Education: Habits of Vigor

Francis Olmsted-Grubbs, fresh from Princeton University, got off to a bad start when he began teaching French at the Loomis School in Windsor, Conn. At his very first class, he caught his feet in a wastebasket and fell flat on his face. Later, the boys, with typical irreverence, began calling him “Fog.” But as things turned out, Francis Grubbs soon gave the lie to his nickname. Last week, after 22 years on the faculty, he became the school’s headmaster.

He thus automatically became one of the East’s most important secondary schoolmen, for Loomis occupies a secure place among the nation’s top dozen prep schools. It began in 1912, with $2,170,000 left by five childless members of a wealthy Windsor family named Loomis, who wanted to found a place for students of all races and religions—”that some good may come to posterity from the harvest, poor though it may be, of our lives.” Under the first headmaster, Nathaniel Batchelder, the good came quickly. He boosted enrollments from 67 to 320, built a $1,500,000 campus, saw his endowment grow to over $3,000,000, Over the years, Loomis began to get a goodly share of scions—the sons of John D. Rockefeller Jr., Lee Higginson, Gerard Swope and Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

An earnest Batchelder disciple, Grubbs means to keep Loomis as it is—from its comparatively low price tag ($1,375 for boarders, $250 for day students) to its policy of making every boy, rich or poor, wait on table and clean his own room. The whole idea, says Grubbs, is to turn out boys who will be ready to “stand up and be counted. We don’t pass the buck to the colleges. It is our role to bring boys to the highest degree of maturity possible.” All this is just what the Loomis founders wanted—”to train boys to habits of vigor and self-reliance and [to use] every means to attain this end.”