The performances in the fall of 1960 by the football team and in the spring of 1961 by the track & field team will long be remembered.  

The 1960 football team outscored its opponents 228-47, including four shutouts, the last one a 48-0 victory over Kent in the Spoon Game. The team is the last unbeaten, untied team in Loomis Chaffee football history. 

The 1961 track team also was undefeated in six dual meets and finished first in the quadrangular meet with Choate, Hotchkiss, and Taft. The 1961 yearbook noted that the “Joffraymen” gave Loomis its first undefeated track season. 

The Class of 1961 dedicated the Pratt Field scoreboard in memory of Don Joffray, math teacher, track coach, assistant football coach, during this year's Reunion Weekend June 5-7. The speakers at the dedication were Head of School Jody Reilly Soja; Tony Kissling ’61, captain of the track team who was outstanding in the 100, 200, and broad jump; and Rex Joffray ’76, son of Don and Sue Joffray, who lived and worked for nearly 50 years on campus.  

“Joff was the best in every way as teacher, coach, and friend — empathetic, supportive, endearing,” said Rich Beams ’61, a captain of the football team. 

After the dedication, members of the Class of 1961 had an informal memorial for their classmate Pete Cummings ’61, a football and track star, who died on May 12, just weeks before the reunion.  At the gathering Steve Karp ’61 and Rich spoke about Pete. All three captained the football team that year. 

Pete’s name was all over the headlines for both sports. He scored 20 points in the season-opening 50-0 football win over Wilbraham. Other highlights: three touchdowns against Taft; three against Hotchkiss, which also came into the game undefeated; and three in the finale against Kent.  

“He was big, fast, and nearly impossible to tackle,” Steve said. 

“Peter was one of the greatest players ever, as Joffray said once,” Rich noted. “Pete and I enjoyed ‘banging each other up’ on the practice field on occasion, but the power and athleticism of Pete is best appreciated by the following vignette: He went on to play at Yale, me at Dartmouth. On the wall of our freshman-year locker room, looking ahead to the Yale game, there was a picture of Pete, with the words ‘Get him.’ His reputation preceded him as always. Enough said.” 

In track, noted the 1961 Loomiscellany, “Pete Cummings broke all scoring records, amassing 102 points in the shot put, discus, and javelin.”  

That Pete was on the track team at all led to a story from Steve at the memorial. Pete had earned letters in baseball as a freshman, sophomore, and junior and was a standout pitcher. Pete’s switch to the track team as a senior “has stuck in my craw for 65 years,” joked Steve, who captained the baseball team. “I was [angry] that Coach Joffray and Captain Kissling would engineer such a theft though I was aware that Pete wouldn’t have jumped ship if he didn’t want to. I was seriously upset at the time, but of course it became a running joke that I had lots of fun with over the ensuing 65 years — with both Pete and Joffray. Pete, with his record-breaking throws in the javelin, discus, and shotput, became a main reason for the track team’s undefeated season. Meanwhile, my baseball team lost four games that I thought we should have won if Pete had remained as our No. 1 starting pitcher … and until his most recent dying day, I never let him forget it!”   

Pete was awarded the Grubbs Prize for athletics and scholarship at Commencement in 1961. Steve earned the Evelyn Longman Batchelder Prize for sportsmanship. 

The 1960 football team had Steve at quarterback, Pete at left halfback, Rich at fullback, and Rich’s brother, Fred Beams ’62, at right halfback.   

“There was much that was special, of course, about our undefeated football team,” Rich said.  “Our success didn’t come easily, but it was team effort that made it such a success ... and lots of fun.”   

A mock-up scoreboard for the dedication showed the 16-13 score for the Loomis victory over Choate, the toughest and closest game of the season. “We won basically from a total team effort, including an interception by John Daniels ’61, [also at the reunion]," Rich said. That late interception saved the game. 

Steve went on to play baseball at Tufts University, and in the summer of 1963 for the Chatham Red Sox in the Cape Cod League, known throughout the country for its level of play as a premier college summer baseball league. Steve was an All-Star on the Chatham team, he said, and he received offers from the Red Sox and the Mets to play professional baseball after college. But, he said, the “fire in his belly” for baseball had strangely left him.  

That fire developed elsewhere as it did for all three captains of that football team. As artful as they all were on fields of play, so too were they in their chosen careers. 

Pete was a painter and sculptor. Steve is an actor, director, filmmaker, and founding/producing director of the Stamford (Conn.) Theatre Works. Rich is an opera aficionado, directing Opera con Biro, an opera education program, for 36 years. 

“It's quite interesting that Cummings, Karp, and Beams — all extremely committed jocks — would end up in the arts,” Steve said. “The three of us had a number of fun conversations about this over the years.”    

Steve has always enjoyed music and singing, and he eventually found his way to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. He graduated in 1968. 

For the next 10 years, he acted on Broadway and Off Broadway, in regional theater, at Lincoln Center, and at other venues while transitioning to dramatic writing, directing, and producing, he said. He made three acclaimed short films, The Tennis Lesson, The Jogger, and The Tennis Match, which were distributed by Columbia Pictures. “The Tennis Lesson, about a woman who has an affair with a tennis ball machine, would become the most widely distributed theatrical short-subject in the history of Columbia Pictures,” Steve said. 

Steve stopped acting in the early 1980s and pursued writing and producing theater exclusively, founding Stamford Theatre Works in 1988, which closed in 2008. He continues to write plays. 

Rich said he grew up with an extensive music background, but his love of opera began in a sophomore English class at Dartmouth. “In one class,” he said, “the focus was on Verdi's Rigoletto, which I immediately loved, for the power of the voice, especially, but ultimately for its powerful music/drama as well. I was hooked.” 

Thus, the spark was provided for Rich to become an opera scholar who founded and led Opera con Brio. 

Peter's artistic vision, it says on his website, was “informed by a lifelong devotion to nature, and to Native American culture.” 

Rich turned to poetry when he spoke at the informal memorial to Pete. During their junior year at Loomis, they were assigned to write a short poem for English class. “I never forgot Pete’s verse: Sleep wastes / Just half our time,” Rich recalled. He concluded his talk with “a verse I made up for the occasion, in homage to Pete and the power of art in his life: Pete lived / Deep in his art.”