O Pioneers

After 15 years of teaching, bustling, buoyant Carmelita Chase Hinton in 1935 decided to quit the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Mass. and start a school of her own. The Bryn Mawr-trained daughter of an Omaha editor and art patron, widow (with three children) of a Chicago lawyer, Mrs. Hinton was no ordinary schoolmarm. And as a disciple of John Dewey, she intended to found no ordinary New England boarding school.

Her school, she averred, would "break through some of the traditional ideas of education for adolescents." In the rolling dairy country near Putney, Vt., she bought up 620 acres of farmland, pitched in with her first pupils (54 boys and girls) and teachers to equip classrooms and a library, convert outbuildings into dormitories.

As the Putney School grew, Director Hinton kept the pioneer spirit fiercely alive. Her blue-jeaned charges learned their math and history in the mornings; in the afternoons they learned how to ski, tend cows, or run a blacksmith's shop. There were no rigid schedules of weekly exams, no report cards--not even football teams. After hours, students were urged to strike out on their own projects, e.g., sonnet-writing, musical composition, working with wrought iron. Nor were the sexes kept apart. Said one recent alumnus: "There is no 'problem.' After you've worked all afternoon around the stable with a girl, the Hollywood romance gets taken out of it."

Inevitably, Putney's unorthodox approach drew fire from more conventional competitors, although Putney's graduates held their own with their college classmates. Moreover, when two of Director

Hinton's long-absent children, Joan, 33, and William, 35, made congressional-committee headlines as proCommunists (TIME, Aug. 9), the school caught a whiff of bad publicity. But, respected and liked in her Vermont community, Rugged Individualist Hinton attracted the children of some of the nation's top professional and amateur educators (e.g., High Commissioner for Germany James B. Conant, former Ford Foundation President Paul G. Hoffman, Pundit Marquis Childs), and unendowed Putney prospered.

Last week, her once-blonde hair a crisp iron grey, Carmelita Hinton. 64, briskly announced that she would step down as head of Putney July 1. She added: "I hate to leave, but I have so many things before me that I'm boiling over." Founder Hinton's successor: Admissions Director Henry Benson Rockwell, a personable Princetonian ('37) who came to Putney from Connecticut's Pomfret School three years ago.

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