Lawrenceville School - Olla Podrida Yearbook (Lawrenceville, NJ)

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5 on 19 oofricfa HEAD MASTEIQQS MESSAGE T has often been noticed that, when Lawrenceville alumni meet, the question they generally ask each other first is, What House were you in? What class? seems less important. For the past two years it has not only been less important: it has become downright baffling. The sub-division of a Fifth Form into Sections labeled September, February, and Iune, designed as a convenience, has contributed mainly to the Department of Utter Confusion. The chief trouble with it, from my standpoint, is that many of you barely become tolerably digestible as Fifth Formers when you demand to be graduated. The first chapter in your separate history began with the Summer Semester of 1944. Having discovered the previous summer that my services as an administrator were less than essential to the Gartner management, I deserted you at the outset of your career and went away to rest my mind. Not, however, before I had seen Bill Allsopp display his massive physique in shorts and crew-shirt, while your premier mound artist, Rudy Clemen, preserved his amateur status on the summer diamond and reviewed the glories of the past season with Bob Slocum. Mo Kinnan became a Fifth Former last summer, too, and gave a sample performance so good that everybody wanted more of him. So did the Army. September was the end, also, of the local exploits of Charlie Letts, whose performance as Gran'pa in You Can't Take It With You had made Periwig history. At the annual Convocation which marked the opening of the regular School year, all these worthies, plus enough more like them to total twenty-three, took their diplomas and went on to the grim business of war. The rest of you settled down as if nothing had happened, showing the ability to meet calmly and sensibly whatever came which has been the outstanding charac- teristic of the Class of 1945. The most important thing you did at the beginning of the new term was to elect a Council which is the best I have ever seen: so good that I must speak of it as a group rather than distinguish a few individuals. Ever since taking office, they have given your Form and the School a responsible, con- scientious, public-spirited administration which shows how good elected leaders can be when they are at their best. I am very grateful to them, and I hope they know it. The whole Form, too, deserves some of the credit, for you elected them and you have followed them. Between you, you have made a record which deserves your pride and my deep and warm admiration and thanks. Here they are! You are one of my main reasons for the unshakable confidence I feel in the competence of your generation. Those of you who were labeled To Be Opened in February survived, not with- out pain and moaning, a second term of accelerated courses. You gave the impres- sion that they were difficult. But you did them. Among you were the omniscient Max Gellert, Bill Graves and Roy Holsten, who taught football to the re-born Nine