Rescuing Art - The Taft School

Transcription

B
U
L
L
E
T
I
N
REPORTING
FROM IRAQ
remembering
Rick Davis
Rescuing Art
After World
War II
ONLINE with a BIG
communicator
F A
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B U L L E T I N
Fall 2003
Volume 74 Number 1
Bulletin Staff
Director of Development
John E. Ormiston
Editor
Julie Reiff
Alumni Notes
Linda Beyus
Anne Gahl
Jackie Maloney
Design
Good Design
www.goodgraphics.com
Proofreader
Nina Maynard
Bulletin Advisory Board
Todd Gipstein ’70
Peter Kilborn ’57
Nancy Novogrod P’98,’01
Bonnie Blackburn Penhollow ’84
Josh Quittner ’75
Peter Frew ’75, ex officio
Julie Reiff, ex officio
Bonnie Welch, ex officio
Mail letters to:
Julie Reiff, Editor
Taft Bulletin
The Taft School
Watertown, CT 06795-2100 U.S.A.
[email protected]
Send alumni news to:
Anne Gahl
Alumni Office
The Taft School
[email protected]
Deadlines for Alumni Notes:
Winter–November 15
Spring–February 15
Summer–May 30
Fall–August 30
Send address corrections to:
Sally Membrino
Alumni Records
The Taft School
[email protected]
1-860-945-7777
www.TaftAlumni.com
This magazine is printed on
recycled paper.
Page 16
Page 22
Page 28
Endnote
FEATURES
Embedded
16
Tom Frank ’80, Newsday’s Washington
Correspondent, went to war in Iraq
embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division.
He experienced the war in all its vivid
detail: dust, sleeplessness, camaraderie,
and moments of sheer terror on his way
to Baghdad.
Online With a Big
Communicator
On the Cover
Deane Keller ’19 oversees the return of the
great bronze statue of Cosimo de Medici
by Giambologna, which was hidden outside
Florence, Italy, during World War II. His story,
told through photographs from Yale
University’s Department of Manuscripts and
Archives, begins on page 26.
22
For 28 years one alumna has been watching,
and listening to, elephants in Kenya’s
Amboseli National Park. Now she’s making
sure they’re heard.
By Joyce Poole ’74
Collateral Damage
40
A Day of Service to Others
28
Amid the chaos of World War II, Yale art
professor Deane Keller ’19 had one job: to
put masterpieces of Italian art back where
they belonged.
By Catherine Roach, Yale Alumni Magazine
A Brilliant Mind and
a Passionate Heart 34
A tribute to the late Richard Marshall Davis ’59
By Headmaster William R. MacMullen ’78
The Taft Bulletin is published quarterly, in February,
May, August, and November, by The Taft School,
110 Woodbury Road, Watertown, CT 06795-2100,
and is distributed free of charge to alumni, parents,
grandparents, and friends of the school.
E-Mail Us!
Send your latest news, address change, birth announcement, or letter to the editor via e-mail. Our address is
[email protected]. We continue to accept
your communiqués by fax machine (860-945-7756), telephone (860-945-7777), or U.S. Mail (110 Woodbury Road,
Watertown, CT 06795-2100). So let’s hear from you!
Taft on the Web:
News? Stocks? Entertainment? Weather? Catch up
with old friends or make new ones, get a job and
more!—all at the Taft Alumni Community online. Visit
us at www.TaftAlumni.com.
What happened at this afternoon's game?—Visit us at
www.TaftSports.com for the latest Big Red coverage.
For other campus news and events, including
admissions information, visit our main site at
www.TaftSchool.org, with improved calendar
features and Around the Pond stories.
DEPARTMENTS
From the Editor
4
Alumni Spotlight
5
Remembering the astronauts, a London show,
onstage in L.A., one athlete’s final glory, new
books on art, travel, history, and more
Around the Pond
10
Brodhead’s address, new faculty, college
choices, Potter Gallery events, Poole and
Kilbourne fellows, a sabbatical in statistics
Don’t forget you can
shop online at
www.TaftStore.com
䉳 Katie Fisher ’04, on the Cliffs of Mohr in Ireland, was one of a dozen Poole Fellows
who traveled the globe last summer. See page 9.
FROM
THE
EDITOR
We welcome Letters to the Editor relating
to the content of the magazine. Letters may
be edited for length, clarity, and content,
and are published at the editor’s discretion.
Send correspondence to:
Julie Reiff • Taft Bulletin
110 Woodbury Road
or to [email protected]
Editor Julie Reiff tube feeds a young sea lion near San Luis Obispo, Calif., for the Marine
Mammal Center, where she volunteered during part of her sabbatical leave. For more on
the center, visit www.tmmc.org. MARY MORTLOCK
Authors, television producers, playwrights, athletes, artists, Taft alumni
are an inspiring group, but after being
away on a yearlong sabbatical, I needed
to get up to speed with all your latest
activities, and quickly.
Acting editor Linda Beyus, who is continuing on the Bulletin with Alumni
Notes, graciously put me in touch with
Joyce Poole ’74, whose ongoing work
with elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli
National Park, and now on the Internet,
has always fascinated me.
Deane Keller ’58 fortunately alerted us
to an article in Yale Alumni Magazine
about his father’s efforts to rescue precious works of art in Italy after World
War II, which we’re reprinting in this
issue along with his photographs from
the Sterling Archives.
And finally, over breakfast, my husband, Al Reiff ’80, passed me the latest
copy of Wesleyan University’s magazine (which I had shoved his way the day
before, saying, “This is a great issue; you
4
Taft Bulletin Fall 2003
should read it.”) and said, “I think I
went to Taft with this guy.” He meant
Tom Frank ’80, of course, but the name
is common enough that I’ll admit I
doubted him.
Well, let’s just say that I’ve forgiven
Al for the summer he received all those
e-mails by his classmate Chris Shaw from
the slopes of K2 and never forwarded
any to me.
Tom was kind enough to allow us to
reprint his article as well, and even agreed
to come to campus to talk with students
in November about his experience in
Iraq as an embedded reporter.
So now that I’ve taken all the mystery
out of how the alumni magazine is put
together….
On a personal note, I am happy to be
back after my year’s leave, during which
I immersed myself in the culture of
California’s central coast and spent time
learning to rescue marine mammals.
(Somewhere swimming in the Pacific is
a young elephant seal named Mr. Taft.)
As always, the Bulletin is a place to
share your stories, so let’s hear from you.
—Julie Reiff, editor
Corrections:
Our apologies to Edward F. Herrlinger II ’46, Katharine Herrlinger Hillman ’76,
and Daniel M. Hillman ’06, for whom we failed to include Roth F. Herrlinger ’22
in their alumni lineage.
Also, we mistakenly identified Will Morris ’97 as his brother David ’99 (who
was not pictured) on page 13 of the summer issue.
Our apologies also to members of the 2003 golf team, whose record was omitted
from the scoreboard in the summer issue:
Team captains: ............................................ Andrew Foote ’05, Chris Pettit ’03
Captains-elect: ...................................... Andrew Foote ’05, Joel St. Laurent ’04
Record: ................................................................................................... 10–3
Galeski Golf Award: ............................................... Veronica Aguirrebeitia ’03
ALUMNI
SPOTLIGHT
Alumni
S P OT L I G H T
Magnificent Seven
16 Days: Columbia’s Final Mission, an
intimate portrait of the shuttle’s crew
of six Americans and one Israeli astronaut, aired in June on the Discovery
Channel. Sue Becker Norton ’82 served
as executive producer.
“Over the past several years I have
come to know many in the NASA family,” said Norton, who was NASA liaison
for Discovery Networks and an executive
producer of space-related programming.
“I was present at the launch of Columbia
and mission STS107 and, upon hearing
of the loss of Columbia on February 1,
I knew immediately that I wanted to
produce a tribute film celebrating the
astronauts and their all-science mission.”
Featuring footage from the crew’s
onboard cameras, the program reveals
who these astronauts were as people and
what they were working on during the
mission. With experiments geared towards everything from curing cancer to
fighting fires, the astronauts were working in orbit to better life on Earth.
The seven-member crew had been
waiting almost three years to blast into
orbit. With each delay came more rigorous training sessions added to their
already aggressive regime, making them
one of the best-trained crews in NASA
history. Viewers can see that these astronauts were at the top of their game,
fulfilling their lifelong dreams of going
into space while making great strides in
scientific research.
“I knew that the news and other
media would focus on the tragedy, and I
felt it was important to let the public
know not only what amazing people
these seven astronauts were, but also the
reasons they were willing to risk all for
their quest to explore space and further
the mission of scientific research.”
(Continued)
5
ALUMNI
SPOTLIGHT
More Than the Numbers
“After a year of working hard to get myself into some kind of condition to tackle
this beast,” writes Matt Donaldson ’88,
who competed in the Lake Placid
Ironman in July, “I learned a bit about
what would actually get me through the
day while the good doctor was drawing
race-day numbers on me. ‘Doesn’t quite
look like the body of an ironman,’ I said.
To which she replied, ‘I have been working the medical tent for six years and
getting through the day has little to do
with the shape of one’s body.’ This gave
me a sigh of relief, until I was left with
the question of what would actually get
me through the day?”
He describes the race:
“Salmon run: Imagine 1,800 people
treading water waiting for the big bang.
And out of the blue, all hell breaks loose.
People kicking, punching, swimming
over you—absolute anarchy. I picked the
worst place—in the middle, in front of
the pack—where I was squeezed by
swimmers on both sides at each bottleneck turnaround. I was pummeled for
an hour and 16 minutes. Out of the water they strip the wetsuit (thankfully I
remembered to put my briefs underneath) and I was off for stage two: 112
miles on the bike.
“Red Baron: The bike ride reminds
me of something the old fighter planes
used to do, without the live ammunition
of course. Flying down hills at 45 miles
per hour in the rain, with bikes passing
and jockeying for position. The key for
the ride is to keep eating and drinking—
which the body wants none of. The
conditions were how I like them, torrential downpours with about a 20-mile
headwind for the last 10 miles of each
loop (which are uphill).
“Turtle shuffle: After 112 miles on a
Write Before You Leap
Arnold Margolin ’54 and Kelly Wiles in
the Los Angeles production of Leap.
DENNIS J. KENT
In Arnold Margolin’s new play, Leap,
an angel and a devil fight over the soul
of a former TV comedy writer, Bob,
played by Margolin.
“Leap takes a perfectly hackneyed
sitcom-style plot,” writes Sharon
Perlmutter for TalkinBroadway.com,
“and manages to take it in a totally unexpected direction.”
Leap played at the Elephant Asylum Theatre in Hollywood in May and
again this November at Los Angeles’s
Theatre West.
Margolin has spent 35 years writing for television, including the Mary
Tyler Moore and Andy Griffith shows,
That Girl, Love American Style, Growing Pains, Private Benjamin, and a
number of foreign-language sitcoms,
as well as such TV movies as Between
Love and Honor, A Family for Joe, A
Good Sport, and He’s Not Your Son.
Although he appeared in the feature films Exit to Eden and Young Doctors
in Love, this is the first time Margolin
has acted in a play he wrote. In fact, he
writes, “It was the first time I had been
onstage in 46 years. The last play I acted
in was the original Broadway production of Diary of Anne Frank in 1956–57,
playing the role of Peter van Daam. I
am going to keep trying it every 46 years
until I get it right.”
tiny bike seat, everyone is thrilled to be
running—at least for the first few miles.
Once I realized that I was exhausted—
and had 24 miles left to run—well, that’s
when the doctor’s advice hit me. The
downpours continued, so I kept cool. I
had two goals at this point: don’t be
lapped by my training partners on the
run, and make it to the barn before dark.
I am pleased to say that I met both, although I was a bit frosted when they
turned on the power-generated lights
while it was still light out.”
Donaldson was one of 55 athletes
who competed in the event as part of
the Janus Charity Challenge, and raised
the third highest total to benefit the
Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute
for his mother.
“I had a blast,” writes Donaldson.
“I can’t wait to get out there next year
and torture myself again. Just 13 hours
and 40 seconds of a smiling big ol’ time.”
Magnificent Seven—continued
The one-hour documentary aired
along with Falling From Space: The Challenge of Re-Entry.
Norton also served as NASA liaison
on the first program. She originally produced the one-hour documentary tribute
film for The Science Channel, one of the
Discovery Networks, and is currently an
executive producer and head of production for The Science Channel, Wings
Channel, and Home & Leisure Channel.
ALUMNI
SPOTLIGHT
Final Glory
On May 10, Brigham Olson ’81 was
inducted into the Colorado College
Athletic Hall of Fame. He died the
same day.
Although Olson lost his battle
with the malignant brain tumor that
claimed his life, he had many accomplishments both on the soccer field
and off. He was recognized for his
contribution to Colorado’s “golden
era” of soccer, when the team compiled a record of 58–28–7 and earned
bids to the NCAA tournament all four
seasons he played.
A four-year letterman, Olson
served as co-captain his junior and
senior years, when they advanced to the
national quarterfinals; he was named to
NCAA All-Midwest honors both years
and still owns the school record, 91, for
most career starts.
A four-time all-conference selection,
he was also named to the NCAA All
Far-West Team and had the dubious
distinction of receiving the informal “purple
heart award” for most career stitches.
Before Taft, Olson excelled in many
sports both at The Orley Farm School in
England and at Brentwood School in
West Los Angeles, where he earned
letters in basketball and baseball as well.
Olson earned nine letters at Taft, cocaptaining the basketball team, receiving
the Carroll Soccer Award, and being
Modern Man
The latest play by Roger Kirby ’65,
Modern Man, premiered at London’s
New End Theatre last summer and was
hailed as a “witty, thoughtful play,” by
Robert Shore in Time Out London, that
“charts the course of just ‘a few minutes’
in the life of Edouard Manet.”
“Kirby’s point,” writes Shore, “is that
Manet was so absorbed in the world of
his imagination that at the end of his life
he couldn’t separate fact from fantasy—
in this sense, suggests Kirby, he was the
first ‘modern man.’”
“The biography is also interesting,”
writes Peter Lathan in British Theatre
Guide, “as it depicts Manet as a heartless
man unable to commit himself to other
human beings in the same way as he can
to his art. Kirby makes the artist speak
very portentously about his work and
his beliefs and it is left to the women to
anchor his life.”
“This play,” said Kirby, “explored selfabsorption. Hopefully it will appear in
New York next summer as part of a fringe
festival.” Meanwhile, a filmmaker has expressed some interest in it, and an effort
is being made to transform it into a screen-
play, with much darker erotic themes.
Kirby’s play Natural Inclinations,
which was also performed in London, in
2002, examined “the tension between
the wish to do the right thing and one’s
primitive desires.”
He has two more plays in the works.
“One is a take on financial scandals set to
rock and roll music,” he said, “and the other
sets Medea in the contemporary Middle
East.” Both are scheduled to open in 2004,
one in London, the other in New York.
A New York City lawyer, Kirby said
that combining his two interests can be
“very difficult. The kind of law that I do,
litigation, requires the ability to arrive at
the essential point, or at least something
that looks like it, and to do so really fast.
Playwriting, most fiction really, is happier if approached in a more meandering
naturalistic fashion. That has been the
highest hurdle so far.”
䉴 Kate Steavenson-Payne as Berthe Morisot
(foreground), and the rest of the cast of
Modern Man at the New End Theatre in
London in July. “Hopefully,” says author
Roger Kirby ’65, “it will appear in New York
next summer.” SHEILA BURNETT
named to the All-State and Western
New England All-League teams.
After college, he built a successful
business in Orange County, married
his college sweetheart, Leslie, and was
the proud father of three children.
A brief tribute appears on page 55.
ALUMNI
SPOTLIGHT
Schooled in History
The Struggle for Europe:
The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent 1945–2002
William I. Hitchcock ’82
Doubleday, 2003
When I heard Will Hitchcock speak at
Yale in June, I was impressed with the intelligence of his talk. When he sent me
his most recent book, The Struggle for
Europe, I was even more impressed. (Full
disclosure: I am not a historian; I was Will’s
English teacher and adviser at Taft.) I
found the book fascinating. Reading the
first part, I was keenly aware of the irony
of having my student teach me about the
era of my childhood. Half-remembered
names and events came to life. As the book
moved into the late ’60s and beyond, the
insightful clarity of Will’s presentation
gave my recollections structure and sense.
The Struggle for Europe deals with the
political and economic history of Europe
and Russia from the last days of World
War II through the European Union of
2002. It presents a vast amount of material concisely, logically, and clearly. As John
Lewis Gaddis notes on the book jacket,
“Shrewd, comprehensive, elegantly written, always convincing in its arguments,
it is without question the most successful analytical synthesis of recent
European history now available.”
Most of the book is factual and quite
objective, though Will’s opinions occasionally come through when describing
recent history: for example, he calls
Mikhail Gorbachev “supremely confident, breathtakingly naïve, and humane
to the end” (p.343) and the Bosnian
Serbs “a band of bloodthirsty thugs”
(p.401). This personal voice, part of
Will’s fluent style, makes the book very
interesting reading, even for the non-
historian. As a text for a history course
on modern Europe, it would be superb.
This is the longest piece of writing I’ve
ever received from a student, and the best.
—Robin (Blackburn) Osborn
Will Hitchcock received his B.A. from
Kenyon and his Ph.D. in history from Yale;
he teaches modern European history at
Wellesley College.
Random Acts of Kindness
The Kindness of Strangers
Don George ’71, editor
Lonely Planet Publications, 2003
“The premise of this book,” writes Don
George ’71 who edited the collection, “is
that when you travel, inevitably you fall
into some kind of predicament—you forget your wallet somewhere, you get lost,
your car breaks down—and equally inevitably, someone miraculously emerges
to take care of you and to save you.”
The book features an original preface by the Dalai Lama and original tales
by 26 contributors—including Simon
Winchester, Dave Eggers, Tim Cahill, Jan
Morris, Pico Iyer, and Alice Waters—of
8
being saved on the road.
From London to
Afghanistan, buying underwear in Argentina
and being kidnapped
in Tunisia, these are
heartwarming stories
of travelers and the
fascinating people
they meet. Like
Amanda Jones who
gets lost in the Sahara, or Douglas
Cruickshank who leaves his cash in a
London cab, the writers find what they
need, and come away
richer for the random
acts of fate that bring
them together with altruistic strangers.
The moral of these
stories, writes George, “is
that human beings care
about each other…. Just
about everyone everywhere wants to be
good to others.”
ALUMNI
Best of American Marine Art
Bound for Blue Water:
Contemporary American Marine Art
J. Russell Jinishian ’71
Greenwich Workshop Press, 2003
In Bound for Blue Water, J. Russell
Jinishian has created an authoritative collection of the best American marine art
of the 20th and the 21st centuries. Greenwich Workshop calls it “the first book to
highlight key movements in today’s marine art and to identify its most important
artists with detailed discussions of their
unique contributions.”
Jinishian, former director of Mystic
Seaport’s Maritime Gallery and publisher
of the Marine Art Quarterly, is considered
the nation’s leading authority on the subject. He provides an insider’s view of today’s
American marine art in this showcase of
nearly one hundred artists including John
Barber, Christopher Blossom, Willard
Bond, William Davis, Don Demers, Carl
Evers, Thomas Hoyne, Paul Landry,
Richard Loud, Ian Marshall, Victor Mays,
John Mecray, William Muller, Randy
Puckett, John Stobard, Kent Ullberg,
Robert Weiss, and many others.
Together
these artists
pay homage
to the rugged
men and vessels that make their living
from the seaports of New York and New
England, to Miami, New Orleans, San
Francisco, and the Northwest. Pictured
in it are the magnificent traditional
clipper ships and classic sailing yachts;
historical and modern seaside villages as
well as the tranquility of coastal landscapes and the thrill of sport fishing.
The book features over 140 color reproductions of paintings, scrimshaw and
sculpture, most never before published.
Jinishian studied art and art history
at the Sir John Cass School of Art in
London and holds a BFA from Cornell
University. He served as program director for the nation’s oldest Guild of Artists
(Silvermine) in New Canaan, Conn. He
SPOTLIGHT
Books by Alumni
Across the Great Divide:
Robert Stuart and the
Discovery of the Oregon Trail
Laton McCartney ’59
Free Press, 2003
What Your Doctor May Not
Tell You About Your Children’s
Allergies and Asthma: Simple
Steps to Help Stop Attacks and
Improve Your Child’s Health
Paul Ehrlich ’62 and
Larry Chiaramonte
Warner Books, 2003
The Collapse of the
Common Good:
How America’s Lawsuit Culture
Undermines Our Freedom
Philip K. Howard ’66
Ballantine Books, 2002
Michael
Henry Flesh ’66
Akashic Books, 2000
Additions to the Hulbert Taft Jr.
Library’s Alumni Collection are
welcome. Please send books,
sound recordings, or other published works to Julie Reiff, editor,
Taft Bulletin, The Taft School,
Watertown, CT 06795, for inclusion in this column and they will
be forwarded to the collection.
was the art columnist for the Connecticut
Post, art reviewer for Art New England,
and as a contributing editor, wrote the
popular “Bridge Wing” column in
Nautical World Magazine. His writing has
appeared in many publications including Sailing, Sea History and American
Artist. He operates the J. Russell Jinishian
Gallery in Fairfield, Conn., and lectures
nationally on marine art and collecting.
9
AROUND THE POND
pond
Living Where You Learn
PETER FREW ’75
“With a residential education,” Professor Richard Brodhead told faculty during
their opening meetings in September,
“living your whole life in the province of
school, then different phases of daily life
become the agencies of education.”
Brodhead, dean of Yale College
since 1992, has become well known as
an eloquent advocate of the benefits of
residential college life.
“The nature of a community of
students is a profound education in itself,” he said, emphasizing that diversity
is part of the importance of a residential community.
“Learning to live with students with
whom you have nothing in common,” is
critical, he said. “You are not required to
like the students you live with, but you
must learn to get along with them.”
Brodhead also told the faculty that
students often come away with something of great value of which we are
unaware, or which we do not intend.
They will use knowledge, he said, in ways
it was not originally intended, in ways
seen and unseen, in ways programmed
and unprogrammed.
“I marvel at the process by which
students begin to care about something,
take something external and make it internal. No deep human education takes
place without that.”
The important thing, he said, is for
us to “provide lots of opportunities, then
stand back and let the miracle of personal
growth and education take place. The
space you give them is what enables students to become themselves.”
A specialist in 19th-century American literature, Dean Brodhead is the
author and editor of books and essays on
Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Henry James, and William Faulkner. He
has also lectured widely on the role of
literature in 19th-century culture.
AROUND THE POND
Traveling the Globe, Changing Lives
Every summer, select students embark on adventures around the world, sponsored in part through the school’s Robert K. Poole ’50
Fellowships. Their stories enrich our community and inspire others to make a difference. All members of the Class of ’04, five of them
share the highlight of their experience and what made it worthwhile.
Kaitlynn Fisher:
“I met major political leaders like Gerry
Adams and saw the famous Belfast and
Derry Murals,” writes Katie, who spent
five weeks in Ireland with twelve Americans and one Brazilian. They spent 17
days in Belfast volunteering in both
Catholic Nationalist as well as Protestant
Unionist communities in hopes of learning more of their struggle.
“I learned that the conflict in Belfast
is much deeper than politics, paintings,
or speakers. It is in every person. It was
in the eight-year-old who walked away
from me when she learned I was Catholic, it was in the men rioting in the middle
of the night outside my hostel, and it was
in the officer that pulled the trigger to
shoot a young boy with a rubber bullet.
“I did not just read the legislation to
ban rubber bullets. I did not just see the
murals of the children murdered by these
weapons. I saw the boy, and I heard the
shot. I did not just learn of the conflict, I
was affected by it. The people I met in
Belfast, though—the people who hated
each other so religiously—were some of
the kindest, most welcoming people I
have ever met.
“This trip was more than five weeks
volunteering in a foreign country, it was
inspiration to spend a lifetime working
with and for people.”
Janice Chen:
“I walked near the bed of Mataya,
a girl who has been fighting her
sickness for years and was now
approaching the last few months
of her dreadful struggle,” writes
Janice, who worked with the HUGS
organization in Hawaii, which is
designed to help seriously ill children
and their families.
“Despite what was imminent
and inevitable, Mataya would laugh
and joke with me like any other
healthy person. She always told me
she wanted to enjoy, to appreciate,
and to learn something new every
day to keep her last moments of life
less painful and more interesting.
Although reality finally hit when
she was too sick to leave her bed,
Mataya’s strength provoked the
one question I come back to often:
Is there value in persevering in a
doomed situation? I answer ‘yes,’ but
only with hope and an approach to
life that is positive and productive,
will that be possible. She had adequately proven that. If we do not
give in and give up, we can move on
and forward.”
11
Lucia Piacenza:
Erica O’Neill:
“The most rewarding part of my
trip to Guatemala was finally opening the library,” Erica writes. “The
other group members and I had
been working on fund raising and
book drives since November.
“We spent four days organizing
and cataloging the books before
the trip. When we set it all up and
invited local teachers in for a workshop on how to use the library, their
reactions to the new books told us
that our efforts over the past months
were finally bearing fruit.
“The classrooms in the village
of San Andrés have no books for the
teachers to use, so the library we
brought will provide much-needed
educational resources. It’s really an
ongoing project, and we’re continuing to raise money and run book
drives over the course of this year.”
“I am extremely frightened by sharks,”
writes Lucy, who studied coastal and
jungle ecology. “So when I decided to go
to Belize and do a community service/ecology trip I promised myself that I would
do my best to avoid them. It seemed safe
for the first few weeks; there was no ocean
in sight. Then we spent the last week on
an island off the coast of Belize and took a
snorkeling trip. Our guide assured me over
and over that I would not be in close
enough proximity to the sharks that they
would feel the need to bite me, and that
we mostly saw nurse sharks (‘friendly’
sharks, if there are such things).
“I was so seasick by the time we arrived that I was the first to jump into the
water. I was trying to orient myself when
I saw our guide waving her arms frantically and pointing behind me. I turned
around as quickly as my flippers would
let me and came face to face with a pack
of bull sharks, about six or seven of them.
“I’d learned about these creatures
during ‘shark-week’ on the Discovery
Channel; they were pretty vicious on the
show, and as my life flashed before me,
I wondered what they were thinking.
They seemed to be looking at me like a
Thanksgiving turkey, trying to decide who
wanted light meat and who wanted dark,
and who got the first piece. I was too scared
to move, so I just floated there, listening
to the Darth Vader breath that happens
when you breathe through a snorkel, watching them contemplate my doom. Then,
as if they decided they simply weren’t
interested, they turned and swam away.
That, of course, insulted me immensely.
What, was I not good enough for them?”
Gordon McMorris—Quebec Labrador Foundation
“For my Poole grant I went up to Harrington
Harbor, a small fishing village in Northeast Quebec,” writes Gordon, “and spent a
month working with schoolchildren between the ages of five and fifteen. We taught
not only how to play games and listen to
stories, but also how to interact with each
other, something which the lack of organized sports in the area had failed to do.
12
“Perhaps the greatest moment of my
time in Canada was my very last day,
when we had planned a big barbecue and
picnic, with games and prizes, for the
whole town. For days I was terrified that
the kids would be unable to even get
through the morning, forget the whole
day, but we pulled it off. As trivial as this
may sound, the greatest triumph of the
day was getting the children to actually
organize themselves into teams and play
a successful game of football.
“I will always remember my time in
Harrington, above all for the perspective
I gained on people and cultures that, on
the surface, may seem similar to my own,
but in reality are quite different, and
should be celebrated as such.”
AROUND THE POND
Other
fellowship
recipients include:
Dan Furman
Teaching volunteer at
Beijing Normal University
Lindsey Gael
Creating a documentary
on sturgeon fish in the
Caspian Sea
Andrew McNair
Global Routes community
service project in Thailand
Johanna Pistell
The Redeemer Honduras
Medical Mission
Amy Rose
Operation Crossroads
in Africa
䉱
Lauren Rowntree
Experiment in International
Living in Mexico
Torie Snyder
Rustic Pathways in
Costa Rica
Kilbourne Fellows
“While learning technique was a priority,” writes Veronica
Torres, who spent five weeks at Parsons School of Design in
New York City as one of Taft’s Kilbourne Fellows, “the emphasis in class was placed in finding a voice. I was encouraged
to take risks to visually communicate a thought or emotion.
As I printed in the darkroom, my teacher would peek up
behind me and question each detail in my pictures. In the
beginning I would blush and say that I just liked the lighting, or that I thought it was a touching visual image.
“As the class progressed I not only became aware of what
I was shooting and how it would look printed, but I also
knew what I wanted to tell my audience. While it wasn’t until the last roll I worked on at Parsons that I got one image
that broke the barrier between visual impact and symbolic
impact, it was worth my 25 rolls and five weeks of straight
photography classes.”
Thanks to the generosity of John Kilbourne ’58, five Taft
students were again awarded Kilbourne Summer Enrichment
Grants in the Arts. Other 2003 Kilbourne Fellows are Jon
Acquaviva, who attended National Guitar Workshop, Ashley
DeMartino who attended the Rockport Photo Workshop in
Maine, Antonia Fraker who spent four weeks at Nantucket
Island School of Design and Art, and Julia Tyson, who attended
Yale Drama School. All are members of the Class of ’04.
This cityscape is a digital print by Veronica Torres ’04 taken on 12th street between 3rd and 4th avenues in Manhattan while she
studied at Parsons School of Design on a Kilbourne Fellowship.
13
AROUND THE POND
Sabbatical in Stats
Al Reiff ’80 spent his sabbatical year
from Taft teaching in the Statistics
Department at California Polytechnic
State University in San Luis Obispo.
Some of the highlights of his time away
included working alongside four of the
major authors of Advanced Placement
Statistics textbooks. Al also attended
the College Board’s annual grading of
A.P. Statistics exams (his sixth year)
with other members of the Cal Poly
department, pictured here.
Outside of class, Al was able to find
the time to run a marathon, act in a play
put on by the local community theater,
and write a one-act play. Al, Julie, and
their son Alex also spent a good deal of
time exploring the wonderful sights that
California has to offer.
In the Potter Gallery
Taft Faculty in Art
September 9 through October 18
Opening reception September 11
Megan Craig ’93,
Rockwell Visiting Artist
October 23 through December 10
Funded in part by an endowment in
memory of Andrew R. Heminway ’47
Taft School Visual Arts
Student Show
January 8 through January 24
Opening reception January 9
Langdon Quin ’66,
Rockwell Visiting Artist
January 29 through March 6
Opening reception TBA
䉴 New photography teacher Nick Riggie
at the faculty art show with Rob Kneip ’04
and Nancy Townsend ’05
SAM DANGREMOND ’05
14
Student Art Competition
A juried show of student art from
Taft and some of our peer schools
April 2 through April 24
Opening reception TBA
Independent Study Exhibition
April 30 through May 7
John Richard Whitton Bria ’69
May 13 through June 4
Opening reception May 14
AROUND THE POND
PETER FREW ’75
New Faces on the Faculty
Michael J. Aroesty
Admissions; Teaching
Fellow in Psychology
Williams, B.A.
A. Irene Jenkins
Teaching Fellow in
Religion and Philosophy
Colgate, B.A.
Juan Ortiz Bulnes
Spanish
Universidad Autonoma
de Madrid, M.A.
Amory A. Bradley
Maillard Teaching
Fellow in English
Bowdoin, B.A.
D. Brian Kirby
History
University of Essex
(U.K.), M.A.
Nicholas Riggie
Photography
Bowdoin, B.A.
Ellen C. Brown
Teaching Fellow in Science
M.I.T., B.S.
Cheryl Larson
Mathematics
Yale, M.A.
Thomas Cesarz
Director of the Library
Simmons, M.L.S.
Steven Le
English
University of
Maryland, M.A.
Gregory Emerson
Science
Yale, B.A.
Colin Farrar*
History
Brown, B.A.
Joseph Freeman
English
Hamilton, B.A.
Jacqueline Fritzinger
French
Middlebury, M.A.
Alyson Lindquist
Carpenter Teaching
Fellow in History
Colby, B.A.
Molly MacKean
History
Harvard, A.B.
William Orben ’92
Mathematics
Lehigh, B.S.
Frank Santoro
Science
The University of Chicago, B.A.
Jonnifer Vasse
French
Middlebury, M.A.
Felecia Washington
Williams ’84
Admissions; Director of
Multicultural Affairs
Atlanta, M.S.W.
Amy Wion
College Counseling
Harvard, Ed.M.
Anthony Wion
Mathematics
Yale, M.B.A.
*Not pictured
Popular
College Picks
Members of the Class of 2003 are
attending over 75 different colleges
and universities this fall. Among
their top picks this year were the
following schools, listed with the
number of classmates there.
Cornell .................................... 10
Georgetown ............................. 6
Bates ........................................ 4
Harvard ................................... 4
Middlebury .............................. 4
University of Colorado–Boulder .. 4
Yale .......................................... 4
Amherst ................................... 3
Babson ..................................... 3
Boston University .................... 3
Colby ....................................... 3
Duke ....................................... 3
New York University ................ 3
Tufts ........................................ 3
Union ...................................... 3
Williams .................................. 3
15
EMBEDDED
16
䉳 Members of the 3rd Infantry
Division are driving into Baghdad
after the city fell. Tom Frank ’80
left the blue chair to take the
photograph.
T
he broad outcome of the war in
Iraq may not be known for years,
but in one aspect the results
are already clear. The long-standing
antagonism between the military and
media over war coverage is dramatically
changed. The Pentagon’s experiment
with attaching an unprecedented 775
reporters to military units has been
so widely hailed by both sides that it
is guaranteed to become a fixture of
future military action.
Reporters, angered at their sideline
status in the 1991 Gulf War, had almost
unfettered access as they lived with
military units marching across the Iraqi
desert. The military, frustrated that its
success stories weren’t being told, was
rewarded with tales of bravery, drama,
and humanity.
There were problems, naturally.
Some embedded reporters worked under substantial restrictions imposed by
media-hostile commanders. Television
broadcast extensive combat footage,
often with too much cheerleading and
too little context. “Unilateral” reporters working on their own were often
shunned by military personnel, alarming some that embedding was another
way to control access and coverage.
Perhaps the most significant change
was in the media’s tone. Stories were told
through the eyes of military personnel,
often with empathy. One reporter witnessed Marines killing three unarmed
Iraqis but didn’t lead his next story with
the incident. Rather, he said, he “was
careful to put it in the context of scared
young men trying to protect themselves.”
I was one of the fortunate journalists. I spent one month with an Army
helicopter brigade whose commanders
invited me to combat briefings, showed
me cockpit videotapes, and encouraged
me to talk to every soldier. Their candor enabled me to describe the pilot
who cheered in his helicopter while
blowing up an Iraqi tank, the private who
resented giving medical treatment to
Iraqi fighters, the warrant officers who
quickly realized that Iraqis resented their
presence. It was war in vivid detail.
KUWAIT CITY,
March 2, 5:17 a.m.
I’m lying in a hotel bed awake—not wide
awake, but groggy-awake. Annoyedawake. Awake when all I want to do is
sleep because I’ve been up for three
hours and asleep for only 90 minutes
before that. I’ve tried stuffing foam
plugs in my ears, snapping a sleep mask
over my face, watching Kevin Bacon
movies with Arabic subtitles. Useless.
I arrived in Kuwait three days ago,
and I suppose I could tell myself this is
jet lag. But jet leg does not jar you
awake, heart thumping with fear, mind
racing in horror. I am about to join the
U.S. Army division that will lead the
SGT. CRAIG CLARK/NEWSDAY
THOMAS FRANK/NEWSDAY
By Tom Frank ’80
Newsday Washington Correspondent
Tom Frank went to war in Iraq as an
embedded reporter armed with a laptop,
a satellite phone, and a digital camera.
17
invasion of Iraq with 20,000 soldiers
blasting a hellstorm of missiles, rockets, artillery, and tank rounds against
an enemy widely expected to unleash
chemical and biological weapons whose
gruesome potential terrifies even the
most tattooed infantry grunt.
I will carry a notebook and pen.
I am a reporter.
I am going to war.
My main qualification for this
assignment, as best I can tell, is that I
don’t have a life. I have no wife, no kids,
no girlfriend—no one whose absence
would cause me pangs of homesickness
over two months or generate pleading
calls for an expedited return. I stress this
point to Newsday’s foreign editor one
day in mid-February when I heard war
correspondents were being sought.
“I don’t even have any pets,” I added
for cocky effect.
The next day I was told to start getting ready.
MY GEAR
falls into four categories whose importance corresponds directly to their
cumulative weight: gear that keeps me
clothed, clean, alive, and employed.
The heaviest category, by far, is
the last.
I have: a laptop computer with
power adapter; a laptop-sized satellite
phone with spare battery, a cable that
connects to the laptop for e-mailing
stories, a power adapter, and a compass
to figure out where to point the contraption; a hand-held satellite phone with a
spare battery, earphone, connector cable
and power adapter; a Nikon 4500 digital
camera with two spare batteries, two
flashcards, battery charger, and lens
paper that proves no match for desert
sand; a shortwave radio that consistently
loses reception as the Alistair Cooke
hour transitions to BBC News, six spare
batteries and an attachable antenna; a
200-watt DC-to-AC power inverter
the size of a thick paperback that
plugs into miniature alligator clips that
fasten to a car battery to power any of
the aforementioned items; a half-dozen
American-to-European or European-toAmerican plug converters; an extension
cord; a small tape recorder with four
minicassettes and four spare batteries; a
brick of 12 reporters’ notebooks and
four pens—one blue, one red, one black,
one green, which I alternate each day to
organize my notes.
I separate the items by function,
cram them in Ziploc bags and stuff
them into a large daypack. It weighs
36 pounds.
The remaining 47 pounds of gear
so thoroughly fills an internal-frame
backpack that I remove ANY nonessentials—comb, spare pants, deodorant.
A bulletproof vest with inch-thick
ceramic plates in front and back and
a Kevlar helmet occupy most of the
space. There are two bottles of NATOapproved decontamination powder,
six chemical safety lights and a flashlight
and headlamp with red filters required
by the military to block white light
visible to enemy snipers.
To this stockpile the Army adds a
charcoal-lined chemical-protection suit
that I will wear every day for a month
䉳 Embedded reporter Tom
Frank ’80 photographed these
3rd Infantry Division soldiers
listening to BBC News on a
shortwave radio one morning
in Jalibah, Iraq
in Iraq, and a gas mask that will remain
permanently strapped to my side in a
green canvas case with three atropine
shots to be (self!) administered in case
of exposure. There is a fourth shot for
Serious Circumstances so beyond anything I can fathom that the explanation
shuts down my brain.
FOR 10 DAYS
in late February and early March, I live
in the seaside Kuwait Hilton with fellow
reporters neurotically testing satellite
phones, neurotically debating whether
to get vaccines for smallpox and anthrax
(I get neither) and neurotically trying
to relax at parties that are single-sex and
alcohol-free.
Then, I am embedded.
We 85 journalists joining the 3rd
Infantry Division climb into chartered
city buses one afternoon at the hotel.
We are driven past Kuwait City’s dreary
cinderblock architecture and discount
shopping sprawl, to a desolate highway
running north toward Iraq. As dusk
settles, the convoy passes through a
U.S. military checkpoint and turns off
the highway. We sputter across the flat,
lifeless desert for a four-hour stop-andstart journey to the division’s bases.
It’s nearly 10 p.m. when I am
dropped off, with a photographer from
the Agence France-Presse, at an Army
base. Newly built Camp Udairi feels
like a miniature city with grid patterns
of platform tents, a hospital, a store,
hangars, dirt roads and a mile-long
tarmac stacked with helicopters.
Two soldiers pile my gear in the
back of a Humvee and drive me in the
darkness to a 40-foot-long tent that will
be home for the next week.
I open the green canvas flap and step
into fluorescent brightness. Seventeen
soldiers, including two women, are
lounging on their aluminum-frame canvas cots two feet apart enjoying what I
would later learn are standard leisure
activities: writing letters, sleeping and
cleaning their guns.
A blur of handshakes, friendly chatter and food offerings greet me. I am
assigned a cot between two veteran soldiers, one wizened and wry, the other
from South Dakota, both about my age.
A major turns out to be from the small
Pennsylvania town where I started my
journalism career; we discover a mutual
friend. The battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel who went to West Point
with Dave Johnson ’80, is fully open with
me and encourages the same of his
troops. Another late-thirties soldier has
a laptop that plays music. Sitting on his
cot as we wind down my first night, he
pops in a CD. Neil Young’s “After the
Gold Rush” pipes out.
I feel instantly at home.
MY BATTALION
operates Apache helicopters, the
military’s premier attack helicopter. The
Apache prowls 100 feet off the ground,
skulking in the dark night for tanks and
other armored vehicles to blow up with
the eight laser-guided missiles and 34
rockets it carries under stubby wings. A
gun perched under the nose fires 30-mm
cannon shells at a rate of 600 per minute.
I spend hours while stationed at
Udairi hanging around the helicopters
with pilots on the tarmac, wedging myself into the cramped cockpits, sliding on
the tight headsets, gripping the left
handle that aims the laser, fingering the
right-hand trigger that launches the
Hellfire missile. Each helicopter costs
about $25 million, and as I gaze at the
long hazy rows of some 200 birds my
liberal instincts try to berate the extraordinary sums they cost and devastation
they wreak.
But those thoughts do not go far.
Rather, I imagine an Apache hovering in
the air, a sleek black missile curling up
from under a wing before rocketing down
to its target and blasting it in an explosive shower of flames. I want to feel
outrage and fear as I circle the helicopters. But what I feel instead is giddy awe
at their sheer, brute power.
THE APACHE’S
two cockpit seats preclude passengers, so
my first helicopter ride comes in the open
cabin of a Black Hawk. I am with a dozen
soldiers from the Apache unit’s sister battalion, sitting literally on top of each
other and our gear. Each soldier rests his
M-16 automatic rifle across his lap; 30round ammo clips are taped to the grips.
We fly in formation with a dozen
other Black Hawks, buzzing above the
brown desert that stretches unbroken by
any sign of life or vegetation. After an
hour, we land in the middle of nowhere
at an abandoned military airstrip, its
19
runways rubbled and cratered by bombs
dropped 12 years earlier.
A burly young private climbs out
through the helicopter’s sliding side door
ahead of me. He looks stern and alert.
He steps on the pavement and silently
slides a clip into his rifle. The war began
one day ago. We are in Iraq.
The war’s early stages make clear that
the Apache battalion I’m with will see
little combat. The Iraqi strategy of hiding in cities, trying to draw U.S. forces
in, works against Apaches, which are vulnerable to small-arms fire—rifles and
rocket-propelled grenades—that Iraqi
fighters can unleash from close range hiding on rooftops and in alleys.
But war comes to those nearby, and
on our third day in Iraq a convoy of
Marines passing through the city of An
Nasiriyah 10 miles north is ambushed in
one of the bloodiest attacks, during the
war, on U.S. forces. Two Marine transport helicopters land at our airstrip and
drop off wounded Marines for treatment
at the field medical station, which is
nothing more than a few litters quickly
set up next to a small beige medical truck
with a red cross.
By night, one Marine is left, sitting
on a litter in the glow of generator-run
lights hooked to the medical truck. I start
to approach him and stop. Back home,
interviewing hospital patients typically
requires clearance through a thicket of
guards, flaks, doctors and relatives. Here,
I only have to walk five feet. Nothing can
guide me but instinct, which is torn between sympathy for what the Marine has
been through and duty to report it.
I find the battalion doctor, a 29-yearold resident, and say I’d like to talk to
the Marine. The doctor chats briefly with
him and motions me over with a nod. I
am stunned to see a scrawny 19-year-old
kid, no more than 125 pounds, with
acne, glasses, a high-pitched voice and
fear all over his bandaged face. He tries
to answer questions with rambling tales
of being hit by mortars, machine guns,
20
heavy guns…a fire in the back of his
amphibious assault vehicle…hiding
under a bridge…Marine helicopters
unloading everything. But he conveys
one message with perfect clarity in his
shaky voice.
“That’s the worst shit I’ve ever seen,”
he says. “I don’t want to do it again.”
OUR MOVE
from the airstrip to the next in-themiddle-of-nowhere desert encampment
further north is repeatedly delayed. On
the morning we are finally supposed to
leave, a sandstorm sweeps in.
I am lying on the airstrip next to the
Black Hawk in which I expect to fly, and
believe I had actually fallen asleep when
a soldier pats me on the shoulder and
calmly suggests I put on my body armor.
An enemy company is three miles south.
I stand up. I walk to the helicopter. I
panic. My mind shouts, “Get me out of
here,” as if I could be magically extracted.
Then I ask a soldier what I should do.
“Got a weapon?” he says, ripping a
grenade out of a carton and stuffing it in
his chest pocket.
Of course not, I reply.
“Then find one,” he says and rushes
away to join the line of soldiers lying in
the prone firing position on the edge of
the tarmac, valiantly pointing rifles that
suddenly seem puny.
My instinct is in charge again, and
this time it doesn’t have a clue. Back
home I respond to trouble by assessing a
scenario’s worst possible outcome and
working my way back to a reasonable
solution. But now the worst possible
outcome is getting killed—a prospect
that lurches me from panic to denial to
horror and then…to calm.
I climb out of the helicopter and
begin taking notes. I chat with a medic
loading her pistol. In a few minutes, another report arrives. The enemy three
miles south were enemy prisoners. Under Marine escort.
AS OUR UNIT
moves north, skipping from encampment to encampment every few days,
the source of discomfort begins to shift.
The blast of artillery, so powerful I can
feel it from two miles away, no longer
rushes adrenaline. The sight of rocket
launches, which initially sent me scrambling for my vest and helmet, barely
merits my attention.
One night at the midpoint of the
war when 3rd Infantry Division armored
units are storming past Karbala to within
50 miles of Baghdad, I lie outside in my
sleeping bag on a cot and gaze at the starsplattered sky until my eyes go fuzzy and
I fall asleep. A few hours later, I’m awakened by artillery blasts in the distance and
roll over back to sleep.
Several nights later, we are 20 miles
from Baghdad and the evening is peaceful. Someone has a laptop, someone else
has a “Spider-Man” DVD, another soldier has Jiffy-Pop. The laptop is plugged
into a generator and set on a litter against
the medical truck. Cots are set up in front
of it, popcorn is passed around, and a
dozen soldiers banter through a night at
the movies as an Apache stands nearby,
silhouetted by a sliver-moon.
Yet after three weeks in the desert
with no shower and no break from the
sun that pushes the temperature above
100 degrees each day, filth has become
egregious. The Middle Eastern desert is
not sand but powder, chewed up by Army
trucks and pelted by the incessant helicopter rotors. Dirt works into every pore
of my skin, crusts my scalp and layers
the inside of my sleeping bag. Under the
dull light of my headlamp, the backs of
my hands look like they belong to an
85-year-old blacksmith.
My hand-held satellite phone and
tape recorder are destroyed. My laptop
screen is cracked internally and barely
usable. I have eaten nothing but mealsready-to-eat for a month. Any source of
relaxation does not exist. I am hanging
on. My editor suggests a day off, to which
I reply, “And do what exactly?”
I rejoice one morning hearing we are
breaking camp and driving to Baghdad.
Our convoy of about 50 vehicles joins
with other convoys forming a slowmoving line several miles long. We
rumble through villages whose residents
line the one-lane road, some buoyantly
waving, others skeptically glaring, many
hoisting white flags.
I ride in the back of an open-air
truck strewn with knapsacks, bottles of
water and MREs. Camelbacks hang from
a thatch of straps across the top. There
are 10 soldiers and me, all geared up in
helmets and vests. We bounce along the
rutted road. The soldiers point rifles with
one hand and cameras with the other.
They banter incessantly, spit tobacco
juice and smoke. I drop my veneer of
dispassion, laugh at their jokes and throw
back one-liners. After a while I start to
feel like grabbing a rifle and lighting up.
WE REACH
Saddam International Airport at night in
the middle of a thunderous exchange
overhead of rockets and artillery. It would
turn out to be the last serious fight of the
war. Within a day, the statue of Saddam
Hussein is torn down in Baghdad.
Realizing the fighting is over, I begin
a desperate search for a ride into central
Baghdad. After a few days at the airport,
I stumble on an Australian TV crew with
two SUVs and room for me but no time to
wait. I bid a frantic and unceremonious
farewell to a couple of soldiers and am gone.
I arrive in Baghdad on a sunny afternoon with hundreds of journalists who
are suddenly free to enter the country
without a visa and work without the oversight of government minders. The two
main Western hotels are so packed that
my offer of a $100 bribe cannot get me a
room. I run into an old journalist friend
who hands me her room keys.
Aided by a translator and driver who
came looking for work outside my hotel, I spend the next five days traveling
through the city’s neighborhoods, where
goats eat garbage in the street, and report on people who had been liberated
yet felt newly oppressed by looting, chaos
and foreign occupiers.
When my editor says it’s time to
come home, I put up no fight. On the
ride board that journalists have set up
in the hotel lobby, I see a convoy is
leaving for Amman, Jordan, in two
days at dawn.
The night before I go, the hotel
generator has conked out. I pack in my
dark seventh-floor room. Gunfire ripples
outside. The moon glows on the murky
Tigris River. I climb in bed and try to
sleep. But my mind is charging, excited,
alive—wide awake.
Reprinted with permission from Wesleyan
University magazine.
䉳 After the fall of Baghdad,
Firas Hashimm and hundreds of other Iraqis spent
days outside the city’s prisons, which U.S. forces took
over, looking for relatives
who had been missing for
years. Hashimm was looking for two uncles who had
been arrested in 1991 after
they fought in southern
Iraq in the abortive attempt
to overthrow Saddam
Hussein after the 1991
Persian Gulf War.
21
with a
ONLINE BIG
communicator
22
When I close my eyes
to think of elephants I
For 28 years Joyce Poole ’74 has
been watching, and listening to, elephants
in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park.
Now she’s making sure they’re heard.
feel enduring warmth:
Sunlight reflecting
off large bodies, amber
eyes blinking in deep
contemplation, soft
footfalls on the pan,
lingering exhalations of
warm breath, and the
comforting resonance
of their voices. For more
than 28 years these
images and feelings
have been etched deep
into my psyche.
䉳 Observing elephants in Amboseli National
Park at the base of snow-capped Kilimanjaro
23
䉱 Our lab and office at the edge of Rift
Valley, south of the Ngong Hills, an hour
outside Nairobi
䉳 Echo, Erin, and Enid in deep discussion
FAMILY TIES
Well-known for their intelligence, close
family ties and social complexity, elephants
are unusually long-lived and have the biggest brain of any terrestrial mammal. Like
humans, elephants, living in a fissionfusion society, remember for years other
individuals and places, forming close ties
with individuals in social groups that form,
split and reform in numerous combinations and in multiple layers of complexity.
Relationships radiate out from the
mother-offspring bond through families,
extended families, clans, and populations
creating one of the largest social networks
of any nonhuman species.
To add to this list of extremes, elephants are able to recognize, up to 1–2
kilometers away, the powerful infrasonic
24
voices of more than 100 friends and relatives, and they can send strong vocal
signals that may be detected acoustically
by other elephants up to 10 kilometers
away and seismically, through sensitive
corpuscles in their feet, up to perhaps 30
kilometers away.
ONLY A
CALL AWAY
Most recently we have discovered that
elephants are able to imitate the calls
of other species and machines in their
environment, making them the first
terrestrial mammal other than humans
to do so. Like us they may be using vocal
imitation to mimic the voices of close
family and friends thus enhancing the
bonds upon which the survival of these
extraordinary individuals depends.
The study of elephant communication is in a phase of rapid discovery and I
believe that over the next ten to twenty
years we will continue to uncover astonishing details that challenge the accepted
view of the minds of animals.
ECHO
I work with my husband, Petter Granli,
in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, at the
base of snow-capped Kilimanjaro with a
family of 26 African savanna elephants led
by 58-year-old matriarch, Echo. From a
kilometer away I recognize her unmistakably slow and rhythmical stride that creates
the characteristic swing of her crossed
tusks; close up the knobbed pattern of
rough skin on her forehead, the cataract
in her left eye, the abscess on her right hip
are her distinguishing marks. Her calm
and steady demeanor belies an arousing
nature and a fierce loyalty to her family.
In late April 2003 Echo’s eldest
daughter, Erin, was speared by Maasai
warriors 15 kilometers from their Ol
Tukai Orok home in an area the family
seldom visited. For over three weeks the
family stayed within calling distance,
visiting Erin from time to time to greet
her in demonstrative vocal and tactile
interchanges. I was with Erin and her
family over the course of several days
during this difficult period. On May 21,
after a long and painful struggle, Erin
collapsed and died of septicemia. At 34
years old she was the mother of three
immature calves, Echeri (8), Erica (5),
and E-mail (20 months), two adult
daughters, Edwina (21) and Eleanor
(18), and three grandchildren. Her son
Esau (12) had already left home.
Only after Erin’s death did Echo and
the extended family depart. Traveling
southwest they walked across the border
into Tanzania to a place Echo had not
visited in 31 years. There they remained
for several more weeks. When Echo and
her family returned to Kenya they walked
straight to the place of Erin’s death and
stood touching and fondling her bones.
A FAMILY IN
MOURNING
What goes on in the minds of beings such
as elephants? What kind of thoughts and
feelings can an individual as long-lived,
as large-brained and as socially and emotionally complex as Echo have? Did she
feel love and loss for a daughter from
whom for 34 years she had rarely been
separated by more than tens of meters?
In remaining near to Erin through the
course of her decline was Echo able to
comprehend not only that Erin was unable to walk home, but that she probably
never would? If not why didn’t she, or
some of the others, simply go home and
wait for Erin to follow later, as they normally would have done?
These were some of the questions
that Petter and I asked ourselves as we
watched the drama on the plains unfold.
It seemed to us that Echo remained
with Erin because at some level she
understood that her daughter needed her
25
䉳 Erin’s death was a grim experience.
In 2002, during happier times, Erica plays
in the mud by her mother’s side.
䉴 A family group bunches together after
hearing a lion call; teamwork is a vital
component of elephant survival.
presence and because she was able to
comprehend that her daughter would
probably die.
It appeared, too, that Echo was able
to communicate to other members of her
family, perhaps through simple vocal signals, her insight as well as her intention
to remain with Erin, for rather than splitting up as they usually would have done,
they remained together in an unfamiliar
place for weeks. The apparent ability of
elephants to empathize and to have some
understanding of death contradicts the
conventional view of the minds of nonhuman animals.
Are we correct in our conclusions or
are there other simpler explanations for
Echo’s behavior? These are the questions
that continue to fuel my life’s work.
Answering them may open a window
26
into the minds of elephants, as well as
provide us with deeper understanding of
our own human origins.
GREAT
COMMUNICATORS
I have studied the behavior and communication of elephants over a period of 28
years as part of the Amboseli Elephant
Research Project—the longest study of
elephants in the world. While no species
vocal communication can begin to compete with human language in terms of its
richness and complexity, elephants have
an extensive repertoire including over 70
different calls. Elephants call to advertise
physiological or hormonal state, threaten
adversaries and secure group defense, dem-
onstrate strong emotions, announce needs
or desires, propose, discuss a plan of action, coordinate group movement, care for
calves, elicit care or support from others,
reinforce bonds between family and
friends, and to reconcile differences.
Elephant vocalizations are highly variable ranging from very low frequency
rumbling sounds, or “rumbles”, to higher
frequency trumpets, roars, barks, bellows,
cries, snorts, screams, squeals, and groans.
These different sounds vary over more than
10 octaves from 5 hertz (far below the
level of human hearing) to 9,000 hertz.
Indeed, within a single call an elephant
may slide over 6 octaves—significantly
better than an opera singer!
In addition to this basic vocal repertoire, elephants produce a variety of
idiosyncratic and novel sounds. Elephants
also communicate via a wide variety of
visual and tactile gestures and displays
and chemical secretions. A complex suite
of these signals mediates the intricate
teamwork displayed by members of an
elephant family, including the kinds of
decisions that Echo and her family took
over the course of the weeks leading up
to and following Erin’s death.
WORKING
TOGETHER
A couple of years ago Petter and I
initiated the Savanna Elephant Vocalization Project (SEVP) to create a
multimedia collection of elephant
communicative signals and interpretive
information easily accessible to biologists,
wildlife managers and conservationists
around the world through our website,
www.elephantvoices.org. The elephant
communication collection, started in
2002 and hopefully to be completed in
2006, is being created in collaboration
with scientists and institutions both in
Kenya and around the globe.
In Kenya our main collaborators are
members of the 31-year Amboseli Elephant Research Project, of which I am
scientific director, and the Kenya Wildlife Service, as well as a team of biologists
and engineers at the University of Cornell
and individuals at other academic institutions in the United States, Europe, and
Asia. Through the collection and our
work with colleagues we aim to form a
new scientific basis of understanding for
the intelligence and behavioral complex-
ity of elephants, provide innovative tools
to enhance their long-term survival, and
inspire other people working with and
for elephants.
As among the elephants, longdistance communication is vital to the
success of our project, and the Internet
and e-mail are fundamental tools for us.
The growing number of contacts and
mail gives us long working hours, but
also inspiration and deep satisfaction. A
lesson we have learned from elephants:
teamwork is a key to achievement!
Our collective goal in the long run is a
world where people, elephants, and other
living creatures live together in relative
harmony. To achieve that goal we need
understanding.
All photos by Joyce Poole ’74/Petter Granli
27
As a “fine arts officer” in World War II, Yale art professor Deane Keller ’19 helped
to rescue Italian masterworks from the ravages of war. His efforts are documented
in a remarkable collection of photographs in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library.
by Catherine Roach
Collateral
28
When the Allies invaded Italy in the summer of 1943, Yale art
landed in Italy on a different mission. The artworks that Keller
professor Deane Keller was among the troops scrambling ashore
had emulated as a student suddenly became his to preserve.
in Naples. In civilian life, Keller taught painting and created
As a fine arts officer assigned to the U.S. Fifth Army, Keller
portraits of Yale worthies that adorn dining halls to this day.
was responsible for protecting Italian cultural treasures against
As a young artist fresh from the Yale School of Fine Arts, Keller
the threats of combat and looting.
won the prestigious Prix de Rome, an award that sent him to
Over the next three years, Keller would encounter every-
study in Italy between 1923 and 1926. But 20 years later, he
thing from endangered Roman ruins to purloined Renaissance
Damage
䉳 Keller rests his hand on
the forehead of the statue
of Cosimo de Medici and
contemplates the statue
before its return to Florence.
䉱 Deane Keller had studied Italian
art on a Rome Prize fellowship in the
1920s. The war brought him back to
Italy to protect the country’s art, a
task that included the rescue of
masterpieces looted from the Uffizi
Gallery in Florence.
䉳 Resembling a modern-day Trojan horse,
the equestrian portion of the Cosimo de
Medici statue is wheeled through the plaza
as Florentine citizens look on. Restoring the
massive statue was a huge undertaking
requiring engineers as well as art experts.
29
Collateral Damage
䉲 A soldier poses with
one of the many looted
artworks discovered by
the U.S. Army.
䉴 In Florence, crates containing priceless Renaissance
marbles are carried down
narrow streets and returned
to the National Museum of
the Bargello.
䉳 American and
Italian officials
gather in Florence
to celebrate the
return of looted
artworks.
30
altarpieces. In places like Pisa, Keller and his fellow arts officers
them from bombing were later seized as spoils of war by retreat-
struggled to salvage shattered medieval frescoes. After the libera-
ing German forces. When the looted artworks were discovered
tion of Florence, they were greeted by empty museums. The
piled haphazardly in a carriage house near the Austrian border,
city, famed as the cradle of the Renaissance, had been a con-
Keller was in charge of seeing them safely back to Florence.
tested site in the war, and many of the artworks that had made
The photographs on these pages record some of the
Florence famous were missing. Works by artists such as Botticelli
most dramatic moments in Keller’s efforts on the cultural
and Duccio that had been removed from the city to protect
front of the war. Keller and his friend Charles Bernholz were
䉳 Workers gaze at
Michelangelo’s David,
which has just been
freed of protective
masonry coverings
designed to protect it
from bombing.
31
Collateral Damage
䉴 Keller takes his turn
chipping away at protective coverings to
reveal Michelangelo’s
Bound Slave.
䉲 Bomb-damaged churches, such
as the one in the northern town of
Treviso, became a familiar scene and
restoration challenge for Keller and
other fine arts officers.
䉱 An empty spot on an Uffizi wall reveals
where Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat
once hung. The painting was one of
many taken from the city by retreating
German forces.
32
authorized to take pictures of their duties, a commission that
years to come. By depicting familiar masterpieces in perilous
resulted in a remarkable collection of some 12,000 images
situations, they challenge us to rethink our concept of the
depicting heroic restorations as well as terrible damage.
eternal artwork, untouched and outside of time. Instead they
After his death, Deane Keller’s widow, Katherine H. Keller,
show us that works of art are human creations, and as such
donated his papers and photographs to Yale. Now in the col-
are subject to human conflict and human intervention. The
lection of the Manuscripts and Archives department at Sterling
photographs seen here testify to one Yale professor’s efforts to
Memorial Library, these records will provide a resource for
salvage these creations in the midst of war.
䉲 The great bronze statue of Cosimo
de Medici by Giambologna was hidden outside Florence during the war.
Keller oversaw its return to the main
square, which U.S. Army officials
hoped would boost the city’s morale.
Faces in the Hall
A well-known artist at Yale and beyond, Deane Keller’s brush strokes are
also familiar at Taft. Keller painted the portraits of Horace Taft, Harley
Roberts, Sen. Robert Taft 1905, John B. Armstrong ’34 (for whom the
dining hall is named), Paul Cruikshank, John Esty, and longtime school
dean Andrew McIntosh, pictured (after whom the dorm is named).
He also created the charcoal drawing of history teacher John Reardon
that hangs in the faculty room. Son Deane Keller ’58 understood that
painting portraits was part of an arrangement his father made with the
school to pay his son’s tuition. Deane, of course, continued in the family
business (Spring 2003) and was himself commissioned to paint the
portraits of longtime faculty Al Reiff Sr. and Joe Cunningham.
Catherine Roach catalogued the Deane Keller papers
while working for Yale’s department of Manuscripts
and Archives as an undergraduate. The collection was
a source for her senior essay, which focused on art
theft during World War II.
Copyright ©2003, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission.
Photographs: Deane Keller Papers, Manuscripts and Archives,
Yale University Library
33
a BRILLIANT
MIND
and a
Passionate
Heart
A Tribute to Richard Marshall Davis ’59
May 2, 1941–September 25, 2003
By Headmaster William R. MacMullen ’78
A man who devoted nearly his entire
life to teaching Taft students, Richard
Marshall Davis, who died of kidney
complications, taught hundreds of students in his nearly 40 years here.
Rick Davis was many things to
many people. For some of you, he was
the teacher you have known only for
two weeks. For the faculty, Rick was the
slightly eccentric but brilliant teacher
you never knew, or the colleague who
one moment frustrated you and the next
inspired you. And you feel the school
has an emptiness now, a vast one.
In the great history of this school,
and a history filled with great teachers,
we will be hard pressed to find someone who taught as well and for so long.
Perhaps with him will die the career of
the person who devotes himself to a
school for an entire life, embracing it as
if it were family, flaws and all, but never
letting it go. Let’s hope not. For Rick
Davis, Taft was his life. Of his 62 years,
only his youth and college days were
spent away from these halls, in the dorm
above us, and in the CPT classrooms,
where he held court and dazzled, frightened, and inspired his students. I know,
for I was one of them, as were several
other faculty.
Rick Davis came to Taft as an
upper mid and graduated in 1959. He
was a handsome boy and a very good
student. His senior page tells the story
of a hard-working intellectual: he was a
His travel was inseparable from his
teaching of history. He simply could not
live his life without learning about
other cultures, and he traveled with an
anthropologist’s eye, swiftly and hungrily
observing culture and history, assembling it in that great mind of his, and
then sharing it with others over coffee,
in the classroom, or in his apartment.
35
Mr. Davis was one of the funniest and
most captivating teachers I had, and
he was one of those staple teachers
who made you think “Taft” every time
you passed them in the hallways.
My parents both had Mr. Davis, I had
Mr. Davis, my brother had Mr. Davis.
One of the only shared experiences my
family has to discuss when talking
about our times at Taft is this teacher
who made us laugh and taught us
everything he could.
I remember stories he told and
the way he conducted his classes like
mini plays—he would act out the parts
of the key historical figures. I remember the voices he would use when
talking about Thomas Jefferson or
Andrew Jackson. I know how many
books Teddy Roosevelt would read in
a day, or how little he slept.
Mr. Davis didn’t just teach history,
he performed it—he didn’t just try to
impart knowledge on his classes, he
tried to get us to care about it. He was
one of the reasons that history is now
one of my passions.
Mr. Davis was one of the great
teachers who could transform a student into an interested scholar.
—Eliza Clark ’03
36
member of the Biology Club, Radio Club,
Masque and Dagger, and he was headed
for Princeton. There he majored in history, and soon after he completed his
master’s at the University of Michigan.
In 1964, he was tutoring a young
boy at a ranch in Texas, and he wrote
Headmaster John Esty about a job. I
find his letter, still on file, and on yellowed paper, haunting: “I am most
interested in teaching history at Taft,”
he wrote. “I plan to make teaching at
the private secondary school level my
career and would consider a position
at Taft not only a fulfillment of my
hopes but also a definite honor.” It is a
wonderful letter: steeped in decorum,
appropriately respectful, refreshingly
idealistic, and above all, eerily prophetic.
For nearly forty years he would honor
the profession and the school.
For all you teachers who knew him,
I would add this: Naturally Rick did not
make it easy for Headmaster Esty. He
wrote several letters with questions and
clarifications, and, after receiving a job
offer, he wrote back yet again to say he
was waiting to hear from Hotchkiss and
Lawrenceville. Happily he began teaching at Taft that winter, and so began a
marriage between an institution and a
man, and one as complex, flawed, joyful, and intimate as any marriage.
Rick brought to Taft a prodigious
love of history and a brilliant mind.
One recommendation remarked that
“He is an interesting conversationalist.
He will be an excellent teacher and
will be creative and stimulating to
his students.” He became the heart of
the history department. During the
Vietnam War, Headmaster Esty wrote
the draft board every single year requesting a deferment: “He is a key member
of the faculty,” he wrote.
For essentially his entire career,
Rick was the face of history at Taft,
especially A.P. United States History.
During his career, a number of great
history teachers have retired or moved
䉱 For three decades, Rick Davis provided
a home away from home for boys on his
corridor, pictured here with Jim Gibson,
Eddie Ofria, and John Briton, all members
of the Class of ’77.
on; Rick was the constant force with
whom everyone in the department had
to deal. He brought stubbornly voiced
opinions, a massive grasp of history,
and a touch of eccentricity that for
many students made him all the more
interesting. Simply put, he was the
most fascinating man on campus.
In part, because Rick loved to travel.
His travel was inseparable from his
teaching of history. He simply could not
live his life without learning about
other cultures, and he traveled with an
anthropologist’s eye, swiftly and hungrily
observing culture and history, assembling
it in that great mind of his, and then
sharing it with others over coffee, in the
classroom, or in his apartment. His travels are mind-boggling. In addition to
Europe—which he traversed numerous
times, taking in the great battlefields,
cities, and museums—he received travel
How well I remember Rick arriving
from tutoring at the King Ranch, filled
with humorous stories of life with
the wealthiest of Texans. He lived
across the hall from Patsy and me on
the fourth floor of CPT and quickly
established himself as a firm but
popular master.
Equally quickly he became one the
school’s most gifted lecturers, blessed
with an unending reservoir of knowledge, a devastating sense of humor,
and a complete devotion to history.
Throughout his career he fought for the
principles he believed in: Republican
values, high academic standards, and
opposition to political correctness.
If he was somewhat of a throw-back,
grants from the school, and no one took
more advantage of them. In 1967, 1976,
and 1982 and through the ’90s he
took summer trips—to Australia, New
Zealand, New Guinea, Fiji, Polynesia,
China, Vietnam, Thailand, Greece,
Italy, Russia, and on and on. His travels
were a reflection of his mind: roving,
restless, insatiable.
On campus, he refused to be involved with anything athletic, but in his
years here he would serve as a dorm head,
chairman of the History Department,
coach for the Debate Team, head of the
Jobs Program, and adviser to Masque and
Dagger. As a teacher, he introduced new
courses almost every year—in Russian
history, anthropology, Islam.
But it was as an A.P. American
History teacher that Rick Davis was most
compelling, frightening, and effective.
He seemed to know everything, and
when you meet someone like that—
and it is rare—you will find it a very
exciting and unsettling experience.
I know the feeling since I took A.P.
history with him, and I am sure that
Jack Kenerson ’82, Greg Hawes ’85, and
Jon Willson ’82 would share similar
stories from their student days, as would
any of the department who saw his great
mind at work, and who worked with
him, argued with him, and learned
from him every day.
Writing an essay for him was a
daunting task: you knew that no matter
what topic you chose, he would know
more, and without ever picking up a
book to check facts. It was impossible to
find an area of history about which he
did not seem extraordinarily, meticulously, lavishly informed. His department
head in 1969 wrote, “He can almost
overwhelm a class he teaches because he
is so witty and so well informed. He is a
master—his lectures are meticulously
organized and proceed unerringly from
point to point. He is a master teacher.”
His effect on his students was enormous. Every year they scored brilliantly
on the A.P. exams. Though he died only
twelve hours ago, I have already had
e-mails from students; one senior reported that her older sister burst into
he was proudly so and challenged
many a student and fellow faculty
member to reconsider their thinking.
Over his long career, Rick did it
all from housemastering, to debate,
to club sports, to directing plays to
teaching, but it was in the classroom
that he left his real mark. I feel certain
that every student who ever had
Rick Davis remembers his powerful
presence and command of his subject.
—Lance Odden,
headmaster emeritus
37
My strongest and fondest memories
of Rick Davis are of team-teaching
“The Roaring Twenties” with him many
years ago. It was a spring term senior
elective in American history and English,
with a silent film shown every Friday
after the weekly paper was handed in.
Rick lectured as always, I ran discussions, and we all had a fine time.
The students thought the course
quite easy, but we managed to get a
goodly amount of work out of them.
At the end of the course each year we
taught the Charleston, even dancing
it together, if one can imagine that.
Rick greatly enjoyed traveling.
One summer, on the spur of the
moment, he and I went to Greece
for a memorable three weeks. He
was a magnificent tour guide: both
of us would read the Blue Guide each
evening, for the area to which we were
about to travel; I would then forget
everything, and he would lecture the
next day right out of the book. Occasionally I caught him in a mistake, or
making up stuff he had also forgotten,
but on the whole I learned a great deal.
My triumph, though, was in the ancient
theater at Delphi during a performance
of Oedipus Rex, in classical Greek,
when he leaned over and actually
asked me, “Do you know what’s going
on?” I was able to reply, “Yes!” and
proceeded to tell him the plot. What I
had forgotten, I made up, of course.
—Robin (Blackburn) Osborn,
faculty emerita
38
tears when she heard. Who knows how
many of his students chose history majors in college. Teachers on this and
other campuses are teaching what they
learned from him in A.P. workshops,
professional associations, and office chats.
Just this morning Mike Maher said,
“My talk on Puritanism the other day?
Rick taught it to me fifteen years ago.”
As a student, you felt awe certainly;
the sheer volume of his knowledge was
intimidating. You asked one question—
“Was Rasputin murdered?”—and you
got 40 minutes of Russian history, geography, politics, and economy. And he
told stories. His lectures—and he always
lectured, remaining disdainful of group
exercises and Socratic seminars to the
very end—were filled with anecdotes,
generally funny and often just a bit
off-color, and told with his trademark
nasally voice, and perhaps a few “Egads!”
thrown in. He was charismatic, vital,
exciting, and energetic. It was hard not
to like history as he taught it, even as
teaching changed so profoundly in his
tenure and he felt out of step with cur-
ricular innovations. He was devoutly
traditional and old fashioned in his
pedagogy; his was not a seminar. There
was no question where the class was centered. He refused to change: you walked
into class, opened your notebook, got
out your pen, and held on for dear life.
But he loved students outside of
class as well. I recall nights in his apartment, on CPT2, where he was corridor
head both when I was a student and as
a young teacher. I visited often. He was,
as you would imagine, formal and picky.
He had a lamp outside the door, with a
typewritten sign telling you he was not
to be disturbed if the light was off. Generally it was on. We all knew that Rick
was an insomniac, and that meant on
nights he could not sleep, he read or
watched movies. His movie collection
was staggering—from Hollywood classics to documentaries to cheap horror.
And so on many a Saturday night, you
would find 20 boys in his living room,
bowls of popcorn and a tray of donuts,
the lights off, and a great movie, with
Rick chiming in with trivia about how
Rick Davis quickly became one the school’s most gifted lecturers, blessed with
It is amazing to think about how many
an unending reservoir of knowledge, a devastating sense of humor, and a
Taft students R.M. touched. Although
I did not have him as a teacher, he also
complete devotion to history, pictured here in 1981.
the movie was made. When the movie
was over, you blinked your eyes,
stretched, but didn’t get up to leave.
Rick had put in awful thick orange
carpeting—this was the ’70s—and some
wonderfully comfortable, ugly chairs
(his furnishing taste was plain awful!);
and his walls were covered with fascinating memorabilia from his travels.
Arabian muskets, Civil War guns,
Asian tapestries, Maasai tribe shields—
his apartment was a museum, and we
would munch popcorn and ask him
about some item we saw, and he would
tell us its history. After an hour or two,
a score of Taft boys would walk back to
their rooms yawning, and a solitary,
brilliant insomniac history teacher
would finally rest.
But Rick was a tough, no-nonsense
historian, and he wanted the truth, even
the gritty and sometimes not pretty truth,
so he would not want me to end here.
The truth is that Rick could be a prickly
man, and not always an easy colleague
to have. Over the past few years, he
battled serious health problems, and this
made him impatient with others and his
teaching days more difficult. And he was
always a tough man to read, extremely
private and oddly shy, scathingly smart.
Once when I wrote him a note
questioning something he did, I
got back a three-page essay; when
Headmaster Lance Odden made some
professional suggestions, Rick wrote
back nine pages; when Walker Hall was
opened up, he wrote angry notes to the
grounds crew about the fact that they
were driving their carts over his lawn.
At one time or another, just about every
administrator received one of these
notes. Rick-O-Grams, we called them,
but they were never mean-spirited:
touched those who never knew him in
he was mad, if he thought something
was unfair, and he was not going to sit
by quietly. He drove three headmasters
and three deans of faculty crazy. But
there was no mistaking the respect we
all had for him. We knew that what
he had accomplished in his life was
something epic. Seeing him last night
in his hospital bed was to gaze on a
visage almost Greek—colossal, it was,
and marble heavy, statuesque. Nearly
40 years, I marveled! And still as passionate as his first day!
***
The average Taft teacher has four
sections of about fifteen students each
year; math tells us Richard Marshall
Davis must have taught close to 2,400
students. There are about 7,000 living
alumni.
the classroom.
Before each corridor had its own
common room there were no opportunities to watch TV or a movie unless a
faculty member on corridor invited you
into his apartment. R.M. was known for
having a great movie collection (he
may have been the only teacher with
VHS tapes and a VCR at that time!) and
often invited us to join him.
What I remember was R.M. allowing a bunch of us from different teams
to watch “psych up” movies before
games—like Slap Shot during hockey
season. The one time I remember vividly was before our first football game
in the fall of 1981. R.M. was not a huge
football fan, but he certainly knew
***
many of us on the team. The Friday
In 2002, he and I had battled about
some issues, but this I wrote him in his
appointment letter: “You are the quintessential schoolmaster. Your passion for
history and your extraordinary intelligence have made you the kind of teacher
who will go down in history at Taft.”
night before our first game he showed
And he will.
us The Warriors—a brawling New York
City gang movie having nothing to do
with football! I am sure it did little to
improve our play the next day, but it
got us excited about “smashing” the
opponent. I believe we went out the
next day and beat Hopkins 44–0.
To all of us, he was a symbol of how
a brilliant mind and a passionate heart,
wedded to the education of young men
and women in a school brim-filled with
intellectual energy, can lead to a life of
great goodness, meaning, and nobility.
All of us would be so lucky to have a
teacher who cared so much about his
subject, a colleague who devoted almost
every deep breath he took to the school
he so deeply loved.
He knew what we liked as teenagers, and he opened his house to us.
Now with his passing, I think a number
of us will realize how lucky we were to
have known R.M.
—Jack Kenerson ’82,
History Department head
39
A Day of Service to Others
More than 650 students and faculty fanned
out through Watertown and the surrounding area to help out local nonprofit
organizations on the school’s ninth annual
Community Service Day.
“Opportunities for service allow us to
see, firsthand, the positive role played by
charitable organizations in our extended
community,” admissions officer Holly
McNeill told the Town Times. Holly,
who coordinated the day’s activities and
transportation, estimates that the Sept.
29 event generated 5,200 volunteer hours
in a single day.
Projects ranged from trail maintenance
and landscaping to painting, food collecting, and working with elementary-school
children. On-campus workshops in arts,
40
sports, and other activities were made available to local third and fourth graders.
“Community Service Day is one of the
most important events on our calendar,” said
Headmaster Willy MacMullen, “and it is
both proof and reminder of Mr. Taft’s motto,
as well as a great way to maintain strong, enduring ties between Taft and the community.”
Clockwise from left, a local school boy
enjoys some time on Taft’s climbing wall
[SAM DANGREMOND ’05]. Courtney Coughlin ’06
shares her love of dance with local elementary school children in an on-campus
workshop [SAM DANGREMOND ’05]. Alex Bisset
’04 helps make a labyrinth for a Waterbury
Church [PETER FREW ’75]. Students work to
landscape an abandoned lot in Waterbury’s
Crownbrook neighborhood [PETER FREW ’75].
join us
for the fun
69th Annual Service of
Lessons and Carols
December 9
First Congregational Church,
Watertown
Holiday Party
December 10
Yale Club, New York City
Mothers’ Day
February 21
New York City Telethon
February 26
Williams Club
Boston Telethon
April 7
Grandparents’ Day
April 16
Alumni Weekend
May 14–15
114th Commencement
Exercises
May 29
For more information
on any of these
or other events,
please visit
www.TaftAlumni.com
Taft Bulletin
The Taft School
Watertown, CT 06795-2100
860-945-7777
www.TaftAlumni.com
Change Service Requested
Notice: Postal regulations require the school to pay
70 cents for every copy not deliverable as addressed.
Please notify us of any change of address, giving
both the new and old addresses. You may e-mail
changes to [email protected].

Rescuing Art - The Taft School

Transcription

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