Word: avon
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There it sat, an $18 million imitation English village, spang in the midst of the Connecticut countryside. An eccentric old woman had built Avon Old Farms as the spit & image of a Cotswold village, with carefully warped roofs, rippled window panes, synthetically worn stairs. She had meant it for a boys' school. There were no students at Avon last week. The only sign of schoolboy life was a boy named Butch, busy tacking up college pennants in a monklike cubicle in one of the dormitories, installing model airplanes, and littering up the joint after the fashion of twelve-year...
...Avon had been a fancy prep school for rich kids until the middle of World War II. Now it was getting ready to reopen in the fall. The school's new head had hired Butch (for 50? a week) to live in the place, so he could see how an ordinary boy would improve on the carefully arranged surroundings. The new head, Provost Donald W. Pierpont, 41, needed all the hints he could get to make sense out of the "Deed of Trust" that the school's founder had left behind...
Sidewalk Superintendent. Avon was started in 1927 by the late Mrs. Theodate Pope Riddle, domineering daughter of a steel millionaire and wife of a onetime U.S. Ambassador to czarist Russia. An admirer of the medieval and a semiprofessional architect, she personally sidewalk-superintended the construction of Avon Old Farms, twelve miles out of Hartford. Only hand-hewn stone and oak were used, and bricklayers had to rip out rows of crude bricks because they laid them in too straight to suit Mrs. Riddle (it cost her $125,000 to do over the dining-hall roof...
...Avon, wrote Mrs. Riddle firmly, "was founded for the sons of the gentry. ... It is difficult, if not impossible, for Avon to develop [honor and culture] in a boy, if he has not been trained in early years." She expected the well-born youngsters to wear black ties and dark jackets by night, Brooks Brothers grey flannels by day, play no interscholastic sport except polo, learn fly-casting and the manly art of self-defense...
Died. William George Tyrrell, first Baron of Avon, 80, president of the Board of Censors of Britain's booming film industry, onetime (1928-34) British Ambassador to France; in London...