Jeremiah Evarts

When Jeremiah Evarts was eleven, his parents sent him off to school in Burlington, twelve miles south of their farm, on the shore of Lake Champlain. A frail child, he soon found himself attracted to the life of books and ideas rather than a life working the soil, and he quickly distanced himself from his family’s close attachment to the land. When Jeremiah turned seventeen, he travelled on horseback back to East Guilford to study with the Reverend John Elliott, and entered Yale the following fall of 1798.

Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards (and thus first cousin to Aaron Burr), was president of Yale at that time. As early as 1776 he had described Americans as having a unique national identity, a new people with common religion, manners, interests, and language. Appalled by the radicalism of the French revolution, Dwight vigorously challenged “infidelity” from the pulpit, led the Federalist Party in the political arena in Connecticut, and encouraged efforts to maintain the influence of religion in public life. One of his principal accomplishments, central to the “Second Great Awakening", was to help found the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).

The ABCFM sent missionaries to India, Ceylon, the Sandwich Islands, China, Singapore, Siam, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Syria, Persia, to the Zulus in Southern Africa, and to the Cherokees and Choctaws in Georgia and Tennessee. The ABCFM prohibited unmarried people from entering the mission field, but to help prospective missionaries, they maintained a list of “reasonably good-looking” young women who were pious, educated, fit and available for matrimony. Missionaries established schools and set up printing presses wherever they were stationed, as printing and literacy were crucial elements in the process of Bible translation and evangelism.

When Jeremiah Evarts arrived at Yale he was only a year off the farm. His classmates described him as spare, homespun, a bit stiff and awkward, but honest. He obviously made the most of New Haven, attending debates at the state’s general assembly and meeting and dining with representatives, the governor, and the lieutenant governor. While he avoided the more riotous behavior of many of the students, he did find time to play some football, and he wasn’t afraid of controversy. His junior year essay addressed the question: “Are the Abilities of Females Inferior to those of Males?” which is a question my father would have warned me to never, never, consider in public. He was elected president of the Brothers Society, chosen orator by the Moral Society, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He passed exams in Greek, Horace, Cicero, Algebra, Surveying, Trigonometry, and Navigation, but evidently the need to preserve republican virtue and the American future through religion and morality dominated his thoughts.

The election of Jefferson (and Burr) in the “revolution” of 1800 upended the Federalist view of the world. This upheaval undoubtedly contributed to Jeremiah’s conversion experience during the revival that swept through the college in 1802. For Jeremiah, conversion called him away from the family farm into a world where he would struggle every day to improve the moral life of his country, searching for the “Soul of America” through both his private and public life.

Like most young grads, after Jeremiah graduated from Yale in 1802 (which started the Evarts family affinity for Yale and their aversion to “Hell and Harvard”) he cast about for various occupations. He taught school in Peacham, Vermont for a year. He knew he was not cut out to be a farmer or a merchant, so he decided to study law. He studied in New Haven, and in September 1804 married Mehitabel Sherman Barnes, the recently widowed daughter of Roger Sherman, the New Haven patriot who had signed not only the Declaration of Independence, but also the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.

The following spring Jeremiah received his law degree and delivered a commencement address on the vanity of pursuing fame. He soon began writing essays which were published in the Connecticut Evangelical Magazine. He was admitted to the bar in 1806. Jeremiah thought he could be a successful lawyer “if only I could get the business”, but he was not terribly successful, perhaps because he could never get over his obligation to assist “unjust” clients. He soon considered moving to Massachusetts to either practice in a new setting, write, or sell books. In January of 1809, he was asked to become assistant editor of The Panoplist in Boston. This was his opportunity to move on.

Pressmen

The first printing press was brought to Cambridge in 1638, the same year that John Evarts arrived. The Reverend Joseph Glover, a “worthy and wealthy dissenting clergyman”, was a great supporter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony which had been started when seventeen ships brought a thousand colonists to Boston in 1630. Glover thought a printing press would be an important improvement for the new colonies. He raised money among his associates and purchased a press, two trays of type, ink and reams of paper and found an apprentice pressman, Stephen Daye, to accompany him and his family as they emigrated to the new world.

Unfortunately, Reverend Glover never made it. He died at sea during the voyage in 1638, but the press and Glover’s widow and children and Stephen Daye made it ashore. The widow Glover had the press set up in Cambridge, where a college had just been started. The college would be named Harvard College the following year when it received 400 books and 779 pounds sterling from the estate of another young English clergyman, John Harvard. The move to Cambridge was a good one on Elizabeth Glover’s part, because she soon became the wife of Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard College.

Stephen Daye was supposedly a good printer, some say he was related to John Daye, the eminent London printer of the 16th century, but the evidence shows otherwise. In the first year he printed a broadsheet, The Freeman’s Oath and an almanack, and in 1640 printed the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in the new world. He received 300 acres of land from the colony for his work, which he promptly mortgaged for a cow, a calf, and a heifer. A close inspection of the book shows that, while the type brought from Europe was new and unworn, Daye didn’t really know what he was doing. Impressions were uneven, there were many typographical errors, commas and periods were used interchangeably, syllables were broken incorrectly.

By 1643, his fourth year on the job, Daye landed in jail (about average for a pressman). By 1648, he had been sacked from his job by President Dunster, who administered his wife’s financial affairs, and replaced by another pressman, Samuel Green. Daye hung around Cambridge, sued Dunster for one hundred pounds claiming past wages, and went to court to try to collect on his real estate grant.

By 1656, there were two presses in Cambridge. These were the old “wine press” apparatuses, paper had to be brought in from England, and production was very slow. It made sense to send a lot of material back to England to be printed if time allowed. By this time, however, the colonists had begun to teach young Indians to read at the school in Cambridge. They wished to translate the Bible into the Indian languages; it made sense to print in the colonies where the Indian students could proofread the copy. Using new type cast in England, Green printed 500 copies of the New Testament when Marmaduke Johnson, a master printer, arrived from London in 1660.

Marmaduke was a pretty good pressman, although he had some run-in’s with the law in his past. His wife was back in England, and so when he got to Cambridge he started hitting pretty hard on Samuel Green’s daughter; by 1662 a restraining order had been put out on him. Marmaduke got to work printing the Indian Bible which John Eliot was translating into Algonquin using a phonetic English alphabet. They got help from a young Nipmunk Indian they named James the Printer.

The Bible consisted of about one hundred and fifty different sheets, which were folded into signatures and then gathered together, sewn, and bound into books. The pressrun for the bible was one thousand copies, and it took about a week to print each form of the book, so, with Marmaduke's periodic absences, it took more than two years to print the book. The printers had two trays of type, which was enough to set a form, but after each form was printed, the type had to be distributed back into the cases, so that it would be available for the next form. The New Testament came out in 1661. There were a few delays along the way due to Marmaduke’s “ issues”, and then the Old Testament was completed in 1663.

In 1714, the press became the property of Timothy Green who took it to New London, Connecticut. Over the years, the press was moved several times through Connecticut and New Hampshire. It eventually printed the first Vermont newspaper The Vermont Gazette, or Green Mountain Post Boy in Westminster in 1781. George Hough purchased the old Daye press and moved it to Windsor in 1783 where he published The Vermont Journal and the Universal Advertiser. (Anthony Haswell printed the second state paper the Vermont Gazette in Bennington in 1783).The press is now in the Vermont Historical Society.

Going into Business

Young James Perkins loved books, and would have benefited greatly from a Harvard education, but the circumstances of the time dictated that he become apprenticed as a teenager to W. & J. Shattuck, merchants in Boston. On reaching the age of twenty-one in 1782 James came into an inheritance from his grandfather Peck, and set out on his own for Cap François on the island of Saint Domingue (Haiti), the richest, most elegant city in the West Indies, which supplied half the sugar and much of the coffee used in Europe.

The Revolutionary War was still underway; the first ship James sailed on was captured by a British frigate and taken as a prize into New York Harbor. He made his way back to Boston and sailed again, this time on his Mother’s boat The Beaver, which successfully carried him to Cap François along with a cargo of cavalry horses for the island’s French army.

Cap François was a two week sail, but a world away, from Boston. With its lush tropical climate, and fueled by unrelenting exploitation of slave labor, Saint Domingue was the most profitable and most cosmopolitan of all New World colonies during the last half of the eighteenth century. Cap François was the "Paris of the Antilles", famous throughout the Caribbean for its women, particularly the mulatto courtesans whose skills were advertised around the world by the sailors who came to port. Soon after James arrived, the Revolutionary War finally came to a close, and a sense of euphoria lifted the spirits of young Americans everywhere. Anything was possible now, and especially so for young men in their twenties, especially young Bostonians with some capital.

Jim went to work trading for the firm of Wall and Tardy, until that firm dissolved in 1786. His brother Tom then joined forces with Jim and his friend Walter Burling,who had just fled New York after shooting a man who had impregnated his sister, and set up business as Perkins, Burling, and Perkins. They sold the usual commodities: Slaves -- “Your negroes were sold at Auction, our W.B. attended and trumped up Bob to 2300 and odd livres, the other went for 1600, he was lame.” Flour -- “Our J.P. will be in Boston last of September and will communicate to you the means of Introducing Flour to this Port and taking away Contraband Goods.” Wine -- “Excellent Sherry wine in quarter casks, Madeira wine.”

Young Jim certainly enjoyed the pleasures of the Caribbean, but when his brother Tom took over on the Cape in the spring of 1786, he returned to Boston to act the firm’s Boston Agent. He had business of his own at home as well. In January, he rode out to Worcester in a sled with his sister Mary, getting dumped once in the snow along the way, to be married to twenty-one year old Sarah Paine, daughter of Judge Timothy Paine, of Worcester.

The portrait of Sarah as a young woman by Stuart Newton shows her as round faced, wearing a headband, with a slightly distrusting smile. In the Gambardella portrait painted later in life which hangs in my front room she seems rather dower – she keeps her lips pursed, probably missing some teeth; the blue ribbons in her hair were only revealed when the Keck’s cleaned the painting back in the seventies. Nevertheless, she must have been game. She accompanied Jim back to Haiti even though passage was not always assured; the eldest son of Jim’s sister Elizabeth had just sailed for the island that winter, but the ship had never arrived.

At Cap François Jim, who had drilled his youthful platoon in front of the garrisoned Redcoats, and his younger brother Sam were Captain and Lieutenant of the American "Corps de Garde ". This quasi-military position was a social distinction, but also a practical move, as the colony’s wealth was derived from the forced labor of five-hundred-thousand African slaves. Without the strong arm of the French military, and the para-military “gardes”, the colony’s agricultural economy could never survive.

The young married couple travelled between Boston and Cap François. In 1791 they were on the island with their infant son James when they travelled by coach to visit several plantations on the fertile plain which spread inland from the Cape. When they arrived at the Rouvry plantation, The Marquis was in the mountains on business, and their hostess was visiting a neighboring plantation, but expected them for dinner. When Madame finally arrived she was in a state of great alarm. The whole country was in revolt; the slaves were burning and looting everything. At their plantation, evidently, the slaves did not yet know about the uprising, but it was clear there was no time to lose. A plan was made to leave at midnight. As they sat down to dinner set on a rich service of plate, the boisterous noises outside made it clear news had arrived of the day’s events. Dinner was soon over; little food had been eaten in the silent gloom.

Madame de Rouvry packed up her plate. It took some money to bribe the driver to harness his horses, but just before twelve the three carriages were brought to the door. The Marchioness, her beautiful sixteen year old daughter, and her instructress were in the first carriage, with the plate; Sarah and infant son James, with Madame de Rouvry and her child, were in the second carriage; Mr. Perkins, and a lady who had escaped another plantation, were in a phaeton; and Mr. Baury was on horseback. James and Baury were both armed and agreed to shoot the drivers if they hesitated, and mount the horses and drive the carriages themselves.

They reached a village where the houses were all lit up and the slaves howling and dancing. The carriages came to a stop, but Madame de Rouvry ordered her driver to proceed instantly, or she would have him punished in the severest manner. The man hesitated, but her voice and Baury’s sword prompted him to spur the horses, and they proceeded so quickly that the insurgents who were all in the houses dancing and beating drums never discovered them.
They arrived safely at Fort Dauphin about six o'clock in the morning where they secured a boat and sailed for the Cape. Sarah spread a mattress on the ballast stones of the vessel, and she and her young son lay down to rest during the passage.

After the island finally fell to the slave revolt in 1798, James and Sarah Perkins brought their faithful Negro slave, Moose, who had saved their lives, back with them when they returned to the United States. Moose received his freedom; but the only use he ever wished to make of it was “to spend it in loving service to his former master, and all who were connected with him. He was a great favorite with young and old; and no wonder, for, to the day of his death at an advanced age, their joys and sorrows were his own.”

Sarah was the “Glue” that held the Perkins clan together until her death in 1841. She outlived James by almost twenty years, living in Pine Bank, their country home on Jamaica Pond. She looked tough, but she took care of her friends and relatives. Her Trumbull cousins in Worcester were not as well off as the Perkins, but Sarah purchased a home for them, and made sure the deed was conveyed through the female line.

Print

My year editing the Horae at St. Paul’s was the first step in a career associated with print. I went on to the University of Denver where I majored in English, studying with Bob Richardson and John Williams and Bob Pawlowski and Helen Williams, writing poetry and fiction and studying literature, particularly modern American poetry.

I’ve come to realize that I have been living in the latest part of a continuum of change. How we live is defined in part by how we communicate. I grew up on the very tail end of the letterpress era, and made my living through multicolor offset lithography. The business was transformed in the 1990’s with the rise of desktop publishing and digital file formats, and is continuing to change as it is integrated with other distribution channels for information such as the internet.

I had no idea what I was getting into when I got my first job.

I worked on the newspaper, The Clarion, setting headlines on the phototypositor, waxing galleys, slicing them with exacto knives, and pasting up the paper. Looking for some practical experience, I stayed in Denver for a year after college and apprenticed at the Harvest Press with Roger Strawbridge and Seth Milliken, where I drove the truck, learned to run the Kluge letterpress, help feed a Heidelberg KORD press, paper cutter and folder.

I returned east in 1974 and became assistant to the production manager at the House of Offset, a large commercial printer in Somerville, MA, which was running two-color Millers and Miehles. I bought paper, planned jobs, contracted with binderies and finishers. Four-color-process offset printing was entering its heyday; Polaroid and Gillette kept all the printers in Boston busy with their marketing campaigns.

Soon Morris (“its on the truck”) Greenbaum, who owned Graphic Arts Finishers in Charlestown offered me the opportunity to manage The Mechanical Bindery, which he was starting in Everett. After a few year running businesses for other people, I figured I could start a business of my own.

Vermont

John Evarts was perhaps the first of my forbears to come to America. He emigrated from Yorkshire and settled in Concord, Massachusetts around 1638. He lived in Concord where at least two of his children were born, before moving to Connecticut around 1650. The Evarts family farmed around Guilford for the next four generations.

After a century of plowing, overgrazing, deforestation, and erosion, the soil was becoming exhausted and the population growth limited options for farming new land locally. After the revolution my progenitor James Evarts, like many of his contemporaries, moved to Vermont, looking to resettle outside the inbred cluster of farms on the coast. Jeremiah Evarts was born in 1781 to James and Sarah Todd Evarts in Sunderland, Vermont, about fifteen miles north of where I live today in Bennington.

Settlements were being developed throughout the Republic of Vermont in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Ethan and Ira Allen, who also lived in Sunderland, had travelled across the Green Mountains four years earlier to meet with fellow settlers at the tavern in Windsor to declare the creation of the Republic of Vermont, independent from the jurisdictions of New York and New Hampshire.

The Evarts family farmed in Sunderland for a few years, but found that southwest Vermont was better suited for water powered mills, such as the paper mill Anthony Haswell was building in Bennington, than for agriculture. The Evarts soon moved north and helped settle the town of Georgia in the productive Champlain Valley. By 1790, Georgia, with its timber resources and fertile soil, was one of the most prosperous communities in northern Vermont.

Tyringham

In the summer, we went to Tyringham.

My grandfather bought Glencote from the Gilder family in 1923. My grandmother Kate had lunch at the Cos Club on East 66th Street with Ros Gilder in the spring of 1922. Ros asked Kate what the family's plans were for the summer, would they spend it in Windsor? The Gilders had a house available next door to Four Brooks Farm, and would love to rent it to the right family. Sight unseen they rented the “cottage” for the summer, and bought it from the Gilder family the following year. Books on the Berkshires showcase the various ‘‘cottages” that were built during the Gilded Age- ostentatious mansions like Ventfort Hall, Shadow Brook, Naumkeag, The Mount, or Ashintully. This “cottage” was not an estate, but rather a fine Greek revival farmhouse, built around 1840, which stood between Four Brooks Farm, owned by the Gilders, and Singlebrook, which the Gilders rented to their farm help, the Lorings.

My father would tell me of his first memory of Glencote, how at the age of four, he would look out the back door to the woodpile, where a large rat would sit at his leisure and stare him down. The woodpile and the rat soon departed. My grandfather, for whom I was named, started planting hemlocks, arborvitae, and yews. In Manhattan he practiced law in Rockefeller Center, and wouldn’t dream of crossing 72nd Street in less than a suit and tie, but in Tyringham he wore a faded blue denim shirt, a straw hat, and dungarees, and spent his days on a step ladder patiently pruning and shaping his hedges. At lunch on the front terrace he’d sit on one of the three white Adirondack chairs which faced across the valley towards Cobble and drank his Carling Black Label, except on weekends, when he enjoyed a very dry martini. After dinner, he would sit in “his” chair in the corner of the living room next to the horse hair couch, and read Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and smoke a cigar. He had the ability to amaze me by blowing one, two, three smoke rings, and then sending a plume of smoke through the center of each concentric hole.

He had taught Latin and Greek at St. Pauls for a year before entering law school, and asked me, “What are you reading at St. Paul’s?”

“Hemingway.” I responded.

“Pshaw,” he snorted, “What would you want to read that rogue for?!”

After the Cuban embargo went into effect, he tried to accept the ersatz Habanas that were rolled in Honduras, but when he found they paled compared to the originals, soon gave up cigars completely.

Boss Lady

My mother has a large coffee cup in Tyringham emblazoned “BOSS LADY”. My younger sister Kate refers to herself as a B.L.I.T. (Boss Lady in Training). Every Mrs. Perkins I’ve ever known, especially my own wife Cathy, has had a “take charge” personality.

The original “Boss Lady” was Elizabeth Peck Perkins. Elizabeth was 18, the daughter of a successful fur trader, when she married James Perkins, an employee of her father’s counting-house, in Boston in 1754.

James became a general store merchant, and the family lived on King Street. James was a good friend of Paul Revere, and was said to have once bested him in a horse race. Daughter Elizabeth was born in 1756 and Ann in 1759. Their first son James was born in 1761, followed by Thomas (1764) and Samuel (1767). Following the imposition of the Stamp Act in 1765, as unrest grew in the colonies, English Redcoats were garrisoned right in Boston. Young son Jim gathered a troop of his playfellows, and drilled with soldier-like precision in front of the “Lobsterbacks,” but the play suddenly became deadly and real on a cold March morning in 1770 when nine-year-old Jim and his younger brother Tom were woken to view the blood frozen on the street, and the shot-ridden bodies laid out in their neighbors’ houses, from the shootings now known as the Boston Massacre.

The family continued to grow. Esther was born in 1771, and Margaret in 1773, but thirty-seven year old Elizabeth was suddenly left with three small sons and five daughters when her relatively young husband James died in 1773. Elizabeth did not shrink in the face of adversity; with “firmness and ability” she took over the family business, and sold groceries, chinaware, glass, and wine.

The family evacuated Boston just before the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 for Barnstable on the Cape. Following the British evacuation the next spring, they returned to Boston, but then Elizabeth’s father died in 1777, and her mother a little over a year later. Elizabeth was alone with her children. She was the sole surviving child however, and came into an inheritance of Boston commercial real estate which yielded a modest income.

Elizabeth wanted her sons to get a college education, but “the circumstances of the time” dictated that they enter the world of commerce. She reopened her business, and took over her husband’s partnerships with other merchants. She became part owner of the ship the “Beaver” and was soon receiving letters from Holland addressed to Mr. Elizabeth Perkins, or Captain Perkins. She was successful enough to be able to subscribe $1,000 for the Continental Army in 1780.

She thought independently; she was sympathetic to Universalist doctrines, refused to believe in damnation, and was accepting of a variety of religions. She contributed to Jean de Cheverus, the first Roman Catholic bishop in Boston, for his work among the poor, and she offered him the use of a building on School Street in which he could conduct services. Deeply concerned with the mental illness she saw about her, she helped found the Boston Female Asylum and served the asylum as a director.

Her children did well. The boys went into business. Jim began in business about 1782, at Cape François on the island of Santo Domingo (Haiti), and his brothers Tom and Sam joined him as soon as they came of age. Elizabeth married Russell Sturgis, a fur merchant; Ann married Robert Cushing, Captain of the Beaver; Mary married Benjamin Abbot, headmaster of Exeter Academy; Esther married Thomas Doubleday, and after he died, Josiah Sturgis (Russell’s brother), and Margaret married Ralph Bennet Forbes who entered the Perkins family business.

A granddaughter remembered, “they called her “Madame Perkins” and she seemed rather awful to us. Mother spoke of her, even to the servants, as “the old lady” . . . But she was a remarkable woman, very dignified, and of great strength of character. “

Elizabeth Peck Perkins, “Madame Perkins”, owned a considerable amount of real estate in the Boston business district throughout her life. She became very wealthy, but continued to live with the simplicity of a single mother raising eight children. She wore plain dresses of brown calico in the morning and did most of her own housework, and then changed to brown silk for the afternoon, when civic leaders came to call, looking for financial assistance with another charitable endeavor.

After several years of declining health, she died in 1807, but “something of her remarkable character seems, indeed, to have passed down through successive generations of descendents who to the present day are numbered among the business, political, and civic leaders of Massachusetts.

Telling Stories

The challenge one faces when appearing on Jeopardy is that in the course of our lives we accumulate so many facts and associations, but our brain is only able to recover certain memories at certain times, while at other critical moments, we draw a complete blank.

The ability of humans to represent thoughts, objects, and actions with various symbols has, from our earliest beginnings, separated our species from others. Our ability to improve and cultivate these representations provides a key to the evolution of our cultures.

The urge to communicate with consistency over time and space must be as old as the urge to speak, to pronounce words. We all want others to know what we know, to see what we see, to experience what we have experienced. We want to influence people, to bend them to our way of thinking. We want to do this quickly , and we want to do it widely, to as many people as possible, and we want our messages to last.

The development of language itself was the first major step, a leap of consciousness that allowed a person to step out of the ever present now, and refer to an object with a sound. “Naming” has magical powers which still reverberate through our society. When the Gospel of John is read each Christmas, we continue to marvel at the music of “the Word”.

Out of the development of language, we have History, the ability to reconstruct the past, as well as the ability to make predictions about the future, and Literature, the imaginative ability to associate and compare and record. We have standardization. By naming objects, we begin to quantify them. Commerce flows from the ability to compare and trade disparate objects.

When that early man made the first crude drawings in the dirt, he took an incredible leap into the world of representation and symbols. Scratches on a shell or a slab of clay mysteriously resemble an experience or an object and somehow have the power to convey that experience or object to another person.

Since then, our advances in communicating have been refinements of these leaps from experience to consciousness to symbolic representation, as we have learned to refine and standardize and mange and store and transport and distribute these symbols, When we have mastered one set of symbols, we have developed secondary and tertiary layers of symbols (shorthand) to speed our interactions, and we have refined the vehicles that we use to transmit these symbols.

The constraints have been labor and materials, time, portability, bulk, cost, permanence, accessibility, control, accuracy, authority, standardization, reproduction.

St. Paul's School

At fifteen, I was sent off to school to St. Paul’s, where my father had gone, and my grandfather, and his father as well, and where I could find my own name engraved on one of the “founders” pews in the chapel from my name-sake great-great-great Uncle Ned. It took me three years before I realized that both Jimmy Evarts and Alex McLane were my second cousins. I quickly found out I wasn’t terribly adept at French conjugations with Monsieur Jacques or Latin grammar with Bill Matthews, but I did learn that, in the late sixties, people were writing literature very different from what I read at home. I read Camus and Sartre, the Evergreen Review, Jean Genet, Ionesco, Brecht, Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Frank O’Hara, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, Candy, The Story of O, Baudelaire. I also learned that I could write. I learned, observing schoolmates like Andre Bishop and Peter Garland that, as a Paulie, I was expected to be able to create.

So I wrote poems, stories, plays; I joined the Concordian Literary Society, and was tapped to become co-editor of the Horae Scholasticae. It was an interesting time; I was turning eighteen years old, but also, in the midst of the struggles for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, St. Paul’s School seemed to be, oddly, a fulcrum point for the dynamic forces at work. I watched my housemaster Gerry Studds, teach history and politics to the sons of the Secretaries of Defense and the Army during the day, and then co-manage Gene McCarthy’s New Hampshire campaign in the evenings and knock Lyndon Johnson out of a second term in the White House. It was a time to question how the egalitarian rhetoric of the Episcopal Church could possibly square with the obvious elitism of the School, and, as the first coeducational exchange took place with Concord Academy, it was a time when we, individually and as a school, struggled with our sexual identities.

Editing the Horae, Bob Rettew and I would spend our evenings in George Carlisle’s apartment selecting manuscripts and spreading galleys all over the floor. George Carlisle, the master who advised the magazine, had been working on a novel for years, and loved the idea that he was advising a nephew of Max Perkins as he began his publishing career.

My classmate Charlie Scribner pointedly suggested that Grove Press might be the more appropriate venue for my tastes. My literary tastes at the time were mostly formed by The Evergreen Review, and Bob and I tried to push in an avant-garde direction, using varieties of display fonts and psychedelic illustrations. I now realize we didn’t have a clue what we were doing, and we broke the Horae production budget for a couple of years, but I admire the youthful vigor of the issues we produced.

Crossing the Bridge

Bethlehem was of course not “the country”, but a reasonably civilized place on its own merits. Oncle Jacques Haight taught history at Lehigh University across the river, where Catherine Drinker Bowen’s father had once been president. I walked down the “alley” of Milton Street, then west two blocks on Wall Street to Moravian Prep, which had been founded by the Moravians in 1742. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, after school, I walked over the Hill-to-Hill Bridge, past plaques commemorating Count Zinzendorf, the first performance of Mendelssohn in this country, the poet H.D., to Nativity Cathedral to sing in the boy’s choir.


About 90 years ago, the little band of Moravians, scarcely 600 in number, began their missionary work. Of all the multitudes then professing the name of Christ, they only, seem to have felt the force of his parting injunction, "Go—preach the Gospel to every creature " In this grand work, for 70 years, they continued to take the lead of all the Christian world. Within the last 20 years, the church at large has been waking from her slumbers. Instead of 150 missionary laborers, she has now in the field a number not less than 400.—Sixteen years ago, scarcely a single Bible Society of any extensive influence, existed. Now, the number publicly known is little short of 1000. Before the establishment of these Societies, little was done towards translating and printing the Word of Life for the barbarous nations. Since then, nearly 50 of these nations have to read, in their "own language, the wonderful works of God." -The Panoplist