For Little Gentlemen

There it sat, an $18 million imitation English village, spang in the midst of the Connecticut countryside. An eccentric old woman had built Avon Old Farms as the spit & image of a Cotswold village, with carefully warped roofs, rippled window panes, synthetically worn stairs. She had meant it for a boys' school. There were no students at Avon last week. The only sign of schoolboy life was a boy named Butch, busy tacking up college pennants in a monklike cubicle in one of the dormitories, installing model airplanes, and littering up the joint after the fashion of twelve-year-olds.

Avon had been a fancy prep school for rich kids until the middle of World War II. Now it was getting ready to reopen in the fall. The school's new head had hired Butch (for 50-c- a week) to live in the place, so he could see how an ordinary boy would improve on the carefully arranged surroundings. The new head, Provost Donald W. Pierpont, 41, needed all the hints he could get to make sense out of the "Deed of Trust" that the school's founder had left behind.

Sidewalk Superintendent. Avon was started in 1927 by the late Mrs. Theodate Pope Riddle, domineering daughter of a steel millionaire and wife of a onetime U.S. Ambassador to czarist Russia. An admirer of the medieval and a semiprofessional architect, she personally sidewalk-superintended the construction of Avon Old Farms, twelve miles out of Hartford. Only hand-hewn stone and oak were used, and bricklayers had to rip out rows of crude bricks because they laid them in too straight to suit Mrs. Riddle (it cost her $125,000 to do over the dining-hall roof).

Avon, wrote Mrs. Riddle firmly, "was founded for the sons of the gentry. ... It is difficult, if not impossible, for Avon to develop [honor and culture] in a boy, if he has not been trained in early years." She expected the well-born youngsters to wear black ties and dark jackets by night, Brooks Brothers grey flannels by day, play no interscholastic sport except polo, learn fly-casting and the manly art of self-defense.

The school was organized as a town, to teach civic duty; boys paid '"town" taxes on their radios and bicycles, purchased "licenses" to hunt & fish on the 3,000-acre campus. Mrs. Riddle provided a blooded herd (one Guernsey cow cost $60,000) for the instruction of her young gentleman farmers. She also spent money on good instructors.

Brailling Along. Riddled by Mrs. Riddle's constant instructions, the first three provosts (a Riddleism for headmaster) had a tough time. She had found one of them simply by consulting a classified telephone directory, looking for likely sounding names among the clergy. When Brooks Brothers was unable to supply grey flannels because of wartime shortages, the clergyman-provost told the boys to wear what they pleased. Mrs. Riddle was outraged, and the provost resigned. Shortly after, in 1944, Founder Riddle shut down Avon and turned over the property to President Roosevelt, a family friend, for use as an Army school for the blind. Its purposely crooked brick walls, sagging stone stairs and mazelike character made it a natural for sightless veterans learning to "braille along."

After Mrs. Riddle's death in 1946, the trustees interviewed some 25 candidates for provost, found most of them reluctant to step into the pattern she had laid down for them. Then they hit on Pierpont. The new head, a University of Richmond graduate (he flunked out of Johns Hopkins), was a headmaster of the lower form at a Baltimore school, later bossed a World War II Navy school. The first time he saw Avon Old Farms, he said, "I felt as if I had walked into the middle of a Charles Addams cartoon."

Pierpont was willing to comply with the minor provisions of Avon's code, such as fly-casting and a school uniform (now modified, at night, to a dark jacket), so long as he didn't have to be too literal about the major ones. Particularly, he doesn't believe, as Mrs. Riddle did, that there is one class privileged to produce gentlemen. He is as anxious to turn out gentlemen as she was, but believes that they can be made, not necessarily prenatally. Without Mrs. Riddle to make up its $25,000 a year losses, Avon will still have to rely mostly on sons of the well-to-do. Cost of an Avon education (without extras): $1,800 a year.

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