Funny thing about Kent School. Despite the fact that I had left early, skulking away in the middle of the night, for Heaven's sake, over the years I came to BELIEVE wholeheartedly in Kent, probably more than I ever would have or even could have if I had stayed to the end.

Temperantia, Fiducia, Constantia. Latin for Simplicity of Life, Directness of Purpose, Self-Reliance.

As the decades passed and I looked back on my time at Kent from an ever-increasing temporal distance, the ideals that Kent represented continued to provide me with inspiration... but they have also gotten me into a heap of trouble more than once.

I remember that as I was taking leave of Penn, it was easy for me to forgo my admission to Naval Officer Candidate School in the midst of the Vietnam War and instead choose to accept a draft deferment and teach at Mercersburg Academy, which sort of reminded me of Kent... sort of... but then again it just wasn't the same.

I recall one particular Mercersburg faculty meeting when the subject of scholarship boys came up. At Mercersburg, everybody on scholarship was assigned a menial job on campus, so everybody automatically knew who was on scholarship and who wasn't. At Kent, everybody had been assigned a menial job on campus. No exceptions. Some swept the halls or the common areas, some cleaned the bathrooms, some waited on tables or washed dishes, some raked leaves or shoveled snow depending on the season, all this supervised by upperclassmen. They called the system Self Help, and one of the important consequences was that nobody knew whose parents could afford to pay full tuition and whose needed financial assistance. We were a classless society.

Constantia. Self-Reliance for all. The school, its students, parents and alumni were justifiably proud of the tradition, which went back to Kent's founding in 1906. Compared to us, the kids at Choate and Hotchkiss and Andover and Exeter . . . AND Mercersburg . . . were living at a country club, and we Kenties reveled in our Temperantia, our Simplicity of Life.

So, back at that Mercersburg faculty meeting, stupid me, naïve me, I raised my hand, stood up and said that it seemed to me unfair to the scholarship boys that their status was common knowledge to everyone and that they were indeed thought less of by the other boys, considered an inferior class as they swept hallways in the afternoons.

Well, the response was instantaneous and thunderous. One after another, my fellow faculty members rose in righteous indignation, wagging their fingers and lecturing me about the undeniable value of hard work, about the moral message that nothing in life is free, that earning one's way in the world was a life lesson best learned early.

So... did I profusely apologize and sit my butt back down? No. Of course not. Fiducia. Directness of Purpose... or bone-headedness in this instance. I stood back up and respectfully stated that if the value of work was so clear and obvious to everyone - including myself, by the way - then why were we denying the experience from all the students paying full freight? If honest labor around the campus was so beneficial, shouldn't we be reserving it for the students whose families had paid the most to come to Mercersburg Academy?

Well, what could anyone say in the face of such true sagacity? Game, Set, Match. Right? I sat down to a resounding . . . silence, but, believe me, this is what they were all thinking:

"Peter, your days at Mercersburg are surely numbered." - Collective Faculty of Mercersburg Academy

And of course it was true. I had not yet learned that idealism sometimes can have little practical use in the real world. In fact, this is a lesson I still haven't learned particularly well. That meeting was indeed the beginning of the end of my two-year tenure at Mercersburg. They could take the boy out of Kent, but they could not take the Kent out of the boy.

Decades later, I would repeatedly dream about Kent School: making my bed, sweeping my room, ringing the chapel bells, waiting tables... the sound of the ice breaking up on the Housatonic River as winter wanes, walking in the surrounding forests, the distinct and unmistakable smells of New England in fall and winter and spring.

And do you know what I'm doing there in those dreams? I have returned to Kent School, after Shortridge, after Penn, after Mercersburg, after a long and productive adult life. I have returned to Kent School as an elderly man, surrounded by fellow students many decades younger than myself. Unfinished business. I have returned to complete my academic program and finally graduate from Kent School.

That explains a lot!

And guess what! Beginning in 2018, I actually DID return and spent many months at Kent researching and writing the history of the Kent Crew I could never imagine making. In the process, I earned a Kent Henley blazer and even an honorary diploma! Isn't life grand?

To be continued...