One of the few things which Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Chicago Tribune's Colonel Robert R. McCormick have in common is their headmaster. As prep-school boys both stood—and perhaps still stand, a little—in awe of the most famed U.S. headmaster of his generation: the founder of small, ultra-swank Groton School. Endicott Peabody, a living legend at 87, retired from Groton's headmastership in 1940—to a new house just off the campus. Last week he received his first full-length biography, Peabody of Groton (Coward McCann; $5), based in large part on his persistent and prodigious correspondence with his rich and famous alumni, their parents and friends.* The author, himself an old "Grottie," is Headmaster Frank Ashburn of Brooks School (North Andover, Mass.).
Days with Punch, Endicott Peabody was born in Salem, Mass, in 1857. His family tree was one of the oldest in the Commonwealth. One of his ancestors was Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Endicott, who hanged Nonconformist Quakers, but was the friend of Nonconformist Roger Williams. Another was Joseph Peabody, owner of one of Salem's finest East India fleets. When "Cotty" was 13, his father became a London banking partner of Junius Spencer Morgan, father of J.P. the First. From 14 to 19, Cotty attended Cheltenham College, preparatory school, where he became "tall, strong as a horse, graceful." From there he went to Cambridge, where he read Punch, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson and the law—and not much else. "There is a striking similarity between the Rector's humor and that of Punch in the days when he was in Britain," observes Ashburn. When Endicott graduated, he knew only that he wanted to be useful.
"What About the Ministry?" When he returned to the U.S., a cousin recalls, he was "a wonderful specimen of stalwart youth, tall, broad-shouldered, fair-haired, blue-eyed, with an irresistible capacity for laughter. ... Of course a young man like that landing in the midst of Boston society played havoc with the fair sex. They fell before him like ninepins." Handsome Cotty entered Lee, Higginson & Co., brokers, as a runner and clerk. Life among the trust funds soon bored him. He visited the famed, silver-tongued rector of Boston's fashionable Trinity Episcopal Church, Phillips Brooks. Their conversation:
P: Mr. Brooks, I am Endicott Peabody. My brother is going to be married by you.
B: Oh, yes. Come in.
P: What do you think of brokerage?
B: It doesn't lead to anything, and has little in it except a fortune, if that.
P: What about the ministry?
B: If it appeals to you as the most interesting and desirable thing in the world to tell people about Christ, you had better come in.
Baseball in Tombstone. After settling accounts with his family's cool Unitarianism, Anglophile Peabody entered the mild warmth of the Episcopal Church. Thereafter "he was . . . first of all a priest." With his brimming fund of faith, Peabody at Cambridge's Episcopal Theological School was "just not interested in details of the Higher Criticism or lower skepticism."