Tales from the Attic: Big Sky

Sam Smith - The first time I saw Peter Sturtevant he was lumbering up to the stage at Maret School to address the assembled new and old parents. An amalgam of Orson Welles and Rodney Dangerfield, the Maret headmaster leaned into the microphone and began to speak:

"Maret doesn't have a dress code . . . [Pause] . . . Last week I sent two girls home for violating it . . . [Pause] . . . Let me tell you why Maret doesn't have a dress code. I used to teach at the Landon School. One day the headmaster sent us a memo saying that the boys could not wear tight jeans . . . Some of us in the faculty sent him one back in which we asked, 'How do you define tight jeans?' He replied that tight jeans were those where a golf ball could not be dropped between the waistband and the body and have it fall out at the ankle. We wrote back: "An English or an American golf ball?" . . . [Pause] . . . That's why Maret doesn't have a dress code."

Sturtevant then proceeded, unaided by notes, to introduce every teacher in the school, recount the high points of their curricula vitae and take a jibe at those he felt could take it or were too new to do anything about it. Leonard King, a humanities teacher and head of the upper school, would recall: "I remember one time, however, when he said nothing to embarrass me and I thought, perhaps, that Peter didn't like me anymore." In fact Sturtevant - Big Sky they sometimes called him - served as best man at the wedding of Leonard and Betty King, the latter also a teacher. The wedding was on Maret's front lawn, although Sturtevant suggested that they do it during assembly period and "get it over with."

I would soon learn that Sturtevant's performance was business as usual at Maret, which -- even as the rest of Washington sank into puerile, pompous predictability -- was creating the magic that comprises a good education. Sturtevant and his extraordinary faculty - the latter sometimes because of and sometimes in spite of the former - had formed a cabal of competence, caring, and cheer.

Maret had been founded in 1911 as a French school for girls. By the time Sturtevant arrived on the scene in 1969 the place was a mess with huge debts and only 19 students. "When I took over," he recalled, "there wasn't a hell of a lot to correct It was already self-corrected. It was a shambles." Sturtevant presented two plans for the school: one was to revive it, the other was to close it. The school was revived and, in a link to the past, its sports teams would be thereafter known as the Fighting Frogs.

"Headmasters," said Winston Churchill, "have powers at their disposal with which prime ministers have never yet been invested." Sturd used every one of them. It didn't always work out. He deployed the principles of affirmative action to his basketball team to the point of supererogation, but the school remained overwhelmingly white off the court. The owner of a then rare four-wheel drive vehicle, he kept the school open when everything else in DC was closed in the snow. At the same time, kids that would have been expelled elsewhere got a second or third chance. Sturd's reaction to trouble: "Now we can reach that kid. Now he might listen."

"I've found," he once said, "that a very inflexible, rule-oriented, quasi-conservative philosophy, which is not conservative at all, but basically laziness and reliance on rules, may be easier, but it doesn't do any good. It doesn't ultimately prove that you're really at teacher at all, but just somebody trying to make it easy."

His tolerance for variety extended to his faculty, which is how I found myself arguing about Commentary Magazine with my son's 4th grade ancient history teacher five minutes after I met him. The teacher also used a 1920s textbook with none of the liberal virtues, but he told great stories and insisted that his students interrupt him if they didn't understand a word that he had used.

Anyway, by 7th grade my son's history teacher was Miss Davis, who held a mock trial of Columbus for having been so mean to the Indians. She also sent her students home with disgusting details of the Black Plague to be regurgitated with glee over dinner. I pointed this out to her later and she replied, "Yeah, the 7th grade boys love the Black Plague, so I always start off with that and then I hit them with Martin Luther."

One of the Sturtevant's most unusual, if sometimes incomprehensible, gifts to the school was his summer letter written from the shores of Maine. A not atypical example included:

"Four or five days of rain have dampened the woods and brought the wells back, at no considerable loss of spirit. The two best games to watch this summer are the Red Sox and the Presidential race . . . Our pocket parrot, Zinnia, has just chosen to climb up to the brass ring surmounting my desk lamp ~ and is trying to evaluate what I'm doing, the ring too small for a comfortable grip but getting heat from the funneled shade. My most tangible production to date is a new sauce for cold salmon: one cup of the bouillon from the poach of the fish added to . . . The District of Columbia is serious (and rightly so) about immunization and I expect that you will have done your pediatric business and completed our medical forms by Labor Day . . . We will continue to enforce our dicta regarding unexcused student absences and cuts (daily zero, no retests for credit) including those resulting from ignoring the school calendar. We believe a school day should not be blatantly cast aside for the purpose of elongating a vacation." He ended with a long list of books he had read and a quote from Alfred Nock.

As it must to all headmasters, a capital fund drive eventually arrived on Big Sky's doorstep. He took on the task bravely if typically idiosyncratically. One letter announced that a donor could become a Gold, Silver or Platinum Frog based on one's contribution. I wrote Sturd that I found the distinctions tacky and reminded him that Emily Dickinson had written "How public like a Frog . . . To tell one's name - the livelong June- To an admiring Bog!" He wrote back saying, "Dear Sam: Of course it's tacky. On the other hand, another woman poet wrote. . And there followed an ode to a frog. Sturd took me to lunch to make the pitch, which we both avoided by discussing everything else we could think about. When the check arrived, he pulled out his credit card and said, "Well, Sam, how much is this lunch going to cost you?"

The last time I heard the since retired Sturd speak, evidence of Maret's non-dress code was in full array as the graduating students each placed a paper lei over his head as he handed them his diploma. By the end he looked like a terrible ad for Hawaii. One of the students wore the outfit he had found in a used clothing shop: a pink suit, pink tie and pink fedora, thereafter handed down from class to class to the senior most likely to be caught dead wearing it.

Sturtevant started this speech by saying "The purpose of Maret is to teach its students how to educate themselves and I believe we have done our job." Once again he was right.