USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Andover > The sesquicentennial record : in commemoration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., May 18, 19, 1928 > Part 10
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Page Sixty-eight
Editorials
(Continued from page 20)
altogether degenerate needs what a school like Phillips Academy can give. It is stimulating to be identified with an institution which wants not only to be, but to become. Those of us who have been associated with it far longer than we really want to admit have seen in our connection with it an opportunity to contribute some- thing to the generations which shall follow us. What the school may accomplish in any one isolated month may seem to be unimportant; but, if it continues to glorify scholarship and character, it is destined to be- come even more influential in the state.
That it has already acquired merit may be deduced in some degree from this Sesquicentennial Record, in which scores of men, some of them graduates of the school, others only its friends, have joined in testifying to its preeminence in educational circles. A glance over the list of contributors reads like a page from Who's Who in America. Here are bankers and soldiers, teachers and poets, artists and statesmen, all offering their evidence as to the prestige which Phillips Academy enjoys in 1928. It is a stately and awe-inspiring display, this long show of names, and one in which the editors are warranted in taking pride. The ideas of Samuel Phillips, Jr., have animated thousands of men to do better work and encouraged them to shoulder respon- sibilities. It is this chiefly which makes our 150th anniversary of notable significance; and Phillips Acad- emy will continue to fulfill this worthy mission just so long as those who serve it are faithful to their trust, remembering that they may be building better than they know.
Andover in the Some-Time-Since (Continued from page 12)
hard cases, the trouble is merely that they must reach some decision.
Moreover it is with school-masters much as it is with doctors. Their successes shine forth and do them credit, their failures in due time are buried and mean- time are not apt to be advertised as failures of a system of education. When one reads of the old style of dis- cipline and teaching at Andover and of the quality of the men who put it over, the propensity is to disparage all contemporary efforts by comparison. We may remember for our comfort that the glorious results of the old method have been pictured on the very sky and where they slipped up pious hands have drawn veils over the results.
One of the institutions of Andover in my day was the Mansion House, a really delightful house of entertain- ment that afterwards burned up. Some of the boys boarded there. I did in my senior year and remember as a fellow boarder Elizabeth Stuart Phelps well known in those days as the author of "The Gates Ajar."
The Mansion House was built I believe by some member of the Phillips family and probably enlarged to suit its needs and purposes as a hotel. It took care of
the relatives of the boys who came there and also, no doubt, did a business with summer residents. The stage ran to it from the depot and one of the pictures that is left to me is of that stage coming up the hill loaded up sometimes with boys when the term began or ended and sometimes with commencement visitors.
During my last year at Andover I roomed at the Stowe House, often called the Stone House. Either name was appropriate for Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had lived there and the house was built of stone. One of my companions there was Emmons Blaine, a member of the next class to mine whose brother Walker was in the class of '71. Their father in those days was "Speak- er Blaine." Both of the Blaine boys were interesting fellows with lively minds. Both died young and greatly lamented. Emmons was in the class next to mine in Harvard College. He came out of a family where there was always good talk and his own talk was always lively, and richer in current information than most of ours. One of his possessions that I remember in the Stowe House was a bunch of tickets to the proceedings in the House of Representatives for the impeachment of Andrew Johnson which had taken place four years before. That seems far off doesn't it?
I had the mumps that Spring of '72, was shut up in that house for a week or two, and a picture that abides in me is of the rapture of getting out finally into a world lovely with apple blossoms and walking through the Seminary grounds to the Mansion House to renew relations with my meals.
Since Prohibition, rum seems to have become a factor in the discipline of large schools. It made little trouble in my day at Andover. Boys went off to Lawrence and played billiards, and perhaps sometimes got some beer, but seldom to hurt. In my last year my classmate Charles Macy and I, having inquiring minds about the incidents and accessories of polite life, imported some claret. I don't know how we got it, but it came in flat bottles and we drank it with due moderation and with- out evil results. When our class went to its reunion at
Page Sixty-nine
the Mansion House three years after we graduated, someone, Charles Bird I think it was, wishing to in- crease the conviviality of the proceedings sent up a box or two of American champagne, but we never got it. It was promptly confiscated under some local option law that obtained in Massachusetts at that time, presumably by Deacon Chandler.
I have no memory of ever seeing a bathroom at An- dover. I remember the exercising apparatus in the gymnasium of that day, now or lately a dining hall, but if there were washing facilities there, and I presume there were, they did not make much impression on me. Bathrooms did exist in the early '7os, but I was raised in a country house where there was no running water and no bathrooms, and where the time-honored institution of the Saturday night tub was still observed. I do not think we were particularly clean at Andover in 1870 but we were neither unhealthy nor unhappy.
If ablutions and sanitation were less conspicuous in the '7os than they are now it was not so as to clothes. Clothes abounded, especially women's clothes. It was the era of the Grecian bend and of that detail of garb known as the bustle, and a lady fully adorned in the raiment that was in style was like an army with ban- ners and a figure that suggested prosperity in textiles. The ladies we saw most of at Andover belonged more to intellectual than to fashionable society and were not as a rule embarrassed by surplus funds, and probably did not follow the fashions more than was convenient. But now and then there would come along some visiting family with girls that had real style, and who, driving up on top of the coach from the station to the Mansion House or walking down that austere street that fronted the Seminary grounds and past the houses of the Seminary professors, afforded a spectacle that left no youthful observer quite the same as he was before he saw it.
Of course the clothes of the boys were about the same as now. Male attire does not vary much, or has not, at least, since wigs and queues went out and trousers got the better of breeches. Any man who has a picture to paint or a statue to make says modern clothes are bad, but they are comfortable enough, less trouble than they were one hundred years ago and im- prove in cloth and make-up even though they do not change radically in style. The vogue of sport has made some changes, most of them good, but nothing has happened to men's clothes at all comparable to the transformation that has befallen the attire of women.
The theologs of the Seminary figured in the picture of that day in which the Seminary, since moved to Cambridge, was still an Andover institution. Some of them taught in Biblical. Since the connection between the school and the Seminary was always intimate (both institutions being in charge, I believe, of the same trustees) we regarded the theologs as more or less ad- juncts of the school. Some of the theological professors were very notable men, Dr. Park and Dr. Phelps especially, and doubtless others of whom the memory
does not abide with me so distinctly. They helped notably to give character to the village and character certainly abounded in it.
As to religion in the school, there was plenty of it. There were revivals, prayers twice a day, plenty of church, Bible teaching and a religious society, The Enquiry, among the students. A good many of the boys got religion there and in some of them it stayed.
Pomps Pond, where we used to go swimming in summer and sometimes held tub races, doubtless still continues its useful ministrations. The boys of the school always paraded on Decoration Day and gener- ally wound up at Pomps Pond.
The gymnasium in the old school building above the Seminary did an active business. The director of gymnastics in my day was a theolog, Frederick Palmer, a brother of Professor George H. Palmer of Harvard College. He was highly proficient in his exercises. One of our notable gymnasts was my classmate William G. Morse, the son (I think the youngest son) of S. F. B. Morse, whose fame as the author of the Morse Alphabet for the telegraph has far outrun his considerable reputa- tion as a portrait painter. The Morse family were faithful backers of the school. Richard C. Morse, a nephew of the famous electrician, had been tutor in my father's family for a couple of years and it was through his influence that my brother and I were sent to An- dover. He became himself widely known and honored as general secretary for many years of the Y. M. C. A.
A school-master, the head of a girls school in New York and a notable scholar, once said to me, "When we have provided the building and heated it and assembled the pupils, that is three quarters of the job." He had the feeling apparently that the provision of environment and association furnished the most important element in school. As one looks back on school days the same impression is apt to intrude. Of course the teaching is important. It is the great central fact of the School. I think in my day at Andover it was good, but what one remembers is not so much the teaching, which is taken
for granted, as the association with the other boys and the gradual progress in the understanding of life. The world is so new to a school boy! Adolescence is an extraordinary time anyhow, bringing all manner of new thoughts, impulses and developments. Add to that the shift from home and home direction to the qualified liberty of the school, and you have a tremendous change.
One of the memories that I have is of starting out in the frosty morning air to walk to class or breakfast on the frozen streets, and of the exhilaration that some- times accompanied that very simple experience. That was youth instinctively rejoicing in growing strength; the same impulse of the blood that stirred the horse that "saith among the trumpets Ha Ha; and smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the Captains, and the shouting." Truly a great school is a great door opening into life. So was Andover in my time, and so, I pre- sume, in an even greater degree, is Andover now.
Page Seventy
War Memorials (Continued from page 19)
superb Crusader edifice, inspiring in scale and design, where pregnant Latin mottoes, "absentes adsunt" and the like, remind us of the great cloud of unseen worship- pers.
Here indeed we approach our ideal: we have a noble thought executed: but I still hold that the truest me- morial is one which serves no other function. It does not even provide a home for daily worship.
I pass then to my conclusion - I know no truer and fairer Memorial than the white Campanile of Andover, which often rises before my eyes, towering among its towering elms and ringing music born in Belgium across your great Campus.
It stands in the highway of your daily life, to which it adds a special note of aspiration, reminding those "who pass where they passed", whether bent on work or play, that the end of all endeavour is faithful service in peace or in war.
He Came to Himself (Continued from page 22)
importance, - that men should be offered acquain- tanceship with themselves.
On a fall day, I stood on the sidelines of a football field beside a great coach. He said to me of a certain mighty attractive boy who was a candidate for the team, "He will find himself some day and be a great player."
Later in the afternoon, I asked at the hospital after a boy who had had a bad fall from a horse and had been knocked unconscious. The doctor replied, "He is all right; he is himself again."
This repetition of the word "himself" kept working through my mind in some familiar association which I could not for a time quite capture. At length I grasped it and recalled the parable of the prodigal son, wherein the statement was made in the Scriptural account that "He came to himself." He had no longer lost himself; he had not forgotten himself; he was not beside himself. He had found himself; he had come to himself; he was himself.
It is an interesting illustration of the instinctive reasoning of men's minds, and of what I believe to be actual fact, that our real selves are always assumed to be our more intelligent, our more purposeful, our more thoughtful, our more generous, and our more respon- sible selves.
When all is done and said, the school or college does not and cannot change the self of any man. It cannot make a foolish man wise; it cannot make a lazy man industrious; it cannot make a bad man good; and it cannot make a small man great. It can, however, offer guidance and sometimes inspiration to a man to dis- tinguish beween his baser and his better characteristics. It can help him through the involved labyrinth of his personality to find those qualities the recognition of which may bring him to himself. Thus a man can be
enabled more nearly to capitalize those qualities of wisdom, industry, goodness, and size which, in varying degrees, attach to the real selves of all of us.
This, fundamentally, is the great responsibility of education.
A Looking Backward Prophecy (Continued from page 23)
of this unexpected and optimistic progress would prove to be a trespass on editorial courtesy. But I do venture to suggest two or three reasons. The school was more interested in the future of us boys than in our present. The present, important as it was, was only a means or a condition of the future. The Principal and his asso- ciates were planting seeds for far-off fruit, and not for immediate and withering blossoming. They knew that what seemed to us boys so useless, so drab, and at times so tiresome, was sure to become, in the long to- morrow, of the highest and most lasting worth. It is also to be remembered as an apparent cause of the surprising enrichment that life itself tends to give devel- opment to good men. As the brook purifies itself by its onflowing, so the proper life, as lived decade by decade, creates strength, ennobles motives, and lifts ideals. A selected group, as those boys were, improves by natural, human forces and processes. It may be said further, as an apparent cause, that we boys did not see into each other or understand each other with the best reasoning. If we had been able to see or to understand we, too, might have been prophets before, as well as after, life's growths and fruitage.
This interpretation, which I venture to give, may well bear good cheer to present teachers, to fathers and to mothers, and even to the boys themselves of today, who are questioning and wondering whether they shall ever amount to anything anyway! Boys, you will, you shall.
CHAPEL
VISITOR .-
HELP! Murder!
-
The singing in the chapel of the Old Main Building had its bad effects.
Page Seventy-one
Sixty Years Ago and Today (Continued from page 29)
missed with the warning, "We will see you again about this matter". I never heard of it again, and never heard why I was arrested, tried, convicted, and sent away with the pretence of a suspended sentence hang- ing over me.
Such conduct naturally produced hostility among the students - more than hostility, contempt, hatred. With some this was modified by a high opinion of Dr. Taylor as a teacher; though this needs qualifications which it would be too long to detail. But the attitude of the student body as a whole was one of complete antagonism to the ruling powers, or rather, power. I ought to say, however, that I was told that after I left School Dr. Taylor's attitude gradually changed, so that at his sudden death in 1872 the School as a body could declare, "We loved him".
Again, I do not need to point the contrast. I believe there is today between Faculty and students an atti- tude of understanding and cooperation and that they are in close, even loving touch. At a recent Commence- ment I saw Dr. Stearns preside with dignity in the fore- noon, speak at the annual Dinner, don a baseball suit in the afternoon and captain to victory an Alumni team while cheers of "Al! Al!" rang out, and in the evening welcome the guests at a dance in the gymna- sium. Such close and hearty association with the students has brought about in the School an atmos- phere of incalculable worth. It makes us old fellows regret what we missed. Yet that is perhaps after all as we wish it - that our children should have a better world to live in than we had.
An Incident of the Great War (Continued from page 30)
"I just heard someone singing an Andover song. Are you an Andover man?"
The soldier rose and came toward the track saying: "Yes, I came over with the Andover ambulance unit, but am now in the motor transport." Just then our train jerked forward throwing me back into the com- partment among the packs piled between the seats. As I regained the open door the train, rapidly gaining head- way, had moved some distance down the platform. "Good old school, Andover!" I shouted at the rapidly receding figure. "Best there is!" came the reply, just audible above the rattle of the ancient rolling stock.
That was back in 1918, and when the incident comes to my mind I mentally repeat the query I made that night as I settled back against the hard back of the train seat - "I wonder who he was?"
A Memory of T'ai Yuan-Fu (Continued from page 32)
report now that that is what I did. Just stood there and felt around. Found it. Dragged it forward with my toe. Reached back and pulled it on.
The lights reappeared. Came bobbing back. John, in his best pidgin English, tried to apologize. In what may or may not have seemed to those yellow men a rather dignified, even a magnificent, outburst of right- eous anger, I ordered John back to his place. And instructed him to send the rear guard back where that ragged exponent of the Chinese military arts belonged. I am short of stature, or I should have been, I believe, splendid indeed. Excepting that it is not over easy to be splendid in pidgin English. That there might be a trace of humor in the situation - a prisoner insistently putting himself back into custody - did not occur to me at the time.
The next day I was received in State at the Yamen of His Excellency. My guards were dismissed, and a small cavalry escort assigned to protect me on my further travels. Mr. Sowerby accompanied me as interpreter, and afterward took me back to his com- pound for lunch.
While we were there two lictors - or runners - arrived from the Yamen bearing trays of presents. There were a few bottles of native wine that tasted like a particularly acid vinegar. Other odds and ends. And two tins of sauerkraut. These last looked like battered cylinders of lead. The labels had long since been rubbed off. Some German traveller must have left them out there. Doubtless His Excellency thought they would be, to me, a pleasant reminder of home.
I Wish I Had Had (Continued from page 35)
Latin Composition (not merely Latin sentences) by which my power to understand and write English was greatly advanced in one of my early college years.
But there are some things that I wish my education, whether in school or college, had included; I should be sorry to go through life again without them.
In the first place I put the understanding of spoken French. The failure to acquire this when I was young has been a handicap all my life, and will prove an even greater one for the coming generation than it has for mine. Speaking French follows readily on understand- ing it, if a suitable chance for practice can at some time be found. The other language that I wish I had learned is mathematical - the Calculus, which when I was in college was deemed "higher mathematics", appropriate only to the elect, but now proves to be wholly within the capacity of any normal freshman.
I also wish I had read more books and faster, es- pecially novels and lighter literature. For that my summers in the whole period ought to have been care- fully planned and a great mass of books devoured with delight. It could have been done, if I had aimed at it, and not taken the reading too seriously.
Another thing I ought to have been deliberately taught (not being by nature gifted thereto) was to play tennis well, instead of lazily and badly. We did play whist, and to play bridge sufficiently well is merely the modern equivalent of that. The lack of skill in other
Page Seventy-two
games has not particularly interfered with my later comfort. Golf is useful, but not a game for boys. Their time is too precious for anything so slow.
Somehow, too, an understanding of the structure of music could and ought to have been given me, and such an intellectual grasp as enables one not merely to enjoy but to follow a complex orchestral piece. And if any suitable teaching of drawing and of the use of water- colors and training in sketching had been brought to me, while I should never have excelled, it would have been of immense usefulness and pleasure - for scien- tific purposes, for little records of travel, as giving a notion of what great painters of many schools and countries aimed at in their pictures, and as a pure pastime.
I do not suppose these exhaust the list of things that I could have been taught or could have picked up by the way. But they are what occur to me. The Phillips Academy of the future ought to be, and we are confident sometime will be, a place where a boy who wants these things can get every one of them. Some of them - a few - can be given by formal classes; most of them depend on the provision of opportunities and then the creation of such an atmosphere that boys will be naturally stimulated to want these things for them- selves and not be ashamed to say so, and will reach out their tentacles and grope about until they hold them as prized possessions.
Andover in the Early Seventies (Continued from page 37)
enough to accommodate the little groups who wanted to bowl or swing Indian clubs. One of the boys acted as janitor; there was no instructor.
Andover was known as a Yale fitting school, both orthodoxically and also because of careful attention to Greek roots. Harvard was regarded as lax in religion and exact scholarship. However, some boys would take that downward path, although it was deemed the harder of the two. Boys went to Amherst for religion, or to Dartmouth for brawn. So they thought when making a choice.
Church morning and afternoon on Sunday. It was a rare treat when Professor Park of the Theological Seminary preached his famous "Peter" and "Judas" ser- mons. People came from miles around, hitched their horses to the fence, and listened spellbound to the orator whose eye was like to that of the Ancient Mariner. Every one felt that preacher was looking straight at him and through him. Often in later years I have read those sermons, to edification and with hardly a question as to the theology, for they were based primarily on an understanding of human nature. Professor Austin Phelps occasionally read to his Seminary class a sermon he was not physically able to preach. His daughter, Elizabeth Stuart, had written "Gates Ajar," the heterodox best seller of the day. Theological students got practice by conducting Phillips classes in the Greek Testament, on Mondays.
The Fem Sem had for principals the Misses Philena and Phoebe McKeen, dragons to the boys who period- ically stole the seminary skeleton. One of the girls poured water on the head of a peeping Tom and then embalmed the episode in a poem which was read at the annual Philo Exhibition. The McKeens allowed the poetess, disguised as an old woman, to go to hear her own production and a Senior's feeble answer thereto. Afterwards the three had a good laugh at the expense of the boys. Out of this adventure came the founding of the Abbot Courant.
With many of the Phillips boys and Abbot girls of those days my acquaintance has continued; and I find that their memories have kept them young in spirit. Not many of them have set water afire; but - except- ing one who got into jail and one who didn't quite - they have been good and useful citizens, and the world has been the better because of their lives.
Some Recent Books of Importance (Continued from page 66)
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