Word: preps
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was probably born ten years too late. When Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated for his first term, Schlesinger was in prep school (Phillips Exeter Academy"), and today he writes of the New Deal with the nostalgia usually found in men who have narrowly missed a famous war. Schlesinger. now 41. sentimentally evokes memories that could not possibly be his own: "The interminable meetings, the litter of cigarette stubs, the hasty sandwich at the desk . . . the call from the White House, the postponed dinner, the neglected wife, the office lights burning late into the night, the lilacs hanging...
...schools were downright unsanitary. The rest rooms were so bad the kids wouldn't even go to the bathroom. And the curriculum was just as bad." In 1953 a friend jokingly challenged him to run for the school board. A self-styled Renaissance man who never went beyond prep school (Choate), Hiss took the dare, to his surprise wound up as the first Republican elected to the school board since Reconstruction days...
After the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Council turned down his proposal to legalize a year at prep school for prospective service athletes, Navy athletic director Captain Slade Cutter remarked, "I guess we will have to operate a prep program, the way the Ivy League colleges...
...page of unselective trivia has been set down, the reader finds himself aching for an earplug. O'Hara continues to describe the nuances of social habit with rare authority in a society in which social flux continuously alters the symbols of prestige. But the snobbism of the right prep school, the right club, the right street in the right exurb becomes so intrusive that Terrace often reads like a gigantic menu...
...have no generalizations to offer about the Mid-West and the East. There are differences, none of them shocking, and most of them superficial. I think it may be easier for a youngster who wants to study to do so here, without having to hide it. And the old prep school myth--what they used to call 'lack of serious-mindedness'--doesn't seem to be true...