Last updated 01-05-2024
Photo taken 3-16-2015 during visit from my daughter with her husband.
See https://raspiplayer.com/cv/ for Education and work
Personal:
My paternal grandfather, Ralph Edwin Boothby (1890-1964) had an outsized influence on my life, not primarily because my cousins and I and our respective parents spent the summers with these grandparents in Vermont, but because his prominence in the early history of Progressive education would result in many of my prep school teachers having known him as well as my being a faculty child from ages 3-6 in a prep school founded in 1935 whose founder he had known since the 1920s when his Harvard classmate, Perry Dunlap Smith, hired her to teach at his North Shore Country Day School that he had founded in 1919.
In a 1929 address to the parents that hired Ralph E. Boothby to found Metairie Park Country Day School he said about his educational philosophy:
“Study of the individual child, and effort to satisfy his or her needs; Freedom to develop naturally, which does not mean license to invade other people’s rights; Attention to play and physical development for every child; The utilization of children’s interests for educational ends; A large place for beauty in nature, in art, in music; Friendly relationship between pupils and teachers, with teachers functioning as guides rather than taskmasters; Such cooperation between school and home as will make the two, supplementing each other, provide for the whole development of the child.”
Nowhere in that statement does he mention the advantage of establishing professional networks by attending elite colleges. Yet in letters with my father when he was choosing a college for himself, he expresses his disappointment that my father chose Dartmouth instead of Harvard and ends with “at least you will let your son attend Harvard.”
My most notable characteristic is finding intrinsic satisfaction in learning whatever attracts my interests. Initially this was science because my father taught science and I spent time after my own school day helping him set up labs for his students. When my grandfather was head of the education department of Antioch College starting in 1922, pioneer aviator, Orville Wright, was a trustee of that college, which probably explains my father’s childhood interest in building model airplanes and later my own. This photograph is of me in 8th grade after winning 2nd prize in the tri-city science fair for the airplane I had designed late in 7th grade and built during 8th grade. It was judged on its structural design as I did not yet have an engine for it and could not afford to build the radio control for it before my interests turned to designing and building homes.
I built my first summer home in 1962 when I was 16 on my father’s undeveloped 100 acres bordering the Green Mountain National Forest at location 3. It had bottled propane stove, oven, and a propane light. It had gravity feed water from a spring higher above.
My father’s brother, Norman, owned 93 acres he bought in 1944 at location 2 which my father loaned him approximately half the money for. When Norman’s wife received an inheritance, they repaid my father who then bought his adjoining 100 acres. Norman’s 93 acres had a smaller brook with beaver pond and frontage on the back of the lake.
My father’s sister had a summer home on 32 acres at location 5 which also had a beaver pond.
My father’s parents had first bought a home at location 1 in 1926. My father first built at location 4 because there was no electricity available for his 100 acres. He eventually inherited 20 acres around that summer house and deeded me 2.43 below his summer house at location 6 in 1970.
My uncle had wanted to create an artists’ colony and my father a writers’ retreat. The inspiration was probably field trips in the 1940’s to the Quaker communities of Celo (1200 acres founded by Arthur E. Morgan, first president of the Progressive Education Association who had hired my grandfather in 1922 to chair Antioch College’s teacher education program) and The Macedonia Cooperative Community founded by Dr. Morris R. Mitchell in Clarksville, Georgia on 1000 acres).
In the summer of 1964, my first girlfriend, met on a blind date in college, took me to 3 days of the Newport Jazz Festival. She was the first American born generation of her Italian parents. I did not have a car so hitch-hiking to her different state also brought me into contact with people unlike my parents and teachers. By sophomore year I transferred to Reed College to major in psych. The social sciences continue to be an interest in my retirement.
Growing up in Vermont, I had no knowledge of my grandfather’s involvement in Black education, but when his wife died in 1993 at the age of 104, the following picture was discovered by my cousin, Deborah Boothby, and she had a copy of this photo made for me which I have since captioned.
I spent two years researching who these people might be by reading books written by faculty of Dillard in that period. I believe that this photo is commemorating Ralph’s first appointment as a trustee of Dillard University, 1944-1960. Edith Rosenwald Stern recruited my grandfather, Ralph, to found and direct Metairie Park Country Day School, a k-12 coed progressive day school in 1929 because at that time existing white private schools in New Orleans did not admit Jewish students. Ralph was chairman of Dillard’s education committee, likely from its founding in 1935 once MPCDS was up and running. Not surprisingly, Julius Rosenwald Fund fellowship recipients are well represented in this photo: Johnson (1930); Frazier (1944), Dent, first Black president of Dillard and his wife (both 1933), a teacher not in photo, L.D. Reddick (1939, 1945), and the first two deans of Dillard, Julian Bond’s father, Horace Mann Bond (1931, 32) and his uncle, J. Max Bond (1931, 32, and 1934). A full list of Rosenwald fund fellowships is available from this link:
My first photo help was in Horace Mann Bond’s memoir:
From left to right: Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher, and Hubert T. Delany, on the roof of 580 St. Nicholas Avenue, Harlem, on the occasion of a party in Hughes’ honor, 1924. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.
More recently a good deal of new information is available on line. For instance this 1938 letter from my grandfather to Horace Mann Bond, then at Fisk University. Charles S. Johnson was not a trustee of Dillard, but he was the founder of Fisk’s sociology department and the first Fisk Black president as well as director of race relations at the Rosenwald Fund.
Here is a full CV for Ralph E. Boothby:
Ralph’s parents were of very modest means. He was accepted by Harvard for 1907, but had to work a year and finally received a scholarship before he could start attending. from a descendant of this Medford, MA business, who by coincidence, had at some time attended the same public high school. The main market for this rum was not New England, but Africa, where it was traded for slaves to work sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean, whose molasses provided the feed stock for making the rum in Medford. This is an example of the triangular trade and of avoiding technology transfer (distillation) to protect a monopoly. That family funded the building of a hospital in Medford and a building for Harvard. This is one illustration of ways that the north profited from slavery taking place somewhere else.
All his professional opportunities came as a result of a Harvard alumni, or Harvard consultant of the employer. As a educator, he tried to acquaint well to do students with how the rest of the world lives. In the mid 1940’s he took students on field trips to the two Quaker intentional communities of 1200 acre Celo (founded by Arthur E. Morgan, president of Antioch College and first president of the Progressive Education Association), the 1000 acre Macedonia Cooperative Community (founded by Dr. Morris R. Mitchell) (see this thesis on Dr. Mitchell: the-turning-of-ones-soul I spent the Christmases of 1960, 1961, and 1962 with the Mitchell family. In 1960 we flew to Puerto Rico to study; in 1961 I was employed as a chainsaw operator in a selective cutting of pulp wood at the former Macedonia Cooperative Community which had reverted to Mitchell ownership; in 1962 I utilized the Putney Graduate School’s library to study historical intentional communities), some labor strikes, and the Highlander Folk School founded by Myles Horton.
Standing are Martin Luther King, Jr., Pete Seeger, Charis Horton, Rosa Parks, and Ralph Abernathy. Pete Seeger’s nephew Tony, and Charis were classmates of mine at Putney. Rosa Parks attended a workshop at this school before starting the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The two intentional communities were likely the inspiration for my uncle Norman Boothby buying his 93 acres in Weston. My father, the eldest, was the last to marry and in 1944 loaned his brother half the money for that purchase. When Norman’s first wife got an inheritance, they paid my father back and he bought the adjoining 100 acres. I spent my early summers with my father and uncle and my cousin Deborah as our father’s mowed their fields and we picked berries with my mother’s sister who came each summer to care for us and later take us swimming daily.
I did not know this history in 1979 when I met my last partner in graduate school. 
Poems
She had a 2 year old daughter. They invited me for dinner at their rental. The following morning, I learned that they had received an eviction notice. Perhaps the dinner invitation had a lot do with my having a VW bus that would be helpful for moving. The two year old was very verbal and observant. She commented on my making one huge pancake and dividing it, whereas her mother would have cooked three smaller pancakes. I wondered if my grandfather’s ideas about education were suitable to raising a Black child. Her mother and I were both single at that time. Like my grandfather moving to New Orleans in 1929, I sensed a learning opportunity and joined this extended family that initially included 5 living maternal generations with one 103 year old woman, the first generation born after emancipation.
Here is this child later at age 14. Her mother did not find me sufficiently spiritual (I am a third generation atheist) so in 1985 she had briefly married a Christian. In this picture I have resumed parenting. It seems unfair to children to have to live out of a backpack between two parents’ homes. Instead I lived out of a backpack and picked Lisa up each day after school and then cooked her dinner at her maternal grandmother’s where she and her mother were living. Usually we did something outdoors first after school. On this day it had snowed. How large a snow lady could we make given the area of the yard and the depth of the snow? How would we get the large middle snowball up there (inclined plane)?
Lisa graduated from Stanford University in 1999 in English and earned a Master of Teaching Arts from Ohio State University in 2000. Then she taught English and creative writing for 7 years. But her real passion was singing and theater. She had the lead female role in Stanford’s performance of the play, Chess, and earlier in April 1997, her a cappella group had competed at NYC’s Carnegie Hall and won the 1997 National Championships of A Cappella. To create more time for her music interests, she earned a second master degree from Kent in Library and Information Science in 2008 and is now a librarian with no papers to read and comment on after work, so has time to perform in multiple musicals in Nashville, TN each year.
Here she is, 8-22-2023.
Her mother had married yet again in 1991 disrupting my parenting. In July 2012, I met another family that was renting from a Putney classmate of mine on the other side of the city park near my credit union. The mother, Linda was 32 and her daughter Noa was 6.
Noa has just turned 17. They helped me plant my 2022 garden. Linda asked me to do an adult adoption which is pending and which will make Noa my granddaughter. She wants to go to Harvard Law School after undergraduate work at Spellman. Here is a picture of Noa in costume for her school play. When I was little, my oldest cousin, Linda Bratton, used to organize us for plays. I don’t remember ever memorizing lines or performing those summers, but we had fun sewing costumes on a treadle sewing machine and building at least one set in the barn workshop. 
Noa was elected president of her public high school Black Student Union this last year.
Linda has been in graduate school in Eugene, OR and is hoping to be able to start medical school. We were never partners because of our age difference. In 2019 she married a fellow she had met in graduate school in 2015. Here, James, is setting up my first cell phone, 9-01-2023. It is much easier for me to write a computer program than to read the instructions for the menu of an operating system that someone else wrote.
October 19, 2023, Linda and her husband James drove up from Eugene Oregon to take me to my surgery for bilateral inguinal hernia which I had been postponing for over a decade. In the next picture we have just returned from surgery to my home where I had moved my bed downstairs to the kitchen for convenience during recovery. A mere two weeks later I was able to mow my own lawn.
Linda is half Native American. She did not know that until she got a DNA report from Ancestry.com and her mother confirmed. The US completed its ethnic cleansing in 1896. I had been considering willing my home and its land to a Native American entity since the chain of property titles starts with broken treaties. Linda’s daughter, Noa, is now my heir.
Noa gave me my first chicken in 2017. They have been very good company during the pandemic when I have been isolating and have successfully avoided covid-19 so far. https://raspiplayer.com/chickens/