I’m writing this post in May and June 2021, when I’m 89 years old. Every Friday at 2:00 pm Eastern Time, I host a Zoom meeting with six or eight friends from St. Albans. All of them except me graduated in the class of 1950 or 1949.
Two of the graduates of the class of 1950 have been on my shortlist of four or five best friends for over 70 years, and one, Tyler Abell, has been at the top of the list for 74 years. My other pal that shared the top spot on my best-friends list was Nick Kotz, who died in a tragic accident in April 2020. Nick had been on our Zoom meeting since its inception in March 2020.
The fact that I host a weekly online meeting after all these years speaks to the importance of my St. Albans experience for my life and set of values.
St. Albans is an Episcopal boys prep school in Washington, DC, that is affiliated with and is on the grounds of the Washington National Cathedral. When it was founded in 1909, it was a school for the choir boys at the Cathedral, and today still gives scholarships to boys who sing in the choir.
From its founding until 1999, the headmaster of St. Albans was an Episcopal clergyman. Wikipedia indicates that: “The St. Albans motto, “Pro Ecclesia et Pro Patria,” translates to “For Church and Country.” St. Albans requires all students to attend Chapel twice a week in The Little Sanctuary. The school seeks to develop in its students a sense of moral responsibility through Chapel, its Honor Code, and a co-curricular social service program.”
I started in St.Albans in the fall of 1947 in the Upper School Form II or 8th grade. The Lower School consisted of grades 4-8, and the Upper School of grades 9-12 (or in the snooty English school system, Forms III-VI). However, for some students who first entered St. Albans in the Upper School and who the school thought were not quite ready for 9th grade (Form III), they put in a small Upper School 8th grade (Form II).
We had moved to Washington from Alexandria at the end of WW II when my father was discharged from the Army and had gotten a job as the head of the Washington office of Clark Equipment Company, which invented and manufactured forklift trucks.
When we lived in Battle Creek and my dad was in the trust department of the biggest bank in town, the Security National Bank, one of his clients and good friends was Ezra Clark, who with his brother founded Clark Equipment Company. Ezra’s wife, Ruth Clark, was my mother’s best friend in Battle Creek, and they remained good friends until the late 1970s when Ruth died. She left my mother a gorgeous emerald and diamond ring that I gave to Crickett after Gramma passed away.
We moved to Washington from Alexandria in 1946, to a three-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of 2900 Connecticut Avenue at the corner of Cathedral Avenue. Of course, it never occurred to me then or for years afterward, but the reason my father chose the apartment on the corner of Connecticut and Cathedral Avenues was that it was the closest place to live he could find to the Cathedral Close and St. Albans.
He had his heart set on me going to St. Albans. When we first moved to Alexandria in 1942, I went to the local segregated public school. I remember little of it except it was crowded and dirty and that I got beat up every day. My father would have none of that and somehow worked it out with the Army for me to attend the secondary school in nearby Fort Belvoir, about 15 miles south of Alexandria.
I did 4th, 5th and 6th grades at Ft. Belvoir. For the 7th grade, I transferred to the first class in the Episcopal boy’s school, St. Stephens, when it opened. My father was passionate about education and wanted me to have what he saw as the best available. He knew what he wanted for me. Of course, I was clueless and did whatever I was told to do (I knew my father “meant business” about my education).
When we moved to 2900 Connecticut Avenue, for the 1946-47 school year I went to Alice Deal Junior High School for the 8th grade. My father applied for me to go to St. Albans for the 1947-48 school year, and I took the tests to see what grade I’d go into at St. Albans.
I had never been a good student, so, naturally, I didn’t do well on the tests. However, I was admitted to St. Albans on the condition that I go to summer school and take Latin and Algebra and that in the fall of 1947 I go into Form II (8th grade Upper School). If I did well in Form II taking classes with Form III students, the next year I would be promoted to Form IV, thus, in a sense, skipping Form III (9th grade).
In my Form II class were (top row below) Sean Gervasi, Phil Bohart, Roger Kingsbury, Hans von Schoen, (bottom row below) Ricky Schultz, Dick Newbold, me, Dick Noyes, and another boy whose name I have forgotten. I made friends with Hans, Sean, Phil, and, especially, Nick Kotz,who wasn’t in the photo below.
Hans, Sean, Roger, and Phil were promoted to Form IV at the end of the year, but Nick and I weren’t — our grades weren’t good enough. Neither were Roger’s, but they needed him to play on the varsity basketball team — he was the best basketball player in Washington for three subsequent years.
Nick, like me, had recently moved to Washington. He lived half a block from me at 2828 Connecticut Avenue. Therefore, we started a habit that lasted for five years: walking to school together. Actually, our senior year in Form VI, because seniors could park on the Cathedral Close, we drove to school. Nick would pick me up in his burgundy Pontiac coup.
Nick and I really bonded, we not only walked to school together, but we often studied and crammed for exams together. Also, because we were both older than all of our classmates in Form III and because we both felt like outsiders and had a huge rebellious streak, we bonded even more. We made fun of our Form III classmates, most of whom had been together in the Lower School since 4th grade. We called them “robots” because they all followed the rules and weren’t as rebellious as we were.
When I was in Form II (class of 1951), we took all of our classes with those in Form III (class of 1950). Therefore, I became friends with and hung out with several boys in the class ahead of me — the class of 1950 — especially Tyler Abell.
Tyler was probably the most popular boy in the class of ‘5o. He was very good looking, smart, outgoing, and had a great sense of humor. He was also socially and politically well connected. He was the stepson of powerful, highly influential columnist Drew Pearson, who wrote the popular Washington Post column “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” Drew and Tyler’s mother Luvie Pearson were also at the top of the A list socially in Washington. It seemed like every boy at St. Albans wanted to be Tyler’s friend. I was lucky enough to be on his list of friends.
I will never forget being invited to the Pearson’s for dinner at their stylish home on Dumbarton Street in Georgetown. I was 16 or 17 and had never been to an elegant, upper-class dinner with finger bowls. I had never heard of, seen, or used finger bowls, and Tyler had to explain how to use them. At the dinner were the Pearsons, Tyler, me, Joseph Alsop, a columnist almost as powerful as Drew Pearson, Clayton Fritchie, then Deputy Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and several other people I don’t remember. I was overwhelmed, starstruck. I had never been around such famous people.
In 1999 or 2000, when I was with AOL and flush with stock options, I gave $10,000 in Tyler’s name to St. Albans. The purpose of the gift was to train teachers who were interested in how to use the internet effectively. In the letter in which I dedicated the gift to Tyler, I wrote about how grateful I was that he invited an unsophisticated Midwestern-born teenager to the elegant dinner party described above.
In the third, fourth, and fifth forms, I was pretty much a loud-mouth smartass. Walter Leach, captain of the class of ’50 football team, nicknamed me “Loosejaw,” which I hated and which, thank God, didn’t stick. I was also not a great student. I never made the Headmasters List, which you got on if you didn’t have a grade below a B.
However, I was a pretty good athlete. I played right inside on the varsity soccer team in forms III, IV, and V and was high scorer all of those years. We won the Inter Academic Conference (IAC) championship in 1948. I also was named first string to the All IAC soccer team all of those years. I was captain of the soccer team in my senior year (F0rm VI), and I played fullback.
We had a new soccer coach my senior year, and we had a terrible team. Several on the team and not gotten their full growth and were small and slow. Therefore, the new coach thought we needed defense more than offense, and moved me to fullback, which pissed me off, but I didn’t complain to the coach. In those days we played a formation consisting of five forwards, three halfbacks, two fullbacks, and a goalie.
Nick Kotz and I were the two fullbacks, and we had a lot of fun playing defense together. We knew each other so well–our strengths and shortcomings–that we coordinated well and made a good defensive pair.
I played football in the fall, soccer in the winter, and ran track in the spring. I was the starting right guard on the class of ’50 football team. We ran a single wing back then, and had an uneven line. Meredith Price (’50) was left end, Tyler Abell (’50) was left guard, Joe Dittmar (’50) was center, I (’51) was right guard, Jim Rill (’50) was inside tackle, Tom Sisson (’50) was outside tackle, Roger Kingsbury (’50) was right end, John Broome (’50) was wingback, Bob Alvord (’51) was bocking back (lined up right behind me), Buddy Summerville (’51) was fullback and Walter Leach (’50), the captain, was tailback. Nick Kotz was my backup at right guard.
It was an excellent team, and we hoped to win the IAC championship. When it came to the last game of the season, we were tied for first place in the IAC with St. James. The last game was at St. James, and we were all psyched. We traveled to St. James, which is near Hagerstown, MD. It was a close, hard-fought game, but we lost. We lost the IAC championship we were confident would be ours. The loss was a good lesson in the danger of hubris and overconfidence.
In our weekly Friday STA Zoom meetings, we sometimes talk about the St. James game. Four members of the line (Tyler, Jim, me, and Tom Sisson. Tom passed away in August, 2020) Ralph Pagter, who’s on the Zoom meeting played second-string end and also played in the St. James game, as did Nick Kotz, who was on the Zoom meeting until he died tragically in April 2020.
We all bonded on that team, and have remained close friends ever since. I think this bonding speaks to the importance of playing team sports and learning the rules and norms of collaboration and being an unselfish team member–lessons that have helped me in my life as a salesperson, manager, and teacher.
Because I had been put back a year and wasn’t promoted to the Fourth Form as were Hans and Sean, who I was friends with in Second Form, I was the same age as most of the boys in the class ahead of me–Sean, Hans, Tyler Abell, Jim Rill, Tom Sisson, Scott Watson, Balz Hubbell, Bill Hollingsworth, and Bryce Clagett, the class of ’50s top student. For a class of ’50 senior prom, Tyler Abell, who was head of the Dance Committee (I was the Junior member of the committee and was chair of the Dance Committee my Seniorn[FormVI] year) decided to have a costume prom for the first time in St. Albans history. Because I had broken up with Kitsy Winslow (another story), I was without a date. Bryce Clagett ad I decided to go as Confederate Colonel Beauregard and his wife. My mother made me a lovely evening gown.
In the fall of our senior year, Nick Kotz and I decided to visit colleges together. We had both applied to Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth. I had also applied to Harvard, but I don’t think Nick did.
Therefore, we visited Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth together. We’d plan our trips carefully so we could take a train to New York and set up dates to meet us under the clock at the Biltmore Hotel where there was an area with tables and chairs and where drinks were served. The drinking age in 1950 was 18, and both Nick and I had had our 18th birthday and could legally drink.
Meeting under the clock at the Biltmore had been the thing for upper-middle-class Eastern preppies to do, especially after it was the location of a major scene in Catcher In the Rye.
I vaguely remember our trip to Yale–largely because of two or three whiskey sours at the Biltmore. I recall that the first place we went to at Yale on a Saturday afternoon was the bar in the DKE house–the longest bar in the Ivy League–and some guy telling us that he was driving to a fabulous party at Princeton. He asked if we wanted to go. “Sure,” we said and left for Princeton.
For years afterward, when Nick and I got together, we’d often laugh about the folly and irresponsibility of our Yale trip and the fact that the only thing we saw at Yale was the bar at the DKE house. We were amazed that we took so lightly the biggest decision of our lives up to that point.
We both liked Dartmouth when we visited Hanover. We loved the campus, but what we really liked were the guys and Dartmouth’s culture of hearty, macho party boys. We were welcomed at the SAE house by our class of ’50 football pal, Jim Rill. Also, members of the Phi Delt house were Tom Bradley and Ralph Lee of the STA class of ’49 and John Barto, class of ’48, who, I think, was president of the house. Tom and Ralph had been two of the most popular members of the class of ’49, and John was a highly respected–he had been Head Prefect at STA–member of the class of ’48. Nick and I were so bowled over by being given such a warm welcome and strong sales pitch for Dartmouth by these popular STA upperclassmen that we decided on Dartmouth.
One of many mistakes I made in the fall of 1952 was not to pledge Phi Delt. My father had wanted me to pledge Phi Delt because his good friend, George Ward, was on the national board of Phi Delt. Maybe my pledging DKE was a senseless act of rebellion — something all sons eventually do.
At St. Albans in the spring, I did track. All STA boys are required to participate in a sport, whether as a player or a manager. In Forms III and IV I took baseball in the spring. I played a bad second-string third base and couldn’t hit, but if I ever got on base, I was fast and would steal second and sometimes third.
In Form V STA hired a new science teacher, Sam Hoffman, who also started the school’s first track team. I loved it. My father had been a track star at Northwestern, and he became my coach and mentor. I also was now able to put my speed on display. It turned out I was the fastest runner in the school. The second fastest was our star tailback and captain of the ’50 football team, Walter Leach. Everyone at the school thought Walter was the fastest at the school. However, we both ran the 100-yard dash that first year of track.
Walter was very quick and would always get off to a fast start. He would be ahead for about 30 or 40 yards, but then I’d catch up to him and always beat him. I won the 100-yard dash in every dual meet and was only beaten once, in the IAC championship meet in ’50 by Walt (I think that was his first name) Binda, who ran a 10-second flat 100, which was quite fast for 1950. In my senior year of 1951, I was not beaten in the 100-yard dash. Nor in 1950 or 1951 did I ever lose a 200-yard dash. In 1950 I beat Binda in the 200. It was my race.
My other best friend in the class of ’51 was Bob Alvord. He was an excellent student and athlete. I think I talked him into taking track in 1950, and he learned to throw the discus, javelin, and shot put. He usually won or came in second in every track meet for two years in all three events.
Bob also went to Dartmouth with me and Nick, and Bob and I roomed together our freshman year.
St. Albans athletics molded me, but so did two classes–Art and Religion.
Art was taught by Dean Stambaugh, who was my, Tyler Abell, and Bob Alvord’s favorite teacher. He was an artist — realistic landscapes of rolling hills and trees painted in great detail — and was a gentle, encouraging teacher. He was tall, thin, and mostly bald, and he was obviously gay. At that time (1948, 1949, 1950) being gay was not cool, and as typical cruel teenagers, we called him a fairy or a pansy. But we loved him because he loved us, and he was very caring. He was also a great teacher. He taught us how to paint in watercolor and oil, how to draw with charcoal and he taught us color theory and how to mix colors.
I loved my art classes. We could use any medium we wanted (I preferred watercolor) and we could paint in any style we wanted. I painted mostly imaginary landscapes that featured cartoonish versions of a single castle uploaded from my fuzzy memory of the drawings of castles in Spain by artist Robert Lawson in Ferdinand the Bull. Weird? Yes. But I couldn’t draw well at all, no matter how much I practiced, so I had to try to re-create on watercolor paper what was in my imagination–stored in my faulty visual memory.
Art might not have taught me to draw, but it did teach me to appreciate art and creativity.
I did not get the drawing gene, but my youngest son, Will did. When he was 13 and visiting me in NY from Chicago, where he lived with his mother, I hired an artist to teach him how to draw for a comic book. As part of an exercise, Will created an amazingly detailed, perfectly proportioned drawing of a hobbit. It was terrific, something I never could have done.
I loved the watercolors that I did for Dean Stambaugh and thought I wanted to become an artist, a thought that infuriated my father. Not only was he homophobic, but he also thought that being an artist meant starving. Being an artist was not a profession. He thought I should be a lawyer, I guess because I talked too much and was argumentative.
Because he didn’t want me to be an artist, my father threw away all my watercolor paintings. Therefore, while I was at St. Albans, Dartmouth, in the Army, at Columbia, and until I was married, had children, and moved to Washington in 1964 did I think about painting. However, when we lived on Elliott Road in Westmoreland Hills I started painting again. I used acrylics and painted very abstractly, filling canvases with globs of colors, mostly orange, red, yellow, and white. The globs looked somewhat like flowers if you squinted. I gave one painting to Tyler and Bess, and of this writing, it’s still in the Abell’s house in Merry Go Round Farm. I gave another painting to Nick and Mary Lynn Kotz, and of this writing, it’s still in the Kotz apartment.
I’m not sure looking back in the fog of time why I decided to get back into painting, but it might well have been because of a Thematic Apperception Test I took when WTOP sent me to the Broadcast Sales Management course at the Harvard Business School. One question on the test was to choose among several crowning life achievements such as winning an Olympic medal, becoming a CEO of a major company, or getting an honorary degree. The one I chose was having an exhibition at an art gallery. I think this choice surprised me, but it must have brought to the surface some deep desire to be an artist or to create art again.
The other class at St. Albans that had a lasting effect on me was a required course, Religion. I didn’t particularly like it at the time (although I didn’t like any course other than Art). But Religion taught me about the Christian values of mercy, compassion, forgiveness, and love, and these values have stayed with me, although they are deep, unconscious, and way too often ignored.
I loved St. Albans and wanted my sons to go there. Chris went for a year as a border (1974 I think), but it was not right for him. Chris is too independent, rebellious, non-elitist, and creative to fit into a rigid, rule-oriented environment. Chas also went to STA for a year in 1995 as a border but came back to Columbia because I was in the hospital with CLL and because he missed his girlfriend, Erin McElroy. St. Albans wasn’t right for Chas either, mostly because being a border is way too lonely a life.