There Are Always More Mountains To Climb

One of the most important things I learned at Aiglon was how wonderful it was to meet people coming from all corners of our planet. My roommates were from Borneo, Zambia, Germany, France, Canada, etc. We all learned that we loved the same music, had similar interests and hobbies. We all learned to appreciate the gift of the great outdoors, and those long and short expeditions taught me I could carry all I needed in a backpack and set up our camp anywhere we found a good place on the map to do so. We had freedom of education in choosing our elected courses, we had freedom of where we wanted to map our expeditions, too. Some expeditions were tough, and yet pushing through we learned just one more step after another could get us home or take us far. We made everlasting friendships and now meet at reunions all over the world to reminisce, exchange stories about our families and sometimes even work together. There was always a support system in place, worldwide. I ended up travelling a lot with my family, living in London, Florida, France and LA before finally settling here in Quebec City, Canada. My children are now living their own lives and I have dedicated myself to making films that make a difference.
 
I just completed an 8-year odyssey (talk about a long expedition!!) to get a documentary made called You Belong To Me: Sex, Race and Murder in The South. In fact one of the interviewees, Cliff Adams, who is featured in my film, informed me at a cast and crew screening after the wrap that he had attended Aiglon College with someone who had the same last name as I have. When I told him it was actually me, we were both stunned. He was just a couple of years in front of me!! We didn’t believe each other at first. It was sharing our memories of early morning PE and jumping jacks in the snow that made us realise it was absolutely true.
 
Our world is small and our planet is extraordinary and yet not small enough to hide the nearly 36 million slaves that exist or subsist on our planet today. More slaves than at any other time in our planet’s history. My brother Steven and my sister-in-law Tamara placed their children at Aiglon, and during visits I saw how much Aiglon had expanded and grown. Not only within the school walls but with their outreach into other parts of the world. Tamara became involved with supporting and volunteering at a Nepalese Orphanage called NOH and arranged to have volunteers and students from the school experience first hand what can be done to help these poor children who have been trafficked and are now rescued. NOH does extraordinary things, but it is not the only institution that is doing so. So like any well-trained Aiglonite, I decided to see what more can be discovered.
 
I have joined a great group of crusaders planning to climb and conquer a huge mountain—to finally help bring an end to Modern Day Slavery. We are bringing together a community of like minded, freedom appreciating, brilliant minds who having reached the peaks of their careers and realise there is so much other work to be done. Work related to gender equality, work in freeing those enslaved, work in bringing down those who abduct, enslave, traffic and utilize those slave workers in the manufacturing of products. Work at creating an App that will put the power back into the consumers hands. An App that will identify if slave labour was utilized in creating the product you wish to buy and giving the public an option to choose another. Busting open and wide those corporate chains of hidden labour. So all this to say I am embarking on a further long expedition and in a way this is a call to arms. If there are any Aiglonites who would like to join me on this latest expedition. Please contact me directly or check out our website http://www.wishingstep.com/. We are raising funds presently and if interested on a personal or corporate level I would be pleased to send you further materials.
 
Aiglon prepped us for so much in life. We didn’t necessarily realise it while it was happening because we were busy making friends, socializing, drinking in the fresh air, climbing the mountains, skiing down them and being fed both intellectually and by wonderful chefs. Yet once we stepped away from those mountains and into the reality of the world, it was truly then we realised the gift of what that education and experience prepared us for, and it gave us the knowledge that we can accomplish so much with just one more step.

H. Saltzman
Aiglon College, Class of 1979

For The Record...

At the beginning of 2015, writer Allen Kurzweil published a book called Whipping Boy: A 40-Year Search For My 12-Year-Old Bully. In it, he recounts his traumatic experience as a young boarder at Aiglon College, a British international school in the Swiss Alps. After 30-some-odd pages, the reader is left with the impression that Aiglon was something right out of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days. The school’s rules, its faculty, his Filipino roommate, indeed the entire ethos of the place where he claims to have been "warehoused" appear to have left Allen emotionally immiserated. It should be said that he apparently was not the only student who was bullied. A few others now have stepped forward to tell their stories. Still, of the 200-some-odd young men and women who were there at that time, including myself, I’d wager the vast majority had a radically different experience. Accordingly, "the other side of the story” should be part of the record.

When I was 15 years old, after seeing The Sound of Music and reading an article in National Geographic, I began lobbying my mother to send me to school overseas—for just one year. Some in the family staunchly opposed it. They argued it was too far away and too dangerous an enterprise for a boy not yet 16. Still, in the end, I prevailed, and late one September afternoon I boarded a plane bound for Geneva. What was to have been one year became two, and I returned home an entirely different person.

The school was Aiglon College. (In Europe, the word “college” often denotes a secondary school.) Contrary to what Allen’s book says, Aiglon is not in fact in the general vicinity of Geneva. It is at the other end of the lake, much closer to Montreux, at an altitude of some 4,200 feet. The school overlooks the Rhône Valley, the majestic Dents du Midi, and on a clear day, Mont Blanc. It is a spectacularly beautiful place.

As part of the curriculum, we took annual cultural expeditions to explore major European cities. Some of us took day trips to Milan and Turin to see Italian opera. We also had to participate in long, exhausting mountain expeditions—on foot in the autumn and spring, on skis during the winter. And we skied almost every day during the season. There were times scaling the slopes of mountains, legs burning, that it occurred to me I could be sitting at home, thousands of miles away, eating pizza and watching "Batman." But there are few experiences as satisfying as standing on a mountain peak, surveying the valleys far below, and knowing you got there through your own sweat and perseverance. That sort of hard-won achievement changes you in a profound way. An entirely new self-perception emerges when you discover you are capable of much more than you thought you were.

But there was something else that happened to me on the mountain. I have always suffered from the neurological impairment we now call ADD, as did my father and several of my cousins. Of course, nobody knew what ADD was in the 1970s. But after a few months at Aiglon, I found I could concentrate for the first time in my life. I could read a short book in one evening. I stopped procrastinating. My hand-eye coordination improved significantly. I have come to attribute the marked improvement to regular strenuous exercise the school emphasized—I went from chubby to a 28-inch waist. But I can’t be sure. Was it perhaps the food? The altitude? All of the above? Something else? In any event, for the first time in my life I succeeded. I suddenly had many close friends. My grades dramatically improved. I found myself making rapid progress learning a second language (which I still speak almost fluently to this day). And I was accepted to an elite university, an achievement that would have been highly unlikely had I remained at home.

Equally life-changing in Europe was the opportunity to meet people from all over the world, many of whom remain dear friends, and the acquisition of a new perspicacity that allowed me to see possibilities that were not on the radar screens of most of the people I knew back home. Everything about Europe and the mountain—the food, the local customs, the palpable history, the breathtaking scenery, the skiing—was a revelation to a teenager from the American south.

After university, I went on to found several companies that took me routinely to Italy, Spain, France, England, Germany, and elsewhere. I was the subject of numerous articles, including two in The New York Times and another in Entrepreneur magazine. In short, I had a career that surely would have been out of reach had it not been for my remarkable teenage experience and early exposure to foreign cultures and languages. Still, one could argue I’m the deadbeat. One of my best friends at Aiglon is now a distinguished poet and formerly the director of the American Academy in Rome. Another is a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal. Several of my classmates are in finance and C-suite offices. Others have made a career of humanitarian work. Make no mistake, our little school had some impressive students all those years ago, students who went on to such universities and colleges as Radcliffe, Princeton, Duke, Dartmouth, Vassar, Mt. Holyoke, Columbia, and Cambridge. And we weren’t all rich. Many kids had parents who worked in the diplomatic corps or for multinationals that helped subsidize the educational expenses of employees living abroad. Too, Aiglon was surprisingly affordable for Americans back in the early '70s, because the U.S. dollar was so strong.

Since I have discovered that a few other boys claim to have been bullied during my time at the school, when I was a prefect in their dorm, I have written two of them to apologize. (I wrote an apology to Allen on the school’s alumni site.) It is heartbreaking to know that those boys had such radically different experiences than I did, and worse, that I perhaps should accept some share of the culpability—a sin of omission for not keeping my ear close enough to the track. But less anybody think that Aiglon College was (or is) some sort of “concentration camp” or Slytherin House, know that, for most of us, it was a magical place that bestowed a tremendous amount of grace on children and young adults. To me, it is clear that teens benefit much more from an international experience when they are in high school than at university. It is a time they begin to form their philosophies of life and begin to think about their futures. Aiglon was structured not to indoctrinate, but to expand our horizons, show us our possibilities, build leadership skills, and give us a strong sense of self. For the most part, I think the school was amazingly successful. We didn’t need expensive, flashy facilities. All we needed was a first-rate faculty, a roof over our heads, Alpine challenges, rich cultural resources all around us, and each other. My time at Aiglon was the happiest of my life. It is extremely dispiriting to think that the school’s reputation has been so badly bruised over the unfortunate choices of one young student and another student’s dogged determination to call him to account 40 years later.

As I write, Aiglon has decided not to respond to Allen’s book. Perhaps they feel a series of incidents so long ago does not require a response. I’m sure they have their reasons. As for myself, it would be hard to conceive of any school as exceptional as the one I attended, some inevitable shortcomings notwithstanding. (Wherever you have people, you have shortcomings.) Founder and longtime headmaster John Corlette, a colleague and votary of Outward Bound® founder Kurt Hahn, was a true visionary. Everything we did was carefully calibrated to bring out the best in us—academically, spiritually, and physically. As I think about it, I wouldn’t know how to begin to put a price on my transformative teenage experience.

It is apparent that, forty years ago, the school failed Allen and several others. And for that I am very sorry. It is heartening to see he has gone on to obtain impressive degrees, marry a wonderful woman, and make quite a name for himself as a writer. For my part, it would be an unconscionable act of ingratitude to remain silent and not give credit to all the people—a founding headmaster, teachers, and fellow students—who together created such a remarkable community: a little school on a Swiss mountain where I thrived and where (most of) my many friends learned so much, loved so much, and went on to do great things.

W. Green

Aiglon College, 1970–’72