August 15, 2014
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3 years, 11 months and 12 days
left until our reunion.
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Nominations Opened!
For the ’69 Classmate Award
The “Classies”
Which Classmate -
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Has Most kids
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Has the Youngest Child
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Owns the Most Ed Degrees
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Is Biggest Slacker
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Has Funniest True Story
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Saw Classmate in Oddest place
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Longest time away from Darien
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Has Best Athletic Achievement
Since Reunion?
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Send in your nomination!
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Darien school's opened Monday, August 27 and classmate Josie Mullen returned to the classroom at Middlesex Junior High School along with the kids. William Long, PhD. was a student at Middlesex Junior High one year behind our class and has written a very funny account of his experience at Middlesex:
As I think of it today, Middlesex Junior High was probably inaptly named.
To be sure, the word has deep roots in New England history, perhaps none more prominent than in Longfellow's famous poem, "Paul Revere's Ride," where Paul went riding "Through every Middlesex village and farm, For the country folk to be up and to arm." But to put together hundreds of gender-confused 12-15 year-olds in one huge building and call it Middlesex--well, you can imagine the stories that were told.
I also think the gymnasium had an unfortunate appellation-the Belcher Gym. We gender-challenged boys would, at the end of and even during gym class, try to outdo each other in that activity which seemingly, to us, was confirmed by the name of the gym. Too bad for Mr. Belcher, who I am sure was a distinguished citizen of the town. I wonder to what extent when the gym was dedicated in his honor that people already knew it would be the subject of future jibes.
Junior High is such an awkward time of one's life. You are dissatisfied with your body, no matter how sculpted you are; afraid of the opposite sex; vulnerable to the taunts of the "cool kids"; and fearful of teacher and coach alike. Then there was the real spirit in the air, or at least I picked it up from somewhere, that if I didn't "succeed" in my work at school I was consigning myself to a lifetime of failure.
But I did develop lots of friendships and considered myself fortunate to be able to mingle both with the pocket-protector-wearing science nerds as well as the short-skirt-wearing cheerleaders. I was not, however, simply a jock or a nerd or the most popular kid in the school, but I mingled characteristics of all three. In the past year I struck up a brief email correspondence with Christine, an old classmate; she described me as "fun" and "smart as a tack" from those days. There must be a word we could come up with that would capture this binatarian or trinitarian reality.
I was recently listening to Simon & Garfunkel's 1966 hit "Homeward Bound" and these words stuck in my mind:
"But all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity,
Like emptiness in harmony I need someone to comfort me.
Homeward bound, I wish I was, Homeward bound ..• "
Then my mind rocketed back to eighth grade music class (1965-66, just when the song was new) at Middlesex Junior High School. The reason for this was that my eighth grade music teacher, Mr. Laube, made a special point of teaching us to hate the word "mediocrity."
What was wrong with America, he claimed, in rather-too-menacing tones for a music teacher, was that we were in love with mediocrity. But "menacing" seemed to be his middle name. He had a military mien and a crew-cut that betrayed the fact that the philosophy of the marines had probably seeped more deeply into his soul than the finer notes of Bach or Beethoven. He strode around the music room as if he was a miniature martinet, with shoulders square, chest puffed out and determined stride. He insisted that we sing and memorize the third stanza of the Star-Spangled Banner, though in most Internet collections it is the fourth verse. The language is the most imperialistic of all the verses, and he had us belt it out with passion. For those of you not privileged to have him as a teacher, the words are:
"0 thus be it ever when free-men shall stand
Between their lov'd home and the war's desolation;
Blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land
Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserv'd us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust!"
And the Star - Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
Ah, but there is one little mistake (maybe two) in this verse from the Internet sources. It is the word "when" in the fourth-to-Iast line. Actually, and I know this because we were forced to sing the verse so many times, the original language is "Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just."' Mr. Laube emphasized that little word "'for." To be Americans meant, for him, that our cause was always just, and that God was on our side.
On the one hand, Mr. Laube came across as a rah-rah school spirit type of guy, one who believed you should support your school, your country, your God. On the other hand, however, I think on further reflection that he represented a kind of bluff and bluster, a braggadocio and naive Americo-centrism that was characteristic not only of him but of a large part of an entire uncomprehending generation of (mostly men), whose sons were simply not enthralled by the values of the WWII generation.
I will never forget my father's reaction a few years later, after we had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and the student protests against the Viet Nam War had begun in earnest. He felt the protestors should be "lined up and shot,"' a sort of chilling reminder to me of the narrowness of perspective of the "Greatest Generation," who had kept the world safe from the expansionistic longings of Hitler and had contained the Communists but still didn't understand the basic notion that it was our enemies who lined people up and shot people. When we stop bowing down to the Greatest Generation, as Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw would have us do, we would get a more balanced view of their achievements--they saved Europe from terrible bloodshed and a tyrant's ways, but they seemed not to understand that America had within itself the capacity for self-criticism and improvement, a capacity that begins in protest and criticism.
I was actually scared of Mr. Laube. I never felt he would actually hit me, but I think he tried to give us the impression that he could if he wanted to do so. And, he certainly wouldn't have understood the words or the yearnings of Simon & Garfunkel, no matter how many times they used the word "'mediocrity" in their music.
Perhaps to emphasize the importance of conditioning as well as gymnastics, we were given a gym teacher my 9th grade year named Mr. Battino. Like my music teacher, Mr. Laube, Mr. Battino (I think his first name was Isidore--a name which, in my Protestant upbringing, I had never heard. We just referred to him out of earshot as "Joe") thought that America was losing its toughness and it was his duty to restore it.
While Laube put us through our musical paces and had us memorize the thirdl/fourth stanza of the Star-Spangled Banner, Battino subjected us to lots of lectures on toughness. He told the story once of the value of gymnastics. He was in the navy in WWII and was on the upper deck of the boat, when he was hit by some object, thus causing him to fall 30 feet to the deck below. Because he knew gymnastics, he treated it as a "dismount," he said, and lightly landed on his feet and did a rear summersault, emerging unscathed. It seemed to me that the toughest people always ran into the most enormous physical obstacles. I, who didn’t plan to get knocked off upper decks of ships, politely declined his invitation to take up tumbling.
Each day began with home room period for about ten or fifteen minutes. My 7th grade home room teacher was an older lady, Miss Reed (I think that was her name) who probably had been teaching for 35 years by the time I arrived. Her closest colleague on the faculty was Miss Olson, of like vintage, whose classroom was next door. Neither of them was particularly attractive, and we students, in our respectful and loving ways, developed nicknames for both. Miss Reed was "Pruneface" and Miss Olson, the shorter of the two, was "Mousie:"
'"1’ll never forget one phrase that Miss Reed would often use. Seventh grade students, lest you forget, are walking cases of attention deficit. They have needs that must be attended to right now or else the structure of the universe will be altered. Miss Reed had developed a classic way of handling all the insistent cries of students for attention. It was the simple phrase, "Die in your seats." Some of us would want to use the bathroom, or be excused from our chair, or get a book or countless other things that only 12 year-olds can invent, but her way of keeping order was to tell us to be quiet and die in our seats. As it happened, no one, even those who had seemingly urgent needs, ended up dying.
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Darien High School Football
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September 2010
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October 2010
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16 – Andrew Warde
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2 – St Joe’s (Homecoming)
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24 = At Danbury
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8 – At Wilton
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16 – At Trinity
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23 – Red Lion
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30 - Bassick
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November 2010
6 - at Westhill
13 - Norwalk
25 - Turkey Bowl - New Canaan
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Yes, Money Can Buy Happiness
If you give it away.
By Michael Norton
After a raise you have the same in-laws and the same traffic jams.
DOES MONEY BUY HAPPINESS? We certainly behave as though it does, spending most of our waking hours pursuing it. If only we got that raise, owned that second home, third car or 3G iPad, things would be better, we tell ourselves. We would finally be happy.
Truth be told, people drastically overestimate the impact of changesin income on their well-being. In a survey I conducted with my colleagues Elizabeth Dunn and Lara Aknin at the University of British Columbia, we asked 315 Americans to rank their happiness on a 100-point scale and predict how happy they would be if they made ten different incomes, ranging from $5,000 up to $1,000,000. Those who reported earning $25,000 a year predicted that their happiness would double if they made $55,000. But when we measured the actual happiness of these two groups, the change was only 7%. Beyond that, our data showed that once people reach the median income in the U.S. (about $60,000), the happiness return on additional income is very small.
Hapless lotto winners, take heart. We did discover at least one way to buy happiness with your money: Give it away.
Why might this be the case? We hypothesize that making more money leads people to accumulate more and more material goods, but not to accrue the things that really make people happy-relationships with others. Think of the wealthy person who buys three homes with 15 guest bedrooms-yet finds himself without any friends or family to host. Even shopping, Americans' longtime preferred method of social interaction, now requires no social interaction at all. You can fill your 16-bedroom home with goods without leaving it. All you need is a cable modem and a PC.
To test our idea, we approached strangers on the street and gave them different sums of money ($5 or $20) and told them to spend it by 5 p.m. that day. Half were told to spend the money on themselves, while the other half were told to spend it on others. When reached that evening, those who spent the money on themselves bought things like coffee and food, while those who gave money to others reported spending it on things like gifts for their siblings or donations to the homeless.
The result? Those who had spent their money on others reported feeling much happier at the end of the day than those who had spent their money as they usually did, on themselves. There was no difference in happiness between those who spent $5 or $20, suggesting that it is not how much money you spend, but how you spend it, that boosts the spirits. When we asked people to choose what would make them happiest, most people predicted that spending money on themselves would make them happier than giving it away, suggesting that people overestimate the buzz they get from a new purchase and underestimate the warm-and-fuzzy benefit to social spending.
Money certainly makes some things in life easier, but many aspects of life remain irritatingly the same. You might make more money, but you're still stuck with the same in-laws, siblings, traffic jams and software glitches. So should you keep trying to make money? Absolutely. As long as you remember to spend some of it on others.
Michael I. Norton is an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton University.
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Paul Hendrickson correctly guessed this street:
Mechanic Street
near Goodwives Shopping Ctr
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TEAM69 vs. TEAM70
Summer Softball Game
August 7, 2010
Saturday was a blast. We had about 13 for lunch and about 30 for the game. More 1970ers came than we were expecting so we could field two class teams. We won, by the way, 5 to 4!
Jim Valente pitched, Steve Verses played first, Paul Hendrickson on second. Dave Lynch played short stop and third base. Steve and Patti Craig played the outfield.
We had a lot of 'cheerleaders'. Really, really good time!
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Casey Nickerson is on a Round-the-World sailing trip aboard a sailboat he owns jointly with a few other guys including Jeff Salzman.
See where they are now.
He has posted photos and blog entries which will continue to appear over the duration of the circumnavigation of Planet Earth, which is scheduled to last until March or April of next year.
Here is his website: www.wildtigris.org
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"Hot Stuff"
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Donna 'Summer'!
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Post reunion party- Steve Craig, Janet Martin Fisher, Suzanne Ferree Kent, Wendy Ashcroft, Jenny Bates, Heidi Gerber, Anne Back Price, Patti Shaw Craig
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Who's on Facebook? Let us know...
Ed Tyler, Keith Clark, Jeff Myers, Meri Hock Bjork, Chris Bischof, Mark Pemburn, George Wehmann, Jenny Bates, Kass Bruno, Lisa Kenny, Sally Shutts, John vanden Heuvel, Tim Potts, Anne Irvine, Steve Morgan, Mary Bass Brown, Diane Bell Brooks, Lauren Fair, Mardie Porter, Susan Danver, Steve Lillis, Dinny Evans, Dave Terry, Jamila Potts, Anne Monti, Deb Ridabock, Gary Gibbs, Chris Garr Weber, Carolyn Calder, Beth Shaw, Penny Fox Parkin, Sandy McGill, Barbara Thorne, Mary Falcioni Zarrilli ...
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The names just keep on coming in!
(starting bottom left): Chris Garr, Ellen Johnson, Martha Whelan, Jane Hindenlang
Sue Dickman, Kathy McIntyre, Pam Burkhart Melee, Co Koppert (Young LIfe)
Bobby Grant, Kathy Fricke, Jackie Fitzpatrick, MaryLou Sivos
Heidi Gerber
Carol Augustus Summers, Anna Lamberton, Louis Belfour, Sara Schyler
Man in hat- L. (Ron) Hubbard, the kid on far right with hood is Mardie Porter's brother, Clark Porter
The guy near top row hat and glasses: Middlesex science teacher "Booger" Bates
Right Center back row: The man in the hat and woman next to him-
Mr and Mrs Hendrickson (Paul's parents)!
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A winter scene sent to us from Mardie Porter in Maine. A group of friends cross-country skied 27 miles to an upscale 'hut' complete with meals, showers and even a happy-hour!
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