Trustee's Letter

I told my father my plans as he and I drove home a couple of weeks later. His initial skepticism made me wonder: Was it genuine interest or just the adventure of the previous summer that was catching my imagination? Could the geology course really be the door to a vocation?

The next day, Dad started the conversation, “I was thinking about what you said yesterday. My brother Bill was an academic and he took great satisfaction from the research he did. If this is what you want to do, go ahead.” True to his word and despite my mother’s misgivings, they gave me permission to drive the family station wagon to New Mexico to work on an archaeological site. This was the beginning of my relationship with our 230-cubic-inch straight six ’63 Chevy.

The excitement of being out on my own with a couple of friends driving across the continent was soon balanced by the boredom of long hot days on the road. The boredom evaporated when we turned off the pavement, through a barbed wire gate and bounced along a ranch road to our field camp for the summer, across 25 miles of the emptiest country I had ever seen.

A couple of weeks later I noticed dark streaks of grease on the inside of the right rear wheel. I had never before been interested in what went on inside an axle, but I was now. A couple of guys on the dig diagnosed a busted seal on a bearing. We thought about driving to town, but all I could imagine was the bearing’s failing, stranding me in the middle a very big landscape with only cactus and a few cows for company. So instead, I bought a shop manual and a slide hammer, pulled the axle half-shaft from its housing, took it into town, got a mechanic to replace the bearing, hauled the half-shaft back to the field camp and reinstalled it.

I’d promised my parents that I’d treat the car responsibly, so I wrote to tell them what had happened and how I’d made the repairs. Since I was two thousand miles away and the car was back in shape, I also sent them a photograph of me kneeling in the dirt, pulling the axle out of its housing. I don’t know if they were appalled or reassured, but the car and I did return home no worse for the wear. The next summer, though, they helped me buy my own pickup truck and I headed west again. The project I started that summer grew into a twenty-five year career of research in the earth sciences.

When I look at that snapshot now, I see it as more than a record of my adolescent adventure. It is a reminder of a summer when there was enough time and space to explore possibilities — to think of a breakdown as a challenge and an opportunity, not just a nuisance. It’s a reminder of the time I began to leave home to find my own way; and of how I discovered that the best way of losing my fear of breaking something was learning that I could figure out how to fix it.

The Memorial Fund has now been working for a decade to support the improvement of education for young children of Connecticut. The real work and responsibility of the education of the children is of course not ours, but that of the parents, citizens and institutions in the state.

For the past two years, the Memorial Fund has focused its efforts and resources on the Discovery program, which aims, in part, to increase the capacity of communities to analyze, organize, reflect and act on behalf of children.

Forty-nine cities and towns across Connecticut participate in Discovery. A key part of Discovery is the formation of a collaborative working relationship that includes parents, community members, service providers and government officials. For most of the participants this is a new way of working. For many parents and community members, for whom the landscape of educational programs, policy and bureaucracy can sometimes seem as vast and inhospitable as the New Mexico desert, participation in Discovery is a new and challenging role.

In this report we honor them by telling some of their stories, as they find their own ways to influence the institutions and programs that affect them and their children. I invite you to explore how the accounts of three varied communities — urban Norwalk, rural Thompson and suburban Windsor — evoke connections with your own experiences and aspirations.

In their ideal form, democratic institutions are also vehicles that can take their people anywhere they decide to go, but as with that ’63 Chevy, the judgment to steer them well and the ability to maintain and repair them must be learned by each generation. I invite you to look at these reports as examples of people committing themselves to learning and practicing the mechanics of democracy.

William Chandler Graustein
Trustee