Snug behind closed windows in his study at Mount Hermon School for Boys one chill Massachusetts evening last week sat the Rev. Elliott Speer, 35, headmaster. Like hundreds of other schoolmasters, he was just back from vacation to prepare for another term. A few boys and proctors were back too, but most of them would not arrive until school opened the following week. The 2,500-acre campus, in the hills near Northfield, lay summer quiet. As was his nightly habit, Headmaster Speer sat with notebook in hand planning his next day's schedule.
Upstairs Mrs. Speer was putting their three young children to bed when she heard a sudden crash downstairs, like an exploding light bulb. When she got downstairs she found her husband with blood streaming from his arm and breast. There were two jagged holes in the window.
"Get a tourniquet," whispered the headmaster, and collapsed in his wife's arms. Twenty minutes later he was dead.
The late, great Evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody founded Mount Hermon in 1881, two years after its sister, Northfield Seminary for Girls. There in an austere atmosphere thousands of boys and girls from pious homes have received a Christian, practical education, with two hours work per day on farm or in shop for rich and poor alike. To Northfield, too, have gone thousands of men and women for its famed summer conferences at which they refreshed their spiritual roots. There in 1926 went young Elliott Speer, fresh from a term as chaplain at LaFayette, to succeed Founder Moody's son William as head of the schools.
To be as genuinely religious as Elliott Speer was when he entered the drinking, carousing Princeton of Scott Fitzgerald was to be cynically labeled a "Christer." At that time his Princetonian father. Dr. Robert Elliott Speer, world-traveled senior secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, was at the height of his fame as the most powerfully emotional preacher of his day. Classmates who met Elliott Speer five years out of college found an affable young man no less religious but well-geared to his own generation. Northfield quickly felt his liberalizing touch. He allowed his boys to smoke, to have parties, to visit the girls at the sister school. Energetic and able, he launched a $3,000,000 fund-raising campaign, carried it to success despite the early intervention of Depression.
Police who swarmed over Northfield's campus last week had no trouble reconstructing the murder—someone lurked on a macadam path outside the study until Headmaster Speer stood up, then fired a shotgun pointblank through the window. But of weapon, killer or motive they could find no trace.
Trustee Chairman Wilfred Washington Fry, president of N. W. Ayer & Sons, summoned his board to Northfield, appointed a trio of teachers to head the school temporarily.