Teresa Barger '73 Address Santa Catalina Alumnae Reunion March

Teresa Barger ’73 Address Santa Catalina Alumnae Reunion March 24, 2018 Thank you so much to the school and my class for this honor. 1969 was a weird year. The year we entered Catalina, the country was deeply divided by the Vietnam War; the nation was just getting over the assassination of Martin Luther King and the race riots that followed; and the Summer of Love with its ethic of “If it feels good, do it” was devolving into craziness. Only a month before school started, a Catalina alumna and cousin of our classmates Katie Budge and Marian Miller was killed by the Charles Manson “family.” But what did I know? I arrived anxiously at Catalina from Saudi Arabia wearing the coolest footwear I had—goatskin sandals with tire tread soles. These were the height of fashion in Saudi Arabia but not exactly huaraches or whatever the cool kids like Dana Hees would wear. And since it was so very cold here, I was never without my trusty navy blue raincoat with its fake sheepskin lining … in hideous red. Since I apparently greeted everyone I met with some exciting tidbit about the oppression of the Palestinian refugees, Joan Frawley later told me she thought I was a refugee. The first time I knew that we should care about the Vietnam War was when Mary Pickering wore a black armband at school on the day of the Moratorium to protest the Vietnam War. I had to look that one up—“moratorium.” Now I think back and wonder how those few nuns kept it together. Thank you, Sisters! They had to oversee the safety of 200 girls in a time not only of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll (do you remember how all those seniors got busted for drugs our freshman year?), but also in a time of the Zodiac Killer and the Zebra murders. And we ourselves even had a taste of the tragedy of this sick time when a so-called eco warrior killed the parents of our classmate, Lark Ohta. But those aren’t my main memories of Catalina. Far from it. I felt I was embraced by kindness and safety. It was a place I could learn. And what better time for learning than adolescence. It was well known that the nuns were the best teachers; for me especially it was Sister Aaron and Sister Jane Fox. But the only body of knowledge I really have to this day is art history. And that is because I took two years of it with the beloved Laurie Boone ’58, who was one of those teachers of a lifetime. (I remember her saying, “When you go to a museum show, always buy the catalogue.” And I thought, “Oh my God, that’s so expensive!”). Later in life I learned the discipline of finance, and I apply it in my work as an investor every day. But in my off time, I still gravitate to art and art history. And Catalina was not a mean girls school. It was very kind. That was part of the mission of the school. There was an understanding that each of us had our own unique spiritual life and that each person had to be treated as a child of God. For all of our mocking of our then-cool guitar masses, and making fun of the girls who paid too much attention to the handsome Jesuit novitiates at Retreat, there was a spiritual and religious fundamental to our experience. Another part of the ethos we absorbed was the classic “us against them” dynamic that, I found out later in life, all boarding schools have and that certainly cements friendships. Despite the best efforts of the poor beleaguered nuns, there was an understanding that you were either with “The Man”—so to speak—or with the fellow students. Even though we were a “good class,” we also had an all-class sneak-out to Denny’s one night that was rather a triumph. Of course I was a goody-goody, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t thrilled to successfully raid the kitchen and eat mint chocolate chip ice cream right there in the freezer. Once. Janie King had advice for a neophyte like me: “Just look like you know what you are doing.” This was the same person who organized the first— and probably only—meeting of the Santa Catalina Liberation Front (in Lower Sophomore, I believe). I kinda forget what its mission was. Maybe just to have that name. But no matter, transgression of the rules was a part of the great bonding experience of high school. A key part of my experience was Speech Club. This is not because we took it seriously, because we didn’t. It was mostly a great excuse to get off campus. The seniors we traveled with were impossibly urbane, but we freshmen were far from sophisticated. When one of us would stand up to practice one of the events—say, expository speaking where you were given a phrase and then had to riff on it for a few minutes—all of us would crack up laughing as if this were the most ridiculous thing ever. It was just too hard to take ourselves seriously. But in order for our region to be included in California statewide tournaments, Catalina was forced to also participate in debate. And do you have any idea what real debate nerds do? They spend every scrap of free time researching the topic of the year and writing out hundreds of index cards which they carry around in file cases inside wheeled briefcases. Not us. I once had to be in a debate against some serious boys. Outside the window of our debate room in Paso Robles, Joan Frawley and Alison Hall were doing cartwheels and jumping backwards on one foot to distract us. And inside, my partner, Ann Politzer, thought she would illustrate a point about the U.S.-Mexican border by leaning forward on the podium, holding her abundant red hair back with her hands, and then picking up the one shoebox we used for our 15 index cards. But it wasn’t even a regular adult shoe box! It was a child’s shoe box that happened to be decorated with an old-timey sepia map of the U.S. with a bit of Mexico showing. But as goofy as we were, I think I understood that Catalina had a clear mission and it was run by people who were utterly devoted to that mission. And that concept of mission is what has motivated most of my career and probably the careers and good works of most in our class. I am sure Basia Belza, who has championed research on standing, would say this is true. And Kathy Carver Grant, who works with food for the needy, and Bobbie Lundstrom Bon, who works on school gardens, and Lucy Butler, who works with disadvantaged children, or people who are dealing with their own difficult family situations and ill parents would agree. All that work fulfills a mission. When I was nine years old, I was walking in the desert behind my house in Arabia. And I remember thinking, I live in a really poor country. It’s great there is an oil company here that produces something that people want to buy. And this allows it to train and employ people who can then feed, clothe, and educate their families. A good, financially sustainable company is really the way out of poverty for the country. I didn’t know those words, of course, but I grasped the idea. And those thoughts in the desert motivated most of my career. After business school I went into consulting because it dealt with how companies could use the world’s resources better. And it was a great education. Then when I moved to Washington, D.C., I found that the International Finance Corporation existed. It was filled with people who believed that the way to make poor countries less poor was to promote financially sustainable businesses that would employ people who could then feed, clothe, and educate their kids. This sounds obvious now, but in 1986 most of the staff at the sister group, The World Bank, still believed that government was the engine of development. So it was not a majority view. Then in 2008 I went out on my own to set up Cartica, which is the first global emerging markets activist investment fund. And at Cartica we say, “We get up every day to learn new things, to make companies better, and to make returns for our investors.” So I am lucky to be learning a torrent of new things every day and experiencing the thrill when a company adopts our suggestions for game-changing improvements. It’s the thrill of fulfilling a mission. Now in 2018 we again live in a weird time. We have an epidemic of school shootings, opioid deaths, institutions built over 250 years being destroyed in a year or two, racial tensions, and 4 percent of our labor force in prison or on parole. But we can contribute to the healing of our country and our families with a legacy of learning, kindness, and a sense of mission in our lives. We are Catalina girls. Teresa Barger ’73 .

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