Monday, Apr. 21, 1947
Nickel's Worth
The master couldn't keep order in study hall. The boys pitched pennies and lumps of coal around the room. So the headmaster fired him, and hurried off to Yale for another. In Harry Alfred Peters, only 23 but lean and hard, he found his man. Peters began his teaching career by tossing the two toughest troublemakers out on their ears.
It was no reformatory the new teacher came to, but University School, for sons of well-to-do Clevelanders. Six years later, Harry Peters thought he was getting no place as a teacher, decided to try gold-mining instead. The school talked him out of it--by making him headmaster. This week, after 45 years in his first and only job, Harry Peters was ready to call it a day, and hand University School on to another, younger Yaleman: Harold Cruikshank.*
Strict Headmaster Peters, a man more respected than loved by his boys, would be turning over a $2,000,000, 36-acre campus (built in his own regime) on the edge of Cleveland's suburban Shaker Heights. Its assets included a big-league style ballpark, three football fields, 13 tennis courts, a quarter-mile track. Peters used to pitch on the faculty team himself, until a few years ago could beat the school's ace tennists, still does daily sit-ups at 67.
But athletics do not come first at University School. Says Peters: "Almost from the time they start first grade, the boys get the idea that scholarship is great stuff. In our school, it's considered good form to do good work." Once a month the older boys with grades of 87% or better get ice cream and cake for dessert, while the dullards eat applesauce or prunes. Each spring Peters declares a half-holiday in honor of old grads who have made Phi Beta Kappa and other scholastic honors at college. He usually picks the day the Cleveland Indians play their opening game.
God & Grease. Alumni, many of whose sons are now in school, include bank presidents, railroaders, and oilmen. All got grease on their hands at University School. Says Peters: "It is good for a boy, especially one who is likely to operate a factory later, to understand machines and how they run. It is also good for his viewpoint as a future employer of labor."
Peters, a Presbyterian of Pennsylvania Dutch descent, usually conducts the daily non-sectarian chapel service, but thinks that one weakness of his administration has been that he did not emphasize it more. "I would have more religion in our school if I could get away with it. It is hard to make the boys understand: You've got to have something better than a good meal in you to face tomorrow's troubles. You can't become religious overnight if you need God tomorrow."
Headmaster Peters also teaches a '"Problems in American Democracy" course for seniors, a simpler current-events class in the lower school. Says he: "Nobody's worth a nickel who doesn't know what's going on in the world. Our fifth and sixth graders know more about the world than I did when I got out of Yale."
* Younger brother of Taft School's Headmaster Paul Cruikshank.
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