|
I have been involved with Mayhew Island since 1976. At the time, my parents had just moved from New England to
Florida, I was about to graduate from high school, and I was desperately looking for a way to stay in the North for the summer. I needed room, board, and a bit of a salary – and, thanks to my teacher
and dean at Phillips Academy, Jack Richards (a founding and current trustee of Mayhew) – I found my way to Mayhew Island. It was probably
the most intense and rewarding few weeks of my life. I returned in 1977, then took a few years off to finish college, study in what was then the Soviet Union (I was a Russian Studies major), and to
work for a year or two in New York City. To get a break from city life, I came back to work at Mayhew the summer of 1982 – and I stayed, year-round, until 1995. For the last ten years of that
time, I was the Executive Director. The most dramatic moment of my time at Mayhew came on January 6, 1990, when the Lindsay Lodge burned to the ground (see picture left with Dick Cowern)– and the
happiest came a few months later, when we opened the new, wonderful lodge for first session. We'd always said that the lodge burning down would be the one calamity from which the program could never
recover. We proved them wrong, though I'd never want to go through that kind of "proving" again..After leaving Mayhew, I spent six years at the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, a longtime Mayhew
funder, becoming their Vice President for major gifts and planned giving. Since the spring of 2001, I have been Vice President for Philanthropy at the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund – a great
nonprofit organization that makes loans available for decent housing and job creation for many of the same families served by Mayhew. I live in Bow with my wife, Pat, a professor and chair of the Education
Department at Plymouth State University; our daughter Becky, a student at Vassar College (and a Mayhew Island resident at the age of two weeks in 1985!); and our son Max, a student at Bow High. Besides
work, family, and Mayhew, my passions include rooting for the Red Sox (I'm a bona fide member of Red Sox Nation since 1967) and the Bow High baseball team (they have a very
good-looking catcher who shares my surname); reading a great deal of nonfiction and history and daily newspapers and journals; hiking, biking, and (more slowly every year) running; speaking and writing on subjects relating to philanthropy and community investing; and following politics.
I'm honored to be back at Mayhew as a member of the Board of Trustees. Some of my best moments are spent in conversation with now-35-year-old men, doing great things, whom I first met as boys on
Mayhew Island, and now-45-year-olds who cut their teeth as summer staff members. It's a very special community, and I hope I'm always a part of it. |
