50 Stories for 50 Years: George Semler, ASSIST Country Coordinator for Spain

August 3, 2022

To celebrate our 50th anniversary year during 2018/19, we collected stories and profiles of people and institutions that have helped us build our organization, which first began as one person’s dream in 1968. We will feature one story per week on our blog. Please enjoy these “50 for 50” profiles featuring ASSIST’s dedicated board members, dynamic staff, welcoming host families and enthusiastic ASSIST Scholars.

George Semler
ASSIST Country Coordinator for Spain

When Sandy (ASSIST founder Paul G. Sanderson) came to town I was always reminded of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Not the grim Grimm Brothers version of the legend in which the magical, patchwork piper marches the children off to their doom, but a happy story in which the fantastic flautist spirits the kids away on a wonderful life-changing adventure. One thing for sure: it was always magic. I would set up a plethora of important meetings, they would all fall through, and new and better meetings would somehow always materialize.

Sandy would ride up to the Pyrenees in our Jeep Commando, a deafening, tooth-rattling, bone-shaking din of grinding gears and rattling cogs and coils and emerge with that fiendish grin on his face, ready to mix it up and get on with the fun. My kids, aged four to fourteen in the early 1980’s, must have reminded him of his own tribe when he was living out of his Volkswagen bus in the Munich campground in 1968 and stepping gingerly between mud puddles on his way to the German educational ministries to convince them they should trust him with their finest scholars and athletes.

Everywhere we went luck seemed to kick in. School Year Abroad was looking for a way to send surplus Kemper Scholarship candidates to independent schools in the United States. Madrid’s Colegio Estudio had a two-week exchange with Milton Academy that led to students interested in spending a school year in similar schools. Sandy met Shelley Buckwalter at the Ministry of Education in Madrid who began to refer good candidates to the ASSIST scholarship competition. Suddenly we had delegations, classes, a dozen students per year or so.

The early Orientations were wonderful brawls, with Sandy imparting nearly all of the advice and instruction via bullhorn in the echo chamber gymnasiums of the different schools and colleges that allowed us space for a few hot days in August. Long Island, Staten Island, Stevens Institute across the Hudson in Hoboken, Walnut Hill School near Boston, Saint Mark’s, Saint Paul’s: we never seemed to be in the same place twice, but the spirit was always the same. Excited fifteen-to-eighteen-year-olds from all over the world selected using similar criteria, each with huge dreams and stars in their eyes, each petrified but voraciously curious and courageous.

Now, nearly 40 years after I first met Sandy and understood, very slowly, what he wanted me to do here in Spain, ASSIST-España is in a better place than ever before. My wife Lucie Hayes, now retired from teaching, is more active in ASSIST work; my daughter Katherine and her husband Sam Lardner have contributed crucial recruiting and educational skills, and Bob and Anne Stanley and Team ASSIST back in Suffield somehow manage to stitch it all together and launch us into the future. Throughout, there has always been a magical dimension to ASSIST. As in “Shakespeare in Love” when producer-manager Henshaw is asked how it’s all going to work out and answers “I don’t know; it’s a mystery,” Sandy’s wild dream somehow continues forth and even seems to be gaining steam. I have asked many alumni if they also feel this strange magic that seems to impregnate all matters ASSIST and they invariably breathe a sigh of relief as if to say “Finally! I thought it was just me hallucinating!”

We have alumni who are (literally) rocket scientists, brain surgeons, robotics experts and artificial intelligence engineers. If Hogwarts were part of the program, we’d have master magicians and grand wizards.

About Brian:
George Semler met Paul G. Sanderson in 1979 and began recruiting ASSIST candidates in Spain in 1980. A Yale French Literature graduate, Middlebury Spanish MA and freelance writer, Semler has published articles and essays in US and international publications ranging from Saveur Magazine to Gray’s Sporting Journal, The Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune, El Pais andEpicurious.com. Semler has combined his writing career with ASSIST work since 1979.