Centennial PALLIUM: 1915-1940

PALLIUM THE MAGAZINE OF CANTERBURY SCHOOL The First Centennial Issue: 1915-1940 VOL. 32, NO. 1

CANTERBURY SCHOOL

Society of Alumni Our Society of Alumni is only as strong as the sum of its parts. We are all Saints, and we stand more than 5,000 strong. That’s an impressive number when we work together. We need you!

We encourage all alumni to become involved with the Society of Alumni.

We are building the CANTERBURY CORE, a robust group of alumni that are involved in a wide variety of ways: n Reunion n Networking and Mentoring n Regional Events and Gatherings n Speaker Series n Admissions n Community Service n And much more!

Let us know how you would like to join the efforts of the SOA and become involved.

Email us anytime at SOA@cbury.org.

We want to hear from you!

We invite all alumni to participate in an Alumni Survey. www.cbury.org/alumni-survey Share your opinions and help us identify opportunities to meet the needs and interests of our alumni.

Survey deadline February 1, 2016

You’re invited to a Cocktail Party (a.k.a. the post-Christmas, Christmas Party!)

Sponsored by the Society of Alumni A festive evening celebrating alumni connections and honoring Tom and Betsy Sheehy’s 26 years of leadership and service to Canterbury School.

Friday, January 29, 2016 6:30 to 8:30 PM New York Athletic Club 180 Central Park South New York City $50 per person No admission at the door per NYAC policy Register online at www.cbury.org/soa-cocktailparty or by phone at 800-526-1710.

Society of Alumni Executive Committee Peter J. Tucker ’78, President Victoria E. Bundonis Rovin ’81, Vice President John B. Gaffney ’90, Secretary William R. Finn ’07 Renata D. Kennedy ’00 Elizabeth R. Leonard ’94 Robert B. Maloney ’95 William F. Meara III ’97 John M. Niles ’68 Richard J. Owens ’82 Nolly Y. Pastore ’96 Patricia S. Rasmussen ’92 William M. Steers Jr. ’04 James R. Briggs ’56, ex-officio

PALLIUM Vol. 32, No. 1

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2015

Letter from the Headmaster Letter from the Editor The Founding of Canterbury School

By Marc Vanasse ’73 In 1914, Henry O. Havemeyer had a unique and bold idea to found the first independent school run exclusively by Catholic laymen. With the financial assistance of a few wealthy men and the energy of first headmaster Nelson Hume, his vision became reality, but not without conflicting viewpoints along the way.

Canterbury’s Trustees: 1915-1940

By Lou Mandler Canterbury’s original five Directors helped realize the School’s founding. During the next 25 years, Trustees played an important role in providing funds to expand the physical plant. Who were these men, why did they invest in Canterbury, and how did they acquire their fortunes to do so?

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A Force of Nature: Headmaster Nelson Hume

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The Faculty

By Emily Dolan From the first day Canterbury opened for business, Nelson Hume set high standards for and dominated all aspects of school life. How did this one-man powerhouse, this force of nature as he has been described, accomplish such a feat for 33 years, and what was his effect on students such as Joseph Campbell ’21 and Sargent Shriver ’34?

By Wright Danenbarger Nelson Hume insisted on hiring scholars of distinction to instruct Canterbury’s students. Dean of Faculty Wright Danenbarger ruminates on the contributions of these men and sheds light on those who had “unusual personalities and a high degree of individuality.”

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Canterbury’s Campus: The First 25 Years

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The Chapel: 1915-1940

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By Bryan Kiefer How did Canterbury start with three buildings and 12 leased acres in 1915, replace the loss of two major structures, and expand its footprint at the top of the hill?

By Bryan Kiefer The story of how Canterbury’s first chapel, a part of the School’s original physical plant, went from an improvised and modest space to a new building that became the crown jewel of the campus.

The Student Body: 1915-1940

By Lou Mandler Canterbury opened its doors on September 30, 1915, with seven faculty, including the Headmaster, on board to teach the 18 boys that year. In 1939-1940, at the end of the first quarter century, the enrollment was 98 boys, which included 13 sets of brothers.

Victory, Victrolas, and Vespers Student Life at Canterbury: 1915-1940

By Kathy Bolster From the opening day of Canterbury, students attended classes and participated in athletics. What kept them otherwise occupied during their free time?

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Forging an Athletic Tradition Developing Spirits, Minds, and Bodies

By Paul Dolan Nelson Hume firmly believed his students should participate in athletics. In the very early years of the School, boys played football, hockey, or baseball. By the end of the first quarter century, Canterbury had added several more choices to accommodate a growing student body.

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Canterbury Celebrates its 100th Anniversary

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Class Notes

A day of pride brings together school community, graduates, parents, and honored guests.

News, photos, obituaries, and Athletics Hall of Fame photo essay

Upcoming Events Alumni Hockey Game January 16, 2016 12:00 p.m.

Society of Alumni Cocktail Party January 29, 2016 6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.

Paul Hendrickson Talks about Ernest Hemingway February 19, 2016 9:55 a.m.

Centennial Alumni Art Show April 2 - 23, 2016 Opening Reception April 9, 2016 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.

Knickerbocker Orchestra April 9, 2016 6:00 p.m.

Women of Canterbury Centennial Dinner April 29, 2016 6:00 p.m.

Canterbury School, founded in 1915 by Roman Catholic laymen, is a coeducational, boarding and day school of approximately 335 students, grades 9-12, PG. The Roman Catholic commitment of the School remains central.

Canterbury School is a non-profit institution that seeks and admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin, and does not discriminate in the administration of its programs and policies.

The Canterbury Observer is a regular feature of the PALLIUM. It is a forum for any and all alumni, faculty, and friends of Canterbury to share their thoughts and interests. Views do not necessarily express the philosophy of Canterbury School.

Editor, Photographer, Designer: Marc Vanasse ’73 Cover photo: The 1917-1918 all-school photo with visiting clergy.

How to Reach Us

The Pallium encourages its readers to communicate with the School.

Mail: Pallium Editor, Canterbury School, 101 Aspetuck Avenue, New Milford, CT 06776 E-Mail: pallium@cbury.org Fax: (available 24 hours a day): 860-350-4425 Call: 860-210-3800 (Switchboard) 1-800-526-1710 www.cbury.org

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Letter from the Headmaster

Dear Members of the Canterbury Family,

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n Wednesday, September 30, 2015, the Centennial Convocation, commemorating Canterbury’s 100th birthday was held before an all-school gathering.

The celebration included invited dignitaries and honored guests, parents, family members of previous heads and alumni who later served as panelists. The highlight of the gathering was the history of the School, researched and written by Wright Danenbarger and presented by five students. Each student covered the tenures of the five headmasters with facts, major events, and humorous stories of the past 100 years.

Much has changed since the early days on the Hill, but the mission put forth by Dr. Hume, Henry Havemeyer, and Clarence Mackay in 1915 is still as alive and vibrant today as it was when the first 18 young men began their careers at Canterbury. It took the courage and vision of a small group of Catholic laymen to launch this educational community, run by laymen, not religious. Even the name “Canterbury” was unique in the annals of Catholic education.

Those early years were touch and go, but because of the energy and optimism of Nelson Hume and the confidence and support of the early founders and Trustees, 100 years later, Canterbury can reflect back with tremendous pride in all that this unique School has accomplished through its visionary leadership, august faculty, and successful graduates. Even against odds, the School grew, always moving forward.

Throughout our history, our graduates have demonstrated the positive effects of a Canterbury education in the arts and letters, government, service, finance, and education. Such men as Joseph Campbell ’21, Gerard Smith ’31, Sargent Shriver ’34, Dominic Dunne ’44, Cofer Black ’68, Conn Nugent ’64, Rudy von Bernuth ’62, Tom Gerety ’64, and Gregory Coleman ’72, to name but a few, have contributed significantly at the local, national, and international levels.

The four headmasters who preceded me–Nelson Hume, Walter Sheehan, Jack Reydel, and Rod Clarke ’46–insured that Canterbury remain a respected educational community among its peer schools, where intellectual pursuits and character development remain central to Canterbury’s mission. It has been a tremendous honor and privilege for me to follow in the storied footsteps of my predecessors.

Just as Henry Havemeyer and Clarence Mackay as early Trustees provided Dr. Hume with financial and emotional support, so in my tenure, Canterbury has been blessed with similar leadership by such men and women as John Duffy ’59, Jim Briggs ’56, John O’Neill ’57, Bill O’Connor ’57, Hope Carter, and Bob Steers ’71. Such men and women of integrity and commitment have given selflessly of themselves and their treasure to enable Canterbury to constantly move forward.

The mission put forth by Dr. Hume, Henry Havemeyer, and Clarence Mackay in 1915 is still as alive and vibrant today as it was when the first 18 young men began their careers at Canterbury.

In a letter from Nelson Hume to Henry Havemeyer dated October 2, 1940, Hume wrote, “When we consider the hard days through which the school, and everybody else, in fact, has had to live, it is quite obvious that the work of Canterbury in its growth and improvement has certainly been favored by God. There is no other explanation.” This still rings true.

In 1990, I inherited a community steeped in traditions and committed to its mission with no less fervor than when it was founded in 1915. It is my firm belief that with this strong foundation Canterbury will thrive in the years to come and provide the next generation of leaders to follow in the footsteps of those who have come before us.

Sincerely,

Thomas J. Sheehy III 2

Letter from the Editor

Dear Readers,

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o celebrate Canterbury’s Centennial year, we will publish four special issues that will cover the School’s 100-year history. Each issue will shine a bright and revealing light on 25 years of our heritage.

Collectively, these four issues will result in the most complete and definitive repository of our illustrious and rich history. While researching primary and secondary sources, seven faculty members who serve as this issue’s writers, have unearthed new and fascinating facts about Canterbury’s founding and development.

The writers, paired with research assistants Alyce Pollock, Sam Register, and Lindsay Mulhern, began their work last spring, and since then countless meetings and article revisions have occurred.

Each issue will cover the physical growth of the campus, the biographies and achievements of each of Canterbury’s headmasters, student life, athletics, faculty, trustees, and student body. This first issue will also include an article about the founding of Canterbury. The four PALLIUMS will retain a Class Notes section and replace the magazine’s Campus Life section with features about Centennial events on- and off-campus. For example, this issue covers the All-School Convocation that celebrated Canterbury’s 100th birthday on September 30.

To say this project has been a herculean effort for all involved is an understatement. However, the results have surely been worth everyone’s endeavors.

I extend my sincere thanks to the writers who contributed to this issue: Bryan Kiefer, Paul and Emily Dolan, Wright Danenbarger, Kathy Bolster, and Lou Mandler. Lou was instrumental in helping me develop the vision for this project and keeping the whole thing on track. I am also grateful for her keen editing skills.

In addition, I wish to thank Kathy for her invaluable assistance in finding photos for the articles.

The authors and researchers studied various archival materials in order to write and verify their stories. Thanks to former librarian Nancy Florio who made those materials available and who created an archives room in the library. She stocked it with Tabards, PALLIUMS, yearbooks, and additional resources, including historical photos. The major sources of information are Edward Mack’s The Way

To say this project has been a herculean effort for all involved is an understatement. However, the results have surely been worth everyone’s endeavors.

it Was at Canterbury: 1915-1965; Kathy Bolster’s Canterbury School: The First Ninety Years: 19152005; Edward T. Carmody’s memories of his days at Canterbury as written to May Hume; David Hume’s detailed memoir on the occasion of his father’s 100th birthday; Tabards, PALLIUMS, and multitudinous letters between Nelson Hume, Henry Havemeyer, Clarence Mackay, and additional Canterbury luminaries. Thanks also to Tony Hume ’71 for his assistance in gathering information about his great-uncle Raphael Hume, Nelson’s younger brother and Canterbury’s chief architect during the early days of the School.

Another great source of material came from Canterbury’s Centennial website, which contains an informative history, gallery, and time line. The articles in this and three subsequent School history issues will flesh out what Kathy Bolster and Lou Mandler have assembled online. In some cases, there is more information on the web than contained in these articles. You may visit the site at www.cbury.org/Page/ Centennial-Home.

All of us who are working on this project hope that you are delighted with what we have put together for you and for future generations of Cantuarians. If you find errors in our reporting, please inform us at pallium@cbury.org.

Enjoy!

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By Marc Vanasse ’73

The Founding of Canterbury School

In 1914, Henry O. Havemeyer had a unique and bold idea to found the first independent school run exclusively

by Catholic laymen. With the financial assistance of a few wealthy men and the energy of first headmaster Nelson Hume, his vision became reality, but not without conflicting viewpoints along the way.

“I had a dream that was not all a dream. –Lord Byron The New England Boarding School Two hundred and sixty-eight years passed from the founding of the first American preparatory school to Canterbury’s opening day, September 30, 1915. The roots of such schools began to mature and spread as a result of the Act of 1647 of the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony, which decreed that every town of 50 families must provide a schoolmaster and be responsible for his salary. Simultaneously, the General Court ruled that every town of 100 families should establish a “grammar” school. These rulings ensured a steady supply of ministers for Puritan pulpits, and they produced a pattern for later public school education throughout the United States as new territories and new States were admitted to the Union.

More than 27 of these “grammar” schools–modeled on the English style were called Latin schools, since Latin grammar was the basis of the curriculum–were begun in and around Boston to prepare boys for Harvard. A few were scattered throughout the rest of Massachusetts and into Connecticut after Puritan pastor Thomas Hooker’s migration from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and then to the Connecticut settlement of Hartford after the founding of Yale in 1701. Most were day schools and can barely be considered the forerunners or models of the later preparatory boarding schools. Public education, or more accurately, education paid for by the public, did not extend into the secondary field much before the 1870s.

In 1763, Lieutenant Governor Dummer of Massachusetts willed his farm and his fortune for the founding of a boarding academy at South Byfield. Samuel Phillips, a graduate of Governor Dummer’s school, started a similar one at Andover, MA, and three years later one at Exeter, NH. Both bore his name. The Methodists established Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, MA, in 1817. Nearly 100 years after Phillips started his schools, St. Pauls’ appeared in 1856, to be followed by St. Mark’s in 1865.

The Hotchkiss School, The Taft School, and Lawrenceville Academy all date from the 1890s. Deerfield Academy, originally founded as Dickinson Academy in 1797, began its later expansion into one of the largest boarding schools in the country in 1922 under Frank Boyden. Fr. Sill, as legend has it, cooked the first meal for his dozen or so boys at Kent in 1906.

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Henry O. Havemeyer. He dreamed of founding a school that would educate boys in their Catholic faith while preparing them for the best colleges and universitites in the country.

The Founding of Canterbury School By 1914, several Catholic immigrants or their sons had acquired considerable wealth.

Examples include Henry O. Havemeyer, nephew of the sugar baron; Allan Ryan, the son of Thomas Foutune Ryan, a tobacco, insurance, and transportation magnate; Clarence Mackey, son of John Mackay, who had a net worth of $30 million investing in mining stocks and operating silver mines on the Comstock Lode when he died in 1902; and James A. Farrell, president of U.S. Steel from 1911 to 1932 and founder of the Isthmian Steamship Company. These titans of business and others provided the necessary financial backing to make Havemeyer’s dream to start a school operated by Catholic laymen who, independent of a religious order, would prepare boys for the best colleges and universities in the country while training them in their faith. His dream was bold, unique, and controversial. If planned for properly and brought to successful fruition, it would be the first school of its kind in the country.

This accumulation of wealth centered in New York City. New

Although Alec felt confident filling in young Henry’s academic gaps, when asked by Mr. Havemeyer to start such a school, Alec reportedly retorted, “I’m not your man, but I have a brother.”

That honest, simple declarative sentence was certainly a major moment in what was to come.

Nelson Hume, Canterbury’s first headmaster. His experience in education and his boundless energy created Canterbury School.

York’s large Catholic population consisted of the two prominent immigrant peoples of the time: the Germans and the Irish. These Catholic men had the financial foresight and wherewithal to wield their power and influence. Against the background of this potent academic, social, and financial background, the seed to establish Canterbury was planted.

In 1913, Henry O. Havemeyer hired Alexander “Alec” Hume, brother of Nelson Hume, to tutor his son, Henry Jr. Based on written correspondence between Alec and Mr. Havemeyer, the two had a professional and cordial relationship. Havemeyer wanted his son, Henry Jr., to enter Yale University, but what could potentially be the lad’s lack of religious formation prior to entering college concerned his father. The elder Havemeyer could have elected to send Henry to Hotchkiss, Taft, or Exeter, or any of the many established schools that prided themselves in preparing boys for the elite colleges. What specifically concerned Havemeyer was what might happen to his son’s Catholic faith at any of these schools.

Havemeyer, pleased with Alec’s success at tutoring Henry Jr., asked Alec if he would spearhead planning all the details inherent in founding a college preparatory school operated and taught by Catholic laymen.

Although Alec felt confident filling in young Henry’s academic gaps, when asked by Mr. Havemeyer to start such a school, Alec reportedly retorted, “I’m not your man, but I have a brother.” That honest, simple declarative sentence was certainly a major moment in what was to come.

Nelson Hume had been on the faculty at two Catholic schools, Loyola School in New York City (1903) and The Newman School in Hackensack, NJ (1906), where he served as Assistant Headmaster from 1912-1913. His tenure at The Newman School was short. Ambitious and confident that he had the requisite experience, he left Newman to start his first school, which opened on September 24, 1906. Initially, Nelson called it School for Boys. However, in September 1908, the title Hume School appeared on the catalog cover and in the announcements. The Hume School prospered to such a degree that administrators at Newman and Hume Schools proposed and carried out a merger. The plan called for Nelson

Alexander “Alec” Hume, Nelson’s brother, served as Head of the Lower Forms and teacher. He was also a close advisor to his brother.

to become headmaster, but a clash of personalities between him and Newman’s Headmaster prevented this, and Hume withdrew from the venture. That experience caused him to reevaluate his place in the world of education. From 19131915, Hume had a brief career as an interior decorator with W.P. Nelson Company of Chicago and then as an assistant to the President of the New York Life Insurance Company. Unfulfilled by these jobs, Nelson was in a position to, once again, answer a call to a life in education.

In a handwritten letter dated September 28, 1914, Alec Hume reports to Havemeyer that he, Hume, had floated the idea of the kind of school that Havemeyer had in mind during the summer of 1914 to members of influential Newport families whose boys, he believed, created a “demand for the opening of a Catholic school which would provide for their education in the best possible way.” He adds, “Around the nucleus of these boys, I am certain that a Catholic school, that would eventually take its place with such schools as Groton and St. Mark’s, could gradually be 5

developed, if a group formed of certain Catholic men would agree to take an active role in supporting the efforts of an accomplished headmaster.”

Alec goes on to report to Havemeyer: I have been explaining these impressions of mine to my brother Nelson to urge him to look into this matter to satisfy himself that there is a demand for such a school and that such co-operation could be obtained. Naturally, I want him to talk to you about it and I would be pleased to have you appoint a time for him to see you either here at Mahwah or in your [NYC] office. He is not concerned at present with what amount of money it might be necessary or possible to raise, but he does want to test what sentiment there would be in favor of going into the matter at all, and he thinks that a talk with you and a direct expression of opinion from you upon what interest such a development would arouse among the right people would be very helpful and illuminating. I am myself very much interested in the idea, and I am eager to bring about an exchange of views on the matter between you and my brother, so I trust you will arrange for an interview soon.

Impressed with Nelson’s school experience, Havemeyer agreed to meet Nelson and arrange an introduction for Nelson to meet Clarence H. Mackay, President of the Postal Telegraph Company.

According to David Hume ’45, Nelson’s son, “That introduction was the key to the formation of Canterbury School and, because of his role in it, Henry O. Havemeyer later claimed, with some justification, that he founded Canterbury.”

In addition to the letter of introduction he had written for Hume to meet with Mackay, Havemeyer stated in a letter to Mackay, “A proposition has been presented to me for the establishment of a first-class preparatory Catholic school for Catholic boys, on the lines of the well-known Groton, St. Paul [sic] and Andover, etc., where they can 6

Hume cautiously, and at times forcefully, navigated the precarious path that would result in his triumphant return to education, specifically as headmaster. In a February 17, 1915, letter to Havemeyer, Hume put the whole plan and his future prospects on the line, writing… be brought up in their religion, at the same time meet men that they will associate with in after years. The establishment of such a school I feel is most imperative.”

David Hume penned in the memoir he wrote on the occasion of his father’s 100th year: “Mackay and Hume met at Mackay’s office at Postal Telegraph. Mackay asked of Hume, “What was it you wanted to see me about?” Hume responded, “Mr. Mackay, I want to start a Catholic school that no one will have to apologize for.” To which Mackay said, “That’s a wonderful idea. How much money do you want?” Mackay’s optimism and generosity “proved to be the perfect complement to Hume’s energy and idealism.”

After Henry Havemeyer and Nelson Hume met, Havemeyer found Hume to be the ideal person for starting “his” school. Mackay concurred and later assured Havemeyer of his interest, writing on March 13, 1915, “I had a most interesting interview with Mr. Hume yesterday at my office, and was very favorably impressed with his general ideas on education. Mr. Hume is an enthusiast on his subject and if energy counts for anything, I should judge that he would make the proposition a go.”

With Mackay’s blessing, Hume began work on locating a suitable property, securing additional financial backing, hiring a faculty and staff, and finding parents who supported Havemeyer’s vision and who were willing to send their sons to the School. He had to work on each of these matters simultaneously because time was of the essence if the School was to open in the fall of 1915. When Hume began to push forward with his plan, he and Havemeyer became engaged in a game of high-stakes “academic” chess throughout the winter of 1915, particularly concerning the financial plan for opening the new school.

Hume cautiously, and at times forcefully, navigated the precarious path that would result in his triumphant return to education, specifically as headmaster. In a February 17, 1915, letter to Havemeyer, Hume put the whole plan and his future prospects on the line, writing, “If these conditions cannot be done under present favorable conditions, I shall be forced to believe that it will be impossible to secure under other circumstances sufficient cooperation to make a good start. In that event it will be necessary for me to put aside for good all idea of ever engaging in this excellent and necessary work. However, if they really wish to see the thing accomplished, a few Catholic men now have it in their power to start a school that will be successful and creditable. It all depends on raising that initial $10,000.”

Although Havemeyer believed in Hume’s plan, he had no interest in funding the school alone and made that clear to Hume in a letter dated February 23, 1915. Although some of the early “money men” verbally supported Havemeyer’s starting a new school, they were skittish about pledging their financial support. This troubled Havemeyer and his concern became the catalyst for his argument against opening the school in 1915.

He wrote to Hume, “This is the crux of the whole situation and until we can find five or more men to guarantee ten thousand dollars each, I do not see how we can proceed with the matter at present.”

Hume attempted to persuade Havemeyer that raising $10,000 in capital would be the best way to start a school. However, Hume’s financial plan was at odds with Havemeyer’s plan of postponing the start until ten investors pledged $100,000 in initial capital. Writes Hume, “This would be difficult to carry out and really not necessary to the success of the undertaking,” and he writes later that, “A present guarantee of $100,000 is really not necessary. The school should be able to operate for three years and complete its capacity of 50 boys on $10,000 capital.”

In searching for a campus for Havemeyer’s proposed boarding school, Hume desired a location that was close enough to New York City to attract wealthy Catholic boys

to enroll, but sufficiently removed to ensure a rural setting, which he regarded as a major selling point to prospective families. He visited many of the existing prep schools, made congenial acquaintances among his prospective colleagues, and concerned himself with such practical details as railroad service, water supply, and available land.

In addition, he drove many miles through the towns of Northwest Connecticut and had almost concluded that the town of Litchfield would be an ideal place, when he learned that the land and buildings of the recently closed Ingleside School for Girls were for sale. He approached New Milford from the north (Rt. 202), reached the crest of the dirt road, past the Elkington Farm, and looked west

into the Housatonic Valley. His gaze took in 12 acres and three major buildings, the imposing Weantinaug Hall, the cozy, lodgelike Bungalow, and a small structure that housed servants. He knew immediately that he had found the right place. The site, which was for sale for $25,000, also contained a large playing field, shaded walks, and an elegant fringe of tall elm trees. Hume had found his Shangri-la.

The Ingleside School was started

by Sarah Sanford (Mrs. William) Black in 1892 with money from the estate of her late husband, one of the founders of Black, Starr & Frost, the oldest jewelry firm in the United States. Founded in 1910 and still in business today, Black, Starr & Frost was the first commercial entity on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. The firm pioneered the use of plate glass windows and introduced the concept of “window shopping” to attract luxury loving passersby. They also introduced the first class ring and the first safe deposit box system.

Mrs. Black located her school on Elm Street, in the building that now houses the offices and CCD classrooms for St. Francis Xavier parish. When it opened in 1892, Ingleside School for Girls prospered. Encouraged by its success and eager to build upon her financial good fortune, Mrs. Black opened a boys’ side to Ingleside in 1901 with the financial assistance of her sister Caroline. For that purpose, she erected Weantinaug Hall on the top of Aspetuck Avenue, naming the Hall after the local tribe of Indians. When Weantinaug Hall came under control of Canterbury, it became known as Main House and contained classrooms, student rooms, the dining room, and offices. The large half-timbered structure occupied the site of what is now the parking lot in front of Sheehan House. She also had built the Bungalow, a residence for her students. To add to her hilltop campus, Mrs. Black purchased a small building from the defunct Adelphic Institute, a boys’ school 7

that had closed in 1880, and ordered the building moved from its original site on Chicken Hill (off Rt. 67 in New Milford) to its present position to the north of Sheehan House. That building, greatly renovated and expanded, is now the Chaplain’s residence and the oldest building on Canterbury’s campus. Mrs. Black first used it as a residence for the servants of Weantinaug Hall. Later, it served as her school’s gymnasium and Canterbury’s first chapel. Mrs. Black abandoned the boys’ school venture in 1904, and the Girls’ School took over the buildings.

In Rod Clarke’s oral history of the founding of Canterbury, he Weantinaug Hall in the days of the Ingleside School. Leased then purchased by claimed that Mrs. Black “like dumb Canterbury School, the building contained classrooms, student rooms, the dining Dora in David Copperfield, did not room, and offices. Hume named it Main House. have a head for figures.” Her lack of business acumen eventually led to the closing of her school, and when she died in 1910, Ingleside School essentially died with her.

Her niece, Jennie Daniels Pell, tried to keep the girls’ school alive, but she was unable to keep the venture successful, and the school closed in 1914.

Having found such a suitable property, Hume must have started to see the fruits of his labors coalescing. He proposed to the Trustees that a corporation be organized with authorized capital of $100,000 to operate Canterbury.

The Bungalow prior to 1915. After it was purchased by Canterbury School, it He told them that no more than became a dorm for Third and Fourth Formers; however, its grand interior made it $24,000 would be needed at the the envy of Fifth and Sixth Formers, who petitioned Doctor Hume for the building outset: $18,000 for the down to become their dormitory. The good Doctor acceded to their wishes. payment on the purchase price of the land and buildings, and $6,000 for start-up expenses. He was confident that tuition fees would cover the remainder of the expenses for the first years and yield a modest profit. He believed this could be accomplished with an enrollment as small as 30 boys, but he also believed that the initial enrollment would be not less than 40. (Only 18 enrolled in the first year.) Even at the time he was presenting this prospectus for the opening of school, Hume foresaw its expansion to an enrollment of 150 and recommended the The School’s Corps of Cadets marches in formation, wooden guns on their acquisition of Ingleside’s entire shoulders, in front of two small buildings, the residence for servants, right, and a barn that was part of Canterbury’s original physical plant. physical plant.

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Nelson Hume’s stock certificate. Confident that his for-profit school would thrive, he purchased six shares at the value of $100 each. Eventually, the School reorganized as a non-profit organization.

Not wanting to put their financial resources at risk, the founders balked at Hume’s approach. They supported a lease arrangement. While Hume was perhaps disappointed in the Trustees’ position, he was confident he could secure favorable terms for a lease. He successfully negotiated great terms: $1,500 per year with an option for purchase at the original price later. Hume presented this modified plan to Mackay at a meeting in Mackay’s New York office on St. Patrick’s Day, 1915. The meeting was a success. At a second meeting with Hume on April 18, 1915, Mackay agreed to contribute as much of the initial $10,000 as would be necessary to open the school in the fall. With Mackay’s support assured, Hume moved rapidly to bring Canterbury’s organization to fruition.

By April 1915, the financial foundation for the School was in place, and Canterbury School, Inc. was formed under the laws of Delaware, with an authorized capital stock of $50,000, divided into 500 shares of common stock of the par value of $100 each. The first stockholders consisted of Henry O. Havemeyer (15 shares; Henry Jr. also purchased 15 shares), Allan A. Ryan (35 shares), John D. Ryan (50 shares), James A. Farrell (50 shares), Clarence Mackay (60 shares), James H. Ward (25 shares), Nelson Hume (6 shares), Condé B. Pallen (3 shares), and Cabot Ward (3 shares).

The incorporation documents also state that the first Directors of the Corporation were James A. Farrell, Henry O. Havemeyer, Nelson Hume, John T. King, Clarence H. Mackay, Condé B. Pallen, Allan A. Ryan, and Cabot Ward. The Officers of the Corporation were: Henry O. Havemeyer (President), Clarence H. Mackay and James A. Farrell (Vice Presidents), and Nelson Hume (Treasurer and Secretary). At its start, Canterbury was to be a for-profit school. That would soon change.

On June 19, 1915, Hume returned to New Milford to take formal possession of the grounds and buildings the corporation had leased there.

Hume received the keys to the buildings from Mr. William Black Pell.

Hume suggested to Havemeyer that an announcement regarding the opening of the School be made no later than May 1, 1915. Havemeyer countered Hume’s suggestion by stating in a letter dated April 20, 1915, that he wished to postpone the opening for a year, because he was not convinced that Mackay had firmly committed his financial support and that he was unsure that he would send his son, Henry, to the School because he and Mrs. Havemeyer agreed that young Henry was not capable of

looking after himself. Hume’s counter-attack to Havemeyer’s proposed delay in opening the school was based on two reasons: “That a great number of people make their arrangements for their boys’ schooling during May and that agreements with teachers are usually made at that time also, and there are two or three men I want to secure for our faculty before they have bound themselves elsewhere.”

Hume must have assuaged Havemeyer’s concerns, because Havemeyer rented Hume a New York office (18 East 41st Street), complete with a clerk, filing cabinet, typewriter (a second-hand Victor Typewriting Machine), a mahogany typewriting desk and chair, and letterhead. From this location Hume conducted school business until the New Milford campus was available.

One of Hume’s early tasks was to propose a name for the school.

He named Canterbury after the cathedral school at Canterbury, England. Founded in the 6th century by St. Augustine, it became King’s School, Canterbury in the 16th century, and is among the oldest schools in the world. Dr. Hume adopted St. Augustine and subsequent Archbishops of Canterbury–St. Anselm, St. Dunstan, and St. Edmund–as the School’s saints. In choosing Canterbury as a name for the School, Dr. Hume set intellectual and religious training as its central concerns following the model of the cathedral school in England. Regarding naming the school Canterbury, Hume stated in a letter (April 18, 1915) to Havemeyer, “Mr. Mackay wrote me a few days ago that he considered Canterbury an admirable name for the school, and as you have sent me word that you thought the name would do, I told the lawyer to incorporate under that name.”

With the lease of an excellent property for the start of Canterbury, Hume proceeded immediately to publish a catalog of information to be used to recruit pupils for the School. He also created a formal invitation announcing its opening.

The announcement, made from an 9

One of Hume’s early tasks was to propose a name for the school. He named Canterbury after the cathedral school at Canterbury, England. engraved plate created by Tiffany & Co., reflected Hume’s insistence that everything related to Canterbury be first rate. To reassure Catholic families that the School had the support of a major Catholic figure, Hume included a line in the announcement that stated that Canterbury would exist “under the patronage of His Eminence John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York.” For undisclosed reasons, Cardinal Farley had not given Hume permission to use his name on the announcement. Embarrassed by his oversight, Hume wrote Farley, informing him that his name had been included in a number of newspapers and magazine, and that it was too late to stop their publication. Hume reassured the Cardinal that if he so requested, Hume could stop Tiffany from printing announcements based on their engraved plate. Wrote Hume to Farley, “I very much regret the matter had gone so far before I learned of your Eminence’s wishes [not to have his name included in the announcement].” Hume, Canterbury’s chief marketer, was well aware that the Cardinal’s name on the announcement would be of “immeasurable value to us as a means of establishing before the public the Catholic character of the school, the fact that it enjoys ecclesiastical approbation, and most of all that the work meets with your Eminence’s personal commendation.” That stated, Hume anxiously awaited the Cardinal’s response.

In a letter to Havemeyer dated June 24, 1915, Hume reported that, “I saw his Emminence [sic] Cardinal Farley this morning. He told me that upon thinking the matter over at greater length, and in view of the fact that his name had already been published as Patron of the School, he had decided to let us continue to use his name in that matter. I have therefore given orders to Tiffany to go ahead with our announcements as originally planned.” With that delicate matter resolved, Hume moved quickly to continue to attract boys to the School.

Not only was Hume to serve as Canterbury’s headmaster, but he was also, out of necessity, to serve as its first Director of Admission and all matter of additional roles typically associated with the running of a prep school. He took to the road, travelling by car and rail to convince parents to send their son(s) to the School. In addition to drumming up business in the tri-state area, he met with families in St. Paul, Milwaukee, Chicago, and St. Louis, to name a few. Hume reported to Havemeyer in a letter dated March 7, 1915, that a Mr. Purcell of Chicago urged Hume that students from outside the New York area should be included among Canterbury’s first pupils. Purcell reasoned that unless the West, for example, was well represented the School might be dominated by Eastern influences and thus made somewhat uncomfortable or unattractive to people from other parts to the country.

With capital secured, Hume continued looking for prospective students and hiring a faculty. Concerned with the possibility that the first students in a new school were usually boys who were not doing well at other places, Hume made it clear in the first school bulletin that Canterbury would not tolerate poor scholastic work or a failure on the part of any student to live up to the high standards he intended to set for the School.

The first boy to officially enroll at Canterbury was Cyril Clemens, Mark Twain’s distant cousin. Next to enroll was Henry Havemeyer’s son, Henry.

The remainder of the “charter” students included John Crimmins, James Farrell, Jr., Joseph Graham, Cyril Hume (Nelson’s youngest brother), Joseph Kelley, Peter Maloney, Nicholas Nelson, Richard and Swithin Nichols, Thomas Pallen, Allan and Theodore Ryan, George Saportas, and Charles Ward. Two more boys, Edward Carmody and Lambert Borden, 10

joined the ranks in October, and, at mid-term, two additional boys, Charles Martin and Grosvenor Fessenden, enrolled. However, the 18 enrolled in the fall of 1915 are generally considered Canterbury’s charter students.

On June 16, 1915, the Executive Committee of Canterbury School met in the office of Clarence H. Mackay to review the qualifications of the masters who Hume desired to hire. The proposed faculty for the first year included Alexander Hume (teacher of the lower form boys, business manager, and confidential assistant to the Headmaster), Maximillian von der Porten, Ph.D. (teacher of French and German), Patrick J. Downing, Ph.D. (teacher of Latin, Greek, and History), James J. McCarthy (Latin), and Frank J. Rooney, M.A. (teacher of mathematics and science). The Committee approved them all.

All the moving parts, the Canterbury idea, sufficient funds, an ideal property, a faculty and staff, and enrolled boys, had finally come into place. A memo dated June 7, 1915, states that the School would open on September 23, 1915. For reasons unknown, Canterbury opened exactly one week later, September 30, 1915. The same memo also states that there would be seven “classes” (Forms), three years of grammar school (Pre-Form, First Form, and Second Form) and four years of high school (Forms III-VI), “from which its scholars would enter college.” According to School documents, the Trustees set tuition at $800 for lower form boys and $1,000 for upper form boys.

Ever attentive to details and by now willing to make some decisions independently of Havemeyer, Hume selected navy blue and Columbia blue to be Canterbury’s school colors, although Havemeyer’s preference was navy blue and white. Hume found his combination to be pleasing to his own eyes, and his choice was abetted by the fact that these colors were also those of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

With the matter of school colors determined, Hume then went about

the business of selecting a School motto. Because he believed that his prayers to St. Jude had had some efficacy in the establishment of Canterbury, he found, in the Introduction to the Epistle of Jude, the Apostle, these words: “Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered to the saints.” Thus, Supercertari semel traditae sanctis fidei–to fight valiantly for the faith once delivered to the saints–became the expression of Canterbury’s mission.

While from Hume’s point of view, Canterbury was sensationally successful during the first two years, the more cautious members of the Board of Trustees, such as Havemeyer, still held off from proceeding much further while the project was operating on a tight budget. The essential buildings of the School were still held under a lease, and there was a desperate need for increased working capital.

Although the Board as a whole hesitated, one member, James A. Farrell, then one of the younger luminaries of United States Steel, who later became president of the corporation, was quietly making plans on his own to acquire land adjoining that was covered by the School’s lease. His confidence and vision were instrumental in ensuring the future success of the School. Furthermore, he proposed establishing a Foundation Fund for Canterbury School on December 17, 1917, to encourage more generous gifts that could be classified as charitable contributions. The response to the creation of the charitable foundation was immediate and substantial. By January 19, 1918, the School had accumulated $43,200

Canterbury’s original School Seal contained the School’s motto, selected

by Nelson Hume.

through gifts to the Foundation, which enabled it on that date to purchase the buildings and immediately surrounding acres of the Black estate.

Farrell, by now a prime mover on the Board of Trustees, clearly saw how the School could expand its original footprint and had the money to achieve that end; he strongly urged the Directors to transform the school corporation from a for-profit corporation to a non-profit corporation under the laws of Connecticut. He believed that such a reorganization of the School’s corporate setup would not only ensure the charitable character of all future contributions to the School but would also alleviate Hume’s concern about his own future. This is because the reorganization would allow Hume to be paid a fixed salary as headmaster without regard to the profit derived from school operations. Even in 1918, most of the Trustees balked at the launching of the complete corporation transformation urged

by Farrell. Finally, however, his views prevailed.

Within two years of its conception, Canterbury was a going concern. It had a beautiful location, a serviceable plant, some working capital, an energetic headmaster, an excellent faculty, 18 students, and a bright future.

To fight valiantly for the faith once delivered to the saints.

With capital secured, Hume continued looking for prospective students and hiring a faculty. Concerned with the possibility that the first students in a new school were usually boys who were not doing well at other places, Hume made it clear in the first school bulletin that Canterbury would not tolerate poor scholastic work or a failure on the part of any student to live up to the high standards he intended to set for the school.

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By Lou Mandler

Canterbury’s Trustees 1915-1940 Canterbury’s original five Directors helped realize the School’s founding. During the next 25 years, Trustees played an important role in providing funds to expand the physical plant. Who were these men, why did they invest in Canterbury, and how did they acquire their fortunes to do so?

Clarence Mackay, an original Executive Committee member, was intimately involved in the founding Canterbury School.

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ewspaper articles announcing Canterbury’s formation, the formal Tiffany announcement of Canterbury’s opening, and the 1915 viewbook list five Directors of Canterbury: Henry O. Havemeyer, Clarence Mackay, Allan Ryan, Condé Pallen, and George Cabot Ward with Nelson Hume listed as the Headmaster. Four of these original Directors of what was then the for-profit Canterbury School were prominent New York Catholic men who possessed great wealth.

The fifth, Condé Pallen, a major Catholic academic figure, was a professor at St. Louis University and an editor.

Of the five, Henry Havemeyer and Clarence Mackay were the most intimately involved. Of the many letters in the School’s archives between Nelson Hume, Henry Havemeyer, and Clarence Mackay, the majority are between Havemeyer and Hume, but those contain many references to Mackay indicating they valued his opinions and benefited from his support. As a group, the letters demonstrate that these three were the triumvirate that drove both the early financial and the practical planning of the School. Meetings were usually held 12

in Mackay’s New York office until the summer of 1938 when Mackay became ill with what turned out to be his final illness. He died in November of that year. The three men comprised the Executive Committee when it was created. As the School gained a secure footing, other wealthy Directors such as the Brady brothers, Nicholas and James, and James A. Farrell made important financial contributions towards the School’s development.

With the reorganization of the Corporation which took place between 1918 and 1920, Directors became Trustees. Terence Carmody, a significant early Trustee, provided valuable legal counsel as well as support for the School in other ways. Hubert McDonnell, Carlton Hayes, and John Burke became Board members before the end of the first quarter century.

The Centennial website (www. cbury.org/Page/Centennial-Home) contains brief bios of these Trustees and others who served the School for more than 20 years. The website also has a complete list of the more than 100 Trustees who have served Canterbury during its first century.

Henry O. Havemeyer was the namesake of his uncle Henry

As the School gained a secure footing, other wealthy Directors such as the Brady brothers, Nicholas and James, and James A. Farrell made important financial contributions towards the School’s development.

O. who was the well known sugar magnate and whose art collection comprises a section of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Canterbury’s Henry Havemeyer was President of Havemeyers and Elder, a New York real estate company, and of Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal, a railroad freight company. He was also a director of numerous copper and sugar concerns. The voluminous correspondence between Havemeyer and Hume in the School archives reveals that Havemeyer weighed in on matters ranging from faculty salaries to dress requirements for the boys

George Cabot

Condé Pallen

Allan Ryan

Terence Carmody

to whether Hume was being too extravagant with school stationery. He served as the primary financial overseer throughout most of the first 25 years. He was President of the Board for 24 years, until 1949, and Honorary Chairman until 1957. However, in September 1919, Havemeyer sent a letter to Hume resigning the Presidency. The two agreed to persuade Mackay to “take his turn.” However, Mackay responded that it was “out of the question,” and Havemeyer continued in that role for 20 more years. His two sons, Henry Jr. and Frederick, graduated from Canterbury in 1922 and 1927.

Clarence Mackay inherited an estate of $500 million from his father John W. Mackay, a silver miner and creator of the Postal Telegraph Company. Clarence was Chairman of the Board of the Postal Telegraph and Cable Corporation and President of the Mackay Radio and Telegraph Company. He was also involved in an array of civic roles–Chairman of the Board of the New York Philharmonic, Chairman of the Board of the Metropolitan Opera, and a member of the Board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Architect Stanford White designed Harbor Hill, Mackay’s home on Long Island, the largest home White designed. This mansion was the site of receptions for the Prince of Wales and Charles Lindbergh in the 1920s. The estate fell into disrepair after Mackay’s death in 1938 and was demolished in 1947. Much of his collection of medieval suits of armor is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His daughter Ellin married Irving Berlin against her father’s wishes. Mackay’s second wife was a lyric soprano who sang with the Metropolitan Opera.

Mackay’s advice and counsel was respected greatly by Hume as illustrated in his advice to Trustee Hubert O’Donnell in December of 1937: From all this you can see how wise a move you will be making in planning to have a talk with Mr. Mackay. Mr. Mackay has always assumed an attitude of real responsibility as a Trustee of the School in the true sense of trusteeship–a guardian of its property, of its reputation, and of its general interests, and an interested promoter of its work as an educational institution and not primarily as a business enterprise.

While Mackay did not issue the same number of letters of advice and counsel to Hume as Havemeyer did, Mackay was also interested in practical matters, illustrated by a letter he wrote to Havemeyer in 1923: Of course I regard it as most important that the boys have good milk, and we should always be willing to pay the proper price for it. As to what that price is in that part of the country I do not pretend to know but I would wish to have impressed upon Dr. Hume, as well as the new lessee, (of the farm) that we will insist that the boys have first-class milk.

The care Mackay took in designing his estate, his interest in collecting, and his involvement in many cultural boards indicate that this was a man with a strong aesthetic sense. In a letter to Havemeyer before the School opened for the second year, in trying to persuade Havemeyer to enlarge the dining room, Hume mentioned that Mackay had criticized the size of the dining room when he toured the School. Hume also told Havemeyer that Mackay recommended planting some flowers around campus. Mackay donated the spectacular west window in the Chapel, and

wrote to stained glass artist Nicola D’Ascenzo on June 22, 1931, when it was completed: I wish to take the first opportunity of telling you how immensely gratified I was with the beautiful window that was the result of your genius. I have made quite a study of stained glass and am familiar with most of the great edifices in France, especially Saint Denis and Chartres, and in my opinion if anybody has been able to come near the medieval masters of this art, you have.. . .

You would, I think, be interested in what I have been collecting in the way of old glass… (D’Ascenzo Studio Collection. Athenaeum of Philadelphia.)

The agreement between Havemeyer and Mackay regarding their roles in supporting Canterbury is hinted at in a letter from Mackay to Hume in 1936 commenting on a favorable audit of the books at the close of the fiscal year: I would judge it to be by far the best report that has been submitted so far; on the other hand, I feel that the situation still requires your vigilant and eagle eye on account of your knowledge of the financial operations.

Mackay’s son, John, graduated with the Class of 1925. When Mackay died in November 1938, Nelson Hume wrote his obituary in The Tabard, commenting that “he was constantly active

Clarence Mackay inherited an estate of $500 million from his father John W. Mackay, a silver miner and creator of the Postal Telegraph Company.

Clarence was Chairman of the Board of the Postal Telegraph and Cable Corporation and President of the Mackay Radio and Telegraph Company.

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Trustee Hubert McDonnell

in the management of all its (School’s) affairs.”

Allan Ryan was the son of Thomas Fortune Ryan who was a tobacco, insurance, and transportation magnate. Thomas Fortune Ryan was said to be the nation’s tenth wealthiest man when he died in 1928. At one point, he had controlling interest in 30 companies including Royal Typewriter, Union Tobacco Company, and NY Cable Railroad.

Thomas Ryan and his first wife supported many Catholic institutions in Virginia, Thomas Ryan’s home state. They also paid for a gym and dorm at Georgetown University and helped finance Byrd’s trip to the South Pole.

Sculptor Auguste Rodin created a 14

bust of Thomas Fortune Ryan.

Allan Ryan began a brilliant career on Wall Street as head of his own firm and with a seat on the Stock Exchange. However, after he went bankrupt in 1920 as a result of a Wall Street venture gone bad, his father disinherited him, giving Allan’s share of the estate to Allan’s son, Allan Jr., Canterbury class of 1920. Allan’s son, Fortune Peter Ryan ’29, served as a Trustee from 1948 to 1975. Additional sons were Theodore ’23 and Edward ’25.

The Ryan family continued to be involved with Canterbury through successive generations. Allan’s daughter Miriam relocated to South Kent in the 1950s and was a close friend of Walter and Lynn Sheehan.

Fortune Peter Ryan’s son Chris is a

graduate of the Class of 1969.

Condé Pallen, alone among the original Trustees, was primarily an educator and editor. As Chair of Philosophy at St. Louis University, he was well-known as a lecturer, especially on Catholic subjects. He was the publisher of The Catholic Encyclopedia and involved in other publishing firms including The Encyclopedia Press, Inc. Politically conservative, he criticized Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations and fought against the formation of the American Civil Liberties Union. He was a classmate in Rome of Pope Pius XI who made him a Knight of St. Gregory.

In May of 1916, Hume began to solicit James A. Farrell to become a Director. James Farrell was President of U.S. Steel from 1911 to 1932, expanding the company five-fold during his tenure. Farrell also established the Isthmian Steamship Company. He owned 25 rail lines and 700 sailing vessels.

Farrell believed in expanding Canterbury’s property and provided the financial backing to purchase additional land. The Farrell family has had a long association with the School. James Farrell, Jr. ‘19 was a Trustee for many years. Current student Ericka Lowman ’17 and alumna Elizabeth Lowman ‘10 are great-great-granddaughters of James A. Farrell.

John D. Ryan was invited to join the Board of Directors in 1917. He was a major figure in the copper industry in Montana, involved in the electrical business, part of the U.S. government during World War I, and one of the most active Catholic laymen in the New York diocese. He was a friend of Canterbury parent William McPhee of Denver and Canterbury parent and Trustee Nicholas Brady.

Terence Carmody became associated with Canterbury first as a parent and as the attorney who advised and represented Canterbury in its reorganization from a corporation to a not-forprofit institution. He became a Trustee after the reorganization in 1920. An attorney from Waterbury, CT, Carmody was head of the

Connecticut Bar Association from 1916-1928. The Carmody family has maintained an association with the School through the decades. Current student Nelle Carmody ’17 is the greatgranddaughter of Terence Carmody and daughter of Chris (Kit) Carmody ’57.

In 1936, Canterbury’s governing body was significantly strengthened with the addition of Hubert McDonnell, a former student and a friend of Nelson Hume. In a letter to his brother Cyril, Nelson Hume wrote: Hubert McDonnell, Chairman of the Parents’ Committee, whom I knew and taught at Loyola (by the way, he was the original leading character in that little play of mine that you later acted in with Scott Fitzgerald…) is taking a great interest in things. I never saw anybody throw himself so much heart and soul into a work of this kind. You can imagine the kind of support that gives me, and he is interesting a lot of important and prominent men in the school.

I think you will see some very interesting and important additions to our Board of Trustees before long.

By this time, although he continued to be very involved in the financial aspects of the School, Havemeyer was spending much of each year in Newport and Florida and had not visited the School since 1928. Correspondence indicates that the relationship between Havemeyer and Hume was becoming frayed. Hume’s letters to Havemeyer are political masterworks couching a rationale for expenditures and requests for permission in optimistic descriptions of the state and future of the School. Havemeyer sometimes gave snappy responses to Hume’s letters. When Hume told him that all schools have the problem of delinquent accounts, Havemeyer responded, “Because some man jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge is no reason why we should be satisfied to do the same.”

Shortly after McDonnell became a Trustee, the School became embroiled in a potentially

disastrous financial conflict with the contractor for the construction of the new Middle House after the burning of Main House. Much of the correspondence throughout 1937 and 1938 concerns “the O’Reilly case.” Contractor O’Reilly claimed the School owed him $21,049.22 while the School said it was $17,363.21. To make matters worse, the School didn’t have the funds to settle this account. Hubert McDonnell was instrumental, with advice from Terence Carmody, in shepherding the School through this affair. He contributed funds himself and solicited others including Havemeyer. In discussing the last $5,600 needed in July of 1938, McDonnell wrote to Havemeyer, It would be a great shame if the O’Reilly people could step in now, prevent the building of the new school building and, in addition, drag out furniture and fixtures from the present plant.

There was much discussion in letters through July and August of 1938 of the health of Clarence Mackay. Mackay had an appendectomy in December of 1937 but recovered enough to host meetings in his office the following April. By July of 1938, he again became ill. Hume and McDonnell were both of the opinion that Mackay would “not disappoint us” when he regained his health.

However, Mackay never recovered, and he died in November 1938.

Hubert McDonnell, Nelson Hume, and Henry Havemeyer attended his funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Hubert McDonnell provided leadership on the Board in other important ways. He actively solicited friends and acquaintances to send their sons to Canterbury.

He counseled that the School “must build up Alumni participation in School affairs.” In June of 1938, he wrote to Hume, “I am convinced that Mr. Mackay and Mr. Havemeyer will not be very active Trustees from now on and I strongly urge on you the necessity of adding to your Board. Mr. Burke would be an ideal addition. . . “ John S. Burke of B. Altman’s had two sons at Canterbury at the

In May of 1916, Hume began to solicit James A. Farrell to become a Director. time and he had already made a generous donation to the School.

After John Burke became a Trustee, the Burke family’s relationship with Canterbury continued for many years. John’s sons, John, Jr ’41, and Thomas ’41 were both Trustees.

John’s daughter Margo ’76 is a graduate as are Tom’s children Tom ’77, Michael ’78, and Susan ’87.

Carlton Hayes also joined the Board of Trustees at the end of the first quarter century. Hayes was a professor of history at Columbia University who authored several classic historical works such as British Social Politics. His son Carroll was a student at Canterbury until Carlton was appointed Ambassador to Spain, and Carroll went to Spain with his parents.

Carlton’s daughter, Mary Elizabeth Tucker, was one of the first female Trustees, and four of her children are Canterbury graduates, Paul ’68, Carlton ’73, Elizabeth ’76, and Peter ’78.

As Canterbury approached its 25th year, the leadership of the founders was waning. Clarence Mackay had died, and Henry Havemeyer was not as involved as he had been. However, new leadership was in place. Although he never became chairman of the Board of Trustees to replace Havemeyer, Hubert McDonnell played a vital leadership role as the School entered its second quarter century with Carlton Hayes and John Burke also contributing important support. By 1940, the financial support of the Trustees had enabled the School to acquire most of the land which the School owns in 2015 as well as replacing two major buildings destroyed by fire and constructing a chapel, a gym, and a schoolhouse. These Trustees had established a sound foundation for the growth of the second quarter century.

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By Emily Dolan

A Force of Nature

Headmaster Nelson Hume From the first day Canterbury opened for business, Nelson Hume set high standards for and dominated all aspects of school life. How did this one-man powerhouse, this force of nature as he has been described, accomplish such a feat for 33 years, and what was his effect on students such as Joseph Campbell ’21 and Sargent Shriver ’34?

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eginning in 1915 and for several decades, Dr. Nelson Hume was everything to his fledgling school. He found the land for the School, negotiated startup costs with the financial investors, recruited students, and hired faculty. As the School got underway, he was in constant contact with Havemeyer and the Trustees about financial matters.

Not only was he Headmaster, he was teacher, coach, advisor, and theater director. In more modern terms, he was Dean of Students and spiritual role model to the boys of Canterbury, and throughout his years as Canterbury’s leader, he made decisions now relegated to an Academic Dean, Athletic Director, Business Manager, Plant Manager, and Dean of Faculty. For 33 years, Dr. Hume steered Canterbury and its boys to their greatest potential.

Born in 1881 in New York City, Nelson Hume considered pursuing the priesthood after graduating from The College of St. Francis Xavier in 1900. Life took him in a different direction, however, and in 1907, he opened The Hume School in New Rochelle, NY. It later merged with the Newman School in Hackensack, NJ, where Hume taught F. Scott Fitzgerald and directed him in a theater production. The merger, however, proved to be something other than 16

Nelson Hume served as Canterbury’s first headmaster from 1915-1948. During his tenure, he oversaw all matters of the School’s operations.

Dr. Hume’s approach to the School’s Catholicism was innovative for the time. Fifty years before the Vatican Council allowed for laity involvement in religious activity, the chapel at Canterbury lacked an altar rail because Dr. Hume saw the boys as being “in choir,” and as such, they recited Latin prayers that were usually delivered by acolytes and choir.

Nelson Hume with Bishop of Rochester Thomas Francis Hickey, who was a strong advocate of Catholic education and approved of Hume’s work.

what Hume had hoped for, and he ended up resigning as Assistant Headmaster. Though ultimately disappointing ventures for Hume, the Hume and Newman Schools gave him the educational leadership experience to prepare him for the opportunity that would soon come his way in New Milford, CT. Meanwhile, Henry O. Havemeyer, a wealthy heir to his family’s sugar refining fortune, had hired Alec Hume, Nelson’s brother, as a tutor for his son. Havemeyer approached Alec about his desire to start a school where his Catholic son could prepare for the entrance examinations to Yale. Alec Hume referred Havemeyer to his brother Nelson, who had taken two successive jobs in business since resigning from the Newman School, and who had the right experience and the right ambition for just such a new school.

Charming, persuasive, confident,

and determined, Nelson Hume was a presence. In the words of the late long time faculty member Jean Hebert, “He was perhaps the most dynamic individual I had ever met...a man of tremendous energy.”

Founding Canterbury and shepherding it through its first 33 years required a leader with a strong personality and a clear vision; Nelson Hume had both. Hume’s commitment to the humanities, his strong Christian faith, his belief in quality, and his interest in sports determined the culture of his School. He played the piano well, enjoyed painting as a hobby, possessed a gift for elocution, gave weekly sermons in the Chapel, and taught English until the year before his death. He oversaw the quality and correctness of school publications such as The Tabard. Hume’s many friendships included those with painter and sculptor Luis Mora, singer John McCormack, and author, professor, and diplomat Carleton Hayes.

A most distinctive characteristic of Hume’s was his powerful voice.

Havemeyer was confident in Hume’s ability to recruit students as long as he met with them in person; his emphatic voice and theatrical demeanor were captivating. A student writer for The Tabard remembered Hume for his ability to connect with his audience: “A great orator, he spoke from conviction and, by the sincerity of his speech, moved others to his views.” Dr. Hume modeled effective public speaking skills at every chance he had, and in the fall of 1919, he began the “Canterbury Forum.” Once a week, a student presented a speech to the school and responded to questions. Today, Canterbury honors Dr. Hume’s legacy with the annual Dr. Nelson Hume Speech Contest, a competition that awards prizes to the best speech delivery in the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Forms, as well as to the outstanding speaker among all Forms.

As an English teacher, Dr. Hume was meticulous about the teaching of writing, and his attention to detail in instruction produced results. David Hume ’45, Nelson’s son, describes the effect of his father’s feedback on his students: “A compliment about one’s composition would be so measured and delivered in the context of such authoritative criticism of other words that it seemed an ultimate accolade and was an inspiration to further output.” Joseph Campbell ’21, mythologist and author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, told Bill Moyers of PBS that he learned to write in Hume’s English class: “He was a marvelous, marvelous teacher. There were six of us in my class, and we had a kind of precise attention. Every day we had to write a daily scene. Hume would come in and read out scenes and criticize and adjust them for us right there. It was every day: writing, writing, writing.”

Hume’s attention to detail combined with his vocal and dramatic gifts resulted in a classroom experience that, for many students, was a mixture of inspiration and terror. In his history remembering Dr. Hume, Edward Mack wrote that “Dr. Hume had authority and enthusiasm. He had a natural bent for theatrics, and voice of countless decibels, on occasion, and an utter domination of a class that inspired a mixture of fear, respect,

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admiration, and amusement.” He could recite Shakespeare at length, and often did when so moved in the classroom. When directing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1921, he assumed the part of Bottom with natural skill and aplomb when Joseph Campbell fell suddenly ill before the performance.

Sargent Shriver ’34 credits Nelson Hume and Canterbury for giving him “the background, imagination, [and] confidence to start the Peace Corps.”

In an address to the Nelson Hume Society in May of 1986, Sarge told an interesting story about the influence he felt Hume had on his life’s work.

It was back in 1934 that Nelson Hume told me I had to go to a meeting Sunday afternoon at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington for a meeting of the Secondary School Society for International Cooperation. And I had to give a speech. That was the last thing I wanted to do on a Sunday afternoon in May. So I resisted and complained and got nowhere. Off I went, gave the speech and came back–a wasted day.

Two weeks later, Dr. Hume called me to his office. He said, “Sargent, that speech you gave at the Secondary School Society for International Cooperation made a big impression on an older person in the audience.

She has offered you a fully paid scholarship to travel abroad to Germany this summer–three months–with a new organization, the Experiment in International Living.” The Experiment taught me how to form the Peace Corps 30 years later: speak the language, wear the clothes, eat the food, accept the customs, waste no money, follow local customs, study, study, study, play, play, learn, learn, learn. Come back to the USA wiser than you left.

In the same way that Hume pushed Sargent Shriver to new challenges, he also tried to encourage Second Former Jack Kennedy. When his report card went home after the first term, the future president’s Latin grade was near failure. Dr. Hume wrote, “He can do better than this. In fact, his average should be well into the 80s.”

That Hume also made allowances for some fun in the boys’ routine is illustrated by the following from the March 1917 Quill: One evening Dr. Hume, with a stern look on his face, walked into the small boys’ study hall while everybody was busy at work. “Boys,” he began deliberately, “I have something of the utmost importance to tell you. Now, put all your books away; sit up straight; and pay the best attention you can.” This was promptly done. “Boys,” he continued, “it is not very often that I have to make such an announcement. As you know, tonight there is a full moon, and,” – there was a pause. The boys began to wriggle in their seats. “And,” the headmaster went on, “I have decided to let you go out coasting tonight. That’s all.” There was wonderful sport that night, and it lasted till almost ten o’clock.

Dr. Hume’s approach to the School’s Catholicism was innovative for the time. Fifty years before the Vatican Council allowed for laity involvement in religious activity, the chapel at Canterbury lacked an altar rail because Dr. Hume saw the boys as being “in choir,” and as such, they recited Latin prayers that were usually delivered by acolytes and choir.

While every school day began with a 10-minute prayer service in the chapel, weekly Mass was optional during Dr. Hume’s tenure. The boys learned from him that it was a commitment to be honored rather than an obligation to be skirted. David Hume defines his father’s philosophy regarding voluntary attendance as follows: “If the boy was not given the opportunity to decide for himself while in the religious environment he would be unlikely to decide to follow such a practice when he went on to a non-sectarian college after graduation.”

Hume was extremely concerned with the teaching of religion as well as how religion was infused into the daily routine. According to Edward Mack, “It was a matter of conscience with him to prepare the graduating Sixth Formers for the atmosphere of secularism, of agnostic indifference, of sectarian hostility which he knew they would encounter 18

According to his son, Stephen Hume ’43, Dr. Hume was “quintessentially an honest man” and didn’t play favorites. in non-Catholic colleges and universities.” To Hume, Catholicism was character education in and of itself. In a letter from 1929, Hume thanks Havemeyer for a collection of books entitled The Pageant of America, noting the benefit of the volumes to the Sixth Form American History students: “The idea back of this is that by so doing we support the Catholic claim that to be a good Catholic is the sure way to be a good citizen.”

The headmaster’s choice in a spouse benefitted the School as much as anything else he did. After a whirlwind summer courtship, at the age of 42, Dr. Hume married May DesJardins in 1923. The Hume family grew to include Michael ’41, Stephen ’43, David ’45, and Rozanne. Mrs. Hume was well-suited for life on campus.

She had to be, because for the first five years of their marriage, the Humes lived in a small two-anda-half room apartment in Middle House before North House (now Duffy) provided the growing Hume family with larger accommodations.

Ed Mack described Mrs. Hume as an ideal Headmaster’s wife: “She was all, in general, to boys, to faculty, and to the world, and nothing at all beyond the bounds of wisdom and good taste.”

As for the view of the Canterbury boys, William Schusser ’36, in June of 2014, commented to Academic Dean Lou Mandler about May Hume, “Lovely lady. She and I got along famously… she kept him (Hume) in tow. He would have been much more radical without her influence.”

Though Nelson Hume had not been a skilled athlete in his youth, he believed thoroughly in

the benefit of athletics, and when needed, he coached with passion.

When illness swept through the ranks or discipline issues arose, Dr. Hume blamed the lack of exercise as the root problem. Hume chose football as the first fall sport offering and hockey as the winter sport. Hume himself stepped in to help coach the hockey team at times. In her history of the School’s first 90 years, Kathy Bolster notes that Hume saw hockey as the thing that saved Canterbury every winter, despite the near perennial problems with having ice. The hockey team’s early victories, especially against Kent, made up for the blows felt by losses in football.

Dr. Hume’s approach to discipline was unusual: boys with perfect records would be awarded extra vacation time, while those that had more difficulty adhering to the expectations were give days “on bounds,” during which they could not leave campus.

The December 13, 1927 issue of The Tabard includes the headline “159 Extra Days Awarded to Boys: All but Four to Leave School At Least One Day Before Set Day for Christmas Vacation.” A few boys were awarded five or six extra days of vacation, while most only earned one or two.

According to his son Stephen Hume ’43, Dr. Hume was “quintessentially an honest man” and didn’t play favorites. He refused to give founding Trustee Henry Havemeyer’s son extra vacation time. He held the same standard to Ernest Hemingway’s son, Patrick, and in a telegraph to Patrick’s mother, Hume reasoned, I know you would not wish me to break a precedent against giving week-ends which has been in force here for 28 years. That is what it would amount to if I let Patrick off. More important, however, is the bad effect it would have on Patrick...

Hume’s sense of decorum and aesthetics extended to campus cleanliness and the School dining room. Alums recall Hume picking up debris on campus and sweeping stairwells. At dinner, students in

Nelson and May Hume. They married in 1923 in Denver, CO..

Ed Mack described Mrs. Hume as an ideal Headmaster’s wife: “She was all, in general, to boys, to faculty, and to the world, and nothing at all beyond the bounds of wisdom and good taste.”

As for the view of the Canterbury boys, William Schusser ’36 commented about May Hume, “Lovely lady. She and I got along famously. She kept him (Hume) in tow. He would have been much more radical without her influence.”

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No task was too small for Dr. Hume to attend to. In the course of a day, one could, as shown in the photo, see him tidying up the campus.

formal dress dined at tables set with expensive china and damask linen napkins. Dinners were leisurely several-course meals served first by maids and later by Filipino waiters.

The headmaster played the piano in the common room before dinner, and according to Edward Carmody the boys learned to read his moods by noting the music he chose to play: “Mendelssohn signaled a benign attitude while smoldering Chopin gave the boys cause to watch for trouble.”

Hume’s expectations of the boys during these meals were high: conversation had to fit the tone and mood of the fine dining experience.

He established a rotating seating plan using name cards, so that each boy had the experience of eating with each master, including the headmaster, much like Canterbury’s current tradition of sit-down dinner.

Hume’s leadership kept the School on track during even the most difficult times. During Hume’s tenure, Canterbury suffered through two world wars, an influenza epidemic, the Great Depression and two major fires, one in 1925, 20

the Bungalow, and one in 1936, Main House. After each fire, Hume acted quickly to make sure classes and sports continued as usual and he came up with creative solutions for the daily routines of eating and sleeping.

Hume retained his optimism and belief in the future of the School throughout these crises. After Main House burned, he wrote to Havemeyer, I haven’t felt more energetic or able in many a year than I have since things began to happen so fast.

I think perhaps the Lord strengthens the back to fit the burden. And in a letter to his brother Cyril he said, Nobody seems to have been very much alarmed because the building burned down… People get very sympathetic because the school has had such a loss, and they are more likely to help under those conditions than under normal conditions…

In fact, while the fire was burning, Hamilton Gibson, the Headmaster of Gunnery School, came over and sat with me for 15 minutes to cheer me up by telling me that a much worse fire at Berkshire School

resulted ultimately in their really getting started into a big school by the gifts that came to them out of the sympathy that the fire had aroused.

After the personal tragedy of the death of his brother Alec, Hume’s letter to Havemeyer illustrated the challenges of his responsibilities as well as his tremendous energy and his willingness to assume the sundry tasks of his position: It was possible to get a man to assume the duties he (Alec) had performed as a teacher and supervisor of the boys, but all the practical business details that he used to keep off my shoulders have come back to me. I now do probably fifty percent more work than I ever did since I came here, but I thank God that I enjoy it, am well able to do it, and that it is having only the best sort of a stimulating effect on me; but it means that from one end of the year to the other I can hardly leave the job. My vacation last summer lasted only ten days… I still teach classes, do all the business work of the school, attend other practical details of the upkeep of the plant and equipment, assume supervision of the culinary department, manage the faculty, interview parents and see to the enrollment of the boys… I am at everybody’s beck and call, and, except when I am actually asleep, I am constantly interrupted in anything that I am doing except the actual teaching of classes.

Time magazine published a short piece about Dr. Hume and Canterbury at the school’s 25-year anniversary. The article concluded with Hume’s reflection on his school: “Canterbury began on an $8,000 shoe string. Today it is a million-dollar educational plant devoted to the cause of Catholic Action… only school of its kind, really… . Sometimes I can hardly believe Canterbury is what it is today.”

In the first quarter century of the school’s existence, Dr. Hume’s personal dedication to Canterbury laid the foundation for its flourishing for years and years to come.

CANTERBURY SCHOOL Celebrating 100 Years

Donating to the Archives

T

he occasion of Canterbury’s Centennial has put a spotlight on our archives. The photo at right of Nelson Hume at a 1940s football game was donated by Richard Keogh ’49. Past publications such as The Quill, The Tabard, Cantuarians, and PALLIUMS have been rich sources of photographs and historical information. We have used this information and other photographs, correspondence, and artifacts in creating the Centennial website, exhibits, presentations, and the articles in this issue of the PALLIUM. We have benefitted greatly in the past from donations of scrapbooks, photos, athletic uniforms, and other memorabilia from alumni. For example, just this fall Grace Sartor, daughter of Captain Thomas J. Sartor ’19 and sister of Thomas J. Sartor Jr. ’50, sent the photos of the Bungalow and Main House in “The Founding” article in this issue.

Baseball uniforms worn by John Dowling ’30 and exhibited during the Athletics Hall of Fame dinner were donated by his wife Claire Dowling and his daughter Nancy Petty.

We are interested in adding to the material we have on Canterbury’s history. We would welcome receiving personal papers such as correspondence, diaries, scrapbooks, photographs, or videotapes that shed light on the life of students at Canterbury.

Nelson Hume supporting Richard Clarke ’48, unidentified, and J. Barry Stanford ’48.

Even if you did not keep artifacts from your days at Canterbury, you may have memories to share.

We would be pleased to receive written or recorded reminiscences.

These reminiscences could be just a short recollection or anecdote about a classmate, teacher, event, or a general reflection.

At the moment we do not have an archivist; Lou Mandler and Kathy Bolster are minding the space and its holdings in the meantime. If you have any material from your Canterbury years, or if you have questions about what might be appropriate for adding to our archives, please contact either Lou Mandler or Kathy Bolster.

We are interested in adding to the material we have on Canterbury’s history. We would welcome receiving personal papers such as correspondence, diaries, scrapbooks, photographs, or videotapes that shed light on the life of students at Canterbury.

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By Wright Danenbarger

The Faculty 1915-1940 Nelson Hume insisted on hiring scholars of distinction to instruct Canterbury’s students. Dean of Faculty Wright Danenbarger ruminates on the contributions of these men and sheds light on those who had “unusual personalities and a high degree of individuality.”

A

s I write this piece, I find myself in a new position at the School. I have taken over as Dean of Faculty, and upon the publication of this first of four school history PALLIUMS, I will be a few months into the job.

Needless to say, I look forward to my The 1919 faculty. Frank Reagan, Frank Rooney, Nelson Hume, James McCarthy, Phil Brodie, Alec Hume, new role yet Maximillian von der Porten. also wonder what its exact demands will be and how I will fare at it. I am sure I will have many sources of guidance, foremost amongst them senior administrators and, of course, my own 16 years as a member of the very faculty I will be charged with overseeing. A source I had not fully anticipated but perhaps should have seen coming was my experience writing this article on the faculty of Canterbury’s first 25 years.

Unsurprisingly, the act of research and the desire to discover some of the essential qualities of Canterbury’s earliest instructors has strengthened my 22

connection to the School.

What kind of teachers does it take to get a school–and a rather novel and controversial school at that–off the ground? What I came to learn, largely from reading Edward Mack’s The Way It Was at Canterbury 1915-1965 and Edward Carmody’s 1979 history written in the form of a letter to May Hume about his personal reminiscences as a member of Canterbury’s first enrolled class, is that it takes, in Mack’s words, “unusual personalities and men of a high degree of individuality.” This quote, taken out of context, might suggest a group of erratic men pulling chaotically in different directions.

After reading about them, though, what one comes to find is that Mack rightly saw men who were secure in themselves and who each knew he had something at once unique and valuable to offer his students. These were teachers who were comprised of some happy admixture of confidence, knowledge, and engaging peculiarity. They knew how to play the pied piper’s flute.

The survival of Canterbury in the early years was far from an assured conclusion. There were anti-lay Catholic forces that argued against its very existence. The one that most directly bears upon this piece was Nelson Hume and Henry Havemeyer’s unorthodox plan to form a college-prep, Catholic school in which the boys would be taught not by clergy but by Catholic laymen. The Church for decades had supported only parochial schools that were, as Carmody put it, “tightly enough sealed to keep out the said heretical fumes of Protestantism” which American bishops had found to be wafting in the air at American public schools of the 19th Century.

Catholic schools, thus, would not prepare their students for nonCatholic colleges. In practice what that meant was that they would not prepare them for the College Entrance Exams that the major (translated: Ivy) colleges required for admittance. Nor would they encourage them to apply to any

Hume thus was tasked

by Havemeyer with assembling a faculty who were not only good teachers but who would also be both an extension and a defense of their argument that the boys could and should be prepared for life in a secular world without sacrificing or even weakening their Catholic faith. non-Catholic college.

Needless to say, Havemeyer did not buy it. He wanted his son to attend Yale, and he shared with Hume a sense that the parochial schools “tended both to isolate and to insulate the student from a realistic awareness of his religious position in a pluralistic society.”

Neither, however, did he want to send his son off to a place such

as Yale without being properly girded with the faith. Mack tells us that while the Church was not openly hostile to the School, it certainly was not warm to the idea of preparing students for non-Catholic colleges and may have even been suspicious of a presumed anti-clerical bias pervading the School. Carmody refers to this sentiment by saying that Hume faced plenty of “clucking” from those opposed to using the laity to prepare the boys for Ivy League colleges, and he reassures May Hume that her husband did the right thing by ignoring the “cluckers.”

Hume thus was tasked by Havemeyer with assembling a faculty who were not only good teachers but who would also be both an extension and a defense of their argument that the boys could and should be prepared for life in a secular world without sacrificing or even weakening their Catholic faith. I think it is fair to argue that any school is, at its essence, two things: students and a faculty. The students arrive as yet to be formed by the precepts and ethos of the school; the faculty, therefore, must by necessity already inhabit and embody those qualities that make any school a distinct phenomenon. In short, the school is the faculty; the faculty, the school. Hume had, in fact, previously established a school with a lay faculty in New Rochelle, NY, the eponymously named Hume School. Started in 1907, this school later merged with the Newman School in Hackensack, NJ, and the combined institutions flourished. These schools were not, however, as a matter of mission, preparing the boys to take the College Board Entrance Exams of the major non-Catholic colleges.

Hume’s Canterbury faculty had to be scholars of high order and well versed in the curriculum and standards of the Ivy Leagues. The 18 “charter” members, the sons of rich Catholics, were all to be boarders, and they needed to be guided morning, noon, and night by laymen that were somehow to do a semi-heretical job that many around them thought only the clergy should undertake. They were to prepare Catholic boys to withstand not only the rigors but also the “secularism, agnostic indifference, and sectarian hostility” they were sure to find at the Ivy League schools. Sounds like a job for “unusual personalities and men of a high degree of individuality.”

A portion of the 1924 all-school photo.

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I am not sure that Hume was exactly searching out “unusual personalities” to complete his opening day faculty, but he was quick to sign one in the form of Dr. Maximillian von der Porten. Von der Porten stands out in the histories because, although Mack tried to cover all the major players, von der Porten is the only one of the original masters Carmody describes by name or at any length. It is in the light of Carmody’s memory that we can deduce that von der Porten must have possessed a “high degree of individuality.”

Who were these men? After reading the above background in the opening pages of Mack and Carmody, I was eager to find out. Hume’s first hire was his own brother, Alec. An act of nepotism, you say? Not at all, when you consider the man and what Nelson was looking for. Alec had graduated from Nelson’s alma mater, St. Francis Xavier, a Catholic college that was later to merge with Fordham. He had taught at both the Hume School and Newman before becoming Henry Havemeyer Jr.’s private tutor for the two years before starting at Canterbury.

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Alec, reports Mack, was a cheerful bachelor, a friendly type who liked the boys and who, in turn, was liked, albeit teased a great deal by them.

He exercised general control of the business management of the plant, as well as doing his share of teaching. He was the permissive type; no boy in his classes ever failed if he sat up straight, asked no silly questions and otherwise behaved himself therein. Alec liked bridge, golf, good food and beverages, and most of the good things in life. The Headmaster placed heavy reliance upon his assistance in running the School.

At first glance, this description does not exactly sound like that of a man preparing students for the hallowed halls of Harvard or Yale. Yet we must remember that Alec, possessed himself of a fully Catholic education, had been the tutor for two full years to Henry Jr. What I read between the Mack’s lines is also a depiction of a man of worldly things who also happens to have a particularly fine rapport with boys. Alec was, moreover, the head of the lower school–the First and Second Formers–and that speaks volumes to me. I can tell you from first-hand experience as a middleschool English teacher in my younger days, that it is practically an art form. Students at that age have energies and emotional needs that merge on certain days to necessitate a teacher be part pedagogue, part psychologist, and part circus master. Alec successfully straddled the Catholic and secular worlds. After his death in 1935, his was the first funeral in the Chapel of Our Lady and was the cause of much sorrow throughout the community.

Hume also brought on two ex-seminarians, Frank Rooney for mathematics, and Patrick Downing for Latin, classics, and history.

Both had taught at Newman and clearly had Hume’s full trust as men capable of executing the School’s new mission. He also hired James J. McCarthy to teach Latin, and I think his publication in 1919 of a book of Latin rules and syntax is evidence

enough that McCarthy was a man of deep erudition.

I am not sure that Hume was exactly searching out “unusual personalities” to complete his opening day faculty, but he was quick to sign one in the form of Dr. Maximillian von der Porten.

Von der Porten stands out in the histories because, although Mack tried to cover all the major players, von der Porten is the only one of the original masters Carmody describes by name or at any length. It is in the light of Carmody’s memory that we can deduce that von der Porten must have possessed a “high degree of individuality.” He was remembered

by Carmody as no other Canterbury master was some 60-odd decades later. Mack tells us that he was a “European savant who had studied at the Sorbonne, Vienna, and Heidelberg.” Does that not tell you enough? If not, Carmody goes on for five full pages about him.

Von der Porten regaled his young Canterbury charges with stories of Imperial Germany, and Carmody’s admiration of him comes through in his writing: He told us how the Herrenvolk had to step aside into the gutter to make way on the sidewalk for a full Colonel or a Herr Doktor professor.

This, of course, delighted me (the comic aspects of it delighted me the most) and my delight delighted him and we became good friends. He was tall, with a van Dyke beard, had a doctorate from Heidelberg, and taught us modern languages.

His English was perfect but he did say ex-ow-sted for exhausted and finyer for finger. I studied French, German, and Spanish under him. [… ] He brooked no nonsense and was a superb teacher.

You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in Education to see how von der Porten’s unique, exotic qualities won over the boys. What is more, Carmody’s recollection warmly conveys a dynamic that is central to the art of teaching but which is difficult to achieve or impart: von der Porten and his students were delighting each other simultaneously and reciprocally. I

Mr. Brodie was a personality in his own right.

He never quite lost his southern drawl and certainly never his cavalier manners or his adherence to strict social protocol. He was adamant in his resistance to any breakdown of formality, whether it was at teas or on the athletic field. He functioned wholly without selfconsciousness, as about the best public relations promoter the school could have employed.

He had a silent contempt for ostentation and insincerity. suppose, then, that few teachers should be surprised at Carmody’s next paragraph–he was fully in thrall: He was pleased when I announced that I intended to devote my life to discovering the tantalizing secrets of the origin of Euskera and its seven dialects. I made this commitment when I learned from him that the Devil spent seven years trying to learn the language so he could tempt the Basques but gave it up as a hopeless task.

It was absolutely the kind of pluralistic, intellectual pursuit that Hume and Havemeyer felt these boys needed to grapple with were they to survive in the Ivies and the larger world.

When you look at pictures of the early faculty, von der Porten is, unsurprisingly, the one who stands out. The van Dyke Carmody refers to actually gives him an air that is at once patrician, European high class, scholarly, and just sinister enough that boys might want to emulate him.

His “high degree of individuality” also led him to argue with Hume enough that he only lasted until the early 1920s. The histories suggest von der Porten was increasingly tweaking and gainsaying Hume at every opportunity. Von der Porten loved the boys and even often took their sides against the imposing and sometimes imperious Hume. I love his devotion to the students, but I also have to say that it is likely time to part ways with a private prep school when you can’t find common ground with your own headmaster.

If von der Porten is Carmody’s master schoolmaster, then Mack’s would seem to be his colleague Philip Brodie, hired in 1921. Mack, writing as his training in the field of history must have taught him, tries to strike an objective tone. He attempts to write as an outside observer who is concerned with only the facts. Mack cannot hide his own admiration of Brodie, however, as he seems intent on making sure the reader knows that, second only to Hume, Brodie was at the heart of the Canterbury enterprise. A native of Arkansas and a Rhodes Scholar, Brodie must have appealed to Hume on many levels upon his hire in 1921. Neither Hume nor Havemeyer wanted the School to be insularly Northeastern, and here was a Southerner who saw service during World War I and coached high school football while a student at the University of Arkansas. In his long tenure, Brodie taught Latin, acted as Director of Athletics, coached football, baseball, swimming, and track, and essentially assumed the unofficial role of Assistant Headmaster after the death of Alec Hume.

Mack’s tone goes from factual to sentimental and near gushy as he relates Brodie’s centrality to the School: Mr. Brodie was a personality in his own right. He never quite lost his southern drawl and certainly never his cavalier manners or his adherence

to strict social protocol. He was adamant in his resistance to any breakdown of formality, whether it was at teas or on the athletic field. He functioned wholly without self-consciousness, as about the best public relations promoter the school could have employed. He had a silent contempt for ostentation and insincerity. He was and is loved, honored, and respected by generations of Canterbury boys and by men and women of the faculty and all of any connection with the institution. He retired in 1956, full of memories and honors and is still the familiar “Mr. Chips” about the school.

Earlier in his text, Mack makes the point that nearly all of the major New England boarding prep schools were virtually synonymous with their founding headmasters, and he puts the Hume-Canterbury relationship in that category. I suspect that those schools that got off the ground and lasted 100 years or more, as Canterbury now has, likely had a Philip Brodie in the number-two spot. He was Mr. Everything, a quadruple-threat when you take in his administrating–he was, to use a term current Headmaster Tom Sheehy introduced me to, a School Man. Hume clearly relied heavily upon him, and Brodie, in turn, devoted his life to the School. In a 2014 interview with Lou Mandler, William Schusser ’36 remarked that when he and his mother visited the School, “It was Mr. Brodie who sold us on the School.” My peers and I have been brought along in our careers thus far by such members of the faculty at Canterbury. I will need to rely on the Philip Brodie among them, and I hope to continue to help make Canterbury a place that fosters and is embodied by “Brodies” for years to come.

Mack reserves nearly an equal amount of space for mathematics teacher Joseph Maloney. True to his thesis about the attraction of prep school work to teachers of high individuality, he writes that Maloney was “perhaps the most colorful of all those who have served on the Canterbury faculty.”

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In 2014, when William Schusser ’36, was asked by Lou Mandler about teachers he remembered, he immediately said,“Mr. Mack I remember, the organist at the church and the lone German instructor.

I s’pose that was one of the arrangements my family made that I wouldn’t take Spanish I would take German, and he was a wonderful guy. He was very patient. He was one book ahead of me, not schooled in language, but he did a good job.”

Serving from 1925 until his death in 1955, Maloney was another School Man who was an avid coach and sportsman. Another former seminarian, Maloney also comes across as an unofficial Dean of Students before that position was created at Canterbury. I recognize and love Mack’s description of how Maloney was the archetypal eyesin-the-back-of-his-head teacher that we all had in school and knew better than to mess with: Mr. Maloney was especially adept at ferreting out young citizens guilty of devious attempts to “beat the system.” As a consequence, there were few, if any, unsolved mysteries in the gallery of boyish misdemeanors. He had a “way with” boys that made his services indispensible. It was bootless to “try” 26

anything on him; and his humor was so sharp and his repartee so deadly that new boys soon learned not to try to match wits with him.

A Dean of Students, titled or otherwise, needs to be effective, and an effective Dean of Students is, as Mack describes Maloney, “indispensible.” A strong prep school faculty, I have come to see, has many untitled Deans of Students who have a “way with” teens like Joe Maloney.

Mack finishes his account of the early long-term faculty by grouping together four men who all started together in 1928: Joseph Stanton, Rowland “Hap” Hazard, Ed Lindman, and himself. All four seem to share the qualities that Hume was looking for to fulfill Canterbury’s mission. They were all scholars. They were Catholic but did not all earn their degrees from Catholic colleges. They were worldly and all seemed to engender the affection and respect of the boys. All four appeared to practice what Mack reports was Stanton’s teaching philosophy: “Boys, when it is given to them straight, without fear or favor, can and will take it.”

Stanton’s ability to communicate his lessons deftly was why Hume, in a letter to Havemeyer dated January 6, 1930, begged his patron to be allowed to give Stanton an extra $600 over his proposed $3,000 salary in order to keep him from being poached by competitor schools. Hume’s plea to Havemeyer outlines why versatile faculty are so valuable: Let me tell you at the very beginning that I want very badly to keep this man. He is in every way the best French teacher we have ever had, not excluding Dr. von der Porten. He is the type of French teacher that they have in such schools as Andover, Exeter, Hill, and Hotchkiss, an experienced man who knows the ropes about the Board examinations. In addition to this, he has an excellent influence on the discipline of the school. He is level headed and understanding in regard to the boys. He is housemaster for the North House where the Seniors live. This means

he has special charge of discipline, and in addition to that, he is faculty advisor to the Fifth Form, a difficult job, that he performs very well.

I’m sure it did not take much for Hume to include that mild slight against von der Porten.

Hume’s lesson to me: Then, as now, boarding schools can only really operate with a faculty whose value extends well beyond the classroom.

Health concerns forced Stanton and Hazard to retire earlier than they might have otherwise, but Lindman came to be regarded, along with Brodie, Maloney and Mack, as one of the “old guard.” A Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth, Lindman taught mathematics until his retirement in 1958. Mack wryly describes his teaching style as conducted with a “mighty voice” and that often “the passerby in the corridor outside his classroom heard an application of the inductive system of mathematics without benefit of clergy.”

I am sure that Mack would have preferred not to have to write about himself, but this omission would have been glaring in a book claiming to chronicle The Way it Was at Canterbury. He served here until he was “forced out of action by a heart attack in 1957,” he tells us without emotion–a solid 30 school years of duty. His account of his own tenure at the School is without the praise he lavishes on those of significant peers.

However, we have the voices of some of his students regarding Ed Mack. In 2014, when William Schusser ’36 was asked by Lou Mandler about teachers he remembered, he immediately said, “Mr. Mack I remember, the organist at the church and the lone German instructor. I s’pose that was one of the arrangements my family made that I wouldn’t take Spanish I would take German, and he was a wonderful guy. He was very patient. He was one book ahead of me, not schooled in language, but he did a good job.”

When Lou Mandler interviewed Patrick Hemingway ’46 in March 2008, he spoke of Mr. Mack with

great warmth and admiration as an outstanding history teacher.

When asked about singing tenor in Mr. Mack’s choir, Patrick laughed and said, “I was one of his best students. The way Mr. Mack was, if you were a good student, you were in his choir.”

We also know him, as with others mentioned here, to be a Canterbury Medal of Honor recipient, the composer of Cantuaria Floreat, Canterbury’s school song, and for a time the official carilloneur of the School.

The Edward F. Mack Awards are graduation awards given to the students for their contribution in particular areas of school life such as community service or theater.

The first alumnus to serve on the faculty was none other than one of its most famous graduates: Joseph Campbell ’21.

Campbell served only one year on the faculty–in 193334. He became one of the world’s most influential scholars of comparative mythology and comparative religion, and I’d like to think that the nascence of his famous theories on archetype of The Hero’s Journey was rooted subconsciously, to use his thinking, in the lives of Canterbury’s first School Men.

The 1935 faculty. Front row, l-r: Robert Kimball, Edwin Lindman, Edward Mack, Leo Bellerose, James Doyle. Back row, l-r: William Collier, Joseph Maloney, Benjamin Halsey, David Elms, David Adair.

Now also seems like a good time to mention that twice when major dorms burned down in the early years, these men had to teach in temporary classrooms and supervise the boys in their crowded quarters in the gymnasium. The “housemaster’s” quarters became one of the downstairs locker rooms in what is now the music area. The histories report that it increased camaraderie. Here is the uncomplaining Mack taking one for the team after the Middle House fire in December 1936.

As a lesson in pedagogy, and as a personal experience, it was found that Modern European History could be effectively taught in the locker room of a gymnasium as in more elegantly appointed surroundings. And matter rather than form, substance rather than environment was demonstrated to be the essence of education. Yet, even with the pressing into use of the squash courts, there was not enough room in the gymnasium.

He, Brodie and Lindman, the big dogs, not some low-rung newbies, were assigned to classrooms in the

gym for the rest of the year and to dorm duty in the gymnasium itself.

It sounds crowded, yet Mack only wants to find the silver lining.

I cannot omit a faculty member that lasted, by contrast, one year.

The first alumnus to serve on the faculty was none other than one of its most famous graduates: Joseph Campbell ’21. Campbell served only one year on the faculty–in 1933-34.

He became one of the world’s most influential scholars of comparative mythology and comparative religion, and I’d like to think that the nascence of his famous theories on archetype of The Hero’s Journey was rooted subconsciously, to use his thinking, in the lives of Canterbury’s first School Men. Canterbury School survived an often skeptical public, two major fires, and periodic financial challenges. Yes, it would not have made it had it not been for Hume’s drive, Havemeyer’s desires, and the support of early Trustees, but even a casual reader of the history of the first faculty knows that they gave life to the founders’ dreams.

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By Bryan Kiefer

Canterbury’s Campus The First 25 Years

How did Canterbury start with three buildings and 12 leased acres in 1915, replace the loss of two major structures, and expand its footprint at the top of the hill?

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hen Nelson Hume drove to New Milford in his search for a site for his proposed boarding school, he crested the rise at the top of Elkington Farm Road, and discovered that 12 acres of the former Ingleside School including Weantinaug Hall (later called Main House), the Bungalow, and a servants’ residence were available for sale or lease. The future of Canterbury suddenly took concrete form.

The timing was fortuitous. The campus facilities were only 15 years old and had been vacated for only one year. In addition, the estate of Sarah Black was eager to get the unwieldy Weantinaug Hall off its hands; only a headmaster in search of a school would have been interested in such a package. With the approval of Henry Havemeyer and Clarence Mackay, Nelson Hume executed a $1,500 per year lease that included 12 acres of land, three buildings, and the soccer field that had been the site of the first game of girls’ field hockey ever played in the United States.

Weantinaug Hall was designed by the firm of Rossiter & Wright of New York City. Ehrick Kennsett Rossiter (1854-1941), a graduate of The Gunnery, had developed a love of the Litchfield County area.

In addition to designing hundreds of public and private buildings in 28

An aerial photo of the campus looking east shows Main House, North House, South House, the Chapel of Our Lady, and the gymnasium.

the greater New York City area, Rossitter designed several buildings in his second home of Washington, CT, built many campus buildings at The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, and donated the land to establish the Steep Rock Reserve in Washington. He partnered with architect Frank A. Wright (1854-1949) from 1879-1910.

The final former Ingleside building leased by Nelson Hume was a small building from the defunct Adelphic Institute, a school for boys off Route 67 which had closed in 1880. It was used as a residence for the servants of Weantinaug Hall. Since then, it has seen more varied use than any other building on Canterbury’s campus. Renovated and expanded in 2001, it is now the Chaplain’s residence, and the oldest building on campus.

On Saturday, June 19, 1915, Nelson Hume took possession of the grounds and the buildings. Its campus secured, and its future tied permanently to New Milford, Canterbury School could move forward.

The original gymnasium, built in 1924, housed the pool, basketball court, squash courts, and locker room.

New Milford was originally inhabited by the Weantinaug sub-group of the Paugussett Nation. The first Europeans, John Noble and his 8-yearold daughter Sarah, arrived in the area from Westfield, MA, in 1707, and, in 1711, 12 European families officially established the town. Roger Sherman, New Milford’s most notable historic resident, was a member of the Continental Congress and a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

The first settlers built their homes on Town Hill, now the site of Canterbury School. The first well in town was dug for the preacher on the site of Hickory Hearth. When Nelson Hume cleared the stone wall that once ran up the hill just south of the Chapel, he found an English coin dating to 1711.

Aspetuck Avenue, which now runs from the town green to the center of campus once served as a link in the post road system. The milepost still stands in front of the Chapel and records the distance from New Milford to New York City.

By the time Nelson Hume arrived in New Milford, the town’s population of 5,000 was occupied in farming, largely tobacco, and industry, including paint and varnish, buttons, hats, furniture, pottery, and dairy goods.

The original Weantinaug Hall became the heart of Canterbury School, renamed by Nelson Hume as Main House, and its excellent design guaranteed that every bit of floor space was used. On the third floor were the headmaster’s residence and the quarters for servants; on the second floor were boys’ rooms, classrooms, the infirmary, and the infirmarian’s apartment; and on the first floor were more classrooms, the kitchen, dining room, school office, and the common room.

The Bungalow, built in 1906, had its own distinct atmosphere with its brown shingled exterior, white porch, and rustic lodge-like interior.

Inside a single large living room reached up two stories, which Nelson Hume divided in half to provide a study area at one end. A balcony that opened into small sleeping rooms circled the top of the room. The third story held several large sleeping rooms. After some casual use, including service as the temporary quarters for the chapel, the Bungalow became the living quarters for the boys of the lower school. However, the upper form boys soon discovered the amenities of living in the Bungalow, and persuaded the headmaster to assign them to it. For years thereafter, the Sixth Formers lived in the single rooms on the second floor, and the Fifth

Formers filled out the double rooms on the third floor. The Bungalow was well suited for the teas, dances, and lectures.

During Canterbury’ first two years, the School operated on a shoestring budget, and the Trustees hesitated to commit more capital to the enterprise. Trustee James Augustine Farrell (1863-1943), president of U.S. Steel Corporation, purchased for the School the 12acre lot north of the School’s leased campus in June 1917. Later that summer, he added the lot east of the Bungalow. On December 17, 1917, Farrell also encouraged the establishment of the Foundation Fund for Canterbury School in order to receive charitable contributions. In short order, $43,200 was raised which allowed the Trustees to purchase the entirety of the Black estate.

In 1918, the Board of Trustees turned down Nelson Hume’s request to purchase the land and buildings of Hickory Hearth, which did not become part of Canterbury’s campus until 67 years later. In that same year, the School acquired additional land to the north of campus. Though it contained no

With the approval of Henry Havemeyer and Clarence Mackay, Nelson Hume executed a $1,500 per year lease that included 12 acres of land, three buildings, and the soccer field that had been the site of the first game of girls’ field hockey ever played in the United States.

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LOTTE JACOBY

Raphael “Ray” Hume (1988-1957) was born in New York City, the younger brother of Nelson Hume. Ray’s uncle William Hume ran a busy architectural practice in New York City, so Ray’s choice of architecture as his own profession followed naturally. At the outbreak of the First World War, Ray was already an experienced draftsman in the office of James Gamble Rogers, the architect responsible for the expansion of the Yale University campus (Sterling Memorial Library and Memorial Quadrangle) in the early 1920s.

An interesting historical note is that James Gamble Rogers’ grandson, James Gamble Rogers III, was a named partner in the firm of Butler Rogers Baskett, who designed Canterbury’s Duffy Art Center (1984), Athletic Center (1999), South House (2006), Higgins Aquatic Center (2008), renovated the Old Schoolhouse (1999), and renovated and expanded Steele Hall (2012). Butler Rogers Baskett (founded in 1979) is a successor firm to James Gamble Rogers firm (founded in 1906), and grew through a merger with Kearin & Hume, a firm founded by Raphael Hume’s architect son Thomas Hume of Canterbury’s Class of 1946.

After active duty in France with the U.S. Army artillery corp., Ray returned to set up his own architectural practice. Nelson Hume retained Ray to plan and design many of the first buildings at Canterbury: the gymnasium, the Chapel of Our Lady, and the South, North and Middle House dormitories. Ray’s long and fruitful relationship with Catholic hierarchy earned his architectural practice many commissions for churches, hospitals, and schools.

Ray’s contribution to the restoration of the Catholic University of Nijmegen earned him the Knight of St Gregory from Pope Pius XII in 1950.

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buildings, this land parcel was used by the newly established Gun Club as a shooting range.

In 1919, Mrs. Nicholas Brady funded the construction of a combination hockey rink/running track south of the Bungalow.

Unfortunately, the rink was built on a rock ledge which caused water to seep out when the ice thawed.

Nelson Hume took charge of the many efforts to correct this defect and would personally supervise the flooding and freezing of the rink after each thaw. The whole school would assemble to shovel the rink clear after each New England snowstorm. The remnants of this rink were demolished in 2006 to make way for South House.

To expand the School, in 1920, Nelson Hume launched a Fifth Anniversary Fund and Development Drive. His goal was to raise $500,000, and his plan was to increase the enrollment to 160 boys. On the top of the hill he proposed to build a quadrangle consisting of a new gymnasium, a dormitory for 120 boys, a chapel, and a schoolhouse. These buildings would be constructed out of granite and connected to each other by covered passageways.

By graduation day in 1920, the plans for the new campus were on display. Nelson Hume’s brother Raphael, at 32 years old a highly qualified architect, had drawn up the plans.

In the designs of the hilltop buildings, Nelson Hume and his architect brother Raphael preferred the English Collegiate Gothic style, then in vogue on college campuses such as Princeton and Duke. Canterbury’s gymnasium and Chapel of our Lady are fine examples of this style: tall granite walls, limestone-trimmed windows, high pitched gables and slate roofs, and irregularly placed entrances.

Both buildings are fit to their natural sites and expressive of the program spaces inside.

Nelson Hume’s plans to build a quadrangle on top of the hill involved closing off Aspetuck Avenue about 300 yards south

leaving the new gymnasium in lonely eminence on the hilltop.

In their early planning, the Humes had envisioned an entire school of stone–the gym, dormitory, chapel, and schoolhouse discussed above. When the town rejected their plans to close the road from the Village Green through the hilltop campus, and they were forced to move the center of campus to the bottom of the hill, they elected a less costly, less formal architectural style of simple stucco walls with exposed timbers at overhanging upper gables, entrances, and porches.

Like the English Collegiate Gothic of the upper campus, the chosen style for the lower campus had an English precedent, late 19th century Arts and Crafts architecture, specifically the residential work of architect Charles F.A. Voysey. First employed at South House, and later at North and Middle House, this style had the further advantage of blending with the former Ingleside School buildings.

The public, ceremonial structures in stone atop the hill, overlooking the stucco residences below, constituted the distinctive look of the early campus. This architectural direction set by the Humes–to

Rather than prolonging a contest with the town that had already developed unpleasant undercurrents, Nelson Hume and the trustees abandoned their plans to build the quadrangle at the top of the hill. They asked Raphael Hume to draw up new plans for the construction of North House, and to design the future campus of the school around the Main House, leaving the new gymnasium in lonely eminence on the hilltop.

COURTESY TONY HUME ’71

of the gymnasium, at the road’s intersection with Elkington Farm Road. Since Aspetuck Avenue north of the School had not been used for the past 50 years or more, and, in fact, was a cow pasture, it did not occur to Nelson Hume that the town fathers of New Milford would oppose the closing of the road.

They did, and the opposition was intense. The town meeting held in February 1923 drew close to 700 townsfolk, a record for the town, and the proposal to close Aspetuck Avenue was defeated by a wide margin of 244-170. Hume made a second proposal at a town meeting some months later, suggesting that the closing of Aspetuck Avenue be approved on the condition that Canterbury bear the cost of constructing a detour around the proposed hilltop buildings. This proposal was also defeated.

Rather than prolonging a contest with the town that had already developed unpleasant undercurrents, Nelson Hume and the Trustees abandoned their plans to build the quadrangle at the top of the hill. They asked Raphael Hume to draw up new plans for the construction of North House, and to design the future campus of the School around the Main House,

Raphael Hume’s rendering of a plan to build a quadrangle consisting of a new gymnasium, a dormitory for 120 boys, a chapel, and a schoolhouse on the upper campus. It also called for closing off Aspetuck Avenue where it meets Elkington Farm Road. The project was abandoned when the powerful forces of hundreds of townspeople objected to the proposal.

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South House, occupied in 1927, replaced the Bungalow, which burned to the ground. The new dormitory was built on Bungalow’s foundation.

render the institutional more public and ceremonial structures in timeworn stone, electing the simpler stucco for the residences–has been the basis and legacy upon which recent Canterbury buildings have been built.

To protect the future site of the gymnasium and other planned buildings, in March 1922, Canterbury purchased the 62-acre Elkington Farm property and the smaller Evitt farm property, which ran from the top of the hill down to Route 202. This purchase was once again led by James A. Farrell, though Clarence Mackay, James Cox Brady, and John D. Ryan also provided financial support. The total land owned by the School now came to 135 acres.

Generous gifts from James Cox Brady, Nicholas Frederic Brady, and Clarence Mackay made it possible to begin the gymnasium construction in the fall of 1922.

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South House, occupied on May 14, 1927, had rooms for 40 boys and apartments for two masters. The desire to create as much living space as possible on the Bungalow’s foundation accounts for the several odd-shaped rooms and dormers in the building.

James and Nicholas Brady inherited and managed the vast fortune accrued by their father Anthony Nicholas Brady, who became one of America’s 100 wealthiest people.

Nicholas Frederic Brady (1930 - ), grandson of James Cox Brady and namesake of his great-uncle, was appointed U.S. Senator from New Jersey and served as Treasury Secretary under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Though the granite for the gymnasium came from a quarry in nearby Roxbury, CT, building the gym was a slow process that took a full year. During that period, a new athletic field was added in the pasture adjacent to the gym, and the football games of the 1923 season were played there though the locker rooms were not ready for use until mid-season. The swimming pool and the basketball court were in operation by January 1924, and the first official basketball game took place on February 28, 1924. Canterbury lost to Stamford 29-19.

By the mid-winter of 1924, the gymnasium was in full use and

boasted a swimming pool, two squash courts, locker rooms, and a basketball court. Though the basketball court was of standard dimensions for the era, in later years its small size earned it the sardonic label of “the third squash court.” This did not bother Nelson Hume, who held basketball in lower regard as a salubrious indoor sport. He much preferred swimming, and was proud that so early in its development, Canterbury had one of the few 25-yard pools in New England.

In the spring of 1925, Jerome Sullivan and Alexander Hume of the faculty and student Harold Salembier ’27, laid out a 9-hole golf course on the lower campus.

Previously, the campus had only two or three practice holes. Many natural hazards, including majestic trees, lay over the new course, with the hockey rink the hardest trap of them all. This trap was located on the fourth hole, where the green was nestled in close to the boards. Interest in golf lagged after the death of Alexander Hume in 1935, when the course became too small for a new generation of long ball hitters. Besides, the trees kept growing until the course was no longer playable.

As Canterbury began its second decade in the fall of 1925, with fundraising for North House underway, what seemed like a fruitful year became a crisis when the Bungalow burned to the ground on December 5, 1925.

Students and faculty who lived in the Bungalow were quickly relocated to temporary quarters in the basketball court.

To maintain the confidence of parents, Nelson Hume was eager to begin rebuilding quickly. Thus it was that the construction of North House was postponed, and in the spring of 1926 construction began on South House, built upon the Bungalow’s foundation, using the insurance proceeds and capital funds on hand.

South House, occupied on May 14, 1927, had rooms for 40 boys and apartments for two masters.

The desire to create as much living

North House, occupied in 1928, housed the School’s new dining room, the Headmaster’s residence and rooms for students.

space as possible on the Bungalow’s foundation accounts for the several odd-shaped rooms and dormers in the building. The first floor had a large common room and two magnificent porches, which were the pride of the upperclassmen who first occupied the dormitory. The half basement contained staff housing and a large laundry. South House was renamed Carter House in 1998.

Construction on the Chapel of Our Lady began in October 1927, and it was completed in time for graduation in June 1928. A separate article in this issue of the PALLIUM details the history of The Chapel of Our Lady.

Ground was broken on April 11, 1928, for North House on the site of “the old north football field.” This additional dormitory had been planned before the Bungalow fire, and even after the construction of South House, the School’s facilities were hard-pressed to house the growing enrollment.

North House would provide a dining room for the entire school and quarters for the headmaster and his family, thus freeing needed classroom space in the Main House.

Because the cost of South House and the incidental expenses of the Chapel had exhausted capital funds, in addition to raising $25,000 in new gifts, the Trustees underwrote a $125,000 bond issue to pay for the construction and furnishing of the new dormitory. Although the bonds were supposed to pay 5% interest, most of them were later returned to the School as gifts, and, through the efforts of Canterbury counsel Terence Carmody, the School was eventually able to save most of the expense of underwriting the bond issue.

North House was occupied by October 1928. As was done later with Middle House, the planning extended to the exterior with a stone wall in the back with plans for a garden below. Hume would later have a huge granite millstone from Connecticut Light and Power placed in the garden area. It is still there today. The dining room and the first floor of the headmaster’s residence were elegantly constructed, their dimensions laid out and designed along the proportions of the “golden section,” in art and architecture, the most pleasing ratio, or 1 to 0.618. The high cost of the first floor amenities, plus costly difficulties with site drainage encountered during construction, necessitated economizing on the upper stories, for example, by substituting wall board for plaster. However, the lighter construction was redeemed by the molding and other techniques 33

designed by Raphael Hume. The North House common room was kept simple and small because Nelson Hume intended to keep the center of the School in the Main House, which now was called Middle House. However, the gathering place of any boarding school is where the food is, thus the attention of students split between the dining room and the two common rooms in Middle and South Houses.

On March 18, 1936, fortunately during spring vacation, the night watchman discovered a fire on the second floor of Middle House.

The fire originated in a closet on the second floor, where rags and cleaning materials being used to refinish the floors were stored.

The entire building was destroyed.

Where the Bungalow fire had deprived the School of pleasant sleeping and recreational quarters, the Middle House fire deprived the School of office space, classrooms, the infirmary, and staff housing.

Once again, Nelson Hume sprang into action to relocate students, faculty, and vital administrative functions to other parts of campus.

Construction was immediately started on a new Middle House.

Again, Ray Hume supplied the plans, and with this project, Nelson Hume added an enduring

feature: floor-length windows in the common room, permitting an inspiring view of the Housatonic Valley, obscured today by woods.

In a May 20, 1936, letter to his brother Cyrus, Hume’s enthusiasm for the new building was evident: We are going to put it on the west side of the driveway instead of the east side, the site of the old building.

Ray is doing a swell job in designing that dormitory… One feature of it is that the main foyer, the common room, the Headmaster’s study and the business offices…will be elevated above the level of the old football field with a terrace held up by a long stone wall…from the terrace you will be able to look up and down the valley in great style, and it will be a sort of center of school life.

The new Middle House was ready for occupancy in the late fall of 1936 and was officially dedicated on Homecoming Day in fall of 1937.

Through architecture, Nelson Hume hoped to reinstate the symmetry of influence on the campus. Moving the site for the new building 100 feet to the west was intended to give it a more related and thus commanding position between North and South House. From his office at the north end of the first floor, Nelson Hume

Middle House, occupied in the fall of 1936, replaced the Main House, which burned to the ground in March 1936. Main House was one of the original buildings that comprised the Ingleside School, which closed its doors in 1914.

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could survey the campus. These offices are now a faculty residence.

Nevertheless, Middle House never again became the Main House, and with the later construction of a schoolhouse and infirmary at the north end of campus, it became less distinctive.

The new building did not contain classrooms as Main House had because as Hume explained in a March 31, 1936, letter to May’s father, Denver lawyer Bernard Desjardins: …the idea of putting up a separate building for the purpose of school work will appeal to the parents to such an extent that we can raise the money of it with even less trouble than raising the money to make up what we lost on the other building… The plan at present under discussion, which, of course, is merely tentative, is to put the schoolhouse up on the hill north of the Chapel and west of the gymnasium… . This is the site of the Hume Building.

Desjardins responded to Nelson on April 8, 1936: I have not yet been able to see in my mind the advantage that you would get in building on the hill North of the Chapel. It seems as if the place with only the North and South Houses might look a little denouded (sic), and looking as if the activities were moving up the Hill…

Hubert McDonnell, (parent of Hubert ’39, Donal ’39, Kenneth ’41, and David ’45) upon his election to the Board of Trustees in 1936, was instrumental in raising the necessary funds for the schoolhouse. At graduation in 1938, Nelson Hume was able to announce his plans to build a schoolhouse, to be placed just east and north of North House.

The first, center, wing of the new schoolhouse was finished and dedicated on December 8, 1938, the feast day of the Immaculate Conception. The new building was large enough to provide a study hall for 35 students, a science laboratory, classrooms, and offices for the faculty and The Tabard.

In a letter to Henry Havemeyer,

The central portion of the Schoolhouse (Old Schoolhouse) was finished and dedicated in 1938. It was home to a study hall, a science lab, classrooms, and offices for the faculty and “The Tabard.”

Hubert McDonnell, (parent of Hubert ’39, Donal ’39, Kenneth ’41, and David ’45) upon his election to the Board of Trustees in 1936, was instrumental in raising the necessary funds for the schoolhouse. At graduation in 1938, Nelson Hume was able to announce his plans to build a schoolhouse, to be placed just east and north of North House. The first, center, wing of the new schoolhouse was finished and dedicated on December 8, 1938, the feast day of the Immaculate Conception. The new building was large enough to provide a study hall for 35 students, a science laboratory, classrooms, and offices for the faculty and The Tabard.

Nelson Hume reported on the new schoolhouse: The addition of the new schoolhouse is one of the most important benefits that has come to the school in a long time. It is a like a real school now during class hours. The boys and masters are all delighted with the new building, and the parents who have seen it are loud in its praises. It gives the impression of the actual fact that we are making first-class provision for the boys during their working hours.

The fine laboratory is particularly impressive. It is really a thing to be proud of.

At the dedication, Nelson Hume announced that construction of the north wing of the schoolhouse would begin that summer. Henry Havemeyer was reluctant to proceed until all the funds were raised, but Nelson Hume pressed for the go-ahead, as growing enrollment had already caused overcrowding. The north wing of the school building opened for use on January 9, 1940. It included a large study hall on the second floor, now classrooms #1-3, which could hold 112 students–apparently the size of the school Nelson Hume envisioned as the number of lockers in the gymnasium also number 112–and a shop for arts and crafts on the first floor, now the faculty offices of the History and English Departments.

In Canterbury’s first quarter century, the School’s physical plant had grown from the leased grounds of the Ingleside School to a campus of 135 acres, fully owned by the School. Taking the places of the former Bungalow and Main House were six impressive new buildings: the gymnasium, the Chapel of Our Lady, North, South, and Middle Houses, and the schoolhouse.

Nelson Hume, and everyone associated with his young school, had every reason to feel optimistic as they faced their next 25 years.

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By Bryan Kiefer

The Chapel 1915-1940 The story of how Canterbury’s first chapel, a part of the School’s original physical plant, went from an improvised and modest space to a new building that became the crown jewel of the campus.

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y 1927, pressure was building to construct a new chapel. In 1922 Canterbury acquired the 62 acres Elkington Farm plus the smaller Evitts Farm to secure control of the hilltop all the way to Route 202. In 1924, the School built a spectacular new gymnasium on this new land, complete with swimming pool, squash courts, and basketball court. In May 1927, students moved into the new South House, built on the foundation of the Bungalow, destroyed by fire in December 1925. The stage was set to build Canterbury’s most important building.

Ingleside School’s owner and headmistress, Mrs. William Black, had purchased a small building from the defunct Adelphic Institute, a local school for boys that operated from 1847-1876, and had it dragged to its present location from its original site on Chicken Hill, southeast of town on Route 67. Nelson Hume tranformed this building into the School’s chapel.

The Old Chapel included four stained glass windows designed and built

by G. Owen Bonawit (1891-1971). Bonawit’s studio produced thousands of stained glass pieces for Yale, Duke, Northwestern, and Connecticut College. These four stained glass windows are now part of the

chaplain’s residence.

At the 1927 graduation Mass, Father Francis X. Byrne, SJ, a friend of Nelson Hume and a regular school visitor, delivered his sermon on the sorry condition of the School’s existing chapel. He deplored the contrast between the magnificent new gymnasium, with its commanding position on the top of the hill, and the tiny, insignificant chapel tucked away at the bottom of the hill. In the congregation that day was John Thomas Smith, parent of Gerard ’31 and Gregory ’30. Deeply moved by the sermon, he immediately pledged whatever financial support would be needed for a 36

new chapel.

John Thomas Smith (1879-1947) was one of the most distinguished lawyers in the United States. He served as the general counsel of General Motors for 27 years. A large bronze plaque inside the Chapel of Our Lady honors his contribution to Canterbury and lists his many alumni descendants, including his two sons, six grandsons, three great-grandchildren and, currently, his great great granddaughter (Sophie Menges ’17). For a full treatment of John Thomas Smith’s remarkable life, please see the article in PALLIUM Volume 28 Issue 3, written by his grandson and namesake J.T. Smith ’60.

With John Thomas Smith’s financial commitment in hand, Nelson Hume wasted no time.

Altering architectural drawings already drawn by his brother Raphael Hume for a different site on campus, construction on the chapel began on October 25 1927. The ambitious goal was to complete the chapel in time for graduation exercises on June 9.

Built from the same granite as the gymnasium, quarried in Roxbury just seven miles away, the chapel took shape quickly. With the altar and its wooden baldachin transported from the old chapel, the Chapel of Our Lady was completed in time for graduation, though it still lacked an organ, stained glass windows, and other decorations and furnishings present today.

Graduation day on June 9, 1928, began with a blessing of the chapel and a High Mass at 10:15. Bishop McAuliffe of Hartford formally consecrated the chapel and Fr. Joseph King, pastor of the local St. Francis parish and Canterbury’s guest chaplain from 1921-1939, celebrated High Mass. Father Byrne delivered the sermon. It was his sermon a year earlier that had persuaded John Thomas Smith to fund the new chapel. Graduation itself took place at 11:00 in the gymnasium where the 13 graduates received their diplomas from Monsigneur Chidivick of New York.

As they had on the gymnasium,

Canterbury’s original chapel altar in 1921. The building, once used to house the School’s servants, was renovated and enlarged into the chaplain’s residence.

In Canterbury’s early years, students worshiped in the building that, expanded and renovated, now houses the chaplain. The oldest building on Canterbury’s campus, this building is the sole architectural remnant of the Ingleside School, where it was used as a servants’ residence.

Canterbury’s original altar in the Chapel of Our Lady, built in 1928.

Nelson and Raphael Hume used the English Collegiate Gothic style for the chapel, then in vogue on college campuses such as Princeton and Duke. Its characteristics include tall granite walls, limestone-trimmed windows, high pitched gables and slate roofs, and irregularly placed entrances.

To take advantage of the lightness and brightness of the hilltop location, the design of the chapel opens to the west with a pointed arch window of the later gothic period. Dramatically revealed through the stained-glass donated

by John W. Mackay ’25 in memory of his grandmother Marie Louise Mackay, this window is one of the glories of the edifice and floods the nave with delicate colors each sunny afternoon.

In designing the chapel, Nelson Hume put Canterbury on the cutting edge of church design and liturgical practice, anticipating many reforms of the Second Vatican Council. For example, in 1922, Canterbury became the only congregation outside Vatican City to celebrate the Missa Recitata (dialogue Mass), an early 20th century innovation in which congregants recited responses. The student body could recite in unison the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and the Agnes Dei. In another departure from tradition, Nelson Hume himself 37

The exterior of the Chapel of Our Lady. The School’s gymnasium, built in 1924, is at right.

led many of the religious ceremonies in the chapel. With the support of Fr. King, Nelson Hume designed the chapel with such a laity-inspired innovation as the absence of an altar rail. Years ahead of its time, this rare partnership between priest and layman gave Canterbury the enlightened lay participation in liturgy that has become widespread since the Second Vatican Council. With the design and construction of the Chapel of Our Lady, religion and religious activity were integrated into the daily life of Canterbury’s early students through morning prayers, the Angelus, evening prayers, and the solemn tolling of the De Profundis each night.

In 1928 Michael Meehan, father of Joseph Meehan ’35 and William Meehan ’33, donated funds for a new chapel organ in honor of his mother Sarah Ansbro Meehan. Subsequent generation Meehans included William’s son Terence ’66 and Joseph’s son Michael ’58. Constructed by the Hook & Hastings Company of Boston, established in 1827, their organ #2568 was a complicated instrument containing 967 pipes. Dedicated in a special ceremony on May 26, 1929, the organ’s pipeworks occupied the two bottom floors in the chapel’s tower, with the console along the north aisle, shortening the adjacent pews. In honor of the occasion, Pietro Yon, honorary organist of the Vatican and organist of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, gave a recital. The St. Patrick’s Quartet from New York City performed a voice recital.

The third floor of the chapel’s tower, opened to the weather with louvered windows, holds the mighty framework on which the 23 bells of the carillon hang. Mrs. Irene O’Donohue Ferrer donated these impressive bells in 1931 in memory of her husband Jose Maria Ferrer MD, parents of Jose M. Ferrer, Jr. ’30 and grandparents of Jose M. Ferrer III ’57.

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In designing the chapel, Nelson Hume put Canterbury on the cutting edge of church design and liturgical practice, anticipating many reforms of the Second Vatican Council. In 1922, Canterbury became the only congregation outside Vatican City to celebrate the Missa Recitata (dialogue Mass), an early 20th century innovation in which congregants recited responses.

By 1933, the Chapel of Our Lady’s sanctuary featured a massive stone altar in front in front of a baldachin rising to an imposing Lombardy crown. It was the gift of James A. Beha, father of James A. Beha, Jr. ’33, in memory of Catherine McMurrough Beha.

After spending months travelling around the east inspecting carillons, Nelson Hume finally ordered Canterbury’s bells from the firm Gillett & Johnston in Croydon, England. Established in 1877, Gillett & Johnston was one of the premier carillon makers in the world, with an extensive list of installations in the United States, including the Laura Spelman Rockefeller memorial carillon at Riverside Church in Manhattan, which contains the largest tuned bell in the world. Though Gillett & Johnson’s bell foundry closed in 1957, the firm still travels the world servicing and repairing carillons.

Canterbury’s carillon was dedicated on May 10, 1931 with a professional recital by a Mr. Hailes of Albany and a blessing with oil, incense, and holy water by Monsignor Michael J. Lavelle. William Gorham Rice, author of the definitive text on carillons, Carillon Music and Singing Towers of the Old World and the New, spoke at the dedication.

The ten stained-glass windows in the chapel were installed gradually over the next decade. In the winter of 1929, two stained-glass windows were installed on the south side of the chapel, one in memory of Jane Buglar Hallahan (1881-1926), mother of W. Butler Hallahan ’23, the other in memory of George Ehret (1835-1927), grandfather of George Ehret ’29.

The window nearest the sanctuary shows four scenes from the life of Our Lady. The center window has scenes showing the Sorrow of Our Lady.

The third stained-glass window, nearest to the entry, was installed that September. Installed only a few days before the opening of school, it is dedicated to the memory of Thomas Joseph Hume (1851-1926) and Hattie Kean Hume (1857-1916), parents of Nelson. The window depicts Jesus: as an infant, on the road to Calvary with his cross, crucified, and being buried. At the center is the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

All three windows on the south aisle were made in Chipping Campden, England by Paul Vincent Woodroffe (1875-1954). Woodroffe, a prolific book illustrator and stained-glass artist, designed and built 15 stained-glass windows for the Lady Chapel in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a task that, interrupted

by World War I, took from 1909– 1934. In addition, he designed and built stained-glass windows for at least 16 churches in England.

The following fall, Nicola D’Ascenzo (1871-1954) of Philadelphia installed two lancet windows in the north wall of the sanctuary. (See box on D’Ascenzo Studios.)

Following the general design of the best medieval glass work, the lancets consist of five panels in each window. The panels in the western (left) window depict five scenes from the Old Testament which prefigure the Eucharist: the sacrifice of Abel; Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac; the sacrifice of Melchizedek; the sacrifice of the paschal lamb; and God’s deliverance of mana to the Israelites in the desert. The five panels in the eastern (right) lancet depict five scenes from the New Testament: the marriage feast of Cana; the multiplication of the loaves and fishes; the last supper; the crucifixion; and a priest at the altar celebrating Mass.

The background of both lancet windows is a deep, rich sapphire blue, while the panels consist of subdued reds, oranges, browns, 39

A worker installs the 23 bells of Canterbury’s carillon. The instrument was dedicated on May 19, 1931.

and greens. The beauty of the windows, and the appropriateness of the subjects, makes them a striking story of the Mass and fitting windows for the sanctuary. The left window was given in memory of Henry Frelinghuysen Schenk (18731926), father of Henry Schenk ’30, and the right window in memory of Reverend Terence Bernard Smith (1863-1920).

Later, four more stainedglass windows were installed on the chapel’s north aisle. The westernmost is given in memory of Nelson Hume’s beloved younger brother Alexander (1882-1935), Assistant Headmaster from 19151935. His funeral in February 1935 was the first held in the new chapel. Next to Alexander’s is a window in memory of Alfred Seixas Clark (1893-1937), the gift of his son James Alfred Clark ’45. The third is in memory of Josephine Schweinler, and the fourth in memory of Charles Schweinler (1854-1927), both the gifts of their daughter Dorothy Schweinler Badenhausen, mother 40

Nelson Hume finally ordered Canterbury’s bells from the firm Gillett & Johnston in Croydon, England.

Established in 1877, Gillett & Johnston was one of the premier carillon makers in the world, with an extensive list of installations in the United States, including the Laura Spelman Rockefeller memorial carillon at Riverside Church in Manhattan.

of Carl ’42, Robert ’46, and Richard ’55 Badenhausen.

Like the two lancets in the sanctuary, these four windows were designed, built, and installed

by D’Ascenzo Studios, as was the chapel’s magnificent west window.

The donation of this window by the Mackay family, in memory of Clarence Mackay’s mother and John Mackay’s ’25 grandmother, was announced at graduation in 1930.

It arrived in April, 1931. Clarence Mackay, his son Willie (John) and Willie’s wife came to New Milford in June for the dedication of the window. In a July 29, 1931, letter to Henry Havemeyer, Nelson Hume said, “…you may be interested to know that Mr. Mackay told me he wished Willie to give the window so that the Mackay name would be permanently identified with Canterbury School.”

In 1933, James A. Beha, father of James A. Beha, Jr. ’33, donated a new altar in memory of Catherine McMurrough Beha. Mr. Beha’s gift was a massive stone altar in front of a baldachin of Canterbury’s school

The D’Ascenzo Studios

colors in rich tapestry, rising up to an imposing Lombardy crown suspended high above. Still in use today, the altar was dedicated by Bishop James A. Walsh, Superior General of Marynoll, at a High Mass on December 10, 1933.

Father John LaFarge, SJ, chaplain of the Liturgical Arts Society and an editor at the Jesuit magazine America, gave the sermon. The impressive ceremony closed with a carillon recital by faculty member Edward Mack.

By the end of its first 25 years, Canterbury had moved from its makeshift chapel in the former servants’ quarters to a distinguished architectural gem, the center of the spiritual life of the campus. The beauty and functionality of the chapel would grow during the next 25 years, from 1940–1965. This era will be presented in the next issue of PALLIUM.

The donation of the west window by the Mackay family, in memory of Clarence Mackay’s mother and John Mackay’s ’25 grandmother, was announced at graduation in 1930. It arrived in April, 1931.

ROBERT FERTITTA

Born in Italy and descended from a family of armormakers, Nicola D’Ascenzo came to Philadelphia at age eleven and established a reputation for excellence in the design and execution of stained glass windows, mosaics, and murals. He was also a skilled painter. Among his best-known works are the windows for the Folger Shakespeare Library and National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Riverside Church in New York, and the Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge. The Athenaeum of Philadelphia owns the archives of the D’Ascenzo Studios. Among their holdings are 16 images of the Canterbury Chapel windows. The images include those of the Thomas More window, donated by James Clark ’45; the great west window donated by the Clarence Mackay family; and the two lunetts.

The Chapel of Our Lady’s west window, the gift of the Mackay family, in memory of Clarence Mackay’s mother and John Mackay’s ’25 grandmother. It arrived in 1931.

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By Lou Mandler

The Student Body 1915-1940 Canterbury opened its doors on September 30, 1915, with seven faculty, including the Headmaster, on board to teach the 18 boys that year. In 1939-1940, at the end of the first quarter century, the enrollment was 98 boys, which included 13 sets of brothers.

Nelson Hume, center of middle row, with his opening-year faculty and students.

42

W

hen Canterbury began to accept its first students in 1915, the first student to enroll in September of that year was Cyril Clemens, a distant relative of Mark Twain.

Sons of the founding Trustees helped round out the ranks of the first 18 boys. Henry Havemeyer Jr., James Farrell Jr., Cyril Hume, Allan and Theodore Ryan, Charles Ward, and later that year, Edward Carmody were students in the first group of students. Throughout the first quarter century of Canterbury’s history, sons of the founding families continued to enter the School. These included James Cox Brady ’25, Francis Carmody ’25, John Mackay ’25, Frederick Havemeyer ’27, Guerin Carmody ’28, and Fortune Peter Ryan ’29.

The School also benefited from the loyalty of a number of families who sent several sons to Canterbury in its early years.

These included the Salembiers (Richard ’22, Maurice ’24, Harold ’27), the Hammonds (Edward ’28, Frederick ’29, George ’31, John ’34, Thomas ’36), the Lillys (Joseph ’20, Henry ’21, Robert ’23, Gerald ’25), the Haires (Andrew ’29, Thomas ’30, John ’36), the Earlys (Joseph ’26, Charles ’30 Henry ’35), the Burnhams (James ’23, David ’25, Philip ’27), the Thaxters (Roger ’31, Richard ’33, James ’36), and the Kernans (John D. ’30, James S. ’32, Leslie ’39).

Some of these and other names of students in the first quarter century reappear on the School’s rosters in later decades as successive generations became students. The Corroon (Richard ’31, James ’37), Harding (Charles ’31, Frank ’32), Krug (Thomas ’31, Paul ’32, Peter ‘74), Halsey (Sheffield ’37), Crimmins (M. Lalor ’20), Routh (John ’30), Smith (Gerard ’31), Bouscaren (Anthony ’39), Beha (James ’33), and Dennehy (Thomas ’19) names all reappear in subsequent rosters as their children or grandchildren

Some student names in the first quarter century stand out because of their accomplishments. Canterbury’s most noted graduates are probably mythologist Joseph Campbell ’21 and Sargent Shriver ’34, America’s first Peace Corps Director. become Canterbury students. The Skellys (James ’30, T. MacFarland ’33) were cousins of the Wheelock brothers, Joe ’56, Web ’56, and Tom ’65.

Other names are recognizable for their contributions to the School through service or gifts. Hubert and Donal McDonnell ’39 were sons of Trustee Hubert McDonnell, and Donal served as Canterbury’s President of the Board of Trustees from 1959-1974. Gerard Smith ’31, Thomas Krug ’31, Fortune Peter Ryan ’29, A. Marvin Laidlaw ’25, Walter Briggs II 30, Francis Carmody ’25, Herbert McLaughlin ’22, and H. Wisner Miller ’30 also served as Trustees, Francis Carmody as President. The Appenzellars (Donald ’30, David ’34) contributed the first tennis courts, and the Meehans (William ’33, Joseph ’35) donated the organ for the Chapel of Our Lady. The carillon in the Chapel of Our Lady was given by the family of Jose Ferrer ’57.

Some student names in the first quarter century stand out because of their accomplishments. Canterbury’s most noted graduates are probably mythologist Joseph Campbell ’21, chief U.S. delegate to the SALT Talks Gerard C. Smith ’31, and Sargent Shriver ’34, America’s first Peace Corps Director. Bernard Ridder ’34 of the Knight Ridder newspaper corporation is among the first inductees of Canterbury’s Athletic Hall of Fame.

Bernie excelled in squash at Canterbury and went on to captain the Princeton Squash Team. He became a founding partner of the Minnesota Vikings. A lesser known but accomplished early alum was Dunstan Thompson ’34, who published a book of poems in 1943, a novel (The Dove with the Bough of Olive) in 1942, and another book of poems (Lament for the Sleepwalker) in 1947. After serving in World War II, Thompson settled in Britain, where his last book of poetry was published.

He is the subject of a 2010 book, Dunstan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master. Charles Sweeny’s ’28 life after Canterbury as described in his 1990 autobiography was a remarkable one. After leaving Oxford, he moved in the social circles in Europe that included the Duke of Windsor, golfer Bobby Jones, and various other celebrities.

One student who attended but did not stay to graduate was future President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy entered

Joseph Campbell ’21.

Dunstan Thompson ’36.

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Sargent Shriver ’34, right, with Gerard C. Smith ’31, left, and then Headmaster Rod Clarke ’46 at an on-campus colloquium in the 1980s.

Canterbury as a Second Former in the fall of 1930. In the spring of 1931, he was stricken with appendicitis and went home to recuperate. During his recuperation, the family decided he would not return to Canterbury, and he then spent his secondary years at Choate.

During the first 25 years of Canterbury’s existence, the student body grew from the original 18 to 98 in the 1939-1940 school year. An early expressed goal of the founders was to gather students from across the country, not just from the tri-state area.

The presence of John McPhee from Denver, Thomas Dennehy from Chicago, the Burnhams from Illinois, and the Hammond brothers from Michigan demonstrate success in working towards this goal. In other ways, the early rosters were not as diverse. An abundance of Irish and Anglo names are listed with an occasional French or German surname included. Indeed, William Schusser ’36 commented in a telephone interview in June of 2014, “I was the only German student and that was interesting.”

Another purpose the founders expressed for Canterbury was to offer Catholic boys an excellent education that included instruction 44

in their faith and the opportunity to attend Ivy League colleges. At this time, parochial schools sent their students only to Catholic colleges.

The twin goal of an excellent Catholic education and admission to Ivy League colleges was certainly attained as evidenced by correspondence between Trustee Hubert McDonnell and Nelson Hume in 1936. McDonnell, himself a Yale graduate, asked Hume to give him a list of all graduates who had attended Yale. The list Hume returned to McDonnell listed 65 Elis among the 220 Canterbury graduates from 1918 to 1935.

Two years earlier, in 1934, college statistics was the subject of Hume’s June 25 letter to Havemeyer. Hume explained to Havemeyer that most Canterbury boys prepare for College Board Examinations, which are the basis for admission to Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hume said 69% of the Canterbury boys went to these College Board Colleges.

Colleges such as Georgetown, Notre Dame, College of the Holy Cross, Williams, and Catholic University are Certificate Colleges, so called because upon successful completion of their school work, the students receive certificates

John F. Kennedy, entered Canterbury in the fall of 1930. He left due to illness.

One student who attended but did not stay to graduate was future President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. accredited by The New England College Entrance Certificate Board.

Certificate Colleges admit by these certificates. Hume reported that 31% of the Canterbury boys went to Certificate Colleges. These statistics covered graduates from 1918, the first year of Canterbury graduates, through 1933.

The student body of the first quarter century would grow in size in the following decades, it would begin to include students from other countries and of other races and ethnic backgrounds, and eventually even include girls.

While the make-up of the student body would change over time, the School continued to adhere to the standard expressed by Hume in his 1934 letter, “Canterbury, in its teaching and its course of studies, lives up to the standards maintained by the very best schools.”

The Class of 1936. Front row, l-r: Dunstan Thompson, Michael Gormley, Robert Clay, James Thaxter, Raymond Bengert, William Schusser, unidentified (did not graduate). Back row, l-r: Hugh King III, unidentified (did not graduate), Theodore Emory, Thomas Hammond, John Haire, Nelson Smyth.

Student Graduates: 1916-1940

45

By Kathy Bolster

Victory, Victrolas, and Vespers

Student Life at Canterbury:1915-1940

From the opening day of Canterbury, students attended classes and participated in athletics. What kept them otherwise occupied in their free time?

Founding Years In 1915, when Canterbury opens its doors, Tom Brown’s band from New Orleans performs in Chicago, IL, and advertises themselves as a “Jass Band.” Babe Ruth hits his first career home run for the Boston Red Sox. Woodrow Wilson is president of the United States, Albert Einstein publishes his theory of general relativity, and Alexander Graham Bell talks to Thomas A. Watson in the first transcontinental telephone conversation. As automobiles became common, Cleveland receives an electric traffic signal, and Detroit installs the first proper stop sign. And, in 1915, much of Europe is already embroiled in what will become known as World War I. That same year, Canterbury’s first, the campus, which had been part of the Ingleside School, consisted of the Main House, the Bungalow, and chapel (now the Chaplain’s residence). The Main House held the dining room, offices, classrooms, and living quarters for boys and faculty. The Bungalow provided more sleeping rooms, and all the teas, dances, lectures, and plays were held in the Bungalow’s living room.

When boys assembled for a class or other gathering, they were dressed uniformly. Each boy was required to have “two dark suits for wear in the evening and on 46

Thomas Dennehy ’19 and Gilbert King ’19, seated in front, in School horse and buggy in 1919.

Sundays, also a corduroy suit for the younger boys.” Dr. Hume “preferred that the younger boys wore Eton collars in the evenings and Sundays.” In addition, the boys were to bring a pair of high Arctic overshoes, rubbers, and a pair of pumps.

The first program of studies was demanding. Sixth Formers studied English, Latin, French, Geometry, Chemistry, United States History, Christian Apologetics, and Elocution. In addition, each student

chose either Greek or German to study. A First Former studied English, Latin (in the second half year), arithmetic, geography, Elementary History of England, elocution, singing, and religious instruction. The school year was divided into three terms, with examinations occurring at the end of each term.

To fulfill Canterbury’s mission of preparing boys for admission to Ivy League universities, the College Board Exams were an important

Students in study hall in early 1900s.

John Hughes’s (1920) report card.

component of the academic program. Founded in 1899, The College Board’s first college entrance examinations consisted of essay examinations in English, French, German, Latin, Greek, history, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Students could take one entrance exam for several universities instead of taking a separate exam for each university to which they applied.

Dr. Hume was a great believer in the benefits of being outdoors, and long hikes through the surrounding countryside were regular occurrences. One such

Alec Hume and boys prepare for a hike.

Charlie Martin ’22.

outing was a six-mile hike to picnic at Green’s Pond, located in presentday Sherman near Candlewood Mountain Road. When longer hikes were not possible, Hume insisted that the boys get outside for daily exercise and some fresh air. Edward Maher penned an essay in a 1920 Quill, Canterbury’s first publication, relating how Dr. Hume stood outside the dorm demanding that all boys come outside. When Maher foolishly thought he could ignore the Headmaster’s summons, Dr. Hume called him outside by name and assigned him to ten laps around the track.

From the very beginning, spiritual life was important at Canterbury. Clarence Mackay presented an organ to the School in December 1915, and, each evening, the boys would gather in the original chapel, now the Chaplain’s residence, immediately after supper for evening prayers and hymns.

Visiting clergy were welcomed at School, including the Right Reverend the Abbot of Caldey, who visited in 1917 and returned in 1918 to conduct a four-day retreat.

Caldey is a small island off the southwestern coast of Wales. The boys gave up all studies and work for the period of the retreat; the day was divided into conferences, spiritual readings, the rosary, and benediction. On Sunday evening, at the conclusion of the retreat, Father Abbot regaled the boys with ghost stories after supper.

Canterbury was also blessed to have a visit from The Most Reverend John Bonzano D.D., Archbishop of Melitene, now modern Malatya, a city in the

eastern Anatolia region of Turkey, and Apostolic Delegate to the United States, who visited nearby Hartford. A number of parents made the trip to New Milford for the welcoming reception and tea.

In 1918, the boys were treated to a visit from Abbé Jean Borde d’Arrere, chaplain of the Seventh Moroccan Division, where he had served for 14 months in the trenches during WWI. For many years, the School celebrated devotion to Our Lady during May. A shrine was erected in the chapel, decorated daily with fresh flowers, and the boys recited the Litany of the Blessed Virgin each evening at prayers.

After the death, the first in the School’s history, of Canterbury student William Cranmer McPhee, Nelson Hume wrote in the 1920 issue of The Quill, “It was to the chapel that his memory most frequently returned; in spirit he was often with us at evening prayers, during retreat, or singing hymns at our May devotions – for he was preeminently a Canterbury boy in his devotion to Our Lady.”

The families of the first boys at the School supported recreational activities at the School. Mrs. Havemeyer sent a phonograph and a film projector and arranged for five movie reels to be delivered to the School each week. These were silent films; “talkies” did not come into existence until 1927. Every Friday evening, the whole school gathered for the show for one reel of travel, one of natural history, two dramas, and one reel of comedy.

Into the Friday night program, Hume introduced current events 47

The cover of the first issue of “The Quill,” Canterbury’s initial literary forum and School news items.

speeches. Two boys spoke in the intermission between the movie reels: one on foreign events and one on domestic events.

Mrs. James A. Farrell gave the first 25 books for the library. A poll in The Tabard in the early ’20s indicated that the boys’ favorite author was Robert Louis Stevenson.

The Quill mentions The Black Arrow by Stevenson and Men of Iron by Howard Pyle as younger boy favorites. Cyril Clemens, a distant cousin of Samuel Clemens, gave a complete set of Mark Twain’s works (undoubtedly lost in the Main House fire). The boys purchased a small radio for the common room, capable of receiving New York and neighboring stations.

The Tabard and The Quill were the prime sources of extracurricular activity in the early years.

The first issue of The Quill was published in December 1916. The Quill’s purpose was twofold: to chronicle school happenings and to be a literary forum. The first issue of The Tabard was published on March 3, 1919. It provided weekly news on visitors, alumni, sports, and other items of interest. John 48

Hughes was Editor; Allan A. Ryan and James A. Farrell, Associate Editors; Joseph Lily, Business Manager; Gilbert King, Athletics; and Thomas Dennehy, Assistant Business Manager. The editorial staff felt The Tabard, since it would appear weekly, would cover school events, major and minor, better than The Quill, which only appeared once per term.

The first theatrical performance, Katherine and Petruchio, a three-act comedy, adapted from Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, occurred in the winter of 1916. The New Milford Times reviewed the play favorably. Most of the boys took part in the production; the audience was comprised of friends and relatives invited to attend the play, with a dance following.

Dances were popular at the School. The description in The Quill of the dance following Katherine and Petruchio was typical, “Around the walls (of the Bungalow) was a ring, which here and there formed groups of mothers, fathers and chaperones… At midnight supper was served, and even after it had disappeared, nobody wanted to go home, so there was one more dance.”

In April of 1917, the United States Congress declared war on Germany. Some foods became scarce, particularly potatoes, causing the author of the “Canterbury Tales” in The Quill to write, “Although potatoes are generally a commonplace and ordinary dish, they are hard to do without. This the boys realized after they had been deprived of them for a few weeks, because of their scarcity and high price in the neighboring country.” Part of the field around the School was plowed and potatoes were planted. Since the potatoes would not be ready for at least a year, a parent, Mr. Slade, promised to send a shipment of the famous “Great Big Baked Potatoes.” Coal rationing came into effect. On certain nights, all local power was shut off in order to provide more current for the nearby munitions plants.

During the war, the Headmaster

organized the Canterbury Corps of Cadets, fully outfitted with army style uniforms, hats and wooden guns.

Both the false armistice and the real event on November 11, 1918, were celebrated with great gusto at the School. The school truck, decked out in school colors, paraded through the streets of New Milford on each occasion.

Even after the armistice, the Corps continued to drill and to give a number of creditable reviews for visiting dignitaries. On April 2, 1919, the Student Council voted that in view of the world situation, the Canterbury Corps should be disbanded. The Council suggested that the Corps’ uniforms of breeches, spiral puttees, and army shoes could be worn on all-day tramps through the country instead.

Dr. Hume took the influenza epidemic that hit in 1918 in stride.

He quarantined the students and placed the School under the protection of St. Michael the Archangel. Canterbury was spared completely. The devotion to St. Michael, not only as the protector of Christ in his youth, but also as the deliverer of Canterbury, continued after the epidemic.

Canterbury’s first graduation ceremony occurred on Saturday, June 9, 1918. The celebration lasted throughout the weekend, beginning with a graduation dance on Friday evening. After graduation on Saturday morning, students, families, and guests gathered for lunch, followed by a baseball game, which Canterbury won. Saturday ended with a Bungalow production, Good-bye to the Sixth Form. On Sunday morning, the official closing of the School took place after the celebration of High Mass.

Dr. Hume created an orchestra in May 1919 to give a performance on Commencement Day in June.

The orchestra practiced every Saturday evening after supper in the living room of the Main House.

There were seven members in it: Dr. Hume, the leader, on piano; Joseph Campbell, on violin; James Ryan and John McPhee, on the saxophone; and John Hughes,

Gilbert King and Allan Ryan, on the banjo-mandolin.

1920s In May 1921, the most extraordinary production of a play in the School’s history took place. The play was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and included a prologue written by Cyril Hume, organ music by Jacques Pintell, and singing offstage by John McCormack. Nothing since has ever rivaled it. The distinguishing factor about the production was the lush appointments, including costumes.

Also remarkable was the fact that the character of Bottom was played by none other than the headmaster himself. Joseph Campbell had been slated for the role but fell ill just before the performance. The only other person in the school who knew the lines was Nelson Hume; he could quote long passages of Shakespeare, and had been directing the production right from the start. Without any hesitation, he donned the donkey’s head and gave a sterling performance, with no loss in prestige or discipline among his more fortunate players.

By 1922, enrollment had increased to 65, and mechanical and freehand drawing had been added to the curriculum. In 1921, Joseph Campbell earned a 92% on the College Board Biology examination, the highest grade of those students taking the exam that year. In 1923, James Burnham ’23 earned a 98% on the American History paper, achieving highest honors in that subject exam of the College Board Examinations.

The daily schedule was long, and, as a result, Dr. Hume instituted a 4:30 p.m. tea in October 1923, consisting of two large cookies and tea with milk. Another highlight of the day was the distribution of the mail. The masters delivered mail to the boys in the main study hall directly after lunch. Sunday morning was usually reserved for writing letters.

In December 1923, Dr. Hume announced his impending marriage to Miss May Eleanor Desjardins in Denver. Father King, New Milford’s

parish priest, celebrated a 7:30 a.m. Saturday Mass on campus for Dr. and Mrs. Hume on the day of their marriage. Even more exciting to the boys was the telegram, read to them by Alec Hume, that because of the marriage, Christmas holidays would be extended until January 8.

On November 4, President Coolidge was elected to serve a full term as president. During this same period, F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, and John W. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution.

Across the Atlantic, John L. Baird, a Scotsman, transmitted the first grayscale television image of a recognizable human face.

To the delight of the boys, Dr. Hume procured a radio, referred to in The Tabard as a radio receiving apparatus, which was set up in the living room of the Bungalow to listen to Yale football games. When the Yale/ Princeton game was broadcast, Mr. Sullivan, the football coach, indicated the position of the football during the course of the game by moving a small ball across a miniature gridiron hung on the wall of the Bungalow.

One side of the ball was blue for Yale, whose supporters sat on the balcony; the other side was orange for Princeton, whose supporters held the main floor.

In 1923, a parent presented Dr. Hume with a new, more powerful radio, which, according to The Tabard, “was installed in the living-room of the Main House, the aerial running from the flagpole to one of the corner rooms in the Main House.”

The Quill became the Canterbury Quarterly in 1922. The publication

Thanksgiving 1920 Dance Card.

49

made its appearance in colors of Canterbury blue, with the contents printed on the cover. The magazine continued to include fiction pieces, poetry, essays, and “The Canterbury Tales,” which contained snippets written about Canterbury life. Throughout the 1920s, Dr. Hume awarded the editorial staff of the Quarterly with gold watch charms. These charms depicted the Canterbury School seal with a quill passing through it.

Playing and listening to music remained a popular pastime for the boys and masters. An impromptu evening in the living room of the Main House made such a hit that it was followed the next week by another in the Bungalow, where the boys could set up a stage. To the amusement of the Canterbury audience, some of the performers created their own verses to the popular song “Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean.” Other groups sang or played jazz songs on banjos, mandolins, and saxophones, or acted out comedy skits. The masters participated as well; Mr. Mahoney played Beethoven on the violin, accompanied by the headmaster on piano. In the “Alumni Notes” section of The Tabard, the editor notes that Joseph Campbell, presently at Columbia, visited the School for the weekend in 1923 and entertained the boys with pieces on the banjo and saxophone, including some of his own making.

Dances continued as regular features of the School, occurring at least once or twice a term. Sisters, cousins, and friends of the boys were the invited guests. The first dance number began at 8:30 p.m.

Revelers made use of dance cards to record the names of dancers and partners until midnight, when they were served a light supper.

The following morning, the boys and guests had a late breakfast. At 3:30 p.m., the guests reconvened for a tea dance, which lasted until 6:30 p.m. The types of dances performed during tea dances included waltzes, tangos and, by the late 1920s, the Charleston.

Despite the popularity of music 50

among Canterbury’s boys, it wasn’t until late November 1925 that boys could take music lessons as part of a Music Club. Nine members played banjo, three played the mandolin, and two played the saxophone.

The new orchestra performed their first concert on March 19, 1926.

Selections included “Old Black Joe,” “Oh! Susanna,” and “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” The first choral group at Canterbury was formed in October 1929. Dr. Hume and Mr. Mack held tryouts to form a Glee Club, and 15 boys were

chosen to comprise the club. The club performed religious music, spirituals, madrigals, and popular songs suitable for four-part singing.

Their first public performance was a rendition of “Adoremus in Acternum,” which they delivered at benediction Sunday night. During Advent, the boys continued the custom of singing Christmas carols each evening, with Mr. Mack playing the organ.

In December 1925, the Bungalow caught fire and burned, an event that had an immediate impact on

the boys at School. Father Sill, Headmaster at Kent, immediately offered to house some of the boys, but Dr. Hume acted immediately to have beds sent up from New Haven. Sufficient blankets had been rescued from the fire to be used in the temporary quarters in the gym. Hume rescheduled tea in the Main House at 4:20 for those living in Main, and 4:40 for those displaced to the gym. Study hall for Bungalow residents was moved to the Third and Sixth Form classrooms. Classes were not disrupted. On a rainy Saturday in May 1927, the doors to New House, later named South House and now called Carter House, finally opened. The boys, divided into teams, moved furniture and belongings throughout the day into the new dormitory. Fifth and Sixth Form boys lived in the Main House; Third and Fourth Form boys lived in New House.

The Tabard’s editorial staff established a tradition of stepping down in May to allow the new editorial board to take over. This event was generally celebrated with a banquet. In 1926, at a private dining room at the Elton Hotel in Waterbury, Dr. Hume was the guest of honor. The menu consisted of lobster patties and filet mignon. Coffee in demitasse cups and cigarettes concluded the meal. In 1929, with Volume Twenty One, the editors introduced the Graduation Number. The Graduation Number of the paper provided in-depth reporting of commencement and graduation activities, as in years past, but the greatly expanded issue also acted as a yearbook by printing a picture and Canterbury biography of each of the graduates. This issue included a recapping of the year and reprinting of some of the “Impressions” columns judged best by the editorial staff. Including advertisements, the Graduation Number ran 44 pages.

Even before the Bungalow fire, plans existed for another dormitory building. This new dormitory had been badly needed as enrollment in Canterbury had now reached 90. The custom of Fifth and Sixth Formers gathering after chapel for coffee with the faculty began late in 1926. Every Wednesday evening, the boys, the masters, and their wives would meet in the Main House for conversation before the start of study hall. With the opening of North House (Duffy) in 1929, this custom, called “Club Night,” changed to Thursday evenings in the new building. A piano was added to the furnishings in the common room, and the boys and masters would sing as well as drink coffee and smoke.

Besides the supervised hiking trips around New Milford, a longstanding custom allowed the boys all-day walking privileges on Saturdays.

When work began on excavating Candlewood Lake and installing the

In 1925 the Bungalow, one of Canterbury’s original buildings, burned to the ground. It was replaced two years later by South House.

power dam, boys flocked to the area to see the hydraulic equipment and steam shovels in operation.

In October 1927, Sixth Formers petitioned for, and were granted, additional privileges. These privileges centered on seniority or preferred seating, such as their own dining table and their own dormitory corridor. Sixth Formers also won the privilege of “no lights out” at the end of study hall. These privileges came with responsibilities: Sixth Formers supervised morning study periods and took charge of morning prayers in the chapel. Beyond these specific responsibilities, it was up to Sixth Formers to maintain good behavior and to act as leaders in all school affairs.

1930s In the ’30s, there were already stirrings of the coming upheaval in the world. The Nazi party was beginning to take power in Germany. By 1933, Adolf Hitler was Chancellor of Germany, and the Nazis were burning books and boycotting Jewish-owned shops. Two short years later, Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia.

Throughout the decade, the war in Europe escalated, although the United States limited involvement until the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

The report cards sent home in 1931 included the following explanation of the grading system, “The passing mark is 60%, but any mark below 65% shows weakness in that subject, and should receive special attention. Any mark of 85% or over is an honors mark.”

The radio remained a popular form of entertainment, and in October 1930, Mr. Michael J. Meehan donated three “superheterodyne” radios for the boys. These radios were encased in lowboy cabinets of finished walnut and powerful enough to bring in many different stations. The boys raised money from the sale of the old radios to purchase four electric clocks, which were installed in each of the four school buildings.

Nelson Hume regularly invited 51

speakers in the arts and sciences for the edification of the boys. When it was not possible for speakers to come to campus, Hume arranged for the boys to travel to the speaker. The boys joined with neighboring schools Gunnery, Kent, and Wykeham Rise to hear the Curator of the Bronx Zoo, Dr. Raymond L. Ditmars, give a lecture on reptiles, “Experiences with Reptiles,” at New Milford High School. In 1935, numerous famous documents were placed on exhibit in the common room of North House through the generosity of noted collector, Mr. Thomas F. Madigan. Among the items on display included a letter from Abraham Lincoln to General Meade concerning a pardon for a young man condemned to be shot.

Another item was an original manuscript of Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” written entirely in Kilmer’s handwriting.

The custom of ringing Angelus at Canterbury began in 1931. Three times a day, one of the boys was in charge of ringing the bells of the carillon, which had been rigged especially to make ringing the Angelus easier. The boys recited the Angelus prayers in unison during chapel; during the noon ringing, the boys could recite their prayers privately.

After a hiatus of seven years, the former custom of producing plays was reestablished late in 1931. Mr. Daley, English master, directed three one-act plays, which were performed at the auditorium of the St. Francis Xavier School in New Milford, with permission from Father King. The Sixth Form performed, The Rising of the Moon by Lady Gregory; the Fifth Form performed the Murder of Aaron Kale; and the Fourth Form performed the Beggar and the King. Several years later, Dr. Hume reintroduced speech classes one time per week for all Forms.

Since Canterbury’s first graduation ceremony in 1918, the weekend graduation program remained unchanged. In 1932, Dr. Hume announced that there would be an alteration to the events. Graduation High Mass moved from Sunday to Saturday, allowing the graduates to depart a day earlier. A carillon recital played by Riverside Church carillonneur Kamiel Lefévere was added before the Mass and then again between Mass and the beginning of the graduation exercises.

The graduation weekend was not the only long-standing tradition to change. In November 1932, Nelson Hume announced that those boys living within a day’s commute would have permission to travel home on Thanksgiving Day. His main reason to consider breaking the tradition was twofold: he found that the boys’ spirit and discipline had been unusually good; and, he stated that railroad/bus service now made such a trip possible and inexpensive. The Tabard reported, “At the ending of Doctor Hume’s unexpected announcement there was loud and prolonged applause, and a rush for the telephone booths and telegraph banks.”

During February 1934, temperatures in the metropolitan area plunged to record-breaking lows. The National Weather Service recorded a temperature of -15°F in New York City, while The Tabard claimed temperatures closer to -25°F in New Milford. The unusually bad weather continued when the worst blizzard since 1888 hit New Milford and surrounding towns. The mail and the newspapers were undeliverable; snow reached drifts of 16 feet in some places; and the temperature hung near 10°F. Some of the Canterbury boys acted as a relief crew by retrieving the milk from trucks unable to get up the hill. While great snowdrifts made pathways virtually impassable, athletic teams held regular practices, including the hockey team, which practiced on the Farm (Conn’s) Pond. At the end of the month, Dr. Hume went on record in The Tabard to state that in spite of the snow and cold, the boys remained remarkably healthy.

Canterbury’s first yearbook was released to the School and subscribers on June 9, graduation day, 1934. The yearbook, conceived and edited

by John Purcell and Sargent Shriver, was dedicated to the Most Revered Maurice F. McAuliffe, D.D., Bishop of Hartford and patron of Canterbury School. The yearbook contained reviews of 1933-1934 activities at school 52

in sports and other areas, a picture of the new altar, and an aerial view of the school campus. After two years, the yearbook ceased publication and the custom went back to including a “Graduation Number” of The Tabard. The yearbook resumed in 1946.

On March 18, 1936, the night watchman discovered fire at 6:00 a.m. on the second floor of Middle House (Main House), too late to save the building. Fortunately, it was during the spring vacation and no students were in residence.

Upon their return, a squad of boys not actively engaged in a sport formed to clear up the rubble outside the ruins. Their task was to clear an area for a larger parking space for faculty and visitors and also to stack all the usable bricks they could find from the demolished Middle House.

Once again, Dr. Hume created a plan to continue the School’s program without interruption. The School rented Hickory Hearth to use for classrooms, and the gym was once again used for sleeping quarters. The new Middle House rooms opened on Monday, November 23, 1936. At the official house warming the following April, members of the Sixth Form, under the guidance of Mrs. Hume, served punch and passed around cookies. In the new common room two paintings by F. Luis Mora, were hanging: a portrait of George Washington and Mr. Mora’s “Nativity Scene.”

In a departure from the days when the masters distributed mail in the common room, private mailboxes were installed in the new Middle House. The two daily mail deliveries were important.

Besides receiving personal letters, Canterbury boys subscribed to daily or Sunday newspapers and news magazines as Time, Life, and America, reflecting an interest in world affairs. The office staff estimated that they handled 250 pieces of mail and packages per day, more on Mondays or Tuesdays when laundry bags added another 25 pieces to the total.

Housekeeping in the three

houses was the responsibility of three housekeepers, with nine young male Filipinos under their supervision to make the beds, clean the rooms, empty wastebaskets, and do other odd jobs. During vacations, the floors were waxed and polished, curtains washed, and rugs cleaned. In a sewing room in North House, now Duffy Dorm Room # 25, buttons were replaced and incidental repairs made when necessary. The housekeepers were charged with darning socks and mending tablecloths, sheets, and napkins; they sewed torn clothes, letters on sweaters, and even did an occasional tailoring job. The groundsmen had responsibility of cleaning the common rooms, alleviating some of the burden for the housekeepers. The laundry was located in the South House basement, where approximately 875 napkins were washed weekly. Each boy received a bath and face towel in his room and another bath towel in the gym each day; meaning 250 towels were washed daily.

Connecticut Valley Schools Art Exhibit Groups, begun by the art departments of various area schools, instituted a traveling circuit, limited to 12 schools. Six museums and galleries loaned works, including the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and the Museum of Modern Art. The Wadsworth Atheneum lent Canterbury several pieces for an exhibit on “Surrealism,” as did the Julien Levy Gallery in New York.

Canterbury was fortunate to display works by Salvador Dali, Joan Miró and Paul Klee, although perhaps students in 1937 were not ready for surrealism. The fourth exhibit in the series featured a drawing

by Cezanne, “The Bather,” “Two Dancers” by Picasso and another piece by Dali. The art exhibits continued through the end of the decade; in January 1940, a set of 18 original lithographs by Honore Daumier hung on exhibition in the North House common room.

Hobbies and interests of the boys were varied. Photography was the most popular, but many boys played musical instruments, built

A typical student room in the early days of the School.

model airplanes, or collected stamps. Dr. Hume even sponsored a flying contest on February 27, 1938, for the boys to compete for the best built model airplane. The Camera Club arranged exhibits of their work in North House. They also handled their own developing and enlarging using a dark room outfitted in Middle House. The Choral Club, founded in 1930 and directed by Ed Mack, was revived after a few years of inactivity.

The main section of the new schoolhouse was finished and dedicated on Thursday, December 8, 1938, the feast day of the Immaculate Conception, a date chosen by Dr. Hume because it was 13 years ago on that day when the Bungalow burned to the ground. In a formal ceremony, Dr. Hume placed the schoolhouse under the protection of Our Lady and all the Saints of Canterbury. Father King and Dr. Hume, acting as acolyte, blessed each room and each corridor with holy water. According to The Tabard, “Doctor Hume then mentioned in some detail the lives of the Saints of Canterbury in England, Gregory, Edmund, Thomas a Becket, Augustine and Anselm showing from stories in their histories what each brought by inspiration to Canterbury School.”

The additional classrooms came at an opportune time, as the school year 1939-1940 opened with a record enrollment of 97 students, with one additional student enrolling late in October.

And so we leave Dr. Hume, the masters, and 98 boys, having completed the first 25 years of Canterbury School. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President, and Winston Churchill had just been elected Prime Minister in England. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk were developing the “beebop” style of jazz. Maurice and Richard MacDonald have opened a hamburger restaurant in San Bernardino, CA, ushering in the age of fast food, and Warner Brothers released A Wild Hare, the first official Bugs Bunny cartoon. Even as the United States moved closer to war, life on the hill remained untroubled. The boys’ concerns centered around tea dances, hobbies, and homecoming. They enjoyed their annual Yale football games and spiritual retreats. They vied for staff positions on The Tabard and the Canterbury Quarterly. There was a rhythm to the seasons: hiking, apple-picking and cider in autumn; Christmas carols, cocoa, and skiing in winter; May devotions to Our Lady, lawn picnics, and graduation festivities in spring. Under the tutelage and care of Dr. Nelson Hume, the boys thrived.

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By Paul Dolan

Forging an Athletic Tradition

Developing Spirits, Minds, and Bodies Nelson Hume firmly believed his students should participate in athletics. In the very early years of the School, boys played football, hockey, or baseball. By the end of the first quarter century, Canterbury had added several more choices to accommodate a growing student body.

W

hen Canterbury opened in 1915, Dr. Hume made physical activity and fitness an essential aspect of the Canterbury boys’ experience. In the larger world at the time, feats performed by amateur athletes were capturing the imaginations of sports fans.

With the exception of professional baseball, the major professional leagues did not exist. Babe Ruth was a star on the rise with the Red Sox, but Hobey Baker of St. Paul’s School and Princeton epitomized the spirit of the sporting world in the early 20th century, which was termed “athletic chivalry”

by Charles Scribner III. Also in currency at the time was the idea of muscular Christianity, formulated as early as 1853, which championed the moral benefits of physical exertion.

When Hume ensured athletics played a vital role in the experience of Canterbury’s boys, he was joining prominent men like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and other eminent figures of the period who viewed playing sports as training for combat and a vehicle for moral improvement.

The boys belonging to Roosevelt’s Rough Riders listed “amateur football player” as their occupation at the time of their exploits in Cuba during the Spanish American War. 54

The 1922 Hockey Team. Paul Fitzpatrick (mgr.), Robert Lilly, John O’Reilly, Maurice Salembier (capt.), Keeler, Marvin Laidlaw, Brady, John Sullivan (coach).

However, the romance of early football was overshadowed by its brutality. Many athletes died playing that violent iteration of the game that favored cataclysmic collisions at the line of scrimmage, prohibited passing and limited open field play. Roosevelt himself, when he was President of the United States, called for changes to the game that would allow shifty half backs like Hobey Baker and

Albie “Little Boy Blue” Booth of Yale to thrill fans of the new game.

Through 1921, Canterbury fielded teams in football, hockey, and baseball. The Tabard devoted much attention in each issue to the triumphs and defeats of the boys competing in the team of the season. The football team attracted the most interest. The Tabard began reporting on sports at Canterbury on March 3, 1919. In

Dr. Hume’s emphasis on sports in Canterbury’s early years reflects his hope to instill in his charges the muscular character that Hobey Baker exemplified on the football field and on the hockey rink. each subsequent issue, the paper would include several columns covering athletics at the School, at other schools and in the college ranks. The December 8, 1925, issue covered the fire at the Bungalow and was the first issue not to include an article about sports.

Only a fire could draw the focus of the paper away from athletics.

Even when the ice was too soft for hockey or the mud too deep for baseball, The Tabard, in addition to noting the factors that were getting in the way of reporting on athletic contests, found practices to report on, cross training regimens to memorialize, midget football games to itemize in great detail, and trips to the Yale Bowl to relive.

Sportswriters for the paper rarely commented on skill and talent but were instead keen to comment on how games were played, what the sport contributed to the life of the School, on the effort a team gave, and sportsmanship.

Reflecting on a trying 1919 baseball season, The Tabard attributed the team’s struggles not to a lack of talent but to poor team chemistry: “Unfortunately towards the middle of the season the teamwork of the fellows began to show up poorly.

Some of the fellows evidently were not giving one hundred percent of their effort and playing ability.”

From Dr. Hume to the newest First Form boy, everyone knew that sports provided the boys a venue for practicing teamwork and diligence and for developing into healthy, combat-ready young men if need be.

The 1930 Baseball Team. Front row, l-r: T. Herbert Shriver, Joseph Farrell, Pascall Swift, Henry Schenk (capt.), John Dowling, John Hamilton, Lane. Back row, l-r: Joe Maloney (coach), William Cary, John Miller, James Skelly, George Hammond, John Cummings.

It was baseball that William Howard Taft, 27th president of the United States, described as “a clean, straight game [that] summons to its presence everybody who enjoys clean, straight athletics. It furnishes amusement to the thousands and thousands.” However, it was a football player, Hobie Baker, who epitomized clean, straight athletics. Baker lived the life of a muscular Christian who played football and hockey not because he loved to win but also to practice humility and sportsmanship. Winning was second to playing with honor and class. Baker’s fame in football helped to solidify the sport’s fan base as the game underwent significant transformations from the brutally violent spectacle that it was at the turn of the century to the dynamic, open game it would become due largely to Hobey Baker’s speed and agility as a punt returner averaging 300 yards per game in this capacity. Baker’s legacy was solidified by the time Canterbury began fielding its first teams. Dr. Hume’s emphasis on sports in Canterbury’s early years reflects his hope to instill in his charges the muscular character that Hobey Baker exemplified on the football field and on the hockey rink.

That football was highly regarded for what it could do for the boys on campus is reflected in Tabard articles. “Football Real Help to School” a headline declared in The Tabard on November 7, 1922. The article celebrated the football program despite a season plagued by losses to burgeoning rivals like Berkshire and Salisbury: Football has become America’s second national sport and is no longer merely a college activity. It has proven its worth as a builder of character and grit, and here at Canterbury it has indicated that as a physical developer it is no less efficient. Aided by the excellent meals and regular routine, the squad has constantly increased in height and weight, and the general good health of the School has never been better.

The coach responsible for this growth was John Sullivan who came to the School in 1922 by way of Boston College and Fordham, where he was an associate coach under Charlie Brickley, later coach of the New York 55

Giants. At the start of the 1922 football season, Coach Sullivan singled out two games as being of great consequence: “Canterbury will undoubtedly face its hardest tests against Salisbury and Berkshire this fall and we are pointing the team for these games. By the time the schedule calls us to meet these opponents, our eleven should be going at top speed and we will make no excuses if it is defeated.” When the team played one of its two big games of the season against a strong Salisbury team, The Tabard spent three of its four pages recalling the thrills of the 19-0 defeat.

Each year during Sullivan’s coaching tenure, The Tabard would remark on the team’s weight gain, attributing the added pounds to Sullivan’s drilling. Evidence of interest in the significance of the boys’ weight, even to the point of publishing weight statistics, is sprinkled throughout Canterbury’s history. A February 1927 Tabard article reports that the … outward appearance of good health, combined with the school records of an unusually small number of infirmary cases and visits to the doctor, suggested to him (Dr. Hume) the making of an official tabulation of the weight record of each boy from his arrival in September to this past week. . . the increases range from three pounds to twenty one pounds in the space of four months. Increases of 6 to 10 pounds was ordinary… This “excellent health record” was attributed to structure and the environment of the School.

Coach Phil Brodie took over the program from Coach Sullivan at the start of the 1925 season. At the team banquet at the end of the season, Mr. Brodie was presented with a gold watch in recognition of his fine coaching. In the fall of 1932, David Adair became the football coach.

Adair had been the line coach for football at Lake Forest College, IL, where he was also head coach of basketball and baseball.

Canterbury backfield, fall 1923: M.A. Salembier, Ashton Devereaux, John O’Reilly, A. Marvin Laidlaw.

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When Lou Mandler interviewed William Schusser ’34 in June of 2014, his memories of football included words for Coach Adair.

Schusser remarked, We had a fellow called Adair.

He was a pretty tough guy, an excollege coach and he was a good coach, he was tough. He treated us like men, he showed us how you should play… . He continued with more memories of football in the 1930s, I liked football because it meant you got rid of your anxieties. You sweated it out. In those days you couldn’t drink water, by the way.

It was supposedly bad to drink water when you exercised. You could rinse your mouth out but you couldn’t swallow it. That’s the way things were in those days. In those days you played the whole time. If the game went four quarters you played the whole four quarters. We had maybe 12 players, we had one substitute that was physically able.

Dr. Hume was especially interested in football. At least once an autumn, Dr. Hume would arrange a trip to the Yale Bowl, and he would infrequently allow the sport to encroach in minor ways on the academic pursuits of the School. On October 26, 1929, Dr. Hume and Mrs. Hume attended a football game at the Yale Bowl to see the home team mount a 21-13 comeback win against Army. Henry Havemeyer gave Dr. Hume tickets to the game.

Yale had already amassed two

wins on the season having shut out Vermont by 89 points and beaten Brown 14-6. However, the Army took a commanding 13-point lead after two quarters of play.

A comeback must have seemed unlikely to those in the Yale Bowl watching the home team falling to Army. In a letter to Havemeyer thanking him for the tickets, Hume suggests as much: “It was almost romantic when Yale put Booth into the game with the score 13-0 against them and kept him in for two quarters until he had scored three touchdowns.” The halfback, a native of New Haven, Albie Booth stood at 5’6” and weighed a slight 144 pounds, but in just two quarters, he managed to gain 223 yards while rushing for two touchdowns, returning a punt for a third and kicking two extra points. Changes made to the game years earlier made room for shifty backs who could outrun opposing defenses. Dr. Hume concluded that “we saw the finest exhibition of football I have ever seen in the Yale Bowl… We saw something that one rarely sees in football.”

In his report to the board of trustees dated March 5, 1920, Dr. Hume outlined the physical plant needs of his growing school. Prominent among these, which included the chapel and the building that would become Old Schoolhouse, Dr. Hume called for a gymnasium including squash courts, a swimming pool, and room for basketball and drills.

Young students playing football behind Main House. Circa 1920.

Coach John McCarthy’s hockey team struggled to find ice in 1919 due to an unseasonably warm winter. The eight players on his roster that season averaged a weight of 141 ¼, a height of 5’9” and an age of 16. He reported to The Tabard that the team played more games (5) than they had practices (3) the entire season. The team won two of the five games but outscored opponents 17 to 15.

The hockey team continued to be challenged by poor ice conditions whenever the mercury would rise above freezing, but it drew great interest from the student body. In its first seven years in existence, the team recorded 27 wins and 20 losses, outscoring opponents 272 to 159. By the winter of 1923, the entire school seemed involved in the sport in some fashion. Some were on work gangs who shoveled the ice and scraped it. Others played in the intramural hockey league that boasted a major and minor division each with several teams. The whole school would turn out to watch the likes of captain center Maurice Salembier ’24 attack the goal, or goal guard Robert Lily ’23 stop as many as 62 shots in a 13-0 loss to Kent.

The Tabard in 1926 noted the nation’s growing interest in the sport of hockey. Proudly, The Tabard declared that Canterbury

had been home to a successful hockey team for many years.

Here hockey has been a major sport since the foundation of the school eleven years ago. The school has had more success in this respect than in any other form of sport.

We view this true appreciation of hockey with pride and pleasure, because we feel that for ten years we have given hockey its due position among other sports which only now is accorded it by the outside world. Dr. Hume himself took over the program when Mr. John Sullivan stepped down. By the end of its first decade in existence, the hockey team had recorded a winning record with 33 wins, 31 losses, and 3 ties.

Boys took their passion for hockey with them to college.

James Brady ’25 played for Yale.

In the 1927 Yale/Brown game, he played against a former Canterbury student, Winnifred Binns, who scored Brown’s only goal.

At the start of the 1927 season, Dr. Hume led the hockey team in drills. The headmaster advised the boys on the best way to carry the puck, to shoot, to stop quickly and to take long strides.

That year, Masters Edwin Cahill and Joe Maloney with the help of many eager student volunteers began work on a new rink north of the gym for the second team, thus bringing an additional sheet 57

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By February of 1921, Dr. Hume had procured the necessary funds for the gym which had been designed by his brother, architect Raphael Hume. When school opened on September 29, 1923, the boys saw for the first time the gym rising from the hill, still enclosed in scaffolding.

The Tabard declared that the gym designed would represent “the symbol of a noble ideal-the ideal of high-minded men,” phrasing that forges an indelible link between physical exertion and moral development.

weekly and hosted J.S. Fanning, one of the best known sportsmen in the country. Employed by DuPont Powder Company, Fanning travelled to clubs being formed throughout the country to give hints and pointers to gun clubs.

In his report to the board of trustees dated March 5, 1920, Dr. Hume outlined the physical plant needs of his growing school.

Prominent among these, which included the chapel and the building that would become Old Schoolhouse, Dr. Hume called for a gymnasium including squash courts, a swimming pool, and room for basketball and drills. This would mean that the boys would no longer need to depend upon New England’s winters to furnish them with ideal conditions for pursuing their winter sports. There would be winter sport alternatives to hockey.

By February of 1921, Dr. Hume had procured the necessary funds for the gym which had been designed by his brother, architect Raphael Hume. When school opened on September 29, 1923, the boys saw for the first time the gym rising from the hill, still enclosed in scaffolding. The Tabard declared that the gym designed would represent “the symbol of a noble ideal-the ideal of high-

of ice for Canterbury hockey. A timely cold front aided Cahill and Maloney in their efforts to establish the new surface, but their work that winter served only to reveal the extent of the job that would need completing if a second rink would come into being. Thus work began again the following fall to establish a second surface north of the new gym, which joined the sheet used by the varsity where South House currently stands.

Because of the difficulty of maintaining ice, the Gun Club at times seemed more active than the hockey team. During the winter of 1919, both the Pawling and Westminster hockey games were cancelled because of lack of ice. However, the Gun Club met

The 1935-1936 Tennis Team. Front row, l-r: George Sweeney, Joseph Meehan, Robert Walmsley (capt.). Granville Finneran, Mr. Belerose (coach). Back row, l-r: Edward Creekmore, Beverley Miller, Melchor Ferrer, Ted Emory, Henry Hemmens.

minded men,” phrasing that forges an indelible link between physical exertion and moral development.

When the boys returned from Christmas break on January 8, 1924, they enjoyed their first swim in the pool and not long afterwards their first games of squash on the new courts. The squash courts became the place where Bernard Ridder Jr. ’34 started on the path to become one of the first inductees into Canterbury’s Athletic Hall of Fame. Bernard was a two-time Canterbury squash champion (’33 and ’34) and captain of the Princeton squash team in 1938.

He was christened “The Princeton Bomber” for his mammoth forehand and blinding serve.

He was a two-time runner-up in the National Intercollegiate Squash Championship. He was also an avid golfer and on the executive committee of the U.S. Golf Association.

In February 1924, Dr. Hume formed an intramural basketball league. Tryouts for an interscholastic team had begun by Valentine’s Day. Canterbury played its first interscholastic basketball game against Stanford High School after the successful hockey season had come to a close. Mr. James Mahan coached the basketball team

The 1935-1936 Swim Team. Front row, l-r: Sheffield Halsey, C. Ryan, Mike Gormley, Ted Emory (capt.) Jack Haire, Frank Desmond, Maurice Evans. Back row, l-r: Phil Brodie (coach), Jack Vier, Ed Haag, Thomas Magidan, Dunstan Thomspon (mgr.), Ben Halsey (assistant coach).

to a 2 and 1 record on the season.

Basketball in those early years seemed to fill the gap between the hockey season and the baseball season. The boys and Dr. Hume viewed the gymnasium as a place where the students could stay in shape when conditions hindered outdoor activity. One boy noted in the November 1925 “Impressions” column of The Tabard the many pursuits that kept the boys occupied: “a handball tournament is now being held in the gym.

Baseball, basketball, swimming, squash, boxing, band, and now handball are being played there.

Truly, the gymnasium’s usefulness, like its beauty, is unfathomable.”

The December 1925 Bungalow fire gave impetus to the develop-

ment of the swim program at Canterbury. Over the Christmas holidays, Dr. Hume supervised the transformation of the basketball floor into sleeping quarters, a study hall, and a living room.

When the boys returned from their break, the pool was being cleaned in preparation for the use it would get that winter. Mr. Brodie was the founding coach of the swim program. In February of 1926, The Tabard reported for the first time on a victory by the Canterbury swim team, a 40-19 win over the Torrington YMCA. One boy shared his and perhaps his fellows’ enthusiasm for swimming in an “Impression”: “As the four bodies reach the end and make the turn, almost together, the crowd

of boys in the gallery, until now fairly silent, break into shouts of encouragement, increasing in violence and volume until the gym almost rocks and vibrates with the noise and excitement.” Perhaps enthusiasm such as this helped carry the team to a perfect season that first year of interscholastic competition in the pool.

Not long after that first perfect season, a Canterbury swimmer broke into the college ranks.

Philip Torchio ’26, who starred on the ’26 undefeated tank team, swam on the freshman swimming team at MIT. In a meet against Brown, Torchio came in third in the fifty yard freestyle, and second in the one hundred yard freestyle.

The March 1, 1917, Tabard 59

reported that the sport which substituted for the cancelling of hockey due to the mild winter was swimming. The article also made the point that the good health of the boys that winter disproved old fears of a swimming pool. To the contrary, “In the beautiful filtered water at Canterbury no disease has spread, not even a cold.”

Tennis, after a successful season in 1918, became a sport at Canterbury after a meeting held on Sunday, April 20. In 1919, winter delayed its departure until the weekend of April 26 bringing snow and frost to the campus causing the cancellation of baseball games and the erosion of the tennis surfaces.

Despite enthusiasm for the sport “inexperience, lack of practice, and poor tennis were the main causes of the defeat” in the team’s first match of the 1919 season against Gunnery. The spring that year was so wet that the annual tennis tournament suffered. By May 26, “owing to the almost continual rain, only a few matches were played.”

The courts downhill from the ice rink in the vicinity of the current home of South House were usually not playable until late spring, which limited practice time and restricted the team’s schedule to only a few matches a season.

The baseball team played a number of games each season against the usual opponents of Kent, Gunnery, Taft, and Berkshire.

As many as 25 boys tried out for baseball in 1919, enough to field a Juniors team who handedly defeated the local grammar school but lost to Rumsey Hall.

Jack O’Reilly ’24 and Maurice Salembier ’24 both went on to play baseball at Lafayette College. The undefeated season for the 1930 baseball team garnered them a spot in Canterbury’s Athletics Hall of Fame.

An annual field day provided the School with one track meet a year. One student discovered his potential in track and field at one of the annual field days. After Canterbury, Joseph Campbell ‘21 went on to star for Columbia in track and field. He won a letter in 60

Boys practice on the track that surrounded the hockey rink on the south end of campus while their teammates look on. South House now stands on this once active sports complex. Circa 1922.

the sport in 1924 and captained his team in his final season. At the Penn Relays, he came from behind to win the 800-meter run in 1:55 establishing himself as one of Canterbury’s early successes in athletics thanks in part to the annual tradition. On May 27, 1924, The Tabard enumerated the values of the annual meet: The reasons for this meet are several. In the first place, it gives those who have more or less athletic ability, but are too light or small to figure in any of Canterbury’s major sports, an opportunity to display their worth in competitive sport, and receive a reward therefore. One need not necessarily be a football player, or a hockey or a baseball star to be a fast runner or a high jumper. Secondly, both on the day itself and in the days of preparation, it gives us a new type of exercise, exercising muscles which may have for a long time been dormant, and thus it, helps to build us up physically. Thirdly, it lays a foundation for future Canterbury track teams, for undoubtedly Canterbury will, when it expands, have track teams to represent her.

By 1922, a few golfers were playing in the interscholastics tournament.

The golf match between Canterbury and Pawling that took place at the Ridgewood Country Club in Danbury in the spring of 1925 marked the first time that a team of golfers from Canterbury would play a team from another school. A school-wide golf tournament began in the spring of 1926 played on the School’s course. The following autumn The Tabard reported on the exploits of former Canterbury boy Charles Sweeney ’28, who entered the Boys’ International Golf Championship held at Coombe Hill just outside of London. Sweeney made it to the semifinals of the tournament prompting the London Daily Mirror to comment on his fine play: “he hits a great ball off the tee and is powerful with his irons, and his chances of taking the boys trophy are by no means obscure.” Later in the summer, Sweeney won a cup presented by the Prince of Wales for a mixed foursome played on the links of Le Touquet Golf Club, Paris Plage, France. When Sweeney was competing in Europe, everyone on campus was playing golf. The course was particularly busy on Sundays when it would resemble the fairways at a popular country club.

Prior to the start of school in 1929, Dr. Hume wrote to Henry O.

The 1928-1929 Golf Team. Oswald, Charles Sweeny, James Skelly (capt.), Andrew Haire, John Routh, Paul Oliver (mgr.)

Havemeyer to ask the board member’s approval for allocating funds toward a membership in the School’s name at the newly formed Lake Waramaug Country Club. Hume knew to whom he was appealing, for golf ran in the Havemeyer bloodline. Henry Havemeyer’s uncle, Theodore Havemeyer, was the first president of the U.S. Golf Association and co-founder of the Newport Country Club, where the first U.S. Amateur and U.S. Open were played in 1895. According to Richard J. Moss in his study Golf and the American Country Club, the U.S. Golf Association “elected Havemeyer as their first president, largely because they thought his wealth and prominence would give the new organization a much needed boost.” Years later, Havemeyer’s nephew acceded to a request from Canterbury’s founding headmaster that would give golf at the School its own much needed boost.

In the 1930s, Canterbury boys played field hockey for a short time.

The coach, Leo Bellerose, on one occasion brought a picked team to Canterbury, many members of whom had played on the previous Olympic Team. So outstanding was the goalie work of Eddie Patera ’34 and Ben Halsey ’34 that both were invited to try out for the position on the next Olympic Team.

Athletics had a strong presence at Canterbury from the beginning.

By 1919, Canterbury had solidified competitive relationships with Kent, Gunnery, Taft, and Berkshire. By the end of its first quarter century, Canterbury had celebrated a host of noteworthy firsts: a league championship in hockey in 1922, an undefeated baseball season in 1930, a 1933 homecoming football game against Kingswood, a 12-7 victory played in front of 200 guests, and two undefeated swimming seasons in 1926 and 1934. Several graduates had played significant roles on Ivy League teams. By 1940, the hilltop campus contained a 9-hole par 3 golf course, playing fields, a hockey rink, a track, squash courts, tennis courts, a gymnasium, and a pool. Not only did Canterbury’s setting provide expansive views of rolling hills, it now also had all of the facilities required to support a vibrant athletic program. Even if at the founding the options were limited according to the School’s resources and included one sport per season each chosen by Nelson Hume, the athletic program would continue to grow with the School and the country.

By 1922, a few golfers were playing in the interscholastics tournament. The golf match between Canterbury and Pawling that took place at the Ridgewood Country Club in Danbury in the spring of 1925 marked the first time that a team of golfers from Canterbury would play a team from another school.

A young student practices baseball.

Circa 1937.

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Canterbury Celebrates its 100th Anniversary with All-School Convocation A day of pride brings together school community, graduates, parents, and honored guests.

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Headmaster Tom Sheehy welcomed guests.

Bella Capanna ’17 chronicled the Nelson Hume years.

Douglas Lyons, Executive Director of the Connecticut Association of Independent Schools, spoke about the importance of Canterbury’s mission.

Hsu-Lun “Aaron” Kan ’16 reviewed the Walter Sheehan years.

Bob Steers ’71, President of Canterbury’s Board of Trustees, enjoys the proceedings. Marie Cotier, wife of Pete Cotier ’86, Associate Headmaster, at right.

Bridget Murphy ’17 reviewed the Jack Reydel years.

Skylar Stepankiw ’18 summarized the Rod Clarke ’46 years.

Tim Sheehan ’94, son of the late Kevin Sheehan ’62 and grandson of Canterbury’s second headmaster Walter Sheehan.

Nikhil Trivedi ’17 told guests about the Tom Sheehy years.

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Tom Esposito ’80, Town of New Milford Councilman, delivered greetings from the Office of the Mayor.

Rudy von Bernuth ’62, father of Celia ’93 and nephew of Canterbury’s fourth headmaster Rod Clarke ’46.

Centennial Convocation Committee Lou Mandler, Co-Chair Jennifer Loprinzo, Co-Chair Kathy Bolster Wright Danenbarger Michelle Fusco Padraic McCarthy ’94 Molly Murphy Alyce Pollock Thomas J. Sheehy III Elyse Soifersmith Kim Tester Marc Vanasse ’73 Andrew Bortey ’16, president of the student body, shares his thoughts about Canterbury’s 100th Anniversary with guests.

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Bob Steers ’71, President of the Board of Trustees, delivers his remarks.

Sally Adams, mother of Steve ’72, Tom ’74, and Chris ’77, left, with Frances Hebert, widow of longtime faculty member Jean Hebert and mother of Jacques ’71, Frank ’73, and Chris ’75, at the reception following the Convocation.

Dan and Kelly Ann Murphy, parents of Alana ’16 and Bridget ’17, with Jie and Xiang Li, parents of Angus ’16.

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Convocation Panels

L-r: Warren Garceau ’06, Kurt Garceau ’06, John Marinelli ’05, and Ryan Mulhern ’92 served on the athletics panel.

Nancy Rooney ’88 served on the finance panel.

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Trustee Dan Kaiser, father of Christian ’18, served on the finance panel.

Sharif Chowdhury ’17 listens intently to a panel discussion.

Greg Robb, great-grandson of founding trustee Allan Ryan, shared his thoughts on the current state of the finance world with students.

John Ceronne ’16 focuses on the comments of the medicine panel.

Nasir Naqvi, M.D., Ph.D. ’90, served on the medicine panel.

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Claudia Califano, M.D. ’88 and Danielle Paglia Cannon, D.V.M. ’91, members of the medicine panel, answered students’ questions.

Keith Choate, M.D., Ph.D. ’92 enjoys serving on the medicine panel.

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Scott Grant ’05 and Heather Williams ’97 gave students advice about art and design.

Trustee Jay Clarke ’84 served on the art and design panel.

Serving on the technology panel, Pat Egan ’95 and Matt Glaser ’81, Canterbury’s Director of Technology, shared their wealth of experience with students.

On the entrepreneurs panel, Juan Camilo ’03 and Eileen Bell ’10 gave students advice on how to start a business.

Andrew Eckhardt ’01 joined Juan and Eileen on the entrepreneurs panel.

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Andrew Smith ’59 and Chris Molanphy ’89 served on the writing panel.

Actress Victoria Bundonis Rovin ’81 served on the theater and television panel.

Nick Yost ’08 and Will Tully ’06 served on the music panel.

Actor PJ Zeller ’95 shared his thoughts about the current world of film and television.

Becky Mayo Goodrich ’94 and Desmond FitzGerald ’87 discussed the current state of the law with students.

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Gregory Gvilava ’17 takes in the advice of panelists.

ALL PHOTOS BY MARC VANASSE ’73 AND HEIDI JOHNSON

Not only was it Canterbury’s birthday but it was also Kasey Celniker’s ’19 birthday. As Tom and Besty Sheehy look on, Kasey cuts the first piece of cake.

Headmaster Tom Sheehy consults with student body president Andrew Bortey ’16 prior to the after-dinner announcements.

Tom Sheehy addresses students and faculty on the significance of Canterbury’s turning 100 at sit-down dinner.

“I think a comment made

by Nelson Hume on the occasion of the School’s 25th anniversary is most fitting for this day: ‘When we consider the hard days through which the School, and everybody else, in fact, has had to live, it is quite obvious that the work of Canterbury in its growth and improvement has certainly been favored

by God. There is no other explanation.’ God bless Canterbury as it celebrates its centennial and positions itself for its next hundred years” –Thomas J. Sheehy III Headmaster 71

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COURTESY TOM EGAN ’99

COURTESY HENRY WICKHAN ’99

COURTESY BILL GILBANE ’65

COURTESY GERRY CASSEDY ’57

CLASSNOTES

Jack ’58 and June Heffernan with Gerry ’57 and Kim Cassedy.

Bill Gilbane ’65, George Haley ’66, and Bob Constantine ’66.

Henry Wickham ’99 and wife Jonelle.

Mary Addison “Addie” Egan, daughter of Tom ’99 and Meghan Egan. Addie was born on August 16, 2015.

1959 This year Michael Koenig received the ASIS&T (The American Society for Information and Technology) Award of Merit, the organization’s highest honor. To qualify for the award, the candidate should have made noteworthy contributions to the field of information science, expressed new ideas, created new devices, or developed better techniques, made substantial research efforts that have led to further development of thought or devices or applications, provided outstanding service to the profession of information science, and, by successful efforts in the educational, social, or political processes affected the profession in positive ways. Bill Kupersmith recently blogged about his experience at Canterbury’s Centennial Reunion Weekend. The following are some excerpts from the blog entry titled A Condition of Belonging: Thoughts on a School

Centenary. “This is how historical change is supposed to work, it occurred to me; all good things from the past are preserved alongside the welcome improvements.”

“What I’ve been reflecting on was how the kind of educational experience that I thought Canterbury offered differed from that of most schools, public and private, and that was that Canterbury provided not simply an education, but a formation.” “A formation comprises values, community, and ethos.” “At that moment as I listened to the headmaster speak, I knew that Canterbury is indeed the school that I had thought it was, and that I was being offered a great privilege in having this opportunity to continuing the School’s mission.” “We don’t pass through life like a train going along a track through different stations.

More like the way a ship is built. When we are small children, our parents laid down our keels, but it was as teens that our hulls

were framed and planked.

And Canterbury was a fine yard with excellent naval architects and skilled shipwrights so we could run straight and true.”

1966 Mike Taradash reports that he is retired from managing Barclays Wealth Business in Los Angeles. Prior to that he managed Lehman Brothers L.A. business.

1972 John Kiernan has been nominated as President of the New York City Bar Association. John, a partner at the law firm of Debevoise & Plimption, has been Co-Chair of the firm’s Litigation Department since 2002 and Chair of its Ethics Committee since 2004. His practice has included a wide range of commercial and quasi-commercial litigations, arbitration, risk analyses, and negotiations involving private disputes, governance, and fiduciary duties, intellectual property rights, class actions or other mass claims, and actions by and against government entities. “It is a great honor

to be nominated president of the New York City Bar Association,” said John.

“As an active member throughout my career, I have witnessed and admired the City Bar’s capacity for positive impact on the justice system, on the legal profession, and on society in New York, nationally, and around the world.”

1993 Ebony Grisom was recently installed as resident pastor of the Warwick Central Baptist and First Baptist Church of East Greenwich, RI. 1995 Allyson Kane is now affiliated with William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty. She works from the Danbury, CT, office.

“I am super excited to be located so close to home and right in the center of where my life is happening, not to mention being in the office that is number one in closed dollar volume in Greater Danbury, including Brookfield, Bethel, New

2012 Devin Good, a chemical engineering student at Villanova University, and his teammate, Thomas Iervolino, came in first place out of more than 100 teams competing in the Universitywide VSEC Competition.

The competition is hosted by the Center for

Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship (ICE).

The year-long competition culminates on Pitch Day, when finalist teams pitch their idea and product to industry leaders, faculty, and alumni. Devin and Thomas were award first place and the $5,000 prize for their innovative product and concept. Devin, completing his senior year at Villanova, is a chemicals industry solution management intern at a multinational software corporation in the Greater Philadelphia area. n

COURTESY DARLENE CIARDULLO

their two children reside in North Carolina.

2001 Christopher McLaughlin, who earned his B.A. at UNC Chapel Hill and his M.B.A. at UC Berkeley has joined GOOGLE. 2004 Kevin McLaughlin recently graduated with his Ph.D. in Economics from UC Santa Cruz. (See photo at right.) He is now a research scientist with Nobel Prize recipient Vernon Smith at the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University in Orange, CA. Christopher Weber and Michaela LaBlanc were married at the Lake Placid Lodge in Lake Placid, NY, on June 20, 2015. (See photo of wedding party.) After four years working in private equity in Hong Kong, Christopher returned to the U.S. in 2013 to pursue his M.B.A. at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. He graduated in June 2015 and currently works at Goldman Sachs in NYC.

L-r: Stephen Dyott ’04, Christopher Weber ’04, Michaela Weber, Anne Weber Kohart ’05, Ryan Cavada ’04, Erik Akhtar ’04.

BRYAN KIEFER

Fairfield, New Milford, and Newtown.

1999 Ian Hart writes: “I have an internationally successful back pain relief program and have created a fitness system that now has three locations, and I am working on opening a fourth. My new project is building a tree house/ fitness studio in the Costa Rican jungle in a famous tree house community readers may have seen on Animal Planet and House Hunters International. It is a land that was saved from deforestation and is now an off the grid Ewok type community with an organic garden zip lining, and cliff jumping. It will be used for transformational retreats for body and mind.”

Captain Henry Wickham recently graduated from the United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center & School.

CPT Wickham was named to the Commandant’s List, representing the top 5% of the graduating class. CPT Wickham, his wife, and

COURTESY CHRISTOPHER WEBER ’04

COURTESY KATIE EGAN HAYES ’01

Katie Egan ’01 married Brian Hayes on April 18, 2015, at the Chapel of Our Lady. L-r: Lauren Michael Falcone ’01, Meg Egan Pallazola ’98, Molly Egan Reilly ’03, Christina Harris Genoveze ’01, Katie Hayes, Brian Hayes, James Egan ’97, Patrick Egan ’95, Marco Falcone ’01.

L-r: Graduates of the Class of 2005 - Haruki Oh, Vincent Ciardullo, Jason Snyder, John Silvestro. Photo was taken on August 12, 2015, on Marco Island, FL, on the occasion of Vincent’s marriage to Jamie Daley from Madelia, MN.

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CLASSNOTES CANTERBURY ATHLETICS HALL OF FAME INDUCTION DINNER

Representing the 1966 Swimming Team, l-r: Tom Orofino ’66, Chris Ryan ’69, Pedro Torres ’66 with Hall of Fame organizers Lindsay Mulhern and Trustee Doug Famigletti ’90.

Representing the 1930 Baseball Team, l-r: Nancy Petty, second from left, and Joan Todd, center, daughters of John Dowling ’30, Jim Skelly III ’63, son of Jim Skelly Jr. ’30.

Recipient Matt Dwyer ’71, center.

Recipient Gerry Vanasse ’78, center.

Representing the 1989 Girls’ Varsity Soccer team, l-r: Kimberly Moffitt Hehir ’90, Erin McLaughlin Roark ’90, Joan Simonelli ’91, Patricia Sordoni Rasmussen ’92, Coach Mike Hennessey, Cathy Brewer ’90, Karin Lascano Buckley ’90, Beth Gaffney Gorton ’91, Vanessa Fertaly ’91, and Nicole Duff DeSantis ’91.

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OCTOBER 24 • DAVID C. COPLEY LIBRARY We proudly introduce the 2015 Inaugural Class of Athletics Hall of Fame Inductees:

Recipient Bill Gilbane ’65, right.

Individual Athletes Bernard H. Ridder, Jr. ’34 (posthumously) Anthony B. Cudahy ’43 (posthumously) Lee V. Comfort ’62 William J. Gilbane, Jr. ’65 F. Gordon Lawson ’68 (posthumously) Matthew P. Dwyer, Jr. ’71 Gerald F. Vanasse ’78 Marcia A. Simpson ‘85 (posthumously) Michael F. Dunham ’90 Lilly M. Bertz ’03 Coaches Dr. Nelson Hume (posthumously) Philip H. Brodie (posthumously) Charles R. Huntington (posthumously) Jack Karpoe (posthumously) Teams 1930 Baseball 1966 Swimming 1989 Girls’ Soccer

ALL PHOTOS BY MARC VANASSE ’73

Recipeint Lilly Bertz ’03, center.

Daughters of Tony Cudahy ’43, Tamsen Resor, second from left, and Nina Cudahy, right.

Son and wife of recipient Charles Huntington, Chris Huntington ’83 and Janet with Doug Famigletti ’90.

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CLASSNOTES OBITUARIES Richard D. Cudahy ’43 The Honorable Richard Cudahy Sr., who led the family meatpacking company in the 1960s while also pursuing a legal career that eventually landed him on a federal appeals court, has died at 89. His son, Richard Cudahy Jr., said his father died of natural causes at his home in Winnetka, IL. Though he suffered a debilitating lung disease that made walking difficult, Cudahy continued to actively work on cases from home, said Collins Fitzpatrick, executive director of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Chicago.

“He’ll be missed here,” Fitzpatrick said. “He was a real gentleman.”

Ralph Weber, a Milwaukee lawyer who was Cudahy’s law clerk in the early 1980s, said he “shaped generations of lawyers who had the privilege of working with him, on how to combine intellect with compassion.”

Cudahy was born and raised in Milwaukee, a grandson to Patrick Cudahy, who in 1882 with his brother John launched the meatpacking company that bears his name to this day. The grandson attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He later served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Service before going to Yale Law School. After graduation in 1951, he served as law clerk at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and then as a legal adviser at the U.S. State Department before entering private practice in Chicago.

In 1961, at his father’s request, he joined the family’s business, and served ten years as president and CEO until the sale of Patrick Cudahy, Inc. During that time, he kept his hand in law, teaching courses at Marquette and the University of Wisconsin law schools. He was also active in Democratic politics, serving as chairman of the state party in 1967-68, and running as the party’s candidate for Attorney General in 1968. In 1972, Cudahy returned to private practice and served as chairman of the Wisconsin Public Service Commission.

In 1976, he moved his practice to Washington, D.C. Three years later, President Jimmy Carter nominated him to serve on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where Cudahy heard cases from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana for 15 years as an active duty judge. He took senior status in 1994.

He remained in that status until his death, in part because of vacancies on the court, long unfilled because of partisan conflicts in Congress.

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Joseph Donald called Cudahy a close friend and mentor, almost a surrogate father. Donald’s mother worked for the Cudahy family as a housekeeper, and Donald lived in the Cudahy’s carriage house at their Lake Drive estate in the 1970s. Cudahy swore him in when Donald became a judge in 1996.

Donald said when he called Cudahy in May to say he was thinking of doing something crazy, Cudahy correctly said, “You’re running for Supreme Court,” and has offered his advice and contacts to him as Donald began campaigning over the summer.

“He was frail, but his mind was still so sharp,” Donald said. “He was so smart, so quick, so well read.”

Cudahy is survived by his wife, Janet, sons Richard Jr., Dan and Patrick, and daughters Kit, Tia, Michaela and Molly. Cousins Edward A. Cudahy ’41 and Anthony B. Cudahy ’43 predeceased him.

Robert M. FitzGerald ’43 Robert M. “Bob” FitzGerald of Litchfield, CT, died on August 9, 2015. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Jeanne McCormick FitzGerald and six sons, Peter R. FitzGerald ’71 of Berwyn, PA., Samuel N. ’72 and Karen FitzGerald of Sharon, CT., Benjamin C. ’73 and Barbara FitzGerald of Tucson, AZ., Geoffrey M. FitzGerald and Ellen Starr of Montpelier, VT., Mark M. FitzGerald of Bantam, CT. and Anthony C. and Lori FitzGerald of Litchfield, CT.; 12 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. He is also survived by his brother-in-law Cliff McCormick ’44.

Bob was born in Torrington, CT, on October 14, 1926. He attended St. Francis Parochial School in Torrington. After graduating from Canterbury, he entered Yale at age 16.

He attended midshipmen’s school at Princeton University and received his commission as an ensign in the Naval Reserve from Northwestern at age 18. He was subsequently stationed on Guam in the Mariana Islands for one year before his discharge in August 1946.

He graduated from Yale in February 1948 and from the New York University School of Law in June 1950. He was admitted to the Connecticut Bar in July 1950 and he served as Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut from 1953 to 1955. He joined Cramer and Anderson in 1961

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and remained part of the firm until he retired in 1997.

Bob and his wife moved to Litchfield in 1953, where they raised their six sons. He served as a trustee and president of the Wolcott and Litchfield Circulating Library Association and was instrumental in moving the library to its present location and changing its name to Oliver Wolcott Library.

He performed pro bono legal work for the Greater Litchfield Preservation Trust Inc. and Connecticut Volunteers for the Blind and Handicapped. He was appointed as an original member of the Litchfield Housing Authority and was one of the leading forces in the creation of the Wells Run Senior Housing Project.

He was elected to the board of trustees of the Connecticut Junior Republic and served as president, vice president, and treasurer of that institution for more than ten years. He also served as an officer and governor of the Litchfield Country Club and a director of Litchfield Bancorp for many years.

Lamont W. Calder Jr. ’48 Lamont’s wife, Ana Maria, informed Canterbury that her husband died on September 11, 2015. An obituary was not immediately available.

Peter C. Everett ’51 Peter “Pete” Everett, 83, of Port Charlotte, FL, formerly of Nashua, NH, and Atlanta, GA, died on June 24 in St. Petersburg, FL. He was born in Cambridge, MA in 1931. Peter is survived by his six children: Sally, of St. Petersburg, FL; Andy (Sherri), of Ft. Worth, TX; Beth (Jay Mitchell), of New York, NY and Falmouth, MA; Peter (Marilyn), of Acworth, GA; John, of Elmira, NY and Patrick, of Norfolk, VA and 12 grandchildren. He is also survived by dozens of nieces and nephews, including Peter E. Ward ’64.

Pete was a lifelong executive in the textile and fiber industry. He began and ended his career with his family’s Wonalancet Company. Peter travelled the roads of the South long before interstate highways with a car full of fiber samples. He came to know and love the southern mill towns and had a story to tell about each one. He also travelled to similar mill towns in New England and Quebec. He would often say “from the cotton on the Q-tip, the fiber in your car seat to your sheets and towel” he and his clients were part of your life.

Pete loved all sports. From lacing up his skates as a kid at Everett’s pond in Nashua to his playing days at Canterbury and Nashua High, he loved hockey. When the ponds thawed and the grass turned green Pete’s attention turned to golf. He loved the game and was a past member of Dunwoody Country Club in Atlanta and Nashua Country Club. He was proud to have attended nearly 20 Masters and completed his own Grand Slam by attending the 1990 British Open at St. Andrew’s. That trip concluded with his playing rounds in Ireland with his sons John and Patrick. He also enjoyed playing at Southern Hills, Harbor Town, Colonial, Pinehurst, and many other renowned courses with family and friends.

Pete was a faithful Catholic and most recently was a parishioner of St. Charles in Port Charlotte. All of his children received some of their education in parochial schools; Christ the King and St. Jude’s in Atlanta, Andy, Peter and John at Bishop Guertin, Patrick at Nashua Catholic and Beth and Sally at Boston College and Newton College respectively.

Raymond Abel Garraghan ’61 Raymond “Abel” Garraghan of Kingston, NY, died unexpectedly on Monday, Aug. 24, 2015, at his West Hyannisport, MA, residence. He was 72. Loving husband of Nancy Lupton Garraghan, father of Patrick and Tanya Garraghan of Hurley, Kiley ’95 and Jim Shea of Loughton, England and Molly Garraghan ’01 of Denver, CO.; sister of Julie G. Gavitt, Rumford, RI; grandfather of Gracie, Marin and Cian Shea, R. Gabriel Garraghan; step grandfather of Jordan Hulbert. Son of the late Raymond W. and Ruth Abernethy Garraghan.

Kenneth R. Bonomo ’74 Kenneth “Ken” Bonomo ’74 died suddenly at his home on November 2, 2015, of a myocardial infarction. Ken grew up in Merrick, NY, and was the son of Jeanette and Dominic Bonomo. After graduating from Canterbury, he earned his bachelor’s degree from Adlephi University. Shortly thereafter, he moved to West Palm Beach, FL, where he built a successful and rewarding career in finance. Ken always spoke of his days at Canterbury with fondness.

He is survived by his brother Carl Bonomo ’73.

Class of 1965 Establishes Scholarship Fund in Honor of Donald Spaeth ’65 he mood was celebratory during the weekend scheduled to commemorate Canterbury’s 100th anniversary.

Not on the menu of events was one activity that unfolded on the field behind Middle House (now Sheehan House). A small group took a break from the festivities to pay tribute to recently deceased Canterbury alumnus, Don Spaeth, Class of ’65.

As the Saturday activities were winding down, the spirited group of about 30 people led by Edward Spaeth ’75 ambled over to the middle of South Field to help Ed spread some of Don’s ashes behind Middle House in memory of his late brother.

It was a simple but moving gesture designed to ease the pain of the sudden, tragic, and recent loss of Don at the age of only 67. He’d been the first of three Spaeth brothers –Donald ’65, Peter ’70, and Edward ’75–to graduate from Canterbury. “Don was a good big brother who always protected me,” said Ed, who was ten years his junior.

Ed Spaeth was about five years old the first time the family set out early in the morning for the drive from New York to New Milford to see Donnie. “Canterbury was different with woods and hills, I couldn’t wait to get there,” he said. “My favorite things were family days when they served us big squares of ice cream and I would run around the field.”

But on this Saturday, June 13, 2015, more than five decades later on that same field, it was impossible to summon up a similar sense of innocence and joy.

A few tears were shed, but Don’s friends, relatives, and classmates were mostly sharing memories of his music, his friendship, and his devotion to Canterbury. In fact, when Donnie died March 13, 2015, he was an integral part of the planning committee working to ensure that the 50th anniversary of the Class of ’65 was not totally overwhelmed

by Canterbury’s celebration of its centennial.

Little could committee members have imagined that their 50th anniversary planning committee would morph into the Donald Spaeth Scholarship Planning committee creating a memorial fund in his honor. The idea for the scholarship was one of Don’s last contributions to the committee.

The fund is designed to help a student whose family’s unforeseen financial reversal puts in jeopardy his or her ability to finish Sixth Form.

COURTESY DON SPAETH ’65

T

Classmates remember Don for his generous spirit as a musician and as a friend. Bandmates in The King Bees, Charlie O’Neill, Bob Lutringer, Martin Harrington and Lee Beaulac, came out of retirement, reuniting to play one more energetic gig on campus at the reunion. And ironically filling in on guitar for absent King Bee, Donnie, was his classmate Chris Zaloom, who made a career in music after Canterbury and Georgetown. “He was my first music teacher/mentor, showed me my first guitar chords; that became my life’s work,” Zaloom posted in a tribute to Don. After graduation, Donnie went on to Williams College, where he roomed with Canterbury classmate Dana Comfort.

He then spent a few years in the Army as a lieutenant, in finance on Wall Street, and in a family business. He picked up additional string skills on banjo and ukulele while playing in many different bands and combos during the decades leading up to his final gigs while teaching English at the Hyde School and Woodstock Academy in Woodstock, CT. A fellow teacher at Woodstock, Michelle Salvas, recalls his music as a magnet that drew students and faculty alike to him. “Don and other teachers would bring guitars and banjos on Fridays and it became really a cool thing to participate in with them,” she said.

One of those students, Lindsay Moore, felt inspired to do music, but couldn’t relate to the school’s chorus. Don’s Friday jam sessions were a game changer for her. “I didn’t fit in with the music kids, and he helped me find my niche,” she said. “He encouraged me to be more confident and find, my voice.” Now nearly ten years after first being invited to sit in with Don, she is in Nashville pursuing country music as a career.

He had a reputation for helping students identify their own strengths and talents. “He took the time to get to know us and made us feel great about ourselves,” said Brett Poirier, a Woodstock student who’d been experiencing a serious disconnect from his parents. Poirier credits Mr. Spaeth with giving him confidence to find his own direction.

“Nobody had ever asked me what I’m going to do with my life after high school. The difference with him is that he made each student feel he cared about us individually,” Poirier said. They dedicated the yearbook to Don. In his English class, Poirier discovered his own writing abilities, refined his skills and went on to major in communications/ sports journalism. Today Poirier is a sports writer at the Norwich Bulletin.

Salvas describes Don as a wonderful teacher and mentor who could draw people–including her–out of their comfort zones, making them challenge themselves and their assumptions. And as a colleague, Salvas said, Don was an innovator and a problem-solver.

“He was a blessing in disguise for me, he was absolute magic with the kids.”

– by Lawrence Aaron ’65

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CANTERBURY SCHOOL

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PARENTS OF GRADUATES: If this publication is addressed to your son or daughter and he or she no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please notify the alumni office of his or her new mailing address (800-526-1710 or trice@cbury.org). Thank you. www.cbury.org

Call for Hall of Fame Nominations The Canterbury School Athletics Hall of Fame honors those who have made outstanding athletic contributions and have brought recognition, honor, distinction, and excellence to Canterbury School.

To nominate a player, coach, team, or extraordinary sports achievement, please visit: www.cbury.org/hall-of-fame.

Nominations are due by Feb. 1, 2016.

MARC VANASSE ’73

Announcement of second Hall of Fame Class: June 2016

Tom and Betsy Sheehy cut the Centennial birthday cake at sit-down dinner on September 30, 2015, Canterbury’s 100th birthday. The kitchen staff prepared a traditional turkey dinner, the same meal served on the School’s opening day.