As a sailor and professional mariner for most of my career, I learned very early that in order to safely navigate your ship, you rely on trusted landmarks to fix your position and avoid the rocks and shoals that you might encounter along your chosen course. Likewise, in our lives, we rely upon trusted landmarks to take us along our chosen paths. Those landmarks might be parents, teachers, coaches, and even institutions. Norwich Free Academy was one of my landmarks.

Throughout the years, I’ve reflected on my teachers, coaches, my band director and my classmates, teammates, and bandmates who left me with lasting lessons, impressions, and memories that made me think, made me laugh, and often helped me make decisions in my life. So it is a great honor for me to represent those members of the Class of 1970, 50 years later, in offering congratulations to the members of the NFA Class of 2020, their families and friends, and offer thanks to the NFA Board of Trustees, Head of School David Klein, and the entire NFA faculty for their dedicated efforts to get the Class of 2020 to this day, as we collectively navigate these very challenging times.

Several years ago, I found a letter written by President John F. Kennedy that described men and women who crossed the oceans of the world to reach our shores, and how they demonstrated strength, courage, discipline and resourcefulness to find their way across “uncertain and stormy seas.” Kennedy often spoke and wrote both literally and figuratively. So he was using that phrase “uncertain and stormy seas” as a metaphor for the problems and challenges that confront us as a country. And he expressed his belief that the same qualities and characteristics of those sailors would serve us as a country to confront those challenges.

For the Class of 1970, one of our most memorable civics lessons was as third graders, observing the election and inauguration of John F. Kennedy, our 35th, and youngest president. Our “uncertain and stormy seas” began with the assassination of President Kennedy when we were sixth graders, the assassinations of his brother Bobby Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King when we were “lowers” at NFA, accompanied by riots and protests over the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam, and the continuing threats of the Cold War and nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. The landmarks in our lives helped us to navigate our way through those troubling times.

Similarly, the Class of 2020 faces its own “uncertain and stormy seas” — the unprecedented challenges of a pandemic, the continuing war on terrorism, the threats of a rising China and a resurgent Russia, climate change and global warming and, perhaps most distressing, the political polarization, inequalities and discrimination that threatens to drive us apart as a country. How might you, the Class of 2020 take on these challenges?

President Kennedy’s example might provide some direction. In our youth, he inspired all of us with his inaugural speech in which he sought to unify the people of the United States, and really, all of humanity to make the world a better place for everyone. His call to duty was: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,” an appeal to selflessness over selfishness. He told us to get involved!

Kennedy understood the need to find a unifying goal for this very diverse country, and speaking at Rice University in 1962, he acknowledged the many challenges facing the country, but stated, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” He set a very high and optimistic goal for our country. A goal that was achieved less than a decade later when on July 20, 1969, just before my class’s senior year, the crew of Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

When we left this institution 50 years ago, some entered the workforce, some went to college, classmates entered the military and others marched in protest against the war. Some became government servants, or joined the Peace Corps. They married, became good parents, they voted, they made a living and paid taxes. They became good citizens, they solved problems and did their best to build a better country to pass on to their children. We got involved! In spite of our differences, we shared a sense of optimism, and the understanding that if we focused on the many things that unite us, rather than divide us, we could make it through anything.

And so it will be for you. Your generation in a few short years will be challenged to assume the responsibility of leadership. What will guide you? With landmarks like Norwich Free Academy, you’re off to a great start.

Congratulations. Good luck. Fairwinds.

(Admiral Robert J. Papp, USCG (Ret.) is a member of the Norwich Free Academy Class of 1970.)