Fr. Frederick H. Sill, OHC, Tote Walker 1919 and the Chorister’s Daughter by Robert Ober Jr. ’54

UNTANGLING KENT HISTORY

Fr. Frederick H. Sill, OHC, Tote Walker ’19, and the Chorister’s Daughter

BY ROBERT F. OBER JR. ’54

AFTER JOINING KENT SCHOOL following my retirement from the Foreign Service, I became quite close to the then-retired Thomas D. Walker 1919—“Tote” as everyone knew him—the School’s legendary rowing coach who had as warm a relationship with the School’s Founder, Fr. Frederick H. Sill, OHC, as any faculty member during their forty-plus years together.

As a student I had little contact with Tote, my single outing in a Kent boat having been a disaster, as I recall English teacher O.B. Davis threatening to toss me into the Housatonic from the boat he was coxing if I didn’t synchronize my oar with my Third Form classmates. Tote coached me later, somewhat more successfully, in club football.

Upon my return in 1987, my wife and I grew fond of Tote and his wife, Elise, and often had a drink together at their home in Macedonia Valley or, on occasion, at dinner in town. It was at such a dinner, on October 21, 1988, at a local eatery, The Milk Pail, that Tote said that Fr. Sill had once told him that he was prompted to join the Order of the Holy Cross (OHC) shortly after he had been “rebuffed” by a young woman, the daughter of the Chorister at his father’s church, who, according to Tote, later turned out to be the mother of Jake Beam ’24.

I was startled by the comment, but it had likely arisen in the context of my or my wife’s reference to Ambassador Beam, the first ambassador I served under during the first of three assignments in Moscow. Chatting that evening, I had probably alluded to my puzzlement that Beam, while aware of my educational background, had never once mentioned Kent or Pater during my introductory call nor at various other meetings before he retired from that post. Beam was known to be somewhat shy, yet Fr. Sill was such an imposing, even overpowering figure during the 1920s that I thought the ambassador would inevitably mention him or the School. During my own time Father Sill as Coxswain at Columbia, 1894 at Kent, I had seen Pater daily, at the evening Chapel services and elsewhere on campus, always in his white monastic habit and his wheelchair, until his death just after my Fourth Form year.

Tote’s comment so surprised me that, after our gettogether, I wrote a rough note—out of a Foreign Service habit of making “memcons” of important conversations, a note which I would check from time to time in the years that followed.

I doubted that I would ever find reason to cite Tote’s provocative comment but, having already written articles for the Quarterly about Pater, it seemed right at

Father Sill attending Trinity School in New York City (front row, fourth from left).

last to determine, at least, whether Tote’s suggestion had any discernible plausibility. Could Ambassador Beam’s mother have had any association with Fr. Sill before his initial profession to the Order in 1901?

A CHOIR CONNECTION Even if Tote had misunderstood Pater during one of their many get-togethers, often related to their shared interest in developing competitive rowing, it warranted some cursory research. Ambassador and Mrs. Beam’s only son, Alex, a distinguished writer with whom I have been in contact, has also been intrigued by the possibility.

Alex’s grandmother, Ambassador Beam’s mother, was born Mary Prince in 1874, the same year as Frederick Herbert Sill and, according to the federal census of 1880, was living with her brother, John Dyneley Prince Jr., age 12, and their parents, John Dyneley Prince Sr., and his wife, Annie, in Islip, on the southern shore of Long Island. John Sr. was described as a “commercial broker.”

But John Sr., as it turns out, also had an avocation—not reported in the census—which had landed him, probably in the middle 1870s, at the Chapel of St. Chrysostom’s. Fr. Thomas Henry Sill, Pater’s father, had established this church under the auspices of the famed Trinity Church, in the middle 1860s, really a mission chapel in the heart of lower Manhattan known as Hell’s Kitchen, filled with new immigrants and beset with vice.

If John Sr. was indeed a chorister at Fr. Henry Sill’s Chapel as Tote suggested, how to explain the daunting commute that the distance between Islip and Manhattan would have represented, especially in the 1870s and ’80s? There had to be a second home, probably in Manhattan itself, and indeed, online, I did find it, in Phillips’ Business Directory of New York City, 1882, listed among fourscore

other “Princes” but including Mary’s father: “Prince, John D., Broker, 64 Broadway and 180 Fifth Avenue.” And, unlike all the other Princes listed, beneath that single line was this: “h 41 E-34th Street,” “h” designating “house,” close to the very site of the rented space, West 32nd Street near the corner of Broadway and 34th Street, where the first services of St. Chrysostom had been held. In November 1869, the Chapel would in fact move into a new building, located farther uptown, at Seventh Avenue and 39th Street, a substantial church designed by a famed architect, Richard Upjohn. By this time, streetcars were coursing up and down Seventh Avenue and Prince’s brokerage business, judging from the family’s second home, was flourishing.

The enumerator who covered 34th Street in the June 1880 federal census had also found the family at that 34th Street address, ensuring the family’s double appearance in the census that year, which, I suppose, can occur.

So, what was Mr. Prince’s relationship with Fr. Thomas Sill, Pater’s father? It had to have been exceedingly close judging from a book published in 1906, written by a one-time organist and a composer at Trinity Church, and entitled A History of the Choir and Music of Trinity Church, New York, From Its Organization, to the Year 1897. Several entries, in the author’s chronology of happenings at Trinity, underscore Mr. Prince’s vital role both at St. Chrysostom’s Chapel and at Trinity. The author introduces Prince first as having supplemented Trinity’s choir by bringing six boys from St. Chrysostom’s to the Church’s Ascension Day service in 1881. Then, on Christmas Day 1882, Prince is said to have brought the Chapel’s entire choir to Trinity for that service, altogether sixty-nine voices (34 trebles, 10 altos, 11 tenors, and 14 basses).

Then, on Ascension Day 1883, this shocking statement:

There was an element of gloom on this occasion: the banner of St. Chrysostom’s was draped in black, in mourning for John D. Prince, the late Choirmaster over whose remains the Burial Service had been sung on the morning of the same day.

The entry continues for a full page, elaborating that Mr. Prince, who was 43 at the time of his death, had become interested in the work of the Chapel and, with the consent of the Rector and Vestry, had “organized and maintained at his own cost a choir of men and boys of the best material… The head of an important business firm, he devoted his spare time to the study of music and to the training and perfecting of his choir…”

Would Mr. Prince’s son, John, then age 15, have been in the choir? One cannot say, but certainly the entire Prince family, including Mary, then age nine, must have been an important presence at St. Chrysostom’s, and young Frederick Sill, of the same age as Mary, could not have been unaffected by Mr. Prince’s sudden death.

More than a half a century later, in October 1941, Pater was interviewed for a feature article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, and its author wrote:

“Music fascinated the lad. John D Prince had made the choir at St. Chrysostom’s famous all over town; and frequently the stars from the Metropolitan Opera House, lately built across the street, came in to help. Everyone sang or played; Fred did both, the former as a choirboy, the latter on a fiddle.”

So, Kent’s Frederick H. Sill had been in Prince’s choir.

St. Chrysostom’s Chapel circa 1890. Photo by Robert Louis Bracklow, courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.

Father Sill, Coxswain for 1894 Columbia University crew

TEENAGE YEARS ONWARD We have no way to know, however, to what extent the Prince and Sill families remained in contact after John Prince’s death, or after Frederick Sill and Mary Prince moved into their teenage years. We do know that young Fred Sill was then in school; according to the same article, Pater was initially tutored by his grandmother, until he was nine, and then attended “Trinity School and then to the Halsey School to get better brushed up for Columbia College.” Presumably, neither school at that time was coed.

Mary probably was initially tutored at home, as affluent families often arranged, before attending a nearby private school. She would later marry into a highly academic family, so overall probably received a good education. The sister of Fr. Sill, a year younger than her brother, was sent to a St. Mary’s School at age 10, then to Horace Mann School, before entering Barnard College, which had just become affiliated with Columbia.

It is difficult to imagine that Fred Sill and Mary Prince, as teenagers, did not see each other now and then, be it at the Chapel or at the Church, or in their respective neighborhoods. The Sill family resided at 204 West 39th Street, a few blocks from the Prince house. Moreover, Sill’s older brother, Henry Sill, and John D. Prince Jr. ended up as classmates at Columbia University, which is where, three years later, in 1891, Frederick Sill himself matriculated.

What we do know from newspaper reports is that Mary Prince was married on June 1, 1898, in Ringwood,

New Jersey, to Willard Humphreys, 34 years old, a professor of German Language and Literature, and the chairman of that department, at Princeton University. Humphreys had matriculated at Columbia in the same Class of 1888 as Mary’s and Sill’s brothers, later securing a Ph.D. degree there. However, that marriage ended suddenly with the death of Professor Humphreys in September 1902, after he had taken, according to the reports, an “overdose of chloral,” ostensibly due to a painful toothache from which he had been suffering. He never regained consciousness, so there was no opportunity for a further explanation. It was said that he had been “the most brilliant and highly esteemed member of the faculty.” On December 9, 1906, Mary Prince, now the widow Mrs. Willard Humphreys, married Jacob Newton Beam, also with a Ph.D., but from a German university. He was identified as a “preceptor in German” at Princeton, in the very same department which her late husband had chaired. She was “given away” by her brother, John D. Prince Jr., the wedding having been conducted at the Church of the Holy Communion on Sixth Avenue and 24th Street in lower Manhattan. The future Kent student, Class of 1924, the future Ambassador to the USSR and two Eastern European countries, Jacob Dyneley Beam, was born of that relationship on March 24, 1908.

UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS As for the putative rebuff to Fr. Sill, it probably would have occurred shortly before Mary’s first marriage. Fr. Sill had completed his theological training by then, and was ordained a year later, on May 28, 1899, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He then proceeded, rather determinedly, to professing himself as a novice to the Order in 1901 and making his final profession a year later.

Would he have kept abreast of Mary’s marriage plans? Would he have learned of the misfortune which befell Mary upon losing her first husband?

These, to be sure, are unanswerable questions. But what seems clear is that, around the turn of the century, Fr. Sill came to recognize that he had a monastic kind of self-discipline, which would allow him to push aside any carnal ambitions; and while life in a cloister would for him probably have been unthinkable, he soon conceived of an opportunity within the very confines of the Order

“. . . what seems clear is that, around the turn of the century, Fr. Sill came to recognize that he had a monastic kind of self-discipline . . .”

to build a school like no other… not class-based, but open to families of modest means, families such as he came to know at his father’s Chapel.

It is said in Greek mythology that when Paris seized Helen, Sparta’s queen, her face “launched a thousand ships,” provoking that tenyear-long Trojan War.

If Mary Prince’s putative rebuff had not been delivered, would not the consequences for us, in our real world, have been rather disastrous? If Fr. Sill had not professed to the Order of the Holy Cross, the School likely would not have come into being. As for those countless boats to which Fr. Sill and Tote Walker were so devoted, they never would have been launched.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Those associated with the Kent School archive, full- or part-time, provided helpful information as I weighed Tote Walker’s comments: Denny Mantegani (Hon) ’67, Katy Armstrong (Hon) ’70, and Louisa LaFontan. The Quarterly columnist Larry Gile ’73 tracked down the news articles about the successive marriages of the Chorister’s daughter, enabling me to untangle that conundrum.

Included in the School’s archives is a letter (at right) in which Pater attempts to allay his older brother’s, Harry’s, concern that he might be making his profession to the Order without sufficient aforethought. In one letter from Pater, writing as “Fred” to his oldest brother, Harry, then just beginning his teaching career at Cornell, he makes an appeal: “Now, Harry, I want your help and not your opposition. I want you to pray over the whole subject and ask yourself in the sight of God whether you are right in trying to keep me from what I know as my duty…” In the other letter, from Pater’s other brother, James, an ordained priest like Pater at the time, addressed to Harry, James acknowledges that he “used what influence I could to prevent Fred’s joining the Holy Cross Order.” He goes on to recount that he is “not down on Orders, but do not approve of the Holy Cross Order,” adding that “I urged Fred not to become a novice at so early a stage in his ministry, but he did not look in the same way as I did at the conditions of life to-day and the prospects for doing the best work in the Church.” Both letters are undated but seem to have been exchanged shortly before Pater made his final profession to the Order in 1902.

The fact that Pater was not daunted by his brothers’ concerns speaks to his fearless self-assurance, perhaps his stubbornness, the very qualities which enabled this young priest to bring our School through its fraught first years to the success it today enjoys.