Around Town

‘The Two of Us Are a Team’: NCHS ’09 Grads Balance Marriage and Medicine

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James Laird and Mary Escherich became friends after they ended up in several classes together during their first three years at New Canaan High School. As juniors, James took Physics with Mary, and sat behind her in AP Calculus with Jennifer Lee. The NCHS ’09 classmates would engage in intellectually stimulating conversations. “We just ‘got’ each other,” James Laird recalled on a recent afternoon. A “best friend” after three years, James soon started to see Mary as more.

Charles Milot

Turkey Bowl: New Canaanites Gather for Beloved Annual Tradition as Rams Beat Down Blue Wave 27-0

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[Editor’s Note: This article has been updated by removing the name of at least one arrested teen whose charges were dismissed.]

For generations of Americans, Thanksgiving Day and football are synonymous. And for New Canaanites, the football appetite is fed each year when the New Canaan High School Rams football team is pitted against their arch rival, the Darien Blue Wave in the Turkey Bowl. Thousands of New Canaanites traveled to Stamford’s Boyle Stadium on Thursday as part of the local holiday ritual—students, teachers and faculty, alumni, parents and residents. Among them was James Freyre, a 2017 NCHS graduate, and linebacker of two state championship Ram football squads, who said he was eager to come back and enjoy his first game as an alumnus. “It’s definitely a little less stressful to be a fan than a player,” Freyre told NewCanaanite.com while standing on the sidelines on a sunny, mildly chilly day.

Around Town

Hundreds Gather Downtown for Overdose Awareness Vigil

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More than 400-plus people gathered at the Pop Up Park downtown Thursday night to honor those who have died from accidental drug overdoses as well as those struggling with addiction. Those attending the New Canaan Parent Support Group and New Canaan Community Foundation’s vigil on National Overdose Awareness Day heard emotional, heartfelt stories shared by four individuals—two from those in recovery from addiction and two from parents who had a child succumb to the disease. One of those parents was Paul Reinhardt, founder of the New Canaan Parent Support Group, whose son Evan, a graduate of New Canaan High School in 2009, passed away due to a drug overdose in July 2015. “Evan was a true jokester,” Reinhardt told the crowd on a clear, cool night. “He was always out to have fun and amuse those around him to make them happy—always thinking about the other guy.

Around Town

‘So Much Stronger Than I Thought I Was’: NCHS ’09 Grad Jansen Goes the Distance for the Memory of Late Brother

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It was Saturday, Aug. 25, 2012. That day for Elizabeth Jansen began in New Canaan as she and her mom, Peggy, packed up the car and left their house on Silver Ridge Road to drive down to the University of Richmond where Jansen would move into the apartment where she’d live for her senior year. After dinner with her mom, grandmother and aunt that evening, Jansen came back to her place set to relax and unwind with her three roommates and a few friends that she hadn’t seen all summer. At about 10 p.m., Jansen received a text from an unknown number.

News

New Canaan High School Class of 2017 Graduates

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In 1989, Jennifer Lee spoke at her high school graduation. It is a speech that she now admits revealed very little about what it meant to be her because that was something, at the time, she was still figuring out. On Tuesday evening, 28 years later, Lee took to the podium once again to address the 334-member New Canaan High School class of 2017 as its keynote speaker—getting a second chance to deliver something more personal. Yet after learning that she would address the students, Lee felt denial, anxiety and fear being chief among them. To aid her in finding a theme for her speech, the mathematics teacher and 22-year veteran of the New Canaan Public Schools conducted a survey with her students, asking them who their favorite elementary school teachers were.