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| on the mountain Summer/Fall 2012
The following is the speech given by Nicole Ledoux, upon receiving an
honorary diploma at the 2012 Storm King School Reunion…
Good evening. My name is Nicole Ledoux. My great, great grandfather, the
Reverend Louis Palimon Ledoux founded this School, so I guess you could call me
the “ultimate legacy.”
I am thrilled (almost) beyond words and touched more deeply than you could
possibly imagine by the honor you bestow on me this evening. You see, ever since
I was a small child I have always wanted to graduate from our beloved Storm King
School. Unfortunately, as many of you may remember back in the middle of the
last century when I was ready for prep school, SKS was still an all-male bastion of
education. Plus according to my father it was much too close to home for his
comfort…he was actually looking for a boarding school for me in Tierra del Fuego
which, as you may know, is about as far away from Cornwall as you can get and
still be technically in the Americas, as it lies at the very southern tip of South
America. But I wound up at Emma Willard instead.
After Emma Willard, I went to a coed school named Barlow and then to the
Dwight School for Girls, now Dwight-Englewood, and then, after what was 11th
grade, on to a succession of colleges and universities so, as you see, I never really
graduated from prep school…but as my now 100-year-old mother said with a
finely arched eyebrow upon hearing the news: “Better late than never….”
You have no idea how much and how fervently I wished for a school like Storm
King — especially for someone like Andre Green and The Mountain Center.
Because, I am what is now recognized as ADHD and extremely dyslexic — condi-
tions which “didn’t exist”when I went to school, especially at a school like Chapin
where it was referred to as ‘lack of discipline’ and the “family reading problem.”
I have lived and gone to school abroad (NOT in Tierra del Fuego, however) and
travelled to many countries all over the world but I am always drawn back to
Storm King Mountain which, no matter where in the world I happen to have been,
has always been “home”to me and the only place on the planet where I have truly
felt at peace.
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2
1
Helen “Steevie”Chinitz hands Nicole Ledoux
her honorary diploma.
2
From left to right: Billy
Shovan, Alec Milton ‘89, Marge Kovacs, Lesley Pearl
(
seated), Jason Steiker (seated), Tom Delaney ‘58,
and Harrison Davis ‘56
