Days before America’s oldest high school sporting rivalry took root, the editors of The Exonian newspaper expressed high hopes for the occasion:

“We are looking forward with interest to the game of football with Andover,” they wrote in the Oct. 26, 1878, edition. “We trust that the game will be a friendly one, and that the beaten party will accept their defeat as a fair and an honorable one.”

If the ensuing 22-0 Exeter defeat altered those warm thoughts, it didn’t stop the schools from continuing their “friendly” competition. On Nov. 13, Big Red and Big Blue will resume a thrice-annual athletic clash for the 143rd time.

Ahead of that renewal, we offer a quick snapshot of E/A history:

Exeter starts on top

Big Red is born

So, how did Exeter come to be Big Red? That first baseball game against Andover set the style. From The Exonian: “The uniform of the school nine consists of the following: knee-breeches, sweat-shirt, square cut blouse, of white flannel trimmed with cardinal red, cardinal red stockings and a white flannel cap.” The PEA football team also wore red that fall, with The Exonian noting, “This bright color and the color of the Andover suits will make a very pretty contrast.” The rest is history.

Reversal of fortunes

Exeter lost the initial football game, but the wait for revenge was brief. The following November, Andover stepped off the train amid a tempest and was figuratively if not literally blown away by Big Red. The 18-0 victory was the first of 54 for Exeter in the long-running series.

Bittersweet victory

Andover rode an eight-year winning streak into the 1913 football game. PEA Principal Harlan Paige Amen beseeched the entire student body to pray for victory, claiming that Exonians needed a win to regain their faith and hope. Exeter responded with a stunning 59-0 victory at home before a reported crowd of 8,000 people — only to learn the next morning that Amen had suffered a stroke and passed away. “Rarely have the joy and sorrow of life more strangely confronted each other than in the events of the past two days at Phillips Exeter Academy,” the Boston Transcript reported. “Few of the thousands who witnessed the phenomenal football victory of its students over the sister institution of Andover knew that the head of this famous school was dying at his home.”

One for the ages

“The place was Brother’s Field; the clay was fair; the teams were in perfect condition; and the score was 78 to 7. Such a victory with such a score may never take place again in the rivalry of the two schools.” So goes the opening paragraph of The Exonian’s report on Nov. 18, 1914 from the biggest rout in E-A football lore. The writer was prescient: Andover holds the overall edge in the series, but Exeter forever boasts the most one-sided win.

A kick in the grass

Exeter’s first interscholastic soccer match fittingly came against Andover. On Nov. 7, 1928, a veteran Andover side, which had lost just once in four years, arrived for an exhibition match. Beyond all expectations, Exeter reportedly dominated play but lost, 1-0. It would be 11 years before PEA finally tasted victory in the series, with a goal from Bud Palmer ’40 leading to a breakthrough 1-0 victory in 1939.

The comeback

In what may be one of the greatest Exeter victories in the long-running football series, quarterback Mike Lynch ’72 rallied Big Red from a 20-3 deficit to stun Andover 30-20 in the 1971 meeting in front of a crowd of 5,300. The win gave Exeter a share of its first New England title in 15 years.

You lose some …

The Exeter-Andover rivalry began a new era on Nov. 7, 1973, when girls teams first represented their respective schools in the feud. It was a less-than-grand opening for Big Red; Andover swept matchups in field hockey and girls soccer. The losses in the debut of girls sports were part of an Andover sweep of all the varsity competitions that fall.

… and you win some

A year later, Exeter turned the tables entirely. Highlighted by a first-place finish in boys cross-country in Interschols (Andover was second) and a 4-2 boys soccer win to complete an unbeaten season, Exeter enjoyed a clean sweep of its own, with victories in football, girls soccer and field hockey.

Not this time

The superb field hockey team of 1983 had its shot at an unbeaten season spoiled on the last day; a 1-0 loss to Andover. Big Red gained some revenge the following fall, with Peggy Proctor’s goal sealing a 1-0 win over Big Blue and capping a 10-1 season.

Better late …

Exeter’s 12-0 girls soccer season of 1989 was consummated with a resounding 3-1 win over Andover, a match that started more than an hour late because the guests were a late arrival.

“Exeter Beats Andover 20-20”

In the 1994 football clash, Exeter erased fourth-quarter deficits of 14-0 and 20-6 to rally for a 20-20 tie. The result knocked Andover out of the New England Class A title game and prompted The Exonian to declare victory by emulating an infamous Harvard Crimson headline.

Fit to be tied

The 2002 football game ended tied 14-14, the 10th and most recent tie in the long rivalry. Tradition dictates that the teams do not play overtime. In that 2002 game, Big Blue was driving for the winning score, but Exeter’s Austin Blackmon ’03 intercepted a pass in the end zone on the game’s final play.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the fall 2019 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Energy and excitement filled Love Gymnasium on Sept. 10, 2021, as the entire school community of students and faculty gathered for the first time in 18 months for Opening Assembly. In the front rows, members of the class of 2022 listened as Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08 offered a reminder of Exeter’s mission “to unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives.”

But as all Exonians know, the pursuit of goodness and knowledge doesn’t begin after Opening Assembly, and it doesn’t end after that last class in late May. Summer may be for rest, relaxation, family and friends — but it also offers many students, including those featured here, the precious time and space to continue the pursuit of learning and to follow their sense of purpose into the wider world.

Zander Galli ’22: Guardian of biodiversity

For as long as he can remember, Zander Galli ’22 has been interested in wildlife and nature. After his lower year, Galli planned a trip to Africa, where he initially thought he’d be working with cheetahs. In fact, he headed to the Munyawana Conservancy in southeastern South Africa for a conservation project involving pangolins, the rare insect-eating mammals that are covered in overlapping scales resembling the leaves of an artichoke. “They have this entrancing aura that’s hard to describe if you’re not right next to it,” Galli says. “It’s like stumbling on some otherworldly alien, they’re just so strange and beautiful.”

While often compared to anteaters, pangolins are in fact more closely related to the Carnivora order, which includes cats, dogs and bears. Their unique scales are made of keratin, the same protein that forms human hair and fingernails. Despite having no proven medicinal value, the scales are highly sought after for use in traditional cures for ailments ranging from arthritis to cancer. Due to a robust poaching trade over the past 10 to 15 years, pangolins are now believed to be the most-trafficked mammal in the world.

Though the COVID-19 pandemic scuttled all travel in the summer of 2020, Galli returned to the same conservancy this summer. His job was to help rehabilitate three young pangolins that had been rescued from the poaching trade and reintroduce them into the wild. Pangolins are normally solitary, nocturnal creatures, but these orphaned animals were completely dependent on Galli and his colleagues to dig up ant and termite nests for them to feed on. “At night, you bring them back and sleep right next to them, because you have to keep them warm and make sure they don’t get sick,” Galli says. “It’s very stressful for them.”

In addition to the threat of poaching, “the climate crisis is really affecting the areas that pangolins live, especially the drier areas,” Galli says. “When the rainfall is much lower, the insects are way less prevalent, so the pangolins have to spend more time out of their shelters looking for them.” Not only are the animals exerting more energy and risking starvation, but they’re more easily hunted when they’re in the open. All eight pangolin species native to Asia and Africa are currently classified as threatened with extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Galli also spent a month this summer in the Namib Desert in northwest Namibia, working with the Giraffe Conservation Foundation to track and place satellite tags on giraffes. “The foundation used the tagging data to track the giraffe migration between the Namibian and Angolan border and set up community conservation programs,” he explains.

After taking Advanced Biology his upper year, Galli is now working with Science Instructor Townley Chisholm on a senior project to create a new biology curriculum. “It connects natural disruption to zoonotic diseases, like COVID and Ebola and HIV, and explains how the status quo of natural destruction will probably lead to more diseases like those,” he says. Galli hopes to test the curriculum in Exeter biology classrooms before rolling it out to a wider audience. 

In addition to his conservation interests, Galli is on the wrestling and crew teams, serves as co-head of the Daniel Webster Debate Society and sits on the Community Conduct Committee. Next spring, he will travel to the nation’s capital for the Washington Intern Program and plans to intern at an environ-mental law or policy organization.

In a TEDx talk Galli gave at Exeter in the spring of 2019, he advised fellow Exonians to “think of biodiversity as a massive Jenga tower” in which every species is important to the solidity of the tower. He still sees this metaphor as an apt one for illustrating the need to take climate change — as well as the plight of the pangolin and other threatened animals — seriously.

“I think the most important thing for humans is to think of ourselves as part of nature and recognize and appreciate how our actions have effects we can’t even picture,” Galli says. “We just don’t know enough about how all these ecosystems function, and how the entire biosphere keeps us alive. We don’t know when that tipping point will be.”  

Emma Finn ’22: Champion of ancient Greek

Emma Finn ’22 started taking Latin in sixth grade and chose to come to Exeter in part to continue her studies. In pursuit of a Classics diploma, she enrolled in her first Greek course during her upper year and was immediately hooked. “I love Latin, but for me Greek is a more fluid language,” Finn says. “There are these little words called particles that can convey sarcasm and nuance in a way you can only really get while speaking in English.”

When Finn heard that Matthew Hartnett, chair of the Department of Classical Languages, was looking for a student to work remotely over the summer to revise ΑΓΩΝ (pronounced “ahg-own”), the ancient Greek text-book he wrote that is used in Exeter’s introductory Greek courses, she jumped at the opportunity. “My goal for the project was not just to make it easier to learn, but to make people really fall in love with the language the way I did,” she says.

In addition to reformatting the appendix, indexing prepositions and other tasks, Finn added new sentences to the textbook to ensure better distribution of vocabulary words. She particularly enjoyed researching and writing short biographies of the authors whose texts are included in the book, hopefully inspiring her fellow Greek scholars to read more of their work.

“It’s been great practice to see the curriculum and the material through a different lens,” she says. “I’ve always loved storytelling, and it’s been really rewarding to shift from being a consumer of knowledge to being able to produce it in ways that will have an impact on other students’ learning.” 

“Emma came up with a lot of ways to make learning the vocabulary and grammar easier, including little mnemonic devices, tricks and tips,” Hartnett says. “Because she can still see Greek through a student’s eyes, she helped us present the material in a way that’s easier for students to understand.”

Finn’s academic interests also led her to Exeter History Instructor Aykut Kilinc, who enlisted her help in designing lesson plans and curriculum for his economics course. “We read this really interesting book that’s basically a comprehensive history of U.S. trade policy,” she says. “Which I know doesn’t sound interesting, but it turns out to be a great way of looking at the broader political shifts in the United States over time.” 

On top of those two projects, Finn found time to complete a summer internship for the New-York Historical Society. Working remotely from her home in Maryland, she wrote a blog post about the pioneering female journalist Ruth Hale for the muse-um’s Center for Women’s History and helped develop lesson plan content for Museums for Digital Learning, an educational platform that provides K-12 schools with curated resources.

For her academic excellence, Finn was recently selected as a Coolidge Scholar, an honor that comes with a scholarship for four years of under-graduate study at any accredited college or university in the United States. Coolidge Scholars are also selected based on a demonstrated interest in public policy and a record of humility and service. In Finn’s case, she has been involved in the Exeter Student Service Organization since her prep year and is now the co-president. She’s also co-head of Exeter’s Economics Club and Microfinance Club, which provides small loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world.

Before the pandemic, Finn frequently volunteered to care for abandoned horses at the Hidden Pond Equine Rescue in Brentwood, New Hampshire. “The goal is to socialize the horses and get them used to being around humans again so they can be adopted,” Finn says. An experienced equestrian who started riding when she was 6 years old, Finn competed in horse shows on weekends during her lower year and hopes to resume riding and volunteering with horses during the new school year.

Janessa Vargas ’22: Advocate for immigrants

As a first-generation Mexican American, Janessa Vargas ’22 has always been aware of how pervasive questions around immigration status can be in families and communities like her own. While at home in New Jersey near the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, she started working with Make the Road, a nonprofit organization that focuses on empowering working-class and immigrant communities. Building on that experience, Vargas dove deep into researching U.S. immigration policy this summer through a fellowship with the National Advocacy Institute at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

With Make the Road, Vargas helped people apply for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama-era program that protects from deportation certain undocumented people brought to the United States as children and allows them to work. “For my [ACLU] research proposal, I asked the question, ‘How do we achieve citizenship for people who are left out of this very specific pool that the government or politicians think are worthy or have ‘earned’ their citizenship?’” Vargas explains. 

She interviewed immigration lawyers and community organizers, both in her area and in other regions of the country, to get a more complex picture of the issue. “The way I tackled the research project was bringing humanity to policy,” she says. “I would mix people’s interviews — their realities — with the law and present the human perspective. I tried to show how a lack of citizenship and a lack of stability in one’s immigration status is so pervasive in people’s lives, and in the lives of my family and my community.”

In July, around the time Vargas was preparing to present her research (virtually) to some 200 people, a federal judge in Texas ruled that DACA was unlawful and suspended the program. As the debate over immigration reform continues in Congress, Vargas will travel to Saint Peter’s University in New Jersey to speak at a campus event on immigration in September. She also plans to head to Washington, D.C., for events surrounding the vote on the planned budget, which she hopes will include “the pathway to citizenship for millions of people.”

Vargas rounded out her summer with a stint doing research for the Greater Good Institute, a youth-led think tank, as well as classes on literature and philosophy through the Yale Young Global Scholars Program. For good measure, she attended a five-day virtual course on critical race theory at the African American Policy Forum, led by the scholar and writer Kimberlé Crenshaw.

At Exeter, Vargas has immersed herself in the ongoing work devoted to promoting anti-racism and diversity, equity and inclusion on campus. She is head of diversity and equity for Student Council; co-head of the Afro-Latinx Exonian Society, Feminist Union and Democratic Club; and has worked as a student proctor in the Office of Multicultural Affairs. She also co-leads Model UN, which she’s been involved with since her prep year. “Like most Exonians, I’m pretty overcommitted,” Vargas says.

“But even though I’m spread in a lot of places, I feel like it’s all within the same area of work.”  

She’s seen the positive impact of anti-racist work in the Exeter curriculum, as well as in Model UN. “I saw the board before me take accountability and take people out of spaces where they were causing harm, admit that wrong, and make clear that things need to change,” Vargas says. “Now our board is made up mostly of women of color, so I’ve seen that transformation in a club where I probably would have least expected it.”

Vargas is also excited to begin working with GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network), a nationwide organization that seeks to protect and create positive environments for LGBTQ students in K-12 schools. “I think the crux of my Exeter career is making sure that it’s a better place for people like me after I’ve left it,” she says. Referring to the oft-quoted statement made by one of her heroes, James Baldwin, about America, Vargas says she too believes that “if you love something, then you criticize it and make it better.” 

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Becoming global citizens

My father, Frank R. Lacy, and his younger brother, Burritt S. Lacy, both entered the Academy as uppers in September 1897 and graduated in the class of 1899. The letters that my father wrote home to his parents in Dubuque, Iowa, and which, to my good fortune, they preserved, paint a picture of life at Exeter in the Principal Harlan P. Amen era that later Exonians may find interesting.

Although the letters I have start only in the spring of 1898, it appears from the inscription “in Oct. 1897,” on the back of a picture of Burritt sitting at a desk in 11 Peabody Hall, that the Lacy brothers lived in Peabody throughout their two years at the Academy as two of its first occupants. In fact, the building seems not to have been quite ready for them. In a letter dated October 12, my father reports that he was still sleeping on a “lounge” because bed springs, which the Academy had ordered from Boston, had not yet arrived. Could this have been a belated attempt to adjust the school’s bed sizes to accommodate the 6-foot-6 Burritt and other oversized boys present or to come? In other respects, the brothers took the furnishing of their room into their own hands. My father writes enthusiastically about a Morris chair that they bought for $10. Their mother had sent them andirons for the fire-place, and they had purchased a screen and soapstone to complete the equipment necessary for its safe and efficient use.

The Academy apparently did not yet have dining halls, and Frank and Burritt took all their meals at Mrs. Read’s boarding house. The price was right. My father’s letter of June 20, 1898, thanking his father for a draft of $40, indicates that part of the money would be spent on paying his and Burritt’s bills of $9 each for board from June 22 to July 3. The Lacy boys were expected by their father to keep meticulous records of every penny they spent while at Exeter. I turned my father’s account book over to the Academy’s archivist some years ago. It would also appear that there was not yet an infirmary. In May 1899, Burritt, along with a number of other boys, came down with German measles. He simply stayed in his bed in his room, and Frank “had the doctor come and see him.” To cope with the constant threat of catching cold, Frank, at the beginning of his senior year, sent away for a half dozen bottles of cod liver oil, which, he assured his parents, he took regularly.

As a 10-year-old growing up in San Francisco, I was obsessed with the Summer of Love. I would save my allowance and take the 22 Fillmore bus down to Haight-Ashbury and stare with envy and longing at the flower children there. I wanted to play guitar like them, to drop out like them, to belong to a radical movement like them. Instead, I baked brownies for the Girl Scouts and did my homework. My one radical gesture consisted of spending the rest of my allowance on tarot cards from the Mystic Eye Bookstore and then doing readings for gullible friends.

But the longing to belong to a radical community never left me. Little did I know that, in interviewing at Phillips Exeter in the fall of 1971, I would be fulfilling that dream. At the time and for some time afterward, Exeter seemed the epitome of the very opposite of that vision: It seemed staid, restrained and committed to convention and tradition.

But over the last (God help me) 50 years that I have been connected to the school as a student, teacher, parent and, now, emerita, I have seen what is precious and radical continue to emerge in a variety of different and unexpected ways. Yes, when I arrived in the fall of 1972, the engraved Latin slab over the entry to the Academy Building read, “Here come boys to be made into men,” but I also walked under that sign into a history classroom with Ms. Jane Scarborough, who modeled fearless inquiry at the table — and made me realize that a woman could more than hold her own in a room full of men. If she could do it, then so could I. As a lower, I learned to never let gender keep me from speaking my mind. The dictionary’s first definition of radical? “Relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough.” Yes, indeed.

When I returned to Exeter, 22 years and several careers later, I was again surprised. I thought I was returning to the school I had left.

But in the intervening time, the Academy had pushed forward in surprisingly progressive ways. Harkness pedagogy, originally intended as “a real revolution in methods,” had continued to evolve, becoming even more student-led and student-centered than I remembered. As a teacher, I always loved the moment when a student would say something about a book that I thought I knew well, making an offhand remark of such fresh insight that I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

But more exciting still was seeing a Harkness approach applied to student life outside the classroom. Activities, clubs and meetings, whether the Gay-Straight Alliance, Middle East Society or Pirate Club, seemed to be asking, “Who are you? And how can we help you be who you are?” Dorm life evolved with the option of all-gender dorms, providing more choice for students. A second meaning of radical? “Advocating thorough or complete political or social change.” Change was in the air and Exeter was part of it.

My own children felt that change as students there and responded to it in ways that helped them grow into the engaged people they are today. A term at Mountain School turned my son into a climate warrior, while Dramat fed a dream of writing for TV. And Exeter gave my daughter the support to begin a quest in search of gender identity and expression that led to her happy pursuit of a career in social work and psychotherapy. At the conclusion of a year commemorating 50 years of coeducation at Exeter, I look at my children and see yet another expression of what it means to be radical: “Of, or springing direct from, the root or stem base of a plant.” They have sprung from the same base, the same soil that nurtured me. And I cannot wait to see the ways in which Exeter will continue to thrive and help her students grow into who they are meant to be. As an emerita, I will stand on the sidelines and cheer for the radical change to come.