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| I thought it was a school that was made up of misfits and people who had been thrown out of every prestigious boarding school along the East Coast. |
"I thought it was a school that was made up of misfits and people who had been thrown out of every prestigious boarding school along the East Coast. I'm not sure if that is actually true, but there was certainly that feeling about it. I was very unsophisticated when I came to the school, I was very much in awe of the kids I mean everybody there had a background -- adopted daughter of a famous psychologist, nephew of a liberal politician, children of government officials -- everybody had some kind of distinguished background. But one was a dirty boy, there was no other way of describing him. He rarely changed his clothes, he'd wear his pants until they were stiff and dirty, he slept in his engineer boots -- I remember him sleeping in his sheets and not changing them until they got black. He was just dirty. And I was this kid from a shack in the woods of Maine, or not very far from it, I had no claims to sophistication, but I mean, he never showered! We didn't even have indoor plumbing where I grew up. We had an outhouse, and bathed once or twice a month in a tub in front of the kitchen stove, where the water had been boiled to make a bath, so I wasn't the most fastidious kid in the world. But that one really was in a class by himself."
-- Jim Barter '48, [Interview p 1/10,15]
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To instruct this disparate group, and to meet their sometimes greater non-academic needs, the co-directors hired a faculty of five fulltime teachers, another six parttime teachers, and a non-teaching staff of four (a secretary, a cook, a nurse, and a maintenance man). The faculty and staff filled out a school family that included not only the "children" spread over seven or eight chronological and many more emotional years, but the "parents" who covered three generations. The youthfully ubiquitous Elizabeth Johnson (she even became treasurer of the student magazine) was old enough at 64 to be the grandmother of the 22 year old art teacher who looked no older than some of her students. In the midst of it all were Ken Webb and David Bailey, trying to work together to make sense of the variety of backgrounds, needs, and expectations all tugging the school in different directions. At the same time they were trying to make sense of each other as well, to make their marriage work, as it were -- but it made for an odd family to have two father figures and no true mother figure that first year. But most of the children were accustomed to odd families, and this one had all those additional faculty aunts and uncles to help out (most of the time), so the school worked at least as well as some families and better than others. With two degrees from Harvard, Ken Webb was the most impressively credentialled member of the faculty, though several other teachers also had master's degrees. In addition to being the dorm head at The Green, Ken taught senior and junior English, Latin and Greek, and a course in General Language for eighth graders. He also wrote the school catalogue and general publicity, and supervised the student magazine, Symposium. His wife Susan was a parttime teacher of Latin and Greek, and of necessity helped run the dormitory, where they lived with their three children (two of whom were day students). In the dorm, the Webbs invited the students in for snacks every night. In contrast to Ken, David Bailey was always a little diffident about his academic achievements, in part no doubt because they were not remarkable, but also because he held other values, such as "good citizenship," at least as high as academic success. David had attended Harvard, with mixed results, before transferring to Black Mountain College the year it opened. His two years at Black Mountain, from which he took his degree in 1935, were a transforming experience for him, full of energy, vitality, and hope which he wanted to recapture in different ways with the Country School. David taught Social Studies and English in the lower grades, as well as organizing athletics and social events ("Ken didn't think much of me as an educator, so I was put in charge of recreation," David said years later). His wife Peggy was a parttime English and drama teacher, whose involvement was limited by a serious illness for which she was hospitalized that summer. She and David lived with their son Peter some distance from the school, in a house where Peggy felt isolated and alone, in part because "David was completely immersed. When school began, the school just drew him into it, and he became completely immersed in new faculty, new students, and just keeping the school's head above water." [DWB int 1.8.74; Peggy interview p 5/3 & 4/8]
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| Edith Cochran | Edith Cochran not only taught math at all levels, she was in charge of the girls dorm in Greenhithe, where she frequently held afternoon tea parties for selected student guests ("a real aristocrat," David called her). She came to Woodstock with 20 years teaching experience and became one of the school's dominant personalities during its first six years. She had a graduate degree in Landscape Architecture and took care of much of the school's landscaping for the next few years. She had taught landscape architecture at Smith College for years, then taught at the all girls school, St. Mary's in the Mountains (which was then a very strict, traditional place, but has since turned itself into the coeducational White Mountain School, with very much of a Woodstock appearance if not the progressive substance). David recalled "Edith Cochran's innovative course in geometry -she used no textbook but instead required the pupils to create a theorem book of their own slowly and logically. More than one non-math student was successful in getting through the course and thus receiving a diploma." [DWB interview p 1/6; DWB int 1.8.74] | |
| Bob Lake | Although Bob Lake was one of the younger faculty, he, too, was one of the school's first defining personalities. He was a veteran of the Tenth Mountain Division, the ski troops, though he had never seen combat. Ken Webb had hired him to work at the Farm and Wilderness Camps the year before the school started, then hired him again as the first member of the Woodstock faculty. A Dartmouth College graduate, Bob had three years experience teaching at other progressive schools and had worked for the Vermont Soil Conservation Service. He taught Biology, Zoology, and Farming, and lived with his wife and three children in the former groom's apartment in The Barn, the classroom building near Greenhithe. This made him generally available to students, whom he enjoyed immensely, which contributed to his becoming the central figure in a major crisis several years later. | |
| Faith Murray | Faith Murray, who taught art, was young and single and lived in Greenhithe, where she was Edith's assistant in running the dorm. Diminutive but dynamic, Faith worked with every student in the school, whether the student wanted to draw or paint or sculpt, or not. Busy as she was, Vermont was too remote for her and she left after a year. (David had recruited her from Black Mountain, where she had studied with Josef Albers, and he turned to Albers several times over the years for art teachers.) | |
| Bert Sarason | Another one-year teacher was Bert Sarason. David hired him over the summer to teach Social Studies and English. He came to Woodstock after teaching in more rigid, impersonal places like the Harvey School (all boys, grades 4-8). A feisty New Yorker unafraid of speaking his mind, Bert was not always diplomatic about doing so. His students enjoyed his lively classes, including numerous digressions into school issues, even to open criticism of the codirectors. | |
| Alice Bianchi | Alice Bianchi, wife of a Woodstock merchant, taught French (her native tongue) and Spanish. Discovered and hired by David over the summer, she came to the Country School with 16 years of teaching experience at Dana Hall, National Park Seminary, and Central High School in Washington, D.C. Although she taught at Woodstock for three years, she remained relatively uninvolved in the community. [DWB 1974 tape] | |
| The parttime teachers, in addition to the co-directors' wives, included Sue Beatty for music, Ted Gregg for religion, John Long for shop, and Carl Voss for social studies -- none of whom remained at the school after the first year. | ||
| Johanna Pederson | Although she was not a teacher until the second year of the school, Johanna Pederson contributed to the character of the place from the start, as the school's first secretary. She was the first of many secretaries in the school's history who served as an unofficial counselor, confessor, and cheerleader for all kinds of students. | |
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In addition to the personal enthusiasm most of the adults brought to the enterprise, Woodstock opened at a time of remarkable confluence of other energies. In the post-war world at large, there was a profound surge of hope and idealism that the post-war world would be a better, more decent place. The idea of the school was a part of the greater optimism that more humane institutions could create more humane people and a more humane world, an optimism affecting students and faculty alike. The freshness of the freedom the school allowed its students added an exuberance to the usual restlessness of adolescents busy finding out who they were, exploring the larger world around them, testing their own limits, falling in love, falling out of love, and generally feeling passionate about life in all its grand and trivial disguises. Focussing and intensifying both the global and the personal energies was the inherent dynamic of an institution being born. For the most part, teachers and students alike threw themselves wholeheartedly into the task of creating their school, a task made much more fascinating and complex by the majority view that Woodstock should be a place which each new school generation could re-create for itself, to meet its own needs and perpetuate the energy of creation. Some even felt more strongly: believing not that the school could re-create itself, but that it should have to re-create itself constantly if it were to retain the vitality it needed to contribute to profoundly changing American education. Others, while wishing the school to be a shining example to others, also wished it to have a clear and more or less fixed definition. This philosophical tension, while always present, was rarely discussed directly, any more than fish discuss water. But because the tension was there, other, apparently less important questions generated emotional debate out of proportion to the importance of the nominal issue. In one such battle, the community decided that it would be all right for the soccer team to have red and white uniforms, but only on the clear understanding that these were not the school colors, that it was not right for the group to choose school colors at all because that would bind future students to a choice in which they had no say. While a school could survive quite nicely without having official colors, other issues required deciding on a more or less permanent basis -- though deciding which issues should be decided could spark a lively discussion as well. Throughout that first fall term, throughout the first several years, the school hummed along on this vitality of shared new experience, the momentum of continual newness, the excitement of creating and controlling at least some of the terms of one's own life. Academically, too, the school was full of ferment, with teachers pushing students to their intellectual limits in rigorous courses. Susan Webb recalled that "there was a great deal of challenge in the teaching,... [and there was] the feeling of the school, that the students and all, and the faculty, were very supportive of each other. It was the first school some of these kids had ever hit where there was some sense of freedom to learn and not to be stifled by just sitting in a classroom and that kind of thing." [Webb int 8.84] |
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| The powerful sense of community that suffused school life fills the pages of Symposium | The powerful sense of community that suffused school life fills the pages of Symposium, which began as a mimeographed, student-run publication of universal purpose: "Our columns are open to members of the faculty as well as persons outside the school." [Symp I/2] The March 1946 Symposium carried this brief, lead editorial: "This issue of the school magazine is somewhat different in that we have been able to afford to have it printed. Subscriptions remain the sole source of income as heretofore. Without endowment, and independent of the faculty, the Symposium is run by the students, and the articles and poems included in it are printed without censorship. For this privilege we are indebted to co-directors Mr. Kenneth Webb and Mr. David Bailey." [SYMP I/3] | |
| The earliest Symposiums provide a kind of literate family album... | The earliest Symposiums provide a kind of literate family album, reflecting the eclectic intellectual life of the school according to the taste of its continually changing editors. While including some of the usual precocious poetry and fiction of bright high school magazines, Symposium also included articles about the school, the town of Woodstock, and the world, as well as reviews of plays, concerts, and other cultural events. One report on the school listed the 103 books (79 titles) read by 22 students in the 8th through 12th grade English classes during the fall term, adding that, "The average number of books perused in this period is almost five per person. Some students, of course, read less than this average figure -- but in no case less than three. Pat Malet, Walter Walker, and James Barter devoured eight, twelve, and fourteen volumes respectively." [SYMP I/2] | |
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Some of the non-school subjects that students chose to write about were the peacetime military draft, the Civil War battle at Chancellorsville, the Trusteeship System and the Mandate System, figure skating, the Lost Continent of Atlantis, Richard Wright's Native Son, and deceptive political messages in comic books. Among faculty, Ken Webb contributed an article answering the question What Is a Friends' Meeting?, Bob Lake wrote about building the school's new ski tow, and Faith Murray described some student art work. In particular she mentioned Walter Walker's explanation of a strange recent painting: "One late afternoon a friend of mine who was then quite young went walking in a graveyard. She wanted to see if there were any skeletons about. Suddenly she heard a mourning dove and it frightened her. I wanted to paint the way the mourning dove made her feel." As well as the generally much more playful and familiar work (landscapes, a dream of Indians, sculpted animals, a self-portrait, and a Madonna and Child), the art teacher wrote about a student who had fled with his family from Nazi Germany, "During this past month Klaus Heimann has produced two pictures well worth mentioning -- one of a very tough-looking helmeted God of War blowing an atomic bomb through a pea-shooter at the world, which hangs from a lamp-post; the other, just as dramatic, is of a bearded criminal being questioned under the strong yellow beam of a spot-light." (Klaus Heiman also wrote a bitterly wry piece about the use of surplus war material. Among his suggestions: "Bayonets would make fine can-openers and they might be used by the enraged wife on her spouse." [SYMP 1/21]) Woodstock's first term ended with the school's first dramatic production, a short Nativity play put on in the back of the Barn, where a few students kept their horses and the school had some livestock, including a cow. Peggy Bailey wrote the script and directed it, Larry Hagman sang a Christmas carol and, with great serendipity, the cow lowed at the end as if on cue. [Peggy transcript V/3; DWB 1.8.74 p.6] |
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