Chapter 3 - VI
Buffy was a blast. She really was. She went to Antioch before she went to Vassar, and apparently she had been a real rebel at Antioch, led a protest march down the middle of Yellow Springs, and was known as wild and fast. There was some of that kind of breezy attitude about her when she was at school. She had a sense of humor. I found her somebody easy to talk to and to confide in. A lot of kids did.

-- James Barter '48, (Barter int 4/12-13,5/1)

She started her first year at Woodstock as the school secretary. Buffy's son once told another teacher that if Buffy had not found the Country School, she probably would have ended up in an institution. She started her first year at Woodstock as the school secretary. The following year she began teaching music (she remembers David asking her to do it; he said she persuaded him to let her), and she continued to teach music history and theory for 23 years. During that time she also took on the duties of school bookkeeper, then business manager and treasurer. Eventually Buffy would even be president of the Board of Trustees, but this was not till 1978, when she had been separated from the school for many years, during which she had achieved a certain celebrity as one of the few sexagenarian lesbian grandmothers doing feminist therapy in Boston, so the school was no longer one of her highest priorities. [Buffy int p.lff; Mounir int p.4/12]

But in 1946 Buffy was 41 years old, coming off a bad marriage that ended in divorce. She was without significant work experience, and was casting about for something to do with her life. She thought she'd like to teach math in grade school, but at a friend's suggestion, she also wrote to David at the Country School. She didn't need the job for income -­ she was born Elizabeth Dennison, of the Dennison paper fortune -- but she desperately needed the self-esteem.

"I signed my full name to the letter and David wrote me back and said he'd be happy to see me, and wrote by hand at the bottom, 'Are you by any chance related to Jimmy Dennison?' -- who was a Harvard classmate of David's, and my brother, so of course that gave me status right away," Buffy recalls. "You know David's snobby. But I had to get the approval of Kenneth Webb and I snowed him I guess or something, because if he had known what I really was like he would not have hired me. 1'm much too radical for him. He was so moral, you know he didn't approve of kids falling in love, necking, or anything like that."

Since Woodstock didn't need a math or science teacher at the moment, Buffy started as the school secretary, dealing with everyone and everything with humor, energy, and openness that soon made her a favorite for many students. And for most of her years at Woodstock, Buffy was a reliable student confidante, even to the point of cliqueishness for the musical ones among them. She delighted in hearing the details of their ups and downs, and often shared freely of her own. She was a dynamo and threw herself into the life of the school with such energy and commitment that she soon became invaluable. (After she retired in 1970, the work she had been doing turned into fulltime jobs for three men, a fact which cuts in several directions.)

For many years she was the regular Thursday OD, which meant that she was in charge of the weekly all school clean­up. She was also a fierce disciplinarian and grew moreso with the years, as more than one girl came to feel her disproportionate wrath over an untucked shirttail. She could be cruel and arbitrary and there were always some students who were intimidated by her.

Perhaps her most enduring contribution to the school's institutional life was music. She not only taught music, history and theory classes, and led the madrigal chorus (in which David sang), but she embodied music as a central and vital part of the school, not only building the school's classical record collection, but seeing that it was played at chapel, at "listener's music" in the afternoons, and on Sundays. She took numerous school trips to concerts in the area, and she helped arrange recitals at the school by Samuel Barber, Gian Carlo Manotti, and Pete Seeger, among others.

Most of all, students remember Buffy being in love with David, and they wonder what was really going on. Buffy says he held her hand one night as they walked from Greenhithe to the Barn, but never anything else. More importantly to the life of the school, Buffy soon became David's real second-in-command, regardless' of who else might have the formal title. By virtue of her devotion to David, her endless energy, and her willingness to spend most of her time on the school, Buffy became, in effect, David's professional wife.

She held that position for more than 20 years and then, after he retired, served for awhile as his professional widow until she retired at age 65 in 197O.