FAVORITE MEMORIES OF WILLIAMS

English 101 with Lawrence Graver, taken as a sophomore.
Rowing on Lake Onota and the beautiful autumn colors that lasted a month freshman year. When I returned from Florida training in the spring, my deep tan shocked people. Too many stories about men’s crew to share other than we won the inaugural Little Three race at Wesleyan. It helped that we were assigned the lane with the swiftest current. The men’s novice trophy is the William F. McGraw, JR Oar., named in memory of our classmate Bill McGraw. Theater productions were also memorable.

WILLIAMS CLUBS / ACTIVITIES

Men’s crew – freshman and varsity eight; The Williams Record – reporter; The Gulielmensian; Freshman review – actor; Theater productions – actor

CURRENT INTERESTS, PASSIONS, AND ORGANIZATIONS

I am now in my 15th year as head agent and serve on the 50th Reunion Fund Committee. Previously, I was a longtime associate agent and vice-chair of the Alumni Fund for three years. I am also a longtime class agent for Phillips Exeter Academy and have served on reunion planning committees.

I chair the Town of New Lebanon Conservation Advisory Council, sit on the town’s Zoning Rewrite and Comprehensive Plan Update Committees, serve as treasurer of the Corkscrew Rail Trail Association and as director of the Rensselaer Plateau Alliance. I chair the RPA’s Development Committee.

LIFE SINCE GRADUATION

Life is good. I live both in East Chatham, Columbia County, N.Y., and on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with my wife of 42 years, Barbara DeBuono. We were married in 1980 at the Williams Club, then in the Lehman mansion on East 39th Street. Our son Adam was born in 1983 in Boston, and our son Douglas in 1990 in Providence. Both are married, and we have two grandchildren, Gabriel and his sister, Quinn, who enchant us.

The upstate property on 23 acres is our rural paradise straddling the towns of New Lebanon and Canaan, eight miles from Massachusetts, with the Berkshires nearby and Williamstown a 32-mile drive away. Our trip to NYC down the Taconic takes generally 2 hours 20 minutes and the contrast between city and country keeps us intrigued. Both locations are cultural meccas, but only one offers peace and quiet.

My wife, a public health physician, continues to work remotely, now addressing Covid breakthrough cases. I am a full-time volunteer in New Lebanon, primarily for conservation, with multiple meetings each month. Once you prove your worth as a volunteer, demand from the community never diminishes. This is also true of my longtime volunteer roles at Phillips Exeter and Williams and at my sons’ schools over the years.

My working career was very rewarding, split among book publishing, higher-education administration, and freelance writing and editing based in New York City. My nearly 15 years at Houghton Mifflin had me traveling overseas for 18 weeks every year, seeing the world, and prior to that I traveled the nation and Canada for Academic Press. At every stop, I found that I could rely on my Williams liberal arts education to truly appreciate and connect with the people and surroundings.

Our sons are successful in their careers, Adam in a health-care start-up, heading business development, and Douglas at an aerospace start-up, heading external affairs. Adam and his wife, Rachel, work remotely from a spacious home in Upcountry Maui, having relocated in late 2020 from Bernal Heights in San Francisco with our grandkids. They live on three acres, with spectacular views across the Central Valley to the North Coast, South Coast, West Maui Mountains, and a sliver of both Lanai and Molokai. Douglas has worked in Long Beach since April 2021 and lives with his wife, Natalie, in Redondo Beach. They were married in October 2021 in Charlottesville, Va., at a spectacular wedding on a vineyard south of town. We can now break up the long flights home from Maui with multi-day layovers in Los Angeles.

Incidentally, both sons took advantage of interviews offered by the Williams Admission Office. Adam loved Williams but applied early to Princeton, and that was that. Douglas preferred an urban setting and ended up at GW’s Elliott School.

Our post-Covid plans are to travel widely to places in the world I haven’t been, always returning home to tend my gardens, pick up tree fall (the gift that never stops giving), feed my koi, and keep up with volunteer work. Barbara plans to learn Italian and dote on the grandkids.

As I said at the rehearsal dinner we hosted on a hotel rooftop before Douglas and Natalie wed, “May your days, years, and decades together be rich in every way that counts—with the blessings of abiding love, family, faith, good health, budding interests, career accomplishments, adventure and travel, and comfortable, welcoming homes in communities that win your allegiance and ultimately your service. Not least, may you be blessed with enduring friendships.” Such has been and continues to be true for us.