Lawrenceville School - Olla Podrida Yearbook (Lawrenceville, NJ)

Page 13 text:

I-I EAD MASTEITS MESSAGE HE Class of 1951 has surprised me. With your laurels long since tucked securely behind your ears, it will not seem, I hope, ungracious of me to confess to you at last that you have exceeded my expectations. One of the occupational delusions under which teachers labor is the fancy that their ability to appraise the future prospects of a group of students approaches the infallible. My own observation of you as Fourth Formers, therefore, taken together with the findings of my more clairvoyant colleagues, persuaded me that as Lords of the School you would prove to be affable, bright, debonair, and playful Qperhaps frisky is the wordjg but that when it came to the weightier matters of the law we could expect little more from you than an attractive indifference. It was perfectly evident from the beginning, furthermore, that, in view of the uncertainties of your academic and military futures, you would pass your Hnal year here in a condition of chronic dementia, exhibiting panic, instability, palsy of the mind, and jerks of the morale. Well, I was wrong. While I was busy informing alumni and your parents that rebel- lion and anarchy, though not yet arrived, might well be just around the corner, you were more profitably employed in achieving at mid-year the highest academic average ever recorded by any Form since the invention of movable type. By one joint effort you threw all predictions out the window, and I am reliably informed that today you can't find a crystal ball within ten miles of the campus. You should be proud of your accomplish- ment. You had the distinction of leading the largest student body in the School's history, and your own numbers were sufficient to overtax the accommodations normally provided for you. At the beginning of the year, therefore, some of you were submitted to the scheme of life at the Maple House, whose facilities were generally considered a shade less elegant than the Schoolls usual offering. And through the generosity of Dr. and Mrs. Harwood, the last handful of you was tucked in at the Van Dyck House. By mid-year emergency housing had been discontinued, and you were back to normal. At Fifth Form tea, to which many of you have devoted yourselves with zeal and appetite, you have been briskly conversational, relaxed, casual, and comfortable to have around. Some of you have developed, further than all but a few of your predecessors, the difficult technique of working your way through a tray of cake or cookies with thoroughness and dispatch, while giving the appearance of ascetic self-denial. There has never been a year in which Mrs. Heely and I have enjoyed more the tea-time company of the elect. None of us can ever forget the shock and sorrow we all felt at the death of your class- mate Iim Finnegan when he had been with us only a few weeks. In a school community such a loss is especially keen. And the memories of World War II were quickened by the departure of Mr. David Wicks and of the few of your post-graduate companions Nine