According to legend, one of the students, a drug fortune heiress, returned from the school's first Christmas vacation with a suitcase full of contraceptives for the girls' dorm; diaphragms and spermicides. Impossible to verify, but the company in question did in fact make those products in 1945. For the most part the school's sexual life was not so very different from what it was anywhere else: there was fast girls, there were predatory boys, there were loving couples, there were lots of virgins of both sexes, there was plenty of experimentation, there was discretion, and there was lots of empty talk. For five years the school avoided its worst nightmare, a public sexual scandal. In fact, for five years, there appears to have been no serious private sexual scandal either. But when the first one happened, it caught everyone by surprise.

By all accounts Bob Lake was a charming, almost dashing young man. He was in his mid-twenties when he joined the Country School's first faculty in 1945. He came to the school from Ken Webb's camp, having previously worked for the Vermont Soil Conservation Service and having served in the Tenth Mountain Division (the U.S. ski troops) during the war. A Dartmouth College graduate, he was married, had three small children, and gave every appearance of being a happy part of a near-perfect family. Certainly young James Barter thought so at the time.

What he and apparently no one else at the school knew then was that Bob Lake had not seen combat, had not gone overseas with his division, but had been mustered out on psychiatric grounds. [Barter int p.2/11,3/9, 3/12]

What they saw -- and believed to be real -- was an energetic junior younger teacher whose classes in biology, zoology, and geology were well run, popular, and challenging, whose interest in his students was strong, often intense, and whose contribution to the life of the school was varied and positive: he led field trips, he skiied, he taught skiing, he built the school ski tow, he contributed to Symposiam, he took lots of school pictures. His fellow teachers elected him to serve one year as their representative on the Board of Trustees.

"Bob Lake was a great teacher," Jusy Fisher Steffes '51 recalls, "so casual, very warm, very quiet, very concerned. I spent a lot of time -- I had a wildflower project and I used to go out horseback riding and I would get specimens and he'd help me find the Latin names for them and put the pressed flowers in a book. He really helped a lot of students develop an interest in the natural sciences just because he was so interested in them and what they were doing. I'm sure he'd seen six hundred projects like this before, but he just made the student feel like this is really some-thing special -- a very dignified, a very warm person." [Fisher int p.I/10]

Roger Phillips '49 remembers Bob as "kind of a square, Boy Scout type -- Clean shaven, sturdy, non-smoking, which wasn't such a common thing in those days." [Phillips int p.1B/7] As far as anyone knew, Bob Lake was reliable friendly, helpful -- year after year he did his job and never caused any problems.

But by the fall of 1950 Bob Lake was deeply involved with Buffy Dunker's daughter Mary Lou. Their affair went on for some time without anyone suspecting. Their time together was spent mostly in the privacy of cabins at Ken Webb's camp, which was closed and deserted for the winter.

Then in November they had a problem, as Buffy recalls: "Mary Lou was pregnant by Bob Lake and he took her to Boston to have an abortion. I thought she was going off to visit colleges, which was just fine, it was the fall of her senior year. I didn't know she was pregnant and there was nothing to indicate to me that way, except that I knew that she and Bob Lake did a lot of work together."

When Mary Lou didn't show up at the time she was supposed to come back from Boston, the rest of the situation unravelled. The school's response -- David's response -- was swift and amputating.

He fired Bob Lake immediately, giving him two days to vacate the premises and his family a month to follow. David paid him $2,432.50, but required him to sign a formal release (one of the few early documents to survive, since it was in the school's safe deposit box). Besides being a standard general release, document spells out the terms of Lake's departure as well as the promise: "I further agree that I will not communicate with the students, members of the faculty and patrons at the school concerning any matters involving the school and myself in any way to slander the school."

This was Thanksgiving time and the school remained in session, but alumni often came to visit, including James Barter: "I drove up with a couple of friends, partly to see Bob, and when I arived there was all this stiffness. I didn't know what the hell was going on. No one would tell me, except that Bob was leaving the school, that he had this terrific job at Dartmouth, just too good a job to turn down, and his wife didn't contradict the story. That was the cover story, David told me the same story. One thing that I do remember about that time was, and I remember the twinge of jealousy that I felt about this, was Bob raving about what a terrific student Mary Lou was, how she was the best zoology student he'd ever had."

Dartmouth College has no record of ever employing any Robert Lake and the school's $2400 payment seems to support the inference that the story was a fabrication.

As for Mary Lou, David would not allow her to return to the school, and Buffy agreed with the decision: "Of course we knew what we had to do -- it was perfectly clear that you couldn't have the kid back among the other innocent children. So Mary Lou finished the year living with her sister Betsy, who was married and pregnant in Ithaca where her husband was still in law school." Mary Lou was bitter and angry about the way she was treated, and years later Buffy would come to share those feelings when, under a different headmaster, another Country School student got pregnant, went home to have her baby, and came back to school.

Bob Lake's marriage was over, his wife filed for divorce. Apparently Mary Lou was not his first such liaison. But she was perhaps his most serious. He was not allowed to see her for the rest of the school year, but some time after that he persuaded Buffy to let him talk to Mary Lou, with a chaperone, during a train ride to Boston. But instead of keeping that meeting, he went to his ex-wife's house, where she eventually found him in the basement, where he had stood on a box with a rope around his neck and shot himself as he kicked the box away.

Mary Lou's second and third husbands both looked like Bob Lake.

His ex-wife gave his collection of Country School slides to James Barter: "The interesting thing is, Bob took pictures of girls. Some of the pictures are gorgeous, they really, they're carefully posed. But as you look through the pictures -- I have never done a frequency count, but I suspect that if you did a frequency count, you'd find that there are ten pictures of girls for every one picture of anybody else." [Barter int. p.3/11]