Salty

In Exeter's big game with Andover last week, the score was 2 to 2 in the ninth, when a storm broke. The last person to leave the Exeter stand, looking mightily disappointed at the tie score, was a man in a battered brown hat and a black Navy raincoat. He was Exeter's new principal, William Gurdon Saltonstall, 40.

Afterwards, diehard rooter Saltonstall talked about what he would do as ninth head man in Phillips Exeter's 165 years. Said he: "Exeter has been concerned too much with books and too little with the things you do with your hands."

If Saltonstall has his way, the Exeter boy of tomorrow will spend more time studying music and art ("and I don't just mean appreciation") and working with woods and metals in shops. Bill Saltonstall, a handy man himself, is tall (6 ft. 3 in.), lean and gangling, with the same ski-run jaw and long nose as his cousin, Senator Leverett Saltonstall. At Harvard, Bill won letters in football, crew and hockey, and still helps coach the Exeter hockey six.

During the war, he served on the carrier Bunker Hill in the Pacific. Later, as a lieutenant commander, he trained other officers in air-combat intelligence at the Navy's prep school on Rhode Island's Quonset Point. He decided that they caught on fast because their work had purpose. Says he: "I don't believe in teaching any course just crammed full of inert material."

Saltonstall, a history teacher at Exeter since 1932, was just going to bed one night when Board Chairman Thomas S. Lament and retiring Principal Lewis Perry called and took him to the Exeter Inn. There the trustees broke the news. Students heard about it at Sunday chapel. They followed him home. Exeter's cheerleader called for "nine rahs for Saltonstall," and had trouble getting it out. Bill grinned. "Just call me Salty," he said.

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