At Lawrenceville

For thousands & thousands of U. S. novel readers Lawrenceville is still the harum-scarum little preparatory school of the 1890's about which Alumnus Owen Johnson wrote in The Varmint and Tin Tennessee Shad. Unforgettable are sue) redoubtable characters as Dink Stover Doc Mcnooder, The Prodigious Hickey Flash Condit, Turkey Reiter, The Triumphant Egghead--a lusty lot, forever up to highjinks, forever bedevilling their masters.

They got sick in great smoking contest, behind the bushes, or from eating the Welsh rarebit which the Tennessee Shad concocted of cheese and witch-hazel. They invented a Goldbergian "Sleep Prolonger" (alarm clock to window to heat register) which, produced in commercial quantities, made the night hideous by performing at any hour except the right one. They formed a Criminal Club, a Housebreakers' Union, presented in Chapel a solid mass of shaved pates. Dink Stover, later to win fame at Yale, carried his whole Latin class by signalling with a pair of mobile ears whenever The Roman, their teacher, asked his favorite question, "Gerund or gerundive?" One day The Roman changed his question to "Pick out the first gerund you see."

Present-day boys at the large, smart, modern school in the gentle hills of mid-New Jersey are inclined to view the Johnsonian pranks as childish. Their chief stunt is to make "rhinies" (new boys) wear special caps, roll down trouser cuffs, keep off the grass. They stop classes every morning for a 15-min. session of crackers & milk. Lawrenceville enrollment has grown from 60-odd to about 500 and a Student Council rules the campus with a firm hand. It may expel any boy for cause, may even recommend the dismissal of a master. Popular in the Midwest, Lawrenceville sends most of its graduates to nearby Princeton. Some Lawrence-villians: onetime U. S. Attorney-General William D. Mitchell, onetime Ambassador to Japan Roland S. Morris, Architect William A. Delano, Art Critic Homer Saint-Gaudens, Author Richard Halliburton, and the sons of Charles Gates Dawes, Mark Sullivan, Arthur Brisbane, William Randolph Hearst.

Founded in 1810, Lawrenceville was reorganized in 1884 by the late James Cameron Mackenzie, who gave it one of the first U. S. "house plans." Lean years lay behind the school when Mather Almon Abbott took its headmastership in 1919. Halifax born and Oxford bred, "The Bott" had taught President Roosevelt at Groton, had been crew coach and Latin teacher at Yale, was big, ruddy, firm-willed. At Lawrenceville he upped scholarship and enrollment, turned everybody out for sports, started rowing and polo, opened a Lower School for boys under 14, established scholarships for British boys. His biggest & best jobs were to put Lawrenceville on the map, raise funds. He had a $3,000,000 building program two-thirds done when he died last May at 60.

Lawrenceville knew ''The Bott's" shoes would be hard to fill. Last week trustees picked a man to make the try. He was Allan Vanderhoef Heely. 37, tall, husky, popular assistant dean at Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass. Son of a Manhattan banker, Head Master Heely prepared at Andover, went to Yale. There he was an editor of the Record, Junior Prom committee chairman, Student Council member and voted the most popular man in his class. Five years in Manhattan convinced him that he was cut out for neither the advertising nor the dry goods business. Back to Andover went he in 1924 to teach English, indulge his taste for "books, the theatre, music, people." Since then he has spent a year at Oxford, acquired a Columbia M. A. Outside classes he has made friends with his boys by coaching intramural track teams, the dramatic club. Last week he approached his new job, to begin on Thanksgiving Day, with scholarly caution: "I am unacquainted with the set-up at Lawrenceville. I shall not go there with any plans to impart but simply with a desire to learn the situation and do whatever seems necessary.

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