The "rats" begin arriving this week at the Episcopal High School, in Alexandria, Va. By next week they will be learning to address their schoolmates as "gen'elmen." To be a "rat" (nickname for a new boy) is a special distinction this fall. For The High School (as it is known throughout the South) is starting its 100th sparkling year.
This unusual old school, a sort of Dixie Eton, sits aristocratically in the Virginia hills seven miles across the Potomac from Washington. Older than St. Mark's, St. Paul's, Groton, Hill and Hotchkiss, this home of traditions older than four U. S. wars looks down on the Capitol and the Washington Monument. On its list of old boys, living and dead, is many a name prefixed by Robert Edward Lee, many another famed old Southern name: Pinckney, Stuart, Randolph, Bryan, Cocke, Fairfax, Carter, Kinsolving. When Northern troops occupied the school buildings in the Civil War, virtually all the 75 students were away fighting in the Confederate Army, and 61 were killed. In the World War, 461 old Episcopal High School boys took part as soldiers, one as the nation's Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker.— Among the school's casualties was Quentin Roosevelt.
Today, Episcopal High School is no longer a high school (its six-year course embraces prep school and junior college), and among its students are many boys from the North. But it keeps its old flavor. Its principal, Archibald Robinson ("Flick") Hoxton, 63, was born on the campus, the son of an associate principal of the school. Short, brown-and-silver-haired Flick Hoxton, a great Southern school athlete, got his nickname either from his habit of lying in bed and spitting out the window or from his extraordinary quickness of hand. Standing at the blackboard before his class, he used absentmindedly to place five or six pieces of chalk on the back of his hand, toss them in the air and catch them all.
Flick Hoxton's boys have similarly eccentric habits. Sometimes they soak their felt hats, stretch them on baseball bats and traipse around the campus like pixies wearing hats two or three feet high. Each spring they raise squirrels in their dresser drawers. A common event at dinner is the passing of the "boss" (dessert) from unlucky to lucky wagerers. Sometimes boys will bet a whole year's boss on an election or whether a master's wife's baby will be a boy or girl. Once they smeared treacle (molasses) on the bell rope and the whole school rapturously watched Principal Hoxton grab it. For their misdeeds the boys get demerits, which they must wipe off before they are graduated.
They can do this by walking a mile for each demerit. To get his diploma one boy at the eleventh hour had to walk 100 miles.
By the time he had trudged back, commencement was over.
Although he is a strict disciplinarian, Principal Hoxton is popular among his boys, whom he calls "Ol Bill" or "Ol Joseph." Long abandoned is the old school rule that "no student .shall sing any Negro or low song," but such practices as smoking and drinking are strictly regulated. Prime aim of the school is to turn out "Christian gentlemen." Its honor system is scrupulously enforced. The boys themselves once stoned from the grounds a student caught stealing.