Ch. 2. The Woodberry Forest School Experiment. 1970-1972.

1970-1972. The Woodberry Forest School Experiment and aftermath

Introduction

Yes, this chapter requires an introduction. It has so many seemingly disparate pieces, written over so wide ranging a period of time, that only an introduction (and possibly concluding remarks) will hold it all together.

For one, fourteen through sixteen are influential years for an impressionable boy seeking his way into manhood under any circumstances. But 1970 was a critical time to head into that transition. It was the end of the civil rights era, for all practical purposes. It was the heyday of black nationalism and the flowering of the black arts movement in the US. Marxist elements were coming into vogue with the emergence of the very popular and photogenic Angela Davis, aligned with the Jackson brothers on the west coast, and her interpretations of her East German radical professor, Herbert Marcuse. Traditional elements of the community, some may argue, like the church, were entering a decline. Veterans were returning from Vietnam with lifelong ailments and drug addictions. But we were insulated from most of this inside a safe and secure bubble at Woodberry Forest. For the most part.

As part of the overall process, we were entertaining new ideas while being kept in check by the old ones, the old ways, tradition. So there was always a tension, a push and a pull in effect.

More rumination than poetry . . . . the great experiment - a preface of sorts

We were coming up on the 40th anniversary of the graduation of the first group of Anne C. Stouffer Foundation scholars. To mark that achievement, a bunch of us held monthly conference calls to plan a February 2016 reunion in Atlanta. Perhaps we would include some of the prominent luminaries, educators, politicians, etc., who were involved in the original experiment.

Here is my oral history submission from the archives:

It was an interesting, and maybe even a noble experiment.  

Prelude.

Lincoln Jr. High had never seen so many white people! John and Rosemary Ehle and a couple of other people working tape machines and taking notes took over the library. I recall that once we were interviewed, tested and selected, we had to submit a preference for schools. I thought Asheville School for Boys, because it was closer, but my mother did some checking and discovered a whole bunch of Greensboro folks were already in the Woodberry family. My father was dead set against the whole enterprise, I remember, and he had his reasons, but my mother was all for it and all in for Woodberry Forest School.

We (my mother and I) took a Greyhound bus up to Woodberry Forest for the interview. It was winter and it was cold. Snow met us in the parking lot when we arrived by taxi from the bus stop in Orange, VA. Driving up the winding country road to the main building on campus, Walker Building, there was a sense we were entering someplace special. I don’t recall the exact conversations, but I do remember meeting with the headmaster, Baker Duncan, a tall and frankly intimidating man. After the meeting with Duncan, I met Mr. Stillwell and Mr. Glascock. It was a whirlwind of a morning after barely sleeping on the bus the night before.

On the return trip we met up with some relatives in Richmond, where we spent the weekend. I crashed early but they partied into the night. That Sunday we returned to Greensboro and Lincoln Jr. High. I finished out the semester, but learned before Spring that I would be Woodberry bound.

Being there

Ron Long, Terry Jones, and Art Gaines led the charge in 1969. They were the first generation, the pioneers. I think they had some interesting experiences, but I’ll leave that story to them to tell.  In the second year, 1970, Ron Lipscomb, Kevin Miller, Wayne Booker and I arrived as boarding students, and Gary Mance and Wayne Williams came in as day students, tripling our numbers and making a significant addition to the number of variables in the social experiment. In 1971, Clifford Johnson and Robert Long, Ron’s younger brother, joined us, both as boarding students. 

Fourth Form, 1971

Of course, it didn’t take long for us to discover one another. Kevin and I both came from Greensboro and from Lincoln Jr. High. (Five Lincoln students went to Virginia prep schools that year sponsored by the Anne C. Stouffer Foundation. Veda Howell went to Foxcroft, another girl went to Chatham Hall whose name I can’t remember.).

I don’t remember if we came together officially or if we just gravitated to a center. Gaines, Long and Jones were the big brothers we went to for advice. Ron Lipscomb and I had classes together. And we all played football that first fall: Ron, Art, Wayne and Gary on JV, Terry, Ronald, and I on Junior Orange, Kevin and Wayne Williams on Junior Black. That first winter I decided to run track and we all tried a variety of events to see where our best talents were. I remember hating the pole vault. The coach thought I had some natural abilities in high hurdles but I never quite overcame the fear of crashing into one and never got into it. In my second year I gravitated to cross country in the fall after showing some promise as a middle distance runner the previous spring. Several of us continued together in winter track, though Ronald Lipscomb early on distinguished himself in JV basketball in the winter, as did Ron Long in varsity baseball in the spring.

Was I really the first African-American in the history of the school to letter in cross-country? Damn, I guess I was.

Bynum Merritt, Austin Ball, Hugh Hoy, Cameron Hilton, and me in the rear of the 2nd group.

We (the handful of black students) got into the habit of sitting together in the dining hall for Saturday and Sunday breakfasts, which were buffet and informal (no coat and tie, and no assigned seating). It is amusing looking back on it, and maybe even a bit contrived, but at the time it seemed the natural thing to do.

To call the first trimester an adjustment period academically would be a gross understatement. While I excelled in English, Spanish and Mediterranean Studies, I fell flat on my face in Earth Science and Algebra. Algebra was self-paced and programmed learning. Perhaps for mathematics in so different an environment I needed something a bit more structured. I had always been a good science student - I just needed more focus.

Dave Bloor tripled as my earth science teacher, track and cross country coach and assigned academic adviser. He was definitely one of my favorites. I learned so much from Mr. Bloor, in the classroom and on the track. I will never forget him.

Bob Vasquez, my Spanish teacher, started me off on a language learning track and a curiosity about language that would sustain me throughout my future careers (he was also my basketball coach, though his best efforts at converting me to basketball fell short).

Wilfred Grenfell ranks right at the top. I lived for his history lectures, and he, more than any other, bears the blame for my insatiable curiosity about Middle East issues and about foreign affairs in general.

Robin Breeden, our dorm guy, maybe we called him dorm master, would invite us into his apartment for “tea and biscuits” and tell us about the time he swam the English Channel. How I adored those “civilizing” chats.

Jim Ebert’s Vietnam stories sandwiched between learning geometry proofs and a new way of mathematical thinking were a daily delight.

And the Bond couple, Tom and Vicki, with whom I studied both Spanish and French, fueled my thirst for foreign language skills that continues until today, with Portuguese and Arabic added along the way. 

Lucky for me I came to my senses and abandoned football after my first year. Cross country was tough and the other black students made fun of me doing it, but we had a great team and great guys.

Here is an almost lost memory. That first Woodberry-EHS football weekend bonfire was quite terrifying for me. White boys were acting crazy and there were Confederate flags all over the place. I took it all in stride, but I never talked to anyone about it. We as black students never talked about it among ourselves. It just didn’t get discussed. But everybody saw it and everybody experienced the same terror.

Home during the summer between my first and second years at Woodberry, I learned about a bus trip being organized by Hayes-Taylor YMCA (or was it Malcolm X Liberation University?) from Greensboro to Durham for the first USA-Pan Africa track meet. You know I got a seat on that bus! Not only did I see the great African runners Kip Keino, the great Kenyan miler, Ben Jipcho (who was a student at NC Central, I think) and Mirus Iftar, the phenomenal Ethiopian 5k and 10k distance runner, but I also got to see the renown NCCentral sprinter, Larry Black, and middle distance phenoms Marty Liquori and Steve Prefontaine. NC Central also had a world class hurdler whose name I cannot recall. Here is an article commemorating the 50th anniversary of this important event: https://fansided.com/2021/07/19/duke-pan-africa-usa-international-track-meet/

I have only fond memories of running cross country. Those long autumnal runs, named Arrowpoint and Chicken Ridge, and the long 13 mile trek to Achsah, VA and back, introduced me to and acquainted me with the beauty of Orange County. Those runs were the ambrosia that nourished my soul. The habit I formed, of finding wonders and magic in routine and mundane chores, like long distance runs, would later prove to be a source of personal and professional strength. But I digress. We had a great cross country team, eventually winning the Virginia Prep League championship. The camaraderie of that team filled a social and a personal void for me. 

Woodberry Forest School cross country team, 1971. From The FirTree, 1971.

Here is an almost lost memory. We had structured room study every night after dinner. At some point, though, perhaps around 9pm, we’d all go downstairs for break and a snack. And the snack food was several pitchers of ice cold milk (the school had its own dairy farm back then) and all-you-could-eat saltine crackers. And man, those crackers were so good with that milk!

Another almost lost memory. At some point, I noticed that my running buddy and study partner Ron had a different color biology textbook. His book had a green floral design and mine had a blue geometric design. Thumbing through the pages and reading just a bit of a few chapters I was able to figure it out. Mr. Gillespie taught creationist biology, while Mr. Dewey, my teacher, was teaching evolution biology. Woodberry Forest had two different biologies being taught at the same time!

In retrospect, my most enduring thoughts about the Woodberry experience centered around its well known and highly regarded honor system. The honor system, as I understood it, was a give and take thing. You were entitled to respect as an individual as long as you paid respect to others and to the system. Writing “I have neither given nor received help on this examination” on each test paper was only the beginning. Each “boy” was due his propers, his space to explore, his realm for growth and discovery, as long as it didn’t encroach on anybody else’s.

I never accepted getting hazed by seniors as part of the honor system, as hard as they tried to make you think it was, nor did I accept skipping mandatory chapel as a honor code violation, though it was easy enough for prefects to count heads and know that one of the Negro students was not in attendance. It will require an addendum to discuss more aspects of the honor system, how I internalized it at the time, and how it informed and influenced me in later life.

Deciding to leave.

Still, though, for reasons perhaps imagined and perhaps real, thoughts lingered and grew within me that I really didn’t “belong.” Those thoughts reached a height in the spring of my second year, a growing and gnawing loneliness that I couldn’t explain or even understand. At the end of my second year, I told myself I would not return. The loneliness and alienation I felt at Woodberry, I would later come to learn, had a lot less to do with Woodberry and a lot more to do with me and my emergence from adolescence and puberty. 

Years later, and in fact, only recently in answering questions with my cardiologist would I learn that what I thought were stress-induced stomach cramps during intense repetitive training spring track workouts were actually little heart attacks where my heart wasn’t getting sufficient volumes of incoming blood, sort of like pump cavitations I studied later in submarine engineering. I survived, but the pain I endured steered me away from track in later years. The condition sometimes results in sudden death, especially among high school and college athletes with a predisposed heart condition.

****

Afterword

A nagging feeling would stay with me through college, where, like a ship without a rudder, without an anchor, and without a means of propulsion, I bounced around for three long, uncertain years, changing my major almost every semester, back and forth from electrical engineering to biology to economics. It was actually an interesting combination.

Finally, midway through 1978, the year I should have graduated from college, I left school at mid term, degree-less, and enlisted in the Navy’s Nuclear Power program and the submarine force. It was there that I finally hit my stride, serving four years in engineering billets on the USS Hammerhead (SSN-63) and the USS Michigan (SSBN-727(B)).

In the intervening years, I lost track of everybody. I bumped into Ron Lipscomb on Duke’s campus, maybe in 1976. A girl I dated knew Wayne Williams, also at Duke. Kevin Miller (God rest his soul) and I had mutual friends in Greensboro. In 1985, I went back and finished college and upgraded my Navy status from enlisted to commissioned. My tenure as a reserve commissioned officer was a pre-set duration - I owed the Navy at least four years. I finished my four-year obligation and transferred to State and the Foreign Service in 1992. 

While serving the London Embassy, I completed an M.A. at the School of Oriental and African Studies. There I earned the credential “Africanist.” It would serve me well in subsequent assignments, focusing my studies on decolonization, resolution of border disputes, and transnational organization legal identity.

I stumbled on Ron Long’s name in the news in the late 90’s and got back in touch. He was high up in the SEC at the time. Ron put me in touch with Art Gaines, who by that time was doing humanitarian relief work in East Africa. Following assignments in Guinea-Bissau, London, Angola and Ghana, I landed a Washington job also covering East Africa. I thought maybe our paths would cross on many trips I made to Khartoum, but it wasn’t to be.

*

The integration experiment was not for our benefit exclusively. The primary purpose, I concluded, was to produce a slightly different environment for the white boys who would be entering a changed world, a multi-colored world. One might even say they (the white boys) would need to get an early start developing more nuanced negotiating skills to retain mastery in that new world. 

We were funded by an external foundation that counted every penny they spent on us. There were always questions about whether there would be funding in outlying years and threats that our families might have to pay an increasing portion of our expenses. It wasn’t enough that we were being provided as subjects in an experiment. 

In retrospect, there were so many racial undertones to the constant hazing we were subjected to as “new boys.” The honor system we were constantly reminded of and grounded in provided no protection against the constant barrage of hate speech and racist microaggressions. 

One night during study hall I reached my breaking point. Two known racists, twins no less, and one of their little whipping boys were outside my room talking about “nigger this” and “nigger that,” and “that little son of a bitch, Maxwell.” My mother had sent a pound cake and I took a table knife from the dining hall to my room to cut slices. Well, without much thought, I grabbed that table knife and went out into the hall to confront my enemies. No blood was spilled, but telephone calls to parents got me a meeting the following day with the campus disciplinarian, Jack Glascock. 

No disciplinary action was taken on either side, but for them, and for me, everything changed. From that point on there was no more shouting of racial epithets outside my door, but the whispering throughout campus made me feel totally guilty and unworthy. It was as if I had violated some unwritten code. Perhaps I had. When I packed at the end of that semester I knew I would not be returning. What I didn’t know at the time was that the pendulum had been set in motion and I was yet to experience the other side of its swing, a Dantean descent of sorts. 

***

A response 50 years later to the whipping boy: 

20130329. Thanks for your e-mail. The years have passed. I would not have expected to hear from you, even with the e-mail I sent out to the general alumni crowd. It took some courage, moral courage on your part to reach out like this, and I want to acknowledge that courage from the outset. There is far too little courage left in the world.

That small event between you and me with the cake knife was a part of my decision not to return to Woodberry Forest for that third year. But only a small part. We were both young and trying to figure out the worlds we were about to enter. Whether being rich or poor, spoiled or not, was, over the long haul, largely immaterial. I felt at some level the need to return to Greensboro to spend time with my parents, to get to know them better in the few years they had remaining. To hear my father recite poetry. To hear my mother’s hopes and dreams for her children. I would have missed that had I returned to WFS. Looking back, I am glad that I remained home. Everything else worked itself out in time, though there were plenty of bumps in the road. But it was those bumps that made me the person that I am, that I have become, so no complaints there. 

That’s my story. Roller coaster ride through college, dropped out and joined the Navy, two submarines in five years, back to college, Navy commission, back to sea on an aging destroyer, foreign service assignments in Africa and the Middle East and that most foreign of countries, Washington, DC, wonderful wife, pages and pages of poetry I’ve written that I can share with good friends over aged scotch. Early retirement in a city apartment filled with books. Not too shabby for a poor boy from Greensboro.    

I never disliked you and I bear no grudges. I stopped doing grudges a long time ago. I have wondered how those Peterson boys were doing, but I imagine they are functioning in their world, as I am in mine, in the world I have created for myself. That’s what we do over the years, isn’t it, create our world for ourselves and live in it? 

I hope things are going well for you. There are bumps in every road. I have helped people navigate their bumps, and people have helped me navigate mine. It is a continuous process, one that keeps unfolding in front of you.  

I have meandered. Forgive me for going on and on. It is my therapy and maybe it works for you too.

Let me know. We can continue.

Ray

p.s.  Keep being courageous. The Portuguese say, “Coragem!”  (Have courage!).

********************

A “catching up” email on a similar subject: 

It’s been a busy summer, even though the lockdown has us teleworking 99% at the memory factory (but I’ll get to that later).

50 years ago this summer I was girding up for what would become the signature experience of my life, the integration of Woodberry Forest School. Here’s the interesting story in a nutshell. Ex-Confederate Captain Robert Walker acquired a mansion and a large plot of land, a plantation, in fact, in central Virginia from President James Madison’s ne-er do well baby brother, Willey, designed and architected by Madison’s partner in crime, Thomas Jefferson (though we now forgive them all). Walker started a school to educate his sons, pulling his oldest son out of UVA law school and installing him as headmaster, a post he held until his death 50 years later. (p.s. James Madison was a leading proponent of Negro repatriation, and we have Liberia (Americans), Sierra Leone (British) and Nigeria (Brazilians) to show for that brain fart.)

In the 60’s, the great white fathers of Woodberry decided that their sons needed a more “multi-cultured” exposure because the world, she was a-changing. They called up an alum who ran a foundation in North Carolina to dispose of the fortune of another parent alum who had been huge in North Carolina textiles and said, “We need to integrate. Find us some worthy colored students.” But not yet. Wait until after the capital fund-raising project in 1968 so as not to scare off big donors. In 1969 the school admitted their first African-American students, their first Asian student, their first Jewish student, and their first known Native-American student. Also their first female students were admitted, all daughters of faculty members.

Greensboro, Durham, Fayetteville, Houston, and Washington, DC would provide that black human fodder. And off we marched.

This year we lost one of the original crew to ALS. That event has served to reconnect the remaining few. My re-entry to the Woodberry orbit came in 2013, when, you guessed it, one of my classmates made the connection between me and that guy involved in that Benghazi mess. Good guy, did a stint in the Marine Corps and returned home to run the family pipe business, found me and called me up. “Ray, are you that guy? What can we do to help?” Small world.

Impossible to make this all up, I am turning my hand to fiction-writing after penning a two-act play I buried and over a thousand pages of poetry my grand nephew has been instructed to publish posthumously.

And the memory factory. While on extended admin leave, I started taking classes in the Library and Information Science program at Catholic U. After finishing it I worked a series of librarian and archivist jobs, settling on archiving as my calling. While serving as town archivist in the tony Maryland suburb of Garrett Park, I got a call from Howard University’s famed Moorland Spingarn Research Center, where I worked for almost two years. Y’all would not believe the stuff they have. But I am fairly certain that after the BLM and Antifa vandals take down all the statues, they’ll be coming after the libraries, archives and museums next. America’s Cultural Revolution. So, as we speak, I’m planning my next caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis.

Fifty year anniversary of integration at Woodberry Forest. February, 2019.

*****************

Notes to the new headmaster

January 31, 2019

Thanks. As you may know, I am a Woodberry dropout, leaving after my 4th form year. I watched others leave, the Native American student named Gentry (never really knew him and can't remember his first name), for example, and my friend Art Gaines (who I almost ran into many years later in the Sudan, but not quite). In retrospect, in total retrospect, while I may wish I had returned, my motivation at the time was a simple one: through my actions I violated the honor system, my own honor system, and the remedy was self-dismissal. Of course, there were other extenuating circumstances.

Just this past weekend, I googled and found the J. Carter Walker statement on the honor system appended to your statement: https://bbk12e1-cdn.myschoolcdn.com/ftpimages/51/misc/misc_159498.pdf. I had never seen it before. It was very revealing.

Later, I posted the following to a Facebook thread on the weekend visit:

"Thanks, John. In retrospect, the Woodberry experience put my life on a unique trajectory. But most importantly, during a period of extreme adversity (which we all must experience unless we are content to be mere spectators in life), Woodberry's "hidden lessons" gave me both the strength to endure and the courage to fight the bastards back. I feel nothing but gratitude to the institution and all the people I met and came to know there."

I think it will be worthwhile to develop this theme further as I work through the memories of the Woodberry experience that have remained buried deeply in my psyche up until now. That's what I plan to do, and will be honored to share it with you.

May 25, 2019

Hi: Thanks for your note. I can say briefly that exposure to the honor system at Woodberry made a difference in my life that I might not have imagined at the time. Transcending race, creed, even class, I felt liberated to be seen as an individual under a system of ethical and moral control. Frankly, had my youth not been somewhat troubled, I would have finished Woodberry. Instead, I stumbled into college and made a bit of a mess of things there as well, though I carried throughout a strong (maybe too strong) sense of right and wrong, fair and unfair play, especially where I felt the external expectation should have always been that one's word is one's bond.

Perhaps that is the crux of the matter. What happens when that Woodberry-instilled sense of honor (and it is very real, even if subjected to it for only two years; perhaps especially because it is something one really tries to hold on to) comes face to face with, collides, and/or confronts dishonor and lack of positive expectation?

Lucky for me, my stumbling led me to enlist in the Navy (I had to make something of my life), where I voluntarily came under the indirect tutelage of the Adm. Rickover and Adm. Stockdale brands of stoicism. I felt Woodberry had especially prepared me for that in ways that nothing else in my background, not family, not church, had. It was the military ethos of personal honor and personal sacrifice that brought me full circle.

Perhaps it is unfortunate that more Woodberry Forest boys don't do a stint in the military, we would have a bigger database. But the few have made the spiritual connection, I am sure. I met a Marine in Cairo, Egypt who was a Woodberry grad (don't even ask me how that came up in conversation, but it did) and although we never discussed it directly, I believe it was a bond we shared.

I carried that ethos into my next career in diplomacy, where, frankly, I met some very unethical characters across the board. At length, towards the end, I was forced to confront ideas and even people (who bore them) at a very senior level who had no sense of honor whatsoever.

Here is the second crux, the same crux. How does one sustain oneself in an environment devoid of the honor system one buys into as a 14 year old? You either abandon it and "go with the flow," or you hold on to it and endure the storm. There is loss, of friendships, of prestige, even of post-service contracting opportunities (smile!) when you don't "go with the flow." A corrupt system may see you as undependable, not cut from the same organizational cloth. That is OK.

A lot of this crystallized for me when I returned to Woodberry this past winter. I found Walker's statement on the honor system on the internet and so much of it rang so true for me after so many years. 

Here in post-retirement, I am working at a college library, an archive, actually. I returned to school at 57 to get a masters in library science and here I am. And it is the end of the semester and things are pretty haywire. I'll be better able to have a phone chat next week, whenever it is convenient for you. I am on duty at the reference desk Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, but most any other time works for me.

Thanks for reaching back. I await hearing from you.

Ray

********************

Poems from the period. These are the earliest poems I wrote that have survived. Most are quite awful!

Unnamed

When I was younger than today
(around five years of age, I’d say)
I would recite poetry and bible verses
at Sunday school sponsored talent shows.
The old ladies would say, “Hallelujah!”
“Praise the Lord!” And Christian things like that.
And when I finished, they would ask me
what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I’d tell them, “I want to be a lawyer or a writer.”
Then the ladies would say, “He’s such a sweet child,”
never knowing that even then I understood
that life would be rough, not smooth
as everybody said. So I decided
to give my life to revolution.


To Audrey

I see other girls all the time
But they never affect me one way or the other
I look at them and try to see you
but you never fully appear.
Every night I dream of you.
Throughout the day I think of you.
But the absence of your love
from my heart is all my fault.
I don’t know how to approach you
because I think I may be unworthy.
If only I could rap to you
through the frequency of my heart
I would relay to you a love message
that couldn’t be conceived. (by Venus)

Doubleknits

I’d be so cool if only I had a pair
of doubleknit underwear.
I could pimp all day around the town
The brothers would say, “That dude is down.”
The sisters would say, “He is so fine.”
The elders would say, “That boy does shine.”
But underneath their grins they’d frown
and think, “What kind of a stupid clown
does that cool fool think he is
wearing nothing but doubleknit underwear?”

The Revolutionary Cool Collegians (a visit to UVA in the early 70’s)

Yes, this is the dawning of the age of revolution
And all the brothers and sisters are doing their black thing
Everybody’s wearing dashikis and afros
and the baddest ones got the biggest fros.
They are all sporting red, black and green emblems,
not realizing what it means,
just doing it because “It’s so bad, man!”
Trying to adopt a revolutionary consciousness
Digging on Huey Newton and Angela Davis and
Amiri Baraka because what they say sounds
truly together. Quoting Malcolm but never really
believing what he said.
Ignorant to the names of Garvey,
DuBois, Vessey, Fanon, Nkrumah, and Douglass.
“The Black Revolution began in 1965,”
is the number one thought in their minds.
“Ours is the first revolutionary generation,”
is what they believe.
What they don’t understand is that their revolution
was going on before they were born and will not end when
they die because this revolution is an eternal situation.

Unnamed #1

I wish I could write a poem
a bad black poem
that would really infuriate some people
who I really hate
or a poem that would wake up
some due to the facts
of living a life of death while
dreaming of a life after death
(to dream the impossible dream)

But people are tired of reading poems
filled with pessimism
poems filled with hate, poems
filled with truth of this sorry state of things.

So I’ll write about that fine chick
I slow-dragged with last night
and what we did in the bedroom
after the party was over

or about the high I got last night
at Brother Rap’s house –
and all the colors and images I saw
before I killed myself at the end
of the trip

But all this is essentially “the soup can
without the soup”
and a pessimistic outlook is better
than a phony one.

Geometry Class Notes

Oh God! I wish I could take all the circles
out of all the circles
separate all the circles of my being
and discover my true personality

Then I could write my poem
or sing my song
or do my deed
of figure out my geometry correctly

But the circles are so hazy
each one intersects another
and none but one cuts across them all
Here lies the key:

I want to be next to you,
spiritually if not physically
but it seems so impossible
you being such a complex being
and my circles so imperceptive.

Life for me is lifeless

Life for me is lifeless
all my dreams are nightmares
or frightful premonitions
of my life during the day

Life has become a boring chore
there’s no use in pretending
every morning I long for the night
and every night for the morning

Slavery of my mind and freedom of my body
pain always accompanies pleasure
and hate with love
there’s no end to the circle

Escape is all but impossible
death is never the answer
hell is too hot, heaven is too sweet
and purgatory too monotonous.

Some random thoughts in 2025

From graduation in late 2014 until March 2020 when the COVID lockdown hit, I worked a series of jobs in my new field. I spent a year in the beautiful mountains of North Carolina, working as a reference and instruction librarian at Western Carolina University. I loved that job and I loved the mountains. I had two lovely plots in the Cullowhee Community Garden where I rediscovered the joy of gardening. But I was a geographic bachelor and when my wife developed some health issues I rushed back to Washington to be at her side.

a couple of blog posts from Cullowhee

In the interim, I returned to State as a retired annuitant senior advisor in the office of Public Diplomacy. It’s barely worth mentioning because two weeks later I began part time as a reference and instruction librarian at American University (AU), I position I kept for the next two years. Working the reference desk at AU, I learned about the OSher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) hosted at American and prepared a course proposal for a 10-week course/study group reading all ten plays in August Wilson’s American Century Cycle. Meanwhile, I began a short stint as program manager at DC Archives. I was there for one year, my August Wilson course proposal was accepted and I ended my association with DC Archives to devote full time to course preparations.

June 21, 2025. It is the summer solstice and I have apparently run out of space in my sandbox so I’ll be depositing some dated thoughts here. In April, 2025 we completed our project to process the professional papers and work-related documents of Ambassador Terrence Todman, a six-time U.S. ambassador. Yes, he holds the record for number of ambassadorships, which is why we were passionate about preserving the record. He had deposited several (over 21) boxes of papers. photographs, video tapes, cassette tapes, over the years with his designated repository at a college library in his hometown in the Virgin Islands and over the years the unprocessed boxes had fallen into a state of disrepair. A mentor and colleague of mine, Jim Dandridge, discovered and retrieved 21 boxes, moving them to safer storage at DACOR-Bacon House here in DC. He found out I had developed some skills as an archivist in my post-retirement career as a librarian and solicited my assistance. We discussed the project and I came on board in the Summer of 2024. I designed a database that could be uploaded to any content management system in conjunction with librarians at the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI).

Working on Saturdays with of couple of Dandridge’s family members (his daughter and his grandson), a couple of retired ambassadors, and a soon to be retired government historian, we completed the arduous task of identifying, de-stapling,and re-foldering each to-be archived item. In February 2025, Jim and I set a goal of completing the project by the end of April 2025, concluding that only working on Saturdays would not get the task completed on time. So in March, I added a couple days per week to our schedule, coordinating working days with DACOR-Bacon House.

Happy to say we met our deadline and shipped xxx holllinger boxes to their final destination at the University of Virgin Islands, Todman’s designated depository. The team of librarians at UVI will be using a content management system all archivists are familiar with, ContentDM, to uploard the database and make Todman’s papers accessible digitally to researchers everywhere.

My next project, currently underway, is to consolidate seven years of notes I have accrued as study group leader of the August Wilson American Century Cycle, Over the years I’ve done study groups at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), at American University and at San Diego State University, and book clubs at DC Public Library. Starting off with over 400 pages of accumulated notes, blog entries, and transcribed marginalia, I’ve edited it down to just over 200 pages, built a table of contents and a detailed index. The index construction was quite a challenge, calling on all my librarian and archivist skills. I hope to have a finished project, uploaded to substack and available in print form, in time for the next study group offering at OLLI-AU in September.

In my final update note for today, June 21, 2025, I’d like to mention a month’s old text I found on my phone last night. I am horrible about keeping up with texts. It just seems to me that keeping up with mail and email corresspondence should be enough. Anyway, the two month old text was from a high school classmate of over 50 years ago, complaining that some members of our original prep school integration cohort were somehow not telling the whole story about the integration experience, not including all participants. I hardly felt qualified to weigh in, considering I only spent two years, not four, at the institution under discussion and returning home short of completion and graduation. In fact, I think the school only includes me in the graduating class because I pay my dues annually to the scholarship foundation, which is the least I can do for the high quality education I received for the two years I was in attendance. Nonetheless, I am allowing myself to be involved in the group discussion.

On reflection, and I think this is an important consideration, each person has the obligation, the duty to tell his own story, to create content, so to speak, for history sake. That is what I have been doing with my substack memoir project here. We, each of us, also have a collective obligation to share with members of our cohort the content we have created, especially as we enter our golden years. We have already lost three members to untimely deaths (isn’t death always untimely?). Soon we will all be in the ground and our memories will perish in our graves if we do not WRITE STUFF DOWN!

Moreover, and I think this is most significant, I feel personally that we are called upon to live complete lives, not just a high school slice of life, or a college slice, or a work slice, or, in my case, a military service slice, an off-the-grid slice, and a post-retirement smorgasbord slice (smile). Our whole lives provide the only adequate or competent measure of the lives we have led, our accomplishments from A to Z, from tit to tat, from birth to death.

"Tell me not in mournful numbers
Life is but an empty dream - 
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not as they seem."

June 21, 2025 continuation.

All: I tried to send this after our zoom call a couple of months back but there was a glitch in the substack software and I'm not sure it went through. I went back and checked and cleared all the permissions. I think it is set properly now.

I got a friendly call from the Amici Fund guy yesterday. Think I'll send them a few bucks since they have been kind enough to keep me on the Class of 1974 roster.

I think it is important to get these stories written and out there, especially as we approach (and some have passed) 70 and we have already lost Kevin, Terry, and most recently, Gary, God rest all their souls in peace. (I was thinking if our departed classmates had children it would be way cool to to include them in this collective, but that's easy enough for me to say, I never had kids . . .) I had my own brush with death (and have the near death experience memories and the surgical scars to prove it!). None of us are immortal. And the clock is ticking. But don't get me started. I've written a couple of poems about this mortality thing. Don't get me started.

Anyway, I am still missing Cliff Johnson's contact info. Did anybody keep up with Cliff?

So here is the link: https://raymond945.substack.com/p/the-woodberry-forest-school-experiment . It should work this time.

Best regards to all.

Ray

p.s. Filomena (my wife of 30 years) calls this memoir project "The Adventures of Ray Maxwell." Didn't we read Huckleberry Fill at Woodberry? We are reading Percival Everett's James, the account from Nigger Jim's perspective. Fascinating read after all these years.

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