When John Charles and I arrived at Milton in September 1974, Richard Nixon was president, and Jerry Pieh was headmaster, his office in the basement of Straus. Deval Patrick had just graduated; Elaine Apthorp was a senior; and Andre Heard wouldn’t be born until the following summer. There were about 175 boy boarding students and 60+ girl boarding students. Milton was three largely separate schools, each with different histories, standards and practices.
John Charles has been an important part of several of the changes that have made us the School that we are today. He became director of admissions, merging the separate boys’ and girls’ schools, as well as putting a greater emphasis on recruiting and travel, broadening our boarding base and raising its quality and diversity. For two years, he served on the co-ed committee that laid the groundwork for the merging of the boys’ and girls’ schools. That the much larger, and generally dominant, boys’ school not simply overrun the traditions and practices of the girls’ school was imperative; and the committee’s careful thinking and planning made that transition as comfortable as it could have been for people who were changing habits that had been firmly set for many years.
Always, his real love has been his classroom. His students marvel at his enduring passion for literature and at his ability to make it come alive for them: they learn to read and to write. The depth of his comments on their papers is as legendary as the speed with which those papers are returned. His students and advisees receive the great gift of vast amounts of his time, attention, and most of all, his caring. These relationships do not end when his students graduate, for he is still in close touch with many of them years and even decades later. His memory for the lives and families of his students and advisees is even greater than his encyclopedic command of the fi lms and plays of the last 80 or 100 years.
We shall miss his humor, his still clearly discernible accent, and his deep loyalty to Milton Academy; but even more than that, we shall continue to be inspired by his love of the craft of teaching and by the depth of his dedication to those students who were lucky enough to have had him as a teacher or advisor.
–John Banderob, Math Department