Again, I regret that this course of action is necessary. The athletic staff and I will be glad to meet with you at your convenience, before or after the Seven School meeting, to discuss the future of the athletic relationship.
My good wishes,
John
6 October
Mr. William Truax
President, The Fiduciary Trust Co.
P.O. Box 121
New Haven, Connecticut
Dear Bill,
Thanks for your note. Three things:
(1) I will prepare for Friday’s finance meeting several potential budgets for next year, showing implications of greater and smaller enrollments, also showing the implications of reducing staff. Capital and maintenance figures have to project estimated inflation rates, so I can’t see trimming there. Agree?
(2) I am afraid that in the Opening-of-School Crush, the “Wells: Ten Years and After” study has been placed temporarily on a back burner. We have collected some data from faculty, though, and hope to have something concrete to report by the fall board meeting in November.
(3) You may or may not have heard about the ruckus surrounding our football opener with St. I. A very bad show: dirty playing, punches flying, cursing (which provoked an unattractive, anarchic crowd response). We benched some players. St. I. didn’t. The officials lost control over the game. (And we got thrashed.)
I wrote to Fred Maitland asking for support in addressing the problem—and was surprised not to get it. The subsequent correspondence you have seen. Unable to get even an acknowledgement from Fred that the opener represented a sorry spectacle, we’ve dropped them from our program, at least for next year. There is already some stink about this. And I suspect you’ll hear some, too, mostly from older Wellsians who like the cowboy approach to sport and who remember when . . .
So be forewarned. Meg and I both appreciate your family’s concern and the gorgeous flowers. She is doing remarkably well, feisty, funny, tired of being sick.
Best,
John
7 October
MEMO to Tim Shire
Master of Hallowell House
(Personal and Confidential)
Tim-
See no reason to be cautious here. Even if we overreact we will do ourselves a service, especially considering the time of year. The early indications, if true, sound horrendous.
Remember to interview the boys separately and to keep them separate, until you have finished. Each has no idea of what the other has said—and thus may more easily imagine he is cooked and thus may come clean sooner.
Meanwhile I’ll be in touch with the police and see what counsel they offer and what our obligations are.
Come see me, with or without culprits, when you have talked to the boys. I don’t mind the hour. I will be up late.
I naively hoped that this sordid phase of the era was behind us. Guess not.
J.O.G.
7 October
Mr. Frank Greeve
14 Bingham Drive
Tarrytown, New York
Dear Frank,
Thanks so much for taking the time to follow up on your English friend’s tip. I will write M. Baddely at the British consulate in Tangier and see what transpires. I am surprised at the number of young American “transients” your friend estimates are billeted there. Soon I will cease to be surprised by anything.
Meanwhile, I am smack in the middle of—guess what— another suspected boy-drug ring. What a hopeless, irritating, criminal waste of time all this is. Apparently there is no end to this particular cultural development. What can your stereo do? What can your Harley-Davidson do? What can your Trans-Am do? What can your head do? How did altering feeling states by technological and chemical means ever get established as a good idea? What a culture.
Meg is stable, but awfully thin and awfully low. She is hurting physically but won’t say much about it. I’m afraid it’s a bad time ahead. She doesn’t seem to be able to, or to want to, initiate as much talk and activity as she did even a couple of weeks ago. I don’t think she has the energy.
I believe I’m learning a little bit about how life works. It is appetite: intellectual, sexual, esthetic, gastronomical. Subtract these, one by one, and life is diminished proportionately. The last thing to go, and it seems to go quickly without the rest, is a land of critical self-awareness. That’s Meg; she is past wanting now. She only registers. I have heard about remissions and improvements, and I am waiting.
That will have to do. I have, as I have said, this mess in the wings. Love to Val and Hugh.
John
8 October
REMARKS TO THE SCHOOL
By now some of you have heard that there is an important disciplinary inquiry afoot. To stifle rumors and hurtful speculation, I want to tell you this morning that, yes, there is an important disciplinary inquiry afoot. As the situation stands this morning, we have learned the following:
A sixth former in Hallowell, Steve Pennington, apparently made arrangements this summer to have his brother mail him a sizable quantity of LSD to be passed on, at a price, to interested Wells boys. The shipment seems to have arrived in Monday’s mail, and Steven sold some of the LSD to two other sixth formers, Charles Stone and Terry Wilcox; to a fifth former, Ed Hruska; and to a third former, Marc Slavin. Over a long afternoon yesterday and a good part of last night, the five boys just named were questioned by Mr. Shire and by me, and each has admitted to as much as I have told you. Some remaining LSD and the money paid for it have been collected by Mr. Shire. The boys have been in touch with their parents by telephone, as have I. Student-Court proceedings will begin when this assembly adjourns.
At present, we are not sure we have confiscated all the LSD that was mailed here Monday, and we are not sure that only five boys were involved. If there are others of you involved, I invite you to turn yourselves in to me or to your housemaster. Given the nature of the offense, I cannot compromise punishment, or even assure you that you will not be dismissed from the school. I can promise, however, that if what we learn about your involvement in this business comes from a voluntary admission from you, and not as a result of cross-examination or detection by us, things will go better for you than otherwise. You have my word on that.
This is somber news to start the day with, and I am sorry to have to bear it. I doubt that any of you, considering what we have written to your families and what has been said repeatedly from this stage, are in doubt about our drug policy. It’s a very easy policy to remember: there is to be positively none of it here, under any circumstances. Over the past two years, every boy caught using, exchanging, or found under the influence of drugs at Wells has been dismissed. In other words, we could not be more serious about our drug policy.
Whether or not you agree with it, our policy has become what it is because of our actual experience here over the past two decades. There was, at the beginning, real confusion about drugs, confusion about if drugs were a problem and confusion about what sort of problem they were. We are no longer confused. We have had a good deal of experience now of students who smoked pot, took pills, inhaled cocaine, and so on, and as I say, we are no longer confused. Some of us here can remember school when there were no drugs whatsoever on the scene, except liquor which, killer and thief of human promise that it is, has at least been a familiar part of the social fabric of Western life since antiquity. As I say, some of us were working here before the drug scene, worked here through the early days of the drug scene, and are still here. The changes we have seen in drug-using boys are uniform. Let me summarize them as I see them.
(1) They do poorer school work and less of it than formerly; never better and more.
(2) They drop team and other organizational commitments; never add team and other organizational commitments.
(3) They initiate less activity not connected to getting and using drugs.
(4) They are harder to interest and to arouse.
(5) They care less about non-drug-taking friends, about family,
and about others in general than they did before their involvement with drugs.
(6) They do not perceive or attach feelings to dramatic personal and academic losses and may even claim that they are functioning better and thinking more clearly than before.
(7) They increasingly organize themselves socially around drug taking and associate predominantly with other drug-taking friends, even when there is no other basis of shared interest than drugs.
Schools, even this one to a degree, have been changed by the presence of drugs. This is difficult to be precise about, but without question faculty-student trust has been diminished since the onset of casual drug use by the young. By the very nature of the activity, students are unable to be truthful to parents and teachers about drugs. Student communication about drugs is necessarily private and furtive. Similarly, drugs are purchased and property exchanged for them in a clandestine manner, involving, often, theft and dishonesty.
At the national, aggregate level, aptitude-test scores have declined every year since psychoactive drugs have been on the scene. Moreover, the number of adolescent suicides and serious crimes has risen geometrically since the advent of casual drug use, just less than a generation ago. Marijuana and other psychoactive drugs are now the leading cause of referral to mental health treatment centers for the young. I have known scores of happy and functional families torn apart by drug use of a teenage member or members. I have known some of these families intimately; one of them, quite intimately. I know of no family or school where the corporate life has remained unaltered or been improved by drug use.
Nationally the drug culture is supporting a multi-billion dollar industry controlled increasingly by organized crime. Several South American and Central American governments have been reorganized in a disturbing manner to accommodate the booming U.S. drug trade.
And for what? A chemically induced, acutely toxic thrill? Pleasure? Pleasure at those costs? No society organized around the pursuit of here-and-now pleasure has sustained itself. I would be pleased if some of you history scholars would take time to test that hypothesis.
Have I carried things too far? Possibly exaggerated to make my point? I wonder. Frankly, I wonder. But this much I can say for certain: drugs have occasionally hurt Wells School—hurt individual boys, hurt our corporate trust, hurt our general morale. Drugs have hurt us when boys have been caught, and they have hurt us when boys have not been caught. You know this as well as I do.
And now we have Mssrs. Pennington, Stone, Wilcox, Hruska, and Slavin on the line. Five promising souls. Five boys I happen to like. And who knows who else?
I would like to close by advising you gentlemen that I have unlimited time on my hands for discussing any of the things I have just said. Please come by if you are concerned, angry, or just want to talk. I can’t think of anything in the history of this school more important to talk about.
I think I’ll leave it there. Report to first hour classes. All classes through midmorning break will be shortened by ten minutes.
Good morning.
9 October
MEMO
To All Faculty
Dear Colleagues,
I am afraid there is no softening the news: it’s time for fall-term advisor letters. Since I have never been able to figure out how so many of you find the time to write them as extensively and as thoughtfully as you do, I shall cease to try. Rather than set firm deadlines by form, let’s establish that all of them should be submitted to Marge no later than a week from Friday. I cannot set the date any later and still leave time for any parental correspondence and student improvement before the end of the term.
Please make them as presentable, grammatically correct, etc. as you can. If in doubt about the boy’s schedule or family set-up, please consult files. By all means let’s avoid cheerily addressing deceased parents, or remarried parents by former names. (The problem is, they always call me to complain; not, however, the deceased ones.)
One more thing: whenever possible, when communicating a problem to parents, indicate the problem behavior and not just the judgment. “One out of three homeworks not turned in” conveys more than “erratic” or “lazy.” If you are talking about someone’s rudeness or insensitivity, recount some of the things the boy has said and done in its context. If possible avoid, “he is_____” in favor of “I am seeing a great deal of_____.”
I thank you in advance for your hard work. These letters are without question our most important school-home link.
J.O.G.
10 October
Mr. Jake Levin
R.D. 3
Petersfield, New Hampshire
Dear Jake,
I have enclosed my “cancer” poem (unfinished) for your consideration. It may interest you solely because of its discontinuity from anything else you have seen from me. Whose voice is that, anyway? I had the weird feeling, while working on it, that it isn’t mine. A good shrink could tell me, I am sure.
Anyway, I’ll be glad to have your appraisal. I know it’s morbid. Is it anything else?
Everything is high-speed and fuddled here. The prospect of telling you my news exhausts me. Suffice it to say that school is noise, Meg is having a hard time. O for the peace that surpasses all understanding shantih shantih shantih, etc.
J.
CANCER
This sooty film over the tree line,
Over shops, over traffic,
These wires slung, netted over the intersection,
Here, where we are, idling in these fumes—
Is this new territory?
Do I or does my cancer see
The long-legged woman in the sheer dress;
Hear the click of her step on the pavement?
Is it all spoiled?
Have I spoiled it?
What has come over me?
My schoolgirl asks.
Cancer, my Death’s head replies.
O rose, thou art sick.
I am failing, slightly, to replicate.
I am a ruined autocracy.
I imagine cold efficiencies in my lymph,
The reorganization already silently underway.
What fear swells in the throat is superstition here;
Prayer a quaint tradition.
For the time being
This voice at least is mine.
If you will listen, please,
You will hear where I leave off,
Where cancer begins its song or songs.
You are the devil, cancer.
You are legion,
Without passion, demoralizing
Me, my family, all of us—
Is this you speaking already?
No. Cancerous, I can chronicle,
Be true as I can be
To this mute pathology.
It’s important to be true,
And there is nothing else to do.
Your first question: how it feels.
One feels it very little—
A wan nausea
Which may very well be fear.
You’ve felt worse. Fatigue.
Perhaps later the flesh will startle.
What startles now is circumstance:
Regardless April is on again,
Sunny, softening up the land,
And geese are pleased enough to swim the cemetery pond.
All the quiet of a long day home
I muse in a museum of stale concerns:
In this very chair I have cared
Effusively about termites in the porch,
Conceived of, dared a station wagon,
Shaped, reshaped pictures
Of the same income and assets,
Looked to the cosmos for grounds for hating the chain saw,
Daydreamed myself entering, well-dressed and glib,
The parlors of the illustrious.
Now small narcissisms
Play about a more compacted world:
Something familiar in my fuss
About vegetables and vitamins,
<
br /> Costs and benefits of a new chemical.
If I lose my hair to radiation,
I may win six odd, tuft-headed months.
I would read one hundred fifty books,
Hear traffic—and yes, and yes—
Behold in cancer twilight beloved faces.
(IN PROGRESS)
11 October
Mr. and Mrs. George F. Pennington
3 Bay Road Circle
Wellesley, Massachusetts
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Pennington,
I am writing to confirm officially the sad and frustrating news I conveyed to you over the phone last night: that on the recommendation of the Student Court and of the Faculty Discipline Committee, I have decided to ask you to withdraw Steven from Wells immediately.
I write this knowing full well the unhappiness this event has caused and will continue to cause in your family. But given the nature of the offense—bringing dangerous drugs into the school and selling them—there is really no alternative. To take any other course would be to disregard the welfare of, and to confuse, the rest of the school community.
I have always liked Steven and have found him a game, if not an inspired scholar, and an interesting conversationalist. I would not dare or care to assess whether his academic slump over the past few terms is related to involvement with drugs. Perhaps, though, this is a question you may want to pursue as a family.
Boys make mistakes, even very serious mistakes, and some boys rebound and learn from them. I have every confidence that Steven can get back on the track. I also hope this sad incident provides him a sufficiently dramatic occasion to separate himself from psychoactive drugs and everything to do with them.
My secretary, Marge Pearse, will send Steven’s transcripts to whatever school or schools you indicate. Please address such inquiries and related material to her attention.
It is hard for us, too, to lose a sixth-form boy, in whom we also have invested much.
Sincerely,
John O. Greeve
11 October
To the Parents of:
Charles Stone (6th)
Terry Wilcox (6th)
Dear Mrs. Stone/Dr. and Mrs. Wilcox,
I am writing to confirm officially the upsetting news I conveyed to you over the phone last night: that on the recommendation of the Student Court and of the Faculty Discipline Committee, I must ask you to withdraw from Wells immediately.
The Headmasters Papers Page 5