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horns, angry pedestrians and shrieking sirens as the police rushed to investigate the commotion. After the formal picture was done, the Headmaster persuaded the policemen to join us inside for a special snack of delicious blue and gold cupcakes! In fact, Founder’s Day is the main reason that I was hired to teach at Allen-Stevenson in the first place, way back in the summer of 1982 – when dinosaurs roamed the Upper East Side, and I was a twenty-four year old girl with a lot more confidence than experience. It was also Miss Kyte’s first year! As I have noted, this was Allen-Stevenson’s hundredth, and the Headmaster at that time, an extraordinary gent named Desmond Cole, was looking for someone to create and direct a spectacular centennial pageant to cover every decade that A-S had been open – and to help teach English and history in Classes VIII and IX as well with Mr. John Pariseau, who was fiendishly busy setting up A-S’s first ever computer program and lab that year.
Caroline Franklin Berry taught English and history at Allen-Stevenson, was the Ninth Grade Homeroom Teacher and enjoyed assisting David Kersey h’98 in directing everything from Shakespeare to melodrama for the A-S stage. She is now the Associate Headmaster at The Buckley School in New York.
caroline Berry sPeaKs at FoUnDers Day It is my honor and true delight to be back at Allen-Stevenson, my first and much-loved school, and the place where I learned not only that I wanted to be a teacher and mentor, but that I dearly loved teaching and working in boys schools. I will never forget my first Founders Day here at A-S: it was the centennial year of the School’s opening and the schedule was packed with activities to celebrate the completion of the first hundred years in 1983. We had a wonderful school-wide picnic at the oval in Central Park and released a hundred balloons in blue and gold after all the boys had completed a lap around the track in their centennial tee shirts to celebrate Mr. Allen’s and Mr. Stevenson’s deeply held belief in Mens Sane in Corpore Sano, “a healthy mind in a healthy body”. I have a photo of the day we closed down 78th Street to traffic, herded the boys outside to form the number “one hundred” in numerals in the street, made a wobbly “1” and two wavy zeros composed of madly gesticulating arms, legs and heads, and took a picture of all the boys looking up as the photographer snapped it from the sixth floor window. The scene was unforgettable and the neighborhood was a blur of confetti tossed from the windows by Lower and Middle Schoolers, the shrill of flutes and clarinets from members of the orchestra playing on the sidewalk, honking taxi 22
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I was fresh from Harvard, where I had been the author of two of their famous all-male musicals, The Hasty Pudding shows, and I am sure that it was this line on my resume, and the fact that I was obviously well-versed in working with boys, albeit boys pretending to be girls, and my facility with the written word as an English major, that decided him on giving me the job. When I showed up that first day for school, I sensed the joy and excitement in the air as boys of all classes saw their friends and teachers again after the long summer apart, and I heard them calling, “How was your summer, sir?” “Sir, Sir! I brought you back a fossil from my trip to Arizona!” “Sir, did you get the postcard of Pompeii I sent you?” and I knew I was going to love being at Allen-Stevenson. For me, it felt like coming home. You see, although I am not now, nor ever have I been, an actual boy like any of you, I am nonetheless a proud and happy graduate of two boys schools. In 1971, when I was graduating from The Town School over on 76th and The East River, the great and iconic New York City boys school, Trinity, had just made the momentous and much debated choice to open its doors to what it called “girl scholars” after over 250 years of all male education. I was one of twenty girls to join its first coed freshman class and as soon as I walked through the doors of that ancient boys school, I knew I had found the kind of place where I would thrive. I loved the sense of honor, the loyalty and the courage that boys schools foster – and I responded immediately to the strong culture of warmth and respect between the boys and their teachers and coaches, all summed up in that single affectionate word, “Sir.” I loved the emphasis on team sports, on competition not against one another, but with your