60th Reunion

OUR 60th REUNION
June, 2022

by Ned Groth

We had our 60th reunion at Darrow, June 10-12, 2022. While it was on the slender side compared to our 50th, 12 of us, and six wives, plus Bob Lang’s grandson, Dan (Darrow 2014), made for a robust gathering that was at once warm, stimulating and mellow.

Those attending included Bill and Joan Anthony, Tom Bird, Joe and Laurie Coffee, Peter Deri, Peter Golden, Dave and Elaine Griswold, John Ho and Li Xiao-Yun, Bob Lang, Anson and Bev Perina, Carl Sharpe, Huib Soutendijk and Kathy Markel, and Ned Groth.

Three of us who had hoped to be there, Chuck Arundale, Carl Braun and Pete Loomis, each had to cancel their plans because of family health issues – part of the territory in the waning years of our 8th decade, I guess. Jim Mithoefer had said he really thought he’d make it this time but as in all previous years, when the day arrived, he didn’t. We will hope to see all of them at our 65th.

Although the Classes of ’60 and ’61 had not had their own 60th reunions because of the pandemic and were invited to come back this year, only one from ’60 (Van Selden) and two from ’61 (Chuck Currie and Chip Detwiller) did so.

Anthonys, Perinas, Lang & Dan, Sharpe and Groth, all arrived Friday and stayed at the Inn at the Shaker Mill Falls (new name, same owner, same old funky place), our traditional gathering spot. Golden stayed with Deri in Lenox, and they came over for Saturday’s events. The Coffees, Soutendijks, Griswolds and Hos drove up on Saturday. Huib and Kathy had to leave after lunch, Dave and Elaine joined us for dinner on Saturday at the Inn then drove back home to Connecticut, while Joe and Laurie and John and Xiao-Yun were at our dinner and stayed at the Inn that night. Bird joined us on campus but had made his own (Darrow dorm I think) sleeping arrangements.

Lawrence Klein told me this was the largest reunion attendance ever (about 180 registered alumni, most of whom seemed, um, awfully young to us.) We spent a lot of our time lounging in the (new) “campus center.” A couple of years ago, they refurbished the Dairy Barn and created a landscaped meeting area on the east side of the building, with a long north-south walkway that opens up at the Wickersham end into a broad, paved seating area with lots of chairs, a fire pit for warmth and toasting marshmallows, and a few young trees for shade. It’s quite a nice enhancement of the campus, a natural place to gather and converse, and we were readily drawn to it.

To engage and entertain us, the school offered a “Shaker tour,” led by school head Andy Vadnais, who is a Shaker historian; he showed us some of the unique features of the buildings, like the attic (with roof trusses) and basement (inside the foundation) of the Meeting House. Dinner on Friday was organized as a “dorm crawl,” with a series of outdoor buffets and beverages. Starting at Meacham, with cheese and crackers and crudites, we moved on to Hinckley, with chips and dips, shrimp and salad, then wound up behind Brethren’s, with hot hors d’oeuvres and cookies. First time they had done it this way and IMO it worked very well, gave us a chance to meet and chat with some of those younger alumni, and there was good locally brewed craft beer and plenty of tasty food for those who stayed the course.

Saturday featured the traditional morning events – the mass photo on the library steps, the meeting in the chapel, followed by lunch at (outside) the Dairy Barn and photos of smaller groups of alumni, in our case of the 11 of us who were around. (The Hos hadn’t arrived yet so John missed the class picture.) In the afternoon there were several scheduled forms of entertainment that most of us skipped, preferring to sit around and catch up. On both days, more than one of us disappeared for a while – to take a nap, it turned out. (What can I say.) Two of us also bought along younger drivers. Sunday featured a memorial service in the chapel; I don’t think any of us went, even though Jay Tanner and Dave Hoon are among those whose names should have been read. Then there was brunch, under the tent on campus. Coffees and Anthonys had headed home after breakfast at the Inn, but Hos, Lang, Perina and I took advantage of that one last event.

The consensus highlight of the weekend was our class dinner on Saturday at the Inn. Back in February, Joe made the mistake of asking me if I could use help with plans this year, and I joyfully said “Yes!” and delegated housing and food to him. In addition to coordinating our room reservations, Joe worked with Michael, the Inn’s proprietor and a gourmet chef, to feed us in style. We got nice continental breakfasts each morning, and for Saturday, we decided to have our own private banquet, rather than attend the dinner with all the alumni under the tent on campus, live music and fireworks or not. Everyone except Huib and Kathy and Bird was at our dinner, we all sat at a long table in the dining room at the Inn, the company was most delightful and the food – appetizers in the Waterfall Room, pasta Bolognese, garden salad and apple pie for dinner – was exquisite. Kudos to Joe, Michael and his staff. A shout-out also to Lang, Ho and Perina, who each brought wine, sufficient in quality, quantity and variety that we lacked nothing in that regard.

I collected some news from most of us, 5-year interval updates. Bill and Joan are both enjoying retirement now, though each is still involved in volunteer and community activities. They have spent part of the last couple of winters in Florida and one of these years will get together with Towner Lapp, which they couldn’t manage this year. Joe and Laurie are both very busy: he still works (consulting on law enforcement education and professional training projects), part time, on things he likes doing, while Laurie volunteers for practically everything, and they have family (Jeff, his wife, grandkids) close by. Carl is long retired from teaching but keeps busy, promoting poetry, keeping in touch (by Facebook etc.) with former students. Carl looked fit and trim, more so than most of us, and says he walks six miles a day. He got up at dawn each day to do just that, and on Saturday came back with pictures of Governor Tilden’s mausoleum. Many of us knew that the large building at the junction of Routes 22 and 20 (once Shoji’s restaurant) was the Tilden Mansion. Carl discovered that, farther north on 22, there’s an old cemetery, and Tilden, who was the Democratic candidate for president in 1876, is buried there. We got curious and Googled for Tilden’s biographical details and read all about the 1876 election, which was bitterly disputed, with allegations of fraud and a politically engineered solution that awarded the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes, even though Tilden had won a majority of both the popular vote and the electoral college. Read up on it, the resonance with 2020 will blow your mind.

On with the news: Anson and Bev are both still working. His company still inspects power lines, though he says his work now consists of writing checks. Bev is winding down her real estate business and they are splitting the year between Fort Collins and Albuquerque, following the temperature gradient. Deri is also still seeing patients – one week a month live in NYC, and by Zoom the other three weeks. He says shrinks have a hard time knowing when to quit, sort of like Congresspeople. Golden continues to write, producing philippics he hopes will change the world; he and I have had a few philosophical discussions about whether it’s too late and we should just give up and try to live as well as we can. He leans toward fighting like hell, I lean toward fatalism and turning inward, and I got a sense that Anson and Bob lean my way, while Joe and Peter D focus on balance, living your best life and doing what you can to improve those things you can do something about.

Lang is still selling insurance, and has just sold his farm in Salem, NY. He sold the house in Summit 10 years or so ago, rents a condo there, and isn’t sure where he’ll settle down. Groth (that is, I) have sold our home in Pelham, NY and in the first week of July, daughter Sarah and I are moving to San Francisco, where my son Daniel and his wife Colleen already live. We’ll all be living close to each other in the city; this was Sharon’s and my (and Sarah’s) plan, and we are carrying it out ins spite of losing her, so it’s both exciting and achingly sad, but this is my next chapter and I’m getting on with it. I’ll be driving out there in July (to get my car across the country) and expect to see (and mooch off of) Coffees, Perinas, and with any luck, maybe Loomis and Manchester, along the way.

It's highly likely that some of the others who attended also have significant news, but I either wasn’t in earshot when they spoke of it, forgot to ask about it, or it passed through my increasingly sieve-like brain without lodging there. Some of the other things we shared were personal stories that you confide to old friends in an intimate conversation after a few glasses of wine but don’t expect to see posted on the website, so we will follow a policy of what happens at the Inn, stays at the Inn. I will circulate this as a draft to those who are featured in it, and anyone who wishes to embellish is invited to do so.

One amusing and unusual element this time: On Saturday afternoon we were sitting around talking in the “Waterfall Room” at the Inn, when a black bear came out of the woods to investigate the garbage cans outside the room’s picture window. He didn’t hang around long (the Inn doesn’t leave edibles in the garbage there, and since this fellow had visited before, some bear-proofing steps had been taken.) Still, that was a first for us.

Many of you often ask, “How is Darrow doing?” Attending reunions is one good way to find out, but since most of the class wasn’t there, here’s an update.

At the “town meeting,” Head Andy Vadnais and Board Chair Alexa Seip ’74 filled us in on the state of the school, which is sobering. In many ways it’s still the same place, reaching kids and teaching them how to succeed and grow into caring citizens, building a community, sending graduates to quite a few excellent colleges. But many significant problems loom. The past few years have been very tough financially. The Trump administration essentially stopped issuing student visas, almost completely cutting off Darrow’s stream of Asian and other foreign students – about a third of the student body, most of whom pay full tuition. To keep the school open, they had to admit a much larger fraction who needed significant financial aid, reducing tuition revenue and depleting the endowment, spending it on scholarships. Then came the pandemic, which closed the campus for a year and created many new expenses to make it possible to bring students back this past year. With budget stress came deferred maintenance, and as has happened before in the school’s history, the condition of the Shaker buildings deteriorated to an unacceptable degree – right now many need new roofs, there is water damage, there is peeling paint, many also need plumbing and heating upgrades. The condition of the physical plant has huge negative impacts on admissions, especially with kids from wealthier (full-tuition) families, who as Alexa put it, “don’t want to live in a slum.”

Beyond that, a couple of the Shaker buildings simply showed their age by basically starting to fall down, requiring emergency repairs. The east side of the Tannery – the foundation on the pond side – collapsed and had to be rebuilt over two years, and the kitchen wing of Whitaker House, added by the Heynigers in the 1930s, essentially fell off the building, ditto. The “living machine,” the innovative water treatment plant, has died and needs to be rebuilt. On top of all that, New York State is now forcing communities to enforce long-standing state building codes, so the previously lax town of New Lebanon has been sending building inspectors up Shaker Road to tell the school the dormitories can’t continue to house students unless they are equipped fully with sprinkler systems, security systems, handicap access, and do on.

It all adds up to an onslaught of major new expenses and problems, many of which the school has faced and overcome before, but not all at once as now, and not on a scale like now. That made Andy Vadnais tell us starkly in the (just reopened) Tannery meeting, “Darrow is going to have to change, or we’ll die, possibly in as few as the next two or three years.”

The board persuaded Alexa Seip, a past board chair who had retired several years ago, to return to lead the effort to meet these challenges. If you’ve met Alexa you’ll know she’s perfect for the role, forceful, optimistic, energetic, unrelenting. There are plans afoot to try to get grants for rehabbing the Shaker buildings, a contract has been let to reconstruct the broken parts of the living machine. But the center of the planned transformation is a new dormitory, a modern structure that will meet all codes and allow the school to move students out of at least a couple of the Shaker dorms. An architect has been hired and we were shown preliminary plans for a building that would sit south of Brethren’s along the road. The estimated cost is about $7.5-8 million, which those of us who know such things says is pretty good for new construction these days. To fulfill this plan, the school will have to mount the largest capital campaign in its history. They’re raring to go and sounding confident they can do it. You can all expect that at some point you may be asked to play a part.