Education: Rosemary’s 50th

This year Endicott Peabody, 83, retired as headmaster of Groton. Last week Rosemary Hall celebrated its 50th anniversary. Between those two events there was more than a timely connection. Like swank Groton, Rosemary Hall, a swank girls’ school in leafy Greenwich, Conn., has been ruled from its beginning by one person. And like Groton’s Peabody, Rosemary’s Miss Caroline Ruutz-Rees (pronounced R’Treece) is in a class by herself among U. S. headmistresses.

To pay homage to her, there arrived at Rosemary last week socialites, college presidents (including Vassar’s Henry Noble MacCracken), 250 devoted old Rosemarians. They found Miss Ruutz-Rees in nominal retirement, two new co-headmistresses in charge. But there was no doubt who was boss. At 73, Miss Ruutz-Rees still taught her English classes, supervised every detail of the celebration.

“Miss R’Treece” has frowsy blonde hair, flashing blue eyes and (by her own admission) a violent temper. When, aged 23, she started her school in Wallingford, Conn., she had no college degree but very definite educational notions. British-born and a militant feminist, she decided that girls should get no more coddling than boys, set out to establish a girls’ Eton. Her motto: “No rot.” Her program: athletics for all, self-government, hard work.

Miss Ruutz-Rees put her girls through a rigorous classical curriculum, teaching them Vergil herself. She horrified parents, who feared their daughters might develop “unsightly muscles,” by introducing athletics. First Rosemary sport was cricket, but Rosemarians could find no worthy opponents, took up basketball, track and field hockey instead. Now they play Yale freshman teams at hockey, once beat them.

To toughen them morally as well as mentally and physically, Miss Ruutz-Rees made her girls enact their own rules of conduct, mete out their own punishments. Result is strict discipline. For eating candy (only fruit is allowed between meals), a Rosemarian is kept “on bounds” for two weeks. Some other rules: no chewing gum or cigarets (except for sixth formers), no lipstick or nail polish while in uniform, no reading unpermissioned literature or attending unpermissioned movies.

First to prescribe uniforms in a U. S. girls’ school, Miss Ruutz-Rees introduced them, over her girls’ objections, in 1897. Uniforms now are Rosemary blue (matching her eyes) tweed skirts and sweaters for fall and winter, gingham dresses for spring, blue capes for chapel, star-shaped berets. Once, at a tennis tournament at the Round Hill country club, Miss Ruutz-Rees shouted to a player across the green: “Crawford, have you got on your blue bloomers?”

Rosemary traditions are equally exact, equally supervised by Miss Ruutz-Rees. Most hilarious is the semiannual all-night feast. Rosemary teachers conduct classes and even lunch in academic gowns, address students by last names. Rosemary’s chapel is an exquisite early-English-style structure, some of whose stones were lovingly laid in place by Rosemarians themselves. Lighted only by candles, it has engraved in its windows and ceiling the name of every Rosemarian. There Rosemarians each Sunday hear an Episcopal service, there some are married and there they are commemorated in tablets when they die.

No finishing school, Rosemary (fee: $1,600 a year) is patronized by well-to-do girls of the hardier sort, most of whom go on to Bryn Mawr or Vassar. Among its 1,900 alumnae are Mrs. Charles Seymour, Mrs. Robert A. Taft, Mrs. S. Parker Gilbert, President Katherine Blunt of Connecticut College.

As a comely young headmistress, Miss Ruutz-Rees used to drive her late-staying admirers in a horse and buggy to the railroad station in Meriden, Conn., taking along a pistol for the return trip. Never married, she adopted a son, Roland, and a daughter, known to Rosemarians as Bonnie Bell (now Mrs. Jacobus A. J. Van der Bunt Jr.). Famed is her long line of pet black poodles, from Mouf I to Mopsa. Famed also are her activities as a suffragette, as a women’s leader in the Council of National Defense in World War I, as a member of the National Democratic Committee, as secretary of the Connecticut convention for repeal of the 18th Amendment.

A chief event at her school’s soth birthday last week was a masque in which Miss Ruutz-Rees applied for admission to Heaven, recounted her contributions to the seven liberal arts. Rosemarians gladly opened the gates.