The Wrong Attitude

When Chanler Armstrong Chapman went to St. Paul's School in 1915, he had a family reputation to live down. His father (Literary Critic John Jay Chapman) had attended that haughty, Episcopalian institution during the reign of "the First Man of God"--the late, great Headmaster Henry Augustus Coit--and had been expelled because he went too far even for pious St. Paul's: in the midst of a cricket game he suddenly knelt and prayed in front of the wicket. Chanler never was expelled, but his conduct at St. Paul's was, if anything, worse than his father's.

Fortnight ago, after brooding over St.Paul's for 21 years, Mr. Chapman, now a dairy farmer in Barrytown, N.Y., told his story and the low-down on his famous old school in a book: The Wrong Attitude: A Bad Boy at a Good School (Putnam-$1.50).

Mr. Chapman named no names, identified St. Paul's: "It was a great big scnool named after a great big powerful Saint, whom some of us boys thought a little narrow-minded. The place was full of tradition. It was one of the oldest boarding schools in New England. The hockey was good and the scholarship did the best it could."

But old St. Paul boys cannot mistake the characters pilloried in The Wrong Attitude. One, whom Chanler grew to dis like so ardently that he carried a piece of lead pipe to swing whenever he thought of him, was "Chappie"-- St. Paul's famed Housemaster Willard "Chappie" Scudder. Chappie wore a bifocal pince-nez and a drooping, waxed mustache, dressed in the height of fashion, was thoroughly at home at lawn parties,"never let his slight paunch get to be more than a slight paunch," in every way exemplified "the right attitude."

Chanler scandalized the school by major breaches of good form. He jumped into an icy pond (strictly forbidden) to win a $50 bet, got kicked out of the Concordian Literary Society for reciting nasty verses, bootlegged pistols to his schoolmates. His crowning escapade was a clandestine prize fight he staged to raise money to buy a motorcycle. Having primed his second to soak his gloves with water so that he could hit his opponent harder, Chanler went six rounds against a bigger boy before 150 delighted schoolmates (who paid $1 each), was knocked out in the seventh when his gloves got so heavy he could scarcely lift them. The Rector summoned Chanler, ordered him to return the spectators' money. Almost to a boy, the they insisted they had got their money's worth, made him keep their dollars.

Discouraged by faculty preachments about his attitude, Chanler was walking down the school street one day when the school's disciplinary master (known as "the Jeep") overtook him and quietly remarked: "Chanler, you have got just as many friends here as you ever had. You'd better come back next year." After 21 years, Chanler Chapman con cluded: "All that happened was that I learned a sense of proportion. ... I had the best time I ever had in any institution, committed more crimes and follies, led the forces of rebellion and disorder . . . and, because of a dozen dry words spoken haphazardly by one man, suffered no ap parent ill effects from my fun."

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