Biographies
Bios 1959-1960
Since AXP or EQV
or
Bios by them that are living it
Table of Contents
Douglas J. Bennet ’59 was elected the 15th president of
Wesleyan University on April 7, 1995, and began his tenure on July 1, 1995.
He was assistant secretary of state for international
organization affairs when tapped by Wesleyan. He was appointed to that post in
1993 by President Clinton to manage efforts to streamline and improve relations
with the United Nations and other external organizations.
Bennet is best known for his decade (1983-93) as chief
executive officer and president of National Public Radio. He was recruited to
orchestrate a dramatic turnaround at the near-bankrupt organization. He
succeeded in tripling listenership and almost doubling the number of member
stations while raising funds to end its near total dependency on federal money.
He spurred innovative programming that produced popular shows such as “Weekend
Edition,” “AfroPop,” and “Performance Today.”
Well versed in foreign affairs, Bennet was head of the
Agency for International Development (1979-81), where he managed an annual $5
billion budget for U.S. economic assistance to 70 developing nations. He served
as assistant secretary for congressional relations, Department of State
(1977-79), and was special assistant to U.S. Ambassador to India Chester Bowles
(1964-66). He also served as assistant to the economic advisor for the Agency
for International Development (1963-64).
On the domestic side, he was named in 1977 as the first
staff director of the Senate Budget Committee. He previously was assistant to
Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey (1967-69), Senator Thomas F. Eagleton
(1969-73), and Senator Abraham Ribicoff (1973-74).
He left government service in 1981 to become the first
president of the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies in Washington,
D.C., a private think tank specialized in issues of defense policy and
disarmament.
Born in Orange, New Jersey, on June 23, 1938, Bennet grew
up in Lyme, Connecticut, and attended the local public schools. He was elected
to Phi Beta Kappa and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan in 1959,
a master’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1960, and a
doctorate in history from Harvard University in 1968. In 1994, he received an
honorary doctor laws degree from Wesleyan.
He serves on the Board of Trustees of Wellesley College.
He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, serves on the Advisory
Council of The Stanley Foundation, and is a member of the Woodrow Wilson
Foundation National Advisory Committee. Locally, he serves as a director of the
Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce and is a member of the Rockfall Foundation.
I was standing in front of North College on that early
June evening in 1959 before the day of graduation watching the college band file
by when from behind me I heard my name murmured in disbelief. It was Robert
Norwine, Dean of Admissions, incredulous no doubt that I had managed to stitch
together a respectable enough academic record to receive my diploma. (In 1967, I
also earned my MALS degree in English from Wesleyan.)
Following graduation and a year teaching and coaching at
an independent day school in New Jersey (I started a varsity football program
there that is still going), I returned to my old high school, Westminster School
in Simsbury, CT as its first Director of Admissions. I have been there ever
since.
In 1969 at the age of 33, I married Marie-Pier, a French
woman, who I met on the left bank of Windsor, CT! My wife worked for a bank and
later owned a classy clothing boutique but for the past 15 years has been a real
estate agent for Prudential CT. More important, she has been a tough-love mom
for our three large, now adult children: Fletcher (35), the strength and
conditioning coach and associate head track coach at Williams College; Ethan (33
), an offensive lineman for the New York
Jets; and Rebecca (27 ), following her own professional athletic and college
coaching stint, a teacher and coach at Pomfret School in Pomfret, CT. None are
married and my wife and I patiently await our time as grandparents.
I directed the Admissions program at Westminster from
1960 to 1982, and during that time worked for my profession by serving as a
Director and Officer of the Secondary School Admissions Test Board and as
Chairman of the National Association of Boarding Schools. For the next 21 years
I served the school as Director of Development and later as Associate Headmaster
for External Affairs. In 1987, I helped establish and was an officer of the
Planned Giving Group of Connecticut.
My love of track and field from high school and college
days carried me into coaching the sport for many years at Westminster. My
children and I each captained our respective Westminster track teams and the
school did us the great honor two years ago by naming its new track facility
after my family. I continue to compete in the senior track circuit and have
finally joined my three children as an All-American, albeit in my advanced
years.
For the past two years I have been assisting the
Headmaster and the advancement program as a development advisor. My intent is to
step aside completely in June 2006, after my 46th year at the school, but no
one, including my wife believes me!
With the start of my graded descent at Westminster, I
have found time to get more involved in volunteer work with other educational
institutions. Currently I sit on the Boards of the Fay School in Southborough,
MA which I also attended as a young boy and the Cobb School, Montessori in
Simsbury, CT which my children attended in their very early years. Marie-Pier
and I have also been able to spend more time at our island cottage in Boothbay
Harbor, Maine where there is ample opportunity for me to enjoy the pleasures of
reading, barbecuing and messing around in boats.
It was good fun spending time with some of my Wesleyan
classmates at our 45th reunion, and I look forward to celebrating with them our
50 years of escape from Middletown in 2009 when we can have a highball together
and “tell stories of the glories of dear old Wesleyan”.
After a final summer working as a hiking director at a
Y-camp in the Adirondacks, Harriet and I were married in August of 1959. We
dated at Nott Terrace High School in Schenectady, NY, and got together again in
the fall of our senior year. There was much communication and some travel
between Middletown and Middlebury that year along with a preoccupation with my
Honors College project and concern about graduate school. We are still married
with two adult children and two young grandsons. Our daughter, Karen born in
1962, lives in Van Nuys, California. Our son, Laird born in 1964, and his family
live in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Karen does leadman work for movies and TV. Laird
heads the Kaiser federal government relations group in Washington.
In the fall of 1998 Harriet retired as head of the Safety
and Permits Department in city government in New Orleans
and in the summer of 1999 I retired from the public health faculty after thirty
years at Tulane. My Tulane career was a combination of teaching and university
administration. Among other assignments I served as the academic dean for the
Freeman School of Business and founding chair of the Health Systems Management
Department at the Medical Center.
In 1988, during a sabbatical leave, we decided to leave New Orleans at retirement. To that end we found twenty
acres plus of mountain land in Western North Carolina with a ridge-line and the
potential of a great view. We designed a home, built a road and oversaw the
construction of our new home. We moved in during a snow and ice storm in
February of 1999. We love it here. I do a good bit of day hiking and have
undertaken several serious gardening projects. I am active with the Highlands
Institute of American Religious and Philosophic Thought (HIARPT) which provides
me with an opportunity to build on many of my Wesleyan interests that had been
on hold. I am continually reminded of how good the education was that we
received at Wesleyan as I participate in the HIARPT programs. In the spirit of
Victor Butterfield’s civic leadership charges, I have recently completed a stint
on a North Carolina Planned Parenthood affiliate board after being active in
that organization at the local, regional and national levels for some 25 years.
In New Orleans I served on the Board of the Public Library
System for nine years which continually reminded me of the hours I spent earning
my spending money at Wesleyan by manning the circulation desk and shelving books
at the Olin Library.
After moving to the mountains, I joined the health policy
faculty at Emory School of Public Health for four years. Being a virtual faculty
member – using a satellite Internet connection and twice monthly trips to
Atlanta – was great way to end my faculty career. This summer I will
finish a three-year consulting project with the Open Society Institute which has
taken me to developing schools of public health throughout Eastern and Central
Europe. For the six years prior to that, I was involved in the development of a
school of public health program in Moscow. These international experiences,
along with involvement with a distance learning program in India, capped off a
long set of interesting experiences in both residential and distance learning in
professional graduate public health and business education.
Between Wesleyan and Tulane we moved around the Midwest –
between Iowa and Michigan. I did my masters and doctoral work, first in American
history, then shifting to medical care organization and political science at the
University of Iowa with the support of an Edward John Noble Foundation
Leadership grant that I was awarded on the recommendation of Wesleyan. At
different times I worked for state government in Des Moines
and for a hospital in Sault Sainte Marie. In the middle sixties, I joined the
Michigan State (MSU) faculty. Ernie Dunn was also on the MSU faculty at that
time. That was the beginning of my university career and I have been a faculty
member every since until my second retirement in 2003. As I think back on my
days since Wesleyan, I am continually reminded of how many of my values were
formed, reinforced and refined at Wesleyan. Alan Brooks, my Wesleyan roommate,
and I still keep in touch and, because of the AXP/EQV get-together, Gus Napier
and I have reestablished contact. It turns out that we both live the mountains –
a short distance apart but a two-hour drive on winding roads. Those of us who
were at Wesleyan during the Butterfield years were indeed lucky.
After graduation, I attended the University of Michigan's
School of Urban Planning, and attempted a career along those lines, in Chicago. It did not work and one interview led to another
until I ended up in a bank in Massachusetts. I clawed my way slowly to a top
spot, until a merger in the mid '90's swept me away. By that time I had bought a
small farm, where I could raise a fourth adopted boy (from Brazil) and provide
vacation space for my first three children, who were attending a wide variety of
colleges. The farm included an apiary, a vineyard and a large flock of
Clunforest sheep.
With the last boy off to college, I sold my farm, retired
from a bond brokerage, I had started after Bank of America seized my employer,
and retired to northern Vermont where I snowshoe and paint with watercolors. My
first showing will be next year.
After graduating from Wesleyan in 1959, I entered The
Dickinson School of Law (now Penn State’s law school). I graduated in 1962, and
began practicing law in Carlisle, PA, where I still practice with a medium size
firm although I now live in Charlottesville, VA.
Anyone interested in my professional career may visit my law firm’s web site at
http://www.mdwo.com/people/johnFowler.html.
While still in law school, I married Noreen McKinstry
from Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Noreen and I have three children, Cindy, John and
Amanda, who live in Millers Creek, NC, Newtown Square, PA, and Lancaster, PA,
respectively. Sadly after almost 36 years of marriage, Noreen died following a
brief battle with cancer in 1996. I now have four grandchildren, all born after
Noreen’s death.
In early 1996 and again in early1997, on the one per year
plan, I tore each quadriceps both of which were surgically repaired. Because I
have a twin sister and a younger sister who live in
Charlottesville and because the University of Virginia has an
excellent aqua therapy facility in its sports/medicine center, I came to
Virginia to rehab my knees. It was successful, although I doubt I could
effectively engage in “Kick the Can” at Russell House, as many of us enjoyed
doing after dinner a stretch of years ago.
While in Virginia, I was introduced to my second wife,
Carolyn, a close friend of my younger sister. Carolyn was the HR manager of a
Siemens manufacturing plant in Johnson City, TN. Following our marriage, we
lived in Johnson City for about a year before moving to
Charlottesville where Carolyn had previously lived for a number of
years.
I continue to practice law, traveling to PA about every
other week for a few days at a time. Otherwise, I am connected to my law office
there by computer, fax and telephone. Most of my clients don’t know where I am
(nor do I half the time) when they call me at my office, which is kind of neat.
I still enjoy golf, particularly with my son, and bridge, among a variety of
other activities and interests that we now have the time for and, fortunately
and thankfully, the good health to pursue.
Except for a three and half year stint in the Coast
Guard, I spent my entire working career teaching English (thanks to George
Creeger especially), coaching (particularly ice hockey – ditto Bill Spurrier),
and school mastering which was part of my parents’ world.
Mary-Lou and I met in graduate school at UCONN and have
been married since 1968. Our son David and his wife teach at The Taft School
where he is the Athletic Director. Mary –Lou retired as Chair of the English
Department at Plymouth State University two years ago; I have been retired for
six years now.
We live in central New Hampshire on an early 19th century
hill farm with a big vegetable-flower garden, fruit trees and bushes, and about
three miles from the house, a good trout pond where I don’t spend quite enough
time. So, with two grandchildren, lots of books, some volunteer work, and
interests in politics, theatre, and in local history, we are happy and don’t
have time to miss the teaching careers we both left.
Best wishes to you all.
An English major with a Ph.D. in social psych from the
University of Michigan, who defines himself as a survey methodologist: one who
studies sources of error and how to minimize it in statistics derived from
asking samples of people to answer questions. My life basically has been a
series of research projects. A few things that I might put in my obituary:
First director of the Center for Survey Research at UMass Boston, which is still going strong 34 years later.
Author or co-author of four pretty widely used books on
survey methods.
Contributed a good bit to knowledge about how to measure
the way patients are affected by the medical treatments they receive.
Particularly satisfied with work we did that documented
and widely disseminated the effects of treatment of prostate cancer. I think
those studies changed the discussions doctors and patients have about the
implications of the treatment options.
Though I still spend time at CSR, since 2002 I have been
President of the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making (www.fimdm.org),
the mission of which is to change the way medical decisions are made. The goals
are to alert people to when decisions are occurring that warrant patient input
and to get patients the information and understanding they need to play an
active role in decisions about their health. When we succeed, the problem of
health care costs will be largely solved: everyone should be able to get the
medical care they need and want at no collective increase in cost, without any
sense of rationing. We hope to have the world changed by the time I retire.
My wife Judy and I live in Brookline, MA. We have three
kids and a couple of grandchildren who are scattered around the country. My golf
game peaked in 1960, but I am hoping to get it back to its former glory one of
these days.
Jay A. Levy, M.D., an AIDS and cancer researcher and an
educator at the University of California, School of Medicine at San Francisco (UCSF), is presently Professor in the
Department of Medicine and Research Associate in the Cancer Research Institute.
He is Director of the Laboratory for Tumor and AIDS Virus Research at UCSF. Dr.
Levy graduated with high honors in 1960 from Wesleyan University (Connecticut),
and was awarded Fulbright and French Government fellowships to conduct research
in Paris, France. He earned his M.D. in 1965 from
the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia
University. From 1965 to 1967, he was an intern and resident at the University
of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia).
From 1967 to 1970, he was a Staff Associate at the
National Cancer Institute (Bethesda, MD), where he conducted research on DNA and
RNA cancer viruses. In 1972, Dr. Levy was appointed Assistant Professor at UCSF'
Department of Medicine, where he established a laboratory for the study of tumor
viruses; he has been a full Professor since 1985.
During more than 20 years, Dr. Levy and his researchers
have dedicated their efforts to the studies of AIDS. In 1983 he co-discovered
the AIDS virus, HIV, that he originally called the AIDS-associated retrovirus
(ARV). He pioneered heat-treatment studies that demonstrated how to inactivate
HIV in clotting factor preparations. This approach, for which he received the
Murray Thelin Award from the National Hemophilia Foundation, has protected many
hemophiliacs from HIV infection. He was the first to report the presence of HIV
in the brain and bowel and linked it to diseases in these tissues. His group was
also the first to demonstrate the ability of CD8+ lymphocytes in healthy
infected people to control HIV replication by a noncytotoxic mechanism. It is
mediated, at least in part, by a secreted CD8+ cell antiviral factor (CAF). This
discovery presents a new insight into how the host immune system can control
viral infection without killing the infected cell. Dr. Levy is currently
conducting studies directed at the development of an AIDS vaccine and approaches
for immune-based therapies.
Dr. Levy is a Fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was given the Award of Distinction by the
American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR). He received the Distinguished
Alumnus Award from Wesleyan University and an Honorary Degree in Science from
that University. In 1998, he was chosen by the San Francisco
Examiner as one of the ten most influential people in the
San Francisco Bay Area. In 1999, he was given the
UCSF/ARI George Sarlo award for excellence in mentoring. In 2002, he was chosen
as the 45th Faculty Research Lecturer at the University, the highest honor given
to a member of the Academic Senate. Last year he received the Abbott Award for
outstanding research in immunology. Dr. Levy is the Editor-in-Chief of the
highly-cited journal AIDS. He has published over 400 scientific articles and
reviews and is the author or editor of thirteen books dealing with viruses and
immunology. Among these are his acclaimed four volume series, The Retroviridae
and his seminal, sole-authored book, HIV and the Pathogenesis of AIDS, now in
its second edition and translated into Chinese. Dr. Levy participates in
programs of the World Affairs Council and is an AIDS advisor to several
countries (e.g. India, China, Mexico, Ethiopia, the Dominican
Republic, Thailand).
At times I think that my life’s biography is a stereotype
of middle class (lower middle class?) America. I’ve been married to the same
wonderful woman for 45 years. I’ve taught at the same school in small town
America for 44 years, and I’ve lived in a 1790 house for the past 30 years in a
community of 1700 people.
Bob Sade, my freshman room mate at Wesleyan, arranged a
blind date with Karen Obermeyer in the spring of 1957. She soon accepted my
fraternity pin and we dated throughout college. A week after graduation we were
married, and Kay’s nursing position supported us while I earned a master’s
degree in education from Harvard. We moved to Hanover (NH) High School in 1961,
and I’ve been on the staff there ever since. Along the way I also earned another
master’s degree from Carnegie, spent a year at UNH, and accumulated credits from
other colleges.
We have four children. Mandy, our eldest, attended
Wesleyan for a year before returning to the University of New Hampshire. She
pursued graduate work in museum/zoo studies and is currently the associate
registrar at the National Zoo in Washington. Abbe, with mixed feelings from her
father, graduated from Williams and is currently youth coordinator for the Lyme
Congregational Church and follows her passion as a singer in numerous community
groups. Cindy went into the Air Force from high school and then to culinary arts
school. At present she is a very happy homemaker in Miami.
Norm has stayed with the military, and he is currently serving his second tour
of duty with the 82 Airborne Division in Afghanistan which continues to keep his
parents on edge. We also lost a daughter, Gabrielle, in infancy. And of course
Kay is the rock upon which this family is built, often sacrificing herself so
that the kids and I can go the extra distance in our fields of interest.
As a social studies teacher for 44 years, I’ve taught
just about every course you can image. Early in my teaching career I was asked
to teach Anthropology and when I told my principal that I had never taken a
course in Anthropology, he responded that since I graduated from Wesleyan with a
liberal arts education I must be able to teach anything. And so I have taught
just about anything, although I consider myself basically an American Historian.
So far the peak of my career is being chosen teacher of the year for the state
of New Hampshire in 1988, and I continue to be president of the state’s teacher
of the year organization. At the present time the State of New Hampshire
considers me retired, but I still teach three classes a day at Hanover, and I
haven’t yet figured out how to get home before six.
I’ve been very active in Hanover’s extra curricular
program, and I have coached boys and girls varsity basketball, varsity softball,
and junior varsity baseball. For many years I have been the school’s quiz bowl
(academic competition) coach, and we have had a lot of success - it is great to
be blessed with very bright students. I was department head for a short time,
served on regional social studies organizations, and ran the area summer school
for about ten years. It is interesting to note that the school is reaccredited
every ten years, and I have been through five of those reaccreditation
processes. Hanover High School is one of the best high schools in America, but I
often play the role of hair shirt by bringing up issues where I think we could
do better.
Those who remember me from Wesleyan will probably not be
surprised that I continue to play softball in the local men’s league. I did stop
playing in the Sunday night basketball games two years ago, but my basketball is
still in my closet ready to be brought out with any encouragement. We are very
active in our local church and have held just about all of the jobs at one time
or another. As time allows (and even some times when it doesn’t) we are involved
in other community activities. I always planned to be a social studies teacher
in a small New England town where I could make a difference, and with the help
of my wife and family, I think I have.
I grew up in Lumber City, a fly-speck of a town in
southern Georgia, and came to Wesleyan because of the College’s outreach plan to
increase its geographic diversity; I came with a Heddon Scholarship, and with
the help of a certain My Weekly Reader salesman. Perhaps the critical
link was my aunt Alice, who was curriculum director of a metropolitan
Atlanta
school system, and who in that role was a regular customer for Wesleyan’s highly
profitable little newspaper for school kids. So when the salesman was asked by
his employer to look around for promising southern boys who might apply to
Wesleyan, my aunt said, “I know someone in Lumber City.”
I remember vividly studying the Wesleyan catalog like
Alice peering down the rabbit hole into another world; fascinated, I “holed up”
in my room for an entire weekend writing the essay that apparently did the
trick. As I was leaving the campus after graduation, Bob Norwine said to me,
“Congratulations, Gus. And by the way, that was quite an essay. It convinced us
to take a gamble on you.” Certainly it wasn’t the credibility of my grades at
Jeff Davis High School, whose alma mater some of you enjoyed making me sing
while standing on a table in the Crow dining room.
The whole journey north and east was terrifying, my only
solace being Marvin Houseworth, who make the trip with me and my father, and
whose own father was a farmer in Klondike, GA; and who became a life-long
friend.
Fraternity rush was perhaps the most palpable anxiety I
faced, and in every fraternity there was a moment in which I was surrounded in a
hallway and asked, “So, Gus, how do you feel about integration?” To which
question I always replied enthusiastically, “I’m all for it.” Often my response
led to a surprised silence; but at Crow I felt something else: a convergence, a
sense of welcome. Here was a really lively and diverse bunch. Sick of the Jim
Crow south I had been raised in, I was delighted to find Lenny and Ernie as
members, as well as Jews, Catholics, WASPS, preppies and scholarship kids like
me.
Coming to Wesleyan had a tremendous effect on my life; it
opened vistas I wouldn’t have seen from Emory or the University of Georgia. In
spite of the hazing, the Crow chapter was warmly supportive of the kid who said
“awl” for oil and “howdy” for hi. A number of you reached out to me and were
informal mentors—Walt Burnett, Doug Bennet, Ted Wieseman, Don Hinman, and
others. Though I was president of my senior class, a ball that I later dropped
resoundingly, Crow had a much deeper impact on me than my class did. Until this
reunion was proposed, I don’t think I realized just how important to me it was.
I liked to write, and at Wesleyan Richard Wilbur was a
tremendous influence. I majored in English and thought I would be a poet. Wilbur
helped me get a post-Wesleyan job teaching at Phillips Andover, where I studied
with Greek scholar and poet Dudley Fitts. I had a fellowship to go on to the
Harvard MAT program, and I thought I would teach in a private school and write
poetry.
In my junior year at Wesleyan, I met—through my roommate,
Steve Jones—a Mt. Holyoke sophomore named Midge (now Margaret) Mashburn. We fell
in love, and then she went off for her junior year at the University of Geneva. When she returned for her senior year, I was
teaching at Andover while she finished Holyoke. We got engaged immediately, and
as it turned out, prematurely. Love is, as Bruno Bettleheim’s book suggests, not
enough.
Wesleyan nurtured me and challenged me, but it also
pampered me. I was not at all ready to face the world of marriage and career;
and as the year at Andover wore on, my panic about how to be a grownup
increased. As our wedding day approached, I realized that I couldn’t do it. I
quit the job at Andover abruptly, called off our wedding, and retreated to Atlanta, where my parents had moved. Bless her heart, as we
say in the south, my mother found me a good therapist, who in turn helped
Margaret find one in New York City, where she had
enrolled at Columbia for a master’s degree in
French. Two years later, after some cliff-hanger moments, Margaret and I were
married near her parents’ Florida home.
My therapist in Atlanta
became a powerful figure in my life. Brilliant, charismatic, psychiatrist Carl
Whitaker was on the way to becoming one of the founders of the field of family
therapy. Fascinated by the drama and complexity of psychotherapy, I decided to
become a psychologist and a therapist. Margaret and I moved to Chapel Hill, NC,
where I did the coursework for a Ph.D. in clinical psychology; she got a second
master’s degree (in psychology and education) at Duke. By that time Carl had
moved to the medical school of University of Wisconsin,
Madison, where he was teaching family therapy. I went there for my
clinical training (internship and post-doc) and became Carl’s protégé. I stayed
on the clinical faculty in the Psychiatry Department and joined the academic
faculty in the Child and Family Studies Department. I also began a private
practice. With Carl’s support and encouragement, I became a circuit rider for
the emerging field of family therapy, traveling around the country giving
lectures and leading workshops; I also wrote numerous journal articles and
co-edited a text, The Book of Family Therapy.
We stayed in Madison for
ten years, and two of our three children were born there. Eventually I realized
that I had to step outside the long shadow of my mentor. Margaret, meanwhile,
had started a progressive school in Madison, The
Wingra School, and we had begun to experiment with seeing a few married couples
together in my private practice. Toward the end of our time there I wrote The
Family Crucible (Harper/Collins, 1978), which follows a case Carl and I
treated together. Having sold a quarter million copies, it is perhaps the most
widely read book about family therapy and is often used as an introduction to
the field.
I persuaded Margaret to move to
Atlanta
in 1978, where I started a private institute called The Family Workshop. In Atlanta, Margaret continued her interests in education, and
for several years she chaired the Board of the Paideia School, which our
children attended. I taught seminars and supervised other therapists in family
therapy, and I continued to lead workshops around the country and to write
professional articles. Margaret and I also began to work together regularly as
co-therapists; we worked with married couples primarily and often involved
couples’ children and their families of origin. Our work together was for both
of us our most exciting professional involvement. In 1988 I published The
Fragile Bond (Harper/Collins), a book about marriage which describes my
close collaboration with Margaret; it also describes some of our own
relationship struggles.
I had a health crisis in 1997 which precipitated our
decision to retire early. We bought some land and proceeded to build a house
near Brevard, NC, in the mountains. Though building a modernist house in western
North Carolina proved to be something of an ordeal (and a second career), we
love living in an ecologically-oriented community in this wonderful temperate
rain forest. We especially love swimming in our mountain lakes, and hiking
together. There is also a wonderful music festival here in the summer. Margaret
has become a passionate and expert native plant gardener, and is an active
community volunteer.
Our older two children live in New England: Sarah lives
in Concord, MA, and is an administrator at the Fayerweather Street School in
Cambridge. Her husband Rob is a computer software writer; their daughter Katie
is 2 ½. Mark lives in Portland, ME, where he is
finishing a pulmonary fellowship at Maine Medical Center. His wife Nicole is a
geneticist and teaches at Bowdoin; their son Emil is 3. Our youngest, Julia, is
married to an Argentine, Juan Mora, whom she met at Haverford at 19; Juan is an
actor/director, Julia a writer. They live in Buenos Aires.
Most of our travel budget is spent on trying to keep up with their lives. Like
most of you, I’m sure, we love being grand-parents.
For a while after we retired I continued to try to
consult and write in my field, and in 2000 I co-edited a text; but the pleasures
of just livin’ have gradually won out. I still enjoy writing. I am experimenting
with a synthesis of poems and photographs, which I call “photopoems,” and I am
working on a memoir and on a book of reflections of a marriage therapist.
Though I was active in several professional associations
and received a number of citations and awards during my career, nothing gave me
more pleasure than being named a Wesleyan Distinguished Alumnus.