FAVORITE MEMORIES OF WILLIAMS

Experiential education, Winter Study and independent studies, off-campus New England-rooted activities like working with Brad Paul to save the commercial architectural history of Eagle Street in North Adams and driving long distances to historic contra dances, the early days of Environmental Studies, opportunities to explore things I’m not good at (theater, creative writing, printmaking), lessons in courage (the occupation of Hopkins Hall and Dan Pinello’s call for gay liberation in the Record). Kurt Tauber. Bob Gaudino. Clay Hunt, Stuart Crampton (“Particles for Poets”), among many.

WILLIAMS CLUBS / ACTIVITIES

Reporter for Williams Record; band (president, 71-72); WCFM DJ, baseball announcer; Grand Duchy of Fenwick trivia team cofounder; bit parts in theater productions; Mt. Greylock Regional HS tutor; various anti-Vietnam War organizing activities; Gargoyle; freshman x-country; cafeteria work

CURRENT INTERESTS, PASSIONS, AND ORGANIZATIONS

Building Beloved Community in the context of Unitarian Universalism and other non-creedal religions (“one God, or many, if any”; “Love, if it’s sincere, seeks to be effective.”); climate change, dismantling racism, inter-relatedness of oppression; fruitful discourse; poetry and great writing in general; visual arts; music; S.F. Giants and Warriors; deeper understanding of what on earth my dog is thinking and more support for what my wife and kids are doing. Too many organizations to name. We’ll never exhaust the opportunities to invest in justice and compassion.

LIFE SINCE GRADUATION

I arrived at Williams from the San Francisco Bay Area with no idea of what I wanted to become. My answer began emerging almost immediately because Jim Rubenstein was my JA in Sage D.

Jim was a fellow percussionist in the Williams Moo Cow Band and editor of the Record. My second week at Williams, Jim asked me to write something “funny” about the band. I arrived at the Record’s office in Baxter with my story to find Jim leaping from desktop to desktop. He grabbed my copy as he swooped by and told me my next assignment was on the bulletin board. And so it was, written in Mission Impossible-style language.

I was hooked. Amazingly, it led to 40 years of journalism, mostly at the New York Times. My Williams years also steered me toward Vermont, where I’ve lived since 2012, as the minister of the Champlain Valley Unitarian Universalist Society in Middlebury. I began visiting Pawlet, the town where our classmate John Malcolm eventually became a respected dairy farmer; I lived in Putney and worked full-time during the summer of 1970 on the Phil Hoff for Senate campaign; I did an independent study covering Clarksburg for the North Adams Transcript during our senior year.

I started a two-year stint as the Williamstown reporter for the Transcript the Monday after we graduated (first-year pay: $7,700). It wasn’t Watergate-level journalism, but all reporting felt consequential in those years. On the side, I kept playing with the band (I suspect I’m the only six-year member in its history). More importantly, I returned to my Unitarian upbringing and became active in the small UU church in North Adams.

My interest in ministry dates from those years, but it was no competition for the calling I felt to journalism. In 1974, I enrolled in law school at the University of California at Berkeley in the belief it would make me a better reporter. Three years later, equipped with my JD degree and a bulging backpack, I took off for Scandinavia as a freelancer.

My flight home in 1978 landed in New York. I stopped by Energy User News to get some clips of articles I had sold them from Scandinavia, and was offered a job. Hmm. A job without searching. That works. So I settled in Manhattan in what proved to be a right place, right time decision. I was hired by the Times as a technology reporter for the Business Section in 1980, just two years later.

In 1981, I met Michele Lowy, an elementary school teacher who became a friend and, after plenty of twists and turns over the next six years, my wife. Between 1989 and 1993, we became parents of Linus, Matilda (Mattie), and Alfie. With three kids born so close together, we never felt any stage of parenting ended too soon. But we’ve been blessed that everyone came through it healthy, and loving each other as well as us.

The decision about when to retire from journalism was thrust on me by a round of layoffs at the Times in 2008. I realized I had lived my way so deeply into UU-style religious thinking about the world’s needs that seeking another reporting job would be soul-sapping. Fortunately, Michele, a Jewish girl from New York who did not have “wife of minister” on her bucket list, urged me to “go for it.” She was my rock through four years of seminary and internship. I’m in my 10th year of ministry here, needed and needy, and grateful so much is in bud midst the devastation.