NMH Magazine : Fall 2005

Aha! Moments at NMH

We asked alumni to send us stories about NMH’s head, heart, and hand philosophy at work, asking specifically for “aha” moments that helped shape their lives. We received an outpouring of recollections—funny, fond, full of hindsight—including the following eight anecdotes.

The antiwar headmaster
I transferred to NMH from overseas in the middle of winter term during the 1969–70 school year. That spring there was a big anti-Vietnam war demonstration at Kent State University, where Ohio national guardsmen fired on demonstrators and killed several students. This unthinkable incident shook the whole nation, and the NMH community was no exception.
  During the same week, the student council led a big antiwar rally on the Mount Hermon campus. One of the speakers at the rally was the headmaster himself, wearing a black armband and speaking forcefully against the war. Until then I had always thought of a school headmaster as someone who is “above” the students. But there he was, amid the students, and showing empathy on an important social issue. At that moment, I knew I had come to the right school.
—Young Il Chun ’72, media consultant

The ABC’s of friendship
Coming to NMH from the relatively homogenous environment of Fairfield County, Connecticut, I was both slightly intimidated and pleased with the diverse student body. As it turned out, my floor monitor, Rodney Brown, was African American. Because of a common interest in athletics and the incredibly different lives we’d experienced, Rodney and I became friends. I learned that he was an ABC (A Better Chance) scholar and that this program primarily funded his NMH education. Twenty-five years later, I became one of five founders of A Better Chance of Wilton, Connecticut. It was the first new public-school ABC program in the States in over 12 years. We have between six and eight scholars in the program and graduate an average of two scholars per year. We have since helped launch a successful program in the adjoining town of Westport.
—Mark Carta ’70, lawyer, Rucci,
Burnham, Carta, Carello & Reilly

Leave no page unmarked
It was not until Audrey Sheats’s junior-year English class that I really learned how to read. During a conference with me, Ms. Sheats asked to see my text of The Scarlet Letter. I watched her thumb through the pages with a worried expression on her face. She then looked at me and said, “You aren’t reading correctly!” I had no idea what she meant or how she could even tell such a thing from looking at my book. She then explained emphatically, “I want you to have a reaction to the text and respond to it. The margins should be filled with your own writing, and passages should be underlined and marked up!” That interaction helped me become a more engaged reader and critical thinker. I credit Ms. Sheats with inspiring me to become a teacher.
—Shanna Miller ’97, English teacher,
New York City public school system

Chopping and weeping
The moment at NMH that really sticks in my mind is when the amazing Mec Peller made me chop onions with her after a terrible breakup so that I would cry. She knew that I needed it and that I was too much of a stoic to tear up on my own. It was as important to me as the calculus class I took with her, which convinced me, for the first time in my life, that I was good at math.
—Meredith Arthur ’93, director of sales
and marketing, CHOW Magazine

Pretty good advice
One morning while walking to class I passed the legendary English teacher Louis Smith. He smiled and asked me how I was. I replied, “Pretty good.” He smiled again and said, “You mean ‘pretty well,’ don’t you?” That was over 60 years ago. I still don’t say “pretty good” anymore!
—Alan Timm ’44, retired
president, Bank of Maine

Joy in small moments
When I was taking my admission tour at NMH, classes were changing as we walked toward Cutler Science Center. At the top of a small but steep hill, three boys were standing, each with a flattened cardboard box. All of a sudden they shouted, “I LOVE NMH!” and then, in quick succession, flew down the hill on the boxes, ending up in a laughing heap at the bottom. What impressed me most was the sheer joy of the moment. School is tough. Being a teen is tough. Finding joy in the little moments is important. NMH helped to teach me balance.
—Lara Schwabe Rivenburg ’87,
software specialist

The smell of hot type, the roar of the press
I was the sports editor of the Hermonite, and each week the news editor, the editor-in-chief, and I would squeeze into our faculty advisor’s MG and take the back roads to our printer in Amherst. What I remember best are the smell of the hot type and the roar of the printing press. I learned how to be an editor and turn articles into a newspaper. After college I went into the publishing business and now have my own literary agency representing great journalists at the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, and more.
—Raphael Sagalyn ’68,
Sagalyn Literary Agency

If life gives you a Lemon
Dr. Ed Lemon taught a linguistics course that I took my senior year. The course was structured to be continuous over three semesters: In the first semester, there were six to ten students taking it. In the second, the class size was down to two. I was the lone student still enrolled in the course in the spring—and Dr. Lemon continued to use a lecture format! I even felt compelled to continue to raise my hand when asking a question. Though I’d planned to be a Russian or Slavic studies major in college, by the time I started at Northeastern University, I was a linguistics major. Now I’m studying speech perception at Northwestern and have a PhD in cognitive science from the University of Arizona. I owe a lot of this to Ed Lemon.
—Ethan Cox ’90, postdoctoral
fellow, Northwestern University

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