{"id":12,"date":"2016-08-10T17:56:33","date_gmt":"2016-08-10T17:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/profiles\/?p=12"},"modified":"2016-08-10T17:56:33","modified_gmt":"2016-08-10T17:56:33","slug":"bob-couch-50","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/profiles\/2016\/08\/10\/bob-couch-50\/","title":{"rendered":"Bob Couch \u201950"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bob
Bob Couch ’50 at work in the photography lab.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Williston Academy\u2019s first dark\u00adroom was in the basement of the Homestead, where Bob Couch first began teaching students the art of photogra\u00adphy. As a student at Williston, he focused more on singing than slinging a camera, but he learned how to develop photo\u00adgraphs in his father\u2019s newspa\u00adper\u2019s darkroom in Dalton, MA. He\u2019s seen the school weather many transitions\u2014from two campuses to a unified cam\u00adpus, for example\u2014and many incarnations of darkrooms. He taught math and photography at Williston for 40 years, and lived on campus for 30 of those years with his wife, Janet, and five children.<\/p>\n

How did you feel when you first came to Williston Academy as a boarder?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was really lost. I was not particu\u00adlarly happy. One thing that\u2019s stayed true to Williston is that everyone was friendly. I sat down in math class and a junior introduced him\u00adself. That helped a lot. Even though I was still homesick\u2014I was the youngest of four brothers\u2014by the time the end of year came around I couldn\u2019t wait to get back for the next year.<\/p>\n

What did you sing in the Glee Club? <\/strong><\/p>\n

We sang a lot at Williston, just in general. We had chapel every day at 9:00 a.m. We\u2019d always sing a hymn. On Sunday, they\u2019d have an outside speaker come in, and we\u2019d sing three or four hymns. Everybody sang. Townspeople used to stand across the street to hear the singing from the chapel.<\/p>\n

As a photographer, what\u2019s one of your favorite images you took at Williston?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was fortunate to get a grant from the school to go to Newfoundland and photograph in 1992. I spent a month up there. I\u2019ve never been in that situation before where I could devote all my time to just photo\u00adgraphing. That was really a wonder\u00adful experience. I\u2019ve also taken the sports team photos since 1959 for the wall in the gym, and I have been taking them ever since. I don\u2019t think many schools have a display as good as that one.<\/p>\n

What was your philosophy to teaching photography?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I taught math for 22 years. It\u2019s about a 180-degree turn from teaching something so objective as math to subjective as photography. One of the things I would tell them on the first day was that I wanted them to fail. You\u2019re going to mess up. You\u2019re going to put film in the camera wrong or get a double exposure. But you learn from that stuff. The basic idea was to get them to try new things. The first assignment I gave was to take a picture of something common and make it look different.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s one of your favorite memories of Williston? <\/strong><\/p>\n

We used to play hockey on the pond\u2014we had two rinks. We\u2019d check the weather report. If it was going to be really cold at night, we\u2019d get the hoses out from the gym and we\u2019d flood the rink. Of course if we were going to have practice and it snowed, the kids had to shovel the snow off. It was a little different than having a Zamboni. The third hockey team used to play the facul\u00adty. The headmaster and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Stevens, played and their son David was on the third hockey team. David got the puck and he was coming up the ice toward his parents. And somebody said, \u2018How often does this happen?\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Williston Academy\u2019s first dark\u00adroom was in the basement of the Homestead, where Bob Couch first began teaching students the art of photogra\u00adphy. As a student at Williston, he focused more on singing than slinging a camera, but he learned how to develop photo\u00adgraphs in his father\u2019s newspa\u00adper\u2019s darkroom in Dalton, MA. He\u2019s seen the school … Continue reading Bob Couch \u201950<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/profiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/profiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/profiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/profiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/profiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/profiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103,"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/profiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions\/103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/profiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/profiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/profiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}