I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE: As a student, I never liked Mr. Boyden.
Of course, I never knew Mr. Boyden, and distance - be it physical or temporal - does strange things to any relationship. The only real exposure I had to him were the dreamy tales told by administrators of a wee little man who strutted into town 100 years ago, rolled up his scruffy shirtsleeves, and built the best damn school in all the country. He seemed, as one current student put it, "not like a real person, but this glowing mass of light, incapable of doing wrong." To this day I have an image of Mr. Boyden in my mind that runs something like this: It's a beautiful Deerfield day sometime in the 1960's - boys with sheepishly long hair, just freed from afternoon classes, are wondering lazily towards their dorms, feet scuffing at the grass below. Suddenly, in the distance, a magnificent Morgan horse appears, thundering down Albany road, behind which there is an elegant carriage. In the carriage a little (but adorable) oldish man, is gripping tightly to a slender whip that looks something like a giant antenna protruding from the top of his head. He's hunched forward, nose crinkled in the wind, savoring the smells of Deerfield, barreling as only Boyden could. "When I go out for a drive," he used to say, "I like to move."

Then, with a snap of the antenna, the horse stops. The boys also stop. Like a turtle poking its head to the world, his thin hand emerges ever so gradually from the side of the carriage, and creeps downward. It hovers for a moment: waiting, waiting, then pounces! Caught between thumb and forefinger-a vagrant gum wrapper. To a wide-eyed freshman looking on: "When you see a scrap of paper or anything else out of place, even though it may not be your immediate concern, why not just pick it up and throw it in the nearest wastebasket?" A snap of the antenna and he's gone.

ANOTHER CONFESSION: Sometimes, I even called him Deerfield's "Big Brother."
I still remember that huge canvas, hanging in the Old Gym, peering down at me. It was a collaborative painting, the brainchild of an orientation committee that wanted to connect new students to Boyden's legacy. I, along with every other new student, helped paint a square, unaware of what it was that I was actually painting (an earlobe). That night the administration joined all the squares together.

The massive painting that emerged the following day: the face of an old man, with squished, but kindly features, penetrating eyes, and thick glasses: the face, as John McPhee '49 so aptly put it in his book The Headmaster, "of a grumpy Labrador." Gazing up at the massive, smudged features, that clearly I was intended to adore, I just couldn't shake the feeling that this was a strange and somewhat excessive way to commemorate a headmaster from a bygone era.

I went back to Deerfield this fall, two years after graduating, to talk about him. I wanted to know if people felt genuinely connected to his legacy or if, like me, the sense of his continued omnipotence, in this rapidly changing world, struck them as odd. Here's what they told me:

ON THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION'S PORTRAYAL OF BOYDEN'S LEGACY:
Rahul Mehra '03: "I wasn't bombarded with information about him from the administration. What actually increased my inquisitiveness about him was reading John McPhee's book The Headmaster. It's a very good book by a great author about, perhaps, the greatest headmaster in the country."

Dan Weinberger '01: "Sometimes there's a little overkill for sure, but I think it is important to have an idealized figure that people can hold up as a role model."

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF BOYDEN TRADITIONS:
Anina Nolan '03: "The underlying principles are really nice. However, there are certainly people at this school who think there is too much tradition here."

Helen Lamphere '03: "Mr. Boyden stamped Deerfield and gave it a national identity, which was incredible. At the same time, he's no longer around. My question is... who's going to be the next Mr. Boyden?"

Dan Weinberger '01: "His ideas definitely remain today. Faculty and students frequently express his ideals of keeping the grass looking nice, picking up trash, and 'looking to the hills.' His desire for aesthetic beauty and to educate the whole person are certainly still intact."

ON BOYDEN AS A "GREAT" MAN:
Anina Nolan '03: "It is important that people know about him in the future. However, I don't know if it needs to be in such a formal way. We need to allow room for new traditions as well."

Chris Clark '03: "He was a good man, but not a great man. We ought to remember what he actually did, and replace the glowing impression with something more solid."

Rahul Mehra '03: "I do think Mr. Boyden was a great man. Also, I firmly believe that in order to look ahead, you need to find your footholds in the past."

Myfanwy Probyn '01: "Any person who believes in something so much-particularly when it's something like a school, and dedicates his life to it, is a great person. Boyden was a great asset (and some have argued, the savior) to Deerfield, but he should be remembered for the person he was and the contributions he made and not as some idyllic hero."

A FINAL CONFESSION: After grousing for years about the school's obsession with Mr. Boyden, I feel a bit silly.
It's something Mr. Pond, assistant headmaster for alumni affairs and development, told me during the course of my interviews. "The Boyden era was an interesting era," he said. "It was simple, caring, and thoughtful. We're trying to understand what it was about that simple approach that worked so well and, perhaps, use parts of that approach today."

Simple, caring, and thoughtful. His words stewed in my mind for days. Hard as I tried to sweep them from my consciousness, I could not. Coincidence, yes, but since graduation and 9/11, the globe seemed sorely lacking in all three.

A BOYDEN RETROSPECTIVE
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Frank Boyden's arrival at Deerfield and his 66 years as Headmaster Excerpts from previously unpublished speeches by Mr. Boyden and from talks given this year in his honor. A volume of these speeches in their entirety will be published this summer.

"Recreation in The Village High School"--From Mr. Boyden's Speech to The Playground Recreation Society of America, Wednesday, May 7, 1912, 8:00 p.m.

...Times are changing in the country, and somebody has got to right things up. The high school seems to be the most powerful force to accomplish this end...I believe there is room in our high schools for every boy and girl between 14 and 18 and 19, and they should be there, because there is no opportunity for them to learn a good trade, and if they go to work they cannot get enough to live properly. We should keep them in high school for their physical, social, moral and intellectual good.

We like to have the boys of some of the athletic teams come to the house. We play games, and afterwards put out the lights and light the fire and sit around our big old-fashioned fireplace and sing songs and tell stories. There is something about it that draws them together and that makes for school spirit and loyalty that seems almost impossible to get in any other way.

I never danced a step in my life and was brought up to believe dancing was the work of the devil--and I guess it is sometimes. But it was useless to say they couldn't, so we decided to run our own high school dances. There was a long line of boys on one side of the room and an equally long line of girls on the other and they sat there three solid hours and looked at each other. It was the most dismal social function I ever attended, but we learned something from it. Now we have four dances through the year, each class in turn giving one. We have 12 numbers on the program, and there is a rule that each senior and each junior boy must ask two senior and two junior girls--that is four required and eight optional. In the beginning we gave them 15 minutes to make out their orders, then we called the cards all in. One teacher took the girls' cards and I took the boys' cards and after each name we put down the numbers that were vacant. We exchanged lists and then gave them the vacant dances together. When night came and the dance began, every boy and every girl had a partner for every dance.

From a speech by Mr. Boyden to the Newcomen Society, Thursday, November 5, 1959
I am reminded of a trip which I took down south years ago with Mr. Sullivan, and a pleasant week which was spent with the Boston Braves, then at the bottom of the league, with the only bright spot Casey Stengel who was scintillating all through that terrible period. Well, we thought we ought to go and visit a school somewhere since we were in that profession and the only school we could find was a military school, so we went in and found the general's office, the captain's office, the sergeant's office and the janitors' office, but we could not find any headmaster's office. We finally discovered it and went in. There was a young woman typing and chewing gum very vigorously and we asked her where the headmaster was. She replied that she did not know and she did not seem much interested. Finally she looked up and said, "Where are you from?" I said, "From Deerfield." She said, "I never heard of the place. What do you do; do you teach?" I answered, "No," She went on, "Well, what do you do?" And I said, "I suppose I run the place." She stopped and leaned across the typewriter and said, "No kidding."

Historically, Deerfield is a very interesting place; it has so many connections. There are 30 houses on the street built before the Revolutionary War. One of them is where Benedict Arnold stayed when he came to buy cattle for George Washington's army, because Deerfield was the center of the cattle-feeding industry at that time. We have one of the houses where slaves stayed on their way to Canada. Ephraim William's family lived on our present campus. The next house is where Edward Hitchcock lived. He was president of Amherst College in 1840 and was born in this house in 1793. And across the street from that is a beautiful old house, which the town built in 1707 and gave to the minister when he returned from captivity in Canada. So all along the street the old houses have been preserved and it is still one of our old time New England villages that makes such a wonderful background for the school. We hear so much about the teenage delinquent, but never hear anything about the 95 percent who are still sound and right.

There is no quarrel between the public schools and us; we have all got more work than we can possibly do. We are each country building in a different way. I have the greatest respect for the work of the public school and I realize the great contribution we can all make.

I have wandered all over the lot. I have not given you any theories. I have not had any graphs and figures because to me education has always been so simple. An interest in boys, an interest in their all-around welfare, good teachers and a feeling that the future of America rests, to a large extent, in the hands of those who are taking care of our teenage boys at the secondary level. I just hope that everywhere there can be an understanding of this great opportunity to make a contribution.

"Days of Glory--Excerpts From Brian Rosborough's '58 P'03,'06 Convocation Address, September 2002
People forget that Deerfield educated girls for 162 of its 205 years, including the first 46 of Mr. Boyden's 66 years. You might say boys-only was a 40-year experiment, with marginal success, and then abandoned.

He was soft-spoken but he could quiet a room of rancorous teenagers with a single clap of his hands, or divert a major highway with a phone call. He was diminutive, five feet and change, 120 pounds, always dressed in a tattered charcoal gray suit, but he earned the respect of seven U.S. presidents. Heads of state entrusted their children to his care. Behind his back we called him "Quid," an affectionate moniker akin to a wad of chewing tobacco, but we would never knowingly disappoint him.

He was patriotic, believed in public service, celebrated family life, respected farmers, revered community, loved politics, hard work, wholesome living and horses.

Deerfield bedrock. The academy was founded on the belief that it should stand for the right things. To Frank Boyden, that was you. His calling was to build the character of youth. If done well, the future would take care of itself.

The student that needed him most was the most important student that day.

Just as he prophesized, the academy would prepare legions of young people for service to others. He would hammer away at youth on this village anvil until he shaped goodness and character, camaraderie and common sense, befitting the requirements of his time. And so they did serve, statesmen, 15 college presidents, 50 heads of school, hundreds of teachers, countless chairmen, CEOs, artists, engineers, composers, scientists, and writers all met the challenges of their day...and with equal pride, so will you.

From the 2002 Greer Chair Presentation to the Faculty by Claudia Lyons, French Department
I tried to figure out how "casually" to incorporate a man I didn't know into this talk. And then I realized that I do, indeed, know Mr. Boyden: All I have to do is look at this academy to know that I am passing my days living among the fruits of his labor. The influences of many of the teachers he hired--who are now mostly retired or passed away-- are still very much a part of life and lore here, and have contributed to the foundations that uphold DA today. For me, that "part" is one reason I--and many of you--have chosen to spend our adult lives among adolescents here, at Deerfield.

Did Mr. Boyden live vicariously through the colorful antics of his faculty while he had to shoulder the serious business of running this academy? Truthfully, I have no idea, but I sure like to think that he did. What I do know for certain is the influence that these former colleagues had--and still have--on me. Their commitment to teaching, their belief in the joy of learning, and their "spice" are a layer of the foundation that upholds this academy. But that layer continues to grow through what you, my present day colleagues, are adding to it. It is not a layer that can crumble like a dirt and stone foundation; it may shift with the times, but it can't crumble.

As published in the Winter 2003 issue of Deerfield, the publication of Deerfield Academy's Alumni Office.