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84 / Part II prep schools, twenty-one years as a headmaster, and too many drug-related student “firings,” Rod resigned in order to found and direct his interracial school in Botswana. Preparing to retire to his coastal summer retreat in 1978, he was informed that his house had been struck by lightning and destroyed. Rod resolved to build again and founded the Mountainview School in the ashes. The Civil Service Intrusion Mountainview’s early years were marked by a conscious disregard for the rigmarole of institutionalized schooling. More like a nurturing family—albeit all male—that functioned in the style of “old bulls guiding young bucks,” life at Mountainview was like visiting the home of an indulgent grandfather. A student from 1979 recalls that the “Mountainview School” sign at the base of the driveway looked as if it had been scrawled in crayon by Rod. Students were allowed to have a beer on weekends and smoking marijuana in the woods was generally disregarded. Students could dress as they pleased and were allowed their private inclinations as long as they were willing to exercise some restraint during meals, chores, classes, study halls, and other public ceremonies and rituals. Crucial to Rod’s policy of indulgence toward drinking and drugging was the implicit understanding that such behavior would be tolerated as long as it was kept hidden, except when explicitly approved, and did not affect the tone of the school. This ritualized segmentation of illicit behavior, supportive of public compliance and ceremonial polish, provided a context in which the boys could explore the possibility of a reconciliation with the Brahmin world they had rejected. Tolerance toward youthful excess in tandem with the cultivation of humored casualness toward a modicum of decorum, while seemingly calculated to invite an escape from the regimentation of prep school life, amounted to a strategic basis for a rapprochement. A series of gentlemanly agreements mitigated the casual seriousness toward formal requirements that Mountainview imposed. Rod’s understanding of the boys’ darker inclinations endeared him to them; moreover, reluctant students were provided with a model of emulation and a method for eventually navigating a more plausible upper-class world. In a laboratory of indulgence, custom built by an experienced and empathic guide who kept his liquor in an unlocked cabinet of the Big House kitchen, these lost boys might, despite themselves, reconsider the possibilities of this Brahmin version of the bureaucratic world they thought they could not suffer.13 Toward the mid-1980s, two incidents involving housemasters altered the tone of the school. Serving as a less benign representative of Rod’s authority in the lives of the students, most housemasters had been former students, confidants, and protégés of Mountainview’s founder. For Rod, the person in Mountainview School / 85 the position of housemaster would become the lieutenant or foot soldier who could demonstrate to the boys how to comply with the very authority they disdained. In 1984, Rod hired a black friend from St. Mark’s who introduced African American studies into the curriculum. Incapable of disciplining the students, he would greet Rod and Buck Sheldon, by then headmaster, with fretful news of the previous evening’s disasters. He also drank heavily after dinner when the boys had their final study hall. While not revered, the boys harbored some affection for him mixed with the tension his inability to set limits generated. One evening while relaxing with a group of boys, this housemaster was giving a boy a back rub that was inadvertently experienced as a fondle. The situation erupted, the housemaster contacted his psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist contacted state officials, who were sent to the school. A weeklong investigation exonerated the housemaster, but he resigned and the school’s weekend beer policy had to be terminated or the state would close it. Except for his tendency to “play favorites” and not take advantage of his own weekend leaves, the next housemaster, a graduate of Mountainview who had completed two years at a prestigious college, appeared to be an ideal replacement . But toward the end of the next academic year, a student informed Buck that this new housemaster had been supplying and consuming alcohol and marijuana with the boys on a regular basis. His resignation upon admission of guilt was uncluttered. These crises with housemasters initiated a pattern of state interference facilitated by a provincial headmaster more accepting of the necessity of infusing more explicit bureaucratic professionalism into Rod’s cosmopolitan bohemian educational grove. Buck Sheldon...

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