In
August 1987, a former student at Choate Rosemary Hall, the prestigious
Connecticut boarding school, wrote to his alumni director with a secret
he had kept for decades: One of his late instructors, a man so revered
that Choate had named its student center after him, liked “giving little
boys back rubs in his bedroom.”
The reply he got was shocking, according to a report released by the school on Thursday.
The alumni director, Edward Ayres, told the former student that his
complaints were somewhat awkward given that a number of his classmates
and their parents had “contributed several hundred thousand” to create a
memorial fund for the man. Why had they done that? “Damned if I know,”
Mr. Ayres wrote, “but his teaching did reach a lot of kids since 1944,
and I’d rather let it go at that.”