John Murray Forbes of Boston made a fortune in China before he was 24. Back home again, he built the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, acted as a Lincoln secret agent in the Civil War, and in 1885 opened a school near Boston. He called it Milton Academy, after the town, and after a school that had once flourished there. Last week Milton gave a dignified party to celebrate its "150th" anniversary.
Milton's 2,500 graduates include 15 Forbeses, four Cabots, eight Coolidges, five Saltonstalls, nine Welds. Most Milton alumni go to Harvard, and State Street (Boston's Wall Street) is full of them. Besides the proper Bostonians, Milton's roster includes Poet T. S. Eliot, Playwright Robert E. Sherwood, Diplomat William Phillips, Dr. (and ex-All America) Barry Wood, Principal William G. Saltonstall of Exeter. The manufacturer of Thayer's Slippery Elm Lozenges, the designer of three America's Cup-winning yachts, and a British M.P. are all old Miltonians. On Admiral Byrd's first expedition an old Miltonian planted the school's colors at the South Pole.
Unenforced Obligations. Miltonis really three in one: a coed elementary school, a girls' school, a boys' prep school. Upper classes are strictly separated by sex, but Milton boys & girls share a library and observatory, play an annual baseball game together. The combined enrollment: 600.
For those who board in, the Milton school day starts at 7 a.m., when "yellers" run down the halls acting as human alarm clocks. Smoking is forbidden except for first-classmen (seniors), parents are advised to keep weekly pocket allowances to 75¢, and there is a compulsory Saturday sewing-hour for Milton girls. Unlike many New England prep schools, Milton has no required religion courses. But Headmaster Arthur Bliss Perry, 49, son of Harvard's famed scholar Bliss Perry, and a Milton teacher since 1921, tries to impress on his well-bred boys & girls "the obligation of the unenforceable."
Planned Byproducts. More than 1,000 graduates wandered nostalgically last week over Milton's 95-acre, $2,000,000 campus, watched a student production of Alumnus Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, heard speeches by Pundit Walter Lippmann, Senator Leverett Saltonstall, Wellesley's Mildred McAfee Horton, Oxford's Sir Richard Livingstone. After Sir Richard's plea for the sort of education that would foster "a feeling for the first-rate" and "a quest for the good," visiting educators wrangled politely about the best way to get it.
Provost Elliott Dunlap Smith of Carnegie Tech thought that each boy had to work out his own values for himself. He told how, as a boy, he nad built a desk to last a lifetime, after long labor asked his teacher whether one panel was good enough. When the teacher told him to figure it out for himself, Smith scrapped the panel and made another one. The desk was still serving him last week, and so was the lesson. Said he: "Morals can be better taught incidentally."