“It was about two years ago that I was calling Deerfield classmates from the Class of 1967 and asking for possible assistance for the Stokes Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to offering a boarding school experience for inner-city students who might never have the opportunity to attend a boarding school. Founded by Ray Walker ’92 and steeped in much of what both Ray and I had known at Deerfield, Stokes Foundation was named in honor of Ray’s classmate, J. J. Stokes, an African American student who drowned as a junior but was awarded his degree posthumously.
During my calling sessions, I had the privilege of talking at some length with another Ray, Dr. Ray Wolejko ’67, whom I had known reasonably well when he was an exemplary student at the Academy and who went on to Harvard and a successful career as a doctor. When we neared the end of the call, Ray said to me, “Bill, I have to ask: When you were a student you seemed unhappy with your experience at Deerfield. What made you change your perspective?”
Great question, and there is much truth in what Ray said. While at the Academy (Ray and I were both day students), I bristled at times at what seemed like inordinate constraints and restrictions. “The Bank,” where some of us (not Ray) went to have a smoke (even through heavy snow drifts), was a welcome retreat where like-minded students – mild rebels with or without causes – would go to escape the rigors of Deerfield life. Our song, as I recall, was the Animals’ hit “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” On the weekends, of course, I was free to do what I wanted – attend local dances, go to ski areas around New England, play golf or caddy when the local course was open, watch TV incessantly, watch movies at “Drive-In” facilities, and take the car as far away as Boston, the Connecticut shore, and much of New England. To be sure, I was in many ways a teenager trying to find himself, even as Deerfield was magically rubbing off on me and leaving a lasting influence.
That influence was profound to say the least. I went on to work as a teacher and administrator in boarding schools here in the United States and in Europe; read all of the letters of Frank Boyden at Amherst College, Foxborough, Massachusetts Library, and the Academy itself; immersed myself in boarding school histories and biographies of notable “headmasters”; and studied much about boarding schools while a graduate student in Education at Harvard and Stanford. More broadly, I embraced the notion of “the whole person” and of a holistic education that addressed the intellectual, social, emotional, physical, moral/ethical, aesthetic, and, in a loose sense, spiritual growth of students. Perhaps even more broadly, I spent decades developing an increasingly strong commitment to the interconnectedness of everything – disciplines, knowledge domains, multiple intelligences, people around the globe, past and present and future, and even “entangled” particles separated by immense distances. “Everything exists everywhere at all times and in all ways” – the Sarvastivadin conclusion that I have accepted as integral to my life’s subsequent journey. And I believe firmly that my experience at Deerfield, despite many teenage challenges at that time, provided much of the ground for that journey.
Speaking of ground, it was in the early 1980s, well over a decade after my student days at Deerfield, when I discovered that several of my ancestors, among the founders of the town, were buried in the old colonial cemetery at the end of Albany Road – ground upon which I walked often as a student and where Phil Charon, latin I teacher, asked me and my classmates to do a grave stone rubbing. I’m guessing that like me my uncle, a graduate of the Deerfield class of 1943, had no idea his ancestors were interred in that ground. In any case, I was pleased to discover that I had ancestral connections to Deerfield – the town – that went clear back to the 1600s. Deerfield was becoming for me a place beyond time and, given the lessons I took with me to European schools, beyond place.
I honestly did not get to know Frank Boyden during my student days, despite the fact that I walked by him many times each day as he sat at his desk in the Main Building’s hallway. But I seem to have come to know him reasonably well since that time and to have incorporated his holistic approach to education and life. To be sure, he had a big, expansive spirit that was infectious over time, even to a somewhat recalcitrant student such as I was in the 1960s. Though I did not come from the nearby farm fields like the reluctant student Tom Ashley, I seem to have been transformed in a similar way by Boyden’s Deerfield education.
Over the years I have given modestly to the Academy. As an educator, my resources have been limited. But my desire to give seems to have increased since I graduated 57 years ago, such that now I am eager to help out in any way I can – small contributions, I’m afraid, but maybe more substantial assistance as a class representative or otherwise. I would hope that the Class of 1967 could ramp up its contributions – whatever they may be – and participation rate, and make the class exemplary among all Deerfield classes. Please consider, as I have tried to do, what Deerfield has meant to you across time and place, and how it has helped you forge the kinds of connections – personal and otherwise — that have been integral to your life’s journey.
Ray Wolejko, you forced me to look at myself: I was a somewhat rebellious, confused student in the tumultuous 1960s and gladly sung “We Gotta Get Out of This place” with some classmates at that time. But Deerfield has a special way of rubbing off on one, as it certainly did on me. I can only surmise that my distant ancestors – Stebbins, Allens, and others – buried there on the campus 300 years ago may have been guiding me on my journey to a fuller understanding of myself and a fuller appreciation of the town and the Academy.”