Go West, Young Men: with Serendipity and a W By Christine Martin
T
he members of Rivers’ Class of 1961 are marking not only a personal milestone this spring when they return for their 50th Reunion, but also an institutional milestone, as the first class to graduate from the Weston campus. Looking back at the alumni newsletters from the late 1950s, it is clear that the trustees and administration were taking a giant leap of faith by moving The Rivers Country Day School, as it was called then, from Brookline to the suburbs. They were in dire need of a larger facility, but would current students make the trek out from town every day? Could they attract enough new students from the suburbs? The first bit of serendipity occurred soon after the Board had found an ideal location for the campus—a 30-acre farm in Weston. Rivers’ Board President Hathorn Brown was scrubbing in for surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital when he mentioned to his colleague at the neighboring sink that Rivers couldn’t afford the Weston property. On the spot, Dr. Philip Walker, who had no connection to Rivers, offered to buy the land for the school and within days delivered a check for $40,000. Serendipity intervened again on a trans-Atlantic crossing when Ethel Blackwell, wife of then-Headmaster George Blackwell, met Rem Huygens, a young Dutch architect heading to New York City. When Huygens heard about the school’s plans, he made a pitch: He and his partner Allan Chapman should design the new campus buildings. The Board was leery of hiring two thirtysomethings with Bauhaus leanings who had never designed a school building, but decided to give them a chance. Chapman and Huygens designed the cluster of buildings around a connecting walkway to look like low-slung farm buildings. They clad the buildings in yellow brick to blend with the large yellow barn at the entrance to campus. Although they had never seen pictures of the original campus, their design was nonetheless reminiscent of Rivers’ original open-air “bungalows.” Alumni invited to Weston for the 1958 reunion were told to wear their hiking shoes to tour the grounds, and to keep them on for the alumni-varsity baseball game. Plans for the new buildings were on display during the evening’s festivities, although only a portion of the necessary funds had been raised. In 1959, the town’s purchase of the Brookline campus by eminent domain brought an infusion of cash and put the Board on the fast track to begin construction in Weston before vacating the old campus. The official groundbreaking took place on November 14, 1959 and the doors opened in Weston in September 1960 to a recordbreaking enrollment of 222. The rest, as they say, is history.
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Breaking ground in 1959
If you thought after-school detention was bad, you probably never raked the lawn outside the Prince Building.
MacDowell Library—same building, different fashions!
nd a Whole Lot of Faith
tention aked ilding.
50 Years in Weston: Memories from the Move ED SHIFMAN, JR. ’61 “They were still building the gym [in 1960], so we had to take showers where the music school is now. There was a barn there and the shower consisted of a horse stall with a hose that only had cold water. That was our locker room, if you will.” “We got to Weston and there was nothing [in the way of a kitchen]. They had a contract with a catering firm that provided meals to airlines. The gym floor was finished in Haffenreffer and they would put these tarps down to protect the floor. They had tables they would set up and everyone would get a little boxed lunch like what you’d get on an airplane.” WESTY SALTONSTALL ’61 “A lot of us had visited the campus while it was in progress. So, [the first day of school] wasn’t a pull-back-the-curtain-andeverybody-jump-up-and-down moment. [But the move] was certainly dramatic. I’d been at the old campus for 12 years, so going from that to the present campus was pretty exciting.”
“[Athletic Director] Andy Navoni wouldn’t let you set foot on the football field other than for a game. That was sacred territory! We practiced on other remote, scruffy fields around campus, so we wouldn’t ruin the game field.” “I was able to walk to the Heath Street campus in Brookline, so I had to carpool [when Rivers moved to Weston]. Betty Decker lived across the street, so I’d provide her with transportation. She was the one who controlled all the green slips, so if I was late I had her as an excuse! I never really had to worry about being late—it was like a ‘get out of jail free’ card.” JOHN GRIFFIN, JR. ’61 “When the campus was in Chestnut Hill, I used to commute to school with Roger Welch down Route 9 from Framingham center. Roger and I would often hitchhike home, which is unthinkable now. When Rivers moved to Weston, coincidently so did my family. I suddenly had a less-than-10-minute commute. I could either get a ride or drive.”
“The campus was a work in progress. We had two buildings and half a gym, a lot of dirt and mud, and an excuse for a playing field. The campus in Chestnut Hill was limited. It was a lovely former estate—the locker room was in an old greenhouse. If [Rivers] wanted to progress, it really had to move to a new location.” TOZ SPALDING ’62 “When the campus was in Brookline, students lived all over the area and had no formal means of transportation, but when Rivers moved to Weston, many students started taking the green line on the T to the Riverside stop. The school had a bus that ran from Riverside to Weston. I lived in Newton, and I ran a carpool with three or four other guys. They’d pay me gas money and I’d drive them out and back.” “The baseball field used to be where the tennis courts are. It was the best baseball field in the [Independent School] League. Compared to what we were playing on in Brookline, it was really a first class field.”
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