In the extreme Southeast corner of New Hampshire, 50 mi. north of Boston, is the town of Exeter, where John Phillips in 1781 founded Phillips Exeter Academy. Twenty-five miles nearer Boston is Andover, where John's nephew. Samuel, founded Phillips Academy one year earlier. (His school later became "Phillips Academy at Andover" to distinguish it from his uncle's school at Exeter.) Exeter and Andover have flourished mightily, until today they are the twin giants of prep schools in size and in prestige. Other schools are certainly more fashionable, possibly more potent scholastically, improbably more prolific in first-string athletes. But no other schools have the glamour of Exeter and Andover, whose histories are as long as their rosters of students.
Last week Thomas William Lament, outstanding Morgan partner, went back to Exeter, whence he was graduated in 1888, strolled about the elm-shaded Yard, greeted friends and classmates, some 2,000, who like him had come back to the old school to celebrate her 150th birthday. From the Yard Mr. Lament could not see the modern, red-brick Lament Infirmary, whose crack contagious ward is an echo of the time Mr. Lamont had scarlet fever at Exeter.* But he could see the modest basement offices of the school paper, the Exonian, where his sons, Corliss and Austin ("Egg"), spent much of their time while at Exeter. His reminiscing over, Mr. Lamont went to the new Thompson baseball cage and presided over an alumni luncheon, where he read a letter of congratulation from President Hoover and where another Morgan man talked: Vernon Munroe, president of Exeter's General Alumni Association. As Mr. Lamont looked around the tables, he saw such alumni as Senator George Higgins Moses (New Hampshire), '87, Roland William Boyden, '81, Bernard Walton Trafford, '89, and George Arthur Plimpton, '73.
But, true to its New England traditions, Exeter welcomed to its 150th anniversary not primarily men of wealth or family but men of learning. At the commemorative exercises, the platform was crowded with the deans and presidents of the great Eastern colleges and schools. Speech of the day was that of President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, of Harvard, who asked for less coddling and babying in modern education, declared that a child should read "fluently" at five and "certainly at six" and went on to say: "This retardation runs through the whole process. In the secondary school we study what should have been finished earlier; in college we do what should have been done at school. . . ."