| | No one could doubt that, in the 25 years since its founding, Flintridge Prep had grown and prospered. Its alumni had been successful, attending prestigious colleges and universities. They were a diverse group of professional men in business, medicine, law, science and engineering, education, ministry, and the arts; they were ambassadors for the rigorous, intimate education they had received from dedicated Prep faculty. President Doane Lowery could count on loyal support from alumni and a long-standing group of staunch friends — parents, board members, and people in the community — who had come forward continually in times of financial stress. The school was ready to embark confidently on expansion and to meet the growing need for quality boys’ education in the San Gabriel Valley. And expand it did. Although the campus never realized the vision expounded in the campus master plan formulated in 1956 by Thornton Ladd ’43, the building boom of the late 1950s extended into the early 1960s, resulting in the construction of the 30s and 40s buildings (1961 and 1965, respectively), the Lowery Pool (1965), and Jorgensen Center (1966) through the generosity of donor families including the Jorgensens, Detoys, Mollers, and Norrises. Enrollment increased, reaching a high of 253 in 1964, with tuition at $1,200 per year. The faculty increased too, especially in the math and science departments, as Prep rose to the challenge of training men for the Space Age. Teachers like Robert Benton (math and science, 1961–1969), Robert Denniston (English, 1955–1975), Fred DiazGranados (science, 1959–1969), David Fox (math, 1962–1972), Clay Noia (English and social science, 1957–1972), and Neil Poland (math, 1963–1972), joined stalwarts and master teachers LeRoy Smith, Joe Fasken, Joe Rose, Robert Jardine, Phil Acosta, John Neupauer, Ma’am Beatrice Campbell, Miss Louise Gusweiler, Ma’am Ardene Callaway, and Coach Jim Wood. 
President Doane Lowery, Headmaster Malcolm Dickinson, and Comptroller Harold (“Mac”) McKee kept the school running with the addition of Doris Walton, whose career as an administrator exactly coincided with Prep’s second quartercentury. She remembers her first day, March 29, 1957: “I clambered over the kids in the dining room; it was lunch time and pouring rain. Poor old Doane was typing all the renewals and hired me parttime right away. I was making two dollars an hour and after three years got a raise of a quarter. I did not even notice when I became fulltime — it was 1960 or 1961. “Mac taught me the books,” Mrs. Walton remembers. “We were borrowing for every payroll. Teachers would come in and ask for a box of chalk or some paper and he would say, ‘No!’ He pretended to be a gruff, dour Scotsman, but inwardly he was kind and gentle.” Meanwhile, Mr. Lowery’s Sousa marches would ring out from the bottom floor of Skillen House (“He was deaf and turned them up high,” she says) and Mrs. Walton would find herself keeping the beat with her typewriter, keeping up with enrollment contracts that kept rolling in as the school reached a comfortable, consistent 230 or so students each year. Campus life included the dramatic — the October 12, 1959, fire that charred the La Cañada hillsides, with the new gym pressed into service as an evacuation center — and the comic, including the theft of one-half of the bleachers on January 4, 1960, and a cherry bomb that wreaked havoc with the plumbing of Skillen House (as recalled by Victor White ’62). “Chastise Chadwick” was emblazoned on banners in the gym in 1961; it must have worked, because that season Prep’s much-beleaguered Varsity basketball team went 10–4 and the B team 14–0. Mr. Rose led all-school assemblies each morning, providing inspirational readings and enduring the inevitable heckling as Rice University lost again at football. Mr. Acosta would pile his Spanish students in a station wagon for a trip to downtown LA to take in Mexican movies. Dr. Neupauer, known to most as Newpie, supervised as his students implanted electrodes in rats, conducting university-style research. Gradually, there were transitions: Dr. Dickinson got married in 1959 (to Helen Temple, Headmistress of Westlake School for Girls). Mr. Lowery took an unprecedented three-month vacation in the summer of 1960. While Dr. Dickinson was on a post-marital sabbatical, Mr. Rose filled in as headmaster, as he had done during World War II.  Ned Sutro ’64 remembers those days at Prep as “an extraordinary combination of the formal — the academics — and the informal, influenced by the school’s location in a rural area of California. It was decidedly a country school. We had no dress code; you could wear shorts to class. There was a sort of gentlemen’s agreement about conduct, which was mostly supervised by the boys themselves through the student council. One of the few rules laid down by Doane Lowery was, ‘Flintridge boys do not boo.’ To this day I do not boo. I consider it unseemly!”
Sutro remembers the teachers as “different in temperament, but they all loved their subject. They had a lot of learning, their intellects were wide-ranging, and they wanted to share everything. Mr. Denniston had a spectacular gift for reading out loud — I can remember him acting Shakespeare. Neupauer had a twinkle and a level of patience — teaching both Latin and science, he was both a classical scholar and a scientist! Acosta had a great sense of humor and could relate to boys.” Victor White approved of the all-male student body “that let us concentrate on academics and friendships. There was a reverence for academics, and some of these people, faculty like Mr. Fasken and Coach Wood, friends like Steve Neptune ’62 and Dusty Rhodes ’63, were important in the rest of my life.” Entering Prep, both academic and social adjustments were often necessary. Sutro recalls, “I was miserable my first year. It was tenth grade, and I went from being Mr. Bigshot to Mr. Nobody. And everybody should have that experience. The status at a boys’ school came from being the best student academically, or the best athlete. If you were both, you were on top of the heap. If you were neither — and in tenth grade, that described me — I was at the bottom. You had to enter somehow.” Classmate John Plumb ’64 began Prep in sixth grade and made a near-fatal mistake his first day, greeting Headmaster Dickinson with “Hi, Doc!” Surviving that gaffe, the self-described “lazy” student found the schoolwork tough but the atmosphere “homelike — it was warm; they took time with you. We were here at eight a.m. and did not go home until fi ve p.m. Even ‘middle-of-the-road’ boys had a place here — we maybe struggled academically, but we were maybe good athletes, and we were all good kids. There was room for everybody, but of course, there was pressure to succeed.” A TOUGH TRANSITION With Flintridge Prep reaching a comfortable stasis, it became time for President Doane Lowery to retire. He told the Board of his intentions in December, 1963; by the 1964–1965 academic year, Mr. Lowery was on sabbatical, and Dr. Dickinson had retired. Comptroller Harold McKee took over as both President and Headmaster in 1965–1966, to be succeeded by Mr. Rose in 1966–1967. Mr. Smith took over as headmaster in 1967–1968 and Clay Noia was headmaster of the lower school; Chuck Moller ’50 became Prep’s President from 1967–1971. (“Chuck kept things juggling,” says John Plumb. “He was close to Lowery and Dickinson.”) In 1971 the Board abolished the position of President in favor of a single Headmaster. Col. Spencer Edwards became Headmaster for two years; he was followed by comptroller Arch LeQuesne, who stepped into the role for a few months in 1974–1975. 
Prep’s decade of 1965–1975 is sometimes called “the dark years” (or worse!) by alums who knew it when. “A school can unravel quickly,” says Ned Sutro, who, as a young alumnus, was an onlooker (he was later a member of the Board). “By the end of the late 1960s there were already problems; it was clear that nobody on the staff could take the reins. “The Board of that time deserves credit for keeping the school afloat. Ed Bulmahn ’49 worked behind the scenes with Chuck Detoy ’42, who really orchestrated the survival, along with John “Yogi” Jorgensen ’43. And a lot of us who stepped up in the ‘bad old days’ had been ordinary students and had come to love the place that gave us such a lot.” Sutro says of those rough years, “There were no set salary scales; it was a human resources nightmare. We lurched from crisis to crisis — things that would not normally be crises assumed huge proportions. We wanted to keep somebody on staff — a coach, I think — and were just out of money. The trustees locked the door — we were meeting in the library — and the hat got passed. If there was not enough, the hat got passed again, until we had the cash. We would bet on who could name the first date each year that we had to go to the bank and borrow on our line of credit.” Doris Walton recalls having the payroll signed by board member Steve Smith in a bar in Pasadena.(The school’s mortgage was finally burned June 25, 1981.) In spite of the turmoil, there was still the academic rigor, and the sense that the old guard was holding the fort and passing faculty members. Bob Foster, who taught from 1966–1970, remembers, “LeRoy Smith came into my classroom the first day. I thought ‘What a nerve!’ And when he was done, I thought, ‘Now I know what this is all about!’” Running through even the roughest phase was also the thread of “the Flintridge Family type,” according to Mrs. Walton. “The faculty members, the families who were always there — at everything that went on — in sports, the arts, fundraising affairs, social events, plays, even summer activities. We were tight-knit.” ENCOUNTERING THE COUNTERCULTURE The turmoil on campus was echoed and exacerbated by turmoil in the country. From 1965 to 1975, there was a general questioning of authority, the establishment, and anybody over 30. How could a prep school with a group of faculty members, some of whom were approaching 70, all of whom insisted on being addressed as “sir” or “ma’am,” be, in the parlance of the times, “relevant”? Yearbooks document the fact that Prep, along with the times, was a-changin’. In 1963, the theme of the Log was a corporate annual report; by 1968 it had a Day-Glo orange cover and psychedelic graphics. The 1962 “Christmas in Dixie” dance, featuring the Crown City Jazz Band complete with banjo, would give way to a 1966 “Batdance” featuring a battle of the bands won by an all-electric ensemble called “The Plague.” In 1970, there are only a few long-haired seniors in the Log; by 1972 nearly all the boys and many of the faculty sport long hair (and, on those who could grow them, sideburns and mustaches). Dave Schmutz ’71 remembers the turbulent times that inspired the change in Prep’s mascot. “The Highlanders seemed so old-fashioned, so establishment. We wanted to be the Rebels — we thought of ourselves as rebellious, as ‘rebels without a cause.’ With our attitudes on politics, we saw ourselves as an independent group of people.” The independent, newly-christened Rebels nevertheless soaked up learning and the general ethos of Prep. Schmutz remembers Mr. Neupauer and Mr. Fox as “inspirational,” recalls incessant drilling for Miss G, and can still imitate Mr. Jardine’s plaint of “Well, you’ve done and buggered that one!” “Coach Wood was one of the nicest guys, and very inclusive,” Schmutz says. “Even if you were not talented he would say, ‘Get out there and try!’” Perhaps the greatest, and most telling, by-product of Schmutz’s time at Prep is his enduring, 40-plus-year friendship with former faculty member Bob Foster.  Bob Vargas ’75 remembers seeing seniors like Schmutz hanging out. “I thought, those guys have it made! They made the senior room into their pad, with posters and big chairs — and they were shaving and driving — intimidating!”
Vargas reports that his class was “rowdy. There was a sense that the place was falling apart. We had a small class; enrollment was low. We boycotted football when Coach Harper was fired. I remember the Nixon resignation, and we had to register for the draft; I remember the 210 Freeway collapsing, and the school was closed for a day due to the ’71 Sylmar earthquake. “We liked to make our teachers cry,” Vargas recalls, “and they had to be tough or we would run all over them. Mr. John Hamilton lectured us the first day and said, ‘I’m in charge’ — he scared us out of our pants. He ended up being much more than a teacher to me; he connected with me on
a personal level, and I wasn’t one of his better students. Neupauer was beloved for his soft heart; we loved Mr. Acosta and Coach Harper. Tennis Coach Cavanaugh would throw kids into the pool. We had a lot of school spirit and would go to all the games. Jim Wood (who had been on the staff since 1945) did not seem old at all! “Major Hilton Tichenor would step outside and smoke, regaling us with his stories from fighting in Europe in World War II. When he taught geography, he would point to something on a map and say, ‘That is the river I had to sleep in one night during such-and-such a battle.’ Miss
Victoria George drove a Jag; we all had a crush on her. “Linda Lohn was a great English teacher who raced cars as a hobby. She is why I love to write.” Vargas concludes on a literary note (though he says he cannot remember which Prep teacher taught him Kafka): “Even though Prep went through its cockroach stage for a while, the metamorphosis has been achieved. THE ANDERSON YEARS The metamorphosis began when the Board, under Chair Chuck Detoy, conducted a nationwide search for Prep’s new headmaster in the spring of 1974. Two hundred applicants were interested; Edor Anderson, then Headmaster of Randolph School in Alabama, was chosen.
 Headmaster Anderson “was there to pick up the pieces,” says John Plumb, who taught from 1971–1979, and returned to run the alumni office in 1983. “The Board should be credited with keeping the school going, and finding Ed.” Ned Sutro recalls that under Anderson, “Enrollment improved. We tightened up on cash fl ow; he could really manage. He even put his sons Ed ’76 and Steve ’78 to work gardening around the campus!” Rob McLinn came to Prep in 1974 and now heads the biology department (he is the longest-serving current faculty member with 33 years). “Ed Anderson was the turnaround headmaster,” Mr. McLinn says. “I got the feeling that our seniors, before, were glad to go. He began Interim, a fourweek program in the winter, and students and faculty loved it. You could take a psych course, or kite flying, or stained glass. I would teach skiing, and we would go up to Mt. Waterman in the afternoons and race.” 
Anderson eliminated corporal punishment in favor of the infamous “black slip,” which remanded boys to the track for laps and pushups. Card Walker ’77 says, “He was supportive of the sports program. He is the fi rst Head I remember who showed up at all the games and encouraged us to support each other. He turned Prep sports around.” Another of Anderson’s legacies: “He knew how to hire great teachers,” says Robert Parker ’78, who currently serves on the Prep faculty with 22 teaching colleagues hired by Headmaster Anderson (see photos on back and inside covers for those hired before 1983.) Other early achievements during Anderson’s tenure (he served as Headmaster until 1991) include $850,000 worth of renovations in the administration building, classrooms, and labs; the gym addition; the wood shop conversion to litho, print, photo, and ceramics; a seven-room addition to the administration building; and the junior leisure terrace. In 1975, 75 students were tested for admission. By 1983, 300 students applied for 90 vacancies. An all-boys school was becoming an anomaly in the late 1970s. Robert Parker calls it “Dog eat dog. When I was a student here, the peer pressure was like the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Conformity was enforced.” Walker agrees that, “socially, with all boys, it was ‘clique-y.’ You had kids who were very focused on academics, and you had the jocks. We thought of girls as a distraction — being an all-boys’ school made you focus on the work. You get a different dynamic in learning with all boys; when you include girls, it gets more competitive. The boys formed study groups around mid-terms and finals and traded knowledge, so the guys who were good at English would help the ones who were better at math, and vice versa.” Both alumni concur there was a freewheeling atmosphere of “non-stop hi-jinks”; Parker remembers a student who was run up the flagpole calling out plaintively, “I’m stuck, sir,” to a passing faculty member. Walker says, “The seniors used to take a pickup in winter and get snow from Angeles Crest at lunch. We would have huge fights on the lawns. We snuck snowballs under our jackets and had a snowball fight in class. The teacher said, ‘I give up!’ and a week later he was gone.”  Good teachers were, as ever, appreciated. “The teachers were forces of nature, and the teaching was exemplary,” says Parker, who still quotes chemistry teacher Carl Gruhn’s aphorisms to his ninth grade computer classes. “The faculty loved their material, they loved explaining it, and
they loved being themselves. It was a happy atmosphere at school…if you chose to accept what was offered, it was fun. Relations with teachers and among classmates were strong.”
The good teachers were amazing, agrees Walker. “Phil Nix, who taught both French and English, shaped my writing skills; Newpie was so old-school, with his cadence and his roly-poly looks; we thought he was a weird dude, but he was a great teacher. I had Ma’am Campbell in 7th grade. She had complete control of us with her whistle and her scratchy voice. She’d say, ‘write this sentence 16 times.’ Then she would go out for a smoke. She was a fanatic about handwriting and formatting, and really set the tone for Prep. “Our graduating class was only 23 guys,” says Walker, “but we did not know the school might be struggling — it was just, get your homework done, and when is the next basketball game? We were at the tail-end of the hippie culture, but not particularly politically active — I remember voting for Nixon and his resignation. Some of the teachers were earthy — but politics for us were really low key. We got away with a lot. We had some streakers, we filled the chemistry teachers’ office with popcorn for the senior prank. It was looser, wilder, than today — we did a lot of testing the boundaries.” But like Prep alumni before him, Walker concludes, “I went to UCLA, and it was easy compared to Prep.” Concurs Parker, “The quality of the Prep teachers spoiled Yale for me. I remember more from Prep than from Yale. It is a real testament to Prep teaching.” COEDUCATION COMES TO PREP The question of coeducation evolved at Prep as a response to both opportunity and finances. Ned Sutro remembers that when Chandler School closed its upper grades, Prep realized that those students, both boys and girls, “needed a place to land.” The chance to expand enrollment came at a good time for Prep, which was feeling the pinch of a dip in enrollment after the rough interregnum of 1965–1975. The student body was not unanimous on the merits of coeducation; neither were the faculty or the Board, but finally, the decision was made. “I flew home from grad school at Stanford to cast a vote,” says Sutro. “I voted for it. On the first day we went coed I left work and came over to Prep. I remember seeing a girl (Kathy Bathke ’80, the only senior girl that year). She had brothers, she knew how to handle boys. I saw her from
the back, facing the 30s and 40s Buildings, and all I could see was her long blonde hair. She was surrounded by boys sitting cross legged with their mouths open — she was the perfect first girl at Prep.” Becoming coed was the passing of an era. Mr. McLinn says, “There was a lot less crying by boys, and a lot more crying by girls.” English teacher Kathi Condell Herroon (now Prep’s Director of Operations) remembers, “It took a while to integrate the girls. They had a calming influence. You could not yell at girls. They softened the atmosphere. The first girls were just a handful: they had a special status.” 
Once Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys became Flintridge Preparatory School, change on the campus was swift. The shop gave way to lithography and ceramics, a dance program was established, girls’ sports took over the visitors’ locker room, and “a lot more boys started using deodorant,” says Mrs. Herroon. Sutro was there, as a member of the Board, when Kathy Bathke received the first Prep diploma awarded to a girl. “Jorgensen and I took a walk — it was hard for an ‘old boy’ to assimilate, but we finally decided we understood. And Prep is a better school today — you want to be able to say this when you talk about your school.” In 1983, Headmaster Anderson had this message for alumni and parents: “We have witnessed myriad physical changes at Flintridge during the past decade…Nothing … will replace the personal relationship among the students, faculty, parents, and administration. This is the heart of our
school. The conservative curriculum, also the basis of Flintridge, has proven tried and true for 50 years. We shall continue to refine it yearly, but will implement only those innovations that appear necessary and beneficial for the school. To date, the improvements include the computer science program as well as the development of the fine arts program.”  At 2:10 p.m. on April 8, 1983, “Community Appreciation Day,” with students, parents, faculty, and dignitaries from surrounding cities in attendance, a time capsule was lowered into the ground at the base of the flagpole near the corner of Crown and Foothill Boulevards. Board members and loyal alumni John Jorgensen and Chuck Detoy oversaw the ceremonies, which included a Scottish piper in Highland kilt as a salute to the forefathers of Prep. The 20-inch diameter, 5-foot-long capsule, donated by JPL and designed under the direction of parent Caspar Mohl and Dr. Albert Hibbs (husband of then-librarian Marka Hibbs), was filled with memorabilia and sealed. The oxygen in the capsule was pumped out and replaced with argon gas to preserve the contents until Prep’s centennial celebration. The attendees were confident that Prep would easily last another 50 years.
The capsule preserves the ethos of the early 80s at Prep and includes (but is not limited to): an E.T. doll, a pair of Topsider shoes, the plaid 1982 Log featuring a “Preppy Handbook” theme, a photo of Rose Queen Katy Potthast ’82, and a letter from President Ronald Reagan. A draft of the history of Flintridge Prep takes care of the fountain pens, leather football helmets, and beanies which former generations might have placed inside. Prep’s earliest years are represented by the original stock certificates (prior to the school becoming a nonprofit), the original corporate seal, and a bottle of Fasken Scotch whiskey from the Class of ’49’s 25th reunion. Two months later, ground would be broken on the most ambitious building to date, the then-unnamed Science/Cultural Center, and the facilities that would usher in another era in Prep’s history. To be continued .... — Mel Malmberg  | This article appears in Flintridge Prep's
Spring 2008 PrepTalk magazine. |
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