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5 0 t h r e u n i o nA Passionate LifeJ i m N E W E L L ’ 6 1Nobles is a school that inspires lifelongpassions. For Jim Newell ’61one of those passions has been foreignlanguages. “Largely because of studyingGerman with Mr. Bird and Frenchwith M. Bevillard—both great teachers—in1960 I went on a summer programas an American Field Servicestudent in Berlin,” he says. “That was alife-changing event. I hadn’t had muchexposure to different cultures, and thatexperience inspired me.”Newell went to Harvard College,where he majored in international lawand relations and began studying Russian.After college, he enlisted for fouryears in the Army Security Agency,which sent him to the West CoastDefense Language Institute and thento Germany from 1967 to 1969. Hestayed on in Europe, studying at theU.S.S.R. Institute and the Universityof Paris. He met his wife, Sally, in Paris—though it turned out that she was aMassachusetts native and the two hadlived on the same street without knowingone another. The pair spoke onlyFrench for six months, Newell recalls.They returned to the United States andNewell earned his Master’s in Russianat Middlebury College in 1972. Heand Sally married that fall and in 1973moved to the rural Northeast Kingdomin Vermont, where they raised threesons and continue to live today.In 1975, a call came from Noblesseeking a substitute for George K.Bird Jr. ’39, who had fallen ill. Newellspent one semester covering the Germanteacher’s three classes—and discovereda passion for teaching. In 1981,he and Sally helped found the RiversideSchool in Lyndonville, Vt. He wenton to serve as its head for 15 years.A master of understatement,Newell says he “keeps pretty busy” inretirement. He and Sally enjoy foreigntravel, and Jim serves on several boards,including Riverside School, CatamountArts and the Northeastern VermontRegional Hospital.Through it all, he has been writing—another passion that might have hadits roots in his experience at Nobles.“I came to Nobles in seventh grade,’”he recalls. “Mr. Coggeshall praisedstuff I wrote that year, and I’ve neverforgotten it.”Newell has written several screenplays—includingone about Sam Patch,who jumped over Niagara Falls in 1828Jim Newell ’61 withhis grandson, Kingstonand lived to tell about it, and anotherabout the young Herman Melville.“None of them have been produced—yet,” he says. He is currently writingabout another passion: his convictionthat Edward de Vere, 17th Earl ofOxford, wrote all those 16th-centuryShakespearean plays and sonnets.“I’m a fervent believer that the authorisn’t the guy from Stratford,” he says.“When you mention that to academicsthey go crazy.”And those foreign languages?When we spoke to Newell for this profilehe had just started in on Memoirs ofHadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, thefirst woman elected to the Académiefrançaise. He was reading it in French.—Catherine O’Neill Grace28 l the NobLES Bulletin l Spring 2011