Word: avon
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Your fairly accurate account of Mrs. Riddle and Avon Old Farms [TIME, March 22] repeats a myth, unjust to the memory of a headmaster of the school who suffered for ten years under her devastating domination, and ended broken in health and mind. His name was not selected from the telephone directory; he was suggested for the position by the dean of a theological seminary in New York...
...alumnus of Avon Old Farms, class of '36, I ... resent your calling Avon "a fancy prep school for rich kids"; it was nothing of the sort. . . . Avon was a school especially designed to develop individual tendencies in every boy who went there. By the system of "Community Service" at the farm, stables, in the woods, in the garage, in the power house, in student government, etc., each student was taught something practical, along with studies and sports. The school was MEANT to be entirely different from Taft, Choate, Kent and all the rest, which tended to turn out "types...
...directory, looking for likely sounding names among the clergy. When Brooks Brothers was unable to supply grey flannels because of wartime shortages, the clergyman-provost told the boys to wear what they pleased. Mrs. Riddle was outraged, and the provost resigned. Shortly after, in 1944, Founder Riddle shut down Avon and turned over the property to President Roosevelt, a family friend, for use as an Army school for the blind. Its purposely crooked brick walls, sagging stone stairs and mazelike character made it a natural for sightless veterans learning to "braille along...
...laid down for them. Then they hit on Pierpont. The new head, a University of Richmond graduate (he flunked out of Johns Hopkins), was a headmaster of the lower form at a Baltimore school, later bossed a World War II Navy school. The first time he saw Avon Old Farms, he said, "I felt as if I had walked into the middle of a Charles Addams cartoon...
Pierpont was willing to comply with the minor provisions of Avon's code, such as fly-casting and a school uniform (now modified, at night, to a dark jacket), so long as he didn't have to be too literal about the major ones. Particularly, he doesn't believe, as Mrs. Riddle did, that there is one class privileged to produce gentlemen. He is as anxious to turn out gentlemen as she was, but believes that they can be made, not necessarily prenatally. Without Mrs. Riddle to make up its $25,000 a year losses, Avon will...