Wendy Burton:
CLASS OF 1971
Ward Melville High SchoolClass of 1971
East setauket, NY
Wendy's Story
Hello, Class of '71! I was your salutatorian until my family moved to upstate New York the summer between junior and senior years. I had already moved north to work that summer at the Watertown Daily Times, so I never got a chance to say good-bye to most of you. I went on to Harvard, where I ran into Kathy Moos and Wendy Krasner (who was a year ahead of us but on Kaleidoscope with Howard Brick and Jim Calder and me), who filled me in on what some of you were up to at the time. At Harvard, I was executive editor of The Harvard Crimson, which led to some wonderful summer jobs, including one summer internship for the late New York City Mayor John Lindsay.
After Harvard, I married Rob Burton, a reporter I had met at the Times. He had graduated from Columbia's School of Journalism. He wanted to get into TV, so moved to Canada when the CBC offered him a job. For the next decade, we were journalists (newspapers for me, TV for him) in northern Ontario, Ottawa (the capital city) and Toronto. I had majored in urban sociology at Harvard so I found a good fit for myself covering city hall. When the first baby, Rachel, arrived, I started looking for work with more flexible hours. I worked for The Newspaper Guild as a business representative for a few years. During this period, I helped start the Canadian Association of Journalists and served as its first woman president. After our second child, Sarah, was born, I managed a non-profit group and organized conferences.
A few years later, we set up our own TV production company. We started with documentaries and gradually moved into children's television. When the world of cable TV opened up, we started a children's TV network called YTV, which was an instant success. We only owned a small chunk and were soon bought out by the majority shareholders, but it was a wonderful experience.
By that time, I had a third child, Robbie, and we decided it was time to get reacquainted with our children. We took some time off, moved to a medium-sized historic suburb of Toronto called Oakville and...Expand for more
got involved in local politics and cultural affairs. We were very involved in environmental and heritage preservation issues. I continued to work as a freelance writer and editor and published a book about Oakville during this period. When my youngest child entered high school, I went back to school and got my MA in public policy & administration from Ryerson University in Toronto (a downtown university - think CCNY). I am now at the University of Toronto, working on my PhD in urban geography (the theoretical end of urban planning or what my husband calls "sociology with maps") and doing some teaching. Rob is now the mayor of Oakville. In my spare time, I run or work on political campaigns for progressive candidates.
In the past 35 years, we have renovated three homes, had four cats and one dog, who is on her last lap. Our children are all as different as can be. Rachel, 32, was the family brainiac and earned degrees from University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown. She worked for the White House on Obamacare for a few years and is now a health policy researcher for the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., and about to be married to a computer programmer she met at Penn. Sarah is a singer-songwriter based in Toronto. She has two CDs, a hectic touring schedule and a part-time teaching job at a community college. Robbie is going into his second year of engineering at U of T.
Those are some highlights of a life that so far has included its share of travelling to family fun destinations, trips to emergency rooms, laughs as we watched kids in ballet and hockey, tears as we said good-bye to loved ones, volunteer work, gardening, needlepoint, piano playing and books of all sorts. I recently received an invitation to the 40th reunion of my graduating class at Watertown High and realized I was full of questions about the class of students I spent many more of my middle and high school years with. So here I am. I don't know if I will be able to make it to your reunion but I would love to hear from those of you who remember me.
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