I ask readers to forgive me for repeating this personal note from last year. It is meant to pay tribute to my high school, my high school teachers — Latin teachers Lyman Hawbaker (who also taught ancient history) and Dave Sims in particular — and to my classmates. In the course of our high school years we were required to study Latin and dip our toes into Caesars’s Gallic Wars, among other things. We learned something about grammar, rhetoric, Rome, and English in the process. In English we read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and (I think) Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March.
I was a member of the St. Paul Academy High School Bowl team during my junior and senior years. By unanimous consent Chuck Berde was captain of the team. Chuck went on to get M.D./Ph.D. degrees from Stanford and more or less invent the medical specialty of pediatric pain relief. Chuck is Senior Associate in Perioperative Anesthesia and Pain Medicine, Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at Boston Children’s and Professor of Anesthesia (Pediatrics) at Harvard Medical School. In high school Chuck was also a good athlete and musician who somehow found time to play in a rock band with Steve Greenberg. Steve went on to write and produce “Funkytown,” the record that reached number 1 on charts around the world in 1980.
John Fitzpatrick and Jim Vose were the other members of the team. John is the Director Emeritus of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Jim is a retired Minneapolis attorney and an accomplished artist. We were all friends. Below is a photo of us in our final appearance on the High School Bowl program. University of Minnesota Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies Robert Sonkowsky was the High School Bowl referee. He had to cool things down in case fights broke out. That is Professor Sonkowsky with his hand on my shoulder. I would like to say I was so much older then, but will leave it to Bob Dylan at this point.
In our last go-round during our senior year we won three weeks in a row and retired undefeated. In the third week we faced off against Hopkins High School. Chuck was good at everything, but he excelled in math and science. One of the questions our last week required knowledge of several scientific numbers and the performance of arithmetic operations on them to produce another number. What famous event occurred in that year? Without missing a beat, and I mean instantly, Chuck answered: “The assassination of Julius Caesar.”
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