Charlie Sloatman 1944 Reflects on the Years

Charlie Sloatman, Hamden Hall Class of 1944 (formally Charles and also C.D.) was delighted recently to receive a copy of some poetry he had written during his days under the pines. In response, he wrote Eunice Bragg, our Annual Fund director, a simply lovely letter. Here ‘tis!

 

What a surprise to see my poetry of 1944 come back to me in 2016! Mrs. Curtis, our English teacher in my senior year, stressed poetry, having us memorize a significant number of lines that year. I can still, at age 89, recite a good part of the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

I caught the poetry bug that year but did not pursue it further. My chief  avocation has been playing the flute, which has led to over 300 solo performances in addition to band and orchestra experience. The solo work has been in churches for the most part.

 

My career as an accountant-musician was predicted by an Hamden Hall action in the Fall of 1943 when a Yale psychology professor gave our 13-member class a battery of tests to determine what vocations we would be happiest in, rating them A to D. I turned out to have multiple B’s, as did Joan Kelly. We were asked to visit his Yale office during Christmas vacation, where we took further tests to narrow it down. I still came up with two fields: accounting and music.

 

In 1947, my junior year at Bucknell University, I was majoring in economics. Basic accounting courses were required in that field and became my focus. One day, walking to a music practice room, it dawned on me: “Here I am an accounting student who is also doing music”! Those Hamden Hall tests were absolutely right!

   

I first played soccer when I entered Hamden Hall in my junior year. I was impressed by the fact that, in playing five other secondary schools we scored only one point in each game but managed to win three of them!

  

Soon after we entered World War II the teacher, (I believe it was Mr. Heller) who taught both French and Spanish, was drafted. My father, a Methodist minister, was great at languages and had actually taught Spanish to would-be missionaries while himself a student at theological seminary. My mother was a French teacher before they married. They became the school Spanish and French teachers for the next two years!

 

In those days the high school put on a different Shakespeare play each year. I had parts in Romeo  & Juliet, As You Like It and played the part of Ferdinand in The Tempest.

 

My first date, in 1955, with Beverly Merchant was at a performance of The Tempest at the Stratford Connecticut Shakespeare Theater. It was the opening night of the theater itself. It was also the night of a thunderstorm. It was not possible to distinguish the stage thunder from the real thunder! Raymond Massey played the part of Prospero, Jack Palance was Calaban, and Roddy McDowell was Ariel. We have seen performances of The Tempest twice since living in Maine. We have attempted to keep any  “tempest experiences” limited to the stage!

 

Beverly and I were married on the day after Christmas that same year. We have become a family of five: Ann, Beverly, Charles, David and Eric. (A,B,C,D,E.)  We live on “A” Street on a peninsula of South Portland, Maine paralleling the bridge to Portland, which has five streets: A, B, C, D, E! It just happened!

 

However, some years before meeting my wife, I graduated from Hamden Hall and went on to attend Bucknell University, during which I enlisted in the U.S. Army for a period of time during 1946 and 1947, after which I returned to Bucknell and completed my B.A. in economics.

 

 

I spent eight years in the wholesale lumber business accounting for lumber inventories and shipments throughout Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. I took a break and studied philosophy at Indiana University, followed by a year at Garrett, a Methodist theological school in Evanston, Ill. There I discovered Unitarianism and became an active member of U.U. Churches since then. I also learned that I could contribute better to a church service by playing the flute than by the spoken word.

 

After that two-year sojourn I returned to Connecticut for two years as an internal auditor in the machine tool industry before finding the company where I was to spend the remainder of my career.

 

I arrived at the New Haven Trap Rock Company in 1961 where I became controller in 1967 and in charge of accounting for numerous quarries, asphalt plants and related activities. Over the next 25 years, we became a division of Ashland Oil, Inc. and were later owned by Tilcon, Inc., followed by BTR (British Tyre and Rubber Co. (both U.K. companies).

 

In the year 2000, we retired to South Portland, Maine, where our eldest son, a teacher, and his wife, a nurse, and their daughter lived. Our granddaughter, Jalana, has now finished college and pursued theater stage management. She lives in New York City now. Our daughter, a textile and interior designer has moved to South Portland now after some years in California and our youngest son works with vintage cars and also lives in Maine.

 

During our 16 years in Maine, I have developed a strong interest in history. I served as a docent (museum guide) for eight years in the Portland (Maritime) Observatory, the Portland Harbor Museum and currently at the South Portland Historical Society Museum. There was also two years as a tour guide at First Parish Church in Portland (our Unitarian Universalist church) which was Congregational until 1809 when they voted themselves Unitarian. It is the oldest church, both physically and organizationally, in Portland, Maine. This summer, we expect 77 cruise ships to visit our port, thereby keeping the museums quite busy!

 

 

Beverly’s story is dance. This would astonish my classmates at HHCDS as I was not at all into dance! Once a classmate at a class party finally got me to learn one dance step: Bridgeport Shuffle. Beverly says she has danced “since she was born.” She rarely gets me on a dance floor but when she does, she’s been saddled with the Bridgeport Shuffle (for 60 years)!

 

I met her when she taught first grade in North Haven, Conn., after graduating from Gorham State Teachers College (now the University of Southern Maine). She grew up in Rockland, Maine, and danced at every opportunity in high school, later going into modern dance and ultimately teaching creative movement and yoga at many Connecticut facilities and schools, including 17 years for Hamden Adult Education Department.

 

We enjoyed a celebration this past year of 60 years of marriage!