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Sheafe Satterthwaite

49 bytes added, 22:40, February 22, 2007
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Autobiography: added better caption
==Autobiography==
[[Image:Sheafe color.jpg|thumb|right|A recent picture of Sheafe. You can imagine him speaking his autobiography.]]
At the beginning of each semester, Sheafe has each student write a two-page autobiography, and hands out his own as an example. He writes a new one each time. This is the one from Fall 2006.
:Sheafe Satterthwaite is a sixty-seven-year-old bachelor, who arrived on the Williams campus in February 1968 as a research associate in environmental studies and who commenced teaching in the art department, with this very course [American Landscape History], in the fall of 1970. He got here in an under-handed way (through personally knowing the college's president) in that his one sister took Economics 1 at Harvard (she being at Radcliffe) in 1949 and her instructor was a tutor named John Edward Sawyer, whom she came to know well and work for after college, the so-called "Cambridge Rut" -- the pattern of Harvard students not wanting to leave Alma Mater. I (as a teenager) too came to know Sawyer (eventually the Williams president known as "Smilin' Jack") when I was at the Putney (Vermont) School and he was teaching American economic history at Yale -- I well recall the initial meeting, a luncheon at a Yale hang-out, the greasy spoon known as Dick and Harry's (or so I believe, and is that culinary "institution" still gracing the Elm City (of yore)?). Between Putney and Williams (or 1956 and 1968) I would go on to Mr Jefferson's academical village and come to work for what some people thought was a canning company, Wildlife Preserves, actually a New Jersey-based land preservation organizatin concerned especially with wetland (waterfowl?) habitats. Quite a bit earlier I had become an assiduous looker (or birdwatcher), through my paternal grandfather's giving me a ''National Geographic'' birdbook, and my getting to such famous ornithological sites as the Joppa Flats near Newburyport, Massachusetts and nearby Mount Greylock (to hear, if not see, the elusive Arboreal Zone Bicknell's thrush) and Troy Meadows, New Jersey (this fresh water marsh "the canning company" owned). For Wildlife Preserves, between 1962 when I departed from Charlottesville and the 1968 arrival in Williamstown, I had spent a good bit of time in North Carolina, in an abortive campaign to keep development off Bald Head or Smith Island (alias Cape Fear), then one of the less trammeled Atlantic shorelines. This defeat caused me to become attentive to "development," and was an intellectual turning point -- and a wellspring for [Art History] 201. (In North Carolina I wrote a book on Cape Fear with the forest ecologist Arthur Cooper of North Carolina State University where I would come to teach in the landscape architecture department, during an early leave of absence from Williams, during the spring semester of 1970.) Also, my earlier leaving the Choate School for Putney (which had, and still has, a "working farm" serving its curriculum) -- this movement from one boarding school to another boarding school expressed a "pull" towards an ersatz agrarianism. Indeed after leaving the University of Virginia, I hankered to become a farmer -- something I've only known in one Billsville student, the ex-201er and New Orleans denizen John Kinnabrew, who spent at least one summer while at Williams laboring in serfdom for Sam and Elizabeth Smith at the community agricultural enterprise in South Williamstown known as Caretaker Farm. My main agricultural experience, as a laborer, was working for, or with, my friend the dean of Vermont blacksmiths, Peter Krusch, on his Pumpkin Harbor Poultry Farm in Cambridge (just north of Stowe) -- when not in North Carolina or New Jersey, during the Sixties.
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