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CHOATE
READER
O n the occasion of Choate s 125th celebration, we asked Choate Rosemary Hall authors from across the decades to write a tribute or recollection of their time at school. Geo rey Wol 55 is the author of six novels;and biographies of Harry Crosby, John O H ara, and most recently, Joshua Slocum. The Hard Way Around: The Passages of Joshua Slocum was reviewed in the Spring 2011 issue of Bulletin. The author lives in Bath, Maine.
Bull Sessions choate 1952-1955
by geoffrey wolff â55
CHOATE FACT From 1940
until 1959, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt made seven visits to Choate.
RECENTLY MY WIFE AND I WERE WATCHING KEN BURNSâ TELEVISION SERIES DEVOTED TO THE ROOSEVELT DYNASTY.
While it was perverse not to admire Eleanor s sternly promoted good deeds and her relentless insistence on fair play, there was also something excessive about her rectitude that drove me nuts. After 60 years there popped into my head the expression, Straight Arrow. ( Expression in the sense of square-jawed, frank-eyed facial set as well as of idiom.) I was transported to our Chapel, the vivid memory of commendable homilies delivered by estimable personages. The 1955 Choate Brief alludes to corpulent visiting preachers wheez ing as they struggled to the pulpit s summit in order to evangeliz e the stamina, courage, and manliness dramatized by Sir Edmund Hillary s 1953 ascent of Mount Everest. Anyway, not wishing to risk being mistaken by my wife for a cynic, sexist or lookist, Imerely remarked, You know, Eleanor Roosevelt visited Choate to talk to us. No way! In fact she visited more than once. More than twice. Bushwah! She said bushwah in its vulgar American translation from the bogus French, emphatically capturing the spirit of my favorite tribal memories of Choate, hidden from the chiefs and Great White Father: Bull Sessions. Remember? Whispers and unrestrained laughter with roommates just before and often after lights-out, or during visits to
friends rooms in Woodhouse or Combo or West Wing or Bungalow, training to become bull artists ? O h, how I miss those powwows!Passing along the lore and legends, the wisdom entrusted to fth formers by sixth formers. Lies and astonishments, cautions and certainties. And every now and then, as though by miracle, a truth. Which returns my memories to a visit from Eleanor Roosevelt. Everyone (excepting Republicans) knows and knew then that Mrs. Roosevelt was willing to say only what was perfectly true. And if I remember rightly, the truth that she told us in the basement of the Chapel that night in 1954 was bleak. Esteemed scientists had con ded to the great President s widow, that the earth our earth would soon, in a million years or so, be encrusted by ice, just as it had been long ago. Iam aware that this projection today seems ironic, even ludicrous, so I call upon my schoolmates to con rm or deny her prophecy. But whether by ice or hot water, we were sunk, screwed to the wall. I remember vividly with what a brave show of equanimity my school comrades, present in the audience, accepted this awful calculation. We had seen war movies, and had learned from them to ape the impassive physiognomies grace under pressure, as our hero Hemingway had it that bomber pilots displayed during the pre-dawn brie ng that foretold that only three out of ve would return from this dam-busting mission.