EV Road Trip Day 10
Flashback - 50th High School reunion. I have seen a few reunion movies, most notably, “Grosse Pointe Blank,” and this wasn’t like that. First, all of the women there were either school staff or alum wives.
Avon Old Farms School (AOF), a private boys-only boarding school, was a pivotal experience in my life. The unique community of the school developed by its outstanding leadership, excellent faculty, and founder’s motto, Aspirando et Perseverando (aspire and persevere), helped guide me through my adolescence to success later in life. I will always be grateful for the time I spent there, with the possible exception of not being able to successfully navigate the dating scene. Girls were a mystery to me well into my adolescence.
“The school has an interesting history and unique architectural character. Avon Old Farms was founded in 1927 by heiress Theodate Pope Riddle, one of Connecticut’s first licensed women architects. A passenger on the RMS Lusitania when it was torpedoed by a German submarine in 1915, she was left on a pile of the dead and was rescued by a woman from the Cotswold area of England, from whence the design of the school was created. She married American diplomat John Wallace Riddle, a year later. Mrs. Riddle had always dreamed of building a school for boys and having attended Miss Porter’s (girls’) School in Farmington. She purchased 3,000 acres in nearby Avon and designed and constructed the school in the Cotswold style using stone quarried on the property.”
In my days at AOF, boys would sneak out to Miss Porters, and if caught, a call to AOF would bring a van to scoop us up and return us to campus. It became like a badge of honor.
Of course, while other students were jocking-out in sports programs, I and a few other like-minded students were out breaking the rules with impunity. NOTE: a tell-all here would cause my iPad to run out of memory, and what happened at AOF, circa 1969 to 1973, rest assured, will stay at AOF, circa 1969 to 1973
