Goodbye, Mr. Perry
In the grill, over their "peanut betweens" and "Garbo with jams" (English muffins with jam), Exonians last week had two distressing subjects to chew over. They had just lost, 7-to-18, the Big Game with rival Andover, 28 miles away. And their headmaster, tweedy, well-loved Lewis Perry, 68, who had long talked of quitting, had now made it official.
When Lewis Perry became principal of New Hampshire's Phillips Exeter Academy in 1914, he found the school deep in traditions and a $250,000 debt. It had been founded the year Cornwallis surrendered, by John Phillips, whose nephew, Samuel Phillips, started Andover. Daniel Webster went to Exeter; Presidents Lincoln, Grant and Cleveland sent their sons. Other Exonian notables: Booth Tarkington, Robert Benchley, Banker Thomas W. Lament (now president of the trustees).
The student body (a phrase Dr. Perry hates) has jumped from 572 to 725--and each year Exeter turns down five times as many applicants as it accepts. Dr. Perry will leave Exeter embarrassingly rich--with a $10 million endowment, 33 ,new buildings, most of them handsome Georgian brick, and a faculty that has almost tripled. Exonians credit Dr. Perry's fund-raising talent for the school's prosperity. And in fact the biggest gift ($5 million) came from the late oil millionaire, Edward S. Harkness, benefactor of Harvard and Yale, who was no Exonian--just a friend of Perry's. His other friends include hundreds of alumni and parents, students--who see less of him now than their predecessors did--and his grandchildren, who call him "Boo." He was an English professor at Williams College when he was hired for Exeter; but at Exeter he teaches no classes. He is casual, pleasant, hearty, but no backslapper. Summers at Martha's Vineyard he conducts secular Sunday services, reading favorite passages from Tom Sawyer.
Dr. Perry is proud of the democracy he has brought to Exeter. The faculty is practically self-governing, and so, to a large extent, is the student body. Perry abolished fraternities five years ago, because he thought they were too clannish. Exeter spends $105,000 a year on scholarships, has a man searching out likely material among "coal miners and C.I.O. sons," not just to leaven the richer students, but to give poorer ones a good education. Says Perry: "Poor boys can learn a lot from rich boys. There are smart rich boys just as there are dumb poor boys." The schooling Exonians get now includes art, music and science as concessions to modern education, but two years of Latin are still required. "I'm not a brilliant man," says Dr. Perry. "It's the brilliant men who get in trouble. Like that fellow at Chicago" (Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins). He adds, characteristically: "The innovators make great contributions, however." All of Exeter's boys, like college men, are free to wander through the town, call on girls, and even smoke (if they are over 16). Likely as not in their wandering they will meet Dr. Perry careening wildly up the wrong side of some street in his battered jalopy. If they do, they are expected to tip their hats (as they do to all "profs"). In his office, at leisure moments, Dr. Perry munches from a supply of malted milk tablets in his desk, pastes promising after-dinner jokes in a black scrapbook. A favorite: the student from a progressive school who went home with an A in "sandpile." He is one of the best after-dinner speakers in New England.
Dr. Perry asked to be retired by June 1946. He plans to live in Boston, where for ten years he has been president of the hallowed Tavern Club. There he will be just across the Charles River from his distinguished brother, 16 years older, Harvard professor emeritus Bliss Perry, onetime editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who lives in Cambridge. For his successor, Exeter is looking over a list of 100 men. It wants a man like Perry, but younger: between 35 and 45, of college-president caliber.
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