Class Toasts: Reunion 2012

Casa de Piedra gracefully held the energy of 400 reunion revelers the weekend of June 8-10, with over 200 alumni and their families and friends joining the wide spectrum of activities. (See www.thacher.org/reunion for the complete schedule of events.)

Of the 14 entertaining and enlightening toasts offered under the big tent during the Saturday evening banquet, here is a sampling (text provided by toasters):

CdeP 1957, by John Stephenson

My family has a special relationship with The Thacher School. My older brother, Charlie, graduated in 1953. And, my son, Jack, graduated in 1983. I, too, arrived here from San Francisco as a freshman. Four years later, with many lifelong friendships having been formed, our Class of ’57 graduated and headed off to college.

As I look over at my 5 classmates, I am reminded of the heavy involvement of all my classmates in many campus activities throughout our Thacher careers.    

We were enthusiastic, and we took risks. And, we always supported each other. When things did not go well, this support made a huge difference. Meanwhile, our friendship bonds continued to strengthen.  
During our senior year, Jon Beck, who is sitting right over there, and I served as prefects over the freshman class, and we lived in the Lower School dorm. As the months passed and we neared the end of the semester, I began to notice a definite change in these youngsters. Besides taking their studies seriously, they were all involved in various campus activities. Most importantly, they were forming lasting friendships.

Looking back, after 55 years, it is these lifelong friendships that matter. Even though my classmates have led diverse lives - - and, we have lived our lives in all parts of the world - - we make an effort to come to these Reunions to honor these friendships.    A TOAST TO THE CLASS OF ’57 !!      


CdeP 1962, by Michael Milligan

Our 50th reunion. 50 years. It’s an unimaginable length of time when you’re 18, looking forward.  It’s an instant when you look at an aging stranger and suddenly it’s Jay McReynolds, and you are both 18, and no time has passed at all.

It was a halcyon time we came out of, a time before.  It was the early days of rock and roll, post-Elvis and pre-Beatles.  Kennedy was president -- and alive.  The Korean War was memory and no one even knew where Vietnam was.  We followed rules -- mostly.  We were pre-rebellion, and if someone snuck a smoke behind the barn it was tobacco.  We wore crew cuts and thought they looked cool. We talked a lot about girls.

Reunions are all about memory. We honor the present, its new buildings and grass fields, but we’re really here to celebrate our past. And what is this thing memory?

Memory is vignettes -- those intense, sensual snapshots we can still feel with every nerve.  For me it’s the pleasure of a tree-ripe orange from the box at the back of the dining room, juice dripping down my chin after a day at the track.  It’s one night, Upper School, Lower Upper year, Rolly Greene’s room, what seems in memory like a dozen guys crammed in there with the stereo cranked up high blasting out Ray Charles and all of us singing along.
           [CLASS STANDS AND SINGS: “What’d I Say”]
[Aside: Mr. Headmaster, do you have any control over who you invite to these things?]

Memory is intensity -- and what is adolescence in an all-boys school if not intense?  Yes, yes...I’m sure we got a really good education without all those distractions.  But was it worth the deprivation?  I won’t say we were obsessed with girls.  I’m sure we occasionally talked about something else.  We had 3 dances per year in those days, each one an impossible encounter between longing and fantasy on the one hand and cold reality on the other.  There was one shining light in all this, however: our Headmaster had a lovely daughter just our age.  And I think every guy in the class was in love with Peggy Chase.
           [CLASS STANDS AND SINGS: “Peggy Sue”]

And just to show that young love never dies...Peggy, will you wave? [Peggy stands.]

Memory is, of course, people -- Were our faculty really giants, or is that just what time does?  David Lavender, author and superb teacher; William S. McCaskey, a man of serene dignity and grace even when they put water in his chair in study hall; and of course Newton K. Chase, Headmaster of legend, he of the feared 5 misconduct marks, man of steely determination, a wonderful smile and just a hint of twinkle in his eye.  Some of them are still with us too: Marvin Shagam, Jack Huyler and of course Bob Miller, known to generations as Sneaker Bob.  And Tom May, class of ’52, who had the good sense to go from grades to grapes.  See if you can cadge any wine from his table, by the way.

It’s mostly, though, about our brothers.  Our class lost far too many early, 15% in our first few years.  Tony. Brooke. Rolly. Pete. Bill. Maybe that makes the rest of us closer, makes us hold a bit tighter to our past.  We graduated 33 and have 22 here tonight, an incredible gathering across years and space. And we savor our memories.

There is no summarizing what we got from Thacher, or how we carried it through our lives.  Certainly our time here prepared us to search and to strive.  As to how we did, well...
           [CLASS STANDS AND SINGS: “Satisfaction”]

(Don’t worry -- at the 60th we’ll sing “I Did It My Way”)

Well, folks, there’s bad news and there’s good news.  The bad news is that this whole group has promised to attend the next reunion with an expanded repertoire of songs.  The good news is that that’s my cue to bring this to an end.  And so, a toast from the Class of 1962:
           To the future before us all
           To the present around us
           And to the past -- to those intense flashbacks as we walk these familiar paths, and to the 18-year-olds in all of us.
           L’Chaim.

CdeP 1967 by Chad Brown

[Hand “scorecard” to some audience member.]
Let me first explain the scorekeeping:
• Thacher value mention (5 points each)
• Jokes (1 point per joke, 3 if they laugh) [see? three points]
• Brief (minus one point for every minute over 3)
• What about originality? Does originality get points?
• Then, in memory of Fred Lamb: Bonus Points! Bonus points for wordplay. Poems and puns get bonus points.

My favorite [I didn’t start yet actually…] my favorite Thacher story on brevity is what Dave Lavender said when a student asked how long his English paper should be, and he replied it is like a woman's skirt, it should be long enough to cover the subject but short enough to be interesting. That was the sort of thing that went on before the school became coed. I was also told that the Gettysburg Address was a good model for brevity, but it wasn't funny enough to be a Thacher toast. I still remember when Marvin Shagam taught us public speaking and we memorized the Gettysburg Address. What astounds me is that I am able to come back here today to this wonderful place and say,"Fourscore and 7 years ago… Marvin Shagam was already born. And he’s still here!” "Michael, they still teach “fourscore” in the math department, right?

Ok, now you can start. Phil Pillsbury is our traditional class of 67 toaster, but he could not come this year. And so I'm the fill-in. [to scorekeeper] ok, minus one. they didn’t get the pun. Phil, fill-in? Come on people, work with me. Our speaker, who may or may not be Phil, in 5 years will address the question: "What was Sherman Day Thacher thinking when he created this island of altruism in a sea of self-interest?” You can google that phrase and you WON’T find it. So I’ll take a point for originality.

Brooke, and the older classes, are you ok with the verb "google"? We were not taught that either. Thank goodness they taught us about the value of lifelong learning!

Little known fact, not in books by Roy Makepeace or Jack Huyler, it turns out that Mr. Thacher, on his death bed in 1932 summoned Bill McCaskey and told him what he was thinking when he created the school. Bill McCaskey is believed to have passed the answer on to a member of the class of ‘67, which is the class he considered the greatest achievement of his career as admissions director. It is not known to who.. sorry, "to whom" I gotta be careful. Jack Huyler is STILL here! …At least it wasn't a comma blunder. So be here in 2017 to see if in fact Phil was the one, and if so what Mr. Thacher was thinking.

Ok, now I am really going to start...
For two of our hearts,
life's struggle is through,
Sad to say, they’ve ceased their restless tattoo.
Endsley's is ended,
LeGros has ascended
Their accomplishments clear on review.
Honor, fairness, kindness, and truth.
These are the values we learned in our youth.
'Twas a far different time…
Calls cost but a dime,
And were made from a thing called a phone booth.
For the younger classes, does anybody need "phone booth"
explained? Typewriter? Drive in movie?
Good job on the history department, Michael.

On behalf of the class of '67, thank you, Thacher School, for the many transformative experiences you provided us…And thank you to the teachers who dedicated their lives to helping us. We will be forever grateful….

CdeP 1972 by Bill Dawson

We are 40 years removed from the slate walled classrooms, 40 years from the neighing of horses at dawn, 40 years from the seemingly relentless challenge to master our lessons, and 40 years from the warm camaraderie of our classmates. And, yet, four principles have endured.
Honor.  Fairness.  Kindness.  And truth.
We have returned to honor the school, its skilled and caring faculty and administration, whose predecessors (plus Marvin Shagam) taught us so well.
We are struck once more by the fairness of the campus overlooking the majestic Ojai.
The horses showed us kindness – and a bit of soreness – on familiar trails this afternoon.
And once again, truth resonated in every crevice of these mountains, this campus and in the enduring friendships with our classmates.
Indeed, old Casa Piedra has not faded from our hearts.
So, here’s to the indelible stamp of the Thacher School, a remarkable place that touched us all in profound and life bettering ways.

CdeP 1977 by Mark Granger

Good evening and welcome from the class of 1977. I recently was dining with a fellow Thacher alumni and we were talking about just how different our days in high school were from so many of our friends.  And you know when you think about it is almost unbelievable what we did here as students. For example, one of my classmates in the Upper School, a building  I might add that was heated only with wood fireplaces, had a pet rattlesnake that he kept in a glass cage by his bed and he would continually demonstrate his dexterity by feeding it live mice with his bare hands.  Or the evening some of the boys got busy  filling large garbage bags with acetylene from the welding shop and sending them adrift over these very playing fields to be ignited into huge balls of fire.  Of course I could spend the whole of my toast regaling you with stories about the things I and my classmates did, thereby demonstrating to you that my life at Thacher was in many ways a perfect life for a boy.

But I thought I would take a moment and speak of memories. I recently finished reading Two Years Before the Mast, a book written in 1835 by Richard Henry Dana. Dana was a Harvard student who, upon discovering that he was losing his eyesight and health, decided to improve both by signing on as a common seaman and sailing from Boston around the Horn to trade for cow hides  along the coast of California.  Now this book was very influential in the eastern united states because as you can imagine not much was known about California at that time. Dana’s descriptions of the ways and life of the “Californian” are fascinating  and describe in considerable detail his time exploring on horseback this area of the coast. While reading these passages I felt in some ways transported to my time at Thacher, reliving the amazing beauty of this area and the prominent role that horses played a in our lives as students.

Fifty years after Richard Dana made his travels, another easterner made his way to the Ojai , not for his health but for the health of his brother.  A man who inherited the profession of education as a way of life, from his father, this man of course was Sherman Day Thacher.  

Now I  am proud to  tell you that The Thacher School changed my life in many ways, and most of them for the better.  But I think that after leaving Thacher 35 years ago my fondest  memories  are of  experiencing California as perhaps those early visitors did.

So tonight, I would ask you join me in a toast to Sherman Day Thacher and his school, which gave us all the chance to experience paradise for a brief moment in our lives.  So thank you Sherman Day from the class of 1977, and I hope to see you all again in 5 years.


CdeP 1982 by Brian Kopperl

Well, it’s my turn to try and capture something about the spirit of this place, Casa de Piedra.  Now some might point to Tradition and how that binds us.  Look at how easily we fall into a verse of “Domine” -- as if we’d sung it at dinner just last night.   Tradition might hint at it.

Or maybe it’s the sense of place . . . you walk over to the Pergola and look out across the Ojai Valley . . .  or you smell the eucalyptus trees and you’re transported back to a November rain storm long ago. . .  And you know the Place Has Gotten Under Your Skin.

Or perhaps it’s that sense of abiding trust.  Back in our time there wasn’t a door-lock on the whole campus.  Nobody has thatin the real world.  But here, everybody knew and shared the code.  

But – while these are all important, they aren’t quite enough.  So, I think my best path has to lie with the people, those who spoke to us back when we called this place home.  Maybe you know them too.
Some of you may remember Chuck Warren.  Now, all of us were pretty proud of our hiking and camping exploits.  That’s like Thacher 101 and DNA stuff.   But, you know, when they coined the Thacher adage, “Plan for the Worst, Hope for the Best,” old Chuck Warren was smiling hard.   

And here’s the simple tale.  One rainy winter Assembly, when the whole school gathered in Room 14 in what used to be called the Science Building, Mr. Warren told us about the recent winter camping trip he had just led.... And how one disaster had followed another, with pounding rain and then snow storms.  Cold nights with sloppy sleeping bags and wet fire-wood. Stoves that wouldn’t light.... When suddenly, with two days left in the trip, he had to survive the final, inglorious test out in the woods:  No more T-P.

Ohh yeah! Old Chuck Warren:  He said you only really get to be an “A” Level Camper when you get down to that last single ply of T-P and have to figure it out. Now, in case any of us were wondering about the mechanics of the situation, Chuck obliged and proceeded to discuss -- from a scientific perspective, mind you -- how they met the challenge.  But I’ll leave that aside.  I don’t know if they make ‘em like Chuck Warren at Thacher anymore, but I sure hope so.  To cut to the chase:  He spoke to us of making do with what you’re dealt.

The other faculty member I wanted to briefly remember was slightly more refined -- need I add.  She was our fine arts teacher, Betty Saunders. Now, Betty’s was a serene art studio, located in what is now the Study Hall.  Here, the beautiful natural light poured in. Colorful paintings and drawings were all around.  . . . Inspiration was at the ready.  You’d walk in and invariably Betty would greet you with enthusiasm and affection:  Wonderful, maternal greetings.  Really, for a pudgy fifteen year-old boy away from home:  What wasn’t to love??

But the more of it was her perpetual call to each of us – and not just her brilliant painters , but also the rest like me who were really quite pedestrian in our talents -- still waiting for the art bus to arrive, if you will. . . .  And Betty would always say big and bold:   “Oh, go to town with color.”  Heck, even the pedestrians among us could latch on to that.  She helped get to the core of what we were meant to be doing in that space -- and really here at Thacher as a whole:  Be free to experiment.  And try a different color on for size.

And so I’d like to close and raise a glass in honor of the Chuck Warrens and the Betty Saunders, and to all those teachers across the decades who in their own way helped shape us to be ready and resourceful – no matter what you get dealt.

And in equal measures, showed us we were here - - and are always meant to experiment. Right up until the restless end . . . May we never forget them.