<p>Stayed at the Chauncey Conference center, on the grounds of ETS, while visiting my kids recently. The high-speed connection was broken in our room, and so they moved us to an eighteenth-century farmhouse on the grounds, beside a lake. Charming. Turns out it was Chauncey’s own house, where Eleanor Roosevelt and others came to dine. Very pretty, and we had a suite upstairs with our own fireplace (at hotel.com prices!). Naturally, we checked Chauncey’s bookcases to see if we’d find logic or crossword puzzles or literature; discovered lots of Bibles, dictionaries, and a surprising number of popular novels from the 50s and 60s. </p>
<p>In truth, what most interested us were the lovely facilities at ETS, that notorious nonprofit lol (nice to know where all our test fees went!), and the fact that two groups of educators were meeting there that day, discussing the AP Psychology exam and the SAT II Spanish.</p>
<p>In the main conference center, the “hotel art” in the rooms is full of images of pencils in all sorts of colors and degrees of sharpness. Somebody has a sense of humor over there…</p>
<p>Ohio_Mom, in one of Woody Allen’s short stories, the narrator has the services of a machine that transports him into a novel of his choice (Madam Bovary) so that he can have a “safe” extramarital affair only finally the machine malfunctions as its operator has a fatal heart attack and the narrator instead finds himself in a book of Spanish grammar, pursued over a rocky landscape by the irregular verb “tener.”</p>
<p>With just a little tweaking, I’m sure it could have been a book on differential equations.</p>
<p>Henry Chauncey was catcher when my father-in-law was a pitcher for Harvard’s baseball team in the late 20s. Shut out Yale in front of 29000 at Fenway once. I remember meeting him in the 70s. A courtly, optimistic man, by then retired.</p>