BULLETIN A DAY IN THE Life Alumni Weekend 127th Commencement SUMMER 2017 Make this issue Scan this page to watch SUMMER 2017 COME TO LIFE!LIFE!LIFE! the video! Don’t turn the page without learning how. 44 44 Alumni Weekend 2017 Photography by Robert Falcetti, Anne Kowalski, and James Shannon DEPARTMENTS 3 On Main Hall 52 5 Letters A Day in the Life 6 Alumni Spotlight Follow the lives of three Taft students. 14 In Print By Debra Meyers 16 Around the Pond 32 Sports 42 Annual Fund Report “Bring Me Little Water, 72 Alumni Notes Sylvie” drew rave reviews 94 Taft Trivia during Collegium’s 64 performances in San 127th Commencement 124 Milestones Discover Francisco and Santa Monica Remarks by Pressley M. Millen P’17 this year. Use Layar on Scan this page interactive content these pages to enjoy the performance. PETER FREW ‘75 Download thep free T Layar Ap INTERACTIVE PRIN 64 IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR AN INTERACTIVE READING EXPERIENCE THAT INVOLVES MORE Here’s how it works: THAN JUST TURNING THE PAGE, THIS ISSUE OF THE BULLETIN IS FOR YOU. WE’RE PLEASED We hope you enjoy TO INTRODUCE A UNIQUE TECHNOLOGY THAT this interactive 52 EMPLOYS AN “AUGMENTED REALITY” (AR) issue of the Bulletin, 1Download the free 2Look for the Layar symbol 3Open the app and position your BROWSER TO ACCESS DIGITAL CONTENT THROUGH and look forward to Layar app on your on images throughout mobile device over the page. THE PRINTED PAGE. BY SIMPLY SCANNING SELECT your feedback! mobile device. It is the Bulletin. You’ll find Tap your screen to activate the PAGES WITH YOUR MOBILE DEVICE, YOU WILL BE available for both iOS them here and on pages scan. The associated digital ABLE TO VIEW VIDEO CLIPS THAT ADD DEPTH AND and Android. 9, 22–23, 54, 55, 57, 59, 61, content will begin playing on ENJOYMENT TO YOUR READING EXPERIENCE. 62–63 and the back cover. your mobile device! Taft Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 1 On Main Hall A WORD FROM HEADMASTER WILLY MACMULLEN ’78 SUMMER 2017 Volume 87, Number 4 EDITOR Linda Hedman Beyus LIVING ON THE COMMONS DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS AN EXCERPT FROM 2017 COMMENCEMENT REMARKS Kaitlin Thomas Orfitelli Earlier this week, I snuck ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS Debra Meyers out of my office and drove to New Haven, where I hide, in a PHOTOGRAPHY wood-paneled reading room in Robert Falcetti Yale’s Sterling Library, when- ALUMNI NOTES EDITOR ever I have a talk to write. The Hillary Dooley parking meter maxed at two hours, so I twice had to take ON THE COVER DESIGN | Even Horace Dutton Taft was sporting Good Design, LLC www.gooddesignusa.com breaks, emerging blinking into a jaunty hat on Alumni Weekend to the sunlight to take get some SEND ALUMNI NEWS TO greet hundreds of alumni and their Taft Bulletin | Alumni Office air, and to walk by the Green. families and friends for a several days The Taft School In every way, the Green is the of celebrations. ROBERT FALCETTI 110 Woodbury Road, Watertown, CT 06795-2100 center of the city. [email protected] Colonists arrived in New DEADLINES FOR ALUMNI NOTES Haven in 1638, seven men Fall–August 30 | Winter–November 15 | Spring–February 15 | Summer–May 15 wintering over, and about 250 arriving in April to try SEND ADDRESS CORRECTIONS TO Cathy Mancini | Alumni Records to somehow wrest a life out The Taft School of thick woods and thin soil. Taft ONLINE 110 Woodbury Road, Watertown, CT 06795-2100 That they survived is some- [email protected] Find a friend or past Bulletin: thing of a miracle, but what is The New Haven Green F11PHOTO/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM taftalumni.com 860-945-7777 | WWW.TAFTALUMNI.COM more astonishing is this: one of the first things they did was to plan the town Green. It’s amazing. Barely able to eke out survival and with arable land scarce, the first thing they did was to commit to Visit us on your phone: taftschool.org COMMENTS? TELL US! We’d love to hear what you think about the stories in this Bulletin. a space where they could gather—to trade, worship, discuss, remediate, resolve, educate. Think of We may edit your letters for length, clarity, and content, but please write. what that said about their conviction that a community of desperate and diverse voices could only What happened at today’s game? Linda Hedman Beyus, editor taftsports.com endure if there was a commons. And so the 16-acre, nine-section plot has remained. Taft Bulletin And that’s where this talk starts and finishes, where you seniors once began and now end: on a 110 Woodbury Road Shop online: taftstore.com Watertown, CT 06795-2100 green, and with my hope that the work we have done with you will help you for life in the commons. [email protected] As you know, the history of New England is, in some ways, about how we have gathered on facebook.com/thetaftschool communal spaces; and if our discourse as a nation is inevitably imperfect, at turns divisive and The Taft Bulletin (ISSN 0148-0855) is published quarterly, in February, May, August, and November, by The Taft School, 110 Woodbury Road, Watertown, CT 06795-2100, rancorous and uniting and uplifting, that it even happens can be traced to our commitment to the and is distributed free of charge to alumni, parents, grandparents, and friends of the school. twitter.com/taftschool All rights reserved. “Common spaces, we are reminded, are about the bringing together of instagram.com/taftschool citizens, around religion, trade, civics, and education. They are physical and bit.ly/taftlinkedin spiritual loci, the means by which in our best moments as a people we are vimeo.com/taftschool our most humane, visionary, and wise, and where we find ways to gather, Please recycle this Bulletin or share with a friend. debate, and listen, to experience literally and figuratively commonality.” 2 Taft Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 Taft Bulletin / SUMMER 2017 3 FROM THE Headmaster commons. Some 170 towns in this state still have a green, a commons, like the one just a few steps LETTERS from this campus. Common spaces, we are reminded, are about the bringing together of citizens, around religion, trade, civics, and education. They are physical and spiritual loci, the means by which in our best moments as a people we are our most humane, visionary, and wise, and where we find ways to gather, debate, and listen, to experience literally and figuratively commonality. my experiences prepared me for my life. I Oriocos’ Origins The authors of a favorite book titled Common Fire write: have just retired from 10 years of teach- After the Class of ’62 celebrated their Many Americans in an earlier time…participated in some kind of commons—a shared space that ing nursing students. I never imagined 55th Reunion in May, an email discussion anchored the American vision of democracy. Whatever its form, the commons marked the center of a myself at Taft becoming a teacher, but I followed about the origins of the names shared world…. By happenstance and intention, [diverse] people met and talked together with some sense know that my Taft teachers supported of Taft’s student choral groups, Hydrox of shared stake, something in common. me, encouraged me, and influenced me. (who sang at their Reunion Dinner) As the world has never been more complex and dynamic, the irony is that it has also never Funny, that is how my students described and Oriocos. Here are two excerpts: “I will remember looked more like a colonial commons, never more in need of disparate citizens who can gather and me at the end of each semester. you as the converse to meet the pressing planetary challenges. I like to think you seniors learned here some- I receive a number of alumni maga- A little more back ground about the choral thing about participation in the commons. zines: Chatham Hall, Wheaton College groups. The Orinoco is one of the longest class that grew Here’s Common Fire again, noting that technology and transport have created a new commons— (Norton, Massachusetts), and Georgetown rivers in South America. Most of the a global town green where we are inextricably tied and interdependent: University. The Taft Bulletin is always the length of the river is in Venezuela, where enormously, [This] new commons is global in scope, diverse in character, and dauntingly complex. We are simul- most interesting and informative. Beezer Manning was a young petroleum who cared deeply taneously fragmented into loose and shifting associations of individuals, interest groups, and tribes, yet —Holly Holmes Williams Ross ’74 engineer for Standard Oil and part of a drawn more closely into a larger web of life. As the world shrinks, as the diversity of our species and the… team that discovered one of the biggest and publicly limitations of the planet…[on which] we all depend become more evident, [we] must reach out for some Connected by Class Notes oil fields in the world. And it remains so for others… new set of connections, some more adequate way to make sense of a world gone boundaryless, a world now The Bulletin was pleased to receive this letter today. He contracted malaria and had to paradoxically larger, smaller, and more complex. Alumni Notes Appreciation from longtime class secretary Pete Greer ’53, be evacuated back to the States. It was and which gave We all see a shrunken world, with economic interconnectedness, strains on basic resources, I am not sure when or why I began to read who agreed to let us share it with our readers.