well i have i have a mixed feeling about belmont high school i thought it was wonderful academically because it gave me a sense of the greater world outside and it gave me a perspective on my own life but i remember how arduous it was i remember carrying bags of books home and those are the days when we had the green school bags remember that i think i have a permanent dent on my right shoulder as a result of the weight of those bags and so i thought it was a tough slog i worked hard and in those days you know my parents were survivors of the armenian genocide and never completed high school and i never wanted to do anything that would embarrass my parents so i always wanted to be a good student and make them proud of me so i remember working day and night to try to get good grades so i could get into a good college and there was a fulfilling my dream but also be fulfilling their dream so i remember working hard and i remember having excellent teachers that really informed my view of life and my own thoughts and attitude regarding myself and what my own potential was to go forward and so i had wonderful teachers particularly in the social sciences and humanities  english and i think we had a history courses and literature courses and so forth and i was always strong in those courses and i had motivating teachers like a mr meyers and miss hornsby in english and  those days i guess it probably is that way today as well but when the teacher took interest in you it further motivated you and you had a sense of not just having a teacher but having a friend in the classroom who wanted to do what was best for you and i think the best teachers i still like that today and belmont high is fortunate that we have a number of excellent teachers like that who motivate their students to great performance and i think that's why it's belmont highest so highly rated whenever there's a statewide classification as the best high schools belmont high is always right up there it's was a tremendous experience it continues to be a tremendous school i mean as you mentioned very very highly rated the scholarship committee was put together to try and help kids graduate the belmont that have financially and that have good academic credentials to get scholarship money and traditionally the scholarship committee has been giving away for scholarships year twenty five hundred dollars each last year that was bumped up to three thousand dollars each for scholarships at three thousand dollars each we have an endowment the endowment is just over two hundred thousand dollars as i mentioned the committee was put together in two thousand and seven by members of the class of fifty eight peter lachlan and the number his classmates were coming up on the fiftieth anniversary and wanted to do something to try and give back to the have quite gerry boyle is america so you couldn't have a more distinguished left so we have a we have a long list of people that have been involved in the program the regional way of raising money was to was as classes approach the fiftieth anniversary for the committee to send out letters soliciting donations and that's and that's worked fairly well the class of fifty eight continues to be the largest contributor to class of sixty two our classes that a reasonable job in that area and so as the cause as a class is come up on the fiftieth right in a verse we were doing that but we don't want to limit donations with just the fiftieth classes the objective is to try and reach a and a down one of a million dollars sounds like a lot of money but a lot of communities have been down it's in excess of a million dollars i think one of them is in excess of three million dollars and need angelo in the days that we were looking at colleges you could go to college for a few thousand dollars a year three four five thousand dollars a year i think that's what it was at northeastern and the reason that i selected northeastern was because of the co op program and a middle support parents could support that kid going to college nowadays now that it's through the roof at northeastern university for example at sixty thousand dollars a year sixty thousand dollars a year i mean without financial aid coming from a number different sources whether be loans or government guarantees or scholarships of one sort or another middle class cannot afford going to college and belmont's a fairly wealthy town in comparison to others but it's still essentially a middle class town and the kids need financial support in order to go on to college and to aspire to the type of college they would like to go to so i think it's a it's a valuable thing that we're doing it's also a very timely thing that we're doing   we have done these these articles harry lane is done these articles talking about people's experiences about one high school and giving back i think the first one was done with donnie shapiro the class of sixty three and i was in the three year program between the graduate school of international affairs in the graduate school of business i spent a year at the graduate school of business got ill dropped out of school went into the air force did some other things came back and completed my education and finished up with an m b a in one thousand nine hundred sixty nine and also took a number of courses in journalism as i found i like to write was pretty good at it and then finished up and and sixty nine and i started an entertainment newspaper in new york deaf or two and a half years old that joined another publishing group that was associate with new york magazine that was just starting out work with them for a while and then found my true calling which was in international management education so i was able to capitalize on what i learned at columbia what i learned at northeastern and actually belmont high was really my foundation and the reason was that and i was just reminded of this the other day as i was talking to one of my grand nephew is not only nephew but grand if you get to a certain age you have grand nephews and nieces right and i said colby i said what do you remember about whatever the era was maybe about ten years ago so i wasn't even born then he said you know i can expect me to know something that wasn't born and that's a common answer when you talk to a young person how can you expect me to know something before i was born like nothing happened in the world and the great thing is that when we were at northeastern i developed a sense of the past of this country and i developed a sense of my own future in this country and that was because of the motivating teachers that i had in english and history of the sciences and what have you gain a perspective on your life and it's also at a time in your life which is really transform because you're learning things about yourself as well so to have the extra no influences at a time when you're changing so much about your own values and your own thinking was invaluable so at time i got to ne and i had a what i would call an academic maturity and i had a sense of how i could pursue certain avenues academic study and i approached it with a lot of diligence ne and as you know was in those days maybe you recall some of it we worked on a co op program so you had two ten week semesters and a five week semester and it was fast paced fast pace everybody else was working at sixteen weeks and they had the vacations and study you all that sort of thing and we were busting our hump all the time to get through the courses and ten weeks and then ten weeks and five weeks in the rest of time we were in school it working and we worked twenty five weeks we had fifty one weeks one week off between christmas and new year and that was it  five years but the thing is you had to keep up and because of the maturity that i developed i think it belmont i was prepared for this and i loved working and loved the whole experience there but it wasn't for the foundation that i picked up at belmont high i wouldn't of developed as i did you know you will also get into production right i mean you did a number well i you know what happened when i was in management education we were producing seminars conferences workshops training programs and marketing them around the world and i found that you could develop a three day seminar almost like a three act theatrical production so you're building a narrative line that you're building a climax and you getting the audience involved and so forth and you keep them coming back after the coffee breaks after luncheons and so forth so i had the opportunity to be president and c e o of a company here in boston i left new york came back to boston and i was the american program bureau and it was a lecture agency and  four years i was president c e o we made it into the largest lecture agency lecture management company in the world according to the guinness book of records not less and and then from there i the divisions that i established there one was in management education the other was in television producing i took them out and form two companies video events international and executive conferences international and with video events international we moved into live via satellite television programming which was taking off in the late eighty's and ninety's then we moved into programming for p b s foreign affairs national security programming and then i had an opportunity to move into theatrical film and i did two films in puerto rico one of which starred lorenzo lamas and was distributed everywhere and did well for us and helped establish the company's reputation and then i had some some health situations took some time off and i moved into theatre producing and the first production i did was in two thousand and eight it's called according to tip it was on the life and times of tipple neal a one man show we're the best new play in new england according to the reviewers at that time and that stablish me in doing some theatre producing that's what i'm doing now i have a show called to nancy the rock opera we're calling it the knee whacking musical you might remember in ninety four the relationship between tonya harding and nancy kerrigan at the olympics that year and we've done well with it we just closed a show in chicago we opened it up in boston we've done los angeles new york and we're going to be taking it to washington and toronto throughout the rest of this year so but the idea of producing you have to have some business smarts you have to have an understanding of risk you have to understand who you want to work with collaborative partners raising money etc but the foundation was all based on what i learned initially at belmont high as far as how you treat people the sociology of our environment one of the great things about the students that you mentioned who are graduate working with us they all have different backgrounds and the great thing about belmont high unlike a lot of high schools we still have an emphasis on the arts music athletics we have and cut back on that and so that provides a foundation for people  academics to grow and move on in their own lives great power thank you very much it's you've obviously been very successful in one of the many many successes out of belmont high i think back to some of the people that have gone through high as a marvelous credible marvelous things and i think is in arizona now is and he just moved back i think there yeah between arizona and vermont and so we see him from we see him from time to time he and you know my wife taught at the high school for many many many years and i listen to her stories about some of her amazing students and you know we're just so fortunate in terms of the kids that we've got going to belmont because of belmont's proximity to harvard mit we have  the children of a lot of professors that are going there and so the inventory of kids going to bomb on high school is very very high quality very very high quality and and it continues and we you know we have a and she said there's three ways that you can learn one is you learn from your direct experience in life if you put your hand on the stove and it's hot you don't want to do it again you've learned something right the second thing is you learn from your peer group and so when you're competing with other top students and you want to live up to their standard and you're developing friendships and relationships with them that's a great way of learning and motivating yourself in the third way you learn it from books is from third person  accounts as to what other people did at certain points in their lives and she got me involved in reading biographies of important people at that time and she put together i remember a lesson was extra reading for the class for those people who wanted to ten or fifteen books and they were just with biographies and they gain insights into the decision points that these people had in their lives and then to have the opportunity to discuss that with a teacher like mrs hornsby it really helps your reading analytics and helps you understand how people are motivated at certain points in their lives to make certain decisions and i'll never forget her for just motivating me in that direction and leading me in that direction to understand the lives of other people we were fortunate i mean we had some absolutely terrific teachers they can it continue to be terrific teachers by school so what we you know what we need to do is we need to figure out how to get this two hundred thousand or a little over two hundred thousand up to a million dollars we will continue to be sending letters out to the classes as they celebrate their fiftieth anniversary but also the twenty fifth anniversary isn't even the fifth anniversary so we want to we want to to get people thinking about this program hopefully this show will be able to have other shows like this where we interview some of the recipients of of the scholarships to talk about what those scholarships mean to them also have some of the givers that's right you would suggest a baby it might be interesting  hundred percent tax deductible so it is it's a it's a it's a very good solid organization and we want the citizens the belmont to be aware of it we want the former high school graduates to be aware is you know up in the devore that's that's that's worth with taking care of so all of us here in belmont were always the seized by charitable appeals but when you think about it this is something that's local it's transparent it gives you the opportunity to see the benefit of your charitable giving you can attend and meet perhaps with the recipients of those people who receive monies from the scholarship program and i can't think of anything that's more valuable and more timely and that's something that really helped shape a young person and how they're going forward in their own life great power thank you very much we have a little brochure but if you go to the web site there's a lot of background information there's a list of of the people of the the articles that were done by the by harry harry lane you can go there you can post a list of directors and so forth is right there so again that's