O.K. for C.B.K.

At the end of her 86 vigorous years, Miss Sarah Porter was described by a Yale professor as "the most magnificent example of symmetrical womanhood that I have ever known"--meaning, of course, that her spiritual and intellectual attainments were in agreeable balance. Daughter of the Congregational pastor in Farmington, Conn., and sister of Yale President (1871-86) Noah Porter, she was a formidable teacher who at 30 launched a school in her father's house, where she cultivated some 20 young ladies at $200 a year.

The school grew and grew. When she died in 1900, a Boston newspaper glowed that Miss Porter "gave to hundreds of the best born women of the land that poise and stability of character, that combination of learning and good manners which is the mark of the noblest American womanhood." Miss Porter's confers those qualities to this day, and it slipped out last week that the school has an application on file for 1972 or so from the first young lady of the land, Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, 4.

Usually called Farmington, Miss Porter's was long a finishing school for girls who "came out" rather than went on to college. Today it is better known as New England's female Groton--a rigorous, reticent prep school for rich girls (tuition: $2,700) with rich minds. Steeped in Connecticut charm, it boasts a noted art history department, one teacher for every eight of its 220 girls, and a grade-A milk herd to nourish its grade-A students, who consistently enter Radcliffe, Vassar, Smith and Wellesley.

Farmington's alumnae--they are called "ancients"--include Classicist Edith Hamilton, Mrs. Allen Dulles, Mrs. Douglas Dillon and Mrs. John F. Kennedy, who arrived at 15 with her mare Danseuse. She got an A-minus average and repeated warnings that she could do better.

Farmington has been deluged with not particularly welcome applications ever since Mrs. Kennedy became First Lady. Mr. and Mrs. Hollis S. French, who became headmaster and headmistress in 1954, are holding Farmington's thin, well-read line. Even Caroline Kennedy will not get in unless her grades are good, for although Miss Porter's weighs a girl's ancestry with respect, says Headmaster French, it also searches for bright scholars "who have no connection with the past." But Caroline is undaunted. She reportedly informed her father not long ago that in her White House play school (where she is one of a dozen students), she is "the brightest pupil."

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