Exeter's 150th

In the extreme Southeast corner of New Hampshire, 50 mi. north of Boston, is the town of Exeter, where John Phillips in 1781 founded Phillips Exeter Academy. Twenty-five miles nearer Boston is Andover, where John's nephew. Samuel, founded Phillips Academy one year earlier. (His school later became "Phillips Academy at Andover" to distinguish it from his uncle's school at Exeter.) Exeter and Andover have flourished mightily, until today they are the twin giants of prep schools in size and in prestige. Other schools are certainly more fashionable, possibly more potent scholastically, improbably more prolific in first-string athletes. But no other schools have the glamour of Exeter and Andover, whose histories are as long as their rosters of students.

Last week Thomas William Lament, outstanding Morgan partner, went back to Exeter, whence he was graduated in 1888, strolled about the elm-shaded Yard, greeted friends and classmates, some 2,000, who like him had come back to the old school to celebrate her 150th birthday. From the Yard Mr. Lament could not see the modern, red-brick Lament Infirmary, whose crack contagious ward is an echo of the time Mr. Lamont had scarlet fever at Exeter.* But he could see the modest basement offices of the school paper, the Exonian, where his sons, Corliss and Austin ("Egg"), spent much of their time while at Exeter. His reminiscing over, Mr. Lamont went to the new Thompson baseball cage and presided over an alumni luncheon, where he read a letter of congratulation from President Hoover and where another Morgan man talked: Vernon Munroe, president of Exeter's General Alumni Association. As Mr. Lamont looked around the tables, he saw such alumni as Senator George Higgins Moses (New Hampshire), '87, Roland William Boyden, '81, Bernard Walton Trafford, '89, and George Arthur Plimpton, '73.

But, true to its New England traditions, Exeter welcomed to its 150th anniversary not primarily men of wealth or family but men of learning. At the commemorative exercises, the platform was crowded with the deans and presidents of the great Eastern colleges and schools. Speech of the day was that of President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, of Harvard, who asked for less coddling and babying in modern education, declared that a child should read "fluently" at five and "certainly at six" and went on to say: "This retardation runs through the whole process. In the secondary school we study what should have been finished earlier; in college we do what should have been done at school. . . ."

More felicitous a theme could not have been chosen. For Exeter, with its sister school Andover, is noted for its grown-up atmosphere. Its students are older and more mature than in most prep schools. Many of them come from the small manufacturing towns of Massachusetts and New Hampshire to work their way through Exeter by waiting on table at Alumni Hall and doing odd jobs around the school and town. Few boys who need special attention find their way to Exeter, or last long after getting there. There are few rules. Smoking is allowed in the rooms though not on the street; seniors must be in their dormitory by ten, all others by eight; there is no "lights out" time. The chief faculty check on undergraduate amusements is the famed, and perhaps legendary. "Black List" of town girls. To be seen with a girl on this list means instant expulsion. This freedom, almost that of a college undergraduate, stems largely from the practice of letting students room in private houses around the town instead of concentrating them in dormitories. Though the new dormitories recently built have greatly reduced the number of "out students," the idea that a student's extra curricular activities are his own business still persists. Even the force of public opinion, so powerful in smaller schools, is comparatively weak in Exeter, where one can read Shelley or collect butterflies without running any bodily risk.

Though its roots go back a century and a half, Exeter has grown too big and heterogeneous for local color to survive in appreciable quantities. The school has its drink (the "lead shot": a fearful mixture of the sweetest and heaviest syrups of the soda fountain), its venerable professor (James Arthur ["Tuffie"] Tufts, hollow-eyed, white-mustached professor of English), its mode of celebrating mighty victories (keeping the great bell in the Academy Building clanging for hours, building huge bonfires out on the Plimpton playing fields). But the great Exeter tradition is, of course, the rivalry with Andover, which is all the more comparable to the Harvard-Yale rivalry because Exeter has been a predominantly Harvard school (though of late she has sent many sons to Yale and Princeton) and Andover has long been almost completely Yale. And so the climax of the sesquicentennial celebration, for the rank and file of alumni and boys, was not the impressive official ceremonies but rather the 50th Exeter-Andover baseball game, which was played at Exeter in the glow of the evening sun and which resulted in a victory for Exeter, 4~to-2.

Ancient though it is. Exeter is changing today more rapidly than any other prep school. For last November Philanthropist Edward Stephen Harkness, no Exeter man, gave $7,000,000 for a House plan, salary increases, and new dormitories (TIME, Dec. 1). Also active was the late Col. William Boyce Thompson, who spent much of his great mining wealth in giving Exeter a big modern gymnasium, athletic, science and administration buildings and, last year, $1,000,000 more (TIME, April 14, 1930). At present the school has, in addition to these, some 650 students from far & wide, 65 teachers, many handsome Georgian buildings, a Gothic church designed by Ralph Adams Cram, one of the outstanding prep school libraries, and an endowment of over $6,000,000. Many of the blessings enumerated above, those coming from Mr. Harkness in particular, must be credited to Exeter's headmaster: Lewis Perry, brother of Bliss Perry, famed former Harvard English professor and onetime Editor of the Atlantic Monthly. After teaching at Lawrenceville School and at Williams, his alma mater (class of 1898), he came to Exeter in 1914. No scholar, he does not teach at Exeter, spends much time away from school spreading Exter's fame and obtaining endowments.

*Andover, too, has its Morgan partner: Thomas Cochran, class of 1890, whose many sifts, the latest being the school's new art gallery (TIME, May 25), have made him Andover's greatest benefactor. Of late years the school has become his all-absorbing interest.

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