Going Down

A wartime casualty among the plushier prep schools last week was Connecticut's Avon School, formerly Avon Old Farms. Its founder, solid, idiosyncratic Mrs. Theodate Pope Riddle, announced that it would close in June due to war conditions.

Avon Old Farms' closing was only the most recent of a nearly continuous series of shocks to the school--which have kept the fashionable Farmington area of Connecticut agog as to what Mrs. Riddle and her unusual educational foundation might do or exhibit next. Theodate Pope Riddle was born in Salem, Ohio, the daughter of Alfred Atmore Pope, who had a fortune from Ohio iron mines. Her late husband, John Wallace Riddle, was U.S. Ambassador to Russia and Argentina. Mrs. Riddle went down on the Lusitania, but came up again and collected $25,000 damages from Germany. She studied architecture, had individual ideas about education, and designed the swank Westover School (for girls) in Middlebury, Conn. In 1927 she founded Avon Old Farms for boys.

Warped to Order. She had a fine time, and spent close to $5,000,000 doing it. The school rambled over 3,000 lovely meadow and forest acres beside the Farmington River. The red sandstone buildings were in the style of England's Cotswolds. Roofs were carefully warped and steps synthetically worn. Student life had its own picturesqueness proceeding out of the founder's ideas. The school was organized as a New England town with a warden, council and judges elected by the boys. The boys had to pay for "town" (school) hunting and fishing licenses, "town" taxes on radios and bicycles. Since Mrs. Riddle largely disapproved of athletic games, the emphasis was on farming, fishing, hunting, swimming (in a real hole), riding (leading to polo, on blooded ponies). For a while the boys had to wear Riddle-designed knickers by day, striped trousers in the evening.

For the advantages of Avon Old Farms, many parents were willing to pay tuition of $1,450 a year. But the school was repeatedly harassed by conflicts between its high-grade faculties and its formidable founder. In 17 years two provosts ( Avonian for headmaster), to one of whom she had been led by consulting a classified telephone directory, quit after rows. Once the bulk of the faculty followed progressive Provost Francis Mitchell Froelicher to Colorado's Fountain Valley School. Last week Provost W. Brooke Stabler, an Episcopal cleric who formerly preached and taught at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to take the headmastership of Michigan's Cranbook School. He and Mrs. Riddle were incommunicado. Faculty members were not talking about Avon's closing.

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