Message from the President - August 2013

October 18 – 19, 2013 are the dates for the upcoming reunion, so save the dates! The 2013 reunion response form and schedule of events are now displayed separately on the website and also contained in the August 2013 edition of the Pen and Scroll. Class legacy reunion years are 1943, 1948, 1953, 1958, 1963 & 1968.  Be there!!

 
“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” ― Marcus Tullius Cicero

As I write this message, I am struck with all those we rightly owe our gratitude to for their selfless contribution in helping to memorialize thisshared experience we refer to as Lenox School. Be it the masters who demonstrated with their own conduct our motto inservice to the school and beyond; the staff and families who sacrificed in many ways but made that little school run, yet feel like home; our fellow alums that have devoted time, resources and energy to keep the legacy and spirit of this curiously incredible school (which refuses to die) alive; our good friends at Shakespeare & Co who have greeted us each year with open arms as part of their own family as we return to again validate our shared history; the Jurney family who have selflessly supported us; and countless others who quietly serve and sustain the LSAA. 

 
Thus, I wanted to start this message with a note of gratitude to Keith Simpson ’70 who has digitized and established an on-line archive to view and leave comments (as appropriate) for yearbooks from 1965 -1971. A separate article is in this edition explaining in more detail what this is all about and what it means to the LSAA. Many thanks Keith!

 We have a new location for our reunion luncheon with many thanks to Paul Denzel – we will be having lunch in a more familiar area - the Tina Packer Playhouse foyer (an addition to our old gym). Our dinner will still be at the Lenox Club. A reunion schedule of events is also in this edition for your information. I would be remiss however, if I didn’t mention that S&Co will be performing “Accomplice” on Friday @ 7:30PM and they also have a Saturday matinee of this at 2:00PM, which fitsin perfectly with our events.  

July and August finds us definitely in the grasp of a flourishing yet relentless summer! And while everything looks beautiful, it looks beautifully hot! So the heat of summer will be gratefully and hopefully replaced by a pleasant autumn that provides a respite from the summer sizzle … and heralds our Lenox School time to gather. 

 “From the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, novelists including Melville,Hawthorne and Edith Wharton, and landscape painters such as Thomas Cole and George Inness, flocked here. According to Carole Owens, author of The Berkshire Cottages—a survey of the palatial summer retreats constructed by millionaires in the post-Civil War Gilded Age—the influx of literary and artistic luminaries "gave the Berkshires a panache that attracted wealthy New Yorkers and Bostonians looking for more than just sylvan beauty." Smithsonian.com

 We certainly were not millionaires or literary/artistic luminaries when we arrived at Lenox School in the Berkshires, but each of us had our own “causa vitae” for arriving in this idyllic setting many years ago, and it was probably not focused on the “sylvan beauty”. On 18 and 19 Oct, we are compelled back to the Berkshires where we can share the why and circumstances of our arrival, share the stories of our Lenox School experience; what it meant to us then, what it means to us now; honor the memories of those that are not with us any longer; and cement yet again the fact that a marvelous little school existed there at one time, that in part, made us who we are today.

The reunion is upon us, and we have the chance to gather our small, band of brothers who shared that Lenox School experience to keep the legacy of that incredible school and our motto alive. I look forward to seeing all of you back at school!

Bob Sansone

President, LSAA

Lenox '68