Education: Nolo Episcopari

When the late Dr. Samuel Smith Drury was Rector of St. Paul’s School (Concord, N. H.), he was offered two other jobs: the Episcopal coadjutor-bishopric of Pennsylvania, the rectorship of Manhattan’s Trinity Church (“one of the most enviable jobs in or beyond the Episcopal Church” which has often proved a stepping-stone to the top-ranking bishopric of New York). St. Paul’s is the oldest and biggest of the haughty Episcopal preparatory schools, and its headmastership always ranked high, but Dr. Drury’s nolo episcopari enormously increased the prestige of the job. When stern, sonorous Dr. Drury died last February, S. P. S. trustees searched the Church for a man capable of filling Dr. Drury’s shoes. Meanwhile, quiet Vice-Rector Crocker Kittredge, son of Harvard’s famed Professor George Lyman (“Kitty”‘) Kittredge, ran the school.

Last month the trustees thought they had found their man: Rev. John Crocker, 38, studious, absentminded, enthusiastic high Churchman, Episcopal Chaplain of Princeton University, a graduate of Groton. Harvard (where he played end on the football team), Oxford. Grotties speak of “Jack” Crocker as logical successor to Groton’s 80-year-old Headmaster Endicott Peabody; and he himself has declined nomination for the bishoprics of New Jersey and Vermont. Last week, after long pondering St. Paul’s School’s offer, he returned a nolo docere, turned down the job.