By Nat Worley
Image of John Webster, Former Headmaster of Greenwich Country Day School. Source: The Spire, 1962 yearbook of Greenwich Country Day School.
Greenwich Country Day School. Old Church Road, Greenwich, Connecticut. My mother taught second grade at Greenwich Country Day for three years before I was born in 1965. In those years, John Webster was the headmaster, and the title meant something. Students, faculty, and parents alike revered him. By the time he retired, he had been the headmaster at Country Day for more than 30 years.
Many private schools have this history of being led by a single, towering figure for decades. The school becomes a living extension of his vision—for a community, a pedagogy, and a life philosophy. Mr. Webster believed in responsibility, effort, virtue. He hired teachers who illustrated those ideals with their own lives and character.
When I was in my 30s, my mother showed me the letter that Mr. Webster wrote her when I was born. He congratulated her on my birth and promised her that I had a place waiting at the school when I turned four. In an important way, that letter writes my first destiny.
I went to Greenwich Country Day in 1969 as a four year-old preschooler, and I graduated from its Upper School at the end of ninth grade in 1980. The years there were the happiest of my life, for many reasons, but chief among them was the sense that I belonged utterly among my classmates, in those classrooms, on those fields. How odd to see that the great man himself, who retired in my second year there, had pre-ordained at my birth that I should belong.
The school itself occupied two former country estates, one of which contained all the school buildings, and the other of which housed faculty apartments. The academic buildings in that era were white clapboard, rambling wooden structures made to look like large colonial family homes. Their wood floors were varnished to high gloss and chair rails lined some of the walls. Administrative offices were large and just comfortable enough not to be imposing, suggesting large private libraries for great men and women.
Towering pines, green meadows and playing fields surrounded the buildings. We walked down a long hill and over a covered footbridge to arrive at the athletic fields and hockey rink. I can hear exactly the clatter of cleats as 30 boys hustled over the wood boards toward practice below. On game days, we marched in formation as a team, two by two, our cadenced cleats clattering on the bridge in unison, martial and precise. We marched in silence. Our uniforms were orange and black, with tigers growling on the front of them.
Male teachers wore coats and ties, and female teachers wore dresses or skirts with starched blouses or sweaters. Boys wore blazers and ties even while playing football at recess. We were idyllically and comically imprinted with Connecticut prep style and ideals.
What I remember of that time in my life was the almost entire lack of irony and cynicism. Teachers taught that we were preparing for lives as business and political leaders and that we had a moral duty to learn service to others.
Issues of class, money, and social rejection must have loomed large for some of the parents and for some of the teachers, though we were treated as insiders, as the elect. I was unaware of class for many years.
What I remember instead are friends whom I knew and loved for the most unguarded dozen years of my life. I remember teachers and what mattered to them. I remember practical jokes and confident, laughing girls, and the feeling that even with all the money required to build the school and pay the tuitions, principles towered above us and counted more than anything else in life.
To this day, I credit that phase of my life with all of my loves: books (especially poetry), debate, singing, team sports, public speaking, writing, and wearing a tie to work. Those teachers—including my mother, who stopped teaching there when I was born—trained us to take ourselves seriously and to treat our fellow human beings with the respect we wanted for ourselves.
Nat works in marketing for a technology and services company in Rhode Island. He has been a student of Natalie Goldberg since 2003 and learned about writing practice from her book, Writing Down the Bones. In addition to writing essays and poems, Nat writes the blog www.cloud9000.com/nat and is a principal of Cloud 9000, an organization devoted to the discovery and development of happiness, well being, and personal growth.
-from Topic post, WRITING TOPIC – A PLACE TO STAND
Your voice is strong in this piece, Nat. I can hear you as I read it.
The imagery in this section struck me, and I wonder if your days at Greenwich Country Day School had something to do with your comfort and even longing for the silence you get from a week-long silent retreat in Taos:
We walked down a long hill and over a covered footbridge to arrive at the athletic fields and hockey rink. I can hear exactly the clatter of cleats as 30 boys hustled over the wood boards toward practice below. On game days, we marched in formation as a team, two by two, our cadenced cleats clattering on the bridge in unison, martial and precise. We marched in silence. Our uniforms were orange and black, with tigers growling on the front of them.
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Nat, this piece is rich and layered. There are a couple of themes in the write that strike me: belonging, structure, and vision.
How odd to see that the great man himself, who retired in my second year there, had pre-ordained at my birth that I should belong.
-Amazing to think we can be pre-ordained to belong. It seems there are so many these days who feel that they don’t belong, that they are isolated. Place can give us a sense of belonging. This was a great gift you received.
To this day, I credit that phase of my life with all of my loves: books (especially poetry), debate, singing, team sports, public speaking, writing, and wearing a tie to work.
-This is a good insight. That there are places and points in time that form who we become, our values, and who we are as adults. Those places become the foundation of our memoirs.
I have a couple of questions about structure:
1) I’m struck by how the structure of the buildings and the rules and rituals of the school created a container where you felt safe to be who you were. Do you think we try to recreate those structures throughout our lives so we can more fully be who we are?
2) I want to know more about your writing practice. How does it fit into these structures you learned as a child? And how does your writing practice evolve into and help form a piece like this?
3) Love the yearbook photos and your descriptions of the buildings and John Webster. Is he holding an apple? 8) Do you think he knew how much he inspired the students there? He seemed like a man with a vision.
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Nat,
I was riveted to this piece as I read it, sort of holding my breath. I found myself saying, “Yes! Yes! This is how schools should be!” Small, personal, welcoming, full of virtue. I’d love to see a rebirth of such schools. Those, vs. the mega-schools where children feel lost and unknown.
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Thank you all for the wonderful comments. I really appreciate them.
Sinclair, your list of adjectives–small, personal, welcoming, full of virtue–captures exactly how I felt about the place. Reading them now, I realize that those are the qualities I hope for in every community I have ever joined. I have to admit that I haven’t always found them, but I try to bring them with me wherever I go. If there is one enduring legacy of my time there, that is it: I try to embody what I loved about that place and time.
I think that answers ybonesy’s question too, about my love of silence. It never occurred to me, but I do feel at home in Taos silent retreats very much in the way I did at GCDS. Funny that I never made the connection. My favorite teacher there was a Quaker who loved words, so there was always the duality of profound strength in silence and exuberant joy in expression.
QuoinMonkey’s observations about structure catch another truth about places where we knew we belonged: if we are able to recognize what gave us that sense, then we can seek it out in everything we do later. If we’re lucky, we don’t have to recreate the structure, we can re-discover it. But I’ve had to work to recreate it some of the time, and that can be hard and a little lonely.
It’s harder for me to describe my writing practice as a structure I create. I think that’s been my struggle with it. I needed someone else to suggest to me what it might consist of. As it turned out, timed writing practice did the trick. I was really comfortable right away just pouring out whatever was there waiting in my thought. Once Natalie told me it was OK to write the worst junk in America, that sort of opened the door.
But in terms of my creating a discipline in which I carry out that practice, I’ve really struggled. Right now, writing my own blog is taking me one more step toward a structure, and so is the notion that I don’t have to worry about the quality. As Julia Cameron says, God takes care of that.
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Nat,
Wonderful piece! I contrast your experience to mine. Growing up, I never felt safe, secure or confident in school. I learned similar values you mention from a diverse group of people that I met over the years.
What you describe sounds wonderful and it would have been nice to experience. I believe the sense of community could have added a richness to my early years. But, I have no regrets about myself, who I am or where I’ve been.
Thanks for sharing this story.
Michael
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Michael’s comment made me think about my own school experience. Not exactly a place that inspired a sense of safety or confidence. My goodness, I can’t even imagine how I might have gained confidence in my junior high and middle school; I was such a sheep.
Yet, the sense of place was so strong. The schools were both big yet somehow that bigness made the few connections I had all the more profound. Like we were lifesavers for one another. I even picture us walking in lifesaver formation, a small circle of girls able to move from class to class without breaking our circle form. We’re not the kind of friends now who talk often; sometimes years will go by. But we’re just one step removed from family when we do see each other. Like we know something about the other that very few people know.
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[…] the writing blog red Ravine, I posted a piece about my childhood school. I note that its structure and my social life there instilled great […]
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[…] A Place To Stand – Greenwich Country Day School by Nat Worley […]
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Thank you for this story. John Webster is my grandfather and it is so special to read stories such as yours.
Thank you again for sharing.
– Lucy Webster Wicks
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What a delight to hear from you, Lucy. I forwarded your comment to Nat Worley, the essay’s author. I’m sure he will enjoy knowing that you found your way to it.
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Lucy, how wonderful that you found this post. It was such a pleasure to have Nat Worley as a Guestwriter on red Ravine last year. And it is so great that readers are still enjoying his piece. Thank you so much for commenting.
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Lucy,
What a thrill for me and my mother, whom your grandfather hired, to discover that you had read and commented on this reminiscence.
Coincidentally, I drove through Greenwich on the 4th of July with my stepdaughter and her friend. We detoured off the highway so that I could drive them through the school and show them where I had come from. Since my parents moved away from the town, I realize that the school campus is where I go to feel back at home.
Your grandfather was a giant in that community. His influence has doubtless shaped the lives of hundreds of people, both those whom he educated directly and those whom those students subsequently taught, managed, commanded, or parented themselves.
What a legacy. I am grateful to him and so happy that you found this piece.
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During the time that you were there, was there a teacher by the name of William Merriss? If so, did you know him?
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Rebecca,
I knew William Merriss. I graduated from GCDS in 1974 and Mr. Merriss was my English teacher and academic advisor. He was a superlative teacher and authored a grammar and composition book with David Griswold that for many years was a standard textbook at GCDS and elsewhere.
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