Anniversaries

To the aristocratic Philadelphia suburb of Germantown last week went Mr. Justice Owen Josephus Roberts of the U. S. Supreme Court, Presiding Bishop James DeWolf Perry of the Protestant Episcopal Church, President Thomas Sovereign Gates of the University of Pennsylvania, and hundreds of their oldtime schoolmates at Germantown Academy. All one afternoon Germantown's "old boys" sat on the school grounds, watched a pageant of the Academy's 175-year history. Rightly they felt it a rare thing for a U. S. school to reach the age of 175.

In Boston last week a school became 300 years old. Pedagogs made its anniversary the occasion for a National High School Day. Newsworthy because it is the oldest public school in the U. S.,* Boston Latin School is more newsworthy because it sets almost as much store by the classics as it did 300 years ago and because few schools, public or private, can match its record for brilliant students.

Graduates like to boast that Boston Latin School "dandled Harvard College on its knees." Only five years younger than the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Latin School was founded in Philemon Pormort's kitchen to get the colonists' boys ready for Harvard, which opened a year later. Within a year Master Pormort fell into the heresies of Anne Hutchinson, had to be sternly sent away. In 1714 the school stood on what is now the lawn of Boston's City Hall and Benjamin Franklin was a pupil. In the years before the Revolution its Master was a Loyalist named John Lovell, who had the task of making such ardent young Revolutionists as John Hancock, Samuel Adams, William Hooper and Robert Treat Paine mind their Cicero.

One morning in 1775 young Harrison Gray Otis, famed nephew of famed Patriot James Otis, found his way to school blocked by a column of British troops in marching order, ready to start for Lexington. Student Otis got to his desk just in time to hear Master Lovell, with vast relief, tell his unruly pupils: "War's begun and school's done. Deponite libros*." There was no more school until General Washington's guns blasted the British out of Boston.

In the first half of the 19th Century, Latin School set a steady stream of New Englanders on the road to fame. Among them: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles William Eliot, Senator Charles Graham Sumner, orators like Wendell Phillips and Edward Everett, divines like Edward Everett Hale, Henry Ward Beecher, Phillips Brooks.

The Civil War was fought and shortly Latin School had its own private fight. The school committee wanted to give it a broad, up-to-date program of studies. When the headmaster stood pat, the committee revenged itself by making fantastic changes in the curriculum, and the school went into a slump. After the headmaster died, his successor appeased the committee by adding new courses but left the classics in the saddle.

By that time another disturbing element had arisen. At the desks, where only Yankees had sat before, well-scrubbed Irish faces began to appear. Close on the heels of the Irish came dark-haired, nimble-brained Jews. Yankee families sent their sons out of the city to Andover, Exeter, Groton. Today 95% of Latin School boys are Irish or Jewish. Headmaster Joseph Lawrence Powers, a ruddy, white-thatched, billiard-playing Irishman, is the son of immigrants from County Cavan.

Latin School's younger graduates may yet do it as much honor as the old Yankees. The College Entrance Examination Board is never surprised when Boston Latin boys top all other U. S. students in Latin, Greek, mathematics. At Harvard they regularly form the biggest and smartest bloc of students. Joseph Patrick Kennedy (1908) is now chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission and many an-other bright Latin School graduate has found his way to Washington.

Latin School has a new building in the Boston Fens. Inside is an auditorium seating 2,300 where students last week enacted a pageant of the school's history. Outside is a parade ground where 1,700 boys marched last week in cadet uniforms. But Latin School boys learn their lesson as they always have--by grinding long hours over their books. Headmaster Powers hates "frills" with all the vigor of his Yankee predecessors. Harvard's President Emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell turned up at the tercentenary exercises to praise Latin School's "insistence on hard work and its methods of self-education." Many an old Latin School boy nodded approvingly at the message which Philosopher George Santayana (1882) sent to his schoolmates: "The merely modern man never knows what he is about. A Latin education, far from alienating us from our own world, teaches us to discern the amiable traits in it. . . ."

* Oldest private school is Manhattan's Collegiate School, founded by the Dutch in 1633.

* "Put away books."

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