Education: A Worthy Project

“We wish to send our new booklet to a select list of girls. . . . You likely know of some such girls in your town or elsewhere, and can send their names and addresses to me for this purpose (confidentially, if you prefer not to be quoted). We shall appreciate the courtesy and reciprocate with the usual honorarium of $25 for each girl you list who may attend Glen Eden through this information; or $50 if the attendance be consummated with the help of your personal influence. Our school and myself being perhaps unknown to you, may I suggest reference to Who’s Who in America and to Sargent’s Directory of American Private Schools. . .”

(rubber-stamped) “F. M. TOWNSEND”

So ran a letter received lately by many a minister in the East. One minister, an Episcopalian, at once sat down and wrote indignantly to The Churchman (liberal weekly): “This sort of thing is an insult to the ministry.” Editorialized The Churchman: “We agree.”

Sargent’s Directory of American Schools says that Glen Eden, “is a finishing school offering a wide range of electives with special facilities in music, art, domestic science, expression, dramatics, physical culture and athletics.”

Who’s Who reveals that Dr. Frederic Martin Townsend, Glen Eden’s founder-director, was graduated by the University of Michigan and the College of St. Francis Xavier, Manhattan. For a time he was director of the National Park Seminary in Forest Glen, Md., near Washington. Perhaps that is why he affixed a “Glen” to the Poughkeepsie “Eden” which he founded in 1910 and moved to Stamford, Conn, in 1919. Before he founded Glen Eden he conducted parties of summer tourists to Europe. His excuse for circularizing ministers to drum up a clientele was that Glen Eden is to be a “Church boarding school,” a “worthy project” for which he desired “a discriminating publicity.”