Goodbye to the Chief

It was stern, strict, and snobbish--a cold facsimile of an English public school. Boys were belted for the most minor offenses; some tried to run away. Sons of the poor, who came on scholarships, were called "rats" by wealthier students. St. Albans School for boys, owned by the Cathedral Foundation (Episcopal) in Washington, D.C., was that sort of place 20 years ago.

Then came a new headmaster--a big, twinkly-eyed Episcopal clergyman named Albert Hawley Lucas. He had been a Marine private during World War I, later assistant headmaster at Pennsylvania's Episcopal Academy. He dressed in tweeds, liked to smoke pipes, played goal on the faculty soccer team. The boys at St. Albans soon found themselves calling him "Chief."

In time, things began to change around St. Albans. The school kept strictly to its Episcopal curriculum: daily chapel, courses in Christian ethics, sacred studies, and a thorough study of the Old and New Testaments. But the beltings stopped, and no one tried to run away any more. St. Albans doubled in size (351 students), became the top boys' prep school in Washington, where the sons of diplomats and Senators went.

During all those years, Headmaster Lucas didn't change much. Though he became a canon of his cathedral and assistant to the Bishop of Washington, he never learned to be formal. If he heard that some teacher's wife had suddenly been taken ill, he would still rush headlong out of a conference to see that she got proper care; once, when he attended a Halloween party in his old Marine uniform, he danced so hard that the pants split down the middle. The Christianity he taught was never stern. "He could have been any kind of clergyman," said one alumnus. "He was a priest for the Catholics, a rabbi for the Jews."

When Albert Lucas first took over St. Albans, he told his Bishop that, God willing, he would like to stay for 20 years--but no longer. Last week the 20 years were about up, and the Chief announced that in June he would retire; he wanted to spend the next years of his life in a parish of his own. "The Episcopal Church has about 1,000 vacancies," says he, "I'm not much worried about getting a place."

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