Word: northfield
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Murdered. Rev. Elliott Speer, 35, headmaster of the Northfield (Mass.) Mount Hermon School for Boys, son of Robert Elliott Speer, secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions; by a shotgun discharged through his study window by an unknown assailant...
...Speer, 35, headmaster. Like hundreds of other schoolmasters, he was just back from vacation to prepare for another term. A few boys and proctors were back too, but most of them would not arrive until school opened the following week. The 2,500-acre campus, in the hills near Northfield, lay summer quiet. As was his nightly habit, Headmaster Speer sat with notebook in hand planning his next day's schedule...
...late, great Evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody founded Mount Hermon in 1881, two years after its sister, Northfield Seminary for Girls. There in an austere atmosphere thousands of boys and girls from pious homes have received a Christian, practical education, with two hours work per day on farm or in shop for rich and poor alike. To Northfield, too, have gone thousands of men and women for its famed summer conferences at which they refreshed their spiritual roots. There in 1926 went young Elliott Speer, fresh from a term as chaplain at LaFayette, to succeed Founder Moody's son William...
...secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, was at the height of his fame as the most powerfully emotional preacher of his day. Classmates who met Elliott Speer five years out of college found an affable young man no less religious but well-geared to his own generation. Northfield quickly felt his liberalizing touch. He allowed his boys to smoke, to have parties, to visit the girls at the sister school. Energetic and able, he launched a $3,000,000 fund-raising campaign, carried it to success despite the early intervention of Depression...
Police who swarmed over Northfield's campus last week had no trouble reconstructing the murder-someone lurked on a macadam path outside the study until Headmaster Speer stood up, then fired a shotgun pointblank through the window. But of weapon, killer or motive they could find no trace...