PREFACE TO THE SAGA OF 57
“The Saga of 57” is not to be confused with “The 300,” although both draw much from the ethos of Sparta. The saga was written for the 50th reunion (May 17th to 20th) of the Phillips Exeter Academy graduating class of 1957. As such, its intended audience was the hundred and fifty who were at the reunion dinner on May 19th, and it is replete with names, phrases and in-jokes that cannot have much meaning outside of that audience. So it is with some reservations that I post it where a more general audience can access it.
At the same time, the piece represents about five solid months of whatever writing life is left to me, and I’m very proud of it, and I want to demonstrate to all of you that I haven’t been slacking off on my writing. And should any reader not associated with the class of ’57 make it all the way through, I would love to hear your comments, pro or con. Email me at standupoet@yahoo.com.
Any non-Exonian who braves this piece deserves a little help going in, and I’ll endeavor to provide it here. (If you don’t know what an Exonian is, you are a non-Exonian; it’s almost that simple.)
The names: most of the names, especially names prefaced by “Mr.”, are the names of teachers. (I don’t believe that there had ever been any women on the faculty at Exeter as of the 50s; I know there were no female students.) “Salty” was the principal, William Gurdon Saltonstall, brother of Massachusetts Senator Leverett Saltonstall. His wife is mentioned by name, as is Mrs. Wilson, wife of a faculty member. I tried to avoid mentioning any of my classmates by name, but I couldn’t resist Fred Truslow, Charlie Hamlin, and George Gilder. The parts of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Robert Frost are played by themselves.
Why four voices? The bulk of the poem is a pastiche of lines and anecdotes taken from the autobiographies submitted to the reunion book. (Apparently the making of 50th reunion books is something of an industry. Who knew?) I needed a shorthand way of indicating a change of speaker. Becaise I had watched many multi-voice pieces at National Poetry Slams, it felt like a natural solution.
The J voice is my own. My initial intention was to be a sort of commentator on the contributions of others, as well as to speak those lines that were taken from my own (unauthorized) autobiography, but for reasons having to do with my own dramatic instincts, such as they are, I managed to get myself pretty involved in the back-and-forth at several junctures. Two of the other voices are pretty much interchangeable; the last one will be self-explanatory.
Why two mikes? After the piece was almost entirely written, I was told that only two microphones would be available. Because the whole thing has to move very fast, I didn’t want to get into a situation in which B has to wait for the mike to be handed to him before he can speak his line. In order to avoid that, I had to redistribute a lot of the lines. It was like one of those problems on the analysis section of the GRE. And it was fun. It forced me to think about the lines from an additional perspective, and that thinking improved the piece as a whole.
Is this a poem? Even I, Jack “If I say it’s a poem, it’s a poem” McCarthy, find this one a stretch. If it is a poem, I’d have to concede that it’s a prose poem, and I can’t find “occasional epic prose poems” listed in any of my poetry dictionaries. Perhaps the next generation of dictionaries will make a place for it.
If you are so taken with the piece that you make it to the end, you will find there an Afterword. The Afterword is only intended for the true aficionado. Don’t peek.
The Saga of 57
an oratorio for 4 voices, 2 microphones, and 54 years
J: The vast majority of the lines in this piece have been culled from your own beautifully punctuated reminiscences. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do this, and thank you for giving me such great material to work with.
The story of 57 starts when we were fourteen. Who ever came up with the idea of sending boys away to boarding school when they turned fourteen? Must have been some kid’s father. Driving the young males out of the herd.
B: At some point, most of us surely felt that we were sinking, and looked for a life preserver. But the school was expecting us to swim. Huc venite pueri ut viri sitis—and we did.
A: Some of us had to survive summer school just to get in the door.
B: The 32-hour train ride to Exeter was the loneliest, most heart rending event in my life.
A: My father removed his wristwatch and handed it to me and I still wear it today. It would take four days to travel from San Antonio to Exeter.
B: I never studied as hard or as diligently as I did that summer.
A: I flunked Spanish, but they admitted me on my sweet smile and my use of the word sir.
B: The night before Decision Day I went to Phillips Church to ask for divine intervention. Mr. Adkins came out of his house and told me he was going to pass me. I knew at that moment that I was accepted. Effort counted as much as knowledge.
J: That was a well-kept secret!
B: The rest of us arrived right after Labor Day, that saddest of holidays.
A: I was “sent” to Exeter by my parents. I was a “legacy” kid. I spent two years under Mrs. Wilson’s tutorial thumb. Years later my parents revealed how much clandestine effort they put into keeping me in the place.
B: I was one of Hammy Bissell’s paperboys.
A: George Bush and I share one thing. We’re members of the lucky sperm club.
B: Exeter took a chance on a 15-year-old immigrant boy who hadn’t gone to school for some 7 years and whose IQ couldn’t be tested because his English language skills were only 4 months young, having spent those 7 years in a hard labor camp behind the Iron Curtain.
J: As it turned out, perfect preparation for Exeter.
B: At the introductory tea, my mother said, to make conversation with the principal, “I trust I am leaving my son in good hands.” Salty answered:
J: “Madam, you are leaving him in his own.”
B: For the next three years she refused to open or read a single official scrap of mail from the school.
A: When he said something about my not being able to read and write, Mother said, “I don’t see that as a problem; he will always have a secretary.”
B: I write the following with some embarrassment, but I ask you to remember that this was 1953 and we were from North Carolina. As we drove down Main Street, our mothers glimpsed Bob Storey, Afro-American, President of the class of 54, walking across campus. The car stopped. Our mothers looked at each other; their husbands had not informed them that Exeter had black students and they hadn’t thought of that possibility. They turned to us and said with one voice:
A: “When your sisters come up, you will know how to behave.”
B: We said, “Yes Ma’am.”
A: I recall having a classmate ask if, at home in Puerto Rico, we lived in trees. I am afraid many of these questions were genuine.
B: I left Exeter after only a couple of months in my prep year. It might be best to just omit me entirely.
J: No it wouldn’t. We need to remember how very real for how very many of us was the possibility of leaving—or being asked to leave.
B: I came to Exeter from a small town where most people are decent to one another. It was a shock to be with so many obnoxious people.
A: …having your nude picture taken for a “posture study.”
B: Those first two years I learned that almost everyone I met was bigger, smarter, stronger, faster and more talented than I.
A: I loved the Harkness table, but I also feared it.
B: Around that table, no place to hide.
J: My path to Exeter was hard to explain to folks back home in Zanesville, Ohio. Most of the people there who knew I was away thought I was at an industrial school.
B: Especially challenging was my study of French, which was like drilling for oil and never finding it.
A: Percy Rogers warned that we would be banished to Governor Dummer if we didn’t perform up to snuff.
B: Exeter was a real grind for me academically to the point where I wasn’t sure I would be asked back, particularly after the winter terms.
A: Mr. Hatch cured me of sleeping through Latin class by bringing a window pole solidly down across the width of the Harkness table within inches of my elbow.
B: He slept? In Mr. Hatch’s class? I can’t imagine getting that tired.
J: I remember studying no other subject but Latin for two weeks when Mr. Hatch substituted for Mr. Coffin.
B: Memorable as the projectile expulsion of a classmate’s shoe out the window of his class was, I prefer to remember Mr. Hatch’s kindness in having me for Thanksgiving dinner when he found out I would be stranded in the dorm.
A: My first Thanksgiving, I was walking in the park along the river feeling homesick but enjoying my first snowfall, when an attractive woman came running by with her dog. It was Mrs. Saltonstall. She asked me about my origins and invited me to dinner. Young Bill loaned me a coat and a tie. They treated me like an old friend and despite my awe, I felt right at home. When I returned to Langdell, no one believed my story.
B: I still don’t believe it…
J: Riding the train to school after vacations was as bittersweet a time as any I’ve ever had.
B: Even today a train whistle unfailingly brings to mind the haunting sound of the B&M night train and those early years in Dunbar.
A: Some mornings I felt like crying when the alarm clock went off. It just never let up. I’d think, “OK, there is no answer, so keep going.”
B: Talking endlessly with a few close friends on every topic—the peculiarities of everyone else, the difficulties of the day, the nature of the opposite sex—a topic explored largely by speculation.
J: I remember those years as essentially stress-less.
B: Was that Charley Hamlin?
A: Had to be Charley Hamlin.
B: I hit tennis balls against a brick wall for several semesters. That satisfied the powers.
A: Oppenheimer spoke in my physics class. I can still see him standing behind a lab bench, idly sticking his finger in a hole and moving it around in there.
B: Some may remember Hatch as the fearsome Latin teacher; I remember him as the coach who almost lobotomized Bill Miller with a lacrosse stick.
A: Skating up the river for what seemed like miles.
B: Unforgettable was falling through the ice on the river. A fast skate back to the dock produced frozen-solid laces, so no choice but to clamber from the river to the gym for a thawing hot shower, in my skates and frozen khakis.
A: The apple vendor: every afternoon as I emerged from the gym, he would have a Macintosh freshly polished for me.
B: Stopping by the Grille for one of Bucky’s peanut-betweens on the way to my 5:25 with Bob Bates.
J: For six months of the year, that 5:25 class was like going to night school.
B: “Assuming the angle” for tests at the Harkness tables.
J: Sometimes even sleep itself seemed like not the only escape, but just one more chore to be accomplished at its appointed time, one more preparation for the trials and tests of the morrow.
B: Saint Gurdon’s Day: Is there any phrase in the English language that conveys such unadulterated bliss?
A: …music, and particularly playing jazz piano. But Mr. Landers wasn’t interested in jazz. After one lesson he suggested that he would give me a B+, and I go practice on my own. One guy who did help me was the dish-washer named Reggie in Webster Hall. He played ragtime and showed me how you could play the melody with your ring and little finger.
B: I didn’t like the place. Not the arrogance of the students, nor the haughtiness of the teachers.
A: I entered Exeter as an upper coming from a public school with maybe 60 kids in our class. My first class was Latin 3 with Mr. Galt. I entered to find him having a casual conversation in Latin with one of my classmates. Right then and there I realized I was in deep doo-doo.
B: I remember working harder than I had ever worked before, and believing I would never have to work this hard again.
J: I never dreamed I would get in, but made a deal with my parents that if I got accepted, I would attend only if they would let me hitchhike to California and be on my own all summer.
B: I asked Fred Truslow, “What do you have to do to get into Yale from this place?” Fred’s answer: ace the college boards and have a C+ average, plus one very strong extracurricular.
J: In September my mother was killed in a car accident; in March my father died of a heart attack. The day of my father’s funeral they told me I had a full scholarship to Dartmouth.
B: My father dropped dead of his third stroke. I became a homeless orphan, although not a poor one.
A: I spent my senior year trying to get caught so I would be kicked out.
B: Have you heard the story of the Volkswagen on the chapel stage?
A/J: Yes.
B: There is invariably a teacher at every prep school who, if you never had him, you never really went to that school. H D’Arcy Curwen was that for me.
J: I shook/ the feathery, parchment hand of/ Robert Frost when I was seventeen./ Maybe something took.
B: I’m quite sure I was anchorman of the class. All my competition had left by graduation.
A: I wasn’t a good student, but not a bad one either; graduated with just under a straight C, applied to Cornell, and was accepted.
B/J: Those were the days.
A: My senior year at Exeter was probably the high point of my unmarried life. There was a sense that all was possible. I was confident, happy, energetic and capable (and probably smug and cocky too).
B: Exeter was not a lot of fun for me. Many who had been there 4 years had a cynicism that I found unappealing—“Negos,” I think we called them.
J I discovered the evanescent consolations of alcohol.
B: If I had to describe my Exeter experience in one word, I think the word would be “poignant.”
J Before Exeter, I hated school; every boy I knew hated school. As demanding as Exeter was, I don’t remember hating it the way I hated my earlier schools. I think now that what I truly hated was boredom, and Exeter was many things, but it was rarely boring.
B: The fall colors and the playing fields, the acceptance of everyone on those fields, the need for everyone to be on those fields regardless of ability, the desire of everyone to excel in academics, the general meritocratic atmosphere…
J: Exeter in 57 was a remarkably egalitarian place. I don’t remember anyone bragging about money or a famous parent.
B: I had been tested in the crucible of one of America’s top schools and had done all right.
A: After graduation I joined a rather large contingent of classmates at Harvard.
B: I strangely went to another all-male school, Dartmouth.
A: Exeter taught me the value of hard work, the necessity of thorough preparation, and the joy of accomplishment. I learned that competition is good. I chose Amherst because it was the hardest school in the country to get into (and because it felt good to turn down advanced placement at Harvard).
B: I was the first in our class to marry, Feb ’58 between classes at Harvard. We have 5 children, 15 grands and a great on the way.
J I been in jail, but I can explain.
B: While at Yale, I met a gorgeous Vassar girl. We’ve been happily married for 45 years.
A: I coasted at first at Yale, then crashed as the result of bad habits and practices. Exeter prepared me to be a kind, gentlemanly sort but did not instill driving ambition.
B: My Exeter experience made college somehow anticlimactic.
J: After Exeter I spent 5 years at Cornell getting a BA. My chief extracurricular activity was debating, where I met Caroline, my wife.
B: He met his wife in debating?
A: And she’s still his wife?
B: After Exeter I went to Harvard, majored in physics, then to MIT for a PhD in chemistry. The compound I was studying turned out to be a gangbusters electrolyte salt. So I made batteries that worked great—when they didn’t blow up.
J: I went AWOL from an officer training program and hitchhiked from San Antonio to Great Falls, Montana. Eventually turned myself in in Denver.
B: … Peace Corps in Tunisia 62-64.
A: …2 wonderfully free years in Oxford on a Marshall, doing another thesis on Aristotle.
B: Rhodes Scholar.
J: I talked my way into business school, after discovering that philosophy majors had a hard time getting summer jobs.
B: My thesis work consisted of scattering and particle-production measurements.
A: …Navy in the North Atlantic where we struggled to shield you from assault by Russian aircraft. History suggests we were successful.
B: …the front lines of the Cuban Blockade.
A: I enforced the Voting Rights Act and fair employment laws, mostly in Mississippi, Louisiana and Virginia.
B: …Bobby Kennedy’s Dept of Justice, Civil Rights Division. I arrived just in time for the investigation of the Philadelphia, Mississippi murders of three civil rights workers.
A: Spent thirteen months in country.
B: I became a frogman in the Navy. Later a SEAL. I was in Southeast Asia and Vietnam off and on for 7 years. I was a bit mixed up emotionally when I got out.
A: After 2 years as a platoon leader I switched to journalism… My coverage of the Watts riot in 65 led Newsweek to hire me to cover the civil rights beat in the American South.
B: … the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and the Bronze Star.
A: After a stint working in southern France, I joined Cambridge Seven Associates for a splendid apprenticeship.
D: John Lohmann 1939—1968 auto accident. Taught history at Pfeiffer College.
A: I tried teaching for a few years before deciding that it wasn’t for me.
D: Murray Durand 1939—1968
A: Exeter was not the place for me. So much so that I went into secondary school teaching in the hope of working with kids rather than at them.
B: I became increasingly disillusioned by the way in which the best economic ideas could be frustrated by the underlying structure of power and influence in a society.
A: I was drafted into the Navy as a surgeon and served first at Bethesda where I cared for overwhelming numbers of casualties med-evac’ed from South Vietnam.
D: Larry Fraser: 1939—1969 Captain of maybe the greatest football team in New England history. Auto accident; left a wife and son.
A: Why him?
B: I completed my PhD in 68 with a thesis about planetary scale waves in the equatorial ocean.
J: I won cases for clients I hated and lost some that I believed in, and became more and more disillusioned…I decided to give teaching a try and found that I enjoyed it…I’ve been involved in theater as an actor and leader of a mime troupe.
A&B&J: [imitating a mime trapped in a glass box]
A: …Democratic nominee for Governor of South Carolina, disqualified on a dubious residency requirement.
D: Dave Douglas 1939—1970.
A: I came to Alaska in 71 as Assistant Attorney General.
B: In 71 I became a special assistant in the general counsel’s office of the brand-new EPA. I served on the US delegation that negotiated the Law of the Sea Treaty.
A: The knack of feeling the differences, learned early on at Exeter, sharpened into a life goal of wanting to make a difference.
B: After defending Philip Berrigan and others I became Assistant Chief Counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee…I went to the White House to serve the first Congressional subpoena ever served on a sitting President.
A&J: Sweet.
B: Milton’s Epic Process: Paradise Lost and Its Miltonic Background, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
J: You read about people who resign from high positions in order to “spend more time with family;” I just skipped the high position part altogether.
B: Elected to Congress.
A: Since 74 I’ve been president of the world’s largest supplier of braiding
machines. (It’s a small market.)
B: The book “Jaws” was published.
J: (singing)
What ever happened to all those dreams a while ago?
What happened way across the sea?
What ever happened to the way it’s s’posed to happen?
And what ever happened to me?
B: I was 36 before I accepted that I could not drink and remain a gentleman.
A: …a 4 day a week job in Chicago although I was living in NY and teaching at Harvard.
D: Chris Goetze 1939—1977 Of a brain tumor. Taught geophysics at MIT; his studies of the plasticity of rocks are widely used by scientists who study large-scale plate motions of the earth.
A: In 77 I accomplished the hardest thing I’ve ever done: extricating myself from an improvident first marriage. (Hardest not because of legal or financial issues, but because of my dread of being alone.)
D: 1939—1978 Jim Purcell; of leukemia
J: I was a faculty waiter with him. Why him?
B: I very much doubt that if I had remained in Cherokee, Iowa for my high school education I would have become a university professor.
J: I served as headmaster of the Pike School in Andover for 16 years.
B: 16 years behind enemy lines.
A: Leaves a mark on a man.
B: I spent a decade in private practice before I founded Investigative Group International.
A: While serving as state Attorney General I finally faced and dealt with my alcohol problem.
B: …married too young…Divorce; then luckily met Nancee in Birmingham—married now for 23 years.
A: Not even a registered Republican, I was a member of an administration of zealots.
B: President Reagan’s most frequently quoted living author.
J: Peter Benchley?
B: No, George Gilder.
A: …spent time with the Eskimos out on the ice north of Point Barrow for the bowhead hunt.
D: Jock Reid: of cancer 1939—1982.
A: …helped to rethink the management philosophy of the World Bank.
D: Steve Colman 1939—1984
A: 1985 in Journal of Classification: Evolutionary and Psychological Effects in Pre-Evolutionary Classification.
D: Bob Perrine 1939—1986 Enjoyed donning his bear rug and terrorizing Front Street at night.
J: I played club football with him; he was like a little rock. Why him?
B: I found out, very belatedly, that I was an alcoholic.
A: Exeter put me on a new career path, eventually as CEO/Chairman of a company providing fund-raising services.
B: I guess his mother was right about him having a secretary.
A: I taught Classics and Linguistics at UC Davis and UNC. Then I got a home computer and got hooked. I produced the first Pascal compiler for the TRS-80.
B: We and our families built a compound on Tuckernuck Island (west of Nantucket) with our own hands.
A: …elected to the US Senate in 86.
B: My first marriage broke apart in 87. I spent a couple of years as a bachelor and then remarried in 91 to the love of my life.
A: Milton and the Sense of Tradition. New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1988.
D: Sam Huntington 1939—1988 CEO of New England Electric; killed by
lightning while hiking near Aspen.
A: I served more than 31 years in the Navy. My last 15 years were in command of everything from a destroyer to a Navy base.
D: Roger Chaffee 1940—1989
A: One specialty was a program for ski resorts…Patsy and I spent much time each winter visiting our clients and skiing around the US.
B: In the summer of 56 I met a girl from Wyoming and we have been married since 89.
J: Played hard to get, did she? for 33 years?
B: We were both married before and each have two children.
A: Management specialists in the Russian government asked me to evaluate a new law on enterprise reform and give seminars on a high performance model that included employee ownership.
B: We had 3 great children. One is now tragically deceased, having taken her own life at 24. Her depression did not define her. She was an All American gymnast, an honors student at Middlebury, a NOLS graduate, a world traveler and an editorial intern at Outside Magazine. And she was very, very funny! I am currently serving my third term as President of the Board of SAVE—Suicide Awareness Voices of Education.
A: We had exciting moments, like having our car fire-bombed in Spain by an unknown Basque group, or running a barricade manned by drunken Beninese “militants” armed with machetes. There was also real anxiety—our 17 year-old daughter kidnapped by the Mafia in France, taken to Italy, and escaping before she would have been drugged and shipped to the North African white slave trade.
B: In 91 I worked in the US Senate for my friend and colleague, Paul Wellstone. There were four Exeter senators at the time (Wirth, Heinz, Rockefeller and Conrad).
A: In the early 90s, a series of events caused me to think about what I wanted to do when I grew up. I won’t burden you here with the details.
B: After many years of being ambidextrous about my sexuality, I made a permanent switch.
A: I was elected Chairman and Managing Partner of Gibson, Dunn.
D: Mike Madden 1939—1992 In 79 Mike joined the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was never able to tell us what he did. At his funeral a coworker told me he was a “spook.”
A: We saw our daughter Serena and her husband both row in the Olympics.
B: My professional career ended abruptly 13 years ago when I suffered a massive hemorrhage due to a ruptured brain aneurysm.
A: And then, as my family life flourished, my career stalled. No major law firm needed the world’s leading expert on the law of aboriginal subsistence whaling.
D: Julio Cruz: 1940—1994 gifted in the arts, and he adored music.
J: Why him?
B: My major legal victory was winning the largest Native American land claim in the history of the US.
J: A successful consultant I became,/ getting paid big bucks and flying on planes,/ cutting jobs to make profits that Wall Street could see; / to make it sound nicer we called it OD.// Speaking just for myself, I felt no pain; / just a certain sadness I couldn’t explain.
D: Walt Kirch 1939—1995 killed in a skiing accident on Vail Mountain…I worked with Walter for 25 years and we never had a written contract. All he ever did was shake my hand and give me his word. That was all I needed.
J: Why him?
B: I was president of both Sporting News and Golf Magazine.
A: I had concluded that I was doomed to a life of solitude as a grumpy bachelor, until meeting my life partner. He’s also retired.
B: Chairman of Young and Rubicam.
J: 96 ended 35 years of a daily 3 ½ hour round trip commute.
D: Rannie Hobbs 1939—1998
A: Dick Grasso asked me to come off the floor and work for him as president and COO of the New York Stock Exchange.
D: Cameron Forbes: 1939—1998: Lighting designer and photographer for WGBH and The Theatre Company of Boston.
A: I created my own landscaping company. I, of course, have a crew whose documents would not bear scrutiny.
B: As a principal in a textile company I’ve experienced the dark side of economic globalization, the human toll, watching an industry implode in spite of huge productivity improvements.
A: My marriage ended, for which I bear responsibility. We were of the “Brokeback Mountain” generation. We were not gay, but I was.
D: John Gilmour 1937—1999
A: In Paleobiology, 1999: Duration and Habitat of Fossil Taxa—Changes Through Time in Variance and Taxonomic Selectivity.
B: For 38 years after Harvard, I taught in independent schools.
A: Life in Mongolia continued to be great.
D: Sam Haines 1938—2000.
J: Deputy mayor, Pittsburgh.
B: One of the living masters of bluegrass banjo and inventor of the picking technique referred to by his name; co-authored the Earl Scruggs instruction book and record; revolutionized bluegrass banjo playing.
J: I know that guy. I have a great album by Woodstock Mountain Review.
B: Americans do not think like other nationalities and vice versa, yet we make policy as if they do.
A: Today is Tsaagan Sar here in Ulaanbaatar. The temperature is regularly minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit at night. This is the first day of the lunar New Year. First thing this morning I had to go outside with a picture of a dog, then walk south, northeast and finally west to reach my starting point. There I tore up the dog’s picture and threw it down in an angry manner. Our coach assures us that we are now set for a good year! I feel great.
B: It seems I have a lot of doctor’s appointments these days.
A: I had a quintuple bypass last August. They caught me the day before I would have had my heart attack.
B: 3 cheers for Medicare: hip-hip: hooray! hip-hip: hooray! hip-hip: hooray!
And may Social Security last for at least another 20 or 30 years!
A: Professor of philosophy, Princeton.
D: Ned Newman 1939—2001 Of cancer. Contributed greatly to the field of French history while teaching at New Mexico State.
A: With my history students today, I emulate the kindliness of Mr Wilson; bringing juice and cookies to the weekly meetings of the Cinema Club as Mr. Wilson once brought cider and doughnuts to the lonely preps in the Dunbar common room.
B: Those doughnuts were good.
A: Yeah, they were. Elected to a second term on the Board of Governors of the American College of Surgeons.
B: Retirement has now relieved me of sixty-hour weeks.
J: That’s the closest any of you guys came even to mentioning all the long hours that went into all those achievements. We learned this at Exeter too, didn’t we? No point complaining; long hours are a given, hard work a constant.
D: Gerry Parker: 1937—2002 From complications of a head injury from a fall on the ice. BA Colby, MBA Cornell; President of Maine Surgical Supply. Loved skiing, fishing for blues, sailing in Casco Bay and playing cribbage.
J: Why him?
B: I try to keep the families of our 350 employees as well as can reasonably be expected. I would rather remember my long ago friends and classmates as they were. I look in the mirror every day and am sure they do the same.
A: 2 years ago, my son gave my daughter a kidney.
B: I am now the designated CEO of the Afghanistan International Bank, Kabul. One daughter just said that among the problems of dealing with her aging parents, one worry she had not anticipated was kidnapping in a foreign land!
A: Bad knees have forced me to quit squash, climbing and heliskiing. In their place I’ve been motorcycle touring overseas—Europe, Southeast Asia, New Zealand and Morocco.
D: 1939—2004 Eric Ludvigsen; Lud served in the Army, then a reporter for the Detroit News, then editor of Army Magazine. Respected globally for his expertise on military decorations.
A: While the light lasts, we’re starting out old age with a bang and taking a trip to the South Pole.
B: 3 years ago I taught myself to ride a unicycle.
J: I dance around the kitchen every morning while I’m fixing breakfast.
B: I was able to take early retirement, and have been enjoying the things I couldn’t do in my workaholic days, including finishing a hike of the Appalachian Trail.
A: The whole Appalachian Trail?
B: Of course the whole Appalachian Trail!
A: Right. Your recovery from workaholism, how’s that goin?
B: Pretty Good, pretty good.
A: Glad to hear it.
D: Jim Bockhaus: 1939—2005 Harvard ’60; White House fellow; Chairman and CEO of ATEC International; VP Merrill Lynch.
A: I can’t imagine ever retiring. My goal is to continue to spend significant time in Raleigh, Aspen, and the Bahamas, skiing and flying my plane till I am a danger to others
B: When we moved to LA, I took acting lessons, and have actually had some work at same.
A: … regular trips to Bahrain, where our younger daughter—the one who escaped from the Mafia—is advising the US Navy on Middle Eastern political and security issues.
D: John Trippe 1938—2005 Contributions in John’s memory may be sent to the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression.
A: My deepest regret is that I did not write Mr. Robert Scott before he died to tell him how important a role he played in my life. To me, he symbolized Exeter—challenging, demanding, supportive and inspiring.
B: I remain active as a teacher and researcher and am the inaugural holder of the Robert F. Drinan SJ Chair at Boston College Law School.
A: I lost my fear of writing and I can argue with anyone about most anything without any facts.
B: I am exceeding grateful to Exeter for helping me to grow up, to learn how to learn and how to want to learn, and to develop the confidence to jump into any pond I chose.
A: Exeter prepared us much better for academic and professional success than for marriage and family life.
B: I often think of the admonition of Mr. Curwen that our wives would never understand us, but even this icon could be mistaken: Leslie understands me better than I understand myself.
A: I’ve been lucky in love, lucky with children, lucky to be alive.
B: My wife and I continue to find unanticipated meaning in the word “sexagenarian.”
J: When my son was about 12, we visited Exeter for a tour. On the way home he said that he really wasn’t interested in Exeter for high school, but would consider it for college.
D: Peter Benchley 1940—2006 In a 90s Smithsonian lecture, he said, "If I were to try to write Jaws today, I couldn't do it. The book I would write today would be vastly different and much less successful. I see the sea today not as an antagonist but as an ally, rife with mystery and wonder.”
A: There was really nothing wrong with Exeter; I am just still not sure whether I should have gone there.
B: If anyone asks me about Exeter, I say it’s full of rich kids who hate their parents.
A: Exeter was the defining educational experience. What other institution could provide the combination of intellectual spark and terror of classes with D’Arcy Curwen and Norman Hatch?
B: The president of my company once said that success in life was a function of being in the right place at the right time; after a pause he added, “having done the right homework.”
J I never studied or applied myself as diligently as I did at Exeter. It’s really not good to peak at 18.
D: John Billings: 1938-2007 American University and American University Law School; partner, Billings and Billings.
A: Why him?
A&B&J: And not me?
B: Exeter instilled in me a lifetime focus on intellectual rigor and honesty. From college to work experiences, to this day I have about zero patience with intellectual sloppiness or laziness in myself or others.
J: If Exeter has indeed mellowed over time, this is a good thing.
D: Jim Rather: 1939-2005; paratrooper and marathoner; degrees in geology from Cornell and law from Fordham; prosecuted organized crime figures. Of Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
A: What did you do when you were told that you had Lou Gehrig’s Disease?
D: It was like a big explosion in my head, a feeling that there must be a way out. The astounding thing is that it only took me two days to say to myself, “OK, there is no answer, so keep going.”
A: Did you talk to anyone about it?
D: I decided to keep it to myself. I didn’t want to burden my family or partners. For a year and a half I worked and carried on my life as normally as I could. Finally it became very difficult for me to walk, hold a pencil and write, and I got very short of breath. At this time I told Amalia, the children and my partners. It wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be, because by that time I was very attuned to my situation, comfortable with it.
A: What is your philosophy about life?
D: Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Now, for the first time, I am truly examining my life.
A: Exeter created great expectations for success. Perhaps being around so many driven and academically privileged people overwhelmed a need to parse life into more playful moments. Too much have I been concerned about performance.
B: Set in Lucite on Peter Benchley’s desk, a quote from Brendan Gill:
Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the argument that life is serious, though it is hard and even terrible… Since everything ends badly for us, in the inescapable catastrophe of death, it seems obvious that the first rule of life is to have a good time, and that the second rule of life is to hurt as few people as possible in the course of doing so. There is no third rule.
J: Remember how, in chapel, on the morning before vacation, we used to sing, “Gaudeamus igitur, iuvenes dum su-umus…” “Let us therefore rejoice, while we are young. After fecund youth, after decrepit old age, the ground will have us, the ground will have us.” What a joyous anthem it was! What a joyous anthem it was.
D: At the end of Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks, dying on the bridge, gazes up at Pvt. Ryan, and utters these simple last words: “Deserve this.”
A: To me, he could have been speaking of a privileged youth, of schools that fairly reek of excellence. He could have been speaking of Exeter. I’m not so sure I have deserved it.
B: Who knows what might be next?
J: Saint Gurdon’s Days. As far as the eye can see. Saint Gurdon’s Days.
AFTERWORD
If you have any questions or comments about any part of the foregoing, email me at standupoet@yahoo.com, and I’ll be happy to answer you.
To My Classmates Who Didn’t Hear Their Own Lines in the Saga: my initial intention was to represent as many of you as possible, if not all of you. My first pass accomplished that. But it was far too long. By the time I got the piece down into the target time-range, I had had to make many painful and quite ruthless cuts, and I lost track of where each line came from. I had to cut some great lines solely because somebody else had said something similar. Some very interesting resonances were lost in the process, but overall length had to be the highest priority. Performance art is an unforgiving mistress.
Many of the lines and anecdotes that make up the final cut are in there on their strength, narrative or quotable. But a great many others were chosen because they speak to the kind of experiences many of us had. This is particularly true in the area of achievement. So many of you achieved so much—president of this, chairman of that, on the board of the other. My first pass included four or five times as many of these as did the final cut. My first audience suggested to me that there might be a point of diminishing dramatic returns on unalloyed achievement; i.e., it’s nice to honor all your classmates, but not at risk of boring their wives.
So I went back with not a scalpel, but a meat cleaver. The achievements that survived did so because they fell in the right place chronologically, or they were a good fit for the rhythms that I felt developing, or—I confess—I thought they would impress our wives.
Because my classmates were co-creators and thus had a vested interest in the success of the piece, the bar was lower there. It was our women who would be the captive audience; the last thing I wanted to do was bore the women.
The final challenge came when I was informed that we would have only two microphones to work with. By that time I had determined that I needed four voices, and that the piece had to go bang-bang-bang, like clockwork; I couldn’t afford to have dead air while A was handing off to B. I won’t here go into the analytical exercise that ensued other than to say that it was really kind of fun, except when it resulted in a final round of cuts, some of them exquisitely painful and, by any other standard except the logical constraints of the production environment, completely arbitrary.
So please forgive me if you wrote a wonderful line or told a wonderful story, and I didn’t use it. Believe me when I tell you that many of the cuts I had to make verged on the excruciating. Know that had I not had so much wonderful material to work with, I might not have had the nerve to go through with the project at all.
How I got this “commission” in the first place. In 1962, I went to my fifth Exeter reunion. I was one of three members of my class to show up, presumably because everybody else was in grad school. All three of us considered ourselves outsiders, and we were really surprised that we were the three who came.
Over the next forty years, my life took me further and further from the mainstream of my classmates. The alumni magazine was a very intimidating quarterly reminder of my once lofty expectations. I felt tremendous gratitude to Exeter, but very little connection.
In 2002 I was living in Fremont, New Hampshire, about 20 minutes from Exeter, and my wife Carol was encouraging me to reconnect, so when our 45th came up, I thought, “What the hell?” and signed up for the Saturday night dinner.
The Friday night before the dinner I had a reading at a bookstore in Newmarket, and my cousin Mike McCarthy and his wife Carol came. Mike had started at Exeter the September after I graduated, and he eventually settled in the area and became very active in academy and alumni affairs. Because I was planning to attend the reunion the next day, I opened the Newmarket reading with a couple of poems that referred to my Exeter years, including “Magnum Iter,” a thirteen-minute epic about Mr. Hatch, a famous (or infamous) Exeter Latin teacher, a poem I very rarely perform.
Mike loved the poem—it turned out that he had Mr. Hatch not once, but twice. By the time I got to Exeter Saturday morning, Mike was already there, and he had arranged for me to read the first section of the poem at the class dinner that night.
I have had occasional standing ovations over the years, but that night I got what I call a swarming ovation: as I came down from the podium, many of my classmates rushed up to tell me their own Mr. Hatch stories. I was enlisted, almost on the spot, to write a poem for the 50th reunion.
The Mr. Hatch poem (in its entirety) was later mailed out to the whole class, and subsequently published in the (intimidating) alumni magazine. I received numerous emails about it from other alumni, ranging from “Thank you for your wonderful tribute to Mr. Hatch” to “Thank you for exposing him for the sadist he was.” The range itself makes me think I got the poem right.
The unauthorized biography: In early 2006, I wanted to collect material from my classmates, and I didn’t know there was going to be a reunion book. My thought was that my classmates would write their own memoirs on the subject “Exeter and My Life,” and send them to me. I promised them a “sprawling poem,” one that would attempt “to outline the vastness of the diversity of where we came from and where we ended up.”
In an effort to encourage my classmates to write memoirs that would go a little deeper than the standard resume highlights that brighten the Class Notes section of every alumni magazine, I wrote and distributed to the class “The Unauthorized Critical Biography of Jack McCarthy.” It resulted in only a handful of submissions, and I was almost to the point of resigning my “commission” when I learned that there was also a reunion book in the works, and many of my classmates had submitted their memoirs there. A lot of those memoirs displayed the kind of intimacy that I had been agitating for; some have suggested that my bio contributed to that.
I’m not going to post “The Unauthorized Critical Biography;” it’s a little too intimate for the Internet; but if you email me (standupoet@yahoo.com), I’ll email you back you a copy.
The reunion book was a treasure trove. 80-85% of the lines in the finished Saga are lifted direct from its pages.
St. Gurdon’s Day: Understand that at Exeter in the 50s, we worked pretty much around the clock, with time out for moderate sleeping, six days a week. There was a little breathing space from Saturday afternoon through Sunday morning, but by Sunday afternoon the weight of all the weekend assignments would be closing in on us. It never let up. Then, out of nowhere, at the end of (compulsory) chapel one snowy morning in February, the principal, Mr. (William Gurdon) Saltonstall, took the podium and announced that today was St. Gurdon’s Day; all classes and all sports were cancelled. Pandemonium ensued; the faculty members on the chapel stage looked furious—which sweetened considerably an already unbelievably sweet pot. It became an annual tradition.
The VW story. It was the proudest achievement of my class, a legend in Exeter history. The school paper reported, “The Volkswagen was hoisted on the shoulders of a semi-spontaneous group of upper-classmen and carried up the stairs leading to chapel…. The advent on the scene of a faculty wife, the presence in the building of an evening German class, and the necessity of removing one of the front chapel doors did little to delay the gleeful progress. Over-zealous students, hungry for publicity, alerted the Boston Herald, which sent its local reporter to the scene. He spoke to the night watchman… [and] a task force of faculty members and wives happily hauled the car back down the stairs.”
The students showed up for chapel the next morning anticipating pandemonium or, at the very least, closed curtains on the chapel stage, the VW concealed behind them. They were met, instead, by the grinning faces of the faculty, arrayed as usual in their chairs on the car-less stage.
I, alas, had nothing to do with it. I did try to top it a few weeks later. I was ringleader of a brilliant plot to lock the entire faculty up in the faculty meeting. We got everything in place, but had to abort at the last second because janitors were waxing the floor in the hall outside the meeting. Had we done our homework better, we might have been expecting that.
I been in jail, but I can explain. I have been, but I won’t explain here. That line in the poem was me talking, not speaking for anyone else in the class. The line itself is from a Bill Morrissey song. I always liked the sound of it, and I use it in some of my bios.
Thanks
Thank you, everyone who sent a bio for the reunion book.
Thank you, class officers, for giving me the chance to do this.
Thank you, Dave Bohn, for videotaping us; and for hosting large chunks of the reunion.
Thank you, Mike McCarthy; you set it all in motion.
Thank you, Carol. You are my inspiration always. You bore the brunt of all my stress. You made sure I had all the time I needed to do all the work. If I needed another reason to love you, this would do.
Special thanks to the Unindicted Co-Conspirators, the last-second sobriquet I came up with for my three accessories in the presentation of the Saga. In reading over the bios submitted for the reunion book, I learned that three of my classmates had gotten into acting, so they were the first three I approached. Only one of them, Jonathan Kelley, an anesthesiologist in California, was planning to attend the reunion. I remembered Jonathan as one of the good guys, and very good-looking (wife-appeal being a major plus in my priorites).
A second actor, Jeff Savage, who has an antiques business in Connecticut, wasn’t planning to attend, but was seduced by the offer of a juicy part. Back in our Exeter days, I was a pitcher in intramural baseball and Jeff was my catcher. I remember him calling time one game and jogging out to the mound. I said, “What’s the matter?” He said, “Your curveball.” I said, “What about my curveball?” He said, “It’s breaking.”
The third actor couldn’t be talked into coming, so I went for a lawyer, a New york prosecutor. Peter Sobol was a friend at Exeter, though we traveled in different circles. Curiously, Peter was one of the three classmates to come to the 5th reunion in 1962.
After a single rehearsal, on the afternoon of the presentation—a rehearsal that was barely good enough to make me comfortable that we weren’t going to embarrass ourselves—those three were so good on Saturday night that I was hearing truths I hadn’t written; they were marvelous! Thank you guys!!