Today, we enter the thirteenth year that I have been writing this blog, the longest-running educational blog in the world (I am told). It started as a skunkworks operation....under the radar screen. In 1999, no marketing team, administrator or trustee knew that our new Internet service provider had set it up; (I had asked to be able to caption photos spontaneously, and Travis Warren '91--founder of Whipplehill--responded that I could write whole stories with photos.)

From the beginning, I used the trivial (spontaneous, authentic photos) to illuminate greater truths....the nature of education, relationships with teenagers, or--most often--Proctor, itself.

Here's Patty Pond's and Coco Loehr's Wilderness Orientation group setting off on their four-day camping expedition in the White Mountains (or the Sandwich Range, in this case.)



Eventually--long after this site had a growing population of readers--Travis informed me that a "comment feature" was being added, making it something called a "blog." 

Here's Mike Henriques's and Kristofer Johnson's orientation group starting their camping adventure.



Chuck's Corner was originally buried in an alumni site under a primitive frontpage. The fact that I was writing (apparently) to alumni allowed me to write as if my readers already knew me. I had already been at Proctor for twenty-something years. With that in mind, my style was cheeky, edgy and full of ironic humor. I was saying, "Here's what it's like for me interacting with teenagers being teenagers."

Sports camps are under way.



Over the years, tech advancements and increased download time enabled the site to present more and more images. The quirky presentation of smaller pix in the right hand column with larger photos embedded in the text works somehow--I think. It's unexpected and complex, but so is Proctor.



Now, of course, every image you see resides in Flickr, so you can access and download--at no cost--every photo by double clicking on that image.



I'm sure that I've written more than two thousand posts over the years. Each post does not comprise a complete story. Each is a short chapter in the long story of what this school is, what it believes, and how it operates. At the core, of course, is the permission I am granted by the school to communicate a unique brand without editorial review. I am grateful, because I believe this site serves the school I love well.

72,590 unique visitors read this site over the past year. (A unique visitor means a distinct computer, no matter how many times it visits the site.)

Due to a special family circumstance, the next Corner will not appear until Tuesday night. I look forward to our fourteenth year!