Sam Smith - It turns out that Kristen Welker - who will be hosting the presidential debate on Thursday - shared the same high school and college with me. We both went to Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia and then to Harvard College. One big difference was that she graduated with honors from the latter institution while I graduated magna cum probation.
But it was our common past at Germantown Friends that struck me in part because I have to come to think in my excessive maturity that if I now had to choose between the two institutions I would take GFS in a minute for various reasons including its encouragement of curiosity, friendship and decency beyond the lower level of mere knowledge.
GFS was run by a Friends meeting that had been around since the 1600s, back then opposing slavery among other things. We had to go to a weekly meeting which I later described:
Every Thursday we filed into the plain large room with the plain brown
benches -- girls on one side, boys on the other -- for weekly meeting.
Facing us were several rows of high-backed benches for the elders, but
it being only a school meeting, they were sparsely filled -- perhaps a
beatific white haired man who had once been headmaster; or a Presbyterian who
loved Quakerism so much he couldn't stop talking about it.
There was mostly nothing but silence. I filled the silence with thoughts
of girls, today's soccer game, how I was going to explain something to
my parents, and -- on extremely
rare occasions -- the meaning of it all.
I did not think that highly of Quakerism. It seemed a little put on. I
liked to say things like, "The trouble with Quakers is that they don't
fight hard enough for what they believe in."
I didn't think all that much of Quaker meetings, either. The silence
would get boring after awhile and the Presbyterian would get boring when
he broke it. The parts I liked best came when someone did something
different. Nothing as wonderful happened at our meeting as occurred at
my eldest son's Quaker school, when several students let two chickens
loose into the silent hall. But there was the time when a full-fledged
argument on the divinity of Christ developed, all the while people were
pretending they weren't arguing but just getting up and saying what was
on their mind and one of the elders had to suggest that a meeting was
not a place for disputation.
There were "pop-corn" meetings, where speaker after speaker arose,
barely letting their predecessors' words sink in. And in spring, there
was always some student, usually a girl, who would get up and become
emotional about what the school and Quakerism had meant and then sit
down teary-eyed and those of us boys who weren't graduating would turn
to each other and wink and mug and roll our eyes.
Sometimes, though my mind would turn to
things that were troubling me, that were scaring me, that I couldn't put
right and I would stare out the clear windows to the trees and really
think about it. And sometimes, on those rare occasions, a rare kind of
peace would descend and I would suddenly understand what Friends meeting
was about.
And even at an ordinary meeting I had to admit I felt a little better
leaving than I did entering, and certainly better that I ever did at St.
Martin's in the Field where I went with my parents. No one in that room was judging me and nothing
in that room made me feel faint or uncomfortable. I was in a room with
friends. There was, in that room, an undeniable sense of us.
Years later I would come to realize that Quakerism was a form of existentialism where what you did scored much higher than what you professed to be your faith.
And then there were the teachers. Here's what I wrote about several of them about a decade ago:
Last May the Review received an email from a reader praising the work the editor and his wife had done in Washington as they prepared to move to Maine. He wrote: "It is so interesting and moving to hear the two of you reflecting on those years, being young and adventurous there at a time when things were so intensely alive and full of promise. So clearly you have nourished that scene for 40 years as well as having been nourished by it."
Editors get nice letters like that and they get nasty ones, but what was exceptional of about this one was that it was yet another from an 86-year old man who had taught me English at Germantown Friends School in the 1950s and was still egging me on over a half century later. Sadly, however, I won't be getting any more such letters, however, because David Mallery passed on January 16
David Mallery, Ed Gordon and Bob Boynton were the school's English teachers. Mr. Gordon was the toughest of the lot, a smallish, well-dressed man as defensive of our right to say what we wanted as he was insistent that we say it precisely and clearly. . . We would try to trap him, but it was not easy. One day, one of the students demanded of Mr. Gordon why -- given his propensity for free expression -- he always wore gray flannel suits. Mr. Gordon said quietly, "It makes it easier to say what I think."
We knew all about the meaning of gray flannel suits, thanks to Mr. Mallery, who had introduced us to the man in one, and other subversive literature of the 50s such as The Organization Man and Generation of Vipers. Mr. Mallery accomplished with enthusiasm what Mr. Gordon achieved with discipline. I took naturally to the skepticism of the social critics, for I had found much of my world not to my liking but had not realized that one could make a living saying so. And I devoured Ernest Hemingway because his stories were tough and melancholic and he didn't gush adjectives, metaphors and similes like so many of the writers we were meant to admire. In The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, he said that some things lose their meaning when they get all mouthed up. I appreciated the way he didn't use words as much as the way he did.
Several of the bright, proto-literary girls in my class -- who tolerated my less intellectual ways as though I were a colorful but unreliable writer to be both valued and pitied -- became enthralled with T.S. Eliot and Yeats and spoke about them in ways I did not comprehend. Girls, it was understood, would do anything for the handsome Mallery, leaving even proto-literary boys to bring up the rear.
Still, it was a pleasant rear, for Mr. Mallery usually found something good to say, gave us courage to challenge the world and provided daily evidence that growing up did not have to mean the end of joy. And when that didn't work, he once walked atop a row of desks to make his point.
He even inspired me to write a play, a maudlin love story involving a foreign correspondent. In his normal red ink, Mr. Mallery wrote:
Intensely interesting, Sam -- there is talk here that pierces the mind... You have values and feelings made eloquently articulate.
It being only eleventh grade, I believed him. It was thankfully the last play I ever wrote, but it was one of the moments that confirmed that I wanted to be a writer. (Years later, when this essay appeared in a school publication, Mallery wrote me, "But I was right.")
In one essay for Mr. Mallery I even took on the mythic figure of William Whyte who had proposed in Fortune placing an employee's IQ and personality test records, religion, political affiliation, hobbies, type of car and salary all on a single card for use as needed.
On the other hand, my attack on Lillian Smith's The Journey brought Mr. Mallery out of his ebullience:
Lillian Smith is not a friend of mine, or of my mothers. So it is with no bias that I say your attack on her is tiresome, and inappropriate for this particular job... Since you do haggle over her in the way your do, read her again, after a good dinner. Yours, feeling nailsy, though admiring of Sam.
I hope Kristen Welker had as good a time at Germantown Friends as I did.
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