Got out of MHS with the rest in June 54. That Fall I very traditionally went off to college (Dartmouth) and spent 4 pretty good years there studying geology, spending as much time out in the snow as possible, and partying more than I should have. As a result, my performance was mixed - I didn't get bounced, but my name didn't come up at the graduation awards ceremony.

During those college years I did get back to Mamaroneck fairly often, and spent my summers at home, working construction and sailing. One lucky day at Horseshoe Harbor, one of my hangouts, I met Sheila, one of the many Larchmont Learys, a number of whom (not Sheila) went to MHS. Sheila claims that she knew early on that this was not to be a summer romance, although I, being a guy, was clueless about that sort of thing. It took five years, but as usual she was right, and two kids and 42 years of marriage later it still seems to be working and is certainly the central element in my life. The two kids grew into healthy and very independent adults - Kris, 39, a highly successful coach at Tufts and now Williams, and Nick, 27, a computer jock living in Brooklyn. To Sheila's regret, no grandchildren yet.

By the time we got married at St. Augustine's in 1961 I was out of grad school and into Uncle Sam's Navy, working on a destroyer out of Newport RI. Left the Navy in late 1964 after turning down an opportunity to run Swift boats on the Mekong - by then I had not only a wife but also a baby daughter, and Vietnam seemed like a bad idea.

The expectation for us suburban kids (boys anyway) was that we'd leave school, maybe see a bit of the world, and then get on the New Haven for the rest of our years. This was not necessarily a bad option, and I did try it for 5-6 years and had a reasonably good time. But this after all was the 60s, and there were big tectonic forces at work that pulled many of us off in "non-traditional" directions that we thought were doing god's work. My defining moment was very early on a July morning in 1968 when I had spent the last who knows how many hours watching the Democratic convention from Chicago. I never thought of myself as a radical, but that certainly radicalized me and changed how I looked at life. One result was that I realized that there were larger possibilities. I didn't go to back to medical school and join Albert Schweitzer, but we did move to a farm in Vermont in 1971 and have been here ever since. And like Sheila, Vermont has been a central theme and a major influence - in part the state itself, but in part the state of mind it produced. I worked for the governor and then for the legislature, and ran a political campaign; we raised cows and pigs for a number of years and generally enjoyed a sense of community and purpose.

For the last seventeen years of my employed life I worked for Arthur D. Little, a large consulting firm (but still lived on the farm in Vermont.) This gave me an opportunity to see the world and to explore a number of interesting and important issues with a bunch of really smart people - what else could you ask from a job? To counter that, somehow along the way we thought that being a landlord could be fun, so we now own two of what we laughingly call apartment buildings that are more of a social welfare project than an investment opportunity.

For fun Sheila and I enjoy the kinds of outdoor things we can do close to home - skiing, biking, hiking, paddling. And we are partners with two others in a 33' sailboat that we are able to take to some pretty interesting cruising areas each summer , mostly up north on the Canadian coast. And of course family (there is a lot of it) is a big priority.

All in all a good, if not particularly impressive, life - so far. And humbling - to quote my favorite poet, Tom Lehrer, on the occasion of his 35th birthday: "It is a sobering thought to realize that when Mozart was my age, he'd been dead for three years." I really don't know about future plans. Probably to stay right here and keep on keeping on. I'm on three boards in public education that take a lot of time but are rewarding. I'm somewhat active politically and might like to do more. Then there's just keeping our place together - mowing fields, getting in wood, gardens. All the stuff of ordinary existence. I've been incredibly lucky all my life, and maybe it will hold.