Dearly beloved…

Please send us information on your/our recent deaths. If you can’t, won’t or don’t, we hope someone else will–more than just the facts, if possible. Memories that may evoke our own are especially welcome. Although most meaningful memories (even most reunions) weren’t primarily whole-class experiences, but involved just a few classmates at a time, even private events & friendships played out from our shared setting, so possibly of interest to others. Death–& the statute of limitations–encourages a wider sharing while still possible.   

Please send any notices & obituaries (&/or your reflections on time, life & fortune)–for classmates &/or other meaningful parts of your life, c/o bodlibrary2020@gmail.com—with NMH1960 on subject line. 

Yours Crudely [a.k.a. Ricardo (Ye Old Dick)], current moderator for this page, has 4 obits to report–& adds two more by links at page bottom, for reports on two of our Toms: Tom Draper, as previously reported in NMH publications; & Tom Connell, as now in the New York Times archives. (Simply search his name.) Any way measured, Tom Draper was likely the most physically fit of all–apparently hit by a car while out for his usual vigorous morning bicycle ride. I don’t know the details of Tom Connell’s demise, beyond what’s in the New York Times article on his life & impact as stalwart of the Metropolitan Opera (with accolades from ex-wives, as I recall).

It seems we are all on borrowed time–& interest rates rising. In the meanwhile, please cut Yours Crudely some slack for barely hanging on by a thread, without time for finer touches (like better editing, visuals, etc.). Although brevity has value, it often takes longer to achieve. 

While entries #1 through #5 aren’t completely chronological, our most recent will appear on top going forward, starting with a tribute to RRA….

Time is mind-boggling. As Bob Anderson MH ’60 reminded us:
~~~~~Time flies like an arrow.
~~~~~Fruit flies like a banana.

#6: Bob Anderson MH ’60–

 … last call… (click “RRA-rip” to open)                RRA-rip
     [With file opened, you may need to hit the “-” button a couple times to get proper size.]

                                                                                                                  

Prior PASSINGS posted:

#1: BARBARA BERNACHE-BAKER,
#2: JEFFREY J. W. BAKER

#3: VIRGINIA BODNER

#4: TOM DRAPER
# 5: TOM CONNELL

The first two, both passing in 2020, are of our two sophomore biology teachers. They were such a close couple, yet so uniquely individual also. Barbara taught on both sides of the river, and her book on the American independent school reflects her rich & perceptive experience. Jeffrey was especially prolific, including (but not limited to) highly regarded bio texts written with Gar Allen, the 3rd member of our MH biology department a short while. (Maybe Gar would send us some thoughts on the collaboration started at MH, including a bibliography. Nor should we have to wait for an obit to learn more about his other work, a small bit about which appears below.)

[As new entries appear, featured articles may move down the page & possibly appear in a shortened form, with “Read More” links.]

#1. BIO-LUMINOUS: Barbara Bernache-Baker–
~~~wonderful sophomore biology teacher, 
~~~~~~~& so much more…. 

Ever inspiring, caring, exploring, speaking out in her powerfully quiet way, Barbara’s love of life showed up in all her relationships. Whether studying institutions & sexuality (including at MH!) or the bioluminescent bay she helped rescue on the island of Vieques, Barbara’s commitment to science was fueled by caring, wonder, & respect, not just curiosity.  You could say biology was personal to her–& she brought it to life for others. 

As an expectant mother, she let each student in the class listen to the fetal heartbeat through a stethoscope. (To do so properly in an all-male class, she retreated to a lab closet, with the ear-piece extending to listeners outside!)

What a couple she & Jeff made! On spring vacation 1960, four of us seniors set out from New England heading south in Pete Houseknecht’s forty-something jalopy, our first stop the Baker’s family home in Ivy, Virginia, where we were not just warmly welcomed, but snowed in! Ever the considerate match-maker, Barbara organized an impromptu “mixer” with a few local young ladies! I returned to their beautiful place (once part of the Meriwether Lewis estate) many times over the decades, bringing wife (also a biology teacher) & two offspring (both biology majors), as to a shrine. I used to joke that it was Barbara who inspired me to marry a biology teacher, but there was something quite real in what their spirits shared.

Jeff & Barbara (& Gar Allen, too) moved on from MH not very long after we had. During their years at Wesleyan, they bought a house in Middleton previously Richard Wilbur’s, who became U.S. Poet Laureat much later, with a poem of his still hanging in their bathroom. (In an example of the small world principle, I’d been recruited to bring Wilbur to a remote Paiute hot spring many years before.) New England’s prep school world is even smaller, and MH’s Frederick Torrey, having become Loomis-Chaffee Headmaster, recruited Barbara to their science program. Decades later, I heard someone in Albuquerque rave about how a wonderful biology teacher had changed his son’s life, and asked the person’s name: Barbara Baker. 

Somewhere along the way, Barbara earned a PhD, with a dissertation that included research in human sexual development & related educational practices. Combined with reflections drawn from her own extensive independent-school observation & experience, especially on-campus years at MH & Northfield, her work led to a Phi Delta Kappa book that sheds considerable light on the culture of such schools in that era, including on what she considered certain unhealthy institutional shortcomings & hypocrisies. What a rare & rigorously honest perspective on values more  generally, and actual human sexuality in particular, even for a biologist.     

From prep school sex, you might say her work moved on to heroic luminosity. The fundamental respect for life she felt with respect to her students, including their biologies, she felt also for the wonders she encountered in a bioluminescent  bay on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, where she helped found a conservation trust to rescue the bay from its use as a bombing range & protect it from commercial (so-called) ‘development.’ 

I heard from Barbara less than a week before she passed, and I continue to learn more from (& of) her. Towards the end, traveling had become too difficult for Jeffrey, and starting to be for her, too, she felt. She had just returned to Vieques from Virginia to take care of a few business matters when she passed away, about when a modest earthquake was reported there (though not herself counted among its statistics). There’s a link to her more or less official obituary below, but first a few words on her book, Whose Values? Reflections of a New England Prep School Teacher, published by Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation. 

Dedicated “To all of my students and faculty colleagues, past and present, who have taught me so very much,” Barbara’s experience in three New England prep schools made her book much more than a report on the research, though it was certainly that also, much of it her own. Beside her fidelity to the data, she never reduced her subjects into mere objects, however, but felt their feelings also, and reported accordingly–including her own.

With a gift for reporting subjective feelings & attitudes objectively, she does not leave the observer out of the observation–or even the observer’s spouse! Those who’ve shared the feelings for Mount Hermon will appreciate how her preface begins:

“In late August 1954 my husband entered the long campus driveway of the Mount Hermon School for Boys…to interview for a teaching job. To this day he can recall the thrill he felt as he viewed the beauty of the campus and the surrounding Pioneer Valley…. The love he felt for the school was instant and, like one’s first crush, remains with him still. I understand his feelings….”

Her own love for Cushing, Mount Hermon, & Loomis Chaffee drive the book’s purpose–to make “the schools we have all loved and served as good as they possibly can be.” To do that, her study of “Values and the American Independent School” covers considerable ground, notably much territory connected to human sexuality, where biology & education of students at that age converge. Her approach was to shed light on the subject, to do which, as noted, she did not treat her subjects as objects. The fundamental respect for life she felt & practiced applied to those she knew first as students, as well as to the wonders encountered later in a bioluminescent bay on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. She was such a luminous spirit & caring teacher; the light she studied, experienced & shared was not of the mind alone, or even primarily, but sourced in love & respect–for subjects & people.  

Barbara was especially in touch in the few months between my wife’s death & her own. She wrote that Virginia’s writing had helped bring her into a new, “more spiritual stage of life.” In a sense, it was & wasn’t surprising for her to speak of the ‘spiritual.’ Although seemingly leaving a Catholic girlhood & organized religion far behind, she maintained a deep sense of the root feelings evoked by the mysteries of life, mind, feeling…death. She showed the same respect to people’s ‘religious’ feelings as to their sexuality, artistic impulses, thought, & other human relations, in other words.

With so many dear friends recently passing (Tom Lyons among them), she was keenly aware of how close their own passing was, and what the one left awhile must feel. Her last email to me was a new year’s greeting, Jan. 2, 2020, having just arrived on Vieques the day before, & less than a week, it turned out, before she passed on. At the time, she wrote of how traveling had become too much for Jeffrey, her own difficulties only seeping in indirectly. Like my late wife, Jeffrey had been dealing with balance issues, falls, and shaky focus. 

[All but about a paragraph or two of this may be collapsed into a clickable “Read more” file. Most was written on Barbara’s BIRTHDAY–July 4th! Thinking others close to her would be remembering her on that day, I sent a brief note to Jeffrey & Gar–and only then heard back from Gar that Jeffrey had died in June, a few weeks before.]

Does anyone else remember Jeff playing “It takes a worried man…” on the guitar in Overton our freshman year? Or him tooling around campus in a little bubble-car? At times, he was like an evangelist for science & reason, freedom of thought being so basic. In the biology club, he sponsored a reading of Inherit the Wind, loosely based on the Scopes trial about the Tennessee law against teaching evolution, and invited a local fundamentalist preacher for a debate of our own–treating the guest (but not his ideas) with utmost respect & good nature.

He was also a devoted Virginian, & a graduate of Jefferson’s university. His beautiful family land in Ivy had once been part of the Meriweather Lewis estate. Unlike ‘loyal Virginian’ Robert E. Lee, however, he was no fan of either slavery or secession, & would never have found his highest loyalty in any state–or institution. I don’t think he had much tolerance for racist, statist, or theologically conventional dogma. The hypocrite & stuffed shirt provoked his laughter, as well as his urge to teach. As an amateur guitarist he was drawn to flamenco and bluegrass. On one visit passing through Ivy, wife & I piled into his little Suzuki with Jeffrey & Barbara & sped off into the hill country of rural North Carolina for a musical pot-luck hosted by mountain-folk friends of theirs. (I’d brought a dulcimer, but was far out of my depths or their league.)

As Gar suggested, Barbara & Jeffrey were complementary opposites, making a whole even greater than the parts. Barbara was incredibly sensitive to the feelings of others, boldly honest without being undiplomatic. Jeff was a benign provocateur, often challenging conditioned presumptions to provoke further thought. It was not so much the finished thought or view that mattered so much as the keen observation, clear awareness & thinking itself, the active process by which we refine our relations with the human & natural worlds. In that same spirit of fundamental respect for the free exercise of thought, neither shied away from expressing skepticism or dissenting views, an expression of their inherent generosity, the same way they shared their love of life & learning.

P.S.: The Bakers must’ve had a hand in Gar Allen joining the biology faculty for our last year or so–an incredible conjunction, leading to lifelong friendships, & with many close Baker-Allen collaborations along the way, even as they moved on to doctorates, books, & distinguished achievements. 

After his youthful stint at MH, Gar earned his PhD at Harvard in the History of Science, where he returned as a distinguished visiting professor years later (in time to have my two offspring as students). My daughter visited him in Palm Springs not long ago, finding the same passion, open-ness & generosity as in our day. Now Professor Emeritus from Washington University in St. Louis, he’s also had a long relationship with the labs at Woods Hole, where, among other things, he mentored in writing–reminder that he also advised our humble literary magazine, “After Lights.” 

When you read the NYT obituary of our classmate Tom Connell, describing his quite notable career as stage manager for the Metropolitan Opera–consider that it was Gar Allen who nurtured Tom’s love of opera, even letting him listen after lights! How generous such teachers were–transmitting far more than bodies of knowledge! Who knows what might emerge where love of life & learning converge with such creative generosity of spirit?

Each of us thinks of certain teachers in particular. In my own case, a half dozen stand out–all 3 biology teachers, plus  Dave Burnham, Judson Stent &  Jack Baldwin–having had visits all but the last later. Another dozen transmitted special personal warmth & good will in class (e.g., Doc) or simply passing along shared paths (e.g., l’Hommy).

[To Read More, am hoping to add link to Barbara’s official obituary & Jeff’s soon, plus Gar’s Letter about Jeff.]