Yet another reminder this morning that I am following in my grandfather's footsteps. I am in Virginia for a meeting of the College Board's Academic Advisory Council, and this morning V.P. Jim Montoya spoke briefly about the Board's history. I had not looked it up, but I had been wondering when the College Board came to be; the Avon Weekly News-letter makes frequent references to Grandpa's consulting on College Entrance Exams. I had wondered if Grandpa was working with the College Board (the full name of the Board is the College Entrance Examination Board), but I did not know whether it existed in those days. Jim's brief history tells me that it did, and I am now relatively sure that this - my service to the College Board - is yet another way in which I am following in Grandpa's footsteps.
Of course, there are plenty of things to remind me of the family legacy at school; every visit to Brown Auditorium takes me by a picture of Dad, and the old board room, where I attend meetings at least weekly, contains a photo of Grandpa entertaining several students near the fireplace in his house in Diogenes (now the Lampe residence). Still, I sometimes get an odd, not-exactly-deja-vu feeling when I discover another one of these connections. If papers in his Islesboro study are any indication, Grandpa was a big Abe Lincoln fan - another thing we have in common. I did not really know Grandpa, but I think of him as a taciturn man in the style of Calvin Coolidge; perhaps that is how I come by my dynamic social style.
So there is a bowtie-wearing Custer in the history department at Avon Old Farms, and he does quite a bit of volunteer work with the College Board? The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Speaking of footsteps, I find a cautionary tale in this limerick of dad's:
ReplyDelete"The young educator mistook
The stuff that he wrote for a book
His five hundred pages
Were simply outrageous
And all of them gobbledy-gook"