If you have been reading this blog for a while then you already know that at the beginning of the summer I received an e-mail from an alumnus who let me know that he couldn’t view the slideshows or the videos on Sine Charta while using his iPad. It turned out that he was part of the thirty-two percent of all visitors to Sine Charta who use some kind of hand-held device such as iPhones, iPads, and Droids. Over the summer Sine Charta became compatible with iPhones, iPads, and Droid devices manufactured by Motorola.

Making Sine Charta compatible with some of the more popular hand-held, video-capable devices made me wonder about e-books…especially as Apple had already sold about 2 million iPads within the first two months that it was available and Amazon was continuing to sell thousands of Kindles. Over the summer I worked with the team at OneThread Design to put together an e-book version of the spring 2010 edition of Trinity Per Saecula, which I gave to several members of the faculty and a handful of parents and alumni. To keep this simple I gave the test file only to people who had an iPad, iPhone, or a second generation Kindle. What I heard back from those people was both good news and bad news. The bad news was that people told me that whatever they were going to read in the print-edition of the magazine happened the day it arrived. They went to whatever section they wanted ...

I am reminded of Francis Philip Wuppermann class of 1908, whenever the Wizard of Oz is on television. Son of the co-founder of the Angostura-Wupperman Corporation, the manufacturer of Angostura Aromatic Bitters that are used to make Perfect Manhattans and other cocktails, Francis and at least one of his five brothers, Raphael, attended Trinity School shortly after it moved to the present location on West 91st Street. With The Reverend August Ulmann and The Reverend Doctor Lawrence Thomas Cole as rectors of the School during those years, Trinity was a very different place than it is today. It was, of course, a school for boys (St. Agatha School for Girls, Trinity’s sister school, opened in 1903) and it was completely contained within the walls of the newly opened building at 139 West 91st Street. It was then, as it is now, considered by many to be one of the best schools in the city. What a perfect place for the Wuppermann boys to be educated. Francis attended Cornell University while Raphael attended Columbia University.

I have, on occasion, been asked to give historical tours of the 139 building to current Lower School students. It is a great joy to show students the place that they know so well and reveal “hidden” secrets that they walk past every day: the tiles in the floor of the Great Hall that replaced Trinity’s “old” motto, the mysterious door in the stairwell, and the “elevator” hidden in Mr. Warren’s classroom. The very first time that I ...

Without a doubt, the section of Trinity Per Saecula that is the most fun to put together is “From the Archives.” Time in the School’s archives always feels like a great adventure to me, even after spending as much time as I have among the various parts of the collection; there is always something that I haven’t seen before or that I now see in a new context based upon something else that I have learned. I look forward to everything that I come upon while in the archives.

Sadly, as many of you probably know, Trinity hasn’t always treasured its history in the way that we do now. One of the many things that former faculty member Clarence Bruner-Smith told me was that the School, as it marched uptown from its original location at Wall Street to its present location at West 91st Street, discarded many of its records when leaving each of its previous locations. The archival record that we have available to us today is a much diminished view of Trinity’s history.

Fortunately, what we do have available to us in the archives is being catalogued, conserved, and organized in a way that is appropriate for a 302-year-old institution. One of the great advantages of such a well cared for collection is that I am able to find numerous wonderful images to include in the magazine. I will admit that “From the Archives” is one section where I don’t have an elaborate set of criteria for the selection process. ...

Between this week and next your mail box should be bursting with the 2009-2010 Trinity School Annual Report. It is the longest, and largest, publication that I produce…running eighty-six pages this year. The school is fortunate to have such a generous community and the annual report reflects the scope and breadth of that generosity. Thank you for donating your time and money to the School.

When I arrived at Trinity the annual report was the one publication that everyone in the community received (only the alumni received the magazine the School produced at that time, there was no calendar, and the Internet was something that had only just officially moved beyond the National Science Foundation), so it seemed to me to be a great place to share information about Trinity…information in addition to the lists of donors. The convention that Trinity followed at that time, as did nearly every other independent school in New York, was to have the head of school, president of the board, principals, and the office heads write about the previous year. I think that I can write, without exaggeration, that almost none of these people looked forward to this task as it was too vague and unfocused. “Write about last year” seemed to be the charge and so they did…writing about things that had happened in their various areas of the School. An early publications audit indicated that the community looked forward to reading these articles with about the same level of enthusiasm as they were written. ...