Dear Loyalty Club members,

I enjoyed visiting with a few Loyalty Club members this month during a spring campus visit. I hope you will decide to plan a trip and make new friends at an upcoming Loyalty Club event. There will be Loyalty Club gatherings during Alumni Weekend, October 16–19, and for the Christmas Candlelight Service, December 14, 2008.

I think that you will find enjoyment in spending time on campus with alumni who have shared experiences similar to yours. Faculty and students will relate to you their Mercersburg experiences, and your insights about Mercersburg’s values provide context for interpreting today’s experience. Your thoughts about the school today and the direction for the future are respected. It is one of my goals to find avenues for your engagement with the faculty and students.

Students and faculty are encouraged to read over the summer and are required to choose one of the following books. Perhaps you are interested in the books on the school’s summer reading list.

If you have particularly enjoyed reading one (or more) of these books, send me your thoughts and I’ll share them with the faculty and students. At the beginning of the new school year, students and faculty will gather around the Harkness tables in classrooms and discuss these books. Your comments can be added to those discussions. I’ll share the students’ thoughts with you in the fall Loyalty Club newsletter.
 
This is the last newsletter until next school year. I hope that you have enjoyed this new communication. Please send me your ideas for topics that should be included in future issues. Enjoy the summer… and a good book.

Mary K. Carrasco
Assistant Head of School for External Affairs


Ringing in a New Bell

On May 2, following a school meeting in the Irvine Memorial Chapel, the Mercersburg community marveled as a new bell was hoisted 100 feet and lifted into the chapel’s Swoope Carillon.

The two-ton, 139-pound bell rings a C-sharp and is the third largest of the carillon’s 50 bells. The new bell was cast in England more than a year ago by Gilbert and Johnston of Croydon, England, the same company that cast the original carillon bells.

The new bell is named for and dedicated to Academy carillonneur James W. Smith, who has served the school in this capacity for 27 years. Smith came to Mercersburg as organist and choirmaster in 1965 and was later named head of the fine arts department. After the Academy became co-ed in the late 1960s, he formed the Mercersburg Chorale and the Women’s Ensemble.

Smith was appointed carillonneur at Mercersburg in 1981 following the retirement of Bryan Barker, who served 53 years at the Academy. Smith retired from teaching in 2001, and was honored with the Alumni Council Award for service and accomplishment at the Academy.

The original carillon was installed in 1926, a gift of the family of Henry Butcher Swoope, class of 1900. The largest bell in the carillon, named "Roland" for a member of Swoope's family, has 223 pieces of copper molded into it. All of these pieces were of historic or sentimental value and were gathered from a wide variety of sources and locales.  The most famous is a shaving of the Liberty Bell from its attempted repair in 1842, but also included were copper shells from battlefields and pieces from ships, including the USS Constitution and the USS Merrimac. 

Melted into the bell were coins minted before the birth of Jesus Christ and coins from Napoleon Bonaparte, Queen Elizabeth I, Peter the Great, the Sultan of Borneo, and King Joseph Napoleon of Spain.  Coins also came from ancient Greece, Rome, Persia, Carthage, Egypt, India, Turkey, Liberia, Siberia, Morocco, German East Africa, Bengal, Sumatra, British Guiana, Sarawak, Australia, French Guiana, Portuguese West Africa, and New Zealand.

Chris Matthews to Speak at Commencement

NBC News and MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews will be the featured speaker for Mercersburg's 115th Commencement exercises Saturday, June 7. Approximately 120 seniors are members of the Academy's 2008 graduating class.

Matthews, a Pennsylvania native, hosts Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC and The Chris Matthews Show on NBC, and is a regular commentator on NBC’s Today show. Matthews covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first all-races election in South Africa, the Good Friday Peace Accord in Northern Ireland, and the funeral of Pope John Paul II. He has covered every American presidential election campaign since the 1980s.

Matthews spent a total of 15 years as Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner and as a national columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Before that, he had a 15-year career in public service as an aide to Senators Frank Moss of Utah and Edmund Muskie of Maine, as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, and then as top aide to Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. (More)

Finucane Sets Two Records

On one of the grandest stages in American prep track & field, James Finucane ’08 set a new Mercersburg record in the mile run April 25.

Finucane's 4:18.59 effort at the Penn Relays was the best-ever for a Mercersburg athlete in the mile, and broke a school record that had stood since 1984. His time was good for eighth overall in a talented field, and came in front of an estimated 30,000 people at Philadelphia's Franklin Field. (The event is the largest annual meet in North America.) See a video of Finucane’s race.

“James showed a lot of guts running that mile, but he's been preparing for it since well before last summer,” said Matthew Kearney, who coaches Mercersburg’s distance runners. “This isn't something you accomplish overnight, but through long, deliberate training. He is so focused and in control of his running right now because he has been working so diligently all year long.”

At the West Central Coaches' Meet May 2 in Altoona, PA, , Finucane placed first in the 3200m with a time of 9:22.28, shattering another Mercersburg school record.

Finucane, the two-time defending Mid-Atlantic Prep League individual champion in cross country, also earned a state championships medal by taking fifth place in the mile at the Pennsylvania Independent Schools State Indoor Track Championships in March.