More On Francis Froelicher

David Lavender's (author of They Wrote Their Own Histories - Fountain Valley School's First 70 Years) chapter on Francis Froelicher's tenure as headmaster at FVS is an interesting read for a student of Avon's history.  As I mentioned in the last post, I (perhaps unfairly) got the sense that one was meant to conclude that Froelicher's views on education were too progressive for TPR, and that is part of why he left Avon so quickly and abruptly.  Of course, a historian of FVS would have no further interest in TPR or in the school Froelicher left behind, but Lavender describes an FVS that was, under Froelicher, if anything less progressive in its approach than Avon Old Farms in the same era.  He does not describe the academic program in great detail, except to report the one person connected to both schools wrote to another "they are re-creating Avon out West."  In some ways, though, the schools were very different; FVS students'  rooms were cleaned by maids, and servants, rather than other students waited on them in the refectory (yes, they did call it that).  Indeed, FVS students did not have a work program, or formal "chores," until World War II decimated the work force available to them in Colorado Springs.  This despite the fact that there was a working ranch associated with the school.  Throughout that period, the student council at FVS sought ways to be relevant, while at Avon the council actually governed, levying taxes and making and enforcing rules.
On the other hand, there were some interesting parallels in Froelicher's tenures at the two schools.  He was at FVS for ten times as long as he was at Avon, of course, but there, too, he was able to run the school secure in the knowledge that any deficit would be covered by a single benefactor.  As at Avon, the benefactor was a woman, but at FVS she had neither founded the school nor designed its buildings.  He also left FVS abruptly, "resigning" in December of 1950 and not returning when Christmas vacation ended.  Lavender reports that there are no minutes from the board meetings that led to Froelicher's dismissal (and when Lanvender undertook his history, only two members of that board remained alive), but complaints included the deficits and lax discipline at school.  For Avonians, the most telling sentence reads: "Some were aware that he may have had a drinking problem."  Lavender goes on to say that one of the two surviving board members "insists that the problem had absolutely nothing to do with his resignation."
Whether or not his drinking cost Francis Froelicher his job at FVS, as it had his job at Avon, the fact remains that he guided the school from its opening through its first twenty years, which years included the Second World War.  His views on education and his vision for his school inspired TPR and Betty Hare (of FVS) to believe in him and six members of the faculty (a majority) to follow him from Avon, Connecticut to Colorado Springs, Colorado.  When Froelicher died ten years after leaving FVS, C. Dwight Perry, senior master who had become interim head when Froelicher departed, said of him: "In his colleagues he demanded intellectual curiosity and honesty; from them he got admiration and loyalty.  He loved books and mountains, music and poetry.  He was attracted to plain people and great minds.  He gave short shrift to superficial thinking and to social sham."