about his life on the road b y R O B E R T A JE NCK ES

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n his London home overlooking the Thames, John Hopkins reminisced about his adventures in Africa and South America as a young man. Those experiences fueled his literary career: In all, he has published ten books. His latest book, The White Nile Diaries, published in 2014 and called “a beautiful work” by William Burroughs, recounts his travels through Africa on a white BMW motorcycle in the early 1960s with a Princeton friend, Joe McPhillips.

The odyssey began with an invitation from a friend to visit Kenya. Hopkins and McPhillips started in Munich, where they picked up the motorcycle, which they dubbed “The White Nile.” The two travelers rode over the Alps and down the length of Italy to Sicily. From there, they traveled to Tunisia, then in the midst of a war for independence from France, and then across Libya to Egypt. After stopping in Cairo, they went up the Nile to Luxor and Aswan, then by paddle wheel steamer to Sudan. Then they traveled to Uganda and Mombasa in Kenya. In all, they covered about 6,000 miles in five months.

Hopkins writes of crossing the Sahara in 125-degree heat, climbing the Great Pyramid, and racing across the desert with the Libyan border patrol in hot pursuit. The stories reflect a carefree time of travel that has seemingly vanished. “It’s too dangerous today,” he said. “In those days, everybody loved America. Everybody was so friendly.

We went where we wanted to go.”

Hopkins’s adventuresome life had its beginnings at Hotchkiss.

“Hotchkiss saved me, really—saved me from the turmoil of my parents’ divorce.

On one of the first weekends of my prep year, they took me to lunch at the White Hart Inn and announced the tragedy. I went back to my room and lay on the bed,

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sobbing my heart out. My roommate told me to shut up so he could get some sleep. The next morning, I got up and went back to work. At Hotchkiss I had my own life, independent of home.

If my parents had stayed together, I might not have left home and stayed away. My first instinct was to distance myself from my family,” he said.

At Hotchkiss, he joined several clubs, covered sports for The Hotchkiss Record, and played on the hockey team. “As a writer, I am indebted to English instructor Carle Parsons and the Duke [George Van Santvoord, head of school and Class of 1908] for hammering the essentials of grammar into my head," he said.

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e enrolled at Princeton to

study aeronautical engineering, which he thought would lead to a stable career. After two years, he switched to political science. His studies of Africa and the Middle East came in handy when he later traveled to that part of the world.

In the summer of 1959, he and McPhillips went to Peru to investigate the possibility of coffee farming in the jungle. His mother suggested he keep a diary. “If you get swallowed by an alligator,” she said, “at least we’ll know what happened until then.”

Hopkins gradually became addicted to his diary. “It added some discipline. It lent some form to the formless life we were leading,” he said.

Working at a summer job on Wall Street had already convinced him that a career in business was not for him. Nor did he want to

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go to graduate school. The travel bug had bit deep. After graduating from Princeton, he and McPhillips set out on the road once more.

They travelled back to Peru, crossed Africa, and lived in Europe before landing jobs at The American School of Tangier in Morocco.

“By the time I got to Tangier at age 24,” he said, “my diaries had convinced me I was destined to be a writer. I went to Morocco to teach for one year and ended up staying 17.

It was that good. The city was full of famous writers — Paul and Jane Bowles, William Burroughs, Tennessee Williams. Tangier was like a village. You could meet everyone at a single cocktail party. As an aspiring young writer, I was very fortunate to befriend these successful, accomplished authors.”

And his friendship with McPhillips proved equally decisive for his future. “McPhillips was the agent of change. He was a brilliant teacher, and I was his first student. He later became the headmaster of The American School of Tangier. He was the one who encouraged me to write,” he said.

In 1967, Hopkins published his first novel, The Attempt, based on his adventures in Peru.

After that, he quit teaching and devoted himself to writing full time. In 1977, he married Ellen Ragsdale, an artist from Little Rock, Ark., who had studied at Oxford and never returned home.

Shortly afterward, they moved to England to raise their family and for Hopkins to be near an English-language publishing center.

Hopkins continued writing novels. “The diaries were my stepping stone to fiction,” Hopkins said. “Like many writers, I experimented to make the words come. I have used drugs and alcohol and written at all hours of the day and night, finally achieving the best results stone-cold sober in the early morning."

“Right now, I write at night, when the house is quiet. I have all my diaries, schoolboy notebooks piled on the floor. When I need material for a novel, I go to the source. What was it like to cross the Sahara in high summer? Float down the Amazon on a raft? I lift the experience straight from a diary.”

PHOTOGRAPHS: (PREVIOUS PAGE): EAST AFRICAN STANDARD NEWSPAPER IN NAIROBI, KENYA; (THIS PAGE): JONATHAN HOPKINS

“BY THE TIME I GOT TO TANGIER AT AGE 24,”HE SAYS, “MY DIARIES HAD CONVINCED ME I WAS DESTINED TO BE A WRITER.”

Messages from the Alumni Association

Be an Advisor!

In March 2015, The Hotchkiss Alumni Association introduced the next generation of trusted web-based career networks: the Hotchkiss Alumni Career Network (a replacement for Career Connections on Alumnet). We have partnered with Evisors, making us the first secondary school in the country to provide this cloud-based service for our alumni. This new network allows advisors to choose the services they would like to offer (i.e., career conversations, resume critiques, and mock interviews). Advice seekers can search for alumni in many industries.

Signing up is fast and easy at www.hotchkiss.evisors.com.

Stay Connected

!

PHOTOGRAPH BY WENDY CARLSON

e Sav

te Da e th

Join the Hotchkiss Alumni LinkedIn group www.linkedin.com/groups/58779 Regional Facebook Pages Launched Spread the news and keep in touch!

We have regional Facebook pages for alumni in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

The 2016 DAY of SERVICE is planned for Saturday, May 21 in these cities. Invitations will be sent in April.

Atlanta • Beijing • Boston • Chicago • Dallas • Detroit • Hong Kong • Houston Lakeville, CT • Los Angeles • Minneapolis • New York City • Old Lyme, CT • Palo Alto Philadelphia • San Francisco • Seattle • Shanghai • Stamford, CT • Washington, D.C.

Hotchkiss in Your Hometown

Stay in touch with alumni and parents in your area!

To support those of you who get together on your own, we’ve created a kit of Hotchkiss-branded event supplies. E-mail or call Caroline Sallee Reilly ’87, director of alumni relations, at creilly@hotchkiss.org or 860-435-3892 for more information.

Download the Hotchkiss Alumni Mobile App. The app makes it easy to find friends and classmates.

Have you moved? Changed jobs? Married?

Expanded your family? Send your updates to Caroline Sallee Reilly ’87 at creilly@hotchkiss.org or 860-435-3892. i nt te er r/ /S Spp r ri inngg 22 00 11 56 WWi n

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PARTING SHOT

Stepping Back in Time

PHOTOGRAPH BY WENDY CARLSON

Humanities 250 students peered into a large-format camera at Fairfield Farm last fall. Artist-in-Residence and photographer Lisa Elmaleh demonstrated the 19th-century wet plate collodion process, creating tintypes. Her 1996 Toyota Tacoma truck doubles as a darkroom.

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Hotchkiss Reunions June 10-12, 2016

Classes Ending in 1 and 6

Hope to see you in Lakeville!

For more information, please contact: Kamaren Suwijn, Assistant Director of Alumni Relations, at 860-435-3114 or ksuwijn@hotchkiss.org Visit www.hotchkiss.org/alumni (click on Events & Reunions)

Classes of 1956 and 1966 Save the date for Fall Reunion on September 23-25, 2016, in Lakeville!

11 Interlaken Road Lakeville, CT 06039 - 2141 (860) 435-2591 www.hotchkiss.org ALUMNI

Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage

PAID

Permit No. 36 Pittsfield, MA