Lyle Rigg: An Introductory Remembrance Lyle Rigg came to TASIS England in the fall of 1979 as Assistant Headmaster, Head of Residence, and teacher of History. Three years later, he was asked by Mrs. Fleming to come to TASIS to serve as Headmaster. Accompanying him to Lugano was his new wife, Sharon, who had also come to TASIS England in 1979. In the fall of 1984, he returned to TASIS England as Headmaster, a role he fulfilled with distinction until 1998. He was Headmaster at the Pennington School in Princeton, NJ, until he retired in 2006. Mrs. Fleming asked him to come out of retirement and serve as the Interim Headmaster at TASIS for the 2007-08 school year, and this became something of a pattern. He left retirement again for the 2009-2010 school year to serve as Interim Headmaster at TASIS England, and he did this yet again (for the last time!) to be the Interim Headmaster at TASIS for the past two years, 2015-17. In 2012, the Upper School library at TASIS England was renamed the Lyle Rigg Upper School Library.
When C.S. Lewis moved from Oxford to Cambridge University late in his career as a professor of English literature, he gave an inaugural address in which he compared himself to a dinosaur. Lewis cheerfully acknowledged that he was on the wrong side of a great historical divide, but he encouraged his new colleagues at Cambridge to take advantage of this unusual situation. “Use your specimens while you can,” he said. “There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.”
says, rushes about “in appetency on its metalled ways.” Lyle’s world is full of clear, quiet, eternal landmarks that all of us who have known him will never forget. There is Defiance, Ohio, of course, the most famous town in America that none of us have ever been to. In speeches and in meetings, Lyle frequently mentioned his hometown, where, in my imagination, the sun is always shining through the back door; where the local Defiance newspaper is tossed every day onto the wooden front porch by bicycle-riding boys; and where Lyle’s aging father taught him about what really matters in life.
Now I am not likening Lyle Rigg to a dinosaur or any other thundering beast. But I do think that we have had a wonderful, if not unique, privilege to work with a colleague whose values and outlook seem to speak eloquently of another world than ours, which, as the poet
There is Gracie’s Diner in Mayville, New York, where Lyle would meet the local townsfolk. Breakfast has 2