Taftless Taft

"My victuals still taste good," Horace Button Taft jovially assured 300 of his "old boys" at the New York Yale Club last week. Despite that sign of health the brother of the late William Howard Taft was announcing his retirement within the year as headmaster of Taft School. In a profession studded with Grand Old Men. Headmaster Taft at 73 shares with Groton's Endicott Peabody (TIME, Oct. 28) the distinction of being the grandest of them all. A distinguished, kindly man,'"Brother Horace" has the Taft good humor, the Taft chuckle, the flowing Taft mustache. But because he is six feet six and spare, he looks less like his rotund brother than like that other late great jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Seven years out of Yale, Horace Taft founded Taft School in 1890, soon housed it in an old hotel at Watertown. Conn. Nourished by the eminence of the Taft name, it grew until by 1914 it was delivering up some 25 boys a year to Yale, plus a few to Harvard and Princeton. Headmaster Taft became the idol of his students and got on famously with parents, most of whom smiled at his long devotion to the cause of Prohibition. By 1927 the school ranked among the best in the country and Mr. Taft turned it over to a board of trustees, who shortly raised $2.000,000 for handsome new buildings.

A teacher of the old school. Mr. Taft has always believed in making his boys work hard, giving them heavy doses of Latin and mathematics. Once some progressive educators were urging him to teach the boys to use their hands, specifically to put in a course in milking. "Why," demanded Mr. Taft. "should we teach them to do something which any calf can do better?" Last week he had a fling at the College Entrance Examination Board, currently tinkering feverishly with its tests in an effort to please progressive teachers. "You would think," observed the old headmaster, ''that it had St. Vitus's dance."

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