In the grill, over their "peanut betweens" and "Garbo with jams" (English muffins with jam), Exonians last week had two distressing subjects to chew over. They had just lost, 7-to-18, the Big Game with rival Andover, 28 miles away. And their headmaster, tweedy, well-loved Lewis Perry, 68, who had long talked of quitting, had now made it official.
When Lewis Perry became principal of New Hampshire's Phillips Exeter Academy in 1914, he found the school deep in traditions and a $250,000 debt. It had been founded the year Cornwallis surrendered, by John Phillips, whose nephew, Samuel Phillips, started Andover. Daniel Webster went to Exeter; Presidents Lincoln, Grant and Cleveland sent their sons. Other Exonian notables: Booth Tarkington, Robert Benchley, Banker Thomas W. Lament (now president of the trustees).
The student body (a phrase Dr. Perry hates) has jumped from 572 to 725—and each year Exeter turns down five times as many applicants as it accepts. Dr. Perry will leave Exeter embarrassingly rich—with a $10 million endowment, 33 ,new buildings, most of them handsome Georgian brick, and a faculty that has almost tripled. Exonians credit Dr. Perry's fund-raising talent for the school's prosperity. And in fact the biggest gift ($5 million) came from the late oil millionaire, Edward S. Harkness, benefactor of Harvard and Yale, who was no Exonian—just a friend of Perry's. His other friends include hundreds of alumni and parents, students—who see less of him now than their predecessors did—and his grandchildren, who call him "Boo." He was an English professor at Williams College when he was hired for Exeter; but at Exeter he teaches no classes. He is casual, pleasant, hearty, but no backslapper. Summers at Martha's Vineyard he conducts secular Sunday services, reading favorite passages from Tom Sawyer.