2004 Founder's Day Award Recipient
Remarks by Charles Goldberg '67
Awarded at assembly on May 21, 2004

Thanks/Ad Lib: Kim and your committee, Ty, the great class of ’54, family and friends whom I have embarrassed into showing up, trustees, former recipients, beloved fellow travelers in Gilman House, students, and the jewels in the crown, the perfect faculty and staff of Phillips Exeter Academy, thank you for this award and opportunity to speak before you.

Man, was I fired up in the spring of ’67 when we, the PEADQUACS, the Phillips Exeter Academy Double Quartet After Concert Society, took this very stage at 8:05am during what was then called Chapel. Our repertoire was a mish mash of the sublime and ridiculous, such as Greensleaves and a fatalistic drinking song by the Hungarian composer, Zoltan Kodaly, to the chauvinistic silliness of The Duke of Earl and the Kellogg’s Rice Krispies round. The Kodaly drinking song mourned the fallen and inspired of the surviving soldiers with this:

“Sooner or later, awake or in slumber
You’ll find the bullet that’s marked with your number.
Never try to hide, never try to hide.”

Uplifting, eh? Then came the piece-de-resistance. It was a great risk. Machismo was the currency of the realm in those single-gender days and, dare I say, gay and straight students alike knew this rather well. Yet, so much in that time was simply understood and left unspoken. Imagine the effect of yours truly, sitting cross-legged in the crook of the Steinway, singing this particular Sondheim and Bernstein phrase from West Side Story:

“I feel pretty, oh, so pretty!
I feel pretty and witty and bright!
And I pity any girl who isn’t me tonight!”

Well the joint was up for grabs. The undercurrent of tension, competition and, for some, terror, was at slack tide for a few moments as voice was given to that which was either too tough or taboo.

Voice. It took three-and–a-half years at Exeter for me to find mine and, ironically, it arrived through music. Arthur Landers, our colorful, gifted glee club director, would bemoan our substandard rehearsals wailing, with hand to forehead, “Is it too much to ask for perfection?” To me, when it came to singing, that seemed reasonable rhetoric. In just about every other endeavor, the question would have been decidedly unreasonable! As a prep in the fall, I flunked every exam in sight. I’m sure you have heard sob stories like this from the occasional alum. Hang out at the Alumni/ae Office at Gilman House during a reunion and some poor, older person such as I will speak wistfully of his on-campus challenges. Yet, as under-prepared as I was, I could not imagine being at school anywhere else.

My exquisite miseries could be summarized in one tale when academics and sports conspired to confirm my place in the great student hierarchy. After William Gurdon Saltonstall, the legendary Exeter principal, was recruited by President John F. Kennedy to run the Peace Corps in Nigeria, Ernie Gillespie became our interim head. Now, I thought the world of Ernie. He had the most heart-rending stammer I have ever encountered in my lifetime and yet would regularly request a turn in Chapel to speak to the school. His courage and wisdom were boundless. He spoke at our graduation, inviting us to return to visit where he and the faculty would welcome us and ask to hear our stories. Even though my classmate, Dr. Ira Helfand, mentioned the following at this very ceremony last year, Mr. Gillespie’s words stayed in my heart and mind for thirty-seven years and I cannot resist. “I hope and expect that when you find yourselves involved in the skirmishes on the frontiers of barbarism, which are not very far away, you will strike some shrewd blows in favor of civilization.” You did not know Mr. Gillespie, but doesn’t that sound familiar? But I digress.

Ernie Gillespie was also my Club Soccer coach and a mighty good one. “Toe down, knee over the ball and swing!” I did precisely as he instructed and he appreciated my attention and attitude. Although he was an older man, he could still kick the tar out of the ball with an unmistakable, booming thump. One fine October day, Ernie was asked to substitute for my Latin teacher, Easy Ed Echols. I aced my DLT, the daily lesson test, and answered questions well, but I totally blew the sight translation. That night at dinner with his family, which included his son, and my friend, Timmy, he spoke of this particular Latin class. The next day, Timmy was eager to tell me what his dad had said: “I used to think Goldberg was bright from soccer and that DLT but when he began the sight translation, I realized…he’s really stupid!”

Now, I have truly digressed. The Exeter presided over by William Gurdon Saltonstall was a Spartan, and some would say, Draconian environment. Yet, the contradiction was that our faculty members were very friendly and supportive. As my classmate, Andrew Kesler, son of the then one and only Dean, said at our twenty-fifth Reunion, he realized that our teachers truly loved us. He went on to say that he’s glad that, the way things are now, it won’t take a reasonably sensitive student a quarter century to figure this out!

Salty himself was the first person with whom I had a conversation at the Academy. I was a twelve-year-old awaiting my interview when he descended the great marble stairway from his office and approached me as I scanned the scale model of the school. My hand was lost in his enormous mitt which pulled a mighty oar with distinction at a couple of schools. This man and his co-conspirators helped to create this Siberian atmosphere from his lair in Jeremiah Smith Hall, a.k.a. the Kremlin. For those ten minutes, however, this tall, erect, white-haired demigod made me feel at ease and valued as we together surveyed the metes and bounds of a place I, too, would come to call my school.

Siberia. Cold and isolated? Perhaps. Punitive? It certainly could be. Exeter earned its nickname, “Mother Stern Yet Tender.” Which waters are easier to navigate? Neither, I think. Exeter is a more humane, proactively respectful and empathetic place today. Hallelujah! There is great complexity, however, in both such atmospheres.

When I sang the girl’s part of Maria in the PEADQUACS, it had an impact because it harkened to the unspoken pressures of conformity to rules, regulations and the tyranny of image. We needed those moments, and we sought them out and created them. Dramat, Glee Club, The Butt Room, Athletics… Anywhere so you could get away with letting the guard down for a little while, a chance to stop hiding and show a little of your self!

But with cunning and determination, and an occasional visit from Amnesty International (their headquarters, I believe, were at the Dana Hall School in those days), we survived Siberia. But are you thriving today in Utopia? Surely enlightenment, friendliness and an endless salad bar of wholesome encouragement present challenges and pitfalls that we naïve Siberians never dreamed of. And trust me, we could dream!

If there was hypocrisy in Siberia, who’d notice? We were swimming in it, or more often skating on it. A kind of justice prevailed summarized by this observation of Dean Kesler: “Exeter is very democratic…everyone gets shafted the same!” But even a little bit of hypocrisy in Utopia, where you mean what you say and say what you mean, must be dangerous indeed. It must be just as hard for you to be “out there” all the time as it was for us to be “in there” forty years ago.

When you’re not feeling quite as friendly as you know you should, or quite as fulfilled as the inner dress code requires, where do you sneak off to? We were not told who to be, nor was that necessary. It was understood. They don’t tell you who to be now, either, but for a different reason. Now there’s nobody you’re supposed to be here…except yourself. If you reject that and walk away from it, you do so only at your extreme peril. Now, that’s what I call tough.

Tough or not, why not persevere and face head on the lions rampant of Utopia? If indeed you really accept the full burden of the modern Academy’s opportunities, then you might actually come out of Exeter with some clue about who you are. What a gift that would be.

Can you see how we got from there to here, from Siberia to Utopia?

Humanization was not imposed from the outside in; rather it grew from the inside out. The seed of Utopia was already planted in the Siberian permafrost. It was in the stern love of the faculty of that time and in the not so stern love of their extraordinary spouses.

Mr. Saltonstall was famous for telling students how to succeed at Exeter with four deceptively simple words: “Work hard. Be friendly.” He’d feel right at home at this school where we greet each other on the paths and wave thanks to drivers at crosswalks. People are a dam site friendlier, and heaven knows, people here still work so hard.

The Exeter of today is the best intentions of Exeter half a century ago made real. The school was made real, and coaxed to full bloom, by two more generations of insight and zeal which have come from every quarter of the Academy community; faculty, administration, students, alumni and alumnae, parents and friends. As an engaged alumnus, I have felt included in that comprehensive and sustained effort. After you recover from the four-year undergraduate distraction, I invite you join that effort and acquaint yourself with Gilman House. The feeling that one can help to empower and hasten this ongoing evolution is a potent motive for service. And it brings an indescribably rich reward.

If a better Exeter was built from the inside out, then maybe it works that way everywhere else. Maybe you don’t have to change people’s nature, or even change their minds, to make things better. Maybe the better world you imagine is not so totally different from what “the other guys” had in mind, or at least in their hearts, all along.

One of these days, and the sooner the better for the world, you will find the endeavor in which you determine perfection the only reasonable alternative. When you figure out the correct practical, moral balance between eugenics and medical insurance, or when you design a flawlessly clean, life-of-the-machine ball bearing, or when you figure out how to make the next peace treaty really stick… maybe the problem won’t be how to shove it down the throats of an entrenched bureaucracy that sees its own accelerating obsolescence in your breakthrough of genius. Perhaps, if Exeter’s evolution is any indication, the real exercise is to show how those folks wanted it all along.

Try to find the dim similarity, remote but recognizable, between your new, flawless dream and our old, mostly ruined ones. Tell us your brave new world is really the same old song, but with a new twist. I for one will be happily hoodwinked into giving you my wholehearted support. And I will be prouder than I can say to have had something to do with the place where you discovered both your commitment to excellence… and tolerance.

Thank you!

 

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