"I can't tell you how I happened to end up at Hotchkiss, but I can tell you why I didn't go to St. Paul's," recalls Robert S. Pirie '52, in his classically ornate New York office of Rothschild, Inc., where he is president and CE0. "I was dragged around on the usual tour of boarding schools. I remember we went to St. Paul's and they served us cold macaroni for lunch in the dining room. Mother said to me afterward, 'That's the end of that place. You're not going there!' "
To be fair, Hotchkiss has served its share of cold macaroni in its time --- surely one of the less hallowed traditions held in common with other boarding schools throughout the Northeast. And if St. Paul's antedates Hotchkiss in such culinary offerings, it does so in some of the more enviable traditions as well.
Chronologically, Hotchkiss is about in the middle of the pack. Among the first to articulate the purpose of these schools was Samuel Phillips, who wrote that it was his "chief concern to see to the regulation of [the boys'] morals" by "early diligently painting in the purest simplicity the Deformity and Odiousness of VICE, [and] the Comeliness and Amiableness of VIRTUE." With that in mind, he founded in 1778 Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Three years later another member of the family established, in Exeter, New Hampshire, a second Phillips Academy. Andover and Exeter were followed by the founding of such schools as Lawrenceville in 1810, The Hill in 1851, St. Paul's in 1855, St. Mark's in 1865, and Groton in 1884. Though differing in emphasis and approach, these schools shared the goal of instilling in their boys a pristine blend of Christian values, an aristocratic noblesse oblige, and a Darwinian self-reliance abounding in all sorts of manly virtues. "To develop what was good in boys," is how the founder of St. Paul's, George Shattuck, described his mission, "[and] to discourage and check what was evil; to train & educate all their powers; mental, physical and moral." And the best way to accomplish this was to have the boys placed together in country settings, away from the distractions and temptations of the cities and under the constant supervision of "masters." Through a combination of inspiration, persuasion, and an assortment of unforgettable personality quirks, these masters would seek to work their magic on their unruly charges in the classrooms, in the dormitories, and, increasingly, on the playing fields. The goal was to bring forth in the boys their most desirable characteristics while preparing them for leadership roles. Another way of saying that: Moniti Meliora Sequamur. Derived from Vergil's Aeneid, this motto was included in the bylaws approved by the Connecticut legislature in establishing the tax-exempt Maria H. Hotchkiss School Association. Even Mr. Coy's elegant translation, "Let growing wisdom guide us to better ways," falls short of conveying all that the motto implied.
Hotchkiss opened its doors in 1892 as part of a greatly accelerated trend which saw the establishment of such schools as Taft in 1890, Choate and St. George's in 1896, Salisbury in 1901, Kent in 1906, and Berkshire in 1907. Ironically, what contributed to this spurt in private schools was the unprecedented expansion in public education during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The increasing availability of "free" high schools in effect put out of business many of the small academies which had been the pride of towns and villages throughout the Northeast. As semiprivate day schools, these academies had produced some top-notch applicants for the leading colleges that would become known as the Ivy League. Many college presidents, among them Timothy Dwight, now feared that the public high schools, because of their massive scale and bureaucratic structure, would not be able to do the job that had been done by the displaced academies. "The Hotchkiss School is the outgrowth of the conviction that the interests of higher education call for more and better secondary schools," reads the preamble to the school's first handbook. At the same time, the demand for this "better" education greatly increased. New fortunes were being made in the industrialization of America; yet such schools as Groton and St. Paul's looked askance at first- or second-generation wealth, especially if its possessors resided beyond the Northeast. St. Paul's also insisted on sound Episcopal credentials. With the simultaneous appearance of even greater urban sprawls and the correspondingly conspicuous "unhealthy" aspects of life in big cities, it became more imperative than ever to whisk impressionable boys into the bucolic innocence of the countryside. "So long as people dwell in great cities, where the atmosphere, physical and moral, is in a large measure unwholesome," observed Endicott Peabody, many years after founding Groton, "so long the boarding school will continue to minister to the children of those who can afford to send them out of town." In Peabody's day, almost any aspect of that male sybaritic triad of wine, women, and song would have qualified as "unwholesome" for boys --- especially the "women" part.
Endicott Peabody and other educators of that ilk may also have been responding to a subtler reality of the times, namely, that the sons of aristocratic, wealthy, or otherwise notable families were likely to inherit power regardless of their educational background. The implicit responsibility of institutions such as Groton and Harvard or Hotchkiss and Yale was to prepare these boys to wield that inherited power in the most constructive and enlightened way. As one current witticism put it, "The dimmer the boocess was started, the better the chance of overcoming any of the natural tendencies in boys to resist such edification. Just as Yale and Harvard were looking to the likes of Hotchkiss and Groton to prepare and premold their candidates, so these prep schools were now looking to feeder schools of their own. One of the first on the prepreparatory level was Fay, founded in 1866 with grades one through eight. Similar schools followed, including Allen Stevenson in 1883, Fessenden in 1903, St. Bernard's in 1904, Buckley in 1913, Harvey in 1916, and, beyond the Northeast, most notably St. Louis Country Day in 1917. A boy starting out in the first grade at one of these schools could virtually count on progressing through the system to a diploma from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, or some other elite college of his choice. Those falling by the wayside for disciplinary reasons would usually find another path open to them within that same system. Boys expelled from Hotchkiss, for instance, would often be granted sanctuary at Deerfield or Choate.
Yet it was not an entirely closed system. At various junctures, this special path to influence had openings for boys from beyond the small circle of privilege. Scholarship programs provided entry to a limited number of needy boys, whether the deserving sons of missionaries or teachers, or of single mothers impoverished through widowhood or divorce, or from other families of character but modest means --- or just boys who happened to be qualified in some particular way. But the objective was far broader than to benefit merely the recipients. As Frank H. Hamlin '24 has observed, "A lot of the rich and famous sent their sons to Hotchkiss partly because they would be pretty sure of getting into Yale, Harvard, or Princeton, and partly because they would be closely associated with the bright sons of the non-rich who were there on scholarship." He might have added that many of these promising boys would eventually join the family enterprises of their privileged classmates and with astounding frequency marry their classmates' sisters --- who, in turn, had been prepared for their roles at such colleges as Smith, Wellesley, and Vassar and their growing network of preparatory schools.
In starting out with fifty boys and a handful of day students, Hotchkiss was considered to be of respectable size. Taft at that time did not have even half that enrollment, and Groton, which had opened with twenty-four boys eight years earlier, was only then approaching the fifty mark. The notable exceptions in the 1890s were Andover, which already then had close to four hundred students, and Exeter, almost three hundred. Though an academy, Andover had always taken in boarders, lodging them with families in town. This had severely restricted the academy's growth during its early years. In 1810, after three decades of operation, Andover's total enrollment had been only twenty-three. The big change came in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Andover started to build its own accommodations and was converted to a boarding school. Other academies, determined to survive the new competition from public schools, did likewise. Deerfield, a small day academy since 1797, became a boarding school in 1902 under the leadership of Frank Boyden. He served as headmaster for the next sixty-six years and became one of the legendary members in that unique coterie of prep school overlords.
In one respect the Hotchkiss School had an enviable advantage. "It is incredible for a school to start off like that, with land, buildings and everything else," Horace Taft, brother of the future president of the United States, is reported to have said wistfully as he struggled to provide the necessary facilities for his own school, which had just relocated from New Jersey to Watertown, Connecticut. And the growth of the Hotchkiss School continued at an enviable pace. Within two decades of welcoming its first students, Hotchkiss reached a symbolic milestone. Just as the school had drawn on Andover faculty for administrative talent in 1892, Hotchkiss was able to pass on the favor to Loomis in 1912. Nathaniel F. Batchelder, head of the English department at Hotchkiss, moved with his family to Windsor, Connecticut, to become headmaster of the school which was just then preparing to welcome its own initial contingent of fifty students.
When the first Hotchkiss boys arrived at their gleaming new school of lemon-colored brick overlooking a circular lake with an unpronounceable name, they surely had not much of an inkling of what it had taken to make everything ready for them in time --- or of the approaching conflict between the distant lady they occasionally spotted on the grounds and her ever-present escort, the imposing gray-bearded gentleman who was their headmaster. He, along with the associate master, was an especially reassuring sight for the dozen or so transfer students from Andover, who recognized many other aspects of their old school. As at Andover (and, of course, Exeter), Hotchkiss masters were respectfully addressed as professor. The other most obvious borrowing was the designation for grade levels, which was quite unlike those at other secondary schools or colleges, including Yale. The youngest of the new boys were called juniors or, more popularly, preps. They were followed in the hierarchy by lower middlers, upper middlers, and ultimately by the lofty and near-almighty seniors. It was considered as much a senior prerogative as a responsibility to remind the preps of their lowly status by having them wear black ties and always be touching a wall with an elbow while walking along the endless corridor in Main. "Sir" was the only permissible form of address by preps to seniors. But whether seniors or preps, there was a class equality of sorts in that all of the boys had their rooms cleaned and made up daily by maids. Another carry-over from Andover --- this one shared with virtually all boarding schools of that era --was a daily chapel service of about ten minutes and, on Sundays, a longer service with a sermon and then brief vespers at the end of the day. The unspoken theory was that even if the boys happened to be half asleep, such passive exposures to godly wisdom would have the same cumulative effect as the rays of the sun, ennobling the attendants in due course with an inner spiritual glow. As for the curriculum, it was devised by Andover's two most exacting former academics. "I may assure you," wrote Coy, as the headmaster-designate, to his prospective English teacher, Huber Gray Buehler, "that the Hotchkiss School under the present administration will adopt no cheap substitutes for a liberal education. . . . To be sure, we shall recognize Scientific education as a branch of liberal education . . . but we shall make no provision whatever for boys who may wish to enter college, like Harvard, for instance, without Greek." Shortly thereafter, Coy declined to accept an applicant who did not want to study Greek but was otherwise fully qualified --- a luxury the school could hardly afford. Fortunately, it was the boy's father who relented. "In that case," resolved the father, "I will have him study Greek!"
Thanks largely to the more mature of those transplanted Andover boys, an unusual record of that first year has been preserved. Overcoming the disorganization inherent in the starting of a new school, these older boys managed to muster their talents to put out a yearbook, called the Hotchkiss Annual. The significance of their accomplishment looms even larger because the school newspaper, the Hotchkiss Record, would not be inaugurated until the following year, and the next yearbook, in the guise of the present Mischianza, did not come out until 1896. Originally spelled Meschianza, the title derived from the Italian verbs mescere, to pour out, and mischiare, to mix, and essentially meant "a medley." The foreign-sounding nomenclature was in line with similar publications such as Pot-Pourri at Andover and Olla Podrida at Lawrenceville.
That unique Hotchkiss Annual of 1893 was a slim volume in rich lavender covers with the whimsical Gothic lettering of the title imprinted in gold. Among the Andover-transfer editors was Henry L. deForest. "I intend to leave large footprints in the sands of time," he predicted in one of the few attributed quotations. Indeed, young deForest would have a distinguished business and philanthropic career --- and also become the first Hotchkiss graduate elected to the school's board of trustees. He would serve in that capacity from 1919 to 1939, nurturing a school which, he once confided to George Van Santvoord, he considered "a perfect paradise for boys."
In that original publication, unlike those of subsequent years, a considerable amount of space was devoted to descriptions of the embryonic Hotchkiss:
"One of the most pleasant features connected with The Hotchkiss School is the character of the surrounding country. Standing on top of a high hill, the buildings command a superb view in every direction. To the north looms up old Greylock, forty miles away, like a dim spectre; to the west can be seen the hazy outline of the Catskills; while to the east and south the view is broken by innumerable hills. The lakes on both sides of us also add greatly to the beauty of the locality. The village of Lakeville, about a mile distant, seems to lie far below us as we stand upon the summit of the hill. . . . Tradition relates that once, as John Trumbull, Connecticut's famous painter, was passing over this hill, he became so entranced with the marvelous beauty of the scene which lay spread out before him that he ordered the coachman to stop so that he might enjoy more thoroughly the prospect; even the imprecations of the driver and the entreaties of his fellow passengers to re-enter the coach, were unavailing, and it was not until a threat was made to drive on and leave him that he reluctantly consented to comply with their wishes. . . .
"When one takes into account all the influences which here favor high thinking and right living --the bracing air, the strength of the hills, the goodly fellowship --- it seems as if he must be perverse indeed who falls out by the way."
To get away from the temptations and evils of the city --- after all, that was the reason for locating the school in such a remote bucolic spot. The natural splendor remains as precious today as it was in John Trumbull's time. The countryside has been dotted with sparkling white houses (even the modest ones now going for more than it cost to build the school), and the pristine beauty of the fields and the woods remains largely unscathed. The view from the hill is as superb as ever.
The Annual was no less enthusiastic in depicting the functioning of the new school: "This school is the first in the country, to our knowledge, to adopt the self-governing plan. The students study together in one large room with absolutely no faculty supervision, but are bound by a stringent pledge neither to communicate nor to disturb the order of the room in any way. . . . It has been, indeed, an impressive sight to see sixty boys working there quietly at their desks from 9:30 to 11:30 A.M., from 2:30 to 3:30 and 7:30 to 9 P.M., without the supervision of any school officer, yet keeping, by their own voluntary self-control, better order than is usually secured in most study halls by the presence and authority of a master. . . . We should not recommend this plan for all schools, but for one situated as this is, where character building is the first end in view, we heartily recommend it. It strengthens a person's self-reliance and prepares him much better to go out into the world."
The idealistic observations about the boys' conduct in study hall reflect the school's initially lofty expectations. Over the next seventy-five years, every boy would be inescapably exposed to a compelling reminder of this ideal in the rotunda in Main, the internal crossroads of the school.(8) Emblazoned in large white lettering around the rotunda's frieze was the quotation, "I sat obedient, in the fiery prime of youth, self-govern'd, at the feet of Law." No matter that the nineteenth-century English essayist and poet Matthew Arnold had meant those words more as a lament than an inspiration; the boys also did not take their exemplary intent to heart. By the time that first senior class had been graduated, the school's governing ideals had to be modified by the realities of life --especially by the behavior of adolescent males with energy and ingenuity to spare. Study hall was placed under the constant and strict supervision of a faculty member; even so, it remained one of the most inviting places for students to perpetrate pranks. These probably did not change much over the years and represented a variation on the same theme as when I sat in study hall in the mid-twentieth century --- not in the original room but at some of the same desks, embellished by layers of predecessors' initials, some artistically carved out and others impetuously scratched in. The most common trick involved turning out the lights during the two-hour evening session. As in the original room, all of the switches were on a control panel outside the door, and the culprit was in little danger of being caught. He might even abscond with the master circuit breaker and extend the students' relief from books, while providing a rarely missed opportunity to create all sorts of bedlam in the dark.
Faculty-supervised study hall continues to this day for students with academic and disciplinary problems. And the ideal of self -supervision remains. "The student-faculty council recognizes the need for students to take greater responsibility for the daily concerns of campus life," reads a memo of 1990 from the school's student body president, Amit Basak. "As one step toward this end, we propose to the faculty that seniors supervise Main Building study hall."
"The Faculty have proceeded on the assumption that any boy who is worthy of a place here must be trustworthy," stated the Annual, "and that when ever, after a fair probation, a boy is unwilling or unable to respond to appeals to his self-respect and sense of honor, he must give up his connection with the School."
The propensity for less-than-ideal behavior meant that this ultimate punishment inevitably had to be invoked. In his memoirs, Uncle Joe Estill provided a faculty participant's account of how this was done:
"Going back to the first year . . . every effort was made to have boys feel that, as young gentlemen, they should do right without the compulsion of rules. So rules were not promulgated. Announcements were posted, printed on one side of a two-page buff-sheet. Mr. Buehler often quoted the boy who said, 'We don't have any rules, but if you break one, you get it in the neck.'
"The announcement, the non-observance of which has brought more trouble throughout the years than any other, was the one about leaving the grounds after 7:30 P.M. Another important one was that not more than three boys should ever be in a boat at the same time.
"Only a few weeks after the opening that first year some master reported to the faculty that he had seen four boys in a boat, but too far away to identify them. As this was the first serious case calling for discipline, there was prolonged discussion as to how it should be handled. I took the position that as we were trying to start a new school on a higher plane of manliness and cooperation than any of which we knew, and in which we expected boys to do right or to make manly admission when they did not, the Headmaster should call the school into the study, with all the faculty present, and after some such statement as above, call for the boys who had been out in a boat on a certain afternoon to rise. It was agreed by the faculty that they should be told to go to their rooms and pack their things in preparation for going home. It was some shock to the faculty when eight boys, without a moment's hesitation, arose, one-seventh of the whole school. No member of the faculty had the slightest suspicion that more than four boys were involved. Mr. Coy did not hesitate for an instant to dismiss the bunch in agreement with the decision of the faculty. There followed a long discussion in the faculty as to whether the dismissal should be temporary, permanent, or changed to a suspension. I pleaded with all the fervor of my being, even to the point of tears, for temporary suspension of boys who had previously been exemplary, insisting that suspension was punishing parents instead of boys. But colleges and schools in those days made very frequent use of the six-weeks suspension, rustification, as it was called. So all these boys were suspended, five of them for six weeks, the other three indefinitely, as they had previously shown themselves not up to the desired standard. . . .
"The fight over suspension continued till Mr. Buehler was brought into the faculty. A few years after he became headmaster, the sequestration program, one of the best constructive suggestions to my mind he ever made, was started. It had scarcely been adopted before it was brought into play, to mete out punishment to the greatest number ever of offenders on a single occasion, to my knowledge, except where a class or dormitory was in some mix-up."
In the presequestration era, the most extensive disciplinary action came in 1901, when fully a quarter of the senior class of forty-two was dismissed. The indirect cause of the trouble was the rapid expansion of the school --- partly driven by the need to bring in additional revenues --- and the consequent permission for seniors to live off campus. Rooms were readily available in Lakeville in private homes for $2.50 per week, and for a dollar more, at the inn, which was closer to the school. The precise nature of the boys' infraction has not been recorded, but they certainly were in a position to break the no smoking, no drinking, and other cardinal rules. Professor Coy attributed the trouble to "the social leadership of the class [which] by accident fell into incompetent hands. " He assured the board that "the refractory spirit . . . not only did not affect seriously the spirit of the school, but did not even carry the senior class as a whole." Nevertheless, that was the end of the "experiment of going outside of the school grounds to accommodate excess of students." In future years, more and more students would be housed on the top floors of masters' cottages, which were beginning to mushroom on the school grounds.
The failure of off-campus housing only reenforced one of the basic premises on which Hotchkiss had been founded: the constant need for masters to exert their character-building influence. Beyond the interaction in classrooms and in the dormitories, where each corridor was supervised by an unmarried master residing there with the boys, what better opportunity to do so than on the playing fields?
Athletics were a relatively recent phenomenon for teenagers in boarding schools, going back only about half a century to such British private "public" schools as Rugby and Eton. (Eton at that time had already been around for some 350 years.) Athletics thus represented a truly novel opportunity for channeling some of the rowdiness and mischievous idleness of teenage boys into a structured outlet. In franker parlance, daily exertion on the playing fields was expected to drain away some of the pressure of adolescent sexuality --- in that era of no other permissible or untabooed outlets --while instilling the qualities epitomized by the accolade, "He's a good sport." In the United States, organized sports were institutionalized only a couple of decades before the founding of Hotchkiss. Groton's headmaster, Endicott Peabody, was one of the major forces of this movement to build "manly Christians. " The first interscholastic football game, Andover versus Exeter, was played in 1878.
"The Hotchkiss School boy believes it his duty to be first a gentleman, then a scholar, and then an athlete, if possible, declared the Annual of 1893. "To secure the fullest benefits from exercise and yet to avoid the dangers and evils of over-indulgence in matters purely physical is the policy of The Hotchkiss School towards athletics. "
The Annual spelled out the school's specific goals for athletics: "First, the recreation of minds whose first business is genuine hard work in study and classroom. Second, the maintenance of health and the development of the body. Third, the acquisition of those qualities of nerve and character which are so well developed on diamond and football field. Lastly, the making of records and winning of games."
To achieve these goals in their "order of importance," the Hotchkiss School decided to foresake all outside competition and instead divided the student body into two intramural teams, the Pythians and the Olympians. "Every student is compelled to belong to one of these, thereby bringing fellows into a close relation with athletics, and stirring up an enthusiasm which otherwise would not be shown towards school teams," stated the Annual. "The principles of the School look towards making its reputation not by athletics, but by its collegiate record."
Such athletic modesty would not survive beyond the school's first year --- with the impetus for change coming entirely from the students. They were the ones who turned the school's athletic priorities upside down. They yearned to represent Hotchkiss and bring glory to the school, and no doubt a smidgen of the same to themselves. Though the Olympian and Pythian societies continued to provide athletic opportunities for everyone, a school football team began training in earnest in the fall of 1893. Their only game that season was against the previous year's Hotchkiss class at Yale, which the older boys won 6-0. The baseball team that spring had more luck finding opponents, taking the field against several small nearby academies. And by the fall of 1894, the school's football team began to fill out its schedule, too. Among the rivals: Taft, whose new location in Watertown placed it about halfway between Hotchkiss and Yale. But this level of activity was still too low-key and provisional for some of the more competitive spirits in the school. "We all feel great pride in Hotchkiss of a quiet kind," editorialized the Record in 1895, "but great school enthusiasm can be aroused among students only by the exertion of schoolmates with other schools . . . when we can vie with other schools and show our superiority over them." Such aspirations could finally begin to be realized with the arrival at Hotchkiss in the fall of 1896 of a compact young man named Otto F. "Monnie" Monahan. For more than four decades, he would teach Hotchkiss boys not only the principles of good sportsmanship, but also how to win. His most intense rivalry during those years was with the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and many veterans of Monnie's training techniques, including the headmaster's son, the legendary Ted Coy '06, went on to achieve football fame at Yale and elsewhere. Ted's most vaunted moment at Hotchkiss came when be was taken out of a baseball game that was being won to save the track team from defeat. As a fullback at Yale, he was hailed for introducing "the new tactic of running down opposing tacklers instead of dodging them."
Athletic opportunities even in the school's second decade were in no way comparable to those of today. Except for Wednesdays and Saturdays, classes in those years continued into the afternoon and sporting endeavors had to wait until after 3:00 P.M. "The school was channelled very definitely into studies and a very limited range of athletic things, recalled George Van Santvoord '08, in a taped interview with Lael Wertenbaker for the 75th anniversary history. "The faculty were, by and large, people in their thirties, but we thought of them as people who were fifty or sixty and a very few of them took part in the athletic life of the school. There was Mr. Monahan, the physical education director, and only two or three others who were involved. The rest didn't do anything at all except come out and watch. Baker Field had been given to the school some years before, and there was a rather rough place by the crossroads where boys who were not on the school team could play football and baseball. There was no athletic sport at all in the fall except football. In the winter, there were the gymnastic teams, and hockey was a very uncertain sport. You might have a week when the lake was good skating, and then people just went out and skated, and there were some scratch hockey games. In the spring there was baseball and track and tennis, and then about the first of May, you could swim in the lake. The only out-of -town trips were once a year. A team in football or baseball in alternate years went to the Hill School. The other schools we played came to Hotchkiss, and they came by train. The automobile had been invented but the roads were dreadful."
Under these conditions, it was not easy for Monnie to maintain the appropriate athletic spirit from year to year. The following letter from him appears in the Mischianza of 1908:
"I desire to call the attention of the student body to one or two impressions which have been growing on me during the last two years.
"In the first place I have felt that the fellows do not appreciate and covet the letter as much as formerly. If this is in any way true, it is deplorable. The fact that there has been some reason for this impression should stimulate and arouse the energies of every fellow. It does not seem necessary to state the reasons which have caused the writer to question the appreciation of the H, it is sufficient to say that there has been cause."
Monnie's "cause," specifically, was that fewer than a dozen "fellows" earned the H in the preceding year, and far too many other fellows were content to make class teams. "What we want is more of the old Hotchkiss spirit," he wrote. "What I want to make strong is, that every fellow should be ambitious to make his class team, but when it is made he should use extraordinary effort to climb higher and win the H. "
Monnie's exhortation may not have been directed at the students alone, many of whom were eager to carry on and expand the school's sporting tradition. The following editorial entitled "A Few Statistics" appeared in an issue of the Hotchkiss Record in 1912:
"It is an undeniable fact that scholarship at Hotchkiss is each year rising to a higher plane. We do not exaggerate when we say that the present Senior Class is doing the work on a par with the work of the Senior Class at Yale of forty or fifty years ago. Many of the older graduates who are in a position to know have assured us of this fact. . . .
"From the educational point of view this is doubtless a most satisfactory record, but to those who glory in the athletic prestige of Hotchkiss it is anything but welcome. The big men of years gone by, who barely kept up in their work, can no longer hold their positions in the School. But one member of last year's football team came back this year.
"Again, as we look at the picture of the present Senior Class when they were preps, we find that nearly fifty percent have dropped by the way. This is not a protest against the high standard of the School, but a statement of figures that talk for themselves. We do suggest, however, that more regard be taken for the strong men. Let their strength be considered one of their qualifications, since we all admit that studies alone do not make boys into men, and it is by her men that the Hotchkiss of the future will be known."
A quarter of a century later, on the eve of his retirement, Otto Monahan penned a letter (above) which articulates to this day the sporting philosophy for legions of Hotchkiss alumni --- and a growing array of alumnae as well. Many of these men and women, in fact, would consider what they learned on the athletic field by far the most valuable aspect of their Hotchkiss experience. Playing by the rules, self-control under pressure, and a willingness to put out 100 percent are the same principles which brought them success in life. Yet these returns from the school's athletic program have not come without exacting a price. The lesser athletes in each class often have felt diminished by the big wheels of sports, by the jocks; and nonathletic accomplishments, including excellence in class, have rarely managed to evoke the same sort of approval or applause. Moreover, the effect of early fame has not always been positive on the great athletes. Tantamount to a cautionary tale was the well-publicized lot of Ted Coy, who, after a failed second marriage to the glamorous actress, Jeanne Eagels,(9) settled into a notably lackluster existence. Was that perhaps a reflection of "the dangers and evils of overindulgence in matters purely physical" against which the founders of Hotchkiss had sought to alert the school? What exactly was the ideal balance among the physical, intellectual, and moral aspects in character development? Where did the desire to win, to cultivate an intense adversarial relationship on the field fit in with the solitary competition against the selfishly pleasurable temptations within oneself?
With the recent revival of the Olympian-Pythian tradition at Hotchkiss, these questions are being asked again. The primacy of recreation and keeping fit originally assigned to the role of athletics by the founders of the school seems to be more timely now than a hundred years ago.
When Otto Monahan came to Hotchkiss in 1896, he joined a faculty which had already doubled from its original six --- and more would join to keep pace with the rapid growth of the school. From the very beginning, the quality of the faculty was considered as much a key to the success of the school as the personal trustworthiness of students. The first Hotchkiss catalogue promised "the most favorable conditions for instruction and study, which would come from "the intimate contact of students with masters in social as well as in other relations."
That promise soon brought reassuring dividends. "Professor H. P. Wright, who came up from New Haven to conduct the examinations," noted Head Master Coy after the completion of the first year, "was carried away with the spirit of the place, and with the boys themselves. Of the 12 Seniors, 7 were admitted to college without conditions, and the rest with very light conditions." (The word college as used by Coy was synonymous with Yale.) "We are overflowing with applicants for next year. The exact situation is this: 30 old boys return; 40 new ones have applied. Of the 40, some have been refused for various reasons, leaving about 35 from which we must now make our selection. Of this number 25 have already shown satisfactory evidence of being ready for classification in Sept." By 1896, thirty-five seniors were graduating. Twenty-five of them had been accepted by Yale, and the rest were heading for Harvard, Princeton, and other predominantly Ivy League colleges. "But one school in the country sends a larger delegation to the next Freshman class at Yale," Mr. Coy noted with pride, "and that is Andover Academy, and four years ago, the Andover contingent was not as large as that of Hotchkiss this year."
Some Hotchkiss masters were already beginning to earn recognition beyond the school grounds. "During the past year," reported Professor Coy to the trustees in 1897, "text books have appeared from the hands of Mr. Estill, Mr. Buehler, Mr. Pierce and Mr. Barss, which represent the results of their efforts to improve their capacity for service.... Some of these books have had very wide sale, all have been received with high commendation. " The trustees in turn commended the headmaster for his "ability to surround himself with strong and able teachers [and for] his influence and leadership in the important educational associations of New England and the eastern section of the country."
Yet, for whatever reason, the master who was perhaps even more influential with the boys than Professor Coy had been lost to the school. David Y. Comstock received barely a nod of recognition when he resigned in 1895 as associate master: the trustees thanked him rather curtly if enigmatically "for his services during the first three, and very eventful years, at the School." Precisely what happened or how the departure was related to the broader conflict between Mrs. Hotchkiss and Mr. Coy may never be known. But half a century later, one of Mr. Comstock's students would give us a measure of the sort of human being that he was. The following excerpt is from a longer piece sent to the Hotchkiss Alumni News by the late Judge Jesse Olney '93, shortly after returning home to California from his fiftieth reunion at the school in 1943:
"I wish to revive the memory of a great man, of a Professor whose brilliance as a teacher of Latin, I believe, outshone any other in the United States, and who made his classroom hour one for which no Hotchkiss boy would take a cut --- a big, full-lived Human whose kindly sympathy and knowledge of human frailties made him beloved of all the boys under the affectionate nickname of 'Commy.'
"I feel the historical background of these first years at Hotchkiss is far, far indeed, from complete, and this overwhelming, dominating character of the School has been signally overlooked.
"Beyond the suffusing reputation which preceded him to Hotchkiss emanating from the Old Boys at Andover, my personal knowledge of Prof. Comstock dates from my entrance into the School in October 1892, I found at that time that Prof. Comstock was convinced that though the preparatory education for college at that period quickened youthful minds, it also often envenomed their hearts. His idea was to so dramatize it as to make it lovable. He felt that the Preparatory Schools instead of using their techniques as a broad thoroughfare up to Collegiate gates, instead had made it a blind alley.
"I want the later alumni to know the ground on which they stand --- to realize the primal fostering of a great genius of a School free from barriers to opportunity and class distinctions. . . . He saw on the horizon on the hill between two lakes a school world in which there would flourish that science and art of gentle culture which is peculiarly Hotchkiss --- a house built upon a hill, where boys lived peacefully and comfortably together in a society of honor and dignity as true gentlemen should."
Comstock would never again hold a position at a school comparable to Hotchkiss or Andover. "Professor Comstock does not at present know what he will do after leaving the School," concluded a tribute in the Record from the students. After a year of "writing," he became the principal of a small academy in Vermont, and at the time of his death in 1920, he was teaching Latin at the Fall River High School in Massachusetts.
Was the departure of this humane man from Hotchkiss the beginning of the school's reputation as lacking in caring and warmth?
Though the boys surely had a pretty good idea about the Coy-Comstock strife, they probably had only the barest inkling of the fateful differences between Maria Hotchkiss and the board. Within a year of Professor Comstock's departure, the school's benefactress attended her last meeting, and virtually all avenues for any kind of cooperation were closed. Yet even on that contentious occasion she might have found herself nodding approval on hearing the following report from Professor Coy: "Arrangements have been made whereby several boys of limited means are able to render some service to the School in return for tuition , etc. Four boys have thus been able to enjoy the privileges of the chief school whose compensation has been their priceless fidelity and industry. That boys do not suffer in their social standing from this arrangement is shown by the fact that one of these four boys was the Ivy Orator, by the election of his classmates for Class Day."
The genesis of a thriving scholarship program may represent a contribution of Mrs. Hotchkiss's as valuable as any of her more tangible gifts. The stipulation she made to provide free tuition for a number of deserving local boys dovetailed with a similar Andover tradition of helping needy boys irrespective of geographical bounds. Scholarship boys thus became an integral part of Hotchkiss life even when the school was still severely strapped for funds. As the financial situation improved and the facilities expanded, the scholarship program kept pace. The original proportion of around 10 percent, which Mrs. Hotchkiss had acceded to in numerical terms --- six students in total --continued to be honored in correspondingly larger numbers, though drawn from an area by no means limited to the vicinity of the school. By 1922, Headmaster Buehler could proudly report that in a student body of approximately three hundred, Hotchkiss had forty "free pupils," and he listed two dozen prominent boarding schools that still had none. While the number of local Foundation Scholarships among those forty free pupils cannot be readily ascertained, the Hotchkiss Record in 1928 stated that "for many years now [the school] has annually carried on its rolls ten or more local boys as recipients of scholarship aid."
Professor Coy's observation that these "boys do not suffer in their social standing" would be resoundingly confirmed in future years. Many jobs which had originally been performed by maids, such as cleaning classrooms and waiting on tables, were taken over by these "free students," or scholarship boys. (The maid service in individual rooms was continued until the start of World War II.) "Waiting on tables you got to know people by the way they responded to somebody who was serving them," explains the Pulitzer Prize winning author John Hersey '32. "You got to know the faculty very well, too, by the way they presided over their tables. I thought it was a privilege to be at a kind of nerve center." John Hersey and other scholarship boys made their work seem so desirable that some nonscholarship boys felt excluded. A two-week period was eventually set aside during the spring term when any senior in the school who wanted to give it a try could do so. Among the volunteers was a quiet, small-framed boy named Benson Ford '38. The first time he put on the white waiter's jacket and came out of the kitchen balancing a large soup tureen on a tray, he tripped and spilled the contents all over his Latin teacher, Richard Bacon '30. The scion of the founder of America's automobile industry cleaned up the mess and completed the two-week waiting stint he had requested, bringing closer the day when all students at the school would rotate at the task.
Other scholarship tasks, such as sweeping classrooms and washing the blackboards were not without allure. "I always regarded the pail and broom as sort of a badge of honor," says Swarthmore College professor Thompson Bradley '52, whose two brothers also went through Hotchkiss on scholarships. "I felt we were fortunate."
The presence of scholarship boys at a school nominally for the sons of the rich made for some memorable combinations. "I couldn't believe the first night in the dining room when we had supper as new kids," recalls Frank A. Sprole '38. "I sat with my father and mother next to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Watson and their son Arthur. God knows, Watson was then in 1934 already one of the world's wealthy men and my own father was unemployed, and we were stony broke." Frank Sprole today is the retired vice-chairman of Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceuticals, a former president of the Hotchkiss trustees, and one of the school's all-time great fund raisers. "Arthur thereafter became quite a good friend of mine, and he'd always remember himself that evening we had sat together with our parents."
The unbiased treatment of scholarship boys did not imply egalitarianism in every respect. "My exposure to the world of privilege was a shocking one at first," relates John Hersey. "I remember walking along the Main corridor where people left their papers and stuff on the windowsills and along the floor. I happened to see the bill that Walter P. Chrysler had run up at Ma Dufour's [a popular snackbar-with-taxi-service in Lakeville] --- 'swilling in town' as we called it. It was more money than I saw in a year." But the future author of Hiroshima and some two dozen other notable works had his way of keeping up. "I only had one pair of trousers when I first got there, and I used to put it under my mattress every night to have it pressed in the morning."
Similar stories could be told by less conspicuous graduates of the school, including some of the local boys who benefited via Maria Hotchkiss as recipients of Foundation Scholarships. Among them was the grandson of the owner of Ma Dufour's, William "Doof" " Dufour '52, a good-natured classmate who stayed in the area to run and expand the family transportation business before his untimely death. A year behind him was John J. Roche, who became a school trustee and a senior partner in the Boston law firm of Hale & Dorr before starting his own firm. Here is his story as a recipient of a Foundation Scholarship:
"We actually lived in New York City until 1937, when my father suddenly died --- leaving no assets --- and my mother moved the family to what had previously been our Connecticut summer home in the Taconic section of Salisbury. There were some large barns in the back part of the property which she used to start up a chicken farm. One of my earliest memories is feeding about three hundred or four hundred chickens with my older brother. The sale of eggs and chickens was what kept the family together.
"In the second grade, I had an experience which bore on an event years later at Hotchkiss. It was an exceptionally cold November day, and the teacher, Mrs. Mathesson, took me aside to ascertain whether I didn't have a coat for this weather. That night, when I appeared at home with a slightly used but 'really neat' overcoat, my mother gave me a stern lecture about how she got this far raising the family without accepting charity or welfare, that we were not about to start now, et cetera. Much to my regret, the coat went back the next day, and during the balance of the winter, I wore two sweaters. Anyway, my mom was a hardworking lady who at great personal sacrifice raised the family alone. You cannot imagine how proud she was a few years later when, at the urging of one of the teachers at the Salisbury Central School, a Mrs. Hemmerly, I applied for and was granted a scholarship at the Hotchkiss School.
"Prep year at Hotchkiss was a time of great anxiety for all of us, not just the farm kid from Salisbury. The question was whether we were going to survive in that academic environment. We were all in the same boat. That being the case, I did not feel different from anyone else. Another reason for the commonalty, I believe, was the more or less standard uniform everybody wore --- wash khaki pants, beat up sports jacket, and scuffed loafers or dirty white bucks. Furthermore, acceptance by one's peers at the school depended upon your accomplishments, especially in the area of athletic prowess. If you were an achiever academically or received recognition in some extracurricular activity, you would have no major difficulties fitting in. In that sense I didn't really feel I was treated any differently from anyone else. That would not have been the case if I had stayed at the Regional High School where I went for one year to prepare for Hotchkiss. Acceptance there depended upon the kind of car you drove, what your father did for work, how large a home your family lived in, and a lot of other things which had nothing to do with your own basic makeup.
"One incident at Hotchkiss which I will always remember occurred in the spring of my lower mid year. I was walking from the gym back to the Main Building when I found myself in stride with a senior who was a member of one of Hotchkiss's dynastic families. He questioned me at great length about what it was like to grow up on a little farm in Salisbury, Connecticut. He was genuinely curious. Because he was an upperclassman interested in me and my background, I was enthralled and opened up like a flower in the sun. We must have stood there in the middle of the campus for fifteen or twenty minutes before we finally walked back to Main. When we arrived there --- and this I will never forget --- he formally shook hands with me and said with great sincerity, 'I want you to know, John, that I really have enjoyed this conversation. This is the first time that I've had a talk like this with anyone who's underprivileged.' Well, that kind of knocked my socks off because I had never thought of myself in those terms. Actually, I was more embarrassed for him than I was for myself. Nevertheless, I knew well enough not to share the experience with my mother. She had always regarded a scholarship as something which is awarded, something which one wins, a prize given to people who are superior and that type of thing. If she had any notion that scholarships were granted to people who were characterized as underprivileged, I would have very quickly found myself back in the local high school. Just like with the overcoat, she would have made me give it back. She died in 1967 --- and I never did have the heart to tell her."
John Roche's scholarship job in his senior year was supervising the dining room cleanup after lunch. "When I first became a trustee some thirty years later," recalls John, "the president of the board, Fay Vincent [Francis T. Vincent '56], reminded me that he had been one of the lowly preps wielding the broom on my dining hall crew. You could say it was an interesting change of roles."
A personal note: I was John Roche's cleanup crew predecessor, and he was my assistant for a year. After World War II, I was attending a boarding school in England when my father resigned as a Czech diplomat at the time of the Communist coup in Prague in 1948. Among his American colleagues was a friend of a Sharon resident, Admiral Thomas Hart. Admiral Hart conveyed to the Duke the story of our family's situation --- with the result that only days after arriving in New York, my older brother and I found ourselves at Hotchkiss. The Duke enrolled us on the spot, neither asking for transcripts nor giving us any tests. "I don't want you worrying about the tuition fees," I remember the Duke telling Father. "I am instructing our bursar, Mr. Brooks, to consider as payment in full whatever you are able to pay. And I shall let you be the judge of that. If it turns out you can't afford anything right now --- well, we have other boys here on full scholarships. It won't be anything unusual. "
The Duke's voice was matter-of-fact, as if he were merely doing what anyone in his place would. Years later, when I tried to thank him during tea at his Vermont Shadowbrook Farm, his forehead became slightly tinged with pink and he puffed on his pipe several times. "But you really have nothing to thank us for," he finally said, in that same matter-of-fact tone. "We took you in because we simply wanted to see what we could learn from you."
What kind of a man was the Duke's earliest predecessor? And how did he fulfill the role of a gentleman in his time? "Mr. Coy enjoyed the blessed distinction of not looking like a school-master," wrote J. Edmund Barss many years after he had joined the faculty in 1894. "A picture that I well remember is Mr. Coy seated in a light buggy, a soft, black, rather broad-brimmed hat on his gray hair, tooling his fine mare 'Daisy' delicately along the road. When he walked down the corridor he had a way of hitching his right shoulder as if settling his coat in place.... Like most men fit for leadership, Mr. Coy had a quick temper, which he habitually kept well controlled. An angry flush was sufficient warning to most people not to press him too far. I once saw a boy make the dangerous experiment of testing the limit of his patience: his insolence brought instantaneous dismissal. I think the dismissal was just, but it was rarely that such things happened without the safer, if less picturesque formality of faculty debate. Generally, Mr. Coy was long-suffering, so much so that on one occasion a lady who knew him well, and thought that he was unduly patient with some young scamp, implored him, 'Mr. Coy, get mad!"'
The school's first headmaster favored the appropriately measured response. "Never sacrifice a boy to a rule," was one of his maxims. He often put forth the theory that at adolescence a boy's nature "fermented" and would settle and clear if only given enough time and sympathy.
Professor Coy was also known for his humor. One day, when he repeatedly failed to elicit a response from a bright student who had just returned to class after an appendectomy, the headmaster remarked with slight exasperation, "Apparently, they removed not only your appendix, but also your table of contents."
This is how a member of the class of 1899, unfortunately unidentified, remembered his headmaster thirty years later in an article in the Record:
"It was a privilege to have been under Mr. Coy's influence. An imposing figure, very erect, with high color, making even more striking his snow-white whiskers, Mr. Coy was very human withal, much beloved, and had the distinction of causing even Greek to be very interesting. I can see him now, standing before a class, rolling out Greek in his deep, melodious voice, and giving real meaning to every shade of inflection. His handwriting was a flowing Spencerian type with curves and flourishes, tempting to copy, so that often the blackboards were filled with excellent imitations of his signature. A considerable number of the boys at that time, sooner or later, had to call on him alone, at least once. The rules then were not so strict on first offense smoking. Mr. Coy, though very fond of smoking himself, never indulged during the School term. Any student caught smoking was summoned to his office, and together he and Mr. Coy would shake hands and solemnly 'swear off.' Second offense meant immediate dismissal as quickly as a boy could be packed either by the boys or faculty. Going to Millerton was also not subject to review. In those pre-Volstead days Millerton was strictly 'out of bounds'."
That solemn handshake was not merely symbolic. A boy committing a second offense would be immediately expelled not for the smoking itself, but for breaking his word. That was something a gentleman simply should never do --- and a tradition was thus born, which would be enforced for most of the school's first century. A different sort of a tradition initiated by Professor Coy was that, unlike Andover, Hotchkiss would tolerate no secret cabals, cliques, or societies. Open associations for whatever purpose were encouraged. The oldest of these was St. Luke's. Named for the saint on whose day the school first opened, this organization was devoted to furthering Christian qualities, especially through charitable deeds. But any organization with telltale secretive mumbo jumbo was considered destructive of what the first handbook described as "the unity of school life."
The headmaster had more than one way of handling such hidden societies, as is related by that anonymous graduate of 1899: "The Winter term was quite a problem to the faculty and students alike. There were not all the facilities and activities of the present school, so surplus energy was hard to work off during those weeks of slushy, muddy weather. [An incident] ... arising from this fact ... was the formation of a local chapter of a school fraternity. For a short time it caused great thrills as well as heartburns. We were very select and even more secretive. A room was rented over one of the store the 'ville, in which regular meetings were surreptitiously held, unknown to the faculty, as we innocently imagined. We were soon disillusioned, however, as one weekend three or four impressive grads came up from New Haven, and in no uncertain terms told us collectively and individually exactly where we got off. The chapter disbanded, and the 'sacred' paraphernalia was rowed to the middle of the lake and sorrowfully dumped overboard."
Maintaining the harmonious balance within the school and doing his melodious bit in Greek daily in class would have been a taxing job in itself; but Edward G. Coy also personally carried on most of the school's correspondence --- and that, by hand. A letter sent in those days prior to typewriter carbons was the only copy available and could not be readily retrieved. But the small packet preserved in Huber Gray Buehler's file gives an indication of what was involved. In just trying to recruit Buehler for the faculty, Professor Coy while still at Andover dispatched a half dozen detailed letters in a single month between June 7 and July 8, 1892. Since the telephone was not yet in general use, every minute contingency had to be worked out in this laborious way. "For the first year, at least, we can make no engagements with married men," Coy wrote, referring to the lack of housing. "Would you defer marriage for a year? And yet since writing this last sentence, I feel that it is an unkind suggestion." When the deal was eventually sealed, the headmaster's complimentary closing reveals the intensity of his feelings. "Anticipating our labors together with genuine pleasure, I am, Cordially yours . . . "
And that was correspondence with just one master on one specific subject. Professor Coy's dedication to the school was reflected in every line and in every turn of the phrase, and the natural artistry of his pen exemplified the elegance and grandeur of his style. The headmaster would eventually deal with a faculty of 15 and a student body of more than 150 in equally personal detail. This is revealed in the same batch of letters written by Mr. Coy in the summer months when either he or Mr. Buehler was away from the school. Here in its entirety is one of the shorter ones:
Brevoort House
Fifth Ave. and Washington Square
New York, July 2d 1897Dear Mr. Buehler:
As I sit here I am thinking how important and necessary a service to the School you rendered through your admirably conducted interviews with Sills, Kellogg, Shonninger, and McCall and I cannot resist the inclination to send you special assurances of my full appreciation, not only of the service to the School, but also to myself. For it was a very great relief to me, under the circumstances, to have you so kindly take up those cases. I wish you again and again a most enjoyable and profitable summer.
Mr. Goss, of Waterbury [no relationship to Curator Goss] has just come in and has been talking about the son who wishes to enter our School in Sept. May I ask you to find the examination books or papers of C. P. Goss, Jr. in my office and send them on to Waterbury. From all that Mr. Goss tells me about the boy, I think that we ought to encourage him to prepare for entering the Upper Middle Class. We can scarcely do otherwise, under the circumstances. Yet I have also suggested to Mr. Goss that Chauncey may find more work involved than he anticipates; and difficulties which are insurmountable. I am satisfied, however, that the boy will be of great advantage to the tone of the School, should it be found best for him to enter when he naturally feels that he belongs.
Very faithfully yours,
E. G. Coy
Surmounting whatever difficulties he may have encountered, Chauncey Porter Goss graduated in 1899, the first in one of the most prolific of all Hotchkiss families. Numbering nineteen graduates by the end of the school's first century, they include George A. Goss II '38, after whom the Goss Gymnasium was named; Richard W. Goss II ''51, who served two terms as a trustee; and Chauncey Porter Goss II '84, the great grandson of that first Hotchkiss Goss. His father, Porter J. Goss '56, is a U.S. congressman from Florida.
Huber Gray Buehler knew his predecessor, E. G. Coy, as well as anyone beyond Coy's immediate family. When he was starting out as a teacher of Greek and Latin at a small Maryland school, the youthful Buehler undertook the journey of several hundred miles to Andover solely to meet Professor Coy and consult with him about some finer points of teaching Greek. Buehler made quite an impression on the future headmaster, who then continued to try to keep his prize recruit a contented member of the Hotchkiss faculty to the very end. Only weeks before his death at his wife's New Haven residence, the ailing headmaster assured Buehler, in the same exemplary script, that "in the twelfth year of your continuous service . . . I shall have little or no difficulty in persuading the Board to grant you a leave of absence of a year, for purposes of rest and recreation, at half pay."
A few months after Professor Coy died, his successor drew this portrait of him: "The things about Mr. Coy which always impressed me most from the first time I met him and which will linger in my memory longest were his magnificent presence and his unfailing courtesy of manner. Professor Warren of New Haven told me a few months ago that he received his first idea of a gentleman from Mr. Coy when he was his pupil at Andover, and I think that all the masters and boys who knew Mr. Coy here at The Hotchkiss School were impressed with this same thing. One of our masters said to me recently, 'When Mr. Coy introduced me to anyone as his colleague, I felt an inch taller.' In his ideals for his pupils he stood for manliness more than for scholarship, and we sometimes felt that he underrated scholarship as one aspect of character. He impressed his masters and pupils as a man much more than as a teacher, a scholar, or a speaker to boys. In these latter particulars he easily had superiors; but he was a significant specimen of the genus man.... He never appeared to better advantage than when, clad in evening clothes, he presided at the meetings of the University
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