Retiring Faculty
John Charles Smith Member of the faculty, 1974–2012
Carlotta Zilliax Member of the faculty, 1992–2012
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hen John Charles and I arrived at Milton in September 1974, Richard Nixon was president, and Jerry Pieh was headmaster, his office in the basement of Straus. Deval Patrick had just graduated; Elaine Apthorp was a senior; and Andre Heard wouldn’t be born until the following summer. There were about 175 boy boarding students and 60+ girl boarding students. Milton was three largely separate schools, each with different histories, standards and practices. John Charles has been an important part of several of the changes that have made us the School that we are today. He became director of admissions, merging the separate boys’ and girls’ schools, as well as putting a greater emphasis on recruiting and travel, broadening our boarding base and raising its quality and diversity. For two years, he served on the co-ed committee that laid the groundwork for the merging of the boys’ and girls’ schools. That the much larger, and generally dominant, boys’ school not simply overrun the traditions and practices of the girls’ school was imperative; and the committee’s careful thinking and planning made that transition as comfortable as it could have been for
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people who were changing habits that had been firmly set for many years. Always, his real love has been his classroom. His students marvel at his enduring passion for literature and at his ability to make it come alive for them: they learn to read and to write. The depth of his comments on their papers is as legendary as the speed with which those papers are returned. His students and advisees receive the great gift of vast amounts of his time, attention, and most of all, his caring. These relationships do not end when his students graduate, for he is still in close touch with many of them years and even decades later. His memory for the lives and families of his students and advisees is even greater than his encyclopedic command of the fi lms and plays of the last 80 or 100 years. We shall miss his humor, his still clearly discernible accent, and his deep loyalty to Milton Academy; but even more than that, we shall continue to be inspired by his love of the craft of teaching and by the depth of his dedication to those students who were lucky enough to have had him as a teacher or advisor. John Banderob, Math Department
champion of literature and literary history in Milton’s Upper School English department since 1992, Carlotta Zilliax began her career with 17 years as a primary and elementary teacher. Not many could successfully cover the scale from The Runaway Bunny to King Lear, but Carlotta has done so with brio and with a wise appreciation of the Möbius-like continuum that connects the very young with the not quite so young—the let’s-play-grownup first graders with the how-sillycan-we-be-today high-school seniors. At either end of the spectrum, Carlotta knew how to have fun with a class and how to make that fun pay off in learning that would still be there when lessons more rigidly laid out and more soberly arrived at had faded. A visitor to her Warren Hall classroom in recent years might feel at times that he had stumbled into the Junior Building by mistake, such was the raw energy with which her students piled in and the enthusiasm with which they took up a text, as if it were a pet hamster or a box of finger paints. Often everyone talked at once, but everyone was talking about the hamster. The air crackled with questions and ideas, and out of the cacophony would emerge, magically, insight and understanding. Carlotta’s philosophy prompted her to lean back and let discussion proceed willy-nilly, but her knowledge was so deep and extensive that she often could not resist leaning forward again and inserting herself opportunistically into the
conversation, to the enjoyment and benefit of everyone in the room. A class wrestling with the conundrum of Macbeth’s family history would be treated to an anecdote about how two leads, preparing for a production at Stratford, pasted photos of a dead baby in their lockers; readers of Paradise Lost would learn, succinctly and pointedly, about John Milton’s place in the politics of his time. Carlotta fed the intellect, encouraged emotional response, and always made room for the comic and the spontaneous, joining the fray herself in dry sallies from behind the schoolmarm façade. Her ways of getting students to enter a text personally and imaginatively were such that she could make middle schoolers like Jane Eyre. Her special love of drama played out not only in Shakespeare and Performing classes but also in the theatricals she occasionally organized for the department. We will dearly miss her pert, businesslike, and incisive presence. David Smith, English Department