Headmaster Taft himself got to know his charges. Early on he began the long tradition of hosting small groups of boys for Sunday suppers in his living quarters. These evenings provided an informal setting for discussions of “any subject from European politics to the last unpopular rule adopted by the faculty.”
In 1936, after 46 years as headmaster, Horace Dutton Taft retired. Since his inauspicious start at Pelham Manor he had come to be regarded as one of the most revered headmasters in New England. After a year away, he returned to teach his favorite course—Civics—to Taft seniors.
Students and their guests watch a baseball game from the stonewall lining Woodbury Road.The Cruikshank Era, 1936–1963
In February of the following year a search committee appointed the man who would succeed Horace Taft as headmaster. Paul Fessenden Cruikshank seemed a perfect fit: a Blair Academy and Yale graduate who had majored in law and history, a past teacher and coach at Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven and at the Gunnery, and founder of the Romford School in nearby Washington, Connecticut. Surely Mr. Taft appreciated the close parallels to his own career and was pleased with the appointment. In the summer of 1936 Paul and Edith Fitch Cruikshank and their four children moved in to the Headmaster’s quarters in Horace Dutton Taft Hall.
For his first year of retirement Horace Taft gracefully “exiled himself” to California. On his return to Watertown, Cruikshank invited Taft to take an active role in the life of the school. In addition to teaching his class in civil government, the former headmaster spoke weekly at Vespers and hosted Sunday suppers for seniors at his home. Cruikshank later wrote of Horace Taft: “Close as he was to the school and active as he was in its life, he never once offered me gratuitous advice.”
While he was a strict and serious headmaster known for his unrelenting emphasis on moral standards, respect for authority, and his famous insistence on gray flannels and wingtips over khakis and loafers, Cruikshank believed deeply in the ability of the upperclassman to “regulate” himself so as to find his own balance between work and play. New privileges were extended to seniors and upper middlers (juniors) even as life was highly regimented, with compulsory meals (including breakfast,) daily Vespers, and church on Sundays.
The War Years
The War years had a profound effect upon campus life. The departure of much of the school’s staff for wartime work required that the boys take over responsibility for much of the daily care of the school. Student monitors supervised student KP duty, waited on dining tables (previously the task of staff waitresses) and cleaned classrooms, halls, stairs and other public spaces. While they continued to be the ones to clear the hockey rink (which was then the Pond) the boys took over the tasks of mowing the campus grounds and harvesting fruit at local farms for the kitchen. In fact, so much work was done by the students in World War II that the school’s tuition dropped from $1,450 to $1,250.
Another wartime change was the accelerated graduation program, instituted in 1943, in which rising seniors took a summer semester so that they could graduate from Taft in February. Cruikshank felt strongly that the boys finish their secondary education before entering the military. Many faculty members also left Taft temporarily to join the war effort. At Vespers the headmaster would read the names of alumni killed in the line of service; in all there were 59.
Cruikshank’s great legacy was the expansion of the curriculum and the increase in academic standards at Taft. While student enrollment stayed fairly steady at 345 boys between 1930 and 1960, the faculty grew by 50%, the course selection by 200%, and many AP course were introduced. During the 1940s and early ’50s the number of student clubs exploded as well, owing in part to wartime advances in technology and skills, such as chemistry, navigation, radio, ski and outing. Debates with other New England prep school teams, especially arch rivals Choate and Hotchkiss in the Triangular Cup, continued to be popular.
The Mays RinkOne of the most exciting and enterprising events of the time took place in the year 1949–1950, when hockey coach and math teacher Len Sargent decided to build an artificial ice rink for Taft. After traveling the country on a fund-raising trip that summer, he returned to Watertown and mobilized over 3,000 hours of help from students and faculty to construct the first such facility in the independent-school world. After the structure was given a roof, the resulting quantum leap in practice time helped to ensure Taft’s dominance in the prep school ice hockey league for more than a decade.
There were many other additions and improvements to the campus during the Cruikshank years, including the purchase of faculty houses, construction of an up-to-the-minute science center in 1960, a language lab, the “New Gym”, and the interior rehabilitation of several of the main buildings.
In 1961, he hired a 20-year-old teacher named Lance Odden, fresh out of Princeton, who began offering a course in Far Eastern History. Until then, history offerings had been confined to the traditional categories of Ancient, Medieval, European and American. Russian History and Asian Studies were soon added.
Edith Cruikshank was universally regarded as a gracious, maternal figure by the boys and known for her tea and cinnamon toast gatherings in the Headmaster’s quarters. She was appreciated particularly for her special efforts to study the photo and file of each new boy before he arrived on campus in the fall, so she would know every student’s name and something about their background. Her kindliness may have been most appreciated by the youngest members of the community, the eighth graders, who formed the junior class until the level was phased out in 1958. As with all headmasters’ wives, Mrs. Cruikshank’s job included hosting visiting parents, dignitaries, and athletic teams, and accompanying her husband on frequent school-related travels, in addition to raising four children.
The Esty Years, 1963–1972
In 1963 Paul Cruikshank retired, and the Board of trustees hired John Cushing Esty, associate dean and instructor in math at Amherst College, to be the next headmaster.
He and his wife Katharine, an author and mother of their four children, took over Taft at the dawn of the tumultuous ’60s. With his energetic intellect and ambitious ideals, Esty set out to renew the educational experience at Taft. His mission was to question some of the traditional tenets of education and to introduce opportunities and experiences that would foster the development of students’ identities and self-esteem as they moved from adolescence into young adulthood.
Esty recast the mold of the headmaster and asked new things of the faculty: to foster their students’ reflection on the experiences and material they were exposed to, rather than be asked simply to know it. Like other younger educators of his generation, Esty encouraged critical thinking and active discussion inside and outside the classroom.
Ideally, for Esty, good work habits and achievement should be discovered by the student himself, and learning be its own reward. Accordingly, one of Esty’s first initiatives was the Independent Studies Program, which he introduced in 1964 under Lance Odden’s supervision. This was intended to allow the more mature senior boy to follow a chosen field of interest with a teacher’s guidance, and to exert some control over his own life at school. He was not required to attend classes, or the job program or athletics, and exempted from some of the dormitory rules, but was expected to complete all regular course work and behave responsibly. The early IS projects ranged from literary criticism and playwriting to an analysis of American foreign policy in Latin America and the construction of a harpsichord. The program brought a host of distinguished visiting speakers, professors and artists to campus, such as Robert Penn Warren and Archibald MacLeish.
Esty’s experiment in education included changes in daily school life for all students.
The Sunday schedule was loosened considerably, allowing boys to sleep in, and to attend the church of their choice in the afternoon. Where Vespers under Horace Taft and Paul Cruikshank had been a formal, serious function with only the headmaster and the most senior faculty presiding, or perhaps a guest speaker, Sunday Vespers was eliminated, and the weekday Vespers format was opened to a wide array of students and faculty as well as outside presenters.
Before he finished his decade as headmaster, Esty and the school’s trustees began the giant move toward co-education. In the spring of 1971, 82 girls entered Taft.
Opening day of the Arts and Humanities Wing, April 26, 1986Lance Odden’s Headmastership, 1972–2001
In 1972, the school’s second year of co-education, Lance Odden was named the new headmaster. In 1966 he had spent a year and two summers studying for his M.A. in history at the University of Wisconsin, writing his graduate thesis “U.S. Relations with China, 1929–31.” Odden’s intellectual passion for history and Asian Studies was balanced by his career in coaching the boys’ varsity lacrosse and hockey teams. His wife, Patsy Odden, would become assistant director of athletics and coach of the hugely successful girls’ varsity hockey teams.
Odden’s mission at Taft was to put the school on a comparable footing with the other principal New England prep schools at a time when admissions were becoming increasingly competitive. For the next 29 years, the first couple directed and oversaw the transition to coeducation,