Any other boarding school brats on DU?

[bicentennial_baby]

Wondering if any of my fellow DUers went to boarding school for HS like me!

Northfield Mount Hermon...Class of 1995

[KamaAina]

1. I plead this excuse: it was a *psychiatric* boarding school!

My (wealthy, SW Conn.) town actually sent me up there rather than try to educate me in its own schools! Your tax dollars at work...

That had to be one of the few boarding schools where almost no one went on to college. Wonder why Bush* never went there? :evilgrin:

[Throckmorton]

16. Me too, 4 years.

I was inmate of the month at the Devereux Glenholme school, in bucolic Washington Depot Connecticut !!!

5th throught 8th grade

[clar]

2. I went to

Simon's Rock in Great Barrington Mass in the early seventies. Four of my cousins went to Mt. Herman. Also a friend's daughter who attended at about the same time you did.

[bicentennial_baby]

5. I almost went to Simon's Rock

I actually ended up going to NMH for (dork alert)...the Latin & Greek programs.

[Rhiannon12866]

3. Mother of God! I went there, too,

but I was slightly ahead of you! I lived in Center Gould, how about you?:D

[bicentennial_baby]

4. South Crossley

What year were you? (if you don't mind my asking) My fiancee graduated in 1991.

[Rhiannon12866]

6. I went out with a guy who lived in Crossley, but that was an all

male dorm for so many years. My UNCLE lived in Crossley and my brother. It was usually male upperclassmen who lived in Crossley.

You notice I didn't include my class year! My class had the distinction of being the last Northfield class to graduate before the school went completely co-ed! I had guys in my elective classes like Bible and Anthropology, but English and Math were still strictly all girls!:D

[bicentennial_baby]

7. Gotcha

The pre-coed days of NMH...that must have been weird. Living in Crossley, which was 200 boys/200 girls with locked doors down the middle, we had our share of late-night "cruising" :P

[Rhiannon12866]

9. I know! I just couldn't imagine that!

I remember one time that my roommate asked me to hand me her glasses because she thought she spotted a BOY walking way across campus!

When my brother was going there, we gave a ride one time to a girl who was living in West Gould. I had the opportunity to visit my old floor (CG, third floor) and walked past my sr. year room. Gould was, by then, co-ed like you describe at Crossley. There was a sign on the outside of the fire door leading to the main staircase. It said ``if you are reading this, you're booted!'' That was pretty strange for me since I went up and down those same stairs a dozen times a day during my entire time at Northfield.

Okay, I'll tell you, but this has to remain between us!:D I was Northfield class of '71.:o
My brother had a PG year and was NMH class of '76. My uncle was Hermon 1955!!! Your new screen name made me reluctant to admit this! Why'd you change it, anyway? I liked toolfan; she had a lot of cool things to say!:D

[bicentennial_baby]

10. Eh

I got sick of being asked A)are you a guy? B)Do you like the band or power tools?, etc. My mom always called me a bicentennial baby, so i went with that. So far so good, I have'nt been called a troll YET.

NMH has gotten more and more strict on opposite-sex relations. Back in my fiancee's day, he could be in the dorm room of a girl with the door closed 99% of the way. You only had to have it open to the width of a shoe! By the time I left, you had to have the door open, and to be in full view of anyone walking by!

The oversexed students of NMH...dragged back to the days of DL Moody, kicking & screaming!

[Rhiannon12866]

11. The only guy ever in my room was my father!

I liked living on the third floor because my elderly housemother just couldn't make it up all those stairs, so that's why I chose it! Most ``heads of hall'' were like that back then! But my poor dad had to lug my huge footlocker up four flights of stairs (the parking lot for CG is off of the basement) and is lucky he didn't keel over! He kept asking me why I couldn't live on a lower floor!O8)

I did know girls who managed to spend the night in Crossley and not get caught, but things were much stricter at Northfield. Double standard and all that. My date for the Chat actually was let in by the campus police guard. He had long hair and the guy couldn't tell the difference! When he realized his mistake he threw the poor guy out and he was only sitting in the living room!:7

Were there a lot of drugs on campus in your day? When I was going there, CG was the place for drugs on campus. :smoke: My senior year, the two girls who were the main distributors lived in the next room. One night my roommate and I woke up to hear male voices coming from the other side of the wall! We were scared to death because those doors didn't lock. Did yours? This was so they could search your room at anytime looking for illicit items like irons and hairdryers! Fire hazards! My roommate got caught with the latter.:o

As for me, I got caught still in bed when I was supposed to be in chapel. I had a class at Hermon three mornings a week, so they got used to not seeing me and I'd sleep in the other two days. Oops! When I finally was forced to go back to morning chapel there was a lot of grumbling because I had only been there on Seating Day (do they still have that stupid, pointless tradition?) and there was no longer room for me.:7

My time there was a time of transition. There were still stupid traditions, like Seating Day, left over from the '40s, that nobody understood or appreciated. There were also boys on campus everyday, since most classes were now co-ed. The holdovers from the old days, like the spinster teachers and elderly house mothers, were scared to death. Interesting times to look back on, but not something I enjoyed much at the time.:-(

[bicentennial_baby]

12. Changes

Drugs at NMH: Gould still held the honors of being the "stoner dorm" in my day, but drugs were pretty prevalent all over the campuses at the time.

Chapel: once a week, no religious significance attached, but Freshmen still have to learn the words to "Jerusalem", and it is sung in chapel every week. Never bothered me, I like the song.

They still do the Pie Race, and still have that weird One-Tined Fork thing every year.

I went to campus to hear Howard Zinn speak last winter, and things really have'nt changed all that much since I was there.

[Rhiannon12866]

13. We had to go to chapel every morning

I don't remember it being particularly religious, but then I rarely showed up!:7

There were any kind of drugs available that you can imagine, especially in Gould. Acid was particularly popular and most of my dormmates had used it. I remember two very young looking new sophomores who droppped acid on their first night there. My dad thought he was sending me to a more sheltered environment than public school. He had no idea! Sex and drugs and rock and roll!:D

I never paid much attention to the odd traditions. Seating Day sticks in my mind because it just made no sense to me. Maybe it did back in the '40s, but in the '70s whatever meaning it had had was lost. That was the day that you got your permanent seats in the chapel, as part of your new class. Seniors got to sit in front, which was supposed to be some kind of honor. We had to wear these white shirtwaist dresses (I never hemmed mine and it reached my ankles) and our class hats and hair ribbons. I kid you not. Mine were really ugly, brown and gold! Who voted for that?! The gym teachers would supervise marching into the chapel in some strange rhythm. My friend pretended to be Frankenstein's monster. Afterwards the seniors stood at the top of the hill and the juniors at the bottom. If you were a senior, you had a sophomore to hold your hat. The two classes were supposed to sing insulting songs to each other. I don't know who wrote these; nobody seemed to know the words or cared. Each senior had to have chosen a junior and after the songs, the senior was supposed to grab her junior and run to get ice cream sundaes. Make any sense to you?:shrug:

[bicentennial_baby]

14. What a strange tradition!

We did'nt have Seating Day...did you guys have the "Senior Door" at the Chapel? The special door you could'nt go through until you were a Senior?

I was just talking to my fiancee, and I realized that I still remember all of the words to Jerusalem! Scary!!

The second verse was always the students' favorite:

"bring me my bow of burning gold,
bring me my arrows of desire,
bring me my spear,
O clouds unfold,
Bring me my chariot of fire"

Of course "bow of burning gold" became "bowl of burning pot", and "arrows of desire" was sang at top volume (hormones!)....

[Rhiannon12866]

15. Yes, only seniors could exit through the front door

and you didn't become a senior officially until Seating Day. Other ``senior privileges'' included sitting on the furniture in the living room, picking the flowers, leaving your room during ``study hall'' and using the phone (outside in the phone booth, where your housemother couldn't overhear or pick up her extention). I, of course, got in trouble for using the phone. The Dean of Students happened to see me. I was a senior, but we hadn't had Seating Day yet. Of course she would notice, because, by their definition, nobody was a senior yet!:crazy:

Also, it was tradition to rub the nose on the bust of D.L. Moody while leaving the chapel, for luck. We sure needed it back then! It was always really shiny.:7

[Augspies]

8. Asheville School for Boys class 1990

n/t