Today students begin to arrive at Milton Academy outside of Boston, and thus it is the beginning of another school year for Frank Millet. He arrived at Milton in 1942—seventy years ago almost to this day. He has been teaching there ever since. 

Frank turned ninety-five this past May. He will no longer be teaching full-time at Milton, but he still lives on campus, tutors students, goes to faculty meetings and does calligraphy for the school’s diplomas. And he still helps with the Milton squash teams, which he founded in 1964.

When I talked to him a couple of weeks ago, he said he was doing pretty well. “I’m aging. I’ve got a mild case of Parkinsons. But doing pretty well for ninety-five. And I’m still busy at Milton. I go back further than most of the others, so I can still be useful. In a long life you can cover a lot of ground.”

It is true: he was in the Cotswolds after the First World War, later in Switzerland to recover from tuberculosis, and he lingered in Santa Fe after college. But some of that ground just happens to be the same spot for the past seventy years. Pretty amazing.