2012
ANDOVER ALUMNI
AWARD OF DISTINCTION
Inaugural Induction Ceremony FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9 6 p.m. KEMPER AUDITORIUM
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hen President George Herbert Walker Bush went skydiving to celebrate his 85th birthday, many were alarmed, though Bush, still healthy and active, “didn’t feel a day over 84!”
Born in 1924 in Milton, Massachusetts, Bush grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. He has held leadership positions since his Andover days, as team captain of baseball and soccer, a Phillipian editor, and president of his senior class.
2012 AWARD OF DISTINCTION
Audio-Visual Montage Opening Remarks Alumni Council President Thomas A. Beaton ’73
President George H.W. Bush ’42 Leslie G. Callahan III ’68, presenter Ms. Wendy T. Ewald ’69 Susan Urie Donahue ’73, presenter Dr. William S. Knowles ’35 Michael Schmertzler ’70, presenter Ms. Stacy A. Schiff ’78 Lee Sullivan ’68, presenter Mr. Peter M. Sellars ’75 Alfred A. Blum Jr. ’62, presenter
Final Remarks Head of School John G. Palfrey Jr. Dinner will follow in Paresky Commons, Upper Left.
Through an accelerated program, Bush graduated from Yale University with an economics degree in 1948. He captained Yale’s baseball team and, in 1946, became a father when Barbara gave birth to George W., the first of their six children. He moved his young family to Texas after graduation to enter the oil business, and soon became Republican Party chair in Harris County. Representing Houston’s 7th District for two terms, he was one of the youngest congressmen to gain membership to the Ways and Means Committee. In 1970, he was appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations by President Nixon, and later served as U.S. envoy to China and CIA director under President Ford. In 1980, he was elected vice president, serving alongside President Reagan. In 1988, with Dan Quayle as his running mate, Bush was elected president. He oversaw the end of the Cold War, Iraq’s withdrawal from the Persian Gulf War, and the creation of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. At home, Bush created the Environmental Protection Agency in response to the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill, initiated the Clean Air Act Amendments, and created the Americans with Disabilities Act. Bush was knighted in early 1993 by Queen Elizabeth II for his service to his country and the world. The George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, constructed at Texas A&M University, opened to the public in fall 1997. In 2003, Bush was awarded the Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and Service. And in 2004, when a tsunami devastated Southeast Asia, he was quick to co-create the Bush-Clinton Tsunami Relief Fund—a testament to his enduring non sibi spirit. Bush was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 2011; he is the namesake of the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush.
President • Ambassador • Aviator • Athlete
Presentation of Awards
Bush’s plane was shot down by Japanese forces, but he managed to complete his mission before bailing into the ocean. For this act of “heroism and extraordinary achievement in aerial flight,” Lt. j.g. Bush received the Distinguished Flying Cross award. Before his honorable discharge in 1945, he flew more than 1,200 hours, made 126 successful carrier landings, and received three air medals, all in addition to marrying Barbara Pierce.
George H.W. Bush ’42
Determined to join the war effort as quickly as possible, Bush enlisted in the Navy as Seaman Second Class on the day of his Andover graduation— also his 18th birthday. He became the nation’s youngest Naval aviator in 1943 and completed more than 58 missions during World War II. His plane, Squadron Fifty One, unofficially was named “Barbara” in honor of the future Mrs. Bush, his date for a Christmas party in 1941.
ANDOVER ALUMNI
Nowadays, President Bush focuses on “being the best grandfather in the entire world.” The Bushes spend their time in Texas or at the family home in Kennebunkport, Maine. 1
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hen her husband accepted a job in rural Kentucky in 1974, Wendy Ewald reluctantly left San Francisco for a mining town that lacked even a bookstore. But she wasn’t about to sit around and complain. After the 1967 riots, Ewald had volunteered to teach in Detroit schools; the following summer, she taught photography to children on an Innu reserve in Labrador, Canada. It only seemed natural to offer to teach photography in Whitesburg as well. Little did Ewald know that her Literacy Through Photography (LTP) program—funded by the Kentucky Education Board—would grow into an international collaborative art project.
Ewald’s work has been displayed at the Corcoran Gallery, in the Whitney Biennial, the International Center of Photography in New York, and the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. Her exhibition, Pekupatikut Innuat Akunikana/Pictures Woke the People Up: An Innu Project with Wendy Ewald and Eric Gottesman [’94], is on display through January 13, 2013, at Andover’s own Addison Gallery of American Art. Ewald was a 1992 MacArthur Fellow; in 2012, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Currently, Ewald is a senior research associate at Duke University’s Center for International Studies and visiting artist at Amherst College. Her collaborative method has inspired the LTP Arusha Program, which trains Tanzanian teachers to use visual images in their classrooms; Ewald is now creating teaching materials for all the schools in the country. In 2013, based on her re-engagement with her Kentucky students from the 1970s, Ewald will begin Portraits and Dreams: A Revisitation. Those “students” all are now well into their forties. 2
At Harvard, Knowles studied mainly chemistry and math, taking as few humanities courses as possible. In his first college organic chemistry course, Knowles became intrigued by the three-dimensional structure of molecules. He experienced intense academic competition at Harvard, but still earned B’s in classes where the average grade was a C. Ironically, due to his less than stellar grades, Knowles was “strongly encouraged” to attend graduate school elsewhere. After graduating from Harvard in 1939 with a degree in chemistry, he headed to Columbia University, where he received an accelerated doctoral degree. In 1942, he began working as a research scientist in organic chemistry for Monsanto Company. Eventually, Knowles would couple his knowledge of catalyst reactions with chiral molecules, those that come in mirror images of each other that cannot be superimposed (like left and right hands). These mirror-image forms are known as L (levo) and D (dextro). In 1968, Knowles and two teammates began research on asymmetric hydrogenation, discovering a process that allowed the production of primarily only one of the two chiral pairs. At that time, the production of drugs resulted in equal amounts of the biologically active form and its non-active, or even detrimental, chiral pair. The process he and his team at Monsanto developed led to the more efficient and cost-effective production of L-dopa, vital to this day in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, as well as various antibiotics and heart medications. In 1966, Monsanto recognized Knowles as a “Distinguished Science Fellow.” He worked at Monsanto until 1986, pursued consulting for five years, and then retired to spend more time with his wife of 66 years, Nancy, his four children, and four grandchildren.
William S. Knowles ’35
More than 38 years later, LTP continues to thrive as she collaborates with people around the world to express identity and cultural diversity. The resulting images frequently are displayed in art galleries or in Ewald’s themed publications, such as the “American Alphabets” series, where each letter of the alphabet is represented by a term or image from a select community, forming a Spanish Alphabet, African-American Alphabet, and, in 2001, a White Girl’s Alphabet created by Phillips Academy girls. Other publications include In Peace and Harmony: Carver Portraits (2006), and Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children 1969–1999 (2000).
Knowles attended secondary school at Berkshire School in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Although accepted at Harvard, he was advised to spend a postgraduate year at Andover. Knowles’s firstever chemistry course was taught by PA instructor James “Bushy” Graham. Just prior to graduation, his exceptional young student won the Boylston Prize for excellence in chemistry.
Chemist • Nobel Prize Winner • Mathematician • Medical Innovator
Her Appalachian endeavor—to genuinely capture the rural Kentucky way of life through images and writings created by children—would last until 1982 and be published in Portraits and Dreams (1985), the first of Ewald’s many compilation projects.
Wendy T. Ewald ’69
Ewald credits Wendy MacNeil, her “sensational” photography teacher at Abbot Academy, with turning her into a truly avid photographer and inspiring her to spend the summer before Antioch College on a reservation in Eastern Canada teaching children how to use cameras. Ewald soon realized that their boldness in taking pictures of anything—no matter how disturbing, strange, or socially unacceptable—dramatically enhanced what each image seemed to “say” to the viewer. Who actually “makes” the photograph—the photographer or his subject? Ewald asked herself.
Photographer • Educator • Cultural Explorer • Researcher
Ewald was experimenting with photography by age 10. She realized its true power after her younger brother was injured in a car accident: using an image-based game she created, he was able to regain his speech.
hen his miscalculation caused an explosion that destroyed a long-term experiment, Dr. William “Bill” Knowles was not surprised. Humbly referring to himself as an “average student and chemist, if that,” Knowles expected mistakes—and attributed any successes to pure luck. He certainly didn’t expect to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But in 2001, he did.
Knowles was very surprised to receive the Nobel Prize in October 2001, “but that probably made it doubly sweet,” he said. The $1 million prize money was split between Knowles and his two fellow researchers, Ryoji Noyori and K. Barry Sharpless. Knowles, 84 at the time, donated his share to Harvard, Columbia, and various colleagues who helped him with the discovery. In 2004, Knowles was admitted into the National Academy of Sciences. On June 12, 2012, Dr. Knowles died at his home in Chesterfield, Missouri. He was 95. 3
“T
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he romance began in the stacks,” she admits, “amid lusty lungfuls of library dust.” But it’s not what you might think. This love affair involves a girl and her books.
pera, theatre, and festival director Peter Sellars is one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the performing arts in America and abroad. A visionary artist, Sellars is known for groundbreaking interpretations of classic works. Whether it is Mozart, Handel, Shakespeare, Sophocles, or the 16th-century Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu, Sellars strikes a universal chord with audiences, engaging and illuminating contemporary social and political issues.
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Stacy Schiff recalls “gobbling down books” early on in the Adams, Massachusetts, public library. At Andover, she wrote all her papers at the last minute in the middle of the night “in bursts of manic energy,” running track, bouncing among friends in Commons, and regularly haunting the Andover Bookstore in her spare time. (Her 6’s at Andover, says Schiff, remain her most meaningful accomplishments.)
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Desdemona, Sellars’ collaboration with Nobel Prize–winning novelist Toni Morrison and Malian composer and singer Rokia Traore, was performed in Vienna, Brussels, Paris, Berkeley, New York, and Berlin in 2011, and presented in London as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Sellars also has led several major arts festivals. In 2006 he was artistic director of New Crowned Hope, a month-long festival that was part of Vienna’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Sellars is a professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA and resident curator of the Telluride Film Festival. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Erasmus Prize, the Sundance Institute Risk-Takers Award, and the Gish Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Peter M. Sellars ’75
Schiff chooses her subjects in part for the research challenges they offer, writing her first draft with a mechanical pencil on a legal pad, because longhand helps her to “slow down and think, whereas typing moves everything too quickly.” Although Schiff technically lives in New York with her husband and the youngest of their three children, when all goes well she “lives” in 17th-century Massachusetts: she is currently at work on a book about the Salem Witch trials.
A Harvard graduate, Sellars was appointed artistic director of the American National Theater at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., at the age of 26, where between 1984 and 1986 he originated seven productions and presented 18 others from a wide range of American and international theatre companies. His landmark ANT staging of Sophocles’ AJAX, set at the Pentagon, was invited to tour Europe and ignited the start of an international career. Other noteworthy theatre projects include a 1994 staging of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice set in southern California with a cast of black, white, Latino, and Asian-American actors; an Antonin Artaud radio play coupled with the poetry of June Jordan, For an End to the Judgment of God/Kissing God Goodbye, staged as a press conference on the war in Afghanistan; a production of the Euripides’ The Children of Herakles, focusing on contemporary immigration and refugee issues and experience; and, in 2009, Othello, inspired by and set in the America of newly elected President Barack Obama.
Visionary Director of Opera and Theatre • MacArthur Fellow • Erasmus Prize Winner
In 1999, Schiff published Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), a biography of the wife of the Russian novelist. It won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. In 2005, she published A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, which won the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français. Her most recent book, the blockbuster Cleopatra: A Life, was published in 2010, won the 2011 PEN/Jacqueline Weld Award for Distinguished Biography, and was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by the New York Times. It appeared on every 2010 “best-of” roundup and has been translated into 40 languages. Schiff has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the National Endowment of the Humanities, and a fellow at the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers. She has received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and, in 2011, was named a Library Lion of the New York Public Library.
Stacy A. Schiff ’78
Finally heeding the earlier urgings of Andover instructors—including those of Elwin Sykes and Philip Zaeder—Schiff left Simon & Schuster in 1990 to pursue a career in writing. Schiff’s Saint-Exupéry: A Biography was published in 1994, garnered stellar reviews, won several awards abroad, and was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize.
Biographer • Pulitzer Prize Winner • Guggenheim Fellow • PEN/Weld Award Winner
In 1982, before officially receiving a BA degree in art history from Williams College, Schiff began an eight-year stint in the publishing industry, working for Viking and Simon & Schuster. Flap copy, catalog copy, and editorial letters made up her writing portfolio. In 1989, when reading Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars—which she had read previously during a collegiate year in Paris— Schiff realized that the pioneering aviator’s life cried out for new examination.
Sellars has staged operas at the Glyndebourne Festival, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Netherlands Opera, the Opéra National de Paris, the Salzburg Festival, the San Francisco Opera, and Teatro Real (Madrid), among others, establishing a reputation for bringing 20th-century and contemporary operas to the stage, including works by Olivier Messiaen, Paul Hindemith, and György Ligeti. Inspired by the compositions of Kaija Saariaho, Osvaldo Golijov, and Tan Dun, he has guided the creation of productions of their work that have expanded the repertoire of modern opera. Sellars has been a driving force in the creation of many new works with longtime collaborator composer John Adams, including Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Niño, Doctor Atomic, and A Flowering Tree. A staging of their latest work, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, will be seen in the United States and Europe early in 2013.
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2012
ANDOVER ALUMNI
AWARD OF DISTINCTION
Statement of Purpose: To recognize and honor alumni/ae of Phillips Academy or Abbot Academy who have served with distinction in their fields of endeavor.
The recipients’ accomplishments and contributions shall have embodied the values of the Andover/Abbot community and shall have had a significant positive impact on their communities, society, or the world. Awards will be presented by the Alumni Council upon the recommendation of the alumni/ae. • The award shall be given annually to one or more living alumni/ae who have served with distinction and exhibited leadership in the arts, sciences, letters, humanities, or other significant field of endeavor following their time at Phillips Academy or Abbot Academy. • Candidates may be considered during multiple award cycles. Once a candidate is nominated, his or her nomination will remain on file in the Office of Alumni Affairs for annual review. Please visit www.andover.edu/alumni/awardofdistinction for a nomination form. For further information, please contact Jenny Savino in the Office of Alumni Affairs at jsavino@andover.edu.
The Andover Alumni Award of Distinction is an initiative of the Alumni Council. Committee members for the inaugural presentation of the award are Les Callahan ’68 (chair), Christopher Auguste ’76, Alfred Blum ’62, Susan Urie Donahue ’73, Peter Hetzler ’72, Sara Su Jones ’91, Karen Humphries Sallick ’83, Michael Schmertzler ’70, and Lee Sullivan ’68.
180 Main Street Andover, Mass. 01810-4161
Ken Puleo, designer; Jill Clerkin, editor; special thanks to researcher/writer Anne Rao ‘10