My years at Andover, the oldest (1778) and arguably the best prep school in the United States, were the unhappiest of my life. Emotionally, I felt ancient. All but few of the teachers were as sodden with a kind of spititual sorrow as were most of the students. And while the campus with its spacious lawns and grand architecture was breathtakingly beautiful, and the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library would have made any university beyond proud, and all the facilities were many and first-class, paradoxically, the sum of those parts deprecated the whole . Yes, I, perforce, became learned, but at an exorbitant social and emotonal cost. Tone Grant, one of the gods of our class, because he was the quarterback of our football team, a fact that got him into Yale where he was and did the same, was indicted, tried, and convicted to 10 years in prison for embezzling over two billion dollars from customers of the company he ran. Did Andover and Yale inculcate in him the perverse values that led him to prison? He pleaded innocent before his trial, but over two billion dollars are a lot of dollars to explain away. Tone died of a heart attach in prison. My years at Andover ended with a ritual. All the graduates formed a large oval on the Great Lawn as the headmaster began to pass diplomas one at a time to his left. The first graduate would look at the diploma, and if he did not see his name imprinted in gold ink on it, he would pass it to the classmate on his left until every graduate had received his diploma. While this interminable ritual was taking place, I made a silent but solemn vow:  I would never again set foot on the Andover campus. Am I  proud I graduated from Andover, you might ask? I am proud I endured it. Others did not.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks