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B U L L E T I N
Making All the
Difference
IN THE TRENCHES,
NOT STANDING
ON DESKS
The Spirit of Taft
at 30,000 Feet
S P R I N G • 2 0 0 4

B U L L E T I N
Spring 2004
Volume 74 Number 3
Bulletin Staff
Director of Development
John E. Ormiston
Page 10
Page 22
Page 26
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.
ReiffJ@TaftSchool.org
Send alumni news to:
Anne Gahl
Alumni Office
The Taft School
Watertown, CT 06795-2100 U.S.A.
TaftBulletin@TaftSchool.org
Deadlines for Alumni Notes:
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Fall–August 30
Winter–November 15
Spring–February 15
Send address corrections to:
Sally Membrino
Alumni Records
The Taft School
Watertown, CT 06795-2100 U.S.A.
TaftRhino@TaftSchool.org
1-860-945-7777
www.TaftAlumni.com
This magazine is printed on
recycled paper.

F E A T U R E S
Making All the
Difference 16
Fitting in, conforming to the norm, can be
among the most difficult pressures teens
face. For students of color, alumni say, those
pressures brought additional feelings of
loneliness and isolation.
By Bonnie Blackburn Penhollow ’84
In the Trenches, Not
Standing on Desks 22
Born in Saigon during the war, English
teacher Steve Le spoke only Vietnamese
when he arrived in the United States at 10
years old. An Annapolis grad and former
U.S. Navy lieutenant, Le says he has found
his calling in teaching.
By Chris Torino
The Spirit of Taft at
30,000 Feet 26
A tribute to Development Director Chip
Spencer ’56, who retires in June.
By Barclay Johnson ’53
D E P A R T M E N T S
Endnote 30
The Naming of a Feminist
By Debora Phipps
On the Cover
The Collegium Musicum, directed by Bruce
Fifer (left), performs at Grace Cathedral
during its San Francisco tour in March.
ABBY FIFER/SAMUEL DANGREMOND ’05
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,
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For other campus news and events, including
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www.TaftSchool.org, with improved calendar
features and Around the Pond stories.
From the Editor 2
Alumni Spotlight 3
Around the Pond 6
Don’t forget you can
shop online at
www.TaftStore.com
Sport 12
A detail of La Bottega II by Langdon Quin ’66, whose work was on exhibit in the
Potter Gallery this winter (see page 11).

FROM THE EDITOR
In the last issue, Jon Willson’82 made a wonderful
case for diversity at the school, but if
today’s multicultural community is a work in
progress, it’s important to remember (and thank)
the pioneers who helped get us to this point.
Toward that end, we asked Bonnie Blackburn
Penhollow ’84 to seek out alumni from the ’40s
to the ’90s to help us understand what it was like
to be among the first black, Asian, or Hispanic
students to walk these halls (page 14).
Unlike the anniversary of coeducation,
which we celebrated in 1996 by interviewing
a number of those pioneering young women,
there is no anniversary of diversity; as a school
we made no single decision to be diverse. But
the celebration is still long overdue.
As both articles point out, having a
multicultural faculty who can serve as role
models for today’s students is key. This is a
continuing challenge for Dean of Faculty
Penny Townsend as she seeks the ideal candidates
for each year’s vacancies. We are
fortunate this year not only to have Felecia
Washington Williams ’84 return to campus,
but also to welcome new English teacher
Steve Le (page 22), who has made an immediate
impact on the boys on his hall, the girls
on his team, and the students in his classes.
The spring issue is, of course, when we celebrate
the careers of retiring faculty members,
and the task is all the more interesting when the
subject is an alumnus whose career at the school
is as varied as Chip Spencer’s (page 24).
And there is so much more to share with
you. Every page of class notes finds something
to pique my interest. Thanks, too, for
all the books and photographs you’ve sent,
and, please, keep those letters coming.
—Julie Reiff, 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
Watertown, CT 06795-2100 U.S.A.
or to ReiffJ@TaftSchool.org

ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
Alumni
SPOTLIGHT
Deserted
In Brief
Benefit Concert
Jay Gandhi ’00 gave a benefit concert
of classical Indian music and
dance with master teacher and performer
Rachna Ramya Agrawal in
February at the Litchfield Community
Center. Proceeds benefited the
Litchfield Montessori School.
Dan Senecal ’60 during a 1,300-mile motorcycle trip through the United Arab Emirates,
the Sultanate of Oman, and eastern Saudi Arabia.
Dan Senecal ’60 recently motorcycled
for ten days with nine Germans and two
Austrians on a 1,300-mile route from
Dubai in the United Arab Emirates through
the Sultanate of Oman to the “backdoor”
of Eastern Saudi Arabia. Dan rode a BMW
1100GS along the Gulf of Oman to
Muscat, capital of the Sultanate, then inland
over the Jabal Abu Da’du Mountains
on dirt and gravel to desert oasis villages
such as Al Hazm, Al Rustaq, and Nakhl.
“It was amazing,” says Senecal.
“When we’d reach these oases in the
Omanese desert, the kids were fascinated
with us and we with them. We’d give
them rides out into the desert.”
He found this group of motorcycle
enthusiasts through the Austrian company
Edelweiss, which arranges for experienced
motorcyclists to go all over Europe and
on scouting expeditions like his.
“Most Americans are afraid of that
area, especially now,” he says, “but I was
received fabulously. People were amazingly
friendly toward me and extremely
welcoming. It was an incredible trip.”
Senecal first hiked through the Southern
Desert 25 years ago and has been across
the Sahara five times. He has visited over
101 countries, but this was his first motorcycle
trip. For his next adventure, he plans
to motorcycle the coast of South Africa.
Benched
You can usually catch a glimpse of
Elizabeth Matzkin Smith ’88 on TV
while she’s working at Duke basketball
games; she’s the only female
sitting on the men’s bench. Liz, who
received her M.D. from Tulane, is a
research fellow in sports medicine
surgery at Duke.
Word on Asthma
Paul Ehrlich ’62 appeared on the CBS
Early Show’s health watch segment in
December, talking about his recent
book, What Your Doctor May Not Tell
You About Children’s Allergies and
Asthma. Ehrlich told co-anchor
Hannah Storm that parents should
pay attention to the nose. “Physicians
tend to concentrate on the lungs and
forget about the nose. So a stuffy nose
has to be taken care of and not be
taken lightly.”
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004
5

EVAN ZELERMYER
ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
On the Mall with Tennessee Williams
Framji Minwalla ’83 is just finishing a
four-lecture series for the Smithsonian’s
“Campus on the Mall” program. Each
of the talks explored a different period
of Tennessee Williams’ work.
Starting with a look at Williams’ own
life and youthful writing in the first talk,
Minwalla explored two of his major
works—The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar
Named Desire—in the second; how Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof was set in the prosperity
of the postwar years in the third; and
looked at Williams’ later plays in the fourth.
“Desires and dreams are explored by
no American playwright as brilliantly as
they are by Tennessee Williams,”
Minwalla explains. “His plays and short
stories show us minds and bodies fractured
by the pressures of an indifferent
world intent on shaping individuals in
its own image.”
Minwalla also recently directed
Bertolt Brecht’s one-act play The Baby
Elephant at D.C.’s Arena Stage during
their recent production of Brecht’s A
Man’s a Man.
“Since Brecht wrote this short piece
to be performed in the lobby during
intermissions for productions of his
longer anti-war play,” said Minwalla,
“Arena Stage, at my instigation, invited
area colleges to participate by staging
different versions of the short piece.
They also held a series of symposia on
Brecht, and asked me to participate.”
Earlier in his career, Minwalla spent five
years as an actor and dramaturg with
The Brecht Company at the University
of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
Minwalla is an assistant professor at
George Washington University—teaching
theater history, dramatic literature,
and dramaturgy in the departments of
English and of Theater and Dance—as
well as an instructor with the Smithsonian
Resident Associate Program. He earned his
doctorate in fine arts at Yale School of
Drama and taught in the Department of
Theater at Dartmouth College for five
years before moving to Washington.
He is coeditor of The Queerest Art:
Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater
(NYU Press, 2002) and is working on
a new book tentatively titled History,
Performance, Politics: Queer Essays on
Making and Teaching Theater. He also
serves on the advisory board for the
Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at
the City University of New York’s
Graduate Center.
Last Boat to Cadiz
Barnaby Conrad ’40
Capra Press, 2003
Employment with a Human Face
John W. Budd ’83
Cornell University Press, 2004
Europe 1945: Hitler is dead, the
Third Reich is an open wound….
Amid the chaos, a man like no other
makes his way south through France
and into Spain. No one will stand
in his way and live. Only idealistic young Wilson Tripp,
American vice-consul in the city of Seville, stands to discover
the man’s true identity and the stunning threat he poses.
That is, if Tripp can survive.
Author Barnaby Conrad was himself an American
vice-consul in Seville during World War II. As an amateur
bullfighter, he performed in Mexico, Spain, and Peru over
a period of 15 years. He is the author of 32 books, including
Matador, The Encyclopedia of Bullfighting, and Name
Dropping, and is the founder and director of the Santa Barbara
Writers’ Conference.
“A master storyteller has done it again with a great tale about
the very end of the world war set in a country he knows and
loves so well.”
—William F. Buckley Jr.
John W. Budd contends that the
turbulence of the workplace and the
importance of work for individuals and
society make it vitally important that
employment be given “a human face.”
Drawing on scholarship from industrial relations, law, political
science, moral philosophy, theology, psychology, sociology,
and economics, he argues that the traditional narrow focus on
efficiency must be balanced with employees’ entitlement to
fair treatment (equity) and the opportunity to have meaningful
input into decisions (voice). Only through a greater respect
for these human concerns can broadly shared prosperity, respect
for human dignity, and equal appreciation for the
competing human rights of property and labor be achieved.
Budd is Industrial Relations Landgrant Term Professor at the
Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.
“Employment with a Human Face will quickly be viewed as a
classic statement of the first principles underlying the study and
practice of modern human resources and industrial relations.”
—Thomas A. Kochan, MIT Sloan School of Management

IN PRINT
Designing Daughter
“This book was born of necessity,” writes
Leslie Banker ’88 of The Pocket Decorator
(below). “About five years ago I started
working at my mother’s interior design
firm, and although I had a general knowledge
of decorating—gained through a
lifelong proximity to my mother’s
work—I was less certain of its specifics.
Fortunately, I had a treasure trove of
information available in my mother.”
Banker began asking questions and
keeping a notebook to record what she
learned; The Pocket Decorator is a polished
version of that overstuffed notebook.
This visual primer of interior design
is small enough to slip into your pocket.
With chapters on fabrics, floor treatments,
furniture, hardware, lighting, trimmings,
upholstery, walls, and windows, and sidebars
on such topics as how to buy a lampshade
or decorate in the country style, “It’s like
having your own personal decorator in your
pocket wherever you go,” says Banker.
Leslie Banker ’88 and her mother/mentor Pamela Banker ALI PRICE
“A lot of design books are big and
heavy,” she says, “not the sort of thing you
want to lug around to a meeting with an
architect, an upholsterer, or while shopping.”
The pocket-sized volume includes vocabulary,
some history, and stylistic ideas
along with beautifully detailed illustrations.
“For me,” writes Banker, “writing
this book was a unique opportunity to
learn and understand more about what
my mother has been doing since before I
was even born.”
Dreadful Conversions:
The Making of a Catholic Socialist
John C. Cort ’35
Fordham University Press, 2003
For more than 50 years, John C. Cort
has been at the center of most of the
social movements of our time, fighting
good fights in dozens of campaigns for
justice, peace, and human rights. Labor leader, community organizer,
writer/editor on The Catholic Worker, here is his
story—the measure of an exemplary life and a vivid chronicle of
American activism. At its heart, this is also the story of what it
means to take seriously the distinctively radical Catholic vision
that informs American political and religious life in this century.
Cort is now coeditor of Religious Socialism, a quarterly
he hopes to revive, and author of Christian Socialism: An
Informal History.
The Pocket Decorator
Pamela and Leslie Banker ’88
Universe Publishing, 2004
(see above)
“Cort crafted Dreadful Conversions to be as much philosophical
primer as autobiography, as much intellectual journey as recollection
of days past…. He always eyed a life of political activism
through the lens of his Catholic faith, but not until the mid-1970s
did this focus prompt a second conversion: to socialism.”
—Lee Hudson Teslik, Harvard Magazine
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004
7

AROUND THE POND
pond
School Acquires Historic King James Bible
The newest archival acquisition for Taft’s Sacred Texts
collection is a 1616 King James Bible. The first edition
of the King James Bible to be printed in a “lectern
folio” size and intended for use at Cambridge and
Oxford, it was published only five years after the original
King James Pulpit Bible. The 1616 first edition
corrected any printing errors and includes additional
research material not found in the 1611 version.
An Anglican Book of Common Prayer, an illustrated
genealogy of Christ, a standard Psalter, a
metrical Psalter (with musical notation), and a map
of the Holy Land “distinguish the academic provenance
of this very rare first edition,” says Chaplain
Michael Spencer. “Its acquisition underscores Taft’s
continued commitment to religious diversity and
interfaith understanding.”
“This nearly 400-year-old Bible is probably the
most significant archival addition the school has
made,” Headmaster Willy MacMullen said. “Together
with the purchase of the historic Torah last year, I think
Taft has done something powerfully symbolic and
unprecedented among private non-sectarian schools.”
The acquisition was made possible by the generosity
of Alan and Ann Blanchard, parents of James ’03.
A detail of “The Tree of Life” from the book of
Genesis in the school’s newly acquired 1616 first edition
King James Bible dedicated in Walker Hall on April 15.
8
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004

AROUND THE POND
Noises Off
SAMUEL DANGREMOND ’05
No Need for
Global Warning
Retired geologist and professor
emeritus Lucian Platt ’49 came to
campus to talk with environmental
studies students in Laube Auditorium
in January. “I’m trying to
improve science teaching in city
schools,” Lucian told classmates at
his last reunion, “and give talks
aimed at reducing alarm about global
warming, which has been going
on for centuries.”
Susannah Walden ’06, Mariel Montuori ’04, Camden Flath ’05, and Lily Cowles ’05 performed
the farcical play-within-a-play Noises Off for audiences on Mothers’ Day weekend.
SAMUEL DANGREMOND ’05
PETER FREW ’75
A Little Bit of Scotland Comes to Life in Walker Hall
The Baltimore Consort—a sextet of
musicians renowned for their revival of
the popular music of the Renaissance—
performed in Walker Hall in March.
The lively concert focused on the early
music of Scotland, including songs from
their latest CD, Adew Dundee, and the
earlier On the Banks of Helicon. They
played a variety of period instruments—
lute, viol, flute, cittern, bagpipe, early
guitar, rebec, recorder, and crumhorn.
Founded in 1980, the Baltimore
Consort has toured extensively in the
U.S.A. and Europe. Their numerous
recordings have earned a place on the
Billboard Magazine Top-Ten list, and
Billboard named the group one of
the Top Classical Crossover Artists
for 1993. For more information, visit
www.baltcons.com.
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004
9

AROUND THE POND
PETER FREW ’75
Wilson Quartet Wows Jazz Fans
“The Matt Wilson Quartet was so utterly
inspiring,” said instrumental music director
T.J. Thompson. “Rarely have I heard a
group pour so much energy, emotion, and
imagination into their playing. They have
almost completely redefined the genre of
jazz, and they are quite hilarious to boot!”
In addition to the Walker Hall concert,
the quartet held a workshop for
students on the following morning.
“Their workshop helped the kids find
ways to make the music fun and to play
with much more conviction and enthusiasm,”
Thompson said. “It was the perfect
cure for an early Saturday morning class
in one of the coldest winters in decades.
They were terrific.”
Celebrating
Martin Luther
King Jr.
Michael Ficarra, the founder of
Equality for All Races, was the featured
guest speaker on Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.’s birthday. The
mission of EFAR is to take “an aggressive
approach to eliminate the
ignorant belief that an individual’s
character, integrity, and human
rights are based on the color of his
or her skin or ethnic background.”
His visit and all of the activities on
the following Monday were sponsored
by the Diversity Committee.
Instead of classes, students were
treated to the Gospel choir SIII and
the Truth, followed by an African
Dance Workshop and a poetry presentation
by Spoken Word. The
highlight of the day for many was
an International Food Festival in
Armstrong Dining Hall, followed
by a salsa, tango, and merengue
performance in the Choral Room
after dinner.
Making Moves
As Rockwell Visiting Artists, Pilobolus
Dance Theater members Emily Kent
and Rebecca Jung presented a special
half-hour lecture demonstration in
School Meeting in January and worked
with dance classes throughout the day.
Pilobolus is a major American dance
company of international stature that
originated in a Dartmouth College
dance class in 1971. The group is
acclaimed for its mix of humor and
creative invention, its members choreographing,
dancing, managing, and
publicizing their own programs.
PETER FREW ’75

JACKIE MALONEY
AROUND THE POND
Alumni on Ice
Forty alumni returned on January 24
to play in the alumni hockey game.
The near-record turnout was thanks to
Jake Odden ’86, who spearheaded the
event when early responses indicated
there might not be enough interest.
Ironically, circumstances prevented
him from attending, namely the birth
of his second child.
La Bottega II (A Family Portrait), oil on linen, 26" x 52"
Langdon Quin: Paintings and Works on Paper
For many, Langdon Quin’s rich landscapes
and colorful still lifes brightened
up a long Watertown winter. Quin ’66
returned to campus for the opening,
presenting a talk that morning at School
Meeting about his decision to pursue
art as a career, and the influence of
the later Mark Potter ’48 on his work.
A graduate of Yale University’s M.F.A.
program, Quin is represented by Kraushaar
Galleries in New York and Hackett-
Freeman Gallery in San Francisco.
Currently teaching at the University
of New Hampshire, he has also taught
at Boston University, Cornell, Vassar,
SUNY, Skidmore, and Washington and
Lee, among others. His many honors
include a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award,
a New York Foundation for the Arts
Award, a Fulbright Hays Grant for
study in Italy, and a National Endowment
for the Arts Award. Quin’s work
was on exhibit in the Mark W. Potter
Gallery from January 29 to March 6.
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004
11

AROUND THE POND
In Brief
Art Honors
Antonia Fraker ’04 received an honorable
mention in the Connecticut
Scholastic Art Awards for one of
her pencil drawings, which was on
display at the Hartford Art School
Gallery, University of Hartford,
from January 18 to February 6.
Onward to All-State Festival
Eleven students attended the
Connecticut Music Educators
Association Northern Regional
Festival in January, culminating in
a concert in New Britain. Each
was chosen after auditioning in
November with other high school
students from the Northwest corner
of Connecticut.
“It is an honor to be selected,”
said Art Department head Bruce
Fifer. The regionals are the first
step in the process leading up to
the All-State Music Festival held
in Hartford in April.
Six singers from Taft’s Collegium
Musicum: Lila Claghorn ’04, Joanna
Quayle ’05, Lauren Malaspina ’04,
Paul Sorokin ’05, Jon McDonald ’05,
and Arden Klemmer ’05 sang with
the Northern Regional Choir.
Taft Chamber Ensemble musicians
Caroline Berger ’06 and
Christina Lewis ’04 performed
with the Northern Regional
Concert Band; Jason Kim ’06,
Vivian Chiang ’04, and Doris Kim
’04 performed with the Northern
Regional Orchestra.
Coaching All-Star
Congratulations to Will Orben
’92 who was selected as coach of
the year by Connecticut Soccer
Coaches Association.
Treasure Maps
Frank Runyeon, a nationally renowned
speaker in the area of mass media and
ethics, spoke at School Meeting on “Treasure:
Life After Prep School, What They
Don’t Tell You.” He also visited philosophy
and public-speaking classes and was
available to students throughout the day
as an artist-in-residence.
Runyeon has worked in television,
film, and radio for over 25 years. He is
best known for his work on TV, appearing
in more than 1,000 television
programs as diverse as Melrose Place,
Falcon Crest, LA Law, and his starring
role opposite Meg Ryan for seven years
in As the World Turns.
His talk, sponsored by the Paduano
Lecture Series in Philosophy and Ethics,
In Tune with the Yale Symphony
The Chamber Ensemble traveled to
Yale to perform for Yale Symphony
Orchestra conductor Maestro Hahm
in February.
“The workshop involved us playing,
getting some feedback, and then
combined his knowledge and experience
in Hollywood with his academic background.
He attended the Hill School,
Princeton University, and studied at
Fuller Seminary, Yale Divinity School,
and General Theological Seminary in
New York.
hearing and talking with some of
the orchestra members about what it
takes to be a musician at the college
level,” said instrumental music director
T.J. Thompson. “It was a great
opportunity for all of us.”
SAMUEL DANGREMOND ’05
12
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004

Canine Rescue
Makes Local
Headlines
SAMUEL DANGREMOND ’05
A walk according to Garp
A teacher walking her dog is a familiar
enough sight on any campus, but
for history teacher Rachel Ryan, one
Sunday morning walk went seriously
awry. At the end of winter break,
Ryan’s five-year-old yellow Labrador,
Garp, turned their outing into a halfday
affair when he decided to explore
a narrow drainpipe by the tennis
courts and couldn’t get out.
Ensuing efforts to dislodge him involved
the local animal control officer,
the fire department, school security,
and members of the grounds crew.
“I’ve received many phone calls at
home over the years regarding the failures
of heat, water, et cetera, but this
has probably been the most bizarre,”
said Jim Shepard, head of the Facilities
Department.
Garp emerged four and a half
hours later, soggy and muddy but un-
harmed, and ran into the arms of Ryan
and husband Greg Hawes ’85.
Garp, who had crawled 250 feet in
from the pipe’s entrance, received a thorough
bath after his grimy experience,
which is for him “the closest thing to a
punishment,” said Hawes. Ryan and
Hawes, however, were doomed to relive
the experience throughout the week, as
the Waterbury Republican, Town Times,
and Taft Papyrus all carried the story.
Sources: Waterbury Republican; Town Times;
Samuel Dangremond ’05, Taft Papyrus
PETER FREW ’75
Squash Finals
In an interesting turn of events, the
finals of a January U.S. Squash Rackets
Association tournament, which began
at Choate, were held on Taft’s courts
since the finalists were all Taft students.
In the Under-19 draw, Tucker George
’04 (1st seed) faced Gordon McMorris
’03 (3rd seed). In the Under-17 draw,
Michael Shrubb ’06 (1st seed) faced
Peter Irving ’06 (2nd seed). The day
presented a rare opportunity for Taft
fans to cheer for all participants. Tucker
George and Michael Shrubb won out
in their respective divisions; Alastair
Smith ’05 won the consolation bracket
of the Under-19s. (For more on the
squash season, see page 14.)
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004
13

S P O R T
sport
By Steve Palmer
Girls’ Basketball 16–5
With double wins over rivals Hotchkiss and
Loomis, the girls earned a tournament seeding
for the fourth year in a row. Despite
losing two key players mid-season, this team
distinguished itself with outstanding overall
defense. All Founders League guard Keri
Gritt ’04 was the best outside shooter, and
forward Sha-kayla Crockett ’05 was a New
England Class A All Star. However, offensively
and in nearly every category, senior
captain Katie McCabe led the way, averaging
17 points and 10 rebounds per game
this season. She also became Taft’s first ever
1,000-point scorer. A member of the varsity
for all four years at Taft, she was named
a First Team New England Class A All Star
for her junior and senior years.
Boys’ Basketball 2–21
The team began the season with five new
starters after the apparent season-ending
injury to All-League guard Brian Baudinet
’04. Senior guard Tyler Whitley led the
team through a season of close games
against some very talented teams, especially
from Berkshire, Trinity-Pawling, and
Loomis, who all made the New England
tournament. In fact, the Rhinos battled
#3 ranked T-P down to the final minute
late in the season. When Baudinet did
return to action, Taft blew out Avon
69–49 for only their second win and then
nearly upset a strong Salisbury team
behind his 37 points. Whitley and captain-elect
David Halas ’05 were Founders
League All Stars, and Sam Smythe ’05
finished 2nd in the league in 3-point
shooting (39.1 percent). Despite missing
19 of their 23 games this year, Brian
Baudinet still finished his remarkable
four-year career as the boys’ all-time leading
scorer with 950 points.
Ski Racing
Competing in the Berkshire Ski League
and the New England Class C Division,
the boys’ and girls’ teams battled Loomis,
Berkshire, and Suffield on a regular basis.
Middler Wiley Johnston and captain Will
Rickards ’06 provided leadership for the
boys’ team, while newcomer Harry Weyher
’07 and Nick Wirth ’06 placed highest at
the NEPSAC Slalom championships—
18th and 19th respectively out of 70 skiers.
The team placed 8th out of 15 and, combined
with the girls’ team, finished the
season in 5th place in the BSL. Maggie
Seay ’07 led the girls’ to a 7th place finish
in the NEPSAC C Championships with
a 12th place finish in the slalom. Uppermid
Mercer Wu and captain Hillary Lewis
’04 were 20th and 21st out of 50 skiers.
Boys’ Squash 12–2
Once again the Taft squash team distinguished
itself with stellar performances
and first-rate sportsmanship, finishing 3rd
at the New England Championships.
Though they were not able to repeat as
New England champs, the Taft players did
dominate the Founders League as they
have for over a decade. They earned the
New England Sportsmanship Award for
the third time in the last four years—an
impressive honor for coach Peter Frew
and this whole program. Captain Tucker
George ’04 led the team all season at the
#1 spot, but this team was strong all the
way down the ladder. In fact, Ben
Macaskill ’05, Sam Beatt ’07, Peter Irving
’06, and Alastair Smith ’05 all made it to
the New England finals in the 7th, 6th,
5th, and 4th draws respectively while senior
Gordon McMorris placed 3rd in the
#3 spot and Michael Shrubb ’06 won the
#2 consolation bracket.
Girls’ Squash 10–2
If last year’s team was the best in school
history, this year’s squad would have
battled them to the final point; the girls
finished tied for 2nd at the New England
Championships and defeated every opponent
aside from eight-time champion
14
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004

S P O R T
Greenwich Academy. Once again, senior
Supriya Balsekar won the individual New
England title (that makes 3) to complete
an undefeated career at Taft—her individual
match record stands at 48–0 and
the team never finished lower than third
in New England in her three years. In the
words of coach Bogardus, “Supriya has
brought Taft squash to a new level.” Such
success was again duplicated by Sydney
Scott’s repeat championship in the #2 spot.
In fact, Scott powered through the season
without coming close to losing a single
game. Highlights include a 6–1 win over
Deerfield and two exciting 4–3 wins over
Hotchkiss, where captain-elect Margot
Webel ’05 fought back from 0–2 down to
win both matches.
Girls’ Hockey 13–7–4
Founders League Co-Champions
Having graduated several Division I recruits,
this was the youngest girls’ hockey
team in many years. Their success rested
heavily on the seniors; Kerry Kiley,
Katherine Simmons, and Emily Morris
formed a rock solid defense, while Jaclyn
Hawkins provided the critical goals in all
those close games on the way to an 8th
seed in the New England Tournament.
They lost the 1st round game to Nobles,
who repeated as New England champions,
but to get there this team pulled out
several unexpected triumphs, including
tying the top three teams in New England
(Berkshire 2–2, Cushing 3–3, and
undefeated Nobles 1–1). Their most
exciting win came at Choate, down 2–0,
with three third-period goals for a 3–2
victory and a share of the Founders
League title. Hawkins was the team’s
high scorer and a New England All
Star. Blueliners Morris and Kiley, along
with forward Tucker Marrison ’04, were
Founders League All Stars.
Boys’ Hockey 17–6–1
Founders League Champions
For the 7th time in eight years the Taft
boys’ hockey team entered the New
England Tournament ranked near the top.
Their season included powerful wins over
Salisbury (5–2) and Hotchkiss (6–1). In
what has turned into a spectacular rivalry,
Taft again drew Salisbury in the first
round of the tournament. This year’s
game proved to be one of the finest prepschool
contests in recent memory, and
Mike Maher’s squad found themselves
down 2–0 on Salisbury’s home ice. A
perfect man-up goal late in the 2nd by
senior Keith Shattenkirk and an early
3rd-period goal from middler Luke
Popko created the scene for Matt Smith’s
game winner with two minutes left. The
Rhinos had every chance to win their
semifinal game, but it was Tabor who
scored late in the 3rd period to break a
3–3 tie and go on to the finals. Senior TJ
Kelley began the season injured but
ended up as the leading scorer (24 goals),
due in part to the fine play of linemates
Popko and co-captain Tom Maldonado
’04. Seniors Will Reycraft, Sam Driver,
Brendan Milnamow, and J.D. McCabe
anchored the defense. With 14 seniors
moving on to college hockey ranks and
Coach Maher finishing up after his 18th
season, Taft hockey will start something
of a new era next year. In his time here,
Maher has built a legacy of excellence on
and off the ice. His teams have brought
honor to the school with their success,
their spirit, and their sportsmanship. For
the second time in his career, Maher
was awarded the National Ice Hockey
Officials Coach of the Year Sportsmanship
Award. The boys’ record for the past
five years stands at 100–16–7.
Wrestling 8–10
Posting key victories over Avon (35–34)
and Suffield (37–36), the squad was a
young one, with underclassmen starting
8 of the 14 varsity spots. Leading the way
were senior co-captains Jon Acquaviva and
Alex Bisset. Acquaviva came back from a
second knee operation to place 6th at the
Western New England Championships;
Bisset led the team with a 21–6 record,
a 2nd place finish at 215 lbs. at the
Westerns, and his tough, no-nonsense
leadership all season. Freshman Dante
Paolino and middler Toren Kutnick also
placed at the Western Championships.
Supriya Balsekar ’04 won the individual
New England title (for the third year in a
row) to complete an undefeated career at
Taft—her individual match record stands at
48–0 and the team never finished lower than
third in New England in her three years.
Captain Katie McCabe ’04 averaged 17
points and 10 rebounds per game this season
and became Taft’s first ever 1,000-point scorer.
Linemates Luke Popko ’06 and co-captain
Tom Maldonado ’04 in a win over Lawrenceville
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER FREW ’75

LESLIE MANNING ARCHIVES
Making All the
Difference
Fitting in, conforming to the norm, can be among the most difficult
pressures teens face. For students of color, alumni say, those pressures
brought additional feelings of loneliness and isolation.
By Bonnie Blackburn Penhollow ’84

LESLIE MANNING ARCHIVES
S
aturday nights at Taft have
long been a chance to
blow off steam, watching
movies and socializing
with classmates.
For Wayne Jackson ’57, they were
torture.
“I would go outside alone and sit on
a bench on the sideline of the soccer field,
where I played varsity soccer for the
school. It was freezing cold, and tears
would roll down my face. That’s how
isolated and alone I felt.”
As the school’s first black student,
Jackson endured catcalls of “nigger,”
disbelieving stares and condescension.
A native of Bermuda, where he still resides,
Jackson entered Taft as a middler
in 1954, just after the historic Supreme
Court decision ordering the desegregation
of American public schools.
When Jackson arrived at Taft, he was
told he would have to start as a lower
mid, that he would have no roommate,
and that he would have to be chaperoned
when visiting girls’ schools.
“Can you imagine how I felt—and
still do,” he recalled. “This was the first
day of what would be the loneliest three
years of my life.”
Though he successfully lobbied to
remain a mid, Jackson said he was an oddity.
He recalled one Mothers’ Day, passing
a mother and her son in the corridor.
“When I turned around, the mother
had stopped dead in her tracks and was
staring at me, probably in dumbfounded
disbelief,” he said.
“Being made to feel separate and
different, and sometimes inferior, together
with the consequent loneliness
and ostracism—these were the worst,”
he remembers.
“I was tolerated,” he said. “But in
fairness, my presence at Taft was new, something
in the whole previous history of the
school they had not dealt with before.”
Although the first black student,
Jackson was not the first minority. From
the school’s earliest days, students from
other cultures have attended Taft. One was
Julio Rodriguez ’45 from Puerto Rico.
The Beta tennis team in 1957
The cover of the Bulletin from the fall of
1964 assembled students and faculty who
brought with them “a personal knowledge
of life in foreign lands,” even if only for a
summer. Clockwise from left, Roland Simon,
Phillip Young, Alex Chu ’66, Thomas
Baldwin ’65, George Dunlop, Stephen
Armstrong ’65, John Esty, Leslie Manning,
and Sam Kinuthia ’65. A similar “diversity”
photograph today would include more than
half the campus.
“Taft opened the
door to the
wonderful world
of education and
career opportunities
that have
characterized my
adult life.”
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004
17

LESLIE MANNING ARCHIVES
Afro-American Congress at Taft (ACT)
from the 1972 Annual, seated from left,
Aaron Williams '75, Elizabeth Dixon '73,
Kevin Jones '73, Karen Stevenson '75, John
Hare '75; standing, Carl Taylor '74, James
Holloman '73, Michael Rubin '74, Moses
Marshall '73, Zachary Highsmith '73, and
Russel Jones '75. President Lee Keitt '72,
Claude Williams '73, and Charisse Rivera
'74 were not pictured.
“I felt like
others wanted
me to assimilate
rather than to
learn about me
and my culture.”
“I’m very proud of my time at Taft,”
he said from his home on the island. “I
enjoyed my time there.”
Rodriguez, who is now retired from
the military, said his father, a commissions
broker, thought Taft would be a
good place for him.
“I was pretty wild,” he said with a
chuckle. “They tamed me. I made the
honor roll, and I was very proud of that.”
Rodriguez said he didn’t recall
any racial incidents or any overt acts
of discrimination.
When Manuel Rocha ’69 entered
the school in the fall of 1965, the country
was in the grip of racial unrest that
spawned riots in Harlem, where Rocha
lived with his mother and siblings.
“I was born in Colombia and moved
to the States after my father died, when I
was 10 years old. My mother, sister, brother,
and I moved in with my uncle who lived
in Harlem. Hence, my first exposure to the
States was ghetto life. My mother worked
in a sweatshop sewing factory, while we
attended public school and made do with
welfare and food stamps assistance. I was a
Hispanic living in a predominantly black
cultural environment.”
In 1964, Harlem burned in a race
riot, prompting an attempt to lift children
of the ghetto into a different world.
Rocha was one of them.
“In 1965 I won an ABC (A Better
Chance) scholarship to attend Taft,”
he said. “Taft was the best thing that
happened to my life. Taft opened the
door to the wonderful world of education
and career opportunities that have characterized
my adult life. I went to Yale,
Harvard, and Georgetown because of
Taft. Without Taft opening those doors,
I would not have had the incredibly successful
Foreign Service career I have had.”
Rocha served as U.S. ambassador
to Bolivia prior to his recent retirement
from the U.S. State Department. He
also served in Cuba, the Dominican
Republic, Mexico, Italy, and Honduras.
An internationally known expert on
Latin American affairs, Rocha now works
for a law firm in Miami.
Only one racial incident at Taft still
stands out in Rocha’s mind.
“My closest friend from my lowermid
year refused my offer to be roommates
because he felt that if his sisters visited and
saw who his roommate was, they would
not think twice later of dating a black
man,” he said. “I was devastated and considered
suicide. Mr. Small, my Latin and
track coach, listened to me and helped me
overcome the only significant rejection I
have ever experienced in my entire life.”
Though he was Hispanic, Rocha was
named head of the school’s black student
association.
“My ghetto experience and my ability
to deal in that world made me
acceptable to all the black kids,” he said.
During that time, Rocha said he proposed
helping white students understand
what it is to be a minority by putting one
white student in a group of black students.
“Then, for the first time, they’re the
minority,” he said. “I was told to drop
the proposal, that it would create problems
for (students’) families. I tried to
explain that it was a way for the majority
to understand how the minority would
18
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004

feel. The school was walking very lightly
through those years.”
By the time Karen Stevenson ’75
entered the school, being black wasn’t as
strange as being one of the first females
to attend the previously all-male school.
“We kind of went through this initiation,”
she recalled. “We had the experience
of the school getting used to girls and the
girls getting used to the school.”
Stevenson and Rocha both noted
that coming from an inner-city environment—and
a lower economic
background—was another factor that
separated them from their classmates.
“My experience and these kids’
experience were very different,” said
Stevenson, who grew up in Washington,
D.C. “I had no idea where Boca Raton
was. I was much more aware of the
fact that these kids have such a sense
of entitlement to the best of everything.”
Stevenson also felt Jackson’s sense
of apartness.
“It was tough,” she admitted. “There
was an incredible sense of loneliness.
There was no interracial dating. I didn’t
have boyfriends in high school. Nobody
was going to date me. I got a lot of grief
from the black kids for being smart. I
felt I wasn’t really fitting in either place.”
Stevenson—a Rhodes Scholar—still
said Taft “was an amazing experience
intellectually. It was the greatest thing
that ever happened to me to get me out
of the inner city.”
She now is an attorney practicing
business litigation in Los Angeles.
Alex Chu ’66 came to Watertown
from Hong Kong after spending a year
at a parochial school in Massachusetts.
His immersion in the high-stakes world
of Taft academics left little time to notice
any slurs on his background.
“There was name-calling, caricatures,
nothing really drastic,” he said. “The normal
pranks that one would play. Do you
take it in jest or in a more serious, undermining
way? Your own personal makeup
[determines] how you take it.”
Chu, now president of Eastbank in
New York City and a former Taft trustee,
credits headmaster emeritus Lance Odden,
then a history teacher, with helping him
keep up with modern Chinese history.
Chu said younger teachers, such as
Odden, helped him academically, while
watching to see how he would integrate
into the Taft student body.
“The younger faculty were interested
in my thinking,” he noted. “They were
curious about how I would handle things.
A lot of the faculty had not visited foreign
countries in those days.”
As the only Asian student, Chu saw
himself as a role model.
“You’re the ambassador. You somehow
have to have enough confidence in
your values and your culture,” he said.
“Nobody does when you’re 14 or 15.”
Still, “I was able to influence a number
of my classmates, [and provide] a
refreshing look at the Chinese language,
and through me the Chinese culture,”
he added.
Cassandra Chia-Wei Pan ’77 was the
only Asian female student on campus,
coming to Taft for her senior year from
Hong Kong.
“I was brought up in a traditional
Chinese family with strong belief in academic
excellence. I was your typical
naïve and hardworking student from
Asia,” she said.
Pardo de Tavera brothers: School’s first international students
The school’s first experience with
diversity began with William Howard
Taft’s appointment as governor of
the Philippines in 1900 after the
Spanish-American War.
Among his chief advisers there was
Dr. T.H. Pardo de Tavera, head of one
of Manila’s more prominent families
and a member of the Honorary Board
of Filipino Commissioners.
In 1904, Pardo de Tavera sent his
two sons, Carlos ’09 and Alfredo ’11,
off to Watertown, Conn., to study at
the school run by Governor Taft’s
younger brother.
Although the boys did not
graduate, they stayed for three years,
returning to Manila in 1907. Little
is known about their time here.
They were, however, already world
travelers, coming to the U.S.
from a stay in Paris and spending
other summers in Tokyo.
In August 1904, William
Howard Taft writes, “I sincerely
hope that you will
find the Tavera boys all right.
Of course, it is something of
an experiment, but we have all
made some experiments with the
Filipinos and there is no reason why
you should not have your share. Your
affectionate brother, Will”
Young Robert Taft ’05, William’s
older son, was in his second year at the
school when the Pardo de Tavera boys
arrived, and they spent the Christmas
holidays with the Taft family in
Alfredo
Washington, where William
was now secretary of war, and
visited again in March.
Writing to Dr. Pardo
de Tavera, Taft said, “I
am glad to say, my dear
Doctor, that your sons
are looking well…. I
think they both are improving
in their English, and
while they continue to look
pale, they seem to me to be in good
health. Carlos has grown more than
Alfredo, but I thought both were in
a happy frame of mind.”
Sources: Taft Biography Book, 1912.
William Howard Taft Papers, Library of
Congress
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004
19

LESLIE MANNING ARCHIVES
The isolation,
loneliness,
and occasional
slurs didn’t stop
many of these
groundbreakers
from sending
their children
to Taft.
A graduate of the University
of South Africa and Columbia,
Richard Pieterse became the first
faculty member of color in 1969.
Pan said it was hard to make friends,
but faculty members, including Roger
Stacey, helped her get over her homesickness.
“My biggest challenge was English
language proficiency. Although I had an
English education in Hong Kong, it did
not prepare me for the rigorous program
at Taft. Extremely fortunately, I had
Mrs. Blackburn, now Ms. Osborn, as
my English teacher. To this date, I am
still deeply grateful for her teaching and
all the extra hours she spent with me to
improve my English.”
For Joseph Dillard ’84, coming from
inner-city Minneapolis, “It was a big,
lonely school at first. The classes were challenging,
but the teachers were supportive.
I especially remember Bill Nicholson,
Stephen McCabe, and Ed North.
“I thought Taft would be a coed version
of the Facts of Life television show. I
thought it would consist of a bunch of
rich white kids. Other than that, I did
not have a clue.
“The worst part of my experience was
feeling so different and feeling like I was
the only one,” Dillard said. “Although
there were other African-American students,
at times, I felt like I was the only
one who was truly Black. I questioned why
I had to go to Taft to be accepted by society.
I questioned why I had to be away
from ‘my people’ and ‘suffer’ in order to
advance. I felt isolated from others and
consciously isolated myself from white students.
I felt like others wanted me to
assimilate rather than to learn about me
and my culture. But I knew I needed to
get a good education, so I tolerated the
experience. What an internal struggle!”
He expected some racial problems,
but says there were few. A fellow student
once told Dillard, now a banker in
Minneapolis, he was lucky to go to Taft
on a scholarship. “I told him that Taft was
lucky to have me because I was such a good
student. After that, I think I was a little
more conscious as it related to income.”
The isolation, loneliness, and occasional
slurs didn’t stop many of these
groundbreakers from sending their
children to Taft.
Pan, the managing director of the
Greater China Region for the British
firm the Fenner Group, sent her two sons
to Taft. Victor graduated in 2001, and
Nicolas is an upper mid.
Chu’s daughter Lauren graduated in
1999, and he said he’s seen a continued
emphasis on the importance of having a
diverse blend of students and perspectives.
“Taft is more nurturing of the awareness,
the richness, the interconnectedness
of all the academics and cultural values,”
he said. “I believe it’s a very important
thing to bring in students from different
cultures, [for] the teachers [to] have different
perspectives in dealing with children
of different races and cultural values.”
That change in attitudes led Wayne
Jackson’s daughter Alisa Jackson DeSilva to
enroll at Taft, becoming in 1989 the first
child of a black alumnus to graduate from
the school. Despite—or perhaps because
of—her father’s struggles at Taft, DeSilva
said she was determined to enroll at Taft.
“I desperately wanted to leave
[Bermuda] to be able to attend Taft
because my father had been there and I
had a certain pride toward it,” she said.
But growing up in Bermuda “color
was never an issue no matter what you
did or where you went. We all just saw
each other as friends, classmates, teachers,
or people on the street.”
When she arrived at Taft, she didn’t
notice much of a color divide, she said. It
wasn’t until later that someone pointed out
to her that white students would eat with
other white students and black students
would only eat with other black students.
“Because I come from a place where
I have never experienced it, I didn’t know
what was going on or see what was going
on until someone spoke up about it. …
In other settings we were all friends, we
all got along, no one was singled out.”
DeSilva, an accountant with the
Bermuda Alarm Company, Ltd., said she
believes that divide persisted because
of miscommunication and distrust.
20
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004

PETER FINGER
However, she said, things are improving.
“I know that there has been much
change from when my father attended.
It hurts my heart to know what he was
subjected to, what he had to endure.
Anything that I may have been through
is nothing in comparison.”
As with the others, it was the “pursuit
of an excellent education” that brought
Ernest Kwarteng ’98 to Taft in the fall
of 1997. “In fact, education was the only
means of achieving a better standard of
living for my family and me.”
Born in Ghana but raised in Botswana,
Kwarteng describes himself as outgoing and
curious to learn. His parents were both
teachers and always stressed the importance
of obtaining a great education.
“I found most of the students were
friendly. I made lot of friends right away,
and kept most of them. Students were competitive,
in or outside the classroom. Teachers
were a lot closer to the students, and were a
lot more accessible than my previous schools.
“I liked the school’s emphasis on building
character and having students guided
by an honor code. My Taft experience made
me tougher, competitive, confident and
grounded in my core values.”
Kwarteng, a financial analyst for
Goldman Sachs in San Francisco, said, “I
think my Taft experience gave me the confidence
to live and compete in a global
society. The small, discussion-oriented
classes helped me to develop my own voice
even in situations where I was in the minority.
The interaction I had with diverse
groups of people helped me appreciate our
differences, and more importantly made
me comfortable working with people from
different backgrounds. That is essential to
succeed in our global society.”
What differentiates Kwarteng’s experience
from those of earlier alumni is
in part a changed culture at the school.
Over the years, various support groups
for students of color and international
students have also emerged: the Afro-
American Congress in 1970, followed by
United Cultures at Taft in 1982, and Taft
Afro Latino Student Alliance in 1990.
2002 Classmates Ted Emerson, Harry Jones, Jenny Zhang, and Catherine Brayton
And although a welcoming faculty
has always been a key factor for students,
the school created a new position in
recent years, director of multicultural
affairs, specifically to help students of
color feel at home.
“What I do isn’t necessarily anything
other faculty don’t do,” said current director
Felecia Washington Williams ’84, who
succeeds Lynette Sumpter ’90 and Menette
DuBose-San Lee ’87. “I let students know
that my door is always open, that I have a
sympathetic ear, the way my adviser, Monie
Hardwick, did for me when I was here.”
Connecting with an adult in the community
is important, says Williams, but for
most students of color the biggest difference
is simply that she’s here—a role model,
someone who’s been in their shoes. It’s another
reason why she’d like to encourage
more alumni of color to visit the school.
Despite the improvements, being a
non-white student at Taft carries extra
challenges, most agreed. It takes a special
kind of strength to endure the loneliness
and isolation that can come from being
perceived as different. But stay true to
yourself, advised Stevenson.
“You don’t have to become anybody
else. You don’t have to be somebody else.
Believe in yourself. Remember, if you’ve
gotten into Taft, you belong at Taft.”
Bonnie Blackburn Penhollow ’84 is a
freelance writer living in Fort Wayne, Ind.
This article is the second in a series, following
“Sculpting a Diverse Community” by
Jon Willson ’82, on diversity issues at Taft.
“You’re the
ambassador.
You somehow have
to have enough
confidence in
your values and
your culture…”
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004
21

In the TRENCHES,
Born in Saigon
during the war,
English teacher
Steve Le spoke
only Vietnamese
when he arrived in
the United States
at 10 years old.
An Annapolis
grad and former
U.S. Navy
lieutenant,
Le says he has
found his calling
in teaching.
By Chris Torino

Not Standing on Desks
Since arriving at Taft last September, Steve
Le has worn, on his shirt or the lapel of
his coat, a pin of the American flag. “I
wear it to remember my close friends from
the service who are forward deployed in a
war zone,” he says. “Ever since 9/11, at
least one friend has been away; in fact, as
one returned yesterday, another—my best
friend—leaves Thursday.”
“The way Mr. Le interacts with students,”
upper middler Ben Macaskill
says, “shows that he doesn’t take things
for granted; his flag pin shows how much
he values the small and large significances
of daily life. His willingness to share
amazing pictures of his military experience
reveals part of what he brings to the
Taft community.”
Steve has arrived at Taft with purpose.
At the center of his story—undeniably
his family’s story—is the purpose with
which he teaches: the desire to touch
lives. Like all great English teachers, he
is a storyteller; and in sharing his stories,
he interests not only his students, but also
anyone listening.
Having grown up around books,
Steve’s father, Dieu Le, studied journalism
in Vietnam and Cambodia in the early
1960s. Eventually, he took a job in the
Department of Communications for South
Vietnam, leaving temporarily during the
war to serve as an officer in the army.
After four years, he left the military with
the rank of lieutenant, the rank equivalent
to Steve’s in the U.S. Navy—and
returned to the Department of Communications,
this time as director. Less than
two months after Steve, the youngest of
three children, was born, Saigon fell to
the Viet Cong on April 30, 1975, and
with it the communications department.
when Steve was four years old, he “met”
his father for the first time, in a concentration
camp.
While imprisoned, Dieu eventually
advised his wife, Diane Le, to flee to the
United States. She tried to escape by boat
four times. Each time, the Viet Cong returned
Diane and her three children to
prison, thus costing them another year’s
wages. In prison, Diane taught Steve to
hide Dieu’s identity by claiming that his
father was a negligent and abusive drunk.
Steve says that his mother still jokes about
his feeling too at home in prison; she tells
stories of his retrieving errant ping-pong
balls for the guards. Once, after being
“…he doesn’t take things for granted; his flag
pin shows how much he values the small and
large significances of daily life.”
Steve’s story begins with his paternal
grandfather, a man who valued service,
words, and resolution. Phan Le served in
the French-Vietnamese Army in the
1920s and ’30s before fleeing to South
Vietnam from North Vietnam when
Ho Chi Minh established a Communist
government in 1954. After settling in
Saigon, he bought a bookstore that established
the family’s livelihood, until he
was forced to close after the Vietnam War
because the bookstore’s existence—its
words—gave voice to Western culture.
Two days later on May 2, Steve’s
parents held five reserved seats on United
States helicopters to leave the country.
But Dieu, confident that South Vietnam
would soon regain power, relinquished
their seats. Dieu evaded the Viet Cong
for a few months, but was eventually
imprisoned because of his military background;
separated from his family, he
suffered through four or five different
labor camps in the next six years.
“They didn’t kill him,” Steve says,
“because they didn’t know he was a high
government official; they thought he
had only been a military man.” In 1979,
returned, Steve ran to greet the guards
with open arms.
By 1981, Diane stopped trying to
emigrate, ironically, just as her husband
was released from prison. Punished and
“reeducated,” but undefeated, Dieu
began to teach English—vital words—
to potential emigrants in spite of the
risk of re-imprisonment, classes which
Steve observed.
Steve’s elderly grandfather received political
asylum in France for his immediate
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004
23

family, but he did not live long enough to
emigrate with the rest of his family. After
two years in Paris, the Le family left for
Westminster, Calif., where his father
joined a high-school friend, also an emigrant,
who had started and was struggling
to maintain a Vietnamese newspaper,
Nguoi Viet, in Orange County.
With Dieu’s journalistic expertise
and leadership, Nguoi Viet became the
first daily Vietnamese newspaper outside
of Vietnam. Eventually, he helped
develop a media corporation which
owned the newspaper, two periodicals,
two television stations, and Viet Nam
California Radio—a corporation that
communicated Dieu’s native words in
the United States.
During the process of emigration,
Steve missed fourth grade, and, as a tenyear-old,
his English was limited to what
little he picked up listening to his father’s
English classes. He enrolled, finally, as a
fifth grader in California, but spoke only
Vietnamese in school. Dieu and Diane
wanted Steve and their other two children
to assimilate into American culture,
so they moved the family away from the
somewhat insular Vietnamese-American
community in Westminster to Los
Angeles County. There, school officials
enrolled Steve in regular-level courses and
in English as a Second Language. By the
ninth grade, Steve rose from ESL to
Honors English. He cites his Honors
English teacher, Mrs. Brady, as the catalyst
for his passion to read, write, and,
consequently teach those endeavors.
“Taft students,” Steve said, “are much
more inquisitive and intellectually aware
than I was at their age.” As a high-school
senior, Steve came to believe education
should not be entirely selfish. With a
desire to serve, he resolved to enter the
military and attend the U.S. Naval
Academy. More specifically, he decided
he would fly “because it was the most
romantic option.” His college counselor
told him that he would never get into
the academy. Then, disqualified by the
academy because of a misplaced medical
file, Steve still turned down acceptance
to the University of Southern California
because, as he said, “Once I enrolled
there, I’d never leave.”
Instead, he enrolled at Cerritos
Community College, took as demanding
a liberal arts program as the college
offered, ensured his medical information
was submitted early, and was
accepted into the Class of 1998 at the
Naval Academy.
At the academy, from which every
graduate earns a B.S. in Engineering,
Steve rounded out his education with a
major in English and as a member of the
academy’s volleyball team. Set to begin
his senior examinations, in May 1998,
Steve learned that his father would have
surgery to remove a malignant tumor; his
father had entered the terminal stage of
cancer and was given two years to live.
Immediately, Steve returned home to
California to discover that the surgery
was unsuccessful and that his father
would begin chemotherapy. Dieu
made it to his son’s graduation from the
academy; but, one year later, after Steve
earned his master’s in English at the
University of Maryland, while completing
the first phase of flight school, Dieu
died, with Steve and family bedside.
At Dieu’s wake, Steve listened to journalists,
Tibetan monks, movie producers,
and lawyers tell stories about his father;
and every story revealed how Dieu had
touched their lives as a friend, colleague,
mentor, and teacher. Steve asked himself,
“Am I doing that?” He described how,
“in aviation, you work with an airplane,
not people.” After his father’s funeral, in
a process that echoed Henry David
Thoreau’s—whose works he teaches to
Taft upper middlers—Steve traveled to
Charleston, S.C., to isolate himself from
all family and friends and reflect. And,
like Thoreau, Steve codified his personal
resolutions in words, in a nine-page
letter to his family, explaining his reasons
for leaving the aviation community to
join another in which he would work
more closely with people. Following his
metephorical “walk into the woods,”
Steve resolved to join the Special Operations
community rather than complete
flight school. In November 1999, he reported
to the Naval Diving and Salvage
Training Center in Panama City, Florida;
and for the next four years, he served one
and a half military deployments.
Knowing he wanted to teach after
the Navy, Steve considered boarding
school at the suggestion of a roommate,
a Kent School graduate, who said, “If
you really want to affect lives, live with
your students.”
“At that point,” Steve said, “the only
knowledge I had of boarding school was
from Dead Poets Society, and I wasn’t
going to stand on desks.”
At Taft, though yet to stand on a desk,
Steve weaves together his story and the
stories of colleagues and students. “I chose
boarding school,” he says, “because life’s
important lessons are taught outside the
classroom, often in the teacher’s living
room or around the dining table. I have
enjoyed the challenge of exposing my private
life for their inspection, and living on
the hall with students has increased my
own sense of personal accountability.”
Recently, I stopped by his apartment
to find Steve and senior Willy
Oppenheim engaged in a heated, philosophical
debate about truth, goodness,
and beauty. “At night, I sit in his apartment
drinking green tea and discussing
the cosmos,” said Willy in somewhat
Whitmanesque rhetoric; “we never
agree, but it doesn’t matter—he gets me
thinking every time.”
24
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004

“The most challenging part of
teaching is connecting with students, especially
those who do not particularly
enjoy English,” Steve insists. “It’s tough,
sometimes, to get a lower mid excited
about Shakespeare or an upper mid about
Emerson. So, when the students find that
window and discover the literature for
themselves, a teacher fulfills his hopes.”
With focused intensity and using the
Socratic method, Steve asks pointed questions
and challenges students to think
and speak precisely. Beyond the classroom,
he demands similarly precise
thinking and action in the athletic arena.
“After spending five years working only
with men, I found it challenging at first
to coach eleven teenage girls in the fall,”
he says. “By the end of the volleyball season,
however, it was a different story: as
the girls like to say, ‘We broke you.’ They
mean I now actually smile occasionally.”
On Super Bowl Sunday, Steve invited
some faculty members to his apartment
to watch the game. During the first half,
I left my seat from before the television
to get a refill of wings and peruse Steve’s
bookshelves. A stack of Whitman books
caught my eye because Steve and I
were about to begin teaching “Song of
Myself.” After two boys poked their
heads into his apartment, proudly pronouncing
that they were laboring over
their essay on Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”
for Steve’s class, Steve and I discussed
Whitman and then his favorite novels:
Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, John
Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, and
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. He pulled
Moby-Dick from the shelf and quoted
Melville: “Look not too long in the face
of the fire, O man!” He added his words
to Melville’s, “To search too long for your
calling will blind you.” Eyes wide open,
Steve has stared into his fire and, then,
has acted with purpose.
Chris Torino is in his second year in the
English Department after teaching for
seven years elsewhere. He lives in
Cruikshank dormitory with wife Dena,
three-year-old son Cole, and his forthcoming
daughter.
“At that point,”
Steve said, “the
only knowledge
I had of
boarding school
was from Dead
Poets Society,
and I wasn’t
going to stand
on desks.”
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004
25

The
Spirit
Taft
of
AT 30,000 FEET
A Tribute to
Chip Spencer ’56—
Gentleman, Iron Man, Comedian—
Retiring in June
By Barclay Johnson ’53

SCHALER PHOTOGRAPHY
Class agents in reunion years like to drop by Chip’s office
for a pep talk and a few laughs. But he’s usually on
the phone. If he isn’t in and the lights are off, he’s probably in
the air, traveling for Taft.
One day this winter three of us bumped
into each other in Chip’s doorway.
“Mr. Spencer will be back next week,”
said his secretary, “but only for a day.”
So we told Diane what we had heard
about his having been ready to retire last
year, until some of you told him he
looked too young to quit.
“That was last year,” she said.
Before we left, one of us noticed
in the window light on his desk that
old gold pen. Dull with disuse, it stood
on a pine stand with a plaque attached.
We all had seen it before and
read the spare inscription:
Clayton B. Spencer
Alumni Office
1964–1970
as a student, there
was literally nothing.
Mr. Cruikshank had all
he could do to pay off the
school’s debt, which he did.
When Chip returned to work
with John Esty, the endowment was
precariously low. Nevertheless, with the
help of key alumni and trustees, the total
climbed to more than $30 million.
By the end of the recent Campaign for
Taft, the team of Odden, Romano, and
Spencer had led the drive to a recordbreaking
$134 million in only five years.
Lance Odden and Jerry Romano had
asked Chip to return from the business
world to direct the Planned
Giving part of the campaign.
Needless to say, they were
fortunate to find the
person with the exact
combination of experience,
character, and
spirit for the job. Chip,
whose connection with
the school spans six decades,
knew the school
from an unprecedented
number of vantage points:
student, alumnus, teachercoach,
parent, and director of
development. Furthermore, he knew,
by name, alumni in the hundreds.
Looking back at Chip’s career, we
tend to see his work outside of Taft as
interludes. Quite possibly, however, his
nearly 20 years in financial management
has accounted for much of Chip’s effectiveness.
To be sure, a sketch of his resume
could suffice for two people: After
graduating from Taft in 1956—lettering
But this time the whole thing looked less
like a memento than it did a talisman of
destiny. Chip’s career had brought him
full circle. In fact, he had been director
of development twice—with 40 years
between titles. (Of course, the size of the
job in our time requires a high-tech staff
of 14 and alumni networks nationwide.)
Equally providential, the remarkable
growth of the endowment parallels
Chip’s career at Taft. During his time
A young director of development, circa
1964
With wife Susan and sons Oliver ’85
and Jonathan ’88 at Jonathan’s wedding
in 2001
Never missing an opportunity to lead
alumni in the right direction, Chip is an
annual presence organizing the reunion
weekend parade. PETER FINGER
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004
27

in three sports, with an extra letter in
cheerleading—then from Yale in 1960,
he served as an officer on a minesweeper
in the Pacific before earning his master’s
in history at Trinity College. He returned
to Taft, the first time, as director of development,
history teacher, and assistant
varsity soccer coach. In 1970, Chip left
Taft to become headmaster of McTernan
School for boys in Waterbury. Shortly
thereafter he led the merger with St.
Margaret’s, which his daughter Jennifer
attended, and the capital drive that made
the merger possible.
In 1977, Chip left academia to work
for Advest in Hartford and pursue a
career in business, but during those
years away, Chip kept in touch through
parenthood: son Oliver ’85 arrived on
campus in the fall of 1981, and Jonathan
was a member of the Class of ’88.
Chip returned to Taft to direct Planned
Giving in 1994. Then, after Jerry Romano
retired in 2001, he became director of
development—for the second time.
So much for experience. The crux
of Spencer’s success is the man himself.
First of all, very few people can
do this kind of work. We class
agents know. That’s why we’re
happy with our day jobs. Big
time fund raising takes too
many qualities of personality
and character, like
moxie, resilience, and delight
in near-strangers.
But for this very special
job, Chip had to have
other strengths as well.
What, then, did Lance
and Jerry see?
His humor and wit?
But the whole world knew
about that. Chip is a natural
comic. He has that rare
sense of humanness, including
his own. (Can’t anyone
drive off with one’s cell phone on
top of the car?) Also, his remarks in
sports are memorable. When Chip
leaves a putt short, he reproaches himself
with “Hit the ball, Alice!” Then, in tennis,
if he smashes an overhead for a winner,
he hoots, “Take that, Alice!” Who is Alice,
we’d like to know. Chip’s close friends
often serve as targets for his playful sarcasm
or as an audience for his lusty jokes
picked up in his travels like sky miles.
Under the humor, however, we have
seen another quality. This man is tough.
His rivals, amused by his footwork, often
fail to see just how competitive he is, until
it is too late. Moreover, Chip is as
durable as he is determined, taking the
whirlwind traveling in stride. But apparently
not without a few moments of alarm.
Chip’s affiliation with the school started
as a student in the ’50s, continued on the
faculty in the ’60s, as a parent in the ’80s,
on the faculty again in the ’90s, and as a
parent to Jane, pictured in 1986, who
graduated in 2003.
The team of MacMullen, Romano,
and Spencer did more together than just
raise money.
Chip created a special rapport with
Mr. Taft’s Old Boys, here with Jim Loomis
’31 at an Old Guard Dinner.
28
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004

PETER FINGER
“Chip and I spent several years traveling
around the country,” former Annual
Fund Director Olivia Tuttle told us. “Alumni
functions morning, noon, and night, and
in between Chip would call on alumni, always
searching for the ultimate gift to the
school. He did it all—once breaking into
my hotel room in Chicago in search of the
Campaign for Taft movie when I was
caught in traffic. He was the first to arrive
to help with name tags and lists and the
last to leave, closing the bar and turning
off the lights. Quick with a smile and a firm
handshake, he has the remarkable ability
to welcome most of the alumni by name,
putting them immediately at ease.”
Headmaster Willy MacMullen says
that traveling the country with Chip was
more than fun. “It was inspiring. And
for all his leadership success, he never
sought credit.”
“As a Planned Giving officer, Chip
knew that seeing people and spending
time with them would serve Taft well,”
said Jerry Romano. “He single-handedly
raised one-third of the Campaign’s $134
million, largely from Mr. Taft’s Old
Boys. Lance had had the idea that Chip
would be great at Planned Giving; I had
the notion it would be nice to have another
man in the office, given that I was
outnumbered by women 14 to one.”
Then the ladies in the office told us
about a birthday party they threw for
Chip to test his famous good nature.
Each of them wore a striped shirt, preferably
with cuff links, a navy sport jacket,
and one of a variety of Taft neckties. With
hair slicked back Gatsby style, each wore
a name tag slightly different from the
others—to honor this host of countless
alumni events: Poker Chip, Chip N.
Dale, Potato Chip, Computer Chip,
Tortilla Chip, among others. They said
that he grinned a lot and took a chocolate
chip cookie or two, but for once he was
speechless; his quick wit was put on hold.
Suddenly this picture of Chip at the
party revealed his obvious advantage:
Beyond all his experience and virtues,
Chip is “old school.” Believe it or not,
he still has the old school spirit of his
cheerleading days. He is the Connecticut
Yankee patriot and quintessential family
man who embodies every traditional
value espoused by Horace Taft. And the
greatest of these is loyalty.
Like many alumni from the thirties,
Chip is the self-possessed patriarch,
proud of all that is his, not the least of
which is his solid independence. Friends
don’t take care of him; he takes care of
them, regardless of the distance, and
serves his community every way asked of
him—patron, deacon, vice president of
the historical society, etc.
He and his wife Susan (daughter
of the late Bill Fischer ’33) love their
historic colonial home on Litchfield’s
Chestnut Hill. But they seldom sit down
in it. There is too much to do—including
at least two sports a season. First, of
course, they have to dig around in their
terrace gardens, prune the fruit trees,
chase myriad squirrels out of at least 20
birdhouses, make their own wine, host
another dinner party for friends or classmates.
The Spencers could have been
happy 200 years ago—especially after
their daughter Jane ’03 brought them up
to date by inviting 40 seniors home for
her graduation party. Taft may well be
Chip’s extended family.
The campaign took off on schedule and
landed ahead of time, well beyond its original
goal. With apologies to Admiral
Nimitz (from his tribute to the Marines
in the aftermath of Iwo Jima): Uncommon
generosity became a common virtue.
Chip will be back, if he ever leaves.
Certainly the endowment stays on, like
destiny’s gift to Taft, and who has more
friends of all ages. One of Horace Taft’s
“Old Boys” was heard to say, “I liked that
Spencer chap so much, I thought I was
giving my gift to him.”
English teacher emeritus Barclay Johnson
’53 lives in Watertown, Conn. He and Chip
have been close friends since 1964.
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004
29

E N D N O T E
The Naming
FEMINIST
of a
By Debora Phipps
“It was still rare for
a girl to like science
and math, but I
really liked both.”
If I were to fill out one of
those sticky-backed name
tags with “I am” at the top,
after “Debora Phipps” I’d list
mother, friend, and teacher.
But shortly after that, I’d
include a word that has
become uncomfortable for
many: feminist.
I first became aware of
the strong reaction to this
word in talking with Erica
O’Neill ’04 about her Senior
Seminar project last fall. She’d sent a survey
examining people’s responses to the word
feminist, and asked whether the respondents
she questioned considered themselves feminist.
She discovered that feminist seemed almost
a dirty word, one with which few of her
interviewees wanted to be associated.
Then, not long after, while I was on duty in
Congdon, a mid girl alluded to someone as a feminist
in the same deriding tone. I was shocked.
I suspect these negative associations derive
from some stereotype of feminists as angry,
embittered, militant, hairy, unfashionable manhaters.
And this is too bad. The dictionary defines
feminism as “the principle that women should
have political, economic, and social rights equal
to those of men.” That doesn’t seem too militant,
and it certainly doesn’t prescribe a certain
hairstyle or misanthropy.
Perhaps now that women have more rights,
the word feminist has become dated, like socialist, a
word whose connotations are far more negative than
the literal meaning of the word would suggest.
Yet naming myself as a feminist remains important
to me. I want men and women to have the
same rights; I want all people
to have the same choices,
whether or not they choose to
work outside the home or
raise children or vote their
conscience or be paid the
same wage for the same
work. Talking with students,
I wonder how much of the
difference in our responses has
to do with my own experience
as someone who graduated
high school in 1979.
I went to a large high school and quickly perfected
the art of being quiet. It was uncool for
girls to be smart, and really uncool to distinguish
oneself from the masses. In order to succeed
socially, girls pretty much had to play dumb. I
learned to flip my hair over my shoulder and giggle
at whatever any boy in a football jacket said.
I think I might have gained some assertiveness
had I played sports, but few options were available
to girls—this was way before Title 9. I swam
on the coed swim team for awhile, until the
5 a.m. commute put a dent in my social life.
Wanting something active to do after school
(when all the boys were in practice), I did what
was left: cheerleading. I was a terrible cheerleader,
and—though I learned to yell loudly—I was also
quite aware of being on the sidelines of the real
action, a different form of quietness.
At the time, it was still rare for a girl to like
science and math, but I really liked both. In deference
to my curious interests, my school lessened
(meaning evaporated) my language and history requirements
to let me double up on math and
science. (Don’t try this at Taft; the academic dean
won’t allow it.) Not very many people I knew elected
30 Taft Bulletin Spring 2004

E N D N O T E
“I think part of the
reason I’ve stayed
in teaching is to try
to encourage you
all…to speak up
for yourselves,
to exceed others’
expectations when
they try to limit you,
to follow up on
your interests
whatever they be.”
the same courses, so this let me take the subjects I
wanted—quietly—but still avoid the “smart girl”
label by playing dumb at the lunch table.
By my senior year, I found myself the only
girl in Advanced Physics. For this, and because my
teacher was sure I didn’t belong there, I received
extra pages on each of my tests, but no extra time.
I’d furiously work through the problems, trying not
to cry, and I refused to let my parents intervene. I
made it through the course, but not without believing
that girls really might not belong in science,
that really, physics was a boys’ field.
Still, my Advanced Chemistry teacher was
different; he had long hair and wore Frye boots,
and, as our class adviser, observed me in both
modes: chemistry student and social butterfly.
He took me aside, shared a few thoughts on my
split personality, and urged me to follow up my
goal of becoming a chemical engineer in college.
His encouragement was all I needed, I thought.
Even in college, I discovered I was part of a minority
in my science and math classes—one of
two girls in my college calculus class—a course
for which I was sorely unprepared. A pitying professor
suggested at midterm that I should drop
the course and make up the credits later rather
than fail. (He didn’t make the same suggestion to
a boy who was in the same academic peril.) I refused
his suggestion, and for the few days before
the exam, locked myself in a music practice room,
living on honey buns, Sno-caps, and Tab, until I
knew I could make some showing on the test. I
passed, but that was the last math course I took.
And in chemistry, I was the only girl in my
lab section. I had enough spirit to persevere, but
not enough steadiness; everything I touched
broke. I started small—test tubes, beakers—and
gradually moved up to vials of chemicals and,
eventually, a dessicator, a highly expensive piece
of equipment that shatters with an embarrassingly
large sound. I burst into tears, realized
I could not financially manage to remain in
Organic Chemistry, and stopped taking science
at the end of the semester.
After stints in economics and art history, I
arrived in the English Department. Now, I love
what I do, and I learned a lot from my failures,
but sometimes I wonder how my world might
have been different if I’d spoken up for myself
more—if I could have lived in one of those adolescent
fiction “Choose your own adventure”
books with a little more of a voice. And I think
part of the reason I’ve stayed in teaching is to try
to encourage you all—both boys and girls—to
speak up for yourselves, to exceed others’ expectations
when they try to limit you, to follow up
on your interests whatever they be.
A number of years ago, I did a study of coeducation
at Taft, and part of what I examined was the
ratio between the amount of class time during which
girls spoke versus the time in which boys spoke. I
also looked at whether the stereotypes of student behavior—boys
more typically yelling out, or talking
over someone; girls raising their hands and waiting
quietly to be called on—held true at Taft.
Hoping others would let me into their classrooms
if I did, I offered myself up as the first guinea
pig. As a former quiet girl, I thought I did a pretty
good job balancing discussions, but I discovered I
was way off. Boys dominated my classes. Several
girls never talked. I had to learn to pay attention,
every day, and evaluate my progress after each
class, before I got better at helping everyone—
not just loud or confident students, boys or
girls—to speak up. And I still have a long way to
go in meeting this goal on a daily basis.
In the same way, we all have to pay attention
to what happens around us. Our class
committee elections are run the way they are in
response to earlier years when few girls were ever
elected; girls simply weren’t considered leaders,
and because boys didn’t vote for girls, and girls
voted for girls but even more boys, the way to
change the composition of class committees was
to mandate separate elections.
The right to the same opportunities is what
feminism is all about. Sex and the City’s Carrie
Bradshaw writes an editorial about the difference
between should and could. I think feminism believes
there are no shoulds. Instead, the same coulds should
be available to anyone. I hope that feminism reminds
us that you can do anything, regardless of
who you are, depending on how you choose.
Maybe, if we can work through the negative
stereotypes associated with the word feminist, then
being called a feminist by someone will not feel
like being called a name. Instead, it will be a way
that you, too, might name yourself.
Debbie Phipps succeeded former faculty member
Bill Morris ’69 this year as academic dean. She has
previously served as head of the English Department
and dean of the middle class. The remarks
above are excerpted from a School Meeting talk
she gave in January.
Taft Bulletin Spring 2004
31

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