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Dr. Stearns is one of the best beloved schoolmasters of his time. Quiet, alert and understanding, he is remembered by Andover boys young and old as an unobtrusive force in their development. He was schooled at Andover himself, going on to Amherst, Yale (where 60% of all Andover boys have gone) and Andover Theological Seminary. Soon after he began teaching at the school in 1897, he coached the baseball team, an office which he kept up for eleven years of his headmastership. The founder of the school set forth that Andover was to teach "the great end and real business of living," but many a boy who remembers both Stearns the coach and Stearns the friendly, gentlemanly, informal chapel speaker, will boil that long phrase down to diamond parlance: "There is no short cut from first to third. In the game of life, too, touch second base!"
Drs. Drury, Peabody and Thayer
conduct institutions conceived quite oppositely from Andover. These schools early assumed the parental relation with their boys and set out to see that each individual should have "such esthetic culture and accomplishments as shall tend to refine the manners and elevate the taste, together with careful moral and religious instruction." They were schools founded (St. Paul's was the model for St. Mark's and partly for Groton) to accommodate wealthy and socially scrupulous families. All have anxious and extensive waiting lists. Among Bostonians at least, Groton may be said to have achieved the loftiest prestige of this kind. Its graduates, "Grotties," are unmistakable. They boast: "A Groton man wires to Dr. Peabody as soon as his son is born. Others generally think a letter is quick enough."