KENT, Conn.—Fond memories of South Kent School filled the Reading Room at Kent Memorial Library last Thursday, Dec. 5, when “faculty brat” Marge Smith gave a talk about the school’s centennial book that she recently wrote.
Smith’s connection to the school and her affection for it run deep. Her parents, Art and Maggie Smith, both taught at the institution in the 1950s and ’60s. Later, her brother, Lawrence, became head of school. Indeed, even her birth date reflects the school. She was born on Sept. 26, 1953, 30 years to the day after SKS first opened its doors.
She said her father, who loved woods and water, did not want his family growing up in New York City so he began to look for a job in the country. The Smiths were familiar with South Kent School because her mother’s cousin had married the school’s co-founder, Dick Cuyler. A cocktail conversation with Headmaster Sam Bartlett led to the offer of a job that was eagerly accepted.
Writing her history took four-and-a-half years out of her life, Smith told her audience, many of whom had connections to the school. Her sources were yearbooks, a weekly student-published newspaper known as “The Pigtail” that provided “an unbelievable treasure trove of information,” and recollections of alumni. “Those stories needed to be told, and so the book grew, over a period of four years, into this five-pound monster of a book!” she said.
The Smiths moved to South Kent when it was still a scrappy, scrambling little institution, making ends meet innovatively and developing the social climate that has made it special for so many of its alumni. The stories she shared during her talk reflected the novel answers school personnel found to the challenges that faced them.
The school grew out of the vision of the Rev. Frederick Herbert Sill, who established Kent School in 1906. Sill wanted to provide education for boys of modest means, emphasizing “simplicity, purpose and self-reliance.” He envisioned keeping the school small but by its second decade demands for admission were exceeding that goal.
“Sill was worried about the size of the student body,” Smith related. “He wanted to keep it at about 200 kids. In 1918 George Bartlett, appeared, a Harvard graduate who was a scholar, musician and athlete. He was committed to the basic principles of Kent School but thought there was room for expansion. He and Sill talked about forming a second school to absorb the overflow. They talked about establishing a school in another location.”
Unfortunately, Bartlett’s heart failed and he died in 1921 at only 24 years of age. By then, his younger brother, Samuel, a Kent School graduate, had returned there to teach, and Sill put him at the helm of developing the new school. Richard Cuyler, his former classmate, was chosen to work with him.
The Judd Farm in South Kent was purchased, and a frantic effort began to convert its farmhouse to a dormitory and classrooms. “Sam’s diary is fascinating to read,” Smith told her audience. “They had to rehab the farmhouse and add on to it. They had to scramble to get enough money to get the farmhouse fixed up. The night before they opened on Sept. 26, 1923, they remembered there was not a textbook in the school—books could be ordered, but everything else had to be in good shape when the boys arrived.”
She smiled as she revealed that she recently learned that Fr. Sill had not thought to order books for Kent School, either, when that august institution first opened.
“Curiosity, along with a healthy dose of nervous apprehension, surely was felt … by the growing cluster of young boys in knickers, who, having bid tearful goodbyes to their families, began to take in their new surroundings,” she wrote in her history. “Bits of building material and plumbing supplies cluttered the yard, and a new flagpole lay flat on the ground, awaiting the time when it could be placed upright and the flag hoisted. But the school building in front of them shone with a fresh coat of paint, and the barns and fields around them held the promise of many places to explore.
“By the boys’ own account, written several years later in the 1928 yearbook, school started off with a bang the first night. The air in the dormitory was virtually thick with missiles of shoes, slippers and the like.”
The 24 charter scholars were to be joined in January by four more boys.
The concept of self-reliance was introduced immediately, she recounted, with the boys pitching in to get the first dinner on the tables and washing up afterward. Dinner, cooked by the headmaster, and was followed by the first chapel service, held in the classroom. The altar was a packing box topped with a cross made from a couple of sticks, and the congregation was made up of two masters, the housemother and three boys who knelt on the floor between the desks.
The next day, instead of heading for their classrooms, the boys were given shovels and rakes, and put to work alongside the masters to clean the yard. But a routine of classes, chores, meals, athletics and chapel soon took shape.
The school building was packed tight, with the dormitory on the third floor as well as rooms for teachers. A rudimentary infirmary was on the second floor, along with rooms for housemother and housemaster.
The first floor housed the dining room, classrooms, a reception room, living room with a makeshift library and, finally, the kitchen and other utility rooms. Eventually, a chapel was created in a room in the basement, immediately next to the room that housed showers and lockers. The proximity led Fr. Kemmis, the school’s first chaplain, to quip that “at South Kent cleanliness had always been next to Godliness.”
The 1929 class history spelled out the truly spartan conditions of the first few years. “Our study hall was what is now a supply room. In the winter the temperature in this room went down to 15 degrees above zero, and classes were held in mittens and sheepskins. The blackboard was only a large piece of cardboard, which soon became useless as every chalk mark scratched off the paint.”
Smith said that the school encouraged a sense of family and wanted faculty to marry and establish families. Still, quarters were cramped and one family had to resort to a “window greenhouse” where the baby lived and slept. One baby had a ham put out with her one night to keep the meat cold. The next morning it was frozen, Smith said.
“Boy power,” established that first day the school opened, continues to this day. In 1933, a new chapel was built with the boys helping to carry load after load of bricks up the hill to the site overlooking the valley.
“This contribution was known as ‘boy power,’” Smith said, “and is part of the culture today. It might be running the dishwasher, sweeping classrooms or cleaning the bathroom. The Sixth Form started a tradition of returning early to make sure the campus is shipshape for the younger students.”
The boys also worked on the farm and in the tobacco fields that helped the facility survive the Depression.
“The boys did much of the physical work around campus, which not only saved the school a lot of money, it also taught the boys the importance of their individual role in keeping the greater community functioning and thriving,” Smith said. “It is a lesson that countless alumni still credit as being part of their success as adults out in the world.”
Another important part of life on the Hillside was the variety of extracurricular activities—a Glee Club, an art club, a swing band and a small dramatics club among others. In 1935, an alumnus of that last club, Wuz Wittenberg, by now a sophomore at Yale, began to push the school to provide a better home for his favorite club.
In1935, the school took note of the growing popularity of summer stock troupes that were transforming barns into theaters and soon realized it had an old tobacco barn right on campus.
Begging, borrowing, innovating and using boy power, the school converted the barn at virtually no expense, Smith said. Comptroller Sam Woodward, “the king of use and reuse,” was able to furnish the building at no cost, Smith wrote.
A New York show that had folded was persuaded to give the school its props and Woodward somehow persuaded the New Haven Railroad to ship the props to South Kent as baggage checked on the boys’ vacation tickets. Seats were obtained from an old theater, and the heating plant was obtained for $10.59 from Sears Roebuck. A parent donated material and faculty wives made the curtain.
“All the school had to buy was grease paint,” Smith said. “The building eventually fell out of use and was torn down in the late 1970s or ’80s. Gordon Clapp, who appeared in all 12 seasons of NYPD Blues, got his start on that stage.”
Smith ended with thoughts about the role that SKS plays in the town. In a school where community service is a priority, the boys have cleaned roads on Earth Day, handed out water bottles during the Pumpkin Run for the Chamber of Commerce, worked at the blood drive for the Lions Club, and helped with the food bank, “Led by Father Klots, they are always willing to help,” she said.
To purchase the book, click here or call the South Kent School store at 860-927-3539, ext 216.
