"Like Lima Beans"

St. John's College at Annapolis, third oldest in the U. S. (founded 1696), was until 1923 a military institution. Surprisingly, it had no military president until then, when Major Enoch Barton Garey, a brisk, sturdy graduate of St. John's and West Point, military science professor at Johns Hopkins, became its head. Also surprisingly Major Garey, though his manual of arms textbook is standard in U. S. colleges, abolished military training at St. John's. Major Garey worked for the cultural improvement of St. John's, but he and the trustees disagreed on policies and in 1929 his resignation was announced. Last year able Douglas Huntly Gordon, 30, became president of St. John's.

Major Garey went to work for Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., cultivated his farm, played with his seven children, pondered pedagogy. Last week he announced that next autumn he will open a school for boys. He has acquired "Oakington," the 550-acre estate of the late Commodore Leonard Richards on Chesapeake Bay near Aberdeen, Md. Designed by Stanford White, it contains 25 rooms and a ballroom. Adjacent are a model farm, a garden with venerable boxwood, enough tenant houses for 100 boys and faculty members. The school will be "progressive," carry learning-by-doing to its extreme. Grey-haired at 49, Major Garey talks of his plans, sometimes dreamily with closed eyes, sometimes in dynamic barks. Says he:

"Intellectual power grows like lima beans. ... I believe that every boy should be introduced to the elements of the sciences nearer six than 16 years of age. . . .

The time to study botany is when a boy loves to pick dandelions and bring them to his mother. . . . The time to study biology is when a boy throws stones at a bullfrog and climbs trees for birds' nests. . . . The school will train boys to do something today--not only tomorrow. Boys, if trained in this way, will never fear College Board exams.''

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