State Treasurer Phil Angelides' path to The Thacher School was plotted by his father, Jerry, who had a clear objective in mind.
Jerry Angelides was the son of Greek immigrant parents who had labored to put him through engineering school at the University of California, Berkeley. With his son entering adolescence, Jerry Angelides wanted the next generation to move another step up the ladder of American society.
He set out to determine which preparatory school would offer Phil his best chance of being admitted to Harvard. He settled on Thacher, and the plan ultimately worked, with an assist from Thacher's scholarship endowment, after it turned out that the senior Angelides' ambition for his son was more than he could afford.
At Thacher, Phil Angelides established a reputation as one of the brightest students in his class and, in what would become a lifetime recreational passion, a top-flight tennis player.
His years at the school coincided with turbulent times in the nation. Vietnam War protests, the Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, assassinations, the riotous Democratic convention in Chicago, the shootings at Kent State all took place during Angelides' years at Thacher.
Although the school provided some social insulation, Peter Bachman, a classmate and close friend of Angelides, said, "We were all pretty aware of what was going on. There were nightly conversations about what was going on in the news. ... It was a mixed student body, politically, very mixed. There were always sprightly debates."
Edward Cahill, another classmate, said the student protests of the time mostly passed Thacher by, although he recalled that one student boycotted classes for a day to meditate on the mountain instead, an action that angered the headmaster and may have cost the boy a letter of recommendation to Harvard.
Instead of protest, the boys at Thacher mostly studied and discussed current events and talked about how they might be able to influence them in the future.
"Did we talk about changing the world? Yes, Phil was always pretty ambitious about that," Bachman said.
"He was always real interested in public service. ... If you had asked me to pick three or four students in the class who might do something like run for governor someday, he would have been one."
Mostly, however, Angelides was just another teenager.
Cahill recalls that Angelides was accomplished at the piano and practiced often by himself.
Bachman, noting that comedian Rich Little was at the height of his popularity at the time, said Angelides picked up a bit of Little's talent for mimicking celebrities.
"He was always very funny. He could do a drop-dead, great Richard Nixon. He could bring down the house with that kind of stuff."
Even on the playing fields, Bachman said, Angelides sought to imitate the best talent of the day.
"Whenever we played football, Phil always wanted to be quarterback so he could throw his 'Johnny U' rollout pass."
