Inadvertent Assist

Calvert Magruder '46

I had a great chat with Calvert Magruder '46 last week.  If the "'46" looks off, it is because the school closed in 1944, and Cal and his schoolmates were left to find other places to finish up.  Nonetheless, he is a member of the class of '46, and he does have his Avon diploma, thanks to this ceremony at commencement, 2006.
As Cal told us at that Commencement, the '44 Avonians read of the school's imminent closing in newspapers while many of them were on the train leaving for spring break.  He reports that the community saw the closing as a result of a clash between TPR and Brooke Stabler, with a vast majority of students and faculty sympathetic to Stabler.  Students had heard TPR insisted that Mr. Thayer, who was in charge of discipline, be responsible to her and not to Stabler.  The students, he said, saw TPR as the bete noir of the whole situation.  Magruder himself did not see much of TPR in his two years at Avon; he remembers being introduced to her at a pre-dance reception at the Provost's house, but he does not recall seeing her on campus on any other occasion, nor does he recall ever going over to Hill-Stead.  He did hear some of the common TPR myths - that she had been on a ship that sank and was inspired by that experience to build AOF and that the design of the Refectory is the result of a TPR dream that she was in Valhalla.   He had also heard that the Refectory had been torn down when only half built, then re-built more to TPR's liking.
Cal remembered fondly some of his teachers - he mentioned Mr Thayer (for English,  not discipline), Mr. Bates (Music), and Mr. Fraser (French) in particular.  He also mentioned Dr. Custer, whom Cal considers part of the inspiration for his own distinguished career as a history teacher.  He remembers admiring the gallant Russian stand at Stalingrad in '42, which he learned of through Dr. Custer's weekly current events update.  He mentioned a number of fellow students; first and foremost was Dave Stanley '43, whom he describes as "one of the best guys ever to come out of our school."   Stanley was killed when his ship was hit and (it was carrying ammunition) exploded.  Cal remembers Provost Stabler announcing Stanley's death in chapel and is still, nearly seventy years on, clearly moved by the story.  He also mentioned Chris Magee, younger brother of John Gillespie Magee, Ben Byers, and Jim Storer.
Cal, Joe German and and one other student spent his first year at school constructing an elaborate tree house complete with a pulley system that employed a counter-balance stone taken from the quarry.  When they returned the next year, they found the tree had been cut down and the tree house was gone.  Cal suspects it was Verne Priest who cut down the tree, but no one ever said anything to him about it.
In those days, there was a Halloween tradition of initiating new students which today would be classified as hazing (paddles were involved), but which ended (in '42) with a showing of Gone With the Wind in the Refectory.
Along with everyone else from the era, Cal refers to the quad buildings by number rather than name.  #1 building was what we call Diogenes, Pelican was #2 and so on.  This would, of course, explain the numbering of the quad classrooms; all the rooms in Dio, for example, begin with "1."  It seems odd that the Founder's Era folks would not have embraced the statues atop the quad buildings as names for the buildings themselves.  They did, after all, adopt Diogenes and Eagle as the names of the two intramural teams.
Cal was a member of the Diogenes team and recalls how the '43-'44 championship was decided. It seems the Eagles had won for a few years in a row, and in the spring of '44 it all came down to the last baseball game.  Cal was not on the Dio baseball team, but he was doing some community service near the field.  Late in the game, a pitch got past the Eagles catcher and rolled to Cal.  Automatically, he picked up the ball and tossed it to the catcher, who promptly threw out a base runner!  The Eagle team won the game and the overall title for that year.  Cal feels as though the fact that the school was about to close may have saved him a great deal of grief from his Diogenes teammates.

Images

Every time we head to the Brown Auditorium, we pass by the picture above, which is of the Glee Club at some point in the early forties.  At one point, I remembered seeing the 2010 Riddlers head into the Refectory for a picture-taking session, and I began to wonder whether they had re-created this image.  As it turns out, they had not; the pictures they took have the tapestries as background.

Nonetheless, I am currently in favor of using a juxtaposition these images as a central image (book cover, web page background, etc.) for Semblance of Permanence.  I'd prefer, of course, that the modern picture more closely resemble the older one, but we cannot reconvene the 40s Glee Club, and there is an argument for using these Riddlers rather than making a new version with the 2013 Riddlers.  That argument, of course, is that the singer second from the left in the top row of the 40s Glee Club (Ed Custer '43) is the grandfather of the one fifth from the right in the top row of the 2010 Riddlers (Ben Custer '10).   Adding to the air of permanence, both of them were faculty brats who grew up on campus and whose fathers taught history.  As a historian with a long connection to AOF, I have seen this sort of "permanence" many times; sons and grandsons of alumni becoming friends just as their fathers and grandfathers were, etc.  I suspect that by "permanence" TPR meant the architecture and the character of the place, but I think the people aspect is important as well.

This summer, I have been playing around with the idea of creating this work as an iBook, and I have created a "cover" which has the two pictures juxtaposed as above with "Semblance of Permanence" in between.  If it is possible to share that image in this venue, it is well beyond my abilities, but I think it looks good.

While on the subject of images, I should also explain the origins of the image at the head of this blog - TPR somehow in the midst of a Refectory chandelier.  A few years ago, I was putting together a PowerPoint for use in the background at hiring fairs - just a series of images that give a sense of AOF.  Lacking an image of TPR, I attempted to capture one from one of the school's videos; the video faded from the Refectory chandelier to TPR, and I pulled the trigger before the transition was complete.  I have always liked the result; initially, I thought it was vaguely ethereal, but in the light of TPR's interest in parapsychology, it seems particularly apropos.