Bulletin 125 Combined History

common roots / shared purpose Celebrating 125 Years of Choate Rosemary Hall by g. jeffrey macdonald ’87

4 I. VISION & LEADERSHIP TRADITIONS TAKE ROOT 1890–1915

20 II. GRIT & DETERMINATION THE CALL TO SHARED SACRIFICE 1915–1940

38 III. GROWTH & PROSPERITY PREPARING FOR LEADERSHIP 1940–1965

50 IV. INCLUSION & ACCESS THE WINDS OF CHANGE 1965–1990

62 V. TRADITION & INNOVATION TAPPING OLD ROOTS IN FRESH WAYS 1990–2015

FOREWARD As we celebrated our 125th milestone during the past 15 months, more than 2,200 friends of the School gathered in locations around the world to mark this important occasion. A brilliant fireworks display, in honor of our 125th, capped the 2015 Deerfield Pep Rally on campus for our students.

We also celebrated this milestone event through the pages of the Bulletin – the Magazine

of Choate Rosemary Hall – in a five-part series with the overarching theme “Common Roots, Shared Purpose.” What struck me, and I hope will resonate with you as you read the insightful installments of our history by journalist G. Jeffrey MacDonald ’87, is the modernity of our founders’ vision, one that would guide us, keep us on course, and retain its relevancy for us well into the 21st century.

In 1890, Headmistress Caroline Ruutz-Rees committed to the ideal that her

academic institution would be a rigorous purveyor of the “latest ideas in modern education.” Founder William Gardner Choate became firmly rooted in the principle of character formation for his boys – a hallmark that Headmaster George St. John would continue to make his own for the next 40 years. How remarkable that these two guiding principles have held the test of time and are reflected in our current mission statement: “Two interwoven priorities define the Choate Rosemary Hall experience: a rigorous academic curriculum and an emphasis on the formation of character.”

For more than 125 years Rosemary Hall, The Choate School, and Choate Rosemary

Hall have raised standards and prepared students for yet unimagined futures. We cannot wait to see what the next chapter will bring!

Alex D. Curtis Headmaster June 1, 2016

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vision & leadership traditions take root / 1890-1915 by g. jeffrey macdonald ’87

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Reinterpreting the cornerstone educational

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mission would become a guiding principle – an enduring, even defining trait – not only for Rosemary Hall but also for The Choate School and for the later Choate Rosemary Hall, which celebrates 125 years in 2015.

photographs courtesy of choate rosemary hall archives

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Mary Atwater Choate.

Tinted miniature painted on ivory, undated.

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Advertisement for Rosemary Hall from Forum Magazine, 1895

Map of Wallingford, 1883.

Highlights the properties of Judge Choate, the Atwater Family, and Miss Curtis, that would become the future location of the School

From the moment Rosemary Hall first opened its doors as a school for girls in October 1890, its students were tracked for more than one type of success.

The most intellectually oriented would be groomed for the likes of Bryn Mawr College while others would focus on practical skills befitting a “finished” lady of that time. Along the way, all would master how to cook a good meal and mend a torn sock.

Yet by the early 1900s, the Rosemary Hall experience would be far more uniform – and unconventional. Gone were the domestic arts as a focus; every girl would now be on a college preparatory track. Mastery in the classics, from Greek grammar to productions of Shakespearean plays, would be among the marks of a well-formed Rosemarian. The philosophy that girls could and should be classically trained for new roles in the future made Rosemary Hall as avant-garde as it was steeped in tradition.

This shift happened as the first generation of leaders laid claim to the original vision. No sooner had Mary Atwater Choate founded Rosemary Hall than her ideas underwent a radical reinterpretation under the influence of the first headmistress, Caroline Ruutz-Rees. What emerged in the process was not only a premier boarding school for girls; institutional DNA was also becoming evident.

WALLINGFORD

But first, the social justice vision of a social entrepreneur would need translating for a fledgling school in the Connecticut countryside.

As the wife of a federal judge and a fifth-generation heir to Wallingford’s Rosemary Farm, Mrs. Choate leveraged her status in society to create opportunities for women in an era before social safety nets existed. In 1878, she founded the New York Exchange for Woman’s Work, where women could sell everything from chicken pies to mittens – and keep a whopping 75 percent of the selling price.

Her passion for helping women on every rung of society’s ladder led her to the field of education. She envisioned a school where girls of mixed abilities could grow their minds and talents. From that dream came the establishment of Rosemary Hall at the family farm in Connecticut, where Mrs. Choate and her husband, William, spent their summers.

“The special object of Rosemary Hall will be to foster any talent discovered in its pupils and to teach those who are not specially gifted to make a study of some practical subject,” the New Haven Morning News reported when Rosemary Hall opened in Atwater House at the corner of Christian and Elm streets. “Housekeeping will form an important feature of the school course.”

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There are three foundation stones of our education, “They are athletic games, self-government, and hard intellectual work. On those three things we depend for the right training of the body, soul, and spirit.

–caroline ruutz-rees 1941 essay, education

RUUTZ-REES, HOWEVER, WASN’ T CONVINCED GIRLS SHOULD BE TRAINED SOLELY FOR PRESENT-DAY OPPORTUNITIES. She foresaw more doors opening

to future generations, perhaps with a nudge from her well-trained alumnae. She believed they should be ready for such changes, whenever they might come, and her school would reflect that ethos, more and more, over time.

A London-born immigrant and tireless advocate for women’s suffrage, Ruutz-Rees was committed to “the latest ideas of modern education,” as one reporter observed.

This meant providing experiences that virtually no one expected girls to have in those days: college preparatory academics, competitive sports, and a unique self-government system in which they would craft a school constitution, then enforce their own rules.

Rosemary girls weren’t allowed to be homebodies.

They busily learned a range of sports: basketball, field hockey, and cricket. When snows fell, they’d grab sleds and take to the hills. When they weren’t studying the poetry of Homer or Keats, they might be practicing lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream or learning to appreciate the works of Beethoven and Schumann.

Domestic arts remained an important part of the program, at least in the early years. Mrs. Choate personally handed out Prize Day awards in cooking and sewing in 1896.

But by that time, Ruutz-Rees was reportedly already in conversations to relocate Rosemary Hall to another part of the state, where she could prepare girls for opportunities as she saw fit. The Choates were looking ahead, too, to the fall of 1896, when the new Choate School would welcome its first four students to Wallingford.

Caroline Ruutz-Rees, 1894.

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Rosemary Hall basketball team, 1899. Rosemary Hall won its first match ever when challenged by the New Haven Normal School in 1894.

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Rosemary Hall Constitution from 1913-14 Handbook

“A girl too anxious to please does not make a good committeeman, but, then, neither does one whose self-satisfied noise is always in the air. The committee is the executive of your own laws and that fact should be always before both them and you.”

–caroline ruutz-rees letter to girls, october 31, 1905

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1905 Boys baseball team Portrait of Mark Pitman, first headmaster of The Choate School, 1896-1905 Mountain Day, 1901. On the first day of spring, the whole school piled into a large wagon and headed for the nearby hills to picnic. Dr. Huntington Atwater is pictured at far left.

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“It seemed that the most useful private school for boys – the type of school most needed in the community – should be, not in name only, but in reality, a home school – a school in which the boys should fall under influences similar to those which they would be subject to in a well-regulated family.”

–judge choate recalling headmaster mark pitman’s founding vision in a 1906 speech at the school

Judge William G. Choate.

Tinted miniature painted on ivory, undated

TOO MANY BOYS, IN THEIR VIEW, WERE COMING OF AGE WITHOUT THE BENEFIT OF RIGOROUS SCHOLASTIC TRAINING IN A LOVING HOME ENVIRONMENT.

Judge Choate tapped his friend Mark Pitman, an experienced New Haven teacher, to lead a school where boys as young as nine would study subjects from math to literature and drama as part of a well-rounded education.

Judge Choate recalled Pitman’s founding vision in a 1906 speech at the School.

“To him,” Judge Choate said, “it seemed that the most useful private school for boys – the type of school most needed in the community – should be, not in name only, but in reality, a home school – a school in which the boys should fall under influences similar to those which they would be subject to in a well-regulated family.”

As both the visionary and first headmaster of the boys’ school, Pitman created with his own hands what he thought a “home school” should be. The trappings of family life were everywhere. Students lived in Squire Stanley, where they began their days with family-style prayers and studied academic subjects with Pitman, who earned a reputation for fatherly strictness. Mrs. Choate’s brother, Dr. Huntington Atwater, taught gardening and woodworking. Pitman’s three daughters worked as assistants and instructors in piano, voice, and art, which gave the boys what was seen as an essential motherly presence in their lives.

The School was to be a place “where relationships between boys and masters would be of an intimate character that exists between a boy and his parents, and where also the influence of a woman – the integral part of every true home – should be distinctly felt in refining the manner and character of the pupils,” Judge Choate recalled.

Like any good home, The Choate School offered many types of wholesome recreation. Camping and canoe outings on the Quinnipiac River felt like braving the Amazon, as John Dos Passos, Class of 1911, recalled decades later, even though the water smelled of whale oil soap from Meriden’s silver factories upriver.

Every season brought its distinct joys. “I remember wonderful bobsledding and tobogganing,” Dos Passos said in his recollection. “What I particularly enjoyed was taking hitches … on the baker’s and the milkman’s sleighs and being towed for miles around the countryside.”

This original home school vision fit what could barely be called a campus in those days. The main buildings of both schools – Squire Stanley for boys, Atwater House for girls – could easily be mistaken for ordinary residences rather than school buildings. Such homey environs seemed, at the time, essential to the Choate vision. But, as at Rosemary Hall, early hallmarks of a Choate education would soon give way to a broader, bolder interpretation of the core mission.

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ALONG THE WAY, CHOATE AND ROSEMARY HALL WOULD SPEND FOUR YEARS GROWING SIDE-BY-SIDE.

The fit could be awkward at times. Rosemary’s students were older than Choate’s, in some cases by nearly 10 years, and their school was maturing as quickly as its students. Rosemary traditions were becoming firmly established, such as the Sixth Form Walk, which was more a pilgrimage than a stroll. Girls would cover the countryside, logging some 45 miles over several days.

Their triumphant return involved marching arm-in-arm down Christian Street as they sang the 23rd Psalm.

Meanwhile, Choate boys were supplementing their academics with any measure of practical skill they could pick up and immediately deploy. Dr. Atwater, the school physician, engaged “their minds for future usefulness” by teaching basic carpentry and gardening, according to recollections of Marvin Vincent, Class of 1904. Chores were indispensable; the School couldn’t be built without them.

“What work was put on our tennis court!” Vincent recalled. “From early morning till supper time we hoed and raked and really succeeded admirably.”

Despite some age differences, boys and girls still found occasional opportunities to mingle. At Halloween 1899, Choate boys invited the Rosemary girls to a dance. Much to their delight, the young ladies arrived in costume as dairy maids and princesses. Boys, dressed up as kings and Indians, twirled their guests by the light of jack-o-lanterns.

The next year, however, Ruutz-Rees made a move that would set her stamp on Rosemary Hall. With support from Greenwich businessman Julian Curtiss and others, she relocated Rosemary Hall to Greenwich, where Curtiss set up a corporation for the School and made Ruutz-Rees the largest shareholder. Now she’d be fully free to interpret how girls might be empowered for opportunity – not only through training for existing women’s roles but also for new ones rising on the horizon.

1900 – The Shop in The Cabin, where boys made miniature sailboats, stuffed owls, or catalogued their collection of rocks. From Choate Rosemary Hall: A History of the School, 1997.

RIGHT The Sixth Form Walk, which varied from year to year, took roughly three days to complete.

The final ceremony was The Hanging of the Frying Pans on the walls of the Choate family's barn, inscribed with the name of each hiker.

The headmistress left her mark in the classroom. She taught English literature, Greek, and Latin. On Sundays, she hosted students in her living room for Bible study.

Girls found her enigmatic ways unforgettable, even seven decades later.

“Everybody loved her,” said Polly Curtiss Pease, RH 1902, in a 1971 recollection. “She was very … well, you never knew quite what she was going to say or do.” This spontaneity is evidenced in a letter to the girls in the Sixth Form dated September 30, 1905 urging them to take charge of their education.

“The gist of the matter is that facts are dead things and their acquisition is only a means to an end. It is the relations between them and your discovery of these relations, the relations of the particular to the universal and your discovery of it that is the valuable thing in intellectual education.”

Rosemary Hall grew quickly in directions that reflected Ruutz-Rees’ priorities. As early as 1903, girls began collecting stones for what became St. Bede’s Chapel. A 40-student dormitory was built, as was a new outdoor track. By 1909, students were gathering daily for morning and evening services inside St. Bede’s, where Episcopal worship gave the school its spiritual anchor. The next year, faculty member Mary Elizabeth Lowndes became co-headmistress at Ruutz-Rees’ invitation. And in 1911, Ruutz-Rees’ mother, Janet, established the Kindly Club “to spread the spirit of kindliness throughout the school.”

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Rosemary traditions were becoming firmly established, such as the Sixth Form Walk, which was more a pilgrimage than a stroll.

Girls would cover the countryside, logging some 45 miles over several days. Their triumphant return involved marching arm-in-arm down Christian Street as they sang the 23rd Psalm.

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Rosemary Hall, Greenwich campus, 1908.

Far left, St. Bede's Chapel under construction.

Rosemary Hall girls toted stones from an adjoining farm for the foundation.

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Unidentified photograph, from a 1906 scrapbook donated by Zeda Thompson Dean, Courtesy of the Choate Rosemary Hall Archives.

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We all knew that we were a small school and young: only by the character of our School, by strengthening good tradition and establishing new, could we hope to make the present-day Choate a future-day Choate that we could take pride in. –george st. john, forty years at school THE CHOATE SCHOOL, MEANWHILE, WAS GOING THROUGH ITS OWN REINVENTION. After Mark Pitman

Welcome message to boys from Headmaster George St. John, 1914.

died in 1905, the future was uncertain while a series of short-term headmasters tried to hold the rudder steady.

Judge Choate had been personally underwriting the institution’s yearly losses for more than a decade and wanted out. How would the School survive without his financial support? Would it have to close, thus leaving no educational legacy for the Choate and Atwater families in Wallingford, despite almost 20 years of trying?

Such questions loomed prior to the 1908 arrival of George St. John, a Harvard-trained English teacher who accepted the precarious job of headmaster. He would begin with a modest 51 students, five “masters” (teachers), and two frame buildings on 10 acres. But Choate wouldn’t stay that size for long.

St. John took the job on a handshake with Judge Choate.

The agreement said he would not only oversee the School’s affairs but also incorporate the institution. He did as promised, establishing a corporation that would sell shares in the School. Shares paid six percent per annum.

St. John became a major stockholder, relieved Judge Choate of financial responsibility for the School, and, like Ruutz-Rees, brought a radical reinterpretation to bear on Pitman’s original vision.

For the new headmaster, a “home school” didn’t have to look or feel like a family residence. In fact, the campus should bespeak an institution that wouldn’t ever fail or see its buildings reconverted to standard housing. Thus came the idea for Hill House, whose bricks and pillars would state unequivocally that the School was here to stay. The sale of stock to 34 shareholders helped raise the $40,000 needed to build Hill House, whose tall white columns and hilltop location announced a new era had arrived. Completed in November 1911, it fast became the permanent center of daily life on campus.

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The Choate School faculty 1908-1909. Standing from left: George St. John (Headmaster, English), Parker Wilder (Bookkeeper), Raymond Grover (Math, Science), and Wendell Brooks (Latin, Greek).

Seated from left: Bartol Parker (Lower School, Athletics), Paul Temple (Senior Master, German, French), Dr. H. C. Atwater (School Physician), and Ray Brown (Head of Lower School, Math).

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With the Hill House, tentative building at Choate was out; by its shape and architecture it committed itself to being a Choate main building and decreed that the School could never move. It gave Choate a center – made Choate for the first time, look like a school.” –george st. john, forty years at school

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Choate School campus by Richard Rummel, 1911.

Hill House (top left) was completed in 1911 and became a symbol of a new era in The Choate School history.

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WITH HILL HOUSE A REALITY , Choate’s campus was

coming to reflect St. John’s fresh understanding of how best to become a top-notch “home school.” To educate boys in a loving and supportive environment, he felt they needed something beyond an idealized, familystyle residential experience. Three years prior, he’d come to believe they needed a larger scale of offerings – in academics, sports, theater, and other enrichment activities – so that every boy could be nurtured and, most important, challenged on the right level for him.

“The reason we can’t do more individual work is because the school is small,” St. John wrote in a 1908 notebook, as he recalls in his memoir, Forty Years at School (Henry Holt, 1959). “If Choate were larger, there would be enough boys with practically the same needs to make divisions in each subject suited to each one.”

Growing bigger was essential to getting better, St. John believed, and he wasted no time scaling up. During his first 10 years at the helm, Choate would grow nearly fivefold, from 50 to 230 students.

By the time World War I began in 1914, both Choate and Rosemary Hall were firmly established on their new trajectories. Both were growing their campus footprints as well as their national reputations. ■

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grit & determination the call to shared sacrifice / 1915-1940

For the first three years after World War I broke out, the bloody battlefields of Europe seemed a world away from tranquil boarding school life at The Choate School in Wallingford and Rosemary Hall in Greenwich. Both campuses anxiously devoured news from overseas, but routines went largely undisturbed.

Everything changed, however, on April 6, 1917, when Congress declared war on Germany. Both schools upended daily life to support the war effort.

Shared sacrifice linked them to common cause and vision – if only for 19 months out of an era when they were evolving in markedly different directions.

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CHOATE BATTALION 1917. At the far right is the new gymnasium remarkably

completed just a year after a fire destroyed the original one. It was designed

by Francis Waterman, the same architect as Hill House.

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LIFE AT CHOATE WAS TRANSFORMED IN A MATTER OF WEEKS. Half of the School’s 200 students, aged as young as 15, were drilling in six squads before April was out. A campuswide effort raised funds for a Choate ambulance in France.

Boys planted potatoes to boost food production on the home front, and 90 students volunteered to work on the School farm in the summer. As the European theater beckoned men of fighting age, 11 of Choate’s 25 masters left their classrooms to serve, leaving their students and colleagues to pray for their safe return.

Rosemarians were no less committed. They formed the Rosemary Woodcraft Potato Club, which raised crops and steered all profits to a war fund. They expanded their fire brigade and added a drill team. For the winter of 1917-18, the boarders relocated to Florida because of the national coal shortage. Like their counterparts at Choate, they bought Liberty Bonds to help feed and clothe soldiers. Miss Ruutz-Rees took a brief leave of absence while she was engaged as chairman of the Women’s Council of National Defense of Connecticut.

As war took its deadly toll, students at both schools worried as reports arrived from the front, where brothers and friends might or might not still be alive. By April 1918, Choate had lost six alumni in battle. A grieving campus feared the numbers would keep rising.

When peace finally arrived with the euphoric ringing of church bells on November 11, 1918, Choate and Rosemary Hall tried to resume boarding school business as usual. Drill teams soon disbanded. Regular sports schedules resumed.

But the schools faced serial challenges in the wake of war in areas from finances to health and safety. In navigating choppy waters, Choate and Rosemary Hall charted divergent courses. One path would, over time, equip Choate with an expansive, built-up campus with long vistas and extensive playing fields in Wallingford before the dawn of World War II. The other would require penny-pinching perseverance in Greenwich, amidst warnings that Rosemary Hall was at risk to close during the Great Depression.

Factors responsible for the distinct trajectories were many, including what Choate Headmaster George St. John saw as divine Providence, and what others might call hard work and luck. But leadership played no small part. Rosemary Hall experienced the close-knit insularity that came with having a visionary educator at the helm, while St. John turned out to be an artful salesman, one who tirelessly sold Choate.

Mary Atwater Choate.

Tinted miniature painted on ivory, undated.

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clockwise from top: 1917-18, Choate battalion in formation Rosemary Hall Potato Planting WWI. Each girl had a portion of ground sufficient for 25 hills which she then cultivated through the potato season.

Choate School Ambulance, on the French front, WWI. Photo courtesy of the scrapbook of E. Bosworth Grier C ’1918.

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Illustrated Current News, 1918. Courtesy U.S. National Library of Medicine and The Marlin Company, Wallingford, Connecticut RIGHT Archbold Infirmary Solarium, circa 1930s

BARELY HAD THE WAR ENDED THAN NEW CRISES APPEARED . Realizing the respective long-term visions of

St. John and Ruutz-Rees would need to wait until acute situations got resolved.

First came the influenza pandemic that killed upward of 50 million worldwide between 1918 and 1920. Then came diphtheria, which kept all students confined to campus for three months, and then mumps. With each scourge, the West Wing dormitory became a makeshift quarantine space, where George St. John’s wife, Clara, would read to sick students through a window. With each wave of illness, Choate learned the importance of having a strong health service on site and put an adequatelysized infirmary high on its construction wish list.

The post-war period left a financial sting, too, as credit became tight – too tight for Choate’s plans. Counting on a $250,000 loan in 1921, Choate wasn’t prepared when new banking regulations kicked in and limited the School to $58,000. Fearing disaster, St. John leapt into sales mode, touting Choate’s credentials (and what he called Clara’s “small fortune” as collateral) at bank after bank. At the last minute, the necessary loan amount came through. With crisis narrowly averted, St. John resolved to put Choate on firmer financial ground.

In the early 1920s, as both schools were finding their footings, circumstances fatefully intervened. One campus saw a core building rise; the other saw one fall. Those prescient events would set the stage for the pivotal decade to come.

With more than 250 students living on campus, Choate needed a new dormitory on the other side of Christian Street, one that would provide symmetry to Hill House. More than 400 alumni contributed to build the $160,000 Memorial House in honor of the 15 Choate alumni killed in the war. The project went from idea to completion in just two years.

Clara St. John reading to the boys in the Hatch Study of Memorial House, circa 1930s.

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Memorial House Interior 1964-67

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Dedicated in 1921, “Mem House,” the mirror twin of Hill House across Christian Street, became a testament to what Choate could do – again and again – as it ushered in an explosive decade of building, primarily in a Georgian Revival style that bespoke soaring ambitions to be counted among New England’s great educational institutions.

ABOVE The before and

after sketches of Christian Street by art teacher Arthur Koch in 1937 demonstrate George St. John’s campus vision which included the newly constructed Paul Mellon Science Hall.

RIGHT Memorial House, one of three original Georgian-style buildings on campus. It was completed in 1921 and dedicated to the memory of the 15 Choate boys who had fallen in World War I. Designed

by Francis Waterman as a mirror image of Hill House, it was built to house the Lower School of first and second form boys.

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“Personality – how great a force it is for good or ill. The personalities of our Headmistresses have made the Rosemary tradition what they are; and, above all the influences in the school, we especially feel that of the personality of Miss RuutzRees. If, as one fancies, strong personalities may be expressed by mottoes, the motto for hers would be, Nothing is hard, it is only new. This is the motto that the school, since the fire, may be said to have adopted for its own.”

–unsigned editorial november 1923 issue of the question mark

AT ROSEMARY HALL , the turning point was anything but triumphal. Shortly before 4 a.m. on November 11, 1923, a devastating fire tore through the main building that housed a dormitory for 67 girls, dining hall, library, and reception rooms. Everyone escaped unharmed as well-trained girls led their peers to safety. For the rest of the year, they stayed in Greenwich neighbors’ homes. But the campus hub was a total loss, estimated at upward of $200,000.

To rebuild with a new dorm, separate dining hall, and additional facilities, Rosemary Hall offered a $300,000 bond issue in 1924. The costs of new debt would constrain Rosemary Hall for more than a decade.

Ruutz-Rees kept an internal focus on the Rosemary Hall family of alumnae, urging them not only to finance reconstruction but also to relocate and take over the school.

In December 1923, she petitioned alumnae in a series of individual letters urging them to raise $200,000, buy a 400acre property, and literally make Rosemary Hall their own.

“In this new plan,” she wrote to one alumna, “the Alumnae will buy for themselves and own everything except the good-will and the gifts we can give them, and will have themselves the responsibility and the credit of establishing the School as a semi-public endowed institution.”

Ruutz-Rees’ hopes for relocating and transferring ownership didn’t materialize. Instead, Rosemary Hall managed cautiously for the next decade in a campus that she and many alumnae regarded as too small. A lower school at Rosemary Hall opened its doors in this period as a feeder institution, but the boost in revenue would help only so much.

Those who knew Ruutz-Rees well said the business side of school life was not her strong suit. Her passions, as a Ph.D. in French literature, lay elsewhere: in teaching languages, molding adolescent character, and engaging in public affairs from the suffrage movement to Democratic politics. She was a sought-after expert on educating girls and shared her methods widely as a consultant and writer. The Education of the Modern Girl, which she coauthored in 1929, is still regarded as a classic in the field.

Yet she couldn’t avoid cash management tasks altogether, because she effectively owned the School as its chief shareholder. The difficulties were apparent to Elizabeth Hyde Brownell, RH ’21, whose parents were so close to Ruutz-Rees that she called her “Aunt Caroline.” “She wasn’t very good with figures, and she was frequently in financial straits at the School and was always bailed out somehow or other,” Brownell recalled in a 1998 interview.

Advisors urged Ruutz-Rees, an enterprising woman rare in her time, to be extremely cautious. Her longtime attorney, Roger Baldwin, warned her in 1928: “Anything in the nature of an investment in your land or buildings should be very carefully prayed over before being made this year.” She was advised to spend only on essential maintenance, nothing more. Despite myriad needs, from unfinished playing fields to cracking plaster walls, she promised she’d try to reduce expenses.

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LEFT Rosemarians in

Florida during the coal shortage in 1918.

TOP Rosemary Hall Pink

Building, with view of weathervane. The Rosemary Girl weathervane came

from Italy in 1926 to honor a family who had taken in seven boarders who were displaced after the disastrous fire in November 1923. Inscribed on the base are the words Hanc Turrim Sub Astra Educatam – “This

tower built upwards to the stars.” The weathervane is now housed in the Mellon Library.

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The Chapel, which St. John saw as “a rallying place for the best that is in boys and men,� took first priority. Boys needed spiritual formation, St. John believed. Daily worship would frame and anchor everything else at school.

Choate Chapel steeple drawing, circa 1924

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CHOATE, MEANWHILE, WAS RELENTLESS IN BUILDING FACILITIES AND INFRASTRUCTURE to equip an ever-

growing student body. Enrollment surged to 339 in 1924, then to 452 in 1928. Growth stemmed from the School’s ethos, which held that bigger was better. It meant every boy could travel a track just right for him, whether accelerated coursework or slower paced studies. St. John was admittedly no great education theorist like RuutzRees, but he had a pragmatic sense for what would work.

“We are not strong on theories,” St. John wrote in his memoir, Forty Years at School. “If we have any theory, it is that no two boys are alike and no one theory will suffice in working out the educational destiny of hundreds of different individuals.”

Advice given to George St. John was very different from the conservatism forced upon Ruutz-Rees. He received encouragement from the likes of attorney Anson McCook to keep expanding Choate’s support network beyond current benefactors and to invest much more aggressively than Rosemary Hall. In this time, “The Chapel Foundation” was created to realize big dreams.

Because Choate was then owned by a privately held corporation that paid shareholders six percent per annum, donations were not tax-deductible. In fact, gifts could be seen as potentially enriching for the stockholders, including St. John. Thus a nonprofit foundation was formed to remove any potential conflict of interest and to receive tax-deductible gifts for building projects. The first of many would be a campus house of worship.

The Chapel, which St. John saw as “a rallying place for the best that is in boys and men,” took first priority.

Boys needed spiritual formation, St. John believed. Daily worship would frame and anchor everything else at school. Fundraising for it was swift. Soon the foundation would be aptly renamed “The Chapel and Library Foundation,” with the next big project in mind. By 1925, the Chapel was in use.

Andrew Mellon, a leading banker and industrialist, visited Choate in the early 1920s and was impressed enough to reserve a spot for his son, Paul. As Paul’s 1925 graduation date neared, Mellon requested a meeting with St. John and fatefully asked whether St. John would like him to build a library for Choate.

The answer was a resounding yes. By 1926, Choate had a multistory facility with stacks, a spacious reading room, classrooms, and a dormitory. More construction was soon to follow. The John D. Archbold Infirmary (1928) and an expanded dining hall (1929) rounded out the decade that would, more than any other, outfit Choate with core facilities to meet the diverse needs of students and masters.

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TOP LEFT Winter Exercise

BOTTOM Mellon Library

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exterior, circa 1939

TOP RIGHT Winter Ex interior

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Each term, the Headmaster declared a particularly lovely day a free day. During breakfast prayer, the holiday was signaled by the words “I shall lift my eyes up to the hills…”

–mountain day, 1920, choate rosemary hall: a history of the school

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As Choate’s reputation grew, so also did its ability to attract and retain top teachers. The School hired faculty and administrators who in time would become future legends, including Russell Ayres (1916), George Steele (1916), Edward Stengle (1921), Earl Leinbach (1925), and William Shute (1918). No fewer than 23 of the teachers who arrived at Choate in the 1920s stayed for at least three decades, all retiring in the 1950s or ’60s.

Filled with confidence, Choate planned an endowment campaign early in 1929 to ensure the preservation of all it had built. But once again world events would have a sweeping effect and test the mettle of Choate and Rosemary Hall alike.

The stock market crash of October 1929 wiped out fortunes overnight. Even for those who didn’t lose everything, the Great Depression had arrived, and it was time to reassess every expense, especially big ticket items like boarding school tuition. Both schools would need to travel some rough waters, and once again they’d move on separate courses.

Choate postponed its endowment campaign, but not its ambitions. When St. John addressed the alumni in 1930, he made the case for why Choate should remain in the hands of a private corporation for at least a few more years and not yet be signed over to the Foundation.

“I’m afraid you would be too good trustees!” he told them. “You might, at this critical juncture, by conservative financing, produce a school deformed. Let us put to the hazard all we have until we have constructed a school plant and campus to match unity, breadth and harmony in Choate’s inner self.”

Benefactors undaunted by the Depression continued to fulfill the School’s dreams. New leaders would emerge from the Depression’s grip (see “Second Sons” p. 30). It was in 1930 that Choate acquired land for track and field facilities. In 1932, Choate dedicated the Winter Exercise Building, known in later years as the Worthington Johnson Athletic Center. Scholarships were offered to students whose families faced new financial hardships, and it seemed for a time that Choate might weather the economic crisis.

However, signs of struggle emerged, and not only when blues guitarist Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter passed his hat around after performing on campus in 1935. Enrollment dropped and all Choate employees took a 10 percent pay cut. Unable to utilize and maintain all its newly acquired property, Choate sold off houses for a song.

THE SITUATION AT ROSEMARY HALL WAS EVEN MORE CHALLENGING. By 1935, the School still owed

$168,000 in bond debt. Upgrading facilities was now unthinkable. Everything that didn’t affect teaching or students’ well-being had been “cut to the bone” to balance the budget, Ruutz-Rees told alumnae that year. Enrollments were falling, she explained, because the School’s clientele was largely professional class, not the superrich, and private school was no longer affordable for many. Her model for restoring capacity enrollments was Miss Porter’s School, which had dwindled at one time to a mere three students, but recovered in three years as alumnae rallied to enroll nieces, cousins, and daughters of friends.

“Cannot you, loyal, devoted Rosemarians, do for us the same thing as they did for their beloved school?,” she asked at the 1935 gathering to mark Rosemary Hall’s 45th anniversary. “We are in a critical condition, and the outcome depends upon you. We really do not want to close the School… There is, however, that possibility.”

For the next three years, Rosemary Hall watched pennies under Ruutz-Rees. Then in 1938, after 48 years at the helm, she and co-headmistress Mary Elizabeth Lowndes handed off the top administrative job. Her handpicked successor, 45-year-old Eugenia Baker Jessup, Class of 1910, reflected her dream to keep Rosemary Hall in the hands of loyal Rosemarians.

As a Rosemarian, Jessup had been editor of the Question Mark (the School’s literary magazine), captain of the field hockey team, and a member of the self-governance committee. In Ruutz-Rees’ view, no one embodied the School’s ideals better than she. Upon graduation from Bryn Mawr, she returned to Greenwich in 1914 and taught for 11 years before taking the reins in 1938.

But Rosemary Hall would be only partially in Mrs. Jessup’s control. Ruutz-Rees hadn’t been able to fulfill her long-held goal to hand off the School to the alumnae. Thus it literally remained her school on paper because she was still the largest shareholder in the corporation. Her notion of Rosemary Hall as a family that would forever care for its own took on fresh meaning as the matriarchs, Ruutz-Rees and Lowndes, settled into retirement on campus.

The Mikado playbill and cast, 1932, the first in a Choate tradition of annual Gilbert and Sullivan productions.

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Eugenia Baker Jessup ’10, Caroline Ruutz-Rees, and Bobbie Lyons ’44 in chapel cape.

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Football great Jack Stonebreaker ’33 practicing place kicking

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Mellon Science Hall exterior, 1938

MEANWHILE IN WALLINGFORD , Choate’s stature kept

rising even in the long shadow of the Depression. Choate was pioneering some of the prep school world’s first foreign exchange programs, including one that offered a rare glimpse inside Nazi Germany of the late 1930s.

With teams in 13 sports, Choate proved itself an athletic powerhouse in the 1930s, garnering multiple seasons of near-perfect records in football, baseball, tennis, wrestling, hockey, and basketball. The majority of graduates each year matriculated to Ivy League universities. Even construction plans did not bow to hard times. In 1937, the Alumni Boathouse on Community Lake was dedicated.

In 1939, the new Paul Mellon Science Hall opened for classes.

With a quarter century of building projects now complete, St. John was at last ready for the new ownership structure he’d long anticipated. In 1938, the corporation transferred Choate to the Foundation in a generous deal involving a donation worth $1 million from the St. Johns. Now Choate would be governed by a nonprofit entity. St. John would stay on as Headmaster, but trustees finally could begin to play a truly fiduciary role, now that most of the major risk-taking on expensive construction projects was behind them. ■

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growth & prosperity

preparing for leadership / 1940-1965

By 1938, both schools were primed for change. Choate

ceased to be a private, for-profit venture; now trustees, largely alumni, would govern the School as a non-profit alongside Headmaster George St. John. That same year, Rosemary Hall ushered in a new era with the appointment of Headmistress Eugenia Baker Jessup ’10, the first new head since the School’s founding 48 years earlier in 1890.

Change would need to be gradual, these leaders recognized, but could not wait forever.

At both schools, propulsion forward would come from rising national prosperity and population growth.

Social norms would only begin to crack in the 1950s and early 60s; true integration of the races and sexes would not come until later. Yet the arc of the future was clearly taking shape, even in extraordinary wartime.

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The mid-Winter Dance was held during Festivities Weekend.

In 1958, the Phil Malen Orchestra celebrated New Orleans Jazz.

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IN THE LATE 1930s , teaching at Choate or Rosemary Hall

meant accepting a Spartan, no-frills lifestyle. Choate masters lived as if they were still in school themselves, occupying dorm rooms and sharing bathrooms on their hallways. Salaries at both schools were so modest that the best teachers routinely left for higher wages elsewhere. The status quo needed updating in a host of areas, starting with conditions for faculty.

“The crying need is for better salaries for the regular teachers,” Jessup wrote in an early report to Rosemary trustees. “It has been so difficult to obtain good teachers in recent years that it was necessary to find the best teachers available, whether married or single, male or female.”

Jessup called for changes that would in effect make Rosemary Hall more like Choate, where competitive faculty salaries were already helping attract and retain legendary talent. She urged more attention be paid to “the individual girl,” whether she was honing her skills on the playing fields or taking challenging upper-level classes. Jessup would eventually guide Rosemary to embrace a tax-exempt structure like Choate’s, which would help stimulate much-needed fundraising.

Headmistress Eugenia Baker Jessup ’10 and Martha Abbott ’49.

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Rosemary Hall, 1949 BELOW At Rosemary Hall,

preparation for college remained the backbone of the curriculum. During the war years, greater emphasis

was put on science and mathematics “to fit girls to take the place of men in work in scientific fields.”

Also, practical courses in first aid, home nursing, and stenography were added.

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CHOATE, MEANWHILE , would evolve over the next

quarter century to more fully reflect – and prepare leaders for – a dynamically changing American society.

The School would make itself hospitable to prospective faculty, parents, and students by providing sought-after benefits. But its responsiveness to the wider culture wouldn’t end there. Choate relentlessly vied to keep programs relevant to the needs of the United States and equip graduates to lead the country.

Days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, a Choate News editorial argued the School should respond, but not as it did in World War I. Swapping athletics for ROTC drill regimens would be a mistake, the student newspaper said. Sports should continue alongside rigorous academics, with a stronger emphasis on math, science, and practical mechanics.

“Certainly a sound mind and a sound body are the most vital demands upon an individual now that modern warfare has turned from trench and hand-to-hand fighting to a battle of wits and machines,” the editorial read.

Physical fitness training during World War II

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Boston Braves bowling in the Winter Exercise building during Spring training, 1943.

CAMPUS LIFE TOOK ON A WARTIME FEEL , complete

with bomb shelters and drills that had students literally running for cover. Choate kept sports, but cut back on away-game travel and school vacations to conserve fuel.

Waiters and maids had become almost a thing of the past.

Students started making their own beds, doing dining hall chores, tending apple orchards, and harvesting potatoes.

Classes increasingly delivered what the country needed.

In new “war courses,” students learned aeronautics, navigation, and nautical astronomy. In 1944, four Choate masters collaborated on a textbook, An Introduction to Navigation and Nautical Astronomy. Accelerated programs enabled students to graduate before their 18th birthdays, which put them on track to become military officers.

Lest Choate have to guess how to prepare soldiers, the Department of War explained it in black and white.

“No marching and so-called military drill,” said a letter George St. John received from the Department. “We teach that in short order. By the hardest studies you can give… teach ’em to use their heads, and be quick about it.”

When the War ended, Choate would again embark on new construction, as it had done with Memorial House after World War I. The Logan Munroe dormitory, named for an alumnus, went up in 1946 with a distinctive feature: two apartments for married masters. It would be the first of several dorms with apartments built for a new age and for newly minted veterans, eager to teach and raise families.

To guide Choate through the post-War era, the mantle fell to a new headmaster. After 40 years at the helm, St. John handed over the school he’d built to his son, Seymour. An Episcopal priest with linguistic fluency in French and German, Seymour St. John ’31 won the trustees’ confidence to sustain what Choate did well and also make it modern, worldly and responsive to the times.

He got right to work.

“In 1947 when I became headmaster, my first goal was to bring every housemaster up to what I called the ‘washbasin standard of living’, and we did that in the first year,” Seymour St. John says in a transcribed memoir.

Among his first moves was to enroll masters in TIAA benefits, which ensured them a pension upon retirement.

Like his father, St. John felt Choate couldn’t rest on its laurels or remain as he found it. He swiftly launched a two-decade campaign for faculty housing improvements through new construction and remodeling.

In 1946, John F. Kennedy ’35 returned to campus to participate in the 50th anniversary of the School. In his speech, he laid down a challenge: “I believe that in the future, if Choate is really to survive, the men who teach at Choate must instill in its students an active interest in our politics and in the national life around us.” The idea from Kennedy was taken up by Courtenay Hemenway (his former teacher) who fashioned it, with Kennedy’s input, into the Public Affairs course introduced in 1948.

Logan Munroe, as viewed from Memorial House steps, 1950.

“I believe that in the future,if Choate is really to survive, the men who teach at Choate must instill in its students an active interest in our politics and in the national life around us.” –john. f. kennedy ’35 c o m m o n r o o t s

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When Senator John F. Kennedy ’35 came to Choate to receive the School's first Alumni Seal Prize in 1958, he met with Headmaster Seymour St. John ’31, left, and his former history master, Courtenay Hemenway.

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Despite limited resources, traditions of Rosemary continued in the 1950s, including daily required chapel and a uniform dress code for various occasions. Just about every graduate went on to elite institutions such as Radcliffe, Vassar, and Bryn Mawr.

Choate Chapel steeple drawing, circa 1924

Rosemary Hall Gymnasium, 1953

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Helen MacKissick Williamson.

Rosemary Hall's Headmistress, 1953–1957

the School had no endowment and was running a $37,000 deficit. In 1948, a new push began for alumnae to buy Rosemary Hall from its founding headmistress, Caroline Ruutz-Rees.

The proposal to make Rosemary Hall an alumnaeowned, non-profit institution offered mutual benefits.

It would cash out and establish annuity payments for Ruutz-Rees, who by this time was 83. It would also make the School more attractive to donors, who would be able to claim tax deductions for charitable giving. Alumnae received assurance that Rosemary would grow enrollment and cover all expenses with tuitions.

In 1950, the deal went through, establishing the Rosemary Hall Foundation. Now Rosemary had a legal status akin to Choate’s, but wasn’t yet out of the woods.

Rosemary’s enrollment in April 1950 dipped to 118, down from a high of 208 in 1927. Teacher salaries remained low and 10 years of deferred building maintenance took a visible toll.

Yet, Mrs. Jessup would not give up on new initiatives and bold risk-taking. In May 1950, Newsweek wrote about Jessup’s ”Operation X” which gave 10 selected seniors exemption from school rules during spring term, testing their self-proclaimed readiness for college. Said Jessup, “[The girls’] opinions are asked for and valued, both in the classroom and in matters relating to the operation of the School. They are trusted and given responsibility.

This makes them feel that the School belongs to them, and that its success or failure is in their hands.”

Despite limited resources, traditions of Rosemary continued in the 1950s, including daily required chapel and a uniform dress code for various occasions. Just about every graduate went on to college, and Rosemary was well-represented in elite institutions such as Radcliffe, Vassar, and Bryn Mawr. But some of Rosemary’s programs were cut back, (the annual Shakespeare play was produced every year without fail) as students felt the financial pinch.

Jessup hoped her successor, Helen MacKissick Williamson, could build on the momentum established when she took the reins as Rosemary’s third headmistress in 1953. A non-Rosemarian, she sought changes to the curriculum and a reduced role for the Committee, and resistance swelled almost immediately.

Early in her tenure, a group of faculty and staffers balked at Williamson’s initiatives. She resigned in December 1955, only to be reinstated a week later. She died of cancer in 1957 after just four years on the job, forcing Jessup to come out of retirement and steer the ship for an interim year.

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LEFT The 1952 and 1956

ABOVE Headmaster

Democratic party nominee, Adlai E. Stevenson ’18

Seymour St. John meeting with boys informally at Curtis House, 1954

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CHOATE AT THE TIME WAS NOTCHING FEATHERS IN ITS CAP AS A RELATIVELY YOUNG SCHOOL , just 50

years old in 1946, with outsized aspirations to train top leaders. Under the direction of Choate English master Bob Atmore, the campus became a destination for big-name speakers, including former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, poet Robert Frost, evangelist Billy Graham, and baseball hero Jackie Robinson, the sport’s first black major leaguer.

Alumni raised the School’s profile further. From 1952 through 1960, all of the Democratic Party’s presidential nominees were Choate men: Adlai Stevenson ’18 in 1952 and 1956, then Kennedy ’35 in 1960. Even though a straw poll taken by the Current History Club in October 1960 showed 82% of the boys favoring Nixon and only 18% for Kennedy, never was the School prouder than when he was inaugurated President on January 20, 1961.

Choate’s reputation grew internationally, attracting students from more than a dozen countries in the early 1950s. But the School still saw itself as accountable to more than tuition-paying parents and students from across the globe. It remained focused on preparing young men to lead at top levels of business and government.

In 1957, Seymour St. John recruited the School's first Russian teacher, Johannes van Straalen. The program was launched just weeks before Sputnik made world news. In 1959, following a visit to the Soviet Union, St. John and van Straalen created a summer abroad program for Choate students.

St. Andrew's Camp, 1951.

Located a mile from campus, it welcomed 25-30 boys from urban areas to enjoy nature, wholesome food, and help shape moral character.

One exemplary trip reflected that ethos. At the height of the Korean War in April 1951, Seymour St. John traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with the U.S. Navy’s director of training and the Department of Education’s director of secondary schools. He went to ask one question: how can Choate help America win the war?

“He was prepared to make any schedule changes and to put in any new courses so desired,” reported the Choate News. He returned with a mandate to “teach in broad patterns the basic courses that are necessary to all specialization,” as summarized by the News. “Physics is more important than electronics; biology is more important than medical technology.

Seymour welcomed the government’s affirmation, but he kept pushing the envelope of what it could mean to serve students and nation alike. Indispensable would be a keen, nuanced understanding of the world. An avid traveler himself, St. John encouraged Director of Summer Programs Hubert Packard to bring an international dimension to the Choate Summer School. Between 1959 and 1962, summer programs sent students to Russia, Mexico and six European countries. During the academic year, opportunities emerged in three new foreign language tracks: Russian, Arabic, and Chinese. As the Cold War upped the ante for containing Communism and winning the space race, Choate students were once again training to help America win.

In hopes of shaping compassionate as well as worldly leaders, Choate encouraged its students to serve at the yearly St. Andrews Camp for disadvantaged boys from New Haven and New York. From its founding in 1913 to its last year in 1971, Choate students raised funds to run the camp and served as its counselors. They helped boys learn outdoor skills, enjoy games in the country and build moral character, as per the mission of Choate’s St. Andrews Society.

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“The hard work you put in here will not be wasted, because the end product of that hard work will be the acquisition MEANWHILE THE WALLINGFORD CAMPUS was evolving of a disciplined mind.” with a measure of openness to a changing society. Choate’s first prominent female faculty member, Pauline Anderson, directed the library through a decade when circulation grew 600 percent. She paved the way for a new wing in 1962. Between 1946 and 1965, the School built eight new dormitories with faculty apartments and steadily renovated others to Seymour’s “wash basin” standard.

As soon as George and Clara St. John Hall was dedicated in 1957, classrooms were abuzz in foreign languages, including those of strategic value to the nation but seldom studied in secondary schools.

ABOVE Pauline Anderson,

Choate's first prominent female faculty member, escorting Robert Frost around campus for the dedication of the Library's new wing. According to Pauline, "It was, I believe, the first time we had paid an agent’s fee for a speaker to come; I think we paid him $1,500."

RIGHT St. John Lecture Hall, circa 1960s. Dedicated in 1957, the buidling's color scheme, according to a review in the News, was a mix of "Waikiki green, moonbeam blue, and jubilee yellow." From Choate Rosemary Hall: A History of the School, 1997.

–headmistress alice mcbee

1964, Sixth Form coffee with Headmistress Alice McBee. From left, Susan Heyn, Sally Thompson, Alice, and Claudia Bingham.

One faculty member reflected "I have never met anyone who had a clearer knowledge or more thorough understanding of young people." – Choate Rosemary Hall: A History of the School, 1997.

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BACK IN GREENWICH, ROSEMARY AT LAST TURNED A CRUCIAL CORNER when Alice McBee arrived as

headmistress in 1958. From the start, she pumped up enrollment. The School’s small, tired physical plant didn’t stand in the way. Virtually every double room in a dormitory became a triple as girls packed in.

“This increase of students represents Rosemary’s maximum capacity within the limitations of its existing plant,” McBee told trustees in June 1959. “It reflects the national increase in school population and, to be brutally frank, a need for further income.”

McBee, or “Mac” as she was affectionately known, lamented how the low salary problem still vexed Rosemary more than 20 years after Jessup flagged the issue as a priority. In 1959, a beginning teacher in Greenwich public schools could earn within $500 of the highestpaid, most-experienced teachers at Rosemary. McBee saw larger enrollment as an essential prong in a financial strategy to upgrade facilities, including a gym she termed “under sentence of death from the fire department,” an inadequate infirmary, and a need for more lab space.

McBee’s administration creatively leveraged the power of contingency giving to raise much-needed funds. For example, in 1958, an anonymous benefactor promised to give $1,000 for every percent of increase in alumnae participation in annual fundraising. With that incentive dangling, participation jumped from 18 to 60 percent, and Rosemary reaped an additional $42,000 on the promise.

With funds on the rise, Rosemary built a new dormitory, which enabled enrollment to grow some 20 percent to more than 250 from 1959 to 1964. The School still exceeded capacity, as evidenced by the seven students living upstairs in McBee’s house in 1964. But few complained about accommodations as Rosemary was on a roll. By 1962, spending on faculty salaries had doubled, and by 1964, operating deficits were erased.

Pressures for social change began to mount. Rosemary had no black students in the early 1960s, and White Anglo-Saxon Protestants filled the vast majority of seats at Choate. The School admitted its first black student, Ralph Bunche Jr., in 1959. In 1966, Rosemary Hall opened the door to greater diversity in admitting its first black student, Terri Façon, and hiring its first black faculty member. Choate wouldn’t do the same until 1969.

Neither Choate nor Rosemary was oblivious to the winds of change swirling around them in the mid-60s. ■

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1965 Brief

Students, 1971, on the steps of the newly built Rosemary Hall campus.

inclusion

& access the winds of change 1965-1990

In 1965, rhythms of life at The Choate School were still largely as they had been for years. Clean-cut boys donned coats and ties for class and all meals. They ate dinner family-style at assigned seats with two masters enforcing manners at each table. They turned up dutifully, if sometimes reluctantly, for daily required chapel. It seemed this world barely changed from one generation to the next.

These and other pillars of prep school life were about to come crashing down. Long-held norms would collapse so rapidly, both at Choate and Rosemary Hall, that school leaders wondered aloud whether single-sex secondary education as an institution would survive in America.

As a “question authority� spirit roared across the country against the backdrop of an unpopular Vietnam War and a rising counterculture, students in Wallingford and Greenwich began to challenge everything from single-sex classes to Eurocentric reading lists to faculty censorship of student publications. Administrators were hard-pressed to adequately explain why old ways of doing things should endure, even for one more year.

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“Something must be done to make the total educational process more meaningful, or, as the young say, more ‘relevant’ in terms of today’s and tomorrow’s life experience,” wrote Rosemary Hall Headmistress Alice McBee to the Executive Committee in 1968.

Something indeed was done – something dramatic.

The trustees of The Choate School and Rosemary Hall jointly announced in 1968 that after seven decades in Greenwich, Rosemary Hall would return in 1971 to its roots in Wallingford. The school would locate on a new, soon-to-be-built campus next door to Choate’s, but they’d remain separate institutions.

As the plan was concieved, the schools would practice “coordinate” education, rather than coeducation. Girls and boys would come together – not for every class – but for certain advanced electives, and courses in drama, music, and fine arts, as well as other select activities and then return to their same-sex domains. The vision called for construction of a centrally-located arts center to serve as a meeting place for boys and girls. Merging into one school wasn’t the intention, at least not yet.

Even with the march toward coordinate education underway, the bumpy road to inclusivity would take years to pave. Both schools had a long way to go. Rosemary Hall enrolled its first black student in 1966. At that time,

September, 1968. Choate Headmaster Seymour St. John and Rosemary Hall Headmistress Alice McBee study a Wallingford campus map and the proposed site for Rosemary Hall facilities.

Choate had only one to two black students in each form.

The status quo in areas of race and religion was becoming untenable.

Chapel, where Choate students gathered daily for prayers and reflection on moral values, was fast becoming a lightning rod. In the Choate News, students took on their Episcopal headmaster, the Rev. Seymour St. John ’31, in dueling op-eds where they insisted religious observance should be a choice, not a duty, especially on an increasingly diverse campus. St. John steadfastly supported required chapel, insisting it was essential for honing shared values and shaping moral character.

“For decades we had taken our values for granted,” St. John wrote in his unpublished memoir, As We Were Saying. “Now our expressed concern with ultimates betrayed nationwide questioning.”

Chapel was often where conflicting values came to a head. Students protested when Choate spent $620,000 to expand the chapel and install a new organ – both symbols of traditional authority and culture – rather than put the funds toward new scholarships for minorities.

At the 1969 organ dedication, St. John warned from the pulpit that anyone who walked out in protest would be expelled. No one dared leave, but tensions remained at fever pitch.

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In 1968, Choate’s Board of Trustees adopted a goal: within five years, 8 to 10 percent of all boarding students would come from non-white or disadvantaged backgrounds.

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African American students in the late 1960s. From left: Phil La Viscount ’69, Tony Legrand ’71, and Lafayette Rose ’69

Chapel Service 1964. By the start of the 1970-71 school year, mandatory chapel would end.

Conflict wasn’t always neatly managed. In 1969, Choate’s eight black students used a two-page spread in the Choate News to call for more black studies options and fewer white authors on reading lists.

“These stupid honkies who try to tell us that our culture is not as good as theirs and won’t allow us to do our own things,” the group’s statement said, “these people in their ignorance are the causes of violent outbreaks among black students.”

In response, St. John again took the pulpit, where he called their phrases, “deeply disturbing.”

“We are not intimidated,” he told the assembly. “To follow your unhappier intimations. Of course buildings can be destroyed; even lives taken. But we are all ephemera, and there are far greater values to lose than life and property.”

With tensions boiling, Choate scrambled to build and embrace a more diverse community. In 1968, Choate’s Board of Trustees adopted a goal: within five years, 8 to 10 percent of all boarding students would come from non-white or disadvantaged backgrounds. To get there, Choate would raise scholarship funds that would be matched by A Better Chance, a five-year-old non-profit organization that was helping students of color attend private schools. In 1969, Choate established an AfroAmerican Studies Center to encourage more study of black cultures and arts.

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McBee declared that Rosemary Hall “will not only retain her freedom, but will also be strengthened through affiliation with Choate,” but she admitted that hurdles would need to be surmounted.

“I am seriously concerned by one central issue which could cause grave trouble in the attainment of our common goal,” she told the Executive Committee. “The two schools have a widely divergent philosophy about the best methods of handling young people outside the classroom.”

She summed up the differences in a few words: “Choate is run along ‘traditional lines’; Rosemary is a ‘liberal’ school.” On approaches to discipline and rulemaking, they might not reach an easy accord. In the early 1970s, discipline was no small concern as societal mores began to change.

BY THE TIME ROSEMARY HALL ARRIVED IN WALLINGFORD IN FALL 1971, CHOATE HAD RELAXED A NUMBER OF ITS RULES. Softening of hardline policies

Rosemarians come to upper campus in 1972.

IN GREENWICH, ROSEMARY HALL HAD ITS OWN CHALLENGES in forging the path to inclusion. In 1967,

the Executive Committee approved a plan to deconsecrate St. Bede’s Chapel, an Episcopal house of worship, so that the space could accommodate more types of speakers and worship. Rosemary Hall Trustees authorized new funds for scholarships and minority recruitment. English teacher Ann Nesslage introduced two new courses, one on Black literature and the other on feminist authors.

Meanwhile the path to partnering with a boys school meant the additional challenge of negotiating terms, particularly around money and control.

Financing Rosemary Hall’s move to Wallingford meant more than selling the Greenwich property and using the proceeds for a new home. It also meant relying upon Choate to contribute as much as $3 million toward new campus construction. Choate’s commitment was a far cry from the original $25 million that Rosemary Hall envisioned from the larger and much wealthier boys school. But it was enough to make Rosemarians worry that Choate, as the benefactor in the arrangement, might overly dominate decision-making in Wallingford.

McBee acknowledged that, among Rosemarians, she detected “fear that Rosemary Hall will lose her freedom to be an independent entity. This fear must be allayed immediately if we are to be able to rely upon our constituency for wholehearted support in the future.”

marked St. John’s strategy, prior to his retirement in 1973, for renewing goodwill with students.

It was worth a try. So acrimonious had the late 1960s been that he’d once asked for an assistant headmaster to help out as he coped with the “psychic energy drain of dealing with those who seek to destroy.” Meanwhile the administration had heard students’ gripe that they weren’t taken seriously. It was a theme in Peter Prescott’s 1970 book A World of Our Own, which chronicles Choate’s tumultuous year of 1967-68. [The author was an alumnus, Class of 1953].

“Too much weight is given to rules which focus on matters trivial in relation to education, such as beards, smoking, compulsory chapel,” a student committee said in a report requested by trustees. By 1971, boys were allowed freer weekends as well as longer hair and beards.

Smoking was permitted. And the chapel attendance requirement, which St. John had fought so hard to preserve, was no more.

Academic life reflected the more relaxed atmosphere as well. Choate dropped letter grades and adopted a simpler system with just four marks: honors, high pass, pass, and fail. In 1972, the School’s new open curriculum expanded access to courses such as architecture and criminal law, thought to be relevant to a changing society.

But nothing did as much to boost morale as the arrival of more than 230 Rosemary Hall girls on a new campus up the hill. When the plan was announced, Choate faculty supported coordinate education, and when it came to fruition, the boys overwhelmingly approved as well.

“There is a qualitative difference to our School life in this new year,” St. John told the trustees in October 1971, “a happier frame of mind of both faculty and students.”

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But nothing did as much to boost morale as the arrival of more than 230 Rosemary Hall girls on a new campus up the hill. “There is a qualitative difference to our School life in this new year,” St. John told the trustees in October 1971, “a happier frame of mind of both faculty and students.”

Deerfield Day, circa 1970s.

When Senator John F. Kennedy ’35 came to Choate to receive the School's first Alumni Seal Prize in 1958, he met with Headmaster Seymour St. John ’31, left, and his former history master, Courtenay Hemenway.

Rosemary Hall library, 1972.

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Besides operating separately, the two schools also had differences galore in how they functioned day to day. Admissions procedures, diploma requirements, policies for discipline and readmission, weekend permissions, faculty workload – none of these were uniform across the two schools.

TOP 1973-74 Rosemary Hall

BOTTOM LEFT Headmistress

BOTTOM RIGHT Rosemary Hall

faculty. Front row, fourth from left, Joanne C. Sullivan, Headmistress from 1973-1975.

Elizabeth Loomis, 1971-73

Handbook, circa 1972

ROSEMARY HALL AND CHOATE WERE TRULY INDEPENDENT IN THEIR EARLY DAYS as reunited sibling

schools. Each had its own board and its own head of school. Elizabeth “Libby” Loomis became headmistress in 1971 after McBee stepped down, and she oversaw the return to Wallingford. Joanne C. Sullivan, a Latin teacher with a doctoral degree and roots in Greenwich, led the school from 1973 to 1975.

Even telephone operators answered the School phones “The Choate School - Rosemary Hall.”

Besides operating separately, the two schools also had differences galore in how they functioned day to day.

Admissions procedures, diploma requirements, policies for discipline and readmission, weekend permissions, faculty workload – none of these were uniform across the two schools. But synergies and pragmatism won the day as the schools blended their missions and procedures step by step, year by year.

In 1973, the boards made a bold decision to hire one administrator to serve as president of both schools. The president would report to both boards of trustees as well as to a joint Resolutions Committee.

Their choice for president was a Dartmouth College dean Charles F. Dey. He had been a Peace Corps pioneer as well as a Phillips Andover Academy teacher, and he brought deep experience in helping private institutions become more inclusive. At Dartmouth, he’d run the A Better Chance program, which helped prepare scholarship students from families in poverty to succeed at prep schools. At Choate, he would put all that experience to work in a job that was as much about cultural bridgebuilding and increasing access as it was about educating young people.

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WHEN DEY AND HIS WIFE, PHOEBE, ARRIVED IN WALLINGFORD IN FALL 1973 , he had no timeline or

master plan for bringing about a merger of the two schools. He planned to follow the terms of the schools’ agreement, which called for them to remain independent as long as it was practicable to do so.

“You want things to grow organically,” Dey told The Bulletin in a June 2015 interview at his home in Walpole, N.H. “You want to work with people positively and collaboratively. You don’t want to tell them, ‘Well, we’ve got to do this or it has to be like that’ – that doesn’t get you anywhere. I wanted very much to understand the culture so that I could speak to the positives of the Rosemary culture and to the positives of the Choate culture.”

TOP Charles F. Dey, President and

BOTTOM LEFT LEFT Elizabeth

Principal, 1973-1991

Hyde Brownell ’21, first Chair of the Choate Rosemary Hall Trustees

Within Dey’s first year, the two institutions began working more closely together. Their respective executive boards began holding all their meetings jointly. In 1974, they began working out details to establish a consolidation plan. A new Choate Rosemary Hall Foundation was in the works.

By June 1974, the new foundation had its first governance board in place. In a move that signaled equal partnership for Rosemary Hall in its new environs, the board elected Elizabeth “Beezie” Brownell (RH ’21) as its chair. Now the two schools were clearly on track to become one coeducational institution, but not overnight.

Dey made sure to let the process unfold as naturally as possible and not on an imposed schedule.

Making the transition would involve lots of letting go, as well as gradual reclaiming of traditions that had been casualties of the late 1960s and early 1970s upheaval.

The adjustment to coordinate education turned out to be difficult for many on a personal level. The large scale of Choate and Rosemary Hall – now consisting of some 850 students, plus 300 faculty and staff, spread across two campuses – took a toll on close-knit relationships that had long been hallmarks of both schools. From 1973 to 1975, 73 teachers left their jobs amid uncommonly high turnover rates.

Forging a new school culture meant recovering old threads and nurturing community ties. All-school meetings twice a week tried to fill the void left by the loss of daily chapel. A day student center opened in Pitman House to foster community and hospitality for a growing number of commuter students. In 1975, third and fourth formers were reintroduced to family-style dining as a means to improve personal relationships.

Compounding the challenge of building a new, coeducational institution was a weak national economy, saddled by high rates of unemployment and inflation.

In what Dey termed “an enormous disappointment,” a capital campaign to raise $30 million fell far short of its goal in 1975, bringing in just $16 million. To cover costs, including those lingering from the Rosemary Hall move, tuition for boarders climbed 33 percent over four years, from $4,200 in 1973-74 to $5,600 in 1977-78. For day students, the price of educationrose from $2,400 to $3,550.

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Larry Hart ’32 (with camera) pictured with swimming coach Bob Burns.

“If I have an apprehension for the future, it is the threat to the diversity of our student body brought about by rising costs,” Dey wrote in his two-year report in 1975.

“With every increase in tuition, the pressures mount on middle income families… A comparable fear is that in our efforts to balance the budget, we will be forced to lessen our commitment to minorities.”

Choate Rosemary Hall accepted sacrifices in the mid1970s in order to pursue an inclusive, sustainable future.

To qualify for federal subsidies, dining halls stopped serving coffee, tea and soda at breakfast and lunch. Fewer desserts were offered. One dining hall was routinely closed on weekends. During the energy crisis, turning off lights and other measures slashed energy consumption on campus by 22 percent. Tough decisions led to the elimination of 32 jobs and the shelving of plans to build a new science building, a new dispensary, and a swimming pool.

“At each juncture we have asked the question, ‘Where is our priority?’, and answered, ‘Faculty compensation and scholarships’,” Dey wrote in 1975.

Steps to integrate the lives of boys and girls accelerated in the wake of a catastrophic loss in February 1976. A massive fire tore through the Winter Exercise Building, leaving two-thirds of the facility badly damaged. To rebuild the Winter Ex and convert the old gym into a student activities center with a swimming facility would cost around $4 million, a sum raised within a year in a campaign led by Worthington Johnson ’32. When the facilities reopened in 1979, three new coed sports emerged: swimming, squash and riflery.

“The effect of the fire was to help the two schools begin to see themselves as one,” wrote former Choate history teacher Tom Generous in Choate Rosemary Hall: A History of the School.

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Reggie Bradford was one of four African-American faculty and staff when he arrived in 1976.

IN 1977-78, CHOATE ROSEMARY HALL TOOK A FINAL STEP IN COMPLETING THE MERGER OF TWO SCHOOLS

“We were all kind of going through a similar thing… As an adult with kids, I had the experience of being a minority in a predominantly white environment. So if some of the kids’ reactions were purely emotional, I could help them look at things a little differently.”

–reginald bradford

born in Wallingford in the 1890s. The School held its first joint convocation in the fall and awarded the first Choate Rosemary Hall diplomas in the spring. By this time, policies and practices were largely reconciled across the two predecessor school cultures. True coeducation had become the order of the day.

Diversifying the campus, however, remained a work in progress. In 1973, 20 of 843 students at Choate and Rosemary Hall were black. By 1978, the student body had grown to 926, yet still only 24 were black. The financial aid budget had increased by 49 percent over that time, but most of the resources went to cover higher tuition costs, not new scholarships. A bright spot came on the international front as Choate enrolled 60 foreign students from 38 countries.

For minority students at Choate, the heated tensions of the late 1960s had given way to a more supportive environment where each could find his or her niche.

Adjustments were still challenging, especially for students from backgrounds far removed from those of their peers.

Some faculty didn’t like the fact that black students routinely sat together, not with white students, at meals, according to Reginald Bradford, an African-American faculty member who taught art at Choate from 1976 to 2014. Minority students craved settings where they could relax and be themselves without feeling like fish in a fishbowl.

“There were lots of issues,” Bradford recalled. “A lot of those kids had never been in a completely white environment. A lot of the white kids had never been around minority students. So it was a little bit tense in the beginning … it was something we had to work out over time.”

Bradford was one of four black faculty and staff when he arrived in 1976. The number of black employees remained similarly small for years, Bradford said, as the hiring of more minorities was “extremely slow.” But that number eventually grew.

Black students meanwhile found a home away from home in those days with Bradford’s family at their apartment. On weekends, they’d get together at the Bradfords’ home for a meal, a movie or a trip to a park for a picnic.

By the early 1980s, as many as 50 students from various backgrounds – black, white, Hispanic and Asian – were gathering regularly at the Bradfords’ as part of the Choate Afro-Latino Society. They knew Bradford as someone who would step in and advocate for minority students on occasions when they sensed racial bias in a classroom or dormitory situation, and he discovered that by sharing food and hanging out together away from campus, they learned constructive new ways of appreciating and relating to each other.

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LEFT Architect I.M. Pei and

benefactor Paul Mellon ’25 at the construction site of the soon to be Science Center.

ABOVE Aerial view of the

arts center and science center, both I.M. Pei designs.

As the two schools learned to function as one, values were tested in times of crisis. One of the Dey administration’s first moves in 1973 had been to institute an automatic suspension for violation of major school rules in a bid to curtail recreational drug use. The issue came to a head in May 1984 when two students flew to Venezuela and tried to smuggle cocaine back into the United States. Tipped off by an anonymous student phone call, Dey alerted law enforcement, who stopped the students as they tried to pass through U.S. Customs.

Back at Choate, 14 additional students were also implicated and dismissed immediately from school.

The incident made national news, including a fall 1984 segment on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” and in its wake Choate debated how severe its drug punishment policy should be going forward. Once again, differing philosophies of discipline defined the debate.

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Floor Plan of the Paul Mellon Arts Center. Note the directional arrows "To Choate" and "To Rosemary Hall"

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“Something good is happening,” one student leader noted not long after the crisis reached its peak. “I don't know exactly what it is, but I can feel it. Students, faculty, and administrators all seem to be pulling together.”

–choate rosemary hall: a history of the school, 1997.

Faculty weighed in: the School adopted a zerotolerance policy for drugs with 43 percent voting to allow second chances for alcohol. Among leading prep schools, only Phillips Exeter Academy had the same consequences on its books.

The incident was a turning point for the School.

Choate Rosemary Hall decided to draw a line in the sand on its expectations for students, and faculty questioned, revisited and reaffirmed that. It was a conscientious decision made as one school, not two. And, it was perhaps indicative of the start of a cultural evolution on campus around student wellness and support, greater institutional awareness, and community education. All of the issues tackled during this period (accessibility, diversity, inclusion, sex, drugs, and rock and roll) required the School to adjust and reflect. Choate’s willingness to do so put it ahead of its time, or at least in a position to remain a beacon among its peers.

The 1980s ended with Choate Rosemary Hall enjoying the fruits of its long-term vision, planning and sacrifice. Recruitment efforts had made the School increasingly selective to the point of admitting fewer than one in three applicants. A new, $10 million Science Center opened in 1989, as did a new Office of Multicultural Affairs. In lieu of a traditional chaplaincy, a Campus Ministry team of five faculty members from various faith traditions ministered to the spiritual and religious needs of the community.

As Choate Rosemary Hall celebrated 100 years of roots in Wallingford in 1990, its first president was preparing to pass the leadership baton. A new top administrator would soon chart the next course for a young coed school with deep roots in classical liberal education, an institution strengthened by having engaged a changing world and having weathered its unsettling storms. With coeducation and inclusiveness now woven into a single proud identity, the School would begin the next century on firm footing. ■

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Zev Nicolai-Scanio ’18 and Jonah Berman ’18 collaborate on their lander project employing skills learned in their Reverse Engineering class, including engineering principles, hands-on prototyping (traditional and with 3D printers), and microcontroller programming.

tradition & innovation

tapping old roots in fresh ways / 1990-2015

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IN 1990, CHOATE ROSEMARY HALL FELT LIKE A SCHOOL ON THE CUSP OF A NEW ERA . The centennial

anniversary prompted not only festive celebrations, but also many a conversation about priorities for the future.

President and Principal Charles F. Dey, who’d been at the helm since before Choate and Rosemary Hall merged, was preparing to step down after 17 years of service.

The School’s second century would begin with a fresh page, but the script was far from pre-written.

Choate’s trajectory to date had been marked by growth and expansion, always with one eye on sustaining classical education and the other on adapting to a fast-changing world. Since George St. John’s arrival as Headmaster in 1908, the prevailing ethos had held that a bigger school could offer more and serve the needs of every stripe of student. With an enrollment of more than 1,000 in 1990, Choate had staked its place among the very largest of New England prep schools and seemed destined to stay there.

But the next quarter century would undo the notion that bigger was better. By design and careful orchestration, the student body would soon shrink by nearly 20 percent.

Admission standards would climb as Choate went from admitting 60 percent of applicants in 1991 to about 20 percent today. Yet the scope and caliber of what’s offered for students would only continue to expand.

How Choate Rosemary Hall managed to evolve in these new directions, despite three economic recessions in the intervening years, is a story of tapping old roots in fresh ways. Renewing school traditions became an intentional, identity-shaping focus soon after Edward J. Shanahan arrived as Headmaster in 1991. New initiatives burnished Choate’s long-held reputation as an innovator among prep schools. And the generosity of new stakeholders, especially parents, opened up possibilities barely imaginable 25 years ago.

First, however, Choate would need to overcome hurdles that came with the territory of the 1990s. Tough economic times drove the need for $1.7 million in budget cuts and elimination of 19 positions in Shanahan’s first year on the job. Salary buyout programs and attrition helped minimize the hurt, but Choate felt the squeeze nonetheless and took a hard look at its finances.

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CHOATE THUS BEGAN A PROCESS TO WEAVE A CLOSER-KNIT COMMUNITY . Soon boarding students After 17 years at the helm of Choate Rosemary Hall, Charles F. Dey welcomed incoming Headmaster Edward J. Shanahan in 1991.

At $66 million in 1991, “the size of the endowment was small compared to peer institutions – woefully small,” Shanahan told The Bulletin in a September 2015 interview at his home in Old Saybrook. “That placed enormous pressure on us in terms of the financial aid that we awarded, faculty salaries, new construction, renovations, and deferred maintenance.”

Faced with a need to stretch resources, the Board of Trustees was cautious in April 1993 when it considered a proposal to reduce enrollment from 1,021 to 821 as a means to improve community life and lower faculty-student ratios.

Among the troubling questions: what would it mean for Choate to have 200 fewer students paying tuition?

“At this point in time, other critical needs for endowment preclude entertaining a school of 821,” the Long Range Planning Advisory Committee told the Board.

Trustees voted “to authorize the administration to look for opportunities for modest incremental downsizing (+/- 50) in the near term” and keep the door open for further reductions down the road.

But less than a year later, the Board had a dramatic change of heart. It voted in January 1994 to scale back over five years from 1,021 students to 821. The shift would result in 45 fewer jobs, and even those salary savings wouldn’t be enough to offset lost tuitions. The School would also have to defer capital improvement projects to the tune of $20 million and undertake some serious fundraising, Shanahan told The New Haven Register. Yet the Board had been persuaded that smaller would be better in the long run.

A pivotal moment came in 1993 when the Board received renovation quotes for upper campus dormitories that were falling into disrepair. A proper upgrade would require tearing down and replacing the now 1970-vintage buildings at a price tag “well beyond our means,” according to Shanahan. A more palatable option would be to dodge the cost of rebuilding dorms and repurpose the property instead.

“We went through every line item in our budget to see if we could reduce it by a minimum of 20 percent,” Shanahan said. “If we could reduce the size of the school by 200 students, we could pull this off without having a financial problem and without having to build.”

were no longer living on upper campus. Instead they all lived “down the hill” as upper campus became home to faculty and, eventually, the Headmaster’s home. Knowing everyone by name became more feasible in the revamped, more intimate environment.

These closer bonds fed also on a resurgence of shared traditions, many of which had been lost or neglected in the process of merging Choate and Rosemary Hall in the 1970s. It began with a matriculation pledge signing ceremony at the start of school in the fall. With a signature, each student vowed “to commit myself to the principles and values of Choate Rosemary Hall” and to “take my place within this special and lasting fellowship.”

Soon more traditions regained traction and even birthed new ones, including some that didn’t endure.

After Rosemary’s wild boar became the official school mascot in 1995, the School convened a medieval banquet to celebrate the boar. The formal affair brought everyone together around long tables, including faculty dressed in medieval garb, to feast on “wild boar.” With great drama and fanfare, freshmen ceremonially carried in a stuffed wild boar. But the tradition was short-lived.

“I sort of liked it,” Shanahan said, “but I think it was perceived to be a little bit more formal than was comfortable for everybody.”

Other revived traditions fared better. The School Song regained a place of prominence in Choate life.

School meetings ended with everyone singing it. After athletic wins, teams would climb into the stands and sing it. New students literally had to sing for their suppers – instilling the notion that you had to work to get the reward you needed or wanted.

At orientation, first-year students “were not allowed into the dining hall unless you could sing the School Song,” Shanahan recalled. “It was common experience.

Plus the song has some values embedded in it that are very, very important.”

Even weekly chapel services made a comeback, albeit in a far different form than in the days when Headmasters George and Seymour St. John read scripture, led hymns, and preached sermons. The community instead gathered in the 1990s and 2000s to hear “moments of reflection” from a student or faculty member, or sometimes a talk by a speaker well-known for moral authority. Faculty members were wary at first, Shanahan said, but grew more comfortable as they saw no religious agenda playing out.

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Closer bonds fed also on a resurgence of shared traditions, many of which had been lost or neglected in the process of merging Choate and Rosemary Hall in the 1970s.

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TOP In the 1990s, the Choate tradition of “Signing the

BOTTOM In September 2005, a twice-weekly sit-down Com-

Register� at the beginning of the school year became the Matriculation Ceremony. Students formally commit themselves to the principles and values of Choate Rosemary Hall.

munity Lunch was instituted.

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WHILE CHOATE WAS RECLAIMING ITS ROOTS AND DOWNSIZING THE COMMUNITY, THE NEED FOR NEW CAPITAL RESOURCES WEIGHED HEAVILY . Choate’s

LEFT The Arabic and Middle

Eastern Studies (AMES) Program is one Choate’s signature academic programs.

RIGHT Students in the Science Research Program work under the guidance of a mentor scientist at a university research facility during the summer of their junior year.

endowment, valued in 1995 at $90 million, was the lowest among leading prep schools in the Northeast. Growing it by at least $80 million would allow for sustained investments in financial aid, residential facilities, and faculty support among other areas. Thus Choate kicked off an unprecedented bid to raise $100 million through the capital campaign, A Shared Commitment, which engaged more than 11,000 donors over five years en route to exceeding the $100 million goal and setting a new fundraising record for the School. New funds boosted what Choate could do, from dining hall improvements to reconfigured squash courts. They also increased socioeconomic diversity on campus via a new $3.8 million Icahn Scholars Program, which would cover 40 percent of all expenses for 18 disadvantaged students in each form, starting in 1996. The remaining costs would be covered by financial aid, thus ensuring a full ride including books and travel budgets for students for whom “a boarding school opportunity would be the remotest of possibilities.”

“I became really close friends with a lot of the students who were there on scholarship,” said Jacqueline Salamack ’06. “They added a great dynamic to the classroom and to conversations, socially and intellectually… Choate would be a very different place for the worse if it were not for those types of programs” offering scholarships.

Choate’s perennial quest to stay responsive to an everchanging world was on display after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Security concerns affected student life. For example, students weren’t allowed to work in the mailroom during the anthrax scare, and an annual trip to Washington, D.C. was canceled. Before long, the curriculum came to feed new hunger for knowledge about Muslims and Islamic cultures. In January 2002, upper form students flocked to “Crescent at a Crossroads,” a new elective course on the Islamic world. In 2005, Choate reinstated Arabic language courses after a 30-year hiatus, and five years later a signature program in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) was born.

The world had changed, and Choate was determined to keep pace.

Meanwhile Choate was taking stock of its strengths and listening to what students were saying. When students (as typical teenagers) asked for a chance to sleep in more often, a later start time one day per week became part of the schedule. Shanti Mathew ’05, a graduate student in design research and strategy, recalls how the administration increasingly sought students’ input during her time. She sees those days as helping open the door to more features of today’s Choate education, including emphases on design-driven thinking and the importance of learning from failure.

In 2005, Choate reinstated Arabic language courses after a 30-year hiatus, and five years later a signature program in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies was born. The world had changed, and Choate was determined to keep pace.

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TOP Bernhard and Tenney Houses were built in

LEFT As Edward J. Shanahan prepared to step

RIGHT Choate dedicated the Bruce ’45 and Lueza

2008 to accommodate fourth form girls and boys and eight faculty families. They were the first new dormitories to be built in 40 years.

down after 20 years as Headmaster, a multi-field athletic complex – Shanahan Field – was dedicated in his honor in October 2010.

Gelb Track and Field Facility in May 2007 in honor of the lead donors to the School’s largest capital campaign – An Opportunity to Lead.

“That’s what Choate is doing these days by going to places like Google and Pixar, companies that are doing things very differently than companies did them 50 years ago, and saying: ‘What do you look for in the people that you hire?,’ That seems like a whole new way of trying to prepare high school students,” Mathew said.

As Choate listened to students and families in the 2000s, a theme emerged: gifted students wanted to go deeper in areas where Choate already had depth to offer.

They just needed time and structures to support them.

One by one, new “signature programs” came to provide navigable pathways for students with exceptional passions and talents. The Arts Concentration helped qualified students devote the necessary time to master the piano, canvas, or camera, in part by loosening seasonal sports requirements for that cohort. The Science Research Program placed students in university laboratories during the summer of their junior year to participate in groundbreaking research. By 2010, Choate had seven signature programs.

Choate also invested strategically in its facilities. In May 2007, track athletes got a boost from the new Bruce ’45 and Lueza Gelb Track and Field Facility, complete with an eightlane synthetic track, three-bay storage shed, new field, and spectator stands. Then Fall 2008 ushered in the first new dormitories in 40 years on a parcel near the baseball field.

Designed to reflect the School’s values, Tenney House and Bernhard House provided two-story living quarters for eight faculty families. The new dorms also keep environmental footprints small by tapping the power of 40-ton, closed-loop geothermal wells.

To fuel the progress, Choate in 2006 embarked on another landmark fundraising campaign, An Opportunity to Lead. The goal of $200 million – twice as large as the last campaign’s – was ambitious by any measure. But the challenge was heightened exponentially by the stock market collapse of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession, which rocked the portfolios of alumni and left more Choate families applying for financial aid for the first time.

Rosemary Hall library, 1972.

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The Kohler Environmental Center (KEC) was formally dedicated in October 2012 in honor of its benefactor, Board of Trustees Chairman Herbert V. Kohler Jr. ’57, who donated $20 million towards the project. The KEC is the first residential environmental center in U.S. secondary education.

The economic downturn took a toll directly on the School as the endowment plunged 25 percent from its high of $267 million. In February 2009, the Choate News reported that 15 full-time positions, including six faculty, would be eliminated to cut costs. In a sign of the times, plans for two turf fields were postponed a year.

Challenges notwithstanding, An Opportunity to Lead exceeded its goal by a solid 10 percent. A new international generation of parents played an instrumentally resilient role, as did 50 donors who gave more than $1 million each. By the time Shanahan turned the headmaster reins over to Alex D. Curtis in 2011, the endowment had recovered to around $240 million, and new possibilities were on the horizon.

UNDER CURTIS’ LEADERSHIP, CHOATE ONCE AGAIN TOOK STOCK OF ITS STRENGTHS as a school where

tradition and innovation went hand-in-hand. A Task Force on Community gave rise to a Strategic Plan that would yield new architecture, technology-supported learning, and experiences to equip students for a changing world.

The Task Force’s work to solicit broad input and make recommendations “reinforced the importance of community here,” Curtis said. “We realized that we needed new facilities to support community a little more strongly.”

Setting the bar high was the $20 million Kohler Environmental Center, which opened on 266 acres east of the main campus in 2012. The LEED Platinumcertified space became home to a cohort of 14 ecologyminded juniors who would bring best practices to bear, not only on scientific research projects, but also on their daily living habits as residents of the center.

Facilities were named to honor not just donors but also key leaders in the School’s 125-year history. As Shanahan prepared to step down after 20 years, the School dedicated a new Shanahan Field where lacrosse teams play today.

A new Headmaster’s residence bears the name “Phoebe House” in honor of Charley Dey’s wife, Phoebe, and the couple’s tenure at Choate from 1973 to 1991. And since 1998, the Seymour St. John Chapel has been so-named in honor of the Episcopal priest headmaster (1947–1973) who regarded spiritual formation as foundational for everything else at Choate.

In 2013, Choate’s iPad program put the devices in the hands of every teacher and student. The hope was for them to leverage the tool’s power by experimenting with it and using it to collaborate in fresh ways. To test the possibilities and learn from what works (as well as what doesn’t) would be a worthy educational experience in its own right.

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Choate is one of the first independent schools in the country to adopt a 1:1 iPad program. The hope is to leverage the tool’s power by experimenting with it and using it to collaborate in fresh ways. To test the possibilities and learn from what works (as well as what doesn’t) is a worthy educational experience in its own right.

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“That’s what Choate is doing these days by going to places like Google and Pixar, companies that are doing things very differently than companies did them 50 years ago, and saying: ‘What do you look for in the people that you hire?’” –shanti mathew ’05

LEFT In December 2015, Choate Rosemary

Hall joined a national movement and held its first Hour of Code, where experienced programmers inspire novices and let them discover the joy and beauty of coding.

Dr. Curtis and student consult on a project.

RIGHT/BOTTOM In February 2015, the

School’s Cameron and Edward Lanphier Center for Mathematics and Computer Science opened. Located in the new center is Choate’s i.d.Lab, a mindset, space, and resource for the Choate community that provides a place for exploration and innovation.

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“We want to define the playing field. We want to be at the decision-making of: ‘What will education look like?’ We all know we’re in a key period of five, 10 or 15 years where many practices are going to be established that I suspect are going to last for a long time.”

–alex. d. curtis, headmaster

Campus spaces are now emerging to foster the type of interactions that can bolster community ties and prepare Choate students for a changing world. The new Cameron and Edward Lanphier Center for Mathematics and Computer Science is equipped not only with state-ofthe art classrooms, but also casual settings to sustain conversations about big ideas beyond the classroom.

Spaces to facilitate design thinking are cropping up in the form of an i.d.Lab and other i.d. sites around the campus. A new student center with a video studio will soon rise adjacent to Hill House on the former site of St. John Hall. A new auditorium is in planning stages to give the entire community a place to meet as one.

“We want to define the playing field,” Curtis said.

“We want to be at the decision-making of: ‘What will education look like?’ We all know we’re in a key period of five, 10, or 15 years where many practices are going to be established that I suspect are going to last for a long time.”

Choate still has a way to go before realizing some of its perennial, long-term goals. Curtis acknowledges, for instance, the need for more socioeconomic diversity in the student body. While both ends of the financial spectrum are represented, and the School continues its efforts to attract and support full need families, middle class families are also a priority. More than ever, our efforts are focused on those who don’t qualify for a full ride but who also cannot afford full tution. In years ahead, Curtis hopes a Choate education will be viable for more families who need only partial support to pay boarding tuition.

Some alumni share the hope that Choate’s high price tag won’t lead to increased homogeneity on campus.

With the 125-year milestone now behind it, Choate is trusting in its foundations to undergird the way forward. Training in classics and critical thinking are as valued today as they were in 1890, when Caroline Ruutz-Rees gathered the first crop of young teens at the old Rosemary Farms. But just as she broke molds, raised standards, and prepared girls for a not-yet-realized-butemerging world, Choate Rosemary Hall today honors its roots by making sure graduates won’t be startled or daunted by the world they will come to inhabit. The School expects them to be confident because they’ve already honed all the traits and habits necessary to succeed and make a positive difference. From there, the legacy will be theirs to mold. ■

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you, G. Jeffrey Macdonald ’87, author of the five-part series “Common Roots Shared Purpose,” for your countless hours of research in the Choate Rosemary Hall Archives and painstaking recounting of events. Our gratitude to School Archivist, Judy Donald ’66, who took special care to make sure that accuracy and precision guided the narrative at every juncture. Thank you to editors, Lorraine S. Connelly and Henry McNulty ’65 for their expertise and time spent in polishing the manuscripts; to our graphic designer, David C. Nesdale, whose skills made concept to reality a joyful journey; and to Alison J. Cady, Director of Strategic Planning & Communications, and Mari Jones, Director of Development & Alumni Relations, whose departments funded the project. To our living heads of school, Charles F. Dey, Edward J. Shanahan, and Alex D. Curtis, thank you for the generous time allotted for interviews. And a very special thank you to former faculty member Tom Generous, whose 1997 text, Choate Rosemary Hall: A History of the School, served as the bar against which all future School histories are to be measured.

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