Education: Van Dyke to Gunnery

A small but sternly independent preparatory school is Gunnery, which has perched in the Berkshires near Washington, Conn. since 1850. Founded by an abolitionist named Frederick William Gunn, Gunnery still warns parents that “luxury, waste, and soft living are contrary to the spirit of the school,” although such rich boys as Robert Lessing Rosenwald of Abingdon, Pa. now go there. In its long career Gunnery has had only three headmasters. Last week it was handed over by retiring William Hamilton Gibson to a fourth educator who can well preserve its austere tradition: Rev. Tertius van Dyke, Headmaster Gibson’s brother-in-law, the pastor of Washington’s Congregational Church, son of Princeton’s late beloved little literary patriarch, Dr. Henry van Dyke.

In leaving the church for Gunnery, Headmaster van Dyke at 50 is doing what his famed father did at almost the same age, when he resigned his Manhattan pastorate to teach English at Princeton. Tertius van Dyke was in one of his father’s classes there. He went with Henry van Dyke to The Hague when Woodrow Wilson appointed the author of Fisherman’s Luck U. S. Minister to The Netherlands and Luxembourg. The son grew a mustache as flowing as the father’s, later collaborated with him on a syndicated newspaper column, accompanied him on innumerable trout fishing expeditions, wrote his biography when he died (TIME, Nov. 25, 1935). Tertius van Dyke moved from Manhattan’s Park Avenue Presbyterian Church to quiet Washington after his marriage, in 1924, to Mary Elizabeth Cannon. In Washington the van Dykes have reared a girl and two boys. When Headmaster Gibson last year asked Tertius van Dyke to take over Gunnery while he went on a vacation, Brother-in-law van Dyke shouldered his duties ably. Upon deciding last week to become a schoolmaster for good, he remarked: “I desire to work in the purpose of the Gospel and I feel that education and religion are closely related.”