Famed is Groton School, Groton, Mass.
Famed is its decorative Gothic chapel, gift of the late Groton Teacher William Amory Gardner, whose will, filed last week in Cambridge, Mass., left Groton $500,000. Both became even more famed last spring when twice the chapel emitted, in the dead of night, not gentle, melodious, bell-music but a prodigious, strident jingling & jangling. There had been, Grotonians knew, depredations in the chapel. To catch the marauders (presumably schoolboys), wires and alarms had been rigged up. These went off, set the campus in an uproar, revealed naught but the fact that the alarm mechanism was faulty, had worked spontaneously. The villains have never been caught.
Worse, much more shocking to the socialite school and to that well-beloved dean of U. S. schoolmasters, Headmaster Rev. Dr. Endicott Peabody, were the events of the following October. In the boathouse on the nearby Nashua River was found the crew coach's launch, a gaping hole in its side. In the chapel choir room was heard miaowing, tinkling a cat was shut up in the piano. Chapel memorials to deceased worthies were ink-spattered, mutilated. A crucifix was found in bushes near the chapel: it had been torn from its niche, tossed through a window.
Quietly, efficiently, an investigation was conducted by three Groton trustees (Harvard men, Boston businessmen) : Francis Lee Higginson, Charles Pelham Curtis Jr., James Lawrence. Last week it was revealed that the acts had been committed by two Groton graduates: Harvard Senior Edward K. Jenkins of Warrenton, Va., member of the Harvard polo team, and Daniel Merriman (dropped from Harvard in his junior year and awaiting re-entry), son of Harvard History Professor Roger Bigelow Merriman. They had gone to Groton after a football game. They were drunk.
Their parents paid for the damage and incidental expenses: $2,000. Headmaster Peabody said he would push prosecution no further. But Harvard authorities planned to deal with the vandals, probably expel them. Said Vandal Merriman: "It is no use to say I am sorry. Sorry is not the word. Nothing can express it." Said Vandal Jenkins: "We were drunk at the time and as we became drunker we lost all sense of the seriousness of the things we were doing. I was not actuated by spite at Groton. . . . My record there was good."