O'er NH's sunlit hills...

I remember all of the words to my prep school alma mater because 1) they made us sing it regularly at the chapel services we had to attend four days a week and 2) because old friend Karl Fogel, who also went to Tilton and Colby College, and I would sing it together when we got drunk at Colby fraternity parties.

The words popped into my head the other day when we took a detour on our way to Boston from a resort in New Hampshire to visit the campus of The Tilton School, the prep school about 20 miles north of Concord from which I graduated 44 years ago.

While wandering through the dining hall (I swear the room has the same furniture it did in the '60s) I glanced up at the wall and saw plaques with the names of students who graduated with honors through the years. And there under the class of '64 was the name of Karl Arvedon Fogel. I didn't realize he was so smart. I have to admit we spent a lot more time dissecting the Celtics and Red Sox and our chances of getting a date the next time we went home than we did biological specimens or wobbly political theories.

The campus, which I last visited 14 years ago, still felt almost eerily familiar, with each of the rooms I lived in for those four years looking as spare and small as they did when I occupied them, even if the students now have sports, recreation and academic facilities (besides girls!) that we could only dream about in our day. I could almost see the faces and hear the laughs of the guys I roomed with.

And of course it brought back all sorts of memories of the faculty. Maybe the main advantage of the school for me was seeing the same men not just in the classroom or athletic field as would be the case in any school, but also in other life situations. Many of them lived with us (each dorm floor had a faculty apartment), we ate together (sit-down meals with assigned seating) and ran into each other constantly on the small, 250-student campus. We would even see their families sometimes - see our teachers being husbands and fathers.

Several of these men provided excellent role models, and for a while I thought teaching and coaching at a place like Tilton would be a nice life, and it might have been.

We certainly had a lot of laughs when I was there. I remember one math intructor/football-basketball coach whose style of teaching was dominated by him asking questions that typically prominently featured the word "what?" Such as "the area of a rectangle is equal to what? Length times width.''

This was tiresome almost beyond comprehension. But this style more than once got him into hilarious circumlocutions, as when he asked in class one day, "The answer is co-e-what? Co-e-fficient.''

Or on the basketball court, he was explaining how to run a certain play, and he said to one player, "So you cut off my what? My ass.''

Junie Carbonneau and most of the other men who helped mold me at Tilton are gone now. But they taught us about coefficents and teamwork and life. They have legacies I think almost any of us would envy.