Rationing

We spent the last few days on Islesboro, at the summer home of Founder's Era history teacher John S. Custer, a.k.a. "Grampa."  (We also had occasion to walk by science teacher Holland Sperry's house on our way down to the cove.)  I had hoped to come across some resource that would help with this project - a notebook labelled "My Thoughts About Working at Avon" would have been about right.  No such luck, but we did have fun going through massive photo albums and scrap books.  This image fell out of one of them - certainly a familiar scene for Avonians who have been in the Quad houses or the corner classrooms.

I learned that Grampa had been a tennis "ace" in his day, that he was teaching at the University of Wisconsin while earning his PhD, and that he taught at Lawrence College in Wisconsin, where my mother would later enroll.  I also confirmed that when he left Avon in 1944 he became Acting Headmaster at The Gunnery.  The stroll down memory lane also reminded me of a story involving Grampa, Avon, and Islesboro.  It seems that during World War II those in charge of gas rationing would make exceptions for people with long commutes.  So Grampa went to the Rationing Board and announced that he lived at Islesboro, Maine and worked at Avon, Connecticut and thus would need some extra gas.  When they stopped laughing, he added that he only needed to commute once a year, so if he could have the gas necessary for that trip in June and again in August, he would not require any other gas during the year.  It worked!

The Political Process

In the Founder's Era, the student government was very active.  Indeed, the student government levied taxes on the students, and, as you might expect, said taxes were frequently a topic of discussion at Town Meetings.  In the February, '35 Town Meeting, one enterprising student asked why the faculty was not also taxed (it turns out the students lacked the authority to tax the faculty).  Next came a question about a luxury tax on victrolas and crystal sets, with one student pointing out that crystal sets did not use electricity as radios did.  This led to a discussion of the purpose of the taxes and the uses to which the collected funds were put.  The Avon Weekly News-letter's account of the discussion concludes as follows: “It further came out in the discussion that some of the radio license fees was used for restocking the streams on the estate with fish, which prompted Grisom Bettle to spout the following surprising bit: ‘What if the boys with radios and crystal sets don’t like to eat fish?‘  Frankly, no one knew."   

Frustration

With the boys having gone home for the summer over two weeks ago, one might think I would now be able to devote many of my waking hours to this project.  Not so much.  Two late defections from the faculty and some other more routine work have so far conspired to keep me focused primarily on next year at school rather than the many years that have gone before.  That seems likely to remain unchanged for at least another week, but I do hope to begin injecting interviews into my schedule.  I have spent some of the last week reviewing the Alumni Weekend tapes and being reminded that I did get some good information from those.  That information continues to flow, in fact, as at least one alumnus has embraced the notion of sending email messages with his reminiscences. 
Today, after weeks of intending to do so, I finally got over to Hill-Stead.  Granddad and I took the tour, which was very interesting.  I was struck again by Mr. Pope's incredible art collection.  Monet, Manet, Whistler, Degas, Cassatt - and that is just paintings!  I did not see the fly-in-amber which my God-father, Brooks Shepard, remembered from his visits to Hill-Stead as a child and as a student at Yale (and which I thought I remembered from earlier tours).  When I asked the tour guide about it, she was so distracted by the notion that I knew someone related to TPR that she lost track of the actual question.  My other question was about a pair of portraits in the dining room - almost the only pieces of art the tour guide did not initially identify.  It turns out they are of TPR's paternal grandparents, Alton and Theodate Pope; I asked because huge portraits of the couple adorn one of the walls of the refectory, and I had forgotten who they were.  The school is not featured prominently in the tour, but the guide did point out pictures of TPR on site during construction, talk about the nature of the architecture, and mention that AOF cntinues to function as a secondary school for boys.
If you have not yet done so, get over to see Hill-Stead.

Alumni Weekend

With alumni returning en masse this weekend to celebrate various reunions, I have been able to conduct a few interviews and make some connections that will be important to this project.  Particularly fruitful was the gathering of the 50th reunion class - 1961 - along with some alumni from earlier classes.  The '61 group shared a number of stories about Don Pierpont.  One of my favorites concerned some boys who lived in Eagle.  One of them had the room that overlooks the headmaster's back yard, and these boys had a rope ladder that they used to descend into Don Pierpont's rather substantial gardens for the purpose of indulging in a cigarette or two.  (The provost's garden is an interesting choice of venue, is it not, for schoolboys looking to engage in clandestine smoking!)  One evening, as the boys, who had been discussing the provost and using a favorite derisive nickname, prepared to climb back to their window, they heard a familiar voice say "I hope you are sure those cigarettes are out"!  Of course, like almost any story involving Don Pierpont, it ends with Don taking the boys to HoJo's.  There was a Howards Johnson's on the north side of Route 44 in those days, and that is where Pierpont held court. 
Another story that will certainly get into the book is that Don Pierpont used to write a quotation from Chaucer, "follow your ghost," in students' yearbooks.  I've decided to have each chapter title include a quotation - Mrs. Riddle's is "By their fruits, ye shall know them - and it will be difficult to find a more appropriate quotation for Don Pierpont than "follow your ghost."
There was also a story from a member of the class of '42 who chanced to meet a blinded veteran who had come to the Old Farms Convalescent Hospital and said that the people there had restored his will to live.  Chalk that up as a vote in favor of including a substantial chapter on the Convalescent Hospital.

Put 'em in the stocks!

Shortly after spring break, Ken LaRocque sent over a copy of the school history of Fountain Valley school in Colorado Springs.  Fountain Valley is where Avon's first provost, Francis Froelicher, went when he left Avon.  Several members of the first faculty, which resigned en masse, followed him there.  That history has a very different account of the reason for Froelicher's departure from Avon.  It claims the Froelicher and TPR parted ways when TPR, convinced that discipline was lacking under Froelicker, instructed him to build pillory stocks, the punishment apparatus by which a person was immobilized in a wooden device that secured his hands and head, on campus.  Froelicher, so the story goes, refused of course, and was then shocked to find that TPR had instructed a carpenter to build the stocks anyway.  The history - I think the title is They Wrote Their Own Histories, but I have loaned it to Tim - goes on to report that TPR then summarily dismissed Froelicher during a vacation, not even allowing him to return to campus to gather his things (on this last point it quotes a Froelicher daughter).

This is certainly a juicy story, and it fits in with the image of a TPR who would have rose bushes planted upside-down or chloroform a recalcitrant cat.  I have not, though, come across any other references to pillory stocks on the Avon campus, and the idea runs contrary to a number of stories that underscore TPR's rather generous nature where students were concerned.  Of course, if I were writing the history of Fountain Valley, I would much prefer this story to one that suggests the school's first headmaster - Froelicher was first at Fountain Valley, too - had left his previous job because of his binge drinking.

Sorry for the length of time between posts; it is a hectic time at school (the only times that are not hectic are the vacations), and I have done nothing for this project since the resumption of classes.  However, I am making plans to interview alumni as they come through for the various events taking place in the next several weeks, so I hope to be gathering valuable insight - and entertaining stories - about every era in the school's history.

Milestone of Sorts

So I have completed the draft of "The Founder and Her Era," which takes the history of the school through its closing in '44 and TPR's death in '46.  The central story of the chapter in its present form is (once the school opened) the turmoil between TPR and the people she hired to run the school, and it poses the question "Was TPR an eccentric, meddling founder whose interference nearly drove her school to ruin?"  As is suggested in the last post, my answer is no - I think she was eccentric to a degree, and she definitely wanted to have a say in the operation of her school, but I think people finding that unusual or offensive is more sexist than anything else.
The draft is just over 7,200 words, which suggests to me that The History Press word window of 40-45,000 is probably pretty close.  My guess is that the final version of the chapter will be close to 10,000 words, and chapters on the Pierpont, Trautman, and LaRocque eras will be similar in length.  I have not yet decided what to do with the Old Farms Convalescent Hospital, but there seems to be plenty of material, and certainly that chapter would be significantly shorter.
The reason I think there are another 2,800 words coming for "The Founder and Her Era" is that there is much that is still missing.  I have not yet really thought - or consulted with others - about what needs to be in the chapter, but the current draft, for example, does not mention the Nimrod Club, and it only briefly mentions Verne Priest, the Maine woodsman who help manage the woods on the estate.  To this point, I think only two students are mentioned.  I have not yet formally interviewed anyone, and I have not even finished going through the Weekly News-letter.  Thus, there is a wealth of information about the students and the goings-on of the Founder's Era that I'll have to weave into future drafts.
It is important to me that I do a good job with this period, as the next school historian, working perhaps on the centennial in 2027, will not have the access I do to living memories of the era.  (To a lesser but nonetheless still significant extent, the same may be true of the Pierpont years.)
It does feel good to have reached a milestone of sorts; now at least the "book" is not entirely theoretical.

Names

So the writing is going far more slowly than I had hoped.  I am about 2000 words in, and have covered TPR through the design and building of the school.  I did find that the Lusitania fit in nicely, and I have decided to ignore TPR's interest in psychical research.  Not sure I can get away with that decision; the Avon Weekly News-letter for June of '34 contains a note about the Avon Society for Psychical Research taking a recess for the summer.  Was this an unkind shot at TPR?  If so, did Pete know it (he says he found the note on his desk)?  Just one of a growing list of questions for Pete when next I see him.
In the meantime, I continue to struggle with what to call TPR.  I have been using "Theo" and "Theodate" to this point, but in nearly thirty years at AOF I have never seen or heard her referred to as anything other than either "Theodate Pope Riddle" or "Mrs. Riddle."  Of course, my other choices are "Effie," which is the name her parents chose, and "Miss Theodate," which is what the workmen called her, though not to her face.  My first inclination was to use Theo and Theodate, as her biographer does, until I reached the opening of school in '27, and then to use "Mrs. Riddle," as is the custom at school.  In this century, though, it seems a bit demeaning to define a person in terms of her husband.  I will resist here (and I think in the book) the impulse to comment on TPR's relationship with JWR and the nature of their marriage; even if it was ideal, it is still sexist to define her first and foremost as his wife.  Indeed, TPR fought sexism throughout her career; architecture was a man's world in the first half of the twentieth century.  Dearest of Geniuses begins with the story of the Nugent Publishing Company refusing to include her as planned in a book of prominent New York architects and their work - now that they had discovered she was a woman.  That was in 1915; in 1919, when TPR asked the American Institute of Architects to use her maiden name (because it was her professional name), they ignored the request and listed her as "Theodate Pope Riddle."  I am increasingly of the opinion that much of TPR's reputation for being eccentric and difficult to work with - though she was certainly both, to some degree - was a sexist response to her being a woman with the temerity to take her place in a man's profession and then to insist that she have a voice in the operation of the school she designed, built, and financed.  All that is a long-winded way of saying I am not very comfortable with "Mrs. Riddle" as the name of choice for the book.  I think I will continue using both Theodate and Theo and then see how that reads once the chapter is drafted.  (Presumably, TPR won't come up as frequently in the other chapters.)