Goodbye, Mr. Ashburn

On a recent spring day, two abashed seniors paced up and down in front of the headmaster's house at Brooks School in North Andover, Mass., reading from their textbooks. That was Frank Davis Ashburn's way of punishing them for cutting classes. The ordeal may have been humiliating, but it was far less painful than several lusty whacks from a wooden paddle that the 70-year-old headmaster still uses "when nothing else works."

"Mr. Ashburn," as teachers as well as students address him, is retiring this spring from the boarding school he founded in 1927. It was he who set the tone of the place from the beginning, and over the years he relinquished little of his distinctive style.

True, with 245 students, Brooks had grown too large for Ashburn to continue to bid each student good night with a handshake. His age, too, forced changes. In recent years, he no longer keynoted the "spring cabaret," an annual variety show, with an original poem which included rhyming reference to every student and teacher. Nor could he pitch the slow curves that once mystified batters at student-faculty baseball games. Yet Ashburn preserved what to him mattered most.

No graduate's birthday passed without a card signed, "Aff., F.D.A." Each Sunday he invited some students to his house for scrambled eggs, sausage and bacon. Before every Christmas vacation, he sat in front of a blazing fire in his book-lined study reading Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol to the new boys at his feet. Twice a week he held forth on the Bible and Greek philosophy at the headmaster's class, which was attended by juniors and seniors. He also preached at chapel, which is required five nights a week, as well as on Sunday. "I still believe in hard work, duty, honor, decency and reliability," he declares. "We've never put those values on the shelf."

The son of an Army medical officer, Ashburn was educated at Groton and Yale. He founded Brooks to produce "cultured citizens," which to him means inculcating compassion as well as taste. "When a boy comes here," he says, "I think he's joining a new family and treat him that way."

His "family" has grown to capacity --even though Brooks has refused to follow many other private schools and go coed. This year it had 220 applicants for 80 places and ran no deficit. With the close of the Ashburn years this spring, the era of legendary Eastern boarding-school headmasters comes to an end. The others--men like "Black Jack" Crocker of Groton and Frank Boyden of Deerfield--are long gone.

Brooks, however, has chosen to retain as much of the Ashburn tradition as possible. As his successor, the school picked 35-year-old Peter Aitkens, a former physics teacher at England's Eton College, precisely because he was committed to Ashburn's concept of a small, select boarding school.

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