Stories from 20 Years at Thacher

Thank you, Chamber Singers, readers, and Mr. Haggard for that beautiful opening. And thank you Ms. Pidduck and the faculty for inviting me to speak to all of you today.

Good morning and welcome to one of my very favorite places in the world. It’s quite poignant for me to be back here in the Outdoor Chapel, speaking at Thacher, where for 20 years I lived and worked and raised my family. For me, coming back to this campus and this town is a return to home; a return to the people I love most in the world and the place that helped raise me, nurtured me, and taught me wisdom, patience, and commitment—a place where I was lucky enough to find my calling in life, my true north.

When I came to Thacher as an eager pony-tailed young French teacher and tennis coach in 1991—our new head of school, Blossom Beatty, was a senior that year!—I hardly qualified as an adult. I remember arriving on campus with my mom —that is how young and naive I was—I brought my mother to help me settle into my first job. Imagine bringing your mother to your first day as an investment banker or a surgeon—it just isn’t done. The chair of the language department, Roger Klausler, met us at his office, raised one eyebrow at the unexpected and, really, odd presence of my mother, and presented me with a large pile of books and a set of keys and said: “You are teaching French 1, 2, 3, and 4 and these are your texts. Have fun!” He smiled, saluted me, and turned on his heel and marched away. That introduction was followed by a meeting with the dean of faculty, Kurt Meyer, who told me in a very matter of fact way: “You will be coaching varsity girls’ tennis, varsity boys’ tennis and directing the indoor committee (this was in the days before Open House, so this meant that I, along with Bill Vickery, was essentially organizing every social event at the school). Kurt continued: “You will also be running the morning jobs program and will do dorm duty once a week and every four weekends.”

I thought that sounded like a lot for someone fresh out of grad school with no experience, who was barely 23, but desperately wanting to make a good impression about what a diligent, hard worker I was, I said: “Great! Is there anything else you’d like me to do?” praying that there were no other jobs that needed be be filled. Kurt paused, looked at the ceiling and said, “Actually, yes. We really need someone to help Chuck Warren in camp supply. Could you help out with that?”

“Sure,” I nodded with enthusiasm, “no problemo!” Later, the other young faculty members laughed when they heard about the camp supply job. “We love Chuck, he’s the best, but no one wants to be his helper in Camp Supply, no one! Rookie mistake!” And for all of those jobs, which added up to 60 or more hours per week, I was paid the handsome sum of 13,000 dollars. That does not sound like a lot—and that’s because it’s not—after taxes it came out to about $3.50 an hour—but the truth is, I was so excited to actually be employed and have a place to live, I would have done it for free.

At the time, I did not look a day over 16 years old, which prompted all kinds of hilarious comments from Thacher parents. At my first family weekend, I nervously sidled up to the father of one of my advisees as he watched a soccer game (the boys’ soccer season was in the fall back then), and said, “Hello, Mr. Stevens. I’m Chrissy, Justin’s advisor.” He was intently watching the game and paying little attention to me, so after a minute he turned, looked at me and said, “Tell me your name again, dear? And how long have been dating my son?” And on Grandparents Day, in my French 3 class, one particularly impatient grandma, after sitting down for a few minutes, looked to me and said, “Excuse me, when is the teacher coming? We need to get this show going!.”

Truly, the happiest years of my life were spent on this beautiful campus in this serene, mythical valley. During my time at Thacher, the most important and happiest milestones in my life came to pass. I married my handsome college sweetheart, who soon joined me at the school as an English teacher and baseball coach, and later, the athletic director, and I grew in my career under the careful tutelage of Michael and Joy Mulligan, Peter and Bonnie Robinson, Kurt and Alice Meyer, and many, many others—too many to name. Being a young newlywed at Thacher was pure fun. There were lots of us in those days, because we were such a bargain. The School had only to house us (and if we were married, they got a two-for-one deal on the house) and feed us and provide us with a teeny weeny amount of money. Young, enthusiastic and full of energy, we worked hard all week sprinting from classes to coaching to formal dinner, followed by study hall and check in, but then on the weekends, Ojai became our very own playground - we surfed, we kayaked, we rock-climbed, we hiked, and at night we went dancing at the Deerlodge or played pool at the Hub followed by fairly raucous dance parties in the handball courts. It was good living. We made wonderful friends who became family and who have remained so even when some—like us—peeled off for other schools, other jobs, and other careers. Just like our students, living and working together so closely forged friendships that have lasted a lifetime.

Eventually, taking our cues from the faculty who had already started their families—the Mansons, the Jacobsen/Hardenberghs, the Vickerys, to name a few—we started having babies. And boy, in the lates 90s and early 2000s at Thacher, there must have been something in the water! The year that I was pregnant with JJ (now a senior) 6 of us were pregnant and due within a few months of one another. To surprise the students about the impending arrival of the babies, the six of us did a TOAD talk that year in which Michael played the host of a game show. As host, he asked questions that revealed strange facts about the six of us. The students had to guess which person he was talking about. For example, “Which one of these lovely ladies has climbed seven 10,000 foot peaks?” “Which one has eight siblings? “ Etc, etc. The last question was “Which one do you think is . . . . . . . .pregnant?” The kids went wild at that point because they knew that if one of us were pregnant, it meant a school holiday sometime in the near future. Now, imagine the chaos and hysteria when each of us stood and said: “ I’m having a baby! And I’m having a baby” And, I too, am having a baby” - one after the other. The roar was deafening because, of course, the students thought that they were going to get six holidays instead of one. All of the babies for whom the students cheered that day are seniors now and essentially grew up as siblings. JJ, Caroline, Evan, and Aidan all learned to walk together, got potty-trained together, and pretty much knew every detail about one another, as siblings do. I remember once in kindergarten, one of the Monica Ros teachers was serving the kids lunch and Evan Perry said to the teacher—“Please don’t give JJ any ketchup with his hotdog, it gives him a rash on his face.” When the six of them got older, we pooled our money and invested in a pony that we named Macaroni, so that they could learn to ride together. That venture was short lived, however, because Macaroni would not let anyone ride him, and when we insisted, he threw the kids off right and left. We sold him—or maybe gave him away?—soon after he threw five-year-old Aidan Mahoney so hard that he broke his arm in three places and had to have surgery.

Our older daughter, Madeleine, had similar playmates, but they were actually more like a pack of wolf cubs than actual human children. Together with Grady Jacobsen, Zane Schryver, Tim and Hannah Kent, and Owen and Liam Driscoll, she ran free and feral with few rules, little oversight, and a genuine sense of adventure. I remember all of them being constantly filthy. They were like wild things—digging in the dirt, exploring the campus, playing hide and go seek, finding buried treasure in the Barranca, and stopping every hour or so to run and get frozen yogurt from the dining hall. Can you even imagine a more perfect childhood? I remember one summer day they were running around down on the fields—they must have been four or five, and Zane fell backwards off something they were climbing on. Clearly hurt, probably with a broken arm or wrist, they looked at one another with wide eyes, and took immediate action. Hannah and Timothy stayed with Zane and comforted him while Madeleine and Grady sprinted to the barns to get Cam or Lori Schryver. When they arrived, out of breath, Madeleine said to Cam: “It’s Zane, he fell off the bleachers, he’s hurt bad, but Cam—he’s not dead.”

Raising a family at Thacher was like raising a family in a village, by committee. Each of our children had several moms and several dads, too many aunties and uncles to count, and 240 older siblings—all of whom looked after whichever children were in the vicinity at the time. And to the kids, it was heaven on earth. Having so many people love and care for our children was a tremendous gift, and really - so unusual in this day and age, when parenting has become more of a cutthroat competition than a joining together of forces. Griffin McMahon joined this little posse when they were in first grade, and he and Madeleine were like peas in a pod. For most of one year, they told everyone they met that they were twins, which was not actually hard to believe because they both were tow headed and had no front teeth. Madeleine maintains to this day that Griffin is the one who taught her all the swear words she knows, which he had learned from his older brothers and their cohort of faculty children.

As in any village, ours was not without its pain and sadness. We had personal heartaches—Rich and I suddenly lost both of our fathers a year apart while they were still in their 50s—and wrenching community losses, too. We lost Bonnie Robinson—a brilliant and unbelievably hilarious English teacher who mentored hundreds of girls and many young faculty members as the dean of students and the dorm head of Upper School. We lost gentle, brilliant Brooke Halsey, whom we had taught and coached and admired for his warm smile, his deep intellect, and his kind nature. Loss in a small community is never easy, but the love we had in common for them, as well as the comfort of one another, helped to dull the ache a tiny bit.

And, of course, along with our own children, there were our students, the reason we were all at Thacher in the first place. And these students, really to a person, were simply amazing. They, like all of you, our current Thacher students, came here because—not in spite of—the unique and unconventional nature of the place. They came because the School’s mission and values appealed to them. They believed that a community grounded in honor and kindness and fairness and truth was a community worth joining. I’ve found—in my now 29 years in independent schools—that it is very rare to find a school that so authentically and earnestly works to live its mission every single day in all that it does. What I’ve come to realize—really only by leaving Thacher and experiencing other schools—is that everything done at Thacher serves a purpose that works toward serving the greater good of the institution and its values, which in turn does the important work of helping all of us to create a better, more empathetic, more equitable world. The camping program, the horse program, the honor code, formal dinner, the judicial council, the prefect system, having to play a different sport every season—all of it is so darn brilliant in its alignment as to what it takes to raise and grow good, strong, morally-centered human beings. How could Sherman Day Thacher have known, almost 130 years ago, what skills and habits of heart and mind teenagers in the 21st century would need to make their way in the world? I would argue that today, perhaps more than any other time in history, we desperately need citizens who not only believe in, but live and breathe the values upon which Sherman Thacher founded his school.

I know that the Thacher community made me a better person. It made Rich and I better teachers, better coaches, better parents. It made us better people. And I think it does the same for anyone—adult or child, parent or grandparent, teacher or fac brat—who is lucky enough to become a part of this community. I remember once, many years ago, one of our students described Thacher as a parallel universe, a universe where the hurt and anger and ill of the world was left behind in the pursuit of something greater. I’ve always remembered that description and I think she hit the nail on the head with that description. Leaving Thacher was the hardest thing—by far—of anything I’ve ever done. It was equally hard for my family. But as wrenching as it was, it allowed us to take Thacher’s vision and values about what is important, and what it takes to live a good life beyond the Ojai Valley and share it with others. Every single thing we learned in this little community—about kindness and hard work, about the power of failure, about camaraderie and friendship, about both the strengths and frailties of humans—all of it is well worth sharing as far and wide as is possible in this world. And that is what our graduates do, as they make their way around the planet. They take the lessons and the magic of Thacher, this incredible parallel universe, and they spread it like seedlings wherever they go. And I am certain—I just know—that those seedlings take root and grow. And Thacher students of today—that will soon be your job, too. You must take the love, the nurturing, the high standards, the belief that a greater good is worth pursuing, and the knowledge that a values-driven community works and makes all of its inhabitants better—you must take all of it and sow it wherever you go from here. That vision of seedlings sprouting in places far and wide , which I find so powerful and inspiring, gives me hope for the future, because I believe that the simple truths imbedded in Thacher’s values can’t help but lead to the creation of a world that is more kind, more gentle, more fair, and more truthful.