Woodstock School Alumni Magazine Vol CIV, 2011

Following Sports Day was the interschool
meet, magnificently called the Olympics.
Before Sports Day and Olympics, I never
could sleep much, a fact which did nothing
to help my performance. Olympics was always
an awesome affair; we’d walk several
miles over the hills to St. George’s or Oak
Grove. The great climax to my sports thrill
was the day Alec and I took every first
place but one event in the under-14 division.
We both got big brown chenille Ws
for our achievement, and the opportunity
to attend the sportsman’s banquet to which
we were expected to ask a girl - an ominous
prospect for one totally inexperienced in
that field. I asked Jeananne Constance to
be my date. It was a terrifying evening.
Sixth standard was the last standard we
stayed at Ridgewood. From now on we
would be recognized as “hefts,” no longer
chuts. Still, as long as Bob was in school,
I was known as “Chutty Erny.” We had a
set of slang expressions quite peculiar to
Woodstock, most of which have doubtless
passed out of usage. “Buck off” meant
show off; “squinch,” cheat; “chut,” small;
“heft,” large; “packa ding chaunce,” terribly
good; “bra,” brother; “sas,” sister;
“taws,” marbles; “airzes,” airplanes;
“gaff,” fun; and “homey,” homework. Most
of this quaint vocabulary has slipped my
mind but there were enough of these words
to fill a small dictionary.
The dames lived in what was called the
College and at our age only sissies paid
any attention to them. During the noon
hour, we often bought treats from the
ubiquitous cake wallas. Usually there
were landslides after each heavy rain.
I remember the Tehri Hills, Dhanaulti,
Magru, Bear Mountain and Bears Cave,
Pepper Pot, Bundar Poonch, Kellogg, the
chakars, Mullingar, and skating parties.
We sang “Shadows,” the Woodstock hiking
song, and “Cheers for the brown and
the gold.” I also remember “Charley’s
Aunt,” “You can’t take it with You,” and
“Tobias and the Angel,” and also prizegiving
day, going-down-dinner, capture
the flag down at the gravey (graveyard),
the Hostie, Kincraig and Dehra, the buz
(bazaar), Sobha’s (Sobha Ram’s), and a
thousand other words, the mere mention
of which brings back the indescribable
flavor of all that was Woodstock to me.
My great sorrow was that Dad was elected
OMS president in 1950, forcing us to leave
India and Woodstock after my freshman
year.
Class Jottings That Sing
Abhra Bhattacharjee, ’92, Director of Development, Woodstock School
When I first joined the Development
Office at Woodstock 18 months
ago, I came from a communications
background and I was very excited about
the idea of redesigning some of our publications.
When it came to our Quadrangle, Pete
Wildman, our Head of Communications and
Marketing, and quite the designer himself,
warned me that I could mess with the cover, the
editorial, the glossy paper stock and perhaps
even switch from black and white to fourcolor,
but I shouldn’t tamper with the Jottings.
And so, although we innovated last year with
on the Quad cover for the first time, we still
had incredible contributions from more than
70 classes of Woodstock alumni.
“Jottings are what everyone wants to read,”
says Li Chu ’59, our full time voluntary database
administrator, and someone who has
done more than her fair share of collecting
and collating the Jottings over the last nine
years. “They keep us connected. Everything
else is just extra.”
She is right.
Jottings are the lifeblood of the Quadrangle.
No matter how hard we work to create feature
stories that are timely, provocative and
just plain interesting, class notes will always
overshadow them. They’re the first thing
readers turn to when they get the magazine
and the last thing they put down before they
turn out the light.
In one respect, we’re lucky. With Jottings, we
know there’s something in every Quadrangle
that people will read, regardless of its content
or presentation. But let’s face it—to an editor,
that endless name, rank, and serial number list
of new jobs, marriages, children and deaths
can seem very uniform, and I know that for
many class secretaries, the thought of preparing
the annual Jottings ranks somewhere be-
Quadrangle - 9
tween root canal surgery and telemarketing.
Fortunately not everyone feels that way. As
I prepared this article, I reached out to a few
advancement colleagues to ask what they had
learned in their experience of creating alumni
publications. I also enquired of a handful of
class secretaries that clearly enjoy what they
do, and had a lot of great advice to share. They
also asked if I could share some of their pet
peeves with their classmates, to help make
their annual exercise a lot easier. Here is what
many of them said.
Get Real
My advancement peers at other schools
and colleges tell me that their class notes
section has become a lot hipper and more
confessional through the years. Alumni at
other institutions share life-affirming stories
about their triumphs over disease, job loss or
family tragedy with classmates they haven’t
seen or spoken with in decades. For those of
us that attended Woodstock, this should not
be too difficult; after all we all survived the
food, the hills, the leeches and the langurs
together. It is remarkable to me how we are
able to pick up our relationships with classmates
or other alumni no matter how long
it has been since we connected. Try and be
real and honest when you send in your news
to your class secretary – after all that is what
a classmate and friend really wants to know.
Many Woodstock alumni say they feel that
if they haven’t achieved certain goals—
a beautiful family, a stellar job, a Nobel
Prize—then they aren’t worthy to
write in. But you and your class secretaries
can work to dispel that myth.
One class secretary wrote, “Let’s not just
talk about facts, let’s talk about feelings,
and now I see my classmates being honest
about the curveballs life has thrown them.”