Today's Featured Biography

 
Bert Thurber

It’s been a full and fulfilling 50 years since graduation from W-L.

The first 15 years revolved around study and travel, getting married and gradually finding a vocation. As an undergraduate (Princeton) I really got turned on to learning — almost every subject and most of all history. Focusing especially on European history, I took my junior year abroad (Munich) to study German history.

Upon graduation I joined the Foreign Service at the State Department in Washington, but this quickly proved a disappointment, so I took academic leave to study linguistics for a year (Georgetown). While attending classes at night I substitute taught in various schools in Arlington and Fairfax counties (including my old junior high school), and this peculiar experience actually whetted my appetite for teaching. So I spent the next six years in graduate school (Yale) studying primarily U.S. social history with the intention of becoming a college teacher and teaching abroad — neither of which ambitions ever came to be.

Upon returning to New Haven from a year of research in Washington (mostly at Howard) and while struggling to complete my dissertation, I met and married Janie Fisher who was born and raised in Rochester, New York. A month after our marriage (1970) we moved to Hungary for a year where Janie, an elementary school music teacher, studied the Kodaly system of music pedagogy while I wandered, literally and figuratively, rather than work on my dissertation. Eventually I completed the task but in the process demonstrated to myself and any would-be college employer that I was not a great scholar. I still wanted to teach but realized that for me such opportunity was more promising at secondary school level.

In 1973 I began what became, to my surprise and satisfaction, 34 years of teaching history at Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut. Strange that someone who had always attended public schools before college and who had occasionally even disdained private schools should end up teaching his entire career in an independent “prep” school. Loomis turned out to be different than the stereotype in many (not all) respects and a fitting place for me to pursue my lifelong love of learning and teaching (another form of learning). While genuinely committed to educating students about important issues, as broadly and deeply as possible, I was also indulging my delight in engaging diverse subjects. Thus, while teaching required courses in U.S. or World History, I also created elective courses on subjects ranging from the presidency to communism, race to immigration, American society through folk song to modern Europe through film and literature, American cities and suburbs to Islam and the Middle East, from New England to Central America to the Caribbean. All of this probably reflects not only compulsive curiosity but also attention deficit disorder.

Although I did not teach overseas as once intended, I have managed to spend a fair bit of time abroad, earlier in Europe and later in Latin America. Beyond study in Germany and residence in Hungary, I traveled twice with students to the Soviet Union, twice to Turkey, and once with family to Switzerland. Changes in exchange rates contributed to changes in travel destinations and academic pursuits. During my first sabbatical leave (1983-84) we lived in Mexico, and in subsequent years I traveled twice to Nicaragua. During my second sabbatical year (1997-98) I journeyed twice to Cuba, once to cycle and once to study, and a few years later Janie and I returned together to Cuba. We also travel occasionally to Puerto Rico, and we considered both Puerto Rico and Cuba as a regular winter haven. Future sojourns, some involving volunteer service, may find us in Guatemala, Peru, and Brazil as well as India and Russia.

We have three children but no grandchildren so far. Neither Chris nor Karin is married, while Ali is married but still concentrating on her work as a child therapist and social worker. All three children live within a few hours drive, so we enjoy regular get-togethers. A year ago I retired and we moved from Windsor, Connecticut, 35 miles up the Connecticut River Valley to Easthampton, Massachusetts. This year Janie also retired after teaching music for 37 years in the Bloomfield (CT) public schools, and now she is teaching music part-time in a Montessori school in neighboring Northampton. For now I am content to pursue my longtime avocations in gardening, photography, and family history with additional exercise from cycling, kayaking, and cross-country skiing. We continue to camp and canoe some summers in the Adirondacks. And we hope to travel more, to the extent we can afford it amidst these uncertain times, in this country as well as abroad.

It has been wonderful to read about all of you who, unlike me, more promptly submitted your profiles to the WLHS 1958 website. It is amazing how many of you I could picture in my mind, including many I didn’t really know, even before clicking on your names to see your old photos. Some of us, of course, go back together well before W-L. I remember many of you from Westover and Westover Baptist, from scouts and teams, from Walter Reed and Swanson. And I also remember many from Washington-Lee who have departed us over these years. Now I look forward to seeing many of you, whenever or wherever we may have first met, next month at our 50th reunion.
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Over the past five years since our 50th reunion, Janie and I have continued living in New England, traveled in Europe and Latin America as well as the United States, and finally became grandparents.

We have surrounded our new home in western Massachusetts with gardens growing vegetables, fruit, berries, nuts, herbs, and flowers plus a pond. We eat well — fresh, dried, pickled, and frozen.

We have traveled as much as (perhaps more than) our declining energy and money allow. We flew twice to California to be with family, and on one of those trips my sister Susan joined us for a long auto journey to visit most of our many cousins in Oklahoma and Texas. In successive years Janie and I toured Turkey, cruised rivers from Amsterdam to Budapest (on the 40th anniversary of our marriage and one-year residence in Hungary), and drove around Ireland with our youngest daughter. This past spring we made it to Peru and — long topping my list of destinations — Machu Picchu. On three occasions we have sojourned in the Dominican Republic where we assist in a rural school. And we continue to camp and canoe in the Berkshires and Adirondacks.

Late becoming grandparents, we have gained three grandchildren in the last three years. Time with them is, as most of you already know, the best time of all.
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Five years since my previous update; two days until our 60th reunion.

The irrepressible historian in me reviews my life in three periods — the first two each covering about one-third century and the last period another one-third century if I live to be 100! The first period encompassed being born in Texas to parents from Oklahoma, being raised and schooled in Alexandria and Arlington, studying history in New Jersey and Connecticut as well as Germany, briefly trying a diplomatic career in Washington, getting married before residing in Hungary and Massachusetts, and eventually finding a vocation in teaching. The second period comprised my teaching history and our raising three children at a residential secondary school in Connecticut plus a sabbatical year’s residence in Mexico with additional travel to Europe and Latin America. The third and last period (retirement) — now a decade down and how many years to go? — embraces residence in western Massachusetts, more travel home and abroad (to earlier lists add Russia, France, Spain, and Vietnam), auxiliary teaching (mostly English as a second language) in rural Dominican Republic and urban Holyoke, Massachusetts (where about half the people are Latino and many speak Spanish). And, most significant this past decade, Janie and I have been blessed with four grandchildren plus a fifth due in October.

A consistent geographical pattern through these three periods is my moving ever northeastward from the Southwest to Mid-Atlantic to New England where I have now lived more than 50 years (along with currently 27 other ’58 classmates). Long ago my mother’s Shirley family first settled in Virginia while my father’s Thurber family first settled in Massachusetts — both families then gradually moved westward — so my own migration has unwittingly reversed that movement.

Beyond travel I still pursue, not quite so energetically and efficiently, the same avocations: gardening, photography, and family history (this last not so much as I should). Ten years ago, when I wrote of my “compulsive curiosity” and “attention deficit,” I was not being facetious. The curiosity continues while that deficit seems more serious. Virtually all adults diagnosed with ADD have presumably experienced it, more or less, since childhood. Perhaps some of you perceived mine long before I did?

Our travels have included visits with Perry and Susie Neubauer in Cambridge MA, as well as Tony and Beth Johnson in Tupper Lake NY, even as they and other ’58 classmates such as Bob Hunter have visited us here in Easthampton MA. Being a poor correspondent (as some of you well know), I prefer personal conversations to letters, e-mails, and text messages — we do not do social media — but fortunately Janie is a great correspondent who compensates in this and other matters.

Looking forward to our 60th.

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