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More felicitous a theme could not have been chosen. For Exeter, with its sister school Andover, is noted for its grown-up atmosphere. Its students are older and more mature than in most prep schools. Many of them come from the small manufacturing towns of Massachusetts and New Hampshire to work their way through Exeter by waiting on table at Alumni Hall and doing odd jobs around the school and town. Few boys who need special attention find their way to Exeter, or last long after getting there. There are few rules. Smoking is allowed in the rooms though not on the street; seniors must be in their dormitory by ten, all others by eight; there is no "lights out" time. The chief faculty check on undergraduate amusements is the famed, and perhaps legendary. "Black List" of town girls. To be seen with a girl on this list means instant expulsion. This freedom, almost that of a college undergraduate, stems largely from the practice of letting students room in private houses around the town instead of concentrating them in dormitories. Though the new dormitories recently built have greatly reduced the number of "out students," the idea that a student's extra curricular activities are his own business still persists. Even the force of public opinion, so powerful in smaller schools, is comparatively weak in Exeter, where one can read Shelley or collect butterflies without running any bodily risk.
Though its roots go back a century and a half, Exeter has grown too big and heterogeneous for local color to survive in appreciable quantities. The school has its drink (the "lead shot": a fearful mixture of the sweetest and heaviest syrups of the soda fountain), its venerable professor (James Arthur ["Tuffie"] Tufts, hollow-eyed, white-mustached professor of English), its mode of celebrating mighty victories (keeping the great bell in the Academy Building clanging for hours, building huge bonfires out on the Plimpton playing fields). But the great Exeter tradition is, of course, the rivalry with Andover, which is all the more comparable to the Harvard-Yale rivalry because Exeter has been a predominantly Harvard school (though of late she has sent many sons to Yale and Princeton) and Andover has long been almost completely Yale. And so the climax of the sesquicentennial celebration, for the rank and file of alumni and boys, was not the impressive official ceremonies but rather the 50th Exeter-Andover baseball game, which was played at Exeter in the glow of the evening sun and which resulted in a victory for Exeter, 4~to-2.