When Rev. John Crocker, Episcopal Chaplain of Princeton University, was considering an offer to go to St. Paul's School as its headmaster last year (TIME, Aug. 8), his good friend and old headmaster, Groton's Endicott ("Peabo") Peabody, urged him to take the job. "Jack" Crocker, like St. Paul's, is High Church, and Dr. Peabody believed he would be happy there. But Crocker turned down St. Paul's, as he had turned down nominations for the Episcopal bishoprics of New Jersey and Vermont. Last week he got an invitation he did not refuse. With the obvious approval of retiring Headmaster Peabody, Groton elected High Churchman Jack Crocker to succeed Low Churchman Dr. Peabody.
In electing its new headmaster, Groton took a big step, for this famed, exclusive preparatory school has had the same headmaster for all its 55 years. Dr. Peabody, who will serve another year before Crocker takes over, knows that Groton's future is in the hands of no stranger. Fifteen members of the Crocker family went to Groton, and Jack Crocker is an exemplary old Groton boy. He went to Harvard, where he played a bang-up end, then went to Oxford for two years. Afterward he taught at Andover, studied at the Yale and Episcopal Theological Schools, was ordained a priest, went to Princeton as chaplain ten years ago.
Princetonians know Jack Crocker, now 39, as a big, dark-haired, broad-browed man who looks like Napoleon in his youth, likes his exercise (squash and tennis), loves to argue, has a laugh like a small thunderclap, six children and a comely wife (née Mary Hallowell, sister of two famed Harvard athletes) who sometimes needs to remind him where he parked his car. An earnest student, a disciple of Humanist Paul Elmer More, Crocker is a practitioner of "muscular Christianity." In this he resembles old Dr. Peabody, who used to play games with his students.
His friends last week were willing to bet that Jack Crocker, no snob, would get on well at snobbish Groton. One of his chief problems will be to satisfy old Groton boys, whose sons have always had first chance to be admitted to Groton, and still make it a representative institution. Already there are so many sons of old Groton boys (including 16 Roosevelts) that they form almost two-thirds of Groton's enrollment.