2021
The main thing is that Edie and I have remained healthy throughout the past many months of the pandemic. During the 2020-2021 academic year, my connection to Gilman deepened in two different ways. The first involved a new role, described in The Gilman Fund Leadership publication as “Chairs–Grandparent Division, James ’61 and Edith Garrett, GP ’24, ’29, ’32.” Edie and I fulfilled our obligations with, we hope, good results. The second involves our daughter, Julia Randolph, who has returned to teaching after a decade of full-time parenting and is now a long-term substitute in the Lower School. Her Gilman sons are completing first, fourth, and ninth grades this year. Meanwhile, their sister, Anne Garrett Randolph, is a middle schooler at RPCS.
I’m happy to report that Gilman’s ninth graders, along with the tenth graders who missed the opportunity last year, will have the chance to experience the Gilman-Outward Bound Expedition at the end of this school year, either in June or August. This collaboration between Gilman and the Chesapeake Bay Outward Bound School is particularly meaningful to me, and, I believe, also to the students.
Our oldest grandson graduated from Vanderbilt in 2020 and is now an analyst with Deloitte in Atlanta, working with health care companies in the Business Strategy Group. His sister will graduate from UNC-Chapel Hill in May — destination to be determined.
Several gifts from this period of pandemic sequestration are worth noting. Edie and I are continually grateful that we still live in a beautiful place, as stewards of ancestral land and its history. We are gathering and recording the history of the Rockland Farm and family members who have walked this land over the past 300 years. We suspect that our initiatives to restore the Rockland Barn and the pasture fencing are the reasons that the number of horse boarders has doubled in the past 12 months. Our “small business” is thriving!
In addition to my role in the horse operation, I have continued my service as a trustee on a number of boards and lead two of them. Running meetings via Zoom certainly has its challenges.
A final thought: I suspect that there may be classmates who will agree with me that Tennyson was right when he wrote, in the final six lines of Ulysses: “Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’/ We are not now that strength which in old days/ Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;/ One equal temper of heroic hearts,/ Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
2020
Edie and I have three Greyhound grandsons: Wyatt Randolph ’24 and his brothers, Robert ’29, and Dodge ’32. In addition to occasional carpool duty, my other interaction with Gilman has been as an advisor to the Gilman Outward Bound program, which combines on-campus character and leadership education with a wilderness expedition that takes place during the final week of the ninth grade year (exception: 2020).
My active role on nonprofit boards continues with the Evergreen House Foundation, the Robert Garrett Fund for the Surgical Treatment of Children at the Hopkins Children’s Center, the Chesapeake Bay Outward Bound School, and Feather Foundation. I rotated off the Calvert School Board this year, giving HHH the opportunity to serve at our other alma mater. After 36 years of connection to the Parks & People Foundation, I have retired from that board. New pasture fencing and restoration work on the historic Rockland Barn have re-energized the family’s farm.