Two Departures

Last week two great headmasters of two great boys' prep schools announced their retirement:

> In the green hills of Connecticut a small, pudgy-faced Episcopal priest 35 years ago rented a farmhouse and started Kent School. Kent became famous for great crews, for the "Kent idea" (pupils do the school housekeeping chores, pay tuition according to their means). Last week it became known that the man who coached the crews and originated the idea, Father Frederick Herbert Sill, had sent Kent old boys a note beginning: "I am very happy." Reason: the trustees had elected a new headmaster -- 33-year-old, Scottish-born William Scott Chalmers, Princeton '29. In this characteristically self-effacing way Father Sill, ill since last year, let his boys know that he had decided at 67 to pull up stakes.

> John Wayne ("Big Dick") Richards did not found suburban Chicago's Lake Forest Academy, but he made it a Midwestern counterpart of the exclusive Eastern prep schools. He also introduced the Richards Plan, a highly successful system of rotating class periods and supervised study. Last week Big Dick, wasted by an illness in which he had lost 45 lb., announced that in July he would turn over his job to a successor: slender, athletic Harvardman E. Francis Bowditch, 29, now headmaster of Indianapolis' Park School.

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