Reunion Memorial Service Remarks by Nick Thacher CdeP 1963
Remarks at Thacher School Reunion Memorial Service
Nicholas S. Thacher CdeP 1963
Nicholas S. Thacher CdeP 1963
16 June 2013
I want to welcome you all to this tranquil, exquisitely lovely spot, so freighted with unique personal memories for each of us, and begin by saying that I recognize that look on your faces. Many years as a school head, speaking to audiences of every size, shape, and composition, as well as my own memories of chapel services on this dusty Mediterranean hillside, have inured me to your collective expression. We all know that no words of wisdom are about to emanate from this podium, but I do appreciate your pretense of interest in what I am about to say.
We’re gathered this morning to honor our classmates who have preceded us into what the Prince of Denmark called “that undiscover’d bourn” as well as to reflect on our own personal relationships with one another and with the school and its teachers who, in ways both trivial and lasting, shaped us during our complicated and confusing secondary years.
As I noted, we each have our own unique relationship to and memories of Thacher, but what we absolutely share in common this morning is the remarkable view spread out behind me. So go ahead—follow in the footsteps of generations of Casa de Piedra students and alumni and look beyond the speaker; you’ve sung the song: “Fair as the valley in its loveliness before us.” Even my grandfather Sherman Day Thacher, a deist if ever there was one, would encourage you to relish your surroundings, all the way down to the familiar sharp shoulders of Matilija Peak that defined for many of us—certainly for me, born and raised in this halcyon valley whose Chamber of Commerce never tires of describing as “Shangri-La”—the edge of our adolescent world.
For me this Memorial Hill has powerful significance, primarily entangled in what the greatest of the English Romantic poets called “intimations of mortality.” My best friend’s name rests on a plaque embedded on the simple stone pillars to your left. I bid my formal goodbyes to the only grandparent I knew as well as to both of my parents and to innumerable friends, relatives, teachers, and casual acquaintances right here in this powerfully restorative place—a place that stirs in me not so much a freshet of grief and celebration as a torrent of loss and appreciation and deep, abiding affection that—though I am no Biblical scholar-- always puts me in mind of the most beautiful lines of Ecclesiastes:
All the rivers run into the sea,
Yet the sea is not full.
Unto the place from whence the rivers come,
Thither they return again.
And—to return, if I may, to Wordsworth:
But there’s a tree—of many, one,
A single flower that I have looked upon.
Both of them speak of something that is gone.
So—if the view before you seems slightly changed, as it undoubtedly does in its details—find consolation, as the Romantic poet did, in those little changes, as well as in the things that haven’t changed—the mingled scents of dust, orange blossom, greasewood, and manure; the sweep of the citrus groves luring your eye westward towards the far rim that obscures the sea, the looming but familiar solidities of Twin Peaks and Chief and Topa Topa, the occasional nicker from the corrals. Sure, as my father used to remind me upon occasion, we’re all just passing through. Things change; earth abides. And like this valley’s rain-swollen creeks rolling the boulders of the barranca down the Pacific littoral, all our literal and metaphorical rivers and trails ultimately do run into the sea, some more heroically or sadly or immediately than others.
In a moment this morning, as we share the names of our deceased classmates, we who remain will be privileged to take a moment to reflect on the meaning of mortality and life, to reflect on the question the Bard posed in Hamlet: “To be or not to be.” In our senior English seminar, shaped on the systematic lathe of Jack Huyler’s tutelage, the Class of 1963 translated this--with delight and what we envisioned as clever repartee—as “Tooby or not Tooby,” no doubt discomfiting our classmate Norton Tooby. Fifty years ago, in our inchoate minds, such quasi-Elizabethan wordplay bettered brevity as the soul of wit. In retrospect it now seems to me simple confirmation of the neurophysiologists’ discovery that male adolescent brains suffer from a paucity of access to the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex.
No matter. Emerson, like Newt Chase and the recently deceased David Twichell and a thousand other Heads of School, reminded us that “Character is more important than brains.” And while at times the Class of 1963 was (or periodically pretended to be) racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, as well as painfully gauche in the social graces, we also tried our best most of the time to live up to the formal expectations that Thacher and our teachers preached and modeled for us—the timeless values embodied in The Chambered Nautilus (“Build thee more stately mansions, oh my soul.”), in the Oath of the Young Men of Athens (“Not only to preserve the things of worth in my native land, but to make them of still greater worth….”), in the nostalgic Forrest Cooke litany (“The one essential: Truth.”), and in the verities of “The Banquet Song” that my childhood playmate and Thacher classmate John Huyler held up for us on this occasion five years ago: “Honor and fairness and kindness and truth.”
I believe the very best thing about The Thacher School, which I have scrutinized with varying degrees of myopia and perception for almost seven decades, has been and continues to be the fact that while the institution has never been afraid to preach, the school and its teachers have simultaneously understood that truly effective teaching is not done from the outside in, but from the inside out.
This “outside/inside” dichotomy is not simply another kind of Elizabethan wordplay—though it shows up very nicely in the old CdeP bromide, “There’s something about the outside of a horse that’s good for the inside of a…kid.” In mediocre education, teachers work from the outside in: they are asking the questions in the classrooms, and they are providing the answers. (You are all, I hope familiar with the quintessential example, Ben Stein’s pedagogical tour de farce in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—the “Voodoo Economics” high school history class: “Anyone? Anyone?”) In somewhat more effective classrooms, teachers may be asking the questions, but students will be answering them. But in great schools and great classrooms, students are both asking and answering the questions; the learning, that is, is coming from the inside out. What greatness that Thacher—or any school--can claim rests in the degree to which the faculty are looking to the inside—creating the expectation that the students will be asking, as well as answering, the questions.
My recollection of my own years as a student at The Thacher School is that there was an adroit balance of outside/in and inside/out, although, by the way, I never for a moment believed there was something about the outside of a horse that was good for the inside of a boy. For this boy, it was Scout’s reliable production of manure as well as his wily habit of taking a deep breath and holding it whenever he saw me preparing to tighten the cinch, coupled with the granite values and high expectations of an icon known as Jesse Kahle, that helped me learn a lot of tough lessons I needed to learn. Whether shoveling horseshit is outside/in or inside/out I leave to each of you to decide.
After all, as I have already noted, we each have our own unique perspective on the Thacher School. For example, several of the most successful and popular members of our Class of 1963 have never been able to bring themselves to return to this campus. For example, when Howard Hughes came back with Ginger Rogers in the 1940’s, at the zenith of his and her celebrity, he had no interest in meeting the Headmaster or touring the campus the school or seeing his ex-teachers; he just wanted to introduce the most famous actress in the world to his old horse. For example, when Ethel Kennedy thinks of Thacher, she remembers the old Roughhouse as “Bobby’s favorite place,” where (on a late night Thanksgiving stealth visit from Santa Barbara in the company of the US Secretary of the Navy) the then-Attorney General broke his wrist in the roughhouse attempting the “Grand Swing.” So—we all have our own unique and personal memories and relationship with this place. For me, it is home. And, anyway, we’re all just passing through.
So pause with me, if you will, and reflect on this institution. Think about what the school may have meant and now means to you. Consider what Wordsworth called “the best part of a (human) life, the little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” And, through that lens, honor the memories and accomplishments of our friends and classmates who have already departed not only this lovely, tiny valley but also the crazy spinning globe you and I are privileged, transiently, to inhabit.
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