MS. STAMBAUGH: As you heard, it is a tradition of the organization to honor with a memorial resolution those principal members who have died. This year there are two, and I'd like to ask Linda Gibbs to come forward to honor James VanAmburg.
MS. GIBBS: I think Jim VanAmburg would find it very fitting that I'm standing on a wine box.
James E. VanAmburg died quite suddenly on Tuesday, July 26th, as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was only 59 years old. Jim had been the head of the Windward School in White Plains, New York, since 1999. From 1984 to 1998, he served as head of the Dwight Englewood School, and prior to that he headed the University of Chicago Lab School, and was superintendent of schools for the Carlisle School District in Massachusetts.
Jim served on many boards, including Kent Place School and Convent of the Sacred Heart in Connecticut, as well as national committees for NAIS and the New York University Child Study Center.
He leaves his wife, Penny, and two sons, Nick and Noah. As you remember, Jim was an articulate and sophisticated man, a lover of music, especially opera. He also loved to have lots of fun, especially when he traveled, going to places where he and his boys could ride great roller coasters. As we celebrate Jim's life today, we all share a feeling of loss, yet we also can remember him in the myriad ways that we knew him in life. There's a wonderful story about the world-renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman that I want to share with you because I really think that Jim would like this story.
Everybody knows that Perlman had polio in his childhood and walked with the aid of braces and crutches. One evening, he was scheduled to play one of the world's most difficult concertos in a famous recital hall. Only a few bars into the piece, one of the strings on his violin suddenly broke. The orchestra stopped. The audience gasped, and then held its collective breath. But after a moment, Perlman set his violin back under his chin and signaled the conductor to begin again.
ll know that it's impossible to play such a concerto with three strings, but that night, Perlman didn't seem to know that. He re-modulated, re-composed, and at one point seemed to even retune the strings to get sounds from them that they had never made before. When he finished, there was an awesome silence, and then a great cheer and applause rose. He bowed, then raised his bow to quiet the audience, and he said, "You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left."
Windward School today is making new music, as are we all, with inspiration from Jim's legacy.
I don't even remember when I first met Jim, but I got to know him rather well during my years at NAIS when he served on the NAIS School Heads Advisory Committee. I learned very fast that I could always count on Jim for his insight, candid response, and innovative ideas. He always had great restaurant recommendations, too. That perception about Jim never changed for me.
He was my best resource, in February in particular, when things were going off the rails or I was dealing with some thorny situation in my school. I hope that I helped him occasionally, as well. He would call, or I would, and say, "I need a dinner. I have an issue." And we would plan to meet somewhere.
Jim especially liked the restaurant Le Colonial on 57th Street in the city. He always got there first and awaited my arrival in the bar with his trademark -- let me get this right, Bombay Gin martini straight up with an olive, preferably stuffed. He had it in his hand when I arrived. Now, I'm just a boring club soda person, although Jim tried to educate me to the finer things. I remember that salt-and-pepper beard and that twinkle in his eye when he said, "Linda, won't you please try something a little more interesting this time?"
Now I wish I had. We talked about our successes and our challenges, and together we vented and problem-solved. I could always count on Jim to listen and to have wise responses. It was invaluable, and I'm not yet sure how I'm going to do without it.
I watched with great interest and admiration as Jim entered the Windward community, and I was deeply honored to be asked to join the board. I will never forget the first time I visited the school as a new trustee, and saw the pride Jim had in the work of the students and the teachers. He would say, "This is a truly amazing faculty, incredibly committed to helping these boys and girls who have problems and making their lives better."
He really loved that school. Not an expert in learning differences when he began, he soon became one, highly respected at a national level. Like Perlman, he improvised and succeeded.
It was really a daunting task this year to co-chair the search committee at Windward and it brought back to all of us many memories of Jim's leadership there. There's a human bond which connects us all, and just because we have lost Jim's physical presence doesn't mean we've lost him entirely, at least in my mind. I believe that Jim's spirit is still with us. We will have different beliefs about where Jim might be right now, but I took comfort and take comfort from the words in the really kind of amazing novel, The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. Let me share some with you now as I close my remembrance of Jim. In the words of the protagonist of that novel, Susie Salmon, "Now I am in a place I call this wide, wide Heaven, because it includes not only all my simplest desires, but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather used is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. This wide, wide heaven is about the soft down of new leaves, wild roller coaster rides (that's where Jim is) and escaped marbles that fall, then hang, then take you somewhere you never could have imagined in your small heaven dreams."
And so Jim, good friend, from all of us, may you rest in peace in your own wide, wide heaven, roller coasters and all. Thank you.
MS. STAMBAUGH: The second memorial is to Elizabeth Blodgett Hall. Elizabeth Blodgett Hall, fourth head of Concord Academy and founding head of Simon's Rock College, died at age 95 on July 18, 2005. Born in New York City in 1909, Betty was tutored at home and abroad, and then attended the Ethical Culture School before moving with her family to Great Pine Farm in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. After attending local schools there, she entered Ms. Hall's School, and graduated in 1928. She attended Knox College in Illinois for a year before marrying her husband, Livingston Hall, a Harvard faculty member. Later in 1942 she became one of the first women to attend Radcliffe College as an adult. Incidentally, she was the mother of four children by this time. She graduated in 1946 with a BA in government, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.
She did graduate work and then worked at the Cambridge School of Weston for a year before teaching history and heading the department in 1948. In 1949, she became headmistress. In her 14-year tenure, she rose to prominence in girls' education, serving as president of the Headmistresses of the East, and serving on the boards of NAIS and New England Association of Colleges and Schools.
In her tenure at Concord, she discontinued a floundering lower school, increased enrollment in the upper grades from 97 to 218, and acquired four homes on Main Street, built a middle school, dining hall, and chapel. The chapel was actually an abandoned meeting house in New Hampshire, which a group of faculty and students reassembled on the Concord campus.
Betty Hall's Chapel Talks were legendary, and were captured in a small booklet, Through Crowded Ways. It is one of my own revered references. My favorite is the story of a girl who was sent out of class to Betty Hall's office. There, she barely could speak, but Betty saw that the girl kept looking at her feet, and, as she said, "one grubby loafer was planted on the other."
After a time, Betty said, "You must feel awful."
What followed was an incoherent story of misery and of mice. It seemed inadvertently that the girl's mother had remanded the pet mice to the barn and they had frozen to death. The girl impugned that her mother "meant" to do it. Eventually, Betty got the mother and the daughter together, but I shall never forget her intuitive understanding, one I have valiantly tried to emulate in my own headships.
In 1964, with 200 acres of her family's land on Great Pine Farm and a grant of $3 million, she founded Simon's Rock for students to begin college work after 10th or 11th grade. She served as president from 1964 to 1972, and admitted its first class of 57 women in 1966. Today there are 340 men and women. The college merged with Bard College in 1979, and she became a member of Simon's Rock Board of Overseers and of the board of trustees of Bard.
In her obituary in the local paper, the following was stated. "The habit of leadership remained with her in the nursing facility, where she spent her last days. She felt obligated to direct and improve the organization, even when uncertain as to its name and purpose. Her charm and interest in others made them occasionally pay heed to her frequent suggestions."
Heaven got an excellent soul when it claimed Betty Hall.
I'd like to ask if you would stand and let us observe a memorial minute in honor of our colleagues.
Thank you.