Portrait Dedication at the 75th Anniversary - by Donald B. Abbott '59

“Namaste:  I honor the place in you in which the entire universe dwells.  I honor the place in you which is of love, of truth, of light, and of peace.  When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are one.”           

            We live most deeply, and perhaps most genuinely, when we live in the spirit.  If I were to break out of my body right now, I would become gratitude.

·          Gratitude to Chas Fagan, whose artistic genius is surpassed only by his kind friendship toward me.  He knew how uneasily I took to the whole idea of sitting for him and this project.

·          Gratitude to the School for commissioning this portrait and to the very generous souls whose philanthropy brought it into being.

·          Gratitude to our parents, Nat and Clara Abbott, who so naturally wedded their vocation as teachers to their commitment to family and home that Paul, Betsy, and I would happily devote our personal and professional lives to the work their legacy still inspires.

·          Gratitude to my wife, Betsy, best friend and partner in every endeavor of our lives.  At Commencement 1990, in my last public speech as Headmaster, I said that any success Millbrook had enjoyed in our 14 years was attributable to Betsy’s heart and head and hand.  I am here now to say that I haven’t changed my mind one wit about that declaration.  And I never will.

·          Gratitude to the students and faculty with whom we lived and worked during our tenure.  Those were dynamic years of refocusing the historic mission of the school and helping it generate new programs for changing times.  Never without considerable challenge and difficulty, but invariably with creative energy and vision, the students and faculty made a new school thrive.  How meaningful it is that some of those students have subsequently become trustees and leaders for Millbrook in the 21^st century.

·          Gratitude to Lucy and Ed Pulling, quintessential models for Betsy and me, supporting us in quiet, yet firm ways, always encouraging us to find and declare our way to help Millbrook grow. 

·          Gratitude especially to our founder, The Boss.  When he wrote about his “Project for a New School” back in the late ’20s, he said that it was to be “conservatively progressive.”  My transformative education as Ed’s student and then my deepening friendship with him in my adult life taught me that it’s the adjective in that phrase that held sway for him:  progressive.  As I said at the Tamarack Fellowship Dinner in May of 1990, Ed had insisted to Betsy and me back in 1976 “that we must look ahead and move forward without undue loyalty to the past.  He gave us our roots, but then he granted us the gracious freedom, as only the best teacher can, to go on ahead and join others in trying to articulate the meaning of those roots for the next generation.”  And so, with his blessing, the cornerstone for Millbrook’s comprehensive curriculum became the intellectual conjoining of three moral concerns--community service and social responsibility, active concern for the natural environment, and the development of a global perspective.  We believed it was our responsibility to teach and learn what non sibi sed cunctis means for the complex, interdependent and threatened world we now have fully entered.

In that same foundational vision for the school that was to become Millbrook, Ed also asserted his sine qua non, his core belief that the personalities of the teachers come first--bricks, mortar, money, and sound educational theory are “no substitutes for them:” that is, “the spirit of the institution and its ultimate value will in the last analysis depend essentially” on the quality of the faculty.