The Alumni Chronicles
Recently I submitted a report to be published in the Harvard College Class of 1966 35th Anniversary Report. As I had done nearly every five years since graduation, I tried to tell those few classmates who might remember me something about my life in a few brief paragraphs. Once I had sent off the 35th report I found myself curious to see what I had written in those earlier years, so I dredged out the dusty volumes and braced myself, fully expecting to be embarrassed by my sometimes sophomoric wit. I read the first two reports, probably for the first time in twenty or more years, and although I found that the writing does indeed suffer somewhat from strained attempts at cleverness, the story of my thirty-five years started to unfold concisely - so I'm posting the series here for anyone who cares to learn about my fairly uncommon history.
Return to Chronicle listNaval ROTC assured me a place in which to spend my first five years after graduation. Two years of technical and engineering training at various Navy schools prepared me intellectually, but not psychologically, for duty as electrical and reactor control officer on board a nuclear submarine. It turned out that my education at Harvard had not prepared me to be an automaton, nor had it prepared me to ignore the implications of serving in a military establishment capable of perpetrating the Vietnam war. After one year on a submarine I secured a discharge for psychological reasons.Actually, more important in my life than the Navy during those years was my relationship with Shisha Phipps (now Shisha Ruth), a young woman whom I met through Duff Morrow's Operation Match. [Those of you who are unfamiliar with the history of computer match-making should know that Duff Morrow and Jeff Tarr, as part of an undergraduate course requirement, invented the genre in 1965 with their wildly successful "Operation Match". When Shisha and I submitted our own personal information and preferences in 1666 for the third batch run, Operation Match had become a fad, and over 200,000 undergraduates in the Boston area also did so.]
Shisha and I are now in our second year as resident tutors at Adams House. We've found interacting with the students and with other house associates to be very stimulating. Many people are starting to think about alternate ways of being with others, about alternate ways of structuring our lives. Adams House seems to provide an atmosphere in which questioning of our basic assumptions can occur.
I'm working toward a doctorate in Social Psychology but I have almost no idea about what I'll be doing after that.
Return to Chronicle listWhen I wrote the Fifth Year Report I was living with my wife Shisha in Adams House doing graduate work in social psychology and working as a resident tutor. By the time the Report was published nearly every facet of my life had changed. Shisha had left in pursuit of her individuality,and two students had introduced me to ideas that were to make it impossible for me to remain in academia. To one student I gave a reading course in the psychology of meditation; to the other, a course in communal living. The next summer found me saying my mantra for an hour a day, reading Eastern spiritual texts, and searching for a compatible communal environment.At Twin Oaks, then a commune of thirty-five people in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, I found a commune that was successful on the material plane, without a charismatic leader, and open to a diversity of ideas. I returned to spend one more year in Adams House and then joined Twin Oaks.
In the years I've been here I've worked primarily with our publications-managing, editing and writing. I married Kristine and had with her a baby girl, Damia, now nearly two years old. My time these days is divided among writing, preparing a seminar series for Twin Oakers on social planning, and taking care of children. Twin Oaks how has about seventy-five members and I live at the nine-member Merion branch. It feels like a full life.
[Note: For current information about Twin Oaks, visit their website at www.twinaoks.com]
Return to Chronicle listWhen the request for our 5th-year Report arrived I was living in Adams House with my wife, Shisha. As a resident tutor I was enjoying teaching and the freedom to talk openly about the war, institutional oppression, the mystical experience, and other favorite topics of the time. (I was then just a year out of the nuclear navy-where my views had been shared by few.)
When the request for our 10th-year Report arrived, I was living with my second wife, Kristine, and our daughter, Damia, in a group of nine people in rural central Virginia. Our group was part of an income-sharing community of seventy-five adults. (The community, called Twin Oaks, has achieved some fame because of its origins as a Walden II community.) My work at that time was varied; I helped write edit and publish the community's newsletter and a magazine called Communities; I took care of children, washed dishes and cooked a little; and I served as the community's social planner.
And now the 15th-year request has arrived. There's been some stability in that I'm still living in rural central Virginia, and I'm still living with Kristine, Damia, and Will (who had been with us in the group of nine). We're no longer affiliated with Twin Oaks, however, and we've been joined by two-year-old Luke, Kristine and Will's son. (Kristine married Will three years ago-and I'm a contented bachelor, in love for the last year with Virginia, a friend of five years' duration.)
When we left Twin Oaks about three and a half years ago, we knew we wanted to settle down here among the other "graduates" of Twin Oaks, so I had to find any work I could. Like many drop-outs dropping back in, I first found professional level CETA jobs in human service organizations-and now I'm working in a sheltered workshop (a production facility that employs workers with disabilities, and a rehabilitation facility that attempts to prepare some of those for unsubsidized employment).
My other work consists of washing dishes, cleaning floors, and teaching Karate once a week at my daughter's school (a parent-run school with twelve children). The five of us live in a neighborhood of four other families who shared in the buying of a farm three miles down the road from Twin Oaks. Two of the families had previously lived at Twin Oaks, and one had lived at the Tennessee "Farm," back when it had only 700 members. We call the neighborhood "Baker Branch," after the small creek that borders the property. I'm finding life quite pleasant, my rural seclusion broken by magazines and reports on political and economic issues, and by my work in Charlottesville. I find meaning in my work, though it seems quite difficult and I'm well aware that I'm not doing my job as well as I'd like.
My domestic life feels fairly solid (as solid as anything can feel to one who, because of working in the disability field, sees daily the results of random accidents and bio-chemical imbalances). My work life, however, feels anything but solid, governmental funding becoming as scarce as it is.
When the request for our 20th-year Report comes, I hope to again be talking about domestic satisfaction and interesting work.
[Note: For more on the formation of the Baker Branch intentional neighborhood. See my Winter Holidays 1989-98 Letter]
Return to Chronicle listWhen I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1962 I was a gung-ho Midwesterner looking for adventure in both the Navy and academics at Harvard. I was also full of myself-having been a small town "brain," with pictures and articles about my academic achievements appearing ad nauseam in the local paper.
Harvard was exactly what I needed to gain humility. While I managed to be graduated with distinction in my field, social psychology, I had learned to my dismay that I lacked the nimbleness of mind needed to play in the realms of higher mathematics and physics. I had learned also how mundane my talents were compared to those of so many of my classmates: the musicians, philosophers, artists, poets and mathematical whiz kids.
After graduation I went into the Navy, the nuclear submarine service. Unfortunately for my Navy career I had by then become a pacifist, having undergone conversion as a result of background reading about Vietnam. It took me three years to extricate myself from the Navy, but not before learning to parrot solutions to second-order partial differential equations, and not before memorizing 150 sets of emergency procedures to be used immediately upon encountering symptoms of an incipient nuclear accident.
Those of you who are familiar with my often ephemeral memory and tendency to panic in the face of disaster will be relieved to know that I had to handle only one real nuclear emergency; and it happened slowly enough (over a period of a day in dry dock) that although I at first botched it, we didn't end up melting down-or even damaging the reactor.
After the Navy, in graduate school at Harvard, I found myself fascinated by research and writings on group process, organizational development, and a view of the world through the lens of social psychology (which in my day saw people as basically well intentioned but pressured by social circumstance to act in the full variety of ways that we see people act; the key was to understand the relationship between the pressures and the actions).
Today, after having used the skills and perspective acquired in grad school in some unlikely settings (see previous Class Reports), I find myself able to apply them for the good of a large number of people who have disabilities. As in all of my previous jobs, I've started a newsletter; and in this one I analyze and promote state and federal policies that might help people with disabilities participate more fully in community life. And as a state-employed consultant I'm attempting to help agencies in a number of Virginia communities work together to provide quality services.
One constant in my life since my freshman year is my practice of karate (for physical fitness and mental hygiene). I daily do the exercises and "Sanchen," one of the routines in Oechi Ryu karate. I also practice Tai Chi Chuan, the slow moving martial art and meditative dance I learned later in graduate school from Will (?), who as a Harvard junior had been my first karate teacher. A couple of years ago I heard from college classmate Andy Hansen, who had taught, along with Dick Philbrick and me, for the Harvard Karate Club. He's still practicing, too, but some joint operations cause him, he said, to practice "old man's Oechi Ryu" (probably a lot like Tai Chi).
[Note: For more on Tai Chi, see my Tai Chi and Striking Bag Meditation.]Family life in rural Virginia (within an "intentional neighborhood" of friends) continues to be both comforting and interesting. Since I've written a "Winter Holiday Letter" about my family and community life for each of the last few years and have sent them to a number of you, however, I won't repeat any of that here.
[NOTE: A number of those holiday letters are included here: See the list of "Older Stuff" on my home page.]
Return to Chronicle listLate in the summer of 1973, I attended an "alternative small press" conference held at a commune in the mountains near Sperryville, VA. I remember little about the conference except for the sauna, heated with wood and located next to a clear water creek just large enough for total immersion. I spent a number of hours in that sauna, meditating, chanting, or just enjoying the heat with other conferees. I felt I was in hippie heaven and dreamed that one day we would have such a sauna.
"We" in those days included the thirty-five of us who made up Twin Oaks Community, a secular commune that still thrives in Louisa, VA, about three files from where I now live. Twin Oaks, which now has close to 100 members, still does not have a sauna; but at long last my hippie dream has been fulfilled.
Last Thanksgiving our neighborhood, which consists of seven households of Louisa commune graduates, finished a cedar-sided, cedar-paneled, wood-heated sauna located on the beach of a little lake we built about ten years ago. Over the winter, twenty inches of snow and five inches of ice made the sauna's heat even more exhilarating as we alternated our sweating with rolls in the snow or dips in the water where we'd chopped away the ice.
[Note: For more on the sauna, see my Church of the Whimsical Way.]
Return to Chronicle list"Five years pass in a flash!" Mike Lichtenstein wrote in our 30th Anniversary Report before regaling us with wonderful stories about his family's life during those years. Only at the end of his report did he mention the cancer that would take his life the next year. "If this is my farewell to my Harvard classmates," he said, "I want to thank each of you I ever knew for the experience, and for the times we spent together."
Mike was so generous and gregarious, and he valued so much all of the classmate friendships he had maintained and cultivated over the years. I would read his letters and marvel at the number of classmates he would mention whose names meant nothing to me, but whose stories helped connect me to those years. Now Mike is gone and I depend more than ever on these five-year reports to provide that connection.
These past five years did indeed pass in a flash for Virginia and me - and the years were witness to so many changes in our lives. All of our children left the nest, graduated from colleges, and started their separate lives. We became grandparents, moved from country seclusion to a wooded home just on the other side of the Charlottesville city line, and entered new phases in our careers.
Virginia left the mental retardation field four years ago to work in AIDS/HIV case management. Her newest focus (in a job that started yesterday) is on AIDS/HIV education and prevention. She's hopeful that she'll be able to make a difference locally in how many people become infected in the next few years. My own career took a rather bizarre turn when Susan Daniels, then the Associate Commissioner for Disability at the Social Security Administration (SSA), took an interest in a software application that I had developed. I had created a Lotus 123 spreadsheet that could help recipients of Social Security disability benefits to figure out how the benefits could help them go to work and to learn what would happen to their benefits if they did.
SSA is now funding our institute to produce and improve stand-alone software (called WorkWORLD) that helps people negotiate the benefit-maze, and that helps SSA's own employees give good information and advice about how to do that. Fortunately we are being funded sufficiently to hire real programmers, so we don't have to depend upon my rudimentary programming skills to produce the software. The software is available for free download at http://www.workworld.org.
The reason I called this turn in my career "bizarre" is that I remember vividly my freshman roommates David Hemenway and Mark Alpert struggling with an intro computer course, and my thinking that if they - who were so obviously much smarter than me - were having trouble with the work, then I had no hope of doing anything with computers. Thank goodness computers got easier.