Bob Houghteling

— 5th — (1977) Jimmy Carter

Spent two years working with disturbed court-referred teenagers in Boston and San Francisco, and found I'd become a little disturbed myself. Thought things over for a year while working in a repair garage, bagel bakery, and a bar. Now in a credential program and really enjoying student-teaching in a junior high near Berkeley.

— 10th — (1982) Ronald Reagan

I have had three teaching positions since I received my high school teaching credential in June of 1977, each more challenging than the last. The first was to excite seventh to ninth graders about learning Spanish. My second, which lasted two years, in the San Francisco suburb of Martinez, home of Joe Dimaggio and birthplace of the martini, was teaching Spanish and anthropology to mostly disinterested ninth graders. After Prop 13 cuts hit the public schools, I landed at the Urban School, a high-energy progressive high school in San Francisco, where I continue to be the athletic director, admissions director, and coach of the soccer, basketball, and tennis teams. Elizabeth's first book, Sisters, was published in 1978, and she is now working on a new book called The Men in Our Lives, a study of women's relationships with the important men in their lives — fathers, lovers, husbands, mentors, and others. William Morrow will be publishing it in the not too distant future.

I still enjoy my Monday night basketball game (seven years now). My latest kicks are singing in a community chorus, gardening, and bike touring. Elizabeth and I make frequent visits to the East to see family and friends, but have recently bought a nice house here in Oakland. I don't think we'll ever completely resolve the West/East Coast split, but we sure do enjoy our February apple blossoms.

— 15th — (1987) Ronald Reagan

Things that stay the same: I still have my best friend as my wife; still am working with young people in schools; still play in a weekly basketball game; still question which coast I belong on; and still wonder if I am doing what I ought a be doing.

Things that change: in April, 1984 our lives were changed forever with the arrival of our son, Nate, who came out running and laughing and hasn't stopped since; I'm totally in love; I'm thinking third base, National League team (but no pressure); this year we have tried out living in my old home town of Newton, which has been great (snowy!); I've been teaching sixth graders in Brookline challenging subjects for me — math, science, and computers — and plan to continue when we return to California in July.

What does it tell us that the Monkees are the rage among my students and that we are still fighting to get Harvard out of Africa?

— 20th — (1992) George H. W. Bush

The nineties got off to a terrible start for me. On January second, just after a nice Christmas vacation from our home in Oakland to my family's home in Newton, Massachusetts, my Dad had an aortic aneurysm and went into a coma from which he never recovered, dying at the end of that month. I think that turning forty, my Dad's death, and remembering my junior high school prophecy of "Most Likely to Succeed" pushed me to make some rash changes. I left the comfy fourth grade teaching position I had held for three years and took on the challenge of teaching math to seventh and eighth graders (don't try it). I am also middle school head at St. Paul's in Oakland, an excellent and diverse community resource.

We do wonder, after the 1989 earthquake and the 1991 fire if someone has it in for us, but we are staying here. My life is filled most happily with coaching Nate's soccer team, watching Willy becoming a talented artist and rad dude in his own right and, keeping my writer wife, Elizabeth, happy. The list of things I still manage to do just for my own joy is pretty short, but playing in my regular Monday night basketball game (eighteenth anniversary coming up), playing tennis, bicycling, and singing are at the top. I guess I'll wait for retirement to learn how to play the guitar and read War and Peace.

— 25th — (1997) Bill Clinton

IN my high school yearbook I predicted that I would go into the Peace Corps and then into teaching. Does it make me too predictable that I wasn't very far off? My year in Uganda from 1970 to 1971 with the Harvard Africa Volunteer Project during Idi Amin's takeover was my equivalent of a compact Peace Corps experience. And after graduation, and a three-year brief encounter with counseling disturbed adolescents, I launched my now twenty-year teaching career.

During those years I have taught all three pre-college levels. I have taken my twelfth grade civics class from the suburb of Martinez to visit the Russian consulate (a big step during the Cold War), and I have bicycled four hundred miles down the coast to Santa Barbara with a group of eight students from my second school, a progressive private S.F. high school. I taught computers on old Apples to sixth graders in Brookline and took them to fly the kites we made together. My eighth graders took me along to their Gulf War protest march. And now I have the pleasure of introducing fourth graders (including, three years ago my older son, and this year my younger), to the forest of multiplication, the swamp of long division, the peaks of California history, and the tropical island of poetry. We go on two camping trips a year-one to the Pt. Reyes peninsula which my roommate Stretch Longstreth introduced me to, and the other to pan for gold in California's mother lode. I think marrying Elizabeth gave me my second life. We are not one person, although I would like her to be my writer when it comes to student progress reports, and she would like me to be her internal navigator when it comes to picking up the kids at a street she's never been to. But the sharing of love and the ability to enter into a stream of consciousness discussion when we unwind at 10:00 P.M. are what keep me going!

Watching our sons, Nate and Will, come into the world and grow and learn to like mussels, and juke out three defenders and then pass the soccer ball for the score, and sing along loudly to Love Potion No.9, is the third life I've been given. The idea that there are more exciting milestones and games to watch and jokes to share is the greatest thing I have to look forward to. Much of lives number two and three are lived in Northern California. Fortunately some wonderful old friends from Harvard live here, but I am stretched and pulled during my visits in December and August to New York and Boston when I see all my family and my dearest old friends. We have developed some rituals to keep us together such as take-out Chinese feasts with the Romes and Beckman-Ritvos, New Year's Eve lobster and Legal Sea Foods creamy clam chowder, three generation charades in warm August on the rocky coast of Maine and the sandy coast of Massachusetts, tennis everywhere (right on schedule, my twelve-year-old son beat me this past summer).

I am afraid to try and make any pronouncements on the state of the world and U.S. politics. Dad, you were right, that Marxist label I wanted to give myself wouldn't make sense after very long. All I know is that I feel a little more spiritually inclined than I did twenty-five years ago, even more a lover of family (hold the values, please), even more attached to reading, singing, music, and sports. Visiting Italy and France this summer with my family gave me the sense that we need to work less and live more, and that it's a sin that we have so many people here who are nowhere near the good life. I search and hope and work for that good life for my loved ones and friends, and try to expand that circle to include as many people as I can.

— 30th — (2002) George W. Bush

Our latest life transition to report on is a happy one. After an exciting high school career full of basketball, soccer, academics, and girlfriends, our oldest son, Nate, was just accepted to the alma mater last week. I am pumping him with sermons about avoiding my mistakes of procrastination and lax time habits; I think he is going to be a much more organized student than his old man. I also think he is blessed and cursed to be attending school in less revolutionary times, although the earthshaking developments of the last year cause me concern.

Left in the nest is our second son, Will, who is finishing a great first year of high school, specializing in math, basketball, tennis, and keeping his friends laughing. Running the nest is Elizabeth (Fishel), my Radcliffe girlfriend from Barnard Hall who has kept me happy and has reminded me that the cup is half full for the last twenty-three years. A major family change since our Reunion was our successful conclusion to a long search for a new house. Who the hell would have imagined that our new house (roomier, more comfortable, with that all-important extra bathroom) would turn out to be across the street and three houses up from where we had been living for twenty years? We are blessed to have great Harvard friends we still manage to stay in touch with, from David Rome and Steve Beckman to Stretch Longstreth in far off Bath, England. A real treat this winter was running into Tim Hawthorne from the Harvard Africa Volunteer Project at a posh SF Harvard reunion. For old times sake, we went out to a delicious Ethiopian restaurant on Haight Street. I have retired my coaching clipboard after eleven years of soccer and basketball fun, but continue to play in my Monday night basketball game, twenty-seven years in a row and still huffing, although shoulder "issues" seriously limit my abilities to imitate Bill Russell's shot blocking technique any more. At the Prospect Sierra School where I have been teaching for fourteen years, I finally got the fourth grade curriculum down pat, and so I moved this year to teaching the fifth grade. In my class this year is a very bright and lively boy named Caleb Peyton, son of Bernie from the class of '72. Caleb is the third classmate's son I have taught, after Chris Hunt's son, Sam, and David Loeb's boy, Evan. All three of these fantastic boys-so smart, thoughtful, and socially committed-speak well of our class and its legacy.

Finally, I am starting a new non-profit teaching credential program which (I hope) will open its doors next fall. The Bay Area Teacher Training Institute will enroll private elementary school intern teachers in a university credential program. I am excited about creating new opportunities for bringing recent college graduates into teaching. I am pleased to be able to use all of my writing, organizational, fundraising, and teaching skills in this effort. The whole experience of beginning this new organization and working with a coalition of good people has given me much energy this year, enough to hold off the doddering demons of retirement and creaky old age for another Reunion or two.

I send peace and love to you all.

— 35th — (2007) George W. Bush

And now for the latest installment of our version of Seven Up, our long-running maturation drama. Installment Seven finds me in my thirtieth year of teaching, twentieth year at the Prospect Sierra elementary school, fifth year as half-time fifth grade math specialist, and fifth year as director of the Bay Area Teacher Training Institute. (BATT! rhymes with natty.) The exciting news is that I will be going BATT I full-time next year.

In 2002 I founded the Institute, a teacher credentialing program that recruits college graduates to work as paid intern teachers at twenty private, parochial, and charter schools in the Bay Area. We also collaborate with San Francisco State University to train and supervise the intern teachers and grant them their California teaching credentials. We started with eighteen students in September 2002, have launched the careers of forty-six teachers already, and have fifty teachers enrolled now. If your sons or daughters, nieces or nephews want to start their teaching careers as paid interns at good elementary schools in San Francisco, our Web site is www.ba-tti.org. When I become the full-time director next year, I will be driving more across the Bay Bridge (books on CD keep me sane), visiting lots of my students' classrooms, and schmoozing with heads of schools that are members of our nonprofit organization. I love the new challenges the job presents each week, and look back at many Harvard experiences that prepared me beautifully for this job: the interviewing, recruiting, and fundraising I learned while at PBH as part-time director of the Harvard Africa Volunteer Project; counseling people at the Bureau of Study Counsel and Room 13; cooking lasagna once a month for twenty-five of us at Jordan J; and making dance tapes and organizing great Motown and Stones parties at Jordan K. with Steve Beckman, Rachel Ritvo, Charlie Marlin, and others.

Life at home is about to get a lot quieter as I write this at Thanksgiving. Our newly minted Harvard College grad, Nate, has been living with us since September. Our great beer-making adventure was a foaming success, as were his guest appearances at my thirty-one-years-running Monday night basketball game. But now Nate is off for a six-month adventure to Vietnam, Thailand, China, and Japan. We will have to console ourselves with weekly calls from our younger son, Will, a lively and funny sophomore at Winthrop House who is having a great time in Cambridge. My Barnard Hall kidnappee, Elizabeth Fishel '72, continues her teaching and publishing career, and we are doing our best to age gracefully together. I send much love and best wishes to all.

— 40th — (2012) Barack Obama

Things I am most proud of as I look back on my life:

I had the good fortune to climb into the right window at Barnard Hall in February 1970 — Elizabeth Fishel was surprised but curious about who might be scaling the walls, and this led to a forty-two year affair. Please read about Elizabeth's great work teaching writing out of our living room and her latest book about launching twenty-somethings. I expect you all to have it on your shelves or your ereader next year!

Elizabeth and I had a little to do with their success, but we also had the true luck to have two terrific boys who are launched in fascinating twenty-first-century careers. You can track older boy Nate's video work, such as an outrageous campaign video he cooked up for San Francisco mayor Ed Lee, "Too Legit to Quit." Nate's turning into an advertising maven after his grandfathers heart. Check out www.portal-a.com. You can see younger son, Will, making his impact on the world of politics and education on YouTube. com/edu, where he works. A highlight of the last five years was his Harvard Class Day comedy speech six months after the economy tanked: "Class of 2009: face it, we are screwed!"

And then there is my third baby, the Bay Area Teacher Training Institute, or BATTI, that I founded at San Francisco State University and direct, after my own twenty-five-year teaching career. This elementary school teacher credentialing program is ten years old this month. It offers students a blend of public and private school experience as they "learn by doing." We have a coalition of twenty-five independent schools throughout the Bay Area and have proudly launched over two hundred well-prepared teachers into the profession.

I am also blessed to have a wonderful, diverse family. My oldest brother fights the good fight teaching special education in the NYC public schools, and my sister has devoted her life to seeking truth in the words and music of Meher Baba. The courage of my brother, Peter, with severe Parkinson's disease, is sad but inspiring, and I will be forever grateful to his devoted and amazing wife, Susan Waisbren.

I am grateful for:

Poetry, jazz, gospel and blues music (hell, all kinds of music!), birds, and trees. The chance to be around five- to thirteen-year-olds every week, as I supervise my student teachers, and also teach fifth-grade math once a week at my neighborhood school.

My three B hobbies and passions: making Beer in my basement (my wife hates the smell on brewing day, but too bad); Basketball, which I've been playing every Monday night with the same guys for thirty-seven years; and Bicycling, a way to pick up groceries and, this July, a way to get from Seattle to Portland in two days. (How did I let my sons talk me into this?)

Jordan J roommate Charlie Marlin, who makes great music and came back into my life this year through the miracle of that Internet thing.

My mom, the ninety-one year old prison visitor, Unitarian lay minister, wise saint of a woman. My father-in-law, Jim Fishel, who died at ninety-three this past Memorial Day. A giant of a man, good to all people from all stations, a great storyteller, interested in sports and Democratic politics — how was it that after I lost my own father Jim, at sixty-nine, I was able and fortunate enough to enjoy this outstanding man's company for all those missing years.

I wish I had more time to:

See and talk more to my good friends from the Classes of 1972 and '73: Steve Beckman and Rachel Ritvo in Washington, DC; David Rome in Newton; Frank Longstreth in Bath, England; George Scott in Casper, Wyoming; Sandy Frazier in New Jersey and Siberia; Tim Hawthorne in Iowa; Garrett Epps in Washington; Choddie Houghton in State College, Pennsylvania; Jim Breckenridge and Steve Orlins in NYC; Shanti Fry in Cambridge; Dick Kravitz in New Haven; Kenny Haas in San Francisco, Toni Martin, Mike Darby, and David Loeb in Berkeley; Sally Glaser and Cathy Howard in Palo Alto; Herbie Levine in Pennsylvania; and Charlie Marlin in Huntsville, Alabama.

I am proud of what our Class has done, the change in our society we represented and in some cases instigated, and of all the good people I know who came to Cambridge in September 1968.

— 45th — (2017) Donald Trump

Since our last (definitely not Chairman Mao's) Red Book came out in 2012, some great and not so great events have happened in the world of my family. I have lost a couple more friends, including my best friend, my brother, Peter '67, to Parkinson's, after a fifteen-year struggle. The loss of our 1972 classmate Frank "Stretch" Longstreth in November 2012 was another blow, softened by the continuing contact I have with his widow, Maureen Freely, and wonderful daughters, Helen and Pandora, and son, Kimber, whom we have seen in California and London.

Saying goodbye via surgery to my prostate actually has helped my long-term health prospects. So it will be a short organ recital from this classmate.

My work continues to absorb and consume me. After my almost thirty-year K-12 teaching career, I founded the Bay Area Teacher Training Institute sixteen years ago. This nonprofit has helped four hundred new elementary school teachers get great mentoring and on-the-job residency training at over twenty-five private schools in a combined credential and master's program. I still get to visit schools and hang out with little ones, but also watch twenty-somethings grow over two years from nervous, unsure teaching assistants to confident, competent teachers. Frustrations abound, mostly bureaucratic in nature. But the excitement of keeping our program strong, with minimal administrative overhead, and even creating a new public school project and a new master's program in educational leadership, more than outweigh the downside. Retirement may be two to four years away.

Absolutely no downside with my wife and children. Elizabeth's and my friendship deepens through nesting in a new home on the Point Reyes peninsula, north of San Francisco, listening to books on tape together in the car, traveling to visit our nieces and nephews, and sharing the joys of our two boys and their new wives. Three years ago Elizabeth published Getting to Thirty: A Parent's Guide to the 20-Something Years, with coauthor Jeff Arnett.

It almost goes without saying that my greatest accomplishment in life has been watching my two sons grow and develop into amazing guys. Nate (thirty-three) started his own online video production company, the wildly successful PortalA. Working with two of his kindergarten buddies, he created this company just in time for the YouTube explosion, and, boy, has he had a long, fun ride on that wave. They were commissioned to produce fun videos for the Clinton campaign, which thrilled us, and are moving into the world of original content for YouTube Channels TV. Younger son Will turns thirty this summer and is in his third job since he wowed them at college. As happens to many of us, basically none of these jobs existed when we went to school. He started at Google in marketing. Chafing at the bit to be in a new start-up, he spent four years developing programs and recruiting students for Minerva, a brand-new university based in San Francisco. Using an ingenious online platform (think Google Hangout), this program attracts students from all over the world to start their schooling in San Francisco, then after their first year to move on to campuses in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Bombay, and others. For the last half year he has been building his own start-up, Strive Talent, helping undercredentialed people find and train for sales and marketing jobs with a variety of businesses.

Both of these guys have gotten married to wonderful women, with remarkably similar names: Nan and Anna. Both of them are caring, funny, bright, and adept at laughing at our jokes. Large pleasures include: Continuing in my forty-third year of playing full-court basketball every Monday night with the same group of Berkeley artists, misfits, and fun, Anchor Steam-beerdrinking friends. Playing occasional tennis with another group of old guys on Saturday mornings, resisting, bringing the sixties back, this time without a draft and a Vietnam War. Also, seeing old friends and staying in touch with Steve Beckman and Rachel Ritvo, David and Ellen Rome, David Loeb, Kenny Haas, Charlie Marlin, Charlie Allan, Steve Orlins, Cathy Howard, Garrett Epps, Charlotte Houghton, and, from the Class of '73, Toni Martin, Mike Darby, and Sandy Frazier. Shout-outs to long-lost Jim Boster, George Scott, Peter Guarnaccia, Jim Breckenridge, and many others.

Small pleasures include: knitting (mostly baby blankets and hats), rooting for Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors, identifying new birds who come to our feeder, brewing beer, biking, walking, gardening, reading, singing along with my old records, and dancing at weddings. My warmest thoughts go out to all of you — those whose names I've dropped above and others with whom I intersected at the Freshman Union or on a soccer or track team or at PBH or the Adams House dining hall. Let's enjoy our next forty-five years!

— 50th — (2022) Joseph Biden

What a time in our lives and in our country’s arc! I can’t imagine successfully summarizing or analyzing here all that we are going through. I let my fingers do the walking every day through the pages of the NYT, Washington Post, and The Atlantic to learn from others’ thoughts, as well as seeing what our friends on the cable channels have to say.

To quickly turn from the political to the personal, I am happy to report that Elizabeth and I may have reached the apex of our lives, with the birth of our first grandchild. Eleanor “Nellie” was born in June 2021 to our oldest son Nate and his wonderful wife Anna Duning. They live in San Francisco, across the Bay Bridge from our Oakland home, so we grab as many opportunities as we can to bring over dinner and get some Nellie time. We cherish our Friday night babysitting dates and really getting to know this budding sweet girl. Luckily, because of the bleeping pandemic and because he is his own boss (of a startup video digital content company) Nate gets to stay at home. Perhaps the greatest pride and contentment I feel come in seeing my son so involved, enthusiastic, competent, playful, and joyful as a new father. Thanks to our phones (those damn instruments that I had to work to keep my students’ hands off of), we get almost daily photo and video updates in “Life and Times of Nellie”.

Our younger son Will is also a startup maven in SF. He echoes my interests a bit more, as he has pursued education and leadership training, in this case for tech engineers, especially minorities and women. We are wildly proud of both boys, and love the fact that they are best friends who live near each other and see each other many times a week.

Our one regret is that my mother didn’t get to meet this new arrival, as she died in 2020 just before Covid hit and eight months shy of her 100th birthday, which she really wanted to reach. But we say her DNA lived to be 100! We celebrated her life this summer with a family reunion, 29 members strong, at our vacation home on the Pt. Reyes peninsula.

My rock and inspiration remains as ever my 1970 Barnard Hall girlfriend, Elizabeth Fishel. A wordsmith extraordinaire, accomplished author and writing teacher, enthusiastic, involved, and skilled mother and now grandmother, she graciously laughs at all my jokes and I at hers. We share so many interests, from our friends, to good cooking, to our “crafting” (I knit and she does needlepoint), to movies and theater, to our nightly viewing of recorded Rachel Maddow show which keeps us up on politics. We love hiking, swimming in Tomales Bay, and occasionally getting our canoe out onto the water. A great joy in our lives is listening to audio books, from Trevor Noah to Sally Rooney.

She has even become a Golden State Warriors basketball fan, and so we can root on our team together. But she does not accompany me to my Monday night basketball game (going on now for 45 years), my Sunday tennis game, or my Friday pickleball game (try it!).

It turns out my life did not come to an end when I retired on July 1st of this year after almost 30 years of teaching K-12 and 20 years of directing the Bay Area Teacher Training Institute that I founded in 2002. I am proud of the over 500 new K-8 teachers that we brought into the profession and trained to be child-centered successful classroom leaders. I am content so far, muddling my way to a slower time, buoyed by our new grandchild adventure. This Covid time has not been an ideal time to finish up a career, or to celebrate, or even to find and start new activities. For now I have plunged into woodworking and have joined a nonprofit affordable housing board. When the sawdust settles, I want to get back in the classroom, tutoring math to 5th graders and/or teaching adult English learners.

As I face ABS (Aging Body Syndrome) along with all of you, I look forward to our Reunion--to keeping up my friendships with Bay Area neighbors Ken Haas and David Loeb, and reconnecting with more distant friends as well.