Hum Sweet Hum

Long after he had settled in Philadelphia, his fellow townsmen regarded Stephen Girard as a very strange fellow. He was a Frenchman--a squat, swarthy ex-sea captain with one blind eye, an insane wife, and a taste for gold lace and velvet breeches. He smuggled opium and traded in rum, but he named his ships after the Philosophes. Though he became one of the richest Americans of his time, he boasted that he could still eat on 20-c- a day. Philadelphians called him, among other things, a miser.

An odd sort of miser, Stephen Girard spent millions bolstering the U.S. Government during the War of 1812. He lent President Monroe $40,000 to pay off his personal debts, helped Joseph Bonaparte set up a court in exile, dribbled away thousands to anyone with a hard-luck story. When he died in 1831, the childless old man left $6,000,000 to found a school for fatherless boys.

Last week, on Founder's Day, President Harry Truman drove to Girard College to help celebrate its centennial. The college has a 42-acre campus whose classical buildings rise like a bit of ancient Athens out of a drab part of midtown Philadelphia. Girard is not really a college at all, but the richest boarding school in the world (its endowment: $90 million). Harry Truman inspected everything, put away an enormous roast beef luncheon, accepted a pupil-fashioned bronze statuette of the Founder, listened to a 16-year-old pianist play Chopin, planted a pair of sapling twinoaks.

No Classics. In the last 100 years, the 15,000 fatherless boys who have gone through the "Hum" (campus corruption for home) have turned out to be everything from mechanics to insurance-company presidents. Girard has a "double curriculum." Every "newbie" (new boy) must try ten different trades, and then pick his favorite. Girard also teaches the standard grammar and high-school subjects, except for Latin and Greek, which Stephen Girard considered a waste of time.

The Girard staff includes a psychiatrist and two psychologists, but problem kids are rare. Every boy learns to dance and to read music. And women teachers take them to restaurants to learn all about dining out, French menus and conversation with girls. Hummers wear no special uniform; each boy's free G.I. (Girard Issue) is two new tailor-made suits a year.

No Clergy. In his will, Stephen Girard declared that "no ecclesiastic, missionary, or minister of any sect whatsoever" be allowed within the college wall. His next of kin, hoping to break the will on the basis of the anticlerical clause, once hired Daniel Webster to argue the case. Webster lost.

Last week, in the $1.5 million chapel where Hummers meet for prayer and hymns, but where no minister has ever set foot, Harry Truman ended his visit to the Hum. After a happy day "knee-high in boys," he had tried Hum-Muds--the college's special ginger cakes. Then he ad-libbed nostalgically of the days when he was a boy and milked cows, split wood, cleaned oil lamps. Things were different now: "this great country has only started on its career . . . Oh," cried the President, "I wish I were 18 . . . I wish I had the same opportunities that you have."

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