From the moment I ran away from Kent in the middle of the night more than 60 years ago, unfinished business has seemed to insinuate itself into every aspect of my life going forward.

At Kent I had felt utterly alone and abandoned by my parents, condemned at the age of 13 to a crazy world I could not comprehend. Listen to this! One afternoon during the first semester of my Second Form year I was in the library periodical section leafing through magazines, and for the first and last time in my entire life I actually picked up a copy of Business Week.

Hey, what do you know? Here’s a picture of my dad . . . and the article says he has been appointed Executive Vice President of the corporation my grandfather had founded . . . and he and his family would be moving immediately to Indianapolis, Indiana . . . Wait a minute! Are you kidding me? I have been trying to deal – and not very successfully, thank you very much – with being cruelly ripped from everything familiar to me and sent to this bewildering place, and now I am destined never, ever to return to the security of my home town of Rye, New York? My family had been in Rye for generations! We had roots! No more. We’re moving to Indianapolis, and I found out my fate by reading it in Business Week!

As a consequence, for more than half a century now, fear of abandonment has never been far from my consciousness, and for half a century and more I have been a joiner: my fraternity, my teams, my friends, my coworkers, my marriages, my family. I can only feel secure when surrounded by people I believe I can truly count on, with whom I have a mutual dependence. Every night I thank my wife for coming home to me one more time . . . without even a hint of irony!

My Kent roommate, Robb Carr, and I had made our getaway in a red sports car. Until very recently, there was always a red sports car in my garage, gassed up and ready to go. Now it’s silver. Perhaps a sign of progress.

For a semester during my Third Form year, I roomed with the only African American in our entire class, Charles Countee. One night, when Charles was studying at his desk after mandatory lights out and I was trying to sleep, he told me if the light was bothering me I should “put a pillow over my head”. Well, every night from that night to this, more than 60 years, for Heaven’s sake, I have slept with a pillow over my head.

Later, in the midst of a heated argument (not about pillows) I cruelly used the supreme derogatory racial term on Charles simply because I knew it would piss him off. In my years after Kent I attended a majority black city public high school and insisted on sitting at “black” tables in the lunch room, encouraging other whites to do so as well, a small symbolic step that led to many more social interactions between the races at school and away from school. I marched for civil rights during high school, taught black inmates in a maximum security prison while in college, and as a member of the National Teacher Corps I taught in an all-black public elementary school in North Philadelphia and volunteered in the neighborhood Black Panther breakfast program. As a teacher at Mercersburg Academy, a church-affiliated boarding school in a rolling, rural setting, I assigned Black Like Me and Soul on Ice to kids who had hardly gotten to know a single black person. I wrote and performed a one-man play exploring what it might be like to have the n-word used on me!

That’s me in the center, jutting out my chin in righteous indignation!

The art studio had been my refuge at Kent, but I had left school that fateful night partly to avoid studying for an art history test. I then majored in art history at Penn, worked to rescue Renaissance art in Florence, Italy after the 1966 flood, and after college I taught art studio and art history at Mercersburg. Today I am best known as an historian of art . . . and rowing, too. I have lectured around the world on both subjects.

I found next to no success at Kent as an athlete. As a lowly intramural coxswain, I never won even one race on the Housatonic. Five years later, on April 23, 1966, as the Penn Lightweight Varsity stroke-oar I won the racing jersey of Zeus, Pete Neely, my former classmate, captain and stroke-oar of the New England Champion 1963 Kent First Boat, as he was stroking the 1966 Yale Lightweight Varsity – Yale, the alma mater of my father – and with my father in attendance, one of exactly two times in his life that he actually saw me row. I still have that memory, and I still have my oar . . . and Pete’s jersey, old and faded, framed on my wall!

And I am still rowing. If I am not mistaken, there’s a bit of a pattern here.

To be continued...