Education: Crump’s Boys

Tommy Crump was a sergeant in the Minnesota Volunteers during the Civil War. In 1865 he enrolled in Seabury Divinity School in Faribault (pronounced Farribo), Minn., but a stoutly martial heart still beat beneath his cloth. Observing that the boys in the preparatory department of the Divinity School were undisciplined, Tommy Crump took to drilling them in the afternoons, using sticks as muskets, into the first cadet corps in any secondary school in the U. S. Minnesota’s Episcopal Bishop Henry B. Whipple turned away from the Indians long enough to persuade the War Department to detail a regular Army officer as Commandant of Cadets to the school, named it for a rich and philanthropic Boston physician, Dr. George Cheyne Shattuck. One of the oldest prep schools west of the Mississippi, Shattuck is also one of the most famed military schools in the land.

Picturesquely perched on a sandstone bluff above the Straight River, in whose caves the Fleck brewery has been aging beer since Shattuck was a pup, Shattuck makes Christian soldiers every year of some 200 boys who hail from far & wide, pay $1,000 a year for their tuition and upkeep. One of the six military schools in the country which has never had an honor graduate separated from West Point, Shattuck drills its boys as smartly in the classroom as on the parade ground. Shattuck boys call themselves Shads, their food “garbage,” the girls of nearby St. Mary’s “saints,” the demerits they get (for anything from an unmilitary snicker to an unmade bed) “soaks.” Proudest Shads are those who make the Crack Squad of 16 boys, which drills in special uniforms, with the last remaining 1870 Army rifles, and is rated by Army men one of the best pre cision teams in the U. S.

Small Shads, called mew yaps, must shag for their elders, rise at 4 a.m. to close the windows in winter, when temperatures of 30° below are no rarity. Divided into Gophers and Badgers for intra mural sports, Shattuck boys excel at most, helped introduce football to the Midwest. When Shads rebel at fish twice a week and ice cream only once, they stiffly march down the hill against orders, march back up again. Some loyal Old Shads: Diplomat Robert Woods Bliss, President George M. Moffett of Corn Products Refining Co., President Henry A. Scandrett of Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific R. R., Bill Benton of Benton & Bowles, now University of Chicago vice president.

Since the death of its first rector, Rev. James Dobbin, Episcopalian Shattuck has been chiefly headed by laymen. Last week, to replace retired Headmaster James S. (“The Bull”) Guernsey, Shattuck inducted a clergyman. He was Rev. Donald G. Henning, 33, pipe-smoking, resonant rector of Christ Church, St. Paul. Not an Old Shad but a Toledo-bred onetime Roman Catholic, Shattuck’s new head helped work his way through Kenyon College by fiddling in a band, cut his missionary teeth in South Dakota’s Rose bud Indian Reservation, where he had four white communicants on his 110-mile circuit.